Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

On a shelf behind the counter in a dingy roadside shop sits a glass bottle. Inside the bottle, a pink fairy lies motionless, her wings drooping like wilted flower petals.

One hundred Rupees would be steep in a town market; half a day’s ride away from a fairy fountain renowned for its healing waters, the price is a joke. The shopkeeper used to open the bottle to drop in bits of food or a few dribbles of water each day, and those moments were enough to allow her some fresh air, but business has been dwindling and no customer ever gave the fairy a second glance, so the shopkeeper gave up and so did she. After all this time, she thinks, the other fairies should have noticed her absence and the Great Fairy should have arrived in wrath to rescue her stolen daughter. It’s customary to allow mortals to carry fairies in times of danger, but this is beyond reason. Someone should have put a stop to this. Someone should have saved her by now. Someone. Anyone.

They haven’t.

The bell above the door jingles and the shopkeeper jumps up to take his place behind the counter. His first customer in two days, an ambiguous green shape through the breath-fogged glass, loiters by the map pinned up to the wall.

“I’ve got more copies of that for sale if you’re looking to buy one,” the shopkeeper calls out.

The shape possibly nods, only entering focus after it approaches the counter. While the fairy’s bleary eyes are still working out the details, the shopkeeper edges back as if he regrets speaking; before him stands a big man dressed in a patchwork of leather armor barely hidden under a travel-stained green cloak, not an exceptionally tall man but broad-shouldered and strong, inclined to move with a silent assurance that claims space in a room. If he isn’t a bandit then he must be a mercenary, perhaps foreign to Hyrule, judging by the curiously diamond-patterned hilt of the sword he wears at his back. There’s an ugly scar where his right eye should be.

Words are said, and the shopkeeper leans reluctantly over the counter to hear them. As far as bandits or mercenaries go, this one is unusually soft-spoken.

“Eh? You want one? That’s fine, fine. I’ll give you a warning before you come back angry and wanting a refund, though: they’re, uh, not quite up-to-date. The forest off toward the east of town has turned strange and overgrown, bewitched, so they say. And before you get that far, if you were planning to visit the spring...”

Before the shopkeeper can say much more, the traveler’s gaze slides along the shelves and past the fairy’s bottle, then snaps back to her. The creasing of the traveler’s brow alerts the shopkeeper that his customer’s attention has turned elsewhere. “Ah, then there’s that one... you would have thought there would be more takers, right? One hundred and fifty Rupees if you want it.”

A week ago, the fairy would have pounded her fists against the glass and screamed until her lungs gave out. Yesterday, she would have savored a quiet fantasy of this hard-bitten vagabond chopping off the shopkeeper’s head. Now, today, she does nothing, and the vagabond in question studies her only a moment longer before shaking his head and gesturing to the map on the wall.

“You’ll take the map, then?” asks the shopkeeper. “Sure, I’ve got more of those. Wait here just a minute, I’ll get a new one from the back.”

He disappears around a corner to search through about fifty different drawers, by the sound of it. The traveler stands and waits, the picture of patience, his hands resting flat on the counter. Then he vaults over, landing with remarkable lightness on the other side, and sweeps the fairy’s bottle into a hidden pocket of his cloak. 

Plunged into darkness, the bottle tumbles this way and that as the traveler jumps back to where he was standing a moment earlier, or so he must have, because the fairy can hear the shopkeeper speaking, and then the traveler, and then a hand is rummaging through the pocket to extract a wallet. She’s too sick and dizzy to make any further sense of what’s going on. In a moment, a big rustling object appears beside her and then there’s more talk from the shopkeeper. The bottle sways with the movement of the cloak. The traveler is walking, maybe. Everything is spinning.

From a long distance away, a bell jingles, and the fairy hears nothing more.

There’s a pop! as the traveler uncorks the bottle and pours the fairy out onto a gauntlet-covered hand. She covers her eyes against the sun, groaning, and he curls his fingers against his chest to form an enclosed shady space that might have been relatively comfortable if it didn’t smell like sweat and leather and if she wasn’t being jostled around so much. An interminable length of time passes, with the fairy having the hazy sensation of being continually glanced at. She thinks she hears hoofbeats.

Then the sound has ceased, the world has stopped its merciless shaking, and a sprig of pale yellow flowers appears beside the fairy, lightly sweet-smelling honeysuckle blossoms. She pushes herself up to sit and reaches unthinkingly for the nearest flower, plucking out the delicate stamen to reach the nectar inside. It’s the first thing she’s eaten in days and it tastes impossibly good; after she’s finished, there follows a round metal cap filled with something that looks a bit like blue potion and smells more than bit like alcohol, and she drinks. This doesn’t taste quite so good, but it helps to clear her head, and her vision too.

As the world sketches itself back into existence, the fairy finds herself in a wooded clearing a little ways from the road, still resting on the traveler’s hand while he kneels among the underbrush and flowering plants. He’s watching her with more worry than she would have expected from one with such a rough look about him. She’s not sure what to make of this.

“I’m sorry, I won’t be able to heal you right now,” says the fairy. She has a terrible mental picture of this mercenary bleeding to death on a battlefield somewhere and opening the bottle with the last of his strength, just to watch her drop out like a squished bug. Whoever he is and whatever his plans may be, he deserves better. “And, and I can’t restore you back to life if you really die. Not even the Great Fairy has that power.”

He shrugs and twists the cap back onto a flask he must have pulled out from somewhere.

“You were... just helping me?” the fairy asks. In her experience, fairies who have frequent dealings with the big people while out on their own tend to keep up an overly rude and brash persona to compensate for their dainty looks. One of them would probably smack her right now if they could hear how pitifully squeaky she sounds. After such a long time languishing alone, she wouldn’t even mind. 

He nods.

“Oh. Thank you. I thank you... very much. It would have been all right with me, you know, that’s what healing magic is for, but he left me in there for so long, and... and it got hard to breathe...”

Dropping the flower, the fairy hugs herself. Her belly feels a little better and she’s not so dizzy anymore. The outside air smells fresh and sweet. She hadn’t realized just how horribly stuffy it was inside the bottle.

“...Thank you.”

The mercenary—she has no specific reason to continue thinking that he’s a mercenary, except that she has no reason to think otherwise and the word has affixed itself in her mind—smiles at her. He has a hard, harsh, sharply-angled face, but each part of the whole somehow realigns when he smiles, and he doesn’t look cruel or scary at all. His good eye is a deep and vivid blue.

He tucks the empty bottle into one of the many pockets in his cloak and the flask into another, then slowly pushes himself up from the ground with a pained grunt. The fairy clings to the edge of his gauntlet, troubled less by fear of falling and more by the thought of how he had jumped over the counter to reach her at the shop. Being no stranger to the ailments which often plague experienced knights or soldiers, she’s sure that at least one of his knees appreciated the maneuver a great deal less than she does.

“Um... excuse me? Were you going to the healing spring?” Receiving a nod in response, the fairy goes on. “If it isn’t any trouble, would you bring me with you? I still don’t feel quite like myself, and I don’t think I can fly there alone. The Great Fairy... she’ll help you anyway, of course, but she will be very grateful for what you’ve done.”

A light seems to enter the mercenary’s eye at the offer and he breaks into an even broader smile than before. He deposits the fairy onto his shoulder as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Back at the road, an enormous mare with a reddish coat is grazing among the dandelions, free of any lead rope or other means by which to keep her in one place. She’s an old horse, though in much better health relative to her age than her master, the fairy instantly suspects; he hums in greeting and gives the mare a fond pat before hauling himself up into his seat. The wisdom of leaving a fully saddled horse alone at a roadside while galavanting off into the woods seems questionable, but then, any would-be thieves would certainly have their work cut out for them here. Old or not, big horses come with big hooves.

They ride off at a easy pace, the road dappled with sunlight and the early summer day pleasantly bring and warm. The mercenary’s shoulder is a perfectly comfortable perch, and the drink from that flask went a long way in alleviating any lingering discomfort she might have otherwise suffered. As the fairy revives enough to fully appreciate the scenery from this unusually high vantage point, her curiosity blooms. She’s always enjoyed meeting the big folk who visit the fountain in search of relief, all those cranky old people with their aches and pains, the grizzled men-at-arms with old wounds, or mothers with coughing babies; aside from the satisfaction of healing magic being put to good use, even the most ordinary among them seem to live such interesting lives compared to that of a fairy. It was her curiosity which led her to stray far enough from the water to be captured in the first place, but at least it turned out all right in the end, because she’s finally heading toward home.

In the meantime, while the mercenary shows little inclination toward traditional conversation, he possesses seemingly endless patience for the fairy’s barrage of questions, at least provided that they can be answered in a word or two or, more preferably, with a nod for yes or a shake of the head for no or a shrug.

Is he a bandit or a mercenary? (A pause. A shrug.)

Was he ever one of those things? (Yes.)

Both? (Yes.)

At the same time? (Yes.)

How did he know what kind of flowers fairies like? (Shrug.)

Is he foreign? (No.)

Is that sword from a foreign land? (Shrug.)

Has he had it for a long time? (Yes.)

Is he good at using it? (Yes.)

Does he fight a lot? (No.)

How did he lose his eye? (Shrug.)

Was it in a fight? (Shrug.)

Did it hurt? (Yes.)

Has he met lots of other fairies before? (Yes.)

Has he visited other fairy fountains before? (Yes.)

Has he ever met a Great Fairy before? (Yes.)

Are there Great Fairies in lands outside of Hyrule? (Yes.)

Has he ever been to the ocean? (Yes.)

Has he ever been to the desert? (Yes.)

Has he ever gone near the Kokiri Forest? (Yes.)

When? (A long time ago.)

What was he doing there? (Silence.)

Did he hear her? (Yes.)

Is something wrong? (No.)

What’s his horse’s name? (Epona. He doesn’t like to travel far with her these days, because she’s quite elderly for a horse and he worries about pushing her too hard, but she gets bored and cranky and picks on the other horses if he leaves her behind for too long.)

What’s his name? (Shrug.)

Is it a secret? (Shrug.)

How old is he? (Thirty-seven.)

This last piece of information surprises the fairy. From the way the mercenary moves and the handful of words she’s heard him speak, she would’ve believed him to be ten years older. He’s young, even as far as mortal lifespans go, much too young to look so weathered and exhausted.

While the fairy contemplates this fact, her as-yet nameless companion asks a question of his own in so near to a whisper that she only manages to hear him because she’s sitting up on his shoulder.

“Navi?” she repeats, looking up at him quizzically. “No, I’ve never met a fairy with that name, blue or otherwise. Who is she?”

He shakes his head and turns his attention back to the road, leaving the fairy with a vague sense that he had asked the question out of old habit alone, and expected no other answer.

At twilight, they arrive at the place where the fairy fountain should have been. Instead of glassy water illuminated by dozens of tiny rose-colored wings, there’s a dusty indent like a shallow bowl cut into the earth and some sad, shriveled water-lilies. No Great Fairy. No little fairies.

The fairy tries to fly from the mercenary’s shoulder and flutters to the ground in a tiny puff of dust where the water should have been. “Wh-what happened?!” she wails. “They’re gone, everyone is gone... where are they? They’re supposed to be here! The Great Fairy should be here! What happened? Are they dead? They can’t be dead, can they?!”

Though hardly more than a child by immortal standards, she has been alive for twice as long as the oldest of Hylians, and never has she seen such a catastrophe befall her home, even in the most brutal depths of war and chaos. Fountains or springs such as this one are protected and sustained by the magical power of their Great Fairies, the least of the sylvan deities but deities nonetheless. Even in the Great Fairy’s physical absence, her continued existence would still feed the spring, and her little domain would remain in much the same condition as ever until her return to its waters. For a spring to be utterly destroyed and left in this barren state, the Great Fairy herself would have had to be shattered and rendered inert somehow, or simply killed. 

“How did this happen? Who could do this?!” The notion that any being might wish to harm a Great Fairy is beyond her understanding, and somehow more frightening than the idea that it could be done.

Two heavy boots crunch across the little slope, sending pebbles rolling down with each unsteady step; the mercenary is unmistakably favoring one knee. He scoops up the fairy and delicately brushes away the dust from her wings while she sobs.

“What happened?” she pleads, as if he might somehow know any more than she does.

The mercenary wears a grim expression as he looks over the dry earth, the lines of his face pulled tight with some combination of worry and physical discomfort.

For a time, nothing is said. The fairy shines like a little lantern in the deepening dark.

“I guess I was the lucky one, wasn’t I? All that time while I was trapped... that must be why no one came to help. I’d thought they just forgot me,” the fairy says at last, sniffling. Now she knows the truth, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. Or any less abandoned.

With the fairy’s wings clean again, the mercenary simply holds her against his chest and hums. He gives no other answer, not even in a near-whisper.

“Do you... do you think they’re dead?”

After a lengthy pause, he tilts his head and makes a small gesture that seems to mean something like I don’t know. It looks to the fairy like he’s thinking about something, or maybe remembering something. She doesn’t know whether that signifies much, but his calm presence is reassuring. At least she isn’t alone.

“Where are you going to go now? The town isn’t very far away, so... it would make sense to go there,” says the fairy, trying her very best to collect herself. “Could I stay with you for a while longer? I don’t know where else to go, and... th-they might know what happened here. Please?”

The mercenary nods and places her back up onto his shoulder, where she burrows into the heavy fabric of his cloak. With both hands freed, he pulls out the metal flask from one of his many pockets, takes a long drink, and tucks it away. Then he limps back up the slope and pulls himself up onto his horse, keeping one hand hovering at his shoulder to make sure the fairy doesn’t fall.

Turning aside from the place where the fairy fountain had been, they begin the long ride toward town.

Chapter Text

At some point after nightfall, lulled by the steady rocking of the horse’s gait, the fairy had crawled down into the hood of the mercenary’s cloak and fallen into an exhausted stupor, her eyes swimming with ghostly images of dead water-lilies behind fogged glass. As miserable as she’d thought she’d felt in the bottle, there had been no reason to doubt that her home still existed and the other fairies were safe. Once she and the mercenary finally part ways, she’ll be completely alone.

The movement ceases and the mercenary whistles. A dog sets to barking. By the time the fairy reorients herself, pushes aside the mercenary’s hair—he wears it quite long for a man, tied back at the nape of his neck—and clambers from the hood to his shoulder, she sees a face peering suspiciously down at them from over the wall.

“Of all times to...” the guard mutters to himself under the background clamor of the dog, then raises his lantern and squints at the mercenary. “You, there! Who do you think you are?”

By way of answer, the mercenary reaches for something tucked into a cloak pocket just over his heart, but the fairy speaks up before he can retrieve whatever he’s got hidden away. “Oh, hello! Didn’t you once visit the healing spring for help with a broken arm?”

The guard’s mouth hangs open in surprise. He shouts for the dog to shut up and then leans further out over the wall. “Where did you come from, little fairy?”

“I was in a bottle at that shop by the roadside for a long time, much too long, until this swordsman saw me and—”

The mercenary shushes her, which is rude all by itself and particularly rude when she’s talking about how he saved her, but then she remembers exactly how he saved her. An act of theft, no matter how justified, may not be the best thing to announce just now.

“Um, I mean, I was trapped all alone, um, somewhere, for a very long time, until he saved me. He’s a good person, you can trust him, even though he looks a bit frightening.” The fairy finds herself interrupted by the mercenary for a second time as he stifles a laugh. “...He tried to bring me back home, but it was gone. What happened to the fountain? Wh-where did everyone go?”

After scrutinizing them for what feels like ages, the guard disappears behind the wall. There’s a heavy scrape and a thud, and the gate opens to allow them inside. The mercenary smiles in thanks to the fairy, though he clearly had some other plan for getting into town. Bribery, perhaps. Even if he’s secretly a good person, a burly, ominously quiet stranger with a sword and a scarred face has little hope of gaining any wary gatekeeper’s trust on his own merits after dark.

The mercenary’s smile dies as he slides down from the saddle and his boots hit the paving stones. He doesn’t make any attempt to soften the landing, which would have required bending his damaged knee; the fairy can feel his breath catch and his posture turn rigid, and she wants to snap at the guard for regarding him with such suspicion as he leads Epona through the gate neither very quickly nor at a suspiciously slow pace. Though he’s trying to pretend otherwise, the mercenary is in the kind of pain that makes it difficult to think about anything else. It’s blindingly obvious to the fairy.

Behind the guard, a big dog is chained to a post. It growls until the guard scolds it again.  “Thought for sure you would know about the healing spring,” he says, finally offering a response to her question. “But if you weren’t there, I guess not. Anyway, those two witches in the forest beyond town... whatever they’ve done, the fairies are gone, the spring dried up, and that forest has turned dangerous beyond any natural place. You get lost before you make it three paces, they say, and it’s crawling with monsters like somethin’ from a nightmare. That was close to two weeks ago, and the witches have turned even more secretive than ever. Nobody’s seen ‘em. The town elders sent a messenger for help from the queen, but it’s been no more than a day since then. All we can do is hope that those two stay put until help arrives.”

Until now, the fairy harbored a frail hope that whatever befell the Great Fairy and her fountain might have simply forced her sisters to flee, but if that’s so, then none of them made it here. She’d expected this disappointment; what she hadn’t expected was even worse news on top of it. “Irene and Maple harmed the other fairies? That makes no sense! They’re only herbalists and casters of charms, they’re good people. They would never hurt us. I don’t even know whether they could. The Great Fairy is much stronger than they are.”

“They’re witches. You can’t fully trust that sort, especially not in pairs.”

For the first time in hours, the mercenary speaks, albeit in a flat mumble he hadn’t used when he was alone with the fairy and talking about his horse. The guard doesn’t hear a word and even the fairy, positioned as close as she is, only catches three: Zelda and her girls. She thinks she gets the idea.

“Yes, what of Queen Zelda and the princesses? They’re sorceresses, witches in all but name, that’s no secret.”

“Queens and princesses do as they like, that’s no business of mine. All I know is that old lady and girl live up in that part of the woods, and now it’s gone strange. Some of the things that wander out from there every now n’ then, it would make you sick to see them.” The guard yawns. He’s still eyeing the sheathed sword on the mercenary’s back, but the mercenary has nothing more to say, so the guard fills the silence himself. “The ones I feel sorry for are the sick folks who traveled all this way for the healing spring. Can’t you do anything for ‘em with your own magic, little fairy?”

With an awful flash of panic, the fairy wonders if the guard might try to stuff her into another bottle right here and now. She grips the mercenary’s cloak and he raises a protective hand to his shoulder as if sensing her anxiousness. “I’m sorry. I still feel rather weak, and I can’t do much all alone, regardless. Maybe we can... find some other way to help. I think that’s, um, what we’re going to do?”

The mercenary nods.

“Agh. Figures.” The guard shakes his head and waves toward the streets leading off into the town. “Better you than me, swordsman. Anyhow, if you want to stay for the night, try that way. If you’re looking for food, try over there. And watch yourself.”

The door to the tavern has been propped open to allow the night air in; what spills out is a hubbub of clinking plates and scraping chairs, and over that, two voices singing. The singing rather than the drink was what drew the mercenary inside, though drink he certainly has.

While the mercenary is occupied, the fairy sits on the table beside an untouched fairy-sized portion of food pushed carefully to the side of the plate. Even with his attention divided between pain and her and whatever he’s doing at any given time, he has yet to overlook any of the the practical considerations of having a fairy companion with him, which suggests that he’s traveled with one before. She’s in no mood for quizzing him any further about his past, though. Of the other people in the room, many look older or sickly thin, several with crutches, and few have happy faces. Just as the guard said, they all must have come to this town in search of healing, only to find the spring gone on the one side and the woods filled with monsters on the other, and all their hopes vanished. There’s another cloaked person over in the corner with their hood pulled up, though if they were aiming for a tough lone-wolf image then they missed the mark, because they look as small and miserable as the fairy feels. “The man at the gate was wrong about the witches, I’m certain of that,” says the fairy. “Irene is just an old woman, and rather frail as of late, and Maple can be stubborn, it’s true, but that’s nothing unusual. They’re visited the fountain many times for advice or for help on their own behalf, they aren’t evil people. Whatever has happened can’t have anything to do with them. It can’t. They may even be in danger, too.”

The two Zora on the little stage at the other side of the room are singing a song the fairy recognizes despite an unfamiliar arrangement, a bittersweet duet for a man and woman about a girl living on a doomed island made of dreams. The male Zora’s voice is good enough for what’s required of him, which doesn’t seem to be much in this version; the most intricate runs and unearthly high notes seem to be reserved for the female singer, though the female Zora stumbles more often than not. The fairy wonders why they didn’t just switch roles if they were going to change the song anyway.

“They might have picked something more cheerful, at least,” she remarks, only to find that the mercenary is in his own world, tapping his fingers in a pattern on the table as if following the melody on an imaginary instrument. Watching him, she can’t help also noticing that the tankard next to his plate is nearly empty again. The man behind the counter has been steadily refilling it over the course of the past hour and she hadn’t thought to keep count, but at some point after the mercenary left the table for a bit, the man stopped sneaking glances at her and started eyeing the tankard instead.

“How many of those have you had?” she asks.

As the singers move on to their next song, which is thankfully less ambitious and more upbeat than the last, the mercenary raises a hand from the table just long enough to flash four fingers. He’s definitely undercounting, though, and the true number is in addition to whatever was in that flask earlier today. It didn’t taste like plain blue potion.

“Is this normal for you?”

He waggles a hand in a noncommittal gesture.

“Is it because your leg hurts? That’s nearly the worst ‘medicine’ there is, you know. You won’t be able to stop if you aren’t already at the point of not being able to stop, and people who drink too much for too long eventually get sick and feel more pain just from that in the end, and your leg will still hurt and you’ll get accustomed to drinking too much and need more to get the same feeling. You’ll be terribly sickly as an old man and that’s only if you manage to never fall out a window before then from not being able to see straight. Haven’t you tried anything else, such as curative plants? Poppy would be too strong, it can make you stop breathing if you use too much, but feverfew would do very well for someone like you, or willow bark. Or even hot baths, water doesn’t need to be magical to have beneficial properties.”

The mercenary sits through her advice in polite silence, his chin resting on one palm, though the slight raise of his eyebrows communicates something more like are you done yet?

“Well, it’s true! I’m a healing fairy, nearly every one of your people who comes to bathe in our spring is sick or wounded and I’ve seen nearly every sort of thing that can go wrong over time, this is the one topic that I’m knowledgable about!” the fairy insists, then just feels more wretched than ever. Now there’s no fairy fountain for anybody to visit for healing and she’s just a useless little burden. “Haven’t you tried willow bark?”

He nods.

“How did you feel?”

The mercenary walks two fingers over the table, then makes a quick guttural noise in his throat—gghhkk!—and flops his hand down with a spasmodic twitch evocative of a squished spider’s death-throes. His deadpan expression borders so closely to the mindlessly blank despite the miniature theatrics that the fairy almost laughs through all her worry. He’s still expressing himself clearly, so there’s that, at least.

She sighs. “I wish you could properly visit the fountain. I’ll help you as soon as I can, but old wounds are difficult, especially ones that developed over time and couldn’t properly heal on their own. It’s like trying to fix cracked pottery when the clay is already dried and glazed.”

He drains the last of the tankard, this time setting it aside without signaling the man behind the bar for a refill. Instead, he retrieves his map from his cloak pocket and smooths it out on the table. It shows the town in the center plus the nearest outlying villages and the network of roads and paths between them. The healing spring is marked with a tiny picture of a winged orb to signify a fairy, whereas much of the outlying area is portrayed as an indefinite sea of trees, as expected for a Hylian’s portrayal of a region where a queen of her folk resides.

The mercenary glances between the map and the fairy.

“Um, do you want me to tell you what’s around here? What knowledge I have may not be very useful, as I don’t usually go very... very far from home...”

She walks over the map, feeling oddly as if she were a giant stomping across a tiny landscape. The mercenary points to the spot east of the town.

“I suppose, if you need to know it, the house of the two witches is in that area. Over there.”

Taking out a small lump of charcoal, the mercenary marks the spot where the fairy is pointing.

“And some ways beyond that is the castle. Well, it isn’t truly a castle, only a stone watchtower, but that’s what people in town have sometimes called it. It was abandoned while I was still quite young, after what had been the most recent war. It’s a ruin now.”

He sketches this landmark next, pauses to consider something, then gets no further chance to pursue the topic as the young Zora woman drops onto the stool next to them. The fairy hadn’t even noticed when the last song ended.

“Hi there! What did you think—I was perfectly awful, wasn’t I?” asks the Zora, as bright and chirpy as anything, wrapped up in a gauzy dress with a skirt that most Hylians would consider scandalously short and long, loose-fitting sleeves that reach nearly to the floor and flutter when she moves. She laughs at the expression on the mercenary’s face. “It’s okay, you don’t have to try to be polite about it! I’m a good singer, I really truly am, but I have the most awful stage fright and botch old songs I’ve known and had perfectly memorized my whole entire life, I can’t help it. My brother and I decided to go traveling in a foreign land for a while, thinking that it would be good practice for him and that singing in front of strangers all the time would force me to gain confidence as a performer, you know, the ‘sink or swim’ method? But I’m nearly as bad as ever! Well, I don’t get sick from being scared anymore and I’m glad for that, but it’s nothing to brag about. It’s really so embarrassing, I’m better than what you heard and it’s just me, I’m the only one like this... I swear I was born the unluckiest lucky person in the world, I really truly was, you wouldn’t believe the half of it if I told you. Do you think it’s possible to be blessed and cursed at the same time, so you’re constantly surrounded by bad luck but it always bounces off and sticks to everybody else instead of you? Aside from the stage fright, of course, but that’s my own fault so I can’t blame it on luck.”

Even the fairy, ordinarily quite talkative herself, isn’t sure what to say. “Your singing wasn’t so bad as that...”

The singer smiles sheepishly and looks between the fairy and the mercenary, revealing rows of delicately triangular fangs. “That’s very nice of you, but oh, sorry, I’ve been going on about nothing! I meant to ask, where did you, the fairy, I mean, where did you come from? Have all the fairies returned now?”

For a few moments, the fairy can say nothing, feeling not so unlike like a squished spider herself. “No,” she answers in the mercenary’s place. “They’re still missing. I wasn’t there when it... it was my home, and it disappeared, and everyone with it...”

“Oh no! I’m so sorry, I’d thought, well, I really don’t know much, we’ve been here ourselves for only so long and I thought maybe something had changed. It seemed like this town would be a good place to stop, since it normally has so many people traveling through, the ones looking for healing, but oh it’s been a dreadful mess. I wish we could do more to help than hang around and sing a few songs, but we’re musicians, not warriors. Trying to get involved would end so badly, it would.” The singer sighs, then finally notices the mercenary staring intently at her. Her smile takes on a nervous edge. “You don’t talk very much, do you, mister?”

“Stage fright,” says a masculine voice at a volume sufficient to be heard over the ambient hum of two dozen other tavern patrons. The fairy, having seen his mouth move and heard words come out, can only conclude that the speaker was, in fact, the mercenary. Now she really wonders how much alcohol is in him right now.

The singer laughs. “Really? You? I wouldn’t have guessed! That makes me feel a little better, honestly... if someone tough like you can feel shy as well, then I have no reason to be so embarrassed about it. Hee!” She bounces up from the seat, the long sleeves of her dress coming perilously close to tripping her. “Wait! Maybe I can help you two after all, I know exactly who you need to speak with..!”

She patters off—it takes a twisted sort of courage to run barefoot through a place like this—and returns to her brother, who’s facing away from them while he talks to someone at a table in the opposite corner of the room. His sister grabs his arm and says something, and the mercenary keeps staring in their direction with the strangest expression.

The fairy’s pink glow flickers toward red; she and the mercenary have been quite chummy up to this point, but they’ve known each other for less than a day and that isn’t nearly enough time to learn everything important about a person. “Stop it. You’re being creepy.”

The mercenary gives her a look of confusion which turns into such sincere disgust that she feels a little reassured about his intentions, or rather, the lack thereof.

“Well, you were! Why else would you be looking at her like that?”

He makes as if to speak but can’t seem to think of what to say, eventually mumbling something that sounds like long story.

“You seem like a person with many of those.”

Descending into a sullen silence, the mercenary shrugs off the comment and puts away the map. Getting up is an awkward business thanks to his knee, and in the meantime he offers a hand to the fairy so she can return to what’s become her spot on his shoulder; she’s limited to only one plane of movement at a time for now, and she has no one who could be considered a friend or ally except for this mercenary.

His stride is steadier leaving the tavern than when he entered, which is troubling at whatever angle one considers it, but the fairy has little left to say on the subject of his drinking habits. The night is air is pleasantly cool and the moon overhead is nearly full, and her heart aches from wishing that she could enjoy the nice weather with her sisters instead of being stuck here. The mercenary folds his arms and leans back against the side of a nearby shop, taking a deep breath as if to settle himself and gazing up at the moonlit sky with no particular expression.

With no other ideas as to what she should say, the fairy returns to the only topic that comes to mind. “Do you think the other fairies are dead?”

The mercenary shakes his head.

“What became of them and the fountain, then?”

He waves a hand in a helpless sort of gesture. If alcohol counteracts whatever personal oddness it is that renders him incapable of speaking at a normal volume, then at the moment he must be consciously choosing to stay silent. That’s better than being given any false reassurance, the fairy supposes.

As she broods, the cloaked person from the tavern emerges and glances around the street, then makes a beeline for her and the mercenary. She isn’t sure whether this person is a young woman or a very young man, or for that matter whether they might prefer to be seen as neither, as their unseasonably heavy layers of clothes hide any hint of a shape not already obscured by their cloak’s added bulk. They wear a quiver strapped to one hip, which hadn’t been visible while they were hunched behind the table, and as their hood slips back, she also now sees that they have a mop of red hair, the small round ears of a human, brown skin, and nervous eyes. Their face is smooth and unlined and they’re certainly younger than the mercenary, though their ambiguity and his prematurely-aged looks have thrown off the fairy’s ability to compare. It could be a difference of five years or ten.

“Wait!” they say, though the mercenary has shown no inclination to go anywhere in the immediate future. “You two were going to the forest, I could tell without being told. You look like the type who would.” This last remark is addressed specifically to the mercenary. The archer waits for a response that doesn’t come, plucking unthinkingly at a ragged feather on the end of an arrow at their side. “What are your names?”

Reliance on names isn’t particularly customary between healing fairies, and the mercenary neither asked for hers nor gave his own during the ride to town. It takes the fairy a moment to remember what to say. “You can call me Gaida, if you really want to call me anything. His name is, um... it’s a secret. I think.”

Having chosen this moment to go completely mute, the mercenary doesn’t contradict her statement.

The cloaked person, after another fruitless wait, raises their eyebrows. “All right? Whatever you say, I guess. My name is Kimeris. I want to help you find the other fairies, and find out what happened to them. Someone has to take action, and I’ve already been dragged into the situation whether I wanted to be or not.”

The fairy brightens quite literally at the mention of the fountain. “What do you mean? Tell us!”

Twisting, twisting at the loose bit of feather, Kimeris speaks. From the steady rise and fall of their words, the fairy has the distinct impression that they’ve recited this story before. “I traveled here because I’d heard about the healing spring, just like anyone else, and I left town at night, because I wanted to talk to the Great Fairy alone, for something personal. But as I was walking, this girl on a broom came out of nowhere and crashed into me—”

“That must have been Maple!” the fairy exclaims.

“Does she do that a lot?! ...Anyway, my lantern went out, we both dropped our stuff, and instead of apologizing or asking if I was hurt, that girl completely lost her mind, saying I was a blind idiot for not looking where I was going, and it was my own fault that I was in her way. I... didn’t say very nice things back to her, I admit, but I didn’t realize she was so young. Just a kid. When I regained my senses and picked up what I thought was my knapsack, I heard her sniffling, and realized she was crying. I felt awful for that. I asked her what her deal was, and she said that if I was going to the healing spring then I had better scram, because I wasn’t going to see the Great Fairy even if I got there. Before I could ask what she meant, she picked up what was actually my knapsack, which had my bow case in it, and flew away, which left me with her bag instead.”

“Well... didn’t you see her? The Great Fairy, that is?” The fairy’s mind is whirling. Hearing the guard’s speculation was one thing. Confirmation that one of the witches had indeed been on the move that night is quite another.

“No, I didn’t see anyone.” Kimeris sighs. “I never arrived. It was dark, and that girl would reach the fairy fountain long before I did. At the time, I’d thought she meant that she had some problem of her own and needed to ask for help before I could get the chance, though now I realize what she was actually saying... she was planning something that the Great Fairy definitely wouldn’t like, one way or another.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean, am I sure?! She said it to my face!”

The fairy has no argument against that, so she says nothing. Kimeris continues.

“Anyway, going back to town and waiting for an extra day would be annoying, but I didn’t want to get myself into trouble by provoking some witch girl and showing up in a place where she didn’t want me. So I made the safer choice.”

They laugh bitterly.

“I came back here, drank too much, then realized that I had the girl’s bag instead of my own. I didn’t have my money and she didn’t have any, either, so that was bad enough, and I didn’t have my bow. It’s smaller than the Hylian style, I had it in a case, and now it was gone... and I didn’t have the cash for a room at the inn anymore. Those two Zora took pity and paid my bill when they saw what was going on, and they let me stay with them so I’d have a place to sleep. I woke up the next morning to find the whole town in an uproar because the fairies were gone, the water in the spring was drying up, and the last person known to have gone there was a thief from the desert.”

Thief. Now the fairy wonders whether their androgynous image and Hylian style of dress is simple preference or an effort to divert attention while traveling. It would have been unthinkable forty years ago for a lone Gerudo to have ventured this far east, and subsequent events haven’t helped much: the brutal civil war throughout what would have been the mercenary’s infancy produced a generation of orphans and about a decade of comparative quiet in the supposedly-unified kingdom before the next spasm of violence, which, depending on who tells the story, involved a holy emissary of the goddesses thwarting a planned invasion of the Sacred Realm by the King of Thieves shortly before an invasion of a more mundane variety, or else a hideously botched assassination in the middle of a diplomatic visit to Hyrule Castle which provoked the ladies Koume and Kotake’s doomed campaign to rescue their wounded foster-son from an execution justified by false confession. Since then, visitors to the fountain say that the pendulum has inexplicably swung back toward diffident gestures of friendly relations between Castle Town and the now quasi-independent Gerudo, and some attribute this inexplicable outcome to further divine intervention, though others have murmured that the deaths of Hyrule’s king and both twin witches occurred in suspiciously quick succession, to say nothing of how quickly Queen Zelda and the lady Nabooru used their newfound authority to co-write this new chapter of history between their people. The fairy, having little direct knowledge of the political situation beyond a depressing familiarity with treating old battle-wounds, thinks it all sounds like a frightfully confusing mess.

The mercenary is silent, and the fairy can’t think of anything to say, either. “Oh.”

Kimeris smiles sourly. “It’s funny. I actually did have another person’s stuff, and nobody noticed or cared. I guess some dried flowers and a picture book don’t compare in value to the fairy fountain. Anyway, I was pretty lucky. The gatekeeper saw me leave and come back too soon to have even reached the fairy fountain, and he was willing to vouch for me once he heard what was going on. Those singers knew where I had been for the rest of the night... they’re good people, those two. I doubt I would still be freely walking around right now if they weren’t so willing to defend someone they’d only just met. But most of the local businesses relied on visitors to the fountain, and with the water all dried up, there are sick, unhappy people waiting around for something to change, or leaving, and word will spread that there’s no point in traveling here anymore. This hasn’t been a friendly place to be since then.”

“Why don’t you leave as well?” asks the fairy.

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong!” Kimeris snaps so suddenly that the fairy flinches. Seeing that, they grimace and soften their tone. “I know it makes more sense to leave. I heard that they want the queen to send some of her own soldiers to deal with the witches, and I’d prefer not to still be here by the time they show up, but that girl has my bow. Even if I had the money to replace it, which I don’t because she also has my wallet, you can’t just swap one for another that easily. And I came a long way to see this Great Fairy... I’ve heard that they usually don’t let anyone see them, and they definitely don’t offer their help to just anyone.”

The fairy doesn’t know what to make of any of this. If this story is true, then one and probably both witches seem to have had a hand in the disappearance of the fairy’s queen and sisters, but it still makes no sense to her. The Great Fairy has never given anyone a reason to wish her harm, certainly neither of the witches.

“So. There you have it, my tale of woe.” Kimeris folds their arms, glancing between the fairy and the mercenary. “I don’t care about proving myself to strangers who already hate me, but something’s badly wrong and I’m tired of moping around doing nothing about it. That’s not my style. I want to find the fairies and get the fountain back to how it should be, if it’s possible to do, and I know it’s not anyone’s most important problem here, including mine, but I want my bow. I’m not exactly a warrior with or without it, but I’m not useless, and I won’t slow you down.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” the fairy says. “Extra help is a good thing.”

The mercenary, who’s been looking up at the sky again, shakes his head.

“Huh? Why not?” the fairy asks.

He mumbles something with the words not exactly a warrior and don’t know them.

Kimeris frowns. “Neither is that fairy, and you can’t have known each other for long if you haven’t even told her your name.”

“Hey!” the fairy squeaks.

The mercenary tips his head down to look at them with a blankness not unlike his deadpan stare back inside the tavern, conveying the hazy ghost of a sardonic smile. “...Captain Keeta.”

Kimeris narrows their eyes at him. While the mercenary gives the impression of being significantly bigger—in terms of relative muscle mass, he could pick Kimeris up and snap them in half if he felt like it—they’re about the same height as he is, even without standing up straight. “Oh really.”

“Oh, really?” the fairy echoes. “Don’t military captains have to be able to shout commands in battle? You always speak so quietly.”

The corner of Kimeris’ mouth twitches, and they fold their arms beneath their cloak as if they’re cold. “Are you sure you didn’t end up with some bandit, Gaida? There’s barely a difference, especially without a war going on.”

The mercenary laughs.

A little ways behind Kimeris, the tavern door opens again and the male Zora singer slips outside. “C’mon, Sis, did you really have to send them chasing after a...” he mutters, then spots them and waves. “Are you okay over there, Kim?”

“I’m fine,” they call back, and for the first time, the fairy detects a slightly formless quality to their words. They must have been drinking, too.

Apparently this doesn't serve as reassurance, because the Zora follows after them, though rather more hesitantly after seeing who they’re speaking with. While the fairy is reasonably convinced by now that the mercenary won’t do anything worse than act slightly stranger than usual, he certainly doesn’t look like the ideal first choice of people to be following around in a mostly-dark street with drink involved. “Okay, how about we go back inside?” says the Zora. “Instead of bugging the nice, uh... sword-guy.”

Kimeris rolls their eyes. “I’m not. But all right, fine. Fine.”

They still wait for some other word or gesture from the mercenary. When he gives none, they allow themself to be herded back indoors by their Zora friend.

“That was unkind,” the fairy remarks. “I think you should have let them come with us.”

The mercenary ignores the remark, and it isn’t like the fairy has any way to force him into talking.

Upon further deliberation, she concludes that his real name probably isn’t Keeta.

As the healing magic takes hold, the mercenary lets out a quiet sigh. “Did you have a headache?” the fairy asks with somewhat more of an edge than she intended. He grimaces in apology and stretches with a mildly alarming series of crackling noises.

Truthfully, the fairy didn’t wake up feeling at her best, either, though not because of a hangover. Perching on a windowsill is no substitute for a night beneath the stars, and this was the first time she’d ever slept with only one other person nearby. It was too quiet without the eternal background whisper of tiny rustling wings and leaves and lapping water. Still, the mood between them has already lightened from the night before, and the fairy is glad for it.

As tentatively as though he were venturing out across thin ice, the mercenary shifts his weight onto his feet and stands. He takes an experimental step away from the edge of the bed, and another, then makes his way to the table to retrieve the two long strips of sturdy fabric which had been beneath his gauntlets when he took those off the night before. He hadn’t made it known until then that he was hurting anywhere except the bad knee, but judging by the quick, nearly careless movements with which he binds and pins the wrappings back into place from the bases of his thumbs to his slightly swollen wrists to halfway up his forearms, the process of unwinding them each evening and bandaging himself back up in the morning has been a routine for quite some time. The removal of these wrappings had also briefly revealed layers of scars across both arms under the long sleeves of his shirt, remnants of long-healed slices, stabs, burns, and a big curved blotch that looked an awful lot like an old bite wound from a monstrous set of jaws, though this discovery didn’t particularly surprise the fairy, considering everything.

“I can make the pain go away for a while, but nothing has been properly healed yet,” the fairy warns. “And this won’t prevent any new injuries. So, um, you’ll still need to have a care, and don’t push your luck too far. No backflips.”

For some reason the mercenary finds this last remark funny. His laughter sounds different from before, and the fairy looks at him in wonder as what she had at first interpreted as the weary bearing of a much older man slips away like a cloak far heavier than the one draped over the back of the chair, revealing a stranger in his place. Time hasn’t been gentle in exacting its toll from this new person, that much is undeniable, yet he’s so visibly, vibrantly, magnetically alive that the fairy can’t understand how she could have failed to sense what was missing until now. Even when he’d laughed the day before, he’d sounded tired.

“...Oh please no, don’t tell me you’ve actually done anything that foolish,” the fairy says at last, once she remembers what she had been talking about only a moment earlier.

Grinning, the mercenary shakes his head and mouths: used to.

“You must have looked rather different in those days,” she observes, tentatively adding acrobatics to the list of occupations he’s held at some point. The alternative would be a younger, lighter version of the mercenary pulling gymnastic stunts in the middle of combat, and he surely never dreamed of trying anything so ridiculous.

“Prettier, too,” he whispers with a downright impish glint in his remaining eye, and he’s only joking, but she can imagine it now that the life has gone back into him. No longer wan and drawn from constant pain, a face that had read as severe the day before might now be called striking, and he’s certainly been blessed with lovely hair, as difficult as it is for a three-inch tall fairy to appreciate that particular trait after nearly being buried. The scar gets easier to look at the longer she’s around him, and appearing so old for someone so comparatively young doesn’t change his overall impression for the worse, apart from being a sad signifier of an unusually hard life.

“Don’t say that. You could... um, still look nice now, if you wanted.”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

The mercenary rolls his sleeves back down and returns to the edge of the bed to push up the cuffs of his trousers and repeat the same procedure with his knee and ankles as he did with his bandaged wrists. He seems to be in a chatty mood, mostly, as far as that goes for such a quiet person. The fairy tries to think of another question to ask that won’t nudge him back toward silence, then changes her mind and flutters over to his cloak to satisfy her curiosity in a less direct fashion. He gives her a questioning glance but raises no objection.

The whole inner lining is covered in pockets. She goes straight for the biggest one on the upper-left side where she saw the mercenary reaching for something outside the town gates the night before, relying on the pink glow of her wings to light her way. Then a sound distracts her, a soft and regular clicking like a mechanical heartbeat, and she goes there instead. Upon investigation, she makes an unusual discovery indeed: a thick disk of gold on a golden chain. 

Her curiosity thoroughly piqued, the fairy unclips the chain from where it attaches to a loop sewn into the pocket and rolls the disk out for proper study, only to shriek and drop out from under the cloak’s hem as if she had been tied to an anchor, having not at all anticipated that this mysterious object would be so heavy for its size. The mercenary lunges to catch both it and her before they would have slammed into the floorboards, instead gently depositing both onto the table. It’s a very good thing that he did, as the fairy learns once she figures out how to undo the latch at the top of the disk and pops its cover open.

“Oh! A clock!” she exclaims. She’s heard of pocket-clocks, handcrafted marvels of impossibly tiny springs and screws and interlocked gears all in service to the purpose implied by the resulting object’s name. The number of artisans with the mastery required to produce these pieces can be counted on one hand, and they’re said to be so breathtakingly expensive that Queen Zelda herself would have to think twice before commissioning one. Anyone with that kind of wealth would surely have personal healers and plenty of servants to fetch some magic springwater for them if the fancy ever struck, so the fairy never imagined that she might see one up close. “How on earth did you acquire such a thing?”

“It was a gift.”

Not being so hopelessly naive as that, the fairy interprets his answer as a politely-worded confession of theft. Such a thing wouldn’t be out of place with what he’s already admitted about his past. “It’s very wonderful, but my goodness, you should have sold it by now. You would be rich.” At least that fancy sword serves a functional purpose in the life of a professional warrior.

“I like to know what time it is,” the mercenary explains, clarifying absolutely nothing.

The fairy goes back to amusing herself by crawling through more of those pockets while the mercenary continues with his stretching, working the rest of the stiffness from his joints before turning his attention to the water basin by the wall and combing his hair smooth with his fingers. In the pocket she had originally intended to explore, she finds a wax-treated leather pouch containing a solid object and a second pouch full of oddments she can’t fully identify without being able to see inside. Prodding at it, she hears the light rattle of what sounds like splintery fragments of wood, the rustle of folded parchment, and the soft clinking of metal, maybe a piece of jewelry or two. There’s something else in a connected pocket that’s been sewn loosely shut, so that the fairy wouldn’t be able to get in without snapping the threads and quite possibly irritating the mercenary whenever he notices the evidence of intrusion. From what she can tell, the contents of that pocket consist of a large flat object, and going near it makes her feel uneasy, so she moves elsewhere and soon finds something that unsettles her in a very different way.

The fairy peeks out over the hood of the cloak and buzzes her wings. “You kept that bottle?! You ought to have smashed it!”

By the stricken look on his face, one might have thought she’d suggested smashing the skull of his firstborn child. The fairy huffs.

After the mercenary has finished with his routine, buckled his armor back into place, and run out of any further excuses to delay, he winds the pocket-clock and returns it to its home, then gently shoos the fairy out so he can put his cloak back on.

“So... we’re going to the forest today, aren’t we?” she asks, trying her very best to sound optimistic. The mercenary doesn’t seem to be assuming the worst as far as the other fairies are concerned, so she’ll follow his example as best she can.

His expression turns thoughtful, edging toward a frown, and the fairy doesn’t like that one bit.

“You’d better not try to tell me to stay behind at the very last moment! It was my home that was ruined and my queen and sisters who disappeared, so if anything, you’re the one who’s accompanying me. I know the lay of the land and you don’t. I don’t care if it’s become dangerous.”

The mercenary gives her a skeptical look.

“I don’t! I don’t care, and if it is dangerous then that’s all the more reason for me to be there! You’re a mess and you’ll need my help, you will, we haven’t even left yet and you already look like half a Gibdo!”

This last remark perplexes him until he looks down at his bandaged hands and bursts out laughing, very nearly giggling, like a child.

“Well, it’s true, you know it is! What’s so funny?”

He wipes his eye. “You remind me of a friend.”

“Who? That other fairy, Navi?”

“Tatl.”

“I don’t know her, either.”

The mercenary shakes his head and offers no further elaboration on the subject. Once his gauntlets are back on and he’s adjusted the scabbard strapped against his back, he offers a hand to the fairy. She doesn’t need so much help today, but she doesn’t mind the break from flying, so she climbs aboard and he places her on his shoulder, on his good side where he can properly see her.

The edge of the forest looks much the same as it ever did, as far as the fairy’s memory serves her. What unsettles her instead is the scent in the air, which is completely new and most unwelcome: it smells too sweet here, like roses and water-lilies distilled to a noxious intensity so strong it can be tasted—roses and water-lilies, flowers and something sickly, perfume over an underlying stench of rancid meat. Even the mercenary is momentarily repelled as if by a physical barrier.

“It... smells like something died,” the fairy says in a hush, suddenly afraid to make too much noise.

Grimacing, the mercenary hums in agreement and keeps walking. The plant life is overgrown here, the dandelions and sparse patches of grass grown unnaturally tall in the places where sunlight should have shown through the treetops. Now the branches overhead are locked together like woven fingers, casting an unnatural gloom over the woodland below, and the roots and tangling briars make every step as treacherous as if the trees and plants themselves were trying to trip the mercenary up and entangle him in their grasp. He walks slowly, lightly, and keeps his eye toward the ground.

Still positioned at what’s become her usual spot, the fairy has wrapped herself up in the folds of the mercenary’s cloak like a heavy blanket, pressing the thick fabric over her face to filter out some of the flowery reek. The air here feels as unnaturally still as the time before before a thunderstorm and she hears a nearby buzzing that grates against her nerves.

So suddenly that she thinks for an instant that he finally lost his footing, the mercenary stops in his tracks. The fairy can hear the chorus of buzzing wings, louder now, and thinks for a moment that he might have spotted a beehive. Then she sees the two deer a few short yards ahead.

One of them is missing all the flesh of its hindquarters and back legs, and there are black crawling masses of flies where its eyes should be. Its head rests placidly across the back of the nearer animal, which has no flesh at all, only a sun-bleached skeleton that sways as if it had been propped up like a grotesque decoration, except that its head moves up and down as it goes through the motions of grazing.

While the fairy burrows deeper into the safety of the cloak, the mercenary slowly stoops to pick up a rock, never taking his eye off the two deer. “What are you doing?!” she hisses at him.

He throws the rock and strikes the ground inches shy of the skeletal deer’s front hooves. The half-decayed deer’s head snaps up and startles the swarms of flies away from its eye sockets, and its remaining ear swivels in the mercenary’s direction. When he makes no further move, the deer lowers its head and the cloud of flies settle back to their feasting. The skeletal deer doesn’t react at all.

When nothing else happens, the mercenary simply walks around the deer and keeps going. The fairy twists to watch as their twin shapes disappear behind layers of shadowed foliage, hardly daring to breathe, half from the inescapable smell and half from fear. She makes no sound. Even more frightening than the undead deer is the possibility that the mercenary might decide that this is too much for her and demand that she turn back. She said that she would go with him, she insisted upon it, and she isn’t going to change her mind now.

As if the deer had been heralds sent to greet the forest’s visitors, the fairy and the mercenary now encounter a steady procession of animate animals in various stages of decay: half of a rabbit apparently left uneaten by some hawk or eagle is placidly nibbling a patch of clover while a pair of fledgling robins with broken wings hop in circles and a mummified husk of a snake basks on a rock that would normally be bathed in sunlight. It’s as if they simply all forgot that they’re dead and went straight back to the motions of ordinary behavior, oblivious to their own hideous plights. At least this absence of distress in the animals undercuts the horror of the situation. A little bit. Sort of.

Halfway to the witches’ house, they see an ancient wolf with patchy fur and eyes clouded by cataracts lying in a heap beneath a tree, flanked at each side by a pair of youthful packmates which appear to be properly alive. As the mercenary draws within sight, the old wolf struggles to rise, staggers, and falls back into a half-crouched, half-lying posture; the younger wolves leap up and place themselves between the mercenary and the old wolf, snarling at him. The mercenary looks at them with no fear, only such deep sadness that the fairy is convinced he’ll do something completely insane, but good sense wins and he backs away, circling around the wolves from a much greater distance than he did with the two deer. The young wolves don’t try to give chase.

“If this is what the plants and animals look like, then what’s become of Maple and Irene?” the fairy asks in a hush. Strictly speaking, they have yet to encounter any true monsters, any evidence of a Wolfos, a proper Stalfols, or even a flock of Keese, and somehow it’s worse this way. Imagining what sorts of living dead creatures might have been seen at the edge of the woods in recent days, she can’t help feeling some sympathy for that guard at the gate and the other nervous townspeople.

The mercenary glances at her just long enough to indicate that he’d heard her question, and says nothing. She doesn’t mind. With or without speech, he remains a steady, solid presence, walking through the nightmare forest as calmly as if it really were just a bad dream, horrific yet harmless—and maybe that’s even true, because for all that the air hangs heavy with malice, she doesn’t get the sense that it’s targeted toward the mercenary, or that the forest is even paying much attention to his intrusion. As long as he stays away from any obviously-dangerous beasts and the fairy stays close, nothing will hurt her either and she can be calm, too.

Facing no actual threat or hinderance from the undead animals, the mercenary progresses through the woods as quickly as could be expected, only stopping now and then to consult his map. Within maybe an hour, they reach the home of the two witches. Enough trees have been cleared around it that the sky is visible for once, and nothing seems too drastically amiss from the outside of the house. The ivy on the walls is thicker than usual, forming heavy green curtains over the windows, and on an early summer’s day, the lack of smoke from the chimney means nothing. If there’s anything ominous, it’s the silence, and the fact that the door is already unlatched, opening at a light touch.

“Irene? Maple?” the fairy calls out.

A mouse’s skeleton scuttles between the legs of the table, pursued by a cat of neither undead nor particularly witchy appearance, just a calico the fairy remembers and mildly dislikes from the last time she’d passed by this area. The mercenary’s entrance distracts the cat from its game, which allows the mouse-skeleton to disappear behind the shelf in the corner.

“That’s Syrup,” the fairy informs him. In response to his questioning hum, she adds: “Um. The cat.”

Under the watchful gaze of Syrup, the mercenary makes a slow circuit around the kitchen, pausing here and there and moving nothing from wherever it currently sits. The ashes in the hearth are cold and there’s nothing on the table except a few tiny twitching leg bones from some thrice-unlucky rodent. A bundle of lavender hung by the window to dry has been miraculously rejuvenated, coiling around the twine holding it up and reaching in green tendrils for the floor while tiny shoots and buds poke out from the back of a wooden chair as if its component boards have remembered that they were once trees. Plates and cups are stacked neatly in the cupboard, and heavy jars of pickled vegetables line the lowest shelves along the other wall. Otherwise, the breadbox is empty and the rest of the shelves are bare of anything edible. Small glass bottles of colorful liquid stand in tidy rows on the shelves a bit below the mercenary’s eye-level, though there are a number of empty spots between them, which creates the impression of a grinning mouth with several missing teeth.

There’s only one other room in the house, the bedroom, which naturally holds two beds. Both have been stripped of their bedding, the two sets of blankets and pillows. Crouching to peer underneath them, the mercenary finds nothing except dust, cat hair, and the cat, which tries to rub against his face. He scoops it up and absently scratches its chin while it purrs.

Off to the side is a wooden stool plus a table with a hand-mirror, a round makeup tin with crumbly green powder, and a small wooden box. Inside, the mercenary finds a ring of indeterminate metal set with fake rubies, the sort of shiny bauble a child might win at a fair. He briefly examines this little treasure and then carefully sets it back into place.

The mercenary puts down the cat and it slips out of the room, and none too soon as far as the fairy is concerned; she hadn’t liked the way it was looking at her, as if she were a pretty little toy perhaps worth a swat of the paw. With his hands freed, the mercenary flips up the mattresses on both beds to check the frames underneath, first the smaller one and then the larger.

“What are you looking for?” asks the fairy.

He mimes opening a book and writing inside, and the fairy would comment on how invasive it is to read someone’s diary, but then, that’s sort of the point of what they’re doing here. She remembers again how he’d so casually acknowledged his former existence as a bandit on their way to town and wonders why she didn’t wonder much about it until now.

The mercenary conducts a second sweep of the house, this time checking for loose floorboards and running his hands over the tops of cabinets, even tapping the walls in a few places as if to listen for secret hollows and stretching up as high as he can reach to feel the tops of the beams by the ceiling. Finding nothing of interest, he produces a little spyglass shaped like a purple hand-mirror and scans both rooms for a third time, though he evidently still sees nothing because he puts it away with no comment. If the chance ever presents itself, the fairy would love to take a full inventory of everything he’s carrying around in those innumerable pockets.

Back outside, the mercenary consults his map with a thoughtful frown while Syrup twines around his ankles and meows for attention. The fairy doesn’t know what to think about the house, or what exactly the mercenary may be thinking. “It... seems like they left on purpose. Everything looks too tidy for it to have been ransacked,” she suggests.

The mercenary hums. The cat meows.

“Should we go to the tower next? I don’t know what we might find there, if anything, but it’s the only other landmark that I know of.”

The cat sits and stares up in the fairy’s direction and meows. Again.

“Would you hush?” the fairy scolds it. “I’m a fairy, not a toy for you to play with..!”

Before she can say anything more, the mercenary waves for the fairy’s attention and a shadow passes overhead. In the round clear patch of sky free of the clawing, clinging layers of tree branches, a teenage girl hovers on a broomstick. Her hair is dull and unwashed, she doesn’t look like she’s slept in days, and the green makeup around her eyes has been reduced to streaks and smears, but at this point, the living face of a familiar person in any condition is a welcome sight. “Maple, it’s you!” the fairy gasps.

Maple scowls down at the fairy. “Uh-huh. It’s me. And this is MY house, so what are you doing here? Who’s this guy?”

“He’s—” the fairy begins, but there are so many questions she wants to ask, she doesn’t know which one to choose. “What happened to this forest, to all the animals and plants?! This place must be under a terrible curse, it’s no wonder the people from town want Queen Zelda to send her soldiers and—”

“They WHAT?!”

Maple veers down so fast that the mercenary steps back to avoid a collision. Otherwise, his face is an impassive mask.

“Those, those IDIOTS! I could kill them, why do they have to get anyone else involved?” Maple fumes, gripping white-knuckled to the broomstick as her pale face fades to an even more sickly pallor beneath her smeared makeup. “That’s the LAST thing that’s going to help anything! Maybe... maybe I can still...”

“What do you mean?” asks the fairy. “If something terrible has happened, then it’s a good thing that help is on the way, isn’t it?” At a sideways glance from the mercenary, a thought the fairy hadn’t wanted to entertain now returns to her. “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you? Or... Irene? Where—?”

“SHUT UP ABOUT MY GRANDMA! It isn’t our fault! It isn’t MY FAULT!”

Tears are welling up in Maple’s eyes. Syrup the cat crouches low against the ground, ears flattened and tail bristling. The fairy clutches the mercenary’s cloak.

“Maple, please, please just tell me what happened. And what about the fountain? The Great Fairy and my sisters, the people in town think you did something terrible to them. You didn’t, right? But they’re all gone, the fountain is gone, I’ve been afraid that they were all killed...”

“‘Killed’?” For the first time, however briefly, Maple’s furious manic energy simmers down into worried confusion, though the cat looks even more distressed than before. “I never... I didn’t kill anyone, nobody’s killed them, stupid. Where’d you get that from?” 

“They aren’t dead?”

The lull doesn’t last for long. “No! Now just leave me alone already, go away and don’t come back, or, or else! Just leave! You don’t belong here, you shouldn’t have come here... oh come on, ALREADY?”

As the cat bolts back to the house, there’s a cacophony of rushing air and the oasis of sunshine turns to shadow beneath hundreds of wings and the calls of a hundred different birds, squawks and shrieks and caws and trills.

Maple screams and the mercenary’s hand shoots up to cup around the fairy on his shoulder. The world turns dark and lurches with what sounds like a deranged screaming windstorm outside. Peeking between the mercenary’s fingers, the fairy sees Maple veer out of the way as a furious incongruous flock of what seems like every living bird in the forest descends upon where she had been a moment earlier, crows, owls, eagles, hawks, even songbirds and tiny furious starlings. The abrupt absurdity of the sight would have been funny if the fairy wasn’t already so bewildered.

“There’s a person at the castle, in the roses, go help and then leave, just leave already!” Maple shouts in a rush, so quickly that the words blend together into near-incomprehensibility. “And don’t touch the flowers!”

With that last warning, she zips straight up toward the open sky and disappears over the tops of the trees. The chimerical flock takes off after her in a rushing wave that darkens the sky before vanishing out of sight, and it takes much longer for the sounds to fade. The mercenary says nothing and betrays no emotion.

“The other fairies are alive..?” the fairy whispers. 

The old watchtower isn’t so tall as it used to be, surrounded here and there by heaps of weathered stone fallen over the course of past decades. From a ways off, the tower appeared in wreathed in green and pink as if under a bulky cloak; drawing nearer, the fairy can see that it’s buried under layers of climbing roses so thick it almost seems that the weight alone should have dragged it down, their stems and vines all spilling out from one window at the very highest remaining point on the tower. It smells overwhelmingly, unnaturally, sickeningly sweet here, even more than the rest of the forest.

The mercenary scans the area and moves in a long slow circle around the base of the tower in a hopeless search for a door; the one visible window is completely filled with plant matter and there’s only the barest suggestion of the shapes of the rest, so any other remotely flat surfaces must likewise be engulfed.

“I don’t see anyone else here,” the fairy says doubtfully.

Nodding, the mercenary approaches the green-infested wall, and the fairy has to stop herself from telling him to turn back. This place feels terribly wrong, like they shouldn’t even be here, which maybe means this is the right place to be, after all. Even stronger than the perfume of the flowers is the murderous hatred seething in the air, yet Maple did say that the other fairies are alive. If that’s the truth, then where are they?

“Maple told us not to touch the flowers,” the fairy whispers.

As if she hadn’t said a word, the mercenary holds out his right hand, lets it hover, then presses it  against the tangle of leaves and trailing vines, his leather gauntlets protecting him from what would otherwise be a formidable array of bristling thorns and briars.

“She said not to touch them!” the fairy squeaks. “She said not to touch the flowers!”

She yelps and zips away from the mercenary’s shoulder as the layers of climbing roses stir and snake downward, at first one and then two which become three-four-five strands of vines twirling around his hand, his wrist, his arm, in the same coiling movement that any climbing plant would follow when affixing itself to a straight branch except a thousand times faster, so that they instead resemble monstrous serpents or the grasping tentacles of a sea-monster, not that she’s encountered any such creatures except in stories from travelers.

As the vines creep up past his elbow, the mercenary pulls back, remaining momentarily frozen in a  slow tug-of-war before he slips free. The vines reel themselves back in and slide up to their former resting places.

“Why did you do that?!” the fairy shouts down to the mercenary, then forgets what she’s saying because as the vines shift along the walls above the highest point where he would be able to reach, she glimpses a flash of color that’s neither gray stone nor greenery nor delicate rose-pink. “...Actually, could you... do that again?”

The mercenary hesitates just long enough for her to say she’d misspoken, and when she doesn’t, he mashes his hand against the leaves. As if they had previously been dozing and are now thoroughly alert to his presence, the climbing-rose vines lunge forward to encase his arm up to the elbow in the blink of the eye and reach his shoulder in a second blink. With the top layer pulled out of position, the fairy can see a bundled shape pressed against the stone, and the side of a body with the knees pulled up toward the chest.

“There’s a person under the flowers there’s a person there’s a person!” she shrieks, only to look down again and realize that the mercenary now has his own problem to deal with. He’s dug in his heels to keep from being pulled any closer to the wall, and he’d kept his left hand free with the apparent intent to draw his sword if necessary, but the vines moved too fast and now they’re coiling around his midsection, both arms, and up over his chest, slithering around his throat and alarmingly close to his good eye, as if they’ve given up on trying to immediately overpower him and instead opted for smothering, strangulation.

The mercenary stops resisting the inward pull and throws himself forward with the vines, slamming both hands into the mass of greenery and the flowers and the stone wall underneath. Flames explode against the side of the tower, scorching a ring into the mass of greenery. The vines around the mercenary’s hands are instantly incinerated and more of them fall limply away from the stone like beheaded snakes, cut off from the place within the tower where they were rooted. At this point the fairy doesn’t even think to question how or why or where a common mercenary learned how to use such magic, feeling only relieved that she didn’t just have to watch her new friend die a horrific death.

As more of the burned vines fall away, the other person slips free of their grip and drops. The mercenary, still entangled by layers of charred and twitching vines, doesn’t manage to catch the person so much as conveniently break their fall, which sends the two of them tumbling down the incline and away from the side of the tower.

“Oh no oh no oh no..!” the fairy flies after them. “Are you all right?! I shouldn’t have told you to do that, I’m so sorry!”

By the time the fairy reaches him, the mercenary is sitting up, bright-eyed and quite unharmed aside from the easily-healed scratches around his neck and the broken thorns and crushed rose petals festooning his green cloak. Beside him, however, a skinny figure bundled up in too-heavy clothes lies curled into a loose fetal position, showing no response to the sound of the fairy’s voice. When the mercenary rolls them onto their back, she can see that their face is ashen and their eyes are closed. They’re breathing, though with a labored fluttery wheezing sound that can’t signify anything good.

“...Kimeris?” says the fairy, as the name comes back to mind. “What are they doing here?”

Sensing the mercenary’s expectant look, she hovers above Kimeris, but there’s nothing much to heal except scratches in the places where their clothes didn’t protect them from the thorns, mostly around the face and the back of their wrists. They have thick gloves protecting their hands, not unlike the mercenary’s leather gauntlets, and the fairy wonders whether the cursed briars wreathing the tower had at first remained motionless and seemingly benign, falsely suggesting that there would be no particular danger in trying to climb up, or whether they had been entangled in exactly the same way the mercenary nearly was, before being dragged up like a fish caught in a net—and if so, then where the vines were bringing them. The thought makes her shiver, even as she extends her magic and a pink glow blooms around the angry red scratches to erase them from existence.

“They haven’t been hurt, exactly... it’s something else that’s wrong,” the fairy says, then reluctantly adds: “To help them, I think we have to turn back. We should get away from the forest’s influence.” As badly as it pains her to leave now, pressing onward in search of answers about the other fairies would have to mean abandoning an innocent and unconscious person to an undoubtedly terrible fate. Even though she knows Kimeris even less than she knows the mercenary, letting them come to harm would go against her whole purpose for existence.

To her gratitude, the mercenary makes no fuss over the suggestion, his only seeming hesitation being the practicalities of following it. He hooks his hands under Kimeris’ arms and pulls them up from the ground, and in a clumsy process of readjustment and shuffling to account for the presence of the sword strapped to his back, in addition to what the fairy would very much consider pushing his luck as far as his knee is concerned, he’s able to drape them over his shoulders and stand with what’s hopefully a minimum of discomfort. They’re so slight of build that they can’t weigh very much.

In the meantime, the layers of climbing-roses have regrown around the burned places like scabs over a wound. The fairy can hear the rustling of thousands of leaves and petals as they slither around and around, coiled and waiting. The fairy, mercenary, and Kimeris seem to be out of their reach, barely, but whatever informal sort of truce the forest had kept toward the mercenary has been shattered. Or burned, rather.

“We had better go,” says the fairy.

Rather than wasting too much more time or physical stamina by standing around with a person on his shoulders, however bird-boned they may be, the mercenary nods, backs away, and retreats from the presence of the tower, followed by the fairy. The scent of scorched leaves and flower petals lingers in the air.