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Delicate footsteps.
Teba's wings paused over his bow. The twang of the string went silent, but the sound remained. He could hear them even over the rushing updraft of the flight range. Small, short, careful. Tiny little scuffs against the aged wood of the training roost.
They didn't have the distinctive click and scrape of a Rito's claws. Paced and near silent, it was a wonder he caught them at all. Whoever was skulking around behind him was well used to stealth.
Still, something kept his feathers loose on his weapon. He turned.
The tiny wraith of a Hylian froze. Wide blue eyes stared at him, bright even under a fraying dark hood. Teba swept his haggard form once over, the figure hunched and slight, and when he didn't see a weapon in those pale, scarred hands he turned back to his bow.
"I don't know you," He said. Short. Easy. Any normal person would just leave at that–– there wasn't much blunter a polite dismissal could get. Teba was busy, yes, but he wasn't a jerk. One explorative Hylian was no reason to get snappy.
Silence, behind him.
Teba fixed his eyes back on his work. The string pulled easily back under his tug. It showed no sign of unfastening from the wood. Sturdy. Functional. The bits of charred wood had been sanding done enough to prevent wayward splinters from getting caught in his feathers–– or worse, his eyes. Maybe a heat-proof lacquer would help protect it from Medoh’s cannons? He would have to ask Saki if anyone had any. Maybe Harth did.
Slow footsteps started back up behind him.
Damn it–– Teba held back a sigh. Were all Hylians like this? It was rare one even ventured up to the village, much less the flight range. It wasn't as if the range was of any use to someone wingless. "I'm actually pretty busy here," He called back a little louder. Despite his best effort, even he could feel the sharpness in his voice. Hopefully it would be enough. "You should probably go."
Nothing. Teba held his breath.
...Scff. Scff. Scff.
Teba cursed in his head and turned around. "Listen, buddy, I–– What are you doing?"
Tangled sandy colored hair. Bright eyes in a pallid, ghostly face. Teba almost reeled back at the sheer extent of scarring across the Hylian's visible skin. They're just a child, he thought, halfway between respect and horror.
"Hh, Help," The child said. He dropped an armful of something. It clattered noisily to the floorboards by Teba's talons.
Teba looked down at the pile of arrows at his feet. Looked back up. Bright blue eyes. Back down. He could feel all his feathers lifting and forcibly kept them all flat. Hylian or not, he had his pride as a warrior to think about. No true Rito would display their shock so openly, not for strangers. "I–– What–– With what?" He managed. He nearly fluffed back up in embarrassment. What kind of warrior stuttered at the face of a child?
The Hylian made a strange face. Pinched, pained almost. Teba nearly stepped back when his eyes seemed to brighten impossibly further, a wispy green blue burning somewhere behind his retinas. "Vuh," His lips moved soundlessly, shaping around a word that wasn't coming out. He squinted at something Teba couldn’t see, scowling. "Vuh.... V––ah? Vah Me-doe."
Teba stared.
A scarred hand pointed towards the sky. "Help," He said again. Teba watched him gesture between them, expression pointed. "I help. You."
...Okay.
He took a deep breath and set his bow down fully, turning to face the child. "Let me... get this straight," He started. Be polite. Be polite. A stranger, yes, a Hylian, yes, but clearly an adolescent one. Hylian youths were about this height, right? Older than Tulin, but–– "Some random Hylian wants to help me bring down Divine Beast Vah Medoh? I'm not buying it."
The kid just... stared at him, head cocked to the side. There was a puzzled look on his face as if Teba's words didn't make any sense. Teba raised an eyebrow, waiting for a response that never seemed to be coming.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
"...What's your name, stranger?" He finally asked.
At the word "name", the Hylian lit up. "Link," He said. Out of all the words he had forced out, that one sounded the most natural. Practiced, almost. The pride in his own face at the word was at once uncomfortable and strangely saddening to watch.
Link watched Teba intently with an intensity that nearly made his wings want to go back to his bow. Waiting, for something.
"Link," He repeated. Link nodded furiously, hair flying into his eyes at the violent motion. His hands pointed at himself excitedly. "Yeah, I got it. I'm Teba. Did the elder ask you to come here?"
There was no real other reason any Hylian would be at the flight range that he could think of. Not even one as... eccentric as this "Link" was. If more Hylians were like this, they'd probably see more of them in the village as a whole, wouldn't they? Even if it made no sense for the Elder to send Link of all people, it made even less sense to see a random Hylian just–– happen to show up.
Link nodded again, and after a moment bared his teeth at Teba. The Rito tensed, unsure what to do. After a moment, Link stopped, cocking his head again. A small, confused noise came out of his throat. When Teba said nothing, he did it again.
Teba unsurely smiled back. When Link bounced in place, a high, happy sound escaping him, he knew he was correct. The short Hylian really was just a hatchling, huh?
Just a hatchling.
The smile quickly left his face.
"A Divine Beast is no place for a hatchling," He warned. Link stopped bouncing to resume staring vacantly at him. It ruffled Teba's feathers the wrong way. Maybe he was a little off about how Hylians aged, and this one was even younger than he thought? "Even if it were, no normal people can just get in. Only the champions could, and they're all dead now."
Link frowned. It was such a sudden shift that Teba was instantly on guard. "Dead?" He asked. His voice was oddly quiet.
"How do you not––" Deep breaths. Come on. You can calmly handle a hatchling but not a stranger? "––Yes, dead. Been dead for a long while, actually."
Teba stepped back, betraying himself as Link's posture suddenly changed. The Hylian snarled at him, teeth bared, and it wasn't for a smile. "No dead," He hissed out. "No dead!"
Seriously? "They've been dead for one hundred years, Link," Teba said cautiously. Link shook his head violently, hands flying up to clasp over his ears. "Look, I don't know why that bothers you, but––"
"Not dead," Link repeated firmly. He glared harshly. Teba watched the unnatural greenish glow in his eyes spin and flicker, almost as if it was blinking up at him. "Not dead."
He wasn't listening. Teba had a strong feeling nothing he could say would make him. "Fine," He acquitted. "Not dead, then. But still not here, and without them there's no way inside Medoh. It can only be killed, at this point, and I refuse to return home until it's fallen out of the sky."
Link's glare didn't exactly lessen. But the light in his eyes receded, and Teba was halfway to counting that as a victory in whatever measure he could find. He remained stubbornly fixed in place despite that small give. "I help," was all he said. Teba watched, intrigued, as his hands lifted in an unfamiliar gesture, one fist loosely raising on top of a splayed open palm. He was no stranger to signing, but this was unlike any Rito sign. Nor was it a sign he recognized of any passing Zora, or even a traveling Gerudo or Goron–– "I help you."
Can he even understand what I'm saying? Maybe he's deaf? Teba could only shake his head. "I'm not entirely in a place to refuse help, kid, I'll be honest. Not after Harth. But you've got no wings, and I can't let just anyone come up there with me. Not unless you can work your way around a bow."
Link huffed but made no other indication he registered anything Teba was saying. Another point for deaf, then, he considered. Or at least hard of hearing. He can't be lip-reading–– not for a Rito. That would take practice and none of the others have ever mentioned seeing him before. "Test," Teba said, and slowly signed out the gesture. With any luck, Rito sign language was at least somewhat close to whatever version Link was using.
He had hope in the way Link straightened. "Three minutes," Teba said, moving alongside his slow drawl. Almost as if subconscious, the Hylian began to copy his movements. On his smaller hands and smaller fingers, Teba's own sign looked sweeping and wide. It was almost comedic, watching Link try to copy him. "Five targets, here in the Flight Range. Okay?"
There was no response for a moment. Link's eyes narrowed somewhere off to Teba's right, lips pressed thin as he dutifully moved through all the new gestures. Teba watched as he nodded to himself before repeating the signs–– except not. They were close, but not exact. Closer, more compact, almost. Without the same flaring expression of Rito sign, yet the minuscule movements were still vaguely recognizable.
Teba's eyes widened. Is that supposed to be a Hylian sign? I heard the usage of it was all but wiped out, in the Calamity––
Link nodded again, more firm. "Okay," He croaked out. He bared his teeth again, holding up two thumbs up, and Teba could do little more than watch as he flung himself off the roost and into the updrafts of the range.
Teba jerked towards the range, a startled cry catching in his throat. A glance over the edge of the roost proved Link wasn't dead, thankfully. The blue of his tunic was unmistakable amongst the icy cliff faces of the range. He almost wheezed out his sigh of relief, sitting back down on the roosts perch to watch. It took a generous effort to lay his feathers flat again. Even after years of Tulin pulling the same thing, his baby feathers not yet ready to carry him, the instinctual panic of watching a hatchling fly over the edge was all-encompassing.
Regardless of his lack of wings, a hang glider carried the Hylian aloft through the updraft as easily as if he were a Rito himself. The steady, confident line of his shoulders, the set of his jaw... he was used to doing this. Teba could tell. He had no idea how he would shoot, with both his hands occupied, but––
Just as quickly as he had calmed down, Teba was near screaming again as Link let the glider go. He was only stopped from launching at the child by the glint of an arrow, its sharp metal head flashing silver in the sunlight.
In the blink of an eye, it seemed, Link's bow settled into his arms. Teba's crest rose high as target after target shattered from the force of his shots. The eyes of the Rito were beyond any other peoples in Hyrule. The eyes of a Rito Warrior even beyond that.
He still felt pressed to process the speed at which Link's arms moved. Grab, pull, release, swap, hold, repeat. The bow resettled against that lithe back as easily as air through his lungs. The snap of a glider catching the wind nearly made Teba flinch.
Just as quickly as he had jumped, the Hylian was floating back across the rising winds to his perch on the roost.
"You're..." Teba swallowed. He knew his eyes were wide. There was nothing he could do about it. "...a skilled archer. It was as if time stopped with every arrow you let fly."
Link grinned up at him, bouncing in place. For once, Teba wasn't put off by it. He almost felt like grinning back. "You're the real deal," He acknowledged, remembering to sign alongside his words. It was worth it just to hear Link laugh, the sound happy despite the grating roughness of his voice. "If you really want to help bring down Medoh, it's now or never. I'll help you up, but you'll have to be the one to handle the cannons. Let me get you a proper Rito bow."
He doubted Link truly grasped all of what he said. But there was little time to truly lay it all out in ways Link might understand. It was enough just to see the determined glint in his face when Teba rummaged through the chests left in the roost for a falcon bow.
...His face lit up more when Teba handed over as many bomb arrows as he could afford. Teba winced as his calloused, dirty fingers wrapped around the arrows with glee.
"I hope your experience involved pyrotechnics," He muttered to himself. He waved Link off when the Hylian looked up at him questioningly. "Normal arrows won't work, so I'm giving you these. I hope you have the proper gear and food to head straight up?" He pressed the tip of his beak twice to the tips of his flight feathers, relieved when Link responded with an almost identical sign before nodding. His feathers had none of the delicate dexterity fingers had, to form that exact Hylian sign, but he had quickly reached a point where any successful communication at all was worth the effort. "All right."
Teba paused on his next words. Would it be worth the time, to ask? Sure, he was curious, but by the looks of things, he wasn't entirely sure Link would be able to offer him any sort of answer to satisfy his questions.
Link stared up at him. His sandy hair fell over his shoulders as he cocked his head at Teba, eyes big and blue and watching him. Waiting, for whatever Teba wanted to say.
Tulin's eyes, big and innocent and happy, looked up at him. Their faces overlapped until Teba felt he had to look away.
Definite skill with a bow. Definite ease, to maneuver in the air. A Warrior.
...He can't be more than a fledgling.
Discomfort ruffled his feathers.
We have no choice, then, but to rely on children? Is this what we've been reduced to?
Link was still staring when he turned back. "Why are you doing this?" Teba asked. He was startled by his own desperation. His wing trembled as he signed why, over and over. "Why risk your life to bring down Medoh?"
If Link seemed young and innocent before, the question now made him seem ancient. Eyes older than him, older than time itself seemed to stare through him. Link's mouth thinned into an unmoving, tight line.
The ghostly blue-green swelled in his eyes, flickering like a candle in a storm. Teba waited, but the Hylian's hands never tried to lift.
Teba shook himself roughly, trying and failing to lay his feathers flat. "That's fair enough," He said, ignoring the unsteady roughness to his voice. "Right. Get on."
If there was nothing more he could do, but to accompany this fledgling to both their deaths, then that was what he would do.
There was always something more important at stake to care about.