I stood amidst dark, thick clouds, moving past me in perpetual fluidity; unceasing, rapid movements, past me in such a way as if I was watching much happen in a short amount of time. The clouds began to clear just enough above Hyrule Field for me to see four large, ominous ghosts, lanterns in hand, streaming towards the green, forbidden area – the Kokiri Forest. I watched as a bright, red, circular cloud appeared above Death Mountain. As the water was sapped from Lake Hylia, I watched. Again, I watched as the doors to the temple above the graveyard in my hometown of Kakariko – the temple that was feared by all – opened to allow ghosts into the land below, to inhabit the previously peaceful graves. As the desert was consumed by monsters and hearts full of evil, I watched. The clouds shifted and changed color – from gray to a dark, ugly green – and suddenly, I could see a face, staring back at me in the clouds, eyes gleaming with pure evil, and –
"Hey," I heard. A ray of sunlight flashed across my eyes, and suddenly, I was awake. "Hey, you were groaning in your sleep again, so I decided to come wake you up."
"Don't do that again," I immediately replied, taking my journal from my bedside table and immediately jotting down what I'd dreamed of. I'd gone a bit further into the dream this time, as I'd never seen a man's face before in the clouds.
By this point, I'd been jotting down my dreams for around a month. At first the dreams were as simple as my figure, standing among the gray clouds, and feeling a sense of doom. Later on, each image would reach my mind, and they were all beginning to piece together – in such a way that, though I found it difficult to believe, I was starting to take seriously.
"What was it this time?" My little brother asked, at the foot of the bed, his eyes large and questioning. "What did you dream about?"
"Nothing," I said, ignoring him completely and snapping my journal closed, setting it back into the bedside table. Either way, I knew he would find out, as he had a habit of snooping in my journal when I wasn't around.
So began another day in my home; another wasteful day of watching and waiting and anticipating, wondering what these dreams were all about. As far as I was aware, each of these things had never happened, and most likely, wouldn't happen, but I couldn't help but feel like a nervous wreck every time I thought about it. What if these dreams actually meant something?
Pushing these thoughts to the back of my mind, I climbed out of bed, still clad in my nightgown, and made my way to the kitchen, where my two other sisters were sitting at the table, arms crossed over their chests, watching me intently as I passed.
"Where's breakfast? You're up late," Nalem, my older sister by four years, snapped at me, her lips pursed and her face ugly as usual. I glanced at my younger sister by two years – a mere sixteen years of age – as she stared at me for a moment, but instead turned her head to the door, watching it expectantly, as if waiting for another male prospect to come walking through the door. I allowed my eyes to turn from them both and shook my head, kneeling down to start a fire in the oven.
"Hey, guys?" I asked, without glancing back, "Could one of you run and get some cucco eggs from the lady next door? Last week we made an agreement with her that if we shared our herbs and potions, she'd equally share her cucco eggs. Her daughter's very sick and needs the potions."
Instead of moving, Nalem sat still in the chair. I could feel her eyes roll behind my back. "More charity?" She groaned, letting her bare feet shift against the dirty floor. "I thought you weren't going to just 'give away' potions anymore? How in the world are we going to afford to move to Castle Town if you keep on giving away potions?"
"I'm not giving them away," I quickly responded, grinding my teeth together in annoyance. "It's in exchange for cucco eggs. We can have breakfast every morning with this deal."
"Couldn't you just ask her for money?" My sixteen year old sister, Rynine, popped in, her gaze still fixed on the door as if she was in another land. "That way we could save it up for when we move to Castle Town. I can't wait until we get there. I hear there are boys around every corner."
"Exactly. Marriage prospects for both you and I. It seems as though Rileth doesn't care, as she has her own marriage prospect as it is. Not just that, but she's the only one of us who knows how to make potions. Perhaps she just wants to trap us here forever." Nalem stood from her chair and snorted. "Anyway, I'm hungry, since we've been waiting for her to get out of bed. I'll go get the cucco eggs."
I sighed heavily as Nalem left; when my older sister left, it felt like a weight being lifted from my shoulders. Ever since our parents had died, it seemed as though endless nagging and anger had come from both Nalem and Rynine. To be completely honest, Aeli, our youngest brother, was my only source of comfort in the home. Of course, he was ordered around just as much as I was, so I suppose it was only natural for the both of us to be in the same boat.
Far too quickly, Nalem was back with a dozen cucco eggs in hand, complaining about how "rude" and "no-good" the cucco lady was next door. I ignored her, shaking me head, knowing full well that Nalem was the rude one. Instead, I took the egg basket from her arm and placed it on the table, taking a few out and cooking them up for us.
As we ate, Nalem found things to nag about, Rynine found boys to talk about, and Aeli found lies to conjure. I sat in silence and ate, listening to nothing Nalem said, bits and pieces of what Rynine said, and to every word Aeli said. His fantastic "adventures" that he liked to make up were probably the most real part of my life at this point.
And then, Aeli made his worst mistake yet.
"And then, it was like in your dream, Rileth! Everything got all cloudy and dark, and suddenly I saw all these ghosts going towards Kokiri Forest and in the graveyard here and-"
"Dreams?" Nalem questioned, her eyebrows raising; this was information too good to pass up. "What kind of dreams?"
Before I could interrupt, Aeli continued. "Oh, Rileth has these recurring dreams! Has she not told you about them? She's had them for about a month ago, and they're all about doom falling on-"
"Aeli, that's enough," I said loudly, standing up from the table and taking my plate. "I don't feel like having my dreams discussed at the table this morning." Nalem looked as though she were about to protest, but instead, she continued to eat, her eyebrows raised in question.
"I'm going to Castle Town today," I announced as I set my plate on the counter to take out to clean later, "So I won't be making potions today. I hope one of you will run out and gather me some herbs from the village."
"What?" Nalem said, spinning around in her chair, her arms folded over her chest. "You haven't told us any of this stuff."
"I need ingredients," I said simply and flatly, looking back at her. "If you want to move to Castle Town, we have to make potions for money, and so we have to have ingredients for potions." This silenced Nalem for a moment, but it didn't, of course, silence Rynine.
"Oh, can I come, can I come? I promise I won't get in the way – last time I was there I met this fantastic boy and he showed me around the town… I just can't help but want to see him again! Could I please go? Please?" She stared at me with such intensity that I could hardly find it in my heart to say no.
"Well, I do need help carrying things back… just keep yourself out of trouble, alright? And I don't want you following me around everywhere. As long as we meet up at the fountain by sundown, it'll be fine."
"Yay!" Rynine seemed far too overjoyed by the circumstances. Immediately she ran into the bathroom to "freshen up." I took the plates we'd just finished using outside, scraped the remaining food into a small bowl just outside the house, and threw the plates in a tub of water we used to clean dishes. I supposed I'd let them soak there for a while – perhaps if I was lucky, Nalem might wise up and decide to do some cleaning for herself, for once. Most likely, I'd get yelled at the instant I came home for leaving the dishes in the tub.
I went inside and changed into my normal, plain green dress, reaching halfway down my shins and covering to the elbow. The weather would be a little hot on the way, true, but this was the cleanest dress I had at the time. I grabbed my basket and headed towards the door, but someone beat me to it.
"Okay, I'm ready to go!" I heard from behind the closed door. Rynine popped out in one, fluid bounce, her blonde curls jolting up and down as she smiled up at me. "Do I look alright?" She asked, smoothing her dress and tapping her shoes together. "I just can't wait till we get there!"
It had become pretty apparent, lately, that Rynine had never had a proper "raising" by true parents, to speak of. Our parents had died shortly after Aeli was born, when Rynine was around six and I was around nine. Nalem was thirteen at the time, and to tell the surprising truth, she wasn't so bad back then. I'm sure losing them so young, but being the oldest, forced a bit of responsibility that she wasn't ready for. She dumped most of these responsibilities on me, and called herself "overseeing" everything. By the time she was sixteen she nagged far too much for her to keep any marriage prospect for any length of time, and had become the Nalem that I knew that day. Nalem was busy with her own life, while I was busy raising Aeli, and Rynine, in the middle of all of this, begged for attention from every place she could find it. Fortunately, and unfortunately, by the time she was twelve, she was a little "well-developed" for her age, and male eyes of every age were following her everywhere she went. By the time she was thirteen, she had already obtained ten proposals, all of whom she'd said no to, vowing to find her "true love". As time passed, her idea of "true love" became less and less romantic and more and more physical. She was constantly unsatisfied by the amount of attention she was getting and began to seek it from every pretty male face she could possibly find.
At first I did the best I could to prevent such a thing from happening. Truthfully, however, Nalem loved having men over – she figured one of them would eventually straighten up and ask her to marry him. Every man in Kakariko – no, in Hyrule – knew better than that. Long ago, though, I'd learned not to interfere; fighting with Nalem and Rynine as a team was like participating in a bullfight, stupid and dangerous.
So, I kept my mouth shut and did my best to ignore everything Rynine said until we reached Hyrule Castle Town. With that being a two-hour walking trip across Hyrule Field, this was no easy feat. My only source of relief was when Rynine would shush to complete silence when passing a random stranger, to thoroughly inspect and pass judgment on him or her. Unsurprisingly, Rynine was not only shallow with men, but was entirely too critical of other girls. Any flaw was immediately recognized and criticized in whispers, even on girls who seemed flawless. She'd find a flaw. Once she'd claimed that she could just tell how rude one particularly pretty girl was. "Conceited with her own good looks," she said, shaking her head and tsking, unknowing of just how hypocritical she was.
Once we'd finally reached Castle Town, Rynine immediately separated from me and went bouncing through the crowded market, whereas I stopped at the stands, picking out fruits, vegetables, and herbs that didn't – and wouldn't – grow within the confines of Kakariko Village. Some of these ingredients came straight from Lake Hylia, Zora's Domain, and even Kokiri Forest. Picking up a particularly strange-looking mushroom, I heard a voice behind me.
"Whatever are you doing in Hyrule Castle Town, Rileth?" I paused for a moment, odd-shaped mushroom still in hand, and turned to the source of the voice. There stood my "fiancé" of sorts, Phiasri.
"Surely you're not coming to visit me," He sighed in his normal arrogant tone, taking the mushroom from my hand. "Or perhaps you're here for this… mushroom? Whatever use would you have for such a thing?"
"Oh, many uses," a dark voice spoke from behind the stand. I whipped back around to see an old lady, hunched over, face covered by her hood, inching forward. "Many, many uses, my dear young ones. If concocted in a potion and given in the right amount of time, it just may prevent you from becoming a monster, but if you use it mistakenly… you very well may die." The old lady laughed, her cold, harsh voice hurting my ears.
"Nonsense," Asri, as all of his friends called him, said, turning the mushroom about in his hands. "I have no doubt that eating the mushroom raw may cause death, but Hylians simply don't turn into monsters. It's a myth. The closest thing we Hylians have seen to monsters are those fish people that pollute our Lake Hylia. How disgusting," he fnihed, his voice degrading and devoid of emotion.
Asri most certainly wasn't my "choice" for a fiancé, by any means. He and I had been arranged for marriage since birth, and to say the least, I didn't appreciate it at all. He was a racist, uncaring bastard, and I didn't want him near my family or to raise my children. Yet here I was, gathering as much money as I could to move to Castle Town to make my sisters happy, putting myself right in danger's way.
I smoothed my dress and reached in my basket, taking my coin purse out. "How much?" I asked. I could almost feel the old woman smiling at me from underneath her hood. "Twenty rupees," she said, and I placed the amount, though expensive for my budget, on the table, and took the mushroom in defiance.
"You're actually going to use that thing?" Asri groaned, watching me place it in my basket. He snorted and shook his head. "You just wasted twenty rupees – rupees you insist on making from making those silly, useless potions of yours. If you would only accept my money and move here, and finally we would marry, and you'd never have to worry about rupees again."
"Nonsense," I said this time, in a fashion similar to his. "I'll marry you when I'm ready. Now if you'll excuse me, I have business to attend to."
With that, I turned down the back alley, basket in tow, unsure of where, exactly I was heading. I was most certainly, however, heading away from him.
I had never really been down the back alley – Nalem had always warned us of just how dangerous it could be – so these surroundings were all relatively new to me. Unlabeled shops left and right caused me to look, with caution, to see exactly what was sold there. It was a little suspicious, to be completely honest.
Finally, I came upon a window full of books, and was unable to resist the temptation that drew me there. I opened the creaky door with a bit of difficulty, as a deep, rusty bell rang above me, indicating my entrance.
No one was around. I assumed the owner of the store was in the back, so I took it upon myself to explore, to look through the assortment of books. What I found next, however, was not something I had expected.
The cover entitled "Hyrule's True History" caught my eye, and I picked the book up from the shelf. The book was apparently written by someone named Impa, a name that rang familiar in my mind for just a moment, though I pushed it to the back of my mind. I sat down at a dusty table and opened the book out of curiosity.
Link. A hylian boy named Link, raised as a Kokiri and forced into an extraordinary destiny. I read with intensity, judging it as a fantasy book from the first few chapters – and outsider's account on this boy's adventures through the Great Deku Tree, whom I hadn't seen but had read about in books my parents had read to me, through Dodongo's Cavern, where the legendary Gorons found food, and through the stomach of Jabu-Jabu, a great whale in the depths of Zora's Fountain. This young boy, of Aeli's age, did all of this because of a prophecy that Princess Zelda had (in the back of my mind, I wondered if it were legal to use her as a fictional character, though she was here, in Hyrule, in living flesh) about a man named Ganondorf who swore allegiance to her father, the king.
The king had not listened to his daughter, as she was a mere ten years of age, and so upon meeting Link, she matched him up with her prophecy and sent him on a quest to retrieve the three stones – the Kokiri's Emerald, Goron's Ruby, and Zora's Sapphire. Once he retrieved them, he returned to Hyrule Castle, only to see Zelda galloping away in her caretaker's tow, as the young girl threw back an ocarina for him to take.
The boy grabbed the ocarina, after a short encounter with this villain named Ganondorf, and took it upon himself to go to the Temple of Time, place the stones on the pedestal, and place the Song of Time with this mysterious blue ocarina. The back wall to this Temple suddenly opened, and behind the door lay the Master Sword. The boy made his way up to the steps, and gazed upon this legendary blade, and then…
"Ah, literature in its truest form." I jumped at the voice behind me, snapping the book closed and freezing in place. "Interesting read?"
"I intend to buy it," I immediately replied, hoping this shopkeeper wouldn't think I was trying to read it in its entirety in the store, so as to cheat him out of some money. "I began to read with every intention of buying it-"
"Oh, miss, I believe you're mistaken as to where, exactly, you are."
I worked up the courage to turn around, though my heart felt as though it were jumping clear into my throat; I should have never visited the back alley, I should have stayed in the main market…
"You're in a library, miss. Reading books without buying them is what we specialize in." I turned to see a man, around my age, his black hair sticking up in all directions, his bright green eyes peering down at me. "Unless, of course, you don't return them in time – in which case we kindly ask you pay a late fee."
"Oh," was the only syllable I could muster. "So you… lend out books?"
"Why yes, if you're a member of the library. Are you, Mrs…?"
"Rileth. And just 'Miss'," I quickly responded. I refused to be mistaken for a married woman. "And no, I'm not a member… how much is it…?" Visions of hundreds of rupees to belong to such a club like this ran through my head, but his next words caught me by surprise."
"Oh, nothing at all. You just give us your real address, your name, and you bring your book back on time. If you fulfill those requirements, then it'll always cost you nothing. If you don't, then… well, I might stop by your house and confiscate everything you own."
I blinked up at him, my eyes suspicious. After a few moments of staring back and forth like this, he winked. He was kidding. I thought.
"Anyway, you can take that book home with two others if you just write down your name and address for me, ma'am. Simple as that." He placed the form on the dusty table, grabbing a quill and pot of ink from his desk. I quickly did so, and he retreated behind the desk, my paper in tow, sticking it into a drawer full of others. "Kakariko Village?" He questioned without looking at me. "You'll definitely have to commit to get them back here in time, but I'll trust you."
"Oh, don't worry," I said, my eyes locking on the cover of my closed book, "I'm in Castle Town at least once a week."
He laughed as he slammed the drawer shut, glancing over at me. "Yeah, never has been a lot in Kakariko. It's almost necessary – and unfortunate – to have to travel here all the time. What's your reason?"
"Oh, I'm a potion maker out that way. I have to head this way to get ingredients."
He nodded, and we sat in silence for a few moments, before I finally stood to leave. "I'm sorry, but I must be heading back – I told my sister I'd meet her at sundown." I took my book to the desk, and he wrote something in the back and handed it to me.
"I'll see you in two weeks, Miss Rileth," He said, his smile unfading.
"I'll see you then, too, Mr…?"
"Adarin. And don't bother with the mister."
"Alright, Adarin. I'll see you."
"Goodbye, Miss Rileth."
With that, I turned and left the library, a new, unexpected addition to my basket, a new, unexpected friend of sorts in my life. A friendly face like that was always a refreshment from my everyday monotony.
Hey guys... finally, first chapter has been posted! I realize the plot is not terribly stepped into quite yet, but I have to set the mood and the characters. Anyway, review!