Chapter Text
The moment he steps across the threshold, Time knows something is not right.
Before them is a valley, silent and untouched. A pale sheen veils the landscape; Time thinks first that it’s snow, but the air is too dry and that certain chilly nip is absent. The substance has a grey tinge to it. Ash, he identifies. A great sea of ash.
Previously motionless and eternal, now as they tread through the eerie silence, every step kicks up a flurry of flaky carbon into the air. The particles hang suspended in the atmosphere and tickle their noses, pale motes drifting down to dust their clothes and hair.
A few thin structures are speckled along the edges of the horizon, towards the center of the expansive waters, strangely twisted. And as they wade across the grey vault, they realize that it rests heavily over the ruins of a city. Though rendered to seared rock and broken mason tile now, the complex tiers and fallen pillars and half-there stonework of crumbled insulae serves as enough evidence to show that it must have once been a large commercial city, well-populated and well-traversed in its prime.
Something crunches beneath Time’s boot; he looks down. But all he sees is a faint powder on the ground, already wafting away into nothingness. Whatever fires that burned here in the past, they had burned so bright and so greedily that not even the coal remains. Just soot and ash and vague echoes of the past. Fragile and pale, disintegrating at the barest touch.
The hills of a curving valley extend high in the far distance, like monuments erected to keep the heroes contained within their bowl. Above their heads is a white sky, blanketed by a thick layer of illuminated clouds with only the thinnest slivers of sunlight reaching though, weak and silvery.
And before them is a lake, impossibly serene and still, reflecting the argentate sky.
Absolutely nothing disturbs it – no current or waves or water foam, no sift of sand or splash of underwater fauna. The absence of these small things is strangely discomfiting, as they walk closer, and it makes the water’s surface appear almost solid, like glass.
It looks like a mirror, and unbidden, that observation drags up old memories in Time’s head. A bright chamber, water splashing up his ankles. A tree in the center. Ripples extending into infinity. An ominous smile in his reflection where it shouldn’t exist. Crimson eyes peering out at him from the shadows. No matter how long ago it is or how far he may grow from it, Time will always remember the hardest fight of his life with crystal clarity.
“The water,” Wild murmurs beside him, staring intently and unmoving at the smooth surface. “I think it’s alive.”
Time eyes the younger hero carefully, recognizing the way Wild has already shifted the way he stands, defensive and watchful, as if preparing to meet an unseen adversary.
“What makes you say that?” Legend asks.
But like the rest of them, he too has long cottoned on to the strange air surrounding them. This is the fighter’s impulse they all have, which makes the little hairs on the back of their necks stand on end as they observe a seemingly peaceful, ashen valley.
It’s too peaceful. Too quiet and too perfect. Flurries of ash twist into the air in the distance and something rustles the scraggly trees that circle the hilltops above their heads. The sky ripples in roiling waves as though it is another sea, this one of bleached clouds – yet no accompanying sound of wind greets their ears, and they feel no breeze against their skin.
It is a profoundly unnatural sensation, to observe movement in the sky and none in the water, to know that something moves but not what moves it.
Hyrule, however, is the one who answers, and when they look they discover that he has put his hands over his ears, a strained expression stretched tight over his face. “Breathing,” Hyrule says, voice tight. He shakes his head as if it will rid him of the sound. “That water is breathing like a person.”
And as soon as the words slip out, like a bubble being popped, like something that can’t be unseen once seen – they can all hear it.
The unmistakable sound of breath, coming from everywhere around them, as if the valley itself is a giant cavernous beast, and simultaneously originating only from the still waters of the vast lake before them.
It sounds… bad. An unhealthy sort of wheeze, deep and gasping. Each breath is a great cacophony of air, pulled through atrophied windpipe and diseased lungs with laborious effort.
“What’s this?” Warriors mutters, his eyes narrowed and face tense, a hand curled around the hilt of his sword.
They are all like that, assuming positions around each other as though readying for a fight. With who or what monster, they still have yet to discover. But this unsettling valley with its sickly breathing is beginning to feel like an enemy in its entirety.
Then, there comes a voice, low and echoing as if from a great, faraway distance.
Ah,
The scent of the Deep Cosmos.
It has been long, but I shall never forget.
Rasping, like the words are being scraped across rough-hewn stone. This voice comes at them through ripples across the lake, at last disturbing the eerie surface, and making the edges lap at the shore like liquid mercury.
In their midst, Wild gasps quietly. He doesn’t respond, but his eyes are wide and startled-looking. The rest of them haven’t yet completely processed the words, having only a partial understanding of what most of it means, and this allows the voice to continue –
Tell me, can you still recall where you come from? Can you still remember how it feels to be a part of that ancient abyss, before you were plucked out of it?
Little soul, little godling. Sired from all the favored things of the universe, I see. How does it feel to be the favorite child?
So much of the wilderness contained in that fragile sack of flesh. So tenacious… and aware… Different from the brethren of your meat.
“Show yourself, fiend, come let us see your miserable face,” Legend snarls.
He only understands half of what this unanchored voice is saying, but regardless he doesn’t like how it seems to target his comrade. Wild, their youngest, their newest member of their merry little dimension-skipping band. Wild – one of the sweetest souls the heroes have ever gotten to know. Legend will never allow something to continue to make Wild as unsettled as he is right now, not while Legend is there to do something about it.
“Aye, come out and face us!” Wind chimes in, head swiveling around like he doesn’t know which direction to shout at. It felt a little silly to scream at an oversized pond. “We’re all here, too. Stop picking on Wild, ya gutless spook!”
But the voice of the lake doesn’t rise to the insults, and instead only chuckles in a patronizing, detached way that has the heroes gritting their teeth.
Ah, yes, so that young goddess has finally chosen a few mortal warriors to bestow upon her blessing. A sacred act for any deity to perform at a point in their godhood, I suppose.
I still recall the Pale days when she was a mere fledgling… barely coalesced into existence from a bare smattering of unanswered prayers and hopeful wishes…
Oh. Well. That is certainly more information.
The heroes glance at each other, more than a little unnerved at this point. A voice from a lake that speaks as if it knows the timeless Goddess of their lands as a child, or whatever the equivalent is for an existence of the divine and celestial. How inconceivably ancient do you have to be, to know that? To have lived it?
Although, the voice croaks, amused fascination licking at the words the way the lake ebbs and flows at the ashen shore. Oh… unfaithfulness brewing already in her flock? I suppose the fledgling goddess could have chosen her acolytes more wisely. To think there is only a single one with true faith in all her flock!
As a terrible wheezing mockery of laughter rolls over them, Warriors raises an eyebrow and Time scowls. Legend bristles irritatedly as he always does when his opinion of Hylia is called into question. Sky simply looks quietly ill.
“This is pointless,” Four says, finally having had enough. He turns to the others. “Everyone, it’s not worth it to listen to whatever this thing is. Let’s just leave.”
Twilight nods, still looking at the lake warily. “If the only goal is to make us upset, well. I’ll be damned if we all stand here and let it happen. Nothing stopping us from walking away, right? Then we can forget about this whole thing.”
Before he turns around to do just that, he spares another glance at the silver waters. Is it just his imagination, or does it look… closer than before?
Come now, heroes. Don’t be so sore, says the voice, teasing and hoarse. Indulge in an aging god’s musings. These are fond memories of mine, before I was cast out.
A god, they were dealing with a god? Something in Sky’s gut squeezes and relaxes at the same time. This, at least, is beginning to slip into familiar territory.
“You are certainly not a god I’ve ever heard of before,” Hyrule says quietly.
I was Cast, little hero. Pulled from my perch. I was Great once, you see, and the Sires became displeased with the great deeds I accomplished. They determined I was unworthy of their love and cast me down to dwell beneath the surface of this lake, for all of eternity, until even the great hands of Fate cease to turn. Great shame…
If this apparent god feels anything at its apparent interminable punishment beyond the sort of mild regret one may typically reserve for the loss of an unremarkable sock, there is little hint of it contained in its voice.
“A god stuck forever under a lake? What kind of existence is that?” Four says, curiosity piqued in spite of everything.
Wind wonders out loud, “Do you even count as a god anymore?”
But behind him, Wild looks almost sickly in pallor, staring at the mirrored surface of the lake as though he sees something beyond the warping mirror reflections. Time’s lips are pressed thinly together as the man observes the proceedings wordlessly.
Something’s not right, he thinks again. The feeling nags at him even while the rest of the heroes seem to become more comfortable with the valley and its god-sealing lake.
Most of them are bluffing, Time recognizes, because he knows his kids, and he most definitely knows the habits of heroes. They hide their disquiet, they bare grins in the face of adversity, they take threats as challenges.
And they can never help themselves from following their own curiosity.
Twilight is looking at the shore again. Yes, he notes with alarm – that water. It’s rising.
There is a hiss of laughter, a frightening crescendo of air rushing through unhealthy lungs and little else. The voice replies, All good questions. Ah, I have forgotten how it is to converse with the mortal heroes of goddesses. So brazen, and delightful for it. Arrogant in your youth, I suppose.
And here, the voice of the lake becomes soft, whispers in between sickly gasps of air.
”Pray tell, whatever gave you the impression you could ever leave?”
They only have a moment’s courtesy to register that question as a warning before –
A hand reaches quietly out of the silver water.
With nary a splash on the shore, grasping at the ash-covered rocks, it is followed by an arm, then a shoulder, the crown of a head – until half a body has pulled itself out of the lake.
ReDead, is Time’s first reaction. Lurkers in the Dark. It’s too much like a person, however, and the proportions of limbs are too familiar. This isn’t a monster. Just a dead person.
A drowned man – bloated and heavy from its indeterminate tenure underwater, favoring the heroes with glassy eyes, slack mouth mute, skin swelling with opportunistic organisms. An unexplained light shines from deep within its gaze, twin dots of light catching pale flurries of ash in its glare.
“Gross…” Wind mumbles with a wrinkled nose, even though he can’t seem to look away. None of them can bring themselves to turn their eyes elsewhere, it seems.
“What new crime against nature is this?” Legend mutters. He makes the mistake of looking the corpse in the eye.
Its pupils are milky and white, and should be entirely blind to the world. They protrude almost comically from their sockets. Nobody home, only a puppet with sub-aquatic terrors floating somewhere in its pupils.
The voice of the lake comes burbling out from the mouth of the drowned man, now, though it still echoes unnaturally around their ears, reaching deep into their skulls with auditory tendrils.
“I wonder, heroes,” it muses rather leisurely, a swollen tongue pushing out from behind rotten teeth, “If I crack each one of you open and slurp that divine blessing from your husks, will I be able to climb from this hell at last?”
It occurs to them, right in that moment, that this god under the lake may not be all sane.
(Perhaps heroes are simply fated to fight mad gods, Sky thinks quietly.)
What happens to a god who has existed since the era before history, when it has been stripped of its divine wealth and held prisoner for just as long? When it feels its believers slip away, flicker by flicker, and the unrelenting turn of time renders it from deity, to history, to superstition, and then to fable, until it ceases to hold a passing thought in the minds of even its own kin? What happens as it starves beneath a forgotten lake, in a lost realm?
They had stumbled across the gateway to this isolated valley only through coincidence and perhaps sheer adventurer’s tenacity. Anyone else would have turned back in that labyrinth long ago. Anyone else wouldn’t have made it through alive. But they are Heroes; tasks such as facing unbeatable monsters and conquering unmappable mazes are just another part of a normal day for people like them.
“Whoever you are, and whatever you are… if you intend to fight us, we will show no mercy,” Time intones gravely, as he hefts the familiar weight of his biggoron sword into his hands.
His armor gleams beneath the thin coating of dust, reliable and well-maintained, and his voice is sure and solid. He has his comrades at his side, in good health, every one of them capable warriors and resourceful fighters. He knows them. And they know each other.
There is not a shred of doubt in his heart as Time says, “There is no adversity that has stopped us before, no enemy we could not conquer. We will survive you.”
”Hmm.”
It’s an amused sound that comes this time, a light breath of dismissal.
”As heroes, I suppose you have faced many trials. Always beaten the impossible odds and all that. Your goddess had to shape you into the great warriors she needed, after all.
”But I am no mere adversity. I am not one of your goddess trials. Your pretty songbird Hylia is not here to watch over you.”
The bloated corpse recedes into the waters, slipping under the murky pale depths with laggard movement. Its lingering, haunting gaze is the last thing the heroes see before it vanishes completely beneath the ripples.
“Good riddance,” Legend mutters with a deep scowl, but he’s interrupted before he can say anything else.
There’s a splash, softly heard and deceptive for it. Their heads turn. There at the shoreline of the lake is another bloated body, dragging itself out of the watery depths on broken-angled arms. Its jaw hangs slack from its decayed hinges, as a pair of shining-pupiled eyes stare at them in eerie focus.
Then as they watch on, more splashes echo the first, all along the bank as more corpses come wandering out of the water.
“Is it me or are those things looking straight at us?” Four mutters to his party.
Through the misty distance along the diminishing shoreline, countless pairs of eyes have blinked open, glowing pinpricks of light flicking through the fog. As the heroes observe the ones approaching, they, too, peer back at them.
“An army of half-rotten corpses?” Warriors has a look on his fine-featured face they have seen a hundred times before – the look of stalwart faith, underlaid by anticipation. It is a look he dons everytime he heads into what he expects to be a good fight – one they can imagine him leading his armies through war and victory a hundred times in the past. “We’ve fought large numbers before. These skeletons just happen to have a little more meat on them. This is nothing new.”
Twilight notices Four looking behind them, and asks, “Something catch your eye, Four?”
“The exit,” Four murmurs, “It’s not there anymore.”
Time looks grim. But his eyes have taken on the old determined light that all of them are familiar with. “Then we have no other path to take. Besides, I don’t feel comfortable leaving this alone for another unlucky group of travellers to trip across.”
It’s a seemingly endless parade of dead, some skeletal and hung with rotted sinew, others bloated and nearly translucent in the pallor of death, and still some disfigured to the point of unrecognizable proportions.
And, as they watch all manners of horrors emerge from the mercury depths of the lake, the god rasps out,
I was the countdown. The Timer. The immutable collapse. I was the exhale and the withering, as all vibration muted and all that lived screamed, as language ground down and lost meaning over the emery wheel of time. I was the cavity of the stars. I was the herd culling. The gullet into which dimensions would tumble. The mold into which you would all decay.
I Was.
But I will Become again.
“I’ve faced a god in battle before.” Sky’s eyes are narrowed, lethal and heavy in a way they have seldom seen the gentle hero before. His grip on the Master Sword is steady, and his breath is slow and even. He stands still in a way they are all familiar with, though usually only attributed to storybook heroes or warriors of legendary grade. Battle calm.
“I don’t mind adding another one to my score,” he decides.
Ahh. Yes, that sweet Demise. Ambitious and hungry, from his very birth. That thin little god-sealing blade of yours keeps the pieces of him locked inside, I sense.
If I also ate a broken god, I wonder, would that finally be enough?
Legend scowls. “Senile old thing, do you ever shut up?”
Then there is no time for any more words exchanged, as the first of the walking corpses reach them with arms outstretched, rotting teeth bared. The heroes fall into a very familiar pattern, swinging their blades, dodging, weaving around each other to protect their comrades’ backs. Their enemies are uncoordinated, though move with unpredictable jerks of motion. Far out-numbered, the heroes fight like a well-oiled machine, skill born of many battles and hardships faced together through the tapestry thread of countless worlds.
A sound from behind them. A light puff – something weightless and fluttery, kicked into the air with a sudden movement.
Four whirls on the momentum of a counter, sparing the half-moment to glance to the side in towards inland territory. It takes another second to gather fully what he is seeing.
Uhh. Maybe… that’s not what we think it is? Red tries.
Stars, you can’t be serious. Are we really fighting an entire city? Where’s the damn fairness in this fight? Blue exclaims.
Have we ever fought on even terms before? Violet reasons, though a little worried-sounding.
All around them, lumps of ash are shifting, flurries flying into the air as arms and legs and glowing eyes plunge themselves out from the piles. Another dead parade, emerging from their graves in the ashen city. The heroes are effectively sandwiched between two masses of enemy armies.
Red makes a small noise. They died so horribly already… It feels wrong to fight them like this.
There’s no one to mind what we do, Red. Always the voice of logic, Violet. Whoever these people are, they’re all long gone. We’re just fighting the one puppetting them.
No choice, Green decides, as Four hefts their sword. Let’s just do what we do best.
The thing with the enemies they’ve always faced before, however, is that they tend to stay down once defeated. This is a fact of the world. Cut down your opponent, inflict enough damage, walk away victorious. Deplete their HP gauge and you won’t have to worry about them anymore.
This is apparently not the case.
Warriors calls out, “Go for their legs, sever their limbs! Watch your step!”
With every rotting body they cut down, the parts remain on the ground, smeared in ash, still squirming around. Soon the battleground becomes a hazardous minefield, with severed heads gnashing their teeth at the heroes’ ankles and torsoless legs threatening to trip their feet.
Back to back with Wild, Twilight grimaces as he kicks away the grasping efforts of a disembodied arm from the kid’s left, sword in the motion of taking the knees out of another corpse. An opportunistic arrow sinks through the knees of one about to leap at their pair, stringing its legs together on the shaft. The smell of decaying flesh is starting to burn Twilight’s sinuses, the fumes like a physical impact to his senses. His eyes are beginning to water. The ash being kicked up into the air certainly isn’t helping with visibility.
Wind leaps backward, flipping acrobatically over a pile of flailing limbs. Their efforts are accumulating around them. The heroes are quick and efficient, especially against a force of monsters with no coordination or real strategy, but it seems that it’s starting to work against them in this situation.
Wind yelps as he narrowly avoids the snapping jaw of a skull with the sludge of algae clinging onto its eye socket. He jumps towards a spot on the field that looks a little more clear of downed corpse monsters than other places, smoothly sinking his blade into a blackened spinal column.
The corpse collapses easily beneath the full weight of his body, taking the brunt of his landing. Wind severs the legs from its pelvis while he’s there, straightens to look for incoming enemies, then lets out a shout of surprise as the rib cage he’s standing on suddenly loses all its structural integrity.
It isn’t the normal cracking of brittle bones too rotten to hold his weight – no, it collapses into a soft, jelly-like substance that reminds Wind too much of the gross chuchu jelly infestation he had to deal with for his Deku Tree. He quickly pulls his feet out of the writhing puddle, mouth twisting as he feels some of the dark slime splash on his shins.
The sludge – it’s moving away.
All around them, the corpses on the ground begin to gather together.
The heroes pause when their enemies cease to attack, breathing heavily, observing a scene somehow even more gruesome than the process of fighting them. Torn limbs roll across the ashen ground and bits of bone, scattered about the area, wriggle into the enclosure of shredded sinew and loose skin. Internal organs glissade toward growing piles, crawling up crudely-fashioned legs like slugs. It’s all… forming something, they realise.
The voice comes to them from the lake once more, narrating. A certain era in the past, a malignant star washed up on the shore of a lakeside city.
Too big to be their opponents from before. Just one in number, but made perhaps more horrifying. Logic and science don’t seem to hold any authority as the corpses fuse together and create a hulking figure that doesn't seem to follow the composition of its individual ingredients.
The citizens thought they could use its arcane energy for their own gain. It could power their engines, engineer new unholy designs with its ancient knowledge, even cure the terminal. Oh, these mortals thought they were innovators of the divine, harvesting a star’s organs.
It prospered the city, and they worshipped it. This was a time as sweet as the stellar offal they all consumed so greedily. Ah, how they all burned for it in the end…
A shadow looms over them.
Like static in their vision, something that hurts to perceive. Like teeth, or terror, or bad virtual viruses. Red light pulsing into their retinas. A migraine blooming behind their eyes. Emergency sirens droning in the distance. An ominous gaze from a living void in space.
“What is that?” Wind gasps, high and sharp. He doesn’t know what he’s looking at. It’s so hard to even look. “What the seven hells is that?”
A shiver, long and nerve-deep, crawls down Hyrule’s spine. Warriors’ eyes are wide, unblinking as he struggles to keep his gaze on this new enemy that feels like an overwhelming threat to his most primitive instincts. Legend is scowling through the sensation, letting his reflexive irritation burn through the trepidation so it doesn’t crawl into a tremble in his grip on his blade as it so wants to at that moment.
A new challenger. What remains of that poor unfortunate star, pulled from the stomachs of a citywide grave. I believe it used to be beautiful, once.
I have fashioned it to your liking, heroes. Your cooperation in preparing the materials is most appreciated. Enjoy yourselves.
The golem lurches forward, a great pillar of a weapon still forming together beneath its hand from void and cosmic gore, and emits a low, broken noise. Like a fog horn, loud and droning. Like an old air raid siren, crackling with static and heavy with pain.
Time is the one to meet it first, all the world in his vision awash in crimson from the glowing scrutiny of the golem. His closed eye aches and the marks on his face tingle with a feeling he hasn’t felt since he laid to rest the things that made them.
It feels strange to fight this new enemy, trying to ignore the repeating echoes of mayday signals at the edge of his hearing. It hurts just to look at it. Wrong to even be in the same vicinity. It’s made after the vague silhouette of a person but all the correct measurements are missing.
Time can’t figure out what it’s made of. He brings his weapon up to block a teeth-rattling swing of its pillar, and he can’t tell what he’s touching. He hears the way it breathes, slow, sticky and uneven, and wonders why that old god in the lake put forth something already so damaged as a champion.
It looks unrendered, like there isn’t enough left over to really put it back together, low-poly. A loading bar stuck in the middle. Doesn’t even understand why it’s here.
It looks incomplete…
He keeps looking for weak spots, for targetable spots or shining clues, for cues and tells of an incoming attack. Every monster has something. But where are they on this one?
His sword sinks into its side with a deeply unsettling squelch. The golem rears back with a blood-curdling scream, then its arm swings around with a blurring speed altogether incongruent to its bulk. Time barely has the chance to block the attack with his sword. The golem’s weapon seems still half-done, in a state of constant reformation and deterioration, but the creature who wields it doesn’t seem bothered by the viscous sludge oozing onto its hands.
A few sticky tar-like strands of the stuff are flung onto Time’s armor, splashing onto his jaw, and the man grunts, unprepared for the frost-ice sensation to hit him where his skin had come in contact.
He glimpses movement from his left and right sides – Time skips back as Twilight and Four come to take over. The two seamlessly engage in the fight and Time retreats, taking the opportunity to scrub away the dark sediment on his skin with the back of a gloved hand.
“What is it?” Hyrule asks, the glow of a recovery spell already sparking at his lips, reaching a hand out for him.
Time shies away. His efforts to wipe the tar off has resulted only in smearing the freezing sensation over more of his skin. His mouth is already starting to lose sensation. “Don’t touch,” he cautions, words threatening to slur with his quickly numbing tongue before he allows Hyrule to sink his magic into the affected areas and chase it away. “It’s as cold as frostbite. Some sort of paralysis curse in it. Spreads easily.”
Hyrule nods gravely, turning to shout Time’s warning to the others. Wind and Warriors are now fighting the golem, light on their feet in contrast to the lumbering mass of their opponent, though forced to a wary distance by its unpredictable and impossibly swift movements.
Hearing Hyrule’s warning just in time, Twilight hops to the side to dodge a stingy splatter of tar-slime, searching for a way to get back into the action.
His foot pitches into an unexpectedly soft surface. Wet. Almost immediately, his foot goes numb up to the ankle.
He looks down, back. His foot is encased in a puddle, dark tar staining his boots. The earth is sodden. Behind him, the shoreline has disappeared.