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It’s dark.
That’s not, in itself, too concerning. The portals spit them out someplace dark from time to time—a moonless night, a cave, on one memorably awkward occasion some random citizen’s wine cellar. (They didn’t steal any wine.) The problem here is that they can’t tell what kind of darkness they’re facing. In a cave, you can feel the presence of the walls if they’re close, or hear the echoes if they’re not. Outside at night there will be the stars overhead, or if it’s too overcast, the smell of the night moisture and kiss of the breeze. In a wine cellar there will be a musty smell, tinged with alcoholic sharpness, and, eventually, the indignant shouts of the owner from overhead.
Here, there’s...nothing. The only sounds are what they’ve brought with them, and those are precious little, caution keeping them quiet and their footsteps slow. The ground is firm enough, with patches of something that gives slightly like thick moss. But there’s no moss smell. No smells of any kind, in fact. Even the air doesn’t feel like anything—not warm, not cool, and without even the slightest current.
And it’s dark. Even after a moment to let the eyes adjust, there is only black emptiness, without a hint of gradation or silhouette.
If someone told Wind that this was the world after it had ended, he might well believe it.
There’s a familiar soft sound nearby as Twilight transforms, as he often does in a new place, to get the wolf’s read on the situation. He changes back after only a few seconds, gasping.
“What did you smell?” asks Time.
“N-nothing,” Twilight rasps. It sounds like he’s bent over, maybe resting his hands on his knees, overwhelmed with something.
“Rather a fuss to be making over ‘nothing,’ don’t you think?” This from Warriors.
Twilight doesn’t bridle at the jab like he usually would. “No. I mean I smelled nothing. At all. Never had that before. Wolf lives by his nose. It was like being suddenly blinded.” They were all suddenly blinded as soon as they came through the portal into this absolute blackness, but maybe it’s worse for a wolf to lose smell. “But I thought...might be some light, somewhere over that way.”
There’s no telling, in this ink, which way he points, but the knowledge that there could be a source of light in this place changes something, lifts some weight. Light is not totally foreign here, and therefore it’s all right to have some. There’s a hiss, and a whiff of smoking oil, and Wind can finally see.
As it turns out, there’s a fair amount to see, in the warm yellow glow of Legend’s lantern. The radius of the light is only a few paces, just enough to encompass them all with a bit of elbow room as they gather around the veteran, but they can get a sense of the character of this place. The ground is earth, or close enough, and there’s quite a lot growing from it, which is genuinely surprising. It looks more like various kinds of sea polyps than anything else, but it must be vegetation—swatches of pale, spindly strands that would be a dead ringer for grass if it weren’t purple, taller branching fronds, mushroom-things, even flower-things. It’s all that which is spongy underfoot, though it doesn’t crunch or squish, and when Wind plucks a blue-white, semi-transparent stem and rolls it between his fingers, it leaks no juice and, incredibly, leaves no odor. (Why does nothing here have a smell? No wonder Twilight was so rattled.)
“Sailor. Don’t touch anything,” Warriors chides.
“Which way was the light?” asks Legend.
Twilight gestures. “Wasn’t much, mind. I don’t think it was the source I saw, more something caught in the glow. Couldn’t tell how far away.”
They set out. They’re at the base of a gentle slope, and two minutes’ walk takes them to the crest of the rise. From there, Legend’s lantern spreads farther, revealing more of the strange vegetable carpet and, incredibly, on the lower grade ahead of them...trees.
They quicken their pace, and Twilight and Wild and Four add their own lights to the equation and fan out a bit at the front of the group, giving them all a much broader view. They are trees—sad, gray things maybe twice-and-a-half Time’s height, trunks cloaked in patchy lichen and crowned with an array of oddly feathery branches that reach upward like the tendrils of a sea anemone. The resemblance is so uncanny that Wind half-expects them to retract into the trunk as the group approaches.
As they get closer to the...grove?...something flickers within it. Lights! Tiny ones, coasting in and out of visibility as they hover among the tree trunks. Wind begins to drift in their direction automatically, his curiosity communicating directly with his feet, but a hand gently grips his shoulder, bringing him to a halt. “Not so fast,” Warriors murmurs. “Anything here could be dangerous in ways we can’t predict.”
Wild sheaths the crackling yellow-bladed sword he was using as a torch and brings out his Sheikah Slate, using the Pictobox view to get a closer look at the twinkling motes. “They’re bugs,” he reports nonchalantly after a moment. “Fireflies, I guess. I could try to catch some, but…” He shrugs.
“Who would have expected so much life in such a dark place?” muses Hyrule.
“Maybe it’s just night,” says Four.
“No,” says Twilight. “No night is this deep. This is...something else.”
They skirt the grove, hoping they can maintain Twilight’s heading. It proves to be...troublesome. The landscape only gets more interesting as they go along, with big boulders and rock ridges and more trees—giant ones, sometimes, with odd things growing around their bases that the captain won’t let Wind touch because he’s a spoilsport—looming up suddenly at the edge of their pool of light, forcing them to detour on the spot. The rocks are especially intriguing, with a pattern and texture that makes Wind think of coral, compressed and petrified. Marine life, again.
(Is this the bottom of the ocean, somehow? But that doesn’t make any sense…)
It’s all neat stuff to look at, but the unnatural silence and stillness (and scentlessness) of the place still get to Wind as the trek drags on. He almost wishes, after the fourth or fifth time they swerve around a broad obstruction only to find more obstructions on the other side, that some monsters would show up or something, just to break the monotony and give them all a challenge befitting their status as protectors of Hyrule. He is as dedicated to exploring the world as he is to cleansing it of evil, but it doesn’t feel like exploring, this endless slog through the pitch dark with only a pool of lantern light to show any of their surroundings. Can they prove any of the bizarre plants and rocks and fungi even existed before they shone their lights on them? Can they prove they don’t stop existing once they move on?
He’s been glancing up every so often, to see if he can make out anything like a roof or a sky. There’s never enough visibility for that, but sometimes he can spot things that are closer, like the branches of the big trees they’re passing. There’s something there now, barely showing in the edge of the lantern’s glow, long and narrow and vaguely curved—another huge tree, leaning at a slant? Another sort of rock formation?—arcing up from somewhere they can’t see and extending toward somewhere else they can’t see. Two motes of light, different from the ones Wild identified as “bugs,” twitch and waver like bluish flames right where the top of the thing curves over to become the side, and Wind is suddenly spiraling. He can’t stop thinking it—they all must be thinking it, because it’s so obvious.
His initial impression was exactly right. This place—this world (?)—is dead. The blue flames are spirits, ghosts. The “life” is dead life, the air is dead air, and there’s no light here except for their lanterns and never has been, Twilight must have imagined seeing any, and if they don’t get their asses back to that portal they’ll be dead but even if it’s still there they’ll never find their way back never never never—
—and then Sky boosts him up the side of a short sheer cliff and he takes in the first welcome sight since they arrived here. It’s an irregular oblong mass, as big as a cottage judging by comparison to the nearby anemone-trees it illuminates, and it glows like a well-kept hearth in the darkness, not with a fierce brightness but enough to clearly show the half-mile of easy ground and short scramble up rocks they must cross to get to it. It’s elevated off its cliff shelf by eight or nine feet, held up by twisting structures like tree roots, and for once they’re accurate rather than thalassic parodies. One by one, the Heroes get up to Wind’s vantage point, and one by one they sigh with relief. It’s not even a question: they can trust this. It promises warmth, and safety, and respite, and the Hero’s Spirit knows from lifetimes of accumulated experience that the promise is genuine.
“Rancher, is that what you saw?” Time asks quietly.
“I think so. Or something of the same kin.”
Despite how kindly the thing calls to them, they maintain their measured pace as they enter this last stretch of the journey. If he’d been alone, or even if the group had been smaller, Wind would have broken into a run, for sure. But the captain’s gentle reminders against incautious behavior have stuck with him, and some part of him whispers that the last stretch, the one that looks safe, is the most dangerous of all. Even so, he gravitates toward the front of the group, his steps just a bit quicker than the others’ despite having the second-shortest legs. He’s done with the dark and the silence and the nothing.
Which is why hes the first to spot it when something finally happens and he gets his goddamn idiot almost-wish.
It happens fast—a stretch of perfectly innocent, moss-cloaked ground off to his left is suddenly the site of a spreading red-and-black stain on the earth. It’s outside the radius of the lantern, showing only in the dim ambient light from the big thing they’re heading toward, but Wind sees enough of it that every cell of his body screams wrong wrong wrong. It’s wrong in the same way that the glowing bole up ahead is right, less a stain than a wound in the fabric of this place. He’s already drawing the Phantom Sword, his pulse jumping in anticipation of combat, even as he hears the others behind him react.
And then the middle of the patch boils, briefly but intensely, and the monster itself emerges, extending, uncurling, and Wind nearly cackles with triumph.
It’s only a Floormaster!
They’re far from his favorite memory of his adventures on the Great Sea, but by now they’ve been downgraded in his imagination from “menace” to “nuisance.” In an open space like this, there’s nowhere for it to drag anyone to and its own options for retreat or concealment are limited.
“Go on ahead!” he tells the others without turning around. “I’ll catch up after I take care of this thing!” Against their protests and warnings, he charges the Floormaster.
Everything happens in the time it takes him to sprint thirty steps or less.
The Floormaster stiffens, noticing his approach—
—it turns—
—sinewy, sharp-tipped fingers fan wide, wide enough to fully seize a grown man by the ribcage, let alone a junior Hero like Wind, and there’s a big glaring yellow eye in the palm (what the fuck?)—
—it screams, a metallic rasping roar worse than anything Wind has ever heard (how is it screaming with no mouth?)—
—Wind raises the Phantom Sword, preparing to bring a diagonal slice down on the thing’s elbow joint—
—the Floormaster begins a counter-charge, angling itself forward, making as if to grab him, the pool of corruption from which it emerged traveling with it (better not step in that)—
—the smell hits him, an indescribable reek, ash and sulfur and rot and blood and shit and tar and worse, all mingled together and somehow amplifying each other into something worse than the sum of its components, but he keeps going, he’s almost met this thing on the field of battle and he can’t turn back now—
—the stain spreads further, a second and third hand jut up out of the muck just in time to to outnumber him in the fight…
Too late, Wind realizes he’s not facing Floormasters at all. Stupid, stupid impulsive teenage Hero, of course there’s more than one hand-shaped monster in the wide world! But there’s no backing out now. He adjusts his path a few degrees so that the new arrivals can’t flank him effectively and lets his momentum add power to his sword swing.
The blade meets the leading hand between wrist and elbow, biting deeply into its substance. The thing roars again, red-black ooze sprays and the stench intensifies. Wind gags a little, skips back as its companions close in. There are shouts behind him from his brothers, hurrying to join the fray—he hears many sets of rapid footsteps, and the singing hum of the Master Sword coming free from its sheath—and he huffs his annoyance that they aren’t leaving him to his duel (though part of him is glad he’ll have backup for what is proving to be a tougher fight than he expected).
He catches the first hand again on the backswing, severing it. Both halves shrivel and boil away into black vapor, a normal enough thing to happen when a monster is killed. But the corruption begins to spread and churn again immediately, more hands lunging free of its surface, and now there are four in total. (How many can there possibly be?) Nevertheless, if he can give himself enough space to charge a Hurricane Spin, he stands a chance of taking them all out at once, even before the others arrive. The Hero of the Winds shifts his weight to one foot and slides the other one back, testing the ground for a micro-retreat, and—
—FIRE shoots up his leg, in winding tendrils that rake and tear and scour, and instinctively he knows what must have happened. The pool crept around behind him while his attention was on the hands, and he put his foot right in it. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Wind spins on his heel in order to flee, no longer caring about the glory of taking these things down on his own, and a fifth one is right there, hateful yellow eye staring him in the face, scant feet away.
It strikes like a snake.
The cries of alarm from his brothers are lost in the clamor of Wind’s own body as every nerve lights up in unfathomable agony. The Phantom Sword drops from useless fingers, rendering him helpless. It has him, and it doesn’t matter exactly which parts of him are in its grip because every square inch where he and the monstrosity are in contact is a siphon that it’s using to take from him, taking and taking and taking taking taking the air from his lungs the heat from his blood the strength from his limbs the thoughts from his mind the light from his spirit until…
it’s dark