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Rain falls in sheets but Link barely notices, his sodden clothes and hair plastered to his skin after his plunge into the moat. Hylians are fleeing for their homes or congregating in scared clumps in the once-lively market, clutching each other and pointing at the black column of smoke over the castle on the hill.
Link squirms through the crowd like a fish swimming upstream, keeping Navi cupped against his chest so she won’t be crushed. A woman pulling a little girl by the hand almost knocks him off his feet before he reaches the relative quiet of the alley, where he stops for a deep breath. His heart is pounding so hard that Navi must hear it echoing in the little cavern formed by his hands. He loosens his fingers to give her more air.
A crumpled shape stirs as Link walks past, and he jumps at the sound of a feeble voice.
“You there... the boy... from the forest?”
The soldier is slumped against the wall with his chin tipped down toward his chest. A broken spear lies next to him and his hand rests on a hole in the armor over his torn belly. Link can’t even guess what happened, only thinks of the big man with the dark horse and scary eyes who nearly ran him down outside the town gates. The soldier’s hands and the rain-slick cobblestones underneath him are red.
“Oh, no...” Navi breathes.
The man raises his head to meet Link’s horrified eyes. “The princess... said she... she would wait, but Impa...” His words are slow and slurred. “...temple... knew you’d come... knew...”
Blood pulses between the soldier’s fingers. Link can’t drag his eyes away. He can’t move.
“...the one she saw... from the... forest...”
People in the town square are screaming and there’s the smell of blood in the air. The injured man and the alley blur through Link’s tears. Maybe he’s been crying and his face was already so damp that he didn’t realize, but now he can’t make it stop. He did everything he was told, he killed the monsters inside the Tree, he left home and Saria and everyone else behind, he braved the cavern on Death Mountain so the Gorons could harvest their food without fear of attack and he allowed himself to be swallowed by a water-god so he could rescue a Zora princess even though she turned out to not need much saving and bossed him around the whole way though. There were times when he got so lost that he thought he might never see daylight again, and he’s so scared of the monsters that it’s all he can do to stab at them until they go away, but Princess Zelda said he was a hero with a special destiny so he had to be like one. She was so wise and pretty. He’d trusted every word. But she didn’t even wait for him to come back and now she might even be dead, and this man with the horrible torn body is looking at him, expecting, expecting—what? Link doesn’t know how to help him.
Navi wiggles out and flutters toward the wounded soldier, her delicate wings battered by the raindrops, but it’s too late for whatever she means to do. A crackling groan rattles wetly in his throat and his body settles, sinking against the ground. He doesn’t move again.
Link buries his face in his hands and sobs.
This all felt like a game at first, but it isn’t fun anymore, if it ever was. He doesn’t like being a hero. He wants to go home.
Navi comes back and touches his face. “Link,” she says, gently but insistently. “D-don’t worry about him. We have to keep going. Princess Zelda taught you that song, and we have the ocarina, we have the Spiritual Stones... we have everything we need to fix all this, as long as we reach the temple before Ganondorf comes back. But we have to go now.”
Navi pulls at Link’s clothes and croons and soothes and pleads until he follows her, sniffling, stumbling after the bright beacon of her wings in the lashing rain. The soldier’s dead eyes follow them out of the alley.
“K...kid..? Are you just going to keep standing there, or..?”
Link jolts, his hand locked in a white-knuckled grip around the Lens of Truth’s handle. He doesn’t remember taking it out.
Shiro, the fallen soldier, feels self-conscious for maybe the first time in his whole existence. “It’s nice to be noticed after all these years,” he says, propping himself up on an elbow with a grimace, “but it would be even nicer if you could spare some medicine... anything will do..?”
Link rummages through his pack with his free hand, extracting the potion he hadn’t been able to get Mikau to drink. At the man’s thanks, Link smiles thinly, accepts the emptied bottle and his new mask, then trudges off to re-mount Epona.
“What’s wrong? Your face is pale,” says Tatl.
Link puts on the mask.
“You better not be getting sick. Not now.”
He isn’t. He doesn’t think so. Even if Tatl’s voice sounds like it’s coming from far away and it doesn’t quite feel like his boots are moving across solid ground. The souls inside the masks are whispering, whispering.
Link’s plan had been to scout out the terrain of Ikana at dawn so he could feel like he achieved something meaningful in what’s left of this final day, but it was past ten by the time Tatl roused him from his coma. He’d shambled to the ranch to retrieve Epona and gotten distracted at the dog racetrack, lying on his belly in the grass while the dogs licked his face and the fat lady in the blue dress watched suspiciously, as if she thought Link might try to steal one of her prized racers. He can’t say he wouldn’t do it; one of the dogs had a hurt leg which the lady hadn’t even noticed until he pointed it out. It was almost noon by the time he turned east.
The empty bottle rattles in his pack next to his ever-growing mask collection. He has no idea what he’ll do with them all if he ever makes it out of Termina alive. Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll get disemboweled by a Dinolfos, or he’ll spend so much time reliving these three days that they’ll add up into years and he’ll become an old man with a big gray beard and die.
The rocking of Epona’s stride lulls Link into something like a waking doze. The scabbed, stitched-up Wolfos bite on his arm is itchy. The stone mask which at first had felt so cold is sticking to his face from the sweat on his skin and the moisture from his breath, and the eye holes don’t line up properly, so he has to turn his head at funny angles to see anything. Epona whickers and flicks her ears at the Bombchus scurrying around the canyon floor, but they ignore her and Link as if the two were made of stone.
Shiro, Link thinks to himself, randomly. Shiro, Shiro, Shiro. There’s a man somewhere in Hyrule whose name presumably isn’t Shiro, and who is almost certainly alive and well. He, like most of Hyrule, benefitted from time being reversed and those seven years undone. Link never learned his name, though. Shiro.
“This place was an ancient kingdom, long before Clock Town existed,” Tatl is saying. “We never went all the way to the castle, but Tael and Skull Kid and I sometimes used to come here to find old knives and spearheads.”
She doesn’t mention how the very air hangs heavy with malice like the scent of blood. Skull Kid, lacking a fairy’s sensitivity to such things, never noticed, and she doesn’t know whether Link is the same, and avoiding Ikana is not an option.
Above the surrounding walls of the canyon, the stone tower awaits. It’s called a tower, but to Link’s eyes it looks more like an enormous stone beehive, or the pockmarked stump of an ancient tree.
Link nods to show Tatl he’s listening, and drifts out of himself.
It’s cool and dark in the tunnels beneath the earth. Tree roots twist through the walls like strong pillars and the ground is so soft that you could sleep anywhere and be comfortable, with a carpet of plush moss and pink flowers with petals as wide as blankets. The air smells sweet and clean, like dirt after a summer rain.
The butler’s son sits in front of a pond, stirring the mud with a stick as he thinks about rain and the misty forest beyond the far end of the tunnel. He’s never gone into the forest, not yet, but he’s still ventured farther from the swamp than any other Deku he knows.
Remembering home makes him restless. He drops the stick and leaves the pond behind, walking with no special destination in mind, breathing in the clean, earthy scents around him.
Link clambers up the face of a rocky cliff face, his hookshot being of limited help without any tree roots or conveniently-placed wooden chests for the mechanism to grip. He doesn’t know how long he’s been climbing, except that he’s far enough from the ground that it would hurt badly if he fell. He must have left Epona behind once the terrain became too treacherous for her.
He
(never wanted his father to go easy on him when they raced through the Deku Shrine, even though his legs are so short that he always fell behind until his father had to stop and come back for him so he wouldn’t be lost. He never cared. He was never truly lost. His father always came back.
He cries now, but no one even knows he’s here, his father isn’t here, sap tears trickle down his face but no one sees when he)
gets his fingertips around the upper edge and drags himself over it with a grunt. Exhausted, Link rolls onto his back and lies there.
“Seriously, what’s wrong with you?” Tatl asks. All day, Link has been sluggish and glassy-eyed like a sleepwalker, and it’s only gotten worse as they’ve traveled deeper into Ikana.
Once he’s caught his breath, Link slips the hooded Garo mask back on, grateful for the small bit of cover from the sunlight. The canyon walls lean in on each side, so that there’s only one narrow path to follow and the sky looks like a muddy river, tinged brown where there it should be a ribbon of pure blue. The ground rumbles under Link’s feet.
Tatl jingles for Link to stop. Before him flashes a gout of green flames, which upon fading become a cloaked and hooded figure with skinny, bandaged legs.
“Master! After all this time... yes, we knew that you would return!”
The cloaked shape bounces toward Link, eager as a puppy. Link freezes and the figure narrows its glowing eyes.
“No... what are you? Liar! Imposter!” Twin blades flash, and
(four of the eggs are in that tank, and seeing them so close hurts worse than anything else. He squirms like an eel but there are too many hands pinning him down and they’re all too strong; these pirates are trained warriors and he isn’t. He’s looking at the eggs when the blade swings down and)
Link deflects the strike with his dented Hylian shield as he draws his own sword. His attacker overreaches and gives Link an opening to shatter their wrist with the shield’s edge before driving his sword between their ribs. With a second flash of green fire, their body fizzles back to nothing, and a frayed cloak flutters emptily to the dirt.
Link hooks the tip of his sword under the hood and lifts it for inspection, but ancient garment crumbles into dust and leaves no other trace, not even blood staining the dirt.
“I think... they weren’t really alive,” Tatl says, uncharacteristically hushed. “Not anymore.”
Link sheathes the sword. He considers what it must be like to exist as a ghost here in Ikana, eternally waiting for a day that will never come. After all this time. How long had they haunted this desolate canyon?
He shivers, despite the
(frost forming over his pebbled hide, this is the first time in weeks that he hasn’t felt cold.
He needs to get up. He’ll die if he doesn’t, and then there will be no one to fight the demon in that temple. But Gorons are brittle, for all their strength, like rock, and he fell a long way down. Something inside him is broken and none of his limbs work right.
He needs to move...
His eyes drift shut. He’s so tired, and the snow against his face feels good, like soft grass under sunlight, a summer day’s)
warmth.
Link makes it another ten paces before the next Garo appears and exclaims at the return of their master, recognizes their mistake, and throws themself at him. Then he walks into the arms of another. None will let Link go in peace or give him a chance to soothe them with the ocarina’s song, and they don’t even notice Tatl, so Link resigns himself to defeating each newcomer as quickly as possible.
“Sheesh,” says Tatl, as the green flames die down for a third time. Link’s strategy against the first Garo has worked equally well with the others, and the sound of bone crunching under steel is becoming disturbingly familiar. “No wonder these guys all died.”
Despite his sympathy toward lingering spirits of any affiliation, Link can’t disagree. He’s also beginning to suspect that the small man in the purple cloak, the one who insisted that he must wear this particular mask to be allowed to pass into Ikana, did not actually have his best interests in mind.
Link takes off the Garo’s hood and makes the rest of the journey to Ikana Hill unhindered by any ghosts except for those he carried in with him.
The landscape of the hilltop is honeycombed with caves and doorways disguised as statuesque faces. The castle, likewise, was carved directly into the stone, and it looks more like the Deku palace than the royal castle of Hyrule; even after all these years, the walls are flecked with cracked and faded layers of paint in geometric patterns and stripes. A few abandoned houses stand here and there, the tattered remnants of a village with caved-in roofs and doors hanging off broken hinges.
Then there’s the other house. The front door is closed and from the roof protrudes something like an enormous musical horn, while the wall facing the streambed supports a useless waterwheel. Gibdos circle the house, moaning, stopping here and there to scratch the walls with their bandaged fingers.
Tatl jingles. “Is someone still living here?!”
Link shrugs. In his experience, undead creatures will only try to grab things they can directly see, so he’s not sure what could be in the house that they want so badly. A swift river runs around the foot of the hill, but the streambed here by the inexplicable house is cracked and dusty from lack of moisture. He doesn’t know enough about geography to reach any conclusions, but the entire scene strikes him as odd.
Slipping the stone mask back on, Link cuts in between two Gibdos to try the door. The lock rattles and a tremulous shout from inside sends him jumping back. “Go away! My father isn’t one of you, leave us alone!”
And then there are hands wrapping around Link’s throat, hands twisting through his hair, legs and arms and teeth clamped around his midsection.
“LINK!” Tatl shrieks.
Shock costs Link two precious seconds, so by the time he tries to reach his sword, his arm is pinned and there’s a bandaged body in the way of the hilt even if he could have reached for it. He twists to sink his teeth into the nearest arm, but the stone mask is covering his mouth; he tries to stomp on a knee as he did with the Gerudo pirate, but without a Goron’s weight behind it, the effort just sends him staggering. Tatl throws herself at one of the dead faces, battering uselessly against it. Then two more Gibdos reach Link and join the mass of clinging arms and limbs. He may be as uninteresting as stone as long as he wears this mask, but the dead creatures feel no interest, no curiosity, only envious hunger.
Under their combined weight, Link can barely stay upright, can barely see, his throat is in agony and his lungs burn. He can’t get free, can’t fight or run, and the loose gravel under his feet is sliding everywhere. He’s going to fall—fall.
Link allows his knees to buckle and then pushes off the ground. The clinging Gibdos, not anticipating the abrupt lack of resistance, go tumbling with him from the doorstep to the loose sand and rocks of the dried riverbed. Carried by the momentum, the downward slope, and the slippery ground, they roll over the sheer edge of the hilltop and fall toward
(nothingness — the too-warm water of the bay — the shadowed expanse of snow under the bridge)
the river below, which despite appearances only makes for a slightly gentler landing than if they had struck solid ground. The arm of one Gibdo detaches from its body almost cleanly and another’s spine crunches like a heavy stick, while whatever air had remained in Link’s lungs gets knocked out of him. The broken bodies flail and grasp and clutch confusedly while the current sweeps them away and the weight of Link’s equipment drags him down.
Black spots speckle his vision and he’s already swallowed water. Blindly, he rips off the stone mask and fumbles through his pack, trying to identify its contents through touch alone, and presses a different mask to his face. Pain rips through him, and—
No gills form, Link’s limbs shorten and his skin hardens into bark, his hair into yellow leaves. He pops up to the surface like a piece of driftwood, slapping at the water with tiny, useless limbs, gasping for air with the funny beak-tube-thing which passes for a mouth on a Deku. Well, good enough.
As Link’s mind and vision clear, he groans hollowly and rolls over, letting himself float limp on his back. The darkening sky has turned a murky, muddy green. He took too long to reach the hill. The third evening approaches.
He closes his eyes and makes a new mental note: the stone mask won’t hide his presence from every kind of creature. He should have guessed as much after that small ghostly man in the purple robe called down to him and said the mask he was wearing wasn’t good enough, that he would need to wear a different one.
Huh.
Kafei is so on-edge that the enormous splash nearly sends him leaping out of his skin. Something heavy must have fallen upriver, perhaps a boulder teetering at the top of the hill. He hadn’t seen one there, but he’s been rather preoccupied with a more important matter.
With a careful glance over the edge of the boulder he’s been hiding behind, Kafei pulls his Keaton mask down to hang on its string around his neck and creeps out to investigate, peering down at the foaming water.
Is that an arm?!
An arm indeed, with shriveled skin and twitching fingers. Two more bodies drift past Kafei’s horrified gaze. Then a tiny Deku scrub with a funny green cap and enormous sad eyes, floating on its back as the current carries it along. A fairy buzzes around its face like a mosquito and shouts; Kafei can’t hear much over the rush of the water, but the words stupid! and careless! feature prominently.
Kafei clenches his teeth, checks the canyon path once again, then slides off the rock shelf and wades out up to his knees. He isn’t fond of Deku scrubs, ornery creatures that they are, but this one is only a child, small even in comparison to his own accursedly tiny form. “Y-you there!” he calls out. “Are you all right?”
The Deku child tips its head back to look at him, dull-eyed. Half-drowned, no doubt. It must not know how to swim. Kafei curses and wades out until the water current is so strong that it nearly jerks him off his feet.
“Here, take my hand!”
The silly thing only shakes its head and waves its little arms. It’s drifting closer, and in a few moments it will be past him. The fairy says something but Kafei pays no attention to her.
“Stop wasting time, hurry!”
Just before the Deku scrub would’ve floated out of reach, Kafei lunges after it, managing to grab ahold of a bark-covered arm. He drags them both up from the river, soaked to the chest and breathing hard from exertion. After letting the child go, his free hand flies up to his throat. Yes, his pendant is still there. He sighs in relief. The Deku child sits up.
“Are you all right? What on earth happened? Those... bodies...”
The fairy jingles. “He was fine! I told you so! Honestly, if you’d gotten yourself drowned it would be your own fault.”
The Deku scrub shoots a glance at its companion, then at Kafei. Its eyes are huge and mournful, its wooden cheeks streaked with sap. Could someone have thrown the poor creature into the water? But no, that makes no sense, the swamp is miles downstream.
The ground rumbles. The fairy and the Deku scrub exchange a look which must in some way be meaningful, because the Deku shrugs and removes its face, and with a convulsive shudder becomes a human boy with blond hair and a dirty, drawn face. Still wearing the same green hat, though.
“Don’t throw a fit, okay?” says the fairy. “We’ve already had enough of that.”
The boy rubs his throat, eyes on the ground. He’s still holding the face of the Deku scrub, only now it’s just a mask.
A month ago, this would have been shocking. But Kafei wasn’t four feet tall and on the wrong side of puberty a month ago, so he instead just thinks of the fairy’s fountain at the northern edge of Clock Town and brightens with hope.
“Please, fairy—or... you there, can you teach me to do that?”
She makes no sound for a moment, save for the whir of her wings. “Can we what?”
Oh sweet goddess, he has no idea how to explain any part of his situation without it sounding absurd. “To... change one’s physical form... would it be possible for someone to... learn how to do it at will?”
The boy’s face darkens. Has he taken offense to the question? He hasn’t spoken a word.
“Not the way he does, and you wouldn’t want to, even if you could,” the fairy answers for him. “What are you doing in Ikana, anyway?”
“I could ask the same—”
The fairy interrupts with a noisy jingle. “You could’ve but you didn’t, and I asked first. Not that your reason is anything interesting, I bet.”
Kafei grits his teeth. The flat dismissal of his last hope stings, and he hates to be interrupted. “You’re very rude, for a fairy.”
“And you’re one prissy kid.”
“I am not a child!”
The fairy looks him up and down. She’s too tiny for him to discern whether her eyebrows are raised, but somehow he gets that impression anyway.
“Oh, never mind,” Kafei slips his Keaton mask back on and goes to sit against the boulder. Wherever this strange duo came from, they’ll surely leave sooner or later.
But they don’t.
Green Hat Boy just slumps there, glancing now and then at the sky in much the same way that Kafei keeps an obsessive watch on the mountain path leading toward this spot. The boy’s fairy buzzes around for a time, then crawls under his hat. The evening sky is turning dark red. Not like the color of a proper sunset. Just red.
Sakon never returns to his hideout. Maybe he was waylaid by one of the many dangerous creatures roaming Ikana, or maybe some bandit’s instinct told him that he was being stalked. Kafei waits to no avail, and Green Hat Boy waits with him because Kafei has nothing to gain from chasing him off. Dusk falls and the ground shakes, a low continuous vibration that sometimes turns into convulsive shudders violent enough to make a man stumble. Kafei leans against the boulder, despairing.
“You know,” he says after a while, unprompted. “Tomorrow was to be my wedding day.”
“At your age?” says the fairy, peeping out from under the hat.
“I told you, I’m not a child!” Kafei snaps. “I’m an adult! A grown man! But an imp in a strange mask turned me into... this.” He flexes his stubby fingers in disgust. “And when I went to seek help from the Great Fairy at the northern gate, my wedding mask was stolen from me. Could anyone have worse luck than mine?”
Green Hat Boy stares blandly at Kafei. There are angry red marks around his throat in the shape of grasping fingers, and his left forearm has been clumsily stitched up from an injury, a cut or bite perhaps. Kafei hadn’t noticed until now. “A-anyway—” Kafei stammers.
The fairy interrupts Kafei with a jingle. In the same moment, her companion sits up straighter, as if coming to some realization.
“Kid,” says the fairy, slowly, as if she’s trying to make Kafei twitch. “What’s your name?”
Kafei looks up at the sickly sky. He can’t see the moon over the edge of the canyon walls, but he knows it’s there. The ground shakes. Somehow he can’t bring himself to care. He’s hardly paid any attention to the moon in these past few days, spending hours holed up in his cubbyhole by the laundry pool, peeking through the crack in the wall into the curiosity shop, hoping in vain for a glimpse of his precious wedding mask, or at least some sort of clue about its whereabouts.
“Kafei,” he admits. “That is my name.”
And the boy in the green hat, for no reason that Kafei can discern, laughs out loud.