This chapter has a few high-effort illustrations! Two NPC portraits and a picture of the unusual monster in this chapter can be found both on Ao3 and on the garden-eel-draws tumblr under the "dungeon 5" and "character" tags. Also, for anyone who's seen that this story is a "series" on Ao3 and is interested in conlangs, the Hylian Conlang (the second work, currently) has been greatly expanded to include more vocabulary.

Content warning for blood, self-harm (intentionally worsening an existing wound), themes of death, and a corpse.

Link hunched over his latest project, counting the ticks of the metronome in his head. This was his third run at this enchantment today and he was one hundred measures away from successfully singing all three-thousand, four-hundred and forty-two. If he screwed up again, he wasn't sure he had enough magic left to throw himself into another two hours of singing. His vision had started blurring a half-hour ago and it sounded like his voice was filtering into his ears through a layer of cotton. Unusual magical reserves or not, even Link had his limits.

The song picked back up:

"I sing of speed and peerless grace,

The envy of Your fleetest creatures.

I call upon the name of Pegasus

And beg to feel such wind on my face."

He could admit he wasn't the greatest at lyrics. Technical and academic writing were where Link excelled. Flowery prose meant to be read aloud, not so much. It was the pure sound of magic that he had an intuitive grasp of, not the words one might put to that sound. It was only because of his friend's help that he'd managed to get the success rate of his enchanting experiments up. Without Avoka's encouragement and nitpicking, he would have still been stuck working within the simplicity of instrumental song enchantments. Sure, wordless music could carry plenty of power; however, the trade-off was that those spells' purposes could only be dictated by the mood of the melody and the careful layering of various musical structures and elements that communicated intent somewhat indirectly. Words allowed for greater efficiency in dictating a spell's parameters and saved Link some time doing his musical composition.

"These shoes are humble,

Small and brown and simple.

I swear to keep them modest

If my feet would never stumble."

Ah, yes, anti-tripping measures. They were difficult to work into verse, but absolutely necessary, as Avoka had pointed out after the tenth time Link had left a trail of lost skin across Hyrule Field. That set of boots had been impressively unstable, thanks to all the new, preliminary features he'd crammed into his song. It surprised him that it had taken a whole week for their spell nodes to shatter.

He was lucky that the knock at his bedroom door came during another section of rests. Knowing it was either his big sister, Gabbi, checking in or his friend Avoka stopping by for an oddly-timed visit, Link pressed a button on his desk that sent a pulse across his room's circuitry. The pulse set off a bell mounted by the door, signaling that he was in the middle off spellcasting. It was something he'd come up with after an unexpected lunchtime visit from Gabbi had resulted in him missing a note in the middle of a particularly dangerous musical phrase and causing a half-enchanted spell node to shatter in his face. Such instability was the nature of experimental enchanting, as opposed to using traditional, tried-and-true spells. His family's distinctive beaked goggles may have looked silly, but they'd saved him from picking Bluestone splinters out of his nose more than once.

As Link continued singing, Avoka discreetly let himself in. The Sheikah being quiet was a funny thought. Link had never met anyone more afraid of a silent room. He didn't mind letting his friend speak his mind, though. The boy didn't get too many chances to do that at home.

Avoka stood in the corner, making faces at Link's prose as he continued his song. Link almost ruined his hard work by laughing when his friend looked comically scandalized by his rhyme of "train" with "train". It wasn't his fault "train" only rhymed with "chariot" and "elevator" in Hylian! Besides, the Royal Guard trainee had been extra busy with his apprenticeship lately and hadn't been around to fix Link's artless lyrics.

A few minutes and dozens of measures later, Link closed off his long prayer and admired the boots he'd just finished enchanting. There was a more than zero chance the Bluestone would crack or explode from some flaw in his self-composed song within a month—these were only his fifth prototype and the second set to have all of those new features—but at least he'd (hopefully) fixed the tripping problem, made the acceleration more natural, and added a more flexible braking ability so he was less likely to face-plant and risk a snapped ankle tendon every time he wanted to stop. Link pushed up his goggles and reached out to still the metronome's swinging arm. Picking up the boots, with their bulky prototype-style spell nodes (shaped to direct explosive failures away from his legs), he swiveled his chair around to show them off.

"Behold the Pegasus Boots, Mark Five," Avoka said for him as he leaned in to inspect Link's work. "I'm not going to have to peel you off of a tree or fish you out of a pond on your next Testing Day, am I?"

Link mentally ran through a list of potential unpleasant outcomes. There were a lot of things that could go wrong, but most of them wouldn't even call for a Red Potion. The likelihood of skidding across Hyrule Field would be lower, too, now that he had a better chance of braking without yanking his feet out from under himself at high speed. "Maybe?"

"Well, 'maybe' is better than 'probably', so I'll take it," Avoka said. "You know, as clumsy as you are when you get up at a reasonable time, I don't know why you're so eager to add super-speed to your mornings." Avoka sat down on Link's bed and grinned, which was visible only by the crinkling of his eyes above his dark blue mask. "Although I can't deny that it'd make my day if you bowled over Maple like a charging Pegasus. Y'know, take out the delivery kid competition for good." He cackled.

Link rolled his eyes and gave his friend a look. Avoka and Maple were similarly loud and opinionated, and had thus formed a bizarre sort of friendly antagonism that mystified Link. If not for the fact that the only physical trait they had in common was their slight builds, he would have thought them to be long-lost twins.

The Sheikah made a face. "Hey, I might be annoying, but at least I'm not shrill. That voice of hers ought to be a crime."

Setting the boots back on his desk, Link put his chin in his hand and turned back toward his friend. "So, problem?"

Avoka pouted. "Don't I always visit you just whenever?"

Link raised an eyebrow and looked at his alarm clock. Its flickering turquoise display (he kept meaning to review his music to fix that glitch) read "21:15". There were three times of the day when Avoka usually showed up—sunrise, lunchtime, or right after his apprentice hours at the castle were done—and a quarter past nine in the evening was none of those. Rarely did he visit during Link's strange night-owl hours unless he was troubled about something and just had to tell someone about it.

"Okay, fine, I have a reason." Avoka leaned in. "I've got news," he said, his eyes shimmering with intensity.

News? Recently, things around Hyrule had been turning rather strange. News these days was generally along the spectrum of "bizarre" to "terrible".

It had started when all those English-speaking strangers had shown up during a sudden wind storm, though those people seemed just as confused to be in Hyrule as anyone else was to see them pop out of the blue. One of those strangers, a large fellow who made Link's intimidating sister look downright tiny, had wound up flat on his back in the middle of Link's kitchen and in no state to explain how he'd gotten there. The man and his giant dog, which had been found cowering under a table in the workroom, had taken up residence in the old shed that Link enchanted his more potentially disastrous experiments in. Hagrid had been up and about more lately, which was heartening. There had been a few moments when his feverish sleeping sickness had been so terrible it seemed he might waste to death while he was unconscious.

After the foreigners had arrived, monsters had appeared and the attacks on the train stations had started. Some of the stations were back up, while others were under such continuous attack or had been so thoroughly wrecked that they might not be operational for another few months. On top of that, the same day the British had shown up in town, a mysterious fire had started on the west side, starting in the Milk Bar and going on to consume two houses and the Bomb Shop. No one had died, miraculously, but the explosives in the Bomb Shop had caused a spectacular amount of damage to the city block around it. The Bluesmith family business, as well as every other smithy nearby, had been swamped with construction contracts as a result of the explosion and ruined train stations. Milling parts like nails and rivets and basic building braces was simple enough busy-work for Link, but it was far more mind-numbing than the usual weapon-repair jobs his sister assigned him.

"More rivets?" he groaned.

"What?"

"Erm…" Link rummaged around for words to summarize his train of thought. He did a lot more thinking than talking, since his ability to make himself understood outside of writing had been uncooperative and fickle for as long as he could remember. Avoka had gotten pretty good at following his style of communication in the few years they'd known one another, though. "You said 'news'," Link said. "More construction contracts?"

"Oh, no, this is weird news, not bad news. Nothing close by blew up or got demolished by monsters today, as far as I know," Avoka assured him. "You'll never guess who I saw in town this morning."

Link thought for a moment. Easily the least-seen famous person in the country was Princess Zelda, who (according to what he'd heard) was only allowed out of her dutifully defended tower for major festivals. Link, who hated the crowds and noise of such events, had only ever seen the mysterious girl in the form of her official portrait in Town Hall.

"Princess Zelda," he declared.

"Link, I work at the castle. I see Hyrule's darling damsel every day and she never gets any less boring. There's no way she'd have the guts to sneak out," Avoka said dismissively. "No, what I saw today were…" he looked left and right, as if one of his fellow Sheikah guardsmen might spring from the shadows cast by Link's dimmed table lamp, "…face-stealers," he whispered. "There were three foreigners with your face, Link!"

Oh! So that was why Maple had been so mad at him! One of those other "Links" must have knocked her over first! He hummed and happily rocked side to side at a mystery solved.

Suddenly the odd behavior of the foreigner living in Link's shed made a lot more sense, too! The first time he'd regained consciousness, Hagrid had looked at Link, delightedly called him "Eri", and hugged him before passing out. From that interaction and the sideways glances Hagrid kept giving him when he thought Link wouldn't notice, Link had concluded that he must have closely resembled someone the giant man was familiar with.

Link sat straighter and thumped his fist into his palm. "Hagrid knows them!" he announced

Avoka blinked owlishly. "Why aren't you surprised? What do you mean, Hag—" He gasped. "That Moblin-sized foreigner you crammed into your experiment shack? Are you saying he already knew your face when he got here? And you're still letting him stay?!" Avoka cast a paranoid look in the direction of the shed out back.

Scooting his rolling chair forward, Link put his hands on the high-strung Sheikah's bony shoulders. Ever since Link had been kidnapped a few times, Avoka had basically declared himself his personal bodyguard. It was flattering to have a future Royal Guardsman who already worked at the castle decide someone like him was worthy of protecting, but Link hated seeing his friend tie himself into knots over his well-being. He'd readily admit that being captured by mad Ganondorf-resurrection fanatics was always scary and only got scarier as the Yiga came up with better ways to keep him contained with each instance of capture; that didn't make him feel any less guilty about Avoka spending so much energy fretting over him.

"Hagrid isn't a secret Yiga. I am fine," Link said firmly. "No interrogating or knife-threatening."

Avoka stared at him with wide, worried eyes. "But how do you know?"

Link shrugged. "He speaks English. Yiga don't."

Link's problems with output and comprehension only plagued him when it came to real-time communication, signed or spoken; in written form, every language was just a set of building blocks that could be categorized neatly by meaning and purpose, and he could read sentences back and forward as many times as he wanted if he missed something.

An early interest in enchanting had led to him studying most of the languages of Hyrule and the island countries around it. Different peoples tended to write down their magics in their traditional styles, which made being a polyglot a must if one wanted to have a wide field of source material to draw upon for inspiration. English had unique phonetics he hadn't come across before, and he doubted that a Yiga agent who happened to be fluent in an alien language and completely unfamiliar with Hylian would just pop into his house one day. That wasn't how they conducted kidnappings, and at this point Link would consider himself an authority on the subject. Hagrid hadn't tried smothering him with a naptime rag even once!

Avoka gave him a doubtful look. "Alright, fine, I won't question him," he said. "But I'll be keeping an eye out, you can be sure. And what if those creepy face-stealers come back?"

Link smiled. "Say 'hi'."

Avoka looked taken aback. "That's it? Say 'hi'? Shouldn't we come up with some contingency plans in case they try to kidnap you?"

"Nope. Be polite. See what happens." That was Link's blanket policy toward people he didn't know, and it had served him pretty well thus far. There wasn't much they could do to prevent his next kidnapping, anyway, without calling the Royal Guard in. He'd prefer to avoid his friend summoning up a team of scary Sheikah warriors when a friendly chat was an option.

Avoka looked lost. While he could be spontaneous or come up with incredibly complicated plans on the spot, going with the flow wasn't anywhere in his playbook. The boy always liked to be at the thrust of a situation, whether his actions served to solve things or make them worse. It was a way of thinking that made Avoka exciting to be around, since Link was someone who tended to go along with whatever was happening, but also led to a lot of trouble.

"I…guess we can try that?" Avoka said falteringly. "It's kind of like what my boss said, now that I think about it…"

Link gave him a fond pat on the shoulder. He trusted his best friend to trust him. It would buy those strangers a few minutes of non-shouted conversation and a threat-level reevaluation, at least.

Looking around for something else to talk about because, as Link knew and never said, there were few things the unusual Sheikah feared more than silence, Avoka zeroed in on Link's outfit. "Do you know what you're wearing? That's the skirt that had that obnoxious coral-pink Safflina pattern on it, remember?"

Due to an equal love of expensive ostentation and comfort, Link was wearing a combination of his favorite tunic and some fancy clothes his best friend had given him. Avoka's adoptive mother loved clothes-shopping and his adoptive sister often wound up stuck with frilly, poufy, lacy outfits she hated, so it wasn't uncommon for Avoka to stop by with an armful of too-small dresses and skirts for Link to pick through and have altered for his size. Apparently the green clothes Gabbi bought him and the pink clothes that Avoka's sister wore didn't go together. He thought his sensible yellow-gray tunic and pale blue silky skirt looked just fine, though. If he squinted, he could kind of make out some grayish, blobby shapes on his skirt.

Knowing the stressed-out Sheikah needed to talk after his long day at the castle, Link scooted back and adjusted the lamplight so Avoka could truly see whatever was clashing. "How bright are the flowers?" He smiled as Avoka happily ranted his heart out about colors Link only knew through his friend's animated descriptions.

Harry awoke to being shaken. He groaned and kept his eyes shut so he wouldn't have to face the dimly lit room. It wasn't the first time one of his brothers had roused him from a nightmare that night.

"Was I screaming?" he mumbled into the rabbit fur under his cheek.

A hand settled on his upper back and started rubbing in circles. "Yeah. Were you getting eaten again?" Red's deeper, gruffer voice asked.

Harry sighed. "It was a sand worm in the green stars this time. So that was new."

"We're going to have the worst dreams when we're one bloke again, aren't we?"

"On the bright side I bet we'd be too dead inside at that point to be afraid of Voldemort anymore," said a more jaded version of his voice that could only belong to Blue. The bubbling of a thick potion added to the white noise of metallic squeaking and clanking that came from the bucket treads in the back corner of the small room.

"It would be a good idea to be at least a little afraid of him," Yellow said from over by Blue. "Even if Vaati's more powerful, Voldemort is more evil. If Voldemort had the amount of power that Vaati does, he would have killed a lot more people by now."

"Vaati tried to drown Scotland, though, remember?" Harry said. "That's pretty evil."

"If he didn't want to damage the castle by killing all of us, he could have just teleported it into space and back to its moorings. Or he could have had Shadow Harry round everyone up outside—without telling him why—and then sent all of us straight into Death Mountain. The caldera is big enough to burn hundreds of people at once, and it would work faster than rain. Vaati has a lot of magic, but not a very good imagination."

Harry braved the lamp-lit darkness of the room to gawp at Yellow in shock. Blue and Red looked no less astonished.

Yellow ducked his head with a sheepish smile. "I spend enough time thinking about every bad thing that can happen that I'm good at coming up with some really nasty stuff that a villain could do," he confessed, tucking some hair behind his ear. "But anyway, I think that even if our world's magic is making him act weird, Vaati's still a different kind of evil than Voldemort. If we come from the Dark World, where everything is scary enough that we don't need a spirit like Shadow Harry, maybe our villains are scarier, too."

"Vaati does have an odd sense of fairness to him," Blue said. "He sent all the mages in and around Hogwarts here to learn a lesson about what kind of world he wants to make back home, even though he has enough power that he probably could have turned us all into loyal Wizzrobes or ReDeads." He paused and there was the sound of shuffling parchment. "Oh, really? Interesting."

"Zelda says that what I said about dropping thousands of people into the volcano sounds worse than anything even Ganon has done in legend," Yellow told them. "He's killed a lot of people, but not like that."

Blue gave his potion one last stir and then doused the flames under it with a weak Aguamenti from his wand. "The villains here really do like fighting fair, don't they?" he remarked. "No wonder they can be stopped by particularly brave children."

"I wonder what would happen if a mass-murdering, blood-supremacist creep like Voldemort ever got loose in Hyrule," Red said.

There was a long, chilling stretch of silence. The world they came from was a place in which "genocide" was a word most older schoolchildren knew. They lived in a country where it wasn't uncommon for people to find grenades, mines, or unexploded bombs in their backyards. Big cities in their world were often trash-strewn and full of people who were left suffering on the street because there were so many ways someone could wind up without the money they needed to live. Harry was lucky to stay with relatives who hated him and worked him to the bone, rather than living as a cold and starving street urchin. Their world's concept of evil was just…not compatible with Hyrule. This was a bright place where people helped strangers and good deeds were rewarded. Harry was glad that a villain from Hyrule had gotten loose in the Dark World rather than the other way around.

He shuddered to imagine what great and terrible things might happen if a man as dark and twisted as Voldemort were allowed to run rampant in the Light World. Simply killing one of the World Spirits would have been enough to cause mass suffering and ecological disaster for years on end, and Voldemort wasn't someone who would have any regard for spirits. Being a charismatic magical Nazi, there was also the chance he'd be able to turn the various human and nonhuman races of Hyrule against each other in a civil war not unlike what had almost wiped out Magical Britain. Worst of all, if he ever got his hands on a powerful artifact like the Ocarina of Time, he had the imagination and cruelty needed to plunge a dagger into Hyrule's heart and slaughter any army, spirit, or sword-bearing child who challenged him. He'd been willing to cast the Killing Curse on an infant, after all…

"Okay, that's enough thinking," Harry declared.

There were nods all around.

The clock on Harry's Navi Slate read "5:13" when they packed up and untransfigured their little camp. Harry clutched his Magic Lamp as close as he dared, forcing himself not to think about the room's many dark crannies. The space looked like it had been charmed smaller, full of processing equipment scrunched and partially crushed in the corners. Whatever Vaati had done to mess with the room had also knocked it off the power grid, thus why Harry was at the front of the queue to ride the buckets out of there. One wouldn't think the inside of a volcano as lively as Death Mountain would be able to reach utter cave-darkness, but this little alcove came pretty close.

"Can we go now?" he whined at Blue, who was busily searching the room. "I don't see why you couldn't have done this earlier."

"I was sleeping, and then I was brewing. I didn't have time to," Blue said. He stuck his Magic Lamp through gaps in the industrial furniture and peered around. "Aha! I knew it." Setting his lamp on a flat-ish section of crunched metal, he started wiggling his way through the wreckage to reach whatever he'd spotted.

"Blue, there could be so many sharp corners in there," Yellow fretted, making an aborted motion to pull Blue back. "What are you even looking for?"

"When the room, got smaller, the Bluestone didn't go with it!" Blue said excitedly. "Vaati was playing with Dark World magic, and since Bluestone is a capacitor and conductor for Light World magic, I hypothesized it would be even more immune to wizard spells than the plain stone around it. I was right!"

Harry winced when he felt a hot line of pain drag up his arm. "You okay in there?"

"Ow," Blue grunted. He pushed himself up with one arm and extricated his body from the tangled metal with a bit more care. In one hand, he held a half-meter-long section of a light strip that must have cracked and popped out of the wall when its mounting had shrunk around it. The dark stone flickered fitfully in his grip, forming a blue aura around his gloved fingers. Was it reacting to his internal magic, perhaps? Blue absently put a hand over the bloodstained rip in his sleeve as he admired the flattened rod of magical rock. "Once I learn how to enchant you, I'm going to make so much cool stuff," he vowed, staring at it intensely.

"Blue, you're still bleeding," Yellow reminded him.

"It's just a scratch," Blue said. He stowed the Bluestone and pulled his wand out of his bag. Pointing it at his upper arm, he said, "Sigilla." After a few seconds, he recast the spell, then waited and recast it again. "There, as good as stitches," he said as he put his wand away. He mended and cleaned his tunic with his Magic Rod. "Next time we see Tiamus, we ought to ask whether everyone in Hyrule heals everything with a Red Potion. It seems like overkill in most cases."

"So you do think it's overkill!" Red crowed. "And here you and Yellow have been telling us to drink 'em whenever."

"Yes, whenever you have a major wound that we have literally no other way to treat right now," Blue said crabbily. "Unless you want me to get out some rubbing alcohol and a surgical sewing kit the next time one of us catches an arrow the hard way. Would you like some stitches?"

Red paled in the light of his lantern. "Nah, I'm good."

They lined up by the treads in the corner, Harry taking the lead. He was eager to get out of that unlit cave, with its occasionally star-studded walls. He worked the grip of his buckler over his thick glove as he watched a bucket flip over, spraying some of the metal inside it around the iron-strewn room and dumping the rest on the bucket below it, then hopped on. Grasping the metal loop anchoring his improvised platform to the conveyor, he raised the shield overhead to protect him from falling metal and closed his eyes. The sound of the rattling treads was magnified as he descended into the pitch-black elevator shaft. Harry focused on his breathing as he listened for open space. While he hadn't seen much of the cavern on the bottom floor, he knew it was big.

A shower of iron pieces clanged off of his shield, followed by the wide echo of giant tools busily achieving nothing. Harry's lips twisted. What a waste, that all this equipment was still perfectly functional, but its hard work was being thrown around a shrunken attic and dumped straight into a lava lake! After that, there was another ten seconds of jouncing through a dark, tight tunnel before the echo became so distant as to be almost nonexistent. Oppressive heat enclosed him, causing sweat to prickle across his forehead. Harry cracked open an eye.

The furnace cavern was a mix of too dark and too bright, both unlit and full of blinding violet-white lava. Anything within it was made visible only by its silhouette against said lava. Harry saw lines upon lines of bucket-shaped vats crowded next to the walls, a veritable hive of violet-edged circles that became glowing ovals and glowing falls of molten rock syrup. The vats were fed by pipes coming in through the walls and periodically poured themselves into the lake below. Every so often, a cluster of them would pour in sync and cause a wave of white-hot lava-falls to cascade across the wall.

Somewhat less visible were the gated walkways leading around and through the tipping pails. Harry only noticed them by the superheated spots that lay under the falls of higher-up buckets. And then, only when he was ten meters from the dark line of land stretching into the middle of the lake, did he see the monsters patrolling those walkways. Their luminous eyes were like hovering rubies against the inky background.

"Oh great," Harry muttered under his breath. Some of the monsters were accompanied by more glowing dots than just their eyes. While Harry didn't recognize the small orange-red shapes bobbing in the dark, he could sense the danger they radiated.

Harry stepped down quietly onto the extended spit of land. Keeping his head on a swivel, he crept forward along the silhouetted stone. He was still getting used to these full-powered, less automaton-like monsters. Back in the Dark World, the only monsters that he knew were affected by lighting conditions were Moblins. Everything else would attack just the same. How well did Bokoblins see in the dark?

He got his answer when his brothers touched down loudly enough to draw attention. Crimson eyes swung around in their direction from all corners of the room. Somewhere, a warning horn was blown. Harry ran as arrows began pelting the stone. They weren't aimed as accurately as the ones he'd faced so far. He hoped that meant the monsters were using the boys' silhouettes to make their shots; if so, that meant the Harrys would be able to hide once they got away from the lava backdrop. From there, it was just a matter of Harry managing his nerves well enough to use the shadows to his advantage.

One of the monsters with extra glowing points behind it back nocked its bow. Orange power flared around what he now recognized as a flame-shaped arrowhead.

Glowing arrows began flying in accompaniment to the dark, practically invisible projectiles clanging around them. Upon landing, they sent out painful waves of flame that briefly lit up the immediate area. Harry cried out when another Bokoblin took advantage of the momentary visibility to put an arrow through his defensively raised left hand. It caught in the meat between Harry's thumb and forefinger. Harry stuffed a scream back down his throat and cast a Severing Charm on the arrow. Merlin, that hurt! Harry swore viciously in his head as he yanked the arrow shaft out of his hand. Red, who had been sent into a stumble by the distraction of Harry's pain, was struck by an arrow right over his shoulder blade. Harry hissed through his teeth, though he was glad the arrow had stopped against bone instead of shattering it or sliding through a gap in Red's ribcage. Red was able to pull out the shallowly-anchored projectile without too much trouble.

A blazing Fire Arrow smacked against Yellow's raised buckler, the magical force behind it almost knocking the boy off his feet. Fire swept out just over the brothers' heads. Harry cursed and slapped the embers out of his smoldering hair. They needed cover, damn it!

"Use the dark against them!" he hissed to his brothers as they neared the end of the long platform. All he could see of the hidden architecture that lay in front of him were two massive buckets and the glowing red spots their contents had created on the walkway below. Whatever lay up on the scaffolding, it had to be better than running along an open, defenseless platform.

"Are we splitting up?" Red asked.

"One of us should go with you," Yellow insisted.

"Pair up. Yellow with me, Blue with Red," Harry said. He knew he was a liability in this room. Phantom stars were winking in the corners of his eyes, creating false threats. Even if it hurt his pride to admit it, he didn't trust himself to manage on his own in here.

The Harrys split into twos, and as the arrows became increasingly inaccurate and fewer, they slowed their running steps to hurried creeping. Despite Harry's newfound aversion to the dark, this was where his talents really lay. He wasn't like the legendary saviors of Hyrule; melee combat in broad daylight was something he'd adapted to, not something he counted among his natural talents. It was much more in Harry's wheelhouse to sneak. He was a little mouse of a boy, raised to be as nonexistent as possible and forced to hone his stealth skills by desperate midnight runs to the kitchen. While Harry could shine in a bright daytime Quidditch match, he did his best work when no one could see him.

Their slower pace meant none of them fell flat on their face when they came across a set of steps totally hidden in shadow. They paused to remove their clunky Goron boots, then slipped up the steps on silent feet.

Harry hid behind the bulk of a bucket on the right-hand side of the steps, watching the glowing eyes of the monsters beyond. He counted six Bokoblins, two of them armed with Fire Arrows. The best course of action was to disarm them and…hmm. They were too big for him to pick up the old-fashioned way, and pushing them into the lava would lead to them screaming and giving away his position. Using magic would also be a tip-off, since almost every spell was accompanied by a flash of light. The Levitation Charm was invisible, though, and it had worked well so far…

"Use your whip to disarm them, then send them flying with a Levitation Charm," Harry told Yellow in a low voice. The whip was almost silent, since its odd tip kept it from making that distinctive bullwhip snapping noise unless you were really working for it. He summoned his Vine Whip as he spoke, only to nearly drop it when the wound in his left hand cried out in renewed pain. Harry glared mutinously at the appendage. If he had to waste another Red Potion because of this stupid little wound, he was going to scream.

Yellow tapped him on the shoulder. "Erm, maybe you should—"

"Not yet!" Harry whispered furiously. He switched his buckler to his left, clenching and unclenching his jaw as he ignored the pain, and conjured his whip in his right hand. After the next time the bucket in front of him slopped its contents over the walkway, he stepped over the glowing residue and crept up on the nearest Bokoblin. A lash of his whip snatched the bow from its hands, making the creature yelp in surprise. As it scoured the shadows for whatever had stolen its weapon, Harry switched tools. He sent the monster flying with a near-silent Levitation Charm and a sharp flick of his Magic Rod. The monster sailed across the cavern, screaming and drawing every glowing eye on the walkways toward it, until it landed in the middle of the lava lake.

Yellow snuck past him, skirted a hotspot from one of the buckets above, and took out the next Bokoblin in line with ease. Were they missing out on collecting whatever the monsters had looted from the place by using the lava to their advantage? Definitely, but Harry would rather stay alive than risk his life to collect more random tools and chunks of crystal. Even assuming he didn't get shot in a vital organ by drawing attention, these narrow walkways weren't the place for a sword-fight. Harry lost all concept of where his feet were going when he was busy remembering sword forms, and his siblings were no better.

Harry jumped when something clanged and set up a spray of sparks at his feet. He backed away, looking around wildly for red eyes aimed in his direction, then glanced up. A Bokoblin glared down at him from the walkway a couple of meters overhead.

'The ones above me can see where I am against the lava!' Harry thought with a mental hiss of frustration. These monsters were too damned perceptive!

Hearing the scuffle of Yellow taking out another Bokoblin, Harry decided to turn his attention to the line of monsters overhead. Yellow had good enough spatial awareness to warn Harry if something was taking aim at him.

Harry leaned over the edge of the walkway and picked off the archers overhead with Levitation Charms rather than using his whip, since the awkward angle the monsters were standing at made their weapons less of a threat. One by one, Bokoblins were launched to their doom. Once the pinging of arrows had stopped and Harry saw no more jewel-like eyes, he dropped his gaze to the walkway he was on. Yellow had taken care of the other Bokoblins in short order.

Yellow warily watched the buckets above them before quickly making his way back to Harry. "I got Fire Arrows!" he whispered excitedly, holding up a quiver full of the magical projectiles. "And some kind of rock, too, but I can't tell what color it is." He showed Harry a chunk of dark stone.

"I'm sure Red and Blue will love them," Harry said. Now that he wasn't focused on slaying monsters, he could see turquoise spots against the dark walls. He swayed on his feet, dizzied by the sight. Setting his jaw, he put his back to the shadowy wall and fixed his eyes on the lava.

"What do you think we're supposed to do in here?" Yellow asked. He stared up wonderingly at the lines of buckets. "I saw a ladder at the end of this walkway, so I'm guessing we can go up and explore all of these rows."

Harry continued staring at the lava, even though the brightness of it was making his eyes water. Vaati's hold on it was likely why it refused to light up the room. "I think we're either supposed to slay all the monsters to open a door, or we've got to feel our way around until we find the way to the lower furnaces," he said. Dropping his gaze, he blinked the spots out of his eyes and conjured his Navi Slate. Harry flicked through the layers of the foundry map until he reached the lowest floor, where he inspected the layout. There was a fair chance that Vaati had covered over or moved around the entrances, so he knew better than to put too much trust in this display. Still, he noted that there were supposed to be ten exits to this room. There were also meant to be only three levels of buckets instead of five, a floor, and some kind of pipe system to move the molten rock and metal to a processing room.

Four of the exits on the map led down to the lower furnaces—presumably for evacuation reasons. It looked like…maybe two of them were accessible, with the lava at this level. The problem was finding the things with no power down here. Even assuming the doors weren't sealed up behind panels of dried lava, the room was so unnaturally dark that Harry could only see his hand in front of his face when he put the glowing lake behind it.

"Okay, we need to restore the power before we do anything else," he said to himself, tapping the virtual "zoom" button onscreen. With the floor map enlarged, he slid it around in search of something resembling a control room. Since Red had a power switch, they just needed a place to put it to work.

Aha! On the uppermost level of the giant cavern, along the wall that lay in front of its only remaining stretch of floor, lay the labeled door to a facility control station.

"Let's go up," Harry told Yellow. He watched the buckets overhead and timed his steps across the red-hot sections of the walkway in between pours. The glint of Bokoblin eyes showed in the darkness above him. Vaati had really gone with overkill for this room, hadn't he?

Harry vanished his slate and hesitated by the ladder. It was nigh invisible, just another black shape against the black room. He could only see it because he was facing the lava. He looked up and felt his head swim. That…was a lot of dark. He'd be climbing a ladder he couldn't see up to a platform he could only see in the places where it was most dangerous. The lowermost walkway had at least been right over the lava, making it a decently visible silhouette. All he could see up ahead were partially obscured eye-lights.

Eyes like moons, as false as the plankton stars. A void opening in front of him. Nothingness closing over his body, crushing his arms to his sides and drowning him in acid—

Harry flexed the thumb of his wounded hand and used the pain to drag himself back to reality. 'You have solid ground under your feet and you're breathing air. Shut up and get over this already,' he mentally snarled at himself. If he didn't overcome this silly fear of the dark by the time he got back to the Dursleys, he'd be spending every summer evening petrified after lights-out.

Harry practically threw himself at the ladder. He had no good reason to be afraid, dammit! Though it was difficult to both climb quietly and one-handed, especially when that hand wouldn't stop shaking, he managed not to draw the attention of the Bokoblins above him. As soon as he was on the second level of metal grates, Harry crept across to the next ladder and scaled it with similar stealth. Now on the third level, he summoned his Magic Rod and started firing away. He didn't have the patience or the nerve to wait long enough to snatch the monsters' weapons. Magical exhaustion from the staff's draining effects soon dragged at his lungs and made his vision swim. Harry just braced his legs to keep from falling over and powered through his body's warnings.

Before the last Bokoblin had finished its arc across the room, Harry was hurrying across the platform. In his haste, he didn't pay as much attention to the buckets as he should have. A stream of molten stone cascaded right in front of him, and his reaction time was just a little too slow—

Yellow's sudden grip on his tunic saved him. Harry muttered a thank-you to him and started moving forward after the bucket overhead had gone vertical again, but his brother's hold didn't loosen. Yellow yanked him back into a half-hug. :You're doing it again,: he hissed in Harry's ear. A thrill of fear went up Harry's spine. Had Yellow said that in Parseltongue? "I'm sorry, but pushing yourself like this is not okay," his brother told him. "Get your lamp."

"What?! The Bokoblins will see us!" Harry whispered.

"The ones across the room are too far away to hit you and I'll take care of the ones higher up," Yellow said. "I'll clear the path up ahead and you follow me once I'm done on each level."

"I can fight!" Harry insisted.

"Green, you already came up with a good plan. The catwalks are too narrow for both of us to be casting spells, anyway."

"I don't need you to baby me!"

"You're shaking," Yellow pointed out.

"So?"

"I know how to do a sleeper hold. Do you need a nap?"

An arrow sent up sparks as it lodged in the grating at their feet. Looking up, they were met with the glowing gazes of the Bokoblins above them. Harry froze, briefly seeing the lights as blue-green. Then he mentally slapped himself and started firing off spells at any bits of the monsters he could reach around the edges of the grating.

"See? I can keep going," Harry harrumphed after he'd managed to catapult the last of the Bokoblins. Before Yellow could stop him, he scaled the next ladder.

Soon, Harry was standing on an archer-free section of the uppermost level, shivering and somewhat nauseous, but victorious. Now, finally, he called up his Magic Lamp. Harry had to fight the urge to desperately clutch it. Instead, he held it up as close as he could to his face and stared into its comforting red-orange flames.

He heard Yellow climb up and loudly sigh. "Good job, you've scared the dickens out of yourself." Yellow put a hand on his shoulder. "Does that prove you're a big, strong leader?"

An involuntary tremor ran through Harry's body. "Sh-Shut up." His skin prickled like he was freezing and his muscles were locked to the point of quivering because of how hard he'd been clenching them on the way up. Harry moved his injured thumb around, focusing on the pain to steady him. He wasn't used to this kind of fear, but pain was definitely something he could manage.

"WOULD YOU QUIT THAT?" Blue's irate voice echoed across the room. "It bloody hurts!"

Harry abruptly stopped, flushing in embarrassment. He'd forgotten his brothers could feel that! Yellow hadn't reacted at all…

The polished shine of glass hovering in front of his nose drew made him go cross-eyed. Yellow was holding out a potion bottle. "No more playing with your wound. Drink," Yellow said sternly.

"Oh, come on—"

"You have a hole in your hand. There is a hole in the muscles you're using to move your thumb," his brother said, dropping each word like a brick on Harry's ears. "Your hand is now bleeding badly because you keep making it worse. Drink this, dammit."

Harry hardly ever heard his brother so close to the end of his rope. "You sound like Blue," he remarked before taking and downing the potion. The zing of energy hit his brain wrong and made him see double for a second. He waited a moment for his vision to settle, then cleaned and mended his glove before handing Yellow the bottle back.

"I don't like being sharp, but you've pushed me to it," Yellow sniffed, putting the bottle away. "Honestly, trying to impress me, of all people. Out of all of us, I'm the one that cares the least about pride." He hooked an arm around Harry's waist and started leading him toward the back of the cavern. As they walked toward the control room, the two bobbing lanterns on the other set of walkways mirrored their movements.

Harry couldn't help but lean a little into Yellow as they walked. He scowled down at the lava. 'The place full of tools was lit up purple just fine, but nooo, we couldn't have that down here, could we?' he thought sourly.

"We looted so much stuff," Red said with glee when they met at the back of the room. "We've gotta learn how to use a bow after this!"

Blue raised his Magic Lamp and gave Harry a skeptical once-over. "You look like crap," he commented. "Let me guess: you charged right into the dark for dumb meathead reasons?"

Harry scowled at his description, but reluctantly nodded.

Blue stepped up and thumped him on the forehead. "Well, don't do that, stupid." He put the hand not holding his lantern on his hip. "Now, why did you do that? What are we doing up here?"

"There should be a control room on this level where we can turn the power back on," Harry said. "Once we can see, we can find the doors down to the lower furnaces. Maybe even turn off the buckets, too."

"So we just have to find a set of doors along the wall?" Red asked. "Shouldn't be too hard." He held his lamp up to the wall and started scanning the rock. Something soon caught his eye and he ran down the walkway. "I found a door marble!"

The Harrys crowded around the darkened card reader. Harry didn't know about the specifics of Bluestone—he hadn't thought to ask Tiamus about the meanings of its three colors before leaving on this trip—but he'd deduced that blue-black generally didn't mean "functional". Even a flickering orange would have been more reassuring. He switched to his Navi Slate and showed it to the reader. As expected, there was no reaction from the unpowered device.

Harry looked closely at the doors. They stood straight, and yet were covered in subtle creases. The metal resembled paper that had been scrunched up and then smoothed out straight. Unlike the other doors they'd come across so far, they didn't interlock quite right, showing small, irregular gaps in between the square "teeth". He had a strong feeling that not only would these doors not work now, but they had also failed back when they'd been most needed. He re-summoned his lamp and held it up to study the stone above the control room. It was subtly off in a way he recognized; Vaati cared about appearances, but not the natural grain of stone. That wall had been taken apart and fused back together. But why?

Under the ever-present low rumble of the Death Mountain's insides, Harry heard a soft, haunting moan. Ice tingled down his spine, the first sense of cold that he'd experienced since fighting Endraal. He carefully lined up his eye with one of the small gaps in the doors.

Blood-red lights, a deeper and dimmer color than the Bokoblins' vivid eyes, floated in the inky darkness of the room. The light of his lamp revealed the wet shine of bared teeth.

Harry took a generous step back. "There's a ReDead in there," he declared in a tight voice. He couldn't take his eyes off that glint of red showing faintly through the doors. The monster in there had been a person, fifty years ago. There was a good chance that someone walking around today knew who they were. They might have been a dear relative, a spouse, or a best friend. And now they were stuck down here in this mass grave, a corpse warped and reanimated by the worst sort of magic.

His brothers' faces went ashen. Blue held up his lamp toward the doors, his expression stony. "Well, the only thing for it is to put them out of their misery. We need to get in there and I'm sure whoever that was would rather not be a zombie," he said with cold determination. "Who's going to break down the doors?"

Harry conjured his Dragon Hammer. "I'll do it. Cover me." While Harry wound up for a rocket-enhanced swing, his brothers switched to their Magic Rods. Yellow cast a bright Lumos and raised his staff to illuminate the area. Harry stepped forward and threw his weight into a downward strike at the doors.

The previously weakened metal gave way and the doors folded backward into the room. With the visual barrier gone, the ReDead's head lifted, its dull eyes flaring. Just as the monster's toothy maw dropped open, Red and Blue hit it with Sunburst Spells. The ReDead jerked back and froze in place, its brownish purple complexion going a shade lighter.

For a moment, in between vanishing his hammer and switching to his sword, Harry was struck by the fact that he could almost recognize this ReDead as a living person. The ones at Hogwarts had been ancient—corpses dredged up from either Old Hyrule or an ancient period of the New Kingdom. This emaciated creature wore leather and red linen clothes eerily similar to Harry's and had clumps of brittle, greenish hair still clinging to the jerky-like skin pulled tight over its skull. Its earlobes sagged under the weight of Bluestone and ruby amulets and a large stala locket swung on its neck from a sturdy chain. It still had a metal nameplate on its uniform: Bluesmith.

This had been a person.

Harry drew his sword.

This had been a person, and that was why he was here to cut their puppet strings. He lunged for the ReDead and hit it with a flurry of slashes to the unprotected spine at the back of its sunken belly. The creature's clothes ripped to shreds, spewing smoke as his blade hacked apart the dried-out flesh underneath. After ten rapid strikes, the monster moaned pitifully and crumpled. Harry sheathed his sword, breathing hard. Slaying ReDeads was only easy if you outnumbered them and moved fast enough that they couldn't fight back. Even though Harry felt bad for whoever this had been, he really hadn't wanted to learn what it was like to feel those massive teeth cracking his head open.

As his brothers cautiously entered the room, Harry crouched down to inspect the body in the light of Yellow's Illumination Charm. Bluesmith had been a powerfully built person, if their height and the bagginess of their clothes was anything to go by. The earrings they had on were interesting; the mix of steel, stala, and dull, opaque ruby formed the stylized shape of a horned owl's face. They looked rather heavy, but he could imagine a fashionable witch wearing jewelry like that.

He tentatively reached out and lifted the large stala locket from the body's chest. It was a sturdy flattened egg, decorated with engraved designs of a horned owl's face and a Triforce surrounded by stylized light rays that resembled a gear. The Triforce symbol was composed of inlaid Bluestone, currently shining a strong blue-white. Whatever enchantment had been laid on this piece of jewelry, its magical battery still had some juice in it after all these decades.

Pulling up the latch with his thumb, he opened the metal egg. A family portrait was set in one side, a ring of Bluestone glowing on the other. Within the picture, a huge, muscular, green-haired woman and a similar-looking man somewhere in their twenties, one stout Hylian man with a close-cut Afro, a tall and narrow Sheikah man, and two chubby, green-blond toddlers clustered together with bright smiles. The toddlers each had an owl patch on their little tunics that matched the earrings Bluesmith wore. A faint blue aura covered the photo—a sign of the spell keeping it from burning up in the heat. This picture must have been really important…

He jumped at the sound of a click and a low hum, then blinked when the lights suddenly came on. Blue-tinted color flowed across the darkness, revealing screens and all kinds of consoles. Some of them were heavily dented, if not completely crushed. The massive cavern beyond brightened as light strips along the walls patchily flared to life. Most stayed a dully pulsing standby-orange, but it was better than nothing.

Red stood over Harry, giving him a funny look. "What're you doing, mate?" he asked. "Because it looks kinda creepy, if you ask me."

"I was, er…" Harry wasn't really sure. He just wanted to know this person for some reason. It wasn't as though they'd seen a ReDead with personal effects before. "I guess I was thinking about who they were," he said, looking down at the monster. Seeing its shrunken, baked skin in the light caused a sudden surge of revulsion to run through him. He abruptly stood up and backed away.

"Do you want to see if we can take some of their things back to their family?" Yellow asked, laying a hand on his arm. "We know this person's last name, so we could find their relatives."

"Er, sure." Harry tore his eyes away from the body. "We can do that. You, erm, figure that out. I'll see what I can do on the computer." He stepped farther away from Bluesmith and set his attention on the console.

Okay…this system was a little more complicated than the computer he'd interacted with earlier. Visitors definitely weren't meant to be in here. Each options list led to another options list, and so on. He could access everything in the lower part of the facility from here: doors, conveyors, buckets, furnace feeds, central data hub, and more.

Harry meandered through every trail of menus that seemed interesting. He turned off the furnace feeds first, just to see what would happen. After half a minute of listening, he noticed the sound of lava slopping into the lake had stopped. Fascinated by his newfound power, Harry turned off the conveyors next. The lines of buckets leading down to the room slowed to a stop. Harry gave the treads a funny look. Were they actually supposed to be there, then? He'd thought those were a result of Vaati's editing.

When he went to open the doors, he was surprised to find they were already open. It didn't take long for him to realize why that might be. Bluesmith had been in here when the room had collapsed, which meant they had likely been at the controls during the monster attack and following cave-in. He clicked through more menus, discovering an announcement system and cameras as he did. The microphone for the speakers was among the things in the room that were still damaged from the cave-in, its Bluestone nodes shattered, but the computer said there was power being sent to it.

"You saved the people down here," he murmured, staring at the fallen ReDead for a moment. Bluesmith must have been monitoring the evacuation through the cameras and giving instructions through the PA system.

Though Harry didn't have anything else to do in that room—the doors to the lower levels were already open and the lava-dropping buckets were no longer an issue—he clicked back through to the central data hub and started going through employee records. He scrolled through the A's and some of the B's before stopping on two monochrome blue employee photos of sharp-jawed, broad-shouldered Hylians with light-colored hair, eyes that turned down at the corners, and matching toothy grins: Kaepora and Gaebora Bluesmith. He recognized them from the locket portrait. They looked like siblings close in age, possibly even fraternal twins. He clicked on their images. Kaepora, the sister, had worked on the first basement level in the Sand Processing Sector. Gaebora, meanwhile, had been one of the foremen on the lowest floor.

Harry stared at the name and committed it and its owner's face to memory. Gaebora Bluesmith. If he had any living relatives, Harry was sure either the last name or the distinctive hair color would have stuck around. It had only been a couple of generations since his time, after all.

He straightened from the computer. "Alright, let's go," he said. "We've got one more floor to go, and then we'll really be in Death Mountain's heart. Let's finish this."

Notes:

-Please forgive my poetry. I have significant difficulty with metaphors and artsy language in general, so poetry is something I find nigh impossible to understand, let alone replicate. Link's ability to write flowery song-words is just as limited as my own.

-Link has full protanopia; he can't see red whatsoever, and his perception of green is close to nil. Why did I make him color-blind? Well, it started with me going "haha what if he couldn't see the green on his tunic?" and then coming to the realization that I've hardly ever seen any color-blind characters in fiction whose color perception wasn't a one-off gag. So I decided to make him color-blind like actual people are instead of as a mean joke. I'll be using the Coblis color-blindness simulator (site linked on Ao3 for anyone who'd find it useful) to get his perception as accurate as I can when it comes up.

-I'm not trying to make it out like the Light World doesn't have its own major bad guys to deal with, but I am trying to draw a line in the sand to establish that the Dark World retains some of the traits that made it the scary boogeyman country of ancient Hylian legend. One of those traits is that certain rules that Light World natives abide by without even thinking about it—good guys and bad guys alike—are more likely to go ignored by Dark World villains like Voldemort.

-I have no idea whether this is an overdone thing in Zelda fic or not, but I wanted to ruminate on the concept of ReDeads a little. Because in the games, they don't tend to be identifiable, y'know? I wanted to try applying some backstory to one of these corpse-monsters that scared me so badly as a kid.