A/N: I'm sorry that this chapter came a little later than I meant to post it. I originally wrote a chapter where he had an adorable run in with a korok and was sent on a cool treasure hunt – but I realised, quite rightly, that it was stupid and rewrote a far more sensible chapter XD

Surprising Sun, Ganondorf took Tilaq's reins once she had mounted and started leading them, not back the way they had come, but east.

"Gan, where are we going? We need to head south again."

"We will," he said. "It'll be easier to do that if we go through the Tabantha Snowfields. I have something there I wish to take care of."

"Isn't that where...?" Her voice trailed off.

"Where I lived, yes."

xxx

The weather cleared as they reached the Snowfields. After the treacherous slopes of the Hebras, it was like stepping onto a different planet. The sun shone down on miles of uninterrupted untouched snow for as far as they could see. Squinting, he crouched, unshouldering his pack and letting it drop in front of him. Taking out strips of cloth that had been used to wrap up their food, he used a small knife, the same one he used for eating, to cut slits in them, creating masks. He handed one to Sun, who took it, looking confused.

"For snow blindness," he explained, holding onto Tilaq's bridle so he could tie one around the horse's head, and then putting on his own. "You didn't need it before, but the snow is so uniform here it acts like a mirror when the sun hits it."

They continued on. The snow was soft and powdery and they left deep tracks behind them. It muffled everything, so that even the sound of their passing was muted as if they had plugged their ears. He could see it now, a blot on the landscape, the one imperfection interrupting the otherwise flawless white. It was the cabin. He hadn't known what to expect. At sixteen, he had left the place in the middle of the night and in the thirteen years since, he had never returned. There had been no reason to until now. He wouldn't have come here at all, but he could feel time slipping through his fingers. There had been no opportunity to pursue his research while with Sun, and they would soon be on the final leg of the journey. It was the only place he could think of that might hold an answer.

As the sun climbed higher in the cloudless sky, the snow glittered like diamond. It was a good thing that the cabin was still standing, but all he felt was a heaviness on his heart that seemed to physically weigh him down, making him feel as if he were wading through water to get to it. In reality, he had hoped it would be buried in snow or torn apart by looting bokoblins or similar. Seeing it standing there, intact, he realised that it must have protective spells laid on it by the witches.

They were about a hundred yards away when he stopped and turned to look at Sun.

"I want to do this alone. Just keep heading south and I'll catch up to you."

She faced him and he struggled to read her expression behind the makeshift mask. Was it concern? Impatience? She probably thought he was being self-indulgent. It didn't matter. He patted Tilaq's strong neck and turned away from them, heading towards the place where he had been hidden for the first half of his life.

He knew better than to think there was anyone inside, but walking towards the entrance, he couldn't help putting his hand on the pommel of his sword for comfort. There were no birds, no animals and now that he was alone, he didn't even have Tilaq's snorting breath and footsteps to stop the silence from pressing in on him. Pausing in front of the doorway, he shut his eyes. He had sent Sun away because he had not wanted her to discover his plans, but that was not the only reason. Seeing the hovel through her eyes would have seared his heart. He did not want her to pity him. He did not want to have to suffer her stunned silence as she tried to imagine his daily existence in this place.

Swallowing back the complex tangle of emotions, he placed the palm of his hand on the door and pushed, bowing his head to step inside.

It had become shockingly small in his absence. He felt his hair brush the ceiling. Sucking in air through his teeth, he stepped around the sparse furniture. There was a fire pit at the far end, where his mother used to sleep to be close to the warmth in this, the first of three rooms. There was a simple table, where they had eaten and a range in the corner. Cast iron pots hung from hooks on the wall and there was still logs of wood by the stove. It smelled of mould and mildew. He had slept in the room to his left, but he turned to the door on the right instead. In all the years he had lived here, he had never been in the room where Koume and Kotake had slept. They had, of course, forbidden him and the threat of their ire had been more than an effective deterrent. But they were dead now.

He repeated the thought to himself. They are dead.

He had done it himself, seen their thin and limp bodies hit the ground like rag dolls. So why did his heart beat like a trapped bird? Gritting his teeth, he turned the handle, feeling it cold and stiff in his hand, and shouldered the door open.

The first thing he noticed was the choking dust. Coughing, he raised the back of his forearm to his nose and mouth and scanned for the source. Even in the frigid cold, moisture had seeped into the walls. There were rows of pots along the walls, each with all manner of plants and flowers, frozen, thawed and refrozen countless times. Without tending, some of them had managed to spill onto the floor, as if grasping to escape. There were dirty plates and bottles on the floor beside two ragged twin beds. There were no windows. By the light of the doorway, he spotted a lantern on a side table. He lit it and began his search.

He had no clear idea of what he was looking for. In fact, he barely expected to find anything useful. The magic that he had seen them use had been elemental. Powerful though it had been, it had been tangible, made of real things that existed in the world - fire and ice. But Kotake had once used blood magic, so their abilities had not been as limited as they would have had him believe. His mother, as far as he knew, had little magic of her own, but had called on them and they had used theirs to step into his world. The question that interested him now more than ever was where they had come from.

They were not part of his Hyrule, he knew that much. Gerudo witches and sages were not unheard of in his people's history, but from what Alma had told him, they had stepped through into this plane whole and the same as they were the day he had killed them. He had never pursued the question, because he had never wanted to know. Now, however, that information might be the key to his own escape.

Kneeling down, he looked under the beds, finding chests of frayed and patched clothes, candles, other odds and ends. The drawers in the side tables revealed nothing. He circled the room, even reaching into the plant pots, but the soil inside had frozen solid. He made notes of the kinds of dead plants, but all he could see were ingredients for the healing salves Kotake gave him as well as other commonly used alchemical ingredients. A crisp, spider shaped flower had lost all colour, but if it had been alive, it might have been purple. Nightshade purple. He paused at this one, crumbling the leaves in his fingers. No, his mother had died over months. Deadly nightshade killed in minutes. But this might have been used to poison his father's tea. This was not a time to get distracted, however, and he tore himself away from morbid speculation, pacing from one end of the room the other, scanning for something that he might have missed. The floorboards beneath him creaked and he put his weight on them. The room was infuriatingly small and he had searched every inch of it.

Then the toe of his boot caught the edge of a loose floorboard and he stumbled, putting his hand on the wall to steady himself. Frowning, he looked down. A plant that might have been some kind of creeping ivy had laced itself into the floor, spreading in a desperate bid to survive off the decaying wood. In doing so, it had dislodged a plank. On a whim, he knelt and found the edges, assisted by the dying efforts of the plant, he was able to hook his fingers under the floorboard and pry it upwards, breaking it off. To his incredulous delight, there was space underneath. Grunting, he tore up two more boards, freeing up enough space for him to reach down and bring out a small chest. Mouth dry, he placed it on the ground in front of him. It wasn't locked. Neither of them must have expected him to find it. He opened it.

Inside was a blade wrapped in cloth. It had a circular handle, curved, almost as if it were the singular half of a pair of shears about eight inches long. It was hooked like a bird's talon and savage looking. At first, he thought it was Gerudo in origin, but then he saw that the other side of the blade of engraved with sheikah symbols that he did not recognise. It was surprisingly heavy in his hand. It didn't have its own sheath as far as he could see, but even without one it appeared to retain its bite. Confused he brought it closer to examine it, but as the blade moved through the air, he felt a snag and a snap that shocked his hand as if he had been burned. Yelping, he dropped the knife. The air in front of him seemed to shimmer as if heated, and then go still. Panting, he stared, unsure he had imagined what he just had seen.

There were a few artefacts that he had read about in ancient skeikah tomes. From that he could tell, they were unique items that contained fantastical magical abilities, so powerful and so complex that they could not be replicated. He had read about a baton that could conduct the winds, and a pair of seeing glasses that allowed the user to see past the veil that divided the living and the dead. At first, he had regarded these things as just another set of myths, and he was still of a mind that most of them were. Then, on his visit to Hyrule Castle, he had seen the boy, gripping that sword with white knuckles as if ready to draw it against him. Even he had to admit the authenticity of the Mastersword. If that could exist, then was it not possible that there was more fact than fiction on those crumbling pages than he initially chose to believe?

Even so, he wrestled with the impossibility of the knife's existence. It couldn't be, he thought feverishly. With numb fingers, he wrapped the cloth around his hand and then picked up the knife, careful not to touch it with his skin. He then deftly covered the blade in it, letting out a breath he hadn't realised he had been holding. He could feel it now, the slight throbbing. He thought at first that it was coming from his own hand, that he had been injured, but the blade was strangely hot, pulsing with an all too familiar energy. If this knife could do what he thought it could do, then he had come to the end of his search.

With a wild rush of excitement, he rose to his feet and stood there, heart thudding as if he had been sprinting, the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

This was it. This was his way out. If he was right and the shadow could not be stopped, he need not die after all. He breathed a prayer of thanks and hurriedly gathered together some rags, his mind whirling with questions. Was this how they had done it? Had they cut their way through? He tied the blade up, making sure it would not slip out of its bindings and hid it at the bottom of his pack. Finally, they had left him something truly useful, and he had stolen it from them. The thought was deeply satisfying. Once he was sure the knife was secure, he took his exit.

Pausing at the entrance to the cabin, he touched the doorframe. It bothered him, leaving it here. It was the one solid reminder of everything he had never had. He could not erase it from his memory, but there was no reason for it to remain here like some fetid monument. Let it be in the past where it belonged. Taking a deep breath, he concentrated on the wood under his hand. It began to smoke, and then to glow like kindling, but it was too wet to catch alight. Shutting his eyes, he tapped into a different kind of energy. Fire, purple and lightless, laced with Malice, latched onto the wood and it began to burn in earnest. He stepped back, watching it spread with alarming speed. A smile twisted his features as, within minutes, the structure was engulfed. He could hear it snap and groan as the walls weakened. In a rush of heat that sent black smoke billowing into the sky, one side of the cabin buckled. By that point, however, he was already making his way through the snow, re-treading his own tracks until he found the larger prints of Tilaq and turned south.

xxx

Sun heard a distant crash and turned her head, peering through the slits in her mask. She had learned to watch out for sounds like that in case part of the mountain was crumbling away above her, but in the flat Snowfields, it made no sense. Moreover, Tilaq didn't seem perturbed. Then she saw thick, choking smoke rise into the sky in great rolling waves and frowned, turning the horse so she could get a better view. It looked like smoke from a massive bonfire. Realising where it was coming from, she kicked Tilaq forward, breaking into a canter, searching for a figure among the endless white.

"Gan!" She shouted, her voice soft as if it were coming from underwater, the snow absorbing all sound.

"I'm here!"

She only just heard his response, seeing him stride towards them, waving. The building behind him was collapse in on itself, wreathed in unnatural fire.

"Gan, what -"

"Let's go. I'm done here."

For a moment, she considered challenging him, but seeing something of the black joy in his smile, she thought better of it. She had never seen him like this before. It frightened her. Biting back her questions, she turned around and followed him, trying to ignore the sounds of the fire, somehow coming to her loud and clear despite the muffling snow.

xxx

A little more than a week passed.

They were getting close now. Satori mountain was a day away. So why did she feel so anxious about what was ahead of them? She had never felt nervous like this before, even when facing monsters several times her size. But, of course, back then things had been different. Ganondorf had been by her side then and there had been no uncertainty about the tasks before them. She had been making decisions with all the information, using tools at her disposal that she knew and trusted. Now, it had been proven that facts she had taken for granted had turned out to be lies. Nothing made sense anymore. Every day, the mask on her back felt like a heavier and heavier weight.

She couldn't shake the belief that what they were doing wasn't right. Twice more, she had tried to convince Ganondorf that a contingency plan needed to be talked through, that they should spar just in case she should have to cross blades with his shadow a second time. Each time he shot her down, until he snapped a few cutting words at her and she gave up, taking the rest of the journey in tense silence. He had never been like this before, so unwilling to entertain her ideas and thoughts. But was it a sudden change brought about by herself, or had the years robbed him of his patience? She could no longer rely on her memories of him as a source of information, and so cast her mind back to the more recent past. When travelling with Chief Riju, he had never second guessed her orders. But it was no use drawing conclusions from this, she reasoned, because Riju was Chief, and in a position of authority, changing the context of their interactions entirely.

It would all be so much simpler if he could just tell her what he was afraid of. Even as a child, however, it turned out that he had been keeping things from her, strategically parcelling out his trust enough to fool her into believing that they had reached an expected level of intimacy, while keeping all the important information about himself buried. He had told her about his nightmares, but he had never told her about the abuse that caused them. He had shared with her his fear of the Malice inside him, but neglected to confess the terrible things he had already done with it. What was he lying about now? If everything went to plan, then why did he feel so strongly about considering her ideas? What was she missing? Was she setting herself up to fall for another one of his manipulations and, if so, would this one end in her death?

Paranoia set in. She started analysing his behaviour towards her, looking for any indication or clue of what he was planning. She struggled to sleep at night, watching him until she could no longer hold on to consciousness, unable to dispel the fear that he would, yet again, take the ground from under her while she slept. Furthermore, she started seeing the shadow everywhere. Silhouettes on the horizon taunted her, sounds in the night plucked at the edges of her mind, often bringing her back from the brink of sleep. The pressure to rest while they were camped compounded her insomnia. More than once, she had woken in the early hours of the morning and, convinced that she had seen a figure in the darkness, had roughly roused Ganondorf and forced him to pack up early and move on. He had tried once more to explain that it wouldn't come for her while she slept, but that only made things worse still, and she could feel his frustration burning into her. She could almost hear his thoughts and it made her want to hurt him all over again. Why couldn't she just be a good mule and do what he told her? Why couldn't she have just stayed asleep and left him in peace? If only she wouldn't let her silly autonomy get in the way of his desires.

Why couldn't he have told her the truth? If only he hadn't used her like a sponge to soak up the consequences of his actions.

With all of this on her mind, they climbed the slopes of Satori Mountain as she tried not to imagine what end awaited her there.