"You managed to get what?!" The last word was at a register so high it made the windows quiver, and Zelda felt it like a knife shoved into her eardrum.
"Yes, well, you can see them for yourself if you like, and—" Purah snatched the Sheikah Slate out of her hands with such force it was a small wonder that her fingers didn't go with it, the girl's strength and insistence far exceeding the apparent limits of her frame. By the time she realized the slate was gone Purah had already dashed away, hoisting herself up onto the chair next to the table and laying the slate flat. She waved Symin over, and after Zelda and Paya exchanged glances the two of them cautiously joined the researchers.
The ease and speed with which Purah shifted through the different functions of the slate easily surpassed her own, leaving her somewhere between impressed and terrified as the tiny hands swept across the different segments of the photographic album she'd been building. Plant plant plant monster weapon plant, and then an image of a great deal of complicated machinery covered in luminescent ichor and smoke. Symin leaned in closer, adjusted his glasses, and let out a low whistle.
"Fascinating. The corruption is dispersed when the Guardians cease to function, though the Bloody Earth is capable of restoring them unless the core loses its Malice. I've never seen the like before."
"Neither have I," Purah said, leaning in close and adjusting her own glasses with a gesture identical to Symin's. Zelda thought that she must have picked it up from him, then belatedly realized that it was probably the other way around. "How did you manage to get a look inside of it while it was functional?"
"Paya and I overloaded its optic sensor while sawing through the armor on the opposite side."
Purah looked up, her face very close to Zelda's and her expression disbelieving. "You looped a Guardian's reboot sequence? Long enough to do this?" Zelda only nodded, and Purah blinked at her before looking to Paya, who must have nodded in the affirmative because Purah then sighed through her nose. "Remind me not to get into a fight with the two of you." She flipped through multiple pictures, then flipped back, stopping to analyze each shot at different angles. "I wish I had been there. Seeing it for myself would have been worth more than all the research we've put into the Guardians since I moved to Hateno. See, Symin, where the servomechanisms are in different positions?"
"I believe that's where they were positioned before we forced the reboot sequence." Purah didn't look up this time, but her nod was satisfying. "We did not fight it on perfectly even terrain."
"Hm. That means that certain mechanisms don't actually have a default position and have to be adjusted back to neutral when it's finished with the reboot, which is probably why they're so slow to get up when you force the cycle." She flipped to the first picture that Zelda had taken of the interior of the Guardian after the Malice had been expelled.
The silence stretched out for perhaps five seconds, but the sudden pressure in the room during those five seconds threatened to blow the doors off the hinges. Symin's expression was wild as he looked from the picture to Purah to Zelda and back again, his bulging eyes nearly pressing up against the inside of his spectacles. Purah was in that strange country between holding perfectly still and her entire body beginning to vibrate like a tuning fork.
Purah flipped back, checked the previous picture, tapped on the Malice, especially the Malice in the core. Then she returned to the post-cleansing picture and tapped on the clean core. The tap was loud in the quiet of the room, invested with a kind of subtle violence, and when she looked at Zelda her expression was wholly unreadable. "What did you do. No. How did you do this. I want you to tell me every detail of how you did this."
The force of Purah's regard was like a physical blow, and Zelda looked back to Paya for reassurance—only to discover that she had backed up a full four feet at the look in Purah's eyes. Well. At least it wasn't just her, then. She turned back to the woman in a child's body, steeled herself, and told her. All of it, the power that rested in that place inside her thoughts, the way that she intuited the relationship between her power and the energy that drove the Guardians, the tiny amount that she had gathered up because the Calamity could sense it above a certain threshold, the method by which she had implanted it into the core, the way it felt as if the light had insulated her from the Malice.
"…and after I let go, the goddess's power flowed through the same channels as the Malice had before, burning all of it cleanly away. You can see here," and she reached past Purah, pointing at the accumulated grime on the interior of the armor and certain components, "that it did not clear out all of the Malice. But I sensed that the core was the control unit for every other function the Guardian had and thought that if I injected power into it then the rest would take care of itself, in time. The active part of the Malice was located inside of it, so unless I'm wrong then it shouldn't be able to—"
Purah's hand rested on hers, and though her grip was very light (and her hands too weak to hurt even if she tried) the tension in her forearm was nearly total. Purah did not look at her; both of them kept looking at the screen. "What happened after that."
"After that, we stopped forcing the reboot sequence, and waited to see if its behavior would change." She removed Purah's hand, very gently, before straightening. "Paya stayed prepared to put an arrow through its optic sensor, since we were confident that its targeting system would give us time to react if it was still hostile, but… it wasn't." Now she grinned, because Symin's jaw had fallen open and Purah looked like she was about to explode. "It focused on us, seemed to dismiss us as non-threats, and then returned to the same route it had been patrolling before." Realizing that she really should have stayed to observe the effects, she coughed self-consciously into her own fist. "I theorized that, without the Malice acting as an insulator for some of its systems, it might be able to utilize its weapon systems more effectively than before, and might level them against monsters in the area, but… we didn't have time to try to observe them. I thought you would want to know right away." I wanted to tell you what we'd managed to do and was so excited I forgot to follow up on it.
Purah switched off the Sheikah Slate's screen and held it out to her, her expression carefully blank as Zelda took the tool back. Then she hopped down from the chair, walked calmly to one of the workbenches that sat in the corners of the laboratory, and began to pack a rucksack with measuring instruments that Zelda did not recognize. "You'll take me to another Guardian and show me how you did it. I will observe and try to give a more complete explanation of what's happening."
Zelda winced, thinking of the Guardians that patrolled the areas near to that one, and how little she knew about the routes they took and the overlap between them. "I think if we want to do that then we would need to find an isolated Guardian that's still able to move on its own, and I don't know where any of those are."
"I don't either, but Impa does. She's been keeping tabs on every Guardian and its movements since the Calamity, so she'll be able to tell us where to go." Her body language was shifting as she spoke, and the urgency of her packing began to kick up, too. There was a light in her eyes, a manic energy that spoke to a hunger that Zelda recognized. There was a kinship between them, nearly as intimate as it was unnerving.
"Auntie Purah," Paya said, and Purah didn't look up, "you want to go see Grandmother? I mean… now?"
Now Purah stopped, set her rucksack down, looked at Paya, and planted both of her fists on her hips. Zelda could almost see the gears shifting in Purah's brain as her excitement and hunger fed into her authority, as she plotted out the best course of action to get what she wanted. In her prime, Purah must have been formidable indeed; actually, no, she was formidable now. "Of course I don't, but it doesn't matter! This discovery is bigger than some petty familial embarrassment! If my little sister wants to make a scene about how surprising this is, then she'll just have to make a scene! And where do you think you're going?" She wheeled on Symin, who during the commotion had started to pack his own gear.
"With you," he said, then realized the tone she had used and glared at her. "I am going with you. You think you can leave me behind when you're going to be working on live Guardians? Repairing them? Restoring them to their original functionality and observing how they operate without the influence of the Malice? You could cut my arms and legs off and I'd drag myself behind you with my teeth!"
Purah made an exasperated sound, rolling her eyes and pushing her glasses up. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I'm not being ridiculous! You said yourself, this could be the most important discovery of our lives!"
"I need you here, Symin! I need you monitoring the lab and making sure that these experiments don't explode!" She put up one hand in a warding gesture to cut off his reply. "No, I understand, so I'll make you a deal, all right? You stay here while I go out and gather this intel, and I'll try to use what I've learned to see if I can engineer some way for us to override the effects of the Malice. I'm going to make a rune for it, if at all possible, a way for us to control Guardians. If I do, then I'll let you test it. Understand? I'll build you your own Guardian, and you'll get to control it as much as you like!"
The negotiation could have gone on for much longer: they didn't know if the Sheikah Slate could transport three people, didn't know if they could find another Guardian in similar condition, and the expedition would be enormously more dangerous for someone with the body of a six-year-old. The arguments practically wrote themselves.
But the look in Symin's eye was hungry, too, and at Purah's offer he licked his lips, and Zelda knew he'd been defeated.
In contrast to her sister, Impa's hand moved slowly and deliberately over the face of the Sheikah Slate. That she understood what she was seeing was beyond question, but Zelda wondered at how little excitement the photographs engendered. The elder nodded at images of the Guardian's interior infested with Malice, then nodded again at the images of the same Guardian cleansed of Ganon's power. She gave no other sign that she was looking at anything important.
Zelda, Paya, and Purah were standing in the main hall of Impa's manor, Zelda at the center of the group with Paya on her right and Purah on her left. Purah was fidgeting ceaselessly, every passing moment seeing both the rise and fall of what Zelda expected were identical anxieties. She had not spoken yet, leaving all the talking to Zelda, and that as much as anything else spoke to how nervous she was about this meeting; Impa had not addressed Purah, either. Paya, for her part, was trying very hard not to let her attention dart between her great aunt and grandmother, and she was mostly succeeding.
Finally, Impa looked up from the screen. "With the goddess's power you were able to free the Guardian from the Calamity's control. A mighty work, indeed." Zelda nodded and Impa returned to the images, lost in thought. "Why did you need to open the back of it?"
That question struck Zelda by surprise; what did she mean, why? The fact that she even bothered to ask, when the answer was so obvious, made her wonder if it was a trick question. But, no, if it was then she didn't understand the trick, so it was better to answer honestly. "So that I could observe the Malice and the inner workings of the Guardian. Opening the armor also allowed me to reach in and place the light within the Guardian's core, though that wasn't our intent at first."
"Hm." Impa's expression shifted, very subtly, into something that Zelda might have construed for amusement in anyone else. "Princess, where is the power of the goddess?"
Another trick question? "Inside of me." Her tone betrayed her irritation; let it, then.
Now Impa raised her eyebrows. "Inside of you, you say. Where, inside of you, does the strength of Hylia rest? Is it in your chest? Your stomach? Your skull?" She gestured at her own diaphragm. "If we performed surgery, would we find the organ of Hylia next to your appendix?" She shook her head, sending the ornamentation on her hat swinging slowly back and forth. "I am speaking nonsense; that you think so is plain. Still, this is a point I want to make to you here, now: the power of the goddess is not limited to the space occupied by your body." She hopped down off of her cushions, making her way across the room to stand in front of Zelda, looking up at her with eyes rimmed in wrinkles but still bright and dangerous. "Draw upon your power. You don't have to show it to me, just draw on it, the smallest amount you can."
In part she wanted to resist this request, to push back against Impa's suppositions, but something about what the sheikah elder was saying tickled at the back of her thoughts, teased at half-remembered possibilities. As she receded into her own thoughts, reaching down within herself into that quiet darkness seeking light, an image became frighteningly sharp: two of the women within her, herself and the Princess, wanted to reject what Impa was saying because they could not intuit it. The third one, the older one who knew the face of the goddess and the touch of her power, was reaching out to grasp hold of her awareness.
She did not shrink away. She brushed only barely against the molten gold of Hylia's strength, not actively taking any except for that which clung to her of its own accord. It was an amount so tiny, so miniscule, that she doubted it would be enough to light a candle. But… no, that is not true. Even this one mote of light could brighten the world.
She opened her eyes and looked down at Impa. From what she could tell the world around her had not changed, and there was no golden light save for the miniscule bit that she held in her… thoughts? She had not thought of it before this moment. Where was it? Behind her eyes, in her skull, as she had imagined it many times before? In her physical heart? In some secret organ of the gods, as Impa had joked? She didn't understand and was thrilled by her own ignorance. She nodded to Impa.
"Good. Now, take that fraction and give it to Paya, just as you gave a fraction to the Guardian."
That, now, that was… could she do that? Did it even make sense? There was a certain parallel between placing her power into the core of the Guardian and passing it to another person, but could she? The Guardians were already conduits for a power attuned to or derived from Hylia's; a human body was not. At least, that was what she had assumed. Yet I am.
Paya's face was crimson as the two of them shared a look, and with an effort that must have been one of the greatest in her entire life Paya extended her hand for Zelda to grasp hold of it.
"Not with your hand," Impa said, and both girls looked at her, Zelda's surprise shifting over into bewilderment. "Just give it to her, without using bodily contact. The idea that you must perform some physical act to impart your power in another place or another body is a relic of your own physical existence. Zelda, as your memory returns to you you will understand this better, but for the work you are intending to do it would behoove you to understand that the power you wield is not physical, or at least not wholly. It exists first and foremost on a spiritual plane that is parallel to the physical one we inhabit; distance, material barriers, the concrete, are shackles placed on your power by your perception of them as immutable. In many ways you are right, and your understanding of the world is useful in helping you move through it, understand it, and master it; but in others you are wrong, because while we in this room are mostly limited by the reality of our bodies, you are not. We are out of your arm's reach, but nothing is beyond the reach of your powers so long as you realize it. Do not reach for Paya with your hand; reach for her with the power. Go on. Try."
To use the power was not as simple as attempting to tense a muscle; she could not flex her temples and improve her own efficacy. It was a natural thing, in many ways unconscious, like the beating of her own heart. How could one make an unconscious action into a conscious one? She didn't know; she had no frame of reference by which to understand what she was trying to do, much less how to do it. It didn't even make sense.
But, no. It did make sense. She had her frame of reference. She closed her eyes.
Do not think that Zelda was not afraid; this fear was with her, had been with her from the beginning, and would continue to build inside of her until it was all that was left, if she let it. Retreating inside of herself, into the space where she carried the goddess's power, was brushing up against ancient knowledge that she would have yearned for if it did not terrify her so badly. She was concerned with the concrete world that Impa said she should be reaching beyond, and the concrete world and its concerns called her back, back to the stability and simplicity of her feet planted on wooden flooring, of a belief that the world was mutable but understandable.
This is larger than that. This is larger than everything that I care about. It is larger than me.
That she had no frame of reference was a lie she told to protect herself; she had one. The memory of the goddess-power stirred inside of her, waiting to grow, its awareness dull and murky like a newborn. She took hold of it, of herself, wondered briefly what she was giving up by doing this. Perhaps it did not matter.
The goddess-knowledge was a fragile thing, shaky inside of her own thoughts, and as she tried to wrap her awareness around it she could feel the supports of her mind immediately trying to crush it down, make it fit a framework that she was more familiar and comfortable with. The knowledge bent and twisted in the grip of her concrete thoughts, and it was with incredible effort that she was able to push her assumptions away from it, to clear a space in her mind where it could sit, and grow, and reach out.
The world shifted, and she had to fight the urge to gasp.
Impa was in front of her, a person whose countenance was like flame, steady and calm and… she did not have the words to try to translate it into a physical likeness, the experience of this knowledge was so forceful that it shoved her physical awareness and her concrete mind away from it. Impa was, and she could feel the flow of the old woman's thoughts, her experiences, the pain in her back that she alleviated very slightly by pressing her fist against her spine, the expectation she had that this would work, was working, some part of Zelda's physical body must have betrayed what she was doing because now Impa's expectation flared like a flame fed oil. Purah was on the other side, watching her, a storm of observation and skepticism and grasping with the concepts that were being paraded in front of her like a new theory of the workings of the universe. She saw here a new potential understanding, new opportunities to measure herself and the progress her people had made and hidden away, but she felt awe, too, real awe of Zelda as she stood next to her. Zelda did not want to feel that awe, but it was plainer than if Purah had shouted it.
Paya was there, cool and burning and expectant and frightened and there were shades to her that struck Zelda full in the face, confronting her with reality for what assuredly was but should not have been the first time.
Paya was infatuated with her, aflame with the passion of it, so intensely that it formed the tree around which so many other conflicting perspectives and motivations twisted themselves like ivy. She wanted to serve, and to be useful, and good, and not to reach beyond herself or her place or to drag Zelda down or bring a terrible end to the quest that they were on together. She stood on the precipice of a self-denial so enormous that this flame would go out and become something else entirely. And Zelda could not help her; not as she was, not with what the world needed of her.
Oh, Paya… Her awareness quaked as her rational mind tried to assert itself, and she shunted it back.
The idea of pretending to distance was farcical; Zelda reached out, not with her hand but with that deeper and more essential part of herself, and brushed against Paya in that realm where spirits walked. The barest touch, lighter than a breeze, and with it she passed the power on.
Paya gasped next to her, and the sound was so sharp in her ear that her physical mind, her frightened awareness that she had spent so long thinking of as her real self, slammed back into primacy. The goddess-awareness was shunted away in a flash and she found herself recoiling from it, whipping from acceptance to terror with such shock that she experienced a moment of vertigo that was more than physical. She should not be that afraid of herself. She could not show that she was.
Instead she was steady as she looked at Paya, and her voice was calmer and more even than she thought it could have been. "Did it work?" The act of asking was, itself, a kind of lie.
"I, I think so," Paya said, and she looked at her hands and hopped back and forth from foot to foot. "I felt something like a spark in my mind, or… or somewhere, and then it… I don't know how to describe it, but I think it worked. I feel light." And she sounded light, too, as if she'd been given some secret thing of enormous import and intimacy. Zelda wondered if Impa had done that on purpose and if she had a better read of her granddaughter than Zelda did.
Impa nodded her head as Purah took a notebook and pen and began to write furiously. "It is as I thought. And how are you feeling, Zelda?"
"Drained," she said, and that was the easiest truth she had ever told. "It was an effort, though not a physical one. It felt as if my physical awareness was fighting against me the entire time, and at the first external stimulus it asserted control and snapped me back."
Again, Impa nodded. "That will fade, as your awareness grows. But now you know, definitely, that you do not need to carve up a Guardian to use your power on it. Your physical awareness will be less of a tether as your power grows; by the end, I should hope you will return to your prior state." Satisfied, she turned away, walked her slow walk back to her stacked cushions, and Paya was next to her as if summoned, helping her settle again.
"Impa," she said, "how do you know so much about this? You shouldn't. Based on the memories I've recovered, I had no one to teach me about the power, or how it worked, or how to access it. Why would you be better equipped to explore and define it than I was, even with a hundred years' time?"
Impa smiled and shook her head as Paya backed away from her. "I would not, except that you were gracious enough to describe it to me. I traveled with you, very briefly, in those final days, and you passed some modicum of knowledge to me. Your family has been guarding that power, matrilineally, since Ganon was sealed away ten thousand years ago, and for just as long it has been kept secret from everyone except for the next woman to inherit it. You decided that was not wise, and that at least one other person should know." She gestured with her hand, to the sheikah slate. "It was part of a greater plan you had, for when Ganon suffered its defeated. You would have seen knowledge recovered, spread, and put to greater purpose for the people. You told me enough for me to reason out certain principles, and I have held them to my heart in hopes of meeting you again. I tell these things to you now, when we are not alone, because I mean to pass the secret on too. As you commanded." She inclined her head, though she could not do so very far from her seated position. "Forgive me for not consulting with you. I hope that you will continue to educate Paya, so that she may also bear the knowledge when I am no longer able."
No one said anything; who could? Purah scribbled furiously, lost in her own world, still ignored.
"But that is not the reason you're here," Impa said. "If you've come to me with news of what you've done, then you, being who you have always been, will want to repeat your feat to better understand it. You don't know where the Guardians are, but my agents have been keeping track of them for years. The nearest mobile Guardian that wanders alone is to the north of the village, in the Lanayru Wetlands. Its circuit usually keeps it close to Bannan Island."
She had seen the wetlands, standing at the ridge just behind the shrine overlooking the village. "Is that the same wetlands where the shrine is resting?" Impa nodded, and Zelda felt a surge, a thrill of possibility and purpose. If she could do this without having to open a Guardian, without even having to touch them, then… the possibilities were endless.
"I don't know if I like this," Purah said, the first words she'd spoken since coming to Kakariko. "Oh, don't look at me like that. I know you need to do it. It's more important to get your abilities working than it is for me to understand how to restore the Guardians. Still, it won't be as effective for my research."
A good point; given that, perhaps it would be best to take Purah back. But then, no, that thought sat poorly with her. "If I can pass some part of my power on to you, then I may be able to expand your awareness enough that you can get a sense of what is happening inside of the Guardian, not far removed from my own understanding. Would that suffice?"
Purah nodded, a slow and calm and controlled motion completely at odds with the shock in her eyes. To be able to see the world as the goddess saw it was the greatest gift that Zelda could have offered her, and that it was possible was something she would remember in the future.
"Will you be able to reach the shrine in a reasonable amount of time? If you like, I can have your horses retrieved for you."
"Thank you, Impa, but I do not think that will be necessary. Purah built a second paraglider for us and has one of her own; it will probably be quickest for us to approach from the air."
Impa nodded, and the nod became another stiff bow. "Excellent. I will wait for news of your success."
Paya bowed deeply to her grandmother, and Zelda did a quick check of her tunic to make sure that all of her notes and note-taking supplies were where she expected them to be. Purah approached Impa's seat, looking up at her younger (so to speak, Zelda supposed) sister, and her tiny hands were balled into fists. Impa looked down at her, expression impassive, though there was some hidden meaning there that Zelda was sure would be impossible to parse except for sisters who had known each other for more than a century. Impa did not speak, looking down at Purah; she waited, though not for long.
"Why haven't you said anything yet?!" Purah's words were an explosion, and Zelda actually recoiled at the tone. "I know you have to know what's going on, and you must have questions! Why haven't you asked them? I've been standing here stewing in my own anxiety for ten minutes, waiting for you to say anything, so out with it! I've had more than enough of your practiced nonchalance!"
"I have said nothing because nothing needs saying." Slowly Impa leaned forward, her face looming closer to her sister's as she spoke. "What we have to discuss between each other, concerning your state of being and how you arrived at it, is not for the ears of children. When we talk, it will be between the two of us, and we will speak at length. Do you not agree this is wise, honored elder sister?" Their faces were nearly touching now, and so much of her expression had not changed but now Impa's eyes were wide and wild-looking, easily as intense and more compared to Purah's learning of the Guardians.
Purah swallowed, and the sound was loud in the quiet of the room. "Yes. Yes, I think that will be best, honored younger sister." She stepped back, and bowed, and Impa inclined her head in return.
Zelda and Purah left the manor. Paya, who had been hiding outside and peeking around the threshold for the past twenty seconds, closed the door behind them.
The three were huddled behind a rocky hill on the eastern side of Bannan Island, setting up supplies as the Guardian quietly but steadily continued its circular march just on the other side. The patrol range of this Guardian was probably the shortest that Zelda had seen in her travels, which suggested that something might have been wrong with its navigation controllers. Purah was of the opinion that it was probably degradation in the programming that defined where it should be patrolling, but Zelda only knew this from reading over her shoulder as she jotted down notes.
Guardians could detect voices, though the distance and volume necessarily varied from machine to machine, so they were silent out of what Purah thought was an abundance of caution but Zelda and Paya agreed was only prudence. It was without words that they agreed on the course of action, that Paya climbed up high enough to get a vantage point on the Guardian, ready to shut it down if they were detected, that Purah sat next to Zelda as Zelda reached inside of herself.
Drawing upon her power to give to someone else the first time had required an expansion of her understanding of herself; the second time was easier, though not by a very great deal. She brushed against her power, taking nearly as much as she had used to cleanse the last Guardian. Purah was next to her, but she was only aware of her by the sound of her breathing, the quiet rustle of her clothing, the click of her nails touching her glasses frames. She tried to be aware of Purah in the same way she had been aware before, not as a body but as an essential presence, but she could not.
Do not be afraid, she scolded herself. Perspective will not harm you. It might change you, but if it does then you need the change it brings. You have to believe that. You don't have any choice. She did not believe, but it didn't matter. She opened herself to the goddess-awareness, which unfurled more eagerly than it had before, a flower seeking the sunlight of the outer world.
Oh, why was she ever afraid of this, always afraid of this? The world was around her, and she saw it with senses that made her eyes seem like crude instruments wrought by imperfect hands. The texture of Purah's life next to her was almost wholly different from her state in Impa's manor; she wondered, in the analytic part of her mind that dozed beneath the goddess-awareness, if a life was simply the reflection of a moment, like a mirror held up to the greater world around it. Maybe that was so. Because she had not done so before, she turned the fullness of her attention on herself, and what she saw sent a shockwave rippling through her thoughts.
She could see the three she had thought were simply metaphorical constructs, though the state of their being was not as she had imagined. The one her mortal mind insisted was herself, the person who had woken up in the chamber, occupied the same space as the woman of a hundred years ago who had fallen in love with the hero. Zelda was like a suspension of matter in fluid, and the individual elements of her swirled in her mind, pulsing with energy and life and insistence and she did not know if that meant they would become more perfectly aligned or if one would overpower the other. For some reason, that made her curious rather than afraid. There was so much more of the amnesiac than the woman from before. Would it be the same if she looked again after regaining more of her memory?
The goddess awareness was a more concrete thing seated deep inside of her, bright and burning, not integrated so perfectly with the rest of her, though it reached up tentatively to the other selves that swirled above. A golden tether reached out from it, anchoring it to the power of the goddess seated at the very core of her being, and to turn her attention on it was like looking directly into the sun, only there was no pain, no harsh glare. It was glorious; she had no other words for it, could feel that glory inside of her as surely as if she had engineered it. Perhaps I did.
She reached out to Purah, but instead of placing all that power directly into Purah's thoughts she shaped it into a strand, anchoring one end of it in her celestial consciousness, forming a relay with the goddess's power for which her own awareness was a node. She narrowed the connection, packing it more and more densely until it was a golden, shining thing nearly as brilliant as the heart of the power itself, and then she placed the end in Purah's awareness, forming their minds into a single network.
Purah gasped beside her, but she held onto herself and did not lose hold of her awareness or the connection.
Purah's thoughts slammed into hers with the force of experience and curiosity, and the insistence and order of them made her thoughts into words in that soundless space they shared.
"How are you doing this?" Purah asked in her not-voice.
"I'm using my mind as a kind of filter, so you can see some part of my awareness."
Purah's mind flashed through possibilities and meanings and consequences with a practiced alacrity; the speed of her thoughts was beyond what Zelda would have thought a person capable of. "You were exhausted by much less before. This may put you in danger."
"I do not think so... But I am unsure, and you may be right. We will work quickly."
She moved her awareness and Purah followed her, and the two of them observed the Guardian, not as a creature of armor and mechanisms but as a collection of energies and forces that intermingled and repelled and ate at each other. She could recognize the energies of its different systems interacting with its frame, how the hum of its capacitors had not degraded but the fine tuning of its targeting systems was out of sync with the rest of it. She could feel the Malice swirling inside of it, blocking and choking the brighter energies that should have been driving it so cleanly.
Purah's awareness flitted ahead of hers, viewing the Guardian from multiple angles, and the inventor was giving off a low, wordless hum every time she looked from a new angle. Zelda could see from Purah's perspective, felt the echoes of her thoughts if not the specifics, and felt her understanding of the Guardians expanding as Purah's observations enriched them both.
Seconds had passed, less than seconds, but now she could feel the strain of the outside world pressing against her awareness. Oh, yes, this was quite a lot of effort, even if she wouldn't feel it until she let go. Mindful of how quickly she needed to work she drew upon her power again, measuring it by feel. Her body was separated from the Guardian's by distance and by stone, but that did not matter now; in the space between spaces she thrust with her strength, and the power of Hylia poured into the Guardian's heart.
There was a flash, and she held on—not for herself but for Purah, who was observing all of these happenings with the same giddy insistence and wild adulation that one would have expected in a researcher given the freedom of being a child again. Purah's understanding was less spiritual, more concrete, than the goddess-awareness insisted it should be, but she could feel the way Purah was analyzing particulate interactions between the Malice and Zelda's power and knew that those might matter, too. She had to learn, learning was the most paramount of all things, and if she could learn from Purah then she would hold on for as long as possible.
The effort told, now, and the walls of her mind began to shake. She tried to shield Purah from the impact of it, but the echo of her effort reached across the tether and Purah's attention turned back to her for an instant. For an instant after that Purah looked at the Guardian, as if taking a snapshot of it in her mind, and then called out across the quiet: "Let go!"
Zelda let go, and the physical world crashed back into place. The goddess-consciousness collapsed like liquid and her first-self slid easily into control. She looked up at an open sky that looked like rain. She would not be afraid of the change this time. She would not. She would not.
Purah staggered to her feet, plainly disoriented and not letting it delay her in the least. "Paya!"
Paya hissed through her teeth but stopped short of scolding her great aunt as she looked down from the top of the rock, eyes wide, and then glanced back and forth between the Guardian and Purah as if trying to decide which of them was more dangerous.
"Paya, stop that, it worked, and also I can't stand up!" As if on cue Purah's legs collapsed under her, and she braced herself against the rock with her hands. "It's safe! Help me up so I can watch what's going on!"
There was a moment where Zelda could nearly see as Paya's duty pulled her in two directions: one in obedience toward her great aunt, one in keeping all of them safe. The moment passed, and Paya's face was set with determination, and she leaped on top of the rock face. She drew her bow, nocked an arrow, and pulled the string back. She whistled, high and shrill, a sound that she'd probably been trained to use as a signal for other sheikah agents. The Guardian whipped its head toward the sound, focusing on her, and Zelda held her breath in spite of how sure she should have been.
Nothing happened. The Guardian turned away from Paya and continued on its patrol as if she wasn't there.
"Paya!"
"Y-yes, auntie!"
The purging of the Malice had restored some part of the Guardian's functionality almost immediately; its patrol route expanded during the second circuit after its repair, and Purah scribbled notes furiously as it stalked toward the shrine. There were lizalfos in that area; Zelda had avoided them when activating the portal gate. She wondered if the Guardian was aware of them, or if it would only notice them if they moved.
As if answering her question its weapon discharged with an eruption of light and fire, and one of the lizalfos was blasted to ashes on the spot. The others rose with startled howls, turning to the Guardian in confusion, weapons raised. One of them was red, two were blue, and one was black—it was this last, the greatest threat, that the Guardian fired on next.
"Curious," Purah said, not looking up. "It seems that the Malice was interfering with its targeting systems. That probably wasn't Ganon's intent, but it does give us advantages when trying to bring them down for repair." More explosions roared in the distance, jets of water and soil leaping high every time the Guardian fired.
"Oh, I hope it will be all right!" Paya's concern was so raw that Purah looked up from her notes and Zelda looked over, too. "See how they're attacking it?"
It was true that the lizalfos were rallying, bone spears and three-pronged swords in hand, dashing quickly forward to get inside of its legs and attack its body directly. The Guardian's response was surgical, though; it backpedaled faster than a horse could run, firing multiple blasts in its retreat, creating cover for itself as it did so. The lizalfos staggered as a group, and it blasted the black-scaled one again, incinerating it utterly. Its sword went sailing through the air, landing nearly a hundred feet away.
"I don't think you need to worry about it," Zelda said, resting one hand on Paya's shoulder. "It was built to fight like this. It would take something as powerful as a hinox, or perhaps a lynel, to stand a real chance against it." Watching the Guardian, though, which fought on her behalf, she thought she understood some small part of what Paya meant. "For what it's worth, I hope it stays safe too. It's just woken up, and it only seeks to protect us, so I hope it is able to do that without losing itself."
"I can't believe how sentimental you two are," Purah said, nose once again buried in her notebook. She was barely paying attention to the world around her, except to occasionally glance up and observe some specific detail about the Guardian's movements to record it. "It's a machine built for this purpose. Even if it did end up getting into a fight it couldn't win, wouldn't that be the happiest thing for it, to fulfill its purpose so perfectly?"
"Hey, is that Guardian attacking those monsters?" the Zora standing behind them said.
The three of them shrieked in unison; as she shrieked Paya spun on one heel, body low, drew her short sword and swung it upward, stopping the blade less than an inch away from the Zora woman's throat.
"WHOA! Whoa! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to scare you! I most definitely didn't mean to scare you!" Her hands were held up, fingers splayed, to show that she was unarmed. "I saw what was happening and came over to see!"
Before Zelda had caught her breath, much less spoken, Paya lowered her blade and put it away. Zelda stepped past her, hands folded in front of her with a practiced air of dignity that she could guess at the origin of, and nodded. "My apologies. Paya has been assigned to protect me and is very dutiful." She inclined her head. "I am Zelda, and this is Paya and Purah. You've come upon us during an experiment; I apologize that we were so distracted that this happened." I am also sorry that you saw fit to scare the daylights out of us, whether you admit it or not.
"My name is Tula. It is a pleasure to meet you." She recovered her composure quickly and easily, as if Paya hadn't been about to cut her throat. "An experiment? Does that mean that you did… that?" She inclined her head toward the Guardian in the distance, which had finished dispatching the lizalfos and was now scanning the area around the shrine to be sure it was clear.
"Indeed, that was us. We're working on a system that can be used to reclaim the Guardians." She didn't need to know more than that; it was already probably too much.
"That's incredible! I haven't heard something that fantastic in almost a century! To think that you could… wow!" Tula stared at the Guardian for what seemed a long time, lost in thought, and then seemed to remember something as she looked back at Zelda again. "This might be a silly question, but… are you a Hylian?"