#t3a

“Hey. Hey, listen. Are you okay? Hey, Link. Hey, listen. Wake up, please. Heyyy.”

Link burbled out a sad little moan of dizzy pain and tried to sit up, blinking back sparking shadows.

“Ohhh, no, no, don’t actually sit up yet. Just. Just wake up, maybe.” A hand pressed firmly on Link’s chest, a weight that made him lean his aching head back down slowly, carefully. On what felt like a pile of rocks barely softened by Graham’s cloak. An instant of shifting around made him realize this was exactly the case.

“Graham?” His voice was cracked sounding.

“Yeah, uh, don’t...definitely don’t sit up. Seriously. You took that hit pretty hard. You okay?”

“You won’t let me sit up and you’re asking if I’m okay. What do you think?”

“I think maybe...maybe you should keep lying there?” Graham’s face was a blur of red blush and black curls and blue hat. Link concentrated, and his vision started clearing up.

Blond scruff nudged Graham aside. “Come on, eyes on me. Right here. Aaaand...okay, we’ve got focus, I think. Good. Anyway, I thought you were an elf. Aren’t you supposed to have, like, godlike balance?”

“That’s stereotyping, isn't it? Seems rude.” Graham turned his attention back to the fallen Hylian. “Hey, Link, listen, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two.”

“How about this?” A hand with a specific finger up.

“Also rude, Guybrush.” But Link was laughing, a little. The movement made his headache flare.

“Yeah, but I got you to smile, didn’t I?” Link could easily tell expressions now, the fog cleared away, and the relief on Guybrush’s face, despite his attempt to hide it behind humor, would have knocked Link over again if he hadn’t already been lying down. His sea-blue eyes were soft and crinkled around the edges with blessed delight. “Seriously, it’s good to see you awake. We were...it was a little touchy for a second. Graham was worried.”

“You carried him halfway across the castle,” Graham pointed out.

“Yeah, because you were worried. And also you hurt your wrist.”

“What happened?” Link tried feeling out the side of his head, which was insistently pounding in time with his heartbeat. He winced, and his hand dropped to the floor.

“What exactly can you remember?” Graham asked, his fingers tracing mindless patterns in the dust.

“Well. We’re in a castle, in a spindly forest full of rocky cliffs with no decent hiding places anywhere--which I told you was probably going to be a problem--trying to get our hands on something for the town. From some wizard named, uh, Telgrin? He's got something that he’s threatening the local villagers with. So, we somehow managed to get inside without being spotted--”

“Thanks to some clever wall scaling and acrobatics and lock picking by yours truly,” Guybrush interjected.

“Right. And it all seemed to be going okay, right up until the point when we opened the wrong door and alarms started going off. Some magic trap, I guess. And there were all these knights...and we started running.”

“Place is like a maze.”

“Normally I like mazes,” Graham said. “Normally I’m not being shot at while I’m solving them.”

And all the corridors tended to look the same, Link thought: whoever that Telgrin fellow was, he had a penchant for painting things in shades of black and red, like a villain in a storybook ought to. But then he forgot to actually maintain anything, so it all looked dingy and sad, but in the tattered and pathetic sort of way, rather than the mysterious and dangerous impression he probably intended.

“We tried to get away,” Link continued. “And...um. Foggy, then.”

“It actually did get foggy, for a second,” Guybrush said. “That wizard, messing about, probably. Fog filled the hall, and it got a little sticky to breathe there for a second. Must be a hard spell to maintain, though; it cleared right up. But noooot before you tripped on some stairs. Thus, the elf-balance thing.”

“Oh.”

"But I caught you, sort of,” Graham said.

“More like he fell on top of you from behind,” Guybrush said.

“Yeah, but it was a softer landing.”

“Not for your wrist.”

Graham shrugged. Even in the dim light trying to reach through the grimy windows, Link could see Graham sort of half cradling one hand closer to his chest than he normally would. Which wasn’t exactly helpful for an archer stuck in a close scrape.

“And it wasn’t a good catch either,” Graham said, glancing guilty at Link. “You still hit the stairs just right.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Days. We’ve left the castle far behind and turned in the treasure and started the next adventure and everything.”

“That’s not possible,” Link gasped—a head injury like that should have killed him. Plus, what, they hauled his unconscious body around with them all that time?

“Nah, you’re right. It’s been like, a minute, worst. No long-term damage done. You’ve got full range of emotions, you know how many fingers, you know our names...presumably. What’s my name?”

“Dopey pirate. Spoken affectionately, but still dopey.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Okay, so, just a minute...means...we must have been captured?” Link looked around the room. It didn’t feel particularly dungeony, but you could never be too sure in a castle as generally gloomy looking as Telgrin’s. A bedroom, a sitting room, a dungeon—all probably done up in black and shadows and dirt. At least he had a theme going.

“Not yet. But I have a feeling we’ve got about, oh, maybe two minutes before they break down the door.” Graham glanced across the room.

Link realized the muffled pounding he’d been hearing wasn’t entirely just his heartbeat thumping in his ears. Someone was kicking at the door. Dust shook from the lintel and the splintery wood kept bowing in and out. “Oh. We’re going to have to fight our way out?”

“I think we might,” Graham said, and he flexed his sore wrist and flinched. “I’m not sure we’re going to win this one, though.”

“Or, we could do something else,” Guybrush said.

“Yeah? Like? We can’t possibly fit through that window, and we’re too high up on a cliff face anyway.”

“I was listening when it came to what we were stealing. I asked the guy about it.”

“Yeah? What is it?”

Guybrush opened his bag and fished out the crystal they’d taken. It was golden and glittery and easily the nicest thing in this entire crumbly castle, shimmering cheerfully in the gloom and making even the dimmest and most unwelcoming shadows glow with a comforting sort of light. It felt like a hug from Wente Fey in light form, it felt like drinking Lon Lon milk with a friend in the sunshine. It made the other two adventurers smile instinctively. Link’s head immediately felt better, and Graham relaxed his wrist.

“Teleportation magic, anyone?” Guybrush twirled the crystal in his fingers.

“Truly?”

“Yep! I know how it works, too. Well. Sort of. I remember how to activate it. Buuuut not exactly how to control where we’ll end up if we use it.”

Link said, warily, “Could we end up inside some volcano or something?”

“Unlikely; the guy said it’s only got a range of about a hundred miles, tops. There aren’t any volcanos around here. Couple canyons that might be pretty interesting if we get stuck at the bottom, but I suppose we could just zap around with it again until we find level ground.”

Graham’s eyes were sparkling—partly because of the crystal’s light, but mostly because: “Can it teleport us anywhere? Will we end up exploring sky temples? Deepest darkest jungles full of danger and exciting monsters to fight? Can we bring noble steeds with us? Will the magic change our clothes to match our location? Can we speak any language through it? Can we use it? Please, please, please?”

“This sounds like we’re going to end up on another long adventure together,” Link said, looking at the crystal.

“Except we don’t really have a ton of money or supplies with us,” Guybrush said. “We were only meant to be exploring one castle, not the whole world again.”

“Sounds familiar.”