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Only twelve hours remained until something very terrible would happen. Oh, there was no reason to pretend he didn’t know what, not when the child had cycled through so many timelines. Yet it felt…better to say it this way. If nothing else, it let him keep a small piece of blissful ignorance.
The salesman surveyed the interior of the clock tower, watching the spinning gears and listening to the slow creak of the water wheel. The door below had sealed itself off sometime after he had followed the child here. Curious, that.
Odder still was the passage of time within these walls. While he was alone, time passed as it normally did, the bell tolling the impending doom—oops, he wasn’t supposed to know that—the bell tolling every so often to warn of morning or evening’s arrival. But when the boy was present, time would stop. The clock tower would groan in protest, but it would stop all the same. He hadn’t had the time to look into what that meant. Well, metaphorically speaking. He supposed he could ask the boy to wait around a bit, and do some investigating. But then the draw of the mask’s power, the urgency to retrieve his precious mask would grow and expand until it maddened him. And besides, a small part of him feared that if he investigated the spell, it would somehow dissipate. Temporal magic was always such a fragile thing, and the boy could not afford to have it broken.
A part of him had thought to go with the boy on his quest. After all, it didn’t seem quite fair to send a child after something so dangerous, and which had been unleashed through no fault of his own. But he was uncertain of just how much help a happiness salesman with a bag of masks could be on this quest. The most he could do would be to provide information on the artifacts he found. He didn’t need that extra burden, someone else to defend on top of himself and whoever might have been nearby.
Beyond that, he had a strange feeling that he wasn’t supposed to leave the tower, a feeling that grew in intensity each time he thought to step outside. The goddesses had long since stopped speaking to him directly—if indeed they had ever spoken to him—but he understood the pull of ancient magic. And with temporal magic especially, one did not want to break the bonds it set.
And so he remained beneath the clock tower, always smiling, always wringing his hands, always listening as the seconds ticked down.
Speaking of which, he could not hear them now, which could only mean one of two things. The first, and better of the two, was that the boy had defeated the imp and retrieved his precious mask. But he had not felt the release of the powerful curse upon this land—which again, was not something he ought to have known, but it was so potent he could hardly understand how anyone could not feel it. The second, and more likely of the two…
He gazed around the room, face carefully cheerful as any of his masks. Ah, there was the familiar polished metal of the Hylian shield, balanced against the step by the doorway. He paused. That wasn’t right. When the boy had entered before, he had always come straight to him, presenting a new mask which the salesman had done his best to explain. Perhaps he had been hurt?
He found his way to the shield, crouching next to it and lifting the corner. There, curled up beneath it, was the little Hylian boy, eyes shut tight and curled in on himself. By the sounds of his deep, even breathing, he had fallen asleep.
Well, it wasn’t as though he could fault him for choosing to rest within the clock tower. He hadn’t spoken of it—as a matter of fact, he hadn’t spoken at all—but the boy seemed to be aware of the strange magic governing this place. It would have been hard not to be, what with his continual returns here every cycle. Ah, another thing he wasn’t supposed to know.
But what was stranger was that the boy had never slept here before. It hadn’t seemed like his place to ask, and so the salesman had not asked, but he had always assumed the boy found a bed at the inn, or perhaps in the home of an ally he had made on his journey. But then, he had forgotten that those allies, for the time being, would remember nothing of a rescue performed on a different cycle. Was there no one this time?
The clock tower groaned again, a grim reminder that though time stood still for the moment, it would move again, and only twelve hours remained.
There was a sharp hitch in his breathing, and the salesman was jolted from his thoughts as the boy’s face screwed itself up in fear or pain, and a plaintive whine escaped from his lips as he curled tighter on himself and shivered.
Ah. He had such a world-weary look in his eyes when waking, that at times, it was easy to forget he was still a child, still subject to the same fear and hesitation of any other child. He had not been given a chance to truly have a childhood, had he?
And yet the mask salesman had been no better in that regard, taking a child in a deceased deku scrub’s body and immediately setting it on a quest that could threaten his very life. It had been the only option at the time, and yet, seeing him here, he had to wonder.
There was nothing he could do about that now, as much as he might have wished otherwise.
Still, he could offer some small comfort at least. The boy did not trust him while awake, a habit that no doubt came of too many appearing to be friends they were not, too many favors asked and then forgotten on completion. And he had been no better, not in the eyes of a child.
He had tried to offer encouragement, to let him have at least some means of support without breaking the fragile bonds of the spell in the clock tower. But either the child did not catch on, or the words had the opposite effect, and only served to pressure him further. Still, it was the most he could do, and so he continued to speak them, and hope he would come to understand his meaning.
Carefully, he removed his traveling pack and slipped off the long vest he wore, draping it over the child before replacing the shield. The boy stirred, unconsciously wrapping the vest tighter around himself, and then grew still once more.
The salesman stood and returned to his post. The child needed rest. When he awoke, he would have little time left to prevent that forbidden doom. Until then, he would stand watch in his own silent vigil, always smiling, always wringing his hands, always listening as the seconds ticked down.
Night of the final day. Only twelve hours remaining.