This chapter features Loopy Malfoy, a.k.a. half the reason I wanted to put the fish-kid on a volcano lol. On garden-eel-draws, you can find an illustration of this fic's Gerudo NPCs under the "characters" tag on the nav post, or you can find it in the Ao3 version of this.
The boys' boots clanked faintly on the metal-plated road as they trooped down the path to Goron City. Yellow kept a sharp eye out for…well, anything. Literally everything on this mountain seemed either out to kill them or easily able to cause them serious harm, and his brothers didn't have the common sense of the average goat. Yellow felt like a mother minding three toddlers and one child who had sense, but was running a frighteningly high fever. He was glad that Red was occupied with keeping Malfoy conscious and hydrated, which left only Green and Blue to wander around unfettered.
There were, unfortunately, a great many things to draw Green's and Blue's attention. Rails ran on either side of the path, hosting abandoned iron carts still full of mined stone. Blue kept poking around the ones within reach, most likely looking for gemstones to steal. He was also a little too interested in the occasional lumps of sparkly black rock growing out of niches in the path. Luckily for Yellow, there weren't any Bomb Flowers blooming out here; the Gorons probably raised them farther away from Death Mountain's heart so their crops wouldn't blow up every time the mountain decided to spray lava everywhere. While Blue was thieving (which, while morally wrong, was as safe an activity as one could find one this volcano and unlikely to get him in trouble with no one around), Green gravitated toward the rails, staring out over the view of Death Mountain's lava lakes. He kept getting perilously close to those cliffs, stepping over smoking blobs of lava from a recent eruption as he did.
"Green!" Yellow said sharply when his brother braced himself on a mine cart rail, preparing to lean past it. He'd had enough of Green's recklessness that day! Yellow was still reeling after his emotions had gotten the better of him earlier; usually he kept the deeper, scarier feelings under tighter control.
Green flinched and stepped back.
"If there's an eruption and the ground shakes, you could fall over the edge," Yellow said to soften his harsh warning. He looked up at the caldera's central peak, which was streaming thick ropes of lava that gushed whenever the mountain let loose a disgruntled rumble.
Death Mountain consisted of a great many stair-stepped plateaus hosting a mix of land and lava, with spires of rock aiming up at its heart. The air around them shivered, the world looking like a shimmering Impressionist painting. Red seemed enchanted by it. He couldn't keep his eyes off the lazily swirling lakes and goopy lava-falls. Yellow, meanwhile, just wanted to leave as soon as possible. That haze of heated air and poisonous volcanic gases was death. The lava lakes were death. Those pretty, boiling turquoise ponds to their left were death. Yellow couldn't stand it. He didn't know how his brothers could be so calm. Even Blue, who had hated that obstacle course just as much as Yellow and Malfoy, was skipping from mine cart to mine cart and happily sorting through whatever he found within. He didn't even seem to mind that he was now smeared with black and red dirt.
Hiss-crack-BOOM.
Yellow jumped in fright and ran for the nearest spot of cover. The highest peak of Death Mountain shuddered, emitting a massive belch of smoke, then spewed a bright orange plume of pressurized magma. "GET UNDER THE CLIFFS!" Yellow screamed over the roar of the mountain. The others dashed over as fast as they could, slowed down by stumbles across the quaking ground. Yellow braced his knees and kept his eyes on the sky, pulling out his Magic Rod. The lava was starting to come down now in barely-crusted boulders, each of them landing with a titanic thud and a spray of semi-liquid rock. Yellow saw one such black and orange blob coming down and snapped his Magic Rod out toward it. "Wingardium Leviosa!" he cried. His head spun as magic was torn from him and thrown toward the refrigerator-sized chunk of lava. The deadly projectile came to a hard stop over Red and Malfoy. Wheezing a relieved breath with his half-paralyzed lungs, Yellow shoved the lava to the side with a swing of his staff.
The Harrys and Malfoy tucked themselves under a too-small outcrop, pressed together in a tight penguin-huddle. Around them, the world fell. The black hills built up over sections of the road, covering the metal plates and burying abandoned mine carts suddenly made sense as yet another layer of lava blanketed the area. Yellow was stunned that any visible patches of road remained left after weeks of this.
He found his anger toward Dumbledore renewed. How could the Headmaster have insisted on them doing nothing for so long? The conditions here must have been horrible for the poor Gorons! Yellow had to wonder how much of their city remained unburied, as close as it was to the center of the mountain. If the great lakes of lava pouring off of it hadn't consumed it, then surely these barrages had. And that wasn't even considering the damage these lava-rains must have done to the Gorons themselves. Gorons were big, but not invulnerable giants; Yellow imagined that catching a refrigerator-sized lump of superheated rock to the skull would be more than enough to kill one. As much as Yellow still wanted to get the hell out of Death Mountain, now he really wanted to see if there was anything they could do to help the besieged Goron town while they were there to take a break and drop Malfoy off.
When the terrifying, thundering rain had stopped falling, they shakily stepped back onto the road. Green led the way, moving with a new sense of caution that Yellow very much appreciated. Blue stuck close to Green and kept a fearful eye on the volcano. Yellow ducked under Malfoy's shoulder and helped Red walk him down the road. "Do you need more water, Malfoy?" he asked.
"Prob'ly," Malfoy mumbled. He was green again; his human illusion had faded. None of them was sure how the passively maintained spell worked, not even the Slytherin himself, but the glamour's strength seemed to be based on how close he was to keeling over. He was pretty close right now. "Went through three jugs. Brought five. Underestimated." His head lolled. "Pathetic."
"You're not pathetic, you're just not designed to be around lava," Yellow said. "And now you can say you're the only Zora-ish person who managed to survive Death Mountain. Can you imagine Prince Tiamus or Ruka getting through the Hero's Trail, with all that fire?" Yellow pointed his Magic Rod toward the sky. "Aguamenti," he said with an intentional lack of force. The spell still turned out way too strong despite his attempt to reign it in, and the staff almost rocketed out of his hand. The deluge it dumped on them was much appreciated by Malfoy, though, who lifted his head to catch some of the water in his mouth.
"I'm never turning down a chance to swim again," Malfoy said, his voice a little stronger than its previous dry wheeze. "I'd even swim in that possessed lake. I'll ask the big fish for permission. I don't care."
"It's not possessed. The fish is the lake," Yellow reminded him.
Firefly green eyes didn't quite focus on him. "But it's in the lake? I'm not the lake when I'm swimming in the lake," Malfoy said. He gave Yellow a slow blink with two sets of eyelids. The second, see-though pair didn't open all the way after closing. Were they stuck? "Potter, am I a lake?" he asked seriously.
Yellow shook his head. "No, you're delirious." He conjured another water spout.
Before they'd gone twenty steps, they were ambushed by…spiders?
Green went down with a yelp as a four-legged, yellow and red spider half his size fell on him from above. Another two spiders leapt down from a nearby cliff, narrowly missing Blue. The creatures hopped around constantly and erratically, as if daring them to actually land a sword hit.
Blue futilely waved his sword at one of the spiders, only to have another jump on his back and knock him over. As he lay sprawled on the ground, the monster revealed a fanged mouth under its eye and went in for a bite.
While Red ran in with a battle cry and his sword upraised, Yellow continued holding Malfoy up and brandished his Magic Rod. "Flipendo! Wingardium Leviosa!" he incanted. The spider pinning Blue to the ground tumbled backward, then was flung into the distance. Yellow didn't know where it had gone, but chances were it had soared into a lava lake.
"Yellow, we can't get their guts if you do that!" Red complained. He took his shield off his belt and punched the spider still hopping around Blue with it. The monster jerked back with a shrill cry, its giant red eye squeezing shut. While it was sitting still, he sliced two of its legs with his sword, then stabbed it through its center. The spider's remaining legs twitched spasmodically before coiling up against the creature's body. It disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving behind an empty shell and a blue Rupee that Red quickly shoved into his bag.
Green still needed help, though. He was having trouble getting the spider hopping around him to stay off of him long enough to kill it. The thing kept knocking him around, its spiny legs pricking his skin like rose thorns. "Just…sit…still!" Green huffed with each frustrated swing. "Red, how did you do that?!"
"You need to use your shield more, Green!" Red ran up to the spider from behind and slugged it into the ground with his buckler. The monster's legs splayed out in all directions.
Green hacked the spider apart and then leaned over with his hands braced on his knees. Blood ran down his arm from the little punctures the monster had left in his skin. "I'd say that isn't how you use a shield, but that was pretty smart," he wheezed. "I tried way too hard to catch that thing."
"Ow," Blue whined as he staggered back to his feet. He had blood dotting him all over, mainly along his back and upper arms. "I was hoping Tektites had been left behind in the Old Kingdom."
"They're heavier than I thought they'd be," Green said, patting himself over. He paused, then looked at Yellow. "Erm, should I take a healing potion?"
Yellow smiled. Green was learning! Maybe Yellow should have yelled at him sooner. "No, a few plasters should be enough. Thank you for asking, though!"
Green nodded and then looked away. Yellow frowned at the guilt he saw flash across his brother's face. Did Green just feel bad for upsetting him earlier? That hadn't been what Yellow had wanted. It was important that Green valued his life and limb; it didn't matter what Yellow felt. He didn't want Green to take care of himself more just so he didn't make him mad. He'd have to sit his brother down and explain later, once they were all safely off this awful volcano.
After crossing a roughly fashioned iron bridge that passed a hundred meters over the pit that housed Goron City, they wandered along a meandering path that waggled its way down the cliff side. Yellow studied the state of the city as they made their way down to it. It looked like the raised lava levels had swept across the base of the settlement, invading buildings and swelling against closed doors. The bottom…maybe fifty centimeters, judging by the current height of the doorways, had been turned into a charcoal-colored blank slate occasionally interrupted by pools of still-molten rock. More lava had slopped over the city since the first flood, half-cooling in crunchy pools and smoldering hills that the Gorons were currently doing their best to clear away. Teams of fit young Gorons wielding hammers, pickaxes, shovels, and the occasional bag of bombs were breaking down the blockages and shuttling them away in mine carts. Despite the heavy-duty aprons, boots and gloves they wore, shiny burns marked their skin where the unpleasant work of hauling away still-molten lava had gotten past their protective wear. Doorways seemed to be a main priority for lava-clearing; Yellow could see some Gorons peering through little porthole windows too small to let them out, waiting to be freed. The piles of rock in front of their doors was hot enough to be dangerous, but cool enough to be resistant to the rescuers' attempts to chip it away.
There was one structure in town that stood out from the rest, and thus drew the Harrys' eyes. It was constructed differently from the boulder-shaped buildings carved directly out of the stone of the deep basin, composed mainly of white-painted bricks instead. The two metal brackets out front held glowing blue-green stones rather than the red ones every other building had, and three big water droplets were painted on the iron sign mounted over the doorway. In contrast to the rest of the town, the air around the building stood still.
Malfoy turned in the direction of the white structure as soon as they stepped foot into the town, pulling Yellow and Red with him. "Water?" he said hopefully.
The Harrys all turned to blink at him. "You can sense water?" Blue asked.
"Imma wizard Zora," Malfoy declared. "M'special."
Red patted him on the head. "Yes, you're very special."
Malfoy smiled instead of insulting him, a testament to how long his brain had been frying. "I am!"
Red's eyes went wide in alarm. "Okay, we need to get to the water building, like, stat."
They hustled over, ignoring the surprised looks from the Gorons they passed by. Yellow scrunched his shoulders and did his best to ignore the stares. Getting Malfoy to safety was more important than how much he hated the attention.
As Yellow had thought, the white building radiated an artificial chill. Approaching it felt like walking into one of those air-conditioned shops in Castle Town on a sweltering summer day. Malfoy stumbled out of Yellow's grip and towed Red with him as he pressed flat against the front wall. "I love this house," he sighed.
"I'm sure you'll love it even more once we're inside," Red said, tugging him toward the door. It was one of those that had been cleared of stone, which saved them the effort of stuffing Malfoy in through one of the iron-shuttered porthole windows. The door swung open far enough for them to easily walk in.
Yellow welcomed the blast of cold—actually cold—air that washed over him. He didn't know why or how this place was so heavily air-conditioned, but he was incredibly grateful to whoever had thought to create it. So occupied was he by the wonderful feeling of having goosebumps again that it took several seconds for him to realize there were other people in the building.
Rather than Gorons, the room was populated by fifteen Gerudo women who looked just as stunned as the Goron townsfolk to see the boys there. Now that Malfoy was safe, Yellow left him to Red and stepped behind Green. The Gerudo were nearly as tall as Inland Zoras, intimidatingly muscular, and had the kind of confident bearing that he associated with people like Malfoy's family, Snape, and that scary boy who'd yelled at him in Castle Town. People who walked around with their chins high and their shoulders squared were rarely friendly to anyone named "Harry Potter".
"Hylians on Death Mountain? You don't see that often," one lady remarked. Her Hylian was…not totally impossible to understand, but marked by a thick accent that Yellow hadn't heard before. Most of the people on the mainland had a nasal and somewhat French way of speaking, but this woman's dialect was low and guttural—maybe even kind of Russian. It was also very different from Islander Hylian, which sounded much like Spanish or Italian, and practically a whole different language compared to the hissing, reptilian way that Flying Zoras spoke.
"Is that a Zora?" another woman asked, rushing over. While most of the Gerudo were dressed in colorful clothes that brought traditional Indian fashion to mind, this woman was clad in a white and blue tunic and bloused trousers that matched the building, much like the other Gerudo lady minding the reception desk at the back of the room. She had a cuff on her right arm and a fan-shaped decoration in her hair with the same water droplet symbols as the sign out front. "Aviara, get over here!" she called over to the lady at the front desk. "This little voe needs to get to the pools immediately."
Yellow cocked his head to the side. Was "voe" a word he hadn't learned yet, or was it not in Hylian?
"Is that wise, Barru?" the receptionist asked as she hurried over. "We need those for drinking water."
Yellow bit his lip. He had decent listening comprehension of Hylian, but very little ability to speak it. The words always got tangled up in his head when he tried to come up with a sentence. He would have liked to say "we can help you", but how did the sentence go? His brow furrowed as he thought. 'Nonne…povar…no, it's pov-something…what's the word for "help", again?' he wondered.
As if he'd read Yellow's mind, Green said, "Nonne povios vi taskar." Oh, so those were the words Yellow had been searching for. "Hi, we're brothers who go by our colors...and Malfoy. He's a friend. We can conjure up some water for you," Green continued in Hylian, holding up his Magic Rod. "We're mages."
Many of the women went bug-eyed. "You can create water?" they gasped. The general tone was as though Green had declared he could conjure up the miracle of life.
Green's confidence faltered. "Er, yeah? I'd show you here, but it'd flood the floor…"
"Come along, children." Barru ushered them toward the back of the room. They went through a blue-painted metal door and started down a white hallway. "You can show us what you can do by refilling the pools back here. With the train station buried and the mountain pass blocked, they've been our only source of water for weeks."
"Gorons don't drink water?" Blue asked.
"No, they get all the water they need from the meat they eat to supplement their rocks. This heat doesn't pull it back out of them like it does for us."
"Why are there so many Gerudo here, anyway?" Green asked.
Barru laughed. "To trade, of course! Everyone knows that." She raised one thick red eyebrow. "Unless you're not from around here? I notice your ears are round—not a common feature on the mainland."
"Oh yeah, you wouldn't have gotten much news up on the mountain," Green said. "A big group of mages like us came to Central Hyrule recently. Er, by accident. We were magically sent here from a place called Scotland."
"'Scotland'? Sounds far," the other uniformed lady following behind them remarked.
"Well, seeing as you're new to Hyrule…Because of the jewel trade, there's usually a mix of Gerudo merchants and tourists in town. The Gorons like our gold, which they use as a seasoning, and we like their gems and iron, so it's a good exchange. Eventually the Gorons realized making things more comfortable for humans meant having more people around to buy their mining scraps, so they let us build a Blue House here." Barru waved her hand at the building. "If anyone faints or has her Fireproof Elixir run out, the Gorons shuttle her over here to cool down. Even so, you don't usually see many Hylians around." She looked down at the Harrys. "You little voes and vais don't tend to be built for the heat."
'The Hylian islanders are,' Yellow thought, remembering the smothering humidity and blazing tropical sun that had cooked him in his sodden clothing on Outset Isle. 'I don't think islanders and people from the mainland see each other much, though.'
"And a Zora? We've never seen one this far from a lake or a river, let alone all the way up on Death Mountain!" Aviara exclaimed. "I thought Fireproof Elixirs didn't even work on them!"
"I'm part-Zora," Malfoy said in Hylian, lifting his head from Red's shoulder. The greenness was fading from his complexion as the lower temperature and higher humidity worked their magic. "Where am I? Where are we going?"
"We're in some kind of cold-spa, and we're headed toward the pools," Yellow explained to him in English. "I think this place must be built into the cliffs behind it, because it's definitely bigger than it looks."
They emerged from the hallway into a spacious tiled room full of various-sized rectangular pools, most of them empty. A high fence sectioned off the room three quarters through, with a couple of doors leading to the other side. The lights on the ceiling were, in contrast to most of the ones they'd seen since arriving to Hyrule, a slightly yellowish white that was brightest in the center. They flickered ever-so-slightly. Yellow stared up at them in surprise. Those were lightbulbs! Perfectly normal incandescent lightbulbs!
"Blue, look!" Yellow nudged his brother and pointed at the ceiling.
"This place runs on electricity!" Blue exclaimed upon recognizing the light fixtures. "But where are they getting it from? Do they know how to generate it from the lava?"
"What are you shouting about?" Red asked. He looked up. "Oh, neat! Hey, Malfoy, you feel that air? That's Muggle power keeping you cool, not magic."
"Impossible," Malfoy said flatly. "There's a volcano outside. Even assuming Muggles are capable of lowering the temperature to this degree, they couldn't possibly keep the heat from radiating through the walls. And if they did manage that, then the outside of this building wouldn't be cool. I know how non-magical insulation works."
Blue clapped his hands. "You actually said something smart about Muggles, Malfoy! I think that's a first!" he exclaimed. "This facility probably runs on a mix of Bluestone circuits and some kind of electrical power. I think that long hallway we passed through went around the generators running this place. I could feel a hum through the inner wall."
"Hey, guys, could you help me fill these pools back up?" Green called over. "It'll be faster if we work together. You'll get to swim again sooner, too, Malfoy."
With that as an incentive, Malfoy immediately set about sending spouts of water into the pools with the determination of a surgeon completing an operation. Between the five young wizards and their supercharged spells, they quickly had the spa set right again.
Aviara admired their work with wide-eyed wonder. "I've never seen a mage create water before," she marveled. "You kids would be swimming in Rupees if you ever took that trick of yours out to Gerudo Desert. King Ganfei himself would want to hire you!"
Barru was more cautious. She crouched by one of the refilled basins and peered into the crystal-clear liquid it now held. "Is this water real?" she asked for confirmation. "It won't vanish? I understand that magic can behave in strange ways."
The Harrys looked to Malfoy, since he was the one who'd shown them the charm. "It's real," he said. "Our magic works differently."
"Glad to hear it." Barru stood up to her full, intimidating height. Between Abyssal and Inland Zoras, Gorons, Ritos and the Gerudo, Yellow had to wonder if it wasn't that those peoples were tall, but that Hylians (which the Harrys most closely resembled) were one of the smallest races in Hyrule. "Now let's go over to the men's side so you can swim." She winked at them. "Technically voes like you aren't supposed to be over here, no matter the age, but desperate times called for a little rule-breaking."
The boys blushed at the realization and shuffled after her as she led them to the big fence bisecting the room.
After remedying the spa's water shortage and cooling off in one of the pools, the Harrys and Malfoy joined the Gerudo ladies in the lobby for a free lunch of ostrich curry.
"It's something we're all getting sick of at this point, but hey, it's food," Aviara said as she ladled some out for the boys. "And all we have to do to make it is set the pot of food outside to simmer in the heat. Death Mountain is a lazy cook's dream." She handed each of them a big spoon with a circular bowl to eat their curry with.
"We have enough water to spare on nice big batch of rice again, so you get to have a full-sized serving," Barru said, flumping some yellow-tinted rice onto their plates. "Safflina pilaf! I added some of the Wildberries and Chickaloo nuts we have left to give the ladies here a taste of home. Goron Spice is close to the flavor of Gerudo cuisine, but not quite the same."
In the absence of furniture other than the front desk in the lobby, they all just sat down in a circle on the tiles and dug in. Malfoy ate quietly, grimacing all the while and watching their Muggle hosts with narrowed pupils. The Harrys, who had never eaten anything spicier than black pepper and roasted garlic, were soon fanning their mouths in between intense bites. Harry chewed and swallowed a mouthful of flavorful curry and doused the flames slightly by following it up with a bite of delicately spiced and delightfully nutty rice. The occasional berry bits added nice notes of tart contrast to the fragrant dish. He wiped his watering eyes on his tunic.
"What's Safflina and where do I find some?" he panted at the lady sitting next to him. She was a couple of decades older than the rest, with an easy, relaxed air. "It tastes amazing."
The woman laughed. "I'm glad you appreciate it! A lot of non-Gerudo complain it's like perfumed grass," she said. "You can find it anywhere that's particularly hot or cold, but the best kind for this dish—Electric Safflina—only grows in Gerudo Desert. The plant comes in three colors that each have their own protective magic, and it looks like a tongue of multiple flowers sticking out from a fountain of long, flat leaves. It's the flower petals that are used for cooking."
Harry paused in flapping his hands at his tongue. "It has magic?"
"Warm Safflina defends against low temperatures and Cool Safflina does the same against heat—though not the volcanic blaze of Death Mountain. If you use Electric Safflina to spice your rice, it'll reduce a deadly shock to something you can walk away from, so it's always a good idea to have some on hand when you go to the desert during times of monster attacks," she told him. "Adding a few Zapshrooms will boost the effect without you drowning your rice in enough flowers to make it a salad." She took a bite of her rice and considered it. "You should definitely use more than Barru did, though," she advised.
"Well, excuse me for trying to stretch our resources," Barru sniffed. "You would've thrown all of it in just for one perfect dish, I'm sure, Sakari."
Sakari gave a decisive nod. "Without a doubt."
One of the Gerudo sitting across from the Harrys leaned in, peering interestedly at them. She was in her older teens, with enough golden piercings in her long, pointy ears to make them sag ever so slightly. "Say, what are a group of foreigners doing on Death Mountain, anyway? Scotland must be at least as far away as Labrynna for your ears to look like that."
"We're here to stop the volcano," Harry said. Just because it sounded ridiculous, there was no reason to lie; it was way less difficult to explain than them having come from an alternate dimension. "Well, specifically to kill the monster inside it."
The chatter in the room paused, then turned to laughter.
"That Gleeok was nearly as big as the Mad Dragon, with three times as many mouths to spout death from!" the girl with ten earrings exclaimed. "To make things worse, the Mad Dragon's in cahoots with it! We saw her fly into the volcano less than an hour ago. How could you little voes slay those things?"
"Actually, Endraal isn't sick anymore. We fixed her before we went up the mountain," Blue said in slightly halting Hylian. His English accent made the vowels sound especially odd through the sword's translation.
"We have a spell that makes things good!" Yellow added.
"A spell that…what?" Barru asked in confusion.
"It cuts through darker kinds of magic and slays undead monsters really well," Harry clarified. "Endraal was under a nasty curse, so we were able to break it. It happened kind of by accident, honestly. We were using that spell her stun her long enough to knock out a few of her teeth." He gestured toward the centerpiece of the bulky necklace he'd never bothered to vanish. "We needed to have this made so we could go slay the other dragon. Endraal went in to stop it, but if she's the spirit of Death Mountain and Death Mountain is all messed up, she might not be strong enough."
"And you think four ten-year olds and a teenager can—" Aviara started.
"Four thirteen-year-olds. I'm not going and the Potters are older than they look," Malfoy cut in. "They may be tiny, but they know what they're doing."
Red paused in inhaling his food to give Malfoy a curious look. "Was that a compliment I heard?"
The slightest hint of a flush touched Malfoy's cheeks. "Like you'd know, Potter," he said in English. "You've been tuning the whole conversation out!"
Blue gave Red a scathing scowl. "If you'd been studying, like I know Yellow has, you'd have caught at least a few words by now."
"I have been studying. When I feel like it." Red shrugged. "Languages are boring."
Blue licked his finger. Yellow caught his hand in the middle of reaching to give Red a wet willy. "You have spicy on your finger now because you were eating curry," Yellow said, frowning. "You can make his ear wet, but not spicy."
Blue cursed at having been foiled and Red gave Yellow a thumbs-up before continuing to tuck in.
"I can't deny those are shrunken versions of Endraal's teeth you're wearing—Moblin tusks don't have that golden sheen—but I find it hard to believe a gaggle of silly young voes can slay a twisted chimera like the one was saw fly into the Mountain's Heart," Sakari remarked. Her face's laugh lines and frown lines looked like they were in conflict. "Then again, you did make it to town even with the road blocked like it is, so the fact that you survived the Hero's Trail also says something for your skills. I'll tell you about a human-accessible path to the inside of the Mountain's Heart, if you truly wish to go to that hazardous place."
The Harrys perked up. "You will? Thank you!" Harry said. In all honesty, he'd forgotten to ask. He'd kind of assumed they'd be spending that afternoon feeling blindly around the mountain for a way into Endraal's nest.
"But only," Sakari held up a finger, "if you help some of the Gorons around town with that magic of yours first. I know you're foreign and might not have much experience with Gorons, but they're just as much people as humans are."
Blue's face pinched in annoyance at the inconvenience, but Harry just nodded. "We were going to do that anyway," he said. "We just needed to cool off for a bit. We'll stick around to help you clean up, and then we'll see what we can do around town."
After lunch, the Harrys (and Malfoy, after Red persuaded him it was in his best interest to make a good impression) magicked the dishes clean. Harry then led his brothers in an aimless walkabout through the town, searching for anyone who seemed to have a problem they could fix.
Watching the Goron stone-clearers chisel their way through the freshly-laid ground, Harry wasn't sure what they could do to help. Cool the stone, maybe? But wouldn't that make it harder to cut through? He could try aiming some Severing Charms at the ground, maybe. If Malfoy's had been supercharged enough to slice through a metal shield, the spell could be enough to cut through stone. Harry aimed his Magic Rod at a couch-sized lump of mostly-cooled lava to his right. "Diffindo." With a loud crack that made him jump, a small divot appeared in the stone. Well, that hadn't been effective. Then again, Hyrule's natural landscape was especially resistant to Dark World magic. What other spells did he know?
What about a Shrinking Charm? He stood back a little and took aim. "Reducio." He made a v-shaped motion with his Magic Rod.
With a startling bang, the outermost few centimeters of the hot stone contracted, then violently shattered. Shards of rock pelted him.
Harry brushed himself off. "Okay…" That spell would possibly work on smaller or man-made objects, but not things like boulders. Good to know.
He mentally cast around for more ideas. Maybe a transfiguration would be more stable? He decided on a spell Professor McGonagall had covered not long before Hogwarts's unexpected transfer—the least specific one-object-to-another transformation he could think of. Though he hadn't quite gotten it right in class, right now he'd settle on making this big, hot rock anything less like a big, hot rock. After dousing the stone with a forceful Water-Making Spell, he flicked his staff twice, left and then right. "Lapifors!" A blast of green light much stronger than he'd intended burst out of the clear crystal and splashed against the ground.
His target and a rough circle of the ground around it shivered, grew mottled brown and tan fur, and shrank to a third of its original size. A ring of simmering orange stone was revealed under the shrunken crust of cooler lava. Harry hummed in consideration, exchanging thoughtful looks with his brothers. The spell was meant to turn small objects into rabbits, but given Harry's inexperience, his less precise new wand, and the fact that Hyrule's land was soaked with an energy that ran counter to Dark World magic, it had been decently effective. If they cooled the rock with a Water-Making Spell, then made it smaller and furrier, that meant they could reduce the volcanic fallout blocking the doorways section by section and make it easier to carry off.
"Hey, you! What did you do to that rock?"
A trio of Gorons came running up and circled around Harry's experiment, looking both awed and horrified. "I mean, we can't eat this kind of stone anyway, but it still seems kinda wrong," said the one with his long white sprout of hair tied in a topknot through a hole cut in his yellow hardhat.
"It can't make our skin itch if it's got fur instead of hot spots, though," said the biggest of the three, a bloke carrying a huge…weapon of some sort on his shoulder. Harry wasn't sure what to describe it as, other than approximately his size and very intimidating. A stone club-sword, maybe? With a metal hammer on top?
"Borim's got you there, Dakko," said the shortest of the three.
Dakko, the first speaker, shook his head. "I guess, Boss." He looked down at Harry. "Seriously, though, what did you do to this rock, Brother?" he asked. "I've never seen anything like it."
Harry bit his lip and fiddled with his Magic Rod, suddenly realizing how bizarre his experiment would sound to anyone who wasn't familiar with wizard magic. "Well, er, I can do spells that turn things into other things. It's a kind of magic we're taught where my brothers and I are from," he began. "Those spells don't work quite right in Hyrule, but I managed to turn that rock partway into a rabbit. I thought that might be less dangerous than lava."
Three sets of wide purple eyes blinked at him. "A rabbit?"
Harry looked down and awkwardly rubbed the back of his head. "That was the only one I thought might work," he confessed. "My brothers and I would really like to help you clear out these rocks, though, so if you have an idea, we can see if we have the magic to help with it. We've got other spells we can use. Like, I could try turning the boulders into birds instead."
Red walked over to the rock and petted its thick fur, then pointed his staff at it. "Spongify." He poked the rock another couple of times, then sat down. It squished under him like a bean bag. "Hey, Green, instant chair!" he exclaimed, waving at Harry. "This should make camping easier."
"How on earth did using a Softening Charm on it occur to you?" Blue asked, walking over to inspect Red's work. "Do you even have a line of thinking or do ideas just randomly spring from nothing in your head?"
"I looked at the furry rock and wanted to make a comfy furry rock. How it wasn't obvious to you is the real question here," Red retorted.
"Maybe because I'm not an overgrown toddler still in my bug-eating phase?"
"I said I'd cook monster guts, not bugs," Red corrected. "For science, like you're always banging on about." He smirked and leaned toward Blue, sitting cross-legged on his transfigured furniture. "Besides, at least I'm not a Kindergartener in his rock-collecting phase."
Blue puffed up with ire, spots of color rising in his cheeks. He'd had to cast a cleaning charm on himself before he took a soak in a pool earlier, since he'd been coated in black dirt from the mining carts he'd been pilfering.
"Look who's talking, you—!"
Yellow, standing next to Harry, took out his Magic Rod and aimed it at Red and Blue. "I'm sorry, but fighting isn't nice and I'm not having a good day," he apologized preemptively. "Aguamenti."
Red and Blue briefly disappeared under a firehose spray of water, emerging with much sputtering and flailing from the cloud of steam suddenly filling the air.
Harry sighed. Trust Blue to pick a fight over nothing and Red to play along. He looked back up at the three Gorons, who fortunately appeared impressed rather than irritated by his siblings' silliness. "See? We have more spells," he told them, holding out his arms toward his quick-drying brothers like he was presenting a magic trick. "We've got one that lets us pick up heavy things, too, so just tell us how to help and we'll do our best."
The short Goron—who Harry supposed he'd think of as "Boss" until he heard a different name—adjusted his hardhat with a low whistle, watching the steam continuing to waft off of the transfigured rock. "Well, I'm not stupid enough to turn down an offer from a group of mages with the power to make water out of nothing and turn boulders into little rabbit pillows. Let's see if we have any gear small enough to fit you, and then you can join my crew, Brothers."
Harry trotted after the Goron with his siblings in tow. He was actually kind of pleased to have a simple physical task to do. Dumbledore had been putting his nose to the grindstone since he'd gotten back to the castle, but flipping through reference books and applying himself to the mentally exhausting chore of crafting linguistics charts was less like work and more like intellectual torture. Harry was someone who had grown up with a heavy chore-load and had learned to use those arduous, repetitive tasks as a way to get his mind in order. Helping around town before going into Death Mountain's core would be a good way to get his head on straight before throwing himself back into danger. Yellow, stressed out as he was by these dangerous surroundings, would probably benefit, too. Besides, there was plenty of time in the day.
What time was it, actually? Harry looked up. The volcano's frequent fits had filled the sky with a thick layer of smoke that he couldn't see the sun through, Given how long his group had dawdled around town, though, the teachers were sure to be up and about back at the castle.
His lips twitched in a nervous smile touched by a hint of mischief. How mad was Dumbledore going to be when he finally noticed?
Notes:
-The density of lava is 3,100 kilograms per cubic meter, and assuming that a fridge is about two cubic meters, Yellow lifted 6,200kg/13,669lbs with that Levitation Charm ;)
-Tektite shells are a crafting material in Tri-Force Heroes.
-Goron doors in this story open outward instead of inward so that lava floods won't break them down. It means chipping people out of their houses later, but at least those people are alive!
-Gerudo leadership in this time is a mixture of BOTW's chieftains and OoT's males-become-kings. There are nomadic tribes led by chiefs, while the larger and more stationary part of Gerudo society is ruled by kings. With Ganondorf being a statue at the bottom of the Great Sea right now, the Gerudo haven't had to deal with any reincarnations of him driving their country into the ground lately. King Ganfei isn't related to Ganondorf/Demise/the Triforce of Power at all and is in fact a decent dude.
-In this story, while Goron food is similar to Indian food when it isn't made of rocks, Gerudo cuisine is closer to Persian. The rice dish in this chapter is based on zereshk polow, saffron rice with barberries. I used to swap lunches with a kid in middle school who got a version of that rice dish with raisins instead of barberries, sometimes with lima beans or almond slivers added for extra protein. It's simple, but tasty!
-Borim's big sword-club is a Stone Smasher.