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The Song of Storms
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He never did think much of it: it was just a ditty he picked up off the windmill operator. It seemed to upset the man, so he did not try to play it until he was on the dry slopes outside the village. He soon regretted it as the resultant storm turned the hillside to a muddy sea and sent him skidding.
When he next played it he was hesitant, the notes soft and unimpassioned. His reward was a light and sunny drizzle over Lon and the end of a grass fire. He used it a few more times, each more confident, until he went back to regretfully fulfill a little destiny of his in Kakariko: they would have a hard decade with their only reliable well dried, and that was on his head.
He played the song one last time after laying the shadowed spirits in the temple to rest. Never again, he told the villagers, would their well lack for water.
The well filled; the Hero left. The storm passed with him.
More would follow.
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It seemed that no matter how hard the windmill drew, the water never had a chance to drain before the moon hazed over and another storm began to boil over the mountains. The ground was always thick with puddles and muck, but the people were glad, for after these hard years the hard cracked earth had yielded such a harvest as even the gaffers had never seen.
The next spring the well overflowed, at first in thin trickles between the close-hewn blocks, and then in gushes, rushing little rapids down the worn and dirty road to where it came to rest in the square. And still the waters came.
By summer's end it was a shallow pool stretching luxuriously though the heart of town. After five years it was a pond, bull rushes bullying their way through the sunken cobble steps, and the people were glad, for through Their Hero the Goddesses had blest them with such bounty. The verdant grasses and farms now slowly crawling up the mountain's backs had never been possible before, and still the rains came!
A decade more passed this way before the townsfolk cut a channel down to the plains before the little lake could burst its bounds and wash away the road. But the people were glad: as the bounty grew so too did Kakariko, as the recipients of such windfalls always do. The farms downstream cried out for water in their ditches, and so the waters came.
Fifty years again after the Hero gave the gift, his unnoticed apology, the road he had once climbed up into town was a rushing river. A river which crashed into the rice fields of the flood plains between the mountain's feet and the Great gorged River Hylia, the aqueduct hopelessly submerged, every time it rained.
Fifty years more and this was lake country, old villages below the warm, shallow water. Grain sailed up to the ever wealthy mountain city from the south, silks from the little Desert in the West, and ever rarer Zoran wares from the East. The fish were leaving, they said, they do not fare well in these ever changing lakes, nor do we, but their waters still rise.
Another twenty years would pass, and the Zora had faded into the deeps, unknown. A hundred more and their myth, too, would be gone with the water.
There came a day that the flocks of sky people could fly no more: the forced to land as the great shining seas were now too wide for their far flung journeying. Roosting sites had grown too few, with fewer every look, for still the waters came.
The rising tides sunk fields, shrunk farms: and so once great cities fell. A shadow fell across the land, near unnoticed save for how little was left for it to take. It was not the greatest danger when faced with whose paddy will wash away next, and what month the trawler's lines run empty. By the time the people knew enough to fear a traveler had flung the shadow into the sea, churning around what once were only mountains, now smaller day by day.
Still the waters came.
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