Burying a Dragon

Dungeon Music

Sir Callad Bolge (3/2/3) - Bladed Healing, Light Gem, Wind Gem.
Keera (2/4/2) - 50r.
Remei (5/1/2) - Iron Boots + Augment, Call Thunder, and Lightning Weave Cloth.

#
Callad felt strange.

How... did...? Where... am I? What... what is this place?

He was standing in an entry hall carved from bedrock, facing a staircase that led up to a walkway. Two doors faced each other on either side of that platform. Braziers, as inexplicable as this place itself, illuminated the room enough for that to be discerned. One of the doors was chained shut. The staircase and the doors appeared to his un-trained eyes to be larger than he was used to, though a Goron might've found them easy enough to traverse.

The room was hot. And with it being carved from bedrock, Callad would bet that he was underground somewhere. He turned around.

There was a doorway, blocked off with a large boulder. And near him, there were two others. One was obviously a Gerudo, while the other looked like a Hylian girl.

He had to ask, "Who are you two? Are you alright?"

After a lapse, Keera felt warmth wafting over her face. Her eyesight cleared from a blinding white, the dank and glowing cavern disorienting the Kokiri as she adjusted to her surroundings.

"Melda... Where are we?" She whispered to her chest. From her dress emerged her light green fairy, whose wings shuddered in the thick air.

"Somewhere hot," Melda replied flatly. "I hope you're not expecting me to fly around too much in here." She then took to drifting lazily around Keera's head, content that there wasn't anything immediately threatening around. Keera removed her cardigan and stuffed it into the carrybag strapped to her belt, leaving her in her green dress. She'd never been somewhere so hot!

A voice brought her to attention, also alerting her to the prescence of a Gerudo in the room with them. Keera turned to the Hylian man.

"I'm alright. My name is Keera. Do you have any idea how to get out of here?" The Kokiri surveyed the room, not finding a visual answer to her question.

Remei groaned, grunting several (luckily unintelligible) words that if properly enunciated would have been extremely inappropriate. Sticky with heat, she briefly wondered what had just happened as she looked around and wondered why she was standing up.
"Gah. My name's Remei," she muttered, swiping her hair away from where it clung to her sweat-soaked face. She must look quite the sight. "Usually I'd assume one of you two brought me here, but judging by your confusion I'ma guess otherwise today."
She looked about curiously. The decor was foreign to her; a far cry from the rotting planks and rusted metal of the Pirate's Fortress, and some idiot had apparently seen fit to set fires everywhere around the room, just in case it wasn't hot enough already.

She briefly wondered if she should take charge, but reluctantly delegated the role to the Hylian she saw before her. This was his turf and he likely knew Hyrule's tricks and turns better than the pirate who'd spent her entire life on an island. The kid, though, that one was strange. Who would bring a little kid with them? Who had even brought them here anyway? Apparently it was a common practice in Hyrule for people to wake up in places that were definitely not where they had gone to sleep. But what dictated who went where? Hesitating, she decided to try and break the metaphorical ice; she rather wished said metaphorical ice would melt like any decent ice would do in this roasting-hot room, but evidently not.
"So," she said dryly, "d'you think this has got anything to do with the fact we're all wearing green?"

Callad looked down at his own attire, then at the Gerudo's, then at the Kokiri's. There were, indeed, similar shades of green on each other them. He turned to the Gerudo and replied, "That is a strange coincidence, and perhaps there is a connection there, but, who can say?" He straightened, crossing his arms. He'd begun sweating, but even with the heat, he kept his cloak on, thinking that perhaps it could prove useful in some regard or other. "It's a good thing, to know the names of those you must work with, and a pleasure to meet you, Keera, Remei. I am Sir Callad, a knight of Hyrule."

The knight saw the Kokiri girl's fairy. "I... uh. Hold on a second. I have... something small enough that it should help you, little fairy," he said, digging around in his satchel. He found it shortly, and pulled out a jar with a screw-on metal lid, the inside of which was lit with a soft blue light. The glass itself was cool to the touch, even in this place, and the inside was frosted. "Inside there is an Ice Gem. I haven't yet found someone to work the gem and its power into my weapon, but until we get out of here, you are welcome to use it." He handed it to Keera.

"Now, let's find a way out of here." He turned, his cloak swirling with him, flaring out as he briskly walked towards the stars. He ascended with a measure of difficulty, considering the size of the steps. As he'd expected, the door to his right was chained shut. He took the left door, opening it and feeling a blast of heated air surge into the room. He squinted, using his hand to shield his face as best as it could, and saw that this room was larger than the first, full of platforms that could be jumped, and a bed of magma that they rested on. There was a large door directly in front of him, chained shut with a massive lock, and two side platforms, one of which held what looked like a prison cell.

What?

A shrieking roar filled his ears, and some forgotten piece of knowledge (...or was it a memory?) told him that it was a dragon. He became filled with a resolve to defeat the beast. Because if that thing gets out of wherever 'here' is, it will hurt people, and I will not accept that. Goddesses, help me in the defeat of this beast and in getting us out of here.

"Sir Callad... Oh, thank you!" Keera cupped her hands to receive the jar, which stuck to her skin with its pleasant chill. In the midst of the dizzying heat, it was a much-needed relief. Despite how much she wanted to hold onto the jar, she knew Melda was finding this climate more unbearable than she was. After gently unscrewing the lid, Keera held the jar up to her fairy, who swooped in and clasped her little hands around its smooth surface.

"Hope you don't mind if I tuck this into my shirt, otherwise my hands'll freeze!" Melda said, chiming afterwards to signal her gratitude. Keera was glad that her fairy wouldn't be complaining about the humidity the whole time: Sir Callad had helped out more than he knew.

Keera greeted Remei with a curtsy, feeling slightly low on the pecking order due to how short she was in comparison to the other two, even if she was much older than they were. She eyed the large steps ahead of them with disdain, knowing that unlike Sir Callad and Remei, she would have to hop up them. With her long hair bouncing behind her, Keera jumped up the steps with as much grace as she could manage, content at least with the fact that she didn't have to crawl up them. She envied Melda's wings at this moment in time.

After following Sir Callad through the door -whilst being careful not to get a face-full of his billowing cloak-, Keera gawked at the bubbling magma beneath them, having never seen anything like this in her life. She had of course seen illustrations in books, but they didn't compare to the swirling, glowing mass that churned menacingly below. She was a fairly good jumper, but the danger of missing those platforms made her nervous. This room was even hotter than the last, so much so that Keera's fringe was sticking to her forehead.

The roar that reverberated around the room shook Keera to the very core, with Melda chiming instinctively beside her.

"Keep sharp: that's a bigger sound than any Dodongo could make." The fairy advised, flitting up higher to survey the room.

How in the name of Din was that man still wearing his infernal cape?
She was glad for her revealing attire even if the fourteen-year-old had nothing to reveal. Sweat gleamed across her muscles as she tugged off her halter top, leaving just the Wing Tunic below it. If someone wasn't paying attention it might look as if she was topless, since the brown of the tunic was similar to the brown of her flesh, but she considered it an acceptable sacrifice in order to cool herself down slightly. She shoved the abandoned top in her belt, and checked for her weapons. Her preferred weapon, her glaive, wasn't present; however, both of her scimitars were hanging from her belt, along with the boomerang her mother had given her.

She followed the other two with mild apprehension, wondering what kind of Hylian insanity awaited her; she was rather impressed to find out that apparently physics and logic had no hold in this place as she stared into a molten pool of lava. She had never encountered lava before, and she had to admit there was a strange beauty to it. The shifting hues of reds and oranges, with little bubbles that rose to the surface and popped merrily, as if the lava were no more dangerous than a Chu. She wasn't stupid, though; she could feel the scalding heat that radiated from the liquid burning into her flesh. For perhaps the first time, she found herself glad for her dark skin- racism be damned, but supposedly dark skin was better in heat. That certainly leant her an advantage over her two Hylian companions.

She nearly jumped straight out of said skin when a echoing, animalistic howl seemed to pierce her eardrums and rend them to pitiful shreds. Her heart thumped in her ears and she barely managed to tease her mind back into service in time to observe the small, sparkling fairy's advice.
"No kidding," she said, willing a tremor out of her voice. Strong Remei is good Remei. What would Dahlia say?
She huffed at herself, sending several mental expletives at Dahlia and her stupid lessons that apparently still had a place in Remei's head.

Callad, seeing neither woman seem to want to explore the room, took it upon himself. He jumped across the gap to the left, landing on the platform, and then jumped again to the extended ledge that had the jail cell carved out of the wall. There was a pressure switch in the floor, which he stomped on. It shifted, but didn't quite go all the way down. He stomped again, and again, and a fourth time, after which it finally opened. The cell appeared to be empty, and whatever might've been imprisoned in here once was long gone.

However, still within the cell was a chest. It was small, hardly big enough to set a good sized dagger in. Curious in spite of his cynicism, he nudged the lid open with his boot, seeing something within. There wasn't a lot of light, so he bent over, reached in, and removed the thing, which turned out to be a key.

Exiting the carved cell, he looked over to the enormous door set into the wall opposite to the side of the room they'd entered. There was a haze of heat that, from the entry of the room, obstructed the vision of an observer partially. The chains and lock that shut the door were large indeed, larger than first he'd thought. He looked at the key in his hand, and realized that, no, he was not going to have this easy. He jumped over to the platform, then to his companions again.

"Looks like we need to go back to go forwards. This key is not big enough to open that big door," he said, showing them the key. It was maybe six inches long, and perhaps a third of an inch thick. He let them use their eyes on the key and the large lock to confirm what he was saying. "Come on, let's open that other door." He returned to the relatively cooler entry hall, moving to unlock the other door. Once the lock was opened, to his surprise, the key broke in his hand.

It opened, and, of course, more heat blasted him. Great Din, you have certainly deemed us fit for torment by this heat..., he thought in resignation. This room, however, was more spacious even than the room he'd just left. The room had a vaulted ceiling higher in scope even than Hyrule Castle and the Temple of Time. The chamber seemed broader, as well.

"Either of you feel like exploring?" he quipped, trying unsuccessfully to fan himself, despite the futility of the exercise.

Keera was just about to size up the jumping distance between the platforms when Sir Callad took the leap before her. As he interacted with the pressure switch, her feet twitched as she wondered whether she should go over to him. Before she had time to commit to travelling across the room, the Hylian knight was already back beside herself and Remei. In his hand he held a small key, which he motioned towards their gaze. She eyed the lock on the only other exit from the room and quickly concluded that it wasn't the key they were looking for, as he said.

While following Sir Callad back to the entry hall, Keera checked behind her to check that Remei was near. As they were in a foreign and mysterious place, the Kokiri was paranoid about something sinister occurring. Not that there was much she could do to prevent anything happening...

Once the next door had been unlocked, she braced herself against the flowing heat, gritting her teeth.

"Is every door going to do that?" Melda said, floating lethargically by Keera's shoulder. She shook her head and ignored her fairy, pressing onward behind Sir Callad.

If not for the continually draining temperature, she would have been more in awe of the size of the room they'd entered. The ceiling reached higher than any tree in Kokiri Forest, reminding Keera of her habit of comparing anything to the size of the Deku Tree. If not for the boiling lava and the aridity, he would have fit very comfortably in here.

"Of course!" She said in response to Sir Callad, whom was trying to relieve himself from the heat. Before them stretched a great plank bridge fastened to the dizzying ceiling by sturdy rope. Knowing she was the lightest of the three, Keera stepped gingerly on the first plank, half expecting the whole thing to crumble into dust. Being on a wooden bridge in such a place was worrying. Once it was clear that the bridge was more than capable of holding her, she began jogging across, Melda flying begrudgingly behind her.

Soon she came upon a break in the bridge, giving way to the lava below. After backing up a little, Keera broke into a run, clearing the gap with relative ease. On the other side was solid ground, which the Kokiri was glad to set foot upon. She looked to the door before them, identifying the lock as the same one in the entry hall. Assuming her voice would be lost in the churning of the lava, Keera motioned for Melda to fly back to Sir Callad and Remei.

"Thank the Gods for this Ice Gem..." the fairy grumbled before crossing the roomand chiming to Keera's comrades. "Looks like another locked door. We've got to find another key around here, somewhere."

Remei watched passively as Callad took lead, jumping across the gap and investigating around. Usually Remei would be front and centre when it came to looking at treasure chests- treasure!- but with her hair slicked to her face with sweat and the oppressive heat as shackles around her limbs she conceded defeat on that particular issue. Good thing, too- Callad returned bearing no rupees, no gold- just a plain iron key. She sized up the enormous lock that held the promising-looking door shut; could she pick it, she asked herself? Likely not- the lock was huge, golden, and looked extremely complex- and that was the outside. Feeling personally offended by the enormous horned lock, she defiantly turned her back on the door and followed after the others. Crossing through the door, she watched Keera jump the gap and tensed, ready to launch herself forward and fly in to catch her. Evidently her help wasn't needed, though, as the little Hylian girl stuck the landing admirably.

When the fairy fluttered back, Remei nodded. The room was rather large and the haze of heat and leaping blobs of fire obscured a great deal of their vision.
"Another key. If you want, I can get us an aerial view of this room...look out for a chest,"
She looked over at the little girl by the door. The lock there looked identical to the lock they had just passed through- in fact, had their key not broken (what a defiant little hunk of metal!) Remei would have bet that it could have opened that lock, too. Judging by the confounding layout of this place so far, she expected that the key would not be just laying around- she had to hope that there really was a key and that whoever built this place had anticipated a need to get through.

"Another key. Hm. We'll need to do a sweep of the room. Remei, give us a bird's eye view," Callad said, trying to think clearly in the heat. "Let us know what you see. I'm going to stand with Keera." He followed the fairy Melda as she led the way back to her friend, walking onto the rope bridge. For where it was, it was surprisingly sturdy. When the two got to the gap, something rose quickly up out of the molten rock at them, and Callad reacted to it. He'd seen it happen when Keera jumped the gap the first time, but the Kokiri had been too fast for it to jump at her in time.

The blade of his sword wasn't what struck the burning skull, though. The pommel bashed the cursed creature aside as it flew away to land again in the lava.

He reached the other side without incident, flicking his sword out to strike at some fire Keese.

"That was close!" Melda said, flying out from the bridge to avoid flecks of flame from the Red Bubble as it dropped back into the lava. As Sir Callad made his way across, she flew to Keera's side. "Watch out; heads up!" She chimed, right in Keera's ears.

The Kokiri girl raised her head to the dive-bombing fire Keese, gasping loudly. Instinctively she brandished her long, wooden flute in order to knock them away, but realized what would happen to her prized instrument if she hit the bats. At a loss for action, Keera dove to the stone floor, watching as the Keese swirled into an updraft to prepare for another attack. She looked to Sir Callad, but he was pre-occupied with some other enemies.

"Help!" Keera called out, shuffling along the floor but soon finding herself a little too close to the edges of the platform.

"Forget your silly flute: whack them!!" Melda rang, zipping around Keera's head in an attempt to distract the Keese, but to no avail. It swept in for another attack...

Remei stepped back, looking at the lava. The heat in here wasn’t favourable, and she’d have to be careful that she didn’t ignite her wings on the downstroke. Regardless, she strode forwards onto the bridge, looking over the side. It was high enough above the spitting mess of molten rock below that she could probably jump off the bridge and use the updrafts to get airborne, but she wasn’t a fan of the idea of jumping off a bridge towards lava. Vertical takeoff it was, however much that strained her muscles. She still had no idea how the hell the tunic’s wings operated using muscles, but she supposed that magic just kind of did whatever it wanted, with no regard for how things were supposed to operate ordinarily.

She lifted her hands and tapped her upper arms, and almost immediately broad, feathery wings sprouted from her wing tunic, growing perfectly through the holes in her tank shirt. Lifting them and resisting the urge to check her companions for looks of awe, she brought them down with a sort of thumping noise, one on either side of the bridge. A second wingbeat brought her off the ground, and she mentally cursed at the imbalance her hanging legs were giving her. Wings were not designed to work on a human body, and her lower body often felt way too heavy to be lifted off the ground. When she was as close to the ceiling as she could get without breaking her wings on the rock with every upstroke, she looked around carefully, making a mental map of the room.

“There’s a door over there!” she hollered to Callad, pointing. “You could probably bunny-hop over there over the rocks!”
A better idea might involve her just carrying him, but the man had seemed perfectly fine with jumping across fiery pits earlier, when he retrieved the key. She whirled at the little girl’s sharp screech, dropping a few feet with the movement. A Keese that was on fire - what?!- was swooping towards her. Evidently the tiny Hylian had nothing in the way of weaponry. Beating her wings hard, Remei drew one of the slightly-too-large scimitars and then sent herself shooting towards the girl with a powerful stroke of the feathery wings, swooping towards the Keese with her blade ready. She was a bit off with the first slash- fighting while flying could be difficult- and she had to be careful not to create gusts of wind powerful enough to send Keera flying off the platform. A second slash separated the Keese’s left wing from its body, and a swift kick sent the dying animal into the lava. Remei landed carefully, kicking out the slight smoulder of her pointed slipper on the rocks.

“You alright?” she asked Keera, folding her wings behind her.

Callad looked up when he saw Keera point the way. He ran back across the bridge, then jumped the gap onto a rock outcropping. He followed the outcrop to a good jumping point, and leaped across to a square platform. It was unstable and began to shake, so he quickly jumped to the one beside it. It, too, was not stable, and Callad leaped to the last platform. It was almost a dock, really. At the back of it was a door. He opened it, and saw a room which contained another prison cell, with a pressure stone for a door.

He stood on it, and when it sank into the stone, he felt a click under his boot, and the bars disappeared into the floor. He picked out a key from the chest in the cell, and returned to the large chamber. His eyes espied a strange patch of wall through the haze across the room, nearly in a straight line perpendicular to the bridge.

He began to make his way over to that point.

"Yes... Thank you." Keera said, gathering herself and standing before edging away from the platform edge. She bowed deeply to Remei.

"We need to get you a proper weapon..." Melda muttered, resting lightly on Keera's shoulders to allow her wings to rest.

"I'm sorry Remei, I'm not much of a fighter." Keera fumbled with the ends of her long hair, feeling like a nuisance. She had to find a way to be useful to make up for that embarrassing display.

Whilst this was happening, Sir Callad had made significant progress with their locked door dilemma, emerging from a prison cell far across the room with a key glinting in his hand. Keera momentarily contemplated what it'd be like to be a prisoner here: they'd only been here for half an hour or so, and the heat was already unbearable. She prayed that there were some rooms here that were slightly more temperate that the ones thus far.

When the knight didn't return to the locked door, but instead made his way across to the other side of the room, Keera wondered whether she should follow him.

"Where is he going: don't we have the key now?"

Remei gave a brisk nod, folding her wings in against her back, the feathers tickling her calves.
"No worries," she said, then paused. She had her boomerang, and two scimitars... surely she could part with one of them? She immediately ruled out the boomerang; no way was she lending the engraved gift to anyone! She bit her lip and flipped around the scimitar in her hand, offering the hilt to the small girl in front of her. Then again, Remei wasn't much taller.
"Here," the Gerudo said. "If you want, you can hold onto this while we're in here. It doesn't really need any finesse to wield, and although it's a little heavy you can really just swing it at whatever's in your way,"

She paused. Would the little girl even want a weapon? It was possible she was a pacifist; didn't almost everyone carry weaponry in Hyrule? Then again, Remei had grown up in an environment where carrying at least two weapons at all times was the norm. It struck her as uncomfortable, to be in a place like this fiery fortress, and be completely unarmed. Besides, the girl seemed monumentally awkward; she was fiddling with her hair.

Remei turned to see Callad, true to form, leaping across the rocks that jutted from the lava like the filthy, blunted teeth of the great smouldering beast they had heard roar earlier.
"I dunno what he's doing," she muttered. "Did you see a key in his hand? I dunno, I wasn't looking,"

Callad reached the other side of the room, successfully keeping his clothes from burning. He had the key held tight in his hand. He reached towards the strange part of the wall with his other hand, touching it. His eyes had picked out something different about this patch from across the room and through the haze. What was it, though? He wracked his mind, trying to come up with different answers to what was wrong with it, until it alighted upon the idea that might be a fake wall.

He backed away, reached into his bomb bag and tossed a bomb at the wall... and it blew up. When the bomb's smoke cleared, there was another door looking right back at him, though further in the wall than it had been.

Callad went into the room, discovering another cell and another key, triumphantly holding it aloft for a second. The knight left the room, rejoining the others in the large chamber. To his companions, he said, "I saw something funny about that wall. Found a key in a hidden chamber behind it. So now we have a spare." He opened the lock more gently this time, but the key he used still broke after the lock had come undone.

"Hm... If these keys keep breaking, I hope there are a lot of them. I get the feeling that these locks aren't in short supply."

"Oh... Thank you, Remei! I'll take good care of it." Keera took the blade, underestimating its weight before steadying her arm to support the weapon. As Keera moved the scimitar around her, Melda understandably flew out of harm's way. Ever curious, Keera was intrigued: she'd never held a blade before.

"You can put it away until you need it." Melda said, waiting to return to her master's side until the blade was safely tucked in Keera's belt. With her borrowed weapon in tow, Keera was ready for some more adventuring.

Callad returned with news that he'd found yet another key, making her wonder how far they would have gotten without his help. He unlocked the door, which Keera then pushed open.

The room was much smaller than the expansive cavern they'd just been in, but still fairly high. Before Keera was an enormous mesh fence that showcased some pillars. She stepped in further, looking closer at the structures and discerning that they used to be attached... A stream of lava burst through a hole in the ground, reaching surprisingly high and vanishing into the ceiling. Keera was glad to be so far from the out-shoot, but peered over the edge of the platform to see a small pool of lava separating them from the mesh fence.

"I think we're going to have to climb that..." Keera thought aloud, also spotting a precarious-looking plank that led towards the fence. The prospect didn't daunt her too much- she was used to climbing trees back home. The lava was the only thing to worry about. "Ready, Melda?"

"Just hold on tight! There won't be much to do if you fall." Her fairy warned.

With a deep breath of hot, sticky air, Keera broke into a short run, getting a few strides on the wooden plank (which was sturdier than she'd imagined) before launching herself at the fence. It was easy to grab ahold of, so Keera let herself settle from the motion before beginning her ascent. She didn't like how the metal wiring dug into her skin, but the lava beneath her kept her clutching hard. The most difficult thing about the climb was being unable to wipe the sweat from her forehead.

Upon reaching the top, Keera took some unpleasant breaths of arid air before surveying the room, quite proud of her progress.

"You have a good eye," the Gerudo girl complimented Callad when he explained about the false wall. "Although I'm at a loss as to why they'd brick up one of those chamber-y things...
She was starting to feel a little annoyed with herself. Once again, she was showcasing her complete inability to navigate anything that wasn't a boat. Ignoring her grouchiness, she followed her companions into the next room, watching as Keera made an awesome jump onto the wire walls.

Remei quirked an eyebrow, impressed.
"You're really good at climbing," she yelled, hopefully audible over the whoosh of the lava spout. She looked at Callad with an appraising eye.
"Are you going to be able to make that jump in your armour?" she asked the knight. "I mean, you could try climbing it from the other side, I guess...but, if you wanted, I could...try and lift you?"
She fluttered the wings she had yet to dispel yet, the white feathers brushing against the wall behind them.

OOC: Sorry for the unimaginative post

"If you're willing to carry me, I'm willing to let you try," the knight replied. He had sheathed his weapon when he entered, and rested his right arm on the hilt. "It's going to be awkward, though. I can't lift my right arm beyond shoulder height. If it gets forced beyond that point, I can't move it. It just hurts for hours afterwards. I'd have to hold you 'round the chest, or over one shoulder and under the other. I'll understand if that discourages the idea. Are you still willing?"

After watching Remei and Callad follow her into the room, she began casting her eyes over the next half. As she took a step forward, a plume of lava rushed upwards through the gap in the platforms below her. Keera almost fell off her feet in surprise, but managed to regain her footing before making a fool out of herself. A few moments passed and the column of lava receded back into the crevice it emerged from. Through the noise, she'd heard Remei compliment her traversing of the wall.

"Thank you! Let me scout the rest of the room while you make your way up here." Keera called, returning to her observation. "Let's steer clear of those platforms, then..." Keera muttered, moving to her right and forward to the edges of the fence-turned floor.

"Hey... That up there is the only way out of here." Melda chimed. After a brief pause, the fairy flew down to the platform, hovering around a large, solid block of stone. It had eerily carved faces on each side, but otherwise seemed harmless.

"Would that let us travel up?" Keera asked, nimbly hopping onto it before dismounting behind it.

"I'd say so, for lack of a safer way." Her fairy confirmed. "Do you think you could move it?"

"I don't think so..." The Kokiri pressed her body into the block, but it didn't budge. "I'll need Callad and Reimei's help." She added, turning back to the entrance to see how they were getting on.