III.

It began with the crack of a twig.

Loam's eyes opened. They didn't burst open, and neither did they blink groggily. They simply opened, and for a minute he stared up at the dark sloped ceiling of his bedroom in the loft, his long ears twitching against the noises in the night.

There were whispers coming from the yard, malicious whispers. He could hear the intent behind them, even if he couldn't quite make out the words. Hissed instructions, stifled laughs…it could only be Bartl and Ado, come to exact revenge for the afternoon's indignity. He sighed through his nose. Whatever they had planned would undoubtedly involve manure in some way — manure in his letterbox, manure on the doorstep, manure smeared over the clothes on the washing line. For some reason, Bartl seemed to think that exposure to manure would cause his victims unimaginable shame and suffering. Loam found it tiresome, mostly for the way it upset his mother. Tonight, he decided, he was not going to stand for it.

Silent as a shadow, he took his glasses from the nightstand and slipped them on, vanishing from under the covers and reappearing at the window a moment later. The waxing moon was at its highest point in the clear night sky, and the world below shone iridescent white-blue in its light, a colourless imitation of noonday in which the shadows were the black of bottled ink.

They were easy to see, the pair of them, crouching down in the vegetable patch with crude masks over their faces, perhaps thinking they could get away unrecognised in a village with fewer than half a dozen teenaged boys. Loam made a distasteful sound in his throat. They had sawed the top off his mother's prized pumpkin, scooped out the innards, and were replacing them with, yes — manure.

He glowered at them for a moment, calculating.

There was nothing else for it. He crossed the bedroom, past the Ordon Sword, which was wrapped in furs and leathers in repose against the wall, and opened the top drawer of his dresser. Inside, the slingshot he hadn't touched for several years lay dormant, and a handful of Deku seeds rolled around it, glinting dully. He seized it all and returned to his vantage point, loading the elastic with the biggest of the seeds and pulling it taut, the wooden prongs held fast in the other hand. Loam kept both eyes open when he aimed, even with a bow, and his target now was the sweet spot on the pumpkin being vandalised by his enemies. If hit just so, it would explode and shower them with dung. The very thought of it sent a ripple of satisfaction over the the usually peaceful waters of his deeper nature.

But in that moment, a fraction of a second before he let go, something gave him pause. His ears twitched once, then twice, the subtle points of them flexing almost imperceptibly underneath his hair. He lowered the slingshot and listened.

Beyond the conspiratorial muttering of Bartl and Ado, he could hear the stream chuckling in its pleasant way, and, farther along, the muted groans and sloshes of the water wheel by the mill.

But that was it. There were no other sounds.

No cricket song, no croaking toads, no owls hooting. Not even the rustle of dead leaves in the wind. It was an otherworldly quiet, the likes of which Loam had never heard. It was not natural, and it was not insignificant. A creeping sense of dread had barely begun to descend down his spine, when the loudest scream in the history of Ordon split the night like a trumpet blast.

'Raya,' he whispered automatically.

It happened in a series of still images, then, like snaps from a pictograph box: the whoosh of his nightshirt as he turned on a pivot, the snatching of the Ordon Sword from its resting place, the flight down the stairs and the bursting through the door, past Bartl and Ado (who stood petrified with helpings of dung and pumpkin guts in either hand), and the hurtling pell-mell down the lane to where the screaming rang out shriller and more terrified than when it started.

He stopped dead in his tracks and tried to process what he was seeing.

Raya was being dragged through the dirt by her ankle, the white shift she had worn to bed bunched up in folds over her face, exposing her young body completely to the night air. Her attacker was nothing less than an actual monster, nine feet tall at a reckoning: a dog who walked like a man, clad in chains and mismatched plate mail. Its face was dull and sour-looking, canine teeth protruding out from behind its bottom lip, red eyes glowing like embers in the shadow of its prominent brow. Raya's shrieking was of no apparent consequence to it, and neither were the windows that lit up in every home, or the doors that flew open, or the wails and curses of the villagers as they looked on in horror and despair. Grunting absently, it lumbered on toward the north pass with its prize in tow.

Thought and reason fled Loam's mind. He cast off the sheath from the Ordon Sword and broke into a sprint with a low growl in his throat that crested into a ferocious war cry. In two long strides, he scaled a rocky outcrop by the way and propelled himself into a leap from the peak, brandishing the blade over his shoulder in both hands. In a single stroke the beast's massive head was parted from its shoulders, sailing in a gory arc to the opposite side of the path where it landed in a patch of bramble, a gruesome and disfigured parody of a pumpkin. Gouts of hot black blood came spurting out from the stump of its neck, soaking Loam's bedclothes as he landed heavily on his knees, while the massive body tottered from side-to-side for a moment in time, still grasping Raya in its loose fist. At last, its legs buckled, and the great broad bulk of it collapsed onto its front with an almighty crash.

Loam tossed his weapon carelessly to one side and fell upon Raya, pulling her tangled nightgown down by the hem to cover her nakedness before the whole village could see. She had become hysterical with panic throughout the ordeal, and lashed out at him with her fingernails, sobbing and flailing in the grass. Loam seized both her wrists and leaned in very close.

'Shh, shh,' he breathed. 'Raya. Raya, it's me. It's Loam. Raya, it's okay — look at me.'

Raya became very rigid, her pretty face a mask of distress as she sucked rapid, shallow breaths in through tightly clenched teeth. When she chanced to open one eye, Loam felt her go limp in his clutches, and it was then that she began to cry.

'It's over,' he assured her quietly, and they embraced.

At once, they were surrounded. Raya's father, Daro, elbowed Loam out of the way and cradled his daughter fiercely, while her mother stood at a distance with Wren in her arms, their anguished faces glistening with tears. Oil lanterns were held high over the body of the creature on all sides, and the clamour of oaths and prayers and swearing that accompanied the scene was like the buzzing of hornets to Loam, who felt weak and dizzy as the adrenaline began to subside and his thinking began to catch up to his actions.

'Moblins!' roared Colin, appearing in their midst. He looked drawn and ancient in the pale moonlight. 'In Ordon! Gods and goddesses, not since…'

'What the heck's a moblin?' interrupted Tobas, the village grocer. 'I know bulblins and I know bokoblins, but I ain't ever seen anything like this, I mean, look at the size—'

'What did it want with Raya?' a fretful woman's voice demanded from further along, as other women sobbed and hugged their children. 'You don't think…?'

'Ask Loam,' said a quiet voice unexpectedly.

The talk died down, and all eyes turned to Bartl, who stood a little apart from the crowd, fresh muck still on his hands. He looked calm, if slightly ill, and his eyes glittered strangely in the firelight.

'Loam killed it,' he continued. 'Took its head right off. I saw the whole thing. He'll tell you.'

The two young men exchanged a serious look, and the face that only a few hours ago had been twisted into a mask of hostility now regarded Loam with an expression of something like awe. Colin made a beeline through the crowd in haste and crouched down to interrogate, his knobbed hand clamped over Loam's shoulder like a vice.

'Loam?' he said hoarsely. 'What happened? Can you speak, son?'

Slowly, Loam turned his head to look his mentor full in the face. His ears were ringing, the lashings of blood up his arms were a stench in his nostrils, and his sweat-soaked nightshirt clung to his body and chilled him in the freezing air, but when he spoke, he spoke clearly and with composure.

'It was taking Raya,' he explained. 'Heading for the woods, it looked like. Must've broken through the gate.'

'You killed it?' whispered Colin avidly. 'With the Sword?'

Loam nodded once, unsmiling. He imagined the sensation of the blade hacking through flesh and bone, the brief resistance he felt in the killing swing before it opened up to thin air, and the blood, the blood, come gushing forth in a black fountain. A dull lurch of revulsion registered in the pit of his stomach, but the memory was not entirely unpleasant for all that.

'Good boy,' said Colin. He raised his voice as he stood tall. 'Good, brave man!'

There was applause and even cheering from the villagers. Loam's mother, Wylla, swept into circle of flickering light and embraced her son's head to her chest, whispering senseless words into his thick hair that spoke of great fear and even greater pride.

'Yes, well,' said a deep voice at the head of the assembly. Those gathered turned in deference to Mayor Thom, whose wide frame set the pinstripes on his pyjamas at odd angles. 'It's all well and good Loam saving Raya, Colin, but what does this mean for Ordon?'

He gave the felled body an experimental kick in the ribs with his bare foot.

'There's not been a monster raid in these parts since before most of us here were even born. If the forest isn't safe —'

'—We'll make it safe!' said Colin firmly, planting a fist in his palm. There was a kind of mania to the way his eyes shone, an overeagerness, as though he had been pining for a night like this for decades. 'Monsters are like birds, moving up and down the land with the seasons. We know this. If they want to make a home in Ordon, we'll give 'em plenty of reason to reconsider. We'll fortify the gate, organise a night's watch, send hunting parties —'

'Hunting parties?' Daro interrupted loudly. There was derision in his voice, even when addressing his own father; his swarthy, stubbly face was livid with fear and anger. 'And what do you propose we hunt with? That sword of yours is the only meaningful defence this village has. If there are more of these things coming down from Faron, bows and arrows won't be of any use — unless you intend for us to fight them back with shovels and pitchforks?'

An angry murmur of agreement rolled through the crowd. Colin looked stung.

'Daro's right, Colin,' said the mayor. 'If we're going to see this menace off, we need to be better armed.'

'How're we gonna manage that?' wondered Tobas. 'Ain't been a smith in these parts for centuries. Nobody here knows how to work a hammer and anvil.'

'No,' Thom replied, after a moment's deliberation. 'But in Castle Town they do.'