To climb the Stone Tower is to climb on the backs of those who built it, to use the people who carved their souls into the figures adorning the walls and the platforms leading the way up into the sky, and likewise carve out soulless corpses of your own to command the way and give you the right of entry. To climb the Stone Tower is to strip away from your body and leave that shedded part of yourself behind.
At the top, a figure pointed skywards with an open mouth that sucked him in and digested him to his smallest parts. The monsters were not so frightening, but the Temple was. An oculus in the skull of the Temple's great head welcomed the sun in the daytime and the moon at night. Enchanted stone and steel guardians moved in cycles, too. The spells that gave them life were familiar. Magic existed everywhere, even outside Hyrule, the land of the gods and order.
But beneath the statues of the crushed, carved men sat three familiar triangles. Its power was beneath them and they consumed it with long tongues. Hyrule did not infect Ikana so much as Ikana swallowed Hyrule. Termina is on all sides of the world, wherever it ends, after all.
He came into the Temple with a mirror like a frightened silver moon and came out with an arrow drenched in the light of the sun. This magic is of the goddesses, pulled from the stomach of a heathen land. With it, he can illuminate any face he wants to. He carries it. The dead begged him to wield it, and now shadows run from him and follow him both. He does not fear death. He does not chase death, because he is death. He wears many faces and claims more, because the dead give him their old faces when they don't matter anymore.
He looked at the urgent face of the Temple, and decided to shove the light arrow down its throat again, since it hungered for it so much.
So he took his bow and shot into its mouth with a bolt of light wrapped around wood, and struck true into the bloody gem caged in tarnished gold and rusting copper on the side of the Temple's painted stone facade. Nothing happens, except the world began to turn and change and suddenly he was dumped from the solid earth and into the open sky while the stone faces of the squashed men carved into the platforms watch him go, and the Temple points the way.
And he thinks about
how
when midnight comes on the final day of the lunar year, the people file up the stone tower in the middle of Clock Town and across the wooden bridge into the mouth of the Tower,
masks on their faces,
and dance together in circles on the inverted clock face beneath the light of the moon, hands pointing up. Some love, some grieve, some hate, some live, some die, and some remember, all in different points in time, the same for every generation. Their real faces don't matter. Each man, woman, and child is a moment in time that runs into the next, cycling into a giant, never-ending spiral leading higher and higher and higher. To join the tower is to cleave yourself in two and leave your body behind in the earth when it dies.
These things never change, no matter what generation they come from. The moon watches over them always, could some day crush them, could crush them this or any day of the year and they know that, but that night when the moon is closest and brightest in the sky like a ball of fire is when they turn the world in another direction as one with the giant clock face and look the inevitability of their fate straight in the eye. On the night of the new year when they are at their weakest and most afraid, they stand in the place of the four giants and they hold up the sky at the highest point of the town.
Majora waits in and on the moon, waits for someone to fall through the sky, waits for something to eat.
He landed on the ceiling of reality and stands upon it like it were the floor. Everything looked the same, but flipped, like a reflection of the mirror of the moon on the shield on his back, and in the temple the way to the room Majora once lived is cleared. This was the only real difference. Two monsters lived in it now, two different, lesser ones than the monsters who lived there before, two worms content to swim in the rotted remains of a temple of the dead after the people had moved on to a different tower.
But he is death, and so he came for their faces, too, even so.