Chapter Text
The Wing Ceremony was going on, and yet, there I sat in the Headmaster's study, sifting through pages and pages in books no one else has ever seen, writing in this silly little book I received for my last birthday.
It's not that I didn't care, no. I have a friend in the ceremony, and I did truly hope he out-flew those three doofuses, Groose and his cronies. They deserve to get a good hit in the face from reality every once in a while.
But that morning, I was much too invested on the things I was reading, about an era long lost to us Skyloftians, the era of the hero chosen by the great goddess Hylia. I didn't look up from the book until a voice from the doorway startled me, making me drop the tome and lose my page.
“Professor! I didn't see you standing there. Should I go ahead out to the plaza? I know you said you wished for me to attend the ceremony.”
The professor shook his head at me and gestured to the window. “I'm afraid you missed the whole thing, dear. Link won and went through with the ceremony alongside Zelda...”
“But?”
“But there was a...an incident, you could say. Link is currently recovering, and Zelda...”
“What about her?”
“We think she fell beneath the clouds.”
A thrumming, echoing silence filled the room, pressing down on my chest. My head felt light, and I swayed.
“Fell...fell through? She's...gone?”
“...We're afraid so, Aella.”
That was the last thing I heard as I slumped back in my chair in a faint. Now, fainting isn't something weird for me. I'm not allowed to fly by myself because of it.
It's how I befriended Link and Zelda in the first place as a child. They had their loftwings a year before I did, and they both offered to take turns flying with me so I didn't plummet to my death beneath the clouds.
Sometimes I wonder that, maybe if I had been there, I could have caught Zelda like she'd done for me many times.