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Spectacle rock hunched majestically from the cliff-side like a smooth gargoyle, squatted so precariously over the abyss of Hyrule’s atmosphere it seemed so likely to simply topple off to the forested valleys below. Rock-ridden trails whitened with blown crystals of frost cut through the sheer canyon faces like folds in a fat man’s belly, glittering silently in the pale overcast daylight. From the stone watched the stern faces of ancient idols, lifted into place eons before a reasonable race of humanity pulled itself from the primordial soup of its ancestry, arrogant with their secrets. These were crumbled, splintered where frost had taken gelid root, reduced in size by a kind of geological necrosis of ice.

On the cool winter breeze carried the heavy breaths of two figures. Their blood soaked from their bodies into the cold air and their animosity smoked in red sheets of intent off their shoulders. The more interesting of these, physically, was the lynelim – he was extraordinarily haired across rippling biceps and chest, tinted with that fiery gold mark of the overseas Isles beyond Holodrum, with a braided beard spilling in hot curls to his heaving solar plex. He shone of sweat and battle-lust and wore nothing to spare his nakedness from the eye – but this was little offensive, because from his muscle-roped abdominals downwards any similarity to the human image ended. The remainder of his body was that of a great cat, as fiery savannah-striped as his locks of hair, sinuous and heavy furred, holding him low to the earth like a feral centaur. It his mighty hands he held two wickedly curved sickles perched at his jaw line. They were old and notched and wise with the murders of hundreds on their serrated edges.

“Ndra, ein crass Hylian whelp,” he grumbled heavily between breaths. He spit blood and saliva on the cooked rocks of the Death Mountain summits. “We will win, dog of the Triforce, fir Din ala we will win.”

His opponent was made far less intimidating in his presence, if not for his stoic countenance. Slung over his back gleamed an immense kite shield which gleamed like pooled moonlight under the brilliance of the sky, an extraordinarily polish that opalesced aureate like melted pearl. He was not using it. His hands, which were mailed with lightly armoured gauntlets of mail and steel (one, the Titan Mitt, and the other, the Power Glove, both respectively different) held only a viciously beautiful broad-sword of gleaming brass/bronze metal, the blade a curiously forged brass steel that seemed coloured with the fires and shadows of dusk, golds and reds and oranges like a jack-o-lantern. He held it across his field of vision with silent discipline. At this silence, the lynelim’s expression knotted with rage and desperation.

”To Nar with you!”

His frame heaved forward, golden muscles rolling under the cold light, paws liquidly scraping across the dust and rock and snow and carrying forward with all the speed of a jaguar, pouncing from the hind legs to whip five pairs of claws forward through the air to take off the Hylian’s face even as his sickles whickered meanly towards both halves of his neck. The following sequence of events were undecipherable – they couldn’t appropriately be broken down into separate movements without irreparably damaging the speed in which they took course. Link was underneath the titan and the point of his blade lifted and stung forwards like the tail of a scorpion, punching through the chest of the lynelim’s lion body (there was a cracking as the clavicle and ribs shattered) and he was sidestepping and turning his body left of him even as blood gouted heartily from the wound across the snow and the sickles fell through empty air. Steel flashed, hot and fiery like the embers of a fire, whickering through the air in a calculated horizontal arc.

There was another crack, and a wet smashing sound like the exploding of rotten cantaloupe. The blade ripped through and severed the lynelim warrior’s spinal column, opening him up through his left kidney and erupting from his body through the flank, tearing flesh loose as it did. His body went rigid and spasmed in shock as the pain tore upwards through him from the pelvis, and he jerked backwards, his head thrown back and his mouth agape with silent, overpowering agony.

The following stillness contrasted sharply with the blur of violence and speed. The monster’s guts had burst from him in red ropes and his blood covered so much of the snow around him it had become a cold, gelid mud of visceral red. The giant teetered, his muscles flopping uselessly as his body died from the bottom up, and heaved over to his side like a felled tree. Link waited under his shadow and bore the beast-man’s impossible weight with the brunt of his shoulders, squatting and lifting upwards with his body to heave the giant from him with the levering strength of a demi-god.

The lynelim’s body hit the earth with a remarkable shudder, blood erupting upwards from him in a pink mist that settled quietly against the rock. Link’s blade hummed like the chord of a harp. He drew from his self a rag, and wiped clean the blade of the blood and gore. The last of them – lynelim appeared around the Death Mountain bluffs. It was strange but not impossible. The drape between the Light and Dark World was tenuous, and what kept Ganon at bay had not been built to keep at bay his hounds. He was a worn traveler, his head scarved and banded with strips of torn clothe beneath his cap, and for a splendid armouring and arsenal he seemed dressed like a vagabond, laden with a multitude of packs and pouches and belts. His eyes were warm chips of eyes set about a wreath of tussed gold-brown hair, and featured around a plain, sturdy face. Around him the flakes of winter snow were tossed around on the wind – not properly falling, merely floating around without purpose or direction. Some were red with the lynel’s blood.

It had been years since the Dark World, and Ganon, and even now that puerile influence forced him to do this, hunting down these underworlds dogs across every corner of Hyrule. Goddess, he hadn’t even seen Zelda in months. To the east, the sculpted Mirage Tower lifted itself from the gulf of mist and rock like a pillar, smooth and featureless against the sky. It was familiar territory. He took a moment to look out across the horizon – from Death Mountain, he could even see the wastelands south of Hyrule. It was quite a sight.

He would eat. And then, continue.


OoC: Yours, Cam. LttP's Link for me.

OoC: Bump =P //

"WAAAAAGH!"

Pulling hard with his right arm, Link shifted the tilt of his tremendous Deku Leaf and swung to the side of the mountain peak which undoubtedly would have killed him otherwise. His hair, longer now than it had been since his boyhood, streamed down to his shoulders and waved wildly behind his head as he soared.

"WAAAAAGH!"

Another pull, another swing, another near-miss on a rocky precipice that undoubtedly would have left him a rather chunky red jelly in a green tunic. The vents of subterranean heat that leaked magma and founts of hot gas into the air created spiraling currents that carried him higher and higher, supporting the leaf where it should have given out long ago. When he began he had been delighted at the sheer novelty of this seemingly unlimited flight, at the speed he was able to build and how he was able to soar without worrying about falling to his grisly death.

That had been nearly an hour ago, and he was now gliding at something like two hundred miles per hour, whizzing by the same peaks that he had already passed twenty times, forced into a constant circuit of the mountain because he was now so high up and moving so quickly that if he tried to fly away from it, his leaf would break and he would fall to his doom.

"WAAAAAGH!"

Another swing, another fleeting brush with the gentle embrace of eternal night. It had occurred to him some time ago that he was going to have to fall at some point - the best he could hope for was something soft that would not break all of his bones upon landing. He soared. And he watched.

Beneath him he saw a man - not any man, but a warrior, the one he had come here to find in the first place, a strange echo of himself from twenty or thirty years in the future.

With only a moment's opportunity, he knew what to do. The boy let go of the leaf, which disappeared in a whorl of dust, and dropped. He dropped even faster than he soared, and it goes without saying that his adversary-to-be never actually saw him coming.

It occurred to him, about a second after it was entirely too late, that he probably should have tried to use the leaf again, just to break his fall.

"WAAAAAGH!"

They collided just as the older Link looked up, with a thunderous sound like a hammer pounding into flesh as they both hit the ground and then the younger Link bounced off, ribs shattering and legs reduced literally to powder. There is no proper telling what the impact did to the elder Link, who lay on the ground surrounded by an almost literal torrent of his own blood, but when the younger ceased rolling the last thing he wanted to do was move.

But move he did: reaching into his storage pouch, he pulled out the one blue potion he had been saving for some dire circumstance, deemed this circumstance dire enough, popped out the cork, and drank. Vitality swam through him with the benevolent sound of bones mending instead of being shoved back together, of organs regenerating into wholeness and of marrow producing enough blood to allow him to stand and fight. He drank that foul stuff, which tasted like blueberry pig sweat, drank until his throat screamed and his lungs burned and he thought he would die from the effort of drinking. Then there was nothing left, and he gasped.

He rose to his feet and placed his bottle, the most sacred possession of anyone in his line, back into its pouch. Turning to face the other Link, he drew out a hammer that was so large as to be comical, so massive as to be terrifying, a flat plane as big around as his arm was long that tapered back into the mouth of a skull. A hammer made to flatten beasts the size of cows, to shake the foundations of buildings, and he hefted it in his thirteen-year-old hands as if he had been born holding it.

He waited, with a look of determination that only he, of all his line, had managed to develop. He was ready.

OoC: Post pending.

Quivering fingers fell tightly over an undamaged glass bottle laden among his many ornments, and he popped off the cork, bringing the neck to his lips. The blue potion - as his counterpart's, one reserved for a moment such as this - seared his throat and he saw white behind his eyes and then darkness and then nausea as his own wounds mended, bones sticthing together beneath his flesh like the shifting of tectonic plates and viscera sewing back whole and functional throughout his body. He throat worked silently, desperate to throw up the vile, sick-blue tonic, but Link fought it - as he'd fought it in the past. And soon, the sickness of healing and fairy magic passed and he shakily sat up.

He was taken slightly aback. The boy - he was not so much a boy as a young man, with long, tussled blonde hair - looked enough like him to be his brother. Something in his eyes. He rolled trained to his feet, his own face - older, but not by very much, and neatly, youngly bearded - staring back with the ice of ancestral determination.

Something seemed to fit, something was right.

He drew iron from leather and dusk flashed, coloured steel, a heavy ribbon of metal twinkling with runes and reds and oranges. The boy's hammer was so huge - so blasted huge - it looked like it had been made for the euthanising of orca whales. There was a poetry in how they did not speak to one another.

Link grit his teeth. The boy wielded a hammer that immense with disembodied strenght. His knuckles tightened over the hilt - knuckles entombed beneath the flesh of mail and metal of the Titan Mitt, and the grinding of his sinews was audible over the wind. Strenght. His arm wheeled, back and forth, thrusting, retreating, arcing and fencing from a distance too great to reach his enemy - but every sing of steel against air hummed throatily, the air bent, moved by the sword, superheated, and blew towards the boy and his hammer. The earth sundered - sliced neatly and geometrically into fractures it heaved up from the carnage in nimbuses of dust and snow and gore and turned to vapour in the heat and the curtains of energy fell across young Link. The breeze turned in on itself, wheeling, revolving, homicidal, glowing bands of fire and lightning. The boy weaved away from them, backpedalling, his hammer not as cumersome as it should have been. His clothes turned to ash or were cut so neatly they simply fell away in shapes, and blood began to let where he was not quick enough.

Link - adult Link - flashed teeth again. He neither shouted nor raved, only breathed steadily, heavily, and his exertion pounded from his lungs with discipline. Pivoting on his right heel he swung his body around in full-circle, and the sword hummed and came forth and around and the slash opened up the earth twenty feet away from him into a smouldering ravine licked black with golden fire and the peals of thunder.

KK-KKRRR-

The child leapt.

"YAAAAAAAGH!" Hammer raised. The stone beneath him rippled, thundered apart, but he was above it and the war-weapon came down with enough force the air thumped bodilessly against it. Off-balanced, the elder Link tore himself back from the force of his swing, falling to a knee while raising the kite-shield with one arm, muscles pulled taut like cabling throughout his body.

Ker-WHAM!

Where Link crouched, rock fractured into a concave bowl downwards. The hammer met the Mirror Shield and but for the sheer force of it, did nothing against its pearly face but richochet backwards. Sparks flew and the clap of sound from the impact punched into their eardrums like a coiled fist. Link's thighs gave out, shaking, and he fell almost ass over ankles from the sheer force of defending against the blow. The other Link, however, was pulled off his toes as the massive hammer fell backwards, lifted clean into the air and hurdled unceremoniously across rock and snow, rolling down the cut paths over himself until meeting a hard, unforgiving stop.

The mountain quivered, and for a long while no bird dared chirp, even in the lofty heights of Death Mountain.

Shakily, the elder Link stood up, and drew his sword. This enemy - this new, impossible enemy - would be something else entirely.

The younger Link spit blood from a cut on his lips, and dusted himself off.

He looked up, and their eyes mirroed the others with explosive symmetry.

Bump, Cameron.