Chapter Text
Sky lets out a muffled cry when his head hits the ground.
His sword and his shield drive hard into his back. By reflex, he tries to get up and the world starts spinning around him. His vision fills with flashing lights and coloured dots that pulse in rhythm with the headache stabbing his skull. A smell of smoke and ozone floats in the air, heavy and metallic.
For a time, Sky – who doesn’t know he’s called Sky yet but don’t worry he will learn it soon enough – can’t do anything except lying still and breathing slowly to repress the nausea twisting his stomach. His limbs twitch in tension, stiff and useless. The touch of his sailcloth and his travel clothes feels like a thousand of pins on his skin. For a few heartbeats, Sky wonders if he may be actually dying.
Then the moment passes and Sky manages to push on the cobblestones and roll on his side. He blinks to clear the haze eating the edges of his vision, still feeling as if Hylia’s giant statue had crashed on his head.
Hold on… cobblestones?
He hurries to look up, just in time to see the last tendrils of the vortex which swallowed him near Lake Floria dissipate into the air.
Oh. Okay. He guesses he’s not in Farone anymore.
He looks around carefully. He is in the middle of a narrow street surrounded by tall brick buildings which remind him a little of the ones in the Sealed Grounds, the only place where he saw edifices of of this size. The cobblestones paving the ground were probably white long ago, but overtime they turned greyish under a layer of filth. Overall, it’s not very clean, trash lies around here and there and the walls are stained with soot.
There is no one in sigh but, unlike in the Sealed Grounds, the area doesn’t seem abandoned. Sky spots some signs of life: a laundry hanging between two cornices, a flowerpot at a window, a curtain moving without the wind’s help.
Creepy.
Anyway, appears his arrival doesn’t trouble much the locals. Maybe they are used to see knights being swallowed then spitted by portals of darkness? Sky runs a hand on the back of his head. He feels like he is being watched.
“Hello?” He tries just in case.
No answer.
Alright. People are probably busy?
Sky gets up with effort. The strangeness of the situation starts to soak in. He is in a city. Not a village. Not a freshly founded settlement on the Surface. A city, a real one, which has visibly been here for a long time. However, the Surface is supposed to be uninhabited, at least by human beings, isn’t it? That’s why Zelly and their people decided to colonise it in the first place.
Prudently, Sky walks between the buildings, wondering if he activated a time shift stone inadvertently. There are a lot of them on the Surface, so it’s easy to step in another time by accident – well, usually more in the Desert, not by Floria Lake, but it’s not impossible. He can’t tell either what time it is, the tall walls mask almost entirely the sky and the little part he is able to see is full of heavy, shifting clouds.
Very soon, Sky realises he is lost. It’s not a particularly concerning thought, he has often been lost during his journey and it has never been a problem. Right, everything is strange and he would like to find a way to go back to his time – supposing he really time-travelled – but hey, it’s a new fascinating place to explore and Sky loves exploration. He wouldn’t spend so much time on the Surface, otherwise.
Even so, he jumps and puts a hand on Fi, still strapped to his back, when a sudden noise resounds on his left. The lid of a bin loudly falls on the ground and reveals…
“Mip?”
Something that really looks like a remlit?
The critter leaps to Sky’s legs to rub his back with soft meows. Sky freezes, unsure of how he should react, then lets go of Fi and crouches to pat the animal’s head. The lookalike remlit starts vibrating.
Ooooooh, so cute! Sky melts.
Touched, he picks up the critter and holds it at eye level. He’s not that much into remlits, but this little guy is adorable. Its ears are pointier and its tail is thinner than those of the Skyloftian remlit. Sky has never seen a fur like this one, white with large black and fawn spots.
The animal vibrates even more in his arms and rubs his head against Sky’s who coos, eyes watering. His nose tickles at the touch of the fake remlit’s whiskers.
“I’m glad to meet a friend here.” He says. “Would you by any chance know where we are and what we’re supposed to do?”
The only answer he gets is a friendly headbutt.
“I bet you don’t happen to be either a member of the local dominant species entitled to lead me to your leader, right?”
“Mip?” The animal questions.
“Well, so bad.” Sky sighs, then get shaken by a sudden but violent sneezing fit. He puts the creature on the cobblestones and fishes his handkerchief into his pocket. “Ah, sorry. I guess I caught a cold.”
The animal watches him with an amused look as he blows his nose, then bolts and disappears at the corner of the street, no without casting him an insistent glance. The young knight shrugs. Why not, after all?
He barely made three steps when a voice rises from behind him.
“Hello sir, have you got a light?”
Sky turns around and sees a man walking in his direction with a thin, innocent smile, the hands in his pockets. Something in his stance sends alarms in Sky’s mind. He recognises a predator when he has one in front of him. Nervously, he steps back to where the non-remlit disappeared.
The man notices his behaviour and his smile widens. Oh, Sky thinks, it’s that sort of predator. The kind who will play with his prey, let it think it can go smoothly, that it’s just a normal conversation between two gentlemen.
Sky knows this well, because he has often been the prey. Even today, after all his adventures, people keep finding him an ingenuous air. There is something in him that pushes them to ignore the sword, the sailcloth and the lightning scars to only see a polite young man who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Well, people shouldn’t rely on appearances.
“Oh, of course my dear.” Sky purrs with his most radiant smile. “Just let me find it, here it is…”
His hand rummages through his adventurer pouch and grabs the handle of his gust bellows.
He hadn’t finished his gesture that an arm closes around his neck from behind and squeezes. A hand twists his elbow hard and forces him to let go of the tool as Fi chimes in alert. In his mind, he crosses the mention “predator” out and replaces it by “pack” – he has been careless. A voice whispers in his ear and Sky is held so tight he feels it rumble against his back.
“Nice sword, sir! How about letting us take a look at it?”
Sky chokes. His opponent’s arm is crushing his trachea, but the most upsetting is maybe the sensation of the breath brushing against his cheek. It makes his skin crawl. Anger lights into his chest. On instinct, he moves his leg backward, grabs the arm squeezing his neck and pivots.
Destabilised, the man is shoved to the ground. Sky kicks him in the face before he could get up. He has no time to feel glad, the first guy leaps at him with a knife. Sky dodges by a hair, draws Fi and takes as much distance as the narrow street allows him.
The man with the knife whistles. When Sky turns around, there are three more rogues behind him, armed with metal bars and daggers and blocking the way.
Well, well, well, at least I found people, he thinks as he does his best to calm down the erratic pounding of his heart. The brief fight left him breathless and with the throat on fire. When he tries to take a full breath, a coughing fit shakes him from head to toes. The men get closer, made more confident by their prey’s apparent weakness, and Sky tightens his grip on his sword and steps back against the wall on shaky legs. Alright, he tells himself, it’s going to be rough.
“Hey, bitches! What about laying into someone of your calibre?”
Everybody, even Sky, turns in direction of the voice coming from the corner of the street.
In front of them a young, pink haired man stands in a perfect fighting stance. He is also very, very naked except for the towel around his waist and the blue hat on his head. The hands holding his sword wears thin, clearer marks where there must be rings usually.
The pack start laughing, probably because the newcomer doesn’t look very menacing despite his air of defiance. Hylia above, he’s not even this tall, less than Sky actually. However, the aggressive energy radiating from his person makes him more imposing than he really is.
Riled up by the rogues’ reaction, the pink haired teen angrily stamps his heel on the ground – then winces in pain since he’s still barefooted on cobblestones. “Hey you, the knight!” He yells at Sky. “Are you up for helping me to smash these assholes’ faces?”
Sky only nods, his throat too sore to speak.
The chief, or so it seems, snickers louder. “Hey boys, seems the circus lost his masco-…”
With a war cry, the young man charges at him, sword raised.
It’s not the best choice of weapon to fight in such a narrow space, but Pink Hair moves like a seasoned swordsman despite his young age. In spite of the urgency of the situation, Sky can’ help but feel impressed by his skills. Still, he re-focuses on the task at hand and joins the fight.
Their opponents – the robbers? Is that the word? – put up a strong resistance for several long minutes. They are fast, sly and, in truth, at home: more than once, Sky gets a lid of trash can in the face because he didn’t expect his foe to let go of the metal bar for a… less conventional style.
But, in the end, Sky and his new friend have more reach, are more agile and more used to long fights. Soon enough, they take the upper hand and, when a first robber drops his weapon to run into the shadows, the chief gives up, whistles again and gets away too. Ten seconds later, Sky and his rescuer are alone in the middle of the deserted street, out of breath but unharmed.
“Wankers.” Pink Hair comments.
Sky scoffs, ears blushing. He is about to thanks his companion when something both familiar and unexpected happens.
Fi speaks.
Sky freezes, heart pounding, like stricken by lightning. It’s been months that Fi hadn’t spoken to him, not since the end of his journey. Sometimes, Sky has felt like the sword was shining or humming, but nothing like Fi’s clear voice when she described the world around him – nothing like the voice he’s hearing right now…
“Hey! Steady, Knight!”
The pink-haired man’s hands close on Sky’s shoulders like to support him. Sky blinks and realises he is standing in the middle of the street, staring into space. He coughs and takes a long breath that helps him to get a grip on himself.
“You alright?” The other asks with a worried look.
“I… yes, I’m fine. My… um, my sword would like to talk to you.”
This answer brings him an arched eyebrow and a side look, but Pink-Haired reaches for the sword with curiosity. His expression morphs into a deep astonishment when Sky drops Fi’s handle into his open palm.
“This sword, it’s… How did you… She spoke! Holy shit, I heard his voice into my head!”
“What did she say?” Sky urges him.
The other hurries to give him Fi back and clenches his fists as taking long, measured breaths in. He makes a few nervous steps, mumbling to himself, then turns again to face Sky, looking a little calmer.
“She said ‘Welcome, Hero of Legend, Forgotten Oracles and Wandering Dreams’, since you want to know.” He answers blankly. His face is pale and stern. “It’s the beginning of a new quest, isn’t it? Oh, yes, it is. No shit. Well, look at that, Knight.”
He raises his sword hilt first and Sky sucks a wheezing breath. “This is my sword!” He reaches for it but stops mid-air. “Wait, my bad, this is the same sword but… older? How?…”
Now Sky understands his interlocutor’s surprise. Here, in front of his eyes, held by foreign hands, is Fi. But an older Fi, changed by the passing of the centuries. On the outside, she looks almost the same than the day he met her, but her magic is different now. Smoother. Wiser.
Pink-Haired – Legend? – continues: “If you own that sword too, then I suppose we’re in the same boat. And seriously dude, I hope you have a good explanation, because I don’t get any of what’s happening here. What’s this place and why are you walking around with the Master sword on your back? Judging by your clothes, you’re not from around here either, I guess?”
Sky frowns and gestures at the man’s weird outfit. “I wouldn’t like to sound unkind, but…”
“Spa day.” Legend pouts and pulls the towel higher. “I was having a self-care day when an odd portal opened and swallowed me. Then I ended up here, wherever it can be.”
“A spa day with your sword?” Sky notes, quite sceptical.
“I love this sword.”
“And your hat?”
“Never heard about swimming caps?”
Sky is about to answer he has weird bathing customs when a meowing sounds at their feet. He looks down and spots the creature from earlier rubbing against his shin.
“Oooooh, look at who came back?” He coos as he lifts the animal in his arms and kisses his snout.
Strangely, his eyes start watering again and he feels as if he had something stuck in his nose, but he doesn’t care, too happy to have someone to cuddle. Legend watches the flood of emotion with a disgusted sneer. “That’s your cat? You’re lucky he came to warn me. These guys would have done you no favours.”
“I guess so. Thank you, by the way. You helped me a lot.”
A coughing fit cuts him off and he touches his throat with a wince. They really held him tight, he will probably keep marks. Legend pushes his hand away and takes the ‘cat’ from his arms.
“Okay dude, let’s find a place to cool down a little and have a nice drink for your throat. And no more kitty-cat for you, you’re obviously allergic. Will you be alright?”
“I’ll survive.” Sky ensures him as he swallows with difficulty.
“Good for you. Hey, what about getting out of this deathtrap? Better not linger in the area.”
Sky hesitates, his first contact with the local population didn’t win his trust. But, in his back, Fi just whispers: Follow him, Hero of the Skies.
So Sky does what he is being told.