Chapter Text
Link is staring at the stone gargoyles guarding the path to Ikana. If Tatl didn’t know him so well by now, she might have said he looks nervous.
“What’s the big deal?” she asks. “They’re just weird statues, they’re not gonna jump out and bite you.”
He points to one. Just like all the others, it has a grotesquely long tongue that reaches down the length of its bloated body and curls around a triangular object, a three-part emblem Tatl has seen elsewhere. She, like Link, hadn’t noticed until now.
“Weird, that’s the marking on your ocarina. Does it mean something?”
“...”
He rubs the back of his left hand and urges Epona on.
The cowardly little boy who cried after every fight and wished that Saria would rescue him is dead. He was too weak to survive what the future held, so the Triforce of Courage hardened his heart. When Link stood on the roof of the clock tower at the end of his third night in Termina, trapped in the body of a tiny Deku Scrub while Skull Kid shrieked like a demon and Tael pleaded and Tatl prayed and the air turned furnace-hot as the moon bore down, he’d acted without hesitation, knocking the ocarina from Skull Kid’s grasp and scurrying over to retrieve it even as the heat scorched his leafy hair and the bark which was his skin. Fear is okay for kids and little fairies, but he was once the Hero of Time, and if the Hero of Time falls to pieces in a crisis then everyone dies.
Some places still give him pause, though. There was the Shadow Temple with its racks, guillotines, and grimy skeletons chained to walls by manacles encrusted with red stains that weren’t rust, which he’d pretended not to see because he didn’t know what to think and there was a sage to awaken. Ikana Canyon is another such place where living people do not belong, not even fearless heroes marked by the goddesses. He‘s too late to save this kingdom. Even the little voice inside the house at the top of the hill might belong to a child who was beyond saving since before he was born, and the three masks of transformation in his pack are whispering discontentedly, though they’re as surely on his side as Tatl or Epona. If he closes his eyes for too long, he sees flashes of snow flurries whipping across the surface of a frozen lake, clouds of blood in water, and endless subterranean tunnels that lead nowhere except deeper into the earth. Maybe the masks envy the warm blood in Link’s veins and hate him for failing to save the people they used to be. Maybe he’s hallucinating. It doesn’t seem like Tatl hears anything.
It’s a little past eleven in the morning. Link is alive. He has an ocarina, some songs, a small arsenal of weapons, a bag full of masks, and slightly less than three full days to figure out how to use these things to awaken a giant.
He rides until the terrain is too steep for Epona, then dismounts and sends her off. He keeps walking.
The first new landmark Link finds is a graveyard whose entrance he must have previously overlooked, and it’s here of all places that he finally sees direct evidence of a living, breathing resident of Ikana: the old gravedigger, Dampé, leaning on his shovel before a crumbling gate where a monstrously huge skeleton sprawls, its skull tilted to rest against the earth.
“My father once said that this was all that was left of the former royal soldier who guarded the graveyard. Even though he’s dead, his remains still block the way to the royal family’s tomb. He must have been a fine soldier when he was alive.” Dampé coughs, shudders, and shambles off to whatever more pleasant spot can be found in the most obviously haunted graveyard in existence, leaving Link and Tatl behind to contemplate his words.
The skull alone is taller than Link and there are too many teeth in the weathered jaw. Otherwise, the skeleton is just a skeleton, and he’s encountered plenty of those. He wonders how this royal soldier died. Whoever he was, it’s cruel to leave a corpse out to rot within sight of a graveyard, and it makes no sense for the ancient royal family to have allowed this hallowed ground to be profaned in such a way. Whatever might have happened, Link feels sorry for the dead man.
That’s how it is, though. With or without a proper burial, this is what death looks like. Link isn’t going to live long, by his own estimation he’s going to be dead by twenty-five at the absolute latest, and when his luck finally runs out, he’ll look exactly like this royal soldier. Just smaller. Being an important person didn’t save Darmani or Mikau, or the Deku butler’s boy, who was important to his father if no one else. Having once been a hero won’t save Link from basic probability.
(“You could’ve saved me, kid,” the voice of the Zora mask hisses at Link. He pretends not to notice.)
“There’s something creepy about that thing. Do you feel it?” Tatl remarks, which sounds completely pointless when said out loud because it doesn’t take a fairy’s mystical intuition to conclude that skeletons are creepy. So she clarifies: “It’s still alive, somehow. Just asleep.”
Trusting her judgment, Link takes out the ocarina to play the song that rouses sleeping things. Red embers ignite within the skull’s eye sockets, and the Stalfos shakes like a wet dog to rid itself of the layers of accumulated dirt. It sits up with ponderous slowness, as if it’s still groggy, then fixes its dimly-glowing gaze upon the boy and fairy. Link has time to wonder whether it was actually the best idea to awaken this creature.
As if in answer, an enormous hand flashes out and pins Link against the ground, missing Tatl by luck alone. “You are back already?” the Stalfos rasps. “Insolent imp.”
“What?! We’ve never seen you in our lives!” Tatl buzzes while Link squirms fruitlessly under the skeletal hand. He might as well be trying to wrestle his way through the bars of an iron gate.
“An imp with a fairy? Yes, I know of you. Mad little fools. You do not belong here.”
A child-sized imp and a fairy were in this area and were perceived by the tomb’s undead guardian. The same imp that shattered all the Great Fairies and sowed discord in all four corners of Termina, from the southern swamp to Snowpeak. Once, Tatl would have gleefully joined in. When they spied a boy riding through the woods with the defeated slouch of a weary man five times his true age, it had seemed like a funny idea to give him something to really worry about, and when he hit his head falling off his horse, it made perfect sense for Skull Kid to see what interesting things he might have in his pockets, and then, well...
“We’ve never even met you before, and Link isn’t Skull Kid, stupid. They’re the opposite of each other. And whatever Skull Kid has done isn’t Tael’s fault, so you leave my baby brother out of it!”
The Stalfos looms above Link, though its hunched posture isn’t reminiscent of a predator with its prey so much as an old man leaning over a book with print too small for his tired eyes. At last, the giant fingers fold gently around Link and tip him back up onto his feet, hovering behind him a moment while he recovers his balance. “Forgive me, child,” the Stalfos creaks. “I was mistaken. Nonetheless, it is unwise for you and your fairy to have strayed into Ikana. There is a curse upon this land which darkens the hearts of its unquiet dead.”
“We aren’t in Ikana for fun,” says Tatl. ”We’re here to break that curse and awaken a giant, a true giant, not just a big guy like you. Termina is in danger, and we need their power. We were told to go to the canyon.”
The Stalfos tries to look at her, but can’t seem to pinpoint where she is. “Is that so? I suspect you are not the first to have attempted the feat. You may not be the last.” It turns its focus back toward Link. “How old are you, Hylian child, and for how long have you carried a blade?”
Startled to have heard the correct term used by someone in Termina—everyone else has called him a human—Link doesn’t even mind the pointlessness of the question itself. He raises all ten fingers and then lowers seven. Thirteen. He doesn’t know how to answer the second half of the question, though, and he’s not even sure if the Stalfos can see how many fingers he holds up. Could it really be so close to blind? That seems improbable for a soldier.
“No... any amount of time would be too long. I am sorry. Though you surely carry it well, that burden should not have been forced upon one so young.” The Stalfos pauses, trying to gauge Link’s response before deciding what to say and how to say it. “I also began at too early an age. They said that there was no other way, and I, lacking the experience to mistrust such orders or the courage to defy them even if I had, obeyed. We all did.”
Link looks at his boots.
“I am called Skull Keeta. I commanded the army of Ikana, the kingdom atop the hill. Since being shamed by loss in battle, I have waited here. Now, tell me. Do you truly believe that you can break the curse upon this land?”
“We’ve already awakened the other three giants. This is the last one,” says Tatl. Link has done all the heavy lifting, but she’s been with him all along and that’s more than anybody else can say.
Skull Keeta shakes away the last of the dirt encrusted around his eye socket. “I do not know where you might find your giant, but Ikana’s curse emanates from the Stone Tower. If any answers are to be found, it will be there. But first...”
A wall of flame flashes up from the ground behind Link, making him jump—and cutting off any chance of retreat down the path to the lower graveyard. For the first time in years, Skull Keeta slowly pushes himself off the ground, and his shadow passes over Link like that of a swaying tree.
“If you cannot defeat me, young swordsman, you have no hope of conquering the Stone Tower. If you have truly done as your fairy companion claims, then it will be no challenge at all.”
With fire on one side and a small mountain of rubble guarded by a suddenly-hostile adversary on the other, Link has little space in which to maneuver. He tries to circle out of Skull Keeta’s way, leaving his sword sheathed and his hands harmlessly empty, but then he has to roll aside to keep from being crushed under a fist the size of his whole body. For as poor as his vision seems to be, Skull Keeta’s aim is good enough for this, at least.
“Hey!!! What’s your problem?!” Tatl buzzes. “Link doesn’t want to fight you!”
Skull Keeta doesn’t particularly want to fight Link, either. It makes no difference.
When a geyser of flame erupts from the arid earth only inches shy of Link’s face, instinct takes over, or not so much instinct as the rote response to a lesson beaten into him a long time ago: this entity looks like a monster and it’s trying to kill him, and if he doesn’t hit back harder then he’ll be the one to die. Skull Keeta is more agile than his stature would suggest, but Link is quicker, weaving in underfoot like a weasel and darting back each time Keeta tries to stomp him, then pressing forward, giving his opponent no chance to go on the offensive with his magic and turn more of the ground into an impassable inferno. When Link finds an opening, a split-second in which Skull Keeta is unsteadily balanced on one foot in an effort to stomp on him, he wedges his sword into the joints of Keeta’s knee, intending to split the bones apart and instead shattering the kneecap and the top of the shinbone, which have been weakened by centuries of exposure to sunlight and open air and wailing winds. Keeta topples to the ground and catches himself with his hands and another sharp snapping noise, like tree branches breaking. Before he can try to somehow recover, Link smashes the hilt of the gilded sword through his skull. Whatever magic fused Skull Keeta’s bones to each other loses its grip and the skeleton quite literally falls to pieces. The walls of fire die down, leaving the ground scorched and blackened.
Less than a minute has elapsed from when the altercation began.
Tatl’s wings whirr in Link’s ear. “Is he dead? Dead again?”
In answer to her question, the scattered bones shift and shudder, as if they’re trying to pull themselves back into place and not quite succeeding. The skull is seamed with cracks and holes and dust is sliding down its sides like the interior of an hourglass. The steely look in Link’s eyes gives way to concern as he lowers his sword.
The fiery lights in the eye sockets of the broken skull reignite. They burn less brightly now. A dry, rattling laugh emanates. “Very good!”
Suddenly overwhelmed with nausea, Link can’t look away from the cracked skull. That last strike wasn’t necessary. Why did he do that? He didn’t hit that Gerudo pirate when she was already down, however many three-day iterations ago that was. He went out of his way to spare her. She was also just a regular person and not a giant monstrous skeleton, but this skeleton was once a person, too. It’s still a person, it can even talk, and he took about ten seconds to decide to use lethal force. Whether that word can actually apply to an undead creature has nothing to do with Link’s intentions in the moment.
The skull’s red gaze moves from Tatl to Link. He isn’t doing as good a job as usual of hiding his feelings, it would seem. “It was right for you to defend yourself, boy. You have done nothing wrong.”
When that fails to dispel Link’s stricken expression, the bones slowly move themselves back together and reach reasonably close approximations of their proper places. A hand and elbow and shoulder are the first to come together, though the fingers aren’t moving quite right, and long cracks are running up and down both forearms. Both hands work clumsily to return the skull to the top of the vertebrae and arrange the legs back into place, first the intact one and then most of the broken one. Skull Keeta sits up, showing no evidence of being in pain. Link relaxes a little. Only a little.
“Young swordsman who has deftly defeated me... will you lend your power to fulfill my request? It will be no risk to your life. I would not ask that of you.”
Tatl and Link exchange an uneasy look. This isn’t the first time a badly injured person has asked something of Link, though he wasn’t the one to inflict those injuries last time around. Or can an undead thing even be hurt? Something about Skull Keeta’s tone conveys the impression that he’s trying to act as if everything is fine, as many adults might do in the presence of a worried child. Now Link wonders what would’ve happened if he hadn’t dodged that first attack, and hadn’t fought back at all. It seemed in the moment like Skull Keeta fully intended to hit him for real.
Having, in any case, no other choice, Link nods.
“When all else was lost, the royal tomb was to be guarded from defilement, but I have not remained here for the tomb’s sake alone. The soldiers I once led have been unable to pass on, even as the kingdom’s ruins crumble into dust and fade from memory. I do not wish to leave them... though I do not wish to stay here. It is unpleasant to remain in this state. I would like to be relieved of duty now,” Skull Keeta explains with an odd calm that doesn’t match his words. “Therefore, I ask you to take my soul and convey my words to my men, who, even in death, remain loyal to me. Tell them the war has ended. Make them understand. Then I shall be able to drift quietly into sleep.”
Tatl has settled onto Link’s shoulder, silencing the mosquito buzz of her wings. She can feel him shiver, faintly, his face going blank with what she now recognizes as distress. Then it passes, and Link nods, some minuscule shift in expression toward calm instead. She’s seen this look before, too. It was right before she crawled under Link’s hat as he knelt next to Mikau.
In accordance with the logic he has learned through all his travels through Termina and the weight of the masks in his pack, Link takes out the ocarina, but the gesture earns him only a hollow laugh. “More music of yours? There is no need... promise that you will do as I have asked, and that will be enough. You will find them in the graveyard after nightfall.”
Tatl answers for herself and Link: “We will.”
“Then. In that case...”
With most of his limbs either damaged or shattered, Skull Keeta can’t move properly; it hadn’t been so obvious until he had reason to try. Standing up just isn’t going to happen. All the same, he sits as straight as he can and salutes. “Captain, sir! May I take leave, sir?”
Link isn’t familiar with this gesture, but Skull Keeta is looking at him expectantly. After a brief hesitation, he mimics the gesture.
“Yes, sir!" As soon as the words are spoken, there is a burning flash and Skull Keeta finally crumbles, the individual bones falling away from each other and disintegrating as if centuries of age and weathering had caught up to them all at once, until nothing remains but a heap of dust indistinguishable from the dirt upon which it has scattered.
Dust, and a mask.
When Link was little, Fado loved to torture him with awful stories about wartime deserters or careless woodcutters who entered the Lost Woods and fell victim to its curse, roaming the shadows beneath the ancient trees until bugs ate their eyeballs and their faces fell off. He refused to sleep in his own bed for a week, and when Saria reassured him by the light of day that the Kokiri are safe from the curse that turns people into walking skeletons, Fado added under her breath that only grown-ups turn into Stalfos, and lost little girls or boys who aren’t Kokiri instead become Skull Kids. Link cried. Fado laughed. Saria bit her.
(A tiny, hollow voice whimpers inarticulately, as soft as rattling leaves.)
He picks up the mask because he has to and brushes it clean of dirt and dust because he wants to. Except what he actually wants to do is crumple to the ground and cry like a little kid, which he won’t, because crying never saved him from anything, it was Saria who did that, and it’s been a long time since she could protect him. Anyway, it makes no sense to kill someone and then act sad about it. Even if it wasn’t exactly murder. Self-defense. He’d thought it was self-defense. He wouldn’t have needed to fight if he hadn’t been attacked first. He wouldn’t have.
His inability to speak is usually an inconvenience more than anything else. Now it hurts. Maybe he couldn’t have talked his way out of what happened, but before that, he could have asked what Skull Keeta meant about being made to fight at too early an age and learned how far their similarities actually went. Link has always been different from everyone, whether in his childhood in the Kokiri Forest or here in Termina, where everything is the same and yet different from Hyrule. A hero and a soldier might have a great deal in common. Now it’s too late. There is a mask in Link’s hands, no replacement for the real person.
It stretches the definition of what Link would call a mask: it’s a hooded headdress made of bone and teeth and fabric woven with a blocky, geometric design reminiscent of patterns he’s seen on Gerudo clothing. The top half of a skeletal face is positioned to cover the area around the wearer’s eyes, and there are small skeletal arms reaching down where the wearer’s cheekbones would be.
He puts the mask on and transforms. It doesn’t bring pain this time, as the other three masks do. It feels like absolutely nothing. Until—
Before Tatl can get a good look at Link, he hides his face with his arms and dashes for the crumbled wall, pressing himself into what little shadow exists beneath it. The daylight burns as if he were staring directly into the sun and he has no eyelids to shield his vision, his eyes are hollow sockets which inexplicably see. He fumbles at his face with his bony Stalchild hands until he finally gets the mask off and turns back into himself, gasping.
“What did you think was going to happen if you turned into an undead Stalchild?” says Tatl, conveniently ignoring how she hadn’t thought to warn him. “There’s a reason why they only come out at night!”
It might be pointed out that Skull Keeta seemed reasonably functional. Or so he did, right before he got himself killed. On purpose. Link feels sick again. His skin, now that he has it, tingles with pins and needles, and the world pulsates with starbursts and swirling dark.
“Collect enough of those masks, and one will turn out to be a dud, I guess,” Tatl adds, with what Link recognizes as an attempt at sounding careless. ”It didn’t even change you properly. I would’ve liked to see you stomp around as a giant Stalfos... oh well. Maybe it’ll be good for something else.”
Link would give her a dirty look if his eyes didn’t sting so badly.
They waste the rest of the afternoon trekking back up to the hilltop and trying to figure out what to do next. There’s a cracked wall near the castle entrance, but it doesn’t lead anywhere and the stonework would be too thick to blast through even if Link had any bombs. There’s the stone tower with a carved facade not unlike the gargoyle statues outside the canyon, the tongue rolling like a long rug from its open mouth and an aura of menace so chokingly strong here that there’s no doubt this is the way he should go, but he immediately hits a dead end, finding a useless switch that will open a path only as long as he remains standing upon it. Behind all this is a small cave with the dry riverbed leading up to it like a road. Link tries playing the song of storms, which produces about ten seconds of rain and surprises Tatl but doesn’t last long in the dry heat of the canyon to spin the waterwheel at the side of the house surrounded by Gibdos. Farther up the riverbed, Link finds a spring inside a little cavern which is occupied by a ghost who immediately tries to murder him for no reason. Sharp waves his little conductor’s baton and a hideous shriek echoes off the walls, louder than the song of the ocarina could ever hoped to match, overlapping itself until Link’s head feels like it’s going to crack like an egg. He flees while the ghost cackles hysterically. Outside the cave, the world spins, and when Link lowers his hands from his ears, he’s surprised to not see blood.
“I think we’re missing something,” Tatl says, as dazed as he is. “We should... go back down.”
Dusk has settled and Dampé has barricaded himself in his little home by the time they arrive, leaving the the graveyard to the Stalchildren. A circle of them sit around a bonfire with their hands held out even though they have no skin to feel the warmth, while others lie on the ground as if asleep or walk around and make chattering noises with their teeth that remind Link of Cuccoos pecking the dirt. In the form of a Stalchild himself, Link can see as clearly in the dark as his normal self would have been able to see in the daytime, and the light of the fire doesn’t bother him a tenth as much as the sun’s rays did. The moonlight is only disturbing for what it represents.
“Didn’t Skull Keeta say they lost a battle? I thought he meant that was how he died, but this doesn’t look like a battleground to me,” Tatl whispers. “Anyway, I wonder if they’re actually going to be fooled by that mask.” To her eyes, Link doesn’t specifically resemble Skull Keeta so much as an undead version of himself: instead of a green tunic, he’s wearing decayed rags and a long lamellar shirt with with armored bronze scales so tarnished by age that they’ve turned turquoise green, and there’s a spear and a round shield strapped to his back in much the same way that he carries his usual weapons. He even kept his hat, which has been incorporated into the bone headpiece. A little more to the point, Link isn’t twenty feet tall.
As Link moves into the light, the Stalchildren around the fire collectively leap to their feet, and he too wonders for a moment whether this masquerade will even work. “Captain! You’re finally back!” one of them cries, practically falling over itself in its rush to salute. The others follow its example (minus the falling) before mobbing him, chattering, some of them poking him or tugging the edges of his clothes to see whether he’s really there. None of them are attacking, yet after countless nights in Hyrule Field being harassed by Stalchildren just like these, it takes all of Link’s self-control to keep from shoving them away. They’re Skull Keeta’s friends.
“We haven’t seen you in some time, sir, but we’ve been guarding these graves just as you ordered!” says another Stalchild.
Behind them, a Stalchild is swinging on the branch of a dead tree like a playful monkey. Link decides to withhold comment, though he wonders whether all of Captain Keeta’s men were actually old enough to be called men.
(Something like shame rises inside him. “No choice,” he hears. It might just be a memory, this time.)
“Where did this fairy come from?” a Stalchild asks, pointing to Tatl.
“He lost his voice for a while, so I’m helping out,” Tatl lies.
“Cute! Are you a healing fairy?”
Before Tatl can say anything to antagonize the undead mob in retaliation for what she considers a grave insult—healing fairies are all prissy, saccharine little milksops—they drag Link over to their campfire to sit with them. He can only hope that these undead will react less violently than the Garos if and when they notice that he isn’t who they think he is.
As the Stalchildren arrange themselves around Link, Tatl perches on one of the tiny arms around the front of his hat-headdress-thing, a decorative feature which she very much hopes was carved from ivory or animal bone rather than having actually come from a skeleton the size of an infant. “How did you guys die?”
The Stalchildren look at each other. “Is that supposed to be a joke..?”
“Oh, come on. I’ve never met a living human who was only a skeleton. You’ve all become Stalchildren. Undead monsters.”
One of the Stalchildren scratches its skull. “We look perfectly normal. You’re a strange little fairy.”
“What color is your skin?”
“...Skin-colored?”
“That was a trick question. You don’t have any skin.”
“Yes, we do.”
“No, you don’t!”
While Tatl and the dead soldiers are busy confusing each other, Link rearranges the facts in his mind like fragments of broken pottery, placing one beside another to see where they all fit. Captain Keeta’s men were camped out in the graveyard while he was at the gate of the royal tomb, and though they greatly respected him, they left him unburied when he died. Those same soldiers died in their camp and became Stalchildren without realizing their true fate, which suggests that everyone must have all died at the same time, and in so abrupt and unexpected a fashion that they had no chance to realize what was happening to them.
Tragic as that is, he doesn’t know what relevance it has to the giant he’ll need to awaken, and he’s not even sure whether his theory is correct. He hadn’t thought to ask, and now it’s too late because he killed Skull Keeta, whose dying wish was that his men should be told that the war is over. As Tatl is busy discovering, that might not be so simple a task as it first sounded; just now, she’s been asking them what year it is, and the only answer any of them will give is off by about a millennia.
When he gets sick of their repartee, Link gets up and walks off toward the back of the graveyard, carrying Tatl with him. A few of the Stalchildren protest. He ignores them, and none of them follow him past the ruined gate of the royal tomb.
The ghost in the underground chamber has a long curly mustache and a shadowy void where the rest of his face had been. Link doesn’t know what it says about him that this particular feature survived past death when nothing else did.
“I served the Ikana Royal family. I am the composer called Flat,” says the ghost. “The songs connected to the Royal Family that remain here were all composed by my brother and I. My brother, who—”
“No, they weren’t.”
Flat narrows the glowing pits which once were his eyes. “What?”
Link’s jaw throbs. An Iron Knuckle was waiting for him and Tatl when they entered this chamber, the ghostly remnant of some lady knight so long-dead that she neither knew nor cared who this upstart Keeta character might be. With his impersonation having failed, Link had hoped that his Stalchild self might be a bit stronger than his typical child-self, but being stripped of what little physical muscle he possesses hasn’t helped much, and a lightly glancing blow that his adult self would have been able to block sent the edge of his shield flying back into his face. He miraculously didn’t lose any teeth, though once he takes off the Stalfos mask, he’ll undoubtedly have a bruise so hellish it would make Madame Aroma have a conniption on the spot.
Tatl bobbles at Link, then at the ancient stele where the notes of a song have been carved. “He already knows that song, and he’s not even from Termina.”
“I surely don’t know what you mean. This song... you wouldn’t accuse me of stealing it, would you?”
“I’m just telling it like I see it. And hear it. The rest is your own problem.”
Flat folds his arms. “Such disrespect..!”
Pretending not to notice a word Tatl says, Link dutifully allows Flat to ‘teach’ him the song of storms, albeit without the usual duet owing to the fact that he still can’t figure out what form the ocarina has taken. Even if Flat is decidedly less homicidal than Sharp, barging into a ghost’s tomb, beating up his undead guardian, and then making fun of his former life’s purpose might not be the best idea.
Stalchildren are huddled around the broken gate when Link hauls himself back up out of the tunnel below the royal tomb. “Did you... find what you were looking for?” one of them asks.
“Something like that,” says Tatl.
“You aren’t going to leave again, are you?”
Another Stalchild nods. “The Garo spies are everywhere... shouldn’t you wait here until morning?”
They aren’t wrong, aside from the Garos being no more than dead spirits at this point. They, like the Stalchildren in this graveyard, remain unaware of their own deaths, though the war ended so very long ago. Link has the increasingly distinct impression that nobody won the ancient war.
Tatl reassures the Stalchildren that their beloved captain will really truly be fine, and they don’t follow him out of the graveyard.
Link plays the song of storms twenty feet away from where he played it the first time, and Sharp is appeased for some reason, and the spring from the cave flows over the riverbank like a jar being poured out. Water gurgles.
Slightly less pleasant is the calliope music that wheezes out from the oversized trumpet on the roof of the lone house as the waterwheel begins to turn. The shambling Gibdos have all gone away, and in their place is the tiniest girl Link has ever seen, walking pigeon-toed to the riverside with a bucket dangling from both hands so that it bounces against her knees with each step.
The girl, Pamela, gasps and drops her bucket as the Stalchild enters the dim pool of light from the window. The fairy at its side inspires no trust, instead reminding her of the warning she received from the pink fairy who lives in some scraggly shrubs near the cliff’s edge, who she used to play with before the river dried up: there’s an imp called Skull Kid who likes to explore the edge of Ikana sometimes with his two fairy friends, one of them white and the other purple. He’s up to no good, the pink fairy said, and neither he nor his friends can be trusted. She drops the bucket and flees for the house.
“Hey, wait!” Tatl zips after the girl, only to have the door slammed in her face. It’s been locked by the time Link gets there. He tries to frown, which doesn’t work when his face is just a bare skull, so he takes off the Stalfos mask and shoves it into his pack. Now more properly equipped to express himself, he crinkles his face and holds his hand out flat at roughly waist-level. He’s shorter than most boys his age—he won’t be particularly tall even as an adult—and that girl was barely half his height.
“Right?” says Tatl, taking a guess at what Link means. “Who would live in a place like this with such a little kid? Talk about negligence!”
Negligence isn’t a harsh enough word for Link’s opinion on the matter, not that he knows any better ones. His mother died while protecting him when he was only a baby; if he were an adult with a little daughter or son of his own, he would do whatever it took to keep his child safe. He’s more competent in that area than any adult he’s met, so maybe most parents have lower standards, but not moving into a haunted wasteland would have been an easy first step for whoever is supposed to be looking out for the tiny girl in the house. And this calliope music is obnoxious.
(The Goron baby up in the mountains cried and cried from being so hungry. He’s crying right not. Link and the Goron mask know he is.)
He backs away and crouches under a lone tree with barren branches. The waterwheel creaks under the weight of the ridiculously cheerful music. Maybe there’s some magic to the song, or else the Gibdos dislike it as much as Link does. He wonders why they were trying to get into the house in the first place. When he approached it for the very first time, the girl had yelled something about her father not being one of them. What could be so important about the girl’s father that a horde of the undead would lay siege to their home? How and why would they have mistaken him for one of their own?
Tatl yawns and settles on Link’s shoulders to doze while he rubs his eyes and tries to stay awake. The skin along his jaw feels raw, even though he didn’t have skin when he was hit in the face. Maybe he should wear a mask around until it heals. There are plenty to choose from.
He waits.
The little girl emerges from her house, briefly silhouetted by the light from the doorway. She’s holding a lantern, and the circle of light bobbles around her as she searches for her lost bucket.
While her back is turned, Link slips inside the house. It’s bright and cozy here, somehow immune to the aura of menace throughout the rest of the canyon. On the mantelpiece, next to a few dishes that aren’t quite so fancy as the ones in Madame Aroma’s office, rests a framed pictograph of Pamela and a man with a white coat and thin, messy hair. A funny scratching sound is coming from somewhere below, like mice under the floorboards. Following the sound, Link finds the stairway to the basement. There are books scattered across the floor, pipes along the walls which he supposed are part of the components of the giant music box built into the house, and a closet. The scratching noise is coming from inside.
Inching closer, Link touches the door handle. A big shape flops out as if it had been leaning against the door all along, something wrapped in bandages and smelling like rancid meat. Link scrambles out of its reach, and the thing moans, stumbling, trying to follow him.
It—the man—doesn’t completely look like a Gibdo yet, which somehow only makes him worse than the creatures so shriveled and ruined that they don’t seem like they ever could have been a living person. Wisps of brown hair peek out between the bandages, and the graying skin on his exposed arm isn’t cracked and desiccated yet. A bug crawls out from under his sleeve and all of Fado’s awful stories come back to Link, the ones about gnawing bugs and rotting faces.
Tatl squeaks and burrows under Link’s hat as he reaches for his sword, reflex and experience screaming at him to kill the shambling thing. Another part of him says to stop, it remembers the little girl’s defiant cry in the last three-day cycle when she had heard Link and mistaken him for a Gibdo: my father isn’t one of you. And that same part of him remembers Skull Keeta, who Link killed, and whose last words are buried in Link’s brain like the undead filling this land, and one sentence in particular which was spoken with a flat simplicity that fills him with numb horror which he attributes to guilt and pity but which may in fact be born from the same prophetic inclination which sent him nightmares of a man on a black horse even before he became a hero and began walking the path that led him to Termina: it is unpleasant to remain in this state.
The thing which used to be the girl’s father, which maybe still is her father, moans and clutches its head. Simultaneously, the front door of the house bangs open.
“I know you’re here!” a shrill little voice shouts from upstairs. “Who do you think you are, walking in without—” Tiny shoes tap-tap-tap across the floor overhead, then halt, and the words soften into an anxious babble as the girl speaks to herself. “Oh no, oh no..!”
As Link takes out the ocarina, the little girl flies down the stairs, throwing herself at him, placing herself between him and her father. She demands that Link get out, just forget everything he’s seen here and get out and shoves him, only she’s so small that he doesn’t have to offer any resistance to stay where he is, so that when she pushes him, her own feet slide back across the floor.
Link plays the same song the creepy mask man had played for him when he had been transformed against his will into a Deku Scrub, which he’d played for the ghost of Darmani III and for Mikau when Link realized he couldn’t save him. The song Skull Keeta hadn’t wanted to hear.
The moaning stops. A mask drops to the floor.
Tatl peeks out from under Link’s hat, and the tiny girl stops kicking Link in his bruised shin.
“Father..?”
A man in a long white coat is blinking at them, bewildered, his head in his hands. “Pamela?”
The girl, Pamela, flings herself away from Link and into her father’s arms. He scoops her up and strokes her hair. “What have I been doing this whole time? I... went down into the well, and then...”
Pamela sniffles and buried her face into the front of his white coat. “You... haven’t been doing anything... you just had a little dream. A little nightmare. That’s all.”
Link looks at them, shuffles his feet, and looks away. There’s a mask shaped like a bandaged face lying on the floor, so he edges over and grabs it, but Tatl pulls his hair when he gets too close to Pamela and her father.
“Let them be!!! Don’t you get it? You’re so insensitive!” Tatl scolds.
Link swats her away, only lightly.
Upstairs, he loiters around the tidy little house. There’s a poster of Lulu on the wall, a souvenir from the band’s performance at the carnival the year before. She’s smiling so brightly that her eyes seem to sparkle even though it’s just a printed copy of a drawing, and even without having ever seen her wear such an expression, somehow he knows that that’s exactly how she looks when she’s really truly happy.
Finding Pamela’s water bucket overturned on the dirt outside, Link refills it for her and brings it inside, then blows out the lantern on the table to save the oil. After that, he can’t think of anything else to do here. It might take a long time for Pamela and her father to remember that he and Tatl exist, and he doesn't know what they might have to say to each other once they do.
The latch clicks softly shut behind Link as he lets himself out of the house.
(All four masks are murmuring to each other. Or to Link. Is his face just a mask, too?)
Tingle is floating on a balloon over the abandoned houses. Link has no idea how long he’s been there, watching, but the man waves like the two of them are old chums. Link waggles his fingers, not wanting to seem unfriendly, then puts on the Gibdo mask and sits at the edge of the well. Neither the light of the swollen moon nor Tatl’s firefly-glow are enough to pierce the inky darkness. No matter how hard Link squints, he can’t see the bottom.
He feels around for a pebble, then holds it out and drops it. Two full seconds pass in silence, and then: plink!
He jumps.