Link and I had decided on taking two stops before heading for Snowpeak, the first of which brought us to a place that was the antithesis of our ultimate destination: the desert. In our haste to save the Gerudo girls from the Bulblin encampment, we had skipped up the Hero's Shade who was waiting there. Link wanted to learn another sword skill from the Shade before setting off to find the mirror shards, and as per my usual, I wanted to learn more about everything spiritual from him.

In the morning, we tracked him down and found him hidden in an alcove along the path to the Arbiter's Grounds. As he had done before, he split into two separate forms and lunged at each of us. The scenery before me faded from desert to snow, and the Hero's Shade transformed into his undead self.

"It's good to see you again," I said.

He nodded. "I notice that you are now carrying both bow and sword on you. Have you returned to sword training?"

"Yeah. I've been training with Link a lot over the past few weeks, so, uh, I'm not really interested in doing more training with you today." More getting my ass kicked, really. "I kinda just wanna talk to you, if that's all right?"

"By that, I assume you mean you would like to ask me questions."

"Yup."

"You may ask what you want, but know there are questions I either will not or can not answer."

"I figured that after you basically kicked me out so you wouldn't have to explain what you meant about regrets last time," I said. I plopped myself on the ground, satisfied that the snow in my subconscious wasn't cold. "...So. My mom said she thinks I have someone else's spirit, and for a while I thought it was just some crazy quasi-religious belief... But now that I know souls do go from person to person, I'm wondering if there's a chance she was right, but she just used the wrong terminology because most people in my world don't think there's a difference between soul and spirit."

He sat down across from me. "You very well may have inherited someone else's soul, but there is also a chance you are a new soul."

I waited for him to say more, but he didn't. "...I was hoping you could see if she was right since you were able to see that I have a soul and no spirit..."

"I am sorry to disappoint you, but my being a spirit does not mean I am omniscient of all spiritual matters. All I know of your soul is that it exists. Only you can tell if your soul has lived before. Often, people will regain memories from past lives in dreams..."

"...But I don't dream," I said.

"That is fine; dreams are not the only avenue of regaining memories from past lives. When your path mirrors the path of a past life, you may find you have a faint memory of experiencing the same thing before."

I couldn't remember anything like that ever happening. "The girl my mom thinks I'm reincarnated from died as a young child, so if she's right, could that explain why I've never remembered anything from her life? Because she was so young, and I haven't experienced anything mirroring what her life was like...?"

"Perhaps. However, you could also be a new soul as I previously suggested, or simply a young one. New souls have no past lives to remember, and young souls with minimal past lives do not recall them as often as those who have had many past lives."

I sighed, contemplating what to ask him next since this was going nowhere. If he couldn't answer questions about me, then maybe he'd be open to answering things I'd been wondering about him that hopefully weren't too personal for his tastes. "...Why do you look all decayed? I saw the spirit of a little boy, and he looked the same as he did when he was alive, just more see-through and blue and glowy. Is it because you've been dead for a long time?"

"No, though I have been dead for a very long time. Spirits can appear however we wish, hence the golden wolf form I take on despite never having been such a thing in life. It is a personal choice of mine to project myself as I do. If I were to retain the appearance I had in life ... Link would have many questions. He does not need to know who I am for now. My goal is to teach him."

"Why would Link have questions if he saw what you looked like? Would I have questions?"

"You always have questions." Well, that was the first time I'd ever heard him make a joke.

He wasn't wrong, though. "But would I?"

"No, you would not, because I already told you who I am. You would not be surprised to see how similar Link looks to me."

"You seriously haven't told him you're his ancestor?" I asked, brows raised.

"No, and it would be much appreciated if you would allow me to be the one to tell him one day."

I smiled. "Okay, I'll keep your secret. If, you show me what you looked like. I'll be the judge of how much Link took after you."

"...Not today."

"Fine, then..." I mumbled. "But if you won't let me see your real face, will you at least tell me your real name? 'The Hero's Shade' can't be what you're really called."

"I will someday." He stood in a swift movement. "Link has learned his new skill quickly. We are nearly finished."

I groaned. "Why do you have to keep kicking me out right when I ask you something just the tiniest bit personal? It's not fair. You already know so much about me, but you won't even tell me your name."

He ignored that. "Continue to train until we meet again. Next time, I would like you to show me all that you have learned. Goodbye."

My vision faded away, and I was back in the desert next to Link and Midna when it returned. The golden wolf was gone.

With nothing left to do there, Midna warped us close to Castle Town. Link wanted to go to the group at Telma's bar and look over Snowpeak on their map. He'd said there were some twilight portals to the north that were close by it, but he thought it best to get a lay of the land so we wouldn't end up aimlessly wandering in the cold snow. As someone who liked neither the cold nor the snow, I had no objections to that.

It was still fairly early in the morning, so not many people were in the streets. The lack of people made it easier for me to notice certain things I hadn't seen in the bustle from before, namely the signs of some businesses. One, in particular, caught my eye—the Fortune-Telling Mansion, Fanadi's Palace. I recalled Mahana telling Zi to see if the fortuneteller in Castle Town would mentor him, and I supposed this was her.

Thinking of Zi made me slow my pace. He and his father hadn't come to Kakariko over the month and a half I was there, but they both still had to be out there somewhere looking for me. I was bound to run into them sooner or later... And I knew I would feel a lot better if I knew when to expect it. A fortuneteller could give me a heads-up.

I stopped when we got in front of the door and tapped Link on the arm to get his attention. "Hey, I wanna go in here real quick. You can go ahead to the bar. I'll meet you there, or you can meet me outside here if you get done in there first."

Link gave me a questioning look that told me he'd want an explanation later, but he agreed to my plan and went off toward the bar without me.

I raised my fist to knock on the door, but a voice from inside told me to enter before I got to. Startled, I looked over the door and around it for some sort of peephole that she could have used to see me. There was nothing as far as I could tell, not even a window. I warily pushed the door open enough to peek inside.

It was ominous, to say the least. Dark, ornate drapes hung over the walls, and the only source of light was the glowing crystal ball on a small round table. The overweight, scantily clad woman sitting behind it had piercing red eyes and a small grin on her piggish face. Her jewelry jingled as she raised a hand to beckon me in.

"I've been waiting for you," the woman said, low voice dragging out and emphasizing every other word.

'What a fortuneteller-like thing to say,' was what I would have responded had I not been speechless.

I slowly stepped inside. The air suddenly felt heavy as I closed the door behind me.

"Come closer," Fanadi said, and I did. "Only I can tell what the fates have in store for you... For ten Rupees."

Mahana had said she was a 'competent' fortuneteller, but I was hesitant to believe that. Though I knew magic and the supernatural were real in Hyrule, the existence of those things didn't automatically give her any credibility. Every world probably had con artists.

"Before I pay you," I said, "I want you to prove to me that you're the real deal. What's my name?"

Fanadi shook her head. "That is not how this works... My magic ball does not speak to me; it shows me scenes from the future."

I crossed my arms. "Okay, then... Can it show you something that would prove I can trust you?"

She hummed and hovered her hands over the crystal ball, and it glowed brighter. "I see... Yes, you should trust me when I tell you I see him. Thin as a twig... He's tall—yes, very tall, this dark-haired boy you know..."

Those descriptors were enough to get the image through to me and make me tense up. Maybe he really had talked to her as Mahana had suggested, and he had told her of me... Or maybe she had seen him around town, but what were the chances that she could have guessed he was in any way connected to me?

"I do not know this boy," Fanadi went on as if she'd read my mind, "but I can see that your fates are heavily entwined. For ten Rupees, you can hear how..."

Even if it turned out to be a con, I could afford to lose a meager ten Rupees. I grabbed a yellow Rupee from the money bag Zi had given to me and placed it on her table. Fanadi smiled and hummed.

"I see... You, fearful. But this boy... He is purer than he seems."

What little trust I had in the woman started to chip away at that. Last time I checked, being an accessory to a planned murder was far from pure.

"Hesitant. Heartbroken. He does not want this..."

I frowned. Why was she trying to make me pity him? As much as I hated it, I couldn't deny that it was working...

Fanadi gasped, and her eyes widened. The light from her crystal ball dimmed, leaving only her face and hands illuminated and sending the rest of the room into darkness. "They are coming. Son and father. Soon."

My heart started to race. I leaned in closer to Fanadi and looked into her ball, but I saw nothing. "What? When? What's going to happen?"

"Death is on the table... But the answer is with you." Fanadi slowly lifted her head, and as her wide, horrified eyes bore into mine, she whispered, "Fly away."

I had never run as fast as I did to get out of there.

"What was that?" Link asked as we exited Castle Town.

He was referring to me bursting into the bar, 'looking like I'd seen a ghost' in Telma's words. I had insisted it was nothing, but I hadn't fooled anyone.

"The fortuneteller told me that Zi and Mr. Rider are coming for me," I said.

"...That's it?" he said. "We both already knew that."

"But she said it was happening soon. And she made it seem like—like..." I gulped. "Like I'm going to die if I don't do something right. But I don't know what I have to do right."

Link stopped walking and looked at me, brows pulled together. "What did she say? Word for word."

"'Death is on the table, but the answer is with you.' And then she told me to fly away, and I ran out."

"'Death is on the table'?" Link repeated. "As in, your death can be discussed? You can talk them out of it?"

"I don't know, maybe? But then what would 'the answer is with you' mean? What answer? Something specific I have to say?" I said.

Midna came up out of my shadow. "Guys. There's no reason to analyze some vague mumbo jumbo like that. Whatever scenario that lady was seeing—if she was really seeing one at all—will never happen. I can warp us all away the second I see Zi or his dad."

"You don't see anything from the shadows, and you stay in them most of the time," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Then just yell for me to warp you if you see them. No need for more angst." The finality in her voice told me there was no point in discussing the situation with her any further. She turned her attention to Link. "So, I only heard what little was said after Vanna made it to the bar. Did you find out anything helpful?"

"Ashei is in Snowpeak visiting her hometown, and we can talk to her and see if she's heard anything about the mirror shard. There's a long tunnel carved through the cliffs around Zora's Domain that should lead us right to it, so we don't have to go climb and hike over Snowpeak's mountains to get there."

"And there's already a twilight portal in Zora's Domain, so we can be there in no time. Shall we?" Midna said.

"Actually, I think we ought to use the portal in Upper Zora's River," Link said. "We'd have to walk some to get to the domain, but I think that'd be better than warping directly into the water in the throne room. We don't need to be all wet when we're headed for the cold."

"Hmm, I guess you have a point. And it'd probably scare the Zoras in there if a wolf and a girl suddenly splashed into their pool... Okay. Let's go."

Midna warped us as soon as Link's transformation into his wolf form was complete. Before my vision even returned, I could tell we were closer to Snowpeak by the sudden drop in temperature. I deflated when I saw that we were already in a snow-covered valley. I'd been hoping we wouldn't come across any until getting out on the other side of the tunnel in Snowpeak itself, but I supposed I should have expected snow to be just about anywhere considering it was December.

Nestled against one of the valley walls above the river was a shack, and a woman was sitting on its porch with her head turned away from us. Midna noticed her as well, and she hurried to take the shadow crystal out of Link and dip into my shadow before she could look our way.

"Zora's Domain is through there," Link said, indicating to a wide and dark cavern.

Hearing Link's voice, the woman's head turned. I narrowed my eyes to get a better look at her, but I didn't have to for long because she got up and started jogging to us. When she got close enough that I could clearly see her face, my eyes widened.

She looked remarkably similar to my oldest half-sister's fiancée Ami. Were she not the third person I'd come across in Hyrule who closely resembled someone I knew from America, I might not have thought much of them looking alike, but it was getting weird. First it was Shad that looked like my friend Bax, then I'd realized that Ilia looked like my friend Maddie, and now there was this woman.

"Hey! Er, sorry to bother you. My name's Iza. I used to rent boats for rides down the river, but the river was dammed up by a rockfall. It's hard enough to run my business in these months as is, and now I can't at all. I've been looking for a handy guy to help out... Do you know somebody who could?" She couldn't have made it more clear that she was really asking if Link would; she didn't look at me while speaking.

"Well, we're kinda busy now, but maybe she can someday," Link said, pointing at me. "She could break up the rocks with bomb arrows."

"Oh... Okay. Sure, if she'd want to," Iza said with a forced smile.

"I'll see about coming back soon," I said.

"You're a lifesaver!" she said to Link. I huffed—I was the one going to deal with her problem, not him. "Be sure to stop on by with her when she comes. I'll be waiting!"

Iza waved—again, only to Link—before turning and going back to her shop. I scrunched up my nose at her, and then Link and I started walking toward Zora's Domain.

"...Do you think she wanted me to help her out instead?" he muttered sarcastically.

"Don't know where you got that impression," I said with a sigh. "I'm surprised she's interested in you, but I guess I shouldn't be."

"What makes you say that?" he asked.

"Remember me telling you about my family?" I asked. He nodded. "Seriously, if her hair was smaller, her eyes were darker, and her nose was wider, she'd basically look just like Ami."

He raised an eyebrow and glanced back. "Ami's engaged to your sister Kalina, right?"

"Yeah. So, she can't really be that similar to Ami if she likes you... It's just really strange seeing someone who looks so much like her acting a way that she never would." I paused for a moment. "I know you know about Ilia looking like Maddie... But I don't think I ever told you about Shad looking like another one of my friends. It seems like every place in Hyrule has at least one person that matches up with someone from my world."

"Even Death Mountain?" he joked.

I smiled. "Except there, and the Gerudo Desert. And I haven't been to Zora's Domain yet, but from what I've seen of the Zoras, I'm confident that no Zora looks like anyone from America, either."

"It could just be a coincidence that some humans here look like humans from there. There are really only so many ways a human face can look."

"Maybe..."

We were silent for the rest of our walk. Nearing the brightened end of the cavern, we were greeted by the sound of waterfalls. Walking into the domain, my first thought was that it was simultaneously more grand and more simplistic than I'd imagined. Murals were carved into the high cliff faces, and multiple waterfalls gushed from above them down into the basin of pure water. While the carvings and the waterfalls were beautiful, especially the largest waterfall at the end, there wasn't too much else to look at at first. Still, the sight was a treat after having gotten so used to the smaller, derelict, arid Kakariko.

The surrounding cliffs hugged in, forcing us to walk closer to where the water encroached the land. Looking into its depths, I realized that the basin had to hold more of the domain than the above-ground portion did. Zoras were swimming in and out of numerous holes along its sides. If I had nothing else to do—and if the water weren't cold, as I knew it had to be—I'd have liked to have swum into them to see what all was down there.

Some Zoras standing around eyed us as we passed them by, but none of them said anything until we got to the tunnel. A nearby Zora asked us if we knew where we were going as they recognized that we weren't people who regularly used the shortcut to and from Tabantha Village, and then warned us that Snowpeak was currently even colder than usual. After we entered the tunnel, the Zora called out one final warning: "Don't freeze to death!"

For a while, the tunnel was actually slightly warmer than it had been in the domain because of the lack of wind, but it gradually became colder. About ten minutes into walking, there was still no end in sight, and we stopped to layer up.

Another ten minutes passed before I knew we were almost at the end. The temperature had dropped impossibly further, there were icicles hanging from the roof, and a distant white light appeared that made the glow of my necklace begin to dim. Frigid air carrying snow flurries blew in, and I pulled my hat down my forehead and tried to hide the lower half of my face under the scarf I had on.

It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the whiteness as we stepped out of the tunnel, and everything was still mostly white after they did. Two people with brown faces and colorful clothes were the only things to break the otherwise monochromatic scenery, but even they were hard to make out because of the shroud of falling snow. They were down a slope and across a cracked frozen lake, standing still on a flat plane amid surrounding cliffs.

"H-how are they just standing there in this weather?!" I said, voice muffled from my scarf.

"Probably used to it if they live here." When his sentence was out in a puff of white air, Link could no longer keep his teeth from chattering. "A-and they can probably help us find Ashei..."

Tucking my gloved hands between my arms and my sides, I went with him down the slope. We stopped at the edge of the frozen lake. There was no way around it with the tall cliffs to the right and left of it; we'd have to go from sheet to sheet of ice atop it to get to the other side, being careful to not misstep and fall into the water.

A man's voice yelled over, but with the wind and my ears being covered by my hat, I couldn't hear the words he said.

"You wanna go first?" Link asked.

"W-what?" I said.

"He said we should go one at a t-time so we don't tip or break the ice. I think you should go first since you weigh less, but I-I'll go first if you want me to."

"N-no, I'll go."

I took a moment to build up some courage, and then I slowly placed one foot over to the first sheet of ice. It felt sturdy enough, so I brought my other foot over. I was exceedingly cautious as I stepped from sheet to sheet, always testing my weight before crossing and sometimes backing out and choosing to step to a different piece. As I got closer to the people, I could make them out more—they were both young men, potentially related, and they had rods out and were fishing through the gaps in the frozen lake. The lake wasn't very wide, but it took several minutes for me to make it over to them.

One of the men, slightly taller than the other and with long black hair hanging out of the front of his fuzzy hood, spoke to me. "Hello, there. You got business here?"

"We c-came to see Ashei," I said.

The other man looked over, curiosity in his dark eyes. "You know Ashei?"

"She's our cousin," the long-haired man said.

"Really?" I asked. I never would have guessed they were related to Ashei; all they had in common were their black hair and brown eyes.

"Our mom's brother's kid, yeah. Believe it or not, our mom is pale," he said with a smile. I didn't know how he could stand having his face uncovered. "I'm Jeen, and this is Kell."

"I'm Vanna, and this is Link," I said as Link hopped off the final sheet of ice on the lake to join me.

Jeen started to reel in his line. "You're Link, eh? Ashei's talked about you some. I'll take you two to her." Finished reeling in the line, he planted the end of his fishing rod deep in the snow, and it stayed upright when he let go of it. "Be back soon, Kell."

He turned around and took off, and Link and I followed behind him. After rounding the cliff that bordered the left of the lake, a series of log cabins came into view. Like the shacks in Kakariko, nearly all of the windows were boarded up, and a few of the roofs looked crudely patched. One cabin was missing a roof entirely.

In front of one of the cabins, Jeen stopped to turn to us, and he spoke quietly. "Ashei should be in here, along with our grandparents, my mother, and my daughter. Don't be surprised if my mother and grandparents are cranky. They always are to begin with, but things haven't been going well in our village lately. The blizzard that's been hitting the province has been devastating, and we've also had a beast ransacking our kitchens in the middle of the night. It'd ... be best to avoid either of those topics."

After using his feet to push away some of the snow that had piled inches high up the door, he opened the door and walked in. I went in next, and then Link stepped in and shut the door behind him. It was colder inside than any house had a right to be, yet it was still much warmer than the bitter outdoors. I pulled my scarf down from my face, but I decided to keep all my other layers where they were for now.

My eyes were drawn first to a fireplace that I wanted to go warm up by, then to Ashei who was leaned against the wall next to it. A little black-haired brown-skinned girl was sitting by the fireplace and drawing on a piece of paper, and an old man and woman, each with light skin and gray-white hair, were sitting on a couch by the girl. Across from them was someone else with graying black hair, who I presumed to be Kell and Jeen's mother, sitting in a rocking chair that faced away from us.

"You've got visitors, Ashei," Jeen announced.

Everyone except the woman in the rocking chair looked our way. Ashei started walking over to us, and the little girl abandoned her drawing to run to Jeen.

"Daddy!" she said, jumping into his arms. "Are you and Uncle Kell all done ice fishing?"

"No, not yet. I only came to let Ashei's visitors in. I have to go back," Jeen said. The little girl pouted and whined. "We'll come back home when we get enough fish to feed all of us for today, all right, Bree?"

She nodded, still pouting, and Jeen put her back on the floor. He gave us a short wave before stepping around us and leaving, letting in a blast of chilled air that made me shiver. Bree ran back to the fireplace as Ashei came to a stop in front of us.

"What are you two doing here?" Ashei asked. "Did Telma send you?"

"No, but she did tell us we could find you here. We came to talk to you," Link said.

"Who comes to a place like this just to talk to someone?" the old lady grumbled.

Ashei looked back at her. "This is Link, the guy I was talking about. He could probably help us." The old lady humphed, and Ashei sat down at a table and gestured to the seats across from her. "What did you come to talk about?"

"Remember that mirror I asked about last time we were at the bar?" I said as Link and I sat down.

"The one Shad said might be somewhere in the desert, yeah? Did you find it?" Ashei asked.

"We found part of it," Link said.

"It was broken, and three shards of it are hidden around Hyrule," I said. "We heard that one shard is somewhere in Snowpeak. Have you seen it?"

Ashei breathed out an unamused laugh. "You can hardly see anything in this blizzard. No." She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. "But I haven't been outside much... You see, I've been staying inside to try to catch a beast that's been breaking into houses in this village and stealing dairy and fruit."

"Dairy and fruit that we pay a good price to get all the way out here."

I surmised that the person who had spoken up had to be Kell and Jeen's mother—she and the old man were the only people I hadn't heard talk yet, and it was clearly a woman speaking—but that didn't stop my heart from reacting to the fact that she sounded exactly like my mom.

Then, when she stood up from her rocking chair and turned to face us, my heart somehow managed to beat even faster, fluttering like a hummingbird's wings in my chest. That was my mom.

She walked over and sat down next to Ashei while I sat frozen in my seat, mind racing yet unable to form any logical thoughts.

"Ashei says you're a helper, yeah?" she said to Link. "Think you can help us track down that rotten thief?"

"We can try. If the beast's a thief, it might've also stolen what we're lookin' for," Link said.

She looked at me and curled her lip. "This little dolt is your assistant?"

I flinched out of my daze.

"She's not my 'assistant,' she's my friend. You want our help, don't you?" Link said.

"Dolt?" I quietly repeated, frowning.

There was no recognition on her face as we locked eyes, only contempt. "You've been sitting there staring at me with a stupid look on your face," she sneered.

Underneath her strict parenting, my mom was a good-natured woman. Her actions, as angry as many of them had made me, had always come from a place of love, and her intentions were never malicious. Never, in a million years, would she have spoken to me or looked at me like that.

This woman's callousness made me realize that she was merely another doppelganger, but I was still stunned by her appearance even knowing that was all she was. The other doppelgangers had their differences, and this woman looked exactly like my mom. The only visual giveaway that they weren't the same person was her clothes that I knew my mom didn't own, but it wasn't like my mom couldn't have borrowed clothes from Hyrule as I had done. Everything else about them was identical; the way their hair parted in the middle and ended bluntly an inch above their shoulders, the little wrinkles between their eyebrows, their thin lips, their narrow eyes the same shade of hazel as mine...

And she had two sons, Kell and Jeen. Like my sisters, Kalina and Jaylene. Ignoring the obvious differences in sex and race, there were some physical similarities between Kell and Kalina, and Jeen and Jaylene. Jeen even had a daughter named Bree, like how Jaylene had a son named Gabriel. Bree was a few years older than Gabriel, but it was easy to imagine that they would someday look similar, too.

In the span of an hour, I had run into the Hyrulean versions of practically every person in my family. Just a couple of things seemed wrong. For one, this woman's parents looked absolutely nothing like my mom's parents, though I supposed that she along with Kell and Jeen proved there was a spectrum of how similar or dissimilar Hyrulean versions could be. For two, I didn't have a cousin that matched up with Ashei; I didn't have a cousin, period. Both of my parents were only children. For three, Iza and Kell apparently weren't together like Ami and Kalina.

The only people missing from the picture were my dad and Vanna, but I guessed they could have been dead here like they were at home.

"Seriously, Daina, these two might be our only help, yeah?" Ashei said. The woman even had the same name as my mom.

"I'm sorry for staring, Daina," I said, having trouble getting her name out. "I was just wondering—um, are Kell and Jeen your only kids?"

"I'm the rude one for not liking some girl staring me down like a dope, eh?" Daina said, glaring at me. "Don't you think it's a bit rude to enter the house of someone you don't know and start demanding to be given information about their family?"

"Yeah, Kell and Jeen are her only children," Ashei answered. "Their father left when they were young, and she's been bitter since."

Daina clicked her tongue and directed her glare toward Ashei.

It seemed it wasn't necessarily that the Hyrulean versions of my dad and Vanna had died here—they were never a part of this family in the first place. I wondered, since families clearly didn't always match up all the way, if the Hyrulean Vanna was out there somewhere with a different mother.

"Anyway," Ashei said slowly. "I caught a glimpse of the beast one night, yeah? Apparently, the Zoras have been catching glimpses of it in their domain, too. Each time someone here has spotted it, it's been holding a type of red fish that don't live in the lake here, so it must be stealing them from Zora's Domain. I want to investigate further, but it's not safe to try to follow the beast in this blizzard..."

"I'm sure we could track it down," Link said.

"Hold on," Ashei said. She pushed herself away from the table, walked to a desk, and came back with a piece of paper. "This is what the beast looks like."

She sat the paper on the table and pushed it over to us. The drawing on it showcased a large creature holding a red fish in one hand and a pumpkin in the other. It looked like it could have been drawn by the little girl.

"...Look, I'm not an artist, yeah?" Ashei said.

"This is good enough," Link said, grabbing the paper. "So, the beast always gets this type of fish from the domain?"

"Always that red fish. He never steals any of the fish from here, just dairy and fruit. Maybe you can talk to the Zoras and see if they have any idea why it'd want it. Knowing why it's stealing might put us a step closer to stopping it, yeah?"

"Couldn't it just ... I don't know ... want food?" I said.

Daina scoffed. "It's been living in Snowpeak for years, and only in the last month or so has it started stealing food. You think it survived just fine on its own for years and all of a sudden it needs to start stealing now?"

I would have been snappy right back to her if she were anyone else, but as it were, her rudeness only upset me. It hurt to hear my mom's voice speak like that to me, though I knew she wasn't actually my mom.

"All right, we're leaving," Link said abruptly, standing up and stashing the drawing away. I stood up as well, grateful he was getting us out. "Thanks for the help, Ashei. We'll let you know what we find."

"I'll be heading back to Castle Town soon, so you can come find me in the bar, yeah?" she said.

"Yeah. See you."

Link placed his hand on the small of my back and took a step toward the door. I returned the glare Daina was giving me and left without a word.

Not sure how many people will even really notice that I changed this, but I just wanted to make a little comment saying I'm aware that in the game the Upper Zora's River portal wouldn't be unlocked at this point unless you'd already gone back there as a human. Buuut Link's just never had any reason to go back up since he's cleared the twilight from there in the story, and I wanted them to warp there, so we're just going with him having unlocked both that one and the Zora's Domain one while in the twilight.