Everything, it turned out, was viewable from a pool at the far end of the garden. What looked like a giant bird bath, carved from a single enormous pearl, stood in a small clearing where the air practically crackled with energy. Even from a distance Link could see the light shining from whatever was shimmering from the basin.

Without a word the three Goddesses walked around to the far end and bid Link and Navi to stand on the opposite. The five of them made a circle around the basin with enough room for dozens more to join around the circumference if they wanted.

Link expected water, or some sort of glowing liquid, but when he cautiously stuck his head over the rim of the huge basin, he didn't see any liquid. Instead, he saw what could be millions and billions of tiny marbles. The tiny orbs, nearly as small as grains of sand, were rolling over each other and rippling as if they were trying to imitate water. As far as Link could tell, there were only three colors of marbles: red, green, and blue. There were far more blue marbles than anything else, adding to the illusion of water, but in only a few seconds he spotted a couple green marbles and a few red ones. The marbles never stopped moving, making it nearly impossible to track the course of any one orb without losing it in a sea of others.

Link looked from the basin to the three Goddesses and Navi. All four were staring at the pool with a sort of awe and reverence. The meaning of the pool was clearly lost him.

"Before we can explain this map," Nayru said, looking up from the basin to meet Link's confusion. "I need to explain some things that aren't known by your world yet."

Map? Link wondered.

He nodded to the Goddess. "I'll do my best to understand."

Nayru smiled. Navi and the other two Goddesses were still enchanted by the rolling marbles, giving Link the impression that he was standing alone with the Goddess of Wisdom.

"Hold your hand in front of your face and study it," she said.

Link obeyed and inspected the palm of his hand. The callouses from his first life were there along with the lines and wrinkles psychics always claimed could tell your future.

"Now watch and see, but do not feel," Nayru said.

Link focused on the palm of his hand with no idea what he should expect to happen. But as he stared at the pale, calloused, wrinkled flesh of his hand, it started to vibrate. He opened his mouth in surprise but he managed not to cry out or look away. He didn't feel the vibration, he could only see. While his hand vibrated of his own volition, he began to notice that the appendage was growing larger, outward from itself.

"Everything is made of something smaller," Link heard Nayru explain. "Even the whole of your body."

While she spoke Link realized his hand wasn't getting bigger, it was separating from itself. The skin and hair of his hand was separating outward from the muscle, bone, and blood of the rest of his hand. The sight of his own bony hand would have unsettled him had he not spent the past one thousand years "living" as the Shade.

"Your body is made of systems," Nayru continued. "Your systems are made of organs. Your organs are made of cells. Your cells are made of compounds. Your compounds are made of bonded elements. Your elements are made of atoms. And your atoms are made of particles."

With each sentence, Link's had descended to each baser component. He watched the different parts of his hands break into millions of tiny pieces. Those tiny pieces broke again. And those tiny pieces broke yet again. Somehow he knew that what he was looking at should be too small and too difficult for him to see. But by the voice of the Goddess, he was able to see.

"Every part of you and your entire corporeal world is an assimilation of these particles," Nayru said. "If you could see your world with our eyes, you would measure everything by the relation of assimilated particles. Look into the basin, Link."

He turned away from his reduced hand and returned to the basin. It only took him a moment to realize that the orbs he'd considered marbles were similar to the particles of his hand.

"This is a person?" he asked with a chilling realization.

"People," Nayru corrected. "All of the people, actually."

Incredulously Link looked up at Nayru. The Goddess couldn't see him though as she too had turned to the basin.

"And animals," she said. "And plants and rocks and the very earth you yourself walked on. This basin IS your world. Or a window into it, rather."

Link looked down at it hoping the tumbling partcles would make some sort of sense to him. Even knowing they were particles, and believing that the Goddesses wouldn't lie to him, he only saw tumbling marbles.

"I only see marbles," Link confessed.

"In a way," Nayre said. "That's all any of us see."

Link frowned, still trying to see a pattern or an image in the cascading particles. The liquid seethed with life, like the cursed amoeba he'd fought in the Zora's Temple a thousand years ago.

"Surely my world is more complicated than a bunch of marbles," Link said.

"It is," Nayru replied. "And it isn't."

"I don't understand," Link said automatically. "Even a single person is more complicated than a million tiny marbles."

Nayru looked up at him. "In your hand, Link."

Link looked back to the hand that had been reduced to particles and found that it was whole again. Not only was it whole, but a marble had appeared in his palm. Unlike the orbs in the basin, the marble in Link's hand was a proper marble. It was a smooth glass ball with a colorful piece of cloth trapped on the inside, similar to the ones children played with.

"Toss it in the air and catch it," Nayru bid.

Link obeyed and tossed the marble a few feet into the air before catching it and holding it in his palm again.

"Now drop it on the ground."

Again, Link obeyed and let the marble roll off his palm until it quietly thumped against the ground.

"The marble obeys the laws of nature," Nayru explained. "When you toss it up, it has no choice but to be sent skyward until gravity brings it back down. And when you drop it, it has no choice but to respond to gravity. It can't diverge in any other direction unless sent that way by an outside force. Particles behave the same way."

Link's frown deepened.

"The particles, obeying the laws of nature," Nayru continued, "assemble to make atoms. The atoms are elements that assemble to make compounds. The compounds combine into cells. The cells make—"

"Are you saying," Link interrupted. "That my brain, when broken down, is a bunch of particles obeying laws like that marble?"

Nayru's face was void of emotion. "I am."

"What about free will?" he asked.

"For as long as you are corporeal, there is no free will." Nayru answered evenly.

Link shook his head. "No," he said with more aggression than he'd intended. "No, I don't believe that." He believed in fate, sure. That some grandiose events must happen eventually. But what Nayru was spouting went far deeper than that. As deep as deep went. If what she was saying was true.

No.

If what she was saying was true, ever single action he made, every thought he ever possessed, was caused by the particles that made everything, responding to whatever put them in motion.

No!

It made sense. Emotions often were often sourced from a reaction within the body. Decisions could be traced back to lessons learned from past experiences. When he was younger Link once wondered why he never became rancher like the hero he'd trained during his time as the Shade. During that millennium he'd given it thought and realized that he couldn't have chosen to be a rancher before he left Kokiri because he didn't even know what horses were. He couldn't be one when he met Malon because he was set to fulfill the Great Deku Tree's wishes, then the Princess', then Hyrule's. He couldn't do it after because he cared too much about Navi to give up searching for her. Not to mention the moon falling, the lawyer, the demons he'd slain, and the battles he'd fought until his death. Even during his time as the Shade he realized that there were some things he'd never been able to do because of the circumstances in which he lived.

NO!

If what Nayru said was true, he never had the freedom to do anything other than what he did, because all of him was just circumstances that came before him. Every good decision he made, every bad decision he made, and those of everyone he ever knew and never knew, were nothing more than assimilations of particles reacting to the particles that reacted before them and the ones that reacted before them all the way to whatever moved the first particle. Whatever dropped the first marble.

"No," Link said shaking his head. "No, no, no, no."

"It's true, Link," Navi said from the side.

"It can't be!" Link said loudly. "If that were true, then what was the point of any of it? Why even be conscious at all if you never have control over anything?"

"Because eventually you come here," Nayru said, unperturbed by Link's frustration. "When the conscious ascends to the Sacred Realm, you are free of your corporeal body and the particles that bind and restrict your conscious."

"So none of my life mattered?" Link growled. "I was destined to make every decision I made, destined to die when and how I did. Even destined to fail to find Navi!"

"Link." Navi tried to reach out and comfort Link but he shrugged away from her, glaring at Nayru.

"None of it mattered! None of the pain or suffering I endured through two lifetimes meant anything." Then a question occurred to Link. "Was I destined to become the Shade?" he asked. "Shouldn't there have been a moment where I WAS free of my body and its stupid particles?"

Din and Farore finally looked up from the basin. They shared a look between them then turned to their eldest sister. Nayru's face finally changed to something other than a smile or a blank expression. She looked ashamed.

"Originally, no," Nayru said quietly.

The buzzing returned in Link's ears.

"What?"

"Since the particles cannot determine how they move, we can project what is going to happen by how they are moving," Nayru said, still refusing to make eye contact with Link, her sisters, or Navi. "Several millenniums ago we noticed that the Hero of Twilight was going to fail. To change that, without disrupting the rest of your world irrevocably, we needed to intervene."

"But if we'd intervened ourselves," Din said, meeting Link's eyes without a problem. "If we'd descended to your world, a gateway in the opposite direction would have also opened."

"Opposite direction?"


Author's Note: This is where I need your help. For those of you previously read/educated on such things, Link is facing the dilemma of free will. More specifically, he is being confronted with DETERMINISM.

The textbook definition of "determinism" is: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.

Now, whether you believe in determinism or not, I would really appreciate your thoughts on the matter of how best to translate a lofty philosophical definition into literature. You've just read my best shot at it, particles and marbles and all that. If you can think of a better way that you don't mind sharing, I'd love to hear it.

Lastly, if you want to talk about "determinism" and argue for or against it, I do so enjoy those conversations. Feel free to PM me. Otherwise, thanks for reading, more to follow soon.