Ganon watched the shadows lengthen over the water as the float of his lure bobbed on the placid surface of the swamp. The rhythm of the whirring cicadas interrupted the soft sound of plants growing, and every so often a pair of dragonflies zipped through the air. Otherwise, everything was quiet.
Like his mothers, Ganon was dressed in loose dark clothing fringed with patterns that he had embroidered in gold thread. As he leaned back against a mossy raised root of a mangrove tree, he seemed to blend into its shade. He was not accustomed to long periods of inaction, but fishing helped him concentrate, and he had a lot on his mind.
Several weeks ago it seemed that the moon would fall. This strange meteorological event filled Ganon with an odd type of energy, almost as if the coming catastrophe were something he'd been anticipating. For a few days the creatures of the swamp had grown violent, and he himself was struck with restlessness. It was like the gravid stillness right before one of the hurricanes that tore through the swamp in the fall, sending arcs of electricity zagging across the water. He had gone out roaming deep into the swamp forest, driven by a compulsive desire to search for something that he would only recognize once he had found it.
But the moon did not fall, and Ganon did not find what he was seeking. When he returned, his mothers scolded him as they always did, but it seemed that nothing had happened in his absence. Since then, however, letters had ceased to arrive from the Gerudo in the western bay.
This didn't bother Ganon, for he wanted nothing to do with the women who clung to their rusting eyesore of an island like barnacles. He had spent the first few years his life on the floating iron fortress, and as far as he knew there had been no problems until his mother died at sea. When he was passed to one of his aunts, it had quickly become public knowledge that he was different from the other children. The revelation of his sex aroused malicious gossip and even panic, for Gerudo males were believed to bring calamity and misfortune. Ganon had been too young to form lasting memories of what happened to him, but he had vague recollections of being kept in a windowless room with little light and even less food. Two of the Gerudo elders, Kotake and Koume, had eventually taken him into their care and brought him with them to the Southern Swamp. It was better to be closer to the source of the ingredients they used for their potions, they explained to him when he was older; and besides, they added, they knew how magic worked, and they had no use for the superstitious nonsense of the ignorant.
Ganon had hated the swamp at first. The air was always oppressively humid, with none of the bright sun and brisk salty breezes of the sea. He missed the sparkle of light on the waves and the endless sound of the shifting tides, but in time he came to appreciate the shadows and stillness of the wetlands. He loved the violence of the fierce storms that swept through the trees in the spring and autumn, and he appreciated that, for the most part, he was left alone.
His two adoptive mothers often sent him out to fetch fresh plants and mushrooms, and he harbored no resistance against being ordered to embark on such errands. He had little patience for potion brewing, but he possessed a gift for magic. He challenged himself by fending off the aggressive snapping turtles that waddled through the depths of the forest, not to mention the giant octoroks that lurked in the shallow ponds at the base of the mangrove trees and the venomous golden orb weaver spiders that dangled from the rotting wooden beams of the ruins that rose from the black water.
Ganon often wondered about these abandoned buildings. Who had lived here, and where had they gone? As he grew older, he ventured deeper into the swamp. The monkeys who swung between the low-hanging branches by the Deku Palace chattered nothing but nonsense, but it was from them that he heard of a place called Woodfall, a basin of murky water sheltered within a hidden cove formed by a hollow in the Ikana cliffs to the northeast. Following the vaguest of directions, Ganon had poled a raft over long stretches of water choked with lotus leaves, making his slow and careful way through curtains of gray hanging moss. Eventually he arrived at a vast stone temple half-submerged in stagnant swamp water.
There was nothing there except for a wooden mask fringed with tattered and moldy feathers. It was propped against a tangle of vines on the floor of the vestibule, as if someone had taken it from its proper place and returned it in haste. The small room was clearly an entryway, but its walls and ceiling were solid, and Ganon could see no way of progressing farther into the structure. He briefly considered blasting his way through the walls, but he could feel the presence of something watching him, something ancient and malicious. His instincts screamed at him to leave the mud-stinking silence of this cursed place, and so he did.
But he was not willing to let the matter rest.
The Deku Scrubs told him that the temple was once a site of worship. Apparently, a great giant had been venerated there. When he asked them about where the giant had come from, and why it had been worshiped, and by whom, they simply shook their heads in a leafy rustle of apathy. One of them muttered something about a "skull kid," which stirred a vague memory in his mind that he couldn't quite catch ahold of. It was like when he forgot a word and could only taste the ghost of another language on his tongue, a language that he had never heard with his own ears.
Every so often his mothers sent him to Clock Town to make an emergency delivery when the Deku merchants had other business. He occasionally entertained thoughts of moving to the town and leaving the swamp behind him. There was something about the bright white stones of the outer wall that called to him, but he had no interest in the arbitrary inconveniences of an orderly urban life, and the townspeople annoyed him with their empty pleasantries. He remembered their names and faces because he had to, but he had no friends among them.
A frog started to chirp, and then another, and then a whole chorus of voices filled the swamp. The sun disappeared below the tops of the trees, and its dying light tinged the water a rich maroon. It looked as it did when the moon seemed to be falling and a rank miasma had filled the swamp. Ganon wondered what the connection between the two could have been, but no one he asked expressed any interest in the question. In fact, no one seemed the least bit concerned with was happening with the moon in the first place. Why had no one else been bothered by such things? Not even his mothers, who usually took note of even the smallest details, had betrayed any anxiety that the moon would fall.
Ganon had always felt out of place with his surroundings, but the strange business with the moon intensified his sense of being somehow out of alignment with the world around him.
He gave a few small tugs on his line, but no fish were biting. He should probably head home before it got dark. He knew, in a sullen and neglected corner of his heart, that the potion shop was not his home, but it made no difference. If he didn't belong here, where could he possibly go?