Chapter Thirty-Six: Electro Elixir
Link leaves the shrine for Rotana and Rhiaru to solve. With Dyeri's map opened in her hands and the ex-whaler's letter of recommendation tucked carefully in her satchel, she follows the sun to the west.
She has not read the letter, sealed in wax and stamped with the imprint of Dyeri's ring, a mark of a triangle emerging from wavy lines. For all Link knows Dyeri could have fooled her, could have sent her on a wild cucco chase. And yet the people of the land have done nothing but help her, from the first gorons who bid her to explore the mine in which she encountered Yunobo, to Amali's endless kindness in believing her and aiding her.
Link passes abandoned villages, sparse and far-between, smaller than she anticipated for a village. Not in ruin, ancient and inert, like the villages on the sides of the road through Central Hyrule, but recently abandoned, windows still paned with glass, inner layers of sapphire still cool to touch, the paint over the top of the doors still vibrant. Those further to the south that she observes through the red telescope swarm with monsters, which have not reached those further to the north through which she travels.
The settlements in the more arid parts of the desert congregate around oases. When she veers slightly to the north, she understands why the villages appear so small: only a few structures immediately surrounding the water seem permanent, made of stone and brick, painted white alongside brilliant hues of decoration. Tents and other fixtures make up the rest. Link watches from afar the evacuation of a village north of her camp. Within the span of those few hours that she can see the village, she watches over half of the settlement bundled up and carried away on the backs of its people, taking their animals with them.
Link rides on.
The robes purchased beyond the topaz gate of Aveil save her from the wind and the sand alike. Their billowing looseness keeps a current of air flowing over her skin where bareness would welcome in the heat. At night, the fabric serves to warm her, and she dons her feathered Tabanch tunic.
When they reach the windswept dunes, Link does not allow Ilia to gallop. They take the journey at a slower gait; she keeps watch for rock beneath the surface of the sand or for deeper sandbanks. The first time they encounter the latter, Ilia nearly drowns.
Only with an application of stasis and injuring her own horse does Link save her.
She takes water from the oases of vacated villages and catches what food she can. Birds and small creatures when she can have them—desert hares and strange squirrel-like creatures for which she has no name—and lizards and snakes when she cannot. Link learns to dig in the banks of oases to uncover frogs that provide both water—in the form of their urine—and meat. She acquires a taste for their legs smothered in fat. Over spots of water Link snags darners and butterflies from the air and cooks them down—as Amali taught her—to serve as substitute nuts.
To feed Ilia, Link breaks into stores of the villages in search of hay and dried grass, and any vegetables or fruit that she can gather up. Her first run-in with a cactus leaves pulling spines out of her abdomen and left arm for hours, but she retrieves their pear-like voltfruit for her companion to eat.
They rest wherever Link can find higher ground: pillars of stone, slopes of rock. She aids Ilia in climbing them and in leaping back down. Ilia shies and whinnies; Link can feel her companion's heart thudding with the fear.
Yet she has no recourse except to risk Ilia's life, for the sands contain their own dangers.
Link does not need to know their name to learn to avoid them. Where monsters she has faced on foot die to a blade through the throat, the monsters of the sands slip away into the ground only to re-emerge under her own boots. In banks of deeper sand lie great pincered monsters with sunctioning mouths large enough to swallow her whole. They hide in wait beneath the surface of dunes. She watches a sand grouse waddle over such a bank of sand. Within an instant, a funnel like a whirlpool has opened up, the monster's pincers jutting from the dunes as a pair of sabres. Squawking, the grouse scrambles to escape, yet the downwards force of the whirlwind leads the bird directly into its waiting circular maw. The grouse disappears.
The monster slips back into the sand.
The deserts bring more than sedentary perils. Some monsters she mistakes for a plant, only to reach out and nearly have her hand cut off when the monster begins to spin. They emerge and descent from the sand like gambling tops, spined and spiked. Fearing for Ilia's life, Link avoids them at all costs: a single broken leg would spell the end for her companion, and she could not forgive herself for that. Other monsters resemble sharks, with tall fins that signal their approach and rock-like bone protrusions over their heads that act as half-helmet and half-battering ram. Though she successfully escapes one at a time, Link spots them more often in groups of three, patrolling around their territories. They leap out of the sand to crash into anything that moves in their abyssal jaws. She learns that whistling will prompt them to jump up and out, much to poor Ilia's confusion. A dose of bomb to their softer undersides drops their innards over the sand and leaves them to rot.
The rock pillars, Link discovers, do not guarantee safety. She falls asleep on top of such a pillar; she awakens to Ilia's neighs of distress.
Something crawls over her body.
Link yells, jumping back on the stone. Inside her clothing. On her bank, under her shirt, too many legs, too many legs. She rolls over the rock to crush them against her body. Their ooze slicks her skin; their squashed corpses cling to her flesh. She tries to scrub them off in a bath of sand and uncovers their identity: one-eyed scorpions capable of expelling fire from their tails.
From then on Link inspects every pillar before she sleeps to cleanse it with her blade.
The malice seems to have spread to the sand itself. In the distant deeper Tantari Desert of the south, she witnesses the sand merge and rise into monsters with outstretched arms that speed across the dunes before disintegrating a few seconds later. She swallows at the prospect of passing the sand-beasts en route to the Divine Beast.
Steadily, steadily, the sand give way once more to steppe.
When she sees a scarlet-striped lizalfos for the first time, she exhales in relief. The lizalfos breathes flame and Link knows just how to dispatch it. A yellow lizalfos gives her pause: from its horn the monster discharges a shock sufficient to convulse anything within a metre radius.
But Link can control the discharges too: the impact of an arrow to the horn triggers a bolt of electricity. The yellow lizalfos become her unwitting second companion to eliminate groups of monsters from afar and then ride on past before the surviving lizalfos can leap to their taloned feet. She turns around on Ilia to sign her thank-you at the lizalfos's spent body.
When she first smells water—about a fortnight after leaving Aveil—she considers the scent a hallucination. But the red telescope reveals densely populated line of villages and towns in the distance. Her mouth opens. Link can feel the saliva dripping from the roof of her mouth, thick and tasting of mud.
The River Sageru.
Wide, so wide that she cannot make out the other bank, some three kilometres across. As the Hylia River feeds Hyrule so does the Sageru River feed Parapa. Link rides Ilia to the point of exhaustion. Her companion's legs tense and shiver; the muscles of her back ripple with fatigue; her head sways. At the bank of the river, Link dismounts her.
She drops to her knees in the mud by the water.
She dips her hands into the river.
She drinks.
It flows over her fingers, and Link dives headfirst into the river.
The water stings in her newer wounds, the scraps on her back and stomach from the scorpions, the angry red welts where a lizalfos's talons hooked into the skin of her right leg, the thick cut across her left palm from the spinning-top plant that leaves her barely able to hold her sword without wincing in pain. She drinks as she bathes. Stripping away her clothing, she allows the sand, the salt, the sweat to wash from her skin. She scrubs her body with the softer sand from the riverbed and digs her nails into her scalp to draw out the sand ingrained to the roots of her hair.
She drinks too much.
On the bank again, she vomits. Mostly water, with a greenish hint of bile. The acid burns up her throat.
She passes out by Ilia's side.
Link awakens under the warmth of midmorning. She drinks again, this time more carefully, and snacks on the leftovers of frog fried the day before. Wiping her mouth on her tunic sleeve, she inspects Ilia. No wounds, no injuries. Her companion walks normally.
"Only a little farther. I'm sorry for how far I pushed you yesterday." She caresses Ilia's cheek. Her companion pushes her nose into Link's hand. "I'll be more careful in the future. You mean more to me than my own life does, you know that, don't you, girl?"
Ilia whinnies. She snuffles Link's chest; Link embraces her.
They do not follow the river exactly. Travellers avoid her on the road until she remembers to pin the yellow pass from Aveil to her chest. When Link comes too close to the towns on the waterfront, guards demand to know her purpose, pass or no. She recognises the tall white-sandstone walls of Nabooru from her memories and—intent on avoiding trouble—skirts the Parapan capital by a wide margin. Even from here Link observes the rise of the statue of the golden-and-sky-blue Goddess Sageru; a fountain of water pumped from the river flows from the seven-pointed star upon the statue's chest, double-crescent mark of the gerudo curving over either breast. Raising the telescope to her eye, Link can discern the details of the three statues surrounding that of the Goddess Sageru: the heads of the Golden Goddesses in green, in blue, and in red.
All else falls within the walls.
Down south. Link rides on past Nabooru, past other villages and towns, until she reaches the final settlement along the river not yet evacuated, slightly further north than Dyeri's map indicated.
Ache's Veil.
A series of metal struts around the village perimeter spark with topaz. Unlike the topaz gate, tall and thick enough to deter monsters even without the sparks, Link notices the fragility of the thin weaves of metal, more like a cobweb than a fence. Some struts lean forward or back instead of standing straight up: a temporary measure, hastily erected.
Link arrives at the northern gate of the village. The guard within the greeting booth—a metal box similarly covered in topaz shards—inquires about her purposes for visiting Ache's Veil. Link reads the words from the guard's hands via a thin, lower-chest-level window in the steel shutter. She slides Dyeri's letter through the shutter. The guard repeats her question.
"I'm hungry," Link signs immediately, and then stops herself. "...Dyeri told me that I should sign up for a position whaling here."
Since Link cannot see the guard's face, she watches the guard's fingers drum on the desk. "You know Dyeri?"
"Is...is she from around here?"
The guard does not reply for a moment. Her hands vanish from the shutter. Link hears footsteps, then the shuffling of papers, then a few noises that she cannot identify. Link waits. The heat climbs along with the mid-spring sun. The wet season should start soon, from what she has heard. From late spring to the harvest. Idly considering what she has learned from passing, Link taps her boot against the dirt. One, two, ten, twenty, one hundred...
At last guard's hands return to the window. She passes over a sheet of parchment. "Here's the whaling contract. Are you familiar with what whaling entails?" Link is not familiar; she nods anyway. She can learn on her feet, as she has before. "Read this, then sign your name here if you agree. If you have any questions about the rules and regulations, feel free to ask."
Link looks at the paper written in three different scripts: in Parapan, in Faronese, and in Tabanch, none of which she knows beyond the recognition of their characters. Nonetheless she signs her name in Central Hyrulean at the bottom.
Anything less might jeopardise her passage into Nabooru.
The guard takes the paper, then pushes an envelope towards Link, who fwips it into her hand. "Please come around to inn at the southern entrance. I am...very sorry about our lack of hospitality, but I hope that you understand." Her gestures tinge with an apologetic steadiness. "The last time we allowed someone in with such a letter, she revealed herself to be Yiga. Boss trusts you, so I've been told to show you to the inn." Trust, for the stamp of Dyeri's ring.
Then again, a Yiga could have stolen the ring from Dyeri.
Link dips her head in understanding, thanks the guard, and comes around the other side of the town. An inn awaits her. Beneath an awning of a miniature stable, she notes a trough of water. Link leaves Ilia there and enters the undulating-cloth curtain of the inn's doorway.
A sandstone-skinned woman in the midst of the foyer sets down the broom in her hands to greet her. "Welcome to Tune on the Dune, Ache's Veil premiere inn. Oh, are you the guest?" The inkeep moves her hand to her chest; Link repeats her motion. "Please accept my apologies for the dust. We haven't had visitors around here in months. I certainly haven't been here until I was called in just now. It's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Vaike and I'll be hosting you while you're here." Link hands her the envelope from the guard. The innkeep flicks it open, scans it from right to left, and closes the envelope once more. "...you signed a whaling contract." Link nods. Vaike's timbre affects a more professional edge, and Link sets her boots together. "I see. Take the bed upstairs, first door on the left, if you have no objections." The innkeep produces a silver key which Link takes and pockets. "Get a good night's sleep. Be careful out there. Monsters have been known to get in. If you need anything, there's a bell next to the window. It'll alert me and I'll come see what's going on in a few minutes, but if monsters come, you signed the waiver that you're in charge of your own life." She exhales and returns to her normal tone. "I hope you enjoy your stay."
Link blinks. "I left Ilia...I left my horse outside. I hope that's all right."
After a few moments of Vaike's silence and Link's panic, the innkeep explains that she does not know how to read sign from her fingers. She does, however, know how to read Central Hyrulean. As Vaike fetches Link paper and quill, Link struggles to write legibly enough for Vaike to read.
"That's what the water-trough's there for," Vaike answers agreeably, noting Link's words from the paper. "I'll feed and water your horse while she's here."
Link writes: "Is Ilia going to be left out there?"
Vaike grimaces. "I'm afraid so. We used to able to bring them in but...there have been incidents. Yiga forcing their horses to swallow explosives." Link pales. "But I haven't lost a horse yet."
Link bows in gratitude. "How much do I have to pay...?" Vaike quirks an eyebrow; Link blushes from her forgetfulness and writes down the question instead.
Glancing over the paper, the inkeep shakes her head. "Didn't you read the contract?" Link smiles nervously, but Vaike seems to pay her little mind. "A night's stay is included. You only have to pay if you desert, though deserting in the desert doesn't sound like a plan much blessed by Nayru." She laughs gently to herself. "Make sure you dress in layers. Don't worry about armour; dress light and make sure you can move. If you can, I suggest a hasty elixir."
Link nods.
"And most of all...unless you decide to become a whaler full-time, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. You might as well enjoy yourself."
Vaike takes her leave once she has shown Link to her room and provided her with dinner in the form of a creamy stew on seal milk. Globules of fat bubble at the edges of chopped voltfruit and Parapan radish from the richness of the milk. Link glances at the inside of the offered room, at its neatness and tidiness, at the pitcher of water on the nightstand, at the candles arranged artfully, at the softness of the bed. She takes the pitcher and then lopes down the stairs to sleep with Ilia under the awning.
The morning after she bids Ilia a temporary farewell. Her companion noses her cheek, and Link brings their foreheads together to comfort her.
Then she meets her employers: five gerudo women in robes the colour of sand, and a sixth dressed in dark green, her hair dyed emerald. The leader—an athletic woman of obsidian skin and practical gaze, her hair drawn back in a series of braided locks, her stature shorter than the others to just a few centimetres above Link's own height—introduces herself as Nadyne. Nadyne provided a pair of sand boots; Link gratefully puts them on. "Ho there, traveller. You have a name?"
"Link."
Nadyne emulates the gesture. As Link cannot write Parapan, or Tabanach, or Faronese and Nadyne knows no Central Hyrulean, they seem to come to an impasse, until one of the other women ventures that she knows a little Necludan. "Link," says Nadyne, and Link inclines her head. "Welcome aboard. I take it you've never been whaling before, so allow me to introduce the team. Ahni—" She indicates the dark-skinned woman who knows Neculudan, her earrings glittering with amber; Ahni shyly raises her hands to her mouth. "—and Luavan—" Nadyne indicates a short-haired woman of sand-coloured tone and green dye at the tips of her locks, who gives Link a smirk and a salute. "—are the harpooners. They're in charge of bringing down the molduga whale itself."
Molduga whale. Dyeri taught her the sign for the word molduga, which she now repeats to herself.
"Pleiade—" The tallest and palest of the assembled women, her mouth a stern line, a golden armlet coiled up her left arm in the shape of a sand shark. "—and Dilani—" The woman bows gracefully to Link as though performing a move in a dance, before lifting her head so that Link can see the golden triangle tattooed under her right eye, vibrant as the sun against the warm onyx tones of her skin, its brilliant matched by the easy smile upon her lips. Her long hair fluffs around her head, her curly bangs dyed blue. "—are our spotters. They're the ones who risk life and limb to get our harpooners close enough to spear the molduga."
Dilani smiles. "You don't need to go on and on about us, Boss."
"Oh. It's the least I can do for how much courage you all have. I can tell you that much." Nadyne grins warmly at her team. "You'd make the Courageous Champion of Sageru herself proud." She turns back to Link. "And this, may Her winds bless us all, is our Oracle of Safarore." The woman in the green robe and the green hair dips low, and Link bows back to her. "Listen to anything that She tells you, for She comes with us to bring our Goddess Safarore's wind and our Goddess Safarore's courage. She can read Her Courageousness's will better than anyone and so tells us where to move to always catch the wind."
Link inclines her head at the Oracle, who offers her a smile as she strums a note upon the three-stringed lyre she holds in her hands painted green with circular markings that remind Link of the symbol on the back of her paraglider. Link blushes though she cannot quite tell why.
"And you, Link, will come with me. Got any questions about what you're supposed to do?"
Link shakes her head. She has no questions if she does not know the first thing about her assignment.
"Then I hope that your courage is well up to the task, because you'll need it." Nadyne brings her right hand to her mouth and whistles. "Let's get whaling."
The team moves outside to where sit sandships of bone hull and linen sail. Four such ships, one smaller than the others. Link's arms fall in surprise to her sides.
The Oracle of Farore brings out four giant leaves painted over with blessings in red, blue, green, and sky blue, symbols of the Goddesses. Korok leaves, Link realises. The women fan out. Dilani and Ahni take one of the ships, and Luavan and Pleiade another. Link watches them lash themselves to the masts with woven lifelines. Upon her left wrist, each spotter ties a rope looped around the mast, which can open, close, and twist the sail; to her right each spotter fastens the korok leaf. The harpooners carry with them massive hooked harpoons bladed with gems of sapphire crackling with frost. Each one carries a supply of four.
The Oracle of Farore takes the smallest ship. Nadyne ushers Link onto the last of the larger sandships and loops a belt around Link's waist with a rope attached. Link observes that the rope does not immediately tie around the mast of the sandship like the other lifelines, but rather winds itself over and over and over around a strange contraption affixed to the lever. Nadyne turns the lever repeatedly and the rope tightens, then locks the lever into place. "Don't worry, Link. There's over one hundred metres of rope in this thing. You're not going to get dragged around the sands." Nadyne reaches up to fiddle with her right earlobe as she saw Dyeri do. "Oh, right. If things do go north, though, and you suddenly feel yourself getting dragged, don't panic. Calm down. The clothing you're wearing will protect you from the worst of the sand, and it'll keep you from becoming molduga chow. You'd rather get a sand-burn than end up a molduga's lunch, I can tell you that much."
Link rubs the back of her head.
"Thanks for coming along with us. Wait here."
Nadyne leaves her ship. The Oracle of Farore's sandship sits a valley of the dunes in front of the other three. Together, the Oracle and Nadyne invoke the Goddesses, Nadyne asking for Nayru's wisdom, Din's power, and Sageru's protection of Her kin, the Oracle asking, at length, for Farore's courage and Farore's wind.
"O Our Goddesses," the Oracle of Farore intones, "may our whaling please You, and may You bless us with success." The Oracle removes a green ocarina. Raising the instrument to the Oracle's lips, the Oracle sings a long note, then tucks the ocarina back into her robe to withdraw again the emerald lyre.
Nadyne takes her place with the korok leaf beside Link again, and the sandship lurches forward.
The ships slip slow over the sand at first. Yet, as Nadyne, Luavan, and Dilani keep the paces of their korok leaves to the song that the Oracle of Farore strums, the sandships quicken over the waves of sand until they fly over the dunes. Clinging to the mast, Link looks out over the desert through which they speed, at the golden light reflecting from the pale sands, at the clear blueness of the sky, the bluest sky that she could imagine, stretching out to the infinities of the world, a sea in the heavens.
Link laughs. For the exhilaration of the wind that billows her robes, for the beauty of the expanse of sand and sky and the line of the horizon where the two blur together into the sea, for the joy of riding a ship over the sands of a desert—
She laughs, and laughs, and when she thinks that she cannot laugh anymore another wave of mirth crashes over her, and she can hear Nadyne snickering, and then chuckling, and then breaking out into laughter so infectious that Link catches the laugh back from her and Nadyne from Link until she has doubled over with her aching stomach against the mast and her mouth threatening to split in half, and the sinew on the underside of her tongue throbbing from the stretch of having laughed for too long—
The Oracle of Farore's lyre-song shifts.
Nadyne's laughter stops with such abruptness that Link gasps out another few seconds and then claps her hand over her mouth to halt her own.
They arrive to a flat expanse of barren sand, lone and level. The other two sandships break away from the formation, and the Oracle of Farore's ship slows to a halt. Only Nadyne and Link's proceeds forward.
"Oh. It's almost showtime, Link. Don't worry about us," Nadyne instructs softly, her words just audible above the soft whisper of the bone ship over sand. "We'll make our ways towards it ourselves. Just focus on luring it out. If you hear me whistle, run straight towards me in a line. Otherwise, zigzagging is your friend. I know you know this already, but first-time whalers can get their nerves in a bundle, so just focus on what Dyeri taught you."
What Dyeri taught her. Link knows how to sign the word molduga. And nothing else.
"Get off the ship, Link. And good luck." Link forcibly uncurls her fingers from around the mast. Nadyne steadies the ship. Link takes a step off. "Stand still until I'm out of range," Nadyne calls softly over her shoulder, "and don't make a sound."
Link gulps down air. The sand boots keep her from sinking into the sand, and she spreads her feet wide to her shoulders to firm her stance. The sandship speeds away. Link watches the rope fixed to her waist unwind and trail off over the dunes.
She hears the song of the emerald lyre.
Link turns her head this way and that. The ships wait along the periphery of her vision. The sun reaches its zenith to bear its heat upon the sands. She blinks. A strange fatigue of confusion paints the inner curves of her eyelids dark.
She should have asked. Asked someone, anyone.
For want of what better to do, Link takes to pacing back and forth. The rope around her waist wriggles back and forth on the sand.
The sand vibrates.
Link pauses. The ground continues to shake, with increasing intensity. She looks around her for monsters, her hands reaching automatically for her paraglider, but no pincers emerge from the sand and no outstretched arms race towards her.
And then she notices the furrow of sand behind her.
A long, long furrow that collapses ten metres after the head rushes towards her at an alarming speed. As it nears, she can hear the noise of something digging out the sand beneath the surface.
Like one of the sand sharks, but larger.
Far larger.
Far, far, far larger.
Link whistles but the giant sand shark does not respond, perhaps too far away. She shoves her hand into the loose robes to remove the slate from its pouch and rapidly summons a bomb that gets stuck inside of her sleeve. Hastily she scrambles to stick her other hand down her robe to recover the bomb. The vibration of the earth knocks her onto her knees. She struggles for the bomb.
The rope around her waist tugs and suddenly Link skids along the sand at breakneck pace. The bomb rolls around down her sleeve to tumble around her torso and between her legs. As she slides, she shoves her hand down her trousers and grasps hold of the spherical bomb, pulling it out and holding it aloft in the air. The furrow charges towards her. She throws the bomb over her head at the sand shark. No matter how gigantic the monster, enough explosives should take care of it.
The wind blows the spherical bomb away from her. Before her very eyes, the furrow angles towards the bomb. She stares at the furrow's form, wider than Ilia's length from head to hindquarters, the immediate collapse indicating its massive depth.
It reaches the bomb.
Link sees the thing emerge from the sand a second before the impact of its breach reaches her and the shockwave of sand tosses her up into the air. The rope around her waist slackens; she opens her paraglider to float above the sands and witness the monster that has leaped from the bowels of the earth.
Larger than the coalesced Malice of Eldin, larger than the stalking guardians with their fire-light, larger than ten sand sharks put together, like a moving mountain of muscle and meat, a whale of the sands with a mouth carved halfway down the entirety of its body, its jaws opening as a flower blooms and snapping shut around the bomb.
The molduga twists through the air. A great whale shadowing the dunes. For a single squeeze of Link's heart that stretches into an infinity of numbness in her chest, its bulk blocks out the very sun.
More by instinct than by thought, Link's left forefinger slips along the surface of the slate.
The bomb explodes inside the molduga's mouth.
She hears its roar resonate through the air as the detonation splurts blood from the corners of its massive maw. When the molduga topples to the ground, the storm of sand kicked up chokes Link's nose and coarsens her throat. The monster writhes. Its weight sinks steadily into the dunes. The beast flails its mouth open and closed, and a pearly-clear liquid begins to drain from its jaw, liquid that moistens the sands with its pale sheen.
Link slowly floats down on the paraglider.
Only in the stillness of the air can she hear her own heartbeat pounding so painfully against her eardrums that they might burst. The other sandships race towards the downed beast. She watches—Ahni, with the amber earrings—drive a harpoon into the molduga's left eye. The monster roars out again. The sapphire of the harpoon must have broken inside the jelly of its eye; the monster spasms against the sand until the entire beast trembles at once into silence, the ice frigiding its muscle and stilling its motion. The sandships slide away and then curve backwards to return just as the molduga starts to stir again. Pleiade readies a harpoon of her own.
Sudden pain explodes at Link's left side, harsh and sharp enough for her fingers to rip from the wooden struts of the paraglider. Blue and white and sandy-tan spin around her. Agony strips meaning from her left shoulder. Her left hip catches her wrist and then her right knee smacks against her left, the impact of her boots landing in the dune slightly knocking up her head.
She rolls woozily onto her stomach and lies there with her face in the sand. Her left side throbs. Her shoulder twinges. When she breathes in, a line of agony sears just under the skin at the base of her lung.
Link buries her face into the sand. A hiccough runs through her that pulls the skin over her left ribs and shoulders in a blaze of pain, and then darkness overtakes her.
When she comes to, the agony in her left side has ebbed and the sun has lowered. The mountainous corpse of the molduga lies still and quiet, its face around its eyes torn through with a series of eight harpoons. Hands over her side prompt her to turn her head to her left. Her vision resolves: Pleiade, kneeling beside her. Link finds herself on one of the sandships on a stretch of fabric with the whalers around her. Pleiade presses a compress to her left side while Luavan checks the wounded area with the practised hand of a healer. She confirms that Link has neither broken nor fractured those ribs, only bruised them heavily. "Microfractures, maybe. I'd believe that." She frowns. "You'll want some pain relief."
"...what happened?" asks Link, blinking blearily through the pain.
"The molduga's tail hit you," Lauvan replies with a sympathetic wince. Link nods blankly at her words. When Pleiade quits her hand, Link presses her own pain into her ribs; the pressure keeps the edge off of the pain.
At this Nadyne arrives. Link attempts a vacant smile at the whaling of the molduga, and Nadyne shakes her head. "For Goddess's sake, when you heard me say that you need courage, you really took it to heart, didn't you?" Link retracts herself back. Nadyne's frown deepens. "I'm blacklisting you from ever whaling for anyone again at your blatant breach of protocols, and you really should have warned me that you were packing anything explosive. There's a reason we sapphire instead of topaz or bombs: a convulsing molduga's one of the most dangerous things on the sands."
Link lowers her head.
"...but whatever kind of explosive you used didn't make it spasm nearly as much as what I've seen before. You've got moxie. I can tell you that much. I have the feeling that you don't know how to properly whale—" Nadyne's eye widen. "—you don't know Parapan. Oh. Oh." Link blinks down at her own two hands. "You didn't read the contract. Did Dyeri even tell you what whaling meant?"
Link pauses, then shakes her head.
"For Goddess's sake," Nadyne says, more to herself than to Link, and then repeats the phrase again. "You didn't know the first thing about whaling; you signed the contract without reading it; you obviously aren't here to hunt molduga. So why did you take on the contract at all?"
Link hands shake at how badly she has once more messed up, at how her fears and anxieties have brought misfortune on those around her.
By herself she can act as recklessly as she wants. But she cannot continue with the assumption that others will dredge the answers out of her, that others will sit with her and talk to her about things like food as did Urbosa and Daruk.
Instead of bowing her head in silence and relying on her skills, she needs to speak, and so she does.
Link explains: of how she met Dyeri by chance, of how she inquired a path to Nabooru, of how Dyeri suggested she take on a whaling contract in exchange for safe passage to Nabooru, of how Dyeri had told her that the whalers of Ache's Veil could guarantee her travel on the basis of their prized molduga oil. As she moves her hands, Nadyne's eyes widen further and further, until the whaler grasps her head in her hands.
"Oh. For Goddess's sake." Nadyne presses her fingers to her forehead. "Link, I can't take you to Nabooru. The city's shut tight as a moldworm trap since the most recent raid. I don't know who Dyeri's friends over at—what'd you say, the statues of the Seven Heroines?—are, but even if they're from Nabooru, they're likelier to sprout fins than they are to get back into the city for a good long while. They'll be stuck out there. I can tell you that much."
Still pressing her palm into her injured side, Link simply looks at Nadyne, panting, her fingers curved in between her ribs, her wrist aching, her knee shuddering with the effort not to drop to the ground.
Nadyne breathes out. "But I'll do you one better, Link. I can't take you to Nabooru, but Goddess curse me if I don't keep my word, and that goes for Dyeri. What did you want from Nabooru? I might be able to arrange something."
"...I wanted to go to the Divine Beast. But I was hoping that I could...get someone from Nabooru..."
Nadyne's throat makes a strange crrk noise and Link's hands still. "You 'want to go to' Vah Naboris."
"...you didn't say Savah?" Link tilts her head as she asks the obvious.
The whaler blinks back at her, then laughs quietly. "You think that piece of murderous junk deserves the Goddess's respect? I can barely stand referring to it with vah and for Goddess's sake you want me to add the sa. No, that damned camel can go—" She says a word Link does not know. "—itself. Doesn't deserve to carry Nabooru's name. But if you've got a death wish for going there, I'll take you, Link. I'll do that much."
Link grins widely. "Thank you thank you thank you—"
"No need to thank me yet." Nadyne reaches up to her right ear in a gesture that again reminds Link of Dyeri. "Though if we're going out there, we'll need some protection. Have you ever made elixir?"
Link nods, and Nadyne beams.
"Attagirl. If you forego the right to molduga organs from your contract, we can use those parts to mix one for electric resistance. We'll want it for Vah Naboris. I can tell you that much."
They sail back to Ache's Veil, Link sitting cross-legged rather than standing on the deck of the sandship. She watches as the team lashes the molduga's corpse to the four ships' masts. They fan out to begin the slow trek, the wind of korok leaves steadily pulling the molduga across the sand. For the molduga's massive size, it does not weigh nearly as much as Link anticipated; then again, the molduga whale could leap out of the sand and thus must be less dense than it looks.
When they arrive again in Ache's Veil, the Oracle of Farore tucks the emerald lyre under her arm; she touches the green ocarina to her lips. Its song opens the gate and out flood the villagers of Ache's Veil. Link observes from the shade of the awning as the villagers take the molduga whale apart, slicing into its flesh to remove its bones and teeth, draining oil from its thick skin and from lumps in its head, cutting off the stretchy material of its fins, removing the twisting innards of its guts. She watches them set up giant vats of boiling water over great open flames in which they drop the fat, the oil, the guts, alongside powders from massive barrels, closed over with huge lids and stirred with ladles that require two or three to move at once.
Nadyne clicks her tongue. "So, what say you and I make like camels and get that elixir?" Link blinks absently at her, and Nadyne laughs. "Silly joke. C'mon, Link."
Under Nadyne's instructions, the two weigh out zapshrooms, voltfin trouts fished from the river, and electric darners that Link herself has caught and which Nadyne notes makes for an excellent ingredient of high potency. They simmer in Link's cooking pot, dwarfed by the giant vat of elixir right next to it. Nadyne handles the molduga guts with thick gloves. The stench of the molduga's innards nearly knocks Link unconscious: acrid and burning, the stink stings her throat and waters her eyes. She dry-heaves but has nothing in her stomach to vomit out. Instead she holds a voltfin trout close to her nose: the overpowering fishy scent smells better than the rot and decay of decomposing molduga entrails. Nadyne lays a thin film of fin sail—nearly translucent, tinted lightly in a reddish pink of the blood vessels that run through the skin—over the top of the cooking pot, and Link shuts the lid. A webbing of sail sticks out from under the rim.
The elixir simmers, and simmers, and simmers. As the other vats near completion for their own simmering—to congeal soap out of the molduga's fat and wax from its oil, to brew its guts into elixirs, to condense its thick and slimy meat into a distillation of monster extract, to prepare an acidic cleanse for the bones removed from its corpse—the air thickens with clouds of stench that settles down into her lungs and fills up her throat. Link drinks; the water does not drown out the smoke that clogs her nose and stuffs her mouth.
At some point the corners of her vision darken. She blinks her eyes to stay awake, to fight the current, and she hears—as though from the water—Nadyne speaking to her.
She closes her eyes and the darkness swaddles her in its comforting warmth.
The scent of soap. The fat boiling away to leave a cake of soap behind. The fragrance of flowers and herbs added in to sweeten and soften the scent.
In the dark cover of the night, after Urbosa had dismissed her from another session of training in which Link had taken her own blade against the Champion of Sageru, Link remained in the courtyard to practise. To go through the stances. To measure out her vertical strikes and horizontal swings, to practise the thrusts and jabs, to examine how rapidly she could twist her limbs to parry, to begin going through the forms of diagonal strikes.
The scent of soap had drifted down from one of the balconies above. Above the aroma of simmered fat, she could smell voltfruit and aloe. Link had explored little of the palace; she charted the course from the kitchen to her own bedroom to the courtyard and back again. She knew of the stables where Urbosa took her to select sand seals for the morning's hunt, and she knew of the grasslands to the north and the sands far, far to the south, in the landlocked stretch of Parapa in the shadow of the mountains.
Beyond that, Link had spent the majority of her waking hours training. Practising. Learning the blade not as a tool of self-defence on the road but as a weapon of war.
The sun had long set; the moon had taken her place to crest into the sky as though frowning upon Link's efforts. The cool air of the young night left the back of her neck cold with sweat, the hairs sticking uncomfortably to her skin. She wiped off her neck with her hand. When she blinked, she strained to lift her eyelids again.
She sheathed the sword. Where the blue glow faded, so too did the last of her energy. Her body's exhaustion led her to quit the courtyard. Spent, she wobbled through the archways and up the stairs to her room.
The scent of soap. Stronger, here. Blearily she rubbed her eyes on the heels of her hands. From her door Link could smell the fragrance of voltfruit and aloe more strongly than from the courtyard. She swung her head with her eyelids closed towards the source of the scent. She padded forward with her worn feet aching in her boots to the balcony at the end of the hall.
The clouds beneath the moon obscured her view of the balcony, yet she could hear—
Voices.
Link paused, her hand on the wall, as she listened to that particular timbre she knew well and yet not at all.
The girl with the golden hair.
Speaking, softly, about the Divine Beasts, about the shrines, about the slate that she carried at her hip though her father had threatened her with taking it away if she did not comply to her studies. Of her research into the sacred power supposedly passed down her bloodline, of the revelation that her blood may not harbour any power at all, of something she has seen repeated in folklore again and again, of another realm, sacred to the Golden Goddesses.
Of Impa's insistence on her prayers. Of how the girl with the golden hair had adored and depended on Impa all her life, and now knew not how to expel the resentment burning inside her chest. "I know it's not Impa's fault. I know that Father is forcing her to force me. It's not fair to her, but oh, whenever she's around I know I can't do anything—" She sniffed. Urbosa murmured something Link could not catch. "...I don't want to blame her. But it's so hard to separate these emotions..."
The clouds shifted. In the smile of the pale moon, Link could just make out Urbosa reclining back upon an arrangement of pillows on the balcony, her arms wrapped softly around the girl with the golden hair who clung to her with her head against Urbosa's chest and her body stretched across her lap, her legs tucked up beside Urbosa's. Link could see how her golden hair glistened wetly as Urbosa ran her fingers through it, the scent of soap undoubtedly from a recent bath.
The girl with the golden hair glanced up at Urbosa. Her green irises—green, weren't they? Link can't remember, green or blue—reflected the moonlight and the brown of Urbosa's eyes. "You're the kindest anyone has ever been to me," she whispered.
Urbosa turned her head towards the skies. "Only because I can be."
"But you believe me, don't you?"
"...you've worked your entire life for this, praying to no avail, pushing yourself past the point of exhaustion. If the royal bloodline does carry some magic, then more prayer won't ever unlock it." Urbosa rolls her shoulders. "And if you don't, then I would rather know we can best the Calamitous One on our skills than waiting on the whims of a Goddess. You are many, many things—" Urbosa laughed lightly and the girl with the golden hair pouted. "—but a Goddess is not one of them. You're human. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't have it any other way."
Link stepped backwards. Her hand retracted from the wall; she nearly toppled over but caught herself. She shook her head, returned to her room, lay down upon the bed and attempted to sleep despite the thickness of the scent of voltfruit and aloe and soap.
Not a conversation meant for her.
Not a friendship meant for her.
Not a life meant for her.
—
Electro Elixir (three hearts, high electric resistance for 12:30) - electric darner, molduga fin, molduga guts, voltfin trout, zapshroom
Chapter Thirty-Six. First written: 06 July 2017. Last edited: 30 September 2017.
Author's notes: As always, thank you to my beta reader, Emma, for assisting me with this chapter, and thank you to you, the reader, for being with me all this time, and also for reminding me to post my chapters on time.
Much like how sapphires are used to keep cool in Eldin, sapphires are used (albeit more sparingly) as a form of air conditioning in the hot summers of Parapa. Conversely, rubies are used during the colder winters.
The enemies described in this chapter include: devalant first introduced in A Link to the Past; geldman first introduced in A Link to the Past; leever first introduced in The Legend of Zelda; malgyorgs first introduced in Spirit Tracks; and aruroda first introduced in The Adventure of Link.
Link whistling in order to disorient the malgyorgs (sand sharks) is a reference to how in Spirit Tracks, Link can use the train whistle to prompt the sharks to jump and then fire at them using the train's cannon.
The sky-blue statue of the Goddess Sageru that Link sees in Nabooru is meant to resemble the Goddess of the Sand from Ocarina of Time and more notably Twilight Princess, albeit with a seven-pointed star upon her chest, which is a more recent addition to her mythos that was added to her design after the Seven became a unified religion.
The bit about Ilia nearly drowning in a sandbar was inspired by a similar scene in The Neverending Story: the death of Artax in the swamp. Fun fact: you can actually force your horse into the Gerudo Desert (I did so by putting my horse onto a metal crate and then utilising magnesis) but the horse becomes stuck in a single pose and the horse cannot be ridden without being teleported out.
The inn is meant for visitors such as Link to stay, since they're not allowed in Ache's Veil proper due to concerns about Yiga attacks. Why are the Yiga attacking places like Ache's Veil? If the hero of legend were to come through to the Divine Beast, the hero is likely to pass through the village nearest to Tantari. At the moment, that's Ache's Veil.
Vaike's silver key is a nod to the silver keys used to open locked doors in dungeons throughout the Zelda franchise.
While most people do know how to read sign language (at least many more people than know how to read it in the present day, due to the higher usage of sign language in Hyrule), not everyone does. We've seen bits and pieces of this before, such as the man on the bridge whom Link met back during the earlier chapters, and I've mentioned it here and there with travellers Link has met.
I finally completely ran out of gerudo from previous games after whom to name the villages, so Ache's Veil is another reference to Aveil and also serves as a reference to ache, the monster from The Adventure of Link; there's a brick-joke. You know, if you're reading this and has never played The Adventure of Link, I recommend looking into it.
Molduga whaling was a lot of fun to thinking through logistically. I really liked the molduga in-game, and it saddens me how often the overworld bosses were merely left as that instead of being interwoven with the worldbuilding. Even though we don't get to spend much time with Nadyne's team, I took some time to sit down and design them. Of course, the songs that the Oracle of Farore plays on the lyre are none other than the molduga tracks from the OST, with the different songs meaning different signals for the whalers. Although the instrumentation in Breath of the Wild wasn't a lyre or anything close, since the main instruments used in the song are strings, I felt the lyre an appropriate enough approximation. While I use the word lyre to refer to the instrument, it's not quite a lyre. Sadly I can't show it to you all visually.
"Going north" is the Parapan equivalent of saying "going south", as in, "if things go south" (meaning, if things go bad).
Farore is invoked with an ocarina because the ocarina is the instrument traditionally associated with Farore. The lyre, however, is traditionally used for big game hunting in Parapa, not to mention that its sound carries farther than an ocarina.
By the way, this is actually in relation to the harps, but I was reminded by the lyre. Parapan harps (the ages) are six-stringed because the harp in Oracle of Ages has six strings, while the harp that Zelda play is eight-stringed from Skyward Sword has eight strings. The lyre here has three strings because the mark of Farore has a circle and two crescents.
Electric darners are one of the ingredients with the highest potency in-game, while other insects tend to have low potency, despite their difficulty in being caught. Preparation of the molduga's various parts is inspired by what actual whales were used for during the heyday of whaling.
Instead of an elixir, today's memory has been brought up to you by the smell of: soap! Please do remember that Urbosa and Zelda only have an age gap of two years here. We do not actually have an age for Urbosa in-game, and all of the gerudo are ridiculously tall and modelled as being 'mature' (look at poor Riju, who is supposed to be a child, and yet is sexualised), so I don't think that the liberties I took with her are too far-off.
midna's ass. 30 September 2017.
Beta reader's comments: Whaling! I really like this very specific thing that happens in fiction where there are ships that sail on sand. I don't know why, it's just a really neat concept to me.
The ending of this chapter is really devastating. Poor Link.
Emma. 30 September 2017.