Between Mercay Island and Boné Pond there was a place where bokoblins and lizalfos used to tread, bridges built of wood and bones from long-forgotten, titanic beasts. That small fortress was empty now, its sentries thrown into the water or blown out of it with concussive force, weapons left where they fell. A single bokoblin horn floated in the water, pulled along by a gentle current. It had been judged too unimportant to bother swimming for.
Past the fort, on the northeast bank of the pond, there stood a rocky hill that could have been a mountain except that no one had bothered to name it. Hastily constructed fortifications stood here, too, planks of wood meant to funnel intruders along particular paths before they had been blown into splinters, independent platforms constructed to give overlapping lines of sight that had not extended far enough to see the attacks that had made them collapse. Moblins and bokoblins had guarded that place, that path up the little hill that was not important enough to call a mountain. They were gone, now.
That emptiness wound its way up the path that spiraled up the hill; here a spot of matted grass where a cloaked lizalfos had lain in wait, there a scorch mark that marked where a bokoblin's patrol came to a sudden end. Footprints were in ready supply, the narrow two-toed tread of the bokoblins in places obscured by the heavier tread of the moblins or the much wider phalangeal spread of lizalfos. These were the only sure sign that their owners had stood on that place, and the rain was quickly washing them away.
A careful observer might see a single pair of more human footprints, here and there; there would have been two pairs, but one of the walkers had a more practiced, subtle step than the other.
At the top of the hill stood one of the Sheikah towers, the rise of which had spurred the building of the little fort and the fortifications on the hill, the collection of guards and sentries that had manned both of them, and which had drawn the two women that had dismantled it all. Atop the Sheikah tower, not at all shielded from the rain that fell in a ceaseless torrent, Zelda and Paya took in the land below them, Zelda through the lens of the Sheikah Slate and Paya through the trained sharpness of her eye.
"Inogo Bridge is a reasonable place to wait for passerby," Zelda said. "The road that leads to the West wends all the way to Akkala, and with the rain falling the way it is there's almost no way in to Zora's Domain except by crossing that bridge."
"Unless you are a Zora," Paya said.
"Yes, excepting that." She wiped at her forehead, flicking away the water that was standing in her eyebrows and running down into her eyes. She would have preferred to swap out her stealth armor for her Hylian tunic and hood, which would do a much better job of keeping the rain off of her, but she'd been in the rain for hours now and it was too late to have an appreciable effect on her comfort. Paya was wearing an identical set of armor, which Zelda took as an indicator of how seriously she was treating this meeting and the journey leading up to it; the white-haired woman hadn't even pulled down her mask during the climb. Zelda couldn't imagine what kind of training and focus it took to resist that urge. "It's a bit of a shame that Purah wanted to go back so quickly; I think she would have liked seeing a Sheikah tower up close."
That struck Paya enough to pull her out of her vigil, and she looked at Zelda, quietly thoughtful. Then: "I think we would have been hard-pressed to get her to come along. She was very eager to share her findings with Symin and get back to work." The question wasn't spoken but Zelda could hear it hanging in the air between them, so she waited, filling the time by estimating the margin of error the two of them would have if they chose an aerial approach to the shrine that sat above the bridge. Paya was deeply curious, though not wholly used to asking questions which hadn't been set up for her. As Zelda wondered if that was perhaps Impa's fault, Paya finally asked, "What was it like, when you showed her what you were doing to the Guardian?"
It was a function of her own self-centeredness, Zelda supposed, that she had never thought how that experience must have been like for Paya. Anchored in the physical world, focused solely on protecting her charge and her great aunt, Paya had probably only drawn three or four breaths in the entire time it had taken Zelda and Purah to finish their tasks. When she had felt the need to test the Guardian's reactions it wasn't simply because she hadn't been aware of what had happened, it was because she couldn't be. Purah and Zelda had been occupying an almost completely different reality; sharing in it had been impossible for someone who wasn't experiencing it directly.
"It is… difficult to put into words." She shut off the Sheikah slate, hung it from her belt. "Do you remember how you said it felt when I gave you part of Hylia's power? That you felt light, and aware of yourself?" Paya nodded, and Zelda breathed slowly, taking the moment's pause to try to arrange her thoughts. "What I did for Purah was anchor her consciousness directly to mine. Not in fullness, she didn't experience things in the same way I did, but she had a similar perspective. She sensed the world around her, the objects and people and the invisible energies coursing around us, as directly as you might feel sunlight on your skin. She could see the world and herself in … not the same way as Hylia would see those things, but very closely. Oh, I'm not saying this very well. Imagine that your eyes and your hands are like words written on a page, describing an actual event or a place. The way the world looks when you use the goddess's power is as far removed from seeing with your eyes as seeing with your eyes is from words written on a page."
The words were clumsy out of her mouth, she could feel her tripping over the ideas even as she tried to string them together, but Paya nodded. Her mask made it hard to read the set of her mouth, but her eyes told the story well enough: she grasped what Zelda was saying, in principle if not in fact. Then: "I wonder if there might be value in that lesser experience, still. To read words on a page… we can build a world for ourselves and invest in it grandeur and meaning that our eyes would be hard-pressed to perceive on their own." With that, she turned back to her watch.
Zelda said nothing; there was nothing for her to say. Paya's words had, in a way, sent her spinning; on their face there was nothing wrong with them, though they ran counter to her own experiences. There was a kind of profundity in the awareness of the goddess that was further removed from the experience of her senses than she could communicate with crude words, layers of understanding that unfurled in front of her in ways she hadn't imagined before.
But then, couldn't that speak to a deficiency in her thinking, rather than in her senses? Was she confusing breadth of awareness with profundity? Did it make sense that to see something with one's own eyes was necessarily more meaningful than the act of thinking on it? Did Hylia's awareness exist on the far end of a spectrum of meaning where one's own thoughts were the least meaningful?
The question arrested her for longer than she would have liked to admit, and she said nothing for the rest of the time they spent deciding on their next course of action. They agreed on where to go next and leaped from the top of the tower, the rain beating a staccato rhythm against their paragliders.
Sidon, Prince of the Zora, son of Dorephan, brother to Mipha who was lost, stood with arms crossed at the top of the tower standing at one end of the Inogo Bridge. His guard here had been long, stretching out over the past several days, ever since he had sent out a few of his trusted contemporaries in a search for a suitable Hylian. Some Hylians had come by, of course, and he would never go so far as to say that they were not suitable to the task that he meant to ask of them, but each of them had either run away immediately upon his greeting them or else had opted not to hear the request he had for them.
Still! He would not give up hope; there was always plenty of hope to hold onto. He was sure that a Hylian would answer to his summons soon, as sure as he was in his compatriots, in himself, and in the essential righteousness of the world. That surety was essential in a prince, after all.
He never saw the two Hylians (they were assuredly not Zora, nor Gorons, nor Rito, none of whom would move through the storm in the same way these two did, and they were much too small to be Gerudo of traveling age) directly; they were silhouettes that were tracing spirals up the hill nearest to the bridge. He never would have seen them at all, save that they were thrown into brilliant relief by occasional eruptions of blue light and force, and the path they took up the hill was marked by the screams of monsters and the tell-tale puffs of smoke that marked the places where the monsters died. He was actually taken aback by the rapidity of their movement up the hill, and the relative quiet of it; if he had tried to make the same trek himself he could have bested the beasts, perhaps, but the methodical stealth of their ascent was something well beyond him. Most of the monsters never knew they were there; even the Yiga Clan were not purported to be so skilled.
Their ascent stopped at the base of the strange tower that had emerged from the top of the hill; or at least he thought it did, as he heard and saw nothing more of them. What a thrilling possibility presented by the sudden quiet! Were they making their way down on foot, now, on the same path they had taken before? Would they be taking a more direct path, skipping down rocky outcroppings that Zora legs would not be able to navigate? Would they come toward the bridge? Oh, he hoped they would: anyone who could fight so valorously and skillfully against the forces of the Calamity must be mighty indeed, exactly the sort of person who Zora's Domain needed in this desperate hour! The idea of meeting them enraptured him, but he resolved to be patient: if he was patient, perhaps they would come to him. If they did not, he had a better idea about where to send people in the search for these strangers.
Given that they were Hylians, and not Rito, he was not watching the sky, and in the dark of the rain he would not have been able to see them clearly regardless. It would be cruel to blame him for not seeing them, but Sidon was, perhaps, slightly cruel in the standards he set for himself. Luckily, he did not have enough time to reflect on this.
Above him, near the shrine that had begun to glow only a few weeks back, he heard Torfeau cry out in alarm.
"What in the world? Torfeau!" He could not make himself heard over the rain, and she was too distant for him to reach in a hurry regardless, but he began thinking of the best way to try to scale the walls of the cliff to the shrine. Even slipping in the rain, he would reach her faster that way than by taking the long way around from the path to Akkala, and if something could make Torfeau cry out…
"I think that is probably my companion," a soft, polite voice said behind him.
Sidon did not start, not he; he was not especially difficult to surprise, but to startle him would require much more than one person sneaking up on him! He turned with a practiced slowness, not trying to hide how inquisitive he was feeling. The words could have easily been a threat, but they were not spoken so; they were an explanation and an apology rolled into one, speaking to a very careful verbal schooling that would have been the envy of any dignitary he had ever met.
The Hylian before him was a woman, unless he was badly mistaken, and wore the combat garb of the Sheikah. She was not Sheikah herself, judging by the golden color of her hair and by her accent, but she seemed to have had some Sheikah training or else she wouldn't have been able to get the drop on him. Her eyes were immediately arresting, clear and fierce and forceful in their regard, the eyes of a woman with a mission who would see it through to the end no matter the effort or personal cost! Instantly he saw in her the essential qualities most necessary in the person that he had been seeking, far more important even than the fact that he was sure she was one of the two that had wiped out those monsters, that she had already proven herself a warrior worthy of renown.
"Please forgive our rudeness," she continued before he could reply. "My name is Zelda, and my companion, who will be joining us shortly, is Paya. We were told by a Zora named Tula that the prince, Sidon, was waiting at Inogo Bridge to speak to a Hylian. May I presume that you are he?"
That name, Zelda, struck him; he knew that name, though he could not have placed it precisely in the heat of this moment. He was full to bursting now, with excitement and surety and a sense of enormous well-being. Let her see it, then, let her get a full measure of him!
"Yes! I am Sidon, Prince of the Zora!" And see, how she did not even shrink back in a way that he could perceive when he flashed his teeth in a wide smile! "And you are Zelda, traveling with Paya—what good, fortuitous, slightly familiar names! It is my enormous pleasure to meet you! Yes, as you have heard, I am searching for a Hylian, and I am hoping that you will be the one that I was looking for. I must admit I've been watching you—I saw your scaling of the hill, the way you dispatched those monsters on the way up to the top! Such skill, and speed, and courage! Zelda, tell me truly: you are considered a mighty warrior among your people, yes?"
Was it modesty that gave her pause, or an analytical acuity that she was actually turning toward the question? She broke eye contact with him, ridding herself of the distraction of his face, staring at a point in the middle distance. He did not rush her, not daring to interrupt whatever process would inform the answer she might give, regardless of how long it took. The answer was not instant, and probably was not easy to formulate; so much the better! How much more genuine a considered thought might be!
"I am not considered one," she said, "because so few know of me." Her eyes turned to him again, and now they carried a challenge, a statement, and it struck him how alike Hylian and Zora expressions could be. "I can fight. If I am not mighty then I have other avenues for addressing challenges, an ability to confront problems that would bring the mighty to their knees."
Sidon's soul was like a fire; he had been told that since he was very young, and he had much liked the comparison. He was hot where his sister had been cool, could use his presence to fill a room that might otherwise feel empty, and he had been told that the force of his personality was such that it could overwhelm anyone he spoke to without him meaning for it to, a weakness in a dignitary but strength for a warrior. They called him indomitable.
That was not true, and he realized it in that moment. Hearing that woman speak, recognizing the truth of her belief if not the fact of her assertion, made him feel like he was brushing up against something much larger than himself, perhaps larger than the crown he would wear. This Zelda, standing at less than half his height, carrying what he now noticed were several weapons, gave off a sense of authority and power that was belied by her frame. What was it? He had an eye for potential, for personal quality, but he could not quite pinpoint what it was that made her so exceptional, save for something at the very core of him screaming that she was, and that she was exactly what his people needed.
The realization passed in the course of a moment, only as long as it took him to flinch back from her words and for his mouth to turn upward in a grin. Truly, he was the most fortunate of princes.
"Wonderful! This is most wonderful! I could never have imagined, or even prayed, to be so lucky as to meet someone like you! Zelda, will you travel to Zora's Domain, the home of my people, and meet with me there? The Zora are in terrible need, and you may be the only one who can help them!"
Now her response was instant. "Yes. But as it happens, I would ask two things of you. These are not conditions," she said, so quickly and so smoothly that the thought hadn't had time to occur to him, "because if I am able then I will help you regardless. Consider these requests, made with no relation to what you have asked of me." She held up one finger. "My first request is that whatever allowances or accommodations you make for me should also be extended to Paya. She is a great warrior, but I am asking you to extend these kindnesses to her because she is my companion."
"Of course! I am more than happy to extend the friendship of the Zora to anyone who would help us, and their companions to boot!" He hoped the next request would be so easy.
"Thank you. The other matter is that I was actually going to try to reach Zora's Domain regardless, though for my own purposes. Once the threat to your people has been addressed, I would be very grateful for whatever assistance you can render in helping me reach the Divine Beast Vah Ruta. I intend to see it restored to its original purpose."
The words were like ice thrown on his back on a warm day, a shock so severe yet so harmless that the thrill of it made him laugh out loud as his brain crackled with new energy. Of course! Of course, that is what she would ask. Why wouldn't it be, when she was already so suited? He did not try to hide his mirth, and to her credit she did not seem disturbed by it.
"Forgive me! Please, forgive me, that is not an unreasonable request, and I will do everything in my power to see that you are aided—not just by my hand, but by all Zora. You have my word! Ah, it is so good that you are the one who came to our aid, Zelda!" He pointed across the bridge. "Follow the road and it will lead you straight to Zora's Domain; I have no doubt that you could reach it by other means, but this rain has made the surrounding cliffs almost impossible to scale. There are monsters along the path that can generate electricity, and the rain has made them more dangerous as well. Still, as easily as you handled the beasts that guarded the tower, I have absolute faith that you can reach Zora's Domain with no problems!"
"Thank you," she said, her expression so neutral that he supposed she must have agreed with him! "Will you be traveling with us?"
"Oh, no. I would like to, if only to see your work up close, but preparations must be made for your arrival! We Zora are strong enough swimmers to take the river upstream, even in this downpour, and I am the strongest swimmer among my people. With that in mind," ah, but he was forgetful to the point of rudeness. He reached into a pouch at his belt, drawing out a small flask of potion. "Forgive me. This is only a small thing, a trinket, but please accept it as a token of my faith in you. Drinking it can provide Hylians with resistance to harm from electricity, I am told." He held it out to her, and she took it with smooth grace, inclining her head in thanks. "Wonderful! Then I will see you at Zora's Domain!"
The energy within him was building until it demanded an outlet and so he leaped backward off the tower, turning in the air, feeling the pull of gravity guiding him so that as he twisted he was always pointed in the right direction. He was breathless, weightless, for a long second before plunging into the water.
Prince Sidon was as good as his word: he slipped into the water with barely a splash, in spite of how enormous he was, and once he was submerged he was off like an arrow, cutting through the water without disturbing its surface. He was a red blur who passed out of sight almost immediately.
"What do you think of him?" Zelda asked.
"H-h-he's very… boisterous." Paya stepped out of the shadows of the bridge where she'd been watching from just out of Sidon's line of sight. "H-he's definitely the Zora prince, and I think we can trust him, based on the stories told about him." By which she meant accounts of his deeds and attitudes that had been meticulously verified by Sheikah observation, Zelda guessed. "If he says he's going to help us, then he intends to."
"That is good to hear, then. Is he the reigning monarch?"
"No, that would be his father, King Dorephan. I don't think that will be a problem, though; the King has been a friend to the Hyrulean Royal Family for a very long time, and he is supposed to be of generous heart. There shouldn't be any conflict between Prince Sidon's promises and what he can deliver."
Zelda hadn't imagined that it would be a problem; she could not have said why but she trusted Sidon almost instantly. Perhaps it was how open he was about seeking to help his own people. No, that was just what one would expect of any monarch who was worth keeping around; was it that he was willing to seek help outside of his people? Was she just responding to his acknowledgment of his own inability in the face of an obstacle he wasn't prepared to overcome? If so, shouldn't she be wary that perhaps he was simply more willing to throw away the lives of someone other than his own people? But no, if that were the case then probably he could have sought any of the other peoples of Hyrule. Whatever he needed must have been something only a Hylian was qualified for, for whatever reason.
She returned to the here and the now and turned to Paya, fairly sure that Sidon was no longer close enough to look at them without them knowing. "I heard someone scream when you landed. Was there trouble?"
Paya looked away, abashed. "I frightened one of the Zora guards, Torfeau. Neither of us hurt the other. She's a very good fighter, though." Zelda could not have guessed how Paya might have ascertained that; she had an image in her mind of the Zora lashing out with whatever weapon she had been carrying and Paya turning away what would have been a killing blow with her own weapon, or a shield, or even a forearm. More likely Paya had managed to talk her way out of it and had ascertained that Torfeau was very skilled based on the way she held her weapon, or some other metric that would have been utterly inscrutable to Zelda if she had been there. Now that she thought of that, she was lucky that Sidon had not responded violently to being surprised. She had not thought he would be so inclined, but guessing games were a losing proposition in the end. Well, it had turned out well enough. "I warned her that you would be coming, and… and what she would see before you arrived." She held out the Sheikah Slate. "I activated the travel pad as you instructed. You should be able to teleport there."
She took the slate, feeling its weight in her hand. That was good—she had worried that the device being registered to her had meant that Paya might not be able to use it, but it seemed to have worked regardless. "Thank you, Paya. As eager as Sidon was for us to travel to meet him, I think he can still wait long enough for me to progress through the shrine. I will be back as quickly as I can."
She keyed her destination into the map and disappeared into strands of light.
In the depths of the shrine Zelda threw herself against a Guardian designed to test someone mightier than herself. It did not matter; through iron nerves and fleetness of foot and the careful application of explosives she triumphed, and when she rejoined Paya she was carrying a new sword and a new shield.
Their trip along the road to Zora's Domain was not eventful, in the sense that such a thing could be uneventful; Paya carried a spear, while Zelda carried a sword and shield that did not conduct electricity. They moved quietly, soaked through and unmindful, the rain masking their footsteps as they drew up behind Lizalfos and Bokoblins. They were never spotted, save by keese, and keese did not raise alarms.
The new sword cut as well as the one she had carried before, its glowing blue blade as sharp as any steel one she had ever used. The shield was just as wondrous, a sort of circular emitter that formed a flat disc with no added weight—but of course she had no opportunity to test it.
The road was long, and wet, and quiet, and they spoke little. Divergent paths would split off occasionally, and the languid pace of their journey was punctuated by the quiet minutes Zelda spent walking these lonely trails to find disparate stone monuments that dotted the domain. They were not in perfect order, or else were meant to be viewed by peoples who did not need to walk along these paths, but every time Zelda found a new one she would stand before it for longer than its predecessors, recording the words she found and then standing in contemplation. Paya read, too, but if she recorded the words then it was only in memory, and far more time was spent considering Zelda's expression.
The contents of the monuments—the history of Zora's Domain, of the reservoir, of the ancient princess who had loved a swordsman, on and on—are known. To Zelda they were new things, windows into a past that she wondered if she had been educated on, perspectives on events that had occurred while she slept. She could feel the past there, history guided by the hand of the goddess, as firmly as if it were pressing against her chest and forcing the air from her lungs.
Eventually they came to a steep hill, on which a Moblin stood sentry; once past the Moblin, Zora's Domain spread before them.
The bridge was a bridge between worlds, crossing an expanse of open air and water, bathed in glowing lights which never dimmed or needed fuel. To cross the bridge was to actively leave the world behind you, to step into the realm of the Zora as surely as crossing into a dream, another life entire. Rising above the city was an enormous fish or whale with its tail raised as if to fan at the sun, and the rest of the domain spread out beneath it like ripples in stacked pools of water. Artisans moved with practiced surety and a newborn urgency to maintain the integrity of the ancient edifices, wending their way up the twisting staircases that lead between different layers of the city. Children ran amuck, shrieking with children's laughter as they raced to the higher levels of the domain and then rode down the channels of flowing water, leaping to solid ground only a level or two before the channels opened into free-flowing waterfalls that pooled in the massive lake above which the city was suspended.
As Paya and Zelda crossed the bridge the domain seemed to spread, an effect caused by their crossing of the walls erected against no threat save for architectural blandness.
"This feels like stepping into a pool," Zelda said. "Isn't it incredible, the way that it draws the eye in so many directions, how the feeling of water is conveyed through stone? The architecture is … it's breath-taking. You could make a lifetime of study out of it!"
"Many of the Zora have." Paya wasn't watching the architecture; her eyes were ever forward, and above, and everywhere, taking in potential points of attack or egress, the tactical examination of a place being so ingrained that it was reflexive. "The domain exists as it does at least in part because of the quality of the minerals it's built out of. The luminous stone glows at night, but it also has specific physical qualities that make it uniquely suited to building in this environment. Its use is why this bridge has such good footing, even in the rain." As she said this she tilted her head, letting thin rivulets of water run more onto her right shoulder than the left. She had swapped into her more casual clothes at the far end of the bridge. "Though I don't imagine they planned for this much."
Zelda adjusted the hood of her tunic; she was soaked through, just as Paya was, and didn't know if she would ever feel dry again, but it had been her suggestion that they change into less confrontational modes of dress. She did have her shirt that Impa had given to her, and it was both sturdy and suited to the occasion of meeting a prince, but she did not want to soil it just yet. The rain really was quite awful.
"I suspect that the needs of the Zora have more than a little to do with the rain." She saw Paya nod out of the corner of her eye and exhaled in satisfaction. Paya was well-versed in the different cultures and peoples of Hyrule, though she had never traveled beyond Kakariko Village, and to have Paya agreeing with her felt like a validation of her own ability to read a situation. That was silly, maybe even petty, but it was also true and she would continue to draw pleasure from it.
They came to the end of the bridge, which terminated in a series of steps that rose up to a flat platform framed at one end by a gate. Walking up the stairs together, they drew the attention of the two Zora guards. Zelda looked at both of them, trying not to stare, realizing she did not have the knowledge necessary to distinguish between masculine and feminine presentation for the aquatic people. She thought perhaps they were both women, but sexual dimorphism was more pronounced among Hylians than any of the other peoples of Hyrule, and she clamped down hard on her instinctive need to assume anything about them.
"Hm?" One guard looked up, voice deep and, to Zelda's ears, masculine. "Hold, travelers. What business do you have in—" He looked from Zelda to Paya and back again, his mouth slightly open.
The other guard looked over and said in a younger, higher voice, "Father? Err, Rivan?"
Rivan waved his free hand at her. "Wait, Dunma." Now he was staring at Zelda alone, and Zelda could see the nerves that had suddenly taken him, the recognition in his eyes. Paya tensed next to her, and without checking she knew her companion's eyes were focused on the crescent head of the Zora spear. "Forgive me, traveler. I know it is raining, and this is not a wholly reasonable request… but I also see that you are already soaked through beneath your hood. Would you pull it back for me, please?" This was not an order; it was a request that stood on the edge of fear of the taboo.
Knowing that she was changing things in ways she did not have the perspective to understand yet, she complied, reaching up and pulling her hood back. The rain fell directly on her hair again, including the meticulous braid that Paya had woven for her. He cannot know me, she thought, as he gasped out loud and fell to one knee.
"Your Grace," he said, eyes locked on her—flitting away only for a moment to stare at his child, who promptly fell into a similar position. "Forgive me. It's… it's been a century. We thought… we all thought that you had…" He swallowed. "I see. Maybe… all of this makes sense now. Please go and speak to the king. His Majesty will wish to know you have arrived."
"Do you know me?" She asked, because it seemed impossible that he should. Did they have portraits of her hanging up somewhere? Had the stories of her been passed down from grandparents to grandchildren, rendered so precisely that they would know her on sight? That she wasn't some descendant of the princess from a hundred years ago?
"I have known you for more than a century, Your Grace. You have no reason to remember me, of course. I was just an urchin then, a childhood friend to the Hylian Champion, and I don't think you ever actually looked at me during your visits here. I saw you, though, if only from a distance; the Hylian princess, so elevated that she could call the Zora princess by her first name. A number of us saw you when you came to ask our lady, Mipha, to be one of your champions, and again when you returned here in the company of Li—the Hylian champion." That name, that practiced familiarity; there was something there beneath his words, an old pain and mourning that ran in more than one direction. "There is no one here who was alive then that will fail to remember you, Your Grace."
Dunma was looking at her now, eyes wide and almost disbelieving, and the rain was falling heavily on the four of them. Paya's nervous energy next to her had given way to something else. Shame?
"Please stand up," she said. "Don't kneel to me." She had to give more than that; she could feel it here, the power of the crown, how the respect paid to her reflected the respect paid to the Zora royalty, and the Zora's love for their royal family ran deep. She could not say that her kingdom was gone; it lived on in her person, she could already hear him say. Fine. Half the truth, then. "I am trying to travel in secret and would be better served by your discretion."
Instantly Rivan stood, and after realizing the severity of his posture he visibly relaxed, with effort. Dunma followed suit. "Of course, Your Grace. If that is the case, please keep your hood up until you reach the throne room. I can't guarantee you won't be recognized," and his expression said that in fact he expected she would be recognized almost immediately, "but you stand a better chance the less of you we can see." He paused, visibly wrestled with something he wasn't sure if he wanted to say, made his decision. "Avoid talking to any of the elders, if you can."
"They are more likely to recognize me?" It made sense; those who were adults during her last visit (though how old would they be, now? How long did Zora live?) would probably have more distinct recollection of her.
"No, Your Grace." He looked away, not to see anything in particular but because he could no longer meet her eyes. "There's a… disagreement, among the Zora. Those of us who were young then, the contemporaries of our Princess, the ones who knew Link," he failed to notice his slip, "we understand what happened during the Calamity. No one could have predicted that, much less stopped it. The elders, though, do not see it as we do." He inclined his head to her; this seemed as much as he was willing to say.
"Thank you," Zelda said, because no other words seemed appropriate (and none at all could be sufficient). She and Paya inclined their heads to Rivan and Dunma, and then she pulled her hood back up. They walked past the guards, down the short path to the gate that lead into the city proper, avoiding the gaze of the artisan who was attending to the stonework. She felt the weight of eyes on her, told herself that this was only paranoia and ego, knew on a deeper level that that wasn't true.
They needed no direction; the layout of the domain was almost naturalistic, lines of importance flowing out from the mouth of the enormous fish that formed the crown of the city. If this was the Zora's Domain, laid out like streams of water running over stones, then the source of that dominion must have been the abode of the king. Still, they did not start immediately; the beauty of the place, its insistent concrete wonder, anchored their feet and demanded that they give it more than a moment's attention. They stood for what felt a very long time, the dark of the rain giving the luminous stone an eerie, otherworldly air that it shared with all of the stone around it. A statue stood at the center of the main plaza, depicting a Zora woman (this one she could tell instantly, though she was not sure why) standing in repose with a trident. The light reflecting off of its rain-slick surface gave it a quality very much like life, though that life was cold and hard and unmoving.
As they ascended the wide, gentle staircases that lead to the upper levels of the city, they passed by what seemed like a much older Zora. Zelda knew she was better served by not looking, and more so by not staring, but as they drew near to him Zelda saw that the old Zora was standing beside a bundle of shock arrows, set against a pillar so that their tips were held aloft. As she watched, the Zora touched the electrically-charged arrowheads with a visible and audible crackle of electricity. He winced, pulling his hand back in pain, hissing through his teeth. Then he repeated the process. Again. And again.
After perhaps the eighth time he had apparently had enough, waving his hand back and forth, muttering to himself as he stepped back—and then he noticed them, his head whipping around, sending his cranial fin bouncing. "What are you looking at? Can't you see I'm busy?"
"Please excuse me," she said, speaking out of reflex and realizing instantly that this was a mistake. "I did not mean to stare."
The old Zora did not reply; she saw the flash of recognition in his eyes, the moment of disbelief, flitting through possibilities, doubting himself, deciding that he trusted his senses. Then, drawing on a well of feeling she did not understand, she saw rage flare to life in his eyes, icy and sharp.
"You." His arrows forgotten he turned toward her, his back straightening so that he reared up to his full height, towering over both of them. "You come back here, now, after everything you did?"
"You should step back." He had started to step toward her; Paya was between them as suddenly as a thunderbolt, staring up at the Zora. She had no weapon in hand, but she would not need one.
His rage was no less severe as he turned his eyes on Paya, who he did not seem to recognize as a person. "Or what, shadow of the royal family? Will I be spirited away to the dark places beneath Kakariko Village, subjected to the tender attentions of their most loyal subjects? What do you think your people could take from me, assassin, that I have not lost ten times over? What pains could match?"
Paya did not make a sound, and she did not flinch; doubtless her face betrayed nothing. Zelda could only see her back, the very mild trembling in her hands.
The elder Zora looked at her again and his expression shifted still more, as if he was remembering something even more terrible than before, and what she saw in him then was grief, grief that had grown old and festered and never been allowed to heal. "You… you. You take her away from us, and after." He balled one hand into a fist, held it against his head as if the pressure would preserve the wholeness of his thoughts. "After everything between them… he manages to protect you… but not her."
Neither Paya nor Zelda moved; Zelda scarcely breathed. She did not understand. She did not want to.
All at once the Zora seemed to collapse in on himself, his stoop asserting itself against the rigidity of his spine, and he looked so tired as he turned away from them. "Go. Our prince is waiting for you, because he believes that there is something in you worth believing in. So many of them do, because they were children." He reached out with his hand, touched his fingertip against a shock arrow, held it there as electric current arced over and around his flesh. It was a long, terrible second before he drew his hand away from it. "But some of us remember, oh Princess of Hyrule. Let the prince believe; in time he will learn as we have. The only thing that Hylians can do, when we need them, is fail."
They did not stay longer; they left him there, nearly fleeing up the stairs, not daring to look back. Zelda pulled her hood closer around her head, willing the shadows to cling to her more tightly, disoriented by the intensity of the Zora's pain and anger. What had she done? How could it have been so terrible that the wounds were still so raw a century after? Paya was shaking next to her, unable to speak, trying desperately not to cry; probably she had never been spoken to that way before. Without thinking, from inside of a haze, she reached out to Paya and rested a hand on her arm.
That touch was enough; the flood gates opened and both of them stood there on the stairs while Paya hid her face in her sleeves and wept as quietly as she was able. They could offer each other no solace, not there, not in that place; Zelda did not even understand what the Zora had said to Paya, only how it had wounded her. Seeing that pain on Paya's face took her own shame and confusion and replaced it with a low heat, a rising anger that she hoped would better serve her in the hours to come. How dare that hateful man wound Paya, who had never hurt anyone, who probably did not have the capacity to hurt anyone.
Paya gathered rainwater in her hands and used it to rinse her face, which Zelda dried with the one handkerchief she had kept inside a waterproofed pocket of her tunic. They returned to the trek.
No one else accosted them on their way to the throne room. The breaching fish became so large that its shape lost meaning, and as they approached its mouth Zelda took note of the guards there. The two drew closer and the guards looked at them, curious, ready to stop them and question them.
She had neither the time nor the energy to speak to them. She pulled her hood down again, let them really see her, tried not to relish the shock in their eyes as they stepped hurriedly out of her way. She and Paya entered the throne room without another word.
The hall was massive, the ceiling a high-reaching arch that felt like it took up every ounce of space inside of the enormous fish, an impression almost like a cathedral. Outside of herself and Paya, only three people were present: an older Zora, bent-backed and green-skinned, whose head resembled a deep-sea ray and who regarded them with mistrust and irritation; Prince Sidon, whose face lit up like the sun as they entered, his smile a beautiful wall of knives; and what could have only been King Dorephan, a king of such prodigious size and obvious power that one might be forgiven for assuming him to be statuary. All of the Zora had small legs in relation to their torsos, compared to Hylians, but for the king the effect was most pronounced of all; his legs were like pillars, or small trees, but his body was that of a whale, his arms of such size and width that she instantly believed the story of him destroying a Guardian with his bare hands. His eyes were deep-set in his face but wide and bright as he looked down at them from his great height.
"Welcome, my friends!" The prince's body language was all energy, all welcoming, all friendship and easy trust. "Thank you so much for coming, and for answering the call of our great need! My lord father, these are the people I told you about. My friends, this is my father, King Dorephan, lord and protector of the Zora."
The king inclined his head to them; not given much to ceremony, then. Looking at Zelda, though, his eyes suddenly brightened, and she felt the impending sting of his recognition, wary of it, of him, after speaking to the old Zora with the arrows. There was no suspicion or anger in the king's eyes, but there was disbelief, as if he were seeing a ghost.
"My eyes must be deceiving me," he said, and his voice was as enormous as his frame, so that even when he spoke softly it filled the hall like a crowd of people. He leaned forward, resting his massive forearms against the supports of his throne. "Can that possibly be you? Have you returned to us, Princess Zelda?" He did not wait for his answer, breaking out into a wide grin not unlike his son's, as Sidon and the older Zora both turned to look at her with identical expressions of shock. "For a hundred years I thought you lost to us after the Calamity, but here you are! And you have not changed at all, it…" He stopped, and she realized she had let her confusion show. "Something is wrong. Do not tell me you don't remember me?"
"I'm afraid that I remember nothing," she said. "Please forgive me, Your Majesty."
"Dorephan," he said, his voice insistent thunder echoing off the ceiling. "I did not let your mother hold to ceremony with me, and I will not have you do so either."
"Sorry… Dorephan," she said. "When we suffered defeat at the hands of the calamity, I suffered a terrible injury. To recover from it, I was put into a sleep that has lasted until only a few weeks ago—and, as a side effect, I remember almost nothing of my previous life."
"Ha!" The derisive bark came from the side of the throne opposite Sidon, the hunched-over Zora who was regarding her with wide-set eyes full of contempt. "Are we supposed to just listen to this drivel? That she's Zelda I do not deny—anyone with eyes can see her, unchanged, after a hundred years, looking exactly the way she did the day she took Princess Mipha away from us!"
"Muzu," Dorephan said, a warning, not just for propriety.
"No, Your Majesty! I will not stand here and listen to this woman attempt to obviate responsibility for the tragedy that has befallen us! To listen to her in anything is an insult to your people and to the harms they have suffered due to her failures!"
The pressure in the room was too much, the force of the personalities in it like storms vying for position inside a terribly limited space. Sidon's voice exploded, "Muzu, how dare you speak that way to your king and his guests! Do you presume that the hurt you have suffered—that we have all suffered—means that you may heap abuses on the people who would help us? Just as the Divine Beast Vah Ruta turns against us, Zelda returns—and if I'd known that she was the Zelda, I would have carried her and her companion here on my back! They are the salvation our people have been praying for!"
Muzu growled, seeing that he was fighting against tides mightier than himself, and threw his hands up. "This is foolishness, and I will not be part of it! Ask the princess for all the help you want, and I will pray instead that we do not suffer a repeat of the tragedy that befell us a century ago! Some of us will not forget!" And he stormed out, as much as he was able to.
Sidon made a start, as if to go after him, but King Dorephan raised a hand and the prince was still. The room was quiet for the breadth of seconds that it took for the king's enormous diaphragm to expand and remained so for the length of his cavernous sigh.
"I am sorry, Princess. Muzu is speaking out of pain; he was Mipha's personal tutor, and she was very dear to him. Many of the elders here loved Mipha fiercely, and for many of them that love made their wounds more terrible, more likely to fester. It's given rise to something else." He bowed his head in apology, a mountain moving to communicate its sorrows. "Please forgive him, and the others. I fear they will carry that pain until they die, and never stop punishing themselves for not keeping Mipha with them."
How to speak to the numbness she felt? To have hurt someone without knowing that she did so, and then to be confronted with that hurt, blamed for it; to cycle through surprise, and shock, and anger, and then unspeakable shame. It was enough to leave her bereft of any feeling, numb to the touch of words and people and the gentle hand of a friend resting on her shoulder. It was as if she could no longer think, and did not wish to.
But something was alive inside of her, and it pulled apart the most obvious part of this. She looked to the king and the prince, and when she spoke her voice did not crack.
"What of you two, then? Surely your pain is no less sharp?" Surely your hatred is just as severe.
Father and son looked at each other, their eyes speaking the secret language that only family share, and then Sidon said slowly, gently: "I do miss my sister terribly, of course. I was only a very small child when I saw her last; I remember her as a presence rather than as a person, and it is only because of the statue in the plaza that I know her face at all. What I feel is very different from what the elders must carry."
"And I," Dorephan said, "miss her far more terribly than do any on the council of elders." These words, said so simply, had all the weight of boulders rolling down a hill, promising to destroy anything that impeded them. "Seggin was her instructor in the spear and thought of her as the daughter he never had. I think his love for her, his devotion to her learning, was so pronounced that it affected his relationship with his son; that is how much he loved her." A long pause, and the stone of his chair groaned beneath him as he dug his fingers into its arms. "But she is my daughter. It is impossible to explain the love a father has for his daughter, how it differs from his love for a son. Still more impossible to explain the pride of a monarch who sees in his child the future of his people, the boundless love each has for the other, and."
He stopped, and did not continue, and Zelda found that she couldn't keep her hands from shaking.
"Forgive me," he said at last. "You mean to ask if I resent you, as the other elders do. I do not. I knew the stories of Ganon as well as any monarch, knew when Mipha agreed to pilot Vah Ruta that it might be the last thing she ever did. I pray every day for her release, but every day I am confronted with my own powerlessness to help her. The biggest different between me and the other elders, Princess, is this: I know that I am the one who failed."
Time was a sticky haze that insisted on clinging to her; Sidon's voice cut through it.
"Forgive us, Zelda. It has been a long day, and my father and I both need our rest." That was not true; Sidon could have swum back to the place she had met him and then returned to this spot three times before needing to stop, but he was trying to be kind. "There is an inn on the main plaza, and I have made arrangements for both of you to rest there. We will meet tomorrow and discuss the problem of Divine Beast Vah Ruta."
It did not register for her that the Divine Beast, the greatest example of ancient technology in the world, was the thing she had been summoned to address. She said her goodbyes, and so did Sidon and the king and Paya, and the two women walked out of the throne room together.
The inn was warm and dry, and the open walls let in the sound of the rain very clearly. Paya had been hearing it all day, but there was a pronounced difference when listening to it with the smell of hot food in the air and a clean bed waiting for you.
Zelda had been almost wholly listless since leaving the throne room, barely managing to mumble her way through introductions with the couple running the inn, so badly shaken that Paya had stepped in to finish laying out the particulars of what they would need. It was still early enough that they should be able to rise with the sun and be well-rested.
They were brought hot bowls of rich, thick soup, redolent with spices and chunks of hearty salmon. It was a meal to relish, but Paya found herself distracted by watching Zelda, praying she would not have to remind her to finish her food.
Do not think that Paya was unaffected by the events of the day: there was a section of her mind, carefully cordoned off for now, that was in shambles over the encounter with Seggin. Paya loathed violence on a philosophical level, wished terribly for a life that would not require it of her, but at the same time she had never been one to shy away from the history of her people. Seggin's words were a knife taken to the tapestry of her composure, leaving it in tatters, precisely because it was true: the history of Hyrule was written in blood by the hands of the Sheikah, who had done terrible things for the royal family so that it could be denied. That Seggin knew that was not surprising—she recognized him because her grandmother had actually spoken of the Demon Sergeant before, recounting stories of seeing him on the battlefield in the days leading up to the Calamity, and he was known to look outward in service to his king—but that he would use that knowledge against her, as a weapon, was something she could not have imagined. She had never seen evidence of such things occurring in her lifetime; in her secret heart she pretended that all of the bloodier elements of her people had been exorcised when the Yiga Clan broke away from them. Pretending was all it was, though. There was a portion of her that was screaming, screaming as she returned the emptied bowls to the inn-keepers and thanked them for their hospitality, screaming at the bloodstains that were older than her flesh, more indelible than the color of her hair. It would not stop for some time.
So, she kept it locked away for as long as it would need to be quieted. She could come back to it later, when less was needed of her. She prepared for bed, made sure that Zelda was similarly prepared, and not a word passed between them. She prayed that morning would find the princess—because in Paya's heart she was still the princess, as often as she would deny it—in better spirits, and readier to face the challenges of the day.
Zelda was asleep almost as soon as she lay down, her exhaustions both physical and emotional pulling her down into what was probably a dreamless oblivion. Good. That was a mercy.
Paya did not sleep yet; she did not need nearly as much as most people, and more than four hours would leave her feeling sluggish and sore in the spine. She would sit up for a while, partially to keep watch but mostly to organize her thoughts.
Her mind returned, over and over, to the thought of Purah and Zelda sharing perceptions for the study of the Guardian. To Purah and Zelda it had seemed a tool, but to her it sounded like a synthesis of consciousness, an act and state of being of such immense intimacy that it beggared her imagination to do more than gesture at it. Such a thing would be almost like becoming the other person, sharing with them and of them in ways that surpassed the physical or even the emotional. She had told Zelda that there was profundity to the less direct experience, and she believed that to be true, but she had also lied in saying it the way she did. She wanted nothing more than to see the world, and Zelda, and herself, in the way that Zelda could. To share sensation with her. To share being. The idea of it sat in her stomach like a ball of hot iron, pressing down, down, and she had to try to force it out of her mind. She could not compartmentalize so many insistent thoughts that effectively. She had to try to exorcise them, somehow.
She knew what had to do; no point in putting it off. She sat on the side of her bed, watching Zelda for long enough to be sure that she was asleep. People who were only pretending often gave subtle signs of it; when Zelda gave none, Paya retrieved her notebook from her pack and began to write. She would need to remove these pages when she presented her findings to her grandmother, but that was fine; she would rebind them later, arranging them with their fellows in proper sequence.
A good diary was worth the effort.
