[Novelization]Ocarina of Time, Part 1: The Vigil (T-M)

I actually introduced a draft of The Vigil about a year ago as an independent Zelda fanfiction project unconnected to the main series timeline except by reference. I've since decided to rework The Vigil as a reinterpretation of the series canon, a retelling of Ocarina of Time.

To provide some background as to the setting of The Vigil:

• Hyrule Kingdom in this game uses the geographical layout seen in Hyrule in Twilight Princess. The same three Hyrulean provinces will appear (Faron, Eldin, Lanayru), with Ordona Province being a province of a neighboring land. There will be several more villages scattered throughout the kingdom, and the provinces will not be divided by extreme geographical barriers as they are in the game so as to maintain a sense of realism.
• The city referenced in the opening scene, Anennor, is one of two cities on either end of the Great Bridge of Hylia that spans Lake Hylia. While the Great Bridge in Twilight Princess is depicted as being suspended a long way above Lake Hylia, which is a low-lying lake thousands of feet below, in my version of the story the Lake is not so low-lying, and reaches up so that the two bridge cities have easy access to it. In this manner Lake Hylia in The Vigil better resembles a real-world lake than Lake Hylia in the games.
• The northern Great Bridge city, which will be introduced later, will include the abandoned ampitheatre seen in Twilight Princess.

The first three chapters are more or less the same as the last draft, with minor changes mostly relating to name changes (Kasuto is now Anennor, etc.).

Anyway, as a retelling of Ocarina of Time I hope The Vigil can serve to flesh out a number of the background elements of the storyline of that game, and I hope as well that it makes an enjoyable, satisfying read.




The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Part One: The Vigil

Chapter First: Sticks and Stones

The attackers came in the night, just as twilight was swallowed by the ether and rain, migrating westward and trailing slowly behind the sun, began to coat the city of Anennor. They came silently, slowly, stealthily; by the time the sentries took note of them, they were already close enough to knock at the door, or, more accurately, to knock at the fringe city’s walls with catapult fire. It was one of the younger recruits who first spotted them. Even thieves need torchlight with which to make their way at night.

The Hylian Royal Guard might have been able to mobilize effectively, had the young plebe not made the unfortunate mistake of shouting for all ears to hear, even those of the unwanted guests, “Alert the captain!—they approach from the west side!” Naturally, the other soldiers on duty scurried to confirm his report, and, when they saw just how near the enemy was, they erupted into a frenzy. They scrambled every which way in a shabby attempt to assemble, although they turned out to more effectively scatter and disrupt their own defenses than to unite and make a stand. Even the countless hours of battle-training the Guard underwent during recent months could not prepare them for the fear and apprehension that accompanied a real battle, that the enemy carried as its battle-banners came into view.

Those damned insurgents, on the other hand, decided to ensure that the Guard would not be permitted the chance to respond with artillery fire. Before the Guard could even begin to mount a defence, the insurrection launched a series of what at first appeared to be scattershot volleys aimed at nothing in particular, but what later proved to be a direct attack at the city’s own perimeter artillery posts, which in turn proved most successful, effectively disabling the Guard’s ability to return fire. Any hopes of maintaining a tactical advantage were lost before the Hylians could even organize. What by all means should have been a battle to prevent loss of civilian life became, in an instant, a desperate struggle to minimize it.

But it was a cold night, a windy, rainy night, and so morale continued to plummet as sharply as the temperature as slowly but surely the Gerudo and their allies—Moblins, Bokoblins, Bulbins, and all other manner of goblin-folk—whittled away at their defenses, taking potshots at the city interior whenever they got the chance. The arrows the Hylian guard returned in response did slow the enemy’s relenting, but only to a point. Arrow shafts were nothing compared to catapults. While an experienced archer could take down anywhere between about twelve to fifteen rouges in a minute, if he were lucky, a single shot from a ballista could easily demolish three times that number, even if it fired completely at random. Which, once the falconets on the perimeter were immobilized, was what the enemy’s catapults proceeded to do.

In the streets, children and their mothers ran amok, shrieking in fear and despair, while fire and police brigades hurried from disaster area to disaster area trying to deliver trapped innocents from the fiery maws of collapsing buildings and working futilely to maintain order amongst the maddened masses. By a stroke of bad luck, a munitions depot that stocked small explosives for demolitions workers was struck by a particularly large catapult projectile, which, as one might expect, caused the entire block surrounding it to have its windows blown out, if not the walls, ceilings, and everything else along with them. Thankfully, it was long into the night, and the building was not localized in or nearby a residential area, else the casualties that followed might have been much more numerous. Of course, nothing could make the sight of crumbling wood, mortar, and brick where half of the industrial district once stood any the less traumatizing.

The Royal Legions of Hylian Knights, after years of effectively holding back the advances of the insurgents, had, in more recent months, seen an unprecedented increase in the success of the stratagems being employed against them on the fringes. After crushing a Hylian force along the Westbanks of Lake Hylia, the Gerudo began an offensive drive that splintered the Legions’ defensive lines and left them licking their wounds while the enemy made a strong advance into their territory. Starting from the Westbanks, the insurgents squelched with unprecedented prowess whatever antagonism they encountered as they advanced toward Hyrule Kingdom proper.

The king realized that his country stared into the eyes of a beastly threat, and so, casting aside the lonely pride of his fathers, he requested the assistance of the Zoras. King Zora had agreed to send a battalion directly to Anennor from the Zora’s Domain, but several days had gone by, and that battalion had not yet arrived. Now the enemy had made their way around the lake to the south end of the Great Bridge and enclosed upon the city.

While the other divisions were out in the field, specifically the Royal Cavalry under which he had served when his father first enlisted him, the good captain and his Guard had remained in Anennor, training endlessly in case the fight came to them. His vanguard quickly ascended to become the best among the Legions, his center was composed of some of the most experienced swordsmen in the land, and his rearguard, while slight in number since most of the able-bodied rearward-men were deployed alongside the Royal Cavalry, was just as skilled.

Every three hours on the hour, from dawn until midnight, his archers ran targeting drills to keep themselves sharp. His swordsmen worked doubly hard, training for three hours solid in the morning, then two hours in the afternoon and late evening. What small numbers of cavalry units were under his command toiled constantly to keep themselves and their mounts in tiptop shape since their job was arguably the most demanding in the field.

Again, however, most of the members of the Guard had never even caught a glimpse of real combat. Their kingdom had remained relatively safe, carefully protected by the mountains to the east and the hundreds of miles of distance between it and Gerudo territory to the west. By the look of things, the time had come to test the fruits of their efforts.

Well, in the loosest sense. The time to test those fruits seemed to be slipping slowly through their fingers, if it had not done so already.

:::

The battle was not going well.

Anennor had already lost nearly three hundred of those enlisted in her stalwart defence to the enemy’s bombardments, whereas the casualties inflicted on the enemy in response were shallow, at best, in comparison. And of even those scarce few, most of them were Bulbins. Her ranged defenses were slowly, but surely, failing against the enemy’s protracted, interminable onslaught. Without a change in strategy, without a shift from a defensive huddle to an offensive thrust, they would soon lose the numbers necessary to fight back at all, and the enemy would push them into a corner. The tug-of-war struggle that the Hylians and the Gerudo had entertained for the last decades was finally reaching a point, a climax, a summit from which the Hylians teetered, trying desperately not to tumble into defeat.

But how to keep one’s footing, let alone the footing of a nation and its valiant militia, when the climate of circumstance was so treacherous? Such was the question that lay before the good captain and his king—should they continue suffering through the enemy’s siege, and hope for reinforcements from the Zoras, or should they risk everything in one final charge? They had been deliberating the matter for the past hour or so, despite having declared such deliberation unnecessary during the earlier months of the campaign, when the tides of war seemed to be turned more in their favor. It was the dreadful irony of wartime politics, as Captain Paligré would often say. He had not hesitated to mention it even during the present convention. Then again, he had not hesitated to mention much of anything that came to mind, not only during this war assembly, but during any and all previous ones.

His cavalier in that respect made him one of the king’s most trusted allies, and had earned him his rank as Captain of the Guard. It also echoed through the Great Hall as he voiced forthrightly his piece on the matter, filled to the brim with exasperation potent enough to shatter glass and topple towers of stone.

“We simply lack the tactical advantages necessary to invest ourselves and our fellow Knights in such a charge! I’m not quite sure you’ve noticed, Minister Potho, but Anennor is under siege! We have the numbers necessary, that much is certain, but how are we going to march them out of the gates and onto the field? The Great Bridge is not wide enough to allow for any more than six or seven files—that’s barely more than half of a typical rank! Surveying the field, we can see that the Gerudo have at least enough archers deployed to crush our infantry units before they can even draw swords or return fire. Our best bet is to hold out until reinforcements arrive.”

“Your Highness, so long as those ballistas keep hammering the city, we run the risk of the Great Bridge itself crumbling against their volleys!” responded Potho, chief advisor to Daphnes, the king. “As of now, the only thing holding the Gerudo back are our expert marksmen on the perimeter, and, as the enemy artillery turns its attentions back to the perimeter walls, it is only a matter of time before even that defence fails. Without a strong vanguard, our primary advantage in battling the enemy on the ground is lost. If we are to, indeed, hope to attempt a charge before our numbers dwindle too low to even consider it, or before the enemy can deliver a battering ram to the city gates, or before some other terrifying fate befalls us, it must be now. Now, or—”

“Majesty, I must protest!” interjected the captain. “Even if we were to amass the manpower necessary to break through their lines, even if we were to find the chance to assemble them out on the battlefield, to let up even the slightest touch on the perimeter sentries would allow the enemy opportunity to find a soft spot in our city’s walls and exploit it, or worse—to assemble ladders and breach our defenses in that way. And, as you must certainly know, Highness, and as I am sure the Minister is well aware as well, to chance a charge with the main-battle at the forefront would be suicide. The enemy’s archers, while not as expert as our own, are deployed in such a manner that they would ensnare anything that wanders unwanted within their midst with a hail of arrowfire like a flytrap catches its dinner. An infantry unit, unguarded at its front and flanks by the vaward, would make for a ripe and easy target. The Zoras have promised backup support, and we should hold faith in that promise. All this I have repeated several times, as I see the Consulate notes. Wait for the Zoras, so that we may confuse the enemy’s fire and ensnare them in flytrap’s jaws of our own.”

All this, again and again, et cetera and so on. Back and forth they would bicker for hours on end, without fail, each and every occasion on which a matter such as the one in question came up for debate. There was no stopping them. Ever since Rusl had been made Captain, he and Minister Potho had been constantly at odds, yanking at one another’s chains as though playing a child’s game of tug-of-war. Of course, it had been so prior to Rusl’s appointment as well, but prior to his appointment they had not been able to carry their little quarrel into Consulate matters. Now the two of them dominated the Forum, which admittedly helped to factionalize the Consulate and thereby accelerated debate, but still was quite an annoyance when neither of them seemed keen to hold his tongue. As in this case, for instance. It was high time that King Daphnes bring down the gavel, as the saying went, before they squandered away what precious little time they had to decide on a course of action by squabbling in committee.

“That’s quite enough, milords,” His Majesty said wearily. “You have both made your cases, and made them clearly and firmly. Unless another wishes to propose a solution, then, High Minister Potho will take a poll, and hopefully we can decide this matter like civilized gentlemen.” He turned and bowed to the Minister, who rose to the podium and began issuing some ceremonial nonsense, at which point His Majesty promptly returned to His Royal Seat, sighed, and paid but half an attention to the proceedings.

King Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule I was still very young, as far as the kings of his day went, but his eyes betrayed the trials of age that had plagued his reign since his coronation, since the death of his father not long after war’s inception. Though he would not, could not disclose as much to his subjects, he often told the good captain, who was his closest friend and confidant, of how terrible a thing it was to be a king during wartime, and that he would gladly surrender his crown to another, if anyone more willing or able than he wished to accept it.

But, of course, there was no such other—none shared his love for the people, nor his shrewdness in military matters, nor any other among those qualities that had served him and his country well throughout this long, tiring campaign. And, much to Daphnes’s dismay, the vote came to a tie, which meant that he and he alone could cast the deciding bid. He rose once again to the podium and addressed his consultants with careful consideration in both word choice and tone of voice, so as to futilely mask his already-obvious uncertainty and anxiety.

“Well, good sirs, I must admit, this is a most arduous dilemma. I cannot imagine any more difficult one that a king might face. Should I take the reigns, and issue the preemptive strike that may turn the tides or may send them crashing down upon us? I have surveyed the chaos in the city below, and, it must be said, if I could, perchance, end this fighting swiftly, that would quite apparently be the more appealing alternative. As the both of you esteemed gentlemen have said yourselves, with circumstances as they now are, it is quite impossible to claim victory in this battle by fighting from within the city walls. We are eggs in a grounded nest, and the snake has already wrapped its coils around us, and, in time, will squeeze the life out of us and have us as its supper.”

He paused briefly, and turned once again to the Great Hall window to look over his kingdom.

“And, yet…” he said, so quietly that he might have been addressing himself, and not the bunch of gray-haired gentlemen on his Consulate, most of them thirty or forty years his senior, “I look upon what might become of my kingdom and I see the product of such so-called ‘decisiveness’, and I wonder whether I could bear to face these troubles as my ancestors have done. It was these same notions, these same intentions, these same designs that threw us all into this tumult to begin with. His Royal Majesty, my father, was faced with a similar choice—to risk everything and cast aside old oaths to quell disaster, or to suffer enduringly and honorably through it, and to count on hope to deliver him. He chose the former, and invited more tragedy than he had a taste for. And I often wonder to myself whether his fate was punishment for shoving providence under the table and taking matters into his own hands when they were not his to take, and then the other option—to wait, and to hope, and to pray that help may come, that powers outside of my control will be able to set things straight—that option becomes all the more attractive to me.

“And so the final play falls to me. Will I follow in the doomed footsteps of my ancestors in the hopes that their way might hold fast against Hyrule’s enemies? These Gerudo insurgents seem all too keen to pursue such a course. They seek revenge, blood-recompense for their fallen kin, those who my father conquered and crushed. What do I seek? I seek peace, peace for my people, for all peoples, and an end to the greed that has torn the world apart. Who am I to raise a sword in the name of my forefathers, and call that justice? I would become no better than them, no better than mine enemies, a clan of thieves and bloodthirsty beasts, as it were. At the same time I cannot surrender, for they also seek something, a great and ancient power, one that I am sworn to the gods themselves to protect above and beyond all my other earthly oaths. Surrender would prove worse than condemning my people to death.”

The cloud of doubt vanished like the fog of dawn into the clarity of day from His Highness’s countenance and articulation. Now was the time for decision, and so he would decide.

“Since these matters have already proven themselves to be beyond my power, as they proved to be beyond the power of my father, I am forced, then, to fold my hand, and to hope that one of the other players in this game of chance holds the cards that I do not. We shall place all our fortunes in the hands of the goddesses that bore us. We shall wait for the Zoras.”

He hoped that they, and his good friend, Do Bon Zora, would not betray his faith in them. The hour of their arrival was already over-late. But, as the saying went, good things come to those who wait, and so he would wait, and hope, and trust that that would be enough.

:::

The young Princess Zelda stood at the Great Hall window, the one that looked out into the eastern courtyard, peeking in, silently bearing witness to the proceedings. Though she was barely six years of age, she was shrewd far beyond the level of normal youngsters, even among royalty and certainly beyond her elder brother, Prince Daphnes, and she understood more or less every word uttered in the Consulate and every plan put forth. Any she could not comprehend she could and would have explained to her by Impa, who indulged her ardent curiosity even against the king’s wishes.

The matters that the men of the Consulate thrashed out of late terrified the young Zelda, and, after eavesdropping on many a secret summit of military men, she often found herself running, sobbing like a babe, into her nanny’s arms. But still Impa permitted her—nay, encouraged her—to poke her nose into her father’s business. It was not only an opportunity for the young princess to obtain a firsthand education of conducting the affairs of state, but it also helped her to develop surreptitiousness, a skill which had served Impa well in defending her village of Kakariko during the early years of the fierce wars, and, as she hoped, they might help the young Zelda to survive when she grew a bit older, just in case these hostilities with the Gerudo dragged on and such skills became necessary.

As it turned out, Zelda soaked up both words and the skills set before her like a sponge, and so Impa’s objectives encountered much success. Already Zelda knew all the pleasantries related to matters of diplomacy, had memorized all the primary military formations as well as when to use them, and had proven on many counts that she was capable of predicting the advice that might be solicited by a select few members of the Consulate in certain situations, and already she knew the lay of the palace so intimately that she could find hiding-places where even Impa had to exert great effort to discover her—all at her tremendously young age! In a few more seasons she might be shrewd enough to govern Hyrule herself, or, at the very least, to render herself invisible—Impa planned, when the little princess was a bit bigger, to impart to her some of the old Sheikah arts as well.

In any case, she was absorbing everything Impa set before her at an impressive rate, almost as impressive as her passion for the infamous candybaker tartlets, and it seemed inconceivable that her pursuits of acumen and ability might discontinue.

Unfortunately, with the climate of Hylia as it was, mostly thanks to the war, the royal family lay imprisoned in a cage of precautions. Spies of the enemy could be anywhere, after all. For the young princess, this meant staying within the confines of the castle grounds, and so all her life she had been unable to appreciate much in the way of acquaintances. Aside from Impa, her interaction was sparing, and so Zelda began to spend more time honing her literacy and tending to the royal gardens than she did socializing with her attendants.

Worst of all, though, what began as her occasional peeps into the Consulate conferences developed into something of an obsession. If the little princess was not in her chambers, or sleeping, or in the banquet halls at mealtimes, or poking her hand into pastry bins, she would probably be peering into the Great Hall window, attending conversations that she was not supposed to overhear. With the tides of war turning against the favor of the kingdom of Hyrule, however, and tensions appropriately high in the Great Hall, she had even begun trudging to the eastern gardens at night, long after her attendants were asleep, to peer in as the Consulate delivered their nightly reports of happenings on the fringes, reports that became more frequent, and, as such, had the princess visiting all the more frequently. Now she hardly slept at all.

Despite her place, safely tucked away in the overarching cage of the castle’s security, she still became a victim of war.

When the Consulate finally adjourned, the teensy Zelda darted as fast as her little legs would allow across the yards of the castle courtyards and into the royal chambers, where she found and awoke her napping nanny at once to disclose to her what she had overheard from the Great Hall window.

“Nanny Impa! Nanny Impa!” she shouted, grabbing her dear nanny’s hand and tugging it insistently. “Hear, hear; so much has happened!”

Though Impa was, at the moment, over-tired from all the errands the other attendants had had her run throughout the night, ever since the siege had begun, she had long ago learned to force herself to wake to attend to the needs of the children of the court. She would adhere to her duty and attend to her princess.

“What has happened, dear Zelda?” Impa asked, lifting up the little girl and holding her to her breast.

Zelda immediately, earnestly, lifted her head from Impa’s bosom and looked her nanny in the eye, revealing the childlike desperation and fear that it so sharply pains a nursemaid to see in her charge. And she spoke in that super-fast manner of speech that only small children and adolescent girls can churn out without stuttering: “Captain Paligré came from Anennor to meet with Father and the Ministers in the Great Hall. I hurried to the window as fast as I could, and I heard some of them say that the city may not last the night if help does not come. Minister Potho thinks that we need to drive them away now, but Father told him that we must wait for the Zoras. But I cannot forget what the others have said! O Impa! I am so frightened! What shall become of this plight?”

Impa brought a finger to her lips and hushed the teary-eyed princess, hugging little Zelda to her with the tenderness of the motherhood she had never quite been able to enjoy. “I do not know what will happen, dear one, but I do know this: have faith, and you will find the courage to persist. Stay with me, Zelda, and I shall protect you through all things. You have my promise, child.”

And then, almost inexplicably, she happened upon a truly remarkable idea, one that astonished her in its simplicity, almost to the point that she wondered why she had not considered it until then. Her birthplace. “But if you are truly afraid, then perhaps we ought to make haste for Kakariko. I can assure you that we shall be safe there, at least for a time.”

“But, Nanny Impa!” Zelda exclaimed, wrapping her arms tightly about her nursemaid’s neck, “there may be insurgents about!”

Impa shook her head and smiled warmly at her protégé. “Fear not, child, for I know a secret way out of the city that will keep us far from danger. It leads through the winding passages of Zora Canyon, to be sure, but passing through that ravine will be much safer than attempting to flee across the Southbridge. Does that sound agreeable to you?”

Zelda nodded, smearing the tears from her lashes, and replied with a simple “mmhmm.” Impa set the young lass on the floor, rose to her feet, and took little Zelda’s hand.

“Come then, child, and we shall inform the other attendants of our plans and be off at once.”

The two of them set off together, Zelda’s fingers still trembling underneath the warm, firm grip of her nanny’s.

:::

It’s time to run.

The old Sheikah released little Zelda’s hand and hoisted her charge onto her back with the grace and poise of a mushabi, and broke into a solid sprint, leaping from rock ledge to rock ledge, effortlessly maintaining her footing where most others might not. In wandering the eastward pass, the two of them had inadvertently stirred a lair of sleeping octoroks, and, as such, had invoked the beasts’ bullet-ridden retribution. Thankfully, their many-tentaculated attackers were sluggish on dry land, and even more so on the treacherous rocky terrain of the river valley descent, and so it was not long before Impa turned her head backward, ascertained the success of her flight, and slowed to a stop at the valley basin, setting the little princess down so that they could resume a more leisurely pace.

They were now safely away, not only from the octoroks, but from the impending peril of Anennor and, gods forbid it, the Hylia Keep as well. They could travel with greater ease knowing that the dangers of battle were no longer at their backs, only those of the wild, in which Impa was well-versed. Other than that nasty encounter with that foul den of octoroks, however, the river valley seemed to be rather void of feral things, and they found no more trouble. Before long Zelda began to feel the weight of night press down upon her, and so Impa proceeded once again to carry her. The princess dozed off rather promptly, and Impa could not refrain from smiling when she felt the child’s cheek lean in sleepy silence against her shoulder.

Within the hour she reached the banks of Zora River, and so she started into the damp and misty cliff-caverns that cut through the canyon walls. Her kin had used them in ages past to travel between Kakariko and Zora’s Domain, whenever it came time to bear a member of the Zoran royal family to the grave. The cool spray of the river tickled her skin as it had not done for so many long years. She draped her cloak over the little Zelda so that the cold and wet would not wake her from sleep, and then gave herself to the tranquility of the sacred roaring river. She had not found use for these caverns in a very long time, and it seemed a relief to finally hear the sound of the stream rushing through the Kakariko gorge once more.

A few more hours, a few more miles through the valley wall caverns, and they would be at Kakariko’s doorstep. It would be easy walking from there one out; the paths inside the valley-caves were well-marked, and besides, Impa knew them well. The worst danger they’d encounter in these parts were angry octoroks, and they were diurnal, and would not attack at night unless disturbed, as that last nest had been. Zelda could sleep soundly until they reached the village, but Impa would have no such peace to herself.

Prior to quitting the castle, Impa had donned her old Sheikah garb, a remnant of her yesteryears, of a time during which she served as steward of her village of Kakariko and not as a servant in the royal courts. Zelda had once remarked that she could see that her nanny missed life in the country, missed the lulling nonattendance of politics in the daily matters of village existence. She had stolen a fleeting glimpse of her dear nanny’s homesickness in the deep, glassy reflection of the old Sheikah’s eyes. For in the eye, the mirror of the soul, the truth lays bare, but when filtered by heart and mind it becomes laden with lies, forsworn. Young children recognize this best of all, impressionable through they are by the pretenses of big people, for they have not yet forgotten how to see.

It would not be doing the old maid enough justice, however, to attribute her sentimentality of times of yore merely to a pining for Kakariko itself. What she truly longed for, beyond returning to live once again in her ancestral home, was to join once again in the ceremony of her tribe. To stand, naked and bare, before pyres lit in prayerful reverence toward the gods, and to bask in their glory and might, nothing but air between her and the heavenly flame. To wear proudly the ritual-paint of the mushabi, and to run with them, hunt with them, with only the sublime glow of twilight to light their way. This was their custom, and they had held it dearly, as had Impa in her youth.

But, alas, the wars had changed their ways from the ways of old to those of darkness, ways she did not wish to ponder or remember, and the Sheikah had absconded Kakariko, had left behind her and her only to be steward to chosen lands the elders no longer wished to preserve. So often she heard echoes of the past, of the Whispering Ones’ lament. They haunted her every dream, in sleep and in wakefulness.

“Shadow and light are not meant to mingle,” the whispers said to her. “It is not the gods’ design that we should live alongside the Hylia folk in this way. The goddesses gave us Kakariko that we might remain separate, apart from them in all things. Now you offer the Hylians sanctuary within our once-hallowed grounds. Now their wars have infringed upon our sacred homeland and the dark deeds they have bidden us to do have soiled it. No longer can we dwell here, Impaz’shi, not alongside the fated ones, not in these lands that now bury the shadows, and so we must retire to another place.”

They had told her more, but she could not suffer to recall those harsh words again. She could not bear to turn over in her mind the blame they had cast upon her for what she had deemed, and deemed even still, to be a good turn toward the people whom her tribe was supposed to serve after all the darkness Kakariko had endured on their behalf. Nor could she bear to entertain thoughts of the scornful reckoning she had received along with it.

Now, so many years after, it was far too late for contemplation. What is done is done, and no matter how dark it was, it had to fall behind her, stored away in the past where it belonged, and especially now, when newfound duties, her responsibilities to her charge, called for her attentions.

She shuddered despite herself.

She would have to swallow those echoes of her past, and let them ring hollow, as her own people had done.

First of all, nicely written. Again, I enjoy the verbage, but there are a few things that could be tweaked to help with flow.

But it was a cold night, a windy, rainy night, and so morale continued to plummet as sharply as the temperature as slowly but surely the Gerudo and their allies—...

I understand what's being said here, but it's a little uneasy to read and might have to be read over two or three times. "As" becomes redundant.

The arrows the Hylian guard returned in response did slow the enemy’s relenting, but only to a point.

I also don't like the wording here. It sounds slapped together.

This is only for the first section, I'll critique the others later, probably. Good points: The attention to detail, the characterization. Needs some work: I want more colour. Give me more imagery.

All points taken, both corrections incorporated. The very first section may be altered so that it is told from the point-of-view of a particular character whose identity will remain anonymous until I finish the retool. Expect all information given so far to remain the same, however.

Chapter 2 is ready for postage--it didn't need many edits from the first draft, in fact. It may be familiar to some of you, as it first appeared in a previous story--"Fate's Mantle"--and is taken verbatim from the previous version of "The Vigil."


Chapter Second: Hark, the Prospect of Discovery!

Kakariko Village.

It was the only place left in Hyrule, excepting, perhaps, the forbidden forest on the southeastern fringe, where one could find refuge from the hailstorm of arrow-shafts to the west and the death-blows of quarrelers’ swords in the east across the whole of the Hyrulean plain as the prolonged wars dragged on.

Everywhere else, from the fiery Death Mountain to the once-immaculate Hylia Lake, stank of bloodshed and treachery. Here the only indications of the conflict were the cries of mournful lament for the fallen as the bodies of the dead found rest under the solid earth and their spirits settled into restful repose. This war had claimed many lives, so many lives, during its duration; such was the lust for the mystical Sacred Realm that had pervaded the hearts of the people. Now, thankfully, that fight had boiled down to an all-or-nothing struggle betwixt the Hylians and the Gerudo, with their allies drawn into the bloodbath.

Maestro Flat was alone, as was often the case, staring pensively over the rain-washed landscape of Kakariko from the desk in his study, which faced the largest window in the manor. Were it not for the blustery flurries of wind rattling the study window and whistling through the jagged crack that scarred its face, the hammering of raindrop bullets against the aluminum roof, the crackling drumbeats of thunderbolts splitting the sky, and the rap-tapping of his conductor’s baton against the writing-desk, the Maestro would have had himself a pristine silence. Those were the sorts of quiets good for a composer’s work, those utter stillnesses in which one can bask in only the echoes of his own artistic brilliance. No disturbances, no distractions, no wayward, wand’ring thoughts. Naught but whispers of virtuosity and a page and quill with which to record them.

But he had not been able to enjoy any such tranquility for many dismal, overcast days; the itinerant front that had wandered into Hyrule’s skies since the insurgents strengthened their advance had bestowed not a notable kindness in its approach, nor any even fleeting interest in departing in the near future. Without a genuinely unspoiled silence to set the ambiance for his work, the Maestro turned his attentions to his ledger, his pen intent on authoring something, e’en if it could not be a musical masterwork or an experimental hypothesis. He had not taken up the ledger in months, and residual sheets of dust had gathered on the cover, caking the otherwise attractive leather binding. The ledger smelled of the oil paper he had packed it with when he and his brother had fled the war-struck city of Hyrule to resume their studies in the more undisturbed Kakariko. He realized immediately after he lifted it from its place that he had not entered in it since before their departure—he had simply set it on his writing-desk when they arrived at the estate and forgotten its existence since.

But now he wrote, and freely, not concerned for once whether or not any abstract stroke of genius would find its way onto the page.

“Our task has proved itself to be an abysmally confounding one. My brother and I toil day and night, night and day, to discern the secret to controlling time. For the past two years, we have set everything aside—our families and friends, our wives, our social obligations, our matters of state, our mistresses, and even, as it seems, our very siblinghood—in pursuit of this seemingly-incomprehensible thing, this solution to the most mystifying riddle that envelops this land of Hyrule. And for what!—nothing! We remain as empty-handed as we were when we began!—even more so, in fact, what of the disquieting hollowness that now inundates our pocketbooks! I cannot begin to fathom the rationale that must sponsor our unremitting doggedness, but I envisage that it must have somewhat to do with our incessant quarreling over our father’s favoritism—a squabble that, much though it troubles me to admit it, did not expire at his passing, has not expired since, and shows no indication of coming to any sort of end in the imminent or even indistinct future. So much progress we have yet to make, in every aspect!

“The unremitting rain has served ever as a hindrance to our designs, and seems to mock our efforts in so doing. Sharp is even now outdoors, conducting tests of varying sorts in an attempt to trace even the slightest hints of magic in the air, in the earth, and (I find myself almost ashamed to express it, e’en in these pages) in all practical probability in the lightning as well; he has been literally thunderstruck twice since we arrived at Kakariko alone. What a shocking effect these fortuitous occurrences must have on his common sense! And still he beleaguers me that the answer must lie in nature—that there must be some rational phenomena at the root of all this. I admittedly am not entirely confident of where my faith rests on these matters. I do know that I shall continue to toil over volumes and manuscripts in the study, and will continue investing myself in perfecting my compositions; Sharp may continue to do as he will, for as long as he pleases—it is of no consequence to me. In any case, I should not be at all astonished if he again finds himself assailed by a hail of lightning this very night. One can only speculate as to how many lightning strikes a fellow can take before he squanders his sanity.”

And what of Sharp?—his elder brother had not ventured inside for several hours, despite the intense downpour and the spectacular lightning show, and he began to worry. But, of course, as Flat recalled instantaneously, Sharp had always had himself a penchant for the outdoors, especially in bad weather, and it had constrained their parentages to the brink of madness. Flat, on the other hand, had inherited the more refined character traits of his family, the genteelism that typified those of noble birth, and, as such, had in turn inherited his parents’ favor, despite being the younger.

Despite their differences, however, the composer brothers did share a few noteworthy commonalities; namely, their unparalleled genius, both in science and in the arts. Curiously enough their superior intellects were not, contrary to popular supposition, prototypical of their kin. Their ancestors descended from a long succession of Hylian aristocrats who, while better educated than the preponderance of the common folk, possessed no congenital scholastic predilection. The two of them made quite the dynamic duo, as their chauffeurs, tutors, and various other attendants never failed to remark.

And what a pair they were!—while their contemporaries hammered out symphony after symphony under the direction of the music instructors, Sharp and Flat were hard at work composing them! Why memorize the numerous varieties of flora and fauna when one could instead be out in the field uncovering new ones? Why scrutinize the politics of the past when they were already a part of the much more pertinent politics of the present? It all seemed such an outrageous waste of time, to youths such as they who already had minds for such things.

Their father had served, as one might anticipate of all gentleman of noble birth during this tumultuous era, as a member of the Legion of Hylian Knights. He had been a captain of the Hylian Royal Cavalry once upon a time, and as such had commanded a great range of respect both among his subordinates and from his family. This unfortunately translated to a significant amount of domestic cruelty, specifically towards his wife, and this translated in turn to a blanketed spite on the brothers’ part towards their father and towards the soldierly upper class in general; which certainly accounts for their abhorrence of and deviance from the customs of the highly classist society of their youth. For instance, when Sharp reached his sixteenth birthday the captain showered him in the typical pomp and circumstance surrounding the coming of age of a military man’s eldest son—a night on the town, his first round of beers, even a complimentary bed-mistress to keep him occupied afterwards.

Any fledged aristocrat would have been more than pleased with the arrangements, but Sharp?—Sharp was hardly the stuck-up courtier that one would expect him to be. While his father badgered him to keep at the gentlemen’s public-house, he instead insisted on going to browse through the glassman’s quarter down at the city piazza. He followed suit by declining every pint offered him, after the first, and outright repudiating—even chastising!—the whore his father had furnished.

Needless to say, his father was furious, but nothing could have incensed the captain more than what would happen next. Instead of taking on the family legacy and entering military service, Sharp decided instead to pursue a higher education at the Hylian Academy of Science & the Arts. This, of course, heightened tensions in the household to an unprecedented intensity. Blunt articles flew, windowpanes shattered, and then Mother, exasperated in her own way, burst into a torrent of tears. Flat recalled his father’s bellowing voice, echoing from the anterior foyer all the way up to his bedchambers on the far side of the mansion. He remembered those heated words as clearly as he remembered his own name.

“Look how you have made your mother weep!—how could the gods have delivered unto me such an ungrateful son? What have I done to deserve such melancholy? What a stain you are upon this family’s name! Get out!—leave my sight at once!”

He remembered hastening onto the mezzanine, frightened that he would never see his brother again, just in time to hear Sharp’s terse reply: “Well then; I suppose I’ll have your blessing after all, won’t I?” before he turned around and walked, his head held high, out through the front entrance and into the rain, pouring then just as heavily as it was in the now. Flat had nearly called out to his brother, but regained his composure. Sharp must have heard his shallow intake of breath as he stopped himself, though, because as he ambled out he turned his head just enough so that Flat could see him wink. The door shut quietly behind him, quieter, at least, than the hammering of the raindrops against cobblestone.

The captain was never really the same again; but, then again, he never really displayed much in the way of change, either. It would be most accurate to say that he wasn’t much of anything at all after that. He became fairly quiet and withdrawn after Sharp’s curt departure, and he gradually withdrew himself from the Legion and from the veterans’ clubs and gentlemen’s public-houses. He did not live long enough to see his eldest son, disowned though he was, graduate from the most prestigious of academies in the realm. The war soon claimed him at the point of a Moblin’s lance. He enjoyed a stately burial—one of his fellow soldiers recited the highly impersonal stock eulogy read at every military officer’s interment, the congregation of mourners sang a collection of funeral hymns, and then all in attendance went on with their lives. And that, as they say, was that.

Sharp went on to pursue degrees in natural sciences and the arts, and Flat soon followed in his footsteps. Of course, as a result, the two of them were essentially disclaimed from the social aristocracy; not that this mattered to either of them in the slightest, since their primary focus was on their academic pursuits, not the approval of the peers of their youth. As Byrna the Renowned once imparted to his fellow scholars: “Revulsion of common mores is the force that makes mountains move and that molds true merit among men.”

And, truly, without their disgust toward their father and toward everything he stood for, the brothers might have turned out the same as all the other products of their generation: lackluster facsimiles of their patrician predecessors, devoid of novelty and sustenance, chattel slaves bound by the shackles of their or generation, unable to move forward without being hauled along by the bandwagon of the day, or sometimes the hour. By what seemed an act of Providence they had discovered early on that what their peers called ‘adolescent rebellion’ was a sham; that though young men pushed the envelope of their upbringing they never pushed hard enough and indeed fell into new envelopes with their own expectations, and in failing to do so never made any honest progress whatsoever. And that realization was precisely what qualified the brothers for foundation grants from the Academy during their graduate years for the purposes of building their musical studio and scientific laboratory, it was precisely the reason why the royal family selected them to study the magical properties of the world, and it was precisely why they intended to succeed.

But this is all detail; consummate detail, memories fluttering across consciousness like a trick played by mischievous spirits before they gave their kisses of death, but still merely detail nonetheless.

The Maestro set his conductor’s baton on the surface of the desk and approached the window to glance over the flats contiguous to the family estate for any sign of his brother, but the rain came copiously, and it proved difficult to observe anything, much less the dark, robed speck that was his brother through the valance of unsettled showers. He did glimpse, however, something that was altogether peculiar; something he had not been sharp enough to remark in the past when he surveyed the Kakariko countryside.

In the budding twilight he could distinguish, just barely, a trace of light which reminded him of the flicker of a candlelight-flame, floating in circles around the Kakariko windmill off in the distance. Flat strode briefly to the far side of the room and rummaged through his chest for his binoculars, then promptly revisited the window, gazing this time through the lenses to better determine, with any luck, the origin of the effulgence, dim and imperceptible as it was.

What Flat beheld through the lorgnette astonished him so profoundly that he nearly cried out in sheer consternation.

He immediately discarded the looking device and returned to his ledger to add a closing line of text, and straightaway he donned his rain-cloak and started for the door in such haste that he left the chronicle ajar on his writing-desk, revealing the single sentence he had scrawled at the bottom of his account.

It seems I may have just stumbled upon a breakthrough.

:::

What a delightful tune.

The young caretaker of the Kakariko windmill, the aptly-named Guru-guru, played the song often on his musical box, and Sharp, distinguished Maestro and celebrated academic though he was, could not help but revel in it, even as he conducted his research. It was light and fanciful, and it reminded him of the carnivals that he and Flat once stole away from the mansion in order to attend during their youth, in disguise, no less, for t’would be appalling if members of the noble class were seen commingling with the common folk.

Oh, but he could perceive the taste of cotton candy bubbling in his mouth at the mere memory of them and the smell of the caramel cauldrons wafting across his senses nonetheless! Ah!—to be a child again!—to look at the world through innocent and carefree eyes once more! But alas, those days were long gone, and nowadays he had no time for carnivals and cotton candies and the purchase of caramel cauldrons, only toil and research followed again by more of the same, day in and day out.

He could still entertain the memories, though, and he could still enjoy the windmill man’s tune.

“Soon,” Guru-guru often said, “I shall contrive a musical box that can perform on its own, without need for human intervention, especially not the manual rotating of cranks.”

The Maestro had to admire the young fellow’s intentions, and were it not for his already-existing obligations to the royal family he might have offered the windmill man some assistance in his endeavor. Someday, if ever he and his brother ever finished this infernal task of theirs, he could lend the young man a hand so that he could make something of himself. For now, he just continued with his work, and marveled privately at Guru-guru’s uncomplicated standard of living. Complexity was the prime persisting trait he maintained from his upbringing; he could take nothing in simplicity.

That may be why he spent so much time in the windmill, he thought, even outside of his work: Guru-guru was everything that his existence had never allowed him to be. Perchance, then, it might be best to let the lad go his own way. After a long while the music stopped and Sharp heard footsteps coming up the stairs of the loft. There came a knock on the door, and before Sharp could answer it, Guru-guru poked his already-balding head into the room, followed by a cascade of light heralding his entrance from the tower proper.

“Good evening, sir,” Guru-guru said meekly. He breathed sharply, as though about to go on, but instead screwed up his eyes and scratched his head. “Gracious, sir! It is rather dim in here! Would you like for me to fetch an oil lamp?—some more wicks?”

It had never occurred to the Maestro how outlandish it must have seemed to the lay masses that he worked in such conditions as he did. He often chose the darkest, dankest corners of the gloomiest buildings in the vicinity to rent for use as research laboratories, and often worked late at night, with only a single candlelight to illuminate his desktop, by which he read, wrote, and even examined earthen material and fiddled with electrical apparatuses of various sorts. But that was how he had always conducted his vocation, and he did not intend to change that.

“No, thank you, my lad,” Sharp replied flatly, “I shall carry on well enough as things are, I expect. Was there something else you wished to speak with me about?”

“Ah, yes sir,” Guru-guru said, bowing politely, out of habit. “I was just going to set off for town to procure some fresh fowl for the supper table, and I was curious as to whether you would care for a morsel or two for yourself as well.”

Sharp was somewhat taken aback by the gesture, and almost even declined it. He was not accustomed to receiving favors from those he hardly knew, much less by someone living so humbly in the lower class; no one had ever exerted even the slightest hint of obligation towards him without expecting something in return, and so he was by nature wary of any charity. But Guru-guru was a fair, kind-hearted young man, and so he could not deny the offer; he was rather famished, to be sure, and he knew that he could hardly expect to fetch something for himself.

“Why, how considerate of you, dear boy!” he answered, pulling his monocle from his face and inserting it into his breast pocket so that he could recline back in his chair. “Yes, please! I would like, let’s see: one order of the Cucoo & Shrimp salad from Aginah’s Seafood Grille, and a loaf of their delicious honey-bread, and a bottle of Torciano Fragolino to wash it all down with. Yes, that will be fine.”

He was about to go on with his work, but it took only a brief moment to realize his mistake.

“Oh, dear!—I have completely forgotten myself. Please don’t allow me to inconvenience you with my luxurious tastes.” He reached into his satchel and produced a small purple gem. “There you are, lad; that should cover both our expenses, I think,” he said, presenting the rupee piece to Guru-guru with his outstretched hand.

But Guru-guru proved to be more modest than the Maestro could ever have expected. He shook his head decisively and said, “Oh, no sir. I could not. You have been more than generous enough already, sir. I’ll leave you to your research. I know you have important work to attend to, and I have taken up far too much of your time as it is.”

What an honest and giving heart!—ne’er before had Sharp been granted such a kindness! He supposed he knew the cause. When he had applied to rent the loft, Guru-guru had originally offered him rent of only three-hundred seventy-five rupees per month. Of course, Sharp could not see how this could possibly be a fair exchange—three-hundred seventy-five rupees was hardly enough to cover a monthly stock of rations, even for a modest one-man household in which its member did not squander thirty-eight rupees a meal on extravagant tastes. So, naturally, he had counter-offered a more reasonable sum of one-thousand seventy-five per month, a sum which Guru-guru was more than happy to accept (so happy, in fact, that he had nearly collapsed at the mere mention of such a figure). Sharp’s munificent rent rate more than paid for Guru-guru’s monthly expenditures, which, as he noted, had also catalyzed a betterment of the young lad’s disposition.

It was around this time, as Sharp remembered fondly, that the young man had expressed his grand idea for the automatic musical box—which he had appropriately given the sobriquet ‘gramophone’—alongside proposals for a heat-powered carriage and a pictobox that could record moving pictures. The lattermost of these was most intriguing to Sharp, as the inventor of the original pictograph box, which he and his brother improved not long after so that it could snap pictographs in color. In any case, he could understand why the lad might feel indebted to him; he had single-handedly allowed young Guru-guru to enjoy a better standard of living and asked for nothing in return, save the services he paid so generously for, namely the use of the loft, and this only made young Guru-guru’s benevolence all the more appreciable to him.

“I thank you, my lad,” Sharp said simply, too enveloped in stark revelation to call any other, more meaningful words to mind.

“You already have, sir,” said Guru-guru, already bowing and already starting down the stairs for the portico. Sharp watched the door swing shut, then set his monocle back on his face and turned his attentions back to his studies. He suddenly became unnervingly sensitive to how dark it was in the room, and so he rose to his feet and ventured down into the windmill proper, to the storage closet, retrieved one of the oil lamps to better light the room, and carried it back up with him.

Before he could start it, however, he perceived the sound of heavy footfalls pounding up the stairs, followed by a heavy and insistent knock on the loft door.

“My word!—he can’t have returned already!” Sharp exclaimed. He made his way swiftly to the far side of the room once more and tugged open the door, only to be faced not with the young Guru-guru but his own brother, panting under his hood, dripping wet from the rain; he had not even bothered to remove his cloak when he entered.

“Ah, Flat—you seem rather excitable!—what brings you to the lab, dear brother?”

Flat rushed quickly to the lab-desk and leaned against it, his face remarkably close to Sharp’s, and lowered his eyes so that he was no longer looking at his brother through his half-moon spectacles but, rather, over them, and replied, “You are not going to believe me, dear Sharp.”

He told him regardless.

:::

Sharp’s reaction had been more or less what Flat had anticipated it would be.

At first, he seemed paralyzed by the sheer shock of the discovery, then that shock turned to the realization that the news might actually be true, and then glee when he finally accepted that it was true. Flat had not seen his brother smile so widely in over a fortnight. Then again, this had been one of the signs they had futilely sought for the past several years: the interaction between the spirit realm and the world of the living. They had long suspected such a connection, since the involvement of the spirits of the dead in everyday life would more than explain the strange magical phenomena that surrounded the land and its people, but they had never been able to demonstrate it—until now. Of course, Sharp would still require a lengthy span of time in order to finally get over the initial announcement—at the very least until he caught a glimpse of the little spirit for himself—but that would only serve to entertain.

“I first saw it just there, floating around the arms of the windmill,” Flat said, pointing up at where the spirit had been. “It carried a small lantern which it had hung around its neck—the same sort of lantern that the stories say houses souls—and it appeared as white as mountaintop snow. But it vanished as I got close, so I was unable to take a quality pictograph.”

“Well, that is certainly unfortunate…” Sharp replied, in that I-almost-don’t-believe-you tone the two of them often employed when they snatched wind of the fact that they were on to something.

It would be difficult to attach any greater significance to his brother’s discovery if he could not bear witness to it himself. But something was nagging at the back of his mind—there was some missing piece of the puzzle, some link between the ghost’s disappearance and young Flat’s arrival at the windmill. His mind worked like a machine, methodically concocting a deductive solution to this riddle. He did the most obvious thing that came to mind.

“Do you recall the time when it appeared?”

His brother kept the time for everything—when the two of them conducted experiments together, Flat always to be the scribe, always the timekeeper. Flat was always so very meticulous that Sharp wouldn’t know what he would have done without his brother to keep him straight.

“But of course!” Flat said. “It was about five thirty.”

“Hmm,” Sharp huffed. This was hardly surprising, since that was the advent of the hour of twilight, which, in legend, was already closely associated with heightened paranormal activity. “And when did it vanish?”

“At five forty-two, only a few minutes ago!”

About the same time that Guru-guru had come upstairs to pay a visit, if Sharp remembered correctly. And, of course, being a musician, he remembered keenly that just a minute before climbing to the loft Guru-guru had stopped playing his music box. Could that song have somehow had something to do with the rift between the spirit world and the world of life?—since music and magic were his business, he couldn’t imagine why that could not be the case.

“I have an idea,” Sharp said. “I need to fetch something from inside—wait here until I return.”

He ran inside and searched the ground floor of the turret for the music box, he rummaged through every crate he could see, every chest without a lock on its latch, but to no avail. The only other room he could think to search was Guru-guru’s private chambers, and, typically, not even the temptations of discovery would lead him to invade another’s private space, but this case was altogether different. Besides, he was certain that the young lad would understand.

There it was, standing on a chair on the far side of the room, the forbidden fruit on the tree of knowledge, beckoning to him as the golden power beckoned to those with greedy hearts from the holy sacred land. The lance of lightning that flickered outside sent a gleam flashing from the cool metal surface of the musical-box’s bell, flooding the room with white light. For a moment, the world froze, and he was alone with the music-box and the natural light of atmospheric electricity, and with this decision that he had to make. This music-box was young Guru-guru’s life, and while he knew the young lad would have gladly granted it to him, he felt torn in two as to even consider taking it without the lad’s knowledge.

In the end his curiosity persuaded him, though, and time seemed to flow again, the light that held him frozen in apprehension of the deed he was considering subsided and passed away. He lifted it carefully from the chair and strapped it to him as he had often seen Guru-guru do himself, threw a cloak over the apparatus to protect it from the elements, and started back outside with a start.

His brother stared at him quizzically as he stepped out the door and into the rain. “Isn’t that young Master Guru-guru’s musical box?” he asked. “What use could it possibly be to our ends?”

“Well, you reported that the spirit disappeared a few minutes before you arrived, and that it appeared at the dawn of the hour of twilight,” Sharp explained. “The spirit’s appearance at the hour of twilight makes sense enough—that hour of the day has always had a curious connection to magic—but I still could not put my finger on the reason why it would have vanished. I did recall, however, that it was about five forty-two—the point you reported—that Guru-guru stopped playing the music-box to ask if I needed any errands run while he headed into town. This song, I feel, may be the missing link in all of this.”

“Ah, so you believe the secret to the magicks of Hyrule lies in song, just as we suspected!” Flat shouted. “So what are you waiting for?—play the music-box!—the hour of twilight has nearly passed us by!”

Sharp did not need to receive the charge twice—he took the crank and rotated it smoothly, listening to the tune issue forth like a siren’s cry. Flat brandished a pictograph box and pointed it to the heavens in anticipation of the spirit’s reappearance. They were not disappointed—within moments, the specter materialized from the ether, just where Flat had said it had been, and Sharp’s mouth fell agape while Flat snapped picto after picto of it.

Sharp took a long, careful look at the ghost, and found it to be exactly as Flat had described it—white and wispy, carrying a small handheld lantern. It also appeared to be wearing a mask, a mask adorned with a single dark eye—an eye similar, but not exactly the same as the symbol of the Sheikah, the Eye of Truth. It shared the same basic shape, and also had three lashes, but instead of the teardrop extending downward, it sported a second set of lashes. What could it mean?—what sort of spirit was this? For the life of him he could not endeavor to tell.

He noticed something in addition to the ghost, however, that he had failed to observe prior—that the rain seemed to fall perfectly in tempo with the song. To test this hypothesis, he increased and decreased his cadence, and—lo and behold!—the rain changed its rhythm in tandem. But not just the rain—the spirit itself also moved in time with his tune.

“Are you noticing this, Flat?” he shouted. “This song seems to command the spirit and control the rain! Could this be the answer, that song, spirit, and magic are all connected?”

“Oh, ho, ho, ho!” The sound of laughter intruded on their discovery and almost caused Sharp to stop cranking the music-box. “So I see, sir, that you have discovered the secret of that song! This is most pleasing, yes, most pleasing to hear, indeed!”

The two of them whirled about, only to find that the laughter and the voice belonged to Guru-guru, who had just returned from his errands, groceries in hand, and who stood chuckling behind them. “Ah!—Guru-guru, my lad!” Sharp greeted him. “So… you knew?”

“Of course I knew, sir,” Guru-guru said calmly. “The legend of that song has been passed down through my family for generations. If its tune echoes in the hour of twilight, it coaxes spirits from the spirit world and causes the skies to pour their lamentations upon the world. Surely it must have seemed rather suspicious to you, sir, that it would always be raining whenever I played the musical box in the evening?”

“No, I’m afraid it did not occur to me,” Sharp admitted. “I always found the song to be soothing, a nice bit of background noise to accompany my work. I never would have thought, until tonight, that it might hold the answer to the questions that have been plaguing me. Confound it!—I have rented out your loft for months searching for an answer to the puzzle of the powers of this land, and all this time the answer has been right under my nose! Why did you leave me to toil all this time?”

“Well, sir,” Guru-guru began, “it would hardly be worth your while if you could not discover the power of the song on your own. As my father once told me—‘wisdom is not gained through word of mouth, but through toil of mind’. However—if you’d like to know the real reason—it is that I knew I would make more of a profit from our contract if I left you to your work and kept the secret to myself.”

He chuckled again, grinning a wise, earnest grin. “Either way, my plan seems to have enjoyed much success, wouldn’t you say?”

Sharp smiled back with the same elation and intensity. “There is much more to you than meets the eye, my lad! Why do you resign yourself to such a modest lifestyle?—you would find yourself comfortably at home in the world of intellectuals!”

“I have my duties, sir, and you have yours, and I’m sure both of us are just as committed to fulfilling them. Mine is to guard the secrets of my fathers, until that day when someone appears, ready to analyze the secrets in full, and to fully realize the power behind them. It seems that day has come, but I will continue to reside here, as is the tradition of my kin, and leave the intellectuals to aiming for the lofty prospect of discovery. In any case, good sir, I would highly recommend starting on the honey bread and the shrimp salad—the second most especially—before they get cold.”

He produced the container of salad from beneath his cloak and gave it a quick shake so that Sharp could hear the jangling of romaine, chicken, and shrimp, and then proceeded to start inside. As he reached the door, however, he stopped for a moment and peered back at them, his kind smile still beaming like lamplight from his facade. “Ah, and one more thing—I sense that you may have been worried that I might be in arms over the fact that you seem to have intruded upon my private chambers and taken what is most precious to me without my blessing. Do not worry, sir, for this is not the case. If it were, I would hardly have left you alone with it without ensuring that I left it safely secure behind lock and key. Feel free to borrow it at any time, although I admit that I would prefer if you would inform me if you wish to take it from the premises.”

He yanked the door open and set one foot inside, then added, “If you will not be joining me for supper, I bid you goodnight, sirs. Your meal, Master Sharp, will be waiting on the dining-table.” And with that, the young Guru-guru entered his haven and shut the door firmly behind him.

The discovery of the ghost seemed almost to pale in comparison to Sharp’s present impression of the young man. Never before had he encountered an individual so remarkable! He wondered to himself whether it was the will of the goddesses that he had stumbled upon the modest Kakariko windmill and taken up residence there—so perfectly mind-breaking was the positive inspiration that had stemmed from doing so! Sharp could not even bring himself to turn his gaze back to the spirit—so compelling was this impact of Guru-guru’s unanticipated communication of such sophisticated wisdom!

He became so taken aback, in fact, that he called to Flat, and said, “You know, brother, I think I might actually join the lad for dinner! What say you, dear Flat?”

“Well, I suppose that, now that the secret has been exposed, there would be no harm in asking him whether he knows anything more about that song and about the spirit world…” Flat answered. “And besides, I suppose I have taken more than enough pictographs as it is. Why ever not?—let us dine!”

Flat pocketed his pictograph box and Sharp stopped cranking the music-box and started inside, but the two of them failed to notice that, despite the fact that the music had ceased, the spirit still lingered, and, after a brief moment, a second spirit joined it, and together they floated off toward the Kakariko graveyard.