Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The woman in white visits his shop often.

“What are you looking for today, ma’am?” Amik asks from behind the counter when the bell on the door announces her arrival. “More yarn?”

(She’s been coming to him almost every morning for months, and still he doesn’t know what her name is.) 

“Yes, you know me so well,” her voice always has a sort of…ethereal quality to it that he can never actually describe. It’s like…It’s like if honey and sugar had a baby and named it Kindness, or something, it’s-it’s warm in a way that the sun could never be, even during the hottest of summers, and the smile she gives him wraps around his very soul and comforts it with a hug. “How is business lately?”

“You’re still my only customer!” he calls as she disappears into the many shelves that are lined with every item he could find during his daily walks: string, yarn, leaves, rocks and jewels, sticks, arrows-

“You’re selling bugs now?” her voice echoes from the back of his store. “So many beetles!”

“They’re my favorite!” he shouts back.

Her laugh is like the harp he watches her play for the kids on the street, melodic and uplifting. “I’m partial to butterflies myself!”

A few minutes later she comes up to his counter with an armful of blue and white yarn.

“Find everything you need?” he smiles, calculating the price and—Holy Hylia that’s a lot of yarn-

“Yes, I know it’s a lot,” she chuckles, smiling back, reaching into the pocket of her dress to pull out a small brown pouch. Her eerily bright blue eyes gleam. “I’m trying to make a blanket, you see, or maybe a sailcloth?”

“Sailcloth?” he repeats, raising an eyebrow. “You got a boat?”

“No, no, it’s more like a—Oh, what’s the word—I call it a sailcloth but it’s more like something that helps to slow your descent from a long fall, so you don’t get hurt and land safely?”

He shakes his head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am-”

“Never mind, never mind,” she shakes her head, pulling open the pouch and digging around inside of it with one hand. “How much for all of the yarn?”

It…It really is a lot of yarn, probably…No…

“Two-” his voice shakes and he clears his throat to steady it. She’s…She’s purchasing his entire stock of blue and white yarn- “Two thousand rupees, please.”

She dumps ten golden rupees out onto his counter with nothing but a friendly smile, pulling the ties of her pouch to close it and slipping it back into her pocket. Her long, golden hair sways from the tilt of her head as she tells him, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“M-Ma’am, wait!” he tries to stop her as she turns and walks towards the door to leave. “This is—This is too much! You can’t possibly need this much yarn!” 

“Oh, I do,” she says over her shoulder, pushing the door open, the ringing bell marking her exit. “I have no idea how to crochet.”

The door claps shut and she’s gone. Amik is suddenly two thousand (two thousand) rupees richer. With this money, he can pay off his debt to the goat farmer and finally work less than twelve hours a day. 

It is, coincidentally, the exact amount of money he had prayed for late last night before he went to bed. 

Maybe Hylia is real after all, he thinks as he scoops the money into his wallet.

— 

That night, Amik is at the tavern celebrating his newfound financial freedom with a drink. 

“You see Her today?” The man sitting next to him at the bar asks the bartender. 

The bartender shakes his head. “I usually see Her on my walk here, but today She wasn’t at Her usual spot on the road.”

“I wonder-”

“Who are you guys talking about?” Amik asks, curious. 

The bartender stares at him. “The…The Goddess Hylia?”

“The Goddess Hylia?” he repeats, incredulous. “You really believe she’s real?”

“You don’t?” The man next to him questions, looking at him like he has three heads. “She practically lives here, her temple is down the road!”

“Sure, but what has she done for us?”

“Oh, I don’t know, created us? Given us this safe haven, protected us from evil?”

“Evil?” Amik scoffs. “Like what? Plague? Famine? There’s still plenty of it to go around, it’s a wonder none of my customers have brought death to my shop’s door!”

“You have no customers, Amik,” The bartender points out. “I know because I walk by your ‘shop’ every day and see you drumming your fingers on the counter and mumbling prayers for business. Why do you pray if you don’t believe in Her?”

Because…

“Because it worked once,” he mumbles. “And only once. I have one customer, she comes in every morning and buys a few things, keeps me afloat.”

“‘She’?” The man repeats, raising an eyebrow. “What does she look like?”

Amik describes the woman in white down to the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles after finding a particular item on his shelves, how this morning she casually dropped two thousand rupees on yarn for something called a sailcloth. 

“She’s the woman who plays the harp for the children,” he clarifies when the two men stare at him. “You know, her?”

A glass slips from the bartender’s old, weathered fingers and shatters on the floor, drawing the attention of the rest of the tavern’s patrons and staff. He stares at Amik like he just told him he doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life. The other man’s mouth hangs open.

“You…” he falters. “You…”

“What?” Amik questions, frowning, glancing between the two with furrowed brows. “What’s wrong?”

“She’s been smiling upon you,” The bartender whispers, reverent. “The-The Goddess has been answering your prayers every single day for months and you didn’t know it?”

The tavern whispers. 

Amik laughs, shaking his head and refusing, “That’s crazy. Why would she do that?”

“Because the Goddess Hylia is kind,” A barmaid says, joining in on the conversation. “Just yesterday She healed my brother’s broken arm with the golden light of her blessing.”

“You…” The man next to him at the bar repeats himself. “You’re Blessed by Hylia Herself.”

“I don’t believe this,” he rises from his barstool, shaking his head, “She isn’t Hylia, she can’t be-”

“Why not?” The bartender asks.

“Because why would she pay for my items? Why wouldn’t she just walk into my shop and tell me she’s Hylia and make me give her things for free? Why doesn’t she just create what she needs herself?”

He shrugs. “You prayed for a customer, and a customer She became. If you don’t believe it’s Her, why not pray for Her to tell you who She is? It would be the easiest way to get proof.”

Amik chews his bottom lip. That would…That would be rude of him, wouldn’t it? To accuse his only customer, a woman he thinks of as his friend, to be some goddess only coming into his shop because he made one prayer months ago? And even if she were Hylia, why would she come almost every day? He never prayed for a daily customer, he only prayed for one, just so he could have some pocket change and some excitement during a slow day. He doesn’t want to offend her, and he doesn’t want to call her some kind of liar. He likes her.

“I’ll think about it,” is all he can manage as he leaves the tavern and walks home.

Before he drifts off to sleep, he thinks of the woman in white’s beautiful face and prays, If you really are Hylia, come into the shop and tell me your name. 

—

The next morning, there’s a never-ending line of customers in his shop, the whole village desperate to either see their Goddess in the flesh or see what items have apparently garnered her attention—her rupees—for months. 

Amik has never had to restock his shelves, before, but by noon almost all of the yarn and arrows are gone, and a little girl is begging her mother to let her have a pet beetle. The woman in white, allegedly Hylia, has yet to walk through the door.

“You said She’s usually here by now?” A woman asks as she hands him fifty rupees for a chunk of amber.

“Yes,” he shoves the purple gem into his bulging wallet. He’s going to have to start putting the money in his pockets before it bursts. “I, um, I prayed for her to come and tell me her name last night, and if she doesn’t show that’ll prove everyone wrong, that she isn’t Hylia.”

“Don’t you want Her to be Hylia?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t like the Goddess, what she stands for, what she means for us mortals. I think she’s an excuse we use to justify all of our wrongs.”

“Strange,” his 219th customer of the day—in history—remarks. “Thank you for the amber.”

“Hope to see you again soon!” he calls to her retreating form as she leaves the shop, greeting customer number 220 with a cheerful, “Welcome to ‘Amik’s-”

The bell of the shop’s announces yet another new customer to join the line that’s threatening to spill out the door. The rest of Amik’s sentence dies in his throat.

The woman in white has finally arrived, and there is a sword on her back steaming with black blood.

The blood of monsters, he knows, familiar with the creatures from his hikes that turn into sprints for his life back to civilization. He has plenty of scars on his legs from grazing arrows that bokoblins have fired at him, it’s how he has most of his stock.

A hush falls over his shop at the sight of Her. She locks eyes with him over the bowing heads of his customers and smiles. 

“I am Hylia,” she says in lieu of greeting. “Do you happen to have any medical supplies? I am bleeding and in need of stitches." 

—

He kicks everyone out of his shop and sits her down behind his counter, running into the shelves to get what he’ll need for stitches (two needles and thread, two needles and thread, where the hell does he keep the needles and thread oh there they are-) and coming back to her cleaning the black blood from her sword (she has a sword) with the rag he uses to wipe the dust from the walls. 

“Where are you bleeding?” he asks, searching her white dress for red stains. 

She puts her now-clean sword back on her spine and pushes her long hair off of her left shoulder, tilting her head to the right to stretch the skin of her neck. There, just below her jaw, is a thin, jagged wound that leaks gold. 

Golden blood, he thinks, staring at the fortune dripping down her throat with wide eyes. She…She has golden blood. 

“I was fighting an army of monsters,” she explains, like she’s telling him the weather. “They threatened the safety of my temple. Their Demon King is a foe I have clashed with for centuries, but this morning he finally broke through my guard and got a good hit in on me.”

“You…” Amik swallows. “You can’t just heal yourself?”

“Demise’s blade was made specifically to hurt me, just like my Goddess Sword was specially made to hurt him. If he had used mortal steel I would be unharmed, it would bounce off of me and possibly shatter on contact. Mortal means cannot snuff out an immortal life; only the divine can harm the divine.”

He holds up the two needles. “So how am I supposed to stitch you up? These are, um, mortal needles.”

The woman in white—Hylia, she really is real, she’s Hylia—waves a hand over the tips. They shimmer gold, and she pokes one with her finger, sucking in a breath before showing him a tiny, golden bead of blood on her fingertip. 

“There,” she smiles. “I would do it myself but, like I said yesterday, I’m useless at crochet.”

“So why come to me? I’m not a doctor.”

“You prayed for my presence. I like seeing you each morning.”

Amik readies the needle and thread, his usually steady hands trembling as he prepares to pierce a goddess’s skin. “Why? I just sell you things you could create at the snap of your fingers.”

“You didn’t know who I was. I liked being treated like I was any other mortal, it…it helps me understand what it’s like for all of you, why you all pray to me the way that you do. I find it all so…fascinating. You humans, I made you, yet I know so little about how you truly function.”

The needle sinks into Hylia’s throat. She winces.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “This would be better if I had some kind of potion, but there’s not a lot of manmade medicine to be found in the wilderness, or the ingredients for some.”

“It’s fine,” she breathes, voice tight as he pulls her skin together and seals it shut with a bridge of string. “Pain is a foreign sensation, I need to get used to it.”

“Why?”

She’s quiet. Then, “I should not say.”

He chuckles. “That bad, huh?”

“…I suppose.”

Golden blood stains his fingertips when he wipes a stray strand of her hair out of the way of her wound. It shimmers in the sunlight that spills in from the windows, and he wonders, distantly, how much it would sell for. He blinks away the thought the second he thinks it and instead asks, “Does it have anything to do with that Demise that did this to you? Whatever army he has?”

The Goddess stares at him out of the corner of her blindingly blue eyes. Up this close, they’re kaleidoscopic, her irises spinning in halting shifts like the gears of a ticking clock.

Hylia, he remembers, counting the seconds in the minutiae of her gaze. Goddess of Time. 

“You’re perceptive for a merchant,” she tells him. He’s not sure if it’s a compliment. 

He grins. “It’s what happens when I only have one customer. I spend the rest of the day after selling to you people-watching. I know a lot about my neighbors just from seeing them walk by my shop except for their names. I’m really bad with names, it’s why I never asked for yours before this. I would forget it in a heartbeat, so I don’t ask for names. I never bother to learn them. People are people, and I like watching them.”

She continues staring at him. He watches a minute pass in her pupils, pausing his hands where the stitches are half-done because he is not a doctor so he is slow. She finally orders, “You will promise me that you will say nothing of what I am about to tell you. If you break your promise, I will have no choice but to strike you down.”

His eyes drift to the sword on her spine. He imagines what it would look like sticking out of his chest. “I swear on my shop.”

“Your shop is that important to you?”

He gets back to stitching her up, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. “It is.”

Hylia swallows, and the quick swell of her bobbing throat almost ruins his work. He stops for a moment to collect himself before continuing, listening as she confesses, “With every passing day, Demise gets closer to my temple. It is imperative he does not reach it for a reason I will not tell you, but know that if he were to step foot inside the world as my mothers have created it will come to a bloody, burning end. Despite all of my efforts to beat him back, he grows stronger.”

Amik knows bad news when he hears it. “How long until he invades?”

“I…” she swallows again. “I made a sizable dent in his forces today, but they are never-ending. By next week, I estimate, this village will be overrun by him and his forces of darkness.”

Next week. Seven days. Seven days until death is staring everyone in the face. 

“I should not be telling you this,” she repeats. “But it is difficult to carry this burden on my own. My mothers, the Golden Goddesses, they are deaf to my requests for help or just a listening ear. They are deaf to my prayers, so I try and listen to every one that I receive. I…I am choosing to tell you because you are the only mortal I can trust not to break your word, and because you are wise enough to criticize me for the things I have done wrong.”

He finishes the stitches and pulls away from her, resting the bloodied needles on his counter and wiping her blood off on his pants. “So you heard all of that, what I said last night.”

“My ears are quite sensitive to the sound of my name,” she laughs. “I appreciate your honesty. It keeps me in check, stops me from becoming greedy like my…darker counterpart.”

She gets to her feet, running a finger over the stitches he’s given her. 

“You should be like new in a week or so,” he tells her, joking, “Just in time for your party.”

She laughs again. “Oh, good. I want to look my best for the coming battle. Thank you for your help, Amik. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He blinks and she’s gone.    

—

He does not see her tomorrow. 

There’s another long line in his shop, this time out the door, more people wanting to catch sight of their Goddess, but it takes him the entire day to get through the line and she has yet to make an appearance. 

Amik stays at his shop well into the night, long enough that he starts falling asleep at his counter, and still the bell above the door does not ring to announce her arrival. It never does.

—

At the Temple of Hylia the next morning, before daily devotions, Amik is swarmed with questions.

“Where is the Goddess?”

“Is it true She’s smiled upon you for so long?”

“Is She in love with you?”

“How did you not know it was Her?”

He answers all of them as best as he can:

“I don’t know.”

“Yes? I guess so?”

“No!”

“I didn’t even believe in her until yesterday!”

It does nothing to help his case. The priest asks him to lead the day’s service even though he’s been sleeping through the daily devotions since he was six years old. 

—

Five days later, on the fated seventh day since Hylia told him Demise’s army would attack, the world ends.

Amik is collecting twenty-five rupees for a bundle of wood he’s selling to the goat farmer when a chorus of screams enters his shop through the open door, and a crowd of people run past in the direction of Hylia’s temple.

“Monster attack!” A man yells to Amik and his customer. “The Goddess is fighting them off for us but-”

An arrow lodges in his back and the roaring squeal of bokoblins echoes from down the street.

Amik doesn’t remember much, after that.

(Shock, as it turns out, is one hell of a drug.)

He comes back to himself in the Temple of Hylia, curled in a ball in the corner and hyperventilating. 

“The Goddess is coming to save us,” An old woman is kneeling in front of him, holding his calloused hands in her wrinkled ones, stroking her fingers over his knuckles. She continues, “You’re Her friend, aren’t you? I have no doubt that we’re going to be just fine. She wouldn’t let Her friend die.”

A group is gathered in the temple, at most forty adults and only a handful of older children. Amik doesn’t want to think about what’s happened to the little kids Hylia would play her harp for, doesn’t want to imagine how the rest of the village met their Demise, so he stares resolutely at the old woman’s hands on his own and refuses to look elsewhere.

(He’s never been happier to not know anyone’s names.)

“O’ Goddess, please do everything within your power to keep us safe,” The priest leads them all in prayer in front of the grand doors that lead outside, as close to the Statue of the Goddess as he can be without being outside and actually in front of it. Safe, but devoted, but they aren’t safe they will never be safe because Demise is here- “Please protect us from those that wish to harm us, please-”

CLANG CLANG CLANG.

“There is nothing more you can do!” Hylia’s voice comes from outside, loud through the open windows. “Submit!”

“You too are greatly injured, Hylia,” The voice of death, a voice that can only belong to Demise, responds. Amik tries to imagine what the owner of that awful voice could possibly look like and the pictures in his mind are too grotesque to keep thinking of. He shakes his head to dispel the thoughts. “It is only a matter of time before I kill your precious creations and collect what is mine!”

“You will never have the Triforce if it is the last thing I do-” 

“It will be!”

CLANG CLANG CLA-

A guttural roar. A blinding flash of golden light. Silence. 

Amik thinks of Hylia’s face, of her kaleidoscope eyes and prays, I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die-

“She won,” Someone breathes. “She won!”

“See, child?” The old woman pats his knuckles, smiling. “The Goddess Hylia never-”

The temple shakes with the force of an earthquake, and a storm of rocks crushes the old woman and a sizable amount of the people huddled in worship.

Amik screams, covering his head with his arms and curling into a tighter ball as the temple’s ceiling falls apart. 

I don’t want to die, he continues to pray. I don’t want to die I want to live I want to live a long life I don’t want to die I want to live please let me live-

A chunk of ceiling drops onto his head and shatters on contact with his skull. He does not die. He sits there, curled in on himself, as more and more life-ending boulders fail to kill him, crumbling to dust around him instead of flattening him into a bloody paste.

Amik dares to open his eyes. He nearly passes out when he looks out of a window and sees the Statue of the Goddess break through the clouds and into a clear, empty blue sky.

—

So…his village is in the sky, now. 

A lot of people are dead, but a lot of people are alive, too. He’s the only person to leave what’s left of the temple, standing at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, but a group of survivors comes up the road to meet him, also in search of more villagers. 

“Are you the only one around?” A man at the front of the group asks. He has dark eyes, gray hair, and a square jaw. 

“Y-Yes,” Amik nods, explaining, “There-There were more people in there but-but the ceiling collapsed as we were, um, as we were rising and-”

“The Goddess sent us up here,” he interrupts. “To protect us from those monsters and the Demon King that led them.”

“That part of the temple is completely caved in,” Another man says, squinting at the wreckage of the small piece of the Temple of Hylia that ascended to the heavens with them. “How did you survive?”

“I, uh…” That is the question, isn’t it? Countless chunks of ceiling fell directly on top of his head, and any other day that would probably crack open his skull and leave his brains spilling out on the floor but…none of that happened. Instead, the stone shattered against his skin like glass. “I honestly don’t know. I guess I got lucky.”

“It’s you!” A woman’s voice says, and a familiar face popping up in the otherwise unrecognizable pack of men and women. It’s the barmaid that spoke on that night he was at the tavern, where two now-dead men opened his eyes to the fact that the woman in white was, in fact, the Goddess Hylia. Her tunic is streaked with dirt and dried blood, but her eyes are bright with life as she meets his and exclaims, “Holy Hylia, it really is you! You’re the merchant with the shop on the corner! The one the Goddess smiled upon for months without you even knowing it! You’re the Blessed!”

“My name is Amik,” he weakly corrects. 

“Amik the Blessed, huh?” The first man raises an eyebrow marred by a jagged scar, holding out his hand. “I’m Rast.”

“Rast,” he repeats, shaking the man’s hand. He’s going to forget the name by sunset. “Nice to meet you.”

Everyone else introduces themselves in the same manner, shaking Amik’s hand and speaking their names, but it’s the woman from the tavern’s name that he makes an effort to remember because, up this close, she’s very pretty. 

“My name is Tove,” she says with a smile, offering her hand. Her eyes are brown and her hair is black and she’s possibly the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and he’s seen the Goddess Hylia up close and personal for months. “It’s a pleasure to talk to you for real.”

“Tove,” he echoes, taking it. Tove. Tove. Tove. Tove. “The pleasure is all mine.”

—

He makes dinner for himself later that night, grateful that there’s a hunter amongst the ranks that’s willing to find a meal for everyone. 

When he’s cutting up the rabbit that was decided to be his portion of the meal, he cuts his finger, the knife slicing across his knuckles, the blade digging into his skin, but when he puts the knife down to check the damage there is none.

“Are you all right?!” The woman—Tove—is sitting next to him and apparently saw him hit his finger with the knife. “Are you bleeding, is there any-”

“No,” he tells her, showing her his unharmed hand. “I’m fine.”

She grabs it and checks for herself, rolling her thumbs and stretching the skin of his knuckles.  Amik wonders if she knows how warm her hands are. “It really looked like you got yourself good there.”

“Guess I’m just lucky,” he jokes.

—

He’s helping a man—Rast, Tove is drilling him on everyone’s names, including her own, to try and help him remember them all, and he knows this man is Rast because of the jagged scar across his left eyebrow—gather and burn any remains of the deceased, whether it be human or monster. 

Amik can’t hold back his tears when he finds a mother cradling her two children, and when Rast comes over to see what has him so upset he puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Go tend to the fire, Blessed,” his voice is gentle. “I’ll do this part. This isn’t something for a merchant’s eyes.”

Tend to the fire he does, poking the kindling and logs with a stick in an attempt to keep it alive. When Rast finally rejoins him in the dirt, he asks, “Who were you? Before all of this. I…I’m really bad with names, Tove is helping me with remembering them all, but it means I’m good with faces. I don’t think I’ve ever seen yours. I haven’t seen a lot of the people here, before.”

“We’re from the outskirts, in the same area but not in the same town,” Rast stares into the flames. “We lived off the land, not wanting to rely on your village for resources, but when the monsters attacked we came to help, and then we were flying.”

“And now you’re here,” Amik finishes, “burning the bodies of people you were trying to save.”

The man nods. “It’s not all bad, though. I think it’s fun that we’re floating along up here, I just wonder if we ever have to worry about falling.”

“That…is not something I’ve ever considered.”

“But the Goddess sent us up here, I trust her judgement. If we ever were to fall, She would protect us, especially since you’re here.”

Amik chuckles, shaking his head. “I don’t know why everyone thinks she’s my best friend.”

“She answered your prayers every day for months!”

“Because she’s nice. She’s a goddess,” he holds his hands up to the fire, warming his palms. “That’s like saying this fire would burn because it likes me, too.”

“Then let’s test it,” Rast nods to the fire. “Pray to Her to protect you and see if you burn.”

“Wh-” he gapes at him. Is he crazy? “What?”

“If you’re not her chosen favorite, you’ll get a little burn that’ll go away in couple hours. If you are, you won’t get hurt at all.”

“Rast-”

“If you do it and you get hurt, I’ll stop calling you Blessed.”

It’s stupid. It’s really stupid. Who willingly sticks their hand into a roaring campfire?

Amik willingly sticks his hand into a roaring campfire, bracing himself for an excruciating burn. Instead, the flame’s warmth tickles. His fingers twitch and he stifles a laugh.

“Damn it!” he chuckles, thinking of the mirth in Hylia’s eyes when he found her out. “She really likes me then, huh?”

Rast’s eyes, in contrast, nearly bug out of his head.

“Blessed,” he breathes, gaping at his untouched hand. Holy Hylia. “You’re really fucking Blessed, aren’t you?” 

—

Amik finds Tove later that night sitting with the other women of the survivors—Kastia, Elto, and Palte are the only other names he can remember of the bunch—at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, a small fire illuminating their faces as they laugh, passing around a bottle of what looks like wine.

“Amik!” Tove waves him over, her smile wide and her face flushed from either the heat of the flame or the alcohol. “Come have a drink!”

He sits between her and Kastia, taking whatever mug is offered to him and taking a sip, frowning down at the sloshing liquid when he swallows.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Ale from the tavern that survived the trip up,” Tove flops against him, confirming that she’s definitely had more than a few cups. “Why, you don’t like it?”

“I do like it, I just…” he takes another sip and nope- “I’m the lightest lightweight I know. Usually I’d be feeling it already, but it’s like this is water.”

The women around him laugh. Kastia, her cheeks also rosy, slurs, “Maybe we’re lighter than you!”

“Just drink it,” Tove encourages, pushing the bottom of the mug up to his face so his lips are forced to wrap around the rim. “You’ll feel it eventually!”

Amik sputters, laughing as he shoves the mug back into her hands. “Relax! Let me pace myself before I fall into the fire!”

She just grins, hiccuping, and downs the rest of her drink. “Suit yourself, Blessed.”

He can only roll his eyes goodnaturedly. I guess it’s time I get used to that.

—

The next morning, he brings a canteen of water and a hearty breakfast to Tove’s tent, laughing when she chucks a shoe at his head for waking her up “so early”.

In the afternoon, when she finally rolls out of her tent, she apologizes by making an extra sandwich for him when she puts together a very late lunch/early dinner.

—

A cold spreads through their group of survivors, leaving a majority bed-ridden with exhaustion and a nasty cough while the rest are ailed with pounding headaches. 

Amik is the only one who has yet to get any sort of symptoms, even though just yesterday he was inches from Tove’s rattling coughing fit while he took her temperature with the back of his hand. 

“Here,” he takes turns spooning chicken soup into her and Rast’s mouths despite the older man’s protests that he can still feed himself and Tove’s insistence that she’s fine. “Both of you are as stubborn as a bokoblin. You’re not secretly related, are you?”

“Hope not,” Tove rasps with a tired grin, knocking her drooping head into Rast’s shoulder, “I don’t think I’d survive up here if he were my father.”

“Likewise,” he weakly retorts, coughing a laugh. 

Tove’s laughter also devolves into a cough, and Amik is firm in shoving another spoonful of soup into their mouths and ordering them to get some sleep. 

—

“Your immune system must be Blessed, too,” Kastia says a week later, after everyone has bounced back from the short-lived plague, helping him wash his clothes in the river, “It’s a miracle you didn’t get sick and were able to help the rest of us get back on our feet.”

He only shrugs. “I’m just happy to help.”

“You know,” Kastia bumps him with her hip, a sly smile on her face, “Tove was telling me all about you the other day.”

“What about me?” he wrings out a dripping tunic and tosses it in the basket they’re using for clean clothes.

“Oh, just the usual. That she thinks you’re kind, funny,” she hands him trousers stained with mud, “handsome.”

Amik stares at the woman, the legs of the trousers dipping into the babbling water. Tove said that about him? “That’s…That’s nice of her.”

Is it getting warmer, all of a sudden? Has he finally been struck with the sickness and he’s getting a fever? What is he-

Kastia laughs. “Careful, Blessed, if you think too much your mind will melt.”

—

To thank her for her kind words, he picks Tove some flowers he saw her eyeing on their daily walks through the woods. 

“Here,” he hands her the self-made bouquet at dinner that night. A hush falls over her conversation with Kastia and Rast. “I, um…Here.”

Tove stares up at him, then, taking the flowers and cradling them like they’re fine jewels. “Thank you, Amik.”

(Out of the corner of his eye, Rast elbows Kastia and Kastia elbows him back.)

—

The next morning, preparing breakfast with Rast, Amik wonders aloud, “Does everyone think Tove is the prettiest woman here, or is it just me?” 

Rast, in response, whacks him upside the head and says, “You’re as dumb as she is.”

“What do you mean?”

The older man shakes his head and mutters, “Children.” 

—

His house apparently didn’t make the cut for being a part of this chunk of land Hylia sent to the sky, but his shop is still intact. It takes him and Tove two months to find it through all of the fallen trees, destroyed roads, and altogether missing landmarks that would otherwise make navigating the new version of their village much easier.  

“You’re happier about your shop surviving than your house?” Tove asks, leaning against the counter and watching him check the shelves.

“The house is a house, it can be replaced,” Amik traces his fingers over his collection of gems, the amber twinkling and the emeralds shining. “My shop is priceless. If anything ever happened to it, I would be ruined. And I wouldn’t be able to get another house.”

She laughs, and if he could bottle the sound he would sell it for a fortune. “You know, you’re actually pretty smart for a merchant.”

“Why does everyone say stuff like that?” he moves on to the next shelf, looking at himself in one of his many mirrors for sale. His brown curls clump together, and he has more freckles than usual from being outside so much, helping the rest of the survivors clean up the damage that Demise’s army left in its wake. “Merchants are hardworking people! I’m a hardworking man!”

“Hardworking, sure, but merchants are rarely as intelligent as you are. They tend to care more about making a quick buck than doing any kind of real business.”

“Rupees are rupees,” he wipes a smudge of dirt from the bridge of his nose, leaning in close to his own reflection to check that it’s all gone. “I think-”

The rest of his sentence dies.

“You think what?” Tove’s voice is closer, now, she’s walked towards the shelf he’s in- “Amik?”

“Um,” his voice cracks and he swallows, clearing his throat, continuing to stare at himself in the mirror. He switches to another one to double-check, and- “Can you come here a second, actually?” 

She’s by his side in an instant. “What is it?”

He looks into her eyes. “What do my eyes look like?”

She frowns, her eyebrows furrowing together. “Your eyes are brown?”

“No, but-but look at them, really look at them,” he leans in close to her face, so close that when he speaks, his lips are a hair’s width from hers. It’s how close he was to Hylia when he stitched up her wound, when he looked at her eyes and counted the next minute of his life in her pupils. “What do you see?”

A minute passes in silence. Is Tove counting it, too? Does she see what he sees? Can she see how his eyes are a clock, how his pupils tick tick tick the seconds away and how his irises shift when the minute comes and goes? Does she know that it’s exactly five twenty-six in the evening, that now it’s five twenty-seven, and that her heart is pounding so fast he’s afraid it’s going to pop? Does she know that blood is rushing to her cheeks, turning them red, that she’s starting to look at his mouth instead of meeting his gaze?

Hylia give me strength, her voice echoes in his head in the cadence of a thought, and it’s the nail in a coffin that Amik will never be buried in.  

It’s no wonder he wasn’t crushed to death when the part of the Temple of Hylia he was sheltering in rose into the heavens. It explains why the chunks of ceiling disintegrated around him, why that knife never cut him, and why the fire never burned.

“Never mind,” he shakes his head but doesn’t pull away from her face. He’ll back off when she does. “I guess I’m just seeing things, then.”

Only the divine can harm the divine.

The question now is How? Why? Does anyone else know, is there a way for him to-

Tove kisses him, then, and he can’t be blamed for losing his train of thought. 

—

He has Hylia’s eyes. He has Hylia’s eyes and he can hear people’s thoughts when they think her name and nothing can harm him- 

Tove shifts in his arms, rolling over and settling her head on his shoulder. Quiet snores rumble from her barely-open mouth, and he pulls the blanket up to cover her bare chest.

(She had dragged him from his shop all the way back to her tent and they had…gotten really close. Now that she’s fallen asleep and he can’t seem to, he can actually think about his current predicament.)

If he has Hylia’s eyes, if he can hear prayers meant for her and he can’t be harmed by fire or get sick or fall asleep, then he’s more than just Blessed, right? He’s more than the Goddess’s chosen?

But what is he, then, if he’s more than that? He’s just…He’s just a guy, just some merchant who just so happened to sell yarn to a Goddess. He’s not…He’s not worthy of anything, he’s not important, so why…

Why is he the new Hylia?

Because that’s the only answer, isn’t it, that the Goddess passed her divinity on to him? Why would she do that? He never asked for it, he never prayed to her and-  

But he did, didn’t he? When the monsters attacked and the Temple of Hylia was crumbling around him, he had curled into a ball and prayed, I don’t want to die I want to live I want to live a long life I don’t want to die I want to live please let me live-

And then the ceiling had caved in and no harm had come to him, the stone instead shattering against his skin, knives didn’t cut him, instead gliding across his knuckles, and fire didn’t burn, instead tickling his palms. 

You prayed for my presence, Hylia had explained back in his shop, back when the village was on the surface and not in the sky. I like seeing you each morning.

Oh.

“Shit,” he breathes into the dark.

—

Rast dubs their floating village ‘Skyloft’ over a lunch of nuts and berries. 

“Skyloft?” Tove repeats with a frown, popping a blueberry into her mouth, “How did you come up with that?”

He shrugs, peeling the tops from a handful of acorns and roasting them over the fire. “Why not? We’re in the sky, and we’re very aloft. What do you think, Blessed?”

Amik, finding that over these past months his appetite has been dwindling and disappearing as a whole, shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter much to me. As long as I can call it home.”

I think I’m a god, lives on the tip of his tongue. I think I’m a god and I think Hylia made me that way and I don’t know what to do. 

“Try this,” Tove holds a blueberry to his lips. “They’re so sweet!”

“Yeah,” he frowns down at it. “It’s a blueberry.”

I think I’m a god and I think Hylia made me that way and I don’t know what to do. I need you to tell me what to do. 

“You’ve had these before?!”

“You haven’t?”

Rast rolls his eyes. Hylia help me, he thinks. “I guess we’re fine with calling this place Skyloft, then?”

“Where would I have these, Amik?”

“We practically live in the woods! They’re everywhere!”

I need you to tell me what to do. What do I do? 

Rast sighs. “Skyloft it is.”

—

Goddess, A man prays, please let my crops grow.

Goddess, A woman begs, please protect my son.

Goddess, A chorus sings, please bless our island with prosperity.

Amik shakes his head and goes back to counting rupees. 

—

“I love you,” he tells Tove, in the middle of the night when he think she’s asleep.

“Love you, too,” she mumbles back.

He goes rigid. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

She presses her lips to his shoulder. “Does that change anything?”

He presses his to her forehead. “Not at all.”

—

Skyloft has become a full-fledged village, the only remnants of Demise’s invasion the memories the people share over drinks. Buildings are repaired, houses are built, bridges connect each part of the land, and Rast single-handedly puts together a Knight Academy.

“So we’re prepared for another attack,” he explains, proposing the idea.

“We’re in the sky,” Tove argues. “What do you think is going to attack us, the birds?”

“We have no Goddess here, and She’s the only reason we survived down there. Without her around, we need to take the matter into our own hands.”

“We need laws, too,” Kastia inputs. “People to uphold them.”

The Knight Academy is built in two weeks.

The next day, Amik proposes a bazaar.

“A place for entertainment,” he says. “A center-point of the islands, so if you ever get lost you can find your way back. We can even open more shops!”

“Because yours is overflowing?” Tove nudges his shoulder.

“What are you thinking?” Kastia asks. “Another building? I don’t know how much land there is left to-”

“Why not a tent, then?” he decides. “Something bright, eye-catching. I have plenty of fabric stocked up from torn clothes.”

The bazaar, a massive purple tent, is set up in three days.

“I can move my shop in here,” Amik says, his hands on his hips as he admires the newest addition to the village, “And the old one can be storage space.”

Rast, hoisting logs and a bag of tools over his shoulder, pants, “Then you can build all of the shelves.”

—

Amik doesn’t need to sleep anymore, so he does, in fact, build all of the shelves for his new shop, done just in time to slip into Tove’s bed so she wakes up in his arms.

“Good morning,” he greets her sleepy face with a kiss.

“Good morning,” she yawns back, resting her head on his chest and wrinkling her nose. “You smell like wood.”  

“I was building my shelves.”

Tove picks her head up, squinting at him. “What?”

He grins. 

—

“The Goddess has abandoned us!” An old woman cries to a group of villagers at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, preaching to anyone who will listen. “She hasn’t answered any of our prayers, She hasn’t shown her face, She is gone just like everyone else on the surface! We are alone up here!”

“I prayed for my crops to survive the harvest and they withered within the week,” A farmer laments.

A grieving mother sobs, “My son fell ill and passed on. I-I prayed for Her to help and still he died-” 

“Our island is aimless,” The old woman continues, turning to face the Statue of the Goddess and craning her wrinkled neck to meet her blank stone eyes. “We keep building and building but to what end? What happens when we run out of land? What happens when there are too many people? The Goddess is meant to provide us the answers, but what do we do when our questions fall on deaf ears?”

Amik bows his head and passes through the crowd, ignoring the way his ears ring with their unanswered prayers. 

—

In private, usually when Skyloft is sleeping, he tests himself, pushing the limits of his supposed immortality.

He doesn’t need to sleep anymore. He doesn’t need to eat. He doesn’t need to drink water. Blades still don’t pierce his skin, fire still doesn’t burn, and a careful, careful test ensures that he can’t die from drowning, large falls, or poison.  

(The last test in terms of his supposed immortality is if he ages, but that’s going to take a long time to confirm or deny.)

He’s able to lift insanely heavy objects, like giant boulders blocking roads from construction, and able to run so fast that he can weave through a downpour and not get a single drop of water on his body. He can hear women gossip about their husbands on the other side of Skyloft and the rapid little heartbeat of the fly that buzzes around his head. 

The scariest ability he discovers when he’s sitting by one of Skyloft’s secluded ponds, feeding the ducks. 

A duckling floats over to him, nudging his hand for more bread.

“I gave the rest to your mother, little friend,” he whispers to it. 

The duckling “quacks!” and stares at him as if to complain. Amik stares back, leaning in close to the animal’s face, close enough that all he can see of his reflection in the duckling’s eyes is his own, his pupils tick tick tick-ing in time.

“See,” he pulls back to roll his neck, “If you were a little older you wouldn’t-”

“Quack!”

Amik startles, scrabbling back from the edge of the pond.

The duckling is a duck. A fully-grown, adult duck that looks exactly like its quacking mother. 

It just…Did he…?

Hylia, Goddess of Time.

He leans into the not-duckling again, getting so close that the reflection of his eyes eclipses theirs. 

“Younger,” he whispers. “Go back to being a baby.”

His pupils tick tick tick-

“quack!”

Amik pulls away and can’t help the relieved, shaky laughter that leaves his lips. 

It’s a duckling again, flapping its little wings and begging for more bread.

He refuses to look anyone in the eye for weeks. 

—

Two years go by. 

Young children toddle the streets, followed by their terrified parents, and Amik practically lives in the bazaar. 

One day, Tove struts up to his counter and greets him with, “I want to sell you something.”

“Oh?” Amik perks up, leaning across the counter. “What is it?”

“A life with me.”

He stares at her. “What?”

“A life with me,” she repeats, grinning. “We’ll live together permanently, doing what we’re doing now until death do us part. Because I love you and you love me.”

“I…don’t understand,” he frowns. I don’t know if I’ll die. “What are you selling me?”

“Goddesses, Amik,” she laughs, leaning over the counter to kiss him on the lips, “I want you to marry me, silly. What do you say? Deal or no deal?” 

Oh.

(She wants to marry him?) 

Oh.

(She wants to marry him. Is Hylia allowed to get married?)

Oh.

(He should probably tell her, right? If she’s going to be his wife? He doesn’t want to lie to his wife.)

“Um,” he manages, very intelligently, “Before I say yes, I need to tell you something. And show you, I guess. Promise me you won’t freak out?”

“Okay,” her joy morphs to a quizzical confusion, and she tilts her head when he comes out from behind the counter, takes her hand, and leads her out of the bazaar. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere we can be alone.”  

—

Tove’s reaction, of course, is perfectly normal when he takes her to the duck pond and drowns himself.

She screams, first, and then tries to yank him out of the water, but Amik has the strength of the gods and refuses to budge. She then resorts to smacking him in an attempt to get him to come up for air and yells for help, but the pond is far enough away from the central, bustling village that no one can hear her. 

(It is, after all, why he chose this spot.)

When enough time passes that he should be dead, Amik pulls his head out of the water. “See? I’m fine!”

He almost wishes he could feel the sting of her slap across his face before she pulls him in and kisses him.

“Are you insane?” she screeches against his mouth, tears in her eyes, “I thought you were dead!” 

“That’s the point!” he pulls away just enough to explain himself, shoving his dripping hair out of his face, “I can’t die!”

“What?!”

—

“No one else knows about this?” she asks, sitting next to him in front of the pond.

He shakes his head, curling in on himself. “I was scared I was going crazy, but I know for sure, now. I don’t want to tell anyone else.”

“Not even Rast or Kastia?”

Again, he shakes his head. “Just you. If we’re going to be together, I needed you to know that I’m not sure if I’ll get older. I-” his voice breaks and his vision blurs and he chokes, “I don’t even know if I can still have children.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she assures, gentle, pulling him into a hug. “Children or no children, I’ll be happy as long as I’m with you.”

“Are you sure?” he leans his head on her shoulder, gripping her hands. He sniffles, “You still want to marry me?”

“For better or worse, right?” she jokes, smiling. “In my opinion, this is better. Means I don’t have to worry whenever you go off somewhere with Rast.”

Thank Hylia he can’t get himself stabbed, she prays. 

He chuckles. “I heard that.” 

She laughs, too. “Goddesses, I’m going to have to get used to that.”

—

They get married one month later, a quick ceremony in the bazaar.

Rast officiates, and he later insists that he didn’t cry when Tove asked him to dance.

Amik cried, though. He cried practically the whole night. 

—

He asks her if she can see his eyes.

Please, he thinks, watching another minute of their life together pass in the reflection of her pupils, Please.

“They’re brown,” her eyebrows furrow. “You’ve asked me this before, haven’t you?”

He sighs. “Yes. I was checking something.”

“Checking what?”

He tells her, then, about the day Hylia came to his shop on the surface, how he stitched up a divine wound and saw her face up close and watched time pass in her gaze, how his eyes are the same now that her power is his.

“I’m sorry, Amik,” Tove shakes her head, staring into his eyes, “I can’t see them.”

—

Loftwings are…a development. 

They first appear three months after Amik and Tove tie the knot, a whole flock landing just outside the Knight Academy where Rast is whipping recruits into shape, and each chooses a rider by hopping over to a person and gently pecking their chest. 

It’s Rast, again, who comes up with a name.

“Loftwing,” he says, stroking his giant bird that’s the same color as his silver hair, “That’s what we’ll call them.”

A red one hobbles over to Amik and pecks his hand. A purple one finds Tove. 

“What if we rode them like horses?” she asks. “They’re big enough. We’d be able to explore the skies, see if any other settlements rose up like ours.”

“This was the only settlement for days,” Rast replies, “but I agree that we shouldn’t be confined to these islands. We could even settle further out if there’s more land floating around, that way the future generations won’t all be stuck here.”

“I can test riding them,” Amik volunteers, sharing a look with Tove.

She nods, endorsing, “He’s very good with animals.”  

—

Flying Loftwings is fun when you know you can’t die. 

Flinging himself off of the edge of Skyloft? Easy. Trusting this giant bird to catch him? Even easier. 

Amik collides with the makeshift saddle they strapped to his Loftwing and whoops when it caws, soaring into the air. 

Down on Skyloft, Rast throws his hands into the air in celebration and Tove cheers. 

—

A drawback of the birds is that they won’t fly at night. 

We’ll have to train them out of it, Amik thinks, stroking the beak of his Loftwing after it freaked out refusing to flap its wings in the dark. Poor things. 

—

When Rast asks him to teach the Knight Academy how to fly, he’s more than happy to help.

“They’ll survey the skies for us,” The older man explains. “Gives them something to do other than run sword drills.”

—

The surveying knights report back that there are more floating islands other than Skyloft, but that they aren’t big enough to support more than one building each.

“We’ll have to pick who’s allowed to go and live out there,” Kastia decides. “Drawing lots, maybe?”

“Whoever wants to can go,” Amik shrugs. “I think the islands should be up for grabs for whoever gets there first.”

“First come first serve,” Rast rubs his chin, then nods. “All right. I’ll let everyone know.”

Tove says, her face lighting up, “I think Nak—The pumpkin farmer?—was talking about wanting to open an inn of some kind, but there’s no need for one here. His place can be a rest stop for Loftwing riders!”

—

Three years pass. 

His house with Tove is a real, bonafide home, and Skyloft is thriving.

Tove sits him down at their dining room table and clasps his hands in hers. She says, “I have to tell you something.”

“Okay,” he nods, squeezing her fingers. “What is it?”

She smiles so wide the corners of her shining eyes wrinkle. It’s the first sign of age in her he’s seen, and a look in the mirror confirms that he still looks the same as he did five years ago. She tells him, “I’m pregnant.”  

Amik opens his mouth, then closes it. He does it again. He manages a quiet, awestruck, “What?”

“I’m very late,” she adds, her voice shaking, “Which I never am, and remember how last night I asked for you to boil tree bark for dinner? Kastia said that’s what her sister asked for when she was with child. My sudden dizzy spells in the morning only confirms-”

“You’re pregnant,” he breathes, his vision blurring with happy tears. 

She nods, laughing, “I’m pregnant!” 

—

“It’s going to be a boy,” Kastia guesses over a celebratory lunch at the bazaar.

Rast shakes his head, taking a sip of his water. “It’s going to be a girl.”

“I don’t care what it is,” Amik tells them, grinning. “As long as it’s healthy.” 

Tove nudges his shoulder. “I think it’s going to be a boy.”

—

“Please let this go smoothly,” Tove whispers in his ear when they’re laying in bed.

“What are you talking about?” he whispers back, rolling over to face her. 

“I’m praying for an easy pregnancy,” she kisses his cheek, cupping his face and stroking her thumb back and forth over it. “If you’re going to hear me anyways, I might as well say it out loud.”

“I…” he glances down at her stomach. “You know I can’t do anything about that. I don’t know how. I don’t want to know.”

“I know,” she smiles. “I just wanted to pray. It feels much better when you know for a fact that you’re being heard, to know that someone is actually listening.” 

Please, Goddess, A voice rings in his ears, I need to know you’re there. I don’t want to be alone anymore.  

—

It hits him in the middle of the night, four months into Tove’s pregnancy. 

His child is going to be born, and his child is going to age, is going to learn to walk and talk and run and scream and love and hate and cry, and he’s going to stay the same. 

His child is going to grow up, and his child is going to, at the age of thirty-six, be older than him. His child is going to…going to die and he will have to live on in a world without them.  

Amik looks down at Tove’s sleeping face, at the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, and realizes that she’s going to die someday, too. Before their child. 

(Is this why Hylia never had children of her own? Why she created a whole species to watch over instead?)

He places a hand over Tove’s rounded stomach and bites his lip to keep from crying.

—

Five months later, Tove gives birth to a healthy baby boy. 

They name him Rama, after Amik’s mother, and when Amik holds him for the first time his hands shake.

(His strength…what if he presses too hard and crushes him?)

“It’s okay, Amik,” Tove whispers, smiling up at him, her hair matted to her face with sweat, “You’re not going to hurt him.”

“I never will,” he breathes to the little life bundled in his arms. “I’ll never hurt you.”

Rama—his son—finally bursts into his first fit of tears, squirming in Amik’s hands, and he can only laugh as he cradles the child in his elbow and rocks him back to calm. 

—

Nights become a lot less boring with a newborn in the house. 

Amik is up and in the nursery seconds before his son starts to wail, picking him up and soothing him back to sleep. When he slips back into bed, Tove is still fast asleep, none the wiser to his excellent parenting. 

Three nights later, when he’s about to get up to soothe the baby again, she places a hand on his chest to keep him lying beneath the blankets and sits up with a yawn. 

“Let me get him once in a while,” she mumbles, rubbing at her eyes. 

“You should be resting,” he tells her, grabbing her arm before she can stumble out of bed. “I don’t need to sleep, I can-”

Rama howls from down the hall.

“I’m his parent, too,” she leans over and pecks him on the lips, her warm gaze bleary. “Let me help with this part.”

Frowning, Amik watches her go, waiting patiently for her return. When she does, she’s back to sleep before her head even hits the pillow. 

(He resolves himself to sitting outside Rama’s door, at the ready to come to his aid.)

—

Rama’s first attempt at speech is a pleading, “Apa,” after Amik dangles a stuffed Loftwing just over his little hands. 

“Apa?” Amik asks, trying to encourage the sound, “Is that me? Papa?”

“Apa,” Rama babbles, reaching in vain for his toy, “Apa!”

“What is he saying?!” Tove calls excitedly from the kitchen. “What-”

“I think he’s trying to say ‘Papa’!” Amik calls back, cooing, “Come on, little one: Papa. Pa-pa.”

“Apa!”

—

It happens like this:

Amik is acting as a sparring partner for the about-to-graduate Knight Academy members, under Rast’s watchful—albeit aging—eye, when the young knight he’s sparring against trips over his own two feet and his sword veers to the right, sliding past Amik’s guarding blade and tearing through his tunic and CLANG-ing against his chest like it’s colliding with a wall of steel instead of running him through and ending his life.

Everything stops. The room goes silent. The CLANG echoes through the tense air. 

“Um,” Amik swallows. Clears his throat. Drops his sword to the floor. “Um.”

“Everyone clear out,” Rast orders, approaching the middle of the room to stand by his side. “You’re all dismissed.”

The knights don’t move, all gaping at the hole in his shirt and the unmarred skin of his chest. 

“Now!” Rast yells.

They stumble out, tripping over themselves to try and keep looking at Amik. 

Amik, who stammers, “Rast, I-I don’t-I just-Isn’t it funny that-”

Rast turns on him and grabs his shoulders, his expression serious when he lowly demands, “Tell me everything right now.”

He motions to the floor. “You’re going to want to sit for this.”

The older man looks him up and down. “We’ll go to my office.”

—

Rast’s office is on the top floor of the academy, a large room filled with books and a wooden desk. 

Rast sits in his large chair and Amik stays standing.

“It’s the most privacy we’re going to get,” Rast tells him, crossing his arms, “How-”

“I’m Hylia,” he blurts. 

His friend stares at him.

“Well, I’m not Hylia, it’s not like she turned into me or something, I-I’m still me, I just-I have her powers? I’m really fast and really strong, I can hear things from super far away, and when people pray to her I hear it all instead. Also my eyes are clocks? Because Hylia is—was? She’s not dead I don’t think, but she’s also not here—the Goddess of Time? Can you see them, by the way, the clocks?” 

Rast shakes his head, saying nothing.  

“A-Anyways, I can make living things older or younger by looking them in the eye and I’m not aging and I can’t be killed by mortal stuff, so that’s why I didn’t die when that recruit tripped and accidentally stabbed me and please say something so I can shut up. Please?”

Rast continues to stare. He uncrosses his arms and leans forward on his desk. He says, very quietly, “Does Tove know?”

Amik nods. “I told her before we got married.”

“Does anyone else?”

He shakes his head. “Just her. And you, now.”

“Amik, why didn’t you tell me? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are!” he’s quick to reassure, “It’s just-I don’t know. I thought I was going crazy while I was figuring everything out, and everyone kept calling me Blessed and that seemed to make it all true, and I just…I don’t know. I was scared. I didn’t want people looking at me any more than they already do. But now…”

“Now those kids are probably telling everyone they see,” Rast sighs, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m betting everyone will know by nightfall.”

“I’m sorry, Rast, I really am, I-”

“I understand,” his friend opens his eyes and gives him a wry smile. “It’s no wonder that fire never burned you, huh?”

It takes him a second to remember, but when he does he laughs. “Yeah, I guess so.”

—

"I'm sure it's fine," Tove tells him that night when he explains what happened, bouncing Rama in her arms as he hiccups through exhausted, refusing-to-sleep tears.

"I don't know about that,” Amik shakes his head, pacing back and forth in their living room, “The knights are-They’re kids, and Rast said they’ve probably told everyone and-”

“What do you think they’re going to do?”

“That’s the thing, Tove, I don’t know-”

There’s a knock on their front door. They go silent. 

Another knock, harder this time.

“Open up!” A man’s voice roars. 

They lock eyes. Amik tiptoes to the window and pushes the corner of the curtain aside, peeking out and sucking in a breath through his teeth. 

There is a mob of people just outside of their front door, armed with torches and farming hoes and swords and books of Hylia. 

Pounding on the door. "Open the fucking door, Blessed!"

"Amik," Tove pulls him back from the window, her voice shaking. Rama's fingers tangle in her long hair, tugging on the few gray streaks that have started to appear over the years. "What do we do?"

“Take Rama into the nursery,” he whispers. “Barricade the door with his crib. I'll talk to them.”

“What? Amik-” 

“Tove,” he grabs her shoulders, ignoring the way his son tries to ask for his attention. He can have all of Amik’s attention when the mob leaves their property. “Please, go. I’ll be right back.”

She kisses him. “Just be careful. I know you’ll be fine, but those people out there-”

“It’s like you said,” he smiles. “I’ll be fine.”

The second Amik opens his front door he’s met with a chorus of angry yelling, a cacophony of, “What are you?” and, “Tell us what you’ve done to the Goddess!” and, “You liar!”

“What is the meaning of this?” he shouts over the noise. “What business do you all have with my family?”

“Not your family, Blessed,” A large, burly man at the front of the crowd growls, a thick beard on his face and a snarl twisting his lips, “Just you. The knights were telling us that a sword didn’t pierce you.”

Amik recognizes him as the blacksmith that started working across from him at the bazaar. He always smiled and waved to him each morning, talking with him about Tove and Rama while waiting for the forge to warm. 

“Give me your hand,” The blacksmith orders, pulling a knife from his belt. “We want to see for ourselves.”

Amik looks back over his shoulder, listening for Tove and hearing her heartbeat and gentle soothings of Rama’s distressed whimpers coming from the nursery. He turns his attention back to the blacksmith and steps out onto his front porch, locking the door before closing it behind himself. He offers his hand. 

The mob holds its collective breath as the blacksmith approaches and slices the tip of the knife across his outstretched fingers. The blade skids and skips over his skin, the metal sparking as it shings down over his palm to the tendon of his wrist. He feels no pain, only the distant heat of the friction of the knife against his invulnerable body and the shock wafting out from the gasping mouths of his fellow Skyloftians, the fear that permeates them in the aftermath when the ringing of the reverberating metal ceases once the blacksmith puts the knife back on his belt.

“So it’s true, then,” The man breathes, staring at Amik’s unblemished skin with wide eyes. “You’re…”

“What did you do to Her?” The old woman who was preaching at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess pushes her way to the front of the whispering crowd. “What did you do to the Goddess?”

“I don’t know what you mean, miss,” Amik shakes his head. “If you’re insinuating that I’ve done something to harm her-”

“Of course you have! How else do you have Her eyes?”

He sucks in a breath, stepping off his porch towards her, ignoring the way the mob steps back. “You can see my eyes? The-The clocks?” 

“I used to be a priestess, child,” The old woman straightens her spine, haughty. “I spent every day of my youth with the Goddess Hylia. I know Her eyes when I see them. How did you acquire them?”

He explains everything, then, how on the day Demise’s army of monsters attacked he prayed to not die and then the ceiling of the Temple of Hylia caved in and the stone didn’t crush him, how fire didn’t burn and knives didn’t pierce his skin and how he’s not aging, how his eyes are clocks and that he has no idea where Hylia is. 

“The last I saw of her she was fighting the Demon King,” he tells the old woman, the old priestess- “and then we were flying. I don’t know what it means, but I-I can hear all of your prayers when you pray to her, I can-”

“You what?” The old woman staggers back, raising a hand to her chest. “You could hear our prayers this entire time?”    

“Yes,” he nods, laughing, “It’s—It’s insane, I know it is, but-”

The blacksmith says, his voice dangerously soft, “You could hear us this whole time, these past five years, begging the Goddess for help? And you did nothing?”

The mob murmurs. The torches bob.

“What?” Amik stares at the man. “What did you want me to do? I don’t know how to farm, I-I can’t heal illnesses, I can barely even figure out how to raise my son! You expect me to abandon my job as a father to-to what, do everything for you?”

“The Goddess is meant to protect us,” The old woman projects her voice, turning her back on him to face the crowd that appears to be growing larger and larger by the minute. Is that Kastia, in the far back? Is that Rast right behind her? “She is meant to perform miracles meant to help us, She is meant to help us prosper. It is under Her guidance that we as a species of life have lasted this long, it is because of Her that we even have Skyloft! It is because of Her that this man, this merchant, stands before us Blessed with Her divine gifts, but it is because of him that we stumble. It is because of him that the crops are dying, that sickness is killing our children, that we are running out of space to build-”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Amik shouts, storming up and grabbing her by the shoulder, forcing her to face him. He glowers at her, arguing, “It’s not my fault you people don’t know how to take care of yourselves, that all you’ve done is rely on someone else to survive. You may see me as Blessed, but I see myself as no more than a merchant trying to make a living for my family, one that just so happened to have the Goddess as a customer.”

The old woman’s mouth twitches, her bright blue eyes gleaming as she wrenches herself out of his grip and continues, like he never spoke, “This man is a liar! He is a liar who has used the name of our Goddess to thrive on our island, and he is not one of us!”

Inside the house, Tove whispers to their wailing son, It’s all right, sweetheart, Papa will be right back. He’s just talking to the people outside, he’ll be back soon. 

“Please,” he begs, grabbing the old woman again, “Please, stop. My wife and son are inside, they need me-”

“We needed you, too!” A farmer yells. “We needed the Goddess!”

“You made us think She abandoned us!” Another raises his fist, yanking a torch out of someone else’s hands. “You insulted Her name!”

The mob pushes forward, and Amik guides them away from his house, moving himself off of his property and backing away from it. He leads the chorus of angry shouting and demands for his head all the way down the road and to one of the bridges connecting the mainland to an outer island, nothing but the clouds below.

That’s far enough away, he thinks. They won’t come closer if they think they’ll fall. It’s dark, the Loftwings are still scared to fly at night. 

Led by the old woman, the mob comes closer. Amik backs up again, but they crowd him until he’s standing at the edge of the bridge, the endless sky at his back and the clouds at his feet.

“What-What are you guys doing?” he stammers, his heart pounding. He raises his hands to try and push them back so he has space to stand. “I’m gonna lose my balance-”

“Pray for help, then,” The old woman practically spits in his direction. “See if She answers you.”

“I don’t-” his back foot meets the open air, and he windmills his arms to stay upright. “Are you guys serious?! I have a family!”

“Amik!” Rast’s voice. “Amik, hang on!”

“It’s repentance for all of us,” she says. “Maybe this way, She will answer us again.”

He’s hedged back again and his feet meet the air and he tips backwards-

“No!” he swipes his hands at nothing, looking for a handhold- “Please!”

“Amik!” Rast bursts through the mob, surging forward, holding out his hand. 

Amik reaches and-

His fingertips brush against Rast’s and then he’s too far gone, falling off of the edge of Skyloft and plummeting through the clouds.  

(He can still hear his baby crying.)

—

He wakes up underwater.

It takes him a second to remember, exactly, why he’s underwater, but when he does, when he remembers, I fell off of Skyloft, he swims as fast as he can to the surface of whatever pond or lake he’s landed in. 

Please be close to a village, he thinks. Please be close to a-

His head breaks the surface of the water and he’s gasping into fresh, salty air, and-

He’s in the middle of the ocean. 

He whistles for his Loftwing, staring up at the cloudless sky, and when his bird doesn’t come he whistles again, as loud as he can. 

There is no familiar caw, no flap of wings, no help coming to bring him back to the sky. 

The ocean, he thinks, trying to remember what that means, trying to remember what’s around from the maps he glanced at years ago when he was in school as a child. The ocean means-

“Lanayru,” he says to himself, treading water. The closest land is- “The Temple of Time.”

(He’s only ever heard about the Temple of Time, doesn’t know anything else about it except for the fact that it’s for some reason in the middle of the Lanayru sea.)

People are bound to be there, right? Worshiping the Goddess of Time? Especially if Hylia won against Demise. Maybe she’s there, too, and she can answer all of his questions and take her powers back and send him home to Tove and Rama. It’s going to be that easy. It will be that easy. 

Amik closes his eyes and listens. 

Two faint heartbeats, but no voices.

(Is he too far away? Are there really limitations to the extent of the Goddess’s divinity? If all he can hear of Tove and Rama are their heartbeats, how is he supposed to know what’s happening up on Skyloft?)

O Goddess, A girl’s voice, coming from the south. I kneel before you today asking for your Blessing-

He opens his eyes, turns in the direction of the prayer, and gets to swimming. 

—

It takes him three days to reach the shore of an island that’s home to a small city made of marble, watched over by a gigantic temple topped with Hylia’s crest. The sun has barely risen, yet the streets are bustling with white-haired, red-eyed people robed in black. 

Amik wonders how they aren’t sweating at all in this heat, then remembers that he hasn’t been affected by the temperature of the weather in years. And that he’s soaking wet, water dripping from his torn tunic and squishing in his soggy sandals. 

He stumbles in the direction of the giant temple, guessing it’s the Temple of Time, ignoring the strange looks he gets from passing villagers and the whispers that vibrate in his sensitive ears. 

I’ve never seen him before.

His clothes are so strange.  

Is he from the north? 

Did he swim here?

O Goddess, A new prayer echoes in his head, this time the voice of a man, I kneel before you today asking for your Blessing in these upcoming trials-

As he walks, Amik closes his eyes and sifts through the noises of the surface, tilting his head to the sky. 

Two faint heartbeats. The distant, Caw! of a Loftwing. 

Still alive, he thinks. Still breathing.

He opens his eyes and walks faster, picking up the pace in his hike to the Temple of Time. 

—

The Temple of Time is filled with bodies robed in white. It makes the hair of the people that stare at him blend in with their clothes, makes the red of their eyes all the more striking. This group gathered in the temple, however, each have a crying eye painted on their foreheads in gold. 

The temple itself is just a large room packed with pews, a Statue of the Goddess standing tall at the end, almost as high as the ceiling. 

Amik searches the bodies for blonde hair and blue eyes, for a divine sword stained black with the blood of demons, and comes up with nothing.

“Damn it,” he whispers, his chest heaving despite the fact that it’s impossible for him to be out of breath, “Damn it.”

“Can we help you, stranger?” A woman approaches, slim and slight, her features sharp. A red belt around her waist bears seven daggers, their hilts encrusted in glittering diamonds. “What have you come to this temple for?”

“I…” Amik trails off. I need to go home. I need Hylia to send me home. “Is Hylia here?”

The woman looks back over her shoulder to the rest of the gathered people, who all share a glance. She looks back to him and says, “The Goddess is forever with us in our hearts when we pray. It is our belief that-”

“No,” he cuts her off. “I mean is she here? Is she, um…still walking the mortal plane?”

She shares another glance with the group, and hesitates before answering, “She disappeared from this realm five years ago, after a long and arduous battle against a dark force. May I ask how you know-”

“I come from the village she frequented, where the Temple of Hylia-”

“There are many Temples of Hylia, stranger, and plenty of villages Her Grace-”

“I come from the place where she slayed the Demon King,” he snaps. “Where the hell is she if she’s not here, then? I need to talk to her.”

The woman blinks, taking a step back. “I told you, She is gone. I don’t know where She goes when She is not here. How in Her name did you get to this island from your village? She told us all about how far it is from here, all the way across the sea, how the people there were the kindest she had ever encountered.”

Do…Do these people not know about Skyloft?

“I had a boat,” he finds himself lying, sure that if this woman knew about the barge of land Hylia sent to the sky then she would ask how he survived the fall back to the surface, and then he would have to explain how he has Hylia’s divinity and he would get absolutely zero information because the topic would change to him and only him and maybe they would run him out like the old priestess on Skyloft- “I took it out when the Demon King attacked, trying to escape his wrath. It, um, crashed against some rocks in a storm and the next thing I knew I was washed up here.”

She looks him up and down, nothing but concern on her face as she says, “Oh, that’s terrible. I can have someone get you a change of clothes, we have plenty of spare robes-” she glances back at a man behind her and he nods, scurrying off behind the Statue of the Goddess. “What is your name?”

Hylia apparently told this woman about his village, about the people who lived there. If she really liked him so much, she probably told her all about him, and if the old woman on Skyloft was a priestess and she could see his eyes he can’t count on this woman not being able to see the clocks, either, and connect the dots between him being a favorite of the Goddess of Time and his tick tick ticking pupils. 

“My name is…” he wracks his brain for a name and suddenly wishes it wasn’t Tove that named their son, that he wasn’t so awful with names and that he could actually think of one- 

Outside of the temple, a beetle chirps.

They’re my favorite! he shouted to Hylia what feels like a lifetime ago, back when she was just the woman in white who bought yarn from him every day, back when she was just his only customer that was keeping him afloat. 

“Beedle,” he blurts, immediately regretting his choice of a name, but he’s made his bed and now he has to lie in it so, “My name is Beedle.”

“Beedle,” The woman repeats, smiling, holding out her hand. “I am Impa, chosen to be the right hand of the Goddess Hylia. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the island of Kakariko.”

Chapter Text

That night Amik-

(No. He’s Beedle now, he has to start calling himself that to get used to the sound. Amik is for Skyloft, for Tove and Rama and Rast and Kastia, for his family.)

Beedle, with the help of Impa and her little group of priests and priestesses, moves into a hut behind the Temple of Time, in a small, isolated village completely separated from the city of marble on the other side of the Statue of the Goddess. His hut is smaller than the rest, and it’s clear just by looking at it that it was thrown together in at most a few hours, but it works for what it is, being a last minute shelter.

(Beedle is for the surface, for this island, for these strangers that know nothing about him except for his fake name. It’s for the best, really.)  

“Housing in the main village costs a fortune that you don’t have,” Impa tells him, blunt in the way she calls him broke, “Here, at least, you can live in exchange for some help around the temple. It’s just cleaning, sweeping up dirt and making sure the Statue of the Goddess stays pristine, but it is one of the most important roles. What you do with the rest of your time here is yours.”

“I’ve been a merchant all my life,” he says, desperately missing his small fortune that resides above the clouds, missing the shop he built in one night just to prank Rast, missing the buzzing of the bazaar on a busy day and the sound of rupees dropping into his wallet, the laughter of a child when he gives them the toy their parents purchased from his shelves. “I can help you with trade, negotiating prices with other nearby settlements-”

(He’s only staying long enough to steal a boat and go back to where Skyloft was once his village to look for any sign of Hylia, despite what Impa says about her being gone. He doesn’t believe it for a second.) 

“There are no nearby settlements, I’m afraid,” she shakes her head, her frown apologetic and filled with pity. “I’m sorry, Beedle, but we are very much alone on this side of the sea. The rupees we do have simply change hands every now and then, it’s more a form of entertainment than making a living.”

“Is this the only village on the island?”

(Swimming there would take way too long, and he doesn’t even know which direction to go in because there would be no prayers to guide his way.) 

“Yes, Kakariko is unfortunately a very small island for a merchant. The Goddess picked it due to its cramped, isolated nature, so we had no choice but to cooperate with each other. The harmony between us all is why we thrive.”

He swallows. A self-sustaining people. They’ve probably mined their land for all of its worth with those buildings. “Do you have boats?”

(A boat would make backtracking and going in circles in the sea so much easier.)

Again, she shakes her head. “We have no reason to venture out into the ocean’s waves. The Goddess provides us with everything we need to survive here without issue.”

Well, shit. 

“All right,” Amik—Beedle drops down onto his measly cot, wincing when it groans and cracks under his weight. “Thank you for helping me. I don’t know how I would survive if I got turned away.”

Impa smiles, reaching out and taking his hand. “I’m only doing what the Goddess would have done.”

He forces himself to smile back. 

(He doesn’t know the first thing about building a boat.)

“I must let the others know that you’ll be staying with us for a while,” she moves to leave, and Am—Beedle wonders how long it’s going to take her to notice his eyes, if she can even see them in the first place. “Have a good night’s rest, Beedle.”

“You, too, Impa.”

She shuts the flimsy front door of the hut, and he listens to her sandals scrape against the dirt as she walks away and settles before a crackling fire.     

“He is a kind man,” she tells the four heartbeats gathered around her. “A merchant, he says. He asked after a boat. I would not be surprised if he started looking for a job to pay for the materials to build himself one.”

“And you’re going to allow him to do so?” The first heartbeats asks. 

“Of course. Who am I to stop a lost soul from trying to find his way home?”

The second heartbeat protests, “The Goddess said-”

“The Goddess said that we were not allowed to travel outside of the island, but even then her reasoning for it no longer applies. Demise has been sealed, there’s no reason for us to hide from him any longer.”

What? Why would Hylia isolate a whole village like that? Why did they need to hide from Demise with her help?

“We Sheikah were made to protect Her, to be an army She can call upon whenever we’re needed. She made me Impa to decide when we should answer Her call, and right now Her call is telling me to help him. If Beedle wants to build a boat, then he is going to build a boat because it is what Her Grace wants for him.”

Sheikah, he mouths the word to himself, wrapping his tongue around the strange syllables. It’s a word he’s never heard before, but it reminds him of, Shadow. 

The third heartbeat murmurs, “I think he is strange. He stares at us like he can hear our every thought, and his clothes were tattered like he was slashed with blades, but his skin was untouched.”

He holds his breath.

“He told us his boat collided with rocks,” he can hear the bones in the fourth heartbeat’s neck crack as they shake their head. “And then the sea tossed him around before spitting him out here. It’s not impossible that his clothing got tattered but he was left unharmed. Besides, what reason would he have to lie?”

“I believe what he says,” Impa tells the other Sheikah. “Asla is right, he has no reason to lie to us.”

Beedle finally lies down on his cot, staring up at the stars through the many holes in his hut’s ceiling. He prays to himself that it doesn’t rain and listens to his new acquaintances kill the fire and retreat to their own huts. 

He wonders what Tove would say if she were here, imagines how she would gasp at the sight of the sea and the beauty of the island that’s become his temporary home. He thinks about how Rast would yell at him for lying to all of these perfectly nice people that only want to help him, and how Kastia would delight in playing along with his fib. He imagines trying to teach Rama to walk in the sand and laughs to himself at the image of his son stumbling in the shallow surf of the sea. 

They’ll…never see this, will they? Not if he doesn’t find a way back up to Skyloft in the next twenty years that Rast has before he dies of old age, or in the next thirty that Kastia has, or in the next fifty for Tove and the next seventy for Rama.

Twenty years for Rast, he drills into himself. Thirty for Kastia, fifty for Tove, and seventy for Rama. 

Seventy years. He has, at most, seventy years to find a way up to the heavens.

(It’s not like he can die trying.)

—

One month into Beedle’s life on Kakariko, he goes into the main village to explore and stumbles upon a technological marvel.

It’s a large wheel outside of the bathhouse that, when someone is pedaling a contraption of some kind, it spins and filters the dirty water out into the ocean and brings freshwater from the nearby freshwater pond into the spacious pools used as tubs. 

“So it’s powered by your legs?” he asks the man who’s pedaling. 

“Yep!” The man pants, his face flushed and dripping with sweat. “I get paid to do it for as long as I can last!”

“Paid?” Beedle’s eyes drift to the merchant down the street who’s selling planks of wood for people to paint and decorate their houses with, thirty rupees a board. “How much?”

“Ten rupees an hour,” he wheezes, stopping, slumping over the handlebars. The waterwheel—that’s what a woman inside called it, how fascinating—rumbles to a stop. “Hey, if you really want to do this then can you step in? My relief isn’t supposed to be here until after lunch and I can’t keep up. It’s like the whole island chose right now to bathe.” 

Boats are made from a lot of wood, Beedle knows. He probably needs at least fifty planks to make one good enough to survive a journey across the sea, so then he needs at least five hundred rupees, which means he needs to pedal and work the wheel for at least fifty hours.

Fifty hours of moving his legs? He spent seventy-two hours straight swimming here. The only real hard part about this is going to be faking that he gets tired after long enough. 

“Sure thing,” he says, smiling.    

—

“I’ve heard you started working the waterwheel,” Impa says, watching him dust the Temple of Time’s pews.

“Yeah,” he nods, moving on to sweeping the floor around the altar at the foot of Hylia’s massive statue. “I’m saving up to buy what I need to build a boat.”

“When you have the wood, I have leftover tools from what we used to build your hut. You can use them to construct your vessel.”

“Really?” he looks at her, his eyebrows raised in surprise, “Thank you!”

She nods. “Of course. Anything to help you get home.”

—

It takes eight days of spreading out his fifty hours to make it believable, but at the end of it all he’s spent five hundred, easily earned rupees and is fifty planks of wood richer. 

Beedle settles himself on the beach where he washed up, Impa’s tools in hand, and gets to work learning how to build a boat, listening to two faint heartbeats all the while.

—

A year. That’s how long it takes him to get the boat to actually stay together and not fall apart beneath his weight, how long it takes for it to not snap in two when he lifts it off the sand. 

It takes him another two years to get a prototype floating. Add another two years for getting it to float with his additional weight, and one more to get it to float with his weight and supplies for any emergency repairs he might have to do. 

(Six years spent doing trial and error. Six years wasted on building a working boat.)

He’s going to need to sail fast to make up for the lost time he could’ve spent searching the sea for the remains of his village. He can’t be left at the mercy of a sail in the wind, he needs to be able to control how fast he’s able to go and how to turn. 

“Shit,” Beedle whispers, standing in front of the bathhouse’s pedal-powered waterwheel. 

How is he supposed to make something like that for his boat? 

Fourteen years for Rast, twenty-four for Kastia, forty-four for Tove, sixty-four for Rama.

Impa asks if he’d like to move into a better hut after one of the old priests passes away, and he gets a raise pedaling the waterwheel for his efficiency: twelve rupees an hour. 

He starts to save it all, the ‘money changing hands for entertainment’ be damned. He’s going to need the money to buy more supplies, to maybe even build an entirely new boat. He has no idea how he’s going to get some kind of mini waterwheel on the one he has now without starting from square one.  

(He wonders if anyone’s noticed that he isn’t aging.)

—

He has to build an entirely new boat. He has to buy more wood. He has to pedal the waterwheel for longer and longer just to afford all of that wood he needs, all of his savings going towards buying the materials to repair his tools once they start to break. 

Six years for Rast, sixteen for Kastia, thirty-six for Tove, fifty-six for Rama. 

While doing his pedaling for the day, he listens for Rast’s heart and nearly cries with relief when it faintly beats in his ears, still going strong. He listens for Kastia’s and-

Silence. 

“No,” he whispers, pedaling faster, “No no no-”

He listens for Kastia’s heartbeat. His ears ring with the strain but he forces through it, listening and listening, but all he hears is the absence of it. 

There must have been another plague, or an accident, or-or-

He listens for Tove and Rama and tears do spill from his eyes when two strong heartbeats answer his call. 

Six years for Rast, thirty-six for Tove, fifty-six for Rama. 

Impa doesn’t ask questions when he steps into the Temple of Time with red, puffy eyes and requests for her to show him how Kakariko performs funeral rites, and only helps him light the candles and recite the prayers at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess. 

—

“Beedle,” Impa stands in the surf, watching him test the prototype of his waterwheel-powered boat, “How old are you?”

It takes him a second to do the math. He’s been on Kakariko for fifteen years, now, so if he was technically forty when he fell off of Skyloft that would make him- “Fifty-five.”

She stares at him for a long while, the wrinkles in her face pronounced in the shadow of a cloud passing in front of the sun. “I’m fifty-five. You don’t look a day over thirty.”

“I eat healthy,” he’s quick to retort. “I take care of my skin.”

“You spend every single day out in the sun and don’t get burned. I’ve never seen you get hurt at all, actually.”

“I-”

“Beedle.”

The way she says his name has a finality to it. Beedle sighs, hammering a nail into the boards of his boat to fix a leak. 

“I’m shocked you didn’t ask me sooner,” he says, glancing at her for a moment, “considering you can probably see my eyes.”

She frowns. “What about your eyes? They’re just brown.”

That makes him stop. He looks at her. “You mean you don’t see the clocks?”

“Clocks? Like the Goddess’s eyes?”

“Impa,” his voice trembles. “You really can’t see them?”

She shakes her head.

If…If Impa is a priestess—If Impa is the priestess—and she can’t see his eyes, how did the old woman on Skyloft?

—

He tells her over a campfire she builds on the beach, so she can still see him in the dark as he works on his boat. 

“You’re…” she stares at him, her mouth hanging open, “You’re the Goddess?”

“I have her immortality,” he corrects, keeping his voice quiet as he patches up another leak. “I’m still me.”

“Your name is really A-”

“My name is Beedle.” 

“But-”

“As long as I’m down here, my name is Beedle.”

She keeps staring at him. The fire pops and crackles. She says, “Your son is a teenager.”

He closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. His fifteenth birthday was two months ago. “Yes, he is.”

And that’s…fine. It doesn’t matter how old his son gets, just so long as he’s alive when Beedle makes it back to Skyloft. Tove needs to be alive, too. If they both are, he can look at them and turn back the clocks in their eyes and make up for all of the time he lost with them. Rama can be a baby again, he can have his father in his life. Tove can have her husband back, she can grow old with him by her side. Beedle can go back to being Amik. 

He just has to get there in time. 

—

Rast’s heart stops beating, and Impa has to tear him away from pedaling the waterwheel, dragging him back to their huts behind the Temple of Time to force him to eat.

“Is that what your friend would want?” she demands, shoving a bowl of soup and a cup of water into his hands, “You working yourself to death like this?”

Beedle shakes his head. “I can’t-”

“Shut up,” she says, something motherly about it as she gently smacks him upside the head, “Eat and drink. I don’t care that you don’t need to, it’ll make you feel better.”

It does, in fact, make him feel a little better, and he cries when he goes into the temple and finds her preparing the candles.

—

Thirty-two years for Tove, fifty-two for Rama. 

He needs more wood to turn his pedal-powered boat into a portable house so that when he leaves Kakariko, he can live on the move as he searches for Hylia. 

(It can also double as a shop, should he ever run low on rupees.)

—

“The Goddess is gone,” Impa insists when he tells her why, exactly, he’s sailing to his old village.

“Her temple is still there,” he argues. “You people still pray to her. She’s a goddess, she lives on nothing but worship.”

“You’re the Goddess, now, you’re still immortal because we continue to believe in Her-”

(Is that how it works?)

“Hylia isn’t dead, Impa, and she’s not gone. She can’t be.”

“And if she is? How are you getting to the sky?”

He swallows, his eyes drifting to the mini waterwheel attached to his boat. If he could put something like it on the roof… “I’ll pedal there.” 

—

It’s finally ready. After twenty years of living on the island of Kakariko, of building boat after boat after boat, he’s finally ready to leave.

Impa, sixty years old and still as sharp as ever, sees him off in the dead of night. 

“I’m never going to see you again, am I?” she asks.

“Hopefully not,” he smiles. “Thank you for all of your help. If there was something I could do properly repay your kindness-”

She reaches out and places her wrinkled hand over where his heart beats steady. “Go back to your island in the sky and be with your family. Be happy. That is all I could ever ask.”

Heat builds behind his eyes and his vision blurs with tears. Beedle bites his lip.

Twenty years for Impa, he thinks, pulling her into a hug and memorizing the sound of her heartbeat, thirty for Tove, fifty for Rama.

—

The ocean is even more unforgiving than the sky. If Beedle were mortal, he would be dead seventeen times over. 

He discovers other islands, where he sells some supplies for rupees and buys others from the people there, making a sort of living out of his search for his village. 

“Welcome to Beedle’s Shop Ship!” he greets every new customer, presenting his wares with flair, “Anything you need, I have!”

Eighteen years for Impa, twenty-eight for Tove, forty-eight for Rama.  

—

He finds what remains of his village six months later.

The land is torn to shreds, littered with craters from where the land that became Skyloft detached and ascended into the heavens. He picks his way through the destruction, making it all the way to the ruins of the Temple of Hylia and gaping at the spiral cliff where the Statue of the Goddess once resided. At the bottom of the cliff is a stone obelisk that leaks black fog, and Beedle decides not to investigate it for fear that it has something to do with how Hylia defeated Demise. 

The Temple of Hylia is empty when he steps inside, overgrown with vegetation to the point that he can’t even read the legends inscribed on the walls, tales of the Goddess covered by endless green. It looks the same way it did almost thirty years ago when Demise’s army of monsters attacked, and Beedle was made immortal by the Goddess as she sent a barge of land to the sky with the—to their knowledge—last surviving humans. 

“Are you here?” he asks out loud, his voice echoing, “Are you listening to me?”

He walks up the steps to the ivory doors that once lead to the priestess’s private chambers, pushing them open and-

There’s an amber crystal resting on a platform in the center of the room, taller than he is and three times as wide. 

That…Beedle has been in this room, before, and that wasn’t there the last time he was here. What even…

He approaches the crystal and-What the fuck-

Inside of it is a girl. Her eyes are closed and her hands are folded over her chest like she’s either sleeping or dead. The girl…looks like Hylia, strangely, but she also looks young, too young to be the woman in white he came to know as the Goddess. She looks like…like a kid, like she can’t be older than fifteen, sixteen-

“Who are you?” he whispers, pressing his hand to the glittering amber. It’s cool to the touch and thin, like a twitch of his fingers would shatter it to pieces and wake the maybe-dead-hopefully-sleeping child inside. “Who did this to you?”

An arm hooks around his throat and Beedle is thrown down the stairs, someone pinning him to the floor and holding a knife to his throat. 

(How did he not hear their heartbeat?)

“Who the hell are you?” The stranger is a woman with white hair tied back behind her head and blood red eyes, and hey, he recognizes that crying eye on her forehead- “How did you find this place?”

“You’re a Sheikah,” he states, ignoring her questions, splayed on his back on the sun-warmed stone.

“Who are you?” she demands, pressing the knife harder against his throat, and oh, yeah, he should probably start acting like he’s afraid of that- 

“My-My name is Beedle!” he throws his hands up in surrender, adding a shake to his voice and intentionally breathing fast to raise his heart-rate and sell his mortality, “I-I was just walking through the woods and I found this temple-”

“How do you know of the Sheikah?”

“I, uh-” Crap, crap crap crap- “I’m a traveling merchant, I-I’ve been to the shores of your island to sell my stock of items I’ve collected over the years! I was sworn to secrecy, I swear, I’m-”

The woman pulls the blade away from his neck and slips it onto her belt, getting off of him and to her feet. She holds out a hand and he takes it, letting her drag him back up to standing.

“Beedle, huh?” she crosses her arms, looking him up and down. “I don’t buy that you just so happened to stumble upon this particular temple. Tell me the truth before I toss you back into the sea where you came from.”

Damn she’s good. He sighs, swallowing to stall, choosing his words carefully as he explains, “I heard from my short time at, um, your island that the Goddess had left the mortal plane. I also heard that this was the nearest Temple of Hylia, and came to see if that was true. What...What is that black thing at the bottom of the spiral cliff outside?"

"That is none of your business," The woman snaps. "You didn't touch it, did you?"

"I didn't even go near the thing! Why, what-"

"It's not your concern. As long as you leave it alone, we won’t have a problem with each other.” 

“Then can I get your name, at least?” he asks. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” 

Her eyes drift to the amber crystal, to the girl sleeping inside. 

“I am Impa,” she tells him, short, “and I am protecting the Goddess Hylia.”

What?

—

They sit in the center of the room, where Second Impa—he can’t call her just Impa, he has an Impa— builds a fire, prepares a kettle of tea, and explains what she’s doing here.  

“So…she reincarnated into a mortal vessel,” Beedle slowly repeats, staring up at the sleeping teenager watching over them, “who just so happens to be that girl?”

“Yes,” Second Impa nods, pouring the boiling tea into two small cups. 

“And…you’re both from the future?”

“Thousands of years, yes. I am watching over Her, to ensure that She stays sleeping and a great darkness stays sealed.”

“But…” he falters. “But won’t you die long before she’s supposed to wake up?”

“My grandmother lived for three thousand years, so strong was her devotion to the Goddess,” she passes him one of the steaming cups, and the tea smells like blueberries. “Though, by the end of her life, she would say the same story over and over again like it was the first time she was telling it. We Sheikah may live long in body, but not in mind.”

“What was the story?”

Second Impa blows on her tea. “It wasn’t really a story, more so a legend that I’ve never understood, even today. One about a man who wanted to know how to fly, so he taught himself how to build a boat.”

Beedle stops breathing. He clutches his cup so tightly he can hear the wood threatening to splinter beneath his fingers. 

Impa is…His Impa is alive for the next two thousand nine hundred and thirty eight years. He…He has time.

I’m never going to see you again, am I?

He can get back to Skyloft, back to Tove and Rama, live his life with them, and then go back to Kakariko and tell her all about his family.

(She never told him that she had a child, even after he told her about his.)

He can’t wait to see the look on her face when he shows back up on her island’s shore.

“Interesting legend,” he manages, struggling to keep the delivery smooth, like he’s not the subject of that story. “How does it end?”

Second Impa—Impa’s granddaughter, Holy Hylia—shakes her head. “I don’t know. She would forget what she was saying after that.”

Beedle forces himself to drink the tea, to take a minute to collect himself. He can’t just interrogate her, that’s too suspicious, but wouldn’t it be natural for him to have a million questions? This woman sitting across from him is from the future, from a time that he’s going to live to see. He at least wants to know what to expect down the line.

“Are you allowed to tell me how you ended up here?”   

“I don’t see why not,” she chuckles. “You’re going to be long dead before I’m born. I was praying in the Temple of Time when I received a message from the heavens, one saying that I was needed to protect the Goddess Hylia, that She would come to me in the form of a child who had fallen from the sky like a star. I came to Her aid, and after many trials we ended up here, in the past, where we sealed the force of darkness the Goddess gave up Her immortality to keep imprisoned. I’ve been protecting Her for just over twenty years.”

So they arrived right after Skyloft was created, he thinks, and asks, “How does the Goddess sleeping keep the darkness sealed?”    

“The Goddess and the darkness, they are…connected, in a way. I cannot explain any more than that.”

“When…” he takes another sip of tea. He needs to choose his next words very carefully, unless he wants another knife to his throat. “When the Goddess gave up her immortality, she gave up her divinity, right? All of her, um, powers?”

“Yes,” Second Impa’s eyebrows furrow. Her heartbeat stays steady, so either Hylia told her nothing of his existence or she’s good at keeping herself calm. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve just always wondered…what happens to all of that power when it’s stripped away? Where…Where does it go? How did she even do it?”

The Sheikah laughs. “I’ve wondered the same thing myself. If I could wake her up without ensuring the end of the world I would, just to ask.”

His next question is, How do you wake her up?, but he doesn’t actually ask it. He’s certain that if he did, she would try to kill him for possibly being an agent of Demise and lusting after the Demon King’s resurrection. Then her knives would shatter on his throat and he would have to explain himself all over again and honestly, he’s tired of it. He’d rather avoid the whole song and dance and keep the conversation civil. 

But…he found his village. He found the Goddess Hylia, who hasn’t left this mortal plane, she’s been right here the whole time, trapped in a crystalline coma of her own making, and he’s gotten all of the answers he can from the Sheikah woman in front of him, all without exposing himself.     

Hylia is alive, but she’s mortal. Hylia is alive, but she’s sleeping. She’s not going to wake up for thousands of years, which means that he has to wait a long, long time for the rest of his answers.

Hylia isn’t dead, Impa, and she’s not gone. She can’t be.

And if she is? How are you getting to the sky?

Two faint hearts beat in his ears. There are plenty of trees by the bank where his boat washed up on shore, and he’s taken care not to let the seawater ruin all of his tools. 

Beedle sets his teacup down and gets to his feet, bowing to the Goddess’s chosen guardian.

“Thank you for talking with me, Impa,” he says, smiling at her, “I think it’s time for me to be on my way.”

“That quickly?” she stands, killing the fire by kicking dirt onto the crackling embers. “I thought you were going to ask me more about the future.”

“I came here for the Goddess, and I’ve gotten the answers I wanted. Now, I must be on my way.”

Second Impa offers her hand. “Thank you for the conversation. It was nice talking to someone that can actually answer me for a change.”

Beedle shakes it. “Likewise.” 

Twenty-eight years for Tove, forty-eight for Rama, two thousand nine hundred and thirty eight for Impa.  

He has to work fast and hard. No breaks, and no distractions, not even if the world starts to end for a second time. 

It’s not going to take him another twenty years just to reach the sky. 

—

As he walks back to his boat, he pulls the nearest trees out of the dirt with his bare hands, snapping them in half like he’s breaking a pencil. As the grass turns to sand, he peels strips of wood from each log until he’s left with lumpy rectangles that he’s going to have to flatten out with his tools.  

Beedle reaches his boat with only six misshapen planks, and sighs. It’s not going to be enough for just one wheel on the roof to lift the boat, he’s going to need another at the tip to compensate for the weight, and…

And then he’s going to have to somehow connect the…the power source, the-the thing he pedals, to both wheels, he should probably come up with a name for that-

He sighs again, massaging his forehead to stop a headache he can’t even feel the pain of, the pounding of his pulse above his eyebrows the only reminder of the mortal he once was. 

I’m gonna have to take the whole thing apart, he thinks, undoing twenty years’ worth of work.

This is…going to take a while. He’s going to need to gather a lot of wood. 

Beedle turns on his heel and ventures back into the forest, resolving not to return to the boat until he has enough materials to build it three times over. 

—

In the midst of his tree hoarding, he decides to come up with a name for the waterwheels he’s going to put on the boat.

“Because they’re not waterwheels, anymore,” he explains to no one. “They’re not even touching any water, but what else do I call them? Windwheels? Actually, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”

A bird whistles overhead. A fly buzzes in Beedle’s ear and he doesn’t bother swatting it away. 

“Windwheels it is, then,” he grins, yanks another tree from its roots, and thinks, Rast would be so proud of me. 

—

Six months later, he returns to the beach with enough wood to last him a lifetime, dragging all of the logs in a makeshift net he crafted from an abundance of watercress that lived in the nearby pond, the same one he learned to swim in as a child. 

(It’s all just in case. He shouldn’t need this much, but he can’t waste time going back for more resources. He’s wasted enough already by gathering them.)

He listens for Tove and Rama and hears only one heartbeat. 

(A young, healthy heartbeat.)  

Beedle stops in his tracks. His head whips up and he stares at the cloudless sky.

“No,” he whispers, his mortal heart pounding in his immortal chest, “No no no-”

He strains his ears, willing there to be a second heartbeat, praying to the teenage Goddess sleeping in the abandoned temple five hundred feet away that his wife is still breathing- 

(She still has twenty-seven and a half years left if she’s in perfect health, if nothing is wrong-) 

“Please,” his vision blurs as a lone ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump echoes in his ears, “Please please please-”

My name is Tove. It’s a pleasure to talk to you for real. 

You’re happier about your shop surviving than your house?

Love you, too.

I want to sell you something…A life with me. We’ll live together permanently, doing what we’re doing now until death do us part. Because I love you and you love me.

For better or worse, right?

I’m pregnant!

It’s okay, Amik. You’re not going to hurt him.

It’s all right, sweetheart, Papa will be right back. He’s just talking to the people outside, he’ll be back soon. 

Rama’s heart is the only one that beats.

(His son is twenty two years old, and he has no parents.)

He tears his excess logs to shreds through his sobs, staggering over to his tools, picking up his hammer, and smashing it through the side of his boat.  

No breaks, he had vowed. No distractions.

(The last thing he said to her was, I’ll be fine.)

—

Rama has forty-six years left at most. 

Beedle listens to his heartbeat and only his heartbeat, fixated on the sound of his son’s blood pumping through his veins. He notes that it’s faster than before, that it stays that way, and he can only guess that his son is a part of the Knight Academy, or an athlete of some kind, active enough that his heart grew stronger for it. 

There’s a windwheel installed on top of the hut and one in the process of being installed at the bow. He’s gotten his pedals to connect to that second windwheel, tracking it through the gut of the boat, already tested it and secured with the knowledge that everything will still float even with that extra weight, so all that’s left is to finish up that second windwheel and hopefully get to flying. 

(Have the funeral rites changed as Skyloft progressed as a society? Do they no longer light candles and pray for the safe passage of the soul into the Sacred Realm? What of her Loftwing, left without its bonded rider? What do they do with the birds when they no longer have a use? Let them fly off into the clouds? Kill them for meat and use the feathers for pillows?)

He tosses his hammer back in his shop, taking a step back to admire his work.

The windwheels are tall, raised up on cylinders of wood to account for the surrounding air, to funnel it up to get the lift he needs. They’re held together with nails and shaved down rocks he found while scouring the beach, lacking any steel to truly reinforce the bindings. It looks…

Good. It looks good. Most importantly, it looks like it’s going to work. 

(It has to work.) 

—

It doesn’t work. 

Even with all of his divine strength, the boat won’t lift off of the ground no matter how hard he pedals, no matter how hard the windwheels spin.

At first he thinks it’s the sand, that with the way the boat is nestled in the beach it’s stuck, but when he pushes it out to sea and tries again it still doesn’t lift. 

“If it was just the actual shop part, I would be there already,” he complains to the sea as he swims back to shore, pushing his boat in front of him. 

And there’s his answer.

Beedle sighs, getting to his feet on the beach, shaking the water out of his hair and lamenting his lack of comb.  

“I spent too much time putting you together,” he mutters, turning back to the woods. He tore up his reserve of wood in a fit of grief when…when Rama became the only heartbeat in his ears, so now he’s back to square one. “I’m not pulling you apart again.”

So now he has to build another hut, and more windwheels. Wonderful.

Forty-five years for Rama. 

—

It takes him four months to gather the proper materials, and another five to put it all together, but in less than a year, he has a small shop with windwheels on the roof. He’s even added a wooden deck out the front door and a ladder at the edge, just in case the people of Skyloft want to come up and browse his wares.  

His pedals are inside the hut, behind the counter, and Beedle is confident that it’ll fly. 

(It has to.) 

—

It…It works. 

Beedle buries his boat deep in the beach, hiding it from any future travelers so he’ll know where it is when he eventually comes back to the Surface, shoves all of his belongings onto the shelves of his new shop, and gets to pedaling. After only a few minutes, the hut lifts from the sand and starts to ascend. 

“It works!” he cheers, grinning so wide that if he were mortal, his cheeks would hurt. He watches out the window as the calming waves of the sea grow farther and farther away. “It works!”

It fucking works, he’s-he’s flying, he’s fucking flying- 

Beedle whoops, laughing, pedaling harder and flying faster. Using his handlebars, he tests out turning, gliding the hut in a slow circle over the top of the forest, listening to branches snap as the bottom of the shop brushes against the trees as it rises. 

Rast would demand to know how it works, he thinks. Kastia would tell me to be careful. Tove would lose her mind. 

He is a man forced to live his life on the Surface, and he is flying. 

“Skyloft, here I come,” he breathes.

—

Despite his endless reserve of energy, flying is slow. It takes him four days to get high enough that the island where his village resided is just a speck in the vast ocean, and takes him another three days just to pass through some clouds. 

It’s when he just rises through those clouds that the air…changes, different on Beedle’s skin, not as…heavy, not as present as it was when he was on the ground. 

“The air thins the higher I go,” he realizes. 

Above him, on the roof, the windwheels rattle. 

“No,” he shakes his head, pedaling faster, “No no no-”

The rattling turns to crackling, which turns to splintering, which turns to-

CRACK!

Outside, a broken windwheel plummets through the clouds. The hut falls, spiraling through the air.

“Shit!” Beedle curses, pedaling as hard as he can, “Shit shit shit!”

No matter what he tries, it’s no use. He sinks through the clouds and the Surface grows closer and he’s crashing back to the beach-

SMASH!

Beedle is left sprawled in the wreckage of all of his hard work, ruined by the very thing that helped him fly.  

He picks his way out of it, stumbling free, and turns to assess the damage.

“Goddess above,” he whispers.

He’s left with nothing but broken planks. There’s nothing salvageable. He has to start over again. 

Forty-four years for Rama. 

—

Forty-two years for Rama. 

He rebuilds the hut, reinforcing it with more planks, layering it so he’s encased in multiple wooden boxes. 

“This way,” he tells the sea, “if I fall again, the only stuff getting damaged is the layers and not the actual hut.”

He’s even reinforced the windwheels, doubling them up so they’re thicker than their broken predecessors. 

“Okay,” he gets ready to fly, adjusting his grip on his handlebars and preparing his legs to work for a long time. “Skyloft, here I come.”

—

A thunderstorm hits before he can even reach the clouds, soaking the wood and making an already-heavier hut even heavier.

The windwheels can’t properly spin in the rain, the wooden blades slapping through the white sheets of water and sent spinning in every direction due to the howling wind. 

He’s not even surprised when the windwheels end up snapping again, screaming out his frustration as he crashes back to the beach, left with even more debris. His layers of wood did nothing to protect the base of the hut. 

Once he’s gotten back to his feet and calmed down, his screams still echoing through the air, Beedle sighs. 

He’s back to the drawing board. Back to square one. Again.

“Forty-one years,” he reminds himself. 

—

He takes his time with the third prototype. 

He takes away the wooden layers, because they didn’t do shit. He keeps the wrap-around porch and the ladder, because despite the fact that it’s added weight that slows him down, he wants a way for other people to come and go without risking falling to their deaths. He makes the windwheels bigger, so that this way, any rain doesn’t interfere with the blades’ rapid revolutions. 

As even more insurance against the rain, he gathers the leaves from the trees he turns into planks and from any plants he passes by. This way, using the stems from flowers he picks, he weaves a sort of shield over the roof of the hut, so any rain he does encounter will just roll right off and leave everything dry.   

By the end of his revisions and rebuild, Rama has thirty-seven years left. His faster heart is still beating strong. 

Beedle pedals into the sky again, eyeing the dark clouds he approaches the higher he climbs through the air. 

“Come on,” he mutters, wincing at the flashing lightning. “Come on, come on-”

Thunder explodes overhead, so loud that his wallet rattles on the edge of one of the shelves, the rupees inside clattering together. If his wallet falls, his decades spent earning all of that money will spill everywhere, and if this version of the hut does fail, all of his rupees will scatter in the sea, and Beedle would be returning to his son empty-handed and in need of a loan, instead of able to help him with any debts he might have. 

(If Rama is anything like him, he definitely has debts. He needs to take care of those before he’s an infant again.)

Another flash of lightning, another shaking BOOM of thunder. His wallet tumbles off the shelf-

(He can build it all again. He can. Getting to Rama means nothing if he can’t help him, if he can’t make up for all of the time they lost, for the life he missed-)

Beedle lunges off his pedals, his legs knocking into the handlebars and sending the shop spinning. He catches the wallet and hugs it close to his chest as he smacks into the wooden floor, cursing as a windwheel snaps and the leaf shield is torn away by the splintered wood, the rain battering against the roof and punching it back down to the Surface. 

—

He reaches the conclusion that he needs a new launch spot. If he flies from somewhere else on the island, maybe he’ll be able to avoid all of the obstacles he’s had thus far.

(It’s just rain. It’s just water. How is this so difficult?)

It takes him a couple hours to dig his boat out of the beach, and once it’s out and sitting empty on the shore Beedle takes a moment to listen to Rama’s heart. 

Still beating. Still alive. 

“There’s a mountain on the other side of the island,” he tells the quick ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump echoing in his ears, “If I start higher, it’ll take me less time to reach you, and maybe I’ll already be past the storms.”  

The only question now is, does he carry both his boat and the hut at the same time, risking damage to either one but getting there faster, or make two trips that take longer? He can’t leave his boat out here, someone might take it, and he doesn’t want to leave it far from where he launches in case he needs to go to another island to fly. 

If something breaks…if he has to spend even one more year doing repairs…

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump-

“Two trips,” he says, decisive. “Two very slow, very careful trips.”

—

Rama has thirty-five years left, and Beedle makes it to the top of the mountain with his flying shop. There’s snow on the peak, something he’s never seen in all of his life, and he takes only a moment to lie in it, wishing he could feel the cold. He throws a snowball to the clear blue sky, wishing that there was someone here to throw one back at him. 

Tove would have the time of her life, he thinks, closing his eyes as his clump of snow falls back on his face, splattering in his hair that’s about to freeze solid. I hope Rama would, too. 

He basks in the frigid temperatures for one more breath before he starts his trek back down the mountain, back to the beach where his boat waits.

—

Rama has thirty-three years left when he returns to the peak with his boat.

His shop is buried in a mound of fluffy, untouched snow, but it’s surprisingly easy to clean it off and make sure that it’s ready to fly. He kicks out the snow surrounding it, making a crater in the center of the peak where dead grass is frozen and matted beneath his boots, before he trudges through the door and sits at his pedals. He grips the handlebars, preparing himself, making sure his wallet is secure on his belt so he doesn’t have to worry about his rupees falling everywhere. 

He’s four years out of practice, but every passing year has started to feel like a second, like he blinks and suddenly it’s been a decade.

(He’s not going to blink again until his son is in his arms, when he looks into Rama’s eyes and turns back the clock in his pupils and has his baby.)

Beedle pedals. The years-old wood creaks, straining in the cold, but the windwheels spin and the shop lifts and he’s flying again. 

“Please let this be the last time,” he whispers. 

—

The shop cuts through the thin air like a hot knife through butter, unfettered by the change in the atmosphere. There’s no rain this high up, and not even the howling wind can send the windwheels off course. 

Beedle laughs, crazed, because it’s working. It’s finally working, he can almost taste Skyloft’s sweet sweet air, can almost hear Rama’s heart beating louder-

Thunk.

The windwheels scrape against something hard. The shop drifts lower, like it’s bouncing off of something, and he frowns. 

He pedals again, slowly this time, and-

Thunk. 

What the…?

Beedle pokes his head out the window. Maybe he’s up against the bottom of Skyloft?

It’s…It’s clouds. A lot of clouds, dark and thick and apparently impenetrable. 

“What…” he trails off, getting off his pedals and pushing them hard with his hand to keep them spinning as he walks out the door and climbs up onto the roof, avoiding the windwheels that bump against the clouds and reaching up towards them, frowning when his hand passes through with no issue, his fingertips stretching out to the endless sky on the other side, the warmth of close sunlight a familiar sensation. The clouds themselves are dense, and when he pulls his arm back the sleeve of his tunic is heavy and dripping with water, soaked through.

He can go past no problem, but his flying hut of a shop can’t? Why not?

The windwheels slow and the shop drifts lower. Beedle scrambles back inside and whacks the pedals again, climbing back out to poke the clouds again. 

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

Rama’s heartbeat is loud, louder than he’s ever heard it. Skyloft must be right there. 

Beedle’s hand pushes through the clouds, his fingers wiggling in the sun-

CAW!  

Sharp talons scrape against his open palm, the tips of feathers brushing against the inside of his wrist. A woman’s voice shouts, “Whoa!”, and there’s the squeak of leather reins being pulled. The talons and feathers pull away and there’s the flap of wings as the sound rockets away.

A Loftwing, he…he just touched a Loftwing for the first time in almost forty years. That was a Loftwing, and on that Loftwing was its rider, another person, another Skyloftian. It’s there, he’s right there, he just has to figure out why his shop can’t pass through and then make it pass through and then he can get back to his son- 

“Okay,” he whispers to himself, blinking back tears, “Okay.”

He lowers his arm back to his side, staring down at his hand where a scratch from the Loftwing would be if he wasn’t invulnerable. He makes a fist, trying to hold on to the lingering warmth of the distant sun, but his fingers go cold no matter how tightly he clenches them to his palm.  

“Okay,” he says for a third time, before climbing down from the roof and going back to his pedals, preparing himself for a smooth descent to the Surface.

—

Twenty-eight years for Rama. 

Beedle is nowhere closer to cracking the barrier of clouds barring him from Skyloft, even with trips up that last months on end. 

What he knows is this:

1. He is allowed to pass
2. His shop is not allowed to pass
3. His tools are not allowed to pass
4. His wallet is not allowed to pass, even when it’s stuffed in his pocket and bulging out of the side of his trousers.
5. The rupees inside of his wallet are not allowed to pass, even when he shoves a few in his mouth, the lower half of his face stuck below the clouds while the top half is above, his nose buried in the condensed water
6. Rama is still alive

What he doesn’t know is this:

1. Why he is allowed to pass
2. Why his shop is not allowed to pass
3. Why his tools are not allowed to pass
4. Why his wallet is not allowed to pass, even when it’s stuffed in his pocket and bulging out of the side of his trousers
5. Why the rupees inside of his wallet are not allowed to pass, even when he shoves a few in his mouth, the lower half of his face stuck below the clouds while the top half is above, his nose buried in the condensed water
6. Why rupees taste like metal when they’re crafted from…from…
7. Where rupees come from 
8. How much time he has left before Rama is gone

“I just don’t get it,” he tells his bag of tools as he adds another shelf to the inside of his shop, “Hylia made Skyloft, right, so I’m guessing she made the cloud barrier, too, but why? To stop Demise’s forces from reaching us in the sky? To stop us from trying to go back down to the Surface? Can the people on Skyloft fall through like I did, or would it be like hitting the ground?”

His hammer, of course, doesn’t answer his questions. He misfires and smashes his thumb, but the mallet only reverberates on contact with his nail, wobbling in his grasp.

Beedle grits his teeth. Sometimes he wishes he could feel pain, just as a reminder that he’s still human. It’s a hard thing to remember when he doesn’t age, can hear heartbeats from up in the heavens, and can’t feel the snow that’s blowing in from outside and pelting against his back. 

Only the divine can harm the divine, Hylia had told him, back in his shop before Demise attacked, showing him her sword that she had crafted and blessed, explaining that only what a god made could match their own might.

“Hylia made Skyloft,” he repeats. “So she must have made the cloud barrier.”

When it clicks, and it does click, he realizes how much of a fucking idiot he’s been for years. Wasted years he could have spent on Skyloft with his son.    

All he has to do is bless his shop, and the cloud barrier will recognize it as a part of him and allow him—allow Hylia—through. 

Somehow. 

—

Twenty-seven years for Rama.

Rama is forty-eight years old. His heart still beats a quick, steady, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

(So did Tove’s.)

Rama is forty-eight years old. Beedle wonders what he looks like, if they look similar or if Tove’s likeness is the one that prevailed. Beedle wonders what his voice sounds like, how deep it is, because all he can hear when he thinks of his son’s voice is that little, Apa! Apa!

Beedle wonders what Rama knows about him, if he knows that his father is still alive, if he knows that his father is coming, that he’s not alone, that…that…

Does Rama have a family? A partner? A child? He must, he’s…he’s almost fifty, which would make Beedle a grandfather. 

(Is he ready to be a grandfather? He wasn’t even ready to be a father, he never got the chance to be a father, so how could he even be a proper grandparent? How could he be a proper parent?)

What does he even do on Skyloft? A knight? A blacksmith? A priest? A merchant like Beedle is?

(He prays to himself that his son is a merchant.) 

—

Twenty-five years, and Beedle still has no ideas about how to bless something. 

He’s practicing it on his boat, just in case it does something…something weird to it, he doesn’t know, he has no fucking clue how it works, okay, cut him a little slack, and no matter how hard he tries the boat isn’t blessed. Whatever the boat being blessed even means. 

He was blessed, he knows, it’s what his immortality and invulnerability is, a blessing, but how did Hylia do it? She was apparently able to do it so easily, having done it under the stress of Demise barreling down on her of all things, but he guesses that that’s what comes with being born the Goddess of Time instead of made it: she knew how her powers worked, because they were an intrinsic part of her, something she was created knowing how to do. 

Beedle, on the other hand, was made. He learned his abilities as he went, as they appeared to him, and had no one around to teach him how to use them. For all he knows, there are thousands of abilities he has that he’ll never have access to, because the ones he knows of and have the creativity to access are based on his mortal thoughts of immortality, of what he thinks the limits of divinity are.

(Can he jump through space, moving from one spot to the next in the blink of an eye by bending reality? Is that something he’s ever heard the legends say Hylia could do? That would be perfect right now.)

All of this to say, his best guess on what blessing the boat means is that it’ll be just like him: Everlasting, and impervious to injury. Only the divine can harm the divine, so what’s the problem with him making a divine boat before making a divine shop?

“Aaaaaaaand bless!” he commands, slapping the side of his boat. The thunk echoes through the frigid air, snow rustling on a nearby hill.

Beedle doesn’t feel any different. A test scratch on one of the wooden planks tells him that the boat is still prone to injury. 

“Bless!” he smacks it again, and again the wood scratches. “Bless! Bless!”

—

He goes up to the sky again, testing to see if the cloud barrier still stands, if it still refuses his shop access.

It does, of course, it’s apparently lasted this long without issue, why would him leaving it alone be any different, but he thinks it’s still beneficial to try.

(He gets to stick his hands through the clouds and touch freedom, listen to Rama’s beating heart as up close as he can, and strain his ears, hoping to hear the sound of his son’s voice, or his name on someone else’s lips.)

— 

Rama has twenty years left when Beedle finally cracks blessing his boat.

Hylia’s weapon, her sword, was divine because she needed it to be, because she needed a weapon that could pierce divine skin. How could it have done its job without a taste of what it was meant to draw?

Only the divine can harm the divine. 

If Beedle blesses his boat—and then his shop—with the intention of having it pierce the magic of the cloud barrier blocking him from Skyloft, then it’ll become divine like him. He won’t be able to scratch the wood and leave evidence of its…immortality. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it, he’s technically making his things immortal like he is, so this should be…this should be simple.

He clenches one of his hands into a fist, tight enough that he hopes his nails will draw blood from how hard they dig into his palm, and-

And then he feels it: A stinging in his hand. Pain. 

He unfurls his fist and stares.

There are four small half-moon shapes in his skin, all leaking-leaking with gold. 

He has golden blood. He…He has Hylia’s blood. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, he has everything else that was hers, her eyes, her immortality, her manipulation over time, he’s used to it all by now, he’s used to being Hylia, but it’s something about his blood no longer being red that makes it all truly, irreversibly real.    

Could he even go back to being mortal if he wanted to? Does he want to? He…He likes the safety of his divinity, how he doesn’t have to worry about falling from the peak of this mountain and to his death, but he’ll never grow old. He’ll never get to see Tove again, because he never will find himself falling from the peak of this mountain and to his death. He’ll never be welcomed into the Goddess’s embrace in the Sacred Realm, because he is the Goddess and the Sacred Realm is…somewhere. 

When Hylia wakes up, when that sleeping girl is freed from her crystal in the temple thousands of feet below, he’ll ask her about it, just like he’ll ask her everything else.   

He just needs to get to Skyloft, needs to live out his life with Rama, needs to bless his boat so he knows how it works, so he can bless his shop and be on his way.

Beedle holds his hand out over the side of his boat, watching three golden droplets tumble from his palm and soaking into the wood. 

A tingle rushes up his spine. A sheen of light spreads over the boat, leaving it twinkling in the mid-afternoon sun. 

He bites his lip. He scratches the side of the boat. It doesn’t take.

Beedle blinks. It doesn’t take?

Then that means…That means the…

The boat is invulnerable. The boat is blessed. His boat is blessed.

Beedle laughs. He turns to his shop and smears his golden Goddess blood on the door, watching the magic encase it in a shield of shimmering light.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

Skyloft, here he comes. 

—

He pedals into the sky faster than ever, reinvigorated by his success. 

(If this doesn’t work, he’s not sure what he’ll do.)

It snows on his way up, wind howling around the shop, but the windwheels aren’t rattled in the slightest. The hut isn’t weighed down by the snow, not even affected when it melts the higher he climbs and the closer he gets to the sun, which means it’s not soaking into the wood which means it’s divine like he is, impossible to faze with the simple likes of the weather.

“Come on,” he whispers, staring up as the cloud barrier grows closer and closer, “Come on, come on, come on-”

He braces for impact as the windwheels hit the clouds and-

-pass through. 

The shop passes through. 

“Yes!” he shouts, throwing his fists into the air, pedaling faster and faster, “Yes!”

Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes!

A Loftwing’s cry is the first thing he hears, and the first thing he sees is the sun in all of its bright, brilliant glory over the clouds, and a large mass of land silhouetted against it. 

“Skyloft,” he says, unable to stop the tears that are blurring his vision from spilling down his cheeks, “Finally.”

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump-

“This way! This way!”

“Where are you going?”

“Mommy! Mommy, look!”

“Watch out!”

CAW! CAW! CAW!

Goddesses, it’s all so loud. It’s all right there, right in front of him. It’s all real.  

“I’m coming,” he tells it all, tells the heart beating in his ears, the only sound he can discern through all of the chaos of a lively civilization he helped to build, “I’m coming.”

Beedle pedals so fast he doesn’t even care that they might break beneath his feet.

—

He nearly crashes into the Statue of the Goddess in his haste to land, as it’s the only landmark he truly recognizes. A group of kids scatter as he makes the rough landing, laughing as nothing even breaks on impact, because he did that, he made his shop immortal, he’s amazing, and now all that’s left is for him to make it home.

He grabs his wallet and sprints out the door, barreling into the kids and not even stopping to check if they’re all right, ignoring their shouts of alarm as he runs in the direction of his house. 

The streets are the same layout, at least, it’s just that there are so many houses, so many people in his way. The bazaar is still a central piece, but the tent is a different color, red and green instead of the purple Tove had chosen, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except for the man who’s waiting for him on the other side of the connected islands. 

“Hey!” A woman’s voice shouts as he barges through a bustling crowd, “Watch where you’re going!”

Beedle doesn’t apologize, pushing himself faster. 

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

He rockets past a group of old knights, doesn’t bother paying them a second of attention even as he hears one of their heart rate’s skyrocket at the sight of him, meaning that he’s probably been recognized, but how could he possibly care about that? What are they going to do, throw him off a second time? He’ll just come right back. He knows how to, he worked for this.

He crosses the bridge the mob shoved him off almost sixty years ago, and pays the memories of that night no mind as he turns the corner and his house comes into view.

It’s been painted over, a light green instead of the dark brown it was. There’s a chimney with smoke pouring out of it, and a garden filled with lavender.

Beedle stops in front of the door, panting even though it’s impossible for him to lose his breath. He raises his hand to knock.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

Only one person inside. 

Apa! Apa!

He knocks fast and hard, hearing the sound of his knuckles rapping on the wood echo throughout the house.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

A chair screeches on the floor. Footsteps approach the door.

Apa! Apa!

“Please,” he whispers to himself, staring down at the Surface below where the Goddess Hylia sleeps, “Please recognize me.”

The door opens. 

A woman stands on the other side. She’s tall, with short black hair and Tove’s eyes. She wears a long-sleeved tunic and a skirt that covers her feet. 

A breathless, “Hi,” is all Beedle can manage, his heart pounding in his chest.

“Hello,” The woman frowns, tilting her head. “Who are you?”

“My-” his voice shakes. “My name is-I-I just…Is Rama here?”

“Rama?” her eyebrows furrow. “You mean my father?”

Her father. His son, his baby, is a father-

“Yes,” he nods, desperate, “Yes, him, Rama, is-is he here? Can-Can I see him?”

Apa! Apa!

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

“I…” his granddaughter—he has a granddaughter—falters. She shakes her head. “I’m-I’m sorry, sir, but…my father died almost thirty years ago. How do you know him?” 

Chapter Text

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

His house looks the same. The rooms are the same rooms, the furniture is the same furniture, even the paint on the walls is the same color. The only difference is the person that putters around the kitchen. 

“I didn’t really know my father,” Rama’s daughter says, her back to him as she places the tea kettle Tove picked out because of the flowers painted on the side over an open flame, “He, um, died when I was a baby. My only memories of him, if you can even call them that, are impressions. A warm voice saying my name, the weight of hands as I’m lifted into the air…those kinds of things.”

“What is your name?” his voice creaks past his lips. 

She faces him. She has brown eyes like him and dark hair like Tove. He wonders what parts of her belonged to Rama. Is it the sharpness of her cheekbones? The slope of her nose? Maybe the way she hugs herself when she says, “Amika. My mother said he picked the name, but she didn’t know where he got it from.”

Beedle closes his eyes. His bulging wallet sits in his pocket, an impossible weight that he can’t bear to lift. 

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

Amika’s—Amika, Goddess above—heartbeat is fast but strong. It’s the heartbeat he’s been listening to for the past thirty years.

“How…” he falters. How did this happen? He was paying attention, he was, but at some point his son’s heart stopped beating and was replaced by this one and he didn’t notice- “How old are you?”

“I turned thirty-one two weeks ago.”

Beedle opens his eyes. “Can…Can you tell me how he-”

The kettle whistles. Amika reaches into the cabinet overhead and takes out two cups, placing them on the table. She walks back to the kettle and pulls her hand into her sleeve before grabbing the handle, carrying it back and putting it between them. 

“Oh, damn it,” she whispers under her breath, giving him an apologetic smile, “I always forget to grab the leaves. I’ll be right back.”

She leaves the kitchen, walking out the back door to where he knows Tove’s garden is. Beedle presses his fingertips to the kettle and sighs at the faint tingling of the freshly-boiled water’s heat against his skin. 

He gets up from his chair and steps into the living room, running his fingers over the worn material of the sofa. Rast built it for them as a wedding gift, stitched the cushions by hand from the cloth of their ceremonial outfits and stuffed them with shed feathers from their Loftwings. Tove always fell asleep on it waiting for him to come back from the bazaar. 

What’s new to him is the shelf right above the sofa, where two drawings sit. He looks at them and-

Oh, he thinks. A lump forms in his throat. 

The first is Tove, but she’s much older. Wrinkles line her face, crinkling around the corners of her eyes and mouth as she smiles so wide her teeth show. The second is…is…Oh, Goddess-

Rama is beautiful. He has Beedle’s eyes and Tove’s smile. His cheekbones are sharp, just like Amika’s, but his nose has a bump high on the bridge, and it’s…it’s off, somehow, like maybe it was broken at some point? And if his nose was broken, then it means he wasn’t gifted any sort of divinity from being Beedle’s son. Amika’s nose must come from her mother, who…who doesn’t have a portrait, so maybe she’s still alive. Maybe he can ask Amika where she lives and go see her and ask-

“Oh, there you are,” Amika steps into the living room, a handful of flower petals clutched in her fist, “I thought you left.”

“Sorry,” Beedle whispers, staring at the pictures of his dead family, “I had to…Who did these?”

“My father did the one for my grandmother. My mother did the one for him. She, um…She died a few years back, and-and I don’t have the artistic skills they did to make her face out of nothing, I…I have a candle lit for her beside my bed.”  

“How…” They still light candles. Good. Did Tove light one for him? Did she describe his face to their son so he could create his likeness? “How did they die?

She motions inside to the kitchen. “That’s why I made tea.”

Ba-bump ba-bump ba-bump.  

His granddaughter’s heart pounds as she leads him back to the table, where the steaming kettle sits in the center. 

“I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Amika,” his voice wavers on her name as they sit. He hasn’t spoken the name Amik in decades, since he was on Kakariko and spilling his guts to Impa. To speak his old name is like speaking a language he hasn’t heard since he was small, or dragging himself out of a grave no one will ever have to dig. He continues, “I’m curious, is all, and-”

“It’s all right, sir,” her smile is tight, and she drops a few petals into the kettle, pouring them each a cup. “I don’t believe I ever got your name, actually. Who are you? How did you know my family?”

Ba-bumpBa-bumpBa-bump-

How did he miss Rama’s heart stopping? He was paying attention, he was, but he missed it somehow. He missed his son dying. How could he do that? What kind of father stops listening? 

“Sir?” Amika repeats.

Beedle is for the Surface and Amik is for Skyloft; that’s what he vowed when he adopted his new name and started his new life on the ground. Beedle is for the Surface and Amik is for Skyloft, but Amik is a father and Beedle is a merchant. How can Beedle claim to be Amik when he’s done nothing but mess up his attempts at getting here? How can Beedle use Amik’s name when he missed the moment Amik’s son died? 

Beedle is for the Surface and Amik is for Skyloft. Amik is a father, and Beedle is a merchant. Amik is a good father, and Beedle… 

“Beedle,” he manages, finding solace in his tea and taking his first sip. It tastes sweet, and he wishes he could feel the burn that doesn't exist on his tongue. “My name is Beedle.”

Beedle is a god, divinity wrapped in a mortal shell, and Beedle is a failure. 

“I didn’t know them well,” his voice rasps from his throat, “I’m a merchant, you see, I-I travel the skies selling my wares. I haven’t been here on the mainland in…in a very long time. Your grandmother liked to buy seeds for her garden. Your father always loved the stuffed Loftwing toys.”

Amika sips at her tea, holding her cup with both hands like she’s trying to absorb its warmth. “What about my grandfather? Did you know him?”

His blood runs cold in his veins. He manages, “Your grandfather?”

“My father’s father. My mother said he died when mine was an infant, and that I’m named after him: Amik.”

Beedle. His name is Beedle. His name is Beedle and he has no right to claim Amik, Amik’s family, Amik’s legacy, when all he has to show for it is fifty years of falling while his wife and son died. How could he even begin to explain himself? How could he face this girl and tell her that he’s the reason she’s alone? 

“No,” Beedle lies, “I didn’t know him, but your grandmother spoke of him often.” 

Amika refills his cup, stray droplets of steaming tea splashing onto the table. He touches the edge of his cup and acts like he burns his fingers, pulling them away with a quiet hiss and counting to eighty in his head before ‘trying’ again, picking it up with ease.

“I’m sorry to keep pressing,” he whispers, “but please. I need to know how your father and grandmother died. It’s…It’s very important to me, I…I liked them very much. They were my…my favorite customers.”

Amika sighs. She sets the kettle down and wraps her hands tighter around her cup. “I have to tell you that what I know is all secondhand from my mother. I’m not sure if it’s the whole truth or even the truth at all.”

“Anything,” Beedle tells her, “I’ll take anything.”

She begins, “From the stories I’ve been told, my grandmother was old. Her memory was failing. She kept waiting for her husband to come home and had to be reminded that he was gone.”

He can see it in the back of his mind, Tove cradling Rama in her arms behind a barricaded door, whispering soothing words into his little ears as the mob calls for his head.  

It’s all right, sweetheart, Papa will be right back, she had promised their son. He’s just talking to the people outside, he’ll be back soon. 

“She passed in her sleep,” Amika says, “holding a book of letters she wrote him.”

Letters? Tove wrote him letters? There’s-There’s a book of letters, of Tove’s writings somewhere on Skyloft?

“I’ve tried reading them, looking for any information about my father when he was young, but the language is older than the current Skyloftian we’re speaking. I can only understand bits and pieces, and none of them are what I need.”

“You have the book here?” Beedle whispers, his heart pounding. Tove’s writings, Tove’s writings for him, are in this house? Skyloft’s language has changed so much in this short amount of time that the words of the Surface can be unrecognizable? “I can-I can read it for you. After you tell me about your father.”

Amika stares at him. “You seem…very invested, for someone who was just a merchant that met my family in passing.” 

“I didn’t have many friends before I left,” He needs to read that book. He needs to read Tove’s letters. He doesn’t want to steal from his only living family, but if he has to, if that’s what it will take for him to have a piece of his wife with him after all of this time, he’ll ransack his own home in between the rapid beats of Amika’s heart, gone before she can even blink. “And they’re all gone. Your family is the only one with a living descendant that I know of.”

Rast didn’t have children, and it didn’t look like Kastia had anyone besides herself before Beedle fell. He wouldn’t even know how to recognize one of her descendants if they do exist. All he has is Impa, down on the Surface and destined to die muttering his name. All he has is Amika, suspicious before him and holding all of the answers he so desperately needs.

She continues to stare. Beedle stares back. He counts seven BaBumpBaBumpBaBumps inside of her chest.  

“My father became a knight so he could fly a Loftwing,” she finally tells him, and relief has Beedle’s tense shoulders sagging. “Apparently he was reckless like that, acting like nothing could hurt him. He would get into fights over rumors about his family.” 

“Rumors?” 

BaBumpBaBumpBaBump. 

“Rumors that his father, my grandfather, was a traitor to the island, that he did something to the Goddess and that’s why She wouldn’t help them when they were building Skyloft. I don’t believe it, there’s nothing I was told when I was in school and everyone knows I’m his descendant, but thirty years ago it was a popular belief held by a majority of the remaining founders and their children. What they did teach us in school, however, was that he was the first to be tried and sentenced with Freefall.”

“Freefall?” Is that how those people spun it? That he was a criminal, that forcing him off of the island was some kind of punishment? “They…They killed him?”

“That’s how I’ve always seen it,” she gives a wry smile. “Of course, I’m biased.”

Beedle—Amik—is a villain in Skyloft’s history. He figured as much, but it still hurts to know that the people he built a society with were so convinced of his wrongdoings, so blinded by their own faith, that they condemned him to Rama’s face and expected him to accept it. He wonders what Rama looked like when he was angry. He wonders if Rast ever taught him how to throw a good punch before he died, if that’s why his nose in the portrait over the couch is so crooked.  

“My mother was a knight at the Academy, too,” Amika drinks deeply from her tea. “They met in their first classes and courted each other and were married by the time they graduated at eighteen. She used to tell me that story all of the time when I was little.”

Tove died when Rama was eighteen. Was she able to see their son get married? Was she able to see him graduate from the school Rast built with his bare hands?

“I was born when my parents were twenty, twenty-one. According to my mother, my father would pore over the book his mother wrote for his father, reading it almost obsessively, but he wouldn’t tell her about what was in it or let her read it. He’d spend the nights sitting by my crib mumbling about getting to the Surface when he thought she wasn’t listening.”

Rama read Tove’s letters. Rama knew Beedle was immortal, that he was alive on the Surface? And he was trying to get to him?

His breath hitches, his chest going tight. His vision blurs. 

“He finally told my mother his plan when I was just starting to be able to sleep through the night,” Amika’s voice shakes. She pours herself more tea and doesn’t wait before drinking, her cup and the kettle trembling in her hands as she lowers them both back to the table. “He said he was going to make some kind of-of blanket, I think, a cloth he could use to slow a great fall. He said his mother wrote about it in her letters, that it’s something his father said the Goddess spoke of, once, before Skyloft was created and they lived on the Surface.”

 I’m trying to make a blanket, you see, Hylia had said in his shop so long ago, back when his name was Amik and he planned on dying when he was old and gray and rich off of her rupees, or maybe a sailcloth?

Sailcloth? he repeated, raising an eyebrow, You got a boat?

No, no, it’s more like a—Oh, what’s the word—I call it a sailcloth but it’s more like something that helps to slow your descent from a long fall, so you don’t get hurt and land safely?

“A sailcloth,” Beedle forces himself to speak through the lump blocking his throat, “It’s called a sailcloth.”

“A sailcloth,” Amika echoes, like the word is something sacred and damned all at once. “Yes, he wanted to make one of those.”

“To fall to the Surface?”  

“Yes. He…My mother said he wanted to go to the Surface and find his father, that his mother held out hope that he would eventually return to Skyloft, and that maybe he needed help.”

Oh, Goddesses. 

Beedle swallows. He drinks some tea and swallows again. He asks, “But if your grandfather, well, if he fell to the Surface with no way of slowing or stopping his fall, how would he have survived? Even if he hit water, his speed and the surface tension alone-”

“That’s what my mother said. She thought my father was crazy for believing my grandmother’s writings about how her husband must still be alive, reminding him that she wasn’t all there before she died and that she might not have been even before that.”

He hates to think of Tove, old and alone and calling his name only to be answered with silence until she died. He hates to think of his son, a young man already with a wife and a child, obsessing over finding him because…

“Why do you think he was so convinced his father was alive?”

Amika takes a deep breath, brushing a strand of her hair out of her face with the back of her hand. She tells him, voice quiet and eyes lowered to the table, “I think he was still grieving the loss of his mother. I think he felt like if he could go down there, if he could find something to show that his father even existed, even if it was bones, it would mean that he didn’t want to leave him behind. I think he wanted his parents and all he had were ghosts.”

Tears spill from the corners of Beedle’s eyes. He covers his mouth with his hands to shove a sob back behind his teeth. 

“A week later, he, um,” she clears her throat, wipes at her own eyes, “he wove together some of my baby blankets and dove into the clouds and never came back.”

Like father, like son.      

That’s how he missed Rama’s heart stopping. Whenever Beedle listened for his or Tove’s heartbeats, he was always straining his ears for Skyloft. If Rama…If Rama leaped from the edge of the island, he’d be falling away from it. His heartbeat would be closer to the Surface, maybe even louder in his ears, but if Beedle was pushing his hearing past the point of where it was in the sky to reach Skyloft he would miss it completely, drowning out everything to focus on the only pulse he cared about. 

Amika’s heartbeat was in the same place as Rama’s, here in this house. Why couldn’t it be his? There was no reason to believe Rama would ever die that early into his life. 

(He stretches his hearing down to the Surface, searching for the beat of Rama’s heart, and all he gets is the crashing waves of the ocean, the chirp of birds, the crackle of fire, and the chatter of children on Kakariko.) 

“Sometimes I think-” her voice catches, her breaths shuddering as she pauses, and Beedle reaches across the table to grab her hands. She squeezes his, flashing him a grateful smile, and all he can think about is the feel of Rama’s infant fingers wrapping around his when he touched his palm. She continues, “Sometimes I dream that he survived. I-I like to imagine him knocking on my door and acting like no time has passed. I like to think he’d still know me, recognize me, and that…that he’d say he was sorry for taking so long. If I wasn’t-If I wasn’t rational, if I didn’t know and understand that falls from impossible heights mean death, I would fall to the Surface to find him, too. Of course I would. Of course I would.”

“Of course you would,” Beedle manages.

“But I’m just-” his granddaughter’s face crumples and she sobs, “I’m alone. My entire family is-is dead, and for what? Something that happened fifty years ago?”

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to comfort his granddaughter when he’s the cause of her grief, when he’s the reason her father left her and died.

“I’m sorry, Amika,” is all he can muster, pouring everything he feels into those words, gripping her hands with only a fraction of his strength so he doesn’t crush her bones to dust and wishing he didn’t have to hold back, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

They sit in silence, holding each other’s hands. He feels her pulse BaBumpBaBumpBaBump against his fingertips, memorizes the calluses on her palms and the way her red, puffy eyes glisten with more tears, because he can’t stay. 

He can’t stay. He can’t. Beedle is for the Surface and Beedle is for Skyloft and Amik is dead and buried at the bottom of the sea with his son. 

“Thank you,” she whispers, pulling her hands away to wipe the tears from her cheeks, “Let me clean up and get my grandmother’s book.”   

She gets up from the table and walks down the hall, sniffling. Beedle watches her open the door to what used to be Rama’s nursery and disappear inside, listens to the rustle of papers and the squeak of old wood and her deep breathing as she calms herself down. She comes back holding a thick tome that’s the size of her head and pushes the empty tea kettle aside to make room, placing it in the center of the table.

“It’s…” Beedle falters. He wasn’t expecting it to be this large. Tove was never that into journaling, much less writing anything down.

“It’s every single day she lived from the moment my grandfather fell to the day she joined him,” she flips open the book to the first page, where the date is marked for spring of fifty years ago, the night he fell. It’s written in the language of the Surface, and Tove’s handwriting is so familiar he almost starts crying all over again. “I can recognize my father’s name, Rama, but not much else.”

Amik, Tove’s looping print reads, Rama and I are all right. Rast and Kastia are here, and they’ve told me what happened, that you’ve been forced off of Skyloft. I don’t know what to do. I have to believe that you’re still alive, that even though you’re separated from us you’re still divine and that the fall won’t kill you. I hope that you can hear my prayers, and that you can find a way back to us. I don’t know if I can do this alone.   

He couldn’t. He could only hear prayers on the Surface, but now that he’s back in Skyloft he can hear the prayers up here but not below. It must be because of the wall of clouds he had to pass through. 

“She writes about how she and your father are safe after your grandfather fell,” he tells his granddaughter, “and how she’ll wait for him to come back.”

He reads the next few pages to himself, learning how Rast refused to leave the house, how he blamed himself for not catching him, how he acted as Tove’s defender when people tried to come after her for helping Beedle keep his divinity a secret. 

Rama isn’t like you, Amik, she wrote a week after he fell. He was crawling around the kitchen while I made dinner and poked his finger on a knife I dropped. Seeing our baby bleed was even scarier than seeing him not. I guess that means I actually have to babyproof the house, now, without you around to act as a buffer.  

“What,” Beedle keeps turning the page, keeps reading about how Tove learned to raise Rama all by herself, how he started walking two weeks before his first birthday and started talking three months after his second, his first word being, No! when Kastia playfully tried to steal one of his toys. “What are you looking for, exactly? So far it’s just…it’s just your father when he was a baby.”

“What about when he was older?” Amika asks, fiddling with her thumbs like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, “When-When he was at the Academy.”

He hates to skip all of these passages, all of these years of his son’s life, but he does. He flips by page after page after page, noticing that Tove’s daily entries vary in length depending on what happened during the day. Some have just one sentence, like a page from when Rama was five that reads, I went to the bazaar and bought some pumpkins, and some have essay-length letters describing the people she spoke to, the meals she cooked, what questions Rama asked over dinner or what bedtime stories she read him. 

He asked where his father was, he catches on a passage written when Rama was eight, because he noticed that all of his friends have two parents while he just has me. I didn’t know how to explain it all to him, I panicked, so I said that you died when he was a baby. When he’s older, I’m going to tell him the truth. I hope that maybe one day you’ll be here to tell him yourself. I have to believe you’re coming home, that I’ll be able to see you again. I miss you every day.  

About halfway through the thick tome, he reaches Rama’s fifteenth birthday. 

I baked him a cake. Chocolate flavored, of course, and he invited all of his friends from the Academy over to the house. There’s a girl that kept staring at him, I think she’s the Loftwing Trainer’s daughter, she made him a necklace that he hasn’t taken off since she gave it to him. He even let her split his second slice of cake, a privilege only he gets because it’s his birthday. If you could see his blush when I teased him after everyone went home, Amik, he looked so much like you that I thought I was seeing a ghost. I wonder if he’ll also have your charm when he eventually makes his move on that girl, probably at his sixteenth birthday party when he’s finally allowed to fly his Loftwing unsupervised.    

It’s awful, reading this and knowing that she died only three years later. 

“Was your mother the daughter of a Loftwing Trainer?” Beedle asks, closing the book. If he doesn’t he’ll go back and read the entries he skipped and then the ones after this one and he’ll be sitting in this kitchen until tomorrow morning.

“Yes,” Amika nods, her voice just barely a whisper, “why?”

He reads her the passage, and she smiles as he describes the necklace and the shared slice of cake. 

“I’ve heard that story, too,” she tells him, “My mother said they were both clueless, that it took them forever to realize that they liked each other back.” 

“Can you tell me?” he requests, glad that her smile is back, “I-I’d like to hear those stories, as well.”

—

He talks with his granddaughter until sunset.

“I…” he falters. He doesn’t want to leave, but he can’t stay on Skyloft. He can’t live in the house he built for Tove and Rama and not have them here to greet him every time he returns. He can’t be reminded of their deaths every time he wants to sit on the couch in the living room. He can’t think of Rast and Kastia and the mob that ruined him every time he steps outside for a walk. “I have to go, now, I…I have somewhere to be.”

Kakariko. He needs to find and talk to Impa, tell her all that’s happened. She’s his only friend, the only person in the world that knows who he is, the only person that could possibly understand.

His hands linger on Tove’s book of letters as he rises from his chair. Stealing it will hurt, but Amika can’t read it. She has no use for it besides remembering all that he’s translated for her.

Amika, standing at the sink and washing their teacups and the kettle, looks back at him over her shoulder, her eyes lingering on where he holds the thick tome.       

“You should keep it,” she says, turning back to the suds, nonchalant when she adds, “After all, they’re for you, aren’t they?” 

Beedle doesn’t dare breathe.  

“You’re too invested in my father and his mother to just be a stranger,” she continues, drying her hands on a nearby towel that hangs off a drawer handle, “and we have the same nose.” 

He swallows. “Amika-”

“I don’t know why you didn’t tell me,” her voice trembles. She keeps her back to him. “I gave you two chances to come clean and still you lied. Are you that ashamed of your own family?”

“What?” It’s as if he’s falling from Skyloft all over again. The ground is missing beneath his feet and all that’s surrounding him is open air and the echoes of his own screams. “No…No, I…Why didn’t you say anything?” 

“Because I’m not the one hiding everything!” she shouts, whirling around to face him with a vicious glare, “How the hell are you still alive? Why didn’t you come sooner?”

“I-I was trying! I-” Tears spring back into Beedle’s eyes, his voice breaking, “I’m-I can’t really explain it but the summary is that I’m the Goddess, I’m immortal, and-and fifty years ago I fell from Skyloft to the Surface and it’s taken me a really long time to figure out a way to fly up here. I thought-I thought your father was still alive, that your heartbeat was his-”

“My heartbeat?” her angry, incredulous tone doesn’t change. “You can hear my heartbeat?”

“Yes, I-I have strong ears because I’m the Goddess, so when I was on the Surface I was listening to Tove’s—your grandmother’s—heart and your father’s, so I knew the moment she died, but with his because-because he fell just like I did I-I missed it and-”

“My father did not fall,” Amika pushes herself away from the sink and storms over to the table, slamming a hand down on it as she reminds him, “He jumped because he thought he would survive and find you. I guess he thought he was the Goddess, too? Is that it?”

“I don’t know, okay?” Beedle throws his hands up in surrender, taking a step back, “I only know what you’ve said about them, the only thing I knew until seeing you was that my son was alive, though that’s clearly not the case.”

“Clearly.”

“Look, what-” he puts his hands back down by his sides, stepping back to the table to grab the book, “What do you want to know? I’m immortal, I fell, I survived, and I came back too late. I admit I was-I was upset when it was you on the other side of the door and not Rama, but that was because it meant that he was gone, because I was listening to the wrong heartbeat and I couldn’t find the right one. I tried to come back the moment I fell, I promise, but I couldn’t.”

“Why?” she puts a hand on the cover of the book, stopping him from touching it. “You’re the Goddess, can’t you do anything? You can’t-You can’t wish to be somewhere and just appear there?”

“If I could, don’t you think I would have done that and your life would have been completely different?” he demands. “I’m not an idiot, I know how my powers work. I had to build an object that could fly, and once I did I had to figure out a way to get through the clouds, because they don’t allow entry to anything that isn’t blessed by Hylia.”

“What?”

He shakes his head, sighing, “There’s a lot of stuff she did before she passed on her divinity to me that I don’t know about or couldn’t even begin to understand.”

Like, for example, the mortal girl sleeping in amber down on the Surface, the one he has to wait for that’s apparently the Goddess reincarnated. The one that’s supposed to be born in however many thousand years. 

“Why did you lie about who you were?” Amika asks, sounding just as exhausted as Beedle feels, “Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I lied because I thought you would think I was crazy,” he explains, trying to sound as earnest as possible, “and-and I couldn’t take back my old life knowing that everyone who knew me was dead. What purpose would I have staying here? You’re not in need of a grandparent, it looks like you’re doing fine on your own, where would I live? This…” He motions to the whole house. “This isn’t my home anymore, and the people of Skyloft made it clear that this isn’t where I belong.”

Beedle is for the Surface. Beedle is for Kakariko. Beedle is for the remains of the Temple of Hylia where his answers sleep under the protection of a warrior from the future that bears his only friend’s name. 

“I’m glad that you exist,” he tells her, “that-that some piece of my wife and son is still here, still alive, but I’m not the family you’re looking for. You’re not the family I was trying so hard to get back to. All I wanted from you was-was answers, and you can’t provide them.”

It hurts to say it, to watch how his granddaughter flinches from the impact of his words, but it’s the truth. He can’t stay. He can’t be her grandfather if he’s the reason her father is dead. He can’t be her family if he’s the reason she lost all of hers. 

“Please,” Beedle whispers, holding out his hand, “give me the book. It’s mine, she wrote it for me.”

“And-” Fresh tears make Amika’s eyes glassy. “And if I don’t?”

He swallows. “Then I’ll take it from you. I’ll be gone before you can finish blinking.”

She closes her eyes, and he listens to her heart pound inside of her chest.

“Please, Amika,” he repeats. “Don’t make this any harder for me.”

“It doesn’t have to be difficult, Amik,” she says, and the sound of his name on someone else’s tongue hits him like an arrow to the chest. “All you have to do is stay. We can-We can figure this out, I’m sure the remaining founders have forgotten your face if not your name, you can use your Beedle alias-”

“It’s not an alias.”

She blinks. “What are you talking about? You’re Amik, you’re my grandfather-”

“Beedle isn’t an alias,” he repeats. “It’s not just a name I’m using to hide my identity, at least not anymore. I’ve been Beedle much longer than I’ve been Amik, and Beedle is…Beedle is easy, he’s just a merchant. That’s all he is. He doesn’t have to think about dead family members and friends, he doesn’t have to worry about an island in the sky and the people who live there that wanted him dead, and he’s not a failure. He’s a merchant, and a damn good one at that.”

Amika stares at him, her eyes so much like his that it’s like looking at himself in a mirror. “So you’re just going to leave? Go back down there and act like you never met me?”

He tells her, “Amik is going to think about you every single day. Beedle is going to move on. That's all I have left to do.”

BaBumpBaBumpBaBumpBaBumpBa-

“Fine,” she snarls, picking up Tove’s book and chucking it at his chest with both hands. For any normal person, the weight of it would send them staggering, the breath knocked from their lungs, but it simply bounces off of Beedle’s chest like a pebble, forcing him to catch it before it falls. “Leave, then. Get out.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes, keeping his voice soft in the face of her hardened expression and trembling lower lip, “I can’t-”

“Don’t,” hers is harsh and cold, like the mountaintop he flew from. He wonders if he gets her temper from Rama or her mother, knowing that he’ll never figure out the answer. “Just go.”

BaBumpBaBumpBaBumpBaBump-

Beedle swallows. He nods. He turns around and heads to the front door, stealing one last glance at the portraits of Tove and Rama before he steps out onto the streets of Skyloft and listens to the door slam shut behind him, the lock clicking into place a final sort of goodbye.             

— 

Rama took his first steps today! I was trying to get him to come and give me a hug, and he stood right up and toddled over before he tripped into my arms. He didn’t even cry when he fell, I think it was because I was cheering instead of looking him over all concerned. Isn’t it funny how that works? I wonder how long it’s going to take for him to start running around the house.  

—

Kakariko looks the same as he left it, the only difference being that there are some new faces that he doesn’t recognize from his years spent living on the island. Beedle lands his shop on the beach, far from the village, and walks the rest of the way, cradling Tove’s journal, careful to protect it from trees that drip with rainwater. A storm must have just passed through.  

He gets some strange looks as he walks down the main street, trying to avoid eye contact with any older Sheikah that might recognize him, and shares a smile with the panting man that’s pedaling the waterwheel. It feels like it was just yesterday that Beedle was the one holding those handlebars, pedaling to make money to buy wood for his boat, and everyone he knew was still alive. His son was still an infant.

Stop it, he scolds himself, shaking his head in an attempt to dispel the thoughts his mind keeps spiraling towards, You can’t change what happened.  

The Temple of Time is similarly unchanged. It’s like Beedle never left, the same stone making up the walls and even the same vines creeping down the top from the towering trees above that cradle it in the land. He nods his head to some younger priestesses as he walks up the steps.

“Are you lost, stranger?” One of them asks, a friendly smile on her face, “Not many outsiders come to Kakariko.”

“I’m looking for Impa,” he says, smiling back, “Is she still partaking in her midday devotions?”

 The priestesses all look at each other. The one that spoke answers, “She just finished, actually. You know our Elder?”

“I’m just an old friend coming for a visit.”

Her eyebrows furrow. Beedle widens his smile, gives a short wave, and goes on his way, pushing open the grand wooden doors and stepping into the place that he used to call his home. 

She’s kneeling before the Statue of the Goddess, her head bowed and her white hair braided down her back. It’s long, much longer than it was when he last saw her, and her hands are even more wrinkled than they were thirty-five years ago as she lights a candle and clasps them together in front of her steadily beating heart.

“I don’t know if you can hear me up there,” she whispers, and the sound of her voice brings tears to his eyes. She’s here, and she’s alive. “I hope your family is well.”  

“Impa,” he calls, his voice breaking. 

Her spine stiffens. Her heartbeat picks up speed. He hears her swallow. Beedle shifts his weight, adjusting his grip on Tove’s book, waiting for her to turn around.

She looks back at him over her shoulder, still holding the candle meant for him, and her red eyes widen. 

“Beedle,” she breathes, her mouth agape, “You’re…You’re here. You’re back. What are you doing here? I thought…”

Her eyes drift to the book in his arms, then back to the tears spilling from the corners of his eyes. Wax drips down her candle and threatens to hit her thumb.

“The wax,” he croaks, motioning. 

She blinks, as if remembering she’s holding fire, and places the candle at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, letting the wick burn. Then she climbs to her feet, her bones creaking inside of her legs, and faces him. She opens her arms, and in the blink of an eye he’s crashing into them, clinging to her robes with one hand and twisting his fist into the material, sobbing into the warmth of her neck.  

“Oh, Beedle,” she whispers, hugging him back with what feels like all of her strength, “I’m so sorry.”

—

She locks the temple’s doors, making an excuse to her other priestesses that she needs to privately commune with the Goddess and make a decision on whether to welcome him into the village or not, and sits next to him in a pew. It takes her a while to walk to and from the door, and he watches her hobble, wondering if that’s how he would move if he aged like everyone else. He’s never thought about taking walking for granted, before.

“Do you need help?” he asks, unsure of what to do once his tears have stopped.

“No,” her voice is rougher, he’s noticed, more gravelly with age. She holds onto the backs of the pews to push herself forward with every step. “This is a recent development I need to get used to. Us Sheikah live for much longer than normal mortals, I’m going to be like this for the next few decades.”

He wonders what she’ll look like, how she’ll move, when she’s thousands of years old and babbling nonsense about him to her granddaughter. 

“Sorry,” she says once she finally sits down beside him, catching her breath, “Being ninety is much different than being fifty-five.”

“Don’t apologize,” he tells her, smiling, “You’re aging. It’s something to be proud of.”

She chuckles. “You only say that because you stopped right before all of the aches and pains got worse.”

“Yeah,” he runs his fingers along the cover of Tove’s journal. “I don’t remember what pain feels like, anymore. It’s weird.”

“I’m sure it is.”

They sit. He listens to her heartbeat. Someone on the island prays, Let my son sleep through the night and all he can think is, My son will never wake up.

“They’re gone,” Impa says. 

“Yes,” he replies.   

“They wouldn’t let you turn back the clock?”

He shakes his head, tapping the cover of Tove’s journal. “It took me thirty-five years to fly, Impa. I only got there this morning. They both died while I was trying to find a way up, but I thought my son was still alive. I thought I was listening to his heartbeat when it belonged to someone else. There…There’s a stranger living in my house, my…Rama’s daughter. She never knew him, never knew my wife, only knew my name as the reason they both died. I…I ruined it for myself. I couldn’t make myself stay.”

Are you that ashamed of your own family?

Impa covers his hand with hers, squeezing his fingers. She repeats, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he lies, taking a deep breath, “It’ll be fine. This book, it’s…it’s my wife’s journal, a-a collection of letters she wrote for me, expecting me to come back. It documents my son’s life, how he grew up, the person he became and the person he was at the time of her passing. I’ve only read a couple of entries.”

“Do you like what you’ve read so far?”    

Beedle nods. “It sounds like Rama was just like me. Personality-wise, I mean. He wasn’t…He wasn’t divine.”

Impa doesn’t let go of his hand. “Tell me about them.” 

He tells her everything. He starts from the moment he left Kakariko, telling her of his journey to find his old village, how he stumbled upon the remains of the Temple of Hylia and-

I am Impa, and I am protecting the Goddess Hylia. 

“Do you have a daughter?” he asks, interrupting his own story. 

She looks at him, her red eyes searching his face. She answers, “She left the island a year before you arrived the first time, wanting to travel the world. She has yet to return.”

“Why did you never tell me about her?”

His old friend shifts uncomfortably in the pew. “We didn’t part on the best of terms. She no longer wanted to devote herself to the Goddess, and I couldn’t understand a life that wasn’t in service to our higher power. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

“She is,” he assures. 

“How do you know? You met her on your travels?”

He does his best to explain Second Impa, her granddaughter from the future that watches over a slumbering Goddess in an amber shell, who owned a familiar set of knives. He tells her what they spoke about, how she told him that her grandmother kept telling a story about a man that wanted to fly, so he taught himself to build a boat. 

Impa lets go of his hand to touch the belt of knives across her chest. 

“I don’t know when,” he says, “but I know that it happens.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about her when you were here,” she meets his eyes, “I just…It’s a sore subject for me. It felt wrong to pull your attention away from your mission of getting back to the sky.”

“I’m not offended, Impa,” he smiles, shoving down a wave of jealousy, because Impa is his friend and Impa is going to get her family back and his is gone- “I’m happy for you, is all.”

Again, she searches his face. “Beedle-”

“Have you ever seen snow?”

She stares at him. He stares back. She lets it slide with, “No, I haven’t. I haven’t even heard of it.”

“You haven’t-” Kakariko is a tropical island, he remembers, and Impa has never left its sandy shores. “Oh, Impa.”

“What?” she asks, frowning, “What the hell is snow?”

He tells her everything. 

— 

He tells her everything up until she falls asleep against his shoulder, while he’s in the middle of describing one of his many attempts at flying. 

At first, he thinks nothing of it when she shifts in the pew again, knowing that they’ve been sitting for a long time and that unlike him, she’ll get stiff if she’s still for too long. She stretches as he speaks, then settles, asking if he’d mind if she leaned against him. 

“My neck hurts,” she says, and he gladly offers his shoulder as he launches back into his story of how the rain became his nemesis. 

He only realizes she’s asleep because she doesn’t laugh at his jokes about how for all of his divinity, all of his powers, water is what kept him grounded. Her breaths are deep and even against his throat, and she might even be snoring a little. 

Beedle fights to hold in his laughter. He can’t even be mad that she passed out while he was talking, he’s been talking for a while, and she’s older than she was the last time he saw her. Of course she needs more rest, of course she’s tired.   

Her chest rises and falls against his arm, but she’s utterly still. He would think her dead if she wasn’t slumped against him, if he couldn’t hear her heart beating.

BaBump. BaBump. BaBump. BaBump. 

He sits with her, listening to her heart, comforted by the sound that means she’s still alive and that he’s not truly alone. He opens the book in his lap and reads about his son.    

—

Rama likes the Loftwings. He begs me to take him flying every day after school, and I feel so bad saying no but I don’t want him to get spoiled. I’m trying to teach him that flying is a privilege and a responsibility, but all he wants to do is touch the clouds. I wouldn’t be surprised if he joined Rast’s school just to learn how to fly. 

I hope you’re learning to fly, Amik. I hope to see you soon. 

—

He helps Impa walk.

“This is ridiculous,” he scolds, forcing her to take his arm when she says she wants to go to the markets and starts inching her way down the street, “You clearly need a cane, why won’t you have one made?”

“Because I’m not that old,” she insists, scowling and trying wrench her arm out of his grip, “Let go of me, you stupidly strong-”

“If you don’t lean on me, by the time you get down these stairs the markets will have closed,” he tells her, laughing when she swats his shoulder, “Come on, Impa, you know I’m right.”

She mutters, “If it wouldn’t shatter my knives I would stab you,” under her breath, like that would do anything to stop him from hearing her.

“You know I heard that, right?”

“Yes, that’s why I said it out loud instead of in my head,” she looks up at him, and by the tug at the corner of her lips it looks like she’s trying not to smile. “I should make you carry me if you’re going to be annoying and give a damn.”

“Sure thing,” he says, and lets go of her arm, crouching in front of her.

“What are you—Beedle,” she laughs, “I was kidding, I-”

“I’m not,” he motions for her to climb on to his back, “It’ll be even faster this way, and it’ll be fun.” 

“Beedle, I’m the Elder, I can’t-”

“You absolutely can.”

Impa sighs. “You’re not going to let me say no, are you?”

He grins back at her over his shoulder. “Nope.”

—

“Lady Impa,” The wood merchant greets them with a tip of his hat, chuckling, “You’re much taller, today.”

“Beedle has taken it upon himself to help me get around,” she tells him, her chin hooked over Beedle’s shoulder as she clings to his back, “I’m actually here to speak to you about a cane.”

“I thought you didn’t want a cane,” Beedle reminds her, cheeky, faking an Ow! when she pulls his hair.

“I’d rather use a stick than make you my personal mount. How much for a good cane, Isor?”

“For you, Lady Impa? Nothing.” 

—

“Isn’t that much better?” Beedle asks, laughing when she swipes at his knees with her new cane, “Careful, you’ll break it against me! They’ll all think you’re blessed with superior strength.”

“I must be, having to deal with you,” she retorts, shaking her head with a smile, using the cane to push herself forward on the path back to the Temple of Time, “You’re such a child sometimes, I swear, it’s hard to remember that we’re practically the same age.” 

They are, aren’t they? If he were mortal he’d be dead by now, in a grave next to Tove up on Skyloft after dying from sickness or old age. If he were mortal, he would have died during the fall to the Surface, when he hit the water. He would have died when that Academy student accidentally shoved their sword into his chest. He would have died before ever meeting Tove, having been crushed by rocks as the Temple of Hylia fell apart around his head after she defeated Demise.  

“I could always turn back the clock for you,” he proposes, not even knowing he means it until the words are out of his mouth and lingering between them. 

“No,” Impa shakes her head again. “I have no interest in living longer than I’m supposed to. I don’t want to go through the process of losing my youth all over again.”

You wouldn’t have to, he wants to say, knows that no matter what he says she will never allow him to turn back the clocks he could find in her pupils. I could keep you young forever. You’ll never die.

But if she doesn’t get older, if she doesn’t die, Second Impa doesn’t have a grandmother who babbles about Beedle. She might not even become the same Second Impa that has to watch over the sleeping girl who houses Hylia, and that would put the Goddess Incarnate at risk. Beedle needs Hylia to live so he can get answers, which means he needs Second Impa to be the one to guard her, which means his Impa needs to age.

“All right,” Beedle nods. He hates being the Goddess of Time, sometimes. 

—

I’ve forgotten what you look like, Amik. When I think of your face all I see is an older Rama, and when I think of your voice all I hear is his.  

—

Beedle is on the beach, standing in the surf, when he spots a boat out on the sea, sailing in the direction of the island. Kakariko is tucked away in the farthest corner of the map, not remotely close to any other settlement. According to Impa, the only people that could possibly find it without clear directions is a Sheikah who already knows those directions, or castaways who wash up by complete accident. 

What about me? he’d asked.

You’re still a castaway, she’d replied, nudging his shoulder with her own, It just wasn’t an accident. 

Beedle stretches his hearing and listens in on the boat, where there are three heartbeats.

“We can turn around and go back,” A man says, his accent the same as the people to the north that Beedle sold hundreds of bundles of wood to because they needed kindling for fire. “There’s no need-”

“Yes there is,” A woman interrupts, her voice shaking. She doesn’t have the man’s accent, she actually…she actually sounds like a Sheikah. “I’m pregnant, my mother deserves to know she’s going to have a grandchild no matter what she thinks of me.”

Impa’s daughter. This woman has to be Impa’s daughter. She’s come home already? It’s only been…It’s only been…

How long has it been since Amika? Beedle hasn’t been keeping track of the years, anymore, he doesn’t know how long it’s been since…since…since anything. How long has he been on Kakariko? How long has it been since Tove and Rama died? It still feels like fifty years ago was fifty years ago, but now that he’s stopped counting everything, time has become…forgettable, in a way. He doesn’t even know how old he’s supposed to be, anymore. He feels thirty-five. He feels fifty-five. He feels ninety. He feels thousands of years old and like he’s just been born, all in the same breath.  

He sprints back to the Temple of Time at top speed, on the beach one second and standing beside Impa as she brushes dust from the Statue of the Goddess the next. 

“You haven’t moved that fast in a while,” she says, using her cane to crush a spider that threatens to climb her shoe, “What’s happened?”

“Tell me how old you are, again?” he requests, breathing hard, “I forgot.”

Impa stares up at him, frowning, her eyes narrowed in confusion. “I just turned one hundred and two last week. Why?”

Twelve years. Twelve years? It’s been twelve years already? Since when? Amika is…Amika is forty-three, now, which means she has, um…she has…twenty-seven years left if the Skyloftain life-expectancy hasn’t changed? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Should he round up to thirty? But if twelve years have already passed and to him it’s only felt like months, by the time it feels like a year has passed she might be dust and bones. Impa’s granddaughter could be Second Impa, leaving the island to save a mortal Hylia. 

“Your daughter is here,” he tells her, answering the first question she asked, “coming in on a boat with a man from the north. She’s pregnant, I think he might be the baby’s father.”

Impa’s heart pounds in her chest. She stares at Beedle, and Beedle stares back.

“Take me to the beach,” she says, and he’s picking her up and they’re gone. 

—

Impa’s daughter is named Cossa, and she’s two months pregnant, which explains the third heartbeat Beedle heard on the beach because it’s only her and her husband, Dagor, that have come ashore from their boat.

Impa’s greeting to her daughter is stiff, unfamiliar. Beedle’s never seen her so awkward or so cold, but she opens her arms to her child anyways, offers him up to carry all of her things.

“This is Beedle,” she introduces, watching with a hint of amusement as he straps all of her luggage to his back without complaint or a sign of struggle, “he’s a friend of mine who’s been helping me keep things in order, and he’s very strong.”

“Remind me not to get on his bad side,” Dagor whispers in Cossa’s ear, making her smile.

“It’s…It’s really okay that I’ve come back, Mother?” The young woman asks, holding her mother’s wrinkled hands, “With a husband and a child on the way, no less?”

“I’ve come to learn that I’d taken you for granted,” Impa says, and at that Beedle avoids her gaze, busies himself with faking some kind of strain as he starts to walk back in the direction of the village, “I’m just happy you’re here.”

He tunes out Cossa’s happy tears and the sound of their hearts colliding as they hug, focusing on the path forward.

—

He gives Impa time with her daughter and new son-in-law, sitting on the beach next to where he landed his shop and starting a fire. It takes until past midnight for her to find him, brandishing a bottle of wine and two cups.

“You shouldn’t have walked all this way alone,” he tells her, grabbing her hand to help her sit in the sand beside him.

“Oh, hush,” she uncorks the bottle of wine and pours some into each cup. “I’m not going to die any time soon according to the baby in my daughter’s belly.”

He huffs a laugh, watching the wood burn.  

“What will you do?” she passes him a cup, “When that baby is born, I mean. I know what I’m going to teach her.”

He lets out a breath, taking a small sip of the alcohol. He hasn’t drank since…since that night on Skyloft where he realized he couldn’t get drunk, when was it…sixty-seven, sixty-eight years ago? Before he and Tove were even together. He answers, “I’ll have to leave. For good this time.”

She frowns. “Why so soon? It’ll be four years before she’ll even have a solid memory.”

He, um, died when I was a baby, Amika had said of Rama, My only memories of him, if you can even call them that, are impressions. A warm voice saying my name, the weight of hands as I’m lifted into the air…those kinds of things.

“She’ll know,” he says, taking a deeper swig and wishing he could feel the burn in his throat, “And I can’t…I can’t be around to watch a child grow up, I can’t help raise her and get attached. It feels like…like I would be replacing him, and I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”

Impa stares into the fire. “I think you’re scared of moving on, Beedle, no matter how many times you say you’re leaving what happened on Skyloft behind.”

What? What is she talking about?

“What are you talking about?”

“Your wife’s book,” she elaborates. “I don’t think you should take it with you.”

What? 

“Impa,” Beedle looks at her, incredulous, not even knowing what to say. “That book is my only connection to them, how can you-”

“You’ve read through it every day for the past twelve years, so I know that you have every entry memorized by now. Its presence is holding you back.”

“How do you even know that?” he snaps, defensive, his guard raising in the face of his friend that wants him to-to leave Tove and Rama behind- “What makes you think you have any right to-”

“Because I know you. You think I don’t, but I do. I know that everything about my daughter coming back, about my becoming a grandmother in seven months, is killing you inside, and I know it’s because all you have is that book where your wife constantly laments and reminds you that you aren’t there to watch your son grow and the memories of your granddaughter throwing you out for a mistake that you made.”

“So, what,” he scoffs, unable to fathom her logic, “You want me to leave it here with you once it’s time for me to go? You want me to-to forget about them?”

“Yes, I do,” Impa pours more wine into his cup, nursing hers. “And I’m not saying you should forget about your family, Beedle, I’m saying that do you think this is what they would want for you? For you to be living on this boring island, still grieving them after the years you’ve already spent doing so? Is that what you would want if the roles were reversed?”

He tries to imagine it. He tries to imagine Tove, immortal and clinging to something he wrote on his deathbed that was meant to help her find closure, agonizing over every line he wrote that was meant to make her smile. He imagines her here, on Kakariko, unwilling to move on from his death and the death of their son because it’s all she’d been working towards for fifty years, and now that it’s done she doesn’t know what to do with herself. 

He thinks if the roles were reversed, he would want Tove to leave Kakariko. He’d want her to explore the Surface or the Sky, going to places that no one has ever gone to before, expanding the endless horizon. He’d want her to live because he couldn’t.    

“You’ve been drowning in guilt for as long as I’ve known you,” his only friend whispers, putting a hand on his shoulder, “I think it’s time you got out of the water.”

Beedle knows that Tove didn’t write that journal to hurt him, she would never do something like that, but the fact of the matter is that it does hurt. It’s painful to crack open the book’s spine and read about the life he missed out on, to have every entry end with some form of, Where are you, Amik? When are you coming back? when he knows that he spent all of those pages struggling and failing to reach her. It’s one long, long reminder of a time in his immortal life that he never wants to think about again.

Should he destroy the book, then? Would he want Tove to destroy it, if it meant bringing her peace, allowing her to finally move on from him? To leave it behind means still giving it power, making it a physical reminder of…of everything, and he would always know where it was. He would always have the temptation to return to it and read it and be reminded of his failures all over again, throwing him back into his grief. He wouldn’t want that for Tove. He knows she wouldn’t want that for him. 

Beedle takes a deep breath in, holding it for the time it takes for Impa to finally finish her first cup of wine and refill it to the brim. He exhales. In between the beats of her heart, he collects the journal from where he’s been keeping it safe in his shop and returns with it in his lap.

“I think…” he falters, stroking his fingers over the cover, “I think I need to get rid of it entirely. It…It can be like I’m…I’m cremating them, like we used to do for people that died from a plague. I can spread the ashes afterward. I think they’d like the sea.”

Impa swallows a mouthful of wine. “Are you certain?”

He nods. “I am.”

The fire crackles in front of them, the wood shifting as it burns. The book is heavy in his lap. 

Closing his eyes, he brings the cover to his lips and kisses the spot where Tove once signed her name to mark the item as hers. He whispers, his voice shaking, “I love you. I love you both so much. I’m so sorry. Thank you for believing in me.”

Love you, too, Tove had mumbled to him for the first time, half-asleep in her bed. 

Apa! Rama had cheered, always reaching for his nose, Apa!      

Beedle opens his eyes. He places the book in the flames, holding it there, letting the fire engulf his hands as it burns. Impa’s fingers tighten on his shoulders, and he lets her think he doesn’t hear the sounds of her sniffling over his own.   

—

The baby comes a few weeks early, in six and a half months instead of the seven they were all expecting. Beedle, having been prepared for this day since he spoke to Impa on the beach, is ready to go in minutes, all of his belongings packed into his shop.  

“I’m never going to see you again, am I?” he asks outside of the house where Cossa is staying, over the sound of her screams as a midwife coaches her through the birth of her daughter and her husband grips her hand, talking her through the pain. 

Impa shakes her head, smiling when she tells him, “If you come back a second time, I might have to find a way to kill you.”

He laughs. “I’d like to see you try.”

She opens her arms and he steps into them, hugging her with all of the strength he had when he was mortal. 

“I’m going to miss you, Impa,” he tells her, speaking directly into her ear, “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

Her frail arms squeeze his indestructible spine. “Thank you for trusting me with yourself, Beedle. You already know how much I miss you.”

They pull apart. He pretends not to notice her wiping at watery eyes. 

“Yeah,” he breathes, acting like he isn’t doing the same, “I do.”

He memorizes her face, the color of her eyes, the way her voice creaks after she laughs. He’s never had trouble remembering faces, can conjure Tove’s smile or Rama’s portrait or Amika’s snarl with ease, but Impa feels more…more final. This time, he knows he’s never coming back. He knows she’s going to die without him there. 

He turns away from her and walks in the direction of his shop-

“Beedle,” Impa calls, stopping him in his tracks.

“Yes?” he replies.

“Stop listening to my heartbeat.”

BaBump, BaBump, BaBump-

He stops, grins back at her over his shoulder, and gives her a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

—

He doesn’t know what to do. He can’t go back to Skyloft and he can’t stay on Kakariko. He can’t go to the Temple of Hylia and wait for the girl with the Goddess’s blood to wake up because Second Impa is there and she’ll ask too many questions because he won’t age. The other settlements of the Surface don’t excite him the way they probably should, and he would have to keep moving after a certain amount of time because he won’t age, and soon enough he’ll run out of places to live again, putting him right back to where he is now: aimless and wandering the skies with his shop, making lazy laps around the world. 

Eventually bored of the view, he ascends past the cloud barrier and into Skyloft’s territory. He has no intention of landing on the main island, but he’s never explored the outer regions before. Maybe he can find a place to land and stretch his legs. 

Beedle pedals his shop for hours, letting his mind wander, and he only sees the giant pumpkin because it’s a splash of color in an otherwise white, monotone landscape. He has to squint to process what exactly it is he’s seeing, is it really…?

Loftwings circle above it. There’s a door that riders walk in and out of. It’s a building made to look like a pumpkin, he realizes, and from the chatter he can hear inside it sounds like it’s a bar, just far enough from Skyloft that it feels safe enough for him to land and go inside. From what he remembers of his conversation with Amika, it didn’t sound like she would have a Loftwing. 

The sign above the door reads, The Lumpy Pumpkin, and Beedle remembers when they were building Skyloft, how Tove proposed that the pumpkin farmer should venture out to the nearby islands. This must be what he and his family have done with the crop.

The inside is like any other tavern that used to be on the Surface, and there’s not a lot of people except for the staff cleaning tables and pushing in chairs. Beedle sits at the bar and examines the menu, catching the bartender’s eye with a smile.

“Can I just get a small pumpkin juice?” he requests.

“Sure thing,” she replies, picking up a glass and filling it with orange liquid from a bottle. “First timer, are you? Haven’t seen your face around here before.”

“I’m looking to live on my own island,” he answers, sliding over the required rupees in exchange for the drink, “The mainland’s gotten too crowded for me, you know what I mean?”

“Sure do. I haven’t been back there in years.”

Beedle takes a sip of the juice and wrinkles his nose at the taste. He’s never actually had pumpkin, before, in all of his years of life, and he’s a little disappointed at how…how bitter it is. The aftertaste leaves a sort of film on his tongue that has him asking the bartender for a glass of water.

She laughs as she passes it over. “I know of an unclaimed island about three hours north from here. I pass it all the time during my flight home.”

He decides to give her a huge tip once he decides to leave, raising his water in thanks. 

—

He finds the island with ease, landing his shop and taking the lay of the land. There’s a good view of Skyloft from here, and it’s close enough to the Lumpy Pumpkin that if he gets bored, he can stop by. 

BaBump BaBump BaBump BaBump-

Amika is still alive. He isn’t sure how much time has passed since the almost thirteen years he spent on Kakariko, has no idea how old she is. He just…has to wait, he guesses, until he can’t hear her heartbeat anymore. He doesn’t want to chance running into her and ruining her only home, while he has all of the opportunity in the world to escape.  

Beedle sits in the grass of his new home, stares up at the stars, and waits.

—

It doesn’t take long for his granddaughter’s heart to stop. Or maybe it does. He’s not counting, anymore, he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is, or what time of year. There are no seasons in the sky. 

He gives her a moment of silence before climbing into his shop and flying towards Skyloft. 

—

He has a good business running within weeks. He does laps around Skyloft from sunrise to sunset, selling his wares and generating a rapport with his customers that dare to ring his bell and climb his ladder, pitching his prices and letting them bargain if he really wants their rupees. When he runs out of supplies, he spends his nights flying down to the Surface to restock. 

Sewing himself an even larger wallet, thinking about investing in chests to hide his fortune on the island where he stops to drop off his money and take a break from the monotony of his own routine, Beedle finds it funny that it literally pays to be immortal. He wouldn’t be as successful if he needed something as trivial as sleep.

—

Beedle is down on the Surface, scavenging the mountains for coldblooded bugs, when he hears it. 

Rise, Link, A voice in his head echoes, faint as though it’s far away, the time has come for you to awaken. You are fated to have a hand in a great destiny, and it will soon find you. The time has come for you to awaken…Link…

He traces the sound of the voice and realizes: It’s on Skyloft. How is someone on Skyloft praying and it’s reaching his ears? And, more importantly…

Who the fuck is Link?

—

A week later, while he’s flying his usual route over Skyloft, his bell rings. 

Beedle stops pedaling his shop and pulls the lever to let the ladder down, slumping over the handlebars and panting like he’s exhausted.

A boy dressed in green climbs into his shop, a sword on his back and a blue and white blanket on his belt. 

“Oh! You’ve come all this way?” Beedle asks, continuing to pedal, watching the boy catch his balance in the floating hut, “It’s so rare to have a customer here! Beedle’s Airshop has everything you could ever want. Please, take a look around! And if you actually buy something, that’d be even better!”

“Um,” The boy glances over the items on the counter, his eyes lingering on the Extra Wallet, “I’m looking for a bigger wallet, actually.”

“That’s an Extra Wallet. It’s amazingly useful!” Thank the Goddess, he finally has a chance to practice and refine his pitch for this item- “With this, you can carry an extra 300 rupees in your wallet! Say goodbye to all those times you couldn’t pick up another rupee because your wallet was stuffed full! Leave no rupee behind! Even you must be able to see just how useful this item is, and all for only 100 rupees. Want to buy it?”

The boy stares at the Extra Wallet. He looks back over his shoulder and murmurs to the hilt of his sword, “What do you think? Good bargain?”

Beedle…doesn’t know what to think about that. What, does this kid think his sword is going to talk to him, give him advice on finances? His prices are good, okay, they’re perfectly reasonable, nothing like the ripoffs that happen in the bazaar nowadays-   

Yes, Master, A voice—The voice, the one he heard down on the Surface that one night—answers. The sword on the back of the boy’s spine hums. There is a 0% chance that you will find this item anywhere else. 

The boy nods, smiling, and turns his attention back to Beedle with a, “Yes, I do! Let me just open up my wallet, here…Two, three, four, five…Here you are!”

He drops five red rupees on the counter and picks up the Extra Wallet, dumping the rupees from his old wallet into the new and placing it on his belt. 

“Oh!” Beedle likes how the yellow fits with the green of his tunic. He also needs him distracted so he can get a better look at that talking sword. “It really suits you!”

“You think so?” The boy looks down at himself, and his smile widens. “You’re right, it looks so cool!”

The sword on his back, he’s…Beedle’s seen that blade, before. Thousands of years ago, when he was a mortal man named Amik and the Goddess Hylia was bleeding behind his shop’s counter, trusting him to stitch her throat back together.

Demise’s blade was made specifically to hurt me, just like my Goddess Sword was specially made to hurt him, she had said when he asked about her injury and the extent of her powers. If he had used mortal steel I would be unharmed, it would bounce off of me and possibly shatter on contact. Mortal means cannot snuff out an immortal life; only the divine can harm the divine.

This…This child has the Goddess Sword, Hylia’s sword, the only blade in existence that can pierce Beedle’s skin and make him bleed. How does he have it? Where did he get it? How can it talk?

“I’m sorry, but-” Beedle swallows, staring at the weapon that could kill him, “Can I ask where you got that? The…The sword?”

Again, the sword hums. The sound is so faint that if Beedle didn’t have his hearing, he wouldn’t catch it. The voice whispers, Tell him it’s from a family friend.

“It’s from a family friend,” The kid lies with ease, that disarming smile still on his face. He’s so goddamn nice, how is he such a good liar? 

Beedle looks him up and down, and his eyes catch on the blanket on the other side of his belt. “And what’s that on your hip, there?” 

“Oh, it’s a sailcloth!” he takes it off his hip to show him the item. “It’s made out of really strong yarn, survived everything I’ve put it through so far. I got it from one of my friends.”

And that’s…that’s his yarn. That’s Beedle’s yarn. That’s the yarn that Hylia paid two thousand rupees for to make a sailcloth a week before the end of the world. Why does this random Skyloft kid have two things that belonged to Hylia? 

 The boy moves to leave the shop, standing in the open doorway and looking out at the tops of the houses. 

“Hey, buddy,” Beedle calls after him, “I didn’t catch your name! I like to get to know all of my customers.”

The kid smiles back at him over his shoulder, breezily replies, “My name’s Link!”, and leaps from the edge of the shop back to the ground below. 

—

Beedle doesn’t know how it happens, but Skyloft’s gigantic Statue of the Goddess, the one that belonged to the Temple of Hylia on the Surface, falls from the sky and plummets back to where it came from. 

He follows it as fast as he can, pedaling so hard that if they weren’t Blessed, they would break beneath his feet. Still, it takes a while. Still, he isn’t fast enough.

He lands just in time to watch a boy clad in green and wielding Hylia’s sword follow Demise, the Demon King somehow back from the dead, into a rift in reality. 

—

In the aftermath, the cloud barrier evaporates. Skyloftians come down to the Surface for the first time in two, maybe even three generations. A kingdom is established, Hyrule, giving a name to the land that Hylia herself once walked. The people name themselves Hylians.

Beedle hides his flying shop deep in the woods surrounding the newly built castle, made from the skeleton of the Temple of Hylia, and builds himself a new shop in the shadow of the Statue of the Goddess. This new civilization is a fresh start, a place where no one knows him, a place where everyone is a little strange, too concerned with themselves to even notice that he isn’t aging. It’s also the perfect spot to wait for the Goddess Incarnate to wake up from whatever slumber she’s in. 

The people that live in the newborn Hyrule Castle, the established King and Queen, name the town outside their front door Castle Town. It’s a simple, obvious name, Beedle thinks, and that makes it charming. He has customers here and there, people trying to find materials to build their own houses or hunt for food, and he’s starting to remember that he likes selling from behind a real counter that’s grounded to the earth rather than one suspended in the sky. 

He’s finishing up a sale of a chunk of amber to a man who wants to propose to his partner when the bell above the door of his shop rings, marking a new customer.

 “Welcome to Beedle’s!” he greets, passing the man his chunk of amber and pocketing the rupees. “You want it, I probably got it! What’re you looking for today?”

When he doesn’t get an answer and his current customer leaves, he looks at the newcomer to see what he’s dealing with. There have been talks in the newly opened taverns about thieves, or young boys that smash pots without a care for the time it took to sculpt them, and while Beedle hasn’t had any trouble so far he knows it’s only a matter of time before it’s his turn to be trifled with.

A teenage girl stands just past the doorway of his shop, barely over the threshold. She has long blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and wears a pink dress with a basket slung over her arm. Like all of the people in Hyrule, her ears are pointed. Beedle is glad his hair covers his to hide their rounded shape, as he’s sure it would garner more questions than he’d like, because how could he even explain that he’s from before the Skyloftians most likely evolved up in the clouds?

“Ma’am?” he asks, frowning. The girl is staring at him like she knows him, which is impossible because he’s never seen her before in his life. “Can I help you find anything?”

Something in the girl’s eyes shifts, like a curtain has been drawn over her pupils. Her spine straightens and her shoulders lift. She hikes the basket up from the crook of her elbow to her shoulder.  

“Yarn,” she says, and her voice has a sort of…ethereal quality to it that he can’t actually describe. It makes her sound older than she looks, maybe she’s in her twenties and just has a young face? “Do you have any yarn?”

“Third shelf on your right,” he tells her, watching her walk across the wooden floorboards with a grace he hasn’t seen since Hylia traversed his shelves, nameless and endlessly rich and dressed in white.

“You’re selling bugs?” her voice floats to his ears from somewhere in the shelves. “So many beetles!”

Everything tilts. 

They’re my favorite! he had replied. 

This girl…There’s no way it’s a coincidence that she’s using the same words Hylia did back when he was- 

“Come now, Amik,” his customer says in the tones of a mortal voice, placing a spool of green yarn on the counter, “You really don’t recognize me?”

His customer, this-this child, is the Goddess Incarnate? She’s the one he was waiting for? She’s-

“Yes,” she says in the tones of a mortal voice, placing a spool of green yarn on the counter, “I am Hylia.”

—

He closes the shop, locking the door and lowering the curtains. The girl that Hylia speaks through sits up on his counter, her legs crossed as she fiddles with the yarn in her basket.

“It’s strange, being this young again,” she says, and she sounds so different but so similar his mind fractures just trying to reconcile the voice of hers he’s used to. “The girl I am now, Zelda, she’s very nice. You would like her.”

“I don’t understand,” he whispers, still standing by the door, for some reason afraid to get close to her. He doesn’t know why he’s scared, he hasn’t had a reason to be afraid since he fell from Skyloft thousands of years ago. “You’re really Hylia?”

“I am Hylia, yes, but I am also Zelda,” she meets his eyes. He finds himself looking for clocks. “Sometimes I’m one, sometimes I’m the other, sometimes we coexist. It’s difficult, you see, housing a goddess within a girl. I have memories of before this land was named, and I was allowed to frolic under the watchful eyes of my sisters, but I also have memories of learning about the end of the world up on Skyloft, learning about the very existence of Hylia, of myself. Even now, I struggle to explain it. There’s no one in the world who understands what it’s like to share a mortal body with an immortal mind.”  

Beedle continues to stare at her. He listens to her heartbeat. It’s normal, it’s mortal, he knows that if she were to fall off the counter and scrape her knees on the floor that she would bleed red instead of gold. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. “All this time, I’ve been waiting for you to wake up, and now you’re here.”

“Yes,” her fingernail digs into a string of green. “Ask me your questions, Amik. I’ll see if I can remember the answers. I’m mortal now, and prone to forgetting things if they’ve happened a long time ago.”

“Why?” Is the first question out of his mouth. “Why did you pick me?”

“The power of the divine is pure energy,” she tucks a strand of her hair behind a sharp, pointed ear. The Hylia he knew had rounded ears, ears like him. “That energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred. You were already praying for my help, wanting to survive, and I needed somewhere to store my divinity. We both got what we needed.”

“I never asked-” his stomach turns, bile rising in his throat- “I never asked to be like you. I never asked to live forever, I-I had a family on Skyloft, a wife and a son, and I lost them because of your power!” 

“Is living forever not something all mortals wish for?” she tilts her head, furrowing her brows. 

“Why-” he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, tries to remember that this is her first time being mortal, that she couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to have everyone you love die while you live on, forever unchanging. “Why did you reincarnate?”

“I was protecting something from Demise, a magical force that only a mortal can wield, and it soon became clear to me that the key to his ultimate defeat was the use of that item. I needed to be here to ensure that the item got used by a mortal of my choosing, and it has.”

He opens his eyes. “So why didn’t you just wait yourself?”

“My fight with Demise had me on the brink of death,” her lips curve into a smile that doesn’t reach hers. “It was my only option.” 

“That boy,” Beedle thinks of the kid that frequented his shop wearing her sword on his back and her sailcloth on his belt. “Link. Was he-?”

“The mortal of my choosing, yes,” she nods. “I’m his childhood friend. I love him, I think.”

“You or the girl?”

Hylia smiles. “The girl, though he is rather cute. He looks a bit like you, actually, in the eyes. You both have…courage, if you will. A determination to do the right thing.”

What does that mean?

“Is there a way for me to give it back to you?” he asks the question he’s been wanting to ask her since he became immortal. “Is there a way for me to be normal again?”

He would give anything to age. His family is gone, Impa is gone, he has nothing left to do but sell his items. He can’t do this forever, not like this, he needs to stop eventually. There has to be a way. There has to.

Hylia thinks, and Hylia thinks, and Hylia shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten how to transfer it. Must have slipped away in the midst of all of my new mortal memories.”

All of the hope leaves his body in a rush. 

“Oh,” he breathes, his vision blurring with tears, “Oh.”

She sits in silence for a moment. Maybe two. Then she pushes herself off the edge of his counter to stand.

“I can’t see my own eyes, anymore,” she says, walking up to him and leaning in close to his face, close enough that he can see his clocks reflected in her pupils. “Be a dear and tell me what time it is? I don’t want to be late for dinner.”

He blinks to clear the tears from his eyes, finds the hour and the minute. Tells her, “Half past six,” and doesn’t know why he listens. Maybe it’s the lilt in her voice, how even though she’s ruined his endless life he still thinks of her as the woman in white that saved him from debt and kept his finances afloat once upon a time.

“Perfect,” she grins, letting him go and walking to the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Amik.”

The bell rings over her head to mark her departure as she disappears down the street. She’s long gone by the time he collects himself and whispers to the empty air, “My name is Beedle.” 

—

Hylia visits his shop often, but Beedle much prefers it when it’s Zelda that comes walking through his door. She’s nice, calls him Beedle, and never complains when he hikes up his prices once she enters, expecting Hylia to enter her gaze any minute. She buys fruits, gems, or string to mend her husband’s shirts.

“Husband?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. She’s only…No, wait, she looks older, doesn’t she? She’s lost the baby fat in her cheeks, and she’s taller than she was the last time he saw her. 

“Yes, my husband, Link,” she smiles. “Tonight is our anniversary, and I’m surprising him with a gift.”

“Care to tell? I promise I won’t share.” 

She looks back over her shoulder, like she’s expecting her husband to appear outside and eavesdrop, then leans in and conspiratorially whispers, “I’m pregnant. I’m embroidering one of his tunics to read ‘Papa’.”

Beedle smiles and is shocked he means it. “That’s wonderful!”

“Isn’t it? Oh, I’m so excited to be a mother, and I know Link is going to be the best father. Do you have any children, Beedle? Any advice? My father passed a few years ago and Link lost his parents when he was young, so we’re truly flying blind.”

He wants to laugh in her face and throw her out on the street. He remembers how much he panicked when Rama cried for the first time, and when he and Tove realized that they had to support his neck unless they wanted to either mess up his spine or kill him. 

“Support his neck,” he manages, bagging up her items and pocketing her rupees, “and there are different cries he’ll have. One is for hungry, one is for tired, and one is for teething.”

Zelda nods, thanking him with an eager grin. She throws some more rupees into his open wallet before she leaves and jogs up the road. 

—

Decades later, he hears news that High Queen Zelda is on her deathbed. He never realized that Hylia was the ruler of the kingdom, but how couldn’t he have guessed? Zelda never carried herself with the poise of leadership, but Hylia doesn’t seem like the kind of person to kneel to someone else. 

Beedle isn’t surprised when he gets a summons to the castle, and is even less surprised when armored knights take him to the Queen’s quarters. He has no interest in all of the finery despite his massive fortune, and is focused only on the sound of a weak heartbeat that grows closer with every step. 

She’s sitting up in a grand bed, wearing a nightgown and suffering a coughing fit. Her hair is stark white and her skin is so wrinkled he has to search to find her clear blue eyes. 

“Hello, Amik,” she greets once she recovers and catches her breath, her voice creaking like Impa’s did as the knights close her door behind his back, “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“What do you want from me?” he asks, crossing his arms. “I left the shop open, your men didn’t give me time to-”

“I lied to you, that day,” she confesses, cutting him off without apology, “I remember how you can rid yourself of your divinity.” 

What he wanted to say to her dies in the back of his throat. What did she just say? What?

“The truth of it is, I liked being mortal,” Hylia continues, coughing again, and the rattle inside of her chest would be concerning if Beedle were a doctor instead of a merchant. “I liked growing old with my husband, but he’s gone now, and I’ve caught the plague that’s been going around. My doctors say I’m too ill to recover, that there’s no cure, but I know of one that they can’t even fathom: You.”

 He could have…He could have been dead by now. He could have been reunited with Tove and Rama, Rast and Kastia, Impa-

“Give me my divinity back, and I will make you a King,” The Goddess rasps, her every breath a wheeze. “I’ll give you anything you want, everything you want. You’ll never have to lift a finger again.”  

Everything he wants died before he reached Skyloft after falling to the Surface. Everything he wants has been gone since before she was reborn. 

She breaks into another fit of coughs, hunching over as she struggles to breathe. 

“It’s a very simple process,” she chokes, “Much like Blessing an item. You’ve figured out how to Bless an item, haven’t you?”

He wants to age, he wants to move on to the next life, but he can’t do that if it means the woman that made him like this gets everything she wants.

“I’m not giving it back,” he whispers. “Not like this.”

Her eyes go wide. She sputters, “What do you-”

“Not like this,” he repeats. “It’s not what you deserve.”

“There’s a curse on this land, Amik,” she hacks, burying her face in her elbow, “A curse Demise cast that will forever send Hyrule into darkness; My Chosen will rise again. He will save this land whenever it cries for his service, his soul taking a new form every turn of the clock. He needs me to protect him, to help him break it-” 

“I can do that just fine.” 

“Please, Amik,” she grabs his hand, squeezing his fingers with feeble, measly strength. Are those tears glistening in her eyes? “Please. I’m…I’m afraid. I don’t want to die alone.”

Pure, blinding rage ignites in his chest, so hot that all he sees is red. He rips his hand out of her grasp and snarls, “Neither did my wife. Neither did my son. They wouldn’t have if I was there with them, and I wasn’t because of you. I will gladly live forever in misery so long as it means that you pay for what you’ve done to me in whatever afterlife awaits.”

His head buzzes, his fingers shaking as he curls them into fists. He’s never been so angry in his life, he has to leave, he has to calm down, he doesn’t know what he’ll do if he’s in this room any longer than he has to be.  

“Amik,” It sounds like speaking his name is taking all of Hylia’s strength. He tunes out her voice as he goes to the door. “Amik-”

“Beedle,” he corrects her, before he’s gone. “My name is Beedle, now. Zelda knew that.”

When the news comes that High Queen Zelda is dead and the mourners line the streets, Beedle lights a candle for the mortal girl that shared a mind with a goddess and called him by the right name. 

—

Time passes.

—

A man from the desert, Ganondorf, is visiting Hyrule Castle. Beedle watches his arrival in the streets of Castle Town, admiring the warriors that flank his sides. 

When night falls and the fires start, word spreading that Ganondorf has betrayed the King and is set on taking over the kingdom in his hunt for a divine power, Beedle packs up his valuables and escapes, hiding on the outskirts of Hyrule Field, planning on staying on the edge of the deepest woods until the dust settles. He doesn’t want to know what would happen if the villain found out he was immortal while trying to ransack his shop.

Seven years later, he spots a young man that looks a lot like Link, Hylia’s Chosen, running through Hyrule Field with a familiar sword on his spine. 

My Chosen will rise again. He will save this land whenever it cries for his service, his soul taking a new form every turn of the clock. 

So…this isn’t the Link he knew from Skyloft, then. This is a…reincarnation? 

“Link!” he calls, grabbing his attention, just to test it. Surely he would recognize the merchant he frequented on his quest to save the girl he loved. “Hey, Link! I didn’t know you were Blessed, too!”

Link meets his eyes and there is no recognition in his gaze. He frowns, tilting his head, and a spot of light buzzes next to his ear. He runs off in the direction of Death Mountain without sparing Beedle another glance. 

Yep. It’s a reincarnation. He’ll try not to be too offended. 

—

Link saves Hyrule. Again. 

Beedle gives him a case of empty bottles as thanks and almost chokes on his tongue when Link repays him by smashing all of his pots for a spare rupee.

“I wish you had bombs and arrows,” he mumbles before he runs out the door.

—

Ganondorf comes back from the dead, as Demise’s cycle bids. This time, Link doesn’t show up to defeat him. 

Beedle watches as Hyrule burns to ash, and knows that when the endless storms start that it can’t be anything but divine intervention. He gets into his shop and flies above the floods, searching for the mountain where he left his Blessed boat a millenia ago. By the time he finds it, the storms have stopped and a majority of the kingdom is drowned. Mountains have become islands, and the surviving Hylians have begun to pick up the pieces and rebuild their lives.

He trades in his shop for his ship and gets to sailing on the open seas, endeavoring to remake his fortune.

—

He stocks up on bombs and arrows, preparing for the day when a boy clad in green will arrive on his deck. 

The next Link he’s faced with is a legitimate child. He can’t be any older than eleven years old, but his eyes light up at the sight of the bombs and arrows on his counter.

“I’ve been looking for these!” he gushes as he sells Beedle out, emptying his whole ship of his wares. “Thank you so much, sir!”

“Yeah,” Beedle gapes as the kid runs back out to his boat, a red little thing that has the face of a lion and a blue and white sail…cloth. The Chosen’s sail is Hylia’s sailcloth. Of course it is. 

The next time he sees him, selling him even more bombs and arrows, he avoids looking at it. He doesn’t like to be reminded of its history. 

—

Time passes. This Link saves the flooded Hyrule. The water doesn’t drain. Beedle follows him to a new land and hopes it all works out.

—

Time passes. It all works out. Trains are a technological marvel. 

—

Time passes. The Kingdom of Hyrule is reborn. The Sheikah, having joined the larger society, dive deep into technological advancement. 

Beedle, more than used to how it all works by now, waits for a darkness to rise.

—

The Royal Family calls it Calamity Ganon. Beedle sells the latest Chosen—Hero, now, they call him the Hero—hearty foods to keep his stamina up in a fight. When the world starts to end for the millionth time, Beedle sits in his third Castle Town shop, makes himself a cup of tea, and waits for the battle to end by the time the water boils.

—

Time passes. Almost ten thousand years to be exact. Beedle, not for the first time, is living on the beach in a new village called Lurelin, selling fruits to tourists from his boat.

A little blonde Hylian girl dressed in a blue bathing suit jogs up to his counter, panting. 

“How much for three Mighty Bananas?” she asks, and her accent tells him she’s from Central Hyrule, probably Castle Town. 

“Twenty rupees, miss,” he tells her, already passing over the fruit, “Having fun in the water?”

“So much,” she giggles, and one of her front teeth is loose. “Father is trying to teach Mother how to swim.”

“Rhoam!” he hears a woman shout in the waves, “If you drop me I swear to Hylia-”

“Relax, darling!” A man’s voice responds, booming with laughter, “I have you, I have you! Is Zelda back yet?”

“She’s still over by the-Rhoam!” 

More laughter. Beedle tunes back in to the little girl in front of him, little Princess Zelda, and takes her rupees with a smile. 

—

Time passes. Ten years. Princess Zelda fails to awaken the divine powers granted to her by the blood she shares with the Goddess, and Calamity Ganon comes back. 

Beedle has invested in a large, beetle-shaped backpack, Blessed it so the material will never tear, and is readying his stock of Hearty Durians for the Hero to eat in preparation for the battle. Before he can even start walking out of Lurelin territory, however, a Sheikah runs past, bringing a message to the village. He stays behind to listen. 

“The Hero has fallen,” The messenger pants, hunched over with his hands on his knees, “The Princess has gone on to face Calamity alone. There’s nothing we can do but wait for the end.”

Beedle swallows. He never got to meet the Hero of this era, has no idea what he looks like. He hikes up the straps to his backpack and heads on his way. 

—

The world doesn’t end. From what it sounds like in the castle, Princess Zelda is holding Calamity Ganon back all by herself. To help her kill it or at the very least seal it away, it needs to be beaten back by the blade of evil’s bane: The Goddess Sword.

The Master Sword, he mentally corrects. He wonders why the name of the weapon changed but has no one to ask. Maybe the voice inside of it wanted to stop associating with Hylia, too. 

With the Hero gone, it’s his one chance to get up close to the sword. It’s his one chance to actually help instead of sitting around and watching the action from the sidelines, the perfect cure for his boredom. He just has to find it.  

—

He tries listening for its voice, but hears nothing. It’s his only lead, and without it he’s aimless, wandering the burning fields of Hyrule, looking in every nook and cranny he finds to see if the Master Sword is there. It never is. 

The robot soldiers the Calamity corrupted, the Guardians, always try to fire at him, but their lasers simply bounce off his skin and ricochet right back at them, shutting them down as they blast out their own blinking blue eyes. He uses that to his advantage, drawing their attention away from refugees as he travels and to make the world a little bit safer. 

It’s the least he can do, after all.

 —

He finds it after a year, when he accidentally steps foot into the Lost Woods and a wall of fog tries to engulf him. He’s heard the stories of this place, how the fog drives travelers mad enough that they never leave the woods, becoming spirits in service to the deity that watches over this area, but it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. It rolls off of his skin like rainwater, wisping away to make a path forward. He follows it as fast as he can, reinvigorated by his sudden success, and laughs in delight when he enters what he soon learns is Korok Forest.

Koroks, as it turns out, are the spirits the Lost travelers become once they succumb to the fog’s song. They’re rather cute, their morbid origins aside, and are not even close to the weirdest things Beedle has seen in his long, long life. 

“You’re strange,” One of them comments when he isn’t fazed by their pranks, the leaf that makes up its face shaking with its laughter. “Are you related to Mister Hero?”

“No,” he says, his eyes staying on the Master Sword that rests in a pedestal before a large tree. He approaches and stands before it, taking off his backpack and putting it down on the cobble path behind him. “How come no one’s come for the sword?”

“Miss Princess said Mister Hero is sleeping,” The same Korok says, climbing on top of his backpack to sit. “She said last year that he’s not gonna wake up for a century!”

So Link is all right, then. He’ll be back soon.

“Good,” Beedle says. “That’s good. Are you and your, um, siblings the sword’s guardian?”

“Nope, that’s the Great Deku Tree’s job!” The Korok points to the giant tree before the pedestal. “But he’s been sleeping ever since Miss Princess left. I think he’s going to wake up when Mister Hero gets here, or when a bad guy comes.”

That’s…strange. Does this ‘Great Deku Tree’ not recognize Beedle as a threat to the Master Sword, and therefore stays asleep? Is it because of what he is? The sword is meant for the Hero, but before it was his blade it was the Goddess’s. Technically, it was Beedle’s. 

He wraps his hands around the hilt. It hums beneath his fingers. If he’s able to pull it, to wield it, he can help Princess Zelda. He can help Link save Hyrule and not even sell him a goddamn thing. 

Gently, he tugs, and the Master Sword slides free with an ease that should be frightening. Around him, the Koroks titter, whispering in a language he for once can’t understand. 

You… The voice is faint in his ears. It sounds…strained. You’re the merchant. From Skyloft. And Castle Town. And the Great Sea.

“My name is Beedle,” he murmurs to it, stroking his fingers over the rusted blade. He wonders what put it in such a state. “I have the Goddess’s divinity. What’s your name?”

I- The sword sounds like it’s choking. I have not spoken my name in millenia, I…It feels wrong to speak it now. 

“That’s all right. Are you strong enough to face the Calamity?”

The hilt buzzes in his hands. The blade pulses in time with a racing heart elsewhere in Hyrule. 

No. I was damaged by Calamity's Malice. I will not be strong enough until my Master awakens. 

“In ninety-nine years?”

Correct. We are…intertwined like that.

Beedle blinks, taken aback. “What about Princess Zelda?”

There is a 98% chance she will last long enough for him to awaken and find me. 

Mentally, he curses. He can’t do anything but wait. Again. 

“Before I put you back to heal,” he says, “Can I ask you a question?”

Only one. I am tired. 

“Did you know of me before all of this? Before I had Hylia’s power?”

No. The Goddess created me to assist the Hero after Skyloft was created. It has been my purpose since my birth on the edge of time.

Beedle nods. “Thank you, Master Sword. Have a nice nap.”

Thank you, Beedle. Enjoy your wait. 

—

Ninety-nine years later, at the Dueling Peaks Stable, he runs into Rama. 

It isn’t Rama, of course, Beedle knows that Rama is long dead, but the young man wearing his face is very much alive. He hears from the stablemaster that the kid, of course, is named Link. Link has amnesia, and he’s looking to find Kakariko Village.

He comes up to where Beedle is pretending to struggle to walk with his giant backpack and tilts his head to silently ask if he needs a hand. Beedle, on instinct at seeing a Hero looking to empty his wallet, launches into his spiel.

“Hey, I don't believe I've made your acquaintance! The name's Beedle, but you can call me-” Amik almost rolls off of his tongue, and what is he thinking? He hasn’t thought about his old name since…since forever, why is it that the sight of the Hero with Rama’s face is making him— “Actually, let's just stick with Beedle. But even if you forget my face, you can remember me by my beetle-shaped backpack! Despite these dangerous times, you'll find me traveling all over Hyrule to fulfill your shopping needs. I stock many special bugs and must-have items for travelers, and I always charge a fair price, or my name's not Beedle! I also buy all sorts of things, if you're in need of rupees, gemstones in particular fetch a high price! How can I help you today?”

Again, The Hero tilts his head, frowning, his eyebrows furrowing together, and there. That’s the face Tove made whenever something was confusing. That’s how Amika looked when she opened her front door and saw him standing there, asking for Rama.

“I’m-I’m sure I have something you'll find useful!” Beedle hands the silent Hero his list of wares and their respective prices. “Please have a good look!” 

Tove’s lips quirk in a frown as Link peruses the list. He fishes a red rupee out of his pocket and points to a bundle of arrows.

“Thanks for the business!” Beedle chirps, taking the rupee and handing over the arrows, “Did you need anything else?”

The Hero shakes his head, nodding in thanks before turning around and running off in the direction of Kakariko Village, leaping onto the back of a wild horse and Hyah-ing away. 

Beedle can’t help his laugh, calling after him, “Thank you very much, hope to see you again soon!”