So good to hear from my readers again! Glad you're still with me and still enjoying my edits! =D Y'know, Mimi, I actually never gave any thought to the monument either – until I came playing through paying attention to all of the details for this fic, and thought "hang on a second, how the heck does that stay up?!" XD

Chapter 47: Sinking Feelings

Master, stop.

Link froze automatically, hand snapping to the hilt of his sword as he scanned the area. Nothing immediately dangerous was visible: the only life he'd seen so far had been a few strange spiky plants and another hrok, which had watched him sullenly as he kept a circumspect distance from the high wall it perched atop. He'd seen a couple of dead robots half-buried in the shifting sands, and a few bones, some of small creatures and a handful that Fi had identified as bokoblins, but nothing else alive.

"What is it, Fi?"

I detect an area of sinksand directly ahead. This highly aerated small-particle sand presents a significant hazard. Although it appears solid, you will sink immediately if you step upon it, until you reach a depth at which you are neutrally buoyant. Attempts at rapid motion or struggle will cause you to sink significantly further. To escape sinksand, you must remain calm and move slowly. Attempt to lie on your back, similar to trying to slow your fall in air. It is imperative that you keep your face clear of the sinksand at all times.

Link's chest tightened at the thought. He hadn't even known that the ground could be treacherous – not if it wasn't in the form of a rockfall or sandslide.

"How do I tell?" The sand ahead looked exactly the same as the sand beneath his feet, golden-bright in the slightly watery desert sun.

There is no easily-visible demarcation between regions of sinksand and regions of normal sand. I will continue to assess the surrounding environment, and will communicate a warning to you where I detect a hazardous region. I advise increased caution in this area. With the additional dangers of exposure and opportunistic predation by hroks and other desert-dwelling life forms able to traverse the sinksand safely, my assessment of bodily danger has increased by 30%.

"Right…" Link shuddered despite the desert heat. Much like the subtle sense of direction Fi had gifted him previously, a sense of discomfort about the sand ahead rose into his awareness from the sword on his back, merging uncomfortably with his own sudden fear of it. Ten more paces, or so, and he'd have walked right into it.

Backing further away, he looked around. The crumbling walls were still several times his own height, and it was getting harder and harder to remember the layout he'd seen from above. Turning his back on the sinksand, he crossed to the wall that was now on his left side. If he kept turning left whenever he could, he'd have to get around the dangerous region eventually… wouldn't he?

. . .

The day wore on as Link made his cautious way around what seemed to be practically a 'lake' of sinksand, if something containing no water whatsoever could be called that. From the ground, the walls and buildings were a maze, one path or another ending at a dead end or yet more of the sinksand. In places, he'd been able to scramble up the walls where they'd crumbled, or where the sand was piled high against them, but while it had provided him with a shortcut, it had afforded him little more of a view. He had, at least, rounded the bluff – but the sinksand remained stubbornly between him and the great monument.

Standing atop one of the walls, Link shaded his eyes and gazed across the empty sand. He didn't even know where it ended, how much further he had to travel. None of the walls protruded into the section he was looking across, all of them subtly arced, the sand between them perfectly flat, perfectly clear… and, Link suspected, perfectly deadly. Certainly the section at the foot of the wall he was standing on was.

He frowned, looking around the sandy expanse before him again.

"Fi…" he ventured. "Does this look like a circle to you?"

Springing from the sword, Fi 'landed' beside him, down-pointed toes barely an inch above the weathered material of the wall.

"Your observation is correct, Master." She turned her head slowly, blank eyes surveying the area. "The formation is significant. All remaining wall fragments exhibit a constant curvature matching a single circle with diameter 64 metres." Fi paused, only for a moment, but Link felt he could once again sense her sifting through her knowledge. "All buildings in the Lanayru region were constructed in the knowledge that they would ultimately be engulfed by the desert, and were designed with that fate in mind. I calculate a probability of 90% that the sinksand in this area was predicted. Please draw the sword and hold it forth."

Link did as she asked, holding the perfectly-balanced sword out in front of himself at arm's length. The blade shone faintly, and it almost seemed as though Fi were concentrating.

"Additional data acquired, Master Link. There are residual power flows deep beneath the sinksand, indicating one or more buried structures are present. Such a structure is unlikely to have been intended to be isolated. There is a 70% probability that the buried structure will offer a means of circumventing the extensive sinksand. In light of this new information, I recommend that you attempt to locate the remains of one of the robots local to this area, and a Timeshift Stone. Although their data banks are too degraded in their current state to permit analysis of the data formerly contained within, restoration to a former timestate will allow communication. We will then be able to request information concerning traversal of this area in the desert state."

Link frowned briefly as he reviewed her words, lowering the sword to his side. Fi's musically calm delivery of so many strange facts at once had left him feeling only just able to keep up.

"All right, I think I understand." They knew this was going to happen, so they would have put some sort of tunnel or bridge or something here – and there isn't a bridge. I still can't get used to the idea that they just… knew this was going to happen. "So we find someone and revive them to ask." It was a good idea – much better than just trekking slowly around the sinksand, hoping to find some path through it by sheer persistence. "That's not… that's not cruel, is it?"

Fi looked at him, and for a moment Link felt she was considering.

"The robots are inoperable in their present-day state, Master Link. From the responses of those we encountered previously, I have confirmed that the robots in this region were abruptly deactivated approximately 40 years into the temporal cycle that once governed the area, as my database predicted. The probability that they were aware of their imminent demise is negligible. In restoring their operational status, you will be extending the span of their experience, albeit for a brief time."

"I guess so. But… They'll wake up and see how their whole city has been destroyed, won't they? That's… I don't know. I'd feel awful if I woke up and…" Link waved his right hand vaguely across the crumbling walls still jutting from the desert.

Again, Fi seemed to consider.

"I cannot evaluate the potential reactions of each individual, Master. Analysis of human customs suggests that it would be reassuring in this context to provide the information that some robots were recovered from this region prior to the raising of Skyloft, and a further subset of them accompanied the people protected by the Goddess into the sky. It is therefore true that their civilisation continued for a significant period of time following the deactivation event. I have no data concerning the fate of the fraction of their population that remained on the surface during the raising of the islands. It is possible that, similarly to the Sheikah, they continue to exist in an undiscovered location." She paused for a moment, just long enough to mark the change of direction. "Given this information, are you willing to restore any robots that we discover in order to obtain the knowledge that you seek?"

Link thought about it for a long moment, Fi watching with her seemingly infinite patience.

"Yeah, I think so," he said, finally. "Can you… find any of them, like you did the kikwis?"

"Negative, Master. Since inactive robots do not possess functional power cores and do not contain even residual spiritual auras, I can only detect them within short range, similarly to the sinksand. You will need to continue your search or retrace your steps."

"Okay. Let's look around here, then. I don't want to go back if we don't have to." We've already come so far… "If you notice one under the sand, or a Timeshift Stone, let me know."

Fi nodded, once, and returned to the sword without further words. Taking a deep breath of the dry, dusty air, Link sheathed the sword again and turned, looking around the somewhat safer area behind him.

I'll try that building, he thought. At least it'll be sheltered in there… and maybe there'll be one of those power cores somewhere.

So a few chapters ago I looked up dry quicksand to determine whether it was even a real thing, and I found that it was, but it's rare and we seem to know very little about it. You can look up "dry quicksand" and "fech fech"/"fesh fesh" (spellings seem to vary). It seems to require very fine particles and(?) that said particles be well aerated. It behaves more or less like regular (wet) quicksand. And if this chapter is still around in ten years or however long when more is widely known about it, I'm sure those future readers can all laugh at how little I knew. Thanks, posterity!
I once fell in regular quicksand after taking a flying leap onto what looked like perfectly solid flat ground that turned out to simply not exist under me – between one heartbeat and the next, I was hip-deep in the floor, and might have gone further (I had felt no vertical resistance/slowdown whatsoever) if I hadn't also slammed into a steep solid bank on the edge of it. It was a very unexpected and unwanted, if also very dramatic, surprise! Luckily, I knew what I'd landed in and how to deal with it, so I kept my head and worked on calmly extricating myself until my companion caught up from going around the long way and hauled me the rest of the way out. It does not work anything like the game. Do not believe the game, it will only make things worse!
(Also do not take a flying leap into quicksand if you can possibly avoid it! And definitely don't run into it, either. If you fall over and go in face-down, that's got to be less likely to end well…)

Why 64 metres? Well, I held a ruler up to the in-game map on my cutscene compilation, and determined the diameter of the sand circle to be 16-17mm or so at that particular VLC window scale. Assuming the walls are 4m across, they're about 1mm across on that same scale, and realising that I had the option to use a power of 2, which seemed appropriate in the circumstances, I did. 16mm x 4m/mm gives 64 metres across! ;-) (Zooming in would make the scale more accurate, but it would also lose the power of 2, so I – for once – didn't!)

Patch Notes:
- Quicksand now real.
- Gorko no longer teleports.
- Link no longer reaches the front door before going five miles out of his way to bypass a rubble collapse that should either be climbable or eminently Timeshift-Stone reversible. Either way, the amount of time that detour takes should definitely be enough for Zelda to finish her job and leave or Ghirahim to catch up without us. So now it doesn't happen.