Time's iterations are many, but few are manifest. In other worlds the will of time would have done the boy unto a death in ice and ill peace, or rive out a creature of the snow to send him in havoc and panic to an end long in the tooth. It is imagination alone that can end out these cruel tenses, and if there is a limit to the fearsome ways a misstep might kill an adventure it is not one man nor manlike mind can see.
In truth no body came with the brief thaw in the mountain spring, and not for the depth of the drifts above – Goron corpses by the dozen piled and festered at a heap in the mountain's foot, fodder for those scavengers accustomed to turflike set. There was no Deku among them. Nor was he dead on the plain – the risen milled, they that had not starved to a second death, none agitated, none molested.
For a time, tire tracks stood in the mud of the plains, alongside great silicon-laced footprints spread at a gallop's breadth one pair from the next – these two scars upon the dirt, coursing like runs in a stocking, reached from the cliff of the mountain badlands to the west, to the wastes and Ikana, before the dust that holds only death killed all readable track.
What moonless weather might come was enough to coax grass and wind, each turning the soil, farming out extinction for a hardscrabble shell of life. Fruits came the next summer, awkward and bitter. Trees yet rose on the town road to close out that path and seal the mountains.
The town decayed, its populace taken by the same winds. Some made to farm the old hinterland, but the risen preyed on them from the moonwrought crags that hid their numbers beyond counting, and what pack creatures might prosper would not prosper there. Clock Town was forgotten to all but tinkers and bandits, and the rare trading company from the spice route where the bay once was.
The Carnival is still held there, on whichever occult solstice laid its date in the time of giants. It is quiet now, the masks sealing up all revels – it is a day of solemnity and family now, a day to remind them of heroes long dead, and those lost in the flames and at the hands of the risen. At midnight one rocket goes up, a splendid white flash at its peak – and if one stands atop the wall, one will see the answer come from Ikana, a pinprick of white beneath the starless sky, to remind that hope is not gone, and the distant brothers have not forgotten them.
And if one treks not far from the western gate, to where the gunpowder rats burrow beneath the pillars, and blue flames circle in the night, one may find the end of the old auto tracks, themselves long gone. And there, against the nearest pillar, equidistant from Ikana and the town alike, one will find an old autocycle, rusted over and dead in all its tires, abandoned even for a junkman's fancy.
But still, one will find it was parked with care, beside the pillar, as though its rider might return at any time to make use of it once more, even down all the years of its decay. And ahead of its nose, through the western dust, one might see the wroughtiron gates of Ikana, laying at ends from whatever device split them down the middle in its dash to the land of death.
There is life there, that much is clear. Perhaps even peace of a kind, even as orange eyes still watch from the tower, distinguished from the other even at a span of miles. There is hard peace, and hard life within. And if a hero is there waiting, he would upset all for sake of his duty alone.
Perhaps it is best, then, that time won out over the hero, and that the story, even unended, has its exit. For the hero is still remembered, and his memory belongs to time.
we're not done yet kids. stick around a little longer.