The sallow surface of the western ocean stretched thin over the horizon with few disturbances surfacing through its membrane, and the wind cut through his hair as he sped swiftly across. The shore lay far behind him, along with the screaming, hungry gulls, and he had long since passed the twin black spires of Pinnacle Rock and the safe, sculptured splendor of Zora Hall. Only the Great Bay Temple punctured the waterline, and the mysterious, never-ending waterspout encircling its perimeter. The Gerudo pirates called it the dragon cloud.
Sometime in the great, vague, storied before, the coastline and the Great Bay Temple stood closer to one another, and tethered themselves together with bridges and ferries. But the years mounted, the blessings mounted, and the waves mounted with them until the ocean spread halfway across Termina field to hold hands with the Ikana River. The Giant of the West's last act before falling into the deep sleep of eternity was to lower the ocean's waterline by drinking it up handful by massive handful.
Granny said that the western leeves, still left over from the time of the ocean's overfull days, stood tall and proud in preparation for the waxing tide under the ever-closer moon, but the great ocean spirit had different ideas.
"No, the levees are there in the event that the sleeping Giant finally relieves themself. The ocean has risen and lowered at several points in its lifetime. It depends on when the Giant quenched themself and when they relieved themself," said the giant turtle. "Ho! Everyone knows that."
Unlike the personifications of Termina's fresh water, the frogs, the spirit of the ocean took the form of a turtle so enormous that the flora and fauna of the Great Bay mistook its back as an island, and took up residence on it. Currently, so was he, as the turtle was kind enough to soldier through Great Bay's unpredictable currents and tempestuous winds to ferry him to and from the old temple.
The turtle continued. "You land-dwellers pretend you don't know, but every sea-dweller knows that's where the salt in the ocean comes from. Old Ikana knew. That's why they used this temple to separate the salt from the water instead of wasting their time with rock salts from the mountains! The loose detritus, the remnants form the land, the eroding bones of creatures, the piss of the Giant," said the turtle, "That's where the salt comes from!"
It laughed. The rippling sound sent tremors through the island sprawled across its back, and through the bodies of its passengers.
He took a swig of the antidote the twin witches of the swamp had given him for the Gekko's poison and gagged it down. The congealing blue ooze had the consistency of watery mud, and if it had tasted like mud, it would have been an improvement over the reality. The bitter drink left behind a spicy aftertaste that left his tongue halfway numb in his mouth.
"That's disgusting," he said, matter-of-factly, and stopped glaring at his medicine to instead gaze out over the choppy, discolored ocean and the isolated wall of water whipping around his distant destination.
"Hmm!" The turtle chortled. "You think that's disgusting? You? Little land-dweller?"
"Huh?" he asked, intelligently.
"What about your air with all your pollen in it? Hm? What do you think about that, knowing you breathe that in?"
He'd forgotten to listen. Usually, he was good about listening, but the sun and the salt and his lightheadedness was getting to him.
"What does that have to do with anything?"
The turtle chortled again. "Oh, come now. I know you are no ordinary child. You know what I mean."
At the end of a seven years that hadn't yet happened, when his body had grown and changed into that of an adult, a man with bloodshot eyes and yellowing skin lurking in the shadows of the ruined castle town looked at him with envy, and with a kind of greedy intensity that made his insides shrivel and his mouth taste like bile. He was a salesman of undead creatures, creatures without flesh, but thought that, if he'd had the face of a child fresh from a seven-year nap, he would have, in a manner of speaking, sold his own flesh instead.
Cremia's smell wafted through his nose, and his stomach tightened and wrung itself into coiled knots. His already dry mouth turned to chalk.
"Those eggs," the turtle urged. "Lulu's children. Surely, if you're going to use the body of their father, you should know about things like that."
He pulled his lips into a taught, unforgiving line.
In a time not long ago, but yet unreacheable, a god swallowed him and sent him deep into its slick, pulsing stomach. He met a Zoran girl who wouldn't leave with him until she'd convinced herself that the two of them would be engaged, and so, with him not knowing any better, they became engaged.
It took him more than seven years for him to figure out anything close to the definition of the word, and then, when his fiance disappeared and someone took those seven years and drained them from the world's memory like blood from dead livestock, it took him three days of knowing Kafei and Anju to come close to understanding.
"Mikau gave me the use of his body to save Lulu's children, and by extension, save the western ocean," he said.
"Mikau asked you to help Lulu," impressed the turtle, and turned its head to peer at its passenger. Its blue-green eyes glistened under thick brown lids like the ocean in its healthier days. Thick algae grew in the creases around its eyes and nose from centuries of sleep beneath the ocean's surface. "I may have been napping, but that does not mean I do not listen to everything that happens in these waters."
He bit the inside of his cheek and stared into the turtle's huge eyes. If it had really been listening, it had done a poor job of it. The turtle made its bed in the waters not fifty feet from where Lulu and her mother had lived all their lives, and had not noticed that the Lulu it wished goodnight and the Lulu it wished good morning were two different Zora.
Perhaps as denial, perhaps from forgetfulness, or perhaps as an immortal failing to distinguish between a figure of destiny and her predecessor, it proved that it didn't actually know anything.
"I have saved Lulu's children, and I will save her home," he said. "That is how I will help her."
The turtle considered him for a moment, and then closed its eyes and craned its neck to face forward.
"I apologize. I had not yet realized that someone had hurt you."
A volatile balloon of Indignation welled up in his chest. How could the turtle so matter-of-factly look away after saying something like that, like it had gleaned everything about him from just a long, watery-eyed look when it couldn't even tell the difference between two generations of Zora? That was like calling Kafei by his father's name because of his hair color, or mistaking Cremia for her little sister because she ran the ranch. It was like sending him back to a time where nobody knew him without stopping to even consider what he might want, or what the consequences would be.
It was like assuming him a liar for never explaining that in so many words that, yes, he had been a shapeshifter long before and long after this morning, and the thing he shifted into was an adult man.
"Most people don't," he admitted, glaring.
He drained the dregs of his potion with vindictive fervor, stashed the bottle, and then looked to the temple. It loomed closer, and large enough to strain belief. The wind blew stronger here, and the water around the edges of the turtle's shell churned in a steady clockwise direction that grew stronger the farther the creature journeyed.
"Oh?" asked the turtle. "I doubt that. I think they simply do not know what to say. Something that deep often makes the bearer of the scars seem difficult to talk to, because they often try so hard to hide it away that they forget who they really are, or they let it fester in the open and consume everything else about themselves." The turtle shook its head. "It's such an awful thing, these masks."
He leaned back against the palm tree and stared up at the fronds. They cut the sun from his face in thick strips of shadow and hid him from its blinding light.
Each mask he obtained, he obtained for a price, but each one taught him something he hadn't known before, or let him be more than he was. Darmani was kind, Mikau determined, and the Deku child was loyal beyond words, because its spirit was stranded without them. Without them, he was only himself, and he was not strong enough on his own.
"They've helped me just as much as they've hurt me," he said.
"That's the curse," said the turtle. "No matter how much they help you, they always hurt you. Once you put one on, you cannot escape."
"Hm," he said.
The wind picked up to a brisk and insistent pace. He pulled the chain of his hookshot from the handle, and used it to wrap the trunk of the palm tree and his midsection together. The hook, he buried into the dirt by his hands.
Soon, the wind was pulling at his hair and beating at the fronds of the palm tree above him. His hat would surely be gone, had he not tucked it away into his bag. He'd made that mistake the first time, and Tatl had almost been lost to the elements forever.
Not that it would have made much difference whether he had lost her then, or lost her now.
"Salt, little one," said the turtle suddenly, calling over the mounting wind. "Is that what you think the treasure waiting inside the temple is? Salt? Because Ikana paid the soldiers in salt?"
Perhaps it was cheating, since he had been inside the Great Bay Temple before, but the only salt left in the temple was the brine in the unfiltered water, and a few preserved barrels forgotten throughout the complex. Whatever the treasure might have been, it surely wasn't that.
Even so: "No," he called back. "I never paid any mind to the stories about treasure! I always assume those kinds of things are stories someone made up to give value to places like this, or to lure people to their deaths!"
"How jaded," said the turtle. "And yet, how noble of you to venture inside, anyway!"
"Don't patronize me!" he wanted to say, but nobody would have heard him, anyway.
The wind ripped at his body and threatened to strip the trees from the back of the turtle's shell, but they held fast to the surface even as the pliable trunk waved and bounced against the force of the elements. His body pressed into the unforgiving metal links of his hookshot chain, but he stayed in place.
Next came the water. It struck him at such speed, he felt as if he'd been hurled through a solid wall and not malleable liquid. The water pelted against him and forced its way into his clenched mouth, and stung his eyes and throat like a deluge of wasps prodding at his insides. For a moment, he thought he might pass out, but at the last blessed second, the turtle broke through the storm and calm air rushed to his face and lungs.
"Are you still there, little one?"
He coughed violently.
The turtle nodded. "Good!" it said, and ferried them both through the storm's eye.
The temple surfaced from the depths in the shape of a gargantuan fish. When it was new, the architects of Ikana decorated it in gemstones and polished its metal scales into a rainbow, surely, but the sun and the wind scaled and cleaned the outside of the structure until it was smooth, dull, colorless steel. It peered out through its wall of water with sightless eyes and a gaping mouth wide enough for five giant turtles. A single thick pipe ran from the back of its head to the tip of its upturned tail, though what purpose it served eluded him even now that he had crawled through this place once before to turn the machine off.
Lulu could have told him. Her ancestors defended the thing until Ikana crumbled, and they shut it down for what they thought was forever.
He supposed the pipe carried concentrated salt to the mouth in a slurry so that the sun's rays and the wind's attention could finish the job. Supposedly, salt poured from the fish's lips whenever the machine in its submerged base worked as intended, and supposedly, the water's abnormal temperature had to do with its abnormally high salinity.
As far as he could tell, the desalinated water was whirling around the temple's exterior as the dragon cloud, and growing larger by the day.
Much like Woodfall functioned as far more than a filtration facility, the Great Bay Temple produced not only salt, but defenses for the entire bay. The elements were its clay, and it could craft and release entire storms against the rest of Termina if given the energy and command. It was the crown jewel of Zoran design married to Ikanan engineering and resources.
They floated inside. A wide, grinning fish head mask greeted them from the entry arch as the turtle ventured into the generous harbor in the fish's chest.
The entry tunnel was unlit, but orbs of reflective crystal inset into the floor and ceiling caught the scant daylight from outside and magnified it so that even in total darkness, an entering or exiting ship could find its way through.
The turtle eased through the darkness and came to a stop at a metal landing leading to the temple's main entrance: a sliding bay door seven times as tall as he was, and twice as wide. The reflective crystals affixed to its surface glimmered blue-white in the silhouette of an octopus. A smaller door inset inside of it- the maintenance door- parted its tentacles into two sets of four on either side.
As he finished coiling the chain of his hookshot into the handle, the turtle extended its long neck to create a bridge from its back to the landing. Its passenger gingerly stepped across its patchy, spotted brown skin before making the leap from its nose to the platform. He settled with a wet, unsteady plop from the saltwater caught in his shoes, and turned around.
"Thank you," he said to the turtle, and waved.
It straightened its neck and squinted at him.
"You look pale, little one," it said. "Will you be alright by yourself?"
His tongue lolled in his mouth with thirst, and his head throbbed. Truthfully, his legs shook, his focus kept shifting, and the sweat beading on his forehead left him with chills. He had taken his medicine, but the toxins from early in the day still made him dehydrated and weak.
"I am going to have to be," he said, and tugged Mikau's mask from his bag before slipping.
His face changed first. His sinuses and features shifted and compressed until his cheeks and forehead flattened against his skull before sloping into his long, sleek, pronounced nose. A fishtail sprouted from the back of his head, and as his body lengthened and grew to twice his original height, his skin fragmented into scales and pushed out a set of green fins along his forearms. His toes fused together in his shoes, and soon, his feet flattened into flippers and folded to fit.
Immediately, he could feel the moisture in the air penetrating the pores in Mikau's skin. But it didn't quench the thirst leftover from the elements and the antidote. He clenched and unclenched his fists and did his best not to wonder where his fingernails went.
Tatl thought that his transforming into a Hylian adult was unforgivable, but why was a Zoran man any different? She had seen this before, and said nothing. She had seen him become an adult Goron, and said nothing then, too.
"There's nobody left to come after me," Mikau said, and hurried up the ramp to the temple's bay door- and then the smaller maintenance door inset in the center. It slid open at his touch, and let him through.
The artificial fish was, predominantly, a facade to make a cohesive whole out of a varied and divided operation. It sat upon a thick, tangled bed of pipes deep beneath the water's surface that pierced through its belly and tangled through its innards like giant, ravenous eels cutting out of their caves in the ocean floor and through the stomach of their hapless prey. Inside, the temple was a mess of ornately crafted pipes, valves, and waterwheels undercut by a maze of walkways and waterways leading from one piece of the puzzle to another. The mounted, metal maps in the walls did little to illuminate the secret inner workings of the complex, but they did inform him which pipes carried inbound water, which ones funnelled the outbound water, and which ones controlled the direction of the waterwheel spinning counter-clockwise above his head.
It didn't matter. His target waited in the first of two maintenance chambers deeper inside the complex, not in the snarl of pipes. He strode across the metal walkways and winced with each timed burst of water from the release valves spread along his path, and at the answering thud of the water-propelled pistons set into the walls. Both took the shape of gleaming golden fish, and they ogled at Mikau with vapid gemstone eyes until he passed through the door of the next room and shut them out.
The complex's central turbine greeted him with a hot swell of air and a steady roar as it churned the deep reservoir of water pumping in from outside the temple walls.
He was so thirsty.
Woodfall's central turbine was finished in stained, sealed wood, painted, and beautified to form a flower, but beyond the striated ridges in the propellers spinning the water, Great Bay's was too immense to warrant such a treatment; one stirred a crater lake, and the other an entire ocean. Nearly every waterway of the complex emptied or started from this room, and one of the many passages and tubes branching from the submerged ten stories beneath his feet.
Once, someone said to him that time was like water. It flowed in a river throughout all of existence according to a natural course. But what happened if something, someone unknown, someone foreign, were to change that course? He had established his dam of three days before the end of the world, but what if someone plunged a pipe into the river and siphoned it out to split the river in two? In three? What next? Would the unnatural tributaries rejoin the river once again, in the future? Could he know? Could anyone know the consequences of splintering time?
Was he doomed to run far away, and run thin, and dry up into nothing more than a dead end long-separated from the rest of the river?
If only this water wasn't full of salt! He was so thirsty!
Mikau took a deep breath, waited for the propeller to pass, and then dove into the water. His body cut through it like a knife.
The ocean outside was abnormally warm, like bathwater, but the heat from the machinery made the water inside outright uncomfortable. He grit his teeth and steered his body with the current towards the wall, and counted the colored pipes disappearing into the branching passageways until he found the one he was looking for, and followed it.
Dangers festered in the hot water, and in the absence of any sunlight. The glowing crystals spaced throughout the passage illuminated only pieces of them- an eye, a tentacle, a long, hungry tooth- and Mikau's body pulsed with an electrifying energy in warning to every one of them. The stupid ones would follow his light and die in it, while the smarter ones would leave him alone in favor of what he picked off.
The tunnel's ceiling went away, and he penetrated the water's swiftly flowing surface in a graceful leap before landing on a textured metal platform.
He took a moment to breathe and regain his bearings. The water's heat left him dizzier than before, and he was tempted to suck down handfuls of it regardless of the consequences.
He abstained.
The insulated, core chambers of the complex ran hotter the farther removed they were from the rest of the ocean. The only exceptions were the chambers closest to the main pump, which the engineers designed to freeze lest the mechanism overheat at its most central, crucial junction.
Gyorg, the spirit of the temple, knew this. She cloistered herself inside the machine's core, where nothing could reach her, and hatched her children.
Lulu's fate, and that of her children, were forever linked with that of the great fish. Her mother, and her mother's mother, and even beyond were a living link to the temple's power, just as Mikau's family was forever destined to fight in her line's honor. Mikau and Lulu were bound by more than love and promises; their fates intertwined like the blue and red of the tattoo on Mikau's arm, the blue and red over Darmani's arm, and the blue and red spread across Odolwa's body. Lulu lived as Gyorg lived, and Mikau's lived to protect that balance.
Some fools believed his fate was the same, bound to that of the Hylian princess, his princess of destiny. Maybe it had been, and maybe they had been, when the symbol of three triangles shimmered brightly on the back of his hand, but now it was nothing but an old, dull scar. Her river flowed east, and his flowed west.
The balance of the ocean had changed, too: Majora infected the temple's engines with enough dark power to steal all of the water from the ocean, and the desire to take the lives of everything in it. For Lulu and her family to live, Gyorg and her brood must die.
Mikau sucked in a breath, and stood back up. The spirit of the river that long ago flowed to this ocean waited for him in the next room, trapped. His feet splashed through the water pooling along the path to the door towards it, unsteady.
Ice. that was his solution last time, and a potent option. He took off Mikau's mask and readied himself to throw open the door and freeze the whole damn thing from ceiling to floor.
He tapped the door with his foot to set off the sensor. It didn't move. He tried again.
It was locked. He didn't have the key, and forgot all about it.
He cursed. It was somewhere in these waters, sitting in a pool at the end of one of these pipes, where someone had tossed it so many years ago. But which one? Which reservoir? He could see them all in his mind, but it was so hard to retrace the path to it. Did he need to make the waterwheel turn the other way and reverse the current?
He couldn't remember. It was so hard for him to focus. He was standing on dry land, and his vision was swimming in the heat, in the wet. The witches' potion should have taken effect not long after he finished it, so why did he feel so weak?
He slumped against the wall and stared at the underbelly of the colored pipes weaving through the ceiling. Yellow overlapped red overlapped green overlapped blue, and though he had only intended to rest for a minute, they started spinning and he realized that, yes, this might be the end of his river.
The room went dark, and the rush of nearby water passed beneath him again and again and again.