Pyrexia | part two
(part one)
Link came to with a jolt. He had to blink more than once to bring the cave into focus, had to stare for too long to get the blurred layers to merge. It was like trying to readjust two sets of eyes at once.
He sat up gingerly, gave his glowing right hand an experimental flex. The pain had ebbed, mostly. It was just his head that was still in a fog—still clouded with something nebulous, indistinct. Ethereal.
A presence.
He gritted his teeth and rolled to his feet, determined to ignore it.
The first few steps were unsteady, and the ones that came after not much of an improvement. But he didn’t have a choice. He limped on, following veins of luminous stone like beacons in the dark.
The haze shifted, settled. He could feel its attention, sliding to him like a beast turning a lazy eye on prey. Watching out of his own eyes with him. It observed in silence, but impressions, feelings, filtered through the shared space between them, unspoken but unmistakable.
Impatience. Disappointment. Judgement.
“What?” he finally snapped, but it lacked bite. His voice was hoarse from screaming.
He could feel the malcontent, the immaterial eye roll. “You’re a child.”
“You’re a parasite.”
Whatever nerve he hoped to strike, he missed; there was only a soft flicker of amusement. It made him bristle.
“You’re weak from the blend. Desperate. Lost. And yet you resist. I could help you.”
“I don’t want your help,” he spat, wincing at the twinge of doubt that tugged at him. At the answering ripple of smugness.
“Are you certain?”
He set his jaw, trying to retrace his route: the entrance to the cave network in Mount Hylia, where the Temple of Time had once stood in an era past; the tunnels that went down, down into the heart of the Great Plateau; the massive, imposing ruins they had run across. A place of worship, Zelda had theorized, or some kind of stronghold for an ancient power.
Her name drifting through his mind made him flinch. Desperate, the voice had called him. And he was desperate to save her. It made his shoulders sag, made the stubborn walls he had erected in his mind to keep them closed off from each other less impassable. And suddenly he saw it all again, but in a different light: glistening, fresh carvings in pristine stone, and walls upon walls in the heart of a mountain.
A stronghold. A prison.
And they’d unleashed the monster they’d buried down there.
He loosed a shaky breath, squaring his shoulders. Left. He needed to turn left.
Images flickered in and out of his head when he wanted them, answering questions he hadn’t asked, laying out a path before him before he had a chance to lose his way. His hands met carved stone—a balustrade, or something like it. The bridge where they’d had to abandon their ox. He limped on faster, feeling after the pillars with his glowing hand.
Soon the air was less stale, the darkness not so dense. He picked up the pace, stumbling towards light.
The sun hitting Mount Hylia was blinding. He had the miserable sensation, as he hobbled out into its brilliance, that he was stumbling again out of the Shrine of Resurrection: dazed, weak, without a memory to guide him.
Just a voice.
He dropped himself down to rest, breathing hard, and swallowed his pride and said, “Thank you.”
“We have similar goals,” it reasoned, decidedly placid. A bit patronizing. “If we work together, perhaps we may both find what we’re looking for.”
He murmured, “Maybe so.”
But then the ground shook, a horrible rumble vibrating the earth beneath his feet that made his stomach churn.
There, bathed in the orange glow of the sinking sun, Hyrule Castle was wrested violently from its foundation stones, drawing impossibly into the air. And the blend flooded with a feeling so overwhelming he tasted it on his tongue, acrid and hot, burning in his throat like bile: wrath.
He saw the monster’s face, and he knew it’s name.
He demanded, shaken, “Tell me everything about him. About Ganondorf.”
But there was no trace of the voice’s earlier patience, none of the level-headedness that had gotten them out of those tunnels. Everything behind his eyes was red and pounding, a fury so bright he wanted to shrink out from under it. He felt its need, its thirst for answers. And it had no intention of simply asking questions. It barely warned him at all.
It shouted, the sound so horrible he clapped his hands over his ears, “YIELD!”
It tore through the last barriers protecting his mind before he had a chance to comply, a flurry of lightning and fire, and ripped him open, taking everything he knew at once. Every memory. Every thought. Even the parts of him he had long thought lost forever, dredged up from the black place the shrine had buried them.
He screamed until he thought his throat would bleed.
The pain was not quick.
