In Saevam Bestia Obscuritatis
Chapter One
The Cycle Begins…
Deep within the Kokiri Forest, a young boy slept uneasily. His dreams were filled with brief surges of faint images of evil spreading like dark clouds sweeping across an immense land, casting deep black shadows. Long enough to identify where he was; not long enough to see much more than that. One moment he is standing in vast grasslands, with a small breeze waving the grass in slow waves under a blue sky and fleecy white clouds. Next he stands between two ancient mountains, where the heated blood of the earth and the frigid breath of winter spew forth. Then he watches as a massive structure of stone is crushed into rubble. From the depths of a vast lake to the heart of an endless desert, he moves at a frantic pace, unable to control where he will end up. In every place he goes, there is an underlying sense of wrongness, of veiled menace. Before he can tell what the cause is, he is whisked away to yet another place. Every place he sees is a location he has never seen before, and yet all of them feel very familiar. Faces of close friends he has yet to meet flash before his eyes. The sense of wrongness is always at the edges of his perception, like a forgotten name at the tip of the tongue. What does it all mean? Why is he seeing this? Is he the only one? Where are these places, why are they important? Why, why, WHY?
A loud crack startled the youth with a cry from his fitful sleep. Breathing heavily, he reviewed what parts of his dying dream he could. "What kind of dream was that…?" a muddled Link mused. Unfortunately, the last remnants of his dream were already fading from his grasp. When another loud crack startled him from his reverie, all traces of the dream were gone. Link whipped his head towards the cause of the racket. One of his shutters had unlatched itself during night and was being slammed about by heavy winds. A glance out the open window told the boy that sunrise was still a ways off. Grumbling under his breath, he got out of bed to re-latch the shutter before returning to his bed.
As Link drifted back to sleep, he felt a nagging feeling that whatever he had just dreamed about was going to turn out to be very important, very soon. After a moment, Link was asleep, his dreams devoid of ominous premonitions. The wind calmed down, joining the residents of Kokiri Village in slumber. Everything was still.
At the entrance to the village, a lone shadow walked quietly towards the Great Deku Tree's clearing, accompanied by the soft sound of muffled armor.