Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Link stands at the edge of the festival square, picking the last crumbs of Tabantha bake from the paper wrap it was served in. It’s a sunny day: perfect festival weather, especially in the north, where snow still lies in old lumps on shaded ground. The first plants are breaking through the soil. Swamp lanterns, along the stream. Mountain leek and cool safflina shoots. Little leafy things with central flower-clumps called butterbur, everywhere.

He even sees one next to the barrel used as a communal bin, when he drops the paper wrap in it. Toeing the butterbur carefully for a moment, he looks up when there’s a loud shout from a nearby stall.

Only a Hylian celebrating his win at a fish-catching game.

The festival centres on the village’s shrine to Hylia, with its goddess statue wreathed in pine cones and gold thread, and subsidiary shrines to locally worshipped figures at the sides of the shrine grounds. The gravel square in front of the shrine is full of stalls – and people. Lots of people. In the few weeks since arriving at Tabantha and its army outpost, Link hasn’t seen this many. It’s maybe too many.

There’s a lot of Rito. Link stays at the edge of the square, trying to tell if any other food stalls look good – he still has some of the pocket money his father handed him that morning – and instead sees three adult Rito laughing over a fortune-lottery. A Hylian soldier he recognises is browsing tall, angular pots at a stall set out by a green-feathered Rito woman. He thinks about going to that stall, because he’s curious about the Rito, but then he sees something even better. In a fallow and nearly snow-free field next to the shrine, on the edge of the village, a whole group of Rito are setting up an archery contest.

He walks to the edge of the field, then hesitates, not sure if he’s supposed to be here. It’s only Rito in the field, and lots of them. They must be from the main Rito village in the west.

Adults wearing what he already recognises as their light armour are setting up circular targets at the far side of the field, which is not how he’s heard the Rito train. The soldiers at the outpost talk in awed tones about aerial archery, cliffside targets and the ability to fire multiple arrows at once. Is this for Hylians, then? For the festival? Link knows he should just ask one of the Rito, but they’re all adults and busy and he’s – not always good at that.

He spots a younger Rito, blue-feathered and a bit taller than him, in an intense-looking conversation with an adult in the corner of the field.

Curious, Link sidles closer along the wooden fence. He doesn’t recognise the young Rito from the village school. The two are next to a stand of birch trees, peeled-back bark rustling like dried paper in the cool wind. More of the butterburs grow underfoot. Link crouches for a closer look, and hears the young Rito say in a loud, outraged voice, “You know I can!”

“Until you have formally proven yourself a warrior, you will compete in your age bracket,” the adult says, with a kind of resigned frustration that Link recognises from adults when he tells them he’s fine spending an entire day in the woods or mountains alone.

The young Rito scoffs. “With children.”

“Yes.” The adult’s tone is firm. At this point, Link would nod, promise not to go out, then wait a few days before next climbing out a window. Permission, forgiveness. Moblins hit harder than his father, anyway.

The young Rito instead says, “I will not demean myself!” and storms off, right past where Link’s crouched. Fortunately, Link hiding a grin at the ground goes unnoticed.

When Link looks up, he sees the adult let out a small sigh and return their attention to the set-up in the field. The overheard conversation’s answered enough of Link’s questions: an archery contest for Rito and Hylians, for the festival, later on. He wants to see it.

For now, he wonders where that blue-feathered young Rito went, but when he looks over at the festival stalls, the crowd is too dense to tell. Link skirts the edges. He finds a stand selling dango with a hearty truffle glaze, which he’s never had before. Stick in hand, he ambles until he sees a storyteller set up in front of colourful cloth-hangings: a blond Hylian boy wearing a long green hat that’s got a bird’s head on the end of it, a Hylian princess who looks not too different to representations of the young Princess Zelda (if she was made of stone), the entrance to a large hillside structure flanked by two stone creatures.

This is the festival story, or part of it. Nowhere else in Hyrule tells the tale of the diminutive Picori blessing Hyrule with a sword and a magic light force. According to the historians in Castle Town, the sealing power possessed by the female line of the royal family was passed down from the goddess Hylia, long ago, and now from mother to daughter. Link has heard bits of the Picori story from other children at the Tabantha Village school, but this will be much better.

The children already sitting on the mat are all little, so he squats at the edge. The storyteller is describing a Fortress of Winds, abandoned by its tribe. The Hylian boy – only called Hero, like in all these stories – and the bird-hat, called Ezlo, are travelling through a swamp to reach the Wind Ruins, fighting snakes and living statues. It’s great. Link wishes he’d heard the beginning, with the original blessing, but he likes hearing about the Hero meeting a Picori who lives in the ground, not in a hole but a nicely furnished house with glowing mushrooms and moss as lights, who tells the Hero how to climb inside a guardian-statue and turn it on or off.

The schoolchildren say Picori lived all over Hyrule but left a long time ago, but also still live inside people’s houses or underground. Everyone’s seen them! Only Hylian children see them. That’s not true, all the Rito children instantly shouted, we see them too. Link’s not sure what to believe, because it mostly sounded like an attempt to make him believe nonsense just because he’s new.

In the evening there’ll be a big formal performance of the Picori story. He’s looking forward to that.

He stays by the storyteller’s mat until the end of the Fortress of Winds, then the teller announces a short break and the children disperse. The rest of the festival is only getting louder, not for any bad reason, only the amount of people: buying food, talking to one another, playing games. It’s clearly a chance for the Rito who live in Tabantha Village to reconnect with family and friends visiting from their big village, if Link’s right about what all the beak-batting and preening means. Hylian adults have friends among the visiting Rito as well. Link shrinks back from an especially exuberant greeting between two women, which sounds very friendly, or – the public part of what older people do in private. He walks around the edge of the festival square, thinking about the stall with the Rito pots, but it’s too popular now. Rito and Hylians alike stand in front of it, even a Sheikah excavator. A loud shout from somewhere nearby – just someone saying delicious! about food – makes Link aware he’s pulling at a loose thread on the hem of his tunic, and he’d rather go sit in a stream until all the sounds stop. He’s not supposed to leave the festival. He got the pocket money for good behaviour since arriving in Tabantha.

More than that, he wants to see the new things here.

What about that young Rito? Though he hasn’t seen him anywhere since the field, he must be somewhere in the village. Link walks back towards the archery field, but on the way he’s distracted first by the dango-seller – he buys another one with his last rupees – and then the line of smaller shrines along the side of the Hylia shrine’s grounds. One of them has butterbur growing all around the base of it.

Tugging at the dango with his teeth, Link crouches to look at the shrine. It’s a small stone building, a little like the Sage Temple in style, with figures on the portico and the northern flowers growing around it like shrubs. A few blue rupees have been put on the steps as offerings. The figures look not quite like people, not Hylians or Rito, or Zora or any other race, but mouse-like with leafy tails. They’re made of wood, well-carved. Link is too aware of his sticky fingers to dare touch them – besides, this is a shrine, these are sacred offerings, even if he doesn’t know who to – but he leans in to see as many details as he can. The artisan cut lines like embroidery up the figures’ tunics, and put mushrooms around their feet.

Something moves at the edge of his vision, but when Link turns his head it’s nothing. An insect?

He stands up, remembering his initial intent, but then he notices a pot behind the little shrine. The maybe-insect moves there, gone before he can see it properly. Now he’s intrigued. The pot is squat and round, more a Hylian design, but the painted patterning is in rich blue zigzags on a green and red striped background like some of the Rito wares. He steps carefully on stones set into the ground, until he can crouch in front of the pot. It’s upside-down, he realises. The base is cracked. Is something glowing inside? Link leans closer.

It feels like tripping, but instead of steadying himself or falling on the ground, Link bounces on an odd, glowing surface: once, twice, a third time. Then, finally, he falls.

He’s lying on dirt, in a pale purple light. The dango stick is still in his hand. He looks up, around, at high, curving green and red walls, at a mushroom larger than a house, at a crack in a distant ceiling. Has he fallen into a cave? He’d expect to be much more scuffed. The Rito woman who runs the village shop warned him about the well having caves under it. He pushes himself onto his knees, then stands. The mushroom is huge. It’s like none he’s seen: three broad white stems, each topped with a pale purple cap, all aglow.

Nor is this like any other cave. The walls look ceramic and nearly smooth. A rounded blue archway is the only way out. Clutching the now-dirty dango stick, he walks forward. He puts his hand on the arch. Smooth, cool. Ceramic.

He steps out under high awnings of leaflike green. Leaves. He stands, frozen in the doorway, staring. He hasn’t spent half his time examining the new local plants not to recognise the underside of butterbur leaves and what what what what–

“Oh,” a voice says, and when Link tears his attention away from the butterbur leaves he sees a figure in front of him: mouse-like, with a leafy tail, but alive. A person.

The rest of their words are in no language he’s heard before.

He clings on to the doorway and says, “Sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t understand.”

The mouse-person nods and reaches into a pocket of their green robe, withdrawing a small red object. A fruit, Link thinks. They hold it out to him with both hands. Link stares at it. He knows well not to eat strange berries, but it seems so unlikely that a stranger would intentionally feed him poison. A strange mouse-person outside a pot that he fell into. He’s completely lost.

But he can’t stand in the blue-glazed arch forever, and here is a path forward. He hesitantly holds out his empty hand for the red fruit.

It’s smooth and shiny, like a baker’s perfect cherry. It’s neither sweet nor bitter, but the flesh is smooth, pitless, easy to swallow.

“That is a jabber nut,” the mouse-person says, in words now as comprehensible as Hylian. “It allows you to understand our language. Now, I think you ought to come with me.”

“Mmm–” is all he gets out, wary again, and tries a sensible-sounding, “Where?” Where is he? Where are they going? Where is the festival? Any and all.

The mouse-person sighs, but not unkindly. “I suppose it is startling. You are with the Minish, now. You are our guest. We will not harm you.” They gesture at the pot. “It is an old magic. The pot shrunk you, but it is entirely reversible. I will gladly show you how. I only ask that first you come with me, for a small conversation. There is something we would like to discuss with you, young Hylian.”

Link nods, as if that makes sense. Shrunken in a pot. The Minish. Not– “Picori?” he says. “You’re–”

The Minish person waves a hand in a gesture he doesn’t understand. “Hylians have called us Picori in the past. We say Minish, in our own language. But yes, we are the Picori of your festival and your stories and the little corners of your houses that go undisturbed, the undersides of leaves, and so on.”

When his father and the other soldiers taking up their one-year posting at the Tabanthan outpost travelled across the tundra, Link stared at it from the wagon: stark and snow-covered and trodden by feet unknown to him. Though he heeded his father’s warning not to stray from the soldiers’ sight as they rested in a copse, he watched wide-eyed as a snowcoat fox ran between thin birches. He pulled wildberries from a bush and ate them fresh and sweet. He saw a pair of Rito land in front of the soldiers, vivid-feathered and tall in bright clothes, and he followed the line of their flight from a rocky promontory towards the distant Tanagar Canyon.

He wanted it all. He wants, still.

He follows the Minish under a tunnel of butterbur leaves.

Chapter Text

The greatest insult is that this festival contest is a concession to Hylian inadequacy: it calls for single arrows fired one after the other, at the same ground-based, motionless targets. Only the unpredictability of the wind provides any difficulty. Only a Rito wholly disinterested in archery – taking up another trade – would struggle to strike their target, or a fledgling, still learning. Revali has learnt it. The warriors have seen it.

Not until he proves himself in the summer trials can he compete with those who would present a challenge.

A surmountable one, at that. No warrior can quite do this. Revali jumps from the rise at the village’s eastern edge and glides on warm air above sun-bathed fields bared of snow, his eyes fixed on the hay barn at the far end of a field: its wooden wall, the three targets chalked on by local children. The sheep graze on newly exposed grasses at a safe distance. The farmers are at the festival. There is no one to see him transfer his bow from his talons to one wing, draw three horn-tipped practice arrows from his quiver with the other and fire them at the barn.

It is unsatisfying. It is not enough, Revali sees: the left-most target is pierced not in its centre, but considerably below. He lands smoothly in front of his arrows and assesses the misplaced one, trying to recall exactly how it felt in his bow, how he drew it alongside its fellows on the string. Where he went wrong. The day is not windy, so the fault lies in him.

He hisses out a word he’s heard the warriors say when they miss a shot, and tugs the arrows from the barn wall. He must fire again, and again, until it is perfect every time.

The trudge uphill to his launch point is tedious. A flicker of a breeze teases the feathers of his thighs, taunting him. By the time he reaches his chosen rock, the air is nearly still, and he must flap to gain additional altitude. He fires. Two bullseyes. Again. Two bullseyes. One below. Again. Again. The fault is consistent, which he takes as a sign that it is correctable, if he can identify what he is doing wrong – what in the nock, the draw, the twist of his body in the air. The warriors tell him that at his size it is hardly a surprise that he struggles at his attempted feats, but he disregards that commentary. He can do nothing for it but eat heartily and hope his height takes after his mother’s (though they say, colouration aside, he looks more like his far shorter father).

Again. Two bullseyes. One below.

“Revali!” someone shouts.

He hesitates, holding the shaft of the second arrow, but the warrior only flicks his gaze over Revali’s partial success.

“Yes?”

“Are you coming to compete? It starts soon.”

“Are you still insisting that I compete with children, on the ground?”

A sharp look. “No, we bend the rules for you alone, oh mighty warrior.”

Revali turns to the barn wall. If they must mock him for it–

“Come on. You’ll win, you’ll enjoy the rest of the festival–”

“Why would I want to win if it’s that easy?” Revali shouts, furious all over again that this is what the warriors think of him. “Why do you think that would please me?”

That earns him a softer sigh, but Revali has no interest in hearing why he must wait until the summer to test himself. As if spring is not sufficient! He pulls his remaining arrows from the wall and walks away, across the field, ignoring the raised voice at his back, until he’s at the edge of Tanagar Canyon, and for a moment he thinks to fly out over it – to catch the warm winds that often rise along its length – and fly west until the cut that would return him to Strock Lake. He likes to fish there, either by bow or by talon.

Instead, he sits on a tree stump, not far from the sheep, and stares at the grasslands far below. Hyrule proper.

He still has his three arrows held tight in one wing, and turns them over, easing his grip, to check their condition. Some small insect brushes against one of his tail feathers. He flicks the feather, focused much more on the arrows. Is the defect in one of them? Not even the most dismissive warriors find faults in his arrow-making, but the effects of use are not always predictable.

The clear sun makes the task easy: the first arrow he examines looks fit for use. He returns it to his quiver. This weather is a welcome change from overcast days and late-winter snow in Rito Village. The insect is bothering his tail feather again. He peers behind him, in case he’s sat on a nest of the things, but sees only the axe-hewn surface of the stump, a little moss, a crack. He adjusts his position and falls.

He falls, not onto the ground but down, flapping awkwardly, and bounces off a soft surface before he can catch the wind under his wings, but then he clips something else solid and squawks like a fledgling falling off the village walkway as he lands face-first on a smooth floor, all in a horrible instant.

Some people compare Rito flight to falling, but gaining altitude is only hard work, not impossible, and even a fledgling’s glide is not falling. How could anyone fall from the sky?

From – a tree stump? He scrambles to his feet. This cavern is walled with wood, like the warriors’ stories of the Crenel stumps, and up one side grows a mushroom like a brightcap but far, far larger. It must be what he struck as he fell. This is a cave, then, if brightcaps grow.

In the fall he dropped one of his arrows, so locates it on the floor – bare earth that looks swept clean, which is peculiar, and stained in faint crescents that make him pause, wary. He takes his bow from his back, not yet unstrung, but movement catches his eye first. An animal, or is it a person? More rodent-like than a Hylian, clothed, waving at him from an opening in the wood-wall in an obviously friendly manner, so it is surely a person. Not even the cunning monsters look so charming, nor are their rudimentary clothes so neatly made and embroidered with broad foliate curls.

Yet Revali hesitates, holding his bow and two arrows. He is too young to have travelled further than the Tabantha tundra to the east or the frontier to the south, never across the Tanagar, and he has only met Hylians and one Gerudo of the other races, but he knows from stories and pictures what the Zora and Gorons look like, and the great fairies, and – if he allows himself a moment’s fancy – how the stories of spirits like Picori and Koroks say they appear. This rodent-person is none of those.

The person speaks, but not in a language Revali knows. Then, the person holds out a red berry, very clearly indicating that Revali ought to eat it.

“No, thank you,” Revali says, not as polite in tone as his elders would prefer. “I do not eat peculiar berries.”

Many chicks and young fledglings, lured by the sight of wild birds eating the berries of mistletoe or bush honeysuckle, have spent a day or two learning that Rito diet is a little too close to Hylian.

The person gestures to the berry and then their mouth, but Revali still refuses.

Then, abruptly, there are two more of the rodent-like people in the opening, similarly clothed to the first, and one says, in Rito, “It is a speech-nut. If you eat it, you will understand us.”

“What?” That berry, or nut – innocuous, appetising to a sparrow – is magical? This person knows Rito? The warriors speak so much Hylian, in all their cooperation with the Hylian soldiers for the foretold Calamity, that Revali has learnt it too. Rito is the language of fledglings, the communal cooking pots, his mother in his remaining memories of her. Hylian is what he uses now.

“We are the Minish,” the Rito-speaker says, “and we need help from you.”

“It will have no other ill effect?” Revali asks, eyeing the glossy red sheen.

“You will understand any Minish, and they will understand you.”

It is a magic he has never heard of, but then he has no knowledge of the Minish, beyond a faint recognition of the name. A childhood story? He opted early on not to sing.

Questions vie for his time – who are the Minish? where is he? – but it will let him talk more freely with all three of them, so he sets his bow on his back and the arrows in his quiver, and takes the speech-nut in one wing. It feels more fruit than nut. Firm, yet slightly yielding. Cherry-like.

It’s far more bland than it appears, and surprisingly pitless. He swallows it all.

“Well? Has it worked?”

“It would appear so,” the first Minish says, in words that are neither Hylian nor Rito, but comprehensible nonetheless. “Thank you. We must ask your assistance with a grave danger that faces our community, but only children among your races are able to see us, which has presented a challenge.”

Only children. That sounds rather like the Tabantha fledglings’ stories of the Picori. And he is not–

“If you will come with us, we will explain everything, and then the choice is yours whether you aid us or return immediately.”

“Why not tell me here? Where must we go?” Not that he has any interest in making it to the archery tournament, but he sees little purpose in a long walk if he is only to turn around and come back to this cave.

“Our library contains information necessary for the explanation, and it is warm, with ample food.” This cave is not cold at all. “We also hope that our brethren have located a Hylian, so that we can talk with you both at once.”

Revali feels unpleasantly like a fledgling, all his feathers flaring out in irritation.

No. Let them see it. He has no time for this.

“Good,” he snaps out, and turns away, waving a wing at them. “Then you hardly need me. Any problem you face can surely be overcome by a Hylian child.”

While the first Minish stumbles over what to say next, the Rito-speaker steps forward, drawing Revali’s eye, and says, “The specific task requires two people, and we believe it will be best achieved by a Rito and a Hylian working in tandem.”

“No.” Hylian soldiers aggravate him: they talk over his head to the warriors, they perform so inadequately on even their own archery ranges, they sometimes stay in the village and complain about all the bread and the bitter winds while dressed in metal and thin wool. They have the most asinine prophecy about a sword. How can they truly be expected to lead the eventual battle against the Calamity?

How can one of their children be more useful?

“Fine archery is required for this task,” the Minish says, “and we know no one is better than your people.”

At the top of this peculiar cave, above the enormous brightcap, is an opening that must lead back out to the field he fell from. “Then why not two Rito?” Granted, his peers lag behind him in skill, and he cannot readily conjure a prospective candidate’s name, but he knows that many of his agemates train.

He can, perhaps, use the ludicrously large brightcap to ease his ascent.

“Archery is not the only skill required,” the same Minish replies, “and a Hylian is better suited to some. This will make more sense when we show you some schematics.” Schematics is a word he’s only heard recently, in the team of Sheikah excavators searching for the legendary divine beast Vah Medoh. What else is there in Hebra or Tabantha requiring such knowledge? “We are pleased to find an archer.”

An archer, yes. Soon, a warrior, whose responsibilities include aiding others. Revali faces the three Minish. “I will of course be pleased to help.”

Unfortunately, what they want from him first is not help but an unsettling journey: an earth-walled passage, shaded by great grasses and often obstructed by boulders and logs that all four of them must clamber over. Revali does not like the size of everything. Where exactly is–

“Ah, wait!” one of the Minish cries. “Be careful.”

Ahead is a slug, striped yellow and blue, as high as Revali’s shoulders. An ordinary slug. He sees these in plant pots, chewing on cool safflina, cabbage, spicy peppers. Pluck the slugs off the plant or soil and toss them away. Small slugs, like pebbles. He stares at this behemoth.

“What–”

“A sluggula,” one of the Minish says, as if that explains anything.

“No. I mean that–” He can’t quite put it into words. “It is very big.”

“You are the size of a Minish, at present,” the initial Minish, the one who held out the nut, says. “There is a magic in tree stumps.”

Revali is never sitting on one again.

“I see,” he says, although he’d prefer not to. “Well, let us continue.”

“The sluggula is a danger,” the Minish says, “though perhaps it could be dissuaded.”

This is simpler. An arrow in the slug’s head ceases its motions, though Revali eyes it as he retracts the arrow from its squishy flesh and wonders if these people’s problems are as trivial as wanting him to shoot down winterwings.

Any problem that a person requires help with is not trivial, his elders would tell him. He follows the Minish in silence.

Finally they leave the series of earthen passages and arrive at the stone base of a high structure that Revali is startled to recognise as the Snowy Feathers. Its plain wood walls stretch into the sky. This is the south side, where the snow swept off its angled roof has already melted. Revali is loath to look around and risk seeing another Rito, incomprehensibly vast. The Minish, instead, lead him through a small hole in the low wall, like a mouse-gnawed entrance but with a finely carved wooden frame, its rounded patterns tipped in old blue paint. A long staircase is built inside the wall’s insulating gap, spiralling up like Rito Village’s walkway without the roosts until they arrive at a wooden beam running under the rafters. Below: the store, closed for the Picori Festival, many of its shelves draped in protective fabrics or bare of goods. Above, on the beam: little wooden tables and rugs that must be made by the Minish, well-proportioned, amid wildberries and slightly wizened apples outsized in comparison, and a dozen Minish, dressed in coats of blue, red, orange, brown. It must be a communal gathering or dining area.

“A Rito!” one exclaims. “Welcome, welcome! This way!” – and so by the time they cross this untidy yet well-worn space to another set of stairs, leading down, Revali is trailed by quite the procession. It is a little discomfiting. He does not precisely know what esteem they have placed upon him.

These stairs descend only partway down the wall, emerging in what he thinks – in dimmer light, it is hard to be sure – is the back of Saezuri’s bookcase, where she keeps her shop ledgers and some books she sells alongside the Rito wood-wares, exotic fruit and staples. “Here,” a Minish says, leading Revali through a door cut into the side of a book.

Here is a room. They have hollowed out a row of books into a connected chamber, lined with desks and small scrolls and lit by holes cut high into the spines of Saezuri’s books. Each desk has a candle with a glass cover, all unlit. Saezuri must not look at this corner of her shelves.

“Here,” a different Minish says, and amid the tight gathering of little furred people in embroidered coats is a Hylian boy sitting at a desk: small, pale, with hair the colour of summer wheat, dressed in plain green and brown.

The Minish are all talking over each other, but the Hylian looks up at Revali and smiles in an oddly friendly way, as if they have met, and very quietly says, “Hi.” Unlike with the Minish, who Revali has the peculiar sensation of understanding without knowing their language, this is straightforwardly Hylian.

Before Revali can decide how to reply, a Minish with long, heavy whiskers and a white brow unrolls a densely written scroll across the Hylian’s desk, revealing illegible letters and an odd, six-limbed thing in the middle. “This is a guardian-statue,” the old Minish says. “Long ago, the Minish assisted Hylians in constructing many of these, but they have been dormant, buried in the ground, for eons. One is waking up under the village. We humbly ask that you two go inside and turn it off.”

Revali stares at the impenetrable document, unnerved by the insect-like look of the statue – too limbed to remain still, with a single eye like a hinox – but the Hylian leans forward and breathes out the word, “Oh.” He looks up, blue eyes wide and excited. “Where?”

Chapter Text

The Minish librarians push three desks together, letting them unroll enough of the scroll that Link and the young Rito – whose name, he’s muttered, is Revali – can see a sequence of schematic diagrams of the guardian-statue. It looks very Sheikah.

Link works his way along the scroll’s length, trying to understand the images. The letters or signs in-between them are mainly the Minish’s own, which the jabber-nut doesn’t make readable, but some words annotating the six-legged statue are in ancient Sheikah script. More than that, the curling patterns in the stone of its body resemble the curling decorations on drawings of the divine beast they’re searching for in Hebra. The Sheikah excavators stopped at the Tabanthan outpost a week ago to replenish their supplies and convene in a warmer, less windy setting than the mountains, so Link has already seen their own ancient scrolls, carefully rolled out and weighted with bags of dried beans, and their new notes in scribbled piles – and peered at them, when he could get close. The youngest excavator, a woman with pepper-red streaks in her white hair, kept shooing him away. Only when he returned with a bag of stolen candied wildberries in the middle of the night did she look at him over the big table and say fine, but don’t get your horrible sticky fingers all over my notes!

What he didn’t see in any of her old documents is interiors so detailed. The divine beast Vah Medoh is supposed to have rooms in its birdlike body – and platforms that go up-and-down, and gondolas – but nothing like this guardian-statue. It’s riddled with stairs and little walkways and rooms. It is, Link imagines, what a diagram of this bookcase would look like. Shelves and books and boxes at ordinary Rito and Hylian size, then a whole sequence of littler things in it, too small to see.

Is the magic that only lets children see the Minish true of their structures, too?

“What do you think?” asks the whiskered elder, Karusri.

“Sheikah,” Link says. “Is it?”

“Very astute! Yes, the Sheikah tribe of old are the Hylians who our ancestors worked most closely with, during the great era of construction, long, long ago.”

“On the divine beasts?” Link asks, because the Sheikah woman told him there are four. That question draws in Revali, who has so far stood at the far end of the combined desks and looked at the scroll without moving at all.

“Those too.” Karusri smiles. “I suppose you know of Vah Medoh, young Rito.”

“Yes,” Revali says, and no more.

After a short pause, the elder says, “This is much smaller than the divine beasts, and much simpler in operation. The divine beasts are animated with an ancient life force, even a mind – or so it is written – and are operated by a living person, an ordinary person, who communicates with them.” Link nods, and whatever the Rito have been told about Vah Medoh, it’s reached Revali, because he doesn’t react at all. “The guardian-statues are not so. Therefore, we Minish installed a safeguard, as part of an agreement with the ancient Sheikah: a simple switch, deep inside it, that turns it off. We are too small for the guardian-statues to target, you see.”

“A safeguard,” Link repeats, and–

“Why do these devices require a safeguard?” Revali asks, as if echoing his thoughts, but when Link glances at him, Revali is only looking down at the schematics.

“The guardian-statues are built to take commands,” Karusri says. “In the era of construction, and the great battle that was fought in that time, those commands came from the Hero and his allies. Afterwards, the guardian-statues were shut down. Some, disassembled; others, buried. Others, I fear, forgotten. There is much that we here do not know about that time or the fate of the Sheikah and our creations across Hyrule, but we watch over the guardian-statues we know about in this region and ensure that they remain dormant.”

“Until the Sheikah dig them back up,” another Minish cuts in. “That was never part of the plan.”

“What do we know of the plan?” Karusri spreads their arms wide. “We copy these scrolls and we maintain the pathways to the buried guardian-statues, but we must accept that much is lost over the millennia.” To Link and Revali more directly, the whiskered Minish says, “We are aware of the renewed interest in these buried creations. We, too, have our auguries. If the Sheikah do not require us, we will nonetheless uphold our side of the ancient agreements.”

This sets off a wave of muttering from Minish who must not feel as accepting of the situation. Link eyes them, wary. He knows too little to know who’s right. It’s a familiar feeling: conversations about the Calamity in Castle Town and the army garrisons that he can’t fully follow.

“This is an ongoing debate,” Karusri says, “and an important one, but first, there is an immediate danger. Without a command, the guardian-statue may not be safe.”

“What does that mean?” Revali asks.

A Minish scholar in a green coat, embroidered with chunky yellow fabric in blocky curls, steps up. Their hat is a small butterbur leaf. “The guardian-statues are ferocious weapons, capable of firing up to three beams of pure energy at a time. A direct strike is deadly. It would destroy this village easily.” Link looks from the friendly-faced Minish scholar down to the nearest schematic of the guardian-statue’s interior, multi-storeyed like an incredible house. It looks nothing like a weapon.

“Exactly as Cirri says.” Karusri adds, “One of our foremost scholars of ancient eras. We alone – and you, the same size as we – can enter the guardian-statues and turn them off, safe from their energy beams.”

“It is only a safeguard,” the scholar Cirri says, “and nothing in the ancient scrolls indicates its use in the era of construction, but it is also not supposed to wake up of its own accord. We would rather be overcautious.”

As sensible as that sounds, it doesn’t answer all the questions burbling up in Link like spring-water.

Revali, again, is quicker to put his thoughts into words. “That sounds like a poor design.” For all that there’s a rude coldness to his voice, Link thinks he’s right. Living in various garrisons and outposts has taught him plenty about appropriate weapon storage. Sharp weapons locked away from anyone untrained. Arrows bundled and boxed. The explosive powder harvested from bomb flowers has to be kept dry so it still works, but away from sunlight or other sources of heat so it doesn’t get set off. Given that Rito warriors fashion it into arrowheads, Revali must know that well, as an archer and – presumably – an aspiring trainee warrior, or a trainee already. Link isn’t sure how young the Rito warriors start to train, or how young Revali is. The overheard conversation at the festival’s archery field only told him that Revali isn’t a proven warrior yet, which isn’t exactly a surprise.

Cirri laughs, plainly amused. “Well, possibly! You must remember that these devices are built with an ancient power source we cannot understand, and I am not entirely sure they understood it, at the time, though–” Here they glance over their shoulder, as if inducting Link and Revali into a playground conspiracy. “–do not tell some of my colleagues that. Very contentious research question.”

“The power of the Calamity was so terrifying, in that time, that we must imagine them willing to take the risk,” Karusri says, in a far less excited tone, and Link understands that.

“If it is as simple as entering this guardian-statue and turning it off, why do you require our assistance?” Revali asks.

“I am not an adventurer!” Cirri announces, and several nearby Minish nod enthusiastically.

Karusri smiles. “We are simple village-Minish. We carve out our little homes in these large houses, we observe the turning of the seasons, we celebrate our festivals. We do not go into the ground.”

“Besides, it has been so many centuries – millennia, even – that the guardian-statues are home to all sorts of nasty creatures. We are also not sure what all the annotations on these schematics mean. Some scholars think that the interiors present barriers. I do not! But I agreed that a Hylian and a Rito together would be best suited to the task, if I am wrong.” Cirri sniffs.

“Hence why we have requested your help,” Karusri says. “Knowing all this, now, are you still willing to go on this short journey for us?”

Link nods immediately. The energy weapon is an uncomfortable fear, but if it can’t target anyone at his current size – and if he’s going to be inside the guardian-statue, anyway – it seems safe enough. Any other dangers, he hopes Revali can handle, because he assumes these peaceful village-Minish don’t have an armoury tucked inside one of the other books. Not that the nature of those dangers is clear. The Minish hardly presented a soldier’s well-structured briefing, but Link finds it more fun to listen to Cirri’s enthusiasm – more like the Sheikah woman – or Karusri’s warm knowledge.

“Yes,” Revali says, and even gives his reason, or one reason. “It would be prudent for my people to be well-informed about these devices, and their dangers, if we are to assist the Sheikah in uncovering them.”

“That is wise indeed,” Karusri says to him.

So he’ll return to the Rito a news-bearer. Link has, so far, only thought that his father normally spends a festival drinking and placing bets, and won’t notice Link’s absence for longer than usual. He can’t imagine I got shrunk and spoke to the Picori will be better-received than I saw a Korok under the bridge.

Maybe if he sees the Sheikah woman again he’ll tell her.

To them both, Karusri once again expresses their gratitude, and Cirri, too, who presents Link with a simpler scroll: a recently copied diagram of the route through the guardian-statue. Link holds it open so that Revali can also see it, and receives only a nod in acknowledgement.

Before they can depart, they’re also provided with a packed meal: wildberry jam in a thin-sided bead, thin seeded crackers, slivers of roasted acorn and chickaloo tree nuts, and salted whole fish wrapped in wax-paper. Sizzlefin trout fry or parr, Link thinks. Too tiny for even little children to catch, but generous in Minish hands. The bead-jar is ingenious.

“This ought to see you some of the way, at least,” the Minish says, packing it all up with tiny wooden cutlery in a red cloth bag that Link takes.

“Thank you.” It looks delicious.

“Yes,” Revali says.

Armed with food and the schematics of the guardian-statue, Link is ready.

Revali follows, silent, as a designated pair of young Minish – Yamri and Atniri – lead them out of the library. Other Minish wave goodbye and say good luck! with cheery expressions that make Link feel good about the task ahead, despite the ominous description of the guardian-statue’s weapon, and Link turns to Revali, wanting to say something like this is so exciting! or aren’t you excited? but the Rito’s eyes are narrowed as if he’s much less impressed. Link isn’t really familiar with how Rito expressions work on their very different faces, but the Rito at the village school usually convey their mood with big gestures – of exuberance, excitement – or say very directly when they’re not interested in something. None of them are so reserved.

So instead Link listens to the two blue-coated Minish, whose tails look like dandelion leaves and whose mousy ears flick and twitch as they talk, a continuous commentary on the artisanry of the stone staircase they’re taking down, the wood-framed doorway that leads them back outside, the Hylian- and Rito-made pots they follow a little mouse-path Minish-track between. Now it’s spring, they say, herbs and strawberries will grow in the pots. They’ll climb up and cut a sprig of safflina to grind into powder. It sounds so like the rhythms of Hylian life, but on an entirely different scale.

Like on the walk from the shrine-pot to the Snowy Feathers, it’s unsettling to be so small. At least this time they don’t see any people towering over them, giant and oblivious, but the size of a bug clinging to the underside of a leaf is alarming. Link is glad it’s early spring, before the big insects come out.

Their chatter cuts out. One points, trembling.

A cat dozes in the sun, its head half-tipped into the dip of their track, its eyes part-slitted. A languid, lazy look. It’s enormous. Link stops fidgeting with the strap of the cloth bag over his shoulder and looks between the two Minish, clearly afraid, and Revali, who hesitates to draw an arrow for the bow he restrung as they started along this path.

It’s a cat. He can’t shoot it.

“Sometimes,” Yamri, or maybe Atniri, ventures, “they play for fun. I heard Cukri fused kinstones with one.”

The other Minish makes a disbelieving sound. “Kinstones?” Revali asks, and Link’s glad for it, because he’s also curious.

“Yes! They’re special stones. If you match two halves together, something special will happen.”

“Such as?”

“Treasure!” maybe-Atniri squeaks, and then hides their mouth behind their hands, eyes fixed on the cat. “Good luck,” they add, muffled.

“I don’t think this cat wants to fuse kinstones with us,” the other Minish says quietly.

Its eyes have drifted shut. Link thinks it wants to keep napping in the sun. “We can sneak,” he says, and though it obviously stresses the two Minish to walk so close to it, they all pass the cat and its long, dangerous whiskers without incident.

The only other obstacle on their path, other than pine cones so large they must be circled around like boulders, is a small swarm of hovering red insects that Revali swiftly kills, firing one or two arrows at a time until they’re dead or dispersed.

“Sometimes they drop stones or clods of earth on our heads,” Yamri, perhaps, comments as Revali wordlessly collects his arrows from the corpses.

Good that the insects didn’t get a chance to throw projectiles at them, but Link wants another chance to see Revali’s archery. No wonder he wants to compete with warriors. For all that he must be years away from fighting with them, he’s incredible, at least compared to any archery Link’s watched in a Hylian army training yard. He’s fast, he’s so precise.

No more insects await them. Yamri and Atniri reach another patch of butterburs: veined leaves high overhead like awnings, hiding a nondescript lump of stone. One of the pair lifts aside a large leaf to reveal an entrance, uncarved but painted – faded, at the moment – in faint yellow, like lichen.

“The path continues underground–”

“–here we leave you–”

“It’s a straight line. You can’t get lost!”

“If there are turnings, don’t take them. That’s my advice.”

Yamri and Atniri nod in unison.

“How clear,” Revali remarks, and their ears twitch.

“Thank you,” Link adds. They brought them a long way.

“Thank you,” one says. “We are all terrifically grateful.”

“Yes! Good luck!”

With only a sigh, Revali starts down the steps, and Link goes after him.

The air grows cold very quickly. Link pulls his coat closed, looking at the stone walls as they descend into a long stone corridor lit by seams of luminous stone and large, purple-hued glowing mushrooms exactly like the one he bounced on when he fell into the shrine-pot. The stone is far too neatly cut to be anything other than a Minish-made corridor, but it’s not worked in any other way: no line of decoration, no paint. Nothing like their café and library in the village shop. The mushrooms probably aren’t intentional either.

Revali walks ahead, quick – impatient, maybe – and Link trots after him, distracted for a moment by the way his own breath mists in the corridor’s cold air, then says, “You’re going to be a trainee?”

“What?”

The bow, the archery skill– “A trainee? You want to be a warrior?” Link says, wondering if he’s gone wrong in the terminology. The Rito probably have different terms for the whole process, like how they say warrior instead of soldier.

“I am not a trainee.” Revali’s sharp beak is suddenly only inches from Link’s face. “I do not want to be a warrior. I am one. As soon as it is summer, I will be formally recognised as such, but it is only a formality.”

Link holds his ground, but only because he’s been in the sword ring with adults. Words fail him entirely. “Mm,” is all he manages.

But – Revali’s young. Link’s father isn’t planning to send him off to Akkala Citadel until he’s close to fifteen, for all his early skill with swords and polearms.

Revali scoffs, and proceeds along the corridor. Link walks mutely behind him, eyes lowered – at the only half-grown tail feathers that jut out between the two halves of the colourful skirt-like garment Revali wears over his upper legs. A warrior, or soon to be. “How fortunate you are,” Revali says, extending one of his wings in a long flourish that lets Link see the line of white running along its length, “to be accompanied by a future legend.”

For a moment, Link imagines his own boast – that in his first week at the Tabanthan outpost, he beat three fully grown soldiers in the training yard – but people only believe that if they see it.

Revali looks over his shoulder at Link, who meets his gaze for a moment, then looks away.

“Ugh,” is all the Rito has to say to that.

Past him, Link can see the corridor stretching straight ahead into the murky darkness. It’s going to be a long, cold walk.

Chapter Text

The air in this long tunnel flows cleanly, a cool comfort that they do not walk into a fetid pit, and every time Revali assesses the ceiling, its uncracked stability assuages the instinct to hurry back to the sky’s safety. It testifies to some other, more attentive Minish and their stone-skill, cutting into the hard rock, to last. More enduring than their Hylian tendency towards written records. We are not sure what all the annotations mean– Imagine if they spoke them aloud, not sounds but words, imbued with meaning, trained in it like a bard.

Still, it is clear enough that this guardian-statue must be handled.

What he has gleaned from talking to the warriors and listening in on meetings with Hylian soldiers and the Sheikah excavators concerns only the divine beast Vah Medoh, and no more than what the Minish scholar Cirri said, other than the Rito songs of it. The first Hylian visitors scorned those. The Sheikah excavators listened more attentively, though the songs tell of its feats and only, in a final quatrain, of its fall, its rest, its grave.

There it waits. Revali longs to see it.

No Rito song he has listened to describes six-legged machine allies to the ancient warriors and their divine protector. He will be pleased to bring the news to the warriors, especially if it reveals a flaw in the Hylian plan.

When this task is actually done. It requires so much walking. The brightcaps continue to grow unsettlingly large up wet patches of wall, and though he is grateful for the luminous stone, he thinks that the Minish tunnellers might have put in lanterns – or the village-Minish provided them. Evidently they rarely venture in here. Revali regrets not asking how they even know this guardian-statue is waking up, but their lively ignorance irritated him too much. The Hylian boy hardly helped.

The brightcaps are starting to thin out, and Revali suspects it is because the cool air is turning icy. Thin lines of water running along the rock wall are solid, now. Though the tunnel’s floor is only slightly inclined downward, it must be taking them into deeper, colder earth.

Revali glances back at Link, who has turned his fleece-lined collar up and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The red bag containing the copied schematic and their food hangs from one shoulder. He ought to have a hat. Hylians never take the weather here seriously.

Perhaps it is unfair to chide him for dressing in adequate clothes to participate in a festival on a sunny day.

For a moment, Link meets his gaze, then averts his attention to a line of luminous stone no different to the others. If only he talked! This long walk is tedious with only the small sounds of his boot-scuffs on the stone.

Even when the ice runs off the walls and turns the ground underfoot treacherous, Link only huffs as he slips and steadies himself. Revali’s sharp talons make easy work of it. The points scratch and stick in the ice, into the crevices between ice and stone, finding stable footing. In early winter or late spring, when the air temperature veers above and below freezing in the same day, the snow on Rito Village’s walkways turns into what he overheard some Hylian soldiers describe as a lumpy ice rink, whatever that is. Watching the Hylians veer all over it is a great source of amusement for any idle fledgling (or Revali, on his way to and from training). The Rito claw and grip the ice and the boards beneath it, or fly.

Unlike the Hylian soldiers, who only survive it by strapping spiked metal to the undersides of their boots, Link appears to be adjusting his weight and stepping with greater care. Even so, he slips short distances.

Revali realises he has got too far ahead and stops to watch Link’s progress. The boy is frowning at the icy ground – and looks up, only momentarily again, at Revali, and frowns at him too.

“It is not my fault your boots are inefficient,” Revali says, not at all pleased by that face.

“Mm,” Link says, an incoherent mumble, and more clearly, “Sorry.”

“For what?”

Bafflingly, that stops Link in his tracks, and he offers Revali an open-mouthed expression, as if he might speak, but then returns to his floor-staring and slow, careful steps.

This is more aggravating than any Hylian soldier. How does anyone talk to this boy?

Link keeps walking, so Revali does, too, until the rock walls are almost entirely ice-coated and the luminous stone glows behind it like a long paper lantern. It’s an eerie light. Every instinct tells Revali it is night, and he should be in his hammock, safe in his roost, even though he knows logically not enough time has passed for it to be anything other than late afternoon.

The tunnel’s floor remains unevenly rock and ice. The Minish who built this place put in a way for water to drain, so it is not flooded. Not easily, anyway. Revali shudders. Another compelling argument for not living in the ground.

Revali is following its unwavering path, but his body follows the wind, feeling the way it flows over his wings – even lax at his sides – and tells of an opening-out ahead. A chamber.

When they reach that chamber, they are both caught in place by its enormity.

Other than the size of the brightcaps, it has been possible to consider this a typical corridor – as Revali imagines them, anyway, having never been inside a Hylian building – proportioned for people of their size. That illusion ends.

They stand at the base of what must be a cave, and perhaps not even an especially large one, but Minish-sized it is vast. The wind – and Revali’s eyes – tell of multiple chambers, and ice, and maybe even running water elsewhere.

Ahead, the guardian-statue sits part-fixed in ice.

It’s huge. To Revali, now, yes, but even at his usual size, even fully grown – one day – it will still be taller, he fears – suspects – and there are its six limbs, its eye, fixed ahead, not on him. The divine beast will surely not be so frightful. He is sure of it.

“How do we get inside?” A whisper at his side, tugging his thoughts back to the ice cave, the now.

Revali turns his head to see Link with the schematic-map unrolled in his cold-reddened hands. His frown, now, is thoughtful.

How is he so–

“The body,” Link says, still very quiet. “If it sits on the ground, there’s a door.”

As they both look at the thing, an orange light pulses over its carved stone body. The air is too tight, suddenly. Revali itches to put an arrow in that eye.

“It can’t see us–” and finally Link sounds afraid, though he looks at Revali with a startling grin and sets out across the ice. Does he have no battle-instinct at all?

No, of course not. He is a child, a Hylian child, certainly younger than Revali, and free of cares.

The ice here is not water-over-rock, but a frozen pool, smooth. Revali skitters. He flaps his wings for balance, alarmed. This is absurd! He should fly. There’s no high point to launch himself from, not nearby, and he doesn’t want to exert himself flapping into the air when so much of their task remains ahead. The wind in this wretched cave stirs his feathers but not upward. It is only some consolation that Link has to flail his arms like a chick’s unfledged wings or a windmill.

It is not helped by a small sound that might be a snicker when Revali next flaps to prevent himself falling.

“Oh,” Link says before Revali can think of a retort. “Look.”

Link points down – at the ice, through the ice. It is not a frozen pool, but a flooded field. Revali looks around at the cave walls and cannot tell if they are artifice or natural, but under his talons, under – no, in – the ice, are petals, purple and forever fresh.

“Swift violets,” Link says softly, a reminder of their Hylian name for Revali, who only thought ia. In summer, they carpet the high mountains.

Revali looks up at the guardian-statue, which has not pulsed orange a second time, and back at the violets, and thinks of the ancient Sheikah sealing this cave away. Did they seal the violets, or did a floor or another alteration of the land fix them here later? Revali is too ignorant of rocks and their formation to know. It is hardly essential for a warrior, beyond the safety rules in seeking out bomb flowers.

“They’re everywhere.” The sweep of Link’s arm encompasses the ice around the guardian-statue, and he’s right: this is a low meadow. A dead meadow. Beautiful, but no more welcoming than the guardian-statue.

“We are not here to look at flowers,” Revali says, and Link only shrugs, and walk-slides on.

By the time Revali reaches the side of the guardian-statue, he has nearly landed on his beak more times than he cares to enumerate, and it has pulsed orange one time more, a flare of colour in the lines and recesses of its carved stone that chills him far more than any ice-cave can through his feathers. Is it stone? He refuses to let it frighten him, like a fledgling unable to fight. He reaches out a wing and touches it.

With a startled yelp, Link skids the final few feet and slams his whole body into the guardian-statue. If anything is going to rouse it–

To the guardian-statue, they are as consequential as darners.

“Does it feel like stone to you?” Revali asks Link once he has a firmer footing, holding onto a carved ridge with one hand.

Link runs the other hand over it. “Maybe?”

It is no stone Revali knows. Though it is old – ten thousand years, if the Sheikah tell it true – and ice cracks and creaks at its sides, it is unweathered. No lichens grow in it, no mosses, no age-blunted details mar its ancient decoration, no damage from water freezing on and around it for millennia. The divine beast will be so unaffected, then.

Actually, what it reminds him of–

“The shrines,” Link says.

“Yes.” Not flower-wreathed Hylia, in the heart of the village, but the old structure out on a promontory, used by bards as a small stage. Revali sat there as a chick. Warrior-songs, wandering-songs, legend-songs. Older songways – other shrines, in the far north, where nomadic Rito worshipped the fixed points in their land – but Revali is no chick, to sit at a bard’s feet all afternoon. Then the Sheikah excavators arrived, and one said, simply, They are ancient Sheikah technology, for the Hero.

“Same stone,” Link says. “Same patterns, I think.”

“It is.” Similar enough.

Supposedly the shrines cover Hyrule, though Tabantha Village lacks one. There is enough truth in it that Link, wherever he is from – if it is not Tabantha – has seen some of them. Strange to think that in their different lives, in different places, they have seen the same structures.

Now, here, Link smiles at him and he is unsure how to respond.

“We still require a way inside,” Revali says, concentrating on their task.

Link tilts back his head, looking up at the tall side of the guardian-statue. Its base – uneven curls of stone, according to the schematic – is buried in the ice, and with it the source of the six legs, though the limbs extend out like skeletal arches. Revali and Link stand at a point between two of them. The ice, thankfully, is less even here, where time and currents in a layer of still-flowing water have driven it against the wall of ancient stone, so it is easier for Link to start walking alongside the guardian-statue, and Revali after him. “Here!” Link says, pointing. His need to hurry nearly sprawls him on the ice. Revali follows more slowly, not so impressed by this Minish ingress: it is a ladder, not even a Hylian or Sheikah construction of wood or rope, but slots cut into the stone side of the guardian-statue. Ideally suited for little hands and feet. It leads up to a tiny doorway nearly hidden by the curling stone.

It follows that curl, not straight up but sloped steeply. Revali supposes he could grip onto it well enough with his talons.

“You – can you use it?”

So the Hylian has recognised the problem. “Of course,” Revali says, “but by all means, lead the way.”

Link gives him another silent not-a-response and only lingers at the base of the ladder for a moment before beginning his ascent. Naturally, he is nimble on it. He climbs into the door and out of sight while Revali more slowly steps from foot-slot to foot-slot, wishing this old stone was not so smooth.

The final span of the ladder is too vertical, and Revali stops, considering it. There is height enough to take off, loop around in the air and land in the doorway, though he will need to tuck his wings in tightly as he comes in. It is not ideal. It is not at all beyond his skill.

Link leans out of the door and sees him. “Oh,” he says, and crouches down, holding out his hand. “Can you reach?”

The hand is close enough. Revali stares at it. “You cannot possibly be strong enough.”

“Rito are light,” Link says, and sighs before adding, quietly and with his head turned, as if addressing the wall, “I threw Kolott high enough he could fly.”

Revali has no idea who Kolott is – presumably, one of the Rito fledglings in Tabantha Village – but the image is a little too like a legend-song to dismiss. “And how old is Kolott?” he asks.

“Your size. Nearly.”

Nearly.

“I threw a lot of them,” Link says, and he sounds exasperated. “It was a game. Come on.”

“This is not a game, and I do not want to be thrown.”

“I won’t!”

Revali ought to fly around to the door, ought to tell this little Hylian to stop throwing Rito fledglings around. Instead, he hooks one foot in the first step, reaches up and takes Link’s hand, wrapping the far larger digits of his wing around both hand and arm, and rather than fall face-first through the doorway, Link holds his weight as he walks his way up the ladder-steps. Who could have known? The Hylian is scrawny but strong.

“Thank you,” Revali says, because it is good to see that in all his easy distractibility and silence, he has a warrior’s eye for a direct solution. Link blinks at him, wordless. Then he nods. “Let us hope this device is not filled with these ladders.”

At that, Link laughs.

It might be better to hope the guardian-statue is well-supplied with lanterns. As he and Link stand at the little Minish doorway, facing a new hallway of dark stone, a pulse of orange light runs in a long line at the base of both walls. It is a curved hall, following the shape of the guardian-statue. In the light’s wake there is a renewed darkness. Link unrolls the map to look at it in the cave’s luminous glow, and he must have more familiarity with these types of diagrams because he nods and says, “Ahead, for now.”

Revali is beginning to wish he went to watch the archery tournament. No, he chides himself. This is important work. He is set to be one of the Rito’s greatest archers, living and in legend. His talons click on stone no Rito has seen in ten thousand years. This is going to be a fine song.

Chapter Text

The corridor along the inside of the guardian-statue is long and dark. It’s an almost complete darkness: the light seeping in from the small doorway fades fast, letting Link see only an outline of walls, floor, but no suggestion of features. No other opening lets more light in. Link puts one hand on the nearest wall and walks step by small, steady step, his fingers running over the smooth stone.

The orange light pulses along the base of the corridor walls, showing him the still-uninterrupted corridor ahead.

“Wait!” Revali calls out in the renewed darkness. “Don’t walk so far ahead.”

The click of Revali’s talons isn’t that far behind Link, but he waits anyway, standing still with his hand pressed flat on the wall. Revali walks right into him – a more solid weight than he’d have thought, but for the softer brush of feathers over his ears – and Revali shrieks, then shouts at Link to not just stand there.

“It’s dark,” Link says, because it’s not like he can see Revali either, not as anything more than a darker person-shape in the dark. He remembers some of the Rito at the village school mentioning poor night-sight. Is that true for all of them?

“You walk too quietly.”

Is he supposed to do an army marching chant? He can’t remember any of them. Besides, he’s used to treading lightly, so he doesn’t annoy his father.

“I’m here,” he says, and taps the wall. It’s a dull sound. “I’ll be slow.”

“Slower,” is all Revali says in reply.

Link resumes his walk, but now it’s more of a shuffle. If Revali’s night-sight is even worse than his, no wonder he’s wary of what they won’t see ahead.

He’s close enough that Link hears some of his breaths, almost at his ears.

The orange light pulses again. Link almost jumps – his back collides with Revali, and he mumbles out a sorry before stepping forwards again. It’s never this dark in army garrisons at night. Someone’s always kept torches lit in the sconces, or a door’s ajar with candlelight from one of the senior soldiers working late, or drinking late. At least he’s seen the corridor still doesn’t have any sudden drops or dead-ends, only a continuing, curving rise up through the body of the guardian-statue.

If the Minish during the first Calamity intended to run into these guardian-statues to turn them off, they didn’t really build a battle-ready route. Even with torches, this wouldn’t be that quick.

“Perish the thought that they might have provided us with candles, or the means to make a torch,” Revali says. In the dark, his voice sounds thinner.

Nothing on the schematic looked like a better way. “Hope it’s better,” Link says. “Ahead.”

In the next orange pulse, after what feels like an endless stretch of darkness, he sees something new: a cut-away in the base of the right-hand wall, lit up by the orange lines running into it.

“Look,” he says, uselessly. It’s already dark.

“At what?”

“A gap.”

Maybe five yards ahead. He measures his paces in his mind, and crouches at the wall to reach forward with both hands. The cut in the wall is smooth, a rectangular opening like a hatch between a kitchen and dining room. If he lies down, he can wriggle into it, and it turns at a corner – it feels like it keeps going in the same direction as the main corridor, built into the wall of the guardian-statue.

In the corridor, Revali mutters something, then says, “What are you doing?”

“Looking. In the next orange light.”

“Where?” A hard thing – a taloned Rito foot, he realises – touches his leg. “Why are you on the floor?”

“Wait. You’ll see.”

It takes a long time. Link wishes he had a timer with him, because he thinks the pulses follow a pattern, but he can’t tell. Not that he’d be able to see a timer in the dark. It’s just that it’s the sort of thing he’d like to tell the young Sheikah researcher, if he’s going to tell her anything.

Finally, the orange light pulses again, in a long line along a tiny tunnel he could crawl along on his belly and elbows.

“Well?” Revali says behind him.

“There’s a way–”

“There is a way along this main passage, where both of us can comfortably walk and there is also light. Or do you think Rito are like squirrels, scrabbling on all fours?”

No, but–

Link backs out into the dark corridor and gets back onto his feet, one hand pressed to the wall. “It’s interesting.” He can’t remember if he saw it on the schematic.

“This is taking us forever.”

Revali’s the one who wanted to go even slower.

Link starts walking rather than risk an argument, and Revali keeps up, talons click-clicking behind him. For a while he’s silent.

“Link,” he says, but Link is wary of whatever complaint this is. “Link, wait!” – and Revali’s grabbed his arms, pulling him back a pace.

“What?” Link asks, straining his ears for any sound of danger. No scrape or scratch on the stone floor, no distant alarm.

“This space opens up,” Revali says, and as he does, the orange light pulses, showing that perhaps five yards ahead there is no corridor at all: the outside wall of the guardian-statue continues, but the floor, ceiling and other wall fall away, a great crevasse into the cavernous innards of the ancient machine. It must be at least ten yards wide, and beyond it the corridor continues. A defensive gap, like a moat, Link thinks, or else no one is supposed to use this corridor, or an old crossing-way collapsed in the intervening millennia.

“I can’t cross that,” Link says.

“No.” For a moment Revali says nothing more, then, “I will be unable to carry you. Hylians are too heavy.” Revali is too close to Link in size, making Link the heavier one.

“The little way. Back there.”

“I told you, Rito cannot crawl like a squirrel.”

“I go there, you fly here–”

“You have the schematic, and the food!”

Link puts a hand into the Minish bag, feeling out the food parcel. “I can give you some–”

“No, that isn’t– how will we know where to go?”

“Both go the same way.” Link points uselessly ahead. Obviously Revali can’t see it. Of course it makes better sense not to split up, but unless Revali’s willing to lie down on his back and let Link drag him along that tiny passageway – unlikely – there’s no path forward for them both. “Have to hope they meet.”

“Good. Terrific.”

Fiddling with the bag, Link says, “Do you want food?”

“No, I want a torch.”

Link laughs without even meaning to. So does he! He’s never been afraid of the dark, but he’s looking forward to normal light, candles, the sun, all of it. “I’ll stop, if I’m back in the corridor,” he says. “Ahead. I’ll shout.” It’s a bad plan.

“Be loud.”

He’ll have to be. The guardian-statue is colossal at this scale, but Link focuses on what’s ahead: one foot in front of the other all the short way back to the little opening at the base of the wall, then he lies down and starts wriggling forward along it.

It’s harder work that he thought it’d be. He gets into a good rhythm, but he’s panting, and sweating under his clothes, and when the next orange pulse comes it’s so suddenly bright along the tiny tunnel that he jolts and knocks his elbows into the sides. The type of stone is different, he thinks. Extremely smooth where the light runs along it, like glass, and a bit more naturally textured – like true stone – on the rest, though it’s smoother than any rock in the Tabanthan wilds. He rubs his elbows and starts moving again.

After a while, the tunnel reaches an end. Link touches the stone in front of him and finds an indent, smooth-cut: a step. Awkwardly, he twists around so he can reach up, and there’s another step above it – and he can sit up here. The tunnel’s vertical. It’s a ladder cut into the stone, like on the way into the guardian-statue. He stands up in what’s now a total darkness and starts climbing, to the sounds of only his hands and feet scuffing on the steps and his heavy breath. The orange will pulse again, he reminds himself, and he mustn’t be startled.

He climbs high enough to suspect he’s above the main corridor, and soon after that the tunnel becomes horizontal again, but not for long, and he can see its end. There’s light, flickering orange. Faint – but light.

Link pulls himself out into a small room. Two squares on the floor are the source of the flickering: two raised platforms, no bigger than a shield, with a line of light running around their base. It’s the same shade as the pulse, but not steady or strong.

It’s enough to let him see the rest of the room, which has only a door on the far wall and a row of gold-glazed pots along one wall. Their rims shimmer in the brighter bursts of light.

Cautiously, he approaches the two platforms and stares down at them, then tries the door. It hasn’t got a handle, nor does it slide back or to one side when he tries pressing his hands against it. It’s locked. He looks at the platforms again. With one foot, he applies pressure to one of them, and it sinks into the floor – sticking, a bit – but it goes all the way down, and the light shines strong. It dims and rises back up when he lifts his foot. He tries pressing down the other platform, and it does the same thing. It changes nothing.

They’re switches. They need two people – or two weights. He puts the red bag on one of them, but the switch barely dips.

The pots. Closer-up, the glaze is perhaps truly gold-flecked at the rims, and extends onto the body in broad, faded swirls. The rest is a warm yellowy tone like honey candy, cracked and old. Most are intact. Any corks or other stoppers they once had are long disintegrated.

The first pot Link touches crumbles into powdery shards under his fingers. He winces. They’re probably abandoned and not being used if they’re that fragile, but they’re someone else’s – and he needs one to stay intact for the switch. If they’ve been here since the first Calamity, they’re really old. Fortunately the next pot is sturdier, and he wraps his arms around it, crouching down like a soldier moving crates. He sees, then, something blue peeking out from the remains of the first pot. Brushing aside the broken pot pieces, he picks up another broken thing: it looks like half of a blue disc, with a design on its face that might be half of a clover leaf. It’s smaller than a saucer. It’s nothing at all, but Link looks at it in his palm in the flickering orange light and decides to keep it anyway. He tucks it into his trouser pocket.

With the second pot in his arms, hugged against his chest, he heaves it to the nearest switch. He’s careful not to drop it, in case that’s what it needs to finally shatter.

It weighs down the switch, turning the light steady.

Link stands on the other switch, and two thin lines of light run from both switches to the door, framing it in orange, then blue. The door slides up.

Is it that simple? Link steps off the switch, and it stays embedded in the floor, and the light is still blue. He grins. He pats the strap of the bag over his shoulder, pats his pocket, and walks through the doorway. This is actually fun.

Chapter Text

Revali waits in darkness for the next orange pulse, attentive to the crawl of air through the corridor of this giant machine. The promise of flight awaits. He wants to see his path again before he launches. With no strong currents, he will have to flap upward from the lip of the stone to cross this artificial gulf – and not dip too low, or else strike the vertical stone-face below. He is confident of his ability, but he’s never flown in the dark.

Why would he? Rito roost where predatory wild animals and monsters cannot reach – or, if they roost on the ground, it is with allies like Hylians or Gerudo, whose better night-sight is balanced by Rito far-sight in the day – or at minimum there is a fire, armed warriors, not a warrior alone.

The dark inside the guardian-statue is unnatural, as even Link struggles in it.

Revali hops from foot to foot. The wait between orange pulses is excruciating. Yet again he imagines a simple torch: wood, old strips of cloth. Even the weak glow of a rushlight.

The darkness endures.

The orange light pulses along the base of the walls and he runs the four paces to the edge of the gulf with the afterglow of it across his eyes. He launches himself into nearly still air.

It is air, though, so Revali catches it under his wings and flaps up, remembering the shape of what he saw and feeling how the air moves beneath him, until it changes and he lands, breathing heavily, on the other side.

It is dark, and now he has to walk without the slight sound of Link’s footsteps and hands tapping and sliding over the wall as a weak guide. He steps cautiously forward. Like Link, he brushes one wing along the wall as he walks, although it is barely a walk. For all that he can feel the air unchanging over his wings and face, he cannot stop an instinct-deep conviction that the darkness contains – something. It must contain something. The guardian-statue’s schematic depicted a complex device, and any of it could be dangerous to the unwary.

He forces his feet forward. He makes sure to extend his wing ahead of him on the wall, so that if the corridor takes a sharp corner he will not walk beak-first into it.

It wends on.

He cannot adjust to the darkness. It’s pure black, as if a monster has plucked out his eyes. With every slow step he must suppress the conviction that the ground will give way or an obstruction jut into his path. The air stays still over his wings, telling him nothing. The light, pulsing sporadically along the corridor, confirms only for a heartbeat that it continues.

Every pulse is an assurance. Revali pushes himself to go on, trusting that he saw a featureless corridor ahead, even if the dark again obscures it.

His feet slow, against his will.

If he holds his wing in front of his eyes, he can’t see it. He waves it. The dark is unmoving. He stands in the corridor – he saw it – and there might be nothing at all there.

The wall is real. The scrape of his talons on the floor is real. The unchanging air is an indicator of the corridor’s shape, and when he waves his wing, he feels the slight draft it creates.

The other uncertainty is where Link will emerge, assuming his egress is in this corridor at all. But thinking that he will not find the little Hylian – never find the little Hylian, lost forever inside this machine – is useless. He will. It won’t be behind him. Though it grates on him to know it, he is making far too slow progress. When will there be another pulse? How far ahead, then?

Try as he might, he can’t lift his feet far from the floor. He shuffles forward.

He strains to hear Link’s small voice, but hears only his own breath, his wing and talons on the ancient stone.

Link’s actions so far suggest sufficient sense. He will wait.

He will need to. The corridor continues and continues.

The air trickles over Revali’s wings and he stops, wary of a fall. There is no convenient pulse of light. He inches forward, curling his fore-talons in anticipation of the floor’s end.

When he reaches it, he holds his legs steady. It is as he expected. He waits. He squints into the blackness, which is somehow less black – featureless, still, but greyer – and tentatively holds a wing out. He can see the shape of it. He holds it up and down, looking for the source of this diffuse light, but cannot tell, nor see any detail beyond it, dark in the dark. He cranes his head into the gulf that opens into the guardian-statue’s innards, but discerns no light-source there.

It is when he’s looking down that the orange light next pulses, and he sees the line of it along the corridor’s edge, down the thick cut-out floor beneath it, all the way to the corridor beneath him and the lip of the gulf he flew across earlier.

A short flight, only a short–

If he had only looked further up! He warbles, dismayed. A flight upward in the dark, not without its dangers, but not far, not an entire circuit of this machine’s shell for nothing, alone in the dark. What else is he missing because he can’t see? What else will the Minish cost him – and Link, and their task – through their ignorance of the guardian-statue’s inner workings and ill-preparedness for an expedition of this scope? He hates this stupid plan and this dark machine and–

“Revali?” A small, familiar voice, up and along the corridor on the other side of the gap. “Are you here?” Not far at all.

Revali steadies his breath. “Yes,” he calls out, clear and steady. “I am flying up. Stay where you are!”

Ridiculous to get so stuck. This is a task that he must complete. He remembers the flight across the first gulf, and picturing the traversal he jumps into the gap and flaps to maintain his height.

As he lands, he hears Link tapping the wall with his hand, so Revali follows the sound and manages not to walk into him. “Well,” he says, ruffling his feathers. It can’t entirely shake off the discomfort this darkness causes. “How was your rodent hole?”

That little sound might be a laugh. “Small. But I found a room.”

So there is more to this machine than an endless corridor. “And? Did it contain any of the mechanisms?” Even if the switch to turn off the guardian-statue is truly at the top, the rest of its interior must have a purpose.

“No. A puzzle, kind of. I had to weigh two orange light switches down, but – only one of me, so I used an old pot in the room. Storage pot. Made them blue.”

That is one of the more ridiculous things Revali has heard yet – but, though he cannot see Link’s face in the dark, he’s sure the boy is smiling. He enjoyed his little excursion, with his orange and blue lights, while Revali walked in a pointless circle in the lightless corridor.

“And did it unlock a secret treasure?” he asks. “Mmm?”

“A door,” Link mumbles. “Then steps. Then here.”

“Any more than old pots? The ancient Minish did not carelessly leave behind any useful objects, I take it.” Link does not reply. “Only games.” That excitable scholar in the Minish library will no doubt want to hear all about it. Revali hopes Link is in a talkative mood when they return, or he will have to relate these paltry details on Link’s behalf.

“You didn’t – nothing else here?” Link asks in his small voice.

“Nothing but this corridor. Not even a pot–” and they are only slightly closer to their destination, and though there is a shorter way up, Revali can’t lift Link up it, nor countenance leaving Link behind. It makes no sense to separate if the path ahead is passable, no matter how slow. Revali can feel the day’s tiredness settling on him. He snaps his head forwards, to face along the corridor, if he could see it. “We should not stop here.”

Link evidently agrees, because Revali hears him start walking: the scuff of his boots, the tap of his hand on the wall, absolutely no words. Revali follows him closely. It is undeniably better not to be alone. Even adult warriors with years of experience group together at night.

The journey remains unpleasant, even so. They progress in slow silence, a familiar loop around the interior of the guardian-statue that Revali starts to expect will bring them to another gulf, above the two he has already crossed, and will there be a little tunnel for Link to crawl along there? At least Revali will know to look up.

When they reach it, the sight takes them both by surprise: that they see it at all, in a thin light seeping along the corridor, and that a bridge spans the gap. Not a stone bridge, or any other material congruent with the guardian-statue’s interior, but woven of some dried plant matter. Boulders anchor it in place.

Pebbles, Revali reminds himself. Small stones.

On the other side, a door is built into the wall that abuts the guardian-statue’s interior.

Link goes up to the bridge and tests the suspension rope at about his hip-height. Revali revels in being able to see him, and the corridor, though the darkness beyond this gap in the corridor – further into the guardian-statue – remains impenetrable.

“It’s good,” Link says. “I’ll cross it.”

Revali wants to say that if it gives way, he’ll be able to catch Link in the air, as anyone would if one of the bridges leading to Rito Village gave way with a chick or Hylian on it, but at his size that remains an impossibility. When he is full-grown, and stronger–

Taking flight, he notes that Link is not hesitant on the bridge, though it is narrower than those leading up to the village, which plenty of the recent Hylian visitors have made a fuss about. Link treads with steady care, one hand on the rope, until he reaches the other side. He’s grinning when Revali lands next to him.

No sense of preservation at all.

They turn towards the door: a frame in the wall, with cloth the yellow of crocus stamens in the doorway. It hangs from lintel to floor, a sturdy piece woven with two weights of yarn to create swirls at the corners.

“Looks like the one I opened,” Link says in little more than a whisper, “but not blue.”

“Not – what?”

“Orange light on the switches, then turned blue and the door opened.”

“I see.” He does not, but agrees that this door is a feature of the guardian-statue’s interior. The rope-bridge is not, however, and neither is the cloth in the doorway or the low, warm light behind it, a familiarly domestic hue.

In lieu of making any more sense, Link lifts aside one half of the fabric and peers inside. Revali steps up behind him, and sees–

A Minish, turned around at their stove and a metal pot, little wooden spatula in hand, says, “Oh! Sorry, you startled me. You must be the people they found to send in here. Come in, come in!”

The air is homely, casserole-laden and humid with its steam, and Revali hesitates not at all, following Link inside.

Chapter Text

They sit at the table while the Minish minds the pot, occasionally taking a taste with a small wooden spoon. It smells fantastic. Link is no good at sitting still, so after he’s finished his cup of water and traced some patterns in the table’s wood grains, he gets up and idles over to the stove, where he asks what exactly’s in the casserole.

“A bit of this, a bit of that. It’s early spring, you know, so it’s what I can find: mushrooms, roots, dried trout from my stores.” When Link peers into the pot, he sees chunks of partly flaking fish-meat. Sizzlefin trout fry or parr, just like the fish wrapped by the village Minish in his bag. That’s set aside for now. It’ll keep. This Minish, who introduced themself as Tokapcupri, gives the pot another stir and says, “I hope it suits your tastes.”

Link leans close, breathing in the steam. “Mmm!”

“And your friend, too?”

Glancing over his shoulder, Link sees Revali still staring at the table. “Probably,” he says, wary of speaking for the Rito.

Apparently aware of the conversation, Revali turns his head sharply in their direction. “I am very grateful for your hospitality. Generosity is the most important ingredient in any meal.” It sounds like he’s repeating someone, probably one of his elders. A Rito adage.

Tokapcupri only smiles. “Very true, very true.” Link thinks the most important ingredient is usually rock salt, but he understands the point of what they’re saying. “Do you want to fetch three bowls from that shelf over there? And three spoons, too.”

Link nods, happy to be given a good task. The shelf Tokapcupri’s pointing to is part of a freestanding log, hollowed out to form a cabinet with two shelves: big dishes on the lower one, bowls and cups on the upper one. The bowls and cups are also made of wood, a band of cross-hatching like fish scales carved around the outer rims of the bowls. They’re beautiful. One cup contains the spoons, which have more engraving up the handles: fish scales, curls like waves or bramble thorns. Link takes out three bowls and three spoons, and puts them on the table when Tokapcupri directs him to do so.

It’s unnerving to think that the table is tiny, like in a girl’s toy house, but it feels as solid-built as any oak or pine table in a garrison. Its runner-cloth, coarsely woven of a thick brown fibre, must be intricate to Hylian eyes, if any – but his, Minish-sized – could ever see it.

Tokapcupri carries the pot from the stove to the runner-cloth, which is sturdy enough to take the heat of it, and Link slides onto the stool next to Revali.

“Here,” Tokapcupri says, ladling casserole into the three bowls. “I have a bit of bread leftover from this morning, enough for us all to have a piece. Let me get that.” The loaf’s under a cloth on a side-table next to the stove, probably where Tokapcupri prepares vegetables and other foods, and the enough for a piece turns out to be a good chunk of it, still soft and delicious. Link dips it into his bowl of casserole and already thinks this is one of the better meals he’s ever had.

Whatever herbs Tokapcupri used in the casserole, he’s not familiar with their taste, but it’s great. Link surreptitiously peers into the pot and sees there’s plenty left, and hopes that means he can have seconds. For now, he’s got plenty of firsts to get through, slurping happily at his spoon.

“So,” Tokapcupri says. “I’m glad to see you two here. I went to the village as soon as I noticed the anomalies within the guardian-statue, but I worried they would struggle to find warriors.”

Link glances up. “You’re not?” he asks. Tokapcupri shares the mousy features of the other Minish, but wears a vivid turquoise and red coat pulled down around their waist to reveal a dark, sleeveless shirt and a far heftier build than any Minish in the village. Muscles like that normally mean soldier, or perhaps–

“I’m a miner, not a fighter,” Tokapcupri says. “I trade rock salt and some precious stones with the villagers. I’m an occasional carpenter.” That explains their build. Link’s seen blacksmiths and other craftspeople with broad shoulders and big arms. Miners he always expects to be Gorons. “I can defend myself in a pinch, but that’s enough to get away from danger.”

“Yet you live inside this machine,” Revali says.

“Other than the odd mulldozer or tektite that crawled inside, it was very calm in here until recently. Now, all that flashing light – it worries me.”

“You got around in the dark before that?”

“Yes, just fine. With torches, of course.”

“Torches,” Link repeats, mouth half-full of mushroom. “Do you have–”

“We were not provided with any,” Revali says.

“Ah. Yes, I’ll give you several, and anything else you need, if I have it.”

Link tries to swallow his mushroom and say thank you in a normal way, not giddy at the thought of walking through the guardian-statue with a steady – or steady enough – light, an end to inching forwards in the darkness. Somehow Revali says, very calmly, “That would be helpful.” As if he wasn’t sounding panicked in the dark.

“Is there a way–” Link starts to ask, then isn’t sure if it’s up or in. “Quicker?” he adds, and hopes Revali picks up the thread of the question.

“It seems a very indirect path,” Revali says. “Was this not supposed to be used in an emergency, if this machine malfunctioned during battle? Were the ancient warriors meant to find a child and send them in for a full day and more?”

It’s a sharper tone than Link would’ve taken, but it’s the full question. He’s keen to hear its answer.

“I’m no historian,” Tokapcupri says, “but I assume that some Minish trained as warriors in the era of construction, rather than having children anywhere near a battlefield. As for getting to the guardian-statue’s switches quickly, there we do have an idea of how they did it. They used devices called travel medallions – there’s a little portable device that lets its user set a travel location, to which they can travel using the medallion.” Here, Tokapcupri shrugs. “Or so we think it worked. The medallions are, or were, Sheikah technology, or Sheikah magic, or both. We know they existed, but not if they survived, or where they might be now. I’ve seen the travel point in this guardian-statue, up in the chamber containing the switch, but it’s useless without the lost transportation device. Those Minish warriors of that ancient era could, I presume, travel quickly between guardian-statues and any other points that they set up. The walkways and tunnels inside the guardian-statues are only a back-up path.”

Revali huffs. It’s a much longer mission than Link realised when he agreed to it in the Minish library. Link looks into his bowl, catching a flake of sizzlefin trout in his spoon, and wonders carefully if his father’s noticed his absence. Not yet, surely. The morning’s going to be a different matter.

This is much better than being in the garrison.

“You’ve made good progress,” Tokapcupri says, “especially in the dark. Rest here. It might not be late night yet outside, but it’s late enough. Sleep a while, and start again fresh.”

Revali shifts on his stool and scowls at his bowl, but Link sees the sense in trying to sleep here – safe, warmer than in the corridors – without any of the creatures or even monsters that might accost them. “Mulldozers, tektite,” he says, feeling out the unfamiliar words. “They’re very small?”

“To you, as a Hylian,” Tokapcupri says. “To you, now, they’re not to be trifled with. Besides – well, it depends.”

For the second time, Link thinks about a sword.

“What does it depend upon?” Revali asks.

“What else is in there. I saw the travel point, years ago, but in that big chamber with the switch is also a lot of old nests, I’m not sure what for. Other miners told me a lot of tall tales about what might nest in there, but you know how it is.” Link nods. A year ago, back in Castle Town, he heard a fisherman up from the south coast tell a story about giant octorok that nearly killed dozens of people, hundreds of people, with tentacles the size of logs, the size of barges. “I would advise you both to take caution. I haven’t heard anything moving around up there, but I don’t go up there much.” Tokapcupri shrugs. “It can only be so big. Now, help yourself to more of this, and how about I make us some tea?”

While Link spoons more casserole into his bowl, Tokapcupri gets up to put a pan of water on the stove. The water comes from a barrel beside it, sourced from Link’s not sure where. Ice out in the cave, perhaps? As the water boils, Tokapcupri moves the pot off the heat and opens a green-glazed jar, taking out a spoon heaped with dried stems, leaves and flower buds, which goes into a matching tea pot, followed by the just-boiled water. He lets it steep for only a short time, then pours it into three cups the colour of cowslip.

Maybe it’s the cups making the tea look yellow, or maybe it’s a naturally yellowy tea. Link’s not sure what it is. When it’s cooled a bit, he takes a sip – and still isn’t sure. It’s nice, though, with a floral, easy taste. It must grow locally. Link realises he’s never tried a Tabanthan tea, because the soldiers always bring Hylian tea to the garrisons, and the Sheikah excavators carried their green teas along with their preferred pickles and little snacks and several crates of rice wine.

He still wonders if he can ask for a sword, if Tokapcupri has one, but with their bowls empty and the tea drunk, the Minish bustles around putting the casserole dish back by the stove – its fire extinguished – to keep for the next day, washing up, running a wet cloth over the table.

Tokapcupri sleeps on the other side of the room, where there are two beds, one rumpled from regular use and the other neatly made. It’s large enough for two. “I’m going into my workshop for a bit,” Tokapcupri says, and gestures at a wall hanging that Link abruptly realises must conceal a second, smaller door. With a wink, they add, “I’ll go easy on the hammering.”

Left alone with Revali, Link turns to the bed. Revali approaches it and prods the bedding with one wing.

There’s a curtain to draw between each bed and the rest of the room, making it a bit more private. Link pulls it closed around them.

“Comfy?” he asks Revali, who’s still examining the bed. He’s sure it is. He’s slept on mattresses and mats and nothing at all – this bed looks inviting.

“I would have no way of knowing,” Revali says.

Link stops halfway through taking off his shirt, unsure what that means.

With a long sigh, Revali adds, “Rito sleep in hammocks, not – these.”

“Oh.” Yes, Link’s heard about those, but has no idea what they’re like. “Something new?” he says, hoping Revali isn’t too annoyed.

“Perhaps,” is all the Rito says.

There’s worse responses to get. Link resumes undressing.

When Link’s wearing only his undershirt, leggings and socks, he gets onto the other side of the bed and wriggles under the duvet. It’s lighter-weight than he expected, given how cool the room is already becoming with the stove fire out, but the Minish have a light layer of fur over their skin, so perhaps they don’t feel the cold. Meanwhile, Revali unties the cream-coloured scarf from around his neck and drapes it over the bed’s headboard, then starts fiddling with the leather body-part of his armour. Link stares at the ceiling.

When Revali gets under the duvet, Link realises the Rito is warm. He lies still, right on the edge of the mattress, while Revali shuffles around in search of a comfortable position. The bed must suit him poorly compared to a hammock. Revali ends up on his side, with his back to Link and his wings curled around himself, and so Link carefully tucks the duvet around his cheeks – wary of moving too much, because he can feel Revali’s tail feathers jutting into his leg – and closes his eyes. There’s a warmth under the duvet like a hot water bottle.

The excitement and exertion of the day catches up on him, because he falls asleep even faster than usual, and if Tokapcupri returns to the main room from his workshop, he doesn’t hear it.

He wakes up covered in feathers. He blinks his eyes open, not sure where he is – then remembers the Minish, the guardian-statue, Revali. Somewhere beyond the bed, he hears the knock of wood-on-wood and Tokapcupri humming quietly, getting the stove started. It’s cold, but he’s not cold. He’s staring at blue feathers and a soft green undergarment, his face pressed into Revali’s collarbones, and Revali’s wings cover his head and back, curled like a thick blanket under the duvet. Even lying on his side with his arms tucked in at his chest, pinned between his body and Revali’s, he’s comfy. Snug.

He’s entirely unsure how to extract himself without attracting Revali’s ire. “Mm,” he says, which isn’t good enough. “Good morning.”

Revali draws back the wing over Link’s head, letting in more of the room’s lantern-light – and Link can feel how cold the air in the room got. “You were shivering in the night,” Revali says. “I’m surprised you didn’t wake up.”

Link doesn’t remember it. “Thank you.”

When Revali doesn’t reply, Link assumes he’s said the wrong thing again, but then Revali sighs and says, “I only wish I could see the sun.”

“Ha!” Tokapcupri says from the other side of the curtain. “Not the miner’s life for you.”

Revali huffs, and Link stifles a laugh.

“I expect you’ll want to get started quickly,” Tokapcupri goes on, “so while I can’t offer you bread until I bake more, or anything else cooked, I do have dried wildberries and tea to get you going.”

Though it’s cold without Revali’s wings around him, Link is eager to resume their task. He pulls the rest of his clothes on quickly, then makes the bed while Revali is still tying his scarf around his neck. Revali’s leather armour is back in place. While they sit at the table waiting for the tea, Revali nudges at some of the feathers along his wings with his beak – preening, Link realises, remembering what some of the Rito at the village school told him, and also realises he ought to comb his fingers through his hair. Less mop, more boy.

The dried wildberries are small and round, not the whole berry but each drupelet prised apart. The seed in each one is a discernible pip. Link swallows every one. With more of the same tea as the night before, it makes a nice breakfast, and Link feels ready to face the dark guardian-statue again.

This time, they’ll have torches. Tokapcupri sets out six. Into the bag of food from the village Minish, Tokapcupri adds more of the dried berries, and refills their canteen.

“Now,” Tokapcupri asks. “Is there anything else you need?”

Tokapcupri’s already checked their schematic and added one or two annotations, but said otherwise it’s accurate, leaving Link to chew on his finger and dither.

“You’re ready for trouble?” Tokapcupri asks with another wink.

Revali sits up a little taller on his stool. “I am ready for whatever I will face.”

“Spoken like a warrior,” Tokapcupri says, and Revali looks pleased. “And you? You don’t have a weapon.”

“No–” but he could, maybe. “Do you have swords?”

“Swords? I do. You already know how to wield one?” Link nods, and Tokapcupri hops from their stool and goes to the wall hanging that covers the workshop door. It opens to a second room – one not so homely, but practical, Link sees when he shuffles closer to peer in. A workbench, tools, crates of ore and wood, all cast in the steady light of one of Tokapcupri’s lanterns. At one wall, next to pickaxes and a heavy-looking sledge, Tokapcupri has two swords on a mount. They look simple, like the common travellers’ swords that a lot of people carry on the road in Hyrule, just in case, but they’re effective if well-kept and wielded right. “Here. Try it.”

Link draws it in the main room, a safe distance from Revali and Tokapcupri, and sees its blade is clear and sharp. The hilt is simple, without a guard, its grip wound in red cloth stained dark by hand-grease, and the scabbard isn’t metal or leather but another toughened material, a brown that’s nearly black. Taking stock of his surroundings, Link gives the sword a few swings.

“Any good?” Tokapcupri asks.

“I can borrow it?”

“If you don’t pass by here on the way back, leave it with the Minish in the village. They’ll see it back to me.”

“It’s good,” Link says quietly, sliding it back into its scabbard. It’s an easier size than using a sword for grown-ups, and more satisfying than the wooden training swords sized for kids. No blacksmith is wasting metal to make a sword for a child, his father told him, but the Minish are proportioned such that it fits in his hand. The scabbard attaches easily to his belt, and he puts the bag of supplies – with the torches added to it, but for the one they’ll light here and set out with – back on his shoulder, and he’s ready to go.

He turns to Revali, who’s eyeing him with an unreadable expression. What now? He thought they were getting along.

The words shall we go dry up on his tongue. He’s stood there in silence until Revali says, “You are ready?” He nods.

“Good luck,” Tokapcupri says. “I look forward to hearing all about your adventure.”

Link steps out into the corridor and focuses on what’s really important: not whether or not Revali wants to be his friend, but the urgency of deactivating the guardian-statue before it can cause any harm.