the depths

by bahbahhh

Summary:

What really happened five years ago was exactly what Mineru had warned Zelda about. Forbidden things cannot be undone so easily.

So her sacrifice remains.
But so does he.

(Zelda never returns after the battle with the Demon King. Link is determined to bring her back, no matter what it takes or where it takes him. So when the Light Dragon starts to dive into the Depths, which have remained dark and uncharted since the Gloom faded away, he prepares to descend as well.)

Notes:

I’ll tell you where the real road lies:
Between your ears, behind your eyes.
That is the path to Paradise,
And, likewise, the road to ruin.
-Hadestown

Chapter 1

For a while now, he’s seen the way it was supposed to go every time he closes his eyes.

The Demon Dragon is gone. Smoke curls around the tail end of the explosion, marking the spot where a war thousands of centuries in the making ended.

Link braces himself against a horn of the Light Dragon, Master Sword in hand, silver still burning white as the wind wipes tears of relief from his eyes. 

We did it, he thinks and tilts his head back, releasing something between a sigh and a sob. I think we actually did it. 

He thinks he’s dying when he starts to float. He’s bloodied and bruised and broken in several places from the battle against the Demon King, so it makes sense. The taste of metal in his mouth and the sinking feeling at the base of his skull are familiar enough…only, everything is bright…too bright. And the Light Dragon is still with him, suspended in some peaceful stasis in the air a hundred meters below him.

From what he remembers about dying, you do so in darkness and completely alone. 

The cool breath of afterlight is on his neck, and he knows it’s them without looking. Another dead king of Hyrule, a Zonai this time, and his fallen queen. He still wears the king’s magic arm, fused where his own was lost—or taken. He was never entirely sure what happened to it.

No matter, it’s gone, and Rauru has saved him more times than he can count. 

The tattooed parts of his skin begin to glow, signaling the dead are summoning magic into the clawed fingers of Rauru’s hand. They point the arm at the Light Dragon and begin showering her in light. He can feel the energy passing through him, how it binds to every scale, every horn, every fang. Everything burns, but he grits his teeth against the pain, willing himself to endure it because the Light Dragon is shrinking. It grows smaller and smoother until it isn’t a dragon anymore. 

It’s her. 

Zelda’s eyes remain closed as she turns, slowly, gently, onto her back in the air, so she’s poised and ready to fall away from him. Her arms are outstretched the same way they were the day he lost her. 

He’s been given a second chance to get it right.

He stretches out his hand, fingers wide and desperate to make it to her this time, and when he does, he grabs her wrist and pulls her into him. He’s holding her so tight he’s afraid he might hurt her, but doesn’t dare lessen his grip because she’s right there. In his arms, falling back to the earth. 

They are falling back to Hyrule together, and it feels so real. Like how it should have been. 

But as they crash into the water, his arms are suddenly empty and cold. He plunges deeper and deeper into the dark, holding onto the devastatingly heavy anchor of nothing. This is usually when he wakes up. Drenched in sweat, breathless. Alone. 

So, what really happened that day? 

It starts the same. The Dragon Demon evaporated into nothing and Rauru and Sonia appeared, but instead of turning the Light Dragon back into Zelda, they healed Link and hurled him back down to Hyrule like a shooting star fragment.

Rauru’s magic arm was gone when he emerged from the water. What was left of his own tapered off above the elbow, skin stained black where Zonai sorcery staunched the Gloom that once threatened his life. 

Zelda was nowhere to be found. The Light Dragon continued along her path above his head with a groan, divine and detached from the world she gave all of herself to save.

What really happened five years ago was exactly what Mineru had warned Zelda about. Forbidden things cannot be undone so easily.

So her sacrifice remains.

But so does he.

—

The beds at the Shuteye Inn aren’t the most comfortable, but they are cheap and usually available no matter what time you roll into Kakariko. The innkeeper, Ollie, has a pretty severe case of narcolepsy and would’ve probably lost the job a long time ago if Kakariko wasn’t geographically secluded from the rest of Hyrule. That and there are few who will risk cheating a business nestled within a village of shadow warriors.

The red rupee Link placed on the books when he claimed a bed well after midnight is still there as he moves past a snoozing Ollie to the door. Paya has told Link his money is no good in Kakariko, so whether or not Ollie ignored it or just never woke up is up for debate, but Link refuses to let a debt pile up no matter how generous the hand. 

They always end up reaching for him eventually.

Kakariko is bustling in the cool morning air. Koko is already setting out her flower wreaths. A few children play tag by the frog statues near the inlet of the goddess statue. Cuckoos wander mindlessly near the general store. He pulls his hood down over his face and walks with purpose across the main road. The Master Sword strapped to his back is a bit of a giveaway, but it’s never been a weapon he could wear on his hip. 

Link pauses at the base of the stairs to Town Hall and looks up. Sunlight peers at him through the Ring Ruins looming over the valley. The scaffolds came down last summer. The research team is focused on the sky islands now, mainly the caves surrounding the refinery on the Great Island. Kakariko still gets the occasional visitor hoping to see the floating slabs of rock that once held secrets from the ancient age, but the spectacle has largely worn off. To most, the Ring Ruins and the sky islands are as much a part of Hyrule now as landmarks like the Duelings Peaks or Death Mountain. 

He hurries up the stairs, away from the curious whispers stirring behind him in the village, and lifts his hand to the door. There is a muffled shuffling from behind it before it quickly, yet carefully, eases open. 

Tauro greets him with a smile. 

“Link!” He creeps around the edge of the door onto the porch and then shuts it behind him. The fact he’s wearing a shirt is almost as startling as his behavior.

“I didn’t know you were in town. I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages,” he whispers. 

Link shifts the weight between his feet. The morning sun is already starting to warm the dark of his cloak. He would much prefer his short cloak or none at all, but Hyrule takes the sight of his face as an invitation to ask for anything. 

“How long are you staying?” 

It’s always been a little challenging not being able to see Tauro’s eyes behind his thick bangs, but Link has learned if he waits long enough, people eventually fill his silences with a best guess. 

“Only passing through?” And thankfully, Tauro usually gets it right on the first try. 

Link nods. 

“Of course, you always are,” Tauro sighs and sets his hands on his hips. “I suppose you’re here for my research notes?” 

Link glances past Tauro to the closed door and tilts his head. 

Tauro follows his gaze. “Oh, well, okay. You can come in, but you need to be quiet.”

Whatever silver of his face visible from under the hood must show offense because Tauro reacts immediately. 

“Sorry! Just- just be extra quiet. Paya is still sleeping. She hasn’t been feeling well.” 

It’s like a scroll unfurls in Link’s head. There has been a lot of rain in the valley lately. Viruses like to spread whenever people hunker down. He can boil some bone broth and garlic for fever easily, if that’s the case. There was an outbreak of illness in Hateno a few months back that turned out to be bad meat in a communal stew. Unfortunately, there is little you can do for that other than throw out the stew and double down on the fluids.

Link reaches for his pouch and starts fishing for herbs, but Tauro sets a hand on his shoulder.

“Oh no, it’s nothing like that. She’s fine. It’s, uh, well, we’re having a baby!” he whispers excitedly. 

There is a whistle in Link’s ear. High and piercing. Like when he accidentally sets off a bomb flower in close quarters.

“It’s still really early, but they say how Paya’s feeling is a good sign the baby is already strong,” Tauro adds. 

It’s bizarre, he thinks, that words can feel like an explosion. But it’s usually not the words themselves that cause this he’s learned. Rather, it’s the memories tied to them. Some remain clouded and dark from before he woke up, while others, from a later time but before the Upheaval, are crystal clear.

Those are the ones that feel like they could be from another time. Another life. 

The school is nearly finished. They are cutting it close, but Zelda insisted the playground be built first so the kids could enjoy it. He’s convinced her to pause for lunch, which he’s got waiting for them back at the house, when she slides her hand into his and smiles.  

“Do you think you’d ever want children, Link?” 

The memory dissolves into nothing as quickly as it surfaced. Link blinks a few times and looks down at his empty hand, feeling oddly disconnected from himself and exhausted even though he just woke up. He starts to sign mechanically, but Tauro interrupts him. 

“Oh, sorry,” he says gently, “Paya has been meaning to teach me, but we haven’t…”

Link lowers his hands and concentrates on pulling his voice into his throat. It’s rusty and foreign. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you!” Tauro bursts and then lowers his voice again, hunching his shoulders. “Thank you. We are excited. Really excited. Feels like the right next step for us, you know?” He claps his hands together and then turns to the door. “Alright, so yeah, come on in.” He eases the door open just enough so the two of them can slip inside.

It’s much cleaner than the last time he was here. All the research they collected after the Upheaval is condensed neatly against the right wall. The Sheikah heirloom, or a replica of it, is polished and back on the pedestal by the stairs. There are blueprints for a festival, something about Sahasra’s Pass, and traditional Kakariko red paper lanterns sit ready to be hung. The focus is back on Kakariko. Dorian must be pleased.  

“I’m afraid there wasn’t much I could salvage from the Royal texts you brought me.” Tauro pulls out a small leather notebook and flips it open. Although the King’s study was spared the elements during the century Calamity Ganon swirled around the castle, the Demon King’s Gloom was corrosive. Vengeful. Once it took over the castle, not even the bones of it were left untouched. The plan, last Link heard, was to salvage and preserve what they could before they tore it all down. There was no mention of whether or not they planned to rebuild.

No one’s bothered to ask him for his opinion on the matter, but he hasn’t exactly made himself easy to find. 

“There was nothing about Secret Stones, no real surprises there, but I did find something interesting about the temples.” Tauro settles on the page he was searching for and hands it to Link. He lowers his hood. “We know about the four elemental temples: water, wind, fire, and lightning, each with a corresponding sage—”

Sidon, Tulin, Yunobo, Riju. He sees a flash of the final battle under the castle, all four united at his side. He can’t remember the last time he’s seen any of them. A year, maybe? 

“—and then there is the Spirit Temple and its sage.”

Mineru is long gone. While she was helpful and connected to Zelda, Link didn’t really know her and made little effort to do so when she joined him. He summoned her the least and when she left, finally departing the realm from the Great Sky Island, he’d planned to take her Secret Stone, until—

“It appears these temples have played an important part in eras of the past,” Tauro continues, “and there have been other temples. Other sages.”

Link looks up from Tauro’s notes and tilts his head. While he’s come across many places and puzzles that feel similar to a temple, the mention of other sages grabs his ear.

“Right?” Tauro grins. “Let’s start with what we know. The Temple of Time had a sage…”

The Sheikah tapestry hangs to his left. Link glares at the center where the Calamity is depicted. Time is Zelda’s power. And the fallen queen’s. That stone is gone with the Demon King. 

“We haven’t found the Temple of Light, but I have a theory that the Temple of Time in the sky was previously called that.”

And Rauru was the sage. His stone became Zelda’s and the Light Dragon carries it somewhere inside her just as the Demon Dragon did Sonia’s. Tauro isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t already know. Seven sages for seven temples. He had been hoping for something fresh; something to sharpen his eye before he went back into the ruins again. 

“Then there are the Spirit, Lightning, Wind, and Fire Temples. They might have been known by other names over the ages, but it’s all the same, and their sages we know, past and present. But one more temple keeps coming up in the text. Here,”—Tauro points to the bottom of the page—“the Shadow Temple.”

A shiver crawls across Link’s skin.

“Sounds real warm and fuzzy, right?” Tauro chuckles.

That’s a new one. And the name is familiar. Link lifts his hand and points to one of the banners bearing the Eye hanging from the ceiling.

“No, I wondered that, too. Paya doesn’t know anything about it. Feels like something important Impa would have shared with her before stepping down, you know? Perhaps it was once tied to the Shadow Folk, but it isn’t anymore, as far as I can tell.”

The air tastes bitter. Like there is magic in her name. Impa has been as much of an enigma as Link lately. 

“Do you want to stay? I can make some breakfast and we can brainstorm like old times?” Tauro says. His face is innocent and hopeful. He doesn’t remember that Link was never involved in this part. The staying. It was always Zelda. It happens a lot. 

More evidence he shouldn’t be the one Rauru and Sonia saved. 

—

Impa is waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. She’s abandoned her signature hat in favor of a smaller, more travel-friendly model. Her third eye is visible and fixed on him. Unblinding and captious. He once imagined it was something he could trick, perhaps get it to spin round and round until it rolled back into her head and disappeared. But she’s not an enemy or a temple puzzle he needed to thwart. Supposedly, she’s the oldest friend he has. 

It’s been harder to remember that without Zelda.

“You’re looking thin,” Impa says. She starts walking up the winding path that leads to the woods overlooking the village. 

‘You’re looking old,’ he follows and signs without looking at her. 

Impa laughs. “You know, for the first time in my life, I actually feel it.”

The footpath is overgrown. They are trying to discourage people from going into the woods. Although the Gloom is gone, the cavern to the depths remains, and it’s a tragedy waiting to happen until they cover it. The decision was made to prioritize the chasms in more frequented areas along the trade routes and major cities first. A few chasms in Central Hyrule and Death Mountain have covers designed to be opened from the surface as needed, but the rest are scheduled to be permanently blocked off at some point.

Kakariko must be low on the list. Another caveat of remaining secluded: your problems tend to wait. Unless you find someone you can hand them off to.

“Have you been to it?” Impa asks him. He stops and waits for her to elaborate, allowing his irritation to settle visibly into his shoulders. “The Shrine they built for her? Zelda would have liked it, I think. Maybe she’ll send us some Silent Princess as a sign of her blessing.” 

Impa’s talking about the pond he fell into after the battle with the Demon Dragon. They erected monuments of Zelda’s story in luminous stone and built a statue of her at the center overlooking the water. People travel from all over to see it. They call it a memorial, but it looks oddly like a goddess statue with Zelda’s face on it to Link, which makes it more of a Spring. And Zelda would hate that.

‘Is there something you need from me?’ he signs.

Impa doesn’t say anything. She looks him over slowly, paying particular attention to the long braid over his shoulder.

‘If there is nothing, then I’m leaving.’

She doesn’t budge or break eye contact. She just stares at him with worry slowly spreading across her face.

Goddess, now he understands why some people find him so infuriating.

“You are angry,” she finally says. He rolls his eyes.

‘I’m busy.’ 

“You’ve been angry for a long time.” 

He lowers his hands, hoping she’ll take the hint he’s not interested in having this conversation again. 

“I fear this anger will poison you if you do not let it go.” 

He scoffs and turns from her to face the cliffs. If he takes off from here, he’ll sail right over Telta Lake and pick the road up again at the base of Sahasra Slope. He can grab a horse at Riverside Stable. If the weather’s on his side, he’ll be at the Great Plateau before nightfall.  

“I loved her, too. But—”

The word does something to him; summons something black and smoldering from deep inside his chest. He whips around and glares at her, his voice ready behind his teeth. 

“I love her.”

Impa doesn’t back down from the maw of his rage. “You have spent the last five years in ruins.” 

Faron, Typhlo, the surface labyrinths, an entire year floating from sky island to sky island. He’ll do it all again too, armed with the new information at the Shadow Temple.

“I’m not going to stop looking for a way to bring her back just because Hyrule has decided she’s g—” his voice cracks, a dying fire, and disappears back into his throat. All he can taste is sorrow and ash.

“It cannot be a coincidence you are the only one who can see her, Link,” she speaks to him gently, like he’s a thing to be pitied. A wounded animal.

‘That’s because I’m the only one who is looking!’ he signs and then turns from her, pulling his glider out in front of him. Purah’s latest model springs open from a single, slender piece he can wear across his back like a shield. Two giant yellow eyes stare up at him from the violet fabric. Many have told him how unnerving this particular design is. He doesn’t know why, but it brings him comfort. Sometimes he thinks he hears questions in his head when he stares at it long enough; questions about friendship and his true face and happiness.

“How far are you willing to take this?” Impa continues from behind him. “Have you asked yourself this? You must be able to recognize your limits. There is much we don’t know about the past. That we will never know. Important people, places, symbols, all of their true meanings have been lost to time.” 

That is the real problem. It is too much time gone by. They can barely recall the history of a hundred years ago, nevermind thousands of centuries. It’s why Zelda founded the research team; why she built memorials for those lost to the Calamity; why she insisted on building a school in Hateno—safeguards. A means of ensuring important details, like those that might stop a Calamity or reveal the hiding place of a Demon King and the weapons vital to vanquishing them both, would never be lost again.

If only something had been left for her. Something that could have spared her from making such a terrible sacrifice.

“What we do know is what happens when a soul is drenched in shadow. When someone tied to destiny is unwilling to move on...” 

He’s glaring at the castle in the distance. It’s quiet, almost peaceful, sitting still on the horizon line where the Demon King left it. Then, with a flash, his mind takes him under it. The world shrouded in darkness, his lungs choking on thick swirls of miasma. The light from Rauru’s slowly unraveling arm catches the gold bangles woven across a chest of decayed flesh stretched far too thin. A cage of ancient bones and a gaping mouth.

“…it bends, and it twists, and it changes. We must be the ones who choose to move forward.”  

The darkness around the corpse starts to grow and swirl, squeezing through the cracks in the ceiling. Link’s eye follows it as it crawls up, burrowing through the earth, up into the walls of Hyrule Castle, all the way to the Sanctum until it bursts from the stone and flies high above the castle. Another wide, gaping mouth that spews rot and oil and rage high into the sky. 

“I’m not giving up on her,” he signs.

“If you do not wish to lose yourself to this pain, you must accept it.” She steps close to him and sets her hand on his chest. Right over his heart. “I’ll ask you again: how far are you willing to go for love?”

It’s a stupid question. A pointless one. How far will he go? Hasn’t he already proven his love for Zelda is unwavering? That he can lose himself and still manage to find her? 

There is no grave capable of holding his body down while she still exists. 

“I’m not giving up on her!” he shouts and pushes Impa’s hand away. She recoils and finally pulls her gaze off him. 

It’s no way to speak to a friend. Certainly not the oldest one he has. Zelda would be disappointed in him if she were here. Then again, if she were, this conversation wouldn’t be happening. He would let Secret Stones and the Zonai disappear into history where they belong. Maybe there would still be a shrine by the pond and he and Zelda could avoid it together. Maybe she would cut his hair and grow hers long, and they could get back to the question she asked him outside of Hateno School and eventually have news to share. Or not. It would be okay with him if they came to the decision together.

But she’s not here.

Notes:

Thank you to the wonderful @zeldaelmo for enduring my sad, twisted brain rot and for beta reading another monster of a story for me. And thank you to the amazing @fioreofthemarch for being a trusted and valued set of eyes on the story's outline.

This story originated from a short fancomic for linktober 2023 surrounding a "bad ending" au idea. It quickly grew into a pretty ambitions goal of a full comic however, I've made the decision to write the story first while I work on my artistic ability and proficiency with procreate and csp. I just have a very specific way I imagine this looking as a comic and my skillset is really just not there. I will be continuing to post art, concept art, and some comic panels on the story's tumblr page! Eventually, I would love to adapt the story into a full comic, but for now, this is where I'll be telling the whole story.

(recent minor edits 7/21/25: sentence flow and grammar. Some dialogue clean up)

Chapter 2

Notes:

See end notes for chapter art

[six months later]

Sweeping doesn’t seem like much, but it’s important work when it comes to running a stable. Araine should know, she’s been doing it for almost thirteen years. She was young when she started working, back at the old Rito Stable before the blizzards pushed them out, and it turned over into the Lucky Clover. And although her back gets stiff more easily nowadays, her arms are lined with muscles that make quick work of New Serene Stable.

She likes to sweep three times a day, sometimes more if traffic is on the heavier side or there has been rain. Appearances are important! A clean floor can make the difference between the purchase of a regular bed or a soft one, or the decision to stop and rest at all. She’s tried to convince Sprinn to make it a policy that all guests remove their shoes upon entry, to minimize the mess and any scuffing on the wood, but he says no one would pay to stay at a stable with such conditions.

She can’t wait until the stable is hers. 

“Hey! Shoes–off! Now!” she snaps at Syd, her oldest, who skids to a halt, but not before she tracks fresh mud all over the floor. While she can’t enforce any rules on customers just yet, she can set them for her kids. 

“You are just as mean as he is!” Syd whines and backs out onto the dirt, rather than doing what she is told.

“Mean as who?” Araine asks and starts at the mess before it can set and stain. 

“The man with the weird hand,” Syd points north of the stable, where the road forks toward the head of Tanagar Canyon. “He didn’t even lower his hood. I told him I would give him a good deal on some of our stew, and he waved me off.” Syd mimics a one-handed gesture of dismissal and then crosses her arms.

Araine stops sweeping. “What do you mean, ‘weird hand’?” 

“It was metal. And it glowed blue, like the big tower at Lindor’s Brow.”

Araine has been dreaming about running her own stable for thirteen years. In all that time, she’s met a lot of travelers and cared for a lot of horses. They are valuable animals, and those who have tamed a wild one know the importance of treating them decently, but the way the traveler she’s thinking about tends to his horses borderlines worship. There was a rumor going around years ago he actually met the Horse God and every horse he claimed carries her blessing. 

He has a favorite; one who has been with him since he first started coming around the stables, before New Serene was new and the stable was in the woods near the canyon; when Hyrule Castle was still in the earth and a demon swirled its peaks. 

One he’s been known to tip the stable hands a ruby for excellent care.

“Was he riding a black horse with white hair?” 

“Yeah, why?”

“And he was traveling that way, you said? Toward the canyon?”

Syd nods and steps back inside the inn, inspecting her curiously. 

“Shoes!” Araine sweeps the broom in front of Syd’s path. She rolls her eyes, kicks off her shoes, and hops over the broom. 

“Do you know that guy or something, Ma?”

Araine would’ve liked to have laid eyes on him herself, but the odds it could be anyone else are slim. Aren’t too many folks in Hyrule with metal hands, nevermind ones that glow. The Yiga know better than to impersonate him, but rumor has it, there hasn’t been a Yiga sighting since the castle came back down. “Sounds like Link.” 

Syd’s gawks at her wide-eyed. “Link–the Hero– Link?”

“The very one,” Araine says and sets her broom down. As she crosses to the inner desk, she feels Syd scurries up beside her. 

“Beedle was looking for him a while back, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was.” 

“You gonna send him a message?”

“A letter, yes,” Araine says, dipping the ledger quill into some fresh ink. She hears Syd sigh, annoyed at her reluctance to use the Sheikah’s fancy device. They gifted it to the Stable Network a few years back to more efficiently track Pony Points as well as monitor trade patterns and traveler logs. The Sheikah tried to sell them on getting rid of the paper records all together, but Sprinn is hesitant to let the routine go. They update the Sheikah device with everything recorded once a day. Araine usually makes Syd do it since navigating the technology comes more readily to her young hands. 

“Do you know him, Ma? Link?”

“Oh yes,” Araine smiles, “he’s helped our stable more times than I can count.”

“Him? Help? He barely looked at me and I was offering food!”

Araine would laugh if she didn’t know Link so well. She actually can’t remember the last time he stayed at New Serene. She sets down the quill and tries to thumb through the primary ledger. The picture flips rapidly under her fingers. Somehow, she ends up on a map of Hyrule and then takes an unflattering photograph of the underside of her chin. 

Syd eventually steps in and shows her how to search for travelers. 

Link hasn’t been to New Serene since the devices were installed. He hasn’t been logged at any stable across the network in over two years. 

“There was a time when he wouldn’t turn down a hot meal. It was almost too easy to get him to stay…” Araine mutters. 

Syd folds her arms over the counter. “What d’ya think happened to him?

Araine presses her lips into a line and thinks about the stories carried along with the wares of merchants all those years ago. Funny to think life could be dull with a Calamity looming in the distance, but big threats like that seem less tangible than the bokoblins in the woods nearby. And when they do stay away, the peace can get boring. So when a mysterious traveler with no memory and the favor of luck starts solving old problems along the trade routes, people come up with all kinds of requests to make if they get the chance to meet him. Sometimes they were for important things, like locating missing persons and monster extermination, but also some ridiculous ones: photographs of leviathan bones, indulgent recipe supplies, bug collecting. 

All the while, the poor guy had been quietly trying to figure out who he was, and later, find what he lost. The princess was a treasure. 

Araine looks across the floor from the old scuff marks she can’t for the life of her get out to the customers scattered across the inn. Ugh. Sprinn is right. It’d be bad for business to make shoe removal a policy. No one would want to come back with her barking at them all day when they are just trying to rest. 

“We’ve probably asked too much of him. Even helpful hands get tired.” Her back aches. Maybe she’ll skip the afternoon sweep today… 

She picks up the quill and glances at the Sheikah device. Sending a letter feels simpler. It’s the kind of thing she might have asked someone like Link to deliver for her. The Sheikah device can send messages, but she’s never taken the time to learn.

And Link used to always stop by…but she can’t seem to rely upon that now. 

She sets down the quill. 

“Syd, could you show me how to send a message to the other stables?”

Slowly, painstakingly, her daughter teaches her how to send an alert out for Beedle. It takes longer than it would to just write out a letter, but Syd reassures that she’ll get faster with practice. Araine already likes that she doesn’t need to waste any time or trade recruiting a messenger. Beedle was last logged at Highland Stable, so she sends it there and to the next stop on his usual route. 

She feels a small swell of pride when it’s done, like when she’s finished cleaning for the day and the inn really shines. She wonders if there is really any harm in asking people just to mind their shoes. Maybe she’ll ask Link what he thinks, given how well traveled he is, he’s bound to know how a rule like that might be received. 

A group of musicians spill into the inn. They claim to have walked all the way from the Breach of Demise where their wagon is stranded and are looking for some help. Their boots tell her they aren’t lying. 

What a mess. 

She picks up the broom, stretches her back from the hips, and sets to work. 

—

The Forgotten Temple isn’t particularly dangerous, but Link never likes to stay long. He’s spent the majority of his life venturing into places much worse than this—underground caves swarming with monsters, a castle dripping with poisonous rot, the belly of a labyrinth filled with hostile guardians—but everything about it feels wrong. 

The moss and the decay and the heavy taste of mineral in the air suggest it’s been here for a long time, likely built into the earth itself as Tauro surmises in his notes, and yet, something it feels out of place. A temple of the Goddess at the bottom of a gorge? The largest recorded statue of Hylia hidden in the dark? He’s no architectural expert, and he doesn’t know how it would even be possible (then again, there are islands in the sky and an entire underworld beneath his feet), but it feels like the Forgotten Temple was once somewhere else entirely. 

All that effort and it still ends up abandoned.   

Maybe it’s just too familiar—too much like his past. Condemned to darkness until he comes across something that triggers an awakening of sorts, like when light finds its way into this temple. It still happens to him now and again, his past coming back, albeit much less frequently than when he first woke up. It was easier to shake when Zelda was here. There was a wholeness with her, even though his memory remained mostly scattered. 

They were busy making new ones. 

He tried to tell her that once, but it didn’t stop her from apologizing. Even when she stopped saying the words, the guilt was always in her eyes. He wished he could stop it or at least pretend it wasn’t happening, but it always felt as if someone were holding him underwater until his lungs were about to burst. He would return from a memory, gasping and shaken, and she would get that look, like she failed him even though she saved him; like she’s failed them all even though she’s the reason the Calamity is gone. 

Was it guilt that pushed her to swallow the stone? Did it follow her into the past? Does she still carry it with her now? Is that why the Light Dragon weeps? 

All this pain so he can remember he once preferred green apples to red, or the name of a comrade who has been dead for a century? He doesn’t need that life anymore. Much of what was once important to him, and to Hyrule, is all forgotten now. 

So at least the temple is aptly named.

The mother Goddess statue is believed to have toppled during the Upheaval. Her fall uncovered the hidden rooms of the Zonai, including a map of the geoglyphs that would ultimately reveal Zelda’s fate to him. He won’t enter that room, not unless he absolutely has to. It’s just an outline of all the places his heart began to crack and ultimately, off the rocky coast of Akkala, completely shattered. 

He keeps to the first room, the one with the rocks and a flower-looking device at the center. There is Zonai script everywhere, but when compared to Tauro’s updated notes, there is no mention of the word ‘shadow’. That would be too simple. And nothing in Hyrule is ever simple for him. 

The room is just a chamber with vague details about the Zonai’s descent from the heavens and the intended usage of the Secret Stones. There is nothing about their creation or if more than seven exist. The room is built to dissuade anyone from even asking the question. Everything is split into seven: seven platforms, seven pillars, seven petals. Who would think to look for more?

But Hyrule has taught him to look: the Sword in the woods, stolen treasure in flooded ruins, the statue of the eighth heroine, sickness leaking up from under the castle. 

If only Mineru had stuck around. The Zonai was supposedly a dedicated researcher—a living archive of her time. She must have learned more about the Secret Stones. She knew enough to warn Zelda what was forbidden, didn’t she?

He could ask Purah if Mineru had left anything on the Purah Pad. Maybe her knowledge is still stored on the device. What’s the point of being a researcher if the information isn’t made available to the future?

But that would require talking to Purah, and he hasn’t been to New Hyrule Center, formally Lookout Landing, in several years. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to get his arm tuned up…

He holds it out in front of him and flexes the fingers so he can inspect the mechanics. Purah is the mastermind, but she let Robbie have some input, particularly regarding the weaponry. The ball joints on the elbow, wrist, and fingers give him decent mobility, but the real benefit comes from the core. Glowing blue like the power in the Skyview Towers, it gives him the ability to scan, store, and replicate certain weapons and gear. Combined with the satchel Hestu gifted him, it made accepting a personal Purah Pad optional for him.

The arm also has other useful functions—unlimited grip strength, a sensor to detect items so long as the arm has scanned one—but most importantly, Purah was able to install a few of the runes from the good old days. 

He glares at the blue core glowing through the coils of metal. Purah assured him it wasn’t at risk of malfunctioning or losing power so long as he has access to sunlight, but she will probably want to fit him with something updated the second he shows his face anywhere near her lab. He put his foot down when she wanted to install a tracking feature. He made her swear, one hand on her heart and the other on the original Sheikah Slate, that she didn’t sneak it into the arm he wears now. 

No, he can’t go back there. Not yet. He flips through the pages of Tauro’s notebook and walks out into the main temple hall. The mother Goddess statue casts a massive shadow, so he holds his mechanical hand over the page for light. Tauro included detailed drawings of the various Zonai ruins: a dragon from the Thunderhead Isles, the ring over Kakariko, statues from Faron. 

The different creature totems catch his attention. The dragon, the boar, and the owl are thought to have been worshiped by the tribe that once lived there. The owl’s massive eyes stare back at him, not unlike Mineru’s construct mask. She would stare at him this way after he summoned her, quiet and looming, and then try to impart some wisdom or kindness he was not open to hearing.

He usually just used her to cross lakes of Gloom in the depths. 

Mineru may have moved on, but her mask was left behind. A mask that once pointed him in the direction he needed to go. A mask that was connected to Mineru and her knowledge by some strange magic that, like most of what is found in Hyrule, might be laced with data. With memory. 

He jogs back into the entrance. The air hums against his skin, cool and otherworldly, like the clear waters that surround one of the Springs or the wind on Satori. He can always feel the Light Dragon before he sees her. He tucks Tauro’s notebook into his satchel and scans the sliver of empty sky visible between the canyon cliffs. She could be above the clouds or still on her way from the east. He’d like to catch her before she soars into Hebra, otherwise he won’t see her again for a while. 

He climbs as fast as he can and spills over, breathing fast and ragged, onto his back onto Rowan Plain. His left arm aches and there is a nasty stitch in his side, but it’s okay because it’s a decent spot to rest. He likes this area of Hyrule. It’s still relatively quiet, with travelers preferring to take the southern road into Tabantha rather than trek through miles of snow. The sky is clear of islands as well. He inhales the smell of fresh grass and wet dirt and the sweetness of fresh sweat and closes his eyes. 

For a second, it’s almost like the Upheaval didn’t happen at all.  

“Can you fall asleep anywhere?” 

They are laying in the field by Firly Pond. Zelda had spent all morning begging him to teach her to fish, only to discover he didn’t really know how. According to her, throwing explosives into the water doesn’t count. She’d resolved to study properly and grabbed a book, reading out loud until her voice gradually faded away. Either his sleepiness muffled the sound or, more likely, she became so absorbed in the material and forgot he was lying there.

At some point, her voice came back with the question spoken softly into his ear. 

“Well? Can you?”

A knot forms, pleasant and warm, in his belly.  

“Hm,” he answers, eyes still closed, drawing in a dragon’s breath in through his nostrils. The air is thick with grass and wet dirt and the sweetness of fresh sweat in the afternoon sun.  

She grabs his chin between her fingers and guides his face over to hers.  

“Are you paying attention?” 

He opens his eyes and spots the Light Dragon slithering vertically toward the clouds to his left. Hyrule Castle sits dormant and decaying in the background, right where it crash-landed after they destroyed the Demon Dragon. How it didn’t crumble into a thousand pieces that day—

Link’s heart leaps into his throat. He scrambles to his feet and sprints toward the east, clawing at the earth with his hands whenever he trips over himself, because he doesn’t dare surrender any of the momentum. The Light Dragon is slowly twisting, a spiral of white scale and soul-stone green, toward the heavens. While she often rides the different currents of the atmosphere, she never ascends this sharply. 

She’s rising out of the chasm at the peak of Elma Knolls. 

She’s rising up from the depths.

—

“Tulin, can you check the sky islands, again?” 

Purah’s newest upgrade to the Purah Pad grants a user the ability to communicate with moving pictures from any spot in Hyrule within a certain range of a Skyview Tower. Tulin currently shares the screen of his personal device with the other sages and the Sheikah director, and it’s literally the coolest thing he’s ever seen. Except maybe when Link ran out of bomb flowers and straight-up dove headfirst through Colgera’s last weak spot. 

Yeah, that was awesome.  

“On it!” he chirps and then clears his throat, glancing at the screen displaying his peers. They all smile knowingly, but say nothing. He sighs. Being a sage counts for nothing when you still sound like a fledgling! 

“Beedle says he was last seen near the Forgotten Temple two months ago, but no one has spotted him since,” Purah adds. “That usually means he’s deep in the wild or hopping the islands.” 

Tulin nods and flashes a thumbs up. “Copy that.”

“We are counting on you, Sage of Wind. Do not engage. He’ll just take off again. We should approach him together.”

“I’ll send a message if I spot him. Tulin, over and out!” He turns the device off and clicks it onto his belt. 

The wind, oddly, is against him, blowing heavy and cold from the east. No matter, he summons Tabantha’s gale beneath his wings and works it into an invisible spring. He waits for the pressure to build up, the way his ancestors before him did, so tight his feathers begin to tremble, and then lets it loose into the sky. 

He rockets up, up, up into the atmosphere, high above Rito Village, soaring until Revali’s Landing is nothing but a speck. He should tell dad where he’s going, but like Purah said, Link’s counting on him, and official sage business is as good an excuse as any to break curfew, right?

Notes:

art for this chapter on tumblr!

Thank you again to @zeldaelmo for beta-reading. I would put you on speed dial on my Purah Pad, if I had one.

Getting to the scenes featured in the Linktober comic! Hope you enjoy (:

[7/21/25 - another minor clean up, no one needs that many commas.]

Chapter 3

 

It’s impossibly cold on the Great Sky Island. 

Link’s grateful for the snowquill gear, but not even Rito down can stop the wind from biting his face raw if he lingers out in the open for too long. He’s careful to keep his back to it while he waits for the steward construct to return, arms folded across his chest to warm his core.

He looks around slowly and thinks about the first time he stepped out onto the island after he woke up. Wearing nothing but the thin archaic set he found in the caves, it’s a miracle he survived that day. Then again, he’s no stranger to miracles. Much of the life he can remember sprouted from a pretty extraordinary one. 

It was likely adrenaline that saved him from the cold that day, spiking higher and higher with each horrid revelation: his arm gone, the blade of the Master Sword broken, Zelda missing. The last image he had of her being swallowed up by the dark under Hyrule Castle sent him diving off the island’s edge to shortcut the distance to the Temple of Time. He was lucky the pond he landed in was deep enough, but he’s never been one to think things entirely through. Not when it comes to Zelda. 

Link scoffs at the irony and pushes a broken piece of stone back and forth between his boots. This whole nightmare started with a lonely, desperate dive into uncertain waters and ended the same way. Perhaps some foreshadowing he should have paid attention to? 

There is so much he should have paid attention to early on. 

The Light Dragon, for one, has been floating around the Great Sky Island from the very start. He hadn’t realized it that first day (those first months!), so frantic and careless and blind, he didn’t even notice she was right there, waiting for him to emerge. The guardian of yet another restoration slumber. 

He looks up, half expecting to see her, a river of scale and sacrality slicing through the clouds, but the sky is clear and lonely. 

Mineru said when Zelda swallowed the Secret Stone, she surrendered completely to the alchemy. The price of immortal life and empyreal power, according to Mineru, requires the unraveling of all you are. 

But if that is true, why does the Light Dragon weep? How did Zelda’s memories become distilled in those tears? Why did the Demon Dragon remain hostile and hell-bent on destroying him? 

She’s not gone. Mineru is wrong. Impa is wrong. Link just needs to figure out how to save her.

He tears his eyes away from the sky and glares back at his feet. A sliver of blue from his tunic peeks out at him from under the snowquill chest gear. It makes traveling unnoticed more of a challenge, but it’s one of the only things he has left from before. From her.

Losing his arm was a shock he felt in waves, the most profound after Rauru’s replacement was recalled and he left with nothing, but the loss of his gear was devastating. Immediate. 

After Purah took back the Sheikah Slate to begin her upgrades and he gifted Zelda Hateno house, most of his belongings were stored in the enchanted satchel he wore on his belt. When the Gloom attacked him under Hyrule Castle, mutilating his arm and the Master Sword, it ate away everything on his right side down to the skin. The Champion’s tunic and his satchel would have been damaged, likely beyond repair, but they were still his. He never found out what became of either. 

And in that satchel: the late Champion’s weapons, all the armor sets blessed by the Great Faeries, his jewelry pieces from Isha. He’d kept a shock arrow from the lynel fight on Shatterback Point as well as an ancient screw from the first guardian he took down when he was strong enough.

Everything from his time in the Wild, from his past, everything he earned, was gone. 

So when he found his old hairband and discovered Zelda was secretly having a duplicate tunic made for him, he risked everything to find where she had hidden it. It’s a perfect replica of the Champion’s tunic, complete with fortified leather armor to protect him.

She was always trying to protect him.

Zelda rarely looks at him in anger, but when she does, it’s usually because he’s come home covered in his own blood. 

The Hateno monster defense squad hasn’t faced a group of lizalfos that size in a long while. He doesn’t want to raise the alarm just yet; it could just be a coincidence, or the result of people leaning into easy times, but he considers mentioning the size of the hoard just to deflect some of her rage.  

One of the lizalfos had jumped up behind him and hooked his left shoulder with its claws just right. Link needed to hack the thing’s arm off after it was dead and the limb remained attached to him until the fighting was done. One of the men helped him wriggle the sickle-shaped claws out. It probably did more damage than good. He doesn’t have the stomach to look at it, but the pain radiating in his teeth tells him it’s pretty bad. 

“Your left shoulder, again?” Zelda steps into him to inspect it. He wrinkles his nose and turns his head in the opposite direction. 

“It’s like monsters are drawn to your left side. Or you’re terrible at guarding it.” It’s a smart comment, but he knows the bite comes from a good place. And she’s not wrong. The left side of his body is badly scarred, so it’s a bad habit he must have carried with him from his past life.  

‘Which side are you drawn to?’ Link signs with his right hand.  

He sees her fight the smile tugging at her lips. She hides the losing battle by pressing her words against his ear. 

“Both.” He shivers, forgetting the pain for a moment. “So protect both.” 

She steps back, smile gone, and inspects the wound again with a sigh. “Come. You aren’t gonna like it, but I’m going to need to stitch you up after this is cleaned. We really ought to invest in pauldrons.” 

Link lifts his eyebrows at her. She knows his preference to stay light in battle. Unencumbered.  

“Just for the left side, then? You don’t want to lose an arm. For me?” 

He’s a lot better about protecting his left side now that it’s his only arm left, but he wears the leathers for her. For a long while they even smelled like her. 

“Link, I have returned with the artifact,” the steward construct’s voice pulls him from his thoughts. It floats up beside him, hovering above the ground in disjointed fragments of ornate stone. It retrieves Mineru’s mask from the drawer in its chest and presents it to him. “Apologies. I was unable to extract the data you requested.”

Disappointment is bitter no matter how many times he’s tasted it. He had been hoping there would have been some kind of data thumbprint left behind from Mineru’s time inside the device. 

“Link!” a voice calls down to him from up above.

“Incoming,” the construct collapses defensively into a pile of stones. Link barely has a second to glance up before a blur of white feathers and wind collides against his chest. He grunts, completely winded, but manages to dig his heels into the dirt to keep them from toppling over. Tulin wraps his wings around Link tightly, muffling a whimper against Link’s shoulder. 

Link checks to make sure Tulin is alone before relaxing into the embrace.The sages have been looking for him for a while, no doubt tipped off by the stop he made in Kakariko and the little girl at New Serenne. It’s becoming harder and harder to disappear in certain parts of Hyrule. Purah’s technology connects people like a web; someone spots him in the morning in Tabantha and the northmost corner of Akkala knows about it by noon. 

Tulin won’t let go as he starts to pull back. Link smirks and uses the disappointingly small bit of height advantage he has left to scruff the top of Tulin’s crest with his hand.

“Hey!” Tulin hops back. “Watch the feathers!” He smoothes them down and hastily wipes his eyes. Link smiles and sets his hands on his hips so he can inspect the Sage of Wind. 

He forgot how quickly the Rito age. 

Tulin clears his throat and keeps feathers busy, gathering a long braid of white and gray from over his shoulder. “My braid is long! Did you notice? Kinda like yours. Looks cool, right?”

Link tilts his head to admire the plait. The Rito always do them the best. Four-stranded and tight to withstand any strength of wind, Link used to pay the fledglings a fresh salmon to braid his hair every time he passed through the village, until the skill returned to him with a recalled memory from his past. Taught to Link begrudgingly, like most anything given by the late Rito Champion, so that he could help Zelda keep up appearances after she injured her wrist on the road during their early days of travel before the Calamity struck. 

Tulin waits eagerly for Link to respond. In addition to the braid and the height, the spots on Tulin’s cheeks have started to darken from pink to red since the last time they saw each other.

Revali stares back at him for a heartbeat, and the grin slips off Link’s face.

The fact that the Secret Stones called to his friends feels like a punishment. Everyone tells him it’s different and they are willing—honored—but it’s the Champions all over again. Only this time, the sages don’t have a Divine Beast to command. They are weapons themselves. It is part of why he keeps running from them, why he fought so hard against their aid during the war. They are too young, even Sidon, to fully understand the danger they have put themselves in by accepting such a burden. 

Tulin’s stone glows dimly from the holster around his ankle. If only there were a way to release a sage safely from their stone without killing them. He would shatter each one with the Master Sword if he had the chance. If he didn’t think they were a key to Zelda’s return. 

He turns from Tulin and sulks back toward his gear. He can feel Tulin circling the air around his head before he starts peppering Link questions: 

“Watcha been up to?”

“Was that Mineru’s mask?”

“I thought her soul moved on?”

The air shifts. There is a song on the wind. Haunting and familiar . Link immediately stops and shields his eyes with the hand of his Sheikah arm to look up. Sure enough, the Light Dragon weaves between low-hanging wisps of cloud over his head. Her path has become unpredictable. Erratic. She used to never pass directly over the island. Never went into the depths. It can’t be a coincidence. 

He squints his eyes, trying to determine which direction she’s come from. Was she following him? 

“Link?” Tulin lands beside him, but it’s like he’s miles away. After watching her ascend from the chasm at Elma Knolls, Link spent weeks following the Light Dragon across Hyrule. She dove into the depths three more times, only to resurface again a short while later with fresh tears in her eyes. 

Are you paying attention? 

Is she trying to point him in the direction he needed to go? To a place of secrets and darkness?

A place of shadow. 

“I’ve noticed you do this a lot…what are you looking at?” Tulin asks. 

No one else can see her. Which means the change in her pattern is for him alone to notice. To see. How long has she been trying to show him? How long has he been blind? 

‘Nothing,’ Link signs quickly. He nods at the Light Dragon, looking directly into one of her massive blue-violet eyes. He’s paying attention. He knows where he needs to go, but he needs to prepare before he dives into the underdark. Uncertain waters. Loneliness. He needs to protect himself. For her.

Link looks at Tulin and signs, ‘Let’s go. Just got to grab my gear.’ 

Link jogs the rest of the way to his things and begins to pile them back on. Hestu’s replacement satchel and his arrow quiver hang off his second gear belt. He slings it over his hips and secures the Master Sword to his back. His remaining pieces of gear, all Gerudo, catch the sunlight and gleam impatiently to be retrieved. The shield is Urbrosa’s, the only original Champion’s artifact to survive the fall under Hyrule Castle, because it hadn’t been with him at the time. 

“Are you really using his weapons?”  

The katana and bow are weapons Link hastily snatched off the chasm floor when the dragon burst out of the Demon King’s throat. At the time, it had been in desperation, a means to stay armed during the fight since battling Ganondorf had proven unrelenting. Viciously fast and cunning, he used everything at his disposal against Link, including weapons laced with Gloom to induce sickness and mirroring Link’s own attack patterns. The fight depleted almost all of Link’s strength and supplies.  

They’ve since proven to be strong weapons and, oddly, a form of unexpected comfort to him. The Demon King is dead. It is proof always within reach, across his back, on his hip, that he’s done one thing right.

—

Tulin does his best to ignore the Purah Pad, which buzzes twice as they soar down from the Great Sky Island. It’s likely Purah asking for an update on the mission, or his dad wondering where he is, but he shrugs off his guilt and keeps his eyes forward. As a sage, he knows he ought to follow Purah’s orders, but as Link’s friend, he knows an ambush like that will be the quickest way for them to lose him again. Maybe for good. It’s clear Link has been staying off the grid for a reason. 

The other sages are just going to have to trust him. Staying by Link’s side as long as he can was their best chance of figuring out what he is up to.

Tulin glances out over Hyrule. It’s been five years. Monster populations are dwindling. The Rito never stopped singing, but their voices echo loud and unfettered with the wind now. He overheard his mom saying this year’s hatch could be the largest in generations. 

Hyrule thrives in peacetime.

If only the princess were here to see it. Not only because she was special to Link, but because she’s the kind of person who deserves this kind of calm. His dad says she’s the reason Calamity Ganon didn’t gobble up the whole world a century ago. He only met her a handful of times during those busy few years between the Calamity’s defeat and the Upheaval, but she seemed real nice. 

To make the sacrifice she did to get the Master Sword repaired and back to Link, she really must have been. Pure good, down to her core.

But while the princess never returned, her spirit is everywhere he looks. Silent Princess, once the rarest flower in all of Hyrule, grows from Hebra down to East Necluda now. Tulin even saw some sprouting out of the sand on the cool spiral in Akkala the last time he was there. 

They are setting up more schools like the one she founded in Hateno and they built a memorial close to New Hyrule Center just for her. He stops every time he’s in Central Hyrule and asks her to watch over his parents. And Link.  

Link just hasn’t been the same. Not since they defeated the Demon King.

Tulin notices it most when they are all together, although that hasn’t happened in a while. It’s like there is a shadow looming over Link in every happy moment. Tulin used to think that shadow was the Demon King’s, but Impa says it’s the princess’s. She thinks Link is trying to figure out a way to bring the princess back. 

But how? 

He wishes Link would just talk to him.

He sends a quick message back to Purah (and his dad) to let them know he is alright and still searching shortly after they land in West Necluda. They travel in silence for a full day and half, but that’s alright with him. He always learns a thing or two from Link just by watching him.

For example, the benefit of earning the favor of a pink fairy rather than just snatching it up. They are rumored to be good luck, which is why people try to catch them in jars like fireflies, but because of watching Link, he knows they can steal you back from death with a kiss if they like you enough. 

So far, he’s been able to figure out Link is gathering supplies. In addition to charming a fairy into his pouch, he’s grabbed some medicinal plants, mighty thistle, and about two dozen bright bloom seeds. The rest is food, which is nothing out of the ordinary, although it’s mostly nuts and other bland dry goods that travel well. It’s a weird mix, but he’s never been one to question Link’s methods. He’s a little thinner than Tulin remembers, but he knows better than anyone how to survive in the Wild.

Hyrule is a place of patterns. Cycles. Link taught him this, too. The people, the creatures, the weather—everything has rhythm here. Recognizing patterns is the key to how Link works; how he’s able to help, how he finds things no one else can find, solves problems no one else can solve. It’s probably how he’s been able to stay hidden even though they’ve become more and more connected by Purah’s tech. 

So it doesn’t really worry Tulin that Link gazes up at the empty sky every so often with a distant look in his eye, or that he insists they search every cave they come across, or that he is hoarding bright bloom seeds. It doesn’t even worry Tulin, although he doesn’t like it, that he carries a dangerous weapon on his hip. These are all things he’s known Link to do, even before he disappeared. It’s a part of his pattern.

He starts to worry when Link leaves the woods. 

When, after avoiding any interaction with people for over two years, he suddenly makes his way to the bustling Dueling Peaks stable. He hands the owner a pouch stuffed with gold rupees and whistles loud into the wind. Bear, his most beloved horse, the one who has been with him since before he helped Tulin’s dad tame Vah Medoh, appears over a distant hill and loyally gallops toward them. 

Link has always been affection toward his steeds, but the careful way he strokes Bear’s mane, the way he presses his forehead against the flat of the horse’s nose and sighs…

It looks an awful lot like a goodbye. A real one.

Notes:

In addition to most everything else with this story, I’m making up the detail a sage has to die in order to be free/released of their secret stone. Again, feels like accepting a stone needed more significant consequences. Even if you don’t swallow it–it owns your life.

Tremendous thank you to @zeldaelmo and @cooking_with_hailstones for beta-reading this chapter. It literally fought me at almost every paragraph. I assumed it would be easy to write since it is the linktober 2023 comic, but it needed to be changed around and condensed in text to flow.

[edited 7/21/2025 - minor clean up.]

Chapter 4

Link knows he needs to move fast once they depart from the Dueling Peaks stable. The change in Tulin is subtle but adept, only obvious to Link because he’s the one who taught him how to be a decent ranger of the Wild. He can’t help but feel a swell of pride in his haste, regardless of how irritating it is to be watched so closely. 

Five years ago, Tulin was the only sage who regularly used his avatar to visit Link. The sage’s avatars functioned under Link’s authority through some kind of telepathic connection to Rauru’s arm. He could think the word “attack” and Riju’s avatar would dash off toward an enemy with twin scimitars raised high; could send Yunobo rocketing into a pocket of zonaite with a nod; order Sidon to surround him in a shield of water by flexing his hand; unleash a flurry of Tulin’s arrows with a whistle. It took a little getting used to, but it was wildly convenient when the fighting picked up. 

A sage could also assume command of their avatar through meditative connection, but it required consistent focus. Yunobo struggled the most, like Daruk before him, and stopped trying after he inconveniently blasted off like a cannon one too many times. 

It came easier to Sidon and Riju, but they needed to be actively present for their respective kingdoms the majority of the time. Tulin, on the other hand, was free and eager to join Link for long periods. Teba actually thanked Link as it encouraged Tulin to train his mind, not just his wings. 

The sages couldn’t speak through their avatars, but Tulin learned to sign at a young age and quickly figured out he could use that to communicate with Link while they traveled. He asked so many questions, so often, that Link got into the habit of offering advice freely.

He still catches himself doing it now and again even though he’s been traveling alone for years. 

Those innocent questions. Conversations about the underrated utility of a korok leaf, or how to hunt a target in bad weather—Link didn’t realize how valuable they were back then. There is little to keep him from his thoughts nowadays with the rapid decline in monster populations. The particularly challenging creatures that appeared after the Upheaval have completely disappeared from the surface. Sure, facing down the three grinning heads of a gleeok or a blossom of gloom hands was no picnic, but he would take that over the paralyzing grip of despair that finds him now in quiet moments when his mind is left to wander.

The front gate to Hateno Village inches closer with every step. It’s hard to miss, adorned with vibrantly colored toadstools and a freshly painted welcome sign that also now advertises the town as ‘Home of the Hylian Tomato Pizza!’. Not ‘Home of Princess Zelda’, or ‘Hateno’s First School for Children’, which she founded. No, the pride of the village that survived the Calamity and the Upheaval is a doughy circle slathered with crushed tomatoes and curdled milk. 

He rolls his eyes and glances up at Tulin who glides on the wind just above him. His attention snaps away from Link, seesawing his wings hyper-casually. Eventually, when he finds Link’s eye again, he tries to look surprised, but Link can detect the worry underneath. That’s an advanced lesson, one Link still struggles with. It’s hard to stay neutral when the target is important to you. When you’re desperate. When you’re reaching . Nearly cost Link his life when he rushed straight into a very obvious trap over a puppet. 

He pauses and moves his Sheikah hand up, fingers forming a circle over his right eye. Toward the end, they came up with a quick sign for when Tulin was present inside his avatar since Link left it activated almost constantly. A way to say ‘I’m here’ efficiently, especially in the heartbeat before a fight got nasty, so Link knew he didn’t need to waste energy concentrating on commanding Tulin’s avatar.

Tulin’s expression immediately softens. He dives a little closer to Link’s shoulder and flashes the sign back. 

Link smirks and leads them off the road. He follows the rocky path along the outskirts of the village until they reach the wooden bridge to her house. It’s overgrown and untended, grass nearly as tall as the doorknob, with thick green vines that stretch across the face of the building and cascade off the side of the roof. He had hoped Claria or Karin would continue tending to the place while he was gone, but perhaps they are too busy now that Hateno is bustling with visitors hungry for farming and fashion alike.

Have people already forgotten this was hers?

He scowls and makes for the well. It is overgrown the same as her house. He grits his teeth, tears back the claws of ivy threaded into the stonework, and vaults inside. The air is damp and mineral and dark, but he doesn’t need the light down here. He committed the number of steps it takes to reach her chair to memory a long time ago.

“You really built this?” Zelda glances over her shoulder at Link. Her hair, freshly cut, swings across the top of her shoulders with the movement. The lightness of it almost makes him want to cut his, but she once mentioned how handsome she finds him now that he’s let it grow long. 

She’s talking about the desk in front of her. He leans against the wall and smiles. Bolson, who promised to keep the well a secret, advised Link cherry wood would be the best material to use given the dampness of the air. He also recommended Link make a bookshelf and install some flooring to give the space ‘a little elegance’. He’s already moved some of her books down onto the bookshelf, along with a new copper inkwell and fresh quills. 

“Is…is this the rug from my old study?”

He glances down at the faded crimson rug at her feet. The edges are tattered and torn where he cut it free from the parts that were unsalvageable. He did his best to scrub a century of elements and mildew, but the border of ornate ivy and fleur-de-lis is more brown than brilliant gold. 

Link looks at her and frowns.

“No, no. I love it, really. My…my mother actually had it made for me.” He didn’t know that. Maybe he did, once. 

What he does know for certain is how sharp an unexpected piece of the past can be, but her smile is genuine and warm with gratitude. Link releases his breath and pushes off the wall to make his way over to her. 

“I can’t believe you did this for me.” She splays her hands eagerly over the top of the desk. “I’ll move all my research down here so we can start using the table for meals again.” 

He shrugs and steps directly behind her. He didn’t do it for the kitchen table or to get her research out of the house. It, like Hateno house, is for her to do with as she pleases. A sense of ownership. Some roots after a century of stasis. 

She tilts her head back into his chest so she’s looking up at him from the chair. “Thank you.”

He smiles and peers over her, his hair forming a curtain around their heads. “Just remember to come home at the end of the day.”

She opens her mouth and then snaps it shut. They both know she’ll fall asleep down here most nights. He might as well build a bed. Her eyes twinkle with mischief and she quickly threads her hands up around the back of his neck. “Or, you could always come down here?”

His hand lingers over the top of the backrest of her chair. Light from a cluster of bright bloom seeds growing in the corner starts to bleed into the darkness around him, but it reveals nothing but cobwebs and dust and emptiness. 

—

Tulin hates being underground. It’s a feeling shared by most of the Rito. There is an old story that says the Rito weren’t always born with wings. In order to earn them, they needed to travel through a fiery mountain cavern on foot to appease the spirit of the Sky. It’s said the fear of that pilgrimage, which the Sky spirit eventually did away with so the Rito could leave the mother island and settle in Hyrule, remains in the heart of every Rito. His father says it’s just a story to keep fledglings out of the dangerous caves on Hebra Mountain, but the legend of the Stormwind Ark turned out to be true. Besides, being able to point to a source outside of himself is easier to stomach, especially with the pressure of being the youngest sage. 

The well beside the overgrown house in Hateno Village isn’t fiery or treacherous, but it unnerves Tulin in a different way. It’s lonely. Sad. An unmarked grave. He can see Link’s outline in front of what looks like a small desk built into the cave wall, and he can’t decide if Link’s seen a ghost or if he’s becoming one.

He wraps his wings around himself and takes a few nervous steps, talons clicking against the floorboards set into the dirt. “Link?”

Link straightens abruptly like he’s snapping out of a dream. He doesn’t face Tulin. Instead, Tulin hears him clear his throat while he pivots and makes his way to the back of the cave where a bundle of bright bloom seeds glow dimly. 

A hot-foot suddenly hops out of the dark, sending Tulin’s heart into his throat. He flutter-runs the rest of the way to Link, the sound of his wings flapping bouncing off the walls while his talons kick up dust and mud. He takes a knee in front of the seeds and curses under his breath. It makes Link chuckle, and he instantly feels a little less embarrassed; a little less worried he’s ruined the first chance they’ve had to talk since they left the Dueling Peaks Stable. 

He’s remained quiet the entire trip here, but not from a shortage of words. Rather, out of concern he’ll pick the wrong ones. It’s something he’s never needed to worry about before with Link, but ever since he found him on the sky island, it’s clung to every one of his thoughts.

Everything is all wrong. Too tense. A trap ready to spring. 

“Y’know, you grab these every time we see them.” A question about inventory seems safe enough. “Why do you need so many?”

The light from the remaining bright bloom seeds illuminates the underbelly of Link’s face in the dark. It makes the shadows under his eyes deeper, sunken, like he’s unfathomably tired or dead. 

‘ Just always a good idea,’ he signs.

Tulin fights the urge to ask why and maintains eye contact. It’s something he’s watched Link do that siphons information out of people. Silence drives people mad; the uncertainty of it, the vastness. All Link has to do is wait a minute longer than necessary, and more often than not, people expose their deepest, most embarrassing secrets just to avoid another agonizing second of his silence. 

It feels a little silly to turn it on Link, like trying to drown a fish, but he’s desperate.

And for a second…it looks like it might actually work. He can see the words in Link’s throat, the way his jaw sets into a hard line against them. 

Talk to me, Tulin wants to say. You can trust me. Just tell me what’s going on! 

Link leans forward, but instead of speaking, he scrunches his nose up and sniffs him. Tulin jerks his head back in shock and nearly loses his balance when another hot-foot leaps high over his head to avoid being squished. He spreads his wings out in a defensive arch to fend off anymore rogue frogs and balks at Link.

Link pinches his nose.

“What do you mean I stink?” Tulin squawks.

Link casually rises to his feet, dusts off the front of his person, and makes for the ladder. Deep down, Tulin knows this is one way to disarm the conversation trap, but he can’t help but get caught up in the absurdity of it—can’t help but lean in. He follows quickly after Link, flapping his wings hard enough to stir up a sizable cloud of dust and dirt. 

“ I stink? No, you are just trying to change the subject by insulting me, and it won’t work because first off, you are the one who stinks. I preen my feathers every—”

“Fine. We both stink.”

Tulin freezes. Link is halfway up the ladder with his head craned over his shoulder and both hands occupied by rungs. He can’t remember the last time Link spoke out loud to him. 

“C’mon, Tulin. Time for a birdbath.” Link hauls back and catapults himself the rest of the way out.

He’s talking. He’s joking. He’s smiling. Everything about him in this moment would seem innocuous to anyone else, but to the trained eye—to Tulin’s eye—it’s the kind of change he’s been dreading. 

This is a bright red sky in the morning, dead silence in Great Hyrule Forest, an unkindness of ravens in an open field. This is a sign. An omen. 

It means he’s run out of time. 

—

They bathe in the nearby pond in complete silence. Tulin watches Link furiously scrub himself clean, scraping at his scalp with his hand and then dunking his head in the water over and over until he’s blonde again. He lathers his skin with soap, rinses, and then spends the rest of the time knuckling the scars he can reach until his skin is pink and splotchy.

Tulin’s dad still has to stretch his leg where Divine Beast Vah Medoh caught him all those years ago to keep the stiffness away. The bare skin before him is a map of injuries.

What must it be to wake up in a body like that? Older than it seems, more broken than should be possible? 

When Link is satisfied, he crawls out of the water, dries himself off, and reattaches the metal arm to what is left of his. He spins the arm from the elbow joint around twice, as if to test the fit, before cocking his shoulder back and locking it into place. It’s cool and insanely useful from the features Purah boasts about, but Tulin never realized how much it makes Link look like a weapon. 

Link gathers his hair back and begins braiding it into a single plait. Tulin always assumed he started wearing the style out of convenience, it’s what most the Rito do with the wind, but then one of the sages mentioned the princess often wore braids, too. Tulin only met her a few times before she disappeared, so he didn’t know it was a signature.

He asked his dad about it, but he just got a sad look and told Tulin not everything needs an explanation.

The braid, the arm, the scars. It all makes Tulin wonder: How much is too much to ask of a person? Of a soul? He wonders this as he watches Link meticulously fold the blue tunic and leather armor he’s notorious for, his signature, and place it carefully on the dusty bed in the loft of the overgrown house beside the well. 

He wonders this as Link begins to wrap himself carefully—like he’s weaving a spell—with the ribbons of the color of warm pyre ash. He covers his non-Sheikah arm, both legs, throat, and half of his face in the fabric, and then pulls on robes embroidered with strange symbols and centipede-like creatures. He keeps the long pointed hood down and drapes his neck and one ankle in a dark wooden parure that resembles prayer beads. It is unlike anything Tulin has ever seen before. 

It looks out of place in the daylight. Nocturnal, if fabric could hold such a preference.

He continues to wonder and wonder and wonder until, after following the road west of Hateno Village toward Meda Mountain, Link pauses before one of the dormant entrances into the depths and looks up at the empty sky again.

The air shifts around the chasm opening, like the earth itself is letting out a breath, and the long tails of fabric on Link’s armor flutter behind him. 

Tulin digs his talons into the dirt, pulls his bow off his shoulder, and utters the only thing he can think to say. “L-link?”

—

The Light Dragon has been following them since they arrived at Zelda’s house. When Link finally reaches the chasm entrance, it lets out a moan that rattles his chest, circles the sky above his head, and slithers down to the earth. His breath quickens, hot air trapped in his mouth by the half-mask of his armor. The set came from the depths. A gift from the mysterious Bargainers, covered in a dead language and depictions of beasts that look like they once ruled the dark. He always felt the mask protected him down there, perhaps not willingly, but bound by whatever ancient enchantment is woven into its thread.

Without Rauru’s arm to unlock the lightroots he skipped or a means of teleporting out once he’s deep inside, he’ll take all the help he can get. He has no idea what he will find there now…or what might find him. He hasn’t descended since the final battle. 

One of the Light Dragon’s massive eyes fixes on him. Angry violet and storm-gray swirl around the pupil blown wide enough for him to see his reflection. A shadow version of himself stares back at him as she dives head first into the chasm. 

He smells cherry wood and turned-up earth and still water. A cool rise of air curls around his head—

Or, you could always come down here?

“Zel—” he starts. 

“L-Link?”

Tulin stands, looking panic-stricken and very small, a few paces back. He glances between Link and the chasm a few times, growing paler as the answer dawns on him. His beak opens and closes, feathers wringing around his bow so tight Link can hear the wood groan. 

“No, Tulin. You can’t come with me,” Link shakes his head. 

“I just want to help,” Tulin whimpers. 

“Not where I’m going,” Link continues, “not this time.”

Tears swim in Tulin’s eyes, but he makes no further effort to object. 

“Take care of Hyrule for me,” Link says, trying to keep his tone even. 

All Tulin can manage is a nod. 

Six months ago, Impa asked him how far he was willing to go for love. He turns back and glares down into the chasm. The Light Dragon has already disappeared. It’s a consuming darkness that waits for him. 

After he does this—he stands on the very edge of the crater, so close he can feel the breath of the darkness, hear it hitch in anticipation of his offering—there will be no turning back. But when Zelda swallowed the secret stone there was no turning back, either. That final, horrifying image of her; her body swelling with power, knuckles bleached white aground the Master Sword, the ripple scales across her skin, her spine stretching and twisting and bending.

He bet the agonizing seconds before the Light Dragon burst forth from inside her felt like an eternity. 

How far will he go for love? Wherever she’s leading him, whatever it takes, he’ll do what needs to be done to save her.

The chasm yawns wide as he draws in breath and readies himself. 

And then he leaps.

Notes:

As always, shout out to ZeldaElmo and cooking-with-hailstones for their eyes on this chapter.

Into the Depths…my favorite part of TotK…here we go!

(7/22/25 - minor clean up grammar and sentence flow)

Chapter 5

Notes:

As always, @ZeldaElmo and @cooking-with-hailstones are my phenomenal second eyes. Thank you both so much.

finally....way down we go!

As he sinks deeper and deeper into the blackness, leaving Tulin and the light of the surface behind, Link remembers exactly what it is that set him on edge the first time he descended into this place.

Everyone assumes the darkness is the most unsettling part of the depths. It’s certainly disorientating and eerie, different from the impermanent shadow of nightfall up above. Consuming and unnaturally aware; it’s the kind of dark that would crawl under your skin and change you if it could. It follows no cycle, knows no end, and still, it is not the thing that unnerves Link the most.

It’s the warmth.

Whereas the sky islands above Hyrule are unbearably cold, the depths are swampy. Humid—with a sourceless wind that whistles like breath across miles and miles of nothingness. Like you’re standing in a throat. It’s what propelled him to accomplish only what was absolutely necessary down here during the search for Zelda five years ago. 

He hadn’t imagined a scenario in which building a map would be helpful, or that he would have any reason at all to come back once they defeated the Demon King.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

When he is finally free of the narrow tunnel that leads into the underground, only distinguishable by a sudden and striking awareness of the vastness all around him, the wind tugs at his paraglider and begins to guide him down. It pulls him back and forth across the dark, his paraglider drifting like a feather fallen off a Rito’s wing. 

He cranes his head from side to side, squinting against the black for the blue-green glow of the Light Dragon’s horns, but she is nowhere to be found. 

Panic prickles across his chest. Link grips the paraglider with the Sheikah hand, locking the fingers tight around the handle, and drops his other hand into his satchel. The lack of an even hold on the glider immediately sends him plummeting toward a floor he cannot see. His stomach drops at the same time his heart slides into his throat, but he channels all his focus into the fingers in the pouch and, tapping into the magic of the korok, summons a bright bloom seed into his hand. 

He quickly lets it drop and reaches back up for the open glider handle. Wind catches the fabric and the paraglider twirls him around a few times like a wild mare fighting its tame. 

When the momentum finally settles, he searches the emptiness below him for the bright bloom. For a moment there is nothing, the glow of the seed lost to the black. Then, much further below him than he anticipated, the bloom suddenly sprouts. It sends a small ripple of light out around the spot where it landed, like a single droplet of rain on dark water, revealing a solid piece of mossy earth for him to land on. Link aims the nose of the paraglider down to quicken his pace, eager to feel the ground under his feet so he can properly search for the Light Dragon. 

Without her guidance, he has no idea what direction he needs to go. 

It takes him a full minute to touch down. He immediately retrieves another seed and chucks it off into the distance. When it blossoms upon landing, the glow illuminates a long arch of a climbing root. They form networks of bridges across the parts of the depths he has seen; helpful if you can see where they lead, deadly should you misstep and fall off. They often stretch over wide, bottomless craters. He throws another seed, aiming for the edge of the light, and, sure enough, it vanishes into the blackness.

Sweat pools into his palms. He doesn’t have the safety net of a hasty teleportation mid-fall any longer. The paraglider can save him so long as he can hold on, but what good is a soft landing if there is no way out? Just an agonizingly slow and lonely death in the dark after his rations are gone and the last of the light goes out?

He’ll need to be especially generous with his bright blooms.

He closes the paraglider and straps it across his back, fingers brushing against the hilt of the Master Sword for comfort. It doesn’t offer any light, hasn’t glowed since the Demon King’s defeat, but his breath finds an anchor in his chest at the familiar feeling of braided leather beneath his fingers.

He checks his belt and adjusts the beads around his neck. The intricate armor is mercifully light, but the layered design traps the warmth in the air against him. Hot breath seeps into the fabric of his half-mask, the ribbon already sticky against his throat, but he won’t dare touch it. It filters the air, preventing flecks of dust the size of cucco eggs from clogging his lungs.

You’ll get used to it, he tells himself stubbornly. You survived Eventide in your underwear. 

The outline of an inactive Lightroot in the distance, otherwise useless to him, becomes a marker to keep from getting turned around. He starts in the direction of it, using the climbing root to cross over the crater hidden in the darkness. 

Instead of wasting bright bloom seeds trying to find where the canyon ends, he pulls back the hanging sleeve of the depths tunic and holds the Sheikah arm out in front of him like a candle. The core produces a small radius of light, barely enough to see his feet, but he manages to keep steady and sure of his steps by crouching low.

When he reaches solid ground again, he tosses a bright bloom to make sure the next fifty yards are clear and searches the black sky for any sign of the Light Dragon. 

Heat creeps up his neck toward his ears. The dark presses in against him, his gear suddenly heavy and constricting. He spins and scans the dark where he came from. The Light Dragon can’t have gotten far, but she could have flown in any direction… 

He curses and runs a hand through his bangs. Was he already lost? He’d been lost before, the feeling his only friend that first year after he emerged from the Shrine of Resurrection without his memories, but this is different. The world that reached for him back then was an overwhelming and foreign place, but at least it had been open. Inviting. Bright. And she was there. Zelda’s voice a constant whisper in his ear. What he wouldn’t give to hear her voice again.

Link drops his hand and sighs.

He starts in the direction of the dim Lightroot, another seed ready in his hand for when he inevitably loses the light. The familiar outline of tall, looming trees shaped like shepherd’s crooks emerge from the shadows over his head, though they offer no guidance. He spots a bomb flower and some muddlebuds among the bizarre flora growing across in the verdant soil, but he doesn’t stop to harvest anything. He needs to keep moving, and he doesn’t like the idea of explosives or toxic spores jostling around with the food on his hip. At least with the Purah Pad, he could see how the supplies were sorted. When he had asked Hestu how the magic pouch worked, the korok replied with a dance and a single word that burst from him with confetti: “Trust!”

Only a little ironic coming from spirits that are perpetually lost and notoriously skittish.

—

Link moves through the darkness for what feels like an eternity. Without the sun, he can only tell time has passed by the fatigue building up in his legs. He once traveled for two full days without rest, but the spikes of adrenaline brought on by the precarious novelty of his surroundings and the persistent lack of any visual on the Light Dragon have thrown off his self-awareness. Desperation can make ten minutes feel like ten hours. 

The last five years without Zelda have ached like a lifetime. 

He pulls out a handful of dried stamella shrooms from his pouch, parts the ribbon of his mask with a finger, and pops them into his mouth. He chews until his tongue start to tingle and then swallows, a current rippling down his throat and out toward his tired limbs. It is no stamina elixir, but it’ll do. He’ll save those for if he really needs them. He doesn’t plan to rest until he finds an abandoned mine or some other secure structure to climb and tuck away into, but it feels like suicide to venture too far away from the dormant Lightroots he’s been using as guideposts through the dark. 

The decision to adjust his strategy with the bright bloom seeds was made shortly after he reached the first Lightroot. To safely navigate the terrain, he needs to be generous with the light, and he also needs to be smart. Bright blooms take a long while to go out once they blossom. He once discovered one still aglow in a cave a month after he’d explored it. The good news: despite the limited number of activated Lightroots and the lack of a map, he’ll have a trail of bright blooms marking his journey.

The bad news: he’ll have a trail of bright blooms marking his journey.

He has yet to see any life outside the vegetation and some deep fireflies. Still, he finds himself pausing every so often to stare beyond the glow of the bright blooms, probing the darkness, waiting for a pair of eyes to blink back at him. For the shadows to slither under his gaze. The new abominations that appeared after the Upheaval have all disappeared from the surface with the Gloom. The noxious substance, not unlike malice and the Calamity, seemed to connect the Gleeoks, gloom hands, aerocudas, and like-likes to the Demon King. Upon his defeat, each withered and died like rootless weeds in the sun. 

But that was on the surface. And while the Gloom appears to have also evaporated in the depths—the only evidence it ever was the patches of barren, scorch-black dirt scattered across the earth beneath his feet—he’d encountered monsters of a different kind down here five years ago. Ones hungry for light, mercifully corralled by the pools of Gloom, though not beholden to it, and others drawn to the depths from above, seeking refuge and retribution in the dark.

He’d found a vicious sickle wedged into the bark of a feather-branch tree a few miles back. When he wrenched it free and inspected it, the blade was clean of rust and moss. Decidedly sharp. Rage seethed out of him like mist. The Yiga earned his ire when he recalled they’d tried to assassinate Zelda a century ago, but when they took aim at her reputation after the Upheaval, they provoked his fury. They’d toyed with his madness, brazen enough to wear her face, defiling her good name with lies. When Link finally caught one of the mimics, her likeness dissolving in a puff of crimson smoke and a cruel ring of laughter, he crushed the pillar of the Yiga’s throat with his bare hands.

Link had never been one to kill for sport. He was respectful of any game he caught, and granted a swift end for his enemies, but there was no denying the pleasure he felt hunting down Kohga after that. It was the only personal quest, outside of finding Zelda, that he fully indulged in. It brought him into the depths, but only for a short while. 

Kohga was wicked, but he was also stupid. Predictable. Careless. It did not take Link long to find him. To end him. His lackeys scattered after that, the few that remained above slinking into the shadows. He can’t recall the last time he’d heard news of Yiga meddling in Hyrule. Maybe they disappeared with the Gloom as well? Or ended up trapped down here after Link defeated the Demon King. 

He rotates the Sheikah arm in front of his face and opens the palm wide. The core pulses icy blue, magic summoning the sickle into his hand from the database within the arm. It’s his weapon now until it breaks, although Robbie assured him Sheikah magic increases the durability of any weapon he scans tenfold. 

He has used Yiga weapons before. They all look similar, viciously cold steel with red and gold accents. This one has a traditional crimson tassel fashioned to the circular pommel, along with a peculiar wooden charm. It looks like something a child might have made. Simple. Maybe a fairy? Age and wear have badly chipped the eggshell-white paint. There is an empty socket in the center that looks like it once held a gemstone.

He’s so busy inspecting it, trying to discern what color the wings were once painted—periwinkle or maybe baby blue—that he almost squashes the Silent Princess beneath his boot. 

A strangled cry bursts through the half-mask. The effort to avoid the flower at the last second nearly snaps his ankle. He stumbles, and the sickle slips from his hand, clanging loudly against a stone.

The Silent Princess looks almost ethereal in the depths—white as lace, with a summer-sky blue heart. A slender, vibrant green stem boasts two frayed leaves that frame the velvety petals like hands in worship. The world tunnels in, and he drops to his knees, shuffling forward to cage his shaking fingers around it. 

A bubble of laughter bursts from his throat so suddenly he almost chokes on it. His eyes dart to the korok pouch on his hip and he laughs again. Talk about trust. It was a risk coming down here, and while he’s no stranger it, this one was weighted heavily against him. 

It cannot be a coincidence you are the only one who can see her, Link. 

It would taste a lie to say the words hadn’t lingered with him. Hadn’t begun to fester without any sign of the Light Dragon in the dark.

“Because I’m the only one who is looking,” he repeats, his voice quaking but sure. With careful fingers, he plucks the Silent Princess and guides it against his chest. The familiar scent—simple and clean, like rainwater on a meadow—fills his nostrils through the ribbons of his mask. It clears his head faster than a tincture distilled with a hundred stamina shrooms. 

—

More Silent Princess flowers wait for him in the dark. After he finds the third, he has a pretty decent idea of where she is leading him and quickens his pace.

The depths under Central Hyrule, where he activated several Lightroots five years ago, are like a completely different world. It’s still dark, like how midnight is still dark even with a pale full moon high in the sky, only the sky here remains an endless and empty swirl of black mist. Each unlocked Lightroot pushes the shadow back across the terrain in a wide circle. 

Besides the shepherd’s crook trees that curl over his head, he can now make out the tops of the trees with high branches that form tiers of rounded organic platforms normally eclipsed by the dark. Bomb flowers and muddlebuds and puffshrooms grow in greater abundance across the floor. The air is lighter, the temperature more bearable. The jungles of Faron during the evening instead of midday. He suspects whatever magic is woven into the depths armor isn’t necessary when the light is on, so he peels the half mask away from his face with a sigh of relief. 

A stone complex welcomes him with bouquets of snow-white cap mushrooms and eternally lit Zonai lanterns. Two colossal dragon heads carved into the stonework frame the entrance to the forge within the abandoned Central Hyrule mine. A construct resting beside the blazing kiln comes to life as soon as Link steps into the space. Tendrils of blue-green magic thread like veins through the rings of its neck, lifting the stone head up to look at him.

“Welcome,” it says. “Would you like me to process your materials?”

The shelves behind the construct are overflowing with charges; the buzzing of the energy so condensed it sounds like a courser bee’s nest. Link has never seen a forge’s inventory so full. 

The construct follows Link’s gaze and beeps a few times. “These charges are reserved.” 

Link tilts his head curiously and steps forward to get a closer look. He has no need for Zonai energy without Rauru’s arm, but something cutting across the glow of the charge catches his eye. The construct glides up beside him, beeping insistently.

“I am unable to accept ore in exchange for these processed materials,” it says flatly. “I can process new materials if you require them.”

Thick crimson ribbons criss-cross over the shelf. At the very center, a paper talisman bearing an inverted eye peeks at him from between the fabric. 

Yiga, Link’s thoughts hiss.

“Does anything catch your interest?” The construct says from behind him and then, as if remembering the deviation is its usual script, “I am unable to accept ore in exchange for these processed materials. I can process new materials if—”

Link draws the Master Sword. The construct lets out a series of alarmed chirps and collapses in on itself defensively. Link turns in a slow circle, blade held out in front of him, waiting for the shrill of laughter that often precedes a Yiga ambush. 

When nothing happens, he keeps the blade in his hand and stalks down the stairs to the Bargainer’s chamber. More crimson ribbon is drawn between two pillars at the entrance to the chamber, several talismans with warnings scribbled onto the paper tucked along the pitiful barricade. 

Besides the ribbon, which flutters to his feet at the slightest hint of pressure from the Sword, there is no evidence of Yiga occupation in the mine. Their hideouts are usually crowded with supplies and lined with teeth—wooden spikes and patrolling guards and vandalized travelers deity statues. But the chamber of the Bargainer beneath the Central Hyrule mine is just as Link remembers. Spacious and uncluttered and dimly lit with a few Zonai sconces and standing lanterns. Two elevator shafts on either side of the room disappear into the darkness of the sunken floor. Three narrow bridges stretch over the pit toward the center platform, where the head of the Bargainer sits atop a massive stone torso carved into the rock.

Directly in front of it, growing out of a long crack in the stone, is another Silent Princess.

His mind’s eye soars out of him and thrusts through the ceiling of the chamber. It flies up through the swirling black mist, through layers of darkness and bedrock and dirt until he’s back on the surface high above the Great Plateau. All of Hyrule stretches out around him, land and sky and shore he knows better than the scars scattered across his skin. The broken cathedral rests before him, spires pointing like fingers up to the sky where, not too far from it, the Great Sky island floats in the clouds. The twin Temples of Time glisten in the sunlight, the shade cast by their structures dark and long across the earth. Their darkness joins together directly beneath him, marking the spot where he came in shadow.

Shadow. 

His mind’s eye snaps back into place like a rubber band. He forgets about the Yiga and scrambles across the center bridge toward the Bargainer. When he kneels to collect the Silent Princess, the four eyes Link returned to the Bargainer five years ago flash to life, pupils a swirl of dark blue flame.The Bargainer does not budge, but the chill that crawls across Link’s shoulders lets him know he’s being measured.

“The one who heard my voice and returned my sight,” a deep voice sounds both far and near. “Last we met, I bestowed upon you my good fortune in gratitude.” A pause. Link swears he can sense a smile twitch behind the unmoving stone mouth. “Has it seen you well in the time that has passed?”

Link straightens and retrieves the Silent Princess he gathered. With the one at the Bargainer’s altar, he’s collected four. One for each of the Bargainer’s wide, piercing eyes. His pulse drums loud between his ears, breath ragged as if he’d been sprinting, as he lays the flowers out in front of the statue with a trembling hand.

The blue flame flashes again, and this time the patches of slender mushrooms and silver moss that adorn the statue’s shoulders glow as well. Some internal engine triggered. A tremor shakes the chamber, water and dust cascading off the stalactite from the ceiling down over him. The tails of the depths tunic ripple at Link’s sides. He smells limestone and copper and overturned soil. 

Something cold washes over him, a visitor shuffling with greedy hands through the restricted archives in his head. Memories drift to the surface of his mind: Puppet Zelda fissuring and dissolving into smoke as if she were a piece of paper held over flame; Link falling to his knees in the sand on Rist Peninsula; the blissfully ignorant ovation that greeted him as he staggered into Lookout Landing after the battle with the Demon King; Impa’s sad, knowing stare; dust floating through the light of the bedroom window in Hateno House; flashes of the various ruins across the surface, lost symbols and crumbling statues and presumptuous epitaphs that offer nothing but shade; people laughing, busy shopping and gossiping and fiddling with new tech, while the Light Dragon slithers across the sky overhead, unnoticed; his reflection in the glassy eye of the Light Dragon before it disappears into the chasm.

Link shutters violently. The connection breaks, his mind his own again, and he immediately wraps his arms around his chest to keep himself from crumbling. Every inch of him aches. Exposed like a nerve. He gasps, unable to summon his mask of indifference, the emotional weight of the last five years drawn to the surface and demanding to be realized upon his face. 

Another low gust wind pushes into the chamber. “Your enduring spirit is heavy now with bitterness and grief.”

He glares at the Bargainer, eyes burning with the tears that threaten to river down his face.

“My brethren and I have no pity for the sorrows of mortals. Did you come to make an offer? Or a request?” 

His voice is a whisper. Hoarse, like he’s been shouting. Like he’s been doing nothing but screaming for five long years. “I seek the entrance to the Shadow Temple.” 

For a moment, there is nothing but stillness. The sourceless wind, the rustling of trees, the drone of the forge above him, the distant hum of firefly wings—all of it goes silent as if the depths itself holds its breath. 

The stoney face of the Bargainer remains fixed, staring out over Link’s head at the chamber doorway. “What is it you seek there within, eternal wanderer?”

The doorway to Hyrule Castle Sanctum, the Demon King’s twisted throne. He hates that this is too familiar—that he’s needed to stand in this spot more than once. 

“I want to save her.” 

He feels the eyes behind the stone face measuring him once again. What they see when they look at him—a hero, a failure, a pawn—Link doesn’t care. He’ll become whatever he needs to be in order to fulfill his destiny. 

“We can give you what it is you desire…” the Bargainer answers finally, a dozen voices in one as the statue’s brethren echo a response all across the depths. Those same icy hands that sifted through Link’s memory reach for him once again. This time, they grab hold of his shoulders, as if to make sure he is focused. Listening. “... for a price.”

Notes:

[7/22/25- clean up way too many run-ons]

Chapter 6

Tulin watches Link disappear into the chasm like a star blinking out of the sky. He never stood a chance of stopping him. Link’s determination has always been a gale-force wind. You only have two choices: take cover or soar with it. 

Problem is, Tulin had been willing to soar (or, rather, descend). Even when he saw where Link was going. Even though he didn’t have a clue as to why he was going. Tulin would have faced his fears and left with him. Link didn’t even need to ask. 

But he did ask, only, he’d asked him to stay back. The final farewell had been wrapped up in an unexpected request that tethered Tulin to the surface. 

Take care of Hyrule for me. 

His trust is actually more devastating than his departure. The words had been spoken earnestly, as if he truly believed Tulin capable of shouldering a duty only he, the Hero of Hyrule, had ever been strong enough to fulfill. So devoted to it, not even death and the turn of a hundred years could stop him. 

Take care of Hyrule for me. 

Like he wasn’t coming back. Like he wasn’t planning on coming back. Tulin slowly staggers back from the chasm as the words play in a haunting loop over and over again in his mind. 

Clink. Clink. The noise pulls Tulin’s gaze to his ankle where the virescent Secret Stone taps against his scales with his movement. It catches the sunlight, and the ancient Zonai magic bound to him sparkles within. 

How is he supposed to take care of Hyrule when he can’t even handle his responsibilities as a sage? He’d been asked to locate Link and then contact the other sages so they could approach him together. Nothing complicated or confusing and instead, he’d acted selfishly. Stupid. The opposite of what it is to be a wielder of a Sacred Stone. 

He thinks about the sages who faced the Demon King with him—Riju’s bravery, Sidon’s compassion, Yunobo’s perseverance, Mineru’s unwavering devotion—and suddenly, for the first time, the Secret Stone feels too heavy. Ill-fit. 

He returns his bow to his shoulders with hollow, mechanical movements and forces his eyes back up. They immediately find the spot where Link last stood, the blades of grass already beginning to shift back into their natural place, erasing the imprint of Link’s boots. Soon, there will be no evidence of him having ever been there at all. 

He doesn’t deserve Link’s trust or the Secret Stone’s power. He’d acted foolishly. Arrogant. Not like a sage at all.

He’d acted like a kid.

The realization snaps something structural inside Tulin. The last pillar of his confidence? His spirit? The muscles in his chest pull too tight, his feathers bristling uncomfortably. He can’t stay here. Not on the ground. Not with that terrible black mouth to the depths gaping at him. He glares at the entrance one last time and realizes the edges are slightly curved. Like a smile. 

Tulin summons a swirl of wind under his wings and the scent of ancient magic mixed with crisp Tabanthian air fills his nostrils. He aims the gust vertical, spreads his wings open, and immediately rockets up into the sky until the grinning chasm is nothing more than a pinprick. 

He lets the magic fade from his feathers and circles around a small sky island, sucking in deep breaths of fresh, clear air. He can see the overgrown house in Hateno where Link left his tunic just to the east. To the north, Death Mountain rests quietly in a cradle of jagged rocks. Ocean stretches out endlessly to the south, the only visible border a dark line where the water meets the Necluda shore. All of these landmarks foreign to Hebra are well-known to him now because of Link and yet, he’s never felt more lost in his entire life. 

He turns and soars in the direction of New Hyrule Center. Purah probably has a bounty on him now, too, but he has no intention of stopping. Not yet. He calls for his gale and shoots higher into the atmosphere. The inevitable reckoning with the other sages can wait a little longer. For now he’s heading west, the direction all Rito instinctively know to go when they’re feeling lost.

He’s flying home.

— 

His dad doesn’t look happy. He rarely looks happy, but especially not now. 

He’s perched at the very center of Revali’s Landing with his wings crossed. His unblinking yellow eyes have been locked on Tulin for the last ten kilometers of his flight. It would be smart to seek the protection of his mother’s wing like he used to do before he lands, but Tulin is not feeling smart. He’s feeling ashamed, and he doesn’t deserve to be coddled. He deserves to be reprimanded. 

So, he lands in front of his father. 

The pinewood groans a welcome under his talons. The chilly air of the frontier washes over him—snow and fresh spruce and spring water. He would savor the smells if he weren’t immediately eclipsed by the shadow of his father’s towering figure. His feathers flatten in anticipation, and he lifts his eyes to try and receive his rebuking with some dignity, but as he meets his father’s gaze, a gust of wind steals the last shred of his composure. It carries it away, back in the direction he just came, and he collapses against his father’s chest. 

He sobs, tears pouring from his eyes relentlessly, for the better part of five minutes. His father mercifully wraps his wings around him at some point, the touch less of an embrace and more like a curtain, either too shocked or too angry to say anything.

When Tulin is finally able to find his voice, he whimpers, “I messed up.”

There is a long pause. Tulin can’t bring himself to look up from his father’s shoulder, but he can feel the weight of his stare measuring him carefully before he finally speaks.

“Did you blow something up?

Tulin is so caught off guard that he stops crying. “N-no.”

“Is the world ending again?”

“No.” The word comes out of Tulin with a puff of air. Praise the skies. But the person who has consistently saved it is gone, thanks to him. He feels his father’s wings pull back from his shoulders, forcing him to stand on his own again. He manages to lift his eyes up enough to see the tip of his father’s beak after another long moment passes. 

“It can’t be that bad, then.”

Tulin lets out an exasperated huff, finally lifting his eyes to his father’s. Remarkably, he’s not glaring. He actually looks…relieved? 

“Link’s gone. It was my job to find him, and I let him go.”

His father tilts his head, golden yellow eyes narrowing with thought. “In my experience, Link’s never really been one to be found. He comes and goes as he pleases. You only happen upon him when he allows it.”

The tightness in Tulin’s chest eases for the first time since Link disappeared into the chasm. He pulls a breath into the space and sighs. “I disobeyed my orders.”

“Orders?”

“I was supposed to message the other sages when I found him so we could figure out a plan. Approach him together.”

His father scoffs. “Like an ambush? Hmph. You’d never see him again.”

Tulin sticks his beak out and lifts his eyebrows as if to say ‘I know, right?’ and is immediately rewarded with a sour turn of guilt in his stomach. It didn’t matter if his rationale had been accurate, he’d still acted recklessly. The sages are a team. 

“I messed up,” he repeats and lowers his eyes again, doubling down on his remorse. “I ran off on you and Mom—”

“We will need to talk about that, later—”

“—I abandoned my mission and did what I wanted instead of my job,” he continues, “I let the sages down. And for what? Link’s gone. Again. And this time…” his voice breaks and he swallows, unable to hold back another wave of fresh tears. He sees the blue tunic on the dusty bed, the grinning chasm mouth, the smooth patch of grass. “It feels like he might be lost forever.”

Tulin sniffles and glares down at the glistening vice on his ankle. He shakes his leg absentmindedly in his father’s silence so it rattles against his scales, half-expecting the stone to pop loose and release him from his duty. If only it were that simple.

“I don’t deserve to be the Sage of Wind.”

Wind echoes through the village, jangling the wooden chimes and woven tapestries fashioned to the rafters. As it settles back down, Tulin can make out a familiar melody drifting down from one of the higher platforms. Higher up, another voice whistles the harmony. 

Unlike the rest of Hyrule, there is always music in Rito Village. The sky above his head stretches out in all directions, crystal blue and cloudless. The mountains along Lake Totori’s perimeter stand steadfast. Secure. He’d spent years daydreaming about adventures that would take him far beyond its peaks and away from this sanctuary. A place he got to call home. 

Is this growing up? Realizing what you had all along is exactly what you needed? Not the absence of mistakes like he had imagined when he was young, but the ability to actually, fully recognize them?

It sucks. 

“Do you remember the day the blizzard ended?” 

“W-what?” Tulin snaps his attention back to his father.

“Did you know the skies parted when you were fighting Colgera?” His father looks over his shoulder at the stretch of sky where the Wind Temple floats dormant. 

Tulin blinks. He didn’t know that. He’d been too busy trying not to take an icicle missile to the chest to notice much else. 

His father flaps his wings at his sides. “I was a nervous wreck. Everything was frozen. We were all starving. No one believed the Stormwind Ark was real, and everyone was looking at me to save the village again…but I was looking at you. And when I saw you up there between the clouds, battling that monstrous beast alongside Link, I swear I could hear the ancient songs of ancestors, every single one, in my heart.”

The wind picks up again. The melody and whistle swell over it, as if not from one of the platforms but the sky itself. 

“You are the Sage of Wind, Tulin.” A wing comes to rest on his shoulder, but his father stands with his wings crossed. Tulin glances at his shoulder. The curve of his bright pauldron is empty.  

“But I messed up,” he says, unsure of who he is speaking to. His father’s striped wing finds him this time. Heavy and sure. 

“We all do,” he assures Tulin.“But feeling lost doesn’t mean you are lost. You can always come back from it so long as you want to come back from it.” 

Each word chips a little bit more of his shame away until only a small, manageable sliver remains. Something he can pocket and learn from. 

His dad takes his wing back and crosses it with the other over his chest. He shuffles his weight back and forth between his feet, clearly at his limit in terms of emotional support, and clears his throat. “You know what you need to do to make this right.” 

Tulin sniffles. He wipes the tears from his face and sucks in a deep breath, nodding a few times for his dad and then himself. The Purah Pad is heavy in his feathers, a small red light blinking irritably in the corner to signify he has a missed message. Probably fifty. 

It only rings once before Purah answers. Her crimson glasses fill the screen.

“Tulin! Are you OK?”

Tulin clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m good. I’m sorry—”

“He’s OK! He’s OK, guys!” Purah shouts over her shoulder. There is a loud shuffling offscreen. He hears Sidon crying and the distinct crack of Yubuno clapping his hands. Riju’s face appears next to Purah’s, her smile brilliant and dazzlingly white. 

“Did you find Link?” she asks, straight to the point. 

His heart sinks. He glances up at his dad, who encourages him to answer with a firm nod.

“I did.”

“And?” Purah blurts.

He looks down at his ankle and gives the Secret Stone a shake. It doesn’t budge from the braided leather. He breathes a sigh, rolls his shoulders back, and looks straight at the screen. “I’m sorry, everyone. I was with him for a little while and…he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Purah repeats. The camera blurs with movement as Sidon’s sobbing grows louder. Purah must be moving away from him. 

“He went into the depths,” Tulin answers. 

“The depths?” Another voice off screen. The new Sage of Spirit. So they are all at Purah’s Lab. 

Purah, looking a little pale and frazzled but determined, centers herself on the screen and speaks, “Tulin, how fast can you get here?”

— 

The glow from the last activated Lightroot near the Great Abandoned Central Mine quickly fades away. Link hurries through the darkness to the west like the Bargainer instructed, Sheikah arm extended out so he has a small perimeter of light to check his surroundings. Bright blooms would be wiser given the sudden drop offs, but he doesn’t want a trail with the possibility of Yiga so close. He’d like to avoid the inconvenience of an ambush. He just needs to find a secure location so he can eat and think. 

Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wander too long before he comes upon the ruins of another mine. It’s much smaller than the one that contains the Bargainer statue and sits at the bottom of a deep hollow in the ground. If Link remembers correctly, this usually means there is a mountain above him on the surface. Judging from where he came from, his best guess is he’s near the Gerudo Canyon. 

Link tosses a small bright bloom seed into the mine, carefully paraglides down to the bottom, and then smothers the light from the flower with one of his shields. He uses the muted luminescence to find the center platform, quickly scanning for any evidence of Yiga occupation. 

No crimson ribbons, no talismans, no sickles. When he’s satisfied, he settles at the base of the platform, preferring the security of a wall to his back rather than shelves of useless Zonai devices. He slides down to a seated position, pulls out a handful of jerky, stuffs it in his mouth, and replays the memory of the Bargainer’s proposition over in his mind. 

“Bring us Poes,” the Bargainer says, the voices of its brethren echoing acrossing the depths in eerie unison. The lost souls of the dead have been the price for everything the Bargainers ever offered him, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn they have a place in this bargain. Their abundance is both convenient and immensely tragic. It had taken six hundred and fifty to obtain the armor he wore now. 

“How many?” Link asks.   

“Powerful magic has concealed the Shadow Temple for eons. It is a crypt of Hyrule’s darkest secrets, its tumultuous and wicked histories. Countless lives have been sacrificed to ensure it remains forgotten. Buried. It will take powerful magic to reveal it.” The shadows on the unmoving stone face of the Bargainer grow darker. “We require special Poes. The most rare type of spirit, with the strength of twenty in a single soul. A Grand Poe.” 

“How many?” Link repeats, his mouth dry.  

The Bargainer hums. The sound is so low and so deep, Link feels it vibrating in his core. He falters back a step and clutches his chest, his heart thundering against his ribcage as if he had been sprinting. As if he should be sprinting. Adrenaline rushes through him, the hair on the back of his neck on end like he’s seconds away from being targeted by a lightning bolt. Every instinct he has shouts for him to run, to escape the bargain before it’s spoken out loud, but he grits his teeth and wills his body to stone. He won’t abandon his duty. His destiny. He has to save her. 

He’s supposed to save her.  

“You’ll find ten resting in the deepest reaches of the depths. Find them and bring them to us and that which you seek, a means to save your beloved Princess, will be yours.”  

Link swallows and leans his head back against the foundation of the platform. He hadn’t known what it was back then, but he found a Grand Poe five years ago. After the final confrontation with Kogha under Rito Village, the unique color of a flame atop the stone structure where they had fought caught his eye. 

Unlike the consistently blue flicker of standard Poe, the Grand Poe burned in a triforce of color: icy blue, poppy red, and where the two colors met, a thin line of brilliant green. It had been mesmerizing, pulling him closer and closer like a moth to flame until he could hear the pulse of the life it had once been in his ears. It lingered in his hands when he moved to take it, a chill crawling across his skin toward his chest. The last thing he saw before he passed out, a mixture of Gloom sickness and exhaustion overpowering him, was the swell of light engulfing his face as the Poe rapidly expanded. 

He’d woken up on a dark cliff beneath the face of the Bargainer without any recollection of how he’d gotten there. It was the massive Bargainer who sat beneath the Forgotten Temple. The one who had taken his Poes, and presumably the Grand Poe with them, in exchange for the first piece of the depths armor. The memory had been tucked away and trivialized in his head under the shadow of Zelda’s disappearance. 

He sits up and glances into the darkness above him. If he’s near the Gerudo Canyon, he can either head north toward the depths under Hebra, or turn southwest toward the Gerudo Desert. Of the two, the depths under Hebra are more familiar. He’d activated a few Lightroots there, so it makes sense to start—

His stomach, indifferent to turbulent whirring in his mind, impatiently growls for more food. 

Zelda slips between Link and the front door, spinning on her heel so fast her freshly washed hair slaps against his face. He wants to laugh, wants to push up against her and give her a reason to return to the bath, but the most recent meeting with the Zonai researchers and the Sheikah has set him on edge. Secrets hidden under Hyrule Castle. A mysterious illness spreading. Monsters creeping back out of the shadows.  

It is time to retrieve the Master Sword. 

Those jade-green eyes search his face. She presses a hand to the center of his chest. The pressure is gentle. Knowing. She can’t stop him and she knows it. They need the Sword.   

“You make stupid mistakes when you’re hungry,” she says with a half-smile. “At least eat before you go. Please.” 

He finishes the jerky and retrieves a small pumpkin loaf next. Food keeps longer in the korok pouch, but he makes a mental note to prioritize anything that might spoil. 

Ten Grand Poes. No map. He’s going to be down here for a while. 

Notes:

Thank you to @ZeldaElmo for beta-reading once again. I appreciate you so much!

[7/22/25 - minor clean up]

Chapter 7

Tulin lowers himself into the open chair next to Riju and prepares for the worst. No one seemed to be upset with him during the call back in Tabantha, but a lot can change when information has been left to simmer. It also doesn’t help that, after Purah specifically inquired how fast he could get to New Hyrule Center, he had arrived later than expected. 

“Sorry everyone,” he tells them, sinking low in his chair. “My dad made me eat before I took off again.” It had been more of a command than a suggestion, and while he hadn’t wanted to disappoint the other sages, he is relieved to have a valid, albeit childish-sounding, excuse for the delay in his arrival.

“Teba wanted to ensure you have your strength. Nothing wrong with that.” Sidon flashes a thumbs up and a razor-sharp smile that is both dazzling and intimidating. 

“You still got here pretty fast,” Riju says, gesturing to the window. “You beat the dark.” 

The sky outside is streaked with dying light. He chased the sun the entire flight to New Hyrule Center. Flying in the dark is a last resort for any Rito as only a few of his kind can see clearly at night. Those undaunted by near blindness travel with jewelry made of luminous stones, but the small radius of light is more for detection rather than increased visibility. 

His thoughts drift back to Link. What good is a grounded Rito? As much as he wanted to remain by Link’s side, Tulin would have been pretty useless to him in the dark unknown of the depths. He wilts further in his chair.

Is that why Link instructed him to stay behind?  

It hadn’t been an issue when he was a glowing blue avatar, but they could have fixed the problem with a bright bloom or two. The glow from one of the flowers is twenty times stronger than a luminous stone. He could’ve held one as he flew (not a bad idea if he ever finds himself in the sky after dark) to maneuver safely through the black skies. 

Not where I’m going…not this time.

Worry flutters like a keese in his chest. 

“You could have used the Purah Pad and teleported.” 

Tulin jumps as Purah busts into the room through the kitchen door with a platter full of steaming food. She drops a talus heart onto the center of the table, taps it so the molten red gemstones shine through the cracks in the stone, and sets the plate of food over the top of it on a thin wire rack. The design is intriguing, but the weight of his embarrassment forces him even lower into his seat. He’s almost ready to lay on the floor between his tardiness and Link’s rejection and Purah’s reprimanding when mercifully, she snaps her attention to the other sages and adds, “All of you can, need I remind you, with the use of your individual Purah Pads!”

Tulin glances around the room. Sidon’s fins droop slightly and he suddenly becomes fascinated by the red glow cast along the ceiling by the talus heart. Riju scrunches up her nose and slowly reaches across the table to retrieve a sweet bun with great determination. Yubono is the only one who doesn’t break eye contact. He just scratches the back of his head. 

“It’s great and all, of course. I’d just rather roll when I can, you know?” the Goron says. 

“Swim!” Sidon adds quickly. Riju has too much in her mouth to answer, but she nods in agreement. 

“You can’t tell me you expect a Rito to pick teleportation over the wind, sister,” Impa hobbles out of the kitchen with Paya on her arm. Her steps are shuffled and slow, focus etched into the deep lines of her face as she maneuvers across the room. Paya helps her into an open chair and points to the plate of food at the center of the table. Impa ignores her and lobs her personal Sheikah device onto the table with a thud.“I’ll say it so they don’t have to: teleportation is a most unpleasant sensation. I vomit nearly every time I use it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to throw the Purah Pad? You are going to crack the screen,” Purah hisses, retrieving Impa’s device off the table and holding it close to her face to inspect it through her crimson spectacles. The lenses flash blue before tiny symbols run down the glass like rain drops.

“Oh, I can hardly read it as it is. The text is too small,” Impa huffs. Purah’s glasses return to normal and she starts in about how the text can be easily adjusted. Paya sets a few sweet buns down in front of Impa and places a gentle hand on her shoulder to draw her attention to them. 

Impa acknowledges the food with a glance but shakes her head and continues bantering with Purah. The comical exchange between the sisters continues, but Tulin’s focus remains on Paya. She doesn’t move the food away despite Impa’s clear disinterest. Her gaze lingers on her hand as she lowers herself into the seat beside Impa, fingers flexing slowly as if stiff or cold. A strange frown pulls at her lips and she folds her hands over the curve of her growing stomach. The violet Sacred Stone of Spirit hangs just above it, strung around her neck as a part of an ornate wooden chain. 

No one had anticipated Mineru’s Sacred Stone would remain behind after she departed, and they surely hadn’t anticipated it would go to Paya. They had all been gathered outside the Temple of Time on the Great Sky Island five years ago when it happened. Mineru had wanted to share the view of Hyrule at peace with them from the altar behind the temple, and Purah recruited Paya to tag along and take notes. Kind words were spoken, about the princess and a burden finally eased, and the sages swore an oath together to honor the princess and safeguard the Kingdom of Hyrule just as the sages of old had done. As Mineru’s spirit began to disappear in a delicate flurry of pale light, her Secret Stone suddenly drifted with purpose toward the group. Toward Paya. 

Her face was full of surprise and wonder as she carefully caged the stone in her hands, a kaleidoscope of iridescent light bright between her fingers. A great gust of wind and sorcery whirled all around her and although no one spoke, Tulin knew the other sages felt the same powerful thrum of magic, like they were all connected by a singular, comic vein. 

Across the spectacle, he spotted an odd expression flicker across Link’s face. The dancing shadows made his features look hard. Embittered. His eyes were narrowed and the corners of his lips twitched down. A frown. It was so out of place that when it was overlaid with the flat, toneless look he so often wore in one flash of magic into the next, Tulin debated dismissing it as a trick of the light. The detail had been lost in the eruption of cheering from their group and the celebrations that followed, only triggered to the surface of his memory now by the similar, unexpected look on Paya’s face. 

“Yeah, well, I suppose it's a good thing to have our eyes on the ground and the air whenever we can, but just a reminder, it’s perfectly safe!” The sound of Purah’s voice pulls his attention away from the stone.

“Link never liked to use it, either,” Paya adds gently. The frown is gone, replaced with something more placid and neutral. Her voice and the point she makes is centering. Like the chime before a meeting or a prayer. 

While Mineru could separate her spirit from her body and transfer her soul into objects like the construct, the stone had a different effect on Paya. Stones can only magnify something already inside a sage, and while Paya had been known to be timid, it appears the true strength of her spirit had been there all along. Perhaps that is what Impa could see and what made her appoint Paya as her successor even before she acquired the stone. 

Paya can influence people, easing tension and drawing focus with the sound of her voice or the soft touch of her hand. Peace hasn’t required her to train her powers for combat, but it is speculated she could use it to temporarily control an unprepared mind. Had she possessed the stone during the Upheaval, she might have been able to turn the Demon King’s monsters against him. 

“Link,” Impa repeats his name quietly and then the entire focus of the room turns, slow and deliberate, back to Tulin. 

He sits up in his chair, takes a deep breath and begins explaining their time together. He tells them about finding Link on the Great Sky Island with Mineru’s mask, about traveling to Hateno, the house, the well, and the extensive foraging of bright bloom seeds and food. Purah has him mark the chasm where Link entered the depths on her Purah Pad and projects the map into the space above the table for the group to see. 

“We shouldn’t close off any more of the chasms,” Sidon says. He’s on his feet with a webbed hand to his chin, eyes flitting anxiously to each of the entrances scattered across the map.

“Does he even have a way to get back out?” Riju asks in a small voice. The room falls silent and heavy. 

“He didn’t say anything about why he was going down there?” Purah finally asks, tapping her flute like a baton against her hand. 

Tulin shakes his head. 

“Any clue as to what he might be looking for?”

Tulin pauses and looks at Paya. The frown has returned to her face, though this time it’s reasonable. Twisted with worry. Link hadn’t looked worried the day the stone went to Paya. He looked upset.

Disappointed. 

Slowly, the answer comes into focus. A puzzle finally made whole with the memory from that day and a more seasoned perspective. Tulin hadn’t wanted to believe it, or maybe he just couldn’t then. Looking up to someone has a way of masking their blemishes. But he is taller now. The sun shines less in his eyes everyday. Link had been disappointed that the stone had gone to Paya. Envious, even.

He blinks. “He’s looking for a Secret Stone.”

“Did he say that?” Purah replies urgently. 

“No…but I…” Tulin tries to figure a way to describe the frown, but every version of the story sounds bad. Not like Link.

“Tauro said he was asking for research notes on Secret Stones the last time he was in Kakariko,” Paya interjects. 

“From the Zonai tablets?” Purah readies her device, the digital archive of Zonai research at her fingertips.

“No, the surviving historical records from Hyrule Castle. The library and King’s Study is in really bad shape, so there isn’t much…Tauro said there is nothing about stones. They found some information alluding to other sages and temples but…” Paya’s voice trails off. She looks at Impa beside her.  

“There are more temples?” Riju asks. 

Impa nods. “It would seem there once were. The Forgotten Temple, the Temple of Time on the Great Plateau, the East Gerudo Temple ruins…Hyrule is covered in the remnants of old from a century ago and beyond. Zonai, Hylian, Gerudo…We know Link has been searching all these places tirelessly for the last five years…we just didn’t know what he was looking for.”

“So…he thinks there is another temple hidden in the depths?” Riju crosses her arms over her chest. “Is there another temple in the depths?”

“I can ask Josha, but I feel like it’s something she would have mentioned—”

“The Shadow Temple,” Impa interrupts Purah, her voice half a whisper. Everyone looks at her. The light from the talus heart is nothing more than an ember. The sunlight through the window is gone, replaced only by a muted glow from the lamp lights outside. Purah reaches forward to crack the stone with her flute, activating the fiery gemstones once again, but the shadows that crept onto the walls remain.

“The Sheikah are Shadow Folk but we were forced into it,” Impa continues, answering the question that lingers between them all in the dark. “By duty. By fear. Paya holds the true power of our people. When we are able to stand in the light….we have always been not of Shadow, but Spirit.” Something passes wordlessly between the three Sheikah. Paya has tears in her eyes.

Purah clears her throat. “So he thinks the Shadow Temple is somewhere in the depths and he’s looking for a Secret Stone. Why?”

Impa places her wrinkled hand against her chest and rubs her palm back and forth over her heart. Tulin can see the muscles in her arm flex. She’s pressing hard. Like something hurts. “We all know who his ‘why’ is.” 

Their last day together, the small desk covered in dust at the bottom of the well, the way Link had folded the sky blue tunic and placed it on the bed in the overgrown house; his eyes on the heavens, his eyes on the heavens, always on the heavens—

“But, the princess is…” Sidon’s voice breaks and he lowers his head.

Again, Tulin wishes he had known her better. He envies their connection to her, feeling the strength and depth peripherally through their reference and Link’s mourning. 

She is the spirit of Hyrule’s new beginning. 

“Secret Stones don’t grant power. They only amplify the abilities an individual already has.” Paya lifts the stone off her chest between her fingers and rotates it in front of her face. Tulin glances down at his ankle. He hears bodies shifting all around him as the other sages take inventory of their own stones. “If anyone has the power necessary to change whatever fate has befallen her, it’s Link.”

 

[three weeks later]

 

The glow from the falling bright bloom seed shrinks into a pinprick and then nothing at all in a matter of seconds. Tulin cups his beak with his wingtips and shouts after it even though he knows the sound will be swallowed just as greedily by the darkness as the light.

“Link!”

He leans forward and turns his ear to the darkness. As anticipated, the echo of his voice bouncing off the walls of the tunnel is the only reply. The sound stretches thinner and thinner until it too disappears, and with it, the last bit of hope he has that today might be different from yesterday or the day before. 

He takes a generous step back from the edge and sighs. He’s been splitting his time between the open chasms along Hyrule Ridge since he left New Hyrule Center three weeks ago. The changeless dark and quiet of his post sent him flying to East Necluda this morning on the slim chance Link wasn't lost somewhere deep in the depths and had decided to double back to where he entered it. But the Meda Mountain chasm is just like the others. 

He kicks a loose stone toward the lip of the crater dejectedly. While the group had all agreed the construction to cover the remaining chasms should be paused, a long debate if the already sealed entrances should be reopened had ensued. Tulin and Sidon had advocated that Link needed as many points of access to the surface as they could afford, but it was ultimately determined the chasms would be left as they are. 

The counter-arguments had been strong. Dispiriting. Link’s awareness of the seals before descending in the depths and his reputation of entering perilous places alone and turning out fine worked against them. It would also be deliberately going against Link’s one, blatant request after making it clear this is something he felt he needed to do on his own: Protect Hyrule. Nevermind if monsters remained in the depths despite the Demon King’s defeat, at the very least, reopening the chasms put everyone on the surface at a greater risk of accident or injury. 

Tulin understands the logic, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.

Sending people into the depths to search for Link was also immediately dismissed. The last thing they needed was multiple search and rescue missions. For the time being, the sages agreed to periodically monitor the open chasms while Purah developed a gadget to dispatch into the depths that would give Link a means of relaying a message…if he even wanted to. 

The Sheikah were understandably hesitant to send unmonitored technology into the depths because of what had happened with Calamity Ganon. Purah was confident she could put safeguards in place against manipulation, but she required time to develop and test it. She seemed excited with her progress the last time they spoke, but she was abruptly summoned to Kakariko and hasn’t been in contact with an update since. 

The sense of urgency feels like it has dwindled since the first meeting between the sages and the Sheikah. No one explicitly said it, but the fact that it is Link who is missing afforded the rest of Hyrule a sense of consolation. He hadn’t wanted to be found for a while, and he hadn’t been needed even longer. Hyrule is alive and busy and thriving. 

There is a loneliness that comes with the feeling you are the only person really missing someone. Tulin feels in his stomach, nestled beneath the dread growing inside him like a weed. He counts on his feathers the number of days Link has been gone and tries to push away a lesson from his training as a young Rito growing up in Hebra’s shadow. He wonders if it’s the same for Gerudo in the desert or the Gorons in the volcanic caves or Zora in the river, but when someone is reported lost in the mountains, a rescue team knows the chances of finding a survivor drop drastically with each passing day. 

After a certain point, everyone knows you are searching for a body. 

— 

It had been dark when Link fell asleep. 

It was dark when he’d last eaten a meal; dark when he climbed over roots; dark as he navigated through gnarled feather branch trees and broken gray stone mines and across rot-stained earth where toxic Gloom once festered. The measure of a single day, cozy titles such as ‘breakfast’ and ‘dinner’, the direction of his searching—all of it was lost to the blackness.

All he knows now is dark.

His consciousness is fuzzy and slow to return as he wakes. Without the guidance of a natural rhythm, everything sort of drags back into place in his skull as if it's trudging through knee-deep water. Eventually, he sits up and pulls a swath of thick fabric away from his Sheikah arm. He holds the glow of its core up his face and waits for the light to blanch some of the heaviness from his head so he can gather his bearings. 

He’s easily twenty-five feet up in the air on the rounded platform of a tier tree, the ground only visible because of the small cluster of Poes that had initially drawn his attention to the spot. They drift in a slow circle around each other, wisps of blue light reaching between them like children joining hands in a round.

There have been plenty of standard Poes like these all over the depths, but he hasn't found a Grand Poe since he set off from the Great Abandoned Central Mine. The Bargainer’s instructions told him as much, he had been sent to search the deepest parts of the depths, but without a map, the winding path of light left behind him is the only way he’s been able to keep any confidence in his steps. 

At one point he’d been heading northwest, but that too was lost without the sun and moon.

Gradually, a constellation of bright blooms comes into focus in the distance. They mark the spot where he had formally stopped searching for the day (or the night—whatever stretch of wake he was stumbling through) and began wandering into the darkness to make camp. From this angle, he can see just how careless he’s become with the trail. The pattern is less scattered, inviting something to find him and follow. 

He scoffs and shakes his bangs into his face. He never thought the day would come he’d find himself missing monsters. 

There hasn’t been any further evidence of the Yiga. No more Silent Princess either, but on more than one occasion, he’s felt the familiar whisper of the Light Dragon’s current across his skin. Twice, salt has suddenly flooded his senses, like he submerged his head in sea water. A dragon tear, as sure as the scars in his skin, but no matter how exhaustively he searches, he can never find where the Light Dragon has left it. 

Food is starting to run low. He’s been making the most out of the nuts and dried fruit and salted meat he gathered, but at some point he will need to figure out what he can eat down here. He should do it before he's starving. 

Water, thankfully, isn’t a problem so long as he had the Sheikah arm. He holds it out in front of him, metal fingers spread wide, and summons a small cube of ice with the magic. He pops it into his mouth and pulls the ribbons of the armor back over his face, letting the cold liquid melt over his tongue and down his throat toward his stomach. Not exactly what Purah or whoever invented the Cryonis Rune intended, but neither are around to tell him differently. 

He makes a mental note to melt some ice down to refill his flask the next time he stops to rest. The ice is refreshing and helps relieve the swampy discomfort of constant warmth, but it’s easier to stay hydrated if he—

A twig snaps somewhere below him. He swallows the half-melted cube and jolts up, eyes wide against the dark for the source of the sound. He senses movement through the shadows just beyond the dull flicker of the Poes. A rustling of earth under heavy feet. Something whickers and the nostalgia of the sound has him moving before he can think it through. 

Pearly white bone catches the light as the bright bloom unfolds. Hollow skulls swivel up from the dirt, balanced on a long curve of clunky vertebrae. Their spines stretch along massive cages of slender ribs that flex with air despite a lack of internal organs. The red eyes of three stalhorses flash bright in dark sockets. They grunt and whine at the source of the brightness and begin stomping their porcelain white hooves. They advance quickly, the sound of their bodies clinking against each other like hollow reeds in the scramble to crush the flower into the dirt. 

The pieces of the bloom glow dimly like the smothered embers of a campfire when they finally stop, luminescent viscera speared upon each of their hooves like battlefield gore. Two of the stalhorses take off galloping into the shadows, their painted hooves like fireflies in the darkness. The one that remains puffs out a staccato of irritated snorts, inspecting the remains of the blossom closely. 

Link has never seen stalhorses behave in such a way. Normally skittish and timid, they only become aggressive at the prompting of their tamer and even then, the moment he would free one from a monster, their sense of loyalty would vanish and they often fled. 

They are usually befit with a saddle of tattered rags, but this one wears a handsome purple cloth with blue dots stitched along the border. It immediately brings his thoughts to Bear and the stable blanket he’d left with the keeper at Dueling Peaks. It can get chilly at night in the shadow of the split mountain. He hopes they are treating him right…

Something catches his eye as the stalhorse turns. A long, crimson ribbon like the ones at the Great Abandoned Mine is fashioned around its neck. A tag. Letters are scrambled in black ink down one length of the ribbon, but it’s too small for Link to make out. What he can see clearly is the symbol at the base of each of the ribbon tails. 

The inverted eye.

The stalhorse disappears after the others. Link quickly gathers up his things and readies his paraglider to descend. They will be easy to track with the luminescence on their hooves. Despite the lack of a stomach, he has seen them eat and drink, so hopefully they will lead him to a source of food. Best case scenario, he can tame one and it will ease the burden of his travel for a time. Even better, they’ll lead him to a Yiga camp where there will be poorly guarded food and resources for him to borrow. Permanently. 

His palm itches. He touches the hilt of the katana at his side. The Master Sword pulls long against his spine and he can feel the length of his bow from his shoulder down to his hip. Although it would be wise to scope out any intel on the depths the Yiga might have gathered and avoid the focus of the inverted eye for as long as he can, he hasn't fought anything or anyone in a long, long time. 

A little company might be nice.

Notes:

Thank you to ZeldaElmo and cooking-with-hailstones for reading through this chapter!

We’ve finally met the new Sage of Spirit! Were you surprised? As always, comments, questions, thoughts are appreciated!

[11/11/24 - minor edits/formatting consistency]

Chapter 8

Notes:

content warning for chapter - violence

 

Glowing hooves dance like sunset fireflies for the immeasurable amount of time Link follows the stalhorses. He’s mindful of his distance and when he drops a bright bloom so as not to provoke them, and in turn, they guide him safely through the uncharted vastness of the deeper depths. 

Eventually, they lead him down a gradual slope of earth and shadow and into a grove of trees that remind him of the fruit-bearing ones in Faron. He lingers at the treeline and watches them trot into a corral-shaped structure that’s partially collapsed. Just beyond it, outlined by the soft blue flame of a few drifting Poes, is a stone ruin that’s been converted into a stronghold. 

A grin tugs at his lips.
It’s the best case scenario. 

Despite the resemblance to Faron banana trees, the branches that stretch out above his head are barren. A flicker of pity starts in his chest but doesn’t catch, like the failed first strike of a match. The stalhorses file into the broken pen obediently and begin grazing patches of tall, dusk-colored grass. Free to roam, saddled with trust. Another strike of the same match, brighter this time and painful in his chest, but he quickly smothers it, too. He doesn’t have time for pity. Not for the Yiga and their trees, and certainly not for himself.

He ties the wide sleeve of his armor tight around his Sheikah arm and reaches back for the Master Sword. His fingers hesitate on the hilt, drumming a thoughtful beat against the leather before he pulls the bow instead. With the way the Yiga like to appear and disappear quickly, hiding behind their magic and speed, he’s always been more effective against them with a bow. And this bow is a warhammer. He slides an arrow out of his quiver and nocks it into place. The bowstring creaks as he samples the tension, cracking like the knuckles of a fist eager to strike. It is a devastating weapon—an expertly crafted reflection of its original wielder. Even in Link’s grip, arrows fly with such force that they often carve clean through a target.

All he has to do is wait for a bright burst of cherry-red fire and he’ll know where to aim before the bastards even start laughing.

Slowly, he steps out from under the cover of the trees and stalks toward the fortress. A faded crimson flag with the inverted eye blinks at him in the shallow breeze. The ruins are plated with rotted wooden spikes and once-white swaths of moldy fabric. The wood flexes easily when he presses his fingers against one of the beams. A quick circle around the main platform reveals much of the same. The entire structure will probably collapse with one deliberately placed kick.

The paper lamp lights strung along the doorway to the structure are all dark. Poes dot along the perimeter, each offering a small radius of light that breaks apart the shadows. A bright cluster of them hover close to the stalhorses, though the blue flame light doesn’t seem to distress them like the bright blooms had. 

Cutting the corner of the doorway into the stronghold, Link sweeps his arrow left to right, scanning the small interior room for movement. A feather quill pen lays on the rug at his feet. Wooden crates balance in tall, clumsy stacks on either side of a slender table against the back wall. As his eyes adjust, he finds evidence of comfort in the shadows—two chairs, a pile of bedrolls, a cooking basin, even a lute—but everything is coated in dust. Abandoned, and judging by the thickness of the debris, for a while, too. 

Lowing the bow, Link slowly makes his way over to the desk and uncovers his Sheikah arm from the sleeve. A dried up ink well, a small hourglass, and a candlestick half-melted onto a porcelain plate are arranged around a thick leather-bound notebook. In the dim light of the Sheikah arm’s core, he flips open the book and shuffles through a few of the tea-stained pages. Each one contains a daily log entry, recorded in small, neat handwriting. 

There is an open crate immediately to his right. A loosely coiled scroll peeks at him from between the slates of wood. Likely a ledger of some kind. He’d capitalized on the Yiga’s extensive record-keeping five years ago. It’s how he learned about the pattern between the terrain of the Hyrule and the depths, as well as how he was able to find the last remaining hideout on the surface. As always, the Yiga are incredibly gifted at screwing themselves without much outside assistance. 

He pushes back the cover of the next crate with the tip of his bow and makes a face. Clothing. Uniforms, to be precise, though he spots some plain clothes mixed in with pieces of standard Yiga armor: a robe with Cece’s mushroom pattern, well-worn boots, a farmer’s hat, assorted travelers tunics. Probably disguises. He pulls out a pair of sleek red tights and toys with the idea of stealing an armor set. Having a disguise of his own might not be a bad idea. Pretending to be Yiga had helped him before.

He tosses the tights back into the crate on top of a forest green tunic and moves onto the next box. Gear and clothing can wait. The priority right now is food. 

Something gold catches the light and winks at him. Link staggers forward, flips back the lid of the crate, and discovers two jars filled with a caramel-colored liquid. A familiar, syrupy-sweet scent fills his nostrils as he opens one. Dabbing the liquid with his pinky, he pulls down his half-mask, and tests it with his tongue.

He almost drops to his knees. It's honey. A farmer in Hateno once told him if properly stored, courser bee honey has no shelf life. It makes the hassle of collecting it well-worth it. He shovels a generous scoop into his mouth with two fingers and immediately starts buzzing from the sugar.

There is a lumpy canvas sack next to the jars. Using the tip of his arrow, he slices the bag wide and a cascade of white rice pours out around the jars and through the cracks in the crate. Rice scatters across the floor in every direction like a Hateno kid afternoon craft gone wrong. For a moment, all he can do is stand there until the laughter begins to bubble past his lips. It’s slow at first, and then, like a boiling pot, overflows rapidly to the point that if anyone were watching, they’d probably assume he’d gone mad. But no one is watching. It’s just him, a couple of horses, and a crate of everything he needs to make sticky rice balls. 

Not much different from his life up above. 

—

The roof of his mouth is burnt, but his belly is full for the first time in a long while. Link also found dried beans and salt in another crate, so he managed to make a decent meal in the Yiga’s cooking pot without touching his tired, dwindling inventory. 

He sets the third helping of rice down onto the desk, pulls off his belt, and retrieves the notebook. He holds it up to catch the light from the small fire and flips the pages open to a random entry about halfway through.

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 624
Hourglass Time: 977 turns 

Storehouse Inventory
8 bags of white rice 
3.5 bags of black beans 
3 bags assorted nuts
2 bags rock salt
2.5 crates dried goat meat 
7 jars of courser bee honey
5 sundelion elixirs 
1 vial Goron spice - only need a small pinch per dish.
0 bananas 

Previous investigations into the depths concluded nothing was edible, however, with supplies from the surface dwindling, and no means of resuming imports at this time, further experimentation is necessary. We do not know how the Gloom previously altered soil components and other resources. We may find the environment to be completely different as a result of its vanishing. 

We have not received a shipment of crystalized charges in a long time. All distribution stopped shortly after the Gloom disappeared. We continue to use our remaining battery power on the water pump, but we will eventually need to scout for water. If only our stronghold had been built according to proper protocol…

Our other Zonai devices are useless without power, but our crew has been intuitive in repurposing parts as needed. We will need to proceed with manual tools until we can reconnect with the Distribution Division. 

Glory to Master Kohga. 

 

Link picks up the hourglass and leans back in the chair so it’s balanced on two legs. The footprint of dust left behind tells him it hasn’t been turned in a long while. Thin wooden caps at either end of the hourglass are stained Yiga red with the inverted eye meticulously carved in the center. As he turns it, sand begins trickling from one end to the other through the narrow pinch of glass. It moves much slower than others he’s come across. Symin uses one when he plays chess, but the sand pours rapidly, counting down the time in a player's turn to prevent the game from dragging on. The tempo of this hourglass is excruciating in comparison. If someone were to use it while playing chess, it would probably take them all day to finish a game.

He blinks. More sand trickles through, methodically paced, like seconds ticking on a clock. A clock. When he turns it again, the sand doesn’t follow gravity. It continues to pour from the fuller side into the emptier section. His eyebrows lift. A spell woven into the sand. It’s clever. Unexpected, although, he needs to give credit where credit is due. The Yiga had managed to activate the Zonai devices without direction, a personal battery pack, or a magic arm. 

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 625
Hourglass Time: 982 turns

• Bomb flowers – Not for consumption.
• Muddlebuds – Not for consumption.
• Puffshrooms – Possibly edible, but tricky handling. Crew blinded for several hours after an accidental explosion in close quarters.
• Bright Blooms (seeds/flowers) - Possibly edible but important light source as well.

I’ve tasked one of our crew members with developing a protocol for handling puffshrooms. We believe they can be cooked similar to mushroom species on the surface…we just need to figure out how to handle them. While this alone won’t remedy the food shortage problem, it is a tremendous first step! 

Glory to Master Kohga. 

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 626
Hourglass Time: 986 turns

Storehouse Inventory -reminder: must track in every entry! 
7 bags of white rice 
3 bags of black beans 
2.75 bags assorted nuts
1.75 bags rock salt
2 crates dried goat meat 
6 jars of courser bee honey
5 sundelion elixirs 
1 vial Goron spice - super small pinch per dish.
0 bananas 

In order to develop a long term solution, we need to figure out a way to cultivate crops without sunlight. I believe we can use sky roots and/or bright blooms to do this. I am eager to test and share this hypothesis across the Clan, however, we still have not been able to make contact with another base since 923 turns. 

The closest base last known to be operational lies beyond the activated sky root to the north. Many of the smaller bases condensed after Master Kohga’s final confrontation with the swordsman, so our records have been updated several times. One of our crew defected from a faction who believed Master Kohga was defeated and began altering protocols. Blasphemous! I can’t wait for Master Kohga to return and punish those who dared to question his might!

We have a group heading out to complete a rotation in the light soon. I have instructed them to travel to the base and propose a trade as they might have imports from the surface better suited for testing (potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, BANANAS, etc). We will need to provide adequate rations for trade as well as for travel. The journey will take longer without use of our Zonai transportation devices. 

Given the proximity of the other base to one of the giant statues, it may be beneficial for the group to take the green armor with them as well. 

Glory to Master Kohga.

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 627
Hourglass Time: 993 turns

Storehouse Inventory
6 bags of white rice 
1.75 bags of black beans 
2 bags assorted nuts
1.5 bags rock salt
1.5 crates dried goat meat 
5 jars of courser bee honey
3 sundelion elixirs 
10 puffshrooms -harvested on 986 turns
18 bright bloom seeds - harvested on 986 turns
1 vial Goron spice - small pinches
0 bananas 

Half our base set out for the light rotation 2 turns ago. It takes approximately 1.5 turns to reach our designated sky root on stalhorse. We anticipate an additional half a turn from the sky root to the target relay base after they complete their rotation and analyze the soil around the root. We eagerly await their return. My remaining crew members have a wager going if the other base will have any bananas to spare. I can’t remember the last time I tasted one. I don’t even care if they aren’t ripe! I am so sick of rice.

In the meantime, we have gone ahead and begun experimenting with the bright bloom seeds. Our supplies are running too low and a recruit with previous farming experience estimates it could be 50 to 90 turns until we can cultivate any harvestable crops…that’s if the bright bloom theory even holds up. 

We planted some peanut seeds and black beans and surrounded the plot with bright blooms. We will water them once a day and monitor closely. It will use up the battery for the water pump faster, so we’ll have to venture out to a water source as soon as our crew returns.

Glory to Master Kohga.

 

It takes a few minutes of searching to find the pump outside. Sure enough, the battery cell is dead. There are haphazard piles of Zonai device scraps scattered all across the site. It's a little surprising given how organized the log made this group seem, but everyone tends to make themselves sound a little better on paper.

The only evidence the same Yiga group had ever been here is the disassembled head of a steering stick attached to a crudely bent piece of metal. Only with the context of the log is Link able to recognize what it is: A garden rake. 

He can’t find any evidence of successful crops. 

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 628
Hourglass Time: 997 turns

Storehouse Inventory
5 bags of white rice - cut meal portions down to 1/2 cup cooked
1.25 bags of black beans 
1.5 bags assorted nuts
1.25 bags rock salt
.5 crate dried goat meat 
4 jars of courser bee honey
3 sundelion elixirs 
8 puffshrooms -harvested on 986 turns
15 bright bloom seeds - harvested on 986 turns
1 vial Goron spice - small pinch
0 bananas 

Still no word from our missing crew, but we are hopeful they have connected with the other relay base and will return any day with more resources. When they do, a few of us can venture out around the base to collect more puffshrooms and bright blooms. Things in the depths don’t replenish as quickly since the Demon King’s defeat. 

In other news, boiled bright bloom leaves make a lovely, invigorating tea. And you can harvest them without harming the flower! We plan to experiment once we have more seeds, but it may turn out to be a decent alternative for herbs in a recipe. 

Glory to Master Kohga.

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 629
Hourglass Time: 1001 turns

Storehouse Inventory
4 bags of white rice 
1 bag of black beans 
1 bag assorted nuts
.75 bag rock salt
0 crates dried goat meat 
3 jars of courser bee honey
3 sundelion elixirs 
.75 vial Goron spice - small pinches!
0 bananas 
4 puffshrooms 
9 bright bloom seeds - harvested on 986 turns
0 bananas 

Puffshrooms are edible! A marvelous breakthrough by our team. Master Kohga will be pleased with our creative energy upon his triumphant return! The puffshrooms become dormant for a time once a cloud has been triggered. With our new handling protocol, we can avoid temporary blindness and gather the puffshroom for cooking. We ate some with the last of our dried meat. Tasted just like rushrooms from the mountains!

It made me long for the old days in the Hideout. I miss the feel of the sun almost as much as I miss bananas…

Master Kohga will return and guide us toward our destiny. I have to stay strong. In the sun or in the dark, we remain loyal and follow his plan!

Glory to Master Kohga.

 

Lower Hyrule Plain Relay Base — Entry 629
Hourglass Time: 1004 turns

Storehouse Inventory
3.5 bags of white rice 
.5 bag of black beans 
0 bags assorted nuts
.5 bag rock salt
0 crates dried goat meat 
3 jars of courser bee honey
3 sundelion elixirs 
.75 vial Goron spice - small pinches!
0 bananas 
0 puffshrooms 
9 bright bloom seeds - harvested on 986 turns
0 bananas 

We are out of water. We have no choice but to search the depths. I will go alone so the base can remain guarded, as per Base Construction Manual, Vol. 2. Thankfully, we have the bright bloom seeds. I will use them to find my way back.

Still no word from the missing crew. 

They didn't end up taking the green armor with them. I am beginning to think they should have. 

Glory to Master Kohga.

 

It’s the second time green armor is mentioned. The image scratches at the door to the forgotten place deep in his brain, a feeling usually reserved for a memory claimed by the Shrine of Resurrection. Did he wear green as a soldier? He’d found the steel armor and all the pieces of the Royal Guard uniform set, but everything was white, red, or blue. Maybe something from his childhood? 

Having spent the last however many days roaming a world drained of color, a glimpse of something vibrant, no matter how brief, isn’t easily dismissed. He makes his way over to the crate with the uniforms. The forest green tunic is folded neatly under the Yiga tights he’d tossed back in. It’s plain, with no regional pattern stitched on the front or the sleeves, and there is a small cut in the hem around the neck. It’s not unlike the style of his Champion tunic, though the collar is longer and folds over at a point. A sturdy brown belt cinches around the waist, matching bracers tethered to one of the loops with some string. 

His thumb presses against the fabric in slow, careful circles. It doesn’t look like armor, but he’s seen stranger things hold incredible power. Only this doesn’t feel strange. Not at all. It feels familiar. The same way the yellow eyes of his paraglider fabric do, along with questions that echo in his head when he stares into them long enough. 

He doesn’t need to try it on to know it’ll fit. 

No such questions emerge from the tunic after a few moments of silence. For some reason, his thoughts just keep wandering back to state the stronghold—Zonai parts in disarray; torn banners; the broken fencing; the feather quill pen on the floor when the desk is three steps away; a very valuable, enchanted hourglass left behind. All of it clashes with the careful handwriting of the log…the painfully meticulous record keeping. It doesn’t add up.

He hurries back to the desk, green tunic slung over his elbow, and picks up the log book once again. When he turns the page, only one more entry remains. It doesn’t have a formal header like the rest. The handwriting is frantic and large, with big, angry blotches of ink where the pen had been pressed too hard. 

DO NOT USE BRIGHT BLOOMS.

All the darkness suddenly drains out of the room like the tide being called out to sea. Miles and miles of bright blooms he’s left behind flare white-hot in his mind, the comfort they once brought turning to rot in his stomach. He thinks about the stalhorses nearly trampling each other, the manic clash of bone and dirt as they smothered the light from the bright bloom.

Sweat beads down the length of his spine. Something echoes through the addled walls of the fortress. He drops the log book, hurries out of the room, just catching the sound of a voice stretched paper thin by the wind. A name—barely audible over his pulse pounding in his ears; only recognizable due to his intimacy with it. 

Link.

He twirls around and searches the sky. He can’t pinpoint which direction it's coming from, but when she used to call him this way, it was always followed by a warning. 

If the sky turns red here, would he even be able to see it? 

He’s reaching for the bow when the onslaught of memory starts. Images flash rapidly before his eyes: Her hand slipping into his as they stand together outside of the school; tall grass rippling around them while he lay half-asleep beside her; her fingers carefully dressing his wounded shoulder; the way the candlelight set her silhouette ablaze in the dark of the well.

When he gets to the final memory – her body pressed against the door to their home, blocking his exit to retrieve the Master Sword – she looks at him and her green irises melt away. The whites of her eyes blow bright like stars, like bright blooms flowering in the dark. When she speaks, her mouth glows too, light shining from deep in her throat.

You make stupid mistakes when you’re hungry.

He tears his attention away from the sky and scans the stronghold site in its entirety. The shadows have returned to normal, the glow of the last bloom seed he released well behind the grove barely visible in the narrow windows between the trees. The only light in the camp still radiates from the Poes. 

Poes.

The tiny floating orbs pepper the darkness to the broken pen in a staggered line. He can see the people the blue flames had once been all running in the same direction toward the stalhorses. The only means of escaping this place fast with all the power gone. But they didn’t get away. None of them did. They never left. They are all right here. 

It’s not a stronghold. It’s a graveyard. 

A sudden thrashing erupts to his left; branches snapping, upturned soil, the ragged panting of lungs nearly spent. A figure barrels out of the grove toward him at full speed. Link reaches back to quickdraw an arrow, but his quiver is missing. His belt is still on the desk inside. 

Stupid mistakes. 

He curses and quickly returns the bow to his shoulder. The Master Sword finds his hand just as the figure catches the light. 

It’s a Yiga. A footsoldier by the simplicity of his uniform. Link dips into a ready stance, but the Yiga doesn't see him…or rather, chooses to completely ignore him. It’s hard to tell with the mask. They dash by him to the stalhorses, arms flapping like a pair of big, frantic wings.

“Go now! Go! Run!” comes a breathless, high-pitched voice.

The stalhorses immediately startle. One jumps over the pen wall and thunders off into the darkness. The other two stomp about themselves while the Yiga tries ushering them out with loud whooping noises and aggressive applause. It’s partially effective. Another horse rears up and gallops through the broken part of the pen, but the remaining one refuses to let the Yiga close. It traps itself, pacing just out of reach in nervous half circles against the intact part of the fencing. 

The Yiga makes a panicked gesture with their hands, as if they would be tearing out hair if it weren’t in a ponytail on top of their head. They whip around and fix the painted eye of the mask on Link. 

“You IDIOT!” the Yiga shrills. 

Link pulls his jaw to the side. His gaze drifts between the Yiga’s hands and then down to their waist. No weapon. He rotates the handle of the Master Sword in his palm and cocks his eyebrow. 

They must have a death wish. 

He’s about to take a step forward to grant it when another odd sound splinters his attention. A low, constant rumble of a hundred moving pieces. Almost like a landslide, but it quickly builds into something more organic. Something living. 

It almost sounds like skittering. 

The dull glow from the bright bloom behind the trees suddenly blinks out. Link takes a slow step back from the deeper dark that presses against him. The shuffling sound of things weaving through the tree trunks begins to swell. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the Yiga spin around and flail their arms at the last remaining stalhorse again.

“Your hooves! They’ll come for your hooves! You have to run!”

The beast finally gathers itself enough to find the exit of the pen. It joins the more distant flickering of lights to the north of the stronghold. The sight unravels some of the tension in his chest despite the incomplete picture of the threat. The horses are safe for the time being. He’ll find them later and figure out how to clean their hooves. 

Fight now, help later. As above, so below. 

Movement rattles the treeline and the Yiga lunges for the garden rake. They pull the tool back over their shoulder like a Moblin club and shout to Link without looking.

“Here they come!” 

Dozens of red eyes pour into the stronghold. Frox. The small ones. More than he’s ever seen before. Annoying in small groups, but in a herd this size combined with the dark…things could get hairy fast. 

Adrenaline hums across Link’s skin. They scurry like spiders across the site, screeching and snapping their jaws at anything they bump into. One launches itself out of the mass at Link and he swings his blade in a high arch to knock it out of the way. The Yiga does the same in his peripheral. Two more come flying toward Link and he spins, his blade slicing the first one clean in half before wedging deep into the shoulder of the second with a sickening thunk . 

He wrenches the blade free just as three more come barreling toward him. He’s able to catch one across the throat with a quick slash, but the second knocks him off balance, granting the third an opportunity to get close. 

It clamps its jaws over the outstretched hand of his Sheikah arm and jerks him sideways. Teeth grind against the metal of his arm. A greedy, too-long tongue slithers out and wraps tight around his mechanical bicep. He swings the Master Sword to stop another frox from jumping on him and thrusts his Sheikah arm up to the elbow down the frox’s throat. 

The frox lets out a surprised gurgle, crimson eye bulging wide right before magic hemorrhages bright behind it. Energy pulses from the core of Link’s hand. Seams tear open along the monster’s body, muscle and flesh and bone shredding to pieces around the massive block of ice expanding from inside its belly.

He’s coated in a layer of salvia and guts from the shoulder down, but it’s not the first time. He grins and cracks the arm like a whip, spraying the side of the ice block with gore. He sends it careening into the fray with a swift kick.

The adrenaline feels good. Better than warm food, better than the hit of any stamina elixir in his pouch. A set of open jaws soar out of the darkness to his right and he sucks in a deep, centering breath in through his nose. The air tastes otherworldly on his tongue, drawn from the place between seconds that grants him unfathomable speed. Everything slows to a crawl but him, and he whirls, catching the underbelly of the frox midair as it descends behind him. Without pausing, Link slashes four-five-six more times before the breath is spent. The world snaps back into place in a violent fast-forward, the circle of frox around him writhing with death come to collect.

The Poe light strobes in the chaos. There are too many bodies and too little light. A muddlebud would make quick work of the frox, but his inventory sits on the desk with his belt and quiver. He dodges another mouth and points his Sheikah hand at the largest grouping of red eyes in the dark. Golden light explodes from the core, weaving into the links of a massive, glimmering chain. When the magic collides with the eyes, the chain coils around them and flashes bright, a half a dozen squirming bodies instantly frozen in midair.

The magic temporarily illuminates the stronghold. Most of the monsters not trapped in stasis gather around the Poe near the fortress. They hurl their bodies into the air underneath it, mouths wide and hungry, oblivious the light has been turned on. The trail of Poes is gone. Only the ones by the broken stalhorse pen remain. The Yiga almost looks like he’s guarding them, body positioned between the flames and the frox, garden rake swinging wildly back and forth to push them back. 

A triumphant shriek snags Link’s attention back. The Poe by the fortress is gone. A frox flops in front of him with a mouthful of blue fire. Tendrils of flame claw out over the line of its mouth like fingers trying to pry the jaws back open. 

The warning in the logbook, the Yiga’s panic over the hooves, the lack of bright blooms in the stronghold despite the fact they have been planted, the way the frox had tried to swallow his Sheikah arm…

They’re eating the light.

He flips the Master Sword around in his grip and drives the blade through the monster’s skull. Its back legs twitch and then go limp, flesh eroding away from the Sword’s blade with a hiss. The Poe emerges from the gore and resumes its drifting, lost but free, and a much easier target now so low to the ground.

Almost on cue, four red eyes begin to weave through the shadows toward the Poe. Pressure pulses up his Sheikah arm and into his shoulder as the golden chain strains against his hold. He should abandon the Poe, focus on taking out the monsters he has trapped, but it feels wrong. Too close to his chest. Under his skin. 

All he can think about is Zelda. The golden silhouette of her body trapped behind the piercing yellow eyes of the Calamity for a century. Swallowed by eternal darkness.

The stasis shatters into a thousand tiny splinters of light. He leaves the Master Sword and lunges for the Poe. It disappears in his hands and for a moment it’s Zelda slipping through his fingers all over again until a band of jarring cold air wraps tight across his chest signaling he’s collected the Poe.

He’s never noticed it before, or maybe Rauru’s arm had prevented him from experiencing it, but it almost feels like an embrace. The voiceless gratitude of a lost thing. 

All of this happens in the blink of a second. Zelda is still gone, the Poe is safely out of reach, and the frox are coming. He retrieves the Master Sword and sheaths it behind his back, crouching down with the movement until his Sheikah hand lies flat against the dirt. The core flares bright, as blue and as cold as one of Naydra’s scales, and a pillar of ice lifts him high off the ground. 

Bodies crash into the ice underneath him. It’s time for the fight to be over. He leaps over the top of the frox and sprints for the entrance to the stronghold. His body slams into the desk as he reaches it, knocking over the candle and the hourglass and his half-way eaten bowl of rice. 

He grabs a fist full of arrows from his quiver and absorbs all but one into his Sheikah arm. He’s about to reach for his pouch when something snarls in his ear. He spins around just in time to watch a frox slam into the rug at his feet, skull split like a hyrdromelon around the head of the garden rake. 

The Yiga stands over it, white-knuckle grip on the handle, breath so heavy it’s visible in their shoulders. The body doesn’t melt away from the weapon like the blade of the Master Sword, but a Poe floats out of the carnage between them, casting streaks of blue light and shadow across the walls. It almost reminds him of the inside of a Sheikah Shrine. Only twisted. Yiga. Inverted. 

A muscle pulls tight along the side of Link’s throat. He doesn’t lower the arrow. He can’t. Not when he’s picturing bottomless pits and machines that hunt him and the hollow eyes of a shriveled, holy monk. His aim shifts to the center of the Yiga’s unguarded chest and holds steady. The Yiga doesn’t move, save for the inverted eye of the mask lifting so it's level with Link’s glare. 

He grits his teeth. If he could just see the Yiga’s face, could see their actual eyes. He could answer the question stopping him from letting the arrow fly:  

Did they actually just help him? 

They standoff for a few moments in the quiet before Link becomes aware of it. Quiet. No skittering, no shrieking, no snarls, not even the whisper of the wind outside.

This silence has meaning. Link can see it in the way the Yiga releases the rake, in the slow step they take back from the Poe, in the way their hands start trembling in the light. 

The painted eye finds him again. Unmoving but eerily emotive. Wide and desperate and afraid. It almost looks like the Yiga is about to say something, but then the ground begins to shake.

Notes:

as always, a big thank you to @ZeldaElmo and @cooking-with-hailstones for their eyes on this chapter. I did quite a few edits with this one trying to get the pacing right!

Chapter 9

Notes:

CW: blood, injury, language

 

A tremor knocks the both of them off balance. Dust flutters down from the rafters as Link drops his aim and braces himself against the desk. Wooden crates topple over and split open across the floor around their feet. He's about to shoot the Yiga a look when another quake, much closer this time, forces him to double down in order to remain upright. The porcelain plate with the melted candle slides off the edge of the desk and shatters into a dozen pieces. 

“No, no, no,” the Yiga whimpers. “We gotta go, we gotta go now.” 

We? Link tilts his head as the tremor subsides and stillness eases back into the room. The Yiga shuffles around the Poe flame, hands outstretched, unable (or unwilling) to get close to the light. They whine and then pivot right into Link’s face, so close he can hear the panicked breath bouncing off the inside of their mask.

“You can hold them, right? You have to take it! The light—” The Yiga gags on the rest of the sentence as Link wraps his fingers tight around their throat. Fresh irritation stokes the embers of his lingering resentment and he lifts the Yiga an inch off the ground for good measure.

The audacity of this imbecile to try and give him orders? Saying “we” like they are a team? Hadn’t they called him an idiot outside? 

Hands feebly paw at Link’s fingers and a few words squeeze past his hold in a broken line.

“No—time—must—get—” 

Link’s tunic flutters around him. The trumpet of ebony hair on top of the Yiga’s head starts to shift as well, bending back toward the doorway in a curious swirl of air. Loose items and broken crate pieces strewn across on the floor slowly roll toward the doorway, disappearing into the dark void beyond the reach of the Poe flame’s light. He releases the Yiga and they collapse onto the desk beside him, gasping and coughing, but the sound too is swept up in the surging echo of air being pulled into a hollowed out space. 

Breath drawn into giant lungs. 

Shit.

Link reaches quickly and the Poe disappears into his hand just as layers of the fortress begin to peel apart around them. Crimson flags rip from their tethers, ushering a torrent of paper and dust and rubble out through the open doorway. Planks of wood tear free from the ceiling and vanish into the dark above their heads.

His boots begin to slide against the floor underneath him. He crouches low and searches for anything to hold onto, teeth chattering against the chill of the Poe’s embrace. 

With a crack, the desk breaks away from the wall and the Yiga flattens down beside him to avoid being hit. It topples over their heads and smashes into several jagged pieces upon impact with the floor. Splinters of wood roll in the current along with the log book, the hourglass, and his belt toward the door.

His belt! 

Link hurls himself after it, Sheikah core flashing bright to summon the stasis rune. The golden chain wraps around the korok pouch once, locking the entire belt place halfway through the threshold. Yellow light pierces the shadows, illuminating the trembling foundation of the fortress. Half of the roof is missing. Through the cracks, a brave streak of light catches the inner wall of a wide, gaping mouth. 

The scourge of the depths lives. 

Debris peppers his body like hailstones. He grits his teeth and white knuckles a raised seam of stone floor under the rug. It’s barely enough to hold onto, the strength of his grip draining quickly against the turbulence, but he lasers his focus onto the rune. If he can just hold on a little longer, the Frox’s attack will pause and he can grab the belt. He can't lose his gear. Not here. Not again. 

Hold it, he commands himself, grinding his teeth so hard he can hear the grate in his ears over the wind. 

Suddenly, the core under the straining gears of his metal arm flickers like a candle. It resets, shining brilliant and bright for a beat and then sputters again, severe enough this time to cause the stasis around the korok pouch to shiver. His heart sinks. Purah assured him the gear was unmatched in durability, that it had a practically limitless battery, so long as there was sunlight—

The sun had been warm on his back when he left Tulin behind…but that was long ago. Even without an enchanted hourglass to count the days gone by, he knows it’s been too long. 

His eyes fly open and the core goes out. The stasis dissolves into a thousand tiny stars before quickly disappearing into the vortex beyond the door. 

Everything goes absolutely, inescapably dark. The radius of constant, dim light provided by the core fully recognized now in its absence. Shadows press in around him, heavy and burrowing. He can feel them under his skin, in his chest, behind his eyes.

The Frox’s lungs are finally spent. The wind stops abruptly and a glowing eye rolls forward in the dark above Link’s head. Scales painted with dim orange phosphorus and mounds of sparking zonaite pepper the void behind the eye, giving the monster a shape in the shadows. It’s massive. A moving hillside. An Obsidian Frox. 

The green eye swivels back and forth under a tight crown of bright horns, focused mercifully on everything but him.

It’s looking for light. Or life. Unsatiated by half a stronghold and Link’s gear. It doesn’t hurt as much as the first time it happened, but the loss stings and the gravity of its significance turns his blood to frost. This is bad. Really bad. He holds his breath and presses flat against the ground to blend into the dark while he filters through his options. 

Suddenly, the core blinks back to life at his side. It’s dimmer than before, a twilight of its full power but bright enough that he can see the skeleton of the once doorway at his feet. 

Something heavy slams into his side. The Yiga. They throw their body over his Sheikah arm, but it’s a second too late. The Frox’s full moon of an eye locks on them, bulging wide and victorious. A deep growl vibrates behind its jaws. 

“We should run. Live to fight another day,” the Yiga whispers. Someone had imparted similar wisdom upon Link once upon a time. A captain in the Royal Guard or one of the Champions, maybe. The memory is fuzzy and distant, only partially returned, but he’s sure he rejected it back then, too.

'Fight to live another day' always sounded much better to him, anyway. 

He springs up, makes a fist with his Sheikah hand, and then opens it wide, a net of tiny blue stars webbed between the fingers. A surprised gasp echoes behind him, followed by something bold muttered under exasperated breath. There is a loud crack and a flash of crimson light. Teleportation magic. It’s usually only good for a couple yards and sure enough, there is another flash just outside of the perimeter of the base, cleverly out of the Frox’s line of sight. 

So much for “we”. Link turns his attention back to the power rapidly taking shape in his hand. The stars morph into a sphere of solid blue light that swells to the size of a hydromelon. It’s a gamble with the core’s energy so low, but this strategy has saved him time and time again, especially in those early days. He can hear Purah’s maniacal laughter and almost smirks. Almost. Her voice was much higher then, every sentence ending in an exclamation point.

When in doubt, just blow it up, Linky. Snap!

They were friendly once upon a time. And then they weren’t.

The Frox is already opening its mouth to inhale him and the rest of the stronghold. Link releases the bomb, letting the building breath guide it where it needs to go, and pulls the Master Sword from his back. He lifts it high over his head and drives the blade into the stone. 

His feet immediately slide out from underneath him, unable to find purchase against the vortex of wind. Steel bites his forearm as he braces himself against the pull, but he ignores the pain, focusing on the clock he’s long memorized ticking down in his head. One one thousand…two one thousand… He wills the magic to hold, visually the bomb pulsing with light as it slides down the Frox’s throat.

A muffled boom halts the wind attack. It won’t be enough to kill the Frox, even with Purah’s enhancements, but it's enough to make it think twice before it tries to swallow him again, and grants Link a window he desperately needs. He wrenches the Master Sword free, digs in his heels, and vaults through a jagged opening in the wall into the dark.

—

Link sprints through the darkness until his lungs scream for air. The last of his adrenaline burns off and every muscle in his legs cramp so tight he’s forced to drop to his knees. Sharp pain radiates from his left shoulder, vying for his attention, but he ignores all his discomforts and clutches the Sheikah arm against his chest to muffle the light of the core. If the Frox spots him, it doesn’t matter what hurts, he’s as good as dead. 

Vague shapes appear in the shadows behind him; trees and odd piles of stone and massive winding root arches, but there are no signs of movement. No bulging green eye. A string of low barks echo faintly in the distance, too close for comfort especially since the call sounds communicative rather than wounded, but far enough for him to steal a moment to catch his breath.

Satiated by oxygen and stillness, his pulse eventually pulls out of his ears. The fire in his muscles subsides enough so he’s able to stand, but pain claps in his shoulder again. It’s demanding enough to push a hiss through his teeth and draw a hand to the source. He blindly feathers the end of something sharp sticking out of his back and winces. With all the debris and wind inside the stronghold, something was bound to stick him. 

A quick body scan finds no other pain points outside of fatigue and the dull ache where the Master Sword cut into his forearm, so he moves quickly, yanking the shard free before hesitation can take root. Spots swim before his eyes as a warm gush of liquid slides down the curve of his spine. In his hand, as thick as a sword hilt, is a splinter of wood. He drops it and instinctively reaches for his korok pouch only to find the space at his hip empty. 

Panic spikes inside him, prickly and hot in his gut. Right. His entire inventory is gone. Swallowed by the giant Frox, probaby sinking to the bottom of its swollen belly with the embers of his stasis magic and a small library of Yiga scrolls. No more elixirs, no bandages, no herbs, no food—the core of his metal arm flickers—and soon to be no water when his power goes out for good. 

To Purah’s credit, the core had lasted a good while before demanding a recharge. He’s used more energy in the last hour than he has the entire time he’s been down here. He flexes the fingers carefully and rotates the wrist joint. Part of him wants to call all the arrows he absorbed out of the core’s inventory, but he has no quiver to store them and he could lose the ability to use a bow very soon. Whether or not the arm will still function mechanically when the core dies escapes him. Purah probably mentioned something about it, but her instructions were always twenty minutes longer than they needed to be and he tuned out after she covered the basics. 

He’s never been away from sunlight long enough to test it. 

Link’s eyes flit toward the sky. He could try to find a chasm, but they are practically invisible from the ground. There is also the problem of getting out if he somehow managed to locate one. 

A Purah Pad doesn’t sound so terrible anymore. 

“Fuck,” he mutters and circles about himself, palming the armor over his mouth so he can feel the warmth of his breath against his fingers. The Yiga was right. He is an idiot. 

The core quivers again as he conjures a small cube of ice and pops it into his mouth. The most immediate priorities begin to filter through his head. He needs to find water and dress his wounds to fight off infection. Food should come next, though his stomach is thankfully full from the bowls of rice before the attack. If he can locate another stronghold, the logbook mentioned one to the north beyond a light root, maybe he could find supplies. A pouch or a satchel or—

Link.

His gaze snaps skyward. The sound is distant but not far enough to stretch familiarity from the voice. It’s her. It’s got to be her. Always looking out for him, even when she herself is lost, her soul suspended between centuries. 

An invisible tether begins tugging him forward through the darkness. The voice calls to him again and he breaks into a jog, a surge of new energy spreading out into his limbs from the center of his chest. He can feel the steepness of the hill underneath him in his legs as it builds. The core barely offers enough light for him to see where he’s stepping, but the doing of her voice grants him sureness. The weight of her devotion, the reach of her love, he will never understand what he’s done to earn it. How he managed to keep it even after he forgot.

The tether pulls at him urgently, the point of tension stronger, closer. Almost there. Almost where she wants him to go.

He breaks over the crest of the hill, the air suddenly thick and damp with mineral, and spots it immediately in the darkness. Twenty yards out, at the center of a narrow strip of rock illuminated by dancing light, is a tri-colored flame. A Grand Poe. 

The Bargainer’s toll. The first of ten. A soul with the strength of twenty that will open the Shadow Temple and bring him one step closer to saving her. This is the priority, not food or water or sunlight. Five years is agony, but she’s been trapped for lifetimes. She’s waited long enough. 

She needs him. She’s showing him that she needs him. 

His body snaps across the distance to the flame like he’s in battle. Lighting crawls along his skin, energy buzzing for release, but there is no weapon in his hands. They are empty as they reach forward, flesh and metal pressed together in a gentle cradle around the base of the Grand Poe. 

Light explodes like a comet in his face, just like before, red and blue and finally, more brilliant in his eyes than the other colors despite the small silver it had occupied in the whole—green. Green like canopy of leaves around the Deku Tree in Great Hyrule Forest, like the first rupee he ever found, like his reflection in Zelda’s eyes, like the armor he’s never owned, but he’s sure worn over and over and over, like he should be wearing now—

It’s the green that flows into him, unrestrained yet purposeful, as if it knows the intricate map of veins under his skin. The deep chill of the embrace that wraps around his chest is tenfold that of a standard Poe; not ice or the bite of cold water, it's as if the peak of Mount Lanayru itself pierces his chest. 

If he had prepared himself before taking the Poe, he might have been able to hold onto consciousness, but he’s uppercut with the full force of a powerful life that once was. His mouth fills with the taste of bright steel and endless sky and something bitter like regret and then his eyes roll back in his head. 

Outside of himself, he can see his body go slack and fall forward. Only, the Grand Poe had been situated on a cliff’s edge, the steep, jagged line of it alight now by the final flash of emerald from the disappearing Poe flame. So instead of the ground coming up to meet him in a violent kiss, Link can only watch as he begins to free fall through the darkness like a star fragment. 

He used to chase them not that long ago, when he still believed destiny could be altered by something as simple as a wish. But a falling star isn’t a piece of ancient magic or a divine artifact from the heavens. It’s an inevitability. Like he is now.

 

Notes:

Side note -- the first time I encountered a Frox, it was waiting at the bottom of a chasm for me. I can't remember which one it is, but there is a chasm very close to a Frox's territory and I was lucky enough to jump in when it was right there. I was minding my business, soaring down into the dark and all of a sudden, this huge mouth opens and starts pulling me in. Terrifying.

It's a shorter chapter but there is a lot going on. Comments, questions, and conversation is always welcome! You can also find me over on tumblr @the-depths-au with story-related artwork, wips, and plot teases.

Chapter 10

He’s falling forever and for an instant. 

The darkness around him shutters and at first, Link thinks it’s death come to claim him before the impact. 

It’s like the universe itself is blinking—shadow and then sky, black and then blue. Endless blue, with an equally limitless surface stretched below him made of nothing but clouds. Too visceral to be the afterlife. Something crimson flashes in his peripheral, but he doesn’t look away. He keeps his eyes fixed on Zelda. 

Zelda, alive and terrified, falling below him into the clouds. Zelda, alive and terrified, falling below him into the dark. Long golden hair, short golden hair, eyes blue and wide and then green. In both versions, her hand is outreached, fingers straining for him. She shouts his name, her voice desperate and yet laden with trust. Like she believes he will catch her. Save her. 

He knows it’s his Zelda even when it’s not. He reaches through the wind for her and his right hand is flesh. No gears or dying core or coils of metal where muscle and bone should be. He’s whole again and reaching, and Zelda’s screaming, and they’re both falling toward the darkness of the depths come back to claim them in the shape of an faceless open mouth with too many teeth. 

The bitter taste is back on his tongue. Regret—familiar—but not his own. How many times has he been forced to watch her fall? How many times has he failed? 

Is he always destined to? 

The thoughts, heavy and dispiriting, consume him right before the mouth does and then everything goes black. 

—

It’s been a dream of Tulin’s to visit Zora’s Domain for as long as he can remember. 

Before the Calamity’s defeat, few Rito dared to travel beyond the western border of Central Hyrule. Even his dad didn’t chance the dark skies above Hyrule Castle back then.

There was one traveler who did so regularly, though. Rumors whispered behind veiled wings liked to color him mad, but everyone stopped to listen whenever he returned from distant horizons. A bard by trade, the Rito would sing beautiful songs about mysterious landmarks throughout Hyrule: A mountain split in two as if cleaved by a giant sword, rolling hills peppered with tree foliage every color of torch fire, and a sculpture city nestled in pine trees, not like Rito Village, that glistened every color a river running. It was Tulin’s second favorite song growing up. His most favorite was the Song of the Hero. 

He’d looked up to Link long before he even knew him.

It’s a mystery what became of the bard, setting out one day, the sky clear and more available than ever after the purge of Calamity Ganon, only then to never return. Tulin’s mother strictly forbade him from asking about it out of respect for his family, but no one seemed to talk about him at all. Like he never existed. A solemn quiet as heavy as snow still falls over the entire village whenever one of his daughters sings his songs. 

But Zora’s Domain is anything but quiet. The echo of water pouring over the surrounding cliffs is a soothing constant amidst the bustle of the plaza at midday. Tulin hovers over the iridescent road for a brief moment, every shade of blue imaginable spread out under his talons. Everything glistens like a gemstone. He’d seen it all through his avatar's eyes five years ago, but the memory pales in comparison to this. So pretty it's almost otherworldly. 

He’s grinning like a fool when his eyes find the statue at the center of the plaza. Link and Sidon carved into stone, commemorating their collaborative effort to reclaim the Zora’s Divine Beast from Calamity Ganon for good. Everyone in Hyrule appreciated Link’s efforts one way or another, but the Zora immortalized it. It’s the reason he flew here. 

Initially, after everything had been decided between the sages and the Sheikah, Tulin couldn’t wait to be as alone as he felt. It helped for a little while, especially when his frustration burned red hot and all his thoughts grew thorns, but as the weeks went by and everything cooled off, the loneliness quickly became one of the heaviest things he’d ever carried. It turned everything it touched to lead: his thoughts, his efforts, even the early memories of Link, once a source of solace and fierce joy for Tulin, now felt heavy. 

He’d pondered his options for the better part of the day yesterday as he sat beside the quiet Meda Mountain chasm. Flying home felt too much like running away and returning to New Hyrule Center, though filled with people that knew Link well, wasn’t going to make anything lighter. They weren’t weighed down by their worry, confident in Link’s perseverance or, more likely, completely oblivious to his strife now that their own has been pacified. 

They only remember to miss him when something goes wrong. 

He needs to be with someone who understands, someone who knows and misses Link the same way he does—

A loud splash startles him out of his thoughts. He blinks and looks down to find two small Zora standing in the shallow pool surrounding the statue of Link and Sidon before him.

“Have you brought the post?” A tiny voice asks. The Zora speaking is the color of a cherry blossom. She wears an aquamarine stone caged in silver over her heart and an innocently expectant look that makes Tulin feel guilty he’s empty handed.

“Your beak is different from Mr. Penn’s,” the other Zora declares. This one, with floppy fins as dark as midnight, marches out of the water to inspect Tulin’s profile as he lands. “He says he can carry fifteen fish in his mouth without choking.”

It sounds like something Penn would boast. Tulin wasn’t too pleased when Purah announced the Lucky Clover Gazette had been recruited to aid in the search for Link a few years back. The editor, a Hylian named Traysi, made a big deal about running an entire Rumor Mill series about Link’s suspected whereabouts in exchange for the newspaper’s resources, but not a single article had been posted despite Penn passing along a few critical leads over the years. He has no idea how Penn was able to deter Traysi, but he imagines it's hard to rat out your former partner to your boss with a dozen fish in your beak.

The pink Zora gasps and points a webbed finger at the Secret Stone on Tulin's ankle. “Are you Mr. Tulin?”

Though they look small, Zora live much longer than the rest of Hyrule. They age differently, too. It fascinated him when he first learned Sidon knew Link a century ago, but the math hurts his head whenever he tries to work it out how Sidon still seems young. These kids were probably born before Tulin even hatched. 

Regardless, the title is oddly gratifying.

“Mr. Tulin, that’s me.” He feathers the braid behind his head sheepishly. They both smile and converge on him quickly, like tiny, eager piranhas. 

“Did you fly all the way here?”

“Can you carry five fish in your mouth?”

“Do you use your own feathers to make your arrows?”

“Can we see you shoot?”

Each question sends him back a step until he’s standing in the shadow of Link’s statue. The shade is familiar on his feathers. His time would be better spent looking for Sidon, but he knows the excitement behind rapid fire questions all too well. The thrill of being in prestigious company; the panic of a potential opportunity to learn wasted; the inability to stop the word vomit from pouring out. 

Link always met his questions with patience, even when there was little time for it. 

Tulin spends the next twenty minutes demonstrating the proper way to fledge an arrow and ends the lesson letting the kids take turns tossing splash fruit into the air for him to shoot. Upon impact, the fruit explodes and releases a tiny shower of water onto the bridge. The Zora giggle and dance underneath each one.

Their enthusiasm eventually catches the attention of a soldier. He approaches carrying an ornate spear as tall as Tulin and a smile that widens with recognition at the sight of him. 

“I hope you two have been paying attention. Tulin here is the best shot in all of Hyrule!” the soldier says. 

“I had good teachers.” Tulin grins and lowers his bow.

“He didn’t miss a single one!” the pink Zora shouts, wrapping her arms around the leg of the soldier.

“I believe it.” The soldier turns and begins ushering the kids back toward the plaza gently with the length of his spear. “Come along now you two. I’m sure Tulin is here to see the King.”—He nods over his shoulder to the east—“He’s up on Ploymus Mountain at the moment.”

It takes Tulin a beat to remember the King is Sidon. The title is never present when he is with the sages and his demeanor is a stark contrast to Tulin’s dad’s—a king by Rito standards. There is a deep reverence in the soldier’s tone at Sidon’s mention though, similar to when the warriors talk about his dad, and it reminds Tulin of one of Link’s very first lessons: There is more than one way to do something right. 

It should make him smile. He wishes it did, but the memory sits heavy in his chest the entire flight up the mountain. 

—

“Tulin! What a wonderful surprise!” Sidon greets him with a booming voice and open arms before Tulin even has the chance to land. The embrace is earnest and tight, like it's been ages since they last saw one another instead of a few weeks.

“It’s good to see you, Sidon–er–King Sidon,” Tulin steps back when Sidon finally releases him and bows his head stiffly. Sidon quickly rights him by the shoulders.

“It’s just Sidon to you, dear friend.” He smiles. “I was just heading up to the top of the summit. Care to join me?” A webbed hand gestures out to the long staircase carved into the mountain on the other side of the reflective pool.

“Sounds good to me.” Tulin nods and follows Sidon into the water. It’s ankle deep and crystal clear, with a constant easy ripple across the surface from the active petal-shaped fountain at the center. Luminous stone lanterns line the perimeter of the pool, though their arcane glow is subdued in the sun. He can only imagine what this place looks like at night. 

“If the water is too cold, you can fly up to the top and I’ll meet you,” Sidon says.

Tulin can taste the chill in the air, fresh and almost-snowy just like home, but the water cascading down the steps around his legs in a gentle current is tolerable. Refreshing, even. Each step steals away a little bit of the weight in his chest, tension unspooling from his muscles and drifting downstream into the lower pool. He can suddenly breathe deeper than he has in weeks—months, if he’s being honest with himself.

The hot springs in Death Mountain have a similar healing effect, but this doesn’t feel like a coincidence of environment. This is intentional. Consecrated. Sidon poured magic into the water five years ago to cleanse away the contamination from the toxic sludge raining down over the domain, but his power, as far as Tulin understood, is purifying, not restorative. And when used in battle, the water offers offensive or defensive magic depending on how it is wielded, but it’s never for healing. 

“I can walk with you. It feels nice,” he tells Sidon. The Zora smiles and gives a tiny bounce in his next step so the water splashes. Tulin does the same and they both laugh. 

“My wife had to get used to the water temperature when she first came here, so I take better notice of it now when I am with people not from Zora’s Domain.”

“Yona, right?” The healer from the sea. Could she be the one who enchanted the water? From what he understood, touch was a necessary part of a healer’s power. Perhaps with a Secret Stone, one might be able to channel their gift into an external source like water, but Yona isn’t a sage. 

“That’s correct. You’ve met, haven’t you?” Sidon tilts his head and the sunlight winks in the silver of his crown.

“Not formally. I mean, I saw her through my avatar, but I couldn’t say hello or anything. This is actually my first time back in Zora’s Domain since…” A pause. He doesn’t know how to catalog life without referencing something painful. The Calamity. The Upheaval. Link’s disappearance. It would be nice to have something different to anchor time to for once.“...well, everything.”

“Everything.” Sidon nods a few times to himself and then continues,”Well, I will be sure to introduce you two before you leave. If you have time to visit, that is?”

Tulin takes a breath into the newly freed space in his chest and nods enthusiastically. 

“Wonderful. And I do apologize again that we were unable to invite you and the other sages to the wedding ceremony.” Sidon flashes him a troubled look and absentmindedly taps the armor over his chest. The large collar he once wore is gone, replaced by an intricately crafted vest fit tight to his body, tiered pauldrons, and an ornate neck guard. The set contains all traditional elements of Zora craftsmanship—sapphires and silver and clusters of half moons— as well as a few components that make it especially unique: smooth stones of frosted lavender thoughtfully set beside the customary blue gemstones and yellow gold interlaced with the silver. 

“It’s alright.” Tulin pulls his eyes away from the armor and shrugs. “I assumed it’s because I am—was still a kid.” 

“No, no.” Sidon stops climbing and places a hand on Tulin’s shoulder. “It would’ve been an honor to have you with us. It’s just, while the Zora have grown much more willing to embrace travelers who wish to visit our city and learn about our culture, there are still certain customs some Zora feel…reluctant to share with the greater Hyrule. For now. Yona and I are hoping to change that, but it will take time.”

“Why?” The question takes flight before he can stop it. Word vomit. 

Sidon raises his eyebrows and Tulin immediately fumbles over himself. “Sorry, if that’s rude, just ignore it. Dad says not everything needs an explanation and I shouldn’t— ” 

“Of course you can ask!” Sidon interrupts and throws his arms out wide with a laugh.Tulin lets out the breath and drops his shoulders. “‘Why’ is the most important question we can ask one another right now, don’t you think?” 

His words fill Tulin’s wings like a strong gust of wind. The kind meant to guide him skyward rather than keep him grounded. Sidon and his dad might be polar opposites in personality, but they possess similar calibers of wisdom; not only knowing the right thing to say, but also the precise moment those words are needed. It’s the mark of a good leader. 

There is more than one way to do something right.

The memory resurfaces again and this time, thanks to the water and Sidon’s company, he’s able to appreciate it. To smile.

A small glimmer of hope reignites inside him.

Sidon starts up the stairs again. “Hyrule hasn’t been a place of peace for a long time. Many of my people were alive for the Calamity’s return and the decades of unrest building before that. My father has done a tremendous job recording our history. He feels very strongly that the past should not be forgotten. And I agree with him, however, we do not have stone tablets about times of peace. True peace. And as a result, how we live now continues to be determined by a past we have finally moved beyond.”

He gets a far off look for a moment. Tulin never considered how the Zora’s unique lifespan might impact their ability to embrace change. How living one way for so long might feel hard to let go even when presented with a new beginning. With peace. It makes sense. 

“We don’t need to hold onto the past so fiercely anymore,” Tulin agrees.

“But this will take time to realize. To trust. Yona and I recognize this and respect it.” Sidon glances over his shoulder. His home glimmers in the sunlight below them and he smiles. “Plus, the logistics would have been a bit of a challenge to figure out in such a short time. The entire wedding ceremony is held underwater.” 

Tulin blinks. “How long does it go on for?”

“Three days.”

“Three days,” he gasps. “I can hold my breath for about twenty seconds.”

“That’s it?” Sidon lifts his eyebrows playfully.

“Yeah. How far can you fly?” He shoots Sidon an equally playful smirk and they both laugh. 

They climb up the rest of the stairs to the peak of the mountain in a comfortable silence. The summit contains another large reflective pool and breathtaking views of Hyrule, as well as a platform with another large glittering topaz statue of a Zora.

He hadn’t seen this part of the domain five years ago. Link insisted he get some rest shortly after they arrived and dismissed his avatar. His Secret Stone stayed dim until after he and Sidon had reached the Water Temple. It didn’t bother Tulin much. He had needed the rest and he figured the mission was something Sidon needed to take point on just as he had done in the Wind Temple, but it did make him curious. Curious enough to quietly take notice of the other places in Hyrule Link preferred to travel alone: parts of The Great Plateau, the field beyond The Dueling Peaks, the Lanayru Road. Always a dismissal under the guise of rest. It is a pattern of Link’s that Tulin never quite figured out. 

“What’s that statue?” he asks casually, still half lost in thought.

“Oh, that’s my sister. Mipha.”

The name sets off an alarm bell in his skull. Mipha. The late Champion of the Zora. His dad had told him about her briefly, but again, the dead are rarely mentioned in Rito Village. She had been killed by a monster inside her Divine Beast just like Revali. His stomach plummets like he’s in a free fall. Oh, his mother would have his tail feathers if she knew what he’d done.

“I-I’m so sorry,” he stammers quickly, bowing his head. “I didn’t mean to—”

“On the contrary, I love talking about her,” Sidon replies calmly. 

“You…do?”

“Oh yes,” Sidon takes a step toward the statue. “I talk about her nearly everyday.” 

He waits quietly, no trace of dishonesty or pain on his face at the unexpected mention of his sister. Heat squirms in Tulin’s belly. Talk about the dead—welcomed, daily talk about the dead. He shivers.

“With…other people?” he manages finally.

“Of course,” the Zora chuckles.

The simplicity of the answer is striking. What would the bard’s family think if someone sang along when one of his daughters started whistling his songs? Would that really be so bad? He’s not sure if the idea feels wrong or it’s just unfamiliar. 

Carefully, as if he’s balancing on a wire. “Did you always like talking about Mipha…I mean…how soon after she…?”

“It was different,” Sidon says after a moment of thought. “I was ready to accept her death before my father. We all talked about her, but when he did back then, it was as if she was in a far off place. Gone but on her way back. I don’t think my father truly accepted her death until Link reclaimed Divine Beast Vah Ruta and freed her spirit. He needed closure. Many do.”

There was no closure in the princess' disappearance. No body to bury, no ritual for them to complete, no final farewell like they’d had with Mineru. All Link had to show for what happened to her was the exhaustive effort he had poured into finding her.

And no one talked about her. They didn’t even say her name. Skies, Tulin had to will himself to even think it: Zelda. He never realized they all used her title, like she was a mysterious figure from the distant past and not someone they’d known. A character in an old story from an old book Hyrule was prepared to put back on the shelf. 

But Link…

He thinks about the tunic folded carefully on the bed in the overgrown house; the way Link’s hand hovered over the chair beside the desk in the underground well; the long braid in his blonde hair.

She was everything to Link. She’s still everything. Gone but on her way back.

“I wish we could do the same for Link…” His voice is small, but he forces himself to say it. “With Princess Zelda.” 

Sidon takes a few more steps into the water. Tulin watches his shoulders rise and fall with breath in his sister’s shadow before he turns to face him again. “He’s been heavy on my mind as well.”

“I’ve been monitoring the open chasms like we agreed but…”

“It doesn’t feel like enough.” Sidon nods. Tulin practically jumps forward.

“Yes. I know why we are doing it, but after everything he’s done for us,”—he gestures his wings out around him—“for Hyrule? Is that really all we can do? Wait and see? I know he said to watch over Hyrule, but does Hyrule even need that?”

“He doesn’t know a Hyrule that doesn't require protection,” Sidon says.

“But neither do any of us, like you said! We should be—”

“Yes, but you and I are ready to embrace it. Is Link? All of it? A Hyrule that is finally safe and without the princess.”

The sound of the waterfall cascading from the sky island above their heads fills the silence between them. He tears his eyes away from Sidon and glares up at Mipha’s statue to fight back the burning behind his eyes. Even though it is etched in stone, he can tell she had a gentle face. She’s adorned in silver jewelry and cradles a long trident with the blades pointed down toward the water. A wave crests up around her feet, immortalized in stone.

He doesn’t know the answer, or maybe just doesn’t want to face it yet, so he asks another question without taking his eyes off Mipha. An easier one. “Did you build this statue?” 

“My father did,” Sidon says gently. “A few decades after she disappeared. I think he wanted to have something other than Vah Ruta to look at when he thought about her back then.” 

When he still thought Mipha was coming back.

Sidon continues, “She used to be in the plaza, where the statue of Link and I now stands. We moved her here after Link and the princess defeated the Calamity. My father said he wanted the warmth of her memory to reclaim this spot.”

When he’d gotten the closure he needed.

Tulin doesn’t need to pull out his Purah Pad to trace the route of Link’s journey after the Upheaval. He glances out over the expanse of eastern Hyrule spread out all around them and can see it everywhere like a golden thread. Every village, every stable, bouncing from dark corner to dark corner, sky ruin to sky ruin. He’d searched and searched for her, following every lead, every rumor and then when it was all over, she was just gone.

Without a gravestone or a goodbye or an answer, what happens to the thread? The struggle? Does it disappear? Can it? Could Link go anywhere in Hyrule without becoming tangled up in it again?

Tulin sighs heavily. “So you are saying Link needs time?”

“I think he deserves it,” Sidon says. “Don’t you?”

Link’s reflection flashes in a glimmer of sunlight on the water. The day they bathed in the lake, his knuckles pressed hard against his skin following the map of puckered, painful looking scars. And that was just the hurt that was visible.

He deserved all the time he needed. 

But did it have to be alone?

The sun has started to descend into the west, smearing the sky with streaks of pink and orange and gold. Wisps of thin clouds show dark against it.

He and Link would sometimes play the game where you take turns finding shapes in the clouds to pass the time. Tulin usually spotted lots of different ones—animals, food, his father’s grumpy face—but Link always said he saw the same thing. 

“Do you think Princess Zelda is dead? Or just…gone?” he finally asks. 

Sidon looks at the same spot in the water where Tulin saw Link’s reflection. His eyes grow focused, like there is an answer forming between the ripples, and Tulin realizes if there is magic here, it isn’t his or Yona’s. 

“I don’t think it matters.” Sidon says, looking up at Mipha. His eyes shine with tears. “Link’s decided she’s missing. If we want to help him through this, we need to remember that.” 

—

Pain would be such a beautiful reintroduction into consciousness if it didn’t hurt so much. 

Fatigue shimmers along Link’s skin in the darkness like the sunlight on water. Sleepy red coals awaken in his chest with each breath, evidence a fire recently burned there. His skull pounds in cruel synchrony with his pulse, loud and steady and blinding white behind his eyes. A sharp ache pulls his awareness into his spine and the hard floor underneath it. 

He’s a constellation of soreness, but it means he’s alive. 

He groans and rotates his head to the side, the faint glow of light outside of his body tempting an eye open. A small flame dances on the very end of a wick inside a cradle of melted wax near his head. It’s close enough to stroke his cheek with its warmth, which makes the temperature of the rest of his body immediately obvious. He’s cold, his clothes heavy and wet against his skin. He eases himself up onto his elbows, but his body jerks to the side when only his left arm connects with the floor. He blinks and looks down to examine himself. The Sheikah arm hangs dark and lifeless under the weight of his soggy tunic sleeve. He tries to wiggle his fingers but the metal is unresponsive to his call for movement. The core is finally dead.

“You are going to want to take it slow.”

Link’s eyes snap in the direction of the voice. Across the small room, barely visible in the yellow light of another melted candle fused to a wooden crate, is the Yiga. The painted eye of their mask tilts carefully like an animal that can’t decide what it’s found: friend, foe, or prey.

“Hi again.”

Notes:

Get ready to meet my favorite character, hehe

Comments, thoughts, questions are always welcome! You’ll find concept art and wip posts and more on my tumblr @the-depths-au

Thank you for reading!

Also, check out this amazing art by pitchblackespresso on tumblr of the scene between Sidon and Tulin: https://www.tumblr.com/pitchblackespresso/771599827103596544/fanart-for-chapter-10-of-bahbahhhs-wonderful?source=share

Chapter 11

Notes:

Cw: strong language.

 

Link leaps into a crouch. At least, he tries to. 

Pain, sharp and demanding, immediately radiates from the wound in his shoulder. Combined with the deadweight of the Sheikah arm dangling at his side and the widespread ache in his muscles, he has to lean against the wall behind him in order to remain upright.

Candlelight, set a shiver by the suddenness of his movements, makes shadows dance across the tiny room. Despite his obvious vulnerability, the Yiga doesn’t move from their spot against the far wall. In the flickering light, the painted eye of their mask blinks at him.

Link quickly reaches for the pommel of the Master Sword, but his fingers grasp air. The lack of weight across his back registers in his body and a hollow feeling fills his gut. 

A trial always awaits him when the sword is gone; the indescribable pain when he first tried to pull it from the stone; a miserable gauntlet that promised to unlock the tremendous strength necessary to face the Calamity; enduring the sound it had made, that horrible grind of metal and bone, when he’d been forced to pull it from the Light Dragon’s skull. All trials, one way or another.

Someone already removed the ribbons of the depth’s armor mask, the damp skin of his face free to the swampy air. He inhales deeply to push back the spiral forming in his thoughts and the smell of rotting wood and still water and rust fill his nostrils. His eyes dart around the small room briefly, storage by the looks of it, before settling back on the Yiga watching him curiously. 

Something catches the light on the floor at their feet. Content in its sheath, the Master Sword winks at him a few times and the hollow feeling dissipates at its proximity. He sighs. Just his luck the Yiga didn’t try to draw it when they took it from him. It liked to bite unworthy hands. It could’ve knocked them out and saved Link some trouble. 

No matter. He hasn’t required a weapon to kill Yiga before. 

He glares and bares his teeth. 

“Down, boy, ” the Yiga counters in a whisper, lifting their hands in a pacifying gesture that only makes Link’s blood boil. “Keep it down. They don’t like water, but they’ll wait us out if they figure out we’re in here.”

He cocks an eyebrow and the Yiga releases a muffled scoff. 

“Uh, the frox? We are in the middle of one of their territories. Didn’t you hear the big one barking when you took off?” They lower their hands between their legs, elbows propped on either knee. It’s a ridiculously casual pose for the look Link is giving them. He could overpower them in a second, even with only one working arm. “Whatever you did with that Poe looked like one big signal flare. The cliff is probably crawling with the little ones already.”

The tension in Link’s shoulders ebbs for a moment. The Grand Poe. He blinks and gently paws at his chest, the memory beating urgently under his fingers; blinding emerald light, the unfathomable cold and familiarity as he’d taken it. Why hadn’t the Bargainer statue teleported him to one of their altars like before? 

You’ll find ten resting in the deepest reaches of the depths. Find them and bring them to us and that which you seek, a means to save your beloved Princess, will be yours.

Because he needs nine more to satisfy the deal. 

And then there was the vision of Zelda falling through sky and shadow. The shuttering of the world around him, her changing face…Had it even been real? And if so, what did it mean? 

His skull throbs as he forces himself to stand. 

“Whoa, seriously, just sit down.” The Yiga’s whisper is suddenly close and Link blindly lunges forward through the muddled edges of his vision, swiping the air with his hand. He hears the Yiga scramble back out of reach. 

“You fell off a cliff into a lake. If I wanted you dead, I would have let you drown.”

It’s a fair point, but coming from a Yiga, it doesn’t make sense. He braces himself against the wall in a defensive slump as his head spins. Bile burns in the back of his throat and he can taste the remnants of the minerals in the water he swallowed. His lungs had ached when he first woke up, his clothes still sodden and heavy. The Yiga built many of their strongholds on top of random dark lakes in the depths... 

The long, bloody history between them tells Link it has to be a lie. A trick. He is their greatest enemy, a grudge passed down from generation to generation of Yiga like a precious heirloom. He’s killed hundreds of them, dismantled their hideouts, defeated their leader and their Demon King. Why hadn’t they just left him to die? Why take the sword only to wait for him to wake? 

Link sways and clumsily knocks into a desk. The Yiga shushes him but doesn’t risk coming close again. He steadies himself and fumbles for one of the larger tears in his tunic from the flying debris. With a grunt, he rips off the first layer of the water-logged armor and groans at the immediate relief from the weight.

He sheds the heavy sleeves before finding another hole to tear the second layer away, revealing where the Sheikah arm is strapped to his shoulder. He fingers the buckle to loosen the strap and then lets gravity claim the heavy metal arm. It clatters loudly against the floor.

“What part of quiet can’t you comprehend?” the Yiga hisses. “Aren’t you a mute.”

“Fuck off,” Link spits.

“Ah, he speaks! Good, because I don’t know any of that,”—they wave their fingers flippantly in front of their mask as if trying to dislodge a spiderweb—“so you’ll need to keep it up if we’re gonna work together to get out of here.”

There it is again. We.  

He flips them off. 

“I know that one. It means ‘thank you’, right? For saving your ass?” they whisper rapidly. Link rotates what’s left of his right shoulder, testing the stiffness of his muscles now that they are free of the Sheikah arm’s weight. 

A sudden heaviness to the silence between them tells Link the Yiga is watching. Most people can’t help but stare.

“That’s twice now, too, in case you forgot,” the Yiga adds finally. 

The memory of the frox’s snarl echoes in his ear. He had been too slow to react to the attack in time, too focused on reaching his gear, but the Yiga appeared out of nowhere wielding the garden rake like a halberd. They’d had his back. It’s just as unbelievable as them rescuing him from the lake, but he’d been conscious for the first save. Seen it with his own eyes. 

“Feels like you might owe me?” 

There it is. 

Link stops mid rotation and flits his eyes to Master Sword on the floor in front of the Yiga. Another pause, though the air between them is electrified this time. The Yiga swallows loud enough that Link can hear it.

“That weapon is what almost killed you. It’s heavy,” they say carefully. Quietly. As if the sword can hear them, too. 

If only they knew the half of it. 

He finishes the rotation and pulls his eyes away from the Master Sword as the pounding in his skull mercifully begins to subside. The Demon King’s blade rests against the wall just behind the Yiga. They must have snatched it before the Obsidian sucked up everything else inside of the stronghold. Of course they didn’t think to grab the entire belt it had been attached to.

A quick glance confirms the Yiga still lacks any of a traditional footsoldier’s arsenal. The Demon King’s sword is the only weapon in the room Link needs to worry about and it’s out of immediate reach should the Yiga decide they require it. 

He finishes tearing away the rest of the tunic and lets it drop to the floor with the other shreds of wet fabric. The armor is beyond saving, but the sight of it reignites the sting of his missing gear. He could always try to find a Bargainer to trade for a new set, but that would take a lot of Poes and, having freed himself of the layers, he realizes how heavy it had grown. As if whatever protection woven into the fabric kept stock of the harm it had shielded him from down here. It’s not a debt he wants to carry around. He doesn’t need another. 

“I don’t owe you anything,” he answers the Yiga without looking away from the armor at his feet. 

“Sure you do. Me and my horses.”

Hooves flicker across the dark of his mind’s eye. He doesn’t have time for this. He drags his eyes away from the floor and peers inside one the crates beside the desk. 

The Yiga continues, “It takes a long time for bloom flower light to fade. My horses will get tired.”

The panic in their cries as they scrambled to escape the broken pen; the relentlessness of the small frox—guilt coils in his gut, but he forces himself to re-tally the Yiga’s crimes. They’d worn Zelda’s face, tried to smear her name, aligned with a terrible evil–twice–bent on consuming all light in the world. Fools. The skin of his palm tingles. He sets his jaw and rummages through the contents of the crate, searching for clothes. He’ll find the horses on his own. Right what he wronged, if he can. He needs to stay focused on the Grand Poes. On her. 

“I’ll show you where another one of those fancy Poes are.”

A current runs up Link’s spine. He knows better than to react and confirm anything before he is ready to, but his patience has barely begun to replenish, wiped clean from fight, injury, and the resulting fatigue. He straightens carefully and trains his eyes on the center of the Yiga’s mask.

“You’re looking for them right?” The Yiga crosses their arms. The seam along the forearm of their uniform is torn back, revealing a patch of incredibly pale skin. “There are a few not too far from here. Help me search for my horses and I’ll take you to one.”

Although he has no way of measuring how long he’s been down here, Link knows from the number of times he’s stopped to rest and the way his supply had shrunk (before he lost it all) that it’s been a while. Weeks, maybe a month or two, and all he has to show for his wandering is a single Grand Poe. He hasn’t got a clue what part of the depths he is in, or where he has already been...or where he needs to go next.

His gaze drifts from the Yiga to the shreds of armor at his feet. His mechanical arm rests beside it, palm facing up, the circle of core at the center dark. Almost as if on cue, his stomach growls temperamentally. He’s injured, down an arm, without food or water, and lost in an relenting dark. 

He sighs and drags his gaze back up to the mask. “We’ll look for the horses on the way to the Grand Poe.”

—

Link had been hoping there might be some Hylian disguises in the crates like at the other stronghold, but all he can find are footsoldier uniforms. He’s being stubborn and he knows it, but he takes to tearing the clean crimson armor into strips to bandage his wound instead of donning it. He can see the offense in the Yiga’s shoulders at the sound of the first tear but they say nothing, retrieving what they need from the supplies to replace the tarnished parts of their armor before retreating back toward their side of the room. 

Once the bandages are ready, Link unravels the remainder of the ribbon from his arms and legs and peels the damp base layer away from his torso. He strains to examine the wound on his shoulder. From what he can see, it doesn’t look infected. Yet. He could really use–

Something thuds against his boot. He glances down and spots a small, circular tin completing a final rotation on its seam before laying flat. A sharp, herbal smell begins to wrinkle his nose and he shoots his eyes back to the Yiga. They present two fingers coated in a mint colored paste before ceremoniously smearing it over a half-healed cut along their side. Shirtless, Link can see from the way their rib bones protrude against their pale skin that food has been hard to come by for a while, the muscle definition of their stomach and thin arms from a lack of body fat, not strength. Their skin is near translucent, webs of dark blue veins visible along their hands, up their forearms, and across the flat planes of their chest.

Link retrieves the tin and opens it, dapping his finger into the salve. It’s cool to the touch and gritty, like frost on the Gerudo Mountains. Up close, he can see flecks of green from whatever had been crudely pulverized to make it. 

“Do you need help putting it on, or do you prefer the slow, agonizing death of an infection?” Link looks up and the Yiga gestures exaggeratedly to the wound at their side now covered in the paste. It’s enough of a presentation to sedate any hesitations. He’s guzzled down far more questionably smelling elixirs before. Bladed rhino beetles cut with Hynox toenails comes to mind. He dips his middle finger into the medicine and holds it up for the Yiga to see.

“You’re welcome,” the Yiga says in a flat tone. 

Link covers the wound with the paste and clean strips of fabric. He’s just about to pull the wet undershirt back over his torso when the Yiga tosses another item at his feet. The green armor. 

Anyone else and Link wouldn’t think twice. Goods in exchange for service was common practice on the surface, though there was the occasional question of equivalence regarding proposed rewards and the ask. He can understand having a deep connection to a horse, but sharing medicine—giving him clothes? Are they that desperate for aid? That afraid of the frox? 

He flashes the Yiga a look, half suspicion, half curiosity.

“Green isn’t my color,” the Yiga shrugs, gathering up the fresh footsoldier set they’d taken from the crate before turning to the door. “Hurry up and change. I want to start looking.”

The armor fits like a glove. It’s light and breathable against the humid air, cut to be flexible in fighting and riding. It’s not the same tunic from the other stronghold. He immediately notes the lack of a pronounced collar and the darker shade of green. Almost olive. It’s cut like his Champion’s tunic, with thin short-sleeved chainmail, knee high leather boots, and a handsome chest and waist belt affixed with a double-pouch.

He pulls on a charcoal colored bracer and a leather fingerless glove, momentarily toying with the idea of slicing the tan undershirt sleeve away from his right shoulder. If he can get the Sheikah arm working again somehow, it would be nice to have the option to cover the light, so he decides against it and just knots the fabric where his bicep tapers off.

With the Yiga gone, he searches the room more carefully, and finds a small ration of dried meat and a few jars of pickled vegetables. He pops open the lid to one and sips the juice, relishing the way the vinegar pleasantly bites his tongue. Hydration, sustenance, and storage—it would be wise to take these with him. 

He glances down at the belt. The square double-pouch sits off his hip just as innocently as the korok one had. What are the chances…

He maneuvers the jar to guide a pickle into his mouth before setting it down on the desk and flicking open one of the pouch flaps. It’s pitch black inside. Bottomless. He chews the pickle rapidly and reaches for one of the unopened jars, easing it inside until it drops and disappears. The slightest registry of weight on his hip tells him he’s not imagining things and he lets out a bubble of laughter at his luck. There isn’t much in the room to test the capacity of the pouch, but he stores away the rest of the food, the other bracer and glove, a box of matches, and the Yiga’s medicine tin in an almost manic frenzy.

Retrieving the Sheikah arm from the floor, Link drops it onto the small desk next to his paraglider which thankfully had been strapped to his back during the frox attack. A frown pulls at his lips. His bow is missing, probably at the bottom of the lake. Like the arm and the paraglider, it’s useless to him now without the single-hold adapters Purah built stored in the dead core, but he can’t bear the idea of parting with any more gear. He fixes both across his back and moves for the Master Sword on the floor. That’s when he notices the Demon King’s sword is missing. 

He finds it across the Yiga’s back when he emerges from the storage room. The inverted eye follows his gaze.  

“I lost my sickle. Only seems fair.” The Yiga finishes tying off the crimson wrap around their left new bracer.

It's an impractical carry for such a long blade. The same could be said for the Master Sword, but the Demon King’s sheath doesn’t have magic that makes it draw like a shorter sword. The magic in the steel is different. Brutal. It bolsters the strength of his blows ten-fold, but it also siphons energy. An immediate tax for power. An honest weapon. He’d come to prefer paying his tolls up front, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight the Yiga for it. He just needs to remember to take it from their body when they’re finally dead. 

The darkness outside the stronghold is quiet. No barking, no skittering, just a glassy dark lake and an oppressively darker beyond. The air is dense with dust and Link needs to breathe through his nose to keep from coughing. He could try to construct another mask out of the ribbons that had been around his arm and legs, but the scraps are mostly shredded and still damp and he’s too impatient to reach the next Poe to wait. He clears his throat and sputters into his shoulder. 

The Yiga sighs and disappears back into the stronghold. 

A minute later, they emerge with a black half-mask and toss it to Link. It’s still warm from their breath. Link makes a face. 

“Don’t be stupid. You’ll give us away with all that coughing,” the Yiga whispers. “It's the pollen from all the trees. Worse than the valley in the spring.”

There are tons of valleys scattered across Hyrule, but Link immediately thinks about Kakariko and the grove where the Great Fairy used to be. It’s miserable during the spring. The Sheikah brew a special tea that eases watery eyes and sneezing, but Link is one of the unfortunate few that the tea has little effect on. He used to avoid the village until the cherry blossoms finished blooming. Now he mostly avoids it all together. 

Medicine. Clothes. Repeated rescue. Sure, it is under a claim of a debt owed, but it’s a tremendous amount of effort just to collect. He searches the inverted eye for any evidence of other intentions, but the crimson paint remains fixed. Resolute. He resists the urge to tear it off their face. 

He’s only ever known one person to be wholly benevolent. Who gave and gave and gave. Who’d done so until there was nothing left to offer but herself and so she gave that to Hyrule, too. 

There is no comparison. 

He pulls the mask on. It’s well-made and fits snug across the middle of his nose and down his throat. 

“Your breath stinks,” Link mutters. 

“Yeah, well, I haven’t had many opportunities to brush my teeth lately,” they reply and Link instinctively rubs his tongue along the front of his teeth. His own toothbrush is gone. He’d used cedar chew sticks and charcoal paste on the road plenty of times, but he isn’t sure if the trees in the depths are poisonous. It’s not the sort of thing you want to test without access to an antidote. Or the surface. 

The Yiga retrieves something from their belt that resembles a child’s slingshot. It hadn’t been noticeable the way it was tucked behind the small pouch on their belt. They shove a hand into that next and the dull blue glow of a bright bloom seed suddenly illuminates the edge of the dock they stand on and the small, sailless raft floating next to it.   

Link narrows his eyes. He’d been called an idiot for using the bright blooms.

“The light is dimmer when it hasn't blossomed. If we keep it like this, we have less of a chance of being spotted,” the Yiga explains in a self-righteous tone. “Unless you want to wander in total darkness?”

It’s the last thing Link wants to do. He’d taken the Sheikah arm’s core light for granted this whole time. The darkness was consuming with it and now, without, it presses in around him like a living thing. A suffocating embrace he feels the urgency to escape in his marrow. Except there is no escape from the darkness here. Only mild, fleeting relief in the small radiuses of light surrounding skyroots and seeds that summon death and aimless, floating souls.

“Plus, if we are spotted,”—the Yiga secures the seed in the slingshot and takes mock aim into the distance—“I’ll fire the seed away as a decoy. The little ones are pretty stupid and will follow the light anywhere. Even off a cliff.”

It’s not bad, but it only solves half the problem. The smaller ones. 

“And the big ones?” Link counters.

“Usually hear them coming. Or see ‘em with those fluorescent scales.”

“And when you don’t?”

The Yiga doesn’t say anything, but Link can decipher the irritation in their posture. They already told him—practically begged it of him back at the other stronghold. You ditch the light and run. You run and pray that big green eye doesn’t find you. You run and pray you're faster than a deep breath.

They climb onto the raft and paddle quietly to the edge of the lake. The Yiga holds the bloom seed ready in the slingshot, inverted eye scanning the shoreline as it comes into view gradually with the approaching light. Thankfully, it looks clear. 

Link rotates the hilt of the Master Sword in his hand, reacquainting it with his left side. Zelda told him being right-handed was a requirement of all the knights in the Royal Guard. “The left hand of the King” didn't have the same ring to it, apparently. He'd trained relentlessly to switch the dominance of his hand when he decided he wanted to become a soldier, to become a member of the elite, like his father before him despite the lack of nobility in their blood. Again, Zelda was the one to tell him all this about himself, pointing out she’d noticed even though he held his sword in his right hand, he preferred to write with his left. The muscle memory of all that effort stayed with him, even when the title he’d once fought so hard for was long forgotten. 

Satisfied by the calm in their immediate surroundings, the Yiga drops their guard and shifts the seed and the slingshot into one hand. They fish out a slender piece of metal no bigger than a matchstick from their pouch with the other. It takes them pushing their mask back slightly, only enough to expose their mouth so they can hold it up to their lips, for Link to put together what it is. A whistle. 

A trap. Link lunges forward to stop them, but the Yiga is too quick. 

They blow into it, but there is no sound. 

Link freezes mid-strike, pommel of his sword a few inches from the Yiga’s injured side. The mask tilts in his direction curiously, whistle still pressed against their lower lip. 

Shepherds have something similar, tuned to a frequency only their hounds and livestock can hear. Not a trap. It’s for the horses. He waits for a moment, eyes turning out to scan the darkness, watching for the flicker of hooves, or the sudden opening of a massive eye. Funny how all the Yiga’s rules have exceptions. 

“How do you know the frox can’t hear it?” he growls.

“I don’t. But that’s why you are here,” the Yiga says matter-of-factly. Link can sense the smug smile forming under that stupid mask. 

He’s accustomed to being used by people who barely know him, but the ease with which he’s found himself in this position after avoiding the public for so long yet again, and with a Yiga, makes his ire whistle like a tea kettle in his ears. 

“Do you have one of those hourglass things?” he asks through his teeth, slowly sheathing the Master Sword. 

“Sure do,” the Yiga nods and retrieves the artifact from their pouch. 

“It measures time. One turn is a full day?”

“Pretty clever—hey!” the Yiga yelps as Link snatches it out of their hand. They lunge for it and Link takes a swift step back, shooting a warning glare that keeps them from trying again. 

He holds it up, pinching the ends between his fingers. “If we don’t reach the Grand Poe by the halfway point, you’re on your own.”

The Yiga stammers. Sand trickles steadily into the bottom half of the hourglass. About a quarter of the time looks spent. He gives the hourglass a little shake and grins. 

“Tick tock.”

Notes:

To quote one of my wonderful beta readers, ZeldaElmo, "Link sure isn't joking around" (:

Thanks again to Zelmo and cooking-with-hailstones for looking this chapter over. Comments, questions, curiosities always welcome. Be sure to give @the-depths-au a follow over on tumblr!

Chapter 12

They wander away from the edge of the lake five feet at a time.

The Yiga tells him the cliff he fell from is somewhere in the darkness to their left. Without any torchlight, the stronghold is quickly consumed by shadow. It puts the importance of their pace into perspective, although every inch of Link itches to push it. The dull glow of the bloom seed cradled in the Yiga’s slingshot is their only source of light against the eternal night. It’s safe. Smart. How he should have been operating down here the entire time. 

He can tell the Yiga is navigating their own subdued sense of urgency by the way their head constantly scans back and forth, the inverted eye of the mask tilted up toward the sky so they can blow into the whistle every hundred yards or so without readjustment. The horses clearly mean a great deal to them. Occasionally, a round of barks echo back from the abyss and the Yiga pauses, crouching low to smother the seed’s light against their chest until they determine it’s safe to continue moving. It’s the kind discipline that’s forced upon a person, forged by the perpetual threat of danger. Like a dog that’s learned to keep its tail low around the hand of a vicious owner. Link just can’t discern the primary hand: monster, master, or demon king. 

As they traverse through the dark, a nagging sense of helplessness begins buzzing around Link’s head like swamp flies. The sheer vastness of the depths makes it impossible to gauge their proximity to the barking. Any other warning signs of an approaching threat that he would rely upon on the surface are nonexistent here. There are no birds to scatter into the sky, no crickets to stop chirping, no streams to be disturbed. It’s already still and quiet.

Mostly.

“They know to get out of frox territory, but it’s been a while since we’ve been out this way,” the Yiga says. Of course they aren’t the type to fall into an awkward silence when they are nervous. They’ve prattled on like this the entire time they’ve been walking. It should irritate Link, but the shadow cast by the Yiga with their arms bent at their sides makes it look like they have wings. All he can think about is Tulin.

Without their cowl, which was now situated around Link’s mouth and neck thanks to some bizarre charity he still doesn’t understand or trust, he’s able to see the lower half of their face with their mask pushed back. Judging by the lack of wrinkles around their mouth and their youthful jawline, they can’t be older than twenty. Just a kid. A kid with a big mouth and a bad ankle.

It’s the right one. The impact to their gait is slight, probably exaggerated at the moment by fatigue. There is no visible trace of pain in their step, so it’s likely an old injury that didn’t heal right. This surprises Link a little, given how adept the Yiga are with technology, but their engineering is always focused on weaponry. Come to think of it, he’s never come across a healer in their ranks. Medical treatment on the surface was probably sought under disguise, but that option disappeared entirely when they migrated down here. 

“They are smart horses.” The Yiga lowers the whistle. “They know bright bloom flower light is bad. They’re just spooked.”

One of Link’s early mounts had a similar reaction to snakes. The horse had gone wild at the sight of a rattler halfway through the Gerudo Canyon Pass. Tossed him into a boulder and took off into the desert. Molduga or heat, he never found her. It was an accident that could’ve been prevented with better training. His fault, not the horse’s, but for a while he’d blamed the snake. It’s always easier to blame the snake.

“Hopefully they didn’t get turned around in all the commotion. They should have gone—” A loud bark cuts them off and Link crouches with the Yiga to block the light. It’s closer than before. Maybe? He half-expects a wave of small frox to come skittering toward them, but they wait and wait and the darkness remains undisturbed. The Yiga diligently controls their breath beside him even though the light jitters ever-so-slightly in their grasp. 

Just a scared kid with a big mouth and a bad ankle.

“At first, we thought they might be the guardian deities come to protect us in the dark,” the Yiga whispers, “but we were wrong.” Link pictures the wide-set eyes of the stone frog statues outside Kakariko’s Town Hall. Though defaced with cloths displaying the inverted eye, they’d also lined the slot canyon walls in the Gerudo Highlands once upon a time. 

The Yiga sighs and stands, convinced enough that the threat has passed. “We think the Gloom persuaded the frox, like the other monsters down here, to only go after you, but when it disappeared…”

The Demon King’s defeat wiped out all monstrosities born from his Gloom, but it didn’t rid Hyrule of natural predators. There are still wolves and pesky octoroks and colonies of keese hiding in lesser traveled caves on the surface. Occasionally, there are reports of bigger beasts, a lynel spotted on Hebra Mountain or the fin of a Molduga seen cutting through the sands near Arbiter's Grounds, but they’re much less problematic than before. The frox are likely native to the depths and thus remained behind when the Demon King fell. And without the patrol of a Monster Control Crew like they had up above, their numbers were bound to increase. 

“How large is their territory?” Link asks.

The Yiga startles a bit and looks at him. “Nice of you to join the conversation.”

“I'm not.”

“Most of the outer depths belongs to the frox.” They lift the bright bloom seed up to expand the light as if searching for a landmark. All Link can make out is more of the same: feather-branch trees and verdant soil and shadow. “Strangely, they tend to keep away from the activated sky roots and large bodies of water. Oh, and the big statues, but nothing down here goes near those.”

“Bargainers,” Link huffs.

The inverted eye tilts in his direction. “Just clarifying, this is you still not joining the conversation?” 

He’s not sure why feels the need to provide the title, but he does. “The big statues are called Bargainers.”

The Yiga pauses, considering this for a moment, and then gives a shrug. “Hm. Strange name. All they do is take.”

 

—

 

Streaks of bright orange begin to pierce the darkness in the distance and Link groans. He’d forgotten there was lava down here. 

The depths under Eldin are just as unpleasant as their skyfacing counterpart. Both feature lakes of bubbling, molten rock, but instead of steep climbs with rocks that threaten to pull free and bury him, the mountain here stretches into the earth forming deep pits lined with jagged, flesh-shredding stones. And while Vah Rudania’s constant march across Death Mountain had made navigating the Divine Beast’s caverns and the face off with Fireblight Ganon a challenge, it was nothing compared to the rusted inferno that is the Ancient City of Gorondia. If a Grand Poe resides inside it…who is he kidding, he’ll still go after it, but there is a very real possibility he’ll end up dying trying to reach it in the maze of rickety minecarts and fire.

The warmth in the air intensifies with every step. Eventually, the glow from the lava eliminates the need for the seed and Yiga pockets it and tucks the slingshot into their belt. Their chatter, thankfully, calms down as well. They must be out of frox territory. 

The Yiga takes a very deliberate turn around a tall pile of rocks so they start traveling parallel to the hellish region. Link sighs in relief and then glances quickly back at the familiar landmark over his shoulder. Though he’d only briefly spent time in the depths five years ago, he’d come across a few similar-looking structures often crowned with a weapon from the surface.

Sure enough, at the top of the rocks, he can just make out a spear suspended in the outstretched hands of a shadowy figure. 

He doubles back without a word. Sometimes they would speak to him, but this one just stares down at him as he scales the rocks to retrieve the spear. It’s in pristine condition. Link holds it against his chest in a final salute as the fallen soldier fades into nothing. The last gift of a comrade he can’t remember. He had hoped they would all be able to rest after the Demon King’s defeat, but they must linger with the same sense of duty they held in life. Forever awaiting a formal dismissal. He’ll give that to as many as he can as he searches for the Grand Poes. It will do him well to rebuild his arsenal.

He jumps down from the rocks to find the Yiga waiting with their arms crossed. “Is that one of the floating weapons?”

Link answers by securing the spear behind his back without breaking eye contact with the mask.

“It’s taboo to take from the dead,” they say. 

For some reason, he’s thinking about the fight back at the deserted stronghold. The Yiga had swung  the rake back and forth to fend off the swarm of smaller frox hungry for the light of the Poes behind them. The stalhorse pen was long empty at that point and yet the Yiga hadn’t fled. They were protecting the Poes. Fallen comrades of their own. And then later, when the Obsidian was preparing to inhale the stronghold, bones and all, they had practically begged Link to take the final Poe, to save the soul from being consumed. 

You can hold them, right? You have to take it! The light—

Was it superstition that prevented them from touching the Poe? From taking weapons when they so clearly needed them? No. They specifically made the distinction that he could do it. But were they insinuating Link possessed some unique ability to interact with the dead or just a lack of morality?

“It is a gift,” he clarifies.

The Yiga’s inverted eye tilts up warily toward the rock structure. “Do you get a lot of gifts from the dead?” 

“Yes,” he says bluntly. 

“How do you know it’s a gift?”

Link rolls his eyes and starts in the general direction they had been heading. 

The Yiga hurries and falls into step beside him. “I’m just saying…a gift from the dead is a rarity, right? Some people spend their entire lives begging for a sign from their departed.” 

“I don’t ask the dead for anything,” he says. 

“And yet, they give you gifts? Things you need?” When Link doesn’t respond, they add, “Does that make you blessed or haunted?”

Link stops dead and glares in warning at the Yiga. Whether it be superstition or some strict Yiga reverence for the dead, he’s not in the mood to dispute the intention behind the Champion’s gifts or Rhoam’s paraglider or Rauru’s arm or any other token he’s received from the beyond. Certainly not with a Yiga. They immediately throw up their hands apologetically and the gesture annoys Link even more. Their instincts are all wrong. Any half-decent Yiga would be reaching for their weapon or teleporting ten yards away if he looked at them like this.

“Do you actually know where you are going?” he snaps, suddenly questioning the validity of the Yiga’s offer to bring him to another Grand Poe. What if they were just using him to get out of the frox territory? What if it is a trap?

The inverted eye fixes on him like it’s the dumbest question ever asked. “I have been down here for a while.”

The heat only makes his ire rise faster. He rotates his jaw and pulls the hourglass out from his belt, making a show of checking how much time is left. 

“There is no need for that. It’s just up here,” the Yiga says, pointing up. 

A scattered groove of the tall tiered trees loom over them. At the very top of the closest one, the tip of a bright tri-colored flame is just visible from where they stand.

Grand Poe number two.

 

—

 

He’s never missed Rauru’s arm more.

Link briefly takes a knee on the second branch of the tree and gulps down hot air filtered through the fabric of the mask. Once he reached the first tier, Ascend would’ve made the rest of the trek a breeze. Since coming down here, he’d only climbed up to the first tier of these trees in order to rest, and that was challenging with the Sheikah arm and some rope. Stripped of both resources, he was forced to maneuver the entire length of the massive tree one-handed. Not impossible, especially with all his experience, but not easy or not enjoyable with an audience. 

The Yiga has thankfully, sensibly, kept any comments to themself. He suspects it is largely due to the fact he threatened to drag them back into frox territory, tie them up, and make them scream until one or a hundred eyes appeared in the darkness if they attempted to follow him. The last thing he wants is company if he passes out again. 

Rising to stand, he looks up at the final branch, which encircles the truck about eight feet over his head. He’s been using the Master Sword to cut grips into the smooth bark until he is close enough to hurl himself up at the edge of a branch, but that only works with the limbs staggered. There is no way up this one but through. 

Link stands and steps back, knuckling the stitch in his side while he thinks. It’s an old memory that finds him. The edges of it muddled by time and the Shrine of Resurrection’s touch. 

Her hair is a long cascade of blonde down her back, her travel clothes crisp and clean since they only just departed the castle for the Gerudo Desert. She stands in the shade of a tree on the edge of Hyrule Field, looking up into the branches with a fierce determination. 

Link cautiously approaches her, but the moment he crosses the invisible line she’s drawn between them, she snaps her eyes down and wrinkles her nose like he’s a bladed rhino beetle come to pester her. Who is he kidding, she doesn’t look at bugs with this much loathing. They interest her. As do hot-foots and monster guts and machine parts and all manner of things one wouldn’t expect to interest a princess. He never thought he’d find himself envious of a bug, but here he stood, wishing he had a hard shell or some wings. 

“I don’t need or want your help,” she reminds him coolly. It’s not his job to make her like him. He knows this, but keeping her safe would be a whole lot easier if she did. Only pleasing her has proven to be a puzzle he can’t solve no matter how he goes about it. If he’s overly attentive to her needs, he’s smothering her. If he doesn’t anticipate them fast enough, he’s incompetent. Once, he had the audacity to maintain eye contact with her for more than four seconds and she accused him of appraising her like everyone else in the castle. 

He stares at the safe spot on her chin and nods. 

“I do, however, require your spear.”

He dares a glance up, fighting to keep his face neutral. “My spear?” 

She blinks. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s spoken to her out loud. It’s more than he has spoken to most people who know him well, but he doesn’t believe telling her that would help him in any way. He doesn’t know why he feels more inclined to speak to her, or what about this moment specially had coaxed his voice out from his throat, but the surprise has seemed to temper her irritation with him. When she speaks, it almost sounds like a request instead of a command. 

“I want you to throw your spear,”—she spins back to the tree and seems to be calculating something with the angles between her fingers before she points to a spot about a foot over her head—“here.”

Link retrieves the spear, an ornate, impressive thing meant to be a gift for the Gerudo from the Crown, and eyes her wearily. 

“Urbosa won’t want it anyway. Gerudo spears are far superior to anything our blacksmiths can make. She’ll be much more interested in what I’m after,” she says and, with the flip of her hand, gestures to the tree. “Alright, good and hard at the spot I’ve indicated.”

He knows better than to question her. Better to oblige her now while they are still surrounded by the reliable peace of Central Hyrule. Hopefully he can leverage this later when he inevitably has to rein her in to keep her safe.

“You’ll want to step back,” he says. 

“Will I?” She quirks a brow at him. “I thought you were supposed to be superior in all manner of—” her voice cuts off as the spear whizzes over her head. It soars with such force that her hair flutters in the subsequent draft. The silver blade is buried up to the socket in the bark.

He has to bite his cheek to keep from smirking. 

She smooths her hands over the front of her pants. “Well. Good. Yes. I believe this will do.” 

Then, with a surprising amount of agility, she leaps up and grabs hold of the spear with both hands. Using the momentum from her jump, she swings her powerful legs and hoists herself up onto the spear, balances, and then steps over to the nearest branch. He watches her disappear into the foliage, hears a curious rustling and a SNAP, and then she drops down in front of him. A rare golden apple is clutched between her fingers, a trumpet of leaves still connected to the stem. 

“I read that if you feed one of these to a mare and you have pleased the horse god, her offspring might be born with a golden coat!” she practically squeals. 

She doesn’t have to like him, probably better that she doesn’t, but, Goddess, seeing that radiant smile on her lips, he’d sure like it if she did. 

It’s no golden apple that waits for him on the other side of the tree branch, but the memory inspires him nonetheless. He moves back to the edge of the rounded tier and for a moment he can almost see her there, pointing at the spot he needs to hit. He smiles and launches the soldier’s spear deep into the trunk. He hoists himself up just as Zelda had done a century ago and uses the Master Sword to cut a jagged opening through the branch so he can climb through. 

As soon as he pops his head through he spots it. A bundle of rippling firelight just a few feet from the hole. The three colors dance around one another, but it’s the green again that calls to him. Emerald fingers reach out from the core, beckoning him closer. 

It takes everything inside Link not to immediately reach for it like he did with the first. There isn’t any water to break his fall this time if he passes out. He takes his time approaching the Grand Poe, drawing in deep, slow breaths in and out through his nose to steady his pulse. It almost feels like the second time he approached the Master Sword. It nearly killed him the first time he touched it as well, though he had been warned the steel would bite if he wasn’t ready to wield it. What the Deku Tree failed to mention was whether he was worthy or not, the sword enjoyed draining his life down to its last pulse before it determined if it would release from the stone or drop him to the forest floor. 

Bracing himself for the cold, Link raises his hand out to the Grand Poe and runs his fingers through the flames. Whereas the first Grand Poe filled his mouth with the taste of open sky and regret, this one tastes of the air under gathering storm clouds or the wind through a deep, long forgotten part of the woods. There is no regret, only loneliness. He reaches and the green detonates into him, crimson and blue fire yielding completely. Ice shoots up his arm, the grip tight and purposeful, like a soldier’s embrace. It's cold like time gone still, like the eternity between seconds without her. This cold knows what it’s like to be without her—

Somewhere in the dark, or maybe it’s just in his head, a haunting melody echoes. Link watches in horror as the Grand Poe reverses out of his chest and reforms. His hand pulls back from the flames, his controlled breaths rewinding out and then in, and then for a moment she’s there. Her but not. Across him in the sky, in the darkness, an ocarina pressed to her lips. She inhales and starts to play again and the scene moves forward out of his control. His hand lifts and reaches for the Grand Poe at the same time he’s reaching for her. 

“No, stop!” someone cries. Is it him? 

Why is she leaving? Why is he being left behind? Why must she leave him behind?

The melody halts mid-note and it’s just the depths around him once again. He crumples forward to his knees, gasping for breath and white-knuckling consciousness as the cold fades into his chest. 

“Hey? Did you pass out?” shouts a voice from below.

His head pounds a battle drum. It takes him a long while to crawl down the tree. When he drops onto the depths floor, he has to sit with his head between his knees to keep from vomiting the meager meal he’d had back at the lake stronghold. The Yiga is smart enough to keep their distance. His entire body is trembling, slick with sweat like he just emerged from a frigid lake, yet, despite how terrible it feels, it means he’s closer to her. Closer to the Shadow Temple and whatever waits for him on the other side. Eight more. The words bounce around in his skull between every throb, dispelling the pain. 

He needs to keep going. 

A canteen slides between feet. Liquid sloshing around inside.

“Drink,” the Yoga instructs. “And before you glare at me all suspicious, the water is laced with bright bloom leaf tea. It will help you feel better. Sundelion elixir would be better, but we ran out a while ago. I can drink some first if you still don’t trust me.” 

He’s too thirsty to argue. He takes up the canteen and drinks until his lungs scream for air. It has a weak, earthy taste and it's warm, but against the lingering frost in his chest, it’s actually refreshing. 

When Link looks up, the Yiga is jotting something down on a large piece of parchment. They glance up and the inverted eye tilts. “Just marking off that Grand Poe. Don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

Link gives them a puzzled look. 

“Part of what I’m supposed to be mapping. They’re dangerous, like most everything down here. Well, at least to us. Bad stuff happens when we get too close to those Poes or your Bargainers. Injury. Death. The green armor is thought to offer some protection, but I usually just avoid them all together.”

“Mapping?” Link repeats. 

“That’s my job. My crew sent me out to chart the depths.” 

Link wipes his chin and drops his eyes to the parchment in the Yiga’s hands—the map . He could take it. Easily. The thought must cross the Yiga’s mind because they slowly fold it against their chest and take a step back. Their bad ankle gives a little and they wobble. All the bravado and big talk is gone in the wake of the terrible mistake they’ve just made. 

“These…these are just notes. The real map is with my horse,” they insist in a too-small voice. Just a kid. If they were really around twenty, that would have made them fourteen or fifteen during Upheaval. Not a warrior. Not someone Kohga would’ve sent after him wearing Zelda’s face. That kind of magic took years to perfect. 

Do you think you’d ever want children, Link?

She would never forgive him if he robbed a kid and left them to certain death in the dark. They’ve been nothing but annoyingly helpful and if they really do have a map here or with the horse, it could make completing his task exponentially easier than wandering around blind. 

“You said there were a few of these nearby back at the stronghold,” Link says, twisting the cap of the canteen back into place. “How many?”

The Yiga glances down at the not map. “Four.”

His heart leaps into his throat. Four. He stands quickly and tosses the canteen back at the Yiga. “Take me to the next one.”

Notes:

I'm backkkkkk.

Thanks for your patience during the hiatus. With only two chapters left to go on my zelinktines EoW fic, I felt comfortable diving back into this story. Comments, questions, and theories are all welcome!

don't forget to check out @the-depths-au on tumblr for updates, art and more.