LOZ: Words of Power 24

“Run! We’re almost there!”

Fourty yards.

Link listened to her. There was no point trying to fight feline-creatures made of spun sugar when the world was liable to crash down upon them in a flood of white insanity. “Do something!” he yelled, grabbing her hand to keep her at pace.

Thirty yards.

“Cartoon riot forces!” Alexandra screamed and instantly the encroaching wall of fog became a bunch of grossly obese badly-drawn Metro cops dressed in too-small body shields. The melodic screech of the bashcats was drowned out by blown whistles and cries for more Dunkin Donuts.

Twenty yards.

Link looked over his shoulder, then to the rapidly collapsing Crack around them. “Not working! They’re gaining!”

Ten yards.

Panting and out of breath, Alexandra couldn’t squeeze a syllable or a thought out through the terrifying haze. “Un…uh…ah.. ha…” The crack mounted high, like a menacing line of white elephants. “Dunkin Donuts! Swap the N and the D and you… you ge… get UNKIND DONUTS! UNKIND DONUTS! EVERYWHERE!”

And the rearing white became a flood of screaming, incensed pastry that slammed into the charging candied monstrosities, burying them beneath wads of super-caloric jelly.

Zero yards. Safe. The silvery barrier at the edge of the desert swallowed them inside and they tumbled to the gritty rocks and sand, gasping. Alexandra cried helpless tears as she sucked in the sweet, dry air and felt her nose sting. Her legs screamed and her chest burned, her heart clawing at the inside of her ribcage. She was sure she had a bruise where Link had been dragging her along.

I wish I was better at running, she reflected, taking the moment to catch her breath. Then she kissed the mercifully crack-free ground, taking armfuls of sand and caressing them. “Oh, man, back again, thank goodness. Hello, safe ground, you are my friend. Yes, you are, I love you, I love you…”

“Um…?”

Link looked at her with wide eyes. He was winded himself, but in much better shape than her and looked out to the barren landscape.

“Some safe zone,” he muttered, getting to his feet. “It’s nothing but sand and monsters as far as the eye can see.”

Alexandra swallowed dust from her throat and took a small sip from her full canteen. Then, shakily, she forced her aching legs to stand and she squinted in the stark sunglare. “I will take Harsh Mistress Desert over Fangirl and Crack any day. At least the Gerudo are safe.”

“The thieves?”

“Only because they have no other choice,” Alexandra shrugged. “They are a fair and just people to themselves, in my experience. As so far as being in a cell can be called experience.”

Link was aghast. “You call that fair?”

“Considering I was an entity of dubious power and unknown purpose, I can say it was fair enough. But Ganondorf is here, too. It’ll be nice to see him again.”

“You can’t honestly mean that.”

“Sure I do. I happen to like the guy. Evil, yes. But we’ve been through a lot and I think he’s come a long way. I don’t think he’s quite the same man that wanted to take over the world.”

“How can you say?”

Alexandra smiled. “Even the proudest are forced to face themselves once humbled,” she advised. “Confucius say.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. We’re safe now, but we’ve got a long way to go. We’ll be walking all night, without proper supplies or even a sure source of water.” She paused. “If the crack didn’t kill us, this heat definitely might.”

--

Ganondorf crossed his arms, surveying the desert’s dunes from atop the tallest point of his fortress. He tapped his foot anxiously, frowning deeply. And he waited.

“Don’t worry,” Twili said quietly. “They’ll make it. They have to.”

He had no reply for her, only a grunt of acknowledgement. He stared out into the distance, clutching the balcony. He could just barely see the edge of the desert as a smudge on the horizon, only because the white cloud rising up was taller than Hyrule’s tallest cathedral or guard spire. Normally, he had no marker to the edge of his domain. From this perch his realm seemed infinite: an endless stretch of barren sand and scrub.

He had wanted for some time for his kingdom to be the only one. But this was not exactly what he had in mind.

“My lord?”

A tentative female voice wavered out from the doorway to the balcony. Twili turned around to see a guard dressed in violet, head bowed. She gave a slight nod to Twili, waiting for her lord’s response.

“Yes, Astraza. What is it that you need?” He asked, businesslike but not angry in the least. Twili smiled secretly at the fact that he referred to all of his people by name, as he knew them all personally. He was not so much a monster among his own kind as the world would have liked to believe.

“The visitors you have expected have arrived. They have magicked themselves to the courtyard and they gave us quite a scare.”

Ganondorf made a deeply perplexed groan and closed his eyes, still not turning to the guard. “That would be the Princess Zelda and Renee, then. Show them to serviceable quarters and I will dine with them tonight if our other company arrives in a timely fashion.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

“What the hell is that?”

Astraza startled before turning to leave, opening her mouth to berate the harsh words, but when she saw Twili’s remark wasn’t meant for her she approached with interest. Ganondorf also glanced down, frowning with distaste.

“What is it?” he asked, squinting.

“That, there on the horizon.” Twili insisted, “I have binoculars in my cleavage again.”

She pulled out a pair of familiar silver opera glasses out of her bodice, much to the alarm of the Gerudo guard. Then her sights turned to the sands below. “Look, over there. Those rocks. They’re moving onto your beaten path.”

The beaten path was a silvery ribbon of trampled rocks and soil that the hooves of Gerudo horses had flattened over the generations. Twili handed the glasses to Ganondorf, who adjusted the eyepieces to fit his face, and he squinted out over the horizon.

“It’s them,” he said with great interest. “Alexandra and the Hero have arrived.”

“Orders, sire?” Astraza asked, her eyes growing wide.

“Send riders to meet them. Their strength is nearly spent, I see from here. Do not attempt to relieve them of weapons—they are… guests. Show them to rooms as you will do for The Princess and Renee.”

“At once, m’lord.”

She rushed away, muttering things about miracles and wonders of pathfinding. Twili squinted down, a smile growing on her face. “So they’re all right.”

“Against all odds,” Ganondorf said, a rare note of doubt tingeing his aghast sneer. He focused the binoculars again, as if he didn’t believe his eyes. “She has the constitution of a warrior twice her size.”

“What?”

Ganondorf frowned deeply. “They must have been pressed to begin moving while the sun was still high, a dangerous resort under normal circumstances. And even then, they managed to find a Gerudo path through the dunes, no easy task in the first place. And what’s worse is that it is a horsepath.”

“Hm?”

“It’s meant for raiding parties. It’s the shortest, but also the harshest passage through the desert, surpassed by only the King’s Way which is used solely by me. Without adequate supplies, which they do not have, they should be dead by now. Which they clearly are not.”

Twili bit her lip. “They’d better be okay down there.”

“The Hero I could understand, but he is not familiar with this land to my knowledge. But that leaves the accomplishment to Alexandra! It’s ridiculous. The blasted girl proves to be an adequate swordsmaid AND a competent pathfinder when she claims neither skill is of any use in the Master Realm.”

That earned a laugh. “That’s her special power, you know,” Twili said. “She can do many useful things. What separates her from Mary Sue is that she can’t be perfect at any of it. If she was Sue, she’d already be here by now, smelling like she just walked down the street, not dragged herself through the desert.”

“There’s going to be a lot of talk of Sue soon. Let’s wait until it gets to that.”

--

Zelda had hardly expected hospitality after she had been threatened with spears. Granted, teleporting into the courtyard was hardly a polite way to introduce yourself to a fortress-city. But after the runner asking for orders returned, they were welcomed with wry faces, a few Gerudo even stopping to crack a joke to Renee about how her living quarters had been somehow ‘upgraded’ since some previous venture.

Zelda didn’t know what to make of it. But they were given a serviceable room and told to wash up if they were up to it. A few minutes later another individual came in and announced that a supper was being prepared and they had been invited to attend.

Supper was an understatement, for their King had returned from a dangerous venture and the entire fortress had come alive with rejoicing. In addition, their raiders had been quite successful in the wake of Fangirl’s chaos and destruction, salvaging ‘ruined’ crops and seizing everything abandoned they could find, recycling it and adding it to their stores.

“It amazes me,” Zelda said to Renee, sitting cross-legged, “that he invokes such a response in them!”

Renee only laughed. “Of course they love him. He is their King and he hasn’t failed them.”

Renee let the unspoken ‘yet’ at the end of that sentence be.

The Gerudo claimed loudly and with a great deal of anger that Fangirl was a demon of excess and waste, and it was only responsible to take what she laid to rot for themselves. And they were quite prepared to stay holed up with their stores while the Crack outside billowed about. It was worrisome to them, but they were prepared.

And, so, with the aid of larders that were full for perhaps the first time in a century, the Gerudo had decided to prepare a welcoming feast for their king before they would ration out the bounty as if under siege. There was pulled lamb and roasted sow (Boars were hunted and eaten only on holy days), strange roots that appeared like baked sweet potatoes, Hylian vegetables mixed with the odd, tough Gerudo ones. Whole pheasants laid on platters, tail feathers stuck in their rears whimsically. Sliced cactus and honeyed fruit were brought out, along with cooked grain and hot, dark bread.

Twili had expected Ganondorf to grumble about the fuss, but his eyes had lit up when he received the news. She had never expected a shred of boyishness from him in any way, but the prospect of an abundance of food shot his eyebrows up and even forced a smile onto him. Then she remembered that the Gerudo had such feasts so rarely that it was unlikely that Ganondorf had even had more than one before in his life.

There were no tables. It was all set onto wide blankets on the ground, under flickering torches and strings of lantern lights. The entire fortress turned out, sitting and kneeling together with cups of looted Hylian wine and elderroot ale. Their conduct was jovial, but less riotous than would be expected-- as if they treated the feast like a holy experience.

Renee and Twili sat together, nearby Ganondorf, swapping the stories of their respective adventures. Zelda kneeled nearby, placing the girls between her and the King of Evil, who had not even gazed in her direction during the entire feast, as if he was making a point to avoid her.

Twili cringed once Renee finished relating the appearance of the Many in her escapade, the ugly illusions manufactured by Fangirl to scare her into helplessness. Renee almost laughed at the tale of Zant, but grimaced when Twili told of the kiss.

“But you’re all right now, right?”

Twili nodded. “Yeah, I’m all right. Thanks to Ganondorf, who did a little… mouth-to-mouth.”

Renee didn’t know what to say to that, only gaping at the deep, accomplished blush Twili made. Many half-formed syllables died in her throat as she glanced frantically at the Gerudo King and at Twili. There was a little bit of jealousy, but it was mostly drowned out by disbelief.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky, too,” Twili giggled. “And believe me, he’s good enough with a kiss to make you *feel* very, very lucky.”

The loud opening of the great-hall door rescued Renee from having to answer the remark. Flanked by two snide-looking guards, looking horribly bedraggled and parched, were the Hero Link and Alexandra. A deep silence fell over the encampment as the eyes of the Gerudo met the pair of newcomers, awkward and hesitant. Link looked tortured as they all sized him up, but he was absolutely mortified when he met Ganondorf’s warning stare.

And, then in the silence a fairly drunken Gerudo matron spoke up. “See now the trouble of bringing your pet lad—you’re late to the feast!”

An uproar of laughter resounded off of the pale stone walls, many female voices young and old rising high. And the joyous nature of the feast returned, but not without Link turning beet-red and gaining a horrified droop to his pointed ears.

Alexandra coughed and made her way through the merrymaking, deeply embarrassed but too tired to care. “Only one rule,” she hissed into Link’s ear. “Make eyes at any of them and they’ll expect you to father their children. No joke. So just say no.”

Link opened and closed his mouth very quickly as he spied Zelda sitting next to the two other Master Worlders, and he quickly went to her side, exchanging quick greetings and relieved thank-yous. As Alexandra lowered herself to sit with her peers they all smiled widely. And she gave them both a big, sisterly hug.

“Finally together again!” she said. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you guys. In the past few days I’ve been caught upside-down in a tree, lost in the woods, chased by skullkids and demon puppets, impaled by the Master Sword, choked by my own dark side, and hunted down by bashcats through the Crack!”

“Phew. And you look awful,” Renee agreed. “Wait, impaled?!”

“I got better,” Alexandra admitted blushingly.

Twili raised an eyebrow. “Right.”

Suddenly, Zelda raised her hand quizzically. The oddness of the gesture caused Renee to look, the others following her gaze. Then, Link mimicked the motion in wonder and slid his eyes to meet Ganondorf’s incendiary stare yet again.

Each one of the marks on the back of their hands glowed with a soft light, pulsing like a tiny heartbeat. As quickly as it came it faded, but the facts of the matter remained plain to them.

The whole Triforce had resonated. The pieces had gathered, and so had their keys. They held all of Hyrule’s hopes in their hands now, now that everything was in one place at the same time. Three and three, the six of them were all that were standing in the way of Fangirl.

And they all knew it: this merry safety in the desert would not last long once Fangirl caught on. Their hours were numbered. They could not stay here forever.

Each one of them heard Ganondorf’s voice in their minds as the connection leveled off once more. He spoke only four words.

War room, dawn tomorrow.

--

Zelda woke Twili and Renee very early the next day. Renee moaned with a very slight alcohol headache, but it faded quickly enough. Not one of them took too much to drink the night previous, so the effects of the feast were relatively minimal. Though it was still dark out, Alexandra was already up and about, pacing around the circular war room. But as soon as the three others walked in she motioned to Link to sit down. And so they sat at the enormous stone table, a painful hush pressing into them all.

After a short while, Ganondorf arrived. He did not wear his armor, instead garbed in black silks. He seemed to have freshened up sometime earlier, long hair neat instead of bedraggled. At his side was the red-robed Agahnim, muttering quietly to the morning shadows. They both took seats at the round table and there was a black silence as Ganondorf cleared his throat.

He unfurled a little scrap of paper. “Agahnim tells me this is what saved my Desert from the growing Crack,” he said. “And that you, Renee, produced it.”

“I did,” Renee acknowledged tersely.

“I cannot read it,” Ganondorf admitted. “What is the nature of this spell?”

Renee bit her lip and continued clearly. “It is not a spell. It is a disclaimer, written in English… a script of the Master World. All three of us write and speak English.”

“Really? You speak perfect Hylian to me.”

“Your stories are told to us in our mother language, and we understand the stories. So we understand you, and by proxy, you understand us. Hylian is spoken the same as English, but it is written differently.”

Renee left out the fact that The Legend of Zelda was a Japanese video game. No need to make things unnecessarily complex.

“This ‘disclaimer’ of yours, then. What does it say?”

“It reads… ‘The Gerudo Desert and all that resides therein belongs to whoever created it.’ This instates that Fangirl does not own the Desert, and that she doesn’t have any power over it. Technically, this means that Twili, Alex, and I don’t own it either. But we don’t *want* to change it, so that doesn’t really matter.”

Ganondorf seemed to ponder this deeply. Then, suddenly, his eyes rose and locked with Renee’s. “You have my thanks,” he said, voice chillingly honest. Renee shuddered “And the thanks of my people.”

And even Link knew that he truly meant it.

Zelda cleared her throat as delicately as she could. Her expression was somewhere between doubtful and pleasing, but she hardly let more than a suggestion of either emotion show. “We must decide what to do now. For surely we’re running out of time.”

“Fangirl can’t break the disclaimer, but eventually she’ll figure out a way around it,” Renee said. “When that happens, we don’t want to be anywhere near here.”

“It bothers me,” Link interrupted quietly, “that the Crack came so quickly.”

Ganondorf raised an eyebrow. “Oh? It is difficult to predict the insane, boy.”

“No, I don’t think that’s it. Something’s happened,” Link insisted. “The… the pattern isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense.”

Suddenly Twili frowned. “He might be on to something,” she said. “Think about it. Fangirl went around to one place at a time and improved them all, leaving the unimportant bits in between untouched. But now she suddenly cares about absolutely everything, even the things she wouldn’t see fit to mention normally.”

“Why crush everything now?” agreed Alexandra.

Agahnim nodded in agreement. “True. But the how is not the question. What the course of action will be is the important matter at hand.”

The desert wind blew a veil of sand overhead, fine grains skittering across the roof above them.

“How do you fight Crack?” Alex wondered, and they all thought deeply for a short time.

Until Renee snapped her fingers. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“Canon,” said Renee. “Crack falls apart when exposed to Canon.”

“A cannon? What sort?”

Alexandra shook her head. “No, Link, Canon. With only one ‘n’. Canon is… it’s… it’s Hyrule in it’s most concentrated form. It’s why things are named what they are. It’s why you exist. It’s your history at it’s purest, the ultimate laws of your universe. Above even the Triforce in a way—the Triforce exists only inside this world. Canon exists both inside and outside. It’s why we know who you are. It’s the presence of the Master Realm.”

Renee nodded in solemn agreement. “All of us, we’re not Canon, all of our power comes from twisting Canon. Even Fangirl’s power. Because we three listen to Canon and respect it, we can coexist with you. Mary Sue, the ultimate lawbreaker, happens when Canon is destroyed.”

“Then how are we to attain… it?” Ganondorf ventured bluntly. “If it is so effective against Crack?”

Twili lowered her head to the table. “That’s the problem. Outside of you guys, there isn’t a Canon anymore! The Crack buried it! We already have it, but we can’t apply it at all.”

A round of annoyed mumbled dominated the moment until Zelda interjected.

“Then, if we have Canon here with us, how are we to apply it inside the Crack, where it can correct things, if we will lose Canon upon entering the Crack?”

“If we could find one thing, the remnant of something defining and significant,” Renee lamented, “One thing that Fangirl left at least partially untouched, then… we could use it to put Canon back. But if that kind of thing really is there, we can’t get to it. One touch of Crack and we’ll be flying toasters or wearing schoolgirl outfits.”

Agahnim cleared his throat. “Perhaps not,” he said softly.

All heads turned.

“I have spent a short while studying the Crack,” he began, “And I have come to a profound conclusion that I just now realized to be of use.”

Ganondorf was stern. “Why did you not tell me this before?”

“Forgive me, my lord. I thought my results… inconclusive a best, useless at worst.”

Link coughed. “What did you find?”

Agahnim looked proud. It was hard to see through the veil, but his eyes smiled. “Crack, by nature, is chaos. It adheres to no standard rules. Its affects are highly mutable. Yet it is not entirely lawless.”

Renee brightened. “Oh?”

“It is chaos, but it appears as stable white dust. For anything to appear in thr world, it must have some rudimentary order—a definition. It must exist as something conceivable, able to exist: in the same way that characters and pictures belong in a book or symbols belong in an equation. Crack pretends to belong in our world so it can exist at all. It does really exist, but simply is something that was never meant to exist because the intangible, inconceivable essence of absolutely pure chaos cannot appear in nature or magic. Ever.”

“Sort of like a real-life Missingno,” Alex said. Everyone struggled to make out the philosophical pseudoscientific magical theory that Agahnim maintained, but eventually the general gist of it became clear. Alexandra smiled. “Missingno isn’t in the list of Pokemon because its number zero, index out of bounds. But as zero it does have a kind of existence and it appears anyway—even if it is never defined as a Pokemon and never SHOULD appear ingame!”

Everyone ignored her, especially Ganondorf.

“So what makes this relevant?”

At this, Agahnim looked especially smug.

“Crack,” he said triumphantly, “Pretends to be a high-grade Dark Magic curse.”

“So why does this matter?” Twili asked.

“Because curses don’t stack, I think,” reminded Alexandra. They minded her again and she stuck out her tongue at them. “Remember, erm, the story of the Twilight Princess? Zant’s creatures tried to curse the hero into a monster, but Courage changed the curse to turn the hero into a Sacred Beast. But it still counted as a curse, so when the Hero went into any cursed area he turned into a beast, not a monster. And in other g-stories, I mean, there are similar themes. Remember the Moon Pearl?”

Everybody looked at her flatly. She blushed, pulled at her collar and said, “I thought writing about this in a fanfi—a story once.”

Zelda nodded. “Curses of equal strength do not overpower one another. At equality they cancel and the one applied first is the only one that appears.”

“So, theoretically,” Renee began, “You could curse someone with something equal to the Crack and they could walk around in it unharmed.”

Aghanim grinned. The smile was hidden, but the sheen in his eyes changed profoundly.

“Exactly.”

--

The edge of the Crack loomed over them. It filtered out the sun and glittered in the evening light like a flood of diamond dust.  The seven figures were dwarfed by it. It seemed an impossible adversary.

“Tell me again how we’re going to get through this.”

Twili waited for an answer, but Agahnim only bowed to his lord.

“It is prepared,” he said. “Just as you asked.”

“And you have gauged its potency with no margin of error?”

“To the smallest unit I know of.”

Renee wrinkled her nose. “You’ve worked this out to a science?”

“This single curse must be of a very particular strength,” Ganondorf said. “Or else the Crack will be fatal.”

“And what are the guidelines of this curse?” asked Alexandra. “A curse is still a curse even if it helps us, you know.”

“It will trigger on exposure to Crack only. No prey species or anything inconvenient.”

Zelda frowned pointedly. “Prey species?”

“Transformation is easy to adapt to our purpose while remaining relatively comfortable,” Agahnim pointed out. “Unless you’d rather be cursed with pain or dumbness or memory loss.”

Link opened his mouth but shut it quickly, as if he really thought better of what he had to say.

“So let’s get on with it,” Renee said, mildly uncomfortable.

“Very well.”

Renee, Twili, and Alexandra clenched their eyes shut. Link tensed, but Ganondorf began to chant softly. It wasn’t any language even Zelda knew. Renee couldn’t place it. But the warm air deadened, a strange dread settling over them. There was no hocus-pocus, no affected spellcasting cliché. There was simply power- and fear.

The fell words sat heavy in the air even after the sound faded away. They stood there, the three women with clenched eyes, for several heartbeats. Nothing changed.

“That’s… that’s it?” Alexandra asked, slowly opening her eyes. “Is that really all?”

Agahnim looked slightly disappointed. “I’m a weaver of magic, not a conjeurer of party tricks. What were you expecting? A festival? Fireworks?”

“No… um….?”

“ ‘Um,’ indeed,” Agahnim frowned. “If you’re so apprehensive, test it.”

The words stuck in her throat as everyone stared at her. Link began to speak but the sound died and he ended up simply rubbing his tunic in anxiety. Covertly the boy pointed to the Crack, signaling her to heed the sorcerer’s words.

And Alexandra decided to.

She tightened her belt, stuck out her tongue, and stared at the wall of frightful Crack. “Let’s do this thing,” she said, and shut her eyes. Then she ran at a sprint directly into the white barrier.

It offered no resistance. Alexandra kept on running, unsure of what would happen next. Opening her eyes she initially was blinded. But then she choked.

As if all the strength was struck from her legs she collapsed onto her hands and knees, palms stinging sharply from the sharp grit. A black blotch squirmed somewhere in her stomach, stinking of dark magic, waking abruptly. It felt terrible and sinister, but also comfortingly like Ganondorf.

And through the haze she could see her hand, the orange glow from it, the upside-down and backwards sigil there marking and projecting—

It was hell in her mind. It felt as if her body had exploded, crushed up and crumpled. Her spine stretched, skull drew, mouth stabbed, limbs burned, bones cracked and danced, flesh tearing angrily…

But it was over soon. Alexandra flopped weakly, mind reeling and fuzzy, tempted to pass out—no, she told herself firmly. No. She had to be awake. She had to hold on.

Focusing on the surroundings, her head began to clear. Colors were a bit different, but all of it was bathed in a milky opalescent murk. She could almost recall Twilight from her beloved game, but white instead of dusky. Random, nonsensical objects buried themselves into the ground, shadows of what had once been there.

Hesitantly she straightened up and took a step, but realized that while she had done so she still had been on all fours.

What.

Her mind couldn’t comprehend it for a second. She looked back. Over a brown-ruddy back she saw a full, bushy tail and looking down she found long legs with large loping paws. In the bottom of her vision was a fine pointed snout.

She tried to yell, but all that came out was a loud, high yipping bark.

That settled it. Alexandra understood what had happened. She had been transformed into a beast. Perhaps one of the mutant foxdog-coyote crossbreed canines that were seen stalking the backyards of her hometown at times, an urban aberration of a woodland predator. But it would do just as well now, she thought. Growling experimentally, she felt her jowls pull over sharp white teeth.

A sound. Sensitive ears twitched and she whirled about defensively. “Who’s there?” she demanded, though it wasn’t words so much as projected thoughts.

Through the pearly mists emerged a massive dark shape. It was roughly twice her own size, and until it spoke Alexandra’s fur bristled with fear.

“Calm yourself, Alexandra. You look like a fool.”

It was an enormous black boar. It wasn’t the fattened sort or the dirty hairy sort, but the sleek, heavily muscled sort—all muscle, slim waist, and cruel sharp tusks. Fire bristled in a thick mane up it’s back, leading to the head in which eyes as yellow as tindersparks sat kindling.

It was Ganondorf, undiminished by the bestial form. Boar charges on heraldic flags suddenly seemed more fearsome, and Alexandra highly doubted Atlanta could have shot this specimen.

“No, I look like a coyote,” Alexandra said. “I was really expecting a cougar, but hey. You can’t always be what your ego wants to be. I ended up a mutant foxdog thing.”

Ganondorf gave her a look. Somehow it was the same look he always gave when dry-humored, unaltered by his porcine face. “We must find the others,” he said sharply. “It’s your own fault for running so far in like an idiot.”

“Huh? Already?”

“You passed out for ten minutes. Of course they are.”

“Really? I didn’t notice. I thought I stayed awake the entire time.”

“Of course you didn’t notice,” Ganondorf snarled. “You were the one who passed out.”

Alexandra really had no way to argue that so she resigned, wagged her tail, and followed Ganondorf into the white blankness.

--

It was not long until most of the cursed expedition were located and revived. None of them had gotten far and once they were together it was easy to simply collect the next closest one.

The first two to be found were a brown, sleek bobcat and a great sun-feathered hawk. They were Renee and Zelda of course, and immediately Zelda began to test the wings of her form and soon got the hang of flight. She claimed to have influenced the shapechange, so that she would take a flying form to travel swiftly and scout ahead of the main group safely. Renee didn’t quite understand why she was a bobcat, but accepted it and took great pleasure in running about without sound.

Link was alone, in the form of the biggest wolf that any of them had ever seen. While nowhere near as large as Ganondorf, his blue gaze was fearsome enough. But the effect was lost when his tail wagged. Next to him, Alexandra was small, leggy and scruffy but the shared canine form pointed out their bindings through the Triforce of Courage.

The Hero gets turned into things more often than you would think, Renee had said. So I’m not surprised the Key to Courage would take at least a little influence from its corresponding piece.

“Where’s Twili?” Alexandra asked. “Five all present and accounted for… the last…?”

“She’s got to be somewhere around here,” Zelda sighed, preening back a golden feather. “She couldn’t have gotten too far.”

“What if she got turned into a bug or something or can’t talk to us?” Alexandra asked worriedly.”

Ganondorf pawed the ground, sniffing about angrily. “She couldn’t have. Part of the guidelines was to limit the curse to beasts and birds, and no exclusively prey species. Or anything larger than a horse, or smaller than a rat.”

Hoot, something peeped from above.

“Hm?” Link muttered, looking up. “Something’s there.

Hoot. Hoot.

Everyone steeped back from the (ugh!) purple peppermint tree they had all stood under.

Hoot, one of the purple lumps on it said.

“Give it up, Twili!” Alexandra said. “We get it, you got us!”

The purple lump giggled and unfurled its wings. A small violet owl sat on the branch, somehow smiling through its beak. It turned its head almost all the way around backward. “This is awesome!” she said, fluttering down. “I’m an owl!”

Hoot, hoot, she continued joyously. Hoot.

They all stood there together, finally gathered. “Boar, wolf, hawk, coyote, wildcat, and owl,” Alexandra said. “We’re a regular zodiac.”

“A zodiac,” Renee mumbled. “Well, we may as well go the whole mile and make this slightly easier. Or more awesome.”

“Huh?” Link asked, noticing that Renee had taken a stick in her mouth and was scratching words into the ground with great difficulty. “What are you going to do?”

“Borrowing something,” Renee said, grateful that she no longer had to speak with her full mouth. “From another story. With permission, of course.”

Twili flutter-hopped over to perch on Ganondorf’s head, delicate with her talons. The boar shook her off once, but once she alighted again he seemed indifferent, more concerned with trying to read Renee’s script. “What is it?” he asked. “I can’t read your Master-Script.”

“It’s another disclaimer,” Twili said. “A different kind.”

“Putting a disclaimer on the place that you’re inside means you can’t touch it or change it,” said Alexandra. “Putting a disclaimer that talks about a place that’s not in this world means that you can borrow things from that place without stealing them from the place itself. But you have to be careful and use the things properly or people will get angry.”

Renee spat out the twig. “Done. And it reads… Nobody here owns the idea of Okami, Ameterasu, or anything related. We borrow the battle system, minus out-of-place godly powers, because it is more convenient to hit normally invulnerable things with swords than to bite them.”

And then the words became truth. Link regained the Master Sword from wherever it had gone, the bright weapon hovering over his shoulder blades. It was similar for Ganondorf and Alexandra, great-sword and bastard-sword rotating slightly in suspension. Zelda’s light arrows hung over her wings, shining torpedoes waiting to launch. Renee carried her bow, arrows mounted but bow relaxed, arrowhead steady between her ears.

Renee didn’t comment that what she had was Ganondorf’s black bow of endless refill. She wondered when he had swapped them in the night, and why he had performed the act of kindness in the first place.

“Well, this is awesome,” Alexandra said. “I don’t suppose flowers spring up at my feet?”

She struck out with her mind, imitating glaive-strikes, and reduced a small bush to brush.

“No, no flowers,” Renee said. “We’re not gods, we’re just borrowing quadruped weapon use. If anything, we’re more Oki than Ameterasu.”

“What,” Ganondorf frowned, “are you even talking about?”

“Different story,” Renee said. “A sun goddess saves the world, is dog while she does it. Has annoying talking bug. If the walk is long, we’ll tell it to you.”