"This land was destined to fade," Tatl said, like those were her words and not the words of a prophecy foretold by a source unseen. "Do you think the Skullkid promised that ghost composer that Ikana could have all of Termina if he helped kill it? Have a bunch more dead people for the Kingdom of the Dead, or something?"
"I don't know what he might've promised," he said. He pulled himself out of the water.
The river had only begun to flow freely just now, right this very moment, after years and years and years of a slow and inevitable death, because the ghost who selfishly held back the waters at the source was washed away in a storm of emotion at his brother's final message. It caught him by surprise, too, and before he knew it, he was in over his head while the water rose up and swept away the pollution of old bones and dust blocking its path.
"We should've asked," said Tatl.
He took off his hat and wrung it out like he could expulse the issue like water from cloth. His tunic was soaking wet, too, and so was everything he carried with him. The released waters rolled by without him and overtook their old track like a clumsy, frothy stampede.
The entire canyon was dry, dead, and destined to stay that way even though the clearest water now rolled through the cracked, flaking earth. It was too little, and too late. No matter what anyone did, this land would never be green, and this river could never flow deep and fast enough to touch the ocean to the west the way it used to ever again.
"This place reminds me of you," Tatl said, craning her head to scale the canyon wall, and then the enormous tower rising out of and above it.
He paused, hat in hand, and looked around.
There was no grass, except a few pale, anemic strands mummified from the sun, and no trees besides two petrified husks in the shade of the canyon walls. The rock walls around them featured fading, worn carvings of skulls and masks, or enormous, black-eyed bodies with parched, hungry tongues rolled out towards the water. The cracked plaster over and around them was painted in patterns that echoed the walls of Clock Town like the muffled call of a lost child from one end of a long, dark tunnel to the other. The few still-standing, still-abandoned houses lined up along the edges of the riverside- the old riverside- older than even now, back when the river ran higher, fuller, wider, and pooled into a lake just shy of the houses- stared across the canyon at the gates of a holed-up palace sleeping inside like a body in a tomb.
"What," he asked Tatl, "are you trying to say?"
"Oh! Look," said Tatl, flying out of arm's length. "The river's flowing, so maybe the waterwheel will start working now."
In the middle of the canyon, a single, suspicious house sat right in the center of the old riverbed, just by the track of the newly-freed stream. A water wheel made of wood obviously not grown here hung off its side and in the river's track. The metallic blue paint coating the house itself was foreign and new, and the gleaming gold horns mounted on the roof glinted obliviously in the noonday sun. It looked like a music box.
Undead bodies wrapped in rotting linen wandered around it like flies around fruit.
"Tatl. What did you mean by that?" he prodded.
"So, about your horse. You left her down in the canyon. Is she going to be alright? Kind of a weird place to leave a horse."
"Tatl," he prompted. "Don't change the subject."
"But she's just out there. Alone." Tatl bobbed in the air like she was keeping time. "Whinnying."
"Tatl."
The water hit the wheel like wind hits a sail. It groaned, and then started moving.
"Tatl," he repeated.
Tatl hurried into his face and fluttered back and forth in front of his nose. "Look, you got into this mess because of that horse, alright? She spooks easily! You need to watch her! I'm serious!"
"Tatl," he said, and he would have said more if the music box house had not started to sing. At first, the notes were sloppy and disjointed as the water and wheel took a moment to remember how to work together, but soon they hit their stride and the horns atop the house broadcasted the most anachronistic melody possible for the dead kingdom of Ikana. It echoed through the canyon and drowned out its lonely winds like it was mocking the canyon's serious drear and the moon's grimacing face.
The raised dead, the Gibdo, couldn't take it. They covered their ears and fled into the dirt just to avoid it.
"I'll be," said Tatl. "It really is just like your ocarina. It's obnoxious, suspicious, cheerful, and makes mysterious things happen when it plays. It's even blue!"
He turned to her. "Tatl, tell me what you mean to say."
The door to the music box house opened like it was timed to give Tatl an exit from this very moment. A girl in a bright pink dress stepped out.
Tatl flew across the river. "Look!" she said. "A little girl!"
She crossed the river shore like a cloud cutting across the sallow sky above.
The girl turned around so fast she almost fell into the water. Her face was round, and so was her nose, and the brown bob of her hair made both look even rounder.
"Hey!" Tatl called. "Little girl! What're you doing out here?! It's depressing, and there are monsters here, you know?"
She must have thought Tatl was one, if the speed at which she ran back into the door of her house was any indication. The painted pink and yellow flower on the front rattled as she slammed it shut. Tatl slammed right into the center of it.
He gave her a slow, deliberate, standing ovation in time with the annoying song spinning around their heads.
"Have you learned anything from this experience about speaking badly of other people?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Tatl, rubbing her nose. "I learned that you can shut your mouth."
He picked Tatl up, put her on his shoulder, and then knocked on the door.
"Go away!" said the little girl.
"Alright," he said.
"Alright?!" screeched Tatl.
Then, he said, "But don't come out, either. I am going to take off my clothes and let them dry in the sun."
"What?!" said Tatl, scandalized.
He started fiddling with his belt as he walked towards the river, alongside the shore.
"The last thing I need is to get sick," he said, pulling off his sword and shield, and then his masks one by one. "I would rather not spend the last thirty-six hours with a cold from something like this."
Tatl sneered. "I don't know. Maybe you would. Maybe if you showed up at the inn all sick and helpless, Anju would take care of you." She snickered. "Gloomy you, even in broad daylight. Full of haunted places and stories nobody remembers."
"Ah," he said. "So that's what you meant."
She snorted. "'Look at me; I look like a sad little boy even though I'm not scared of monsters and can put on my own boots. Pity me because I don't have any friends. Wah, wah.'"
He pulled off his tunic and threw it over her. Both hit the ground with a wet slap.
"Oh, look," he said. "A perfect fit." He sat down, pulled off one boot, and then the other. The music box house and its song loomed over him like a voyeur.
"What're you going to do if those Gibdos come back? Or a Garo. If they see you sprawled out here like a steak on a grill and decide it's lunchtime, I'm not stopping them."
"They won't."
He set out his masks to dry, and arranged a few of them around himself- Darmani to his right, towards the north, Mikau to the west, the lost child to the south- and then rested his head east, towards the source of the river. He held the Mask of Truth above himself, and then put it over his face to keep the sun out of his eyes and block the moon from his view.
"You could die here," she warned. "The ones with a physical form are gone, sure, but this place is teeming with bloodthirsty spirits who would love to get ahold of something like you." Her wings chimed as she let out her frustration. "Don't you feel that?! That evil?! That unrest?! Don't you feel it?!"
"Wake me up if anything happens," he said.
"You know what? Forget it." She threw her arms in the air and surrendered. "You're the freakiest thing here, anyway. I guess I'll just sit here and listen to this… music."
"If anything happens, Tatl."
Beneath them, the earth trembled like the water from his skin had made it shiver. The air rumbled in discomfort.
"Get up," Tatl said, bored. "Hear that? Something's happening."
He ignored her, and closed his eyes. The sun beat down on him without mercy, and the ground beneath him was so hard that his wet body didn't even inspire mud. Around him spiralled the tirelessly cheerful melody of the music box house until he started counting his breaths in his head and didn't hear it anymore.
He remembered a well, and the bottom of it coated in blood and illusion, and a grove in deepest darkness made entirely of rotted hands and yellowed teeth. It had holes for eyes, but no eyes.
He saw a creature with no head and no arms, and eyes in the end of its neck and the center of its palms. They stared at him, and spoke with the beat of an eternal drum. They sounded like minutes. Minutes sped into seconds. His heart beat in time, and then faster and faster until he lost track. Four ghosts watched him from the steps of their house, trees and bushes uprooting the foundation like a grove made of nothing but hands and teeth waiting to tear it down.
They'd taken something important and held it in a closed fist, with fingers like branches, with branches clenched like teeth. He'd lost it. He couldn't put a name to it, but he knew he'd never get it back.
Maybe an hour passed. Maybe thirty minutes. The fact that he didn't know with intimate certainty what the passage of time was when he opened his eyes made him nervous, but not as nervous as the expression of the little girl standing above him. She had a towel in her hands.
"You went to the spring just before it started flowing again. I saw you, through the window."
He didn't say anything. He only exhaled.
"Where did you get these masks?" she asked.
"I guess he's still asleep," said Tatl. "Want me to wake him up? Gives me a good excuse to shove something in his ears."
"No. I know he's awake," the girl said. She threw the towel over him.
"Ten," he decided. "It's been ten minutes. Tatl?"
"Yeah," she said. She was sitting just below the mask's eye. "Almost exactly ten minutes. I shouldn't be surprised by how good you are at that anymore."
"Where did you get these masks?" the girl repeated.
He sat up. The Mask of Truth fell into his lap. "South, north, west, east," he said, and pointed them out in order. It was the greatest understatement he had ever spoken. He pointed to the Mask of Truth's one eye, and hit Tatl in the head in the process. "And some from Clock Town. That is where I got them."
"That's not a good answer."
"Is it important?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, without hesitation. "It's very important."
"Do you really need to know?"
"Yes."
"How badly do you need to know?"
"Badly enough to come out here where more of those monsters are."
He hummed. Then, "Really. How badly?"
The girl paused, and clenched her fists. "Badly enough to let you come into our house, depending on what you say."
"And?"
"A-and?" she asked. "And what? What?"
He levelled a stare at her. "And then, what will you have me do inside your house if my masks are what you think they are?"
Tatl looked between the two of them with some interest picking up her brows.
The girl, Pamela, as he would later learn, bit her lip and looked between him, Tatl, and the jury of faces on the ground.
"He can't know," she said. "Your fairy, she-"
"I'm my own fairy and my name is Tatl, thank you," said Tatl.
"She's not my fairy," he said, at the same time.
Pamela looked between them. "Tatl. My father can't see you. And you," she looked to him. "He can't know what you have. He can't know there's anything," her dark eyes widened as she searched for the word, "strange about you. Anything at all. He'll know. Once you help me, you've got to act normally."
The music played on, undercut by the sound of the water flowing by.
"Sorry," said Tatl. "You have a better chance of passing off a horse as human than you do asking him to act like anything close to a regular boy, Terminian or otherwise. Speaking of horses, do you think your horse is-?"
He put the Mask of Truth on over his face, and leaned in. Pamela straightened and tensed, like she expected that it might try and steal her mind.
"At least pretend like you're trying to act normal when someone's just met you!" Tatl scolded.
"Your father," he said. "You love him. He's an adult, right?"
"Of course he is," said Pamela, her mouth turning down into a resolute frown. "All fathers are."
"But you love him?"
"Yes," said Pamela. "I wouldn't be here asking you anything if I didn't."
"He's done something," he said. "Something dangerous."
"Stop cold-reading me," she said. "I know about cold-reading. It's fake."
"Of course it is. Lots of things are fake. But I need to know, so tell me. Does he love you?"
A hitch in the gears paused the music box tune, but it started again.
"You are the worst," said Tatl. "Take that thing off and talk straight. Please. Please! You drive me crazy enough as it is, without all this nonsense!"
Pamela wrinkled her nose and held back the tears forming over her eyes. "Of course. He makes reckless decisions sometimes, but of course he loves me."
"Are you sure?"
"How dare you!" Tatl hollered, so loudly that the music box melody faded away, and dove at him. "You insensitive little cretin! Don't you understand anything?!"
He took off the Mask of Truth and dug her words back out like relics from a crypt, or bones from a grave. "Adults can love just fine, but that doesn't mean you should trust them," he said. "Especially not with children."
"That's not our business!"
"My father loves me," repeated Pamela.
"They're stupid, and selfish," he said. "It's the way they are."
Tatl pulled at his hair with more energy than she ever had before. "Even if they'll forget when you start everything over again, you can't just say these things to people! Their hearts and lives aren't for you to know, you selfish little bastard!" Tatl screamed.
His eyes had never left Pamela. "Are you sure it would not be better just to leave him to this fate he's made for himself?"
"What?" she asked, and it was almost lost amid the incessant noise of her house. It grated on his ears. He wanted to hide in the earth just to escape from it.
"If I'm going to help him, I need to know," he said. "Most of these are death masks," he said. "They're faces of those who died in body, but could not rest in spirit. His regrets might be his curse, or his undoing, depending on what they are. Are you prepared for that?"
Pamela threw her hands on the dry earth. "Save him!" she cried. "Please! Please save my father! I love him, and he loves me!"