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"Doctor Purah!"
While it wasn't terribly unusual for someone to be screaming her name from across Lookout Landing, she didn't expect it to be Josha. And she certainly didn't expect to see Josha red-faced, breathless, glasses askew and hair falling out of her bands. The girl nearly collapsed as soon as she passed through the south gate. Burwar offered his canteen, but Josha pushed it away, heaving in breaths of frigid air.
"Doctor!" Gasp. "Purah!" Gasp.
"Yes, yes, I'm here!" Purah dashed across the camp, her lab coat flapping behind her. "Hylia's shadow, child. What-?"
"Link!" Josha gasped again, and pointed south through the still-open gate. "It's! Link!"
All the snow in Hyrule couldn't have competed with the ice-cold panic that surged through Purah's veins. She shielded her eyes, squinting at the white Hyrule Field on the other side of the fort. "Where is he?!"
"Coming!" Josha's breaths deepened, through her face still retained the bright red of the morning's chill. "The team is!" Gasp. "Bringing him up!"
"And you sprinted all the way here?" Purah asked, less expecting an answer and more in bewildered confusion. If Josha was this winded, there was a high probability that she'd out-run Link — a feat rarely accomplished by anyone, let alone a fourteen-year-old girl.
It didn't take long for the Depths team to arrive, running the draft horse nearly into the wall of the fort in their haste to deliver their supply cart. But instead of Zonai devices and muddlebuds, she found only Link in the back of the cart — curled up, shaking, sweating, his pupils blown, and completely unresponsive to her grabbing his shoulder to pull him out. His breathing was ragged, and he stared at her without recognition, without focus. His skin was at once burning to the touch and frigid with sweat.
"Golden Three…" Purah cursed under her breath, getting absolutely no where the more she tried to pull him out by himself. "For the gods' sake, help me get him inside!"
The guards and Depths crew sprung into action at her command, grabbed the incoherent, unresponsive hero, and lifted him from the back of the cart. He flopped like a dead creature, and if it weren't for the wheezing breaths he took, the panicked tremor, and dilated eyes, she might think him as such.
"What happened?" Purah asked, dragging Josha along as she followed the strange parade through the Landing and up to her office. No one in the Landing said a word, the fort falling deathly quiet, save for the rapid footsteps of the team carrying their sick hero.
"I-I'm not sure, exactly." Josha struggled to keep up with Purah's quick pace, having to jog alongside her. "He wasn't this bad a little while ago. He walked into the Depths camp and- oh, I'll just let them tell you. Daval found him."
"Daval!" Purah sprinted ahead, startling the easily-startled Zonai Survey Researcher who was helping carry Link by the legs. "What happened?!"
"Ah, Doctor Purah!" Daval nearly dropped Link, much to the annoyance of the guards who were trying to drag his limp body up the stairs. "Link showed up at the camp below looking, well, ill. He said he made a mistake, and then he just collapsed! He had this altered look about him, and he kept twitching as he spoke, looking all around, but I had no idea at what."
Pulling her goggles down, Purah observed Link carefully as they carried him into the office. "Set him down there, on that chaise."
The hero plopped unceremoniously onto plush pillows and crumpled research notes. He kept staring at the ceiling, and his lips moved as if in speech, but nothing coherent emerged — broken syllables, hisses, guttural groans, but nothing that could be considered words. His face was flushed, and sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. When Purah grabbed his wrist and set two fingers against his pulse, she didn't need to count the seconds to know his heart rate was well above normal.
As she was about to release his wrist, an odd color caught her eye. Blue-ish green moss clung to his sweaty palms and fingers, staining his skin a vibrant green. Flattening his palm, Purah inspected the mossy residue, zooming her goggles in and out to focus on the details. "What was the mistake, Daval? Did he give you any indication of that?"
"Yes, Doctor Purah."
Pushing her goggles back up onto her forehead again, Purah was surprised to see a sample of the same moss held out in Daval's hand, wrapped in a handkerchief. She took the sample from him, holding it up to the light, and pinching a few crumbles, rubbing it between her gloved-fingers.
"He had this with him," Daval explained. "I- I think he ingested it. His mouth was green on the inside when he talked."
"What?" Purah set the handkerchief down on the table, leaving her observations aside for a moment. She grabbed Link's face and squished his cheeks so she could ascertain the inner color. The staining was obvious enough on his teeth, tinted green just like his hands. "Why would he-?" She shook her head and released Link's face. He hardly seemed to have noticed, barely blinking in response. "Why am I even asking? The man eats rock roast. He probably thought nothing of eating strange moss in the Depths." Reckless in his culinary habits or not, he was still catatonic and wheezing in her office. If he was poisoned, she had to find an antidote — and fast.
There were plenty of books they'd managed to scrounge up from the remains of the Castle library, and even a few she'd recovered from the Ancient Tech Lab and secreted away prior to the Calamity. But as for the Depths, and the flora therein, she was struggling to find any texts at all with any reference to the poison now coursing through Link's bloodstream. He languished for a full hour, his high temperature kept at bay by Josha's tending to him with a cool rag.
Then, a breakthrough.
If the old texts weren't any good, then new reports were the next place to look. And, sure enough, she found mention of a mysterious blue-ish green substance being found at some Yiga bases. In Link's own handwriting, he reported to Captain Scorpis everything that he'd found in the base directly beneath Taobab Grassland. In addition to schematics for Zonai death machines, bananas, and letters from their beloved Master Kohga, he reported finding a clay jar of some kind of powder, crushed fine and the color of the deep rivers in Faron, with the slight scent of wet earth and a sour note like wood sorrel. The specificity of the man in his natural comparisons at times bordered on tedious to Purah, but in this instance, she thanked his past self for his bizarre note-taking.
In a mortar and pestle, she crushed a small portion of the moss Daval had given her. Even before she'd finished grinding it, the sharp, sour scent hit her nose, along with the earthiness expected of moss. She tapped the pestle, fine, teal dust falling from the rounded stone tool.
She had the what: a substance kept by the Yiga, ground fine and kept in a clay jar in their camps. Now, she just needed the why.
Several more reports fell to the floor in her search, tossed aside as she poured through them for answers, suggestions, any indication at all of what the substance was used for, why it would have such alarming effects on Link, and why, why in Hylia's name would he eat it?!
Another hour passed, and there was no dramatic change in Link's state. Flickers of lucidity passed over him, seconds where he almost seemed to come back to himself before descending into dilated panic once more. During one of these half-lucid moments, he vomited. She expected as much, given the method of poisoning, and had laid him on his side with a bucket strategically placed beneath him when he started to turn green in the face. She had no doubt that he ingested the substance, and a fair amount of it at that, based on what he expelled. She just hoped that a reduction in the amount within his body would lessen the poison's effect. As the symptoms almost appeared to be lessening as more time passed, she felt a little more confident that he wouldn't die. But death being off the table was a small comfort in the potential disaster of the Hero of Hyrule potentially remaining lifeless or comatose for goddess-knows-how-long.
She was almost tempted to taste the mysterious substance herself just to understand its effects. Part of her wanted to ask for a volunteer to test it, but given the horrified looks of the rest of the Landing upon seeing Link's twitching, wheezing body being brought inside, she doubted anyone would step up.
Another report caught her interest, this one from Captain Flaxel. A Yiga hideout in the Aldor Foothills. It looked abandoned when Flaxel's crew found it, and Flaxel strongly suspected that Link had something to do with that. She catalogued everything found within the hideout, or everything that was left. The strange green substance made an appearance here, too, spilling onto the floor from the shattered jar. It was in the food preparation room, along with other medicinal herbs and, naturally, bananas. While that wasn't definitive proof that the substance was meant to be ingested, it was definitely a step in the right direction for ascertaining its purpose. Even so, if it was kept with the medicines and food supplies, why was it making Link so horrifically sick now?
"What the fuck did you do?" Purah whispered while dabbing at Link's forehead. The third hour, and still the mysterious green, mossy poison refused to release its grip on him.
"Zel…"
Purah nearly jumped, lifting the rag from his face. His dilated pupils locked in on her, his bright blue irises trying to narrow and focus. His lips were cracked, partially sticking together when he tried to speak.
"Zel…dra…"
"Zelda? Are you trying to say Zelda?" Purah asked, brushing his damp bangs out of his face.
He inhaled sharply, his eyes watered, and the softest whine escaped his barely-parted lips. He was gone again, his body entirely limp and his focus lost.
By the fourth hour, Captain Scorpis came in with a bowl of stew for Purah. The onset of the afternoon, while warmer than the morning, still left the surface of the stew cold by the time he carried it up to her.
"How is he?" Scorpis asked, his brow furrowed as he observed the still-limp hero, only the occasional twitch and wheezing whine giving any sign that he was still fighting through the toxin. "The men are worried about him. They fear a plague."
"It's no plague," Purah assured him. She stirred the stew around, mixing the cold exterior and warm interior so it at least was uniform in tepidity. "He's poisoned himself."
"Purposefully?" Scorpis frowned, leaning a little closer to Link.
"I wouldn't do that, Captain. He's already vomited once," Purah warned. Despite the topic, she had no difficulty trying a taste of the mushroom stew — earthy, but thankfully no sour notes. "Not sure about that one. He definitely meant to ingest it, this weird moss thing from the Depths. Whether or not he knew it would do this to him is beyond my ability to guess at this point. The Yiga seem to keep quite a bit of this stuff. Link found jars of it in their bases below, and your colleague Flaxel found some at a hideout just south of Mount Drena. She reported that it was found in their food and medicine storage."
Taking Purah's advice, Scorpis withdrew and stroked his short beard. "Any medicine can be a poison if you take too much of it," he pointed out. "But he doesn't look as deathly as he did when we first carried him in. How long do you think it will take him to recover?"
Purah gave a non-committal shrug. "I barely know what I'm looking at here, let alone anywhere close to finding an antidote for it."
"It may be too late for an antidote. It may just have to run its course through him at this point." Scorpis squinted at Link, scanning him over. "What do you know regarding how he got to be like this? What happened?"
Frustrated, Purah handed her notes over to him. "Daval said he stumbled into the Depths camp, already having ingested some unknown amount of this substance. All Link said was 'I've made a mistake' before collapsing into the mess you see here now."
There weren't that many notes for Scorpis to read, and he quickly handed it back to Purah. "What about before that?"
"Before what?"
"Before he ingested it. Where was he? What was he doing?"
"How should I know what-?" Purah stopped herself, her eyes widening as an idea formed. "The Purah Pad!" She practically flew out of her chair in her haste to dig through Link's belongings, haphazardly tossed in a corner of the room by the team that brought him in.
The Pad blinked to life in her hands, her precious baby, her magnum opus, her beautiful replica that she was sure would make her ancestors not just proud but downright envious. She swiped through the screens. First, the album. He was making good progress on the compendium, and he'd saved a few photos that would have made her laugh, if not for his tendency to take self-portraits while getting charged by a lynel. The last photo was from approximately twenty-six hours ago. Rist Peninsula. A blurry photo of a streak of white on a field of blue.
Purah chewed her lower lip, thinking it over. "What is this supposed to be?"
Scorpis leaned over her shoulder. "A fish? An eel?"
"I think that's the sky." Not that Purah was entirely sure of that fact. It was more of a blur than anything. White on blue, a bit of yellow.
Scorpis hummed in thought, frowning at the photo. "A dragon?"
Wood creaked and jerked behind them. Purah whirled around, her eyes wide with horror. "Link!"
Fresh sweat had broken out over his forehead, and he shook violently. Strangled groans and whines rose from his throat. Tears streamed from his too-dark eyes, and his breath was ragged.
Purah ran to his side, holding him as steady as she could to keep him from jerking right off of the chaise and onto the floor. "Scorpis! Help!"
"What do you want me to do?!"
"I don't fucking know!"
Rather than falling, Link curled up tightly, pulling all of his limbs close and hiding his face from them. He continued to shake, and his wheezing gasps were broken only by voice-scratched screaming, muffled by his body. "Don't! Don't! Don't!"
"Don't what?! Link!" Purah tried to get him to say anything else, but he didn't, couldn't, acknowledge her.
He kept screaming for several minutes, until at last the shaking stopped and his body went slack again.
She expected at least one curious soldier or guard to knock on her door asking questions about the episode. Whatever Scorpis told the others in the Landing, it must have been enough to convince them to stay as far from her office as possible.
By the fifth hour, Purah had given up on any hope of an antidote. His moments of lucidity were more frequent, every half to a quarter hour, and lasted about as long as it took for him to drink a little water. He was critically dehydrated, and threw up more than half the water she got him to drink, but at least some of it stayed in his system.
"Oh, Link," Purah sighed, checking his temperature again with the back of her hand. She alternated between putting a blanket on him and taking it off again, his internal heat fluctuating wildly, shivering one minute and sweating the next. "What have you done to yourself this time?"
The last thing she expected was an answer.
"I'm sorry." The words were so soft, breathy and choked, that she almost didn't hear them. "Sh-shouldn't…have…"
He was gone again before she got anything more out of him.
The sun had set by the time he finally managed to sit up on his own.
"Whoa, hey! Take it easy, Link." Purah rushed over to him and gently pushed his shoulders back onto the chaise's elevated back. "Finally back, are you?"
"Nnn, back?" Link groaned, squeezing his eyes shut as if in pain. "Where did I go?"
"You tell me, hero," Purah chided, reaching for a glass of water. "Want something to drink?"
He peeked one eye open. His pupil was a normal size — a little small, even, shrunken by dehydration. He nodded mutely and, though he tried to take the cup, didn't fight Purah as she held the glass to his lips. He drank it greedily, draining the whole thing in a few seconds, leaving some of it dripping down his chin.
She'd just filled the cup again when he spoke.
"How many weeks was I out?"
Purah raised a brow, her red lips pursed. "Seven hours."
Now it was Link's turn to be confused. A little more confident in his mobility, Link again reached for the glass, and did his best to keep his hands steady as she passed it to him. He took another sip, spilling some down the front of his tunic. "It was days. A week at least."
While she wanted to correct him, she had more questions. "What's the last thing you remember, Link? Do you recall being in the Depths at all?"
He didn't reply right away, instead studying his wobbly reflection in the water. After another drink, he spoke. "No."
"Hm." Purah reached over to the small table by the chaise and took hold of the Pad. "What about Rist Peninsula?"
Again, no immediate verbal answer. But, he stiffened, and a shadow of heart-wrenching grief passed over his expression. His grip on the glass tightened, the water rippling with the force of his trembling arms.
"Something happened there," Purah guessed, swiping through the photo album. "Something pretty bad, by the look of you. And twelve or so hours later, you wander into the Depths research base with moss on your hands and your mouth stained green. All you said was 'I've made a mistake', then you went catatonic on Daval. So," she paused, then turned the screen around to him, "what was the mistake?"
His eyes fell to the photo, and his previously-red face paled as white as her chalk. His hands still shook, his trembling fingertips ghosting over the blurry photo. "I…I shouldn't have done it. But I couldn't…I didn't want to feel anything anymore." He swallowed thickly, his bright blue eyes obscured by rising tears. "She's gone."