Link arrives deep into the night, Epona quietly trotting down the path to his house. He dismounts as soon as he gets near the end of the trail, hoping to sneak Epona into her stall and get to bed before anyone notices him.
As if he couldn't have guessed, Ilia is sitting on his balcony, waiting for him. As soon as he enters her sights, she jumps up, sliding down his ladder with uncanny speed.
"Where have you been? You said you'd be back hours ago!" Ilia has an almost comical expression of anger mixed with expectation. But Link doesn't have time for this right now; he feels the shard pulsing in his tunic pocket, eager to reveal it's secrets to him. "Sorry. Didn't realise how long I was gone for," he says, over his back, while he leads Epona to the side of the house. But she won't let him off that easy. "Link," she continues in a softer voice, "you've been acting strange ever since that big showdown in the castle. I wish you'd talk to me about it-" She cuts herself off when she notices Link halfway up his staircase. "Fine then! Be like that, asshole!" She yells up to him, her pout firmly upon her face once more, before storming off toward the village. He pays no heed; he can finally investigate the mirror shard in proper lighting!
What do we have here, he thinks to himself, while lighting an oil lamp over his small desk. Turning the shard over in his hands, he resettles his eyes upon the reflective side. The faint pulse that he felt in the Mirror Chamber has been steady growing; when he lay the piece upon his desk, it visibly begins to vibrate, emitting a humming sound.
No, not just a humming sound, he thinks. I can hear something else, too. But what?
Slowly, the fog begins to cloud it again, like vapour against a window on a warm, wet day.
For a few minutes, all the fog does is fade and reform with the pulsing, humming noise. Link is about to touch it again when a distinct shape begins to form out of the fog. A... A square? No, a rectangle, he figures, watching the lines being traced into the fog by an invisible, guiding finger. The rectangle increases in depth, detail and precision until Link could swear he was looking at the picture of some type of desk, not unlike the one he is using right now.
Looks like... It looks like I'm seeing the desk from the perspective of a person sitting, facing toward it, maybe? A small rectangle is forming above it... From the looks of it, it could be a chair or so-
His eyes lock in place as his blood runs cold. For a minute there, he almost thought he- No, nonsense. Impossible, he thought to himself with quiet reproach. No way, couldn't have been, not-
He almost falls off his chair; his eyes nearly pop out of his skull.
His face bathes in cold sweat, soaking his collar.
There, within the strange animation before him, an attractive, if not somewhat unusual looking young woman is fixing her rich orange hair up. She is looking directly at him, as if through a dirty window.
At least, that's how it looks from his perspective.
The pulsing, humming sound evens out to a uniform buzz, occasionally crackling with the rhythmical movements and folding of the woman's hair.
Link is staring, with a gaping mouth, at someone he thought he'd never lay eyes on again. He is staring at Midna, Princess of the Twilight Realm.
"Midna!" He yells, attempting to catch her attention. If she heard him, she made no sign of it; she simply went on working with her hair, looking at him almost as if he...
… As if I were some sort of mirror, he concludes. She still hasn't changed much, the dark princess; those deep, almost dangerous looking eyes always belied her true nature.
She finishes with her hair, getting up and leaving the frame. She returns after a few moments with a strange looking book in her hands. It's a small, black book with the same strange, glowing runes upon it that seem customary with Twili.
Laying it down, she pulls a strange looking quill-like object out of her robe. She also lays it down on the desk, beside the book.
She opens the book to the first page, folding it down carefully. She then puts the tip of the quill in her mouth. Tiny runes immediately begin to glow around the quill, as if Midna is somehow charging it.
Taking it out of her mouth, she holds it directly above the blank first page of the book, as if to stab it. She then simply lets it fall out of her hand.
It falls perfectly straight, but does not hit the page; it seems to float an inch above the page, idle, as if in expectancy of action.
Midna then pulls what Link theorized was a chair out, and sits on it.
For a minute, nothing happens.
Then he saw the quill slowly fall closer toward the page, until it touched it's upper left corner. The mirror shard began to crackle once more, growing more and more distinct with each passing second.
Eventually he could make out someone's muffled voice, though he didn't hear it well enough to understand any words.
Static sound and a light hum, so familiar, haunts his hearing.
Finally.
A lilting voice he thought he'd never hear again filters through the buzz, as if across a great distance:
One of my maids recommended I keep a record to help organise my thoughts. So here I am.
My name is Midna. I am the Princess of the Twilight Realm, and if anyone finds this, you have the unbelievable luck to have found my personal journal.
The broadcast, growing in strength with each second, is music to Link's ears. He-
… I'm sitting on an old relic of a dresser that was supposed to have belonged in the Royal Family for generations. Looks like junk to me, to be honest. A good chunk of the mirror broke off quite a few years ago, apparently during that big feud between my ancestors and the Hyrule Royal Family over them constantly sending condemned criminals over to our side, forcing us to contend with them. Oh well; it was rumoured to have magic properties long ago, but in this condition? Not likely.
Link notices the quill is furiously scratching away at the journal at a speed that dizzied him. Midna's expression, though hard to read through the dirty-window of the shard, was clearly troubled.
If I'm going to write any form of journal that means something, I'd better stop dwelling on stupid crap like my ancestor's desk. The fact is... We're in trouble. The Royal Family, that is. There are five noble houses that are under my vassalage. For generations, they've kept themselves in line... But with what Zant managed to pull, they've grown defiant.
Link notices something else about her expression; she looks exhausted. The rich, black makeup that frames her eyes fails to hide the dark circles. And the way the corner of her mouth twitches, just slightly, betrays her weariness.
I've been thinking a lot lately. It was probably for the greater good that I broke the mirror, but... I don't know, it just seems sometimes that I could use a champion of my own to put things back in shape. And I had one, too. I wonder what he's up to th-
She turns to the left, seemingly beckoned. A rivulet of fear passes through her profile like a shiver.
To be continued! She yells, jumping up and nearly knocking her book down. She storms out of the room.
For a long moment Link remains transfixed by the shard, unable to process what he just saw.
He frantically goes over himself, trying to understand what happened a few minutes ago.
Midna. Yes, I saw her.
In the shard. No disputing that.
How?
…
Drawing a blank, here, old boy, he thinks to himself, failing at rationalizing this unbelievable stroke of fate. Does it matter? I saw her! But he stops himself there. Yes, I saw her, which means there's still some connection to the Twilight Realm in Hyrule.
Could it be possible? Another link to the Twilight Realm? And Midna sounded like she was in trouble.
He would have to hide this from Ilia, somehow; after what she went through during Link's quest, her phobia of anything Twili escalated into all-out paranoia. If she got a hold of this, he thinks, she'd think it's possessing me or something. And that would be the last he would see of it, he's sure of that much. Ilia aside, the rest of the village would likely not take any more kindly to Twili relics than she would; as far as Hyrule was concerned, the Twili were no different from Ganondorf or Zant.
Of the few people he could confide this information to... Zelda's off the list; she'd likely lecture him over the past must remain the past and the realms must remain separate, blah blah... Renado, perhaps? It's worth a shot, he hopes to himself.
Another glance at the mirror shard reveals that it seems to have gone dormant; the swirling fog that covered the shard is all that remains of the image.
He picks it up gingerly, as if it could crumble to dust at the slightest mishandling.
Laying it under his pillow, he pulls himself into bed. He won't risk leaving it out in the open; Ilia has awoken him in his house before.
Tonight, some rest.
Tomorrow, he will head for Kakariko, seeking Renado. If anything, he can at least offer Link some guidance. He could just as easily condemn the shard and reprimand him for bringing it to his presence.
He falls asleep fervently wishing for the former, while a storm brews outside that bears uncanny resemblance to that torrent of rain, months agone.
