Chapter Text
In the aftermath of a frantic skirmish, the others discuss the black lizalfos and its newfound portal-creating abilities in worried tones. Four just wishes he’d been close enough to see it happen. Spun glass and shadows shot through with blood and poison, the void between its arms dragging in all light; how was it made? Where did the energy come from? How does it keep from growing and swallowing up the world? How does it keep from collapsing in on itself and vanishing? It’s too complex to simply be what it appears, a tear between worlds, a void in time and space.
It’s not at all like the moon gates. For one thing, despite being a direct link to the dark world, they didn’t reek so heavily of malice that he can taste it, nasty and metallic in the back of his throat. For another, the way it hangs in the air, flexing and pulsing with barely-restrained magic. The moon gates had been a little like that, he supposes, the way they had been right at the edge of a tipping point before he cracked them open. But this one is already open. He doesn’t know what precipice it’s riding, and doesn’t know if he wants to find out.
If Four had the time, he’d make a few sketches, maybe check the base for evidence of runes or anchoring magic, but the rest of the group has decided to go through, and honestly, that’s the best option. No telling how long the thing will stay open, and they can’t risk losing their best — and only — lead.
Four hesitates at the border, watching the others walk through one by one. They seem to ripple as they wade deeper into the abyss, or maybe the abyss folds around them. “I can’t believe the postman’s travelling through these,” Four mutters to himself, making Warriors snort. Then the captain’s through too, leaving Four alone in the dark forest.
The portal waits.
The air is chill and silent, in spite of the massive amount of energy swirling over stone just a few feet away. It looks just like the one Four had found while hunting black-blooded monsters in the Castor Wilds, that had led him to the others. If he’d had more time — ah, but he hadn’t, and still doesn’t. The others will be waiting.
Four steps through, and s h a t t e r s.
Heart rushing — cold and slow — wind curling soft around his face — iron pressure at his throat — claws and tails and heavy weight, falling backwards stumbling forwards gravity is all wrong and nothing’s moving right —
Pain like fire, like lightning, streaking out from the spine, turning inwards and thundering through the brain —
Pressure leaning on them a mountain whispering at their shoulders —
Blazing chill searing their sightless eyes —
Falling through stars —
Their feet hit solid ground, and the world swirls from colour to grey to nothing.
Warriors shakes himself, wishing the damp chill of portals was as easy to shake off as real water. In front of him, he can see the rest of the Links, already poking about the new and different forest they’ve wound up in. Except Wind, who’s taking off his shirt and trying to wring it out. Warriors doesn’t have the heart to tell him it won’t help. He’ll figure it out, anyway.
Boots crunch on the grass behind him, and Warriors turns away from Wild climbing a tree to greet the last Link through the portal. “Hey, Four. Any chance you know where we are? No one’s seen anything familiar, yet.”
Four stares at him, uncomprehending, and Warriors realises he’s listing sideways almost too late to catch him. “Wha — Four!” he yelps, lowering a too-limp body to the floor. Training takes over; quick fingers confirm a pulse and breathing, and his hands start running over Four’s head, his neck and back, checking for signs of damage. He doesn’t find anything, which, great! Except what the fuck. Four had been right behind him. What could have happened?
Four is completely unresponsive, eyes half-open and eerily blank; empty of everything that made him a person. At his back the other Links are coming up, first with confusion then with urgency as they register Four’s crumpled form. Hyrule drops to the other side and starts running his own inexpert checks, tight with fear. Warriors marks that — he’s not the only one with medic experience on the team, good to know — but is more focused on Four’s eyes. They keep — ticking to the side, something he’s only seen in severe head injuries, and he can feel uncharacteristic panic rising.
“What happened?” Twilight is asking, “did something get him from behind as he went through?”
“Don’t know,” Warriors says. “Healing items, anyone —?”
Legend drops down next to them, clearly out of his depth but wordlessly offering a potion, a bottled fairy, and a handful of rings that no one else knows the purpose of. A potion’s no good without Four conscious to drink it, but — Warriors uncorks the bottle with the fairy, tipping her out onto Four’s tunic.
The fairy dusts herself off, clearly miffed by the lack of ceremony, then her wings lift her into the air and she gets to work. Pink sparkles drift aimlessly as she flutters back and forth, over his chest, over his head, seemingly unable to decide where to alight.
Then, she darts right up into Warriors’ face and lets loose a torrent of angry chiming, before zooming back into the bottle and settling at the bottom, pouting. Warriors understands not a word of it but feels very scolded all the same.
“There’s nothing for her to heal,” Hyrule mumbles under his breath.
Warriors presses his fingers to Four’s throat again to doublecheck — too fast, but still strong. Four’s alive. He’s just — not conscious. And there’s nothing wrong with him that a fairy can fix.
Four trembles, and his eyes flutter, and for a second Warriors is terrified he’s about to seize — then he goes limp again.
“Anyone seen this before?” he asks helplessly. “I’ve seen a lot of portal travel and there’s never been a reaction like this.”
“Lookit his eyes,” Wind blurts out over a round of negatives, and Warriors quickly checks to make sure —
Oh wow.
They’re still ticking lightly, but the dark grey has been suffused by a light, bright blue. As he watches, purple swirls in, circling wider and wider until the whole iris is deep violet, and green starts to creep up from one side. Everyone stiffens as red blooms around Four’s pupil, but in the next moment it’s washed away by pale blue. Specks of green appear and bleed outwards, purple pushes its way to the surface and fades back, blue limns the struggling borders of green and eats away at them. It’s a constant swirling wash of colour.
Their horrified fascination is broken when Four blinks, and blinks again.
Wars feels a leap of hope. “I think he’s coming round.”
Four blinks hard, and the warring colours drain away, back to the stormcloud grey he’d started with. He swallows, and blinks again, and his arms draw in close to himself, hands flexing almost absently.
“Everyone back up, give him some space,” Warriors orders. “Four, can you hear me? Can you give my hand a squeeze?” He tugs one of Four’s arms back out. Four tries to pull it away. “Come on, Link, squeeze my hand.”
Four squeezes, then pulls again, and Warriors lets him go so he can curl up again. Instead he uses it to push himself off the ground. “Hey, woah, steady!”
Slowly, Four rocks himself into an upright sit — then immediately overbalances the other way. Warriors grabs him to keep him upright. “Easy, there. You back with us? Think you can tell us what happened?”
His throat works, but no sound comes out. Four seems frustrated instead of frightened, at least.
He may not have gone into convulsions, but Warriors has seen the confusion and loss of control after a seizure too often to miss it. It’s almost a relief, knowing, even if seizures are never a good sign. He knows what to look for, he knows how to help if it happens again; he even knows what potions to ask for, if they come across an apothecary with the right stock. “Take it slow,” he tells Four. Four pushes weakly against the hand on his shoulder in a doomed attempt to stand. Warriors rolls his eyes.
Wild jumps from his tree to land close by. Warriors despairs for that man’s knees already. “There’s what looks like a village maybe a half hour northish, if someone needs to go get help.”
“He’s come round,” says Twilight. “We can all start heading that way, though, if someone can carry Four. I don’ wanna put him on a horse like this.”
Four’s lips draw back from his teeth. Slowly, he signs Can walk, with hands that shake so hard it’s a miracle he’s intelligible.
“You definitely can’t,” Warriors tells him and gets a scowl, “give yourself a few minutes, huh?”
This time Four definitely bares his teeth at him.
“Wait wait, you sign?” Wind is nearly vibrating with excitement. “Four, I didn’t know you — and you too Warriors! You can sign?? I never knew anyone outside of my family who could!”
“Sure, it’s pretty standard in the army,” Warriors tells him.
Wind flaps his hands like a bird, beaming with joy, and starts signing rapidly. This is so cool I didn’t realise anyone else knew it I learned because words were so HARD and then I could talk to Aryll before she could talk wait does anyone else know it —
“I do,” says Twilight, a little shyly. “Had a lotta trouble with words when I was younger.”
“Ooh, same hat,” says Legend. “I quit talking completely from age twelve to about seventeen. Old man, what’s with the contemplative look?”
“Just wondering what the chances are. I was much the same, on and off, until I was…” Time stops and thinks about it. “Actually, I suppose I still have trouble on occasion, but it’s been much better since around the time I got married.”
“I didn’t talk for over a hundred years,” Wild says.
“That doesn’t count!” Legend splutters.
Wind giggles at this exchange and turns to Sky, who’s been watching the whole thing with wide eyes and faintly pink cheeks. Do you sign, Sky? Is it a knight thing?
I sign, he signs slowly, because me and Zelda invented it.
There’s a brief pause before Wind starts making a high-pitched shrieking noise and flapping again. THAT’S SO COOL! he signs emphatically, once his hands are still enough.
Sky’s blush intensifies.
The conversation is at least a good distraction while Four rests. He’s stopped trying to stand up and just watches the byplay with hazy eyes. His blinks get slower, and more prolonged, until Warriors feels a flicker of concern when they don’t open again.
“Hey, Four, no.” Warriors gives him a firm shake. “I know you’re tired, but you really can’t fall asleep right now.”
Four opens his eyes to glare at him, then slowly and distinctly signs Fuck you.
“That’s the spirit,” says Warriors, unmoved. “How’s the dizziness?”
Better. The tingling’s starting to fade, and I don’t feel so much like the air is trying to crush me. Like going from a dark room to blazing sunlight, but made physical. Very strange.
Hyrule makes a startled noise, eyes wide. “That sounds like magic shock!”
That gets Warriors’ attention. “Magic shock? What’s that?”
“It’s, um.” He scrunches his face, thinking hard. “It’s when you go from an area of very low ambient magic to a high one very fast, or vice versa. I felt it when we — when I landed, but I was just a bit dizzy. There’s a lot of ambient magic in the portal, though, and Four you said it felt like the other way round —”
Because the portals are dark magic, not elemental, Four signs, eyes suddenly bright. There was no elemental magic as we were passing through, and that’s what I’m sensitive to, so the sudden loss and reappearance — that makes sense.
Warriors is more concerned by the returning bloom of purple in Four’s eyes. “Uh, Four, I don’t want to worry you, but while you were out, your eyes kept changing. They’re doing it again now — they just went purple.”
Four makes a small, startled noise. Warriors raises a brow. “You didn’t know they did that?”
Unlike you, I don’t spend a lot of time in front of mirrors, Four snarks.
Warriors puts a melodramatic hand over his heart. “Ah! You wound me!” He’s still watching Four carefully for unsteadiness, drifting, a return of the earlier confusion. “But you’re not scared by it. You know what it is?”
Four gestures to his tunic, an absent one-two-three-four at each colour. In the process of forging the Four Sword, it was infused with elemental magic. His smile is small and crooked. I caught a bit of the backwash. Only makes sense there were some side effects.
“Side effects like changing your eye colour?”
“Eyes are the windows to the soul, you know,” Four says, in a creaky voice that’s clearly imitating someone else.
At the sound of it Sky lights up and glances over. “Hey Four! You back with us?”
“Yeah,” says Four, and this time when he presses upwards it’s strong enough to pull free of Warriors’ hands. He sways only slightly as he dusts himself off and catches his balance. “Sorry for the delay. Wild, you said there was a village nearby?”
“Well, I saw smoke and a cleared area, and that’s usually either a village or a monster camp.”
Twilight groans. “Wild…”
“What? One way or another we’re gonna wind up there anyway.”
The rest of the group relaxes fast, with Four upright and interacting and steady as ever. Whatever it was, it’s over now.
(Warriors still knows what he saw. He makes a quiet mental note to talk to Hyrule later, about the signs and symptoms of magic shock. Whether seizures were included, and just how severe it could be. Four is incredibly lucky he wasn’t alone today - and that there hadn’t been a platoon of monsters waiting on the other side of the portal.
The smithy hadn’t known that his eyes change colour. What else doesn’t he know about those ‘side effects’?)