Chapter Text
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Link asked. He was sitting on the floor of the Ja Baij shrine, fletching arrows. Zelda was busy digging through the guts of the shrine’s data transfer pedestal.
“It will work perfectly,” she declared, about a dozen books and documents spread out on the floor around her for reference. “And now Purah cannot complain about monopolization of her equipment. Mine will be here! All I have to do is input and test out Purah’s runes. Oh it’s so exciting, Link! Imagine the advancements we can make by creating novel runes!”
“If anyone can do it, you can,” he said honestly.
Zelda looked over her shoulder, face smudged with a little bit of gunk from the pedestal inner workings, and gave him a sweet smile. “Thank you, Link.”
“Don’t forget I have to go clear out that Lynel after lunch if you’re not done.”
“I believe I shall be done before then.”
He focused on fletching his arrows again while Zelda launched into an excited ramble about what she was doing and how she thought it would work. He really was listening, but her sudden delighted gasp still startled him.
“I’ve got it!” she shouted. “Link come here, come look!”
He hopped to his feet and hurried over. She held out the slate for him to see.
“I’m interfacing with it! Purah’s runes are in that core just there—” she pointed to a glowy bit in the mess of tech ”—hooked up to the terminal. We should be seeing them added to the shrine’s data reservoir any moment now.”
They watched in anticipatory silence, but as the moment stretched, Link started to get a little nervous. “The data you used,” he said slowly, “did it include all of Purah’s stuff?”
“Yes, of course,” said Zelda. Her enthusiasm was undimmed. “I’ll be working off of her prior research.”
“Including the de-aging rune?”
Zelda paused. “Well… it is in there, but I certainly won’t be touching it.”
“But it’s in there?”
“Yes.”
“Loaded into the terminal. Right now.”
“Well. Yes?”
“Huh. Right. Maybe we should back away—“
The terminal chimed serenely and lit up… and kept lighting up… and lit up so much in such a short period of time that Link could only wrap a hand around Zelda’s arm before everything went white. He passed out before he could even shout a warning.
When he came to, his head hurt terribly and he didn’t remember hitting the floor. It took his eyes a few moments to focus when he opened them. He got a hand under him and started to peel himself up off the floor, but he felt wrong.
“Zelda?” he croaked, and almost fell over when the sound of his own voice startled him. He gasped, hands flying to his throat. The feeling of wrongness redoubled, and—why did his boots look so small?
A groan caught his attention. He sat frozen with shock as a little mop of blonde hair pulled up from the floor. A girl, maybe six years of age, pressed one small hand to the side of her face. Her eyes were green, the shape and color of them etched permanently into his memory even when they seemed too large for her face.
“Zelda?” he asked, horrified.
The little girl blinked. “Link?” Horror dawned across her face too. “Link?”
“Oh Goddess, we shrunk!” he realized, holding his hands out and flexing them just to make sure the tiny digits really did belong to him. Unfortunately, they did.
“The de-aging rune,” Zelda realized, her horror growing. “Oh no. Oh no.” She fumbled for the slate, balance completely off thanks to her suddenly diminished size. “We have to get back to Hateno!”
Link shuffled over to her, making careful movements to acclimate to his own new size. It wasn’t so bad, really—honestly it was pretty similar to when he’d first woken up in the shrine of Resurrection. He was already calm, evaluating his new (and possibly permanent) physical capabilities.
Zelda tapped frantically at the slate. “No!” She whimpered in panic. “The map is frozen over the Plateau! I—I can’t get it to zoom out!”
“Can we get to our inventory?” Link asked, infusing extra calm into his voice for her sake.
“I—yes. Yes, we can. But we cannot get home!”
He put his hands over hers and squeezed gently. “Hey, it’s alright. We’ll just go the slow way. I’ll evaluate my abilities a little bit, then we’ll decide on a travel path together. You can whistle for Snowdrop as soon as we get off the Plateau, and then we’ll ride home. It’s slower than teleporting, but we can do it.”
Zelda looked at him, blinking rapidly and sniffling a little. “…okay,” she said. She took a deep breath. “My apologies, I feel… very strange and off balance. You are right. We’ll be fine.”
“The Calamity is gone,” he reminded her softly. “Even if we’re stuck like this, we’ll be okay. We have time now. Right?”
She squeezed his hand. “Right.” She took one more deep breath. “How were you going to evaluate your abilities?”
Link frowned thoughtfully. “Hmm… a little bit of combat will do it.” He stood to his feet, hopping in place to test his balance. “Yeah. As long as I can fight we’ll be fine.”
“Combat?” Zelda echoed. “What did you—“ She stopped, wide-eyed as he pulled his savage Lynel sword from the slate. “Link, no!”
He grinned. “Link yes!”
Zelda could not, as it turned out, stop her Knight when he got a notion into his head.
“LINK, PLEASE!” she yelled, hands wringing anxiously as she stood safe behind cover and watched her suddenly tiny friend approach the Lynel.
“IT’S FINE!” Link yelled back, supremely (stupidly) confident as he marched toward the beast with a sword bigger than he was held in both hands. His bow was stored in the slate by necessity, given that he could only carry it horizontally when he was this small. The fight would mostly be a test of how quickly he could draw weapons from the slate and put them away again.
On top of, you know, not getting hit and dying.
“SURELY THERE IS A BETTER WAY!”
“STOP DISTRACTING ME, PRINCESS!”
Her eye twitched. “DON’T YOU ‘PRINCESS’ ME RIGHT NOW, YOU STUPID, STUBBORN HERO!”
The Lynel, for its part, looked angry and then immediately confused by the sight of a tiny child lugging one of its own swords toward it. The confusion only lasted as long as it took the beast to decide that even tiny opponents would meet their end at its hand. It roared and charged.
Zelda shrieked and put her hands over her face, peeking out from between her fingers. She knew Link was capable. She knew that. But there was something distinctly more nerve-wracking about watching an apparent six-year-old facing down such a fearsome opponent.
“LINK!”
Her extremely stressful best friend whooped out a laugh as he successfully backflipped over the Lynel’s sword and rushed in to land a flurry of blows. “YEAH!”
Zelda was so absorbed watching Link literally hop his way neatly out of death that she almost missed the group of adults entirely. They charged across the field from the direction of the Temple and her breath caught in her throat. Even at a distance she could tell something very strange was going on. All were armed, which wasn’t exactly unusual, but they all somehow looked remarkably like her Knight.
They were all running directly at the Lynel with either fury or terror on their faces. She didn’t think—didn’t have any idea of how she could protect Link—before she was up and running too.
Link didn’t notice them until he dodged the Lynel’s fire attack and used the updraft to soar into the sky. Zelda saw him jolt as he looked down. “HEY, STAY BACK!” he yelled at the approaching strangers.
“ARE YOU NUTS?!” one of them called back.
“MAYBE!” Link let go of the paraglider, rapidly exchanging it for his bow. Midair was the only place he could actually draw it properly, considering how much bigger than him it was. As the men beneath him screamed, he loosed seven volleys of bomb arrows directly into the Lynel’s face and snapped out the paraglider with just a few inches to spare.
Not that he needed to. One of the men made it just in time to snatch him from the air, rolling across the ground to disperse the force of impact before he got up and kept running.
“Hey!” Link complained as he was spirited away from the battle and toward Zelda.
“Shh,” the man said, eyes wide and face pale. “Don’t talk until I’m not about to have a heart attack, kid.”
“Why? I had it!”
“Shh!”
Zelda hurried toward them as fast as her short legs could carry her. “Link!” The man slowed to a stop and knelt, setting Link down. Zelda slammed into him, hugging tight. “That was stupid!”
“I mean, maybe,” he said, hugging her and patting her back reassuringly, “but I had it. And I was right, I can keep us safe.”
“Are you hurt anywhere?” the stranger asked, looking between them. “Either of you?”
Link stepped away, crowding Zelda behind him protectively. It didn’t work very well; while Link was only a bit shorter than her in his adult form, she towered over him by half a head like this. He summoned his Lynel blade from the slate. “No. Go away.”
Zelda glanced at the rest of the strangers past the very concerned man who’d grabbed Link. They were busy murdering the Lynel with a special kind of vindictive fury. She probably would have been the same if she’d seen one trying to murder an apparent child.
“Where are your parents?”
Link opened his mouth to answer, but Zelda pinched his side to make him shut up. “My father’s hut is over there,” she said truthfully, pointing in the direction of the abandoned structure. “Please leave us alone.” She had no idea if these people were Yiga or not, but it was better not to take that risk.
The man glanced in the direction she pointed, then offered a hesitant, confused smile. “Right… Listen, you don’t need to be scared of us. We’re going to keep you safe and get you back home, so be honest, alright? Are you two Link and Zelda?”
“No,” Zelda said, probably a little too quick. Link crowded her back another few steps, sword raised in a defensive guard.
“Really? Then why did you call him ‘Link’ and why did he call you ‘Princess?’”
Oh yes, they had been yelling at each other quite loudly, hadn’t they?
“No,” said Zelda, a little too unsteady to be convincing. The other men had finished up and were now heading in their direction, which only served to make her even more nervous. “We were… playing a game. About the, um, the hero and the princess from the old stories.”
“Yeah,” Link said loudly, “how could we be Link and Zelda, they died a hundred years ago when the Calamity came. Do we look over a hundred to you?”
“Stop helping me,” Zelda hissed.
Most of the other men (and at least one youth, now that she was looking at them more closely) held back, but the one who was missing an eye came to kneel beside his compatriot. Link backed Zelda up another two steps.
“What are your names?” he asked, not unkindly.
“Oh, um… I am…” her eyes flitted down to the wildflowers at her feet. “Flora. And he is… Wild.” It wasn’t even an alias, really, just a statement of fact.
“He sure is,” one of the strangers muttered in agreement.
“Who are you?” Link demanded, drawing up to his full six-year-old height.
“This may sound a little strange, but my name is Link too. In fact, all of our names are Link. The Goddess brought us here to find the hero of this era.” He looked at Link with a sort of tired, resigned expression, before his attention returned to Zelda. “Can you tell me where he is… Princess?”
Yiga. Definitely Yiga. One hundred percent Yiga, and they were (maybe) going to die, because eight against one tiny hero was probably a lot even for her Knight. Zelda grabbed Link’s shirt with a white-knuckle grip and found herself too terrified to even speak. The memory of tumbling helpless to the desert sand, death above her, was fresh in her mind.
Luckily she didn’t need to speak. Link slipped her the slate behind his back and began backing them both away in earnest, jaw clenched and sword ready. She fumbled to pull up the map. It was still frozen on the Plateau, but that would be enough. It had to be.
“Hey, it’s okay,” one of the Yiga soothed, stepping up beside his friends and crouching down. “We’re not going to hurt you. You’re safe.”
“Old Man, I think we’re missing something here,” said the one with the wolf pelt.
Zelda pressed the icon for the Oman Au shrine and threw her arm around Link’s shoulders. Startled shouts followed as they dissolved away in blue light, but the Yiga couldn’t stop them and couldn’t know for sure where they’d gone.
They had at least bought time.