"Hm." said Darmani. "If everyone forgot me, I don't rightly know how I'd react. Although, if they forgot about me because the never-ending snows of winter blanketed over my failure, that would be one thing, I suppose. I almost felt worse that they spent the energy and effort to give me a grave when I had, effectively, done nothing for them."
Darmani's grave was in the cave to his back, soaking in the eternal hot spring, but Darmani's body was neither beneath it nor lost in the ravine around Snowhead. It was intact and moving. Darmani had his legs. His chest was in one solid piece, and without a gash ripping through his lungs and heart. To his left was the impostor who took his face.
"But if I had succeeded, and they forgot about me once the ice melted, well." Darmani shook his head. "Goro-ro-ro."
The two of them were sitting, legs dangling, on the edge of the overlook above the Snowhead Valley, just outside the site of Darmani's grave. It was spring, and not the third day spring he could manage in his limited time. In front of him was a full spring, with the mountains good and green, the plants bursting with full blooms, and a soft film of yellow-green pollen dusting the roof of the mountain smithy's redwood cabin and gathering at the edges of the clear blue mountain pond. Looking at it made him want to sneeze.
"They're only able to forget because I succeeded," he said. "I lived. My story doesn't have a clean and easy ending. I don't get a grave with my name on it, so nobody remembers it. That's how it works. Bad times are behind them, and so they get to forget. They get to throw out everything that makes them think of how bad it was, and that includes me." He held out his hands. "After winter, spring comes, and the snow melts away. All of it."
Once upon a time, Darmani's hot spring was the start of a river that flowed down out of the cave and erupted into a vast waterfall right where the two of them sat. The valley below guided it to the base of the mountain, where it found the western ocean and tangled itself in the waves. But the spring wasn't a river, anymore. Now, the northern mountains only fed one river instead of two- the river flowing southeast, through Ikana and then to the swamp, when spring came to melt the ice on the mountains. From the north, the rivers in Termina moved clockwise, and in cycles. Granny said it wasn't that way when the Four Giants were here. Granny said the rivers connected the four worlds in the four cardinal directions because they followed the trails left by the Giants' footsteps. They stopped because the flow of time changed them. They stopped because the Four Giants stopped walking among the people.
Darmani pursed his lips. The capillaries inside paled at the pressure until they almost matched his wild, peaked mane of hair and beard. On the back of his head, a single spike rose from his skull and protruded out of his white hair like a summit that never froze; a reverse-Snowhead. It held steady as he shook his head from side to side and his coarse hair danced around it.
"You would know better than I would, I suppose," he said. "I've been a hero to my people and a symbol to my brothers almost all of my life, yes, but for small things. Unlike you, I had never taken on a task quite as daunting as defeating winter before. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to assume I had any business intervening with something so out of my depth."
"It was arrogant to assume you could do it by yourself," he said.
"Oh, as I remember it, strange traveller, I had no qualms about asking for your help. We were trapped here, understand! Before you appeared, I had nobody that I, in good conscience, could ask." Darmani grinned and showed off the vast gaps in his uneven teeth. "But you can use magic."
"I can use other people's magic," he corrected.
"You can use magic," insisted Darmani. "I gave you everything I had without question. My face, my strength, my name, my reputation, everything. As far as I am concerned, my life is now yours. I gave it without a second thought, and I have no regrets."
He shrugged. "It certainly was a decision that you made, yes."
"It was what you wanted," said Darmani.
"It was what I needed. I would not have gotten anywhere without your help."
"True, but it is also what you wanted," impressed Darmani.
He turned, and, resting his elbows on his knees, squinted up into Darmani's round eyes.
They twinkled above a wry grin. "Well, it is what you thought you wanted, anyway."
The birds in the valley began a call-and-response with the frogs swimming in the crystalline pond, who sang the melody right back, only backwards. The birds returned the backwards melody, and the frogs righted it.
"What?"
Darmani smiled. "What?"
He wiped his mouth and gesticulated with his hand- the left one, the one reserved for his sword. "I don't mean any offense, but why on earth do you think that I wanted to be a Goron?"
Darmani laughed. His protruding stomach rumbled and heaved with the sound, and the mountainside carried it down the cliff and into the valley, and then to Termina Field, where the foothills reservoir used to meet the ocean.
"A Goron! Just a Goron!" Darmani wiped his eyes. "No, strange traveller! I am not just a Goron! I am a proud member of my tribe! They know me by name and by deed! I am the chosen successor to my living Elder!"
He stood, and gestured to the mountain, the sky, to Snowhead beyond the peaks, and to the valley below. "I am Darmani the Third, with a family line I know and cherish, and is cherished in the stone heart of these mountains! I am beloved by all of my people, in life and death, in failure and success! There is no question as to who I am or where I belong!"
Darmani beat his chest like one of his drums, and held his hand out to his impostor.
"My story is written. You know the beginning, you know the middle, and you know the end, because you picked up the pen and wrote the ending where I left off. You returned from the grave a hero, before you so much as set foot inside of Snowhead itself. You succeeded before you even began." He winked. "Is it not everything you wanted?"
He stared up at Darmani, at how the cut of the mountain peaks in the distance framed his worn face like he was part of the mountain range itself. The sky above him was as blue as a robin's egg, as blue as Saria's eyes.
"I," he said, and then shook his head. "No. That isn't why. That isn't why I put myself in your place. That was not my intention."
"Oh, of course not. Not in the moment." Darmani's uneven teeth pushed out from between his lips again. "But when it was over, when you returned to my brothers with spring on your heels and snow melting with every step you took, I did not see you reveal yourself to them. When they cheered you with my name in their mouths, I did not hear you correct them."
"It would have been useless," he argued. He stood, and craned his head upwards to meet Darmani's sparkling eyes. His head came to Darmani's waist, though it would have come just below Darunia's chest. "Come the first day, and they would have forgotten again. I couldn't break their hearts like that- not when they thought you had just returned to them! Not when the moon was coming the morning after!"
"But it could have been you as their hero, for just that moment. It could have been your name that they adored and revered." Darmani took a step to the left, and his shadow fell from his body to dwarfed his impostor. "If just for a moment, they would have remembered you in my place."
He stepped backwards, closer to the sheer cliff of the dead waterfall.
"It didn't feel right," he said. "It didn't feel right to put myself in your story."
Darmani crossed his arms, but did not close the distance between them. In fact, he put more distance between them and blocked out the sun almost entirely. "Well, I would not have minded. I gave you the right to do whatever you wanted to with my face, with name."
"Do you," he searched his chest and belt for Darmani's mask, but couldn't find it, and so held out his empty hands, "do you want it back?"
Darmani reached behind his head and scratched."I cannot take it back."
He took another step back, so he could breathe outside of Darmani's immense shadow, but it proved inescapable. The birds below mimicked a lullaby he knew too well.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Darmani hung his head. "Oh, don't be. I asked you for this. I only wish that my face suited you. I wish that you could carry my name with joy, and with pride, since yours cannot satisfy you."
Suddenly, Darmani looked up. The sun appeared and disappeared between the peaks of his hair. "Say, strange traveller, tell me. I never asked, and nobody knows once the three days begin again. What is your name, anyway?"
The question took him aback another step, and he felt the open air beyond the cliff swallow his leg and drag him down, down, down.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"He's gone," Tatl said, and the panic in her voice sprayed over him like icy water.
He opened his eyes. He was in the Stock Pot Inn, nestled beneath the covers of the bed on the inside of the room, farthest away from the draft. Tatl's bed. The thin, early sun of the third day was creeping in through the open window one pale finger at a time. She was poised over his head, comparatively radiant, and with a letter as big as she was clutched between her needling fingers.
"He's gone," she repeated. "Kafei is gone!"
He threw back the covers. His masks were strewn about the bed next to him, with Darmani's mask on the pillow, next to his head, just beneath the Bremen Mask. He did not remember laying them out, and he never would have put Darmani to the east and not the north.
"What?! When?! What happened?!"
"You fell asleep!" Tatl cried, "You let Guru-Guru distract you, and you fell asleep!"
He put his hand on the Bremen Mask at the sound of Guru-Guru's name, and drew a hand down his face as he counted the rest with a frantic tally.
"They're all here, alright?! Guru-Guru laid them all out when he brought you back here, and I already counted them!" She threw the letter on the bed, right over his hands. "Stop fussing with your stupid masks and focus!"
He looked down at the envelope. Pearlized lilac, with rose and indigo ribbons draping from the wax seal. Kafei's stationary, the same as his mother's. He squinted at the even, handwritten name above the address. Aroma.
"Kafei wants us to deliver this to his mother." Tatl pointed at it. "The greasy man who runs the Curiosity Shop. He gave this to me, because I said that I was with you."
He snorted and ripped open the wax seal without a second thought. The message was short:
Dear Mother,
I have gone to fulfil a promise to the only woman I love as much as you. Her family may not be as prestigious as you wished, but I love her anyway. I hope you can find it in your heart to be happy for us, despite everything.
Do not try to find me, and do not wait for me.
He snorted, and before Tatl could so much as grind her teeth in outrage, crumpled up the letter between his hands.
"Don't tell me what to do," he muttered, and threw it on the bed.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Author's Note: Thank you, as always, for your feedback! Together, we'll solve the Anju/Kafei sidequest eventually!