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Rain beats down on the city, muting the bright reds and greens and yellows of the brick houses, Legend’s fringe hanging in his eyes and dripping. Water trails down his nose and he scrubs at his face with his sleeve but that one’s soaked through already, so it does nothing. Legend spares a resentful thought for lucky Wild and Time, with their injuries, and Hyrule and Sky who are tending to them, who get to stay inside the inn.
Still, there are plenty of merchants out, huddling underneath the colorful fabrics of the market stands or in some cases standing miserably next to their carts of wares. Legend and Four have been tasked to find potions and arrows, while Warriors, Wind and Twilight stock up on food. Any chance to restock has to be grabbed with both hands and stuffed in a bag.
This isn’t Hyrule, Legend can’t say what makes him say that – the cut of the buildings? Smell in the air? The food on offer in the stalls? But regardless, the people speak hylian and it doesn’t really matter when or where they are.
He and Four find a potion seller by a cart laden with crates. He’s thin and mousy, in long, rain-soaked robes. “Oh, my wares are the best in all the land,” he babbles, gesturing, and yeah sure, while Legend takes one of the vials on display and holds it up to peer into the red liquid.
Fuck, not like he knows anything about brewing potions. Still.
“There’s another stand over there,” Four observes mildly, jerking his head to the left.
“Let’s compare prices.”
Make him sweat, if nothing else. How to get a good deal out of a merchant; some things Ravio tell him are more useful than others.
The second merchant’s stall has a green roof, with a single black bird sat there peering down at them through the rain. The potionbrewer is in a long blue cloak, with a hood against the rain pulled down so low Legend can only just see their mouth and a bit of reddish-blond hair. They’ve got a scar on their chin, like they nicked it on something sharp. “You’re after potions?” they say. “We’ve got all sorts of items too – magical rods, jewelry, souvenirs and mementos, armor, weapons, toys…”
“Does that include arrows?” says Four.
Legend looks critically at the potions lined up on the counter, but hey, at least these are cheaper if nothing else. He studies a vial of red potion, same as the other merchant’s.
“What kind of merchant doesn’t sell arrows?” says the potionbrewer dryly. “We have plain ones, fire, ice, bomb, ghost-”
They make Four help them haul out the crates with the arrows, from the back of the stall where they’re shielded from the rain underneath a covering. Legend watches, but Four doesn’t complain, easily hauling up the crates. The potionbrewer stands out of the way, watching, then darts in to crack open the lids so Four can start filling up their bags with arrows.
Legend turns back to the potions. They look fine, so he starts gathering up a dozen – can’t afford to pass up a chance to restock, even as Legend grimaces while he tallies up the prices in his head.
“You must be preparing for a siege or something, huh,” says the merchant when they’re done, as they’re calculating the price. Legend can’t tell if that was a joke or not – until he sees their mouth twitch.
“Something like that,” says Four vaguely.
“Are you heading up to the Eels’ Nest? Where those monsters have been spotted?”
“What monsters?”
“Supposedly, they’re unnaturally strong and fast,” says the merchant. “Then again, city guards are as useful here as anywhere else. So who knows.”
Legend crosses his arms. “You know what, we might just head that way. So, got anything else to tell us?”
“Me? Oh, no – just don’t trip, the cliffs here are a pain in the rain. Watch your step. Potions don’t help in the long run, you know.” The merchant slaps their notepad on the counter, and Legend sees their hands are as cluttered with rings as Legend’s own, protective and not, polished silver and gaudy gold and plain metal bands with and without stones. Even a ring like Legend’s that shifts colors if you will it – and Legend revises in his head, she.
She tells them the price. It is, indeed, painful.
Is this a part of the world where they haggle? Legend gives it a shot.
“We can do half that.”
“Hah. No.”
“Don’t you have such a thing as a bulk discount?”
The merchant parries Legend’s attempts, and though he could keep this up all day, the rain is not making it worth it. Neither is Four, staring down Legend with a flat look.
“Fine,” Legend concedes.
The potionbrewer laughs. “You know, you look so… nevermind, you can have your purchases for a hundred rupees less, and a freebie item.”
Fine, whatever, and Four gives Legend a look here, as if they wouldn’t all be curious to find a mystery item, and now the potionbrewer is brandishing a little figurine, holding it out for Legend to see. It’s a statuette of cat.
“I thought you said item.”
As in, magical item.
“A copycat,” she says. “It’ll turn into any item of your choice, provided you already have one. Well, if it actually works – report back later, won’t you?”
Oh, that kind of freebie. Legend takes it anyway, though after Ravio he certainly should know better, and Four pays, after which they’re left to haul their bags of potions and arrows back to the inn through the rain. Just as they turn onto the street with the inn, already soaked down to their underclothes, the clouds part just a sliver.
Here’s to hoping it’ll be dry tomorrow, if they’re heading up to some sort of dungeon.
Through the power of potions, blessed they be, and no the mending they do certainly leaves no longer-lasting effects on anyone’s bones, which will become true as long as Legend keeps saying it – Time claims to be ready to head out the next morning, and Wild’s up and walking again. Twilight manages to negotiate Time and Warriors down to leaving only in the afternoon, though, at least in part because it’s still raining.
Legend sorts through his gear while Four and Wind do weapons maintenance, or rather, Four teaches Wind how to mend chainmail, and Twilight is somewhere else. Fussing over the old man or the cook, probably. Warriors sits in the corner, mending a shirt while occasionally glaring out the window at the drizzle.
Rising from his crouch on the floor, both of Legend’s knees pop. It feels like all blood rushes straight down to his feet and he almost staggers.
He glares out the window too. Fuck this weather.
They eat an uninspired lunch, bread and cold meats from Wild’s stash. The rain has still to let up, just an endless drizzle that seems to smear the whole city out into a gray blur what with that weak sunlight through the clouds. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to let up anytime soon,” says Twilight.
“It’s just weather,” says Hyrule. “Let’s get this over with. The dungeon will probably be dry inside, right?”
Legend’s tunic is still damp when he pulls it on. From the others’ grimaces, he guesses their tunics and boots haven’t dried much either.
No one says much on the way up, not even Wind. They fight to make the climb up through the cliffs outside the city, towards the dark stone building at the top, which only starts to come into view about halfway up. The stone is smooth and nearly barren beneath them, your typical wind and water-blasted coastal cliffside, and with the rain slicking the stone it might as well be blank ice.
The sea isn’t even visible, thick fog blanketing it. As they climb higher, shuffling from crevice to crevice and digging their hands and feet into the slightest crack to stay on the cliff, the city slowly disappears behind the veil of fog too. Everything is just gray. Legend’s undershirt is plastered to his back with water.
Fuck this weather.
The dungeon, something about Eels, whatever the name was now again, has eels carved into the stone around the entrance. Legend suddenly has a dark suspicion as to the humidity inside that place.
“Remember what we decided last time,” says Time. Every dungeon they’ve tackled together has been a new trial in refining their teamwork, to put it diplomatically. Whoever let Warriors and Wild pair up for that first one wasn’t in their right mind. “Cook, you’re with the knight and smith. Captain, you come with me…”
Twilight says, “Then it’s me and the traveler, yeah?”
Wind slaps Legend’s shoulder. “So, you and me. How much you wanna bet this will be a water dungeon?”
“Don’t even speak it.”
It is a water dungeon.
“We’re already wet!” Wind throws up his hands. He tries to sound peppy. “Some more water, big deal, what does it matter?”
“Okay, so you take that path down there, then,” says Warriors quickly, indicating the corridor where the floor drops off into water after three feet of gray tile.
“Yeah, and?” says Wind, stripping off his shirt. “Like I care. See how bad this isn’t?” He slides into the water, making a face at the cold.
Legend growls, throws Warriors the bird, and hurries to follow Wind.
The corridor ends in a dead-end, a small ledge with a locked door. That is, from what you can see above the surface. So, the key has to be underwater, as if Legend hasn’t suffered enough in this life.
“Would you say you’re a good diver?” says Legend, sat next to Wind on the ledge.
Because Legend is not, not without bringing out the mermaid suit.
Luckily, Wind finds the key easily, in a chest just below the door. “Excellent work,” says Legend, and they continue into the next chamber, which has tektites and exploding fish swarming around the small platforms across the water they need to traverse next.
After which there’s a puzzle, draining the next room before the door will open for them. A switch which needs to be held down with the right number of weighted blocks, it is what it always is. Wind finds another chest, floating in a well, but when they bring it up and break it open…
“It’s empty!” Wind, affronted, looks at Legend, as if he’s at fault here.
“I don’t fucking know,” Legend says. He clears his throat, trying to gentle his voice. It’s been a long day. “Let’s just throw it back in.”
Wind gleefully launches the chest back into the well, splashing them with water all over again. Legend’s tunic will never not smell like wet wool again.
And where are the black-blood monsters that were supposed to be here?
Right, never ask stupid questions – in the next room are some enemies Legend hasn’t seen before: large blue frogs, croaking musically. There are only five of them, guarding an unlit torch, and water is pouring from the ceiling.
He and Wind draw their swords, Wind charging in while Legend hangs back.
Wind doesn’t even scratch the frog with his first swipe, immediately swapping to a two-handed grip and trying again. He cleaves a small gash in the frog’s back, and black blood spills out, washing away with the rain.
Then another frog leaps at Wind, who only just steps aside before it bowls him over. The first frog spits water at him, and right, a third frog leaps towards Legend.
One of the frogs keeps on singing, constantly, and rain pours from the ceiling.
Legend cuts off the forelimb of a frog and black blood pours out, splashing around his ankles as Legend sidesteps another frog. They don’t even have swords or teeth, they’re just so tough, like rubber, trying to slice through rubber-
He retreats to a corner of the room to pull out his hammer.
Smashing the next frog over the head makes it pop like a grape and fluids splatter in every direction, including on Legend. Rain washes him clean before the black blood can even start to burn him, and he advances on the next terrible frog monster.
Wind decapitates another frog with a yell. Legend smashes two more, then Wind swings at the last – and finally, the unnatural rain ceases, a last few drops falling down from the ceiling.
Legend slips on the floor, stumbling and cursing over to the torch. He rips out his flame rod and lights it, wishing he could set himself on fire to dry off. His hair is plastered flat to his neck.
By the newly opened door, Wind shouts outside, “Hey guys, we’re in here!”
Legend takes the time to light another torch in a hidden alcove, and a chest falls down, splashing more water onto his boots. He kicks it open but it’s also empty. Figures.
The next room is a large hall, dry but for some channels of water along the sides of the room. There are more eel carvings too, including four statues rearing up from the water with opened mouths. In between them is the large, ornate door which always seems to feature in these kinds of buildings.
Yeah, it doesn’t take a fucking genius to figure this one out.
Time says, “Did you two find a key?”
“What key?”
Time holds up a faintly glowing orb, then pushes it inside the mouth of one of the eel statues.
“Nope,” says Wind.
Legend wrings water out of his tunic. “Great. Just great. Who’s going with him to check?”
Time says, “Captain, why don’t you go with him?”
Warriors, wet and bedraggled, gives Time a mutinous look before following Wind, and if Legend had the energy he would laugh.
Unfortunately, it would turn out the real challenge had not even begun yet.
Winter comes and Link isn’t alone in the house anymore, and he can feel Ravio’s eyes on his neck every time he fumbles to light a candle, pull on a boot, tie a knot. When Link lifts his head and pins him in place with a gaze of his own, caught right in the act, Ravio doesn’t even say anything.
Ravio boils turmeric and lemon tea, ginger tea and his own lavender blend and says he can’t finish it all on his own. Link says bribery won’t get him anywhere, and Ravio only smiles.
Tea to soothe aches. Yeah, sure.
This time last year, Link had only peace and quiet. He had only just returned from Labrynna, and the house was his; empty and his alone, and he could do whatever he decided with it.
He shattered his left knee in Labrynna, just another fall. A cliff which shifted place in five-hundred years’ time, apparently, and Link wasn’t prepared, holding that harp in his hands. A potion took care of that. He remembers it now, getting out of bed and the cold sinks straight through to the bone.
Fingers broken, time and again against the pommel of his own sword, trying to parry, catching a blow.
He waits until Ravio’s out of the house to take out his cream, rubbing it into his useless legs and hands and thinking, yeah right, Syrup ripped me off for sure, this never works.
He tidies up before Ravio gets back, and watches Ravio from the table when he’s returned. Ravio hums quietly, putting his purchases away like he doesn’t mind Link watching him in the slightest.
Why is Link just watching him? He gets up, but then Ravio looks at him, and Link can’t form the words anymore.
Why are you here? Why are you still here?
Wild, Sky and Four arrive to the hall of the final door with a second key, and after a bit Hyrule and Twilight return with a third. The fourth eel statue’s mouth gapes open, as if laughing at them, empty.
Empty.
Yes, there was something off about the empty chests, wasn’t there? Why would they be empty, if some schmuck hundreds of years ago went to all the trouble of locking up their valuables in a labyrinth like this? Then again, why would anyone bother with any of this in the first place, ever? Why do people build beautiful buildings and create magical items? Why does anyone do anything? Why is Legend still here?
Wind and Warriors return, empty-handed.
“If we have four corridors,” says Four, gesturing in the air as if lecturing to schoolchildren, “Then it makes sense to have one key in each, yes? But that doesn’t have to be the case. It could be a trick.”
They all pair back up again and start to backtrack.
The empty frog room, the corridors with the well, the water puzzle room and the exploding fish obstacle course – where they make sure to kill everything, this time, and only one of them even has black blood. Continue through the flooded corridor, back to the front hall. Where the door is, of course, shut like a tomb – the first security measure of any dungeon.
Back again, and look, Legend knows he didn’t miss anything. But he can try to pretend – maybe that slightly discolored brick is a secret door? Maybe that tiny crack in the floor hides something? Maybe if they walk backwards through this hall something will happen?
“If giving up were an option, would you have taken it?” Ravio asked him one night, a late night, he was in a strange mood just then, sat and staring into the fire, hands limp in his lap. Legend, at the table, was just trying to finish his book before his candle burnt out.
Legend doesn’t remember exactly what he said; something to the effect of no, obviously, what’s the point in trying in the first place if you do that.
Legend, Wind and Time walk back to the final door again. They shake their heads, others show their empty hands, they shrug, they look at each other.
Nothing.
Wild pulls out a plate of riceballs.
They huddle together in front of the door, shoving riceballs and dried fish in their mouths. Legend glares at the fourth eel statue, gnawing on a piece of carp.
“Alright,” says Warriors, getting to his feet with a groan and some delusional greenhorn’s optimism. “Surely, there’s something we’ve missed? If we just-”
Legend wants to throw a riceball straight at his head.
They walk back to the front hall again, and this time Legend tags along with Sky as they take the path he and Four and Wild originally took. This one twists up around the second floor, and features several corridors with fast-moving water where they have to jump from platform to platform before they’re washed away. Another classic.
Legend, with water sloshing around inside his boots, slips as he jumps onto the last one. He barely has time to throw out a hand, hitting it on the edge.
There’s a snap, and Legend bites down a scream.
Sky shouts for him, lunging to grab his arm before Legend is washed away. This time he does scream, pain stabbing through him with the sudden force of a sword straight through his gut, agony pounding like his pulse through his wrist even as Sky shifts his grip to higher up.
He ends up on his back on the floor, wet stone underneath him, as Sky gingerly lifts his arm. Legend tastes blood from biting down.
“Your wrist…”
“Potion,” Legend grits out.
Sky doesn’t protest, pulling one out from Legend’s bag. Legend takes two mouthfuls, exactly the amount needed to reknit bone, and his wrist wrenches back in place. Legend pants around the pain, as hard as if he’s been running, sprinting. Hunted for days.
It’s all in his head, naturally. He tells Sky to help him up, and they continue.
Legend stops by the puzzle, already solved, to shove the blocks around some more. Sky helps him, and they uncover another chest – empty, again.
Back to the front hall, coming down the stairs this time. Twilight and Warriors are there too, and they share a look of misery before turning around to head back, again.
Empty chests. Who’s to say the Chain are the first ones here, really?
The dungeons lock the doors behind intruders for a reason. Hell, maybe some other looter was here and then got eaten by a bomb fish.
They arrive at the final door, again, empty-handed, again.
Evidently, the people in the city know about this dungeon, as they were advised to come here, by that merchant…
Legend suddenly wants to smash his face into a wall. He groans and drags his hands down his face.
“Okay, no, stop. There’s no key. It’s gone.” He puts down his bag to rummage.
“How? Why would the key be gone?” says Wild.
“Huh, did someone already clear this dungeon? But whose era is this?”
“I would’ve remembered this place...”
Legend says, up to his elbow in his bag, “Calm down, I’ve got this.”
“You don’t have a working master key, do you?”
“No.” He holds up a statuette of a cat, one paw raised. “Let’s get out of here.”
He’s pretty sure what era this is now, anyway.
The cloned key opens the door just as well as the original fourth would’ve, and behind it is the largest room so far, a high ceiling held up by pillars carved to look like eels. In the middle of the room sits the largest, fattest, bluest frog Legend has ever had the displeasure of seeing.
It croaks, a single note that rings out through the room. A single drop falls… and water starts to pour down on them.
This frog wouldn’t fit inside Legend’s house, it’s large enough it might be the size of his house. Rain pours down like a dam has burst, Legend struggling to stay on his feet. Hyrule slips but Wind catches him, and Time, heavy and unshakable in all that armor, hefts his sword and starts forward.
There’s nothing else for it. They attack.
Time draws blood first, the black washing out with the rain. Yeah, expected.
The frog tries to stomp on them, thuds down to make the floor shake, spits water on them and, slowly and relentlessly, starts to flood the room.
Legend keeps hammering away at its feet. It sounds like Wind, Wild and Hyrule are trying something behind its back, so the best thing Legend can do is be a distraction. If his wrist twinges as he swings the hammer, well fuck, that’s a problem for the him of later.
Later, later, always later and it will never catch up to him.
The water’s risen up to his knees. Legend almost slips, but manages to lean on the hammer.
The frog bellows, suddenly. Wind shouts.
-and the beast explodes into miasma, finally. Wind and Hyrule fall to the floor, and Twilight rushes to check on them. Legend just leans on his hammer, soaked to the bone, as the rain turns to a drizzle and peters out. Light, from above, and Legend tips his head back to see a hole up in the high ceiling, where the clouds have parted and sunlight shines in, tinted sunset orange.
It’s stopped raining.
When Link opens the door after months away, he smells cinnamon and there’s a light on. “Mr. Hero!” and Ravio rushes to meet him at the door. “You’re back!”
“You’re still here,” says Link.
“Of course, where else would I have gone?” Ravio smiles and Link rolls his eyes.
Ravio pours him tea and blathers on about some customers he’s had, and in the morning he reveals he’s planted tomatoes in the back garden. Link scowls, but he doesn’t have a better idea so fine, Ravio can have his fun. For however long he plans on staying.
Link’s given up on that blacksmith apprenticeship, and so has the blacksmith, no doubt. Gulley still comes around, though, so Link keeps an eye on the kid.
He mends his clothes. He repairs some of his older items.
Ravio watches him, still, saying nothing.
When Link shifts the color of her ring to mark how she feels, Ravio doesn’t say anything, so maybe he knows.
She goes to the market in Kakariko. She helps some guy put up a fence. She talks to Zelda, and Zelda brings out servants with a tea service and tiny sandwiches cut in triangles and asks her about her life. Her life? What, as if Link has anything to report.
Link goes home, and Ravio talks about the tomatoes, and basil now, too, and she just listens.
A summer storm blows through and she feels the cracks in her ribs ache, like Yuga only just threw her aside. Long ago healed. She snapped her arm in Hytopia, drank a potion, remembers it again now.
Ravio makes more turmeric tea.
“Why?”
“I felt like it,” he says, liar.
In the garden, he plants onions and herbs and lavender. “How long until those are done growing?” asks Link, trailing around like she hasn’t got anything else to do. Pulling at the loose threads of life waiting for something to unravel.
“Mmm, maybe next year, for those,” and he explains more about other plants, so on and so forth, and afterwards, Link says,
“How long are you going to stay here?”
“Oh, I could just stay forever, really,” he jokes, smiling at her.
She rolls her eyes.
Fishing around for answers yields nothing but more jokes, he slides out of her hands like an eel, a rabbit, avoiding answering sincerely.
“I could stay here forever,” and he smiles, and turns back to the stovetop, boiling another pot of tea Link hasn’t asked for.
“Fine. Have it your way.”
He’ll tell her when he leaves, whatever, it’s not her problem.
When Legend slips away on their way to the inn, the rest don’t notice, all too eager to finally be dry again and clean up some scrapes that aren’t worth wasting potions on. The last of the sunlight lingers behind the rooftops, though the streets are already dark. In the market place, the merchants are lighting lanterns, and there’s a decent crowd, probably just people happy to finally be out of the rain.
The gutters are flooded, too, and Legend splashes through puddles on his way across the square. Whatever, his feet have been marinating the whole day already, it cannot get worse.
The potionbrewer seems to have been expecting him. She still has the hood pulled down low, leaning back in a chair now put inside the stall, watching him come. On her shoulder is that black bird from earlier. Its eyes are bright green, beady.
Legend figured out how to turn the copycat back. It was easy, exactly the kind of trick he himself would’ve baked in.
So Legend puts the little statuette on the counter. He puts a hand there to brace on as he leans in closer, trying to peek underneath her hood. “It worked,” he says blandly.
The merchant goes to take the statuette, hand emerging from her sleeve. With his and her hands both on the counter like this, even for just a moment, Legend can throw a glance down and see what he already knew: they have nearly all the same rings.
Not the same kind, the same gems; no, the exact same particular rings.
“You’re me,” Legend hisses.
The merchant tips up her hood, and there it is: his own face. Same eyes, same nose, same hair stained pink at the ends, same cheeks but not quite, she’s older. A nick on her chin and another through her eyebrow.
“This will be really funny in a few decades,” she tells him. “So, was that it? You found me out?”
You revealed it all just like that? he doesn’t ask, because she’s smirking, like she knows everything he’s thinking – which she does, if she’s lived this before, because she’s him, but then-
“You could be an alternate timeline.” Legend scoffs. His heart isn’t racing, never. “How isn’t this causing a paradox?”
“The same way Labrynna didn’t spontaneously cease to exist, I imagine,” she says.
“Why are you a merchant?”
“What else should I be?”
Every word is a challenge, some way to mock him.
“You’re not me,” he says. “Just because you’re here – I’m not going to just become you, just like that, now that I’ve seen you, you can’t decide my future-”
She might be in her forties. Forty! Lived all the way to her forties? She smiles at him like- like-
The bird caws. She reaches up without looking, to pet it, and with a lurch in his stomach Legend recognizes that gesture. From another hand, stroking a white bird.
No, Legend still doesn’t believe any of this. He doesn’t.
He raises his chin. “I won’t inevitably become you. I don’t believe in fate.”
“You could be me. Or you could not,” she says, blandly. “But no matter what, you’re going to get older and one day you’re going to be this old, and where will you be then?”
Legend has been young, sword in hand and hobbling through dungeons for an eternity, and he’s never getting older, because if he does… because if he does then what. Seven years has been a lifetime.
No, she can’t be him.
No more. How could he…
The sun is setting behind the rooftops of this nameless city, and Legend stands there in his soaked boots, wrist still throbbing, a hundred tiny long-healed fractures through his bones, and she watches him. The older Legend, with a pet bird and a long hooded cloak and a cart full of enchanted goods.
So he’s not surprised, really, when he hears footsteps from behind him and a familiar voice, though just a little different, says, “Hello, I see my partner’s showing you our wares! Can I help you with-”
Legend looks up and behind him, and Ravio stops in his tracks.
“Don’t worry,” Legend says, shocked back from numbness all at once. “I was just leaving.” He holds up a hand in goodbye and turns to go.
Ravio, in that same purple cloak patched many times over, a green scarf twined around his neck and his hair tied in a long braid, says nothing to stop him. He opens and closes his mouth, then looks to the older Legend, and seeing her face, settles. He puts a hand on top of hers on the counter.
Legend walks away, not looking back.
Water squelching in his boots, Legend looks up at the darkening sky as he walks and thinks, I’m too old for this.
Too old to be thinking about- the future.
And where will he be then?
Ravio’s voice comes back to him, the way he smiles as he says forever, and there he was by the market stall, in his old cloak, same Ravio, still here.
Maybe he wasn’t joking.
Legend rubs his wrist, swallowing. He’s too old for this.