He was in a desert of white. In front of him was a man dressed in black. That man, that warlock, that king, that thief- that thief who once stole the light, the river's flow, and seven years from his life. The two of them stood in a place beyond the forever darkness of the Sacred Realm, a place coated in a blankness that knew neither beginning nor end. No river flowed there, or anywhere.
They stood and stared at one another: him with mouth dry and eyes haunted, and the thief with foam on his lips and bloodthirst in his gaze. The desert of white steadily sucked them dry. The desert of white would leave them as bleached bones and ash.
When he thought he couldn't bear the thirst anymore, when he thought he couldn't fight back the void, when he thought he couldn't keep that man from reaching out and tearing him apart, that man's black silhouette grew, and grew, and grew, and then swallowed him in dust and cold shadow.
He fell. He fell forever, forever alone.
And then, heat. A light.
In the darkness, light. In the solitude, a voice. In the belly of the beast, where lurks rot and rust and death, life. It came for him, harshly, loudly, insistently, and on gossamer wings.
"Wake up!"
Fresh water poured into his mouth in thimblefuls between minuscule, needle-sharp pinches to his cheeks, to his nose, to his ears. Something cold sat below his back and under his jaw.
"Wake up! Right now! You don't get to die before you've held up your end of the bargain! Hey! Hey! Are you listening?!"
He opened his eyes. A fairy of white light shimmered in front of him. Her glow chased the nightmares from his mind like the wind carried dust from a crypt unopened for thousands of years.
"Navi?" he asked, incredulous, and convinced that the dull thud of machinery and insistent rush of water filtering through his ears was somehow part of a great deception covering over the wooden walls of his forest home.
A splash of lukewarm water to his face washed away that impression. This was not the Kokiri forest, and the fairy calling him from sleep's grasp was not his. In front of him was Tatl, and on the ground in front of her was a bottle of fresh water. Two, actually, though the first was empty. His hand found uneven pieces of ice tucked in the fabric of his tunic, around his neck.
He coughed. "Why…?"
"Shut up and drink this," she said, and pointed to the other bottle, the full one, the one from where her hands had just scooped up the droplets now running down his face like seeds from a sack. "Small sips," she commanded.
He took the bottle and looked around at the pipes, the walls, and the rushing saltwater in confusion. A spent arrow protruded from a chipped block of ice gently floating and slowly melting in a reservoir to his right.
"You didn't dilute the potion before you drank it," said Tatl, urging the bottle towards his mouth. "And then you immediately transformed! Stupid. The potions only work on humans! You knew that!"
His voice rasped against the back of his throat. "How did you get here?"
"Just be quiet and stay awake. You're dehydrated, and you overheated. That's all," she said. "I need you. We made a deal," Tatl said. She wiped her face. "I need you."
He drank. She floated in front of him with her hands on her forearms, and watched the water move down his throat with glistening eyes.
"Time doesn't pass inside the Clock Tower," she whispered. "But looking out from the inside…"
He drank. She swallowed.
"I could see you, your back, appearing again and again, right where we began. I could see you and I running back and forth, back and forth, so tired, so ragged. The town emptied, the moon came closer, and then moved away, closer, and then away, until it didn't stop, but just kept coming. Its jaw opened wide, and, and, and the fire, the fire, it…!"
Tatl covered her mouth. He drank.
"I heard you," she said.
He drank.
"Every time. All the times. I heard you."
He drank, and ran out of water.
"The Clock Tower, she… she let me choose when to come back in. I hid. I hid in the Turtle's shell. I'm sorry," she said. "I never should have left you. I'm so sorry."
He held out the bottle. "Is there any more?"
Tatl's mouth screwed into a frown, and her shoulders shook. Her head shook from side to side. "No," she said. "I tried, but I couldn't. I tried, but you, you deserve," she swallowed, "you deserve so much more than that, but it's, it's all I've got."
He licked his lips and blinked. Two hours. He stretched his arms out in front of his face and tested his legs. He could stand, and the room wasn't spinning.
"It's enough," he decided.
Tatl chimed and rocketed into the air. "No! No, it isn't! What are you planning to do?! Huh? Something stupid? Something dangerous?!"
"No," he said, and pointed to a series of thin colored pipes threading through the ceiling and past the locked door to the Gekko's room. "You are."
Tatl's jaw dropped. "What?!"
"There's some kind of liquid freezing agent in one of these pipes, isn't there? It keeps the central mechanism cool when the water can't?
"Yeah, the purple one." She scrunched her forehead and followed the trail of his finger. "It's the same stuff that coats the magic arrowheads. Why?"
"Do you think you can bust the part of it crossing over the other side of that door and flood the room with it?"
Tatl raised her brows and examined the space around the frosted purple pipe cutting through the wall. She pulsed with a single, sudden, brilliant flash of incendiary light, and grinned.
"Gimme some gunpowder," she said. "That thing won't notice me until I've lit it up, and by then, it'll be too late."
He rummaged around in his bag until he found his bomb kit and pulled out a tiny sack.
"The door is closed, so you'll still have to squeeze your way out the way you came in. Are you prepared for that?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and snatched the bag from his hands.
However, she paused just before she slipped through to the next room, and turned.
"I'm coming right back," she said. "Okay? I won't leave you, if you don't leave me. You got it?"
In his head, she was already leaving again, already flying to that tiny black hole like Navi had flown to the tall window white with blatant sunlight, never to return. She was a transitory blessing, and he a transitory visitor.
"You believe me?" Tatl asked.
"I believe only what I see," he said.
Snowhead: an elevator extending from the fiery depths of the earth's core to above a mountain's ice-covered peak. The bottom floors let the people leave offerings to the Northern Giant in their sleep, and the top floors brought them to the Giant's eye level when they awoke and stood to survey the rest of Termina. Old Ikana's mages and wise men used to meditate and pray for control of the elements in the many painted rooms spiraling around the walls of the interior.
Clouds of ice and snow encircled Snowhead's crown, and hailed their load down upon the rest of the mountain with the help of a sharp, merciless wind. Inside the tower, the air was tranquil, but so cold in places that the moisture in his breath turned to ice in front of his face, and so hot in others he felt his flesh cooking. The first time he braved the mountain with only his own power, his body threatened to give out before he reached the entrance. Without Darmani, he never would have made it.
The Goron's thick body shielded him from the worst of it, even at night. The tough hide and dense bodies of his people warded off both numbing cold and extreme heat, and so the temperatures of Snowhead's lowest lows and highest heights were a danger, but not a death sentence.
At the top of Snowhead slept the temple's guardian, locked away behind sheets of ice and a great metal lock. Darmani's huge arms turned the key inside the immense lock with bulging veins and flexing muscles. The lock clicked and fell to the floor without ceremony. The icicles glazed to its perimeter snapped like twigs on contact.
"You sure you have everything?" asked Tatl. "If this doesn't go to plan, we're both in trouble. You've barely taken a break. Just half a day and a few hours into the night, and you spent most of it acclimating to the elevation change."
"Travelling from below sea level to the summit of a mountain is quite extreme," Darmani admitted, but he grabbed the huge sack of rope and explosives sitting by his feet and carried it through Snowhead's massive door, to Goht.
"And it's cold," added Tatl, rubbing her arms.
Goht was a mechanical wonder. Ikana had built a creature of iron and copper, of gold and steel, and the mask on its face gave it a soul. The explosive beat of its metal hooves bored tunnels through solid rock, and shook snow from the peaks of the mountain where it ruled. Goht plowed through the ice and earth to reach those sorry souls buried beneath in times of peace, and cleared the passes of swaths of the kingdom's enemies in times of war. Granny said that some fools had taken to worshipping Goht, the golden bull, in place of the Giant who slept curled around the base of Snowhead. Now, though, the great guardian helplessly stood in a stasis of solid, merciless ice- the icy heart of the eternal winter.
If the ice melted, winter thawed to spring, but if the ice melted, Goht would run free, and run mad. Winter's cruel arms stopped Goht's engine and stilled its powerful legs, and Majora had taken this opportunity to slip dark fingers into the machinery and bend Goht to their will. Once released, Goht ran in circles without end; circles to start earthquakes, circles to bring Snowhead's towering height down around him. Goht ran with one desire: to be chased, to be played with, to steal away the attention of the people; to steal away the attention he had grown so used to, and had for so long been denied. Goht's heart was Majora's heart. Goht's heart was the heart of the imp banished so long ago, the imp who foolishly put on Majora's Mask.
He too was running in circles. He was running in circles of hours and days, not only because of his promise, but because he wanted attention, too, from someone who would never be there to give it to him.
What was that man dressed in black, that warlock, that thief doing in his prison of white? Was he running in circles? Was he held captive in cold nothingness?
Darmani cracked his knuckles and strung the ropes in taught criss-crosses through the room around Goht. Between them, he placed explosives in heaping mounds.
The monster would run into a forest of rope. No matter where Goht turned, a snare waited to tangle its legs and sent it careening into a pile of gunpowder. Goht's time would end in ash and fire, and walls caving in over its head to put out its misery. Mercy and cruelty sat close together in his mind, but he was not one to separate friends when he did not have to.
"You might actually blow up the whole tower with this much," warned Tatl.
"I can't say that would be the worst outcome," he said.
"It will be if we're still in it!" countered Tatl. "I didn't come drag you from exhaustion just to get both of us killed!"
"Oh, I don't actually have a life to lose," he said. "This is all borrowed time anyway, for me."
Tatl turned red in the face and clocked him on the head.
"Ow!"
"Listen!" she said. "All this nonsense about life and time and curses and destiny- it's stupid! It's absolutely stupid! Okay?!"
Darmani's beady eyes blinked. "Well, yes, but it doesn't make it any less-"
"You exist!" screamed Tatl, loudly enough to rattle the cave. "You have a face! You have a life! You have a name! You exist, whether you think you do or not!"
"Tatl, I know I exist," he said. "That's the problem. I'm not supposed to."
"You are!"
"Tatl, I'm-"
"But you are!" she screeched. "You are! You exist, and you are meant to exist! Even if someone said you shouldn't, or made you think you shouldn't, other people want you here!" She pointed to herself. "I want you here! I want you to stay! I want you here as you are! I don't care what anyone else ever said to you, or even what I said to you in the past!" Her finger pointed to the ground with definitive conviction, but her voice wobbled. "This is here, and this is now. You exist, and at least one person wants you here."
Darmani blinked again, dumbfounded. His eyes began to water.
She inhaled a shaky breath, and then let it go like a piece of dandelion fluff to the cold air. "You can resent me, like you resent the princess, but it doesn't change the fact that I want you here. It doesn't change the fact that she hopes that the two of you will meet again. Even if you never forgive her. Even if you never forgive me. That doesn't change. That might not ever be enough to make you happy, but it doesn't change."
Darmani's eyes spilled over. Tatl had left him, like so many others had before, but Tatl had also come back. How could he be so blind? How could he be so cold?
Tatl's light flickered on the slick, frozen rock walls of Snowhead's upper chamber like a lone candle's persistent flame in the face of the cold. She sputtered and hissed and crackled and raged at him, and set fires in those places already volatile from dry anger, but come the water, come the mire, come the wind, come the storm, she refused to extinguish and leave him in the cold darkness.
"I don't resent you," Darmani whispered. "I can hold a great amount of evil in my heart, but there is only so much room inside of me for that." He shook his head. "None of it is meant for you."
Tatl wilted.
Darmani bowed his head and wept.
"Please, forgive me," he said. "I would take off this mask and face you myself, but I c-"
Tatl dashed forwards and spread herself across his chest.
"Forgive me," she said. "I already forgave you."
The light cut over the east, through the clouds, and to the valley. Snow still covered the ground, but made patches as its reign receded in the light. Green grass emerged at the edges, and purple flowers and yellow bees explored the air. The mountain spring flowed forth, unencumbered by ice, and the trees wore green leaves instead of white blankets.
The frog choir, the choir of the rivers and springs, Don Gero's choir, sang. But it was not Don Gero who lead them. It was a child dressed in green, ocarina in hand, with a fairy sitting on his shoulder. Her glow was the only light besides the red and rising sun.
He could not dance, and he could not sing. Some days, he could not be himself. But he could hear music like no one else, and he could play it like a language and draw it out like a light cutting through darkness. It was his greatest gift, and his first gift from the person he loved more than anything- a gift in the form of a clay ocarina.
Darmani's grave watched from atop the highest cliff on the valley walls as a group of five frogs, one boy, and one fairy conspired in the crystalline pond, and sang the song of a new year, a new season, a new day.
Dawn of the Second day. The choir greeted it with joy, for in the mountains: spring.
Author's Note: Thank you as always to those who read and review! We are about, oh... four parts from the end, now, I think.
