Link awoke to an all-enveloping boom of light and sound.

He cast his eyes around, unable to move anything else. He eventually decided he was hanging in the middle of a storm. An endless field of dark gray, lighter above and black below. Far below him he heard the hiss of what must have been rain colliding with the ocean.

The rain that formed the dark haze that surrounded him was not touching him, something was keeping him dry. He was being kept warmer than he would expect, and he did not feel hungry.

A great form came into view.

Hanging in the storm, around a static field of strange brass instruments and pieces of detritus, was a whale. It wore clothes, of sorts, decorations and hangings.

On one side, the eye was closed. On the other, the eye, immense, was glaring. The glaring side turned into full view, perfectly aligned with its visitor, and it stopped there.

Link woke, and told the story to the old woman waiting beside him.

Marin had fallen asleep, so they spoke in hushed tones.

The old woman thought for a time, then gave her interpretation. "It chose to let you see its body, it also chose to let you know that it was keeping you by force. We can assume it keeps airborne by way of kinesis, and that it was holding you by kinesis as well. We may also assume from the eyes, closed on one side and open on the other, that one half of its being is consumed by the dream, even while the other is awake. We may assume that it wishes us to think these things because it showed you these things deliberately, presumably knowing how they would be understood, then saying nothing. It chose to let you see that it could have woven a raft from the pieces of your ship it was holding onto. It wouldn't. It wants you to know that it needs you for something, even if it wont tell you what."

"Do you think it really ever needed me to collect the instruments and force an awakening?"

"I believe so... I can't imagine any reason a fish would perpetuate this dream willingly. I think it exists in both worlds, the waking and the sleeping. It truly wishes to free its sleeping self. It took you up to do it."

"Why does it need me, again?"

"In the dream, it has been trapped. You, a visitor, have not. The visitor has a power over the dream, weaker, but not incomparable to the fish. You have the power to trigger a forced awakening."

"Right.."

"Had, we should say."

Repeating the words of the fading owl; "The instruments have been shattered.

The final catch has been sprung.

The dream will come to a forced end."

"Yes.."

"So why does the dream still hold onto me."

Neither spoke. They allowed the silence to speak for them. It ranted and raved.

Eventually. "Does the waking side know that I've sprung the final catch."

"Hmm. I don't suppose the owl would feel obligated to tell it."

"Well maybe that's the answer. It's simple enough."

"The simplest answer is not always the correct one."

"But in the absence of any means to decide, we should assume that the simplest-"

"Assume nothing!" She hissed. "You're invoking Occan's Shears. No rhetorist's rule of thumb gives you the right to make an assumption before it's due!"

Link felt tired, irritated, and slightly embarrassed. He wanted to sleep an ordinary sleep, but he knew he would be sent to be marked, next. It would take time, and it would hurt.

After a minute of unvoiced resistance against his teacher's orders and the tugging of sleep, he picked up his bedding and moved it to the second plinth, and succumbed. There he lay, for far too long, before the dream gripped him.

Link lifted himself off from the trail and brushed the dust from his clothes. In front of him was a dwelling that had clearly been made using old techniques, windows of waxed papyrus and walls of unvarnished, unpainted wood. He looked up and down the trail, and saw that the beings passing along under the willows were foreign to him and foreign to each other. No two races were alike, no two beasts of burden the same breed. Many were different species altogether.

Someone pulled the cloth of the door aside and stepped out. They bore fresh tattoos. A middle-aged man, dressed plainly, emerged after them, and gestured for Link to come inside.

The man said "I will require payment."

"Will I..-"

"You will regain the object when you awake."

Link handed him the sword. He examined its steel. "Hmm. Are you sure you should be giving this to a strange figure in an in-between place you do not comprehend?"

Unfortunately, Link had nothing else to give. "Yes. I trust that you will put it to no evil use."

They went ahead. Link shed his clothes and sat down on the table, as the man fetched a small pot of ink to refill his pan.

"Is it difficult? Doing these tattoos?"

"Yes, only a few can. My master attempted to teach one hundred students. I, and two others, were the only ones who were not sent back to farm."

"What is this place?"

"We believe it is a place where the spirit world meets the world of the living."

"I'm not dead."

"But you are asleep, aren't you? And sleep is a weak form of death."

As Link's back was wetted, and oiled, and wetted, he thought about this. Spirits had not been known to leave the body while a person slept. It seemed unlikely that the man really understood the phenomena, the story probably wasn't entirely true, though his story, of course, said much.

The man stopped his work abruptly and sat back. "I was going to do the wing pattern... I sense this would not be correct?"

Link looked up. There was a truth to it. "Yes. That isn't me any more."

"I apologize if this offends, but I believe that this is the truth, and there is no other way to proceed... I see a plague, in you."

The song of the sword began to ring. "If I bear a plague, then I should leave at once, I neither deserve nor desire the ability to transmit it through-"

"No. Not a malign plague. A plague of new growth, and harmony...

It overwhelms, it conquers, it cannot be stopped, but to its victims it gives, it protects and enriches..." The man opened his eyes. "I see it now." He breathed. An air of intensity took hold. He looked back and forth as if examining something enormous in the mind's eye.

So Link learned that his new place in the world was that of a plague that conquers, captures, gives, protects and enriches? He pondered this, until the blade cut, after which there were few thoughts but pain over the five ensuing hours.

At one point Link asked; "Why do you need to read my character?"

He answered, "The markings are not really held by the flesh. They are given through the flesh to the soul, and asserted upon the flesh again from within. In order for them to be accepted by the soul, they must reflect its character and its purpose."

Again, the explanation the man gave did not sound entirely true. Was it just a poetic approximation of the truth, perhaps only a master of the art could understand the truth in its entirety? Either way, it deserved respect. The man was devoted to his craft. He might not speak the truth, but he still spoke volumes.

Eventually, the master of tattoo rose and walked over to an enormous copper ornament, whose surface was festooned with plumes of copper's green rust, and he began to turn it to its flat side, revealing it to be a polished mirror. Link wondered why no one had ever brought him any modern silvered glass, knowing that he might take it as payment. When he saw his reflection in hues of gold he understood why the man might favor such old technology.

The tattoo marked Link's hands, his back and his chest. When he looked down at his pale, slender body, marked with arcana, the sorcerer's gates elicited the archetypes of the wicked that so many hyrulean children had been taught to fear and loathe. When he looked at his reflection, instead of this, he saw a being forged from bronze, Talos himself, golden seams immaculately formed.

The design started with a Rose, at the nape of his neck. Its brambles gradually shifted into a truss of descending lines, which coalesced into the ordered forms of common witching gates. A triangle had been added to his right hand, mirroring The Mark of The Hero that had at times appeared on his left. His palms were marked as well.

"What now?"

"It will be some time before another client will visit. You are welcome to stay and chat."

Link had noted that the tattooist had gates on his palms. "Are you a sorcerer?"

"No. That is not my calling."

"But can we speak through-"

"Yes, yes. Come, this way" The man lead the way around to a tea room. There was a low, thick table of dark wood. Embedded in the surface was a four-cornered channel of copper. The lines crossing over the center were rusted green, but the circular ends at the four corners of the table were polished to a mirror sheen.

The man began to prepare tea, and Link sat.

A warm wind blew in from the fields. The window's shoji screens had been slid fully apart.

Link gazed.

When the man sat down and passed Link his tea, he gestured to the polished copper circle at Link's end of the table.

Link took a guess, and put his right palm's gate down onto it. The man nodded, and did the same at his end of the table.

The man took a drink, put his cup down, and then he began to transmit.

First Link felt a sense of the room. He then felt a sense of a great, looming, white-furred THING shambling around the corner of the wall, into the tea room. Link looked left. It was there, but, in some strange way, difficult to see clearly. Was it moving too fast? Was it a ghost?

Link began to rise from the table and the sense of the thing entering the room immediately ceased as he broke contact with the copper.

The man was laughing.

"Well now I wonder if this is safe. What other horrors can be sent through these?"

The man had not lifted his hand from the copper circle. He smiled and gestured again at Link's copper. Link sighed, sat down, and again made contact.

The man transmitted a sense of the room, and the same great malignant THING shambled around the corner. There he had it stand for a moment. Link examined it. It was indeed ghastly. The man then had it walk forward, step around Link, and climb out through the window out into the fields. He then disrupted the scene, and ran it again. This time having the monster lean down and take Link's head in its mouth. There was no sensation of being bitten, and Link realized that he couldn't actually see the thing, it was not available to his senses, it was an awareness without seeing.

The test was repeated with spiders, snakes, crocodiles, and an furious man wearing a very fancy robe. By the end of it, Link had learned to distinguish the concepts being issued from the master of tattoos from his own thoughts.

"Enough?"

"Yes, I understand. Thank you."

They went through a few more exercises. They played conversation games about hiding knowledge. Games where the master would try to influence Link's decisions with subtle suggestions. Learning again how to work together on the same idea without being too prone to suggestion. Link finally gave up when asked to learn to outright ignore his conversant's thoughts, having never mastered the art of ignoring ordinary speech, and deciding this would be impossible.

They turned to simply conversing, in silence, through the copper.

Eventually, they got to the subject of how the man knew when his next client would be coming. He had a list, which was magic, and seemed to be prescient. The man asked who Marin was.

"Oh, yes, I'm supposed to go get her."

They stood, and began to walk to the door. "Wait. She's... This is odd. What if I refused to get her on time? What would happen?"

"Then I would cross out her time on the schedule, and wait patiently for another."

"Oh."

They shook hands. Through the connection, the man transmitted a summary of all that had been said, his name(Moda Toh), and a few of his emblems and signatures. Link held on, and tried to do the same in return.

Link walked along under the willows for some time before he was ready to wake.