Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing that Sky is aware of is the noise. It is like thunder, but endless, rolling on and on instead of coming in brief booming cracking waves. It is vibrato, like the wavering of a plucked harp sting, one waving rise and fall, as indistinct as the rushing of a raging river.

He blinks his eyes open, and sees mostly darkness looking back, sees ill-defined dull gray, smells dirt and dust and his own sweat and beneath it all, that indescribable smell of people. The scent of a large crowd, the ambient aroma he has come to recognize as ‘civilization’ within the eras of his brothers.

Sky coughs the dusty air out of his lungs, and pushes himself up to his hands and knees. As he does so the darkness in front of him shifts, pale light spreading in gaps around his silhouette, and Sky realizes that he has been pressed up against a wall, the light source behind him.

He takes a moment to do a quick personal inventory. He feels a little sore, but less like he has been injured, and more like the ache to be expected from sleeping on a dirt floor. He is missing his pack, and therefore all of his items, all of his personal effects.

Yet Fi remains with him, safe in her scabbard; still his shield sits securely strapped to his back.

Sky reaches back in his mind, searching for a path to draw from his last memory to this moment.

They had all gone through a portal, his brothers and him. It was one of those awful ones that spit them out in multiple locations, one of the ones that compels them to go through in pairs at least, hands woven together.

He was… he had been with the Captain. It was him and Warriors that went through as a pair, mid-conversation about some nonsensical thing of daily life. There was the cross-over, the feeling of the warp through time and space, the displacement of themselves across the endless expanse of history.

And then…

It’s fuzzy, distorted, a fragile wavering thing, his memory of what happened next. He remembers motion, adrenaline, and the ring of a sword. He remembers fear, and Wars’ hand being ripped from his. He remembers something sweet, a sugar rich something drowning out all of his senses and then—

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Sky staggers to his feet, shaking off the lingering grogginess to the best of his ability. His body aches, his head is rather light, actually, now that he is standing. A few feet in front of him is the light source, a gap in the wall, slatted with bars and rounded, almost like the entrance to a cave. The light itself is intense, glaring, stabbing into his aching head via his darkness-adjusted eyes.

He stumbles forward, crossing the rest of the small space—cell, this is a cell—to wrap his hands around the bars. Blinking against the harsh light of mid-day, Sky peers out to the world beyond his unexpected confinement.

He sees sand. Lots and lots of sand, and for a moment he thinks he must be in a desert, locked in some cave in the middle of some waste. And then his eyes adjust to the sunlight bouncing off the reflective granules of the ground and Sky sees the wall opposite him, quite a ways away, but just as stone, curved concave in a gentle angle that suggests a circular enclosure.

Before he can puzzle this out any further, the bars tremble and begin to rise. The knight lets go, leaning back to keep clear as the passage before him opens. He doesn’t hesitate to step through, does not give himself the chance to miss the chance at escape, at freedom.

The thought of danger, of a fight, does cross his mind. He is not stupid. He knows what automatically opening doors to empty rings of earth implies.

He draws the Master Sword as he steps forward with his right hand, unhooks his shield from its place with his left in one smooth motion. He braces himself for the rush of the Dark Magic, for the formation of some great beast that he is about to be asked to do battle with. He mentally prepares himself for the coming fight as he blinks against the harshness of the sunlight.

His vision clears further, and the sight is… not what he was expecting. The sound, the constant sound, droning on and on, is not a force of nature, it is not some quirk of the environment. Above him, at the top of a smooth, unscalable (to anyone but Wild) expanse of stone there is a cutting lip of stone. Beyond that is people.

Hundreds of people. In row after row of seats, climbing in risers up and up beyond what reasonably makes sense to have been built. They are so loud, cheering and talking and laughing, walking up and down to different places on the risers with stomping feet, and Sky now understands what is happening here even less than he did when he woke up face-first on the ground.

The other thing is that he is no longer alone. Not in regards to the crowd above, peering down at him, but here, within the sandy enclosure itself.

Other doors must have opened in sync with his own, because all around him, others come out onto the sand, all with weaponry in-hand, spaced in an equidistant staggering of about twenty yards or so apart.

There is no monster here to fight, but Sky is suddenly—horribly—aware that there is a battle coming. He sizes up those around him, not yet sure if they are enemies or allies, and then he sees him, and Sky’s heart skips a beat.

Sky locks eyes with Warriors across the field, and dread fills his stomach in time with the swelling sound in the air of the thunderous applause.

Chapter Text

There isn't much time to think, after that.

With another ear-itching groan, more doors ringing the smooth stone wall heave open, and Sky braces like the rest of the captives—like the strangers—like his brother—to meet whatever horror it is that they have come to face.

When the monsters come, there is a single heart-stopping moment where Sky nearly laughs. It's a little swarm of peahats, about a dozen of the remlit-sized things twirling and whirling at low altitude as they circle the arena. Easy target practice. Sky quirks a small smile and reaches for his bow—oh.

Oh, that's right.

He doesn't have his bow.

This changes things.

Sky curses under his breath and ducks, letting the razor-sharp edges of the flying plant creature pass harmlessly over his head. He rights himself in time to see the stranger to his right become the creature's next target. Confident or foolish, the man does not duck, doesn't roll out of the way. He simply swings his own sword up as though he can cross blades with the peahat.

The spinning blades clang in rapid succession against the man's sword, a high pitched hum that rings out in a raucous ricochet. After a second the inertia builds and backfires on the creature, and the peahat bounces off the man's sword, careening for the next target.

Sky frowns. This will work to avoid getting killed, not to clear the field. They are going to have to get more creative than that.

He rises back into a proper defensive stance, not wanting to be caught unawares.

And just in the nick of time, it seems. From the corner of his vision, Sky sees a blur of green and silver and pivots, raising his hand and drawing Fi just fast enough to meet the whirring blades mere inches before they slam into his face. He swings wide and strikes hard—harder than he meant to, if he were to be honest—force uncontrolled by the rushed urgency of his strike. The peahat bounces off near instantly, careening away from him at speed; straight for the man on his left side, who raises his sword as well, only… a moment to slow.

A moment is all it takes.

The peahat spins, on the edge of the stranger's sword, but not bouncing off, no, instead it is sliding down. Panicking, the stranger flails, tries to swing their arm wider, and the creature gets the advantage of inertia. It slips the rest of the way down the blade, knocking the stranger's arm out of the way as it it does.

Red sprays across the white sand.

Sky holds in the instinctive gag. He is no stranger to blood, to violence. But this? This senseless slaughter for no reason, something that was inflicted artificially, that he could have prevented had his equipment not been taken from him but the very same monsters than must have locked him in that cage.

The cheers above him crescendo into a rolling thunder wave.

Sky nearly losses the battle with his nausea.

He watches in dull horror as another man takes a hit from behind—so caught up in the death that he forgets to watch out for his iwn safety. Sky takes note of the lesson in real time, and spins on his own heels, forcefully diverting another of the spinning spinedelous beasts.

The crowd cheers, and Sky wonders if the second injury is also a casualty, if the fellow is dead, or merely wounded. He does not think he wants to look.

He focuses on the fight.

"Sky!" Wars' voice, his brother's voice, reminding him that he is not, in fact, in this alone.

(Which means that he has an objective other than 'don't die.')

The thought is more reassuring than Sky would like to admit. It becomes… strangely calming, after that. Almost meditative. To make his way one careful step at a time closer to the center of the sandy pit, his own motions mirrored by the Captain on his end of the field. To keep his head on a swivel, and react to the constant assault of the peahats coming from all directions at rapid-fire speed.

To not look to closely at the strangers as they die. As a third ad a forth go down due to nothing more than poorly timed reflexes. As people die not for a cause, or for an attempt at something noble, but merely for the entertainment of the crowd.

Sky doesn't think he's ever hated anyone before, not really. He feels hate now.

Another peahat flies at yet another stranger, trapped in this pit with them. This time the man swings not out to the side and forward, but up and out, catching the spinning blade-like branches at a peculiar angle.

The creature flies back and rotates slightly on it's axis as it does, careening towards Sky top-first.

Without thinking he pulls out his shield and bashes outwards—clumsy, sloppy, he never was very good at shield-work but this will have to be enough. And it is. Enough, that is.

The peahat bounces off, harmless, and wobbles, trying desperately to right itself in the air.

"Sky!" The knight turns his head sharply towards the sound of his name, sees Warriors grinning something manic at him. "Don't use the shield this time."

Oh dear.

Rather than trying to avoid the spinning death, the captain charges toward one of the creatures, repeating the same awkward upwards strike that the last strange hostage had done. Sky hooks his shield back into place over his scabbard—removes temptation from the mix—and shifts his grip on his sword.

Hylia, let this work.

Like before the peahat is flung backwards at an angle, just like before it tips on it's vertical plane. Except this time, unlike the last time, it does not fly directly at Sky's face. Wars is doing his best, but controlling for angle of force in two vectors at once the very first time a person tries something is a lot to ask. Sky knows this. He also knows the next few seconds of his life are not going to be very fun.

Against all reason and sense he dashes forward, quick as he can, into the path of the flung beast. He wheezes in a ragged gasp, his normally short breath made all the worse from whatever had happened to him to get him in that cage in the first place. But he makes it, directly into the path of danger, and thrusts out the Master Sword, point first.

The peahat skewers itself, spins coming to an abrupt stop halfway down the blade.

The crowd erupts into cheers, louder than any that have come before, and for the first time since Sky stumbled blinking out of that dark hole, he feels himself smile.

They can do this.

Wars grins back an answering display of earned confidence, and then, in perfect sync, they move.

Ten paces apart, Sky and Warriors dash around the field. They move as one towards whatever peahat is closest to either of them, and then send it out at a hard volley. When the angle is wrong, they bash it away with a well-placed sword strike, back towards the other partner, who lines it up again.

When the tilt of the creature's axis allows it, they make a monsterous kebab.

And the crowd goes wild.

Sky cannot help the skip that enters his step as they do, cannot stop the upward quirk of his lips at the whistles and the claps, the way that his heartbeats tick up in time with the pounding of feet against the risers. Cannot deny the way that it feels good.

He doesn't want to examine what that says about him, or the Captain, either, in the way that he sees his own glee reflected back in his brother's expression.

No one else dies, and that helps. Once, there is a close call with a badly launched peahat from Sky himself directly towards a stranger's face. But the man lobs it back with impressive accuracy, and then, well…

Then it is more than one pair in the game.

It's all goes fast after that. The monsters are bounced around without mercy, puffs of dark magic dispersing one after the other within the corner of Sky's eyes or directly before him, on the tip of his blade.

And then, before he realizes it, it is over. He turns sharply on his heels to meet the next target and finds there to be none for him to hit. No more monsters in the arena.

There is no more threat.

The crowd quiets. Sky sheathes Fi and leans forward slightly, bracing his hands on his knees to pant.

"You okay?" Wars asks, jogging up to him at last.

Sky nods, getting his breath under control. "Just a bit winded."

The captain nods, goes to say something else—and then jolts upright, attention and focus seeping back into his shoulders, his spine. Sky nearly asks what the problem is, but he needn't bother. He can see it himself.

The gates are rising once more.

Chapter Text

There is a single moment where Sky forgets to be afraid. Where the prior success and high of the victory rushes through him in what is possibly over-confidence, to the point of foolishness. To the degree that he does not fear what is coming as he probably ought to.

He is a Hero, and he is not alone. His brother, the Captain, a Hero in his own right, and (after a long over-due count) six remaining armed strangers, all of whomst have proven themselves to be at least semi-competent, Sky does not feel like there is anything that could come through that gate—that could be ushered into a cage—that he should reasonably fear.

And then out it comes.

With the stamping of hooves and the roar of a great feline, a chimera of a beast emerges from the dark at a gallop.

"Lynel," Wars gasps.

"What?" Sky replies, like a smart person. "From Rulie's world? Aren't those more—"

"It's Wild's," his brother cuts him off. "And it's worse. Way worse."

…Sky will just take his word for it.

The beast (the lynel) charges—like the rancher's goats when they are irritated, like a shield-wielding moblin, like a creature than does not think anything in it's path is actually in its way. It dashes straight toward the center of the arena, unyielding and unwavering, directly towards where Sky and Wars are just standing there, like idiots.

"We should get out of the way," Sky says, casual, deciding for some reason to state the obvious.

"Yep," Wars agrees, and then, as though that is some kind of pre-arranged signal, they break apart. Both leaping backwards and away from each other, they clear the way for the predatory horse's galloping charge to go unimpeded.

It skids to a stop at the far wall and crouches, human-like hands gripping the earth as it's equine haunches tense. A juxtaposition that ought to be awkward instead screams threat—danger—run.

Sky does not need to be told twice. The creature's eyes lock on him (why is it always him) and it charges forward with a roar, somehow even faster than before. Sky doesn't hesitate, doesn't think, just dashes out sideways as fast as he can manage on screaming legs. He watches in near slow motion as the lynel thing raises a large serrated blade that he had not noticed it holding before in the suddenness of it's appearance, and swing out and down at a sharp angle.

There is a moment of confusion. Sky dodged. He dodged, he wasn't there to hit, so why—

Heat and wet splatters across his face before he understands what happened.

Another captive, a stranger, likely no more reason to be here than Sky himself, caught the brunt of the beasts ire. The great sword came down harshly on the crook of the man's neck—or rather, what used to be his neck—and cleaved him in twain.

Viscera and blood spatter across the sand, not seeping in so much as pouring across, too much liquid too quick for the dry granules to integrate.

He blinks, numb and sick in equal measure, and watches the beast turn to face him.

"Sky!"

The Captain sounds so very far away.

The beast, though. The beast is very, very close.

The fire passes over him, warm, a caress, a flicker of sensation that snaps him out of his daze, and makes him—finally—move.

Good to know his earrings still have that enchantment on them. That would have been… it would have been a very bad way to find out that there was a time limit on the fireshield.

He runs.

Out of the first stream of flame and straight into the second, the beast turning to catch him as he goes, either not understanding his fire resistance or not caring about it.

…Going by the sudden high screams to Sky's left, he may have not been the true target of that second blast after all.

(Or he got another poor soul caught up in the crossfire. That's what he does, he takes action and then other people suffer, other people pay the price whilst he is protected by the Goddesses; and it's not fair but it is the way that the world seems to work—for him, for others, for his brothers—isn't it?)

He feels the heat around him drafting upwards in a current at the same moment that true pain beings to prick around his legs. The earrings don't make him flame proof, just very, very heat resistant, and he is finding the edge of that gray lining here and now.

The beast turns, clockwise once more, seeming to be lining up for a third blast of flame, running in a circle with the attack, not following Sky at all—he feels his guilty conscience lighten just that little bit. On the other hand, back the way he came, when Sky chances a look, he sees no more flame but the remaining heat waves so thick they are visible in the air.

Believe it or not that is safer than the flame itself, in the relative safety provided through Din's gift. Sky backpedals, literally running backwards into the frying pan and out of the fire. The lynel makes another small turn in the same direction as before, and another river of fire pours from its mouth.

The relief that Sky feels from his actions is very, very short-lived.

The beast breaks into a sudden gallop, akin to the one it entered the arena with, but this time not so straight, not so pointed. It lopes in a loose lopsided lap around the sandy pit, bringing itself into striking range of various targets. The remaining strangers all madly duck or roll out of the way, and no further blood is spilled.

The Captain is not so wise.

When the lynel approaches Warriors he does not run, he does not dive, or dash, or roll. He stands his ground, and raises his shield high.

The colossal cleaver of the cloven creature swings down and out and directly into the center of the Captain's shield. With a crack like a bolt of lightning, Warriors is thrown back by the force of the impact, up into the air and back into the wall, where he bounces off, and then crumples, lying limp in the sand.

The crowd gasps, a big inhalation of shock in time with Sky's own.

"Get up," he feels himself say more than decides to say it. "Come on, get up."

His brother does not move, does not so much as twitch. The lynel's circle draws closer to his prone form. Sky makes a decision.

"HEY!" He jumps up and down and waves his arms, "OVER HERE!"

The lynel's rears up and turns with a roar, and runs straight at him with death in its eyes.

Sky holds his ground, back to the wall, and poised the move, but not moving, not yet. Hold, hold, hold…

The ground trembles, Sky's breath hitches against his will.

The lynel raises its blade.

Sky moves, diving to the side and into a roll with nothing but his reflexes and a prayer to save him.

He hears the crash, the boom, the beast slamming into the wall, the answering wails of shock from the crowd above. The lynel shakes the impact off and turns, drawing in a deep breath and rearing back in a way that—this time—Sky recognizes.

He doesn't think twice.

He scrambles to his feet and dashes back into the literal line of fire, whipping out his sailcloth into a ready grip as he does. The flames come, stinging his hands, reddening his cheeks. He doesn't falter, doesn't loosen his grip. The updraft catches the fabric of the cloth and he is thrown upright, the world blurring around him into a whir of light and color as his spins in the current. When the twirl ends—upward momentum shifting to downward, and the centrifugal force losing out—he finds himself above the low-hanging wall that had penned them in, and at last, can properly see.

Sky doesn't know what it is, exactly, that he was expecting to find, up above the violence. Monsters, maybe, cheering on their kindred. What he finds instead is just… people.

Old people, young people. Children, sitting on their parent's laps. Couples holding hands, teenagers. People eating, people drinking, people cheering and clapping and—

He can't help but think that monsters would have been kinder, would have been easier to swallow.

No time to linger on that, no time to philosophize, he doesn't have much longer in the air.

He is drifting down, sinking, the heat that held him aloft dying already, nothing in the sand below to burn and sustain it. And the lynel has ceased it's fire breathing, now galloping in a winding loop, as though it is trying to herd the remaining men into position for an easy kill shot. It's going to pass under him, Sky can tell. The lopping path is predictable from this height and he can tell that it will pass beneath him.

In three, two—He lets go.

Sky does not have a lot of experience with many things. He's only ridden a horse twice in his entire life, both times on this quest. He's never had to worry about much collateral damage. He's never fought beside people he doesn't know (not counting the early days of this strange trans era quest with the other Heroes). He's never fought for the entertainment of a crowd, not spent a lot of time on the surface. There's… there's a lot that Sky is a newbie at, or things that he has just frankly never attempted in his entire life. A lot of things that he knows that he would be very bad at if expected to try them suddenly with no notice in a high stakes situation.

This appears from the outside to be one of those things.

Fortunately, Sky is very, very good at taking big scary tasks apart into small manageable ones, and this? This maneuver that he has decided to attempt on the fly with no plan or prompting whatsoever? This is made up a lot of small tasks that Sky is very confident in.

Step one, ride the current.

He did that without effort, without thought. He did it because it was the most obvious thing to do in order to get out of the way of danger, and now, having seen the way forward, he decides to make himself the danger. It's as easy as—

Step two, stick the landing.

Fall from the sky at speed onto the back of a moving mount? Sky does that every single time that he wants to go anywhere or do anything or even just spend some time in the air. He has no fear, no thought, just the instinctive way that he shifts his limbs and aims his trajectory to fall in perfect vectorial sync with the motion of the target below him. Lynel or Loftwing, the calculus remains the same.

Step three, don't fall off.

His thighs know what to do without Sky putting any conscious thought into the matter at all. He squeezes and relaxes, tenses and releases, in perfect time to the heaving of the creature's flank. His core tightens in careful counterbalance to the motion of the lynel. It's a delicate dance, but one that he knows well.

Step four, draw his sword.

Fighting in the air is a different animal than fighting on the ground, and this seems like it is going to be a little bit of both. The balance of tension and counterweight is bumpy, not a smooth glide, and the creature that he rides does not want him on there. Both of these things work against him, and that is when he has both hand's in the beast's mane. He takes them out, the right to drip the pommel of the Master Sword, the left to use as a counter balance, the swing like a pendulum against his own motions, to keep him upright.

The crowd is cheering with a frenzy that he had not known they were capable of reaching. The high of the applause, the suddenness of it, the pitch: it rings in Sky's ear like an explosion, like the rush of an eruption, all motion and sound, beyond what makes sense to his own perspective.

He tunes it out.

Step five, strike.

Fast and hard, Sky hacks with his blade, faster and faster in a hacksaw flurry rather than as a proper swordsman. He thinks of that silly little game with Peater, on that tiny island with the great stalk of bamboo. He pictures the creature's neck like that, not as a living thing, not as muscle and sinew, but as a great trunk he needs to dice up into as small of pieces as can be managed, as quickly as he can, lest he loose the chance.

Blood sprays, hot and viscous, sticking like sap in Sky's hair, his cheeks, his eyelashes.

Step six, don't quit.

The beasts screams and bucks faster, kicking out with it's hind legs and making him jerk forward with a suddenness that no amount of careful muscle control can account for. Sky manages to keep a hold of his sword, slams chest first into the gaping mess he has made of the creature's back, and looks up. Looks up and forward to how he has accidentally landed in the perfect position, the tip of his blade right below the lynel's feline jaw.

Without hesitation, Sky twists his arm so the edge of his swords rests across the creature's throat, locks his elbow, and throws himself back.

The crowd goes wild.

The creature shudders, buckles, falls, exploding into ash and dark magic just a moment later.

No amount of training, bracing, or muscle memory can prepare a man for his mount literally disappearing from between his thighs. He falls through the air, the drop too short for him to do more than be aware that it is happening before impact. His ankle tries to roll, an otherwise inconsequential injury that would turn deadly in this environment. The thousands of little jumps he has landed from before, the instinctive way his body calibrates his balance, is the only thing that saves his tendons. He goes down fully instead, throwing himself into the fall and trusting the sand to catch him.

The granules abrate his fingers, his face, and the lingering ash that remains of the lynel's mass smears into his blood-soaked clothes, his hair. Sky tries not to let it bother him, and forces himself to keep moving, to continue the roll into a sideways flip, coming to a final stand-still upright, on his knees, facing his brother on the other side of the arena.

His brother who is—finally, mercifully—moving. Wars heaves himself onto all fours, torso held up on shaking arms.

The relief of seeing Warriors not only alive but conscious nearly knocks Sky back into the ashen ground.

There are quite a few things that Sky would like to be doing at that exact moment. Run to the Captain, to check him over, to protect him. Start screaming at the crowd. To lash out at the ground itself as though that will do anything. To burst into helpless childish tears.

He doesn't get to do any of them.

The gates open and they tense. But it is not even monsters, it is people. People who run up to the mangled and broken corpses scattered around the pit and drag them off, people than keep their heads down and do not look them in the eye.

People that have left a gate open.

Sky locks eyes with his brother, and sees him nod.

They both scramble to their feet, and start to run.