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Kass took his first swig of fireproof elixir and grimaced. The good folk of Foothill Stable had warned him. Still, he struggled to swallow the prune-colored dose of stewed lizard parts and monster guts. He forced it down because it was the key, the watchword, the seating token to the grand performance — he smiled at his conceit — of a Rito hiking the sole road through this volcanic desert to Goron City. A stone route-marker had just confirmed what his map showed: the climate was about to leap from merely parching fallen feathers to literally roasting him alive. He was a day out from the lakes. The Southern Mine sat a day ahead, as long as dense, gritty air vented unpredictably from fissures and kept him afoot. Kass squinted up at the blazing sun. No, he couldn’t afford to spend any water on rinsing the elixir’s taste out of his beak. Pity.
He resumed walking up the canyon and refastened the elixir flask to his belt. It felt strange and heavy at his hip, where he usually kept a roll of paper sheets and graphite sticks, instantly ready to capture a tune or preserve a lyric. For now, his trained bard’s memory would have to suffice. Kass had entrusted both his precious musical notations and his irreplaceable bandoneon to the stablemaster at Foothill.
Kass felt plucked naked without his instrument.
Plucked… was progress. The first day, he’d felt like he’d amputated a wing or a leg. He had almost turned back.
Almost.
Kass hiked on. He found himself humming in the Rito way, the notes quietly vibrating through his chest and throat feathers with his beak closed. He’d traded his swift but flammable spear and bow for metal gear at Foothill Stable. The reconditioned rusty halberd he’d acquired made a fair walking stick. His curiosity opened all his senses to the novel terrain: overlapping crusts of black, pitted rock, carved into deep gorges by bubbling streams of incandescent, molten rock. The very sky seemed faded by the sun’s ferocity.
Yet his thoughts flitted not ahead to Goron City, but behind, to his beloved Rito Village hometown, with its crisp, pine-forest air, and his family in their wind-framed timber aerie. Thank the Goddess that Amali … was Amali. All his craft couldn’t muster higher praise. His generous, patient, prudent wife had married his impractical calling and unlikely mission along with him. He prayed that she and their girls were safe and happy, and that he could return to them before a day came when Amali would have to introduce him to their daughters, saying “This is your papa,” and the girls would curtsy and dip their beaks to a big, blue stranger, replying, “Pleased to meet you, sir,” and his heart would bleed out on the spot...
A familiar squelching sound jolted Kass out of the tale spinning itself behind his eyes.
“Oh, ho! Here as well?” He readied his halberd. “I wonder—” Two chu-chus popped out of the ground ahead and wobbled down the slope toward him. As he’d guessed, the little monsters glowed with flame. But while Kass had never encountered this fiery variety before, it didn’t take a warrior to handle the gooey fiends that were a comedy favorite in any bard’s repertoire. Carefully minding his distance in case they jumped, Kass took out the nearer chu-chu with a satisfying pop. He turned to target the other.
That was when the kees appeared.
“You, too?” Kass counted only three, not the cloud of vicious flying mammals he had sometimes encountered. But these kees, like the chu-chus, were alight. “I would expect no less — though, indeed, I wouldn’t mind a tad less, Your Grace, if You are listening.” He stabbed down at the remaining chu-chu, scooped up one of the jellies it left behind, and threw it at a kees. That kees plummeted out of the air and dashed itself to pieces on a rock while Kass speared a second on his halberd’s point. He looked around and up for the third.
On the ridge high above, he spotted an armored, red lizalfos.
The monster produced a bow and notched an arrow. Before Kass could blink, a boomerang-bearing lizalfos began racing down the sheer cliff-face, following a twisty, impossible path that nevertheless brought it closer to Kass with every step. Two more with forked spears were right on its tail.
Kass felt his feathers instantly, instinctively slick down against his body, as if he could narrow himself enough to be mistaken for a stick rather than a steak — this was no time for puns, but he stored up the wordplay, nevertheless. He sidestepped the first enemy arrow. In continuous motion, he dropped his halberd, readied his Foothill Stable bow, and pierced the right eye of the lizalfos firing on him. An indifferent archer by Rito standards, Kass had still always been more than a match for lizalfos.
Lizalfos elsewhere.
This red monster didn’t drop. Its nest-mates had almost reached the canyon floor. And the remaining kees swooped at Kass’s crest feathers, all standing straight and rigid, broadcasting the rising fear that Kass had even less time for now than witticisms.
He grabbed his dropped halberd and ran. A rockslide ahead looked promising. Not too steep to scramble up quickly. Not too low to serve. From the top of the pile, he should be able to take out all the lizalfos even with this slow Hylian bow. More, he could leap into the air. If the Goddess would be so kind as to forestall any ill-timed blasts of that gritty, suffocating vapor from the ground fissures, he should be able to escape aloft on his own two wings.
The stone debris of the rockfall shifted under Kass’s feet with each leaping bound, but he made it to the top. He pivoted, readied his bow, and—
The pile under him heaved.
As the talus lumbered to its feet, the deceptive, protective layer of rocky scree fell away.
Kass felt his feet burn. Elixir tempered climate, not monsters. In pain, he tumbled from the monster’s peak instead of jumping for the sky. He landed, breathless and trembling, flat on his back in the shed gravel. He had heard of this kind of talus. He had never realized how such a titan of living lava would loom, how it would scorch the air he needed to breathe, much less fly. Kass scooted away on his elbows and aching rear toes. Somehow, he regained his feet. He dodged the molten pillars of the talus’s legs and dashed back down the path, only to face the lizalfos, now ranged in a loose ring, apparently awaiting his cooked corpse. The one with a bow drew an arrow.
A piercing shriek erupted from Kass’s throat. The sound would warn other Rito away from this deathtrap — if there were any Rito in this corner of the continent to hear.
Kass kept moving, dodging, now up the slope of the gorge. Maybe he could outrun the heavy monster uphill, even with burned feet. Maybe something ahead could launch him into the air. Maybe he could hold his breath long enough to rise on one of the vile ashy updrafts, and have doubly the luck for it to not foul his wings.
If he got out of this, there would be time enough then to regret this expedition. If he didn’t, he wanted his last thoughts to be of all that had gone right in his life — his family, his teacher, and the strange young man whom Kass had come to believe was indeed the promised hero. Hylia’s chosen. Hyrule’s hope.
The hero had never yet introduced himself to Kass. Kass’s teacher, the last court poet of Hyrule’s last king, had, on occasion, referred to the hero as Sir Link.
Kass trusted that, if he were to die here, the Goddess had another arrow in Her infinite quiver to deliver the hero the remaining information he needed from the last of the ancient songs. Perhaps Her Grace would lead the hero to Kass’s sheets of music at Foothill Stable and his journal in his hermitage above Washa’s Bluff.
Perhaps another bard could someday complete Kass’s teacher’s unfinished song…
A clap of dry thunder boomed through the canyon. Agonized reptilian squeals followed and were silenced.
Kass looked back over his shoulder. His beak dropped open. He slowed, then stopped, and turned.
The talus had fallen over. Piles of weapons and body parts marked where the lizalfos had stood. As if summoned by Kass’s thoughts, the diminutive, teal-clad figure of the hero was falling from — no, rising into! — the sky, like Champion Revali himself, with his glider for wings. The hero loosed three ice arrows simultaneously into the talus, landed on its cooled surface, and slung a sledgehammer around and around in a spinning attack against its exposed ore deposit. As the talus visibly warmed again, steaming and stretching, the hero jumped off and loosed a hail of bomb arrows into that vulnerable spot, hitting more times than Kass could follow before the hero’s feet even touched the ground.
The talus exploded.
Kass blinked. He breathed. The skill. The strength. The speed. Surely a talus must be to the hero even less than a chu-chu was to Kass. The hero stood over the remains of the defeated monster and returned an unneeded arrow to his quiver. In the sunlight, his tunic shone the bright blue once favored by the Hyrulean royal house, surely his own garment from the champions’ set personally embroidered by the princess herself and — some believed — imbued with her sacred power through every stitch. Kass could not help envisioning this paragon surrounded by the glow of his destiny, the aura of the sword that sealed the darkness, the murmur of the Goddess’s own voice. A new song began to twine itself around the edges of Kass’s craft, the tune of a divinely-forged weapon dancing in the hands of that divinely-molded spirit.
Then the hero’s bow slipped from nerveless fingers. An exhausted young man swayed and fell to one knee with a muffled grunt.
Kass saw Link slump forward, clutching one side of his ribcage over a common fishing-village shirt coincidentally similar in hue to the legendary tunic, panting for breath. He looked weakened, drained, and grimy. Was his face always that flushed? And didn’t Hylians usually sweat more with such exertion?
Kass ran to Link’s side as fast as he had run away from the monsters moments before. He’d tend his feet later. Wrapping one wing around Link’s shoulders, Kass helped him lean back and drink as much from Kass’s waterbag as he would accept. Gently brushing the young man’s reddened skin, Kass found it disturbingly hot for a Hylian. He put away the water and uncorked his elixir flask. “You’ll want a sip of this, too.”
Link made a face at the vile smell but let Kass bring it to his lips for one swallow. And then, at Kass’s insistence, another. Link’s color looked more usual almost immediately.
But it was still not quite what Kass was used to from when Link would hike up to the next likely stable, or nearest ancient shrine, on Link’s apparent path to a Divine Beast, where Kass would have flown to support the Goddess's serendipity with foresight and triangulation, as Amali had recommended back when this all began. What would Amali recommend now? Kass stood and angled his shadow over Link.
“Ah, there we go!” The battle had gouged a shallow alcove out of the cliff-face. “We deserve a good rest in the shade, wouldn’t you say? Pardon me if this is a bit rough, but it’s a matter of making do.” Kass scooped up Link as he would one of his daughters, though Link’s Hylian bones made him nearly outweigh all five of them put together. Kass carried Link over, set him in the depression, and cleared away jagged rockshards to better settle him on the smooth-packed earth. “Allow me?” Kass gestured his intentions as he went, unbuckling and setting aside Link’s weapons, pack, and boots in turn. He left the Sheikah Slate — the princess’s slate — untouched. Kass knew it wasn’t exactly a holy relic, but…
Link’s eyes fluttered shut.
Flattered by Link’s trust, Kass was horrified by his condition. They had no medicine or magic here. Kass wondered suddenly what Link had been doing, and where, when he diverted to Kass’s need. This was the first time since the day Kass had recognized Link’s Sheikah Slate that providence alone had pulled them together, with no backstage efforts by Kass, for all that Kass had always pretended otherwise to Link… and perhaps to himself. The Goddess had set him one job, not every job. “The sun moves, even in this region. Shall we use your very impressive glider to keep it out of our refuge?”
Link nodded slowly. So slowly. But certainly.
“Excellent! And many thanks.” Kass took heart, and also took permission to dig into Link’s possessions. The paraglider was so cleverly folded and rolled that Kass had at first missed it alongside Link’s sword-sheath. After spreading its wings and securing it in a foundation of loose rocks as a screen for where Link lay, Kass opened Link’s pack. He blinked. And blinked again. Height and width and depth swelled inside the modest leather pouch. “Oh, ho! How capacious is this kit?”
His eyes still closed, Link’s lips twitched up. So did one shoulder — the one on the other side from what Kass suspected were bruised ribs.
“A juicy mystery, indeed! I get the feeling that the truth is beyond my wildest imagination.” Kass pulled out foodstuffs, flint, and firewood — a full bundle of firewood! and it was not the only one! Then his wing fell on a spare shirt, which he thought to swap for Link’s begrimed one… until he realized that this garment was in truth the celebrated tunic for which he’d previously mistaken Link’s current attire. Kass took a deep breath and let go. Instead, he found an old, undyed shirt, thinned and softened by use. He unsealed a bottle of Hateno milk, smelled it, found it fresh — though not appealing to Rito tastes — and wrapped Link’s hands around it. However did Link heft all this, never mind how it all fit? “I happen to know a song about the magic of diminishing size. Would you like to hear the ancient verse passed down in Central Hyrule?”
Link’s eyes opened. His eyebrows rose and he grinned crookedly.
“Large or small, we are all one kin…” Kass sang of the fabled Picori.
With Kass’s help, Link drank the milk. His skin cooled further and he looked like himself.
Kass started a fire outside their tiny shelter. The Goddess knew they didn’t need more heat, but it would serve to roast a meal and ward off animals. Inspired, Kass found a metal shield in Link’s pouch that could serve as a makeshift pot. Kass accompanied his cooking with a canticle of the mythical Wind Tribe and then a children’s ditty of rumored dragons. He sang on from tale to tale of anything that had nothing at all to do with the Calamity, or the hero, or the princess of one-hundred years ago. Those would be Link’s to rediscover on his own, Kass’s teacher had cautioned, and it was a boundary Kass had always carefully observed. More, though, Kass had just begun to see, those were only parts of all Link was.
The spirit of the hero had nested inside this young man’s soul. It had not replaced it. Surely each chose and nurtured the other.
Kass kept an eye on Link as he sat up against the cliffside and changed his shirt. Link’s grimace when his movements pulled on his ribs was almost, but not quite, too small to see.
“Ah, we are ready!” Using a warm doublet from Link’s pack as first a potholder and then a tablecloth, Kass presented the shield like a platter. “Hearty salmon meunières. It’s Genli’s favorite — my middle daughter — and you happened to have all the ingredients. How could I resist?”
They dug into the meal. Kass felt his scorched feet ease as the rich food and rest did him good; he hoped it was doing the same for Link many times over. Link ate slowly, but his pace began to seem deliberate rather than exhausted, the hero’s coiled, balanced fitness replacing the man’s earlier utter weariness. Kass ate even more slowly, but only because he chattered between bites.
“No, I’ve never been to Eldin before, either,” he answered Link’s question. “I rather suspect that the last Rito to venture here warned off generations of chicks with ‘behave, or Death Mountain will get you’ stories, all of which seem now to be quite without the artistic embellishment I had assumed. This is the most forbidding region I’ve visited! Yet I truly feel such awe…”
“Oh, why am I here?” Kass picked up on Link’s expression a bit later. “My own vanity, I must admit.” Kass considered his words. When Link had turned toward the Gorons’ volcanic homeland and Divine Beast Vah Rudania, Kass had realized that he knew not one song passed down in Eldin. His teacher had researched the region and concluded that the ancient monks had seeded no clues in song with the Gorons, whose musical tradition had been instrumental, primarily percussion. But that was long ago. Now, the towers had risen. The hero walked. The hour was here. What if there were a shrine on the slopes of Death Mountain that the hero needed in order to restore himself fully, to free the princess and defeat the Calamity, and he never found it because Kass had quailed? Kass said, “I’m on my way to Goron City in search of ancient songs of this region. I would be the first bard to bring the melodies of the Gorons to greater Hyrule…”
“Yes, I suppose I have now been to all corners of this continent,” Kass granted after a while. “But, as a well-worn traveler yourself, you know the world does not end at our shores. Indeed,” Kass laughed at himself, “one reason that I thought I might dare this scorching region is that I have always been more comfortable in hot weather than most Hyrulean Rito. My parents, you see, journeyed here from a Rito community far to the south, across the great sea, and told me tales of the lush, warm land of their birth. More like Faron than Eldin, to be sure! They brought my bandoneon with them from there. I have always wondered about their native skies…”
“Ah, Genli!” Kass hummed with contentment when Link gave him an opening to talk about his family. “She is the most stubborn of our girls. She also listens the most carefully, and helps prepare food as much as Amali dares let her; she’s still too young to tend fires, we feel. Notts, our eldest, has a staggeringly beautiful voice; I hope I don’t pressure her to follow in my wingflaps if that turns out not to be her calling. Kotts, on the other wing, has the biggest imagination you will ever encounter; I am but a dull blade and sun-bleached dye by comparison. And Cree is the only one to have inherited the blue plumage of my side of the family; with it, perhaps, came her sensitivity. She feels so deeply! I worry for her in this vale of tears. But I think our youngest, Kheel, will be a bold traveler when she grows up, perhaps an adventurer like you...”
“Pardon me!” Kass realized that Link had long since finished his meal — and also many pieces of fruit as dessert. “I may have gotten carried away. You’ve been generous to let me blather so.”
Link waved off Kass’s apology with a half-smile. Sitting cross-legged now, he scooped up handfuls of the nearby debris that had previously filled this niche in the canyon wall and began picking out the larger and sharper gravel pieces before filtering the sand though his fingers, evidently preparing to scour the shield they’d used as a plate.
Assuming Kass ever finished eating.
To stop flapping his beak once he got started, Kass had found, it was really best that someone else take over as raconteur. Then he would settle back and listen with all his heart. He tasted the words of several questions he yearned to ask the hero, but they all fell foul of his teacher’s injunction. Link must recover on his own that he had been the princess’s appointed knight, the wielder of the sword of evil’s bane, the champion who fell and rose. Instead, with his thoughts full of Amali and their daughters, Kass found himself wondering what this lost chick — this ordinary-extraordinary, old-young man, who seemed so alone at this end of history — most needed to talk about, himself.
“You have listened so kindly to my homesick prattling,” Kass dared, “and of course this is presumptuous of me, but … may I do the same for you? Would you like to share your home, your family?”
Link brushed off his hands and pulled them back into his lap. He looked down at his upturned palms.
Kass opened his beak to beg Link’s pardon and change the subject.
“I can’t match your memories,” Link said suddenly. “May I share a dream, instead?”
Kass nodded. His eyes and ears flared wide.
“In the dream, I have a sister. A younger sister. With hair lighter than mine. She … I dream that she likes to climb up on the roof of our house and glide down holding a cucco, looking far across the valley, watching everything happening all around.” He picked up the empty milk bottle. “Sometimes I dream we live in Hateno Village, but it’s not— not the same Hateno Village.”
Listening as hard as he could, Kass filled his beak with the last of the salmon meunières.
“I dream that our father is a tall man, much taller than me and our mother. He came back from … somewhere … when she died. She used to joke that her side of the family had Picori blood, so we mustn't mind if—” Link put the empty milk bottle away in his pouch. He pulled out an apple, shined it on his sleeve, and handed it to Kass. “And I dream that I have a horse and a dog, that it’s my chore to muck out the byre, and that I would never, ever wake up on time if not for them depending on me.”
Kass ate the apple.
Link scrubbed the back of the shield with the sand he’d sifted.
“It’s a beautiful dream, my friend,” Kass said, when he was sure his voice would hold steady. “Thank you ever so much for sharing it with me.”
Link got up, retrieved and re-folded his glider, and stood by their fire. The canyon was entirely in shadow. Sunset couldn’t be too far off. Link used his Sheikah Slate to peer up one direction and down the other. Returning the device to his belt, he said, “I’m also headed to Goron City. Want to travel together?” He shrugged, “I’m useful with most monsters.”
“As you wish.” There was little Kass would like better. He reminded himself to be careful. Casual. Treat the hope of Hyrule like any other chance-met traveler. As, of course, Link also was and always had been. Kass saw his own path more brightly illuminated. “Yet I must insist that we remain by this fire overnight before setting out, and that you allow me to take charge of our fireproof elixir situation. You carry more ingredients than a general store, but not a single elixir!”
“I’m more of an eater than a cook.” Link returned to sit by Kass. “Can we fill empty milk bottles with elixir?”
“We can and will!” Kass reached for Link’s pouch. “Yet to forestall inflicting my musings on you again while we stew up the essential concoction, I must ask that you select our next topic of conversation. Equestrianism? Caniculture? Gastronomy?”
Link cocked his head. “The land your parents left. Do you know any of its stories?”
“Oh, yes!” Kass chuckled as he set out elixir ingredients. “The question is only: which?” This wasn’t the time for his parents’ own tale. What was needed was a boost, a solace, a spur for Link. Something with a happy ending, to be sure. And boon companions. Yet also an acknowledgment of the price that was always to be paid, as Kass’s Cree had hatched knowing. “Ah, I have just the thing! It begins in tragedy and ends in unshakeable friendships in a kingdom reborn. Once upon a time, a pirate queen…”
Someday, Kass thought, he would compose a song about what Link had done for him here today, as a miniature and symbol of what he trusted the hero would soon do for them all. Someday, he would complete his teacher’s unfinished ballad, including the verses about Daruk, the Goron Champion, with due tribute to this breathtaking region.
First, though, Kass would approach the mysterious Sheikah scientists in their remote laboratories. Surely one could contrive a way to apply fireproof elixir to his bandoneon.
— end —