Link eyed the space above them, searching for any sign of Marl. ‘You would think a bright green bird the size of me would stand out against plain stone,’ he thought wryly.
Minutes ticked past, and the room was silent except for the rustling of cloth as the hylians shifted positions and the scuffling of feet on the floor.
“Creeeargh!”
From the darkness, Marl swooped with a sudden hair-raising screech. His intended target being Link, he did not sway away from giving Vitanre a rough kick to the shoulder as he flew past her. Her sleeve ripped at the seam, caught upon one of his trailing talons as he went by.
Link brought up his shield and Marl slammed into it, both arms reaching around to claw at Link’s unprotected face. Too close for his sword to be of any use, Link leaned back to avoid having his eyes gouged out by those raking talons, and Marl used the opportunity to knock Link flat onto his back...now able to use both hands and feet as he slashed at the pinned male. Link reversed his grip on the hilt and brought it up to bludgeon at the flapping menance, the two combatants being too close together...Link would risk injuring himself in such close quarters.
Marl grunted as the pommel of the sword clacked across the back of one hand, sending a tingling sensation up his arm and momentarily making that hand useless. A sound behind him, and the feathered head turned to spy Vitanre approaching quickly from behind. With a snarl, he leapt off of Link and disappeared back into the shadows of the ceiling.
The brief scuffle with Marl, which had seemed to drag on to Link, had only taken as long as it took for Vitanre to run the mere seven feet separating the two hylians
“This creature is fast,” Vitanre said. “Fast and stealthy...he strikes without warning and then retreats back to hide.”
Link got to his feet. “Do not let him get too close or your weapon will be useless.”
Vitanre ran a finger lightly down the flat of her blade. “We shall see,” she said quietly, eyes narrowing as they searched for a glimpse of their adversary.
Tension seemed to crackle in the air, and still there was no further sign of Marl. Vitanre slowly revolved in place, peering into each corner of the room...and then was lifted from her feet with a squeal as Marl seemed to materialize behind her and bury his talons into the fabric of her smock. Vitanre slashed over her head, and the bird-man changed his grip from hands to feet and began to lift her up, keeping his legs out of the reach of the flashing scimitar.
Link whirled around at her out cry and stabbed up at Marl from behind. Marl growled and let Vitanre drop (he’d only managed to lift her perhaps a foot off the ground) and angrily she stabbed upwards at the green mass of feathers.
Marl hissed and flipped backwards in mid-air, coming to a light landing with both legs firmly beneath him, eight feet away from the hylians. He faced them squarely, a smug look on his face. He spread both wings wide as the two stalked forward...and then he whipped them forward. Green feathers, their shafts pointed at the hylians, streaked towards them with deadly accuracy.
Vitanre fell flat on the ground, the projectiles whistling by overhead. Link threw up his shield and listened as the feathers clinked of its metal surface. Turning her face a bit, Vitanre seized a feather laying on the ground beside her that had ricocheted off of Link’s shield and tapped it. It was as solid as stone, and the shaft tips were as sharp as her scimitar’s blade.
She stood and started to move away from Link, to try and force Marl to concentrate his barrage on one or the other, but, moving independently of one another, Marl continued to hurl his feather-arrows at both...Vitanre could be four feet or forty feet away from Link, and he’d STILL be able to aim at and hit her.
With a growl, she dropped to the ground again.
“Link! They’re like arrows! ” she called out, rolling to the side as another volley of green feathers came her direction. She rolled over to Link, who was still behind his shield, and then rolled up to her feet. She pressed her back flat to his, trusting in him to protect the both of them...and then she got an idea.
She carefully turned around, gritting her teeth as a feather clinked off the very edge of the shield and narrowly missed her face. She patted Link’s shoulder to get his attention. Only his eyes shifted to view her as she put her mouth close to his ear.
“Kneel a moment,” she said. “I’ve got an idea.” ‘He has to stand still to throw his feather-arrows, and while he may be able to aim at both at the same time...I doubt he can fire up and down at the same time...he won’t have us pinned down for much longer if this works,’ she thought.
Link dropped to one knee, angling his shield to face upwards and slightly to the left, sending the feathers ricocheting harmlessly across the room...and then he nearly sprawled over forwards as something hit him from behind.
Behind Link, Vitanre had stepped back...then taken a quick running leap, using Link’s shoulder as something to push off of. She tucked into a ball and flipped over, clearing the feathers and heading straight for Marl.
The feathered being, having been just in the middle of another barrage, was totally surprised by and unprepared for Vitanre’s desperate leap over Link. As the hylian came down to her feet, her scimitar flashed out and gouged a deep cut across Marl’s abdomen: a blow that would have been fatal had Marl’s agility not saved him.
With a squawk, Marl hopped back, one hand held to his chest, his feathery onslaught now halted.
“Clever, most clever,” he growled, making an odd whistling noise as he snorted suddenly.
Vitanre held her scimitar between herself and Marl, ready to defend herself against the retaliation that was certain to come from the wounded being.
With another loud snort, Marl smiled nastily, reaching up to seize his own jaw and wrench it sideways, resulting in a loud pop followed by another nasty smile. “You’ll regret that one, miss.” He inhaled deeply, then his entire body arched as he snapped his neck forward, his mouth gaping impossibly wide open. From within his mouth came a roiling green fireball that rocketed towards Vitanre.
Moving quickly, Vitanre tried to both deflect it away with her blade and duck. With a resounding ‘bang ’ the fireball hit the scimitar and sent it flying, along with its wielder, to slam up against the far wall. Stunned, Vitanre hit the floor just as hard as she hit the wall, her scimitar clanking to the stone beside her.
Marl hissed and flung himself after the helpless Vitanre, and was intercepted by Link before he got more than a few feet. Marl took to wing and fluttered about just out of Link’s reach above his head.
Jabbing at him to make him keep his distance, Link backed up to place himself between Marl and Vitanre. A quick glance behind himself showed that Vitanre was just now pulling herself to her feet, blinking groggily and groping about for her blade. Fending off a charge that was more to put Link on guard than to actually do damage, he watched as Marl flew up into the shelter of the darkness once more.
“Are you all right?” Link asked, eyes turned up towards the ceiling.
“I’m fine...he knocked me for one, but I’ll be fine in a few moments...curse him, where’s my blade?” Vitanre said, growling as she looked around for her weapon, which seemed to have disappeared. “Oh, wait, there it is,” she went on, suddenly spying the scimitar laying up next to the wall near the corner.
Leaving the protected area Link had lent her, Vitanre slowly moved to retrieve it, keeping one eye focused above her as she went. She had just closed one hand around the hilt of the blade when something whooshed down out of the shadows.
With a startled yelp, Vitanre dropped her scimitar as the gnarled vine that had just snared her wrist gave a mighty jerk, nearly taking her off her feet. Lunging forward against the pull, Vitanre snatched up the dropped blade as another vine shot down and wrapped itself around the elbow of the ensnared arm.
She viciously chopped through both vines...and then dove backwards as a multitude of them whistled down from above.
Within seconds, Vitanre found herself backpedaling away from grasping vines that snaked their way towards her, doing their best to snag her. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed Link coming to help her, the vines growing more numerous by the second, when-
FWUMP
“Ksssss...” Marl landed just behind her, a mad light glittering in his eyes. Vitanre growled, attention torn between fending off vines and now this new threat at her back. Link rushed forward to help her; why wasn’t anything attacking him?
Turning so fast he became a green blur, Marl spun around to smack aside Link’s sword swing and then deliver a hard blow to Link’s hastily put up shield that sent a shock all the way up the hylian’s arm and sending him staggering back a step.
Working her blade frantically back and forth, Vitanre was rapidly trying to shuffle her way around Marl while still avoiding vines. The feathered menace had other plans in mind, however.
“You pay,” he hissed, “for this.” And with that, he pointed to the gash across his middle. Leaping forward, he swung a closed fist at her.
Ducking as quick as she could, Vitanre was still clipped by the blow and knocked sideways...into the waiting vines. They wrapped themselves around her, drawing her arms in tight by her sides and painfully binding themselves around her chest, making breathing difficult.
Marl flung both arms out at Link now, punctuating the movement with a gutteral snarl. Suddenly, the earth beneath Link’s feet became like water, and Link plunged down up to his knees in the muck. As quickly as it had become liquid, the ground resolidified, trapping Link in the ground, too far away to attack his captor.
Marl surveyed his two captives. “Tsuko wards his treasure well. I must admit that this was the longest fight anyone has ever put up...it was all fun and games until your female friend was rude and cut me...and for that, she dies first.” Marl turned to Vitanre and slashed with both hands, leaving deep cuts where skin showed through the mass of vines. Grimacing at the sharp pains, Vitanre stared balefully at him as he slashed again and followed through with a kick to the gut that would have doubled her over had she been standing under her own power.
Wheezing, short of breath to begin with, Vitanre vaguely wondered which would kill her first...lack of air, or Marl’s continual blows. Black was beginning to creep into the edges of her vision, and so when Marl suddenly screamed in pain and flew past her (and not by his own choice), Vitanre wondered if she was truly seeing things. Blinking, she spied Link stuck in the earth up to his knees, hand poised as though he had just thrown something. The smell of singed feathers and flesh reached her nose, and she understood: he’d thrown a bomb at Marl’s turned back.
Straining in her leafy bonds, Vitanre turned to see Marl sprawled out, wings askew around him, laying face down on the ground with faint wisps of smoke rising from a ghastly scorch mark on his back. She heard a rustle, then a hissing noise, and turned back in time to see Link lob another bomb at the stunned creature. It hit just beside Marl, and blasted him across the room with a bang and another screech, where he landed in a heap and stayed there.
Vitanre felt the vines go slack; the magic controlling them must be controlled by Marl, as in he had to be concentrating to hold them in place and order them about. Vitanre wriggled until her blade arm was free, and then hacked herself free, chopped bits of greenery raining down around her.
Throwing a glance and a nod at Link, she ran to where Marl lay. Standing over him, she saw that his eyes were shut; he was unconscious. Staring down at something that had tried so hard to kill her, she found that she couldn’t bring herself to kill him in cold blood. Grinding her teeth together, she stood there another second, when suddenly Marl’s eyes flew open.
He yowled and lunged forward, and Vitanre reacted on pure instinct, bringing her scimitar up and jabbing at him. The blade buried itself into Marl’s chest, and the creature’s own momentum made it a killing blow. Again, she smelled burnt flesh as he slumped over her blade with a sigh. With great effort, he lifted his face to look at her.
“Well...done...” he whispered, that odd light fading from his eyes. His head fell forward again, and before Vitanre’s eyes, his body faded away in a puff of cloudy mist. A few feathers floated to the ground, and that was all that remained.
Slowly, she reached out a hand and grasped the feathers, stroking them with a fingertip. “He wasn’t such a bad creature after all...just doing was he was created to do,” she said quietly. Without knowing why she did so, she placed three feathers into a pocket, and then turned to regard Link.
He was currently using his sword tip to dig around his legs, trying to loosen the soil. Vitanre smiled, then began to laugh. Link gave her a look that said ‘I’d like to see what YOU would do were you me’ and kept chiseling away at the dirt around him.
Still chuckling, she kneeled behind him. “I’ll help from back here,” she said, and Link felt the subtle vibrations of her beginning to scratch at the dirt around the backs of his thighs.
Many minutes passed, and they had only cleared away enough earth for Link to be able to somewhat wiggle his legs.
“If I had known beforehand what was coming, I would have tried to point my toes,” he grumbled.
“My arms grow weary...I need to rest,” Vitanre said suddenly, and Link craned his neck around and looked at her.
Sometime while trapped in the vines, she had lost the sleeve Marl had ripped, and her bare arm had numerous purple bruises and bleeding gashes. Her other arm, having been more protected because of her sleeve, wasn’t quite so cut up, but now that sleeve hung on by only a few threads. He watched as she ripped it off completely, and began to mop blood off her arms.
“How bad are those?” Link asked, nodding at her arms.
“I’ll last until we return outside...I’ve bandages and ointments Meriweather pressed upon me before she allowed me to leave,” she said, her eyes daring Link to say something more.
He held his tongue, not wanting to insult her by accidently implying that she was worse off than she thought, and instead continued to dig himself free, Vitanre joining his efforts again once she had rested a few moments.
It took no less than an hour and half, but finally, Link was free.
He was now sitting on the ground next to Vitanre, pulling off his boots to empty them of dirt and rock. Vitanre dabbed one last time at her arms, then threw the bloodied scrap of cloth into the hole Link had left behind, then stood.
“...it’s all clear from here,” she said, nodding at the door. Link put his boots back on and stood as well, hefting his shield.
“Then let us continue,” he replied, walking forward. Vitanre fell into step beside him, and then they both stood before the final door.
Link pushed it open and both stepped inside. They were in a very small, triangular shaped room. A single ray of light came from the ceiling, and fell upon the only object in the room: a stone pedastal set upon a stone block, with a bowl of shining silver placed on the top of the pedastal.
Vitanre approached the pedastal cautiously, circling around it. It was just a plain stone pedastal...no arnaments or carvings of any sort. Only the silver bowl on top, and the block of the same identical stone as the pedastal.
She stepped up the pedastal, peering at the bowl.
“It’s...filled with...water?” she said, leaning in closer. Indeed, the bowl was filled with a clear liquid, water being her guess (although at this point, it could very well be anything.)
“No sign of the medallion?” Link asked, puzzled. Had they missed something? Was the bowl and pedastal just a diversion from the actual hiding place of the medallion?
“No...well...wait,” Vitanre said suddenly, feeling prompted from within to try something. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a single feather. In the ray of light, she could see that the green was shot through with random whorls of iridescent color, that shimmered as she turned it in the light. Holding the feather with two fingers, regarding it for an instant, she then let it drop into the bowl.
It hit the surface of the ‘water’ silently, and sank...and then began to glow a bright blue. Stepping back and shielding her eyes as the glow intensified, Vitanre thought she heard Marl’s last words again, echoing in the chamber.
‘Well done...’
The blue glow drew together into a quivering ball of light, that floated out over the top of the pedastal, then lowered itself to the floor. Shifting, the ball changed shapes...drawing itself into a familiar form.
“Marl!”
The glowing birdman nodded. “You did well to come so far,” he said, nodding again.
The form of Marl then melted away, to be taken by that of an old man...the same old man that had greeted them as a spectre when they had entered the place “I commend you on defeating my pet. Be you good or evil, I cannot tell, and I am past caring now. Your reward is what you seek.”
The image collasped in on itself, and drew together into a pinpoint of light. Both Link and Vitanre watched, spellbound, as the pinpoint suddenly erupted in a shower of gently glowing spores that rained down around them.
The bowl on the pedastal shook, as though it were sitting in an earthquake, and then something shot out of it and hovered above, dripping liquid back into the bowl with quiet ‘plips.’
Dark with wetness, the medallion hung a mere foot away from Vitanre.
She reached out and grabbed it. It was nothing special to behold. A plain disk of wood, with seven glass beads set into it’s face, in a circle, having a leather strip threaded through a small hole in the top. This, and it was just big enough to cover Vitanre’s palm.
Unwinding the leather, Vitanre tied the medallion about her neck and looked at where it lay on her
chest.
“We have it...we have the medallion.”
