Vah Medoh's roar shook the high spire of Rito Village, but the people who lived there had heard it so often that their hearts no longer jumped in their chests—some flinched, and the young covered their ears at the volume, but mostly the Rito went about their day as if the world was not being turned against them. Who could function under such an assumption? They would live, as they had been living, and it would take something even more terrible to change that resolve.
Something even more terrible sounded, not long after.
The scream of the monster that had waited on Medoh's back was not so loud, not so thunderous, as the Divine Beast's, but something in its roar—some hate, some fury, some deep-seated hunger—sent bolts of panic down the spines of every person in the village, adult or child. As a body they stopped, as a body they looked up at a yawning, angry sky.
Kaneli leapt from his chair and went to the balcony, straining his neck to look up at the conflict unfolding in the heavens. He was old, but his eyes were still very sharp, and so he could make out the shapes that danced in halos of roiling purple and radiant gold. He knew what he was seeing, with the surety of those who were watching events unfold that had faded to memory and story when they had been children, but his waking mind denied him that reality. It was too big. It was too impossible. Those arrows loosed in the heavens, the streak of blue that darted in preposterous directions at preposterous speeds, how Teba—and yes, that was Teba—flitted in and out of the combat, all of these could not signify what he thought they did. His heart was betraying him. His hope had overtaken his senses.
Still.
Still, he knew what was happening when those shapes broke off from the sky and hurtled toward Rito Village. The roar of the monster sounded again, high and clear and angry and hungry, and Kaneli was struck by images of what that shape would do when it struck the home of the Rito. His heart was gripped by ice, and for a moment he could not move.
Then air filled his lungs, which drew breath of their own accord, and he shrieked, high and loud and screeching, the most basic and most reliable alarm that every Rito learned. Danger, he called! Danger to the village! Danger to everyone!
Answering shrieks sounded from below and around him, and soon the entire village's voice was raised in one long note. They saw, then. That would have to be enough.
It was time to flee. He would organize everyone. He was too old to keep up with the younger members of the tribe, but he could shepherd the children or the children could shepherd him. It didn't matter. He turned and ran for the door, impressing himself with his own speed. Those old, creaky legs were not so useless as he had feared.
He exited his home and began running down the ramp. Ahead of him, Saki and Tulin were running out of their own home, Saki pulling her son along while the boy looked back and up with wide, terrified eyes.
He looks so much like his father did, Kaneli thought, then chided himself for reminiscing in the middle of a crisis. That was when Saki saw him, and the look she gave him was equal parts concern and relief.
"Kaneli! There you are. Come, stick with me! Can you make sure that Tulin is all right?"
A mother's instinct, trying to make sure that I am provided for while not thinking myself a burden. I am too old for that, Saki, but I love you for trying. "Yes! Yes, of course, leave it all to me." He offered a wing to Tulin, and Tulin took it, clasping on with the fervor of someone who sought a protector. The boy thought the chief would see to his safety better than even his own mother, then. I have to live up to that expectation, no matter how impossible.
The three ran together. They got less than ten steps before Tulin looked back over his shoulder.
Kaneli could not have guessed what made the boy look back when he did—perhaps the sharper, rawer instincts of youth warning him of the coming danger. Perhaps just better hearing. But whatever made him look back, the result was Tulin's eyes growing wide and a low, trembling moan escaping his throat.
"Look!" the boy croaked.
They shouldn't have; Saki should have kept running, and Kaneli should have picked Tulin up and redoubled his pace. They should have kept going. But that fear in the boy's voice, that deep-seated knowledge that told them that they would not understand what was about to happen unless they turned their heads, took control of them. Both Kaneli and Saki looked. Then all three of them saw.
The blue streak that rocketed at the head of the whirlwind.
The burning red-and-purple shadow that trailed behind it, beating wings of leather.
Saki's voice was disbelieving, almost strangled by shock: "Revali?"
The blue shape flitted effortlessly into Kaneli's home. The red-and-purple collided with the structure a moment after.
The elder's house exploded, raw force and air pressure sending wood and stone hurtling and spinning into the air. The beast screamed again, so close now that it was all Kaneli could do not to cover his head and cower on the walkway. Smoke and fire of a hundred colors erupted from every stem and sliver, and then the blue streak shot into the sky again. The spire shook with the force of a second take-off, and then the monstrous shape was following the Rito warrior into the sky once more.
"Look!" Tulin said again, only now he did not sound so afraid. "That man has the Great Eagle Bow!"
Kaneli could not see; his eyes were not so sharp as the boy's. Still, it was easy to imagine.
It was easy to believe.
The village looked skyward as the two shapes chased each other across the firmament. The blue Rito turned and ducked and dove as the monster flung beams of blue-and-white light at him, the warrior's graceful bobbing letting him nearly caress each projectile even as he avoided them. Then there was a shift as the warrior pulled arrows from his quiver, turned, drew.
Explosions rocked the sky as three bomb arrows soared with every pull of the string, each volley striking home perfectly. There was no avoidance, there was no missing, and there was suddenly no doubt left as to what was happening.
None of them had ever seen the warrior before, of course. Even Kaneli wasn't that old, to say nothing of everyone else. But they'd all heard the stories of a fighter so sublime that it was only in being deprived of his arms that he was defeated by an emissary of the Calamity itself. That had been the favorite story of the Rito for a hundred years: the Tragedy of the Champions.
So, yes, they knew Revali, and they stared up at his battle, and barely a breath was drawn among them.
The rolling concussive eruptions continued as Revali led the Blight in arcs around the spire. The Blight's own projectiles were carefully lead, and any other warrior in the village would have died at the first shot—but no matter how well-aimed, no matter how precisely predicted, none of the deadly attacks ever struck home. More, they did not strike the eyrie, either—Revali always kept himself aligned so that any blasts sailed harmlessly away from the village, usually up and into the sky.
The beast roared again, flexing its mighty wings, and with the beating of its limbs it summoned a maelstrom, a whirlwind of debris and fire that pulled at the air across the entire village, so that children clung in panic to their parents out of fear of being lifted away. Who could fly in such conditions, with a disaster worse than nature's own bearing down on them?
Revali could.
Vacuum was met with vacuum as Revali's Gale drew on the wind of the Blight's maelstrom, and the Rito warrior wove the currents before diving directly at the beast. The village saw Revali plunge into the whirlwind and emerge, less than a second later, by smashing into the Blight's chest. A glowing blue sword was in his wing, and there were spurts of fire and blood as he carved into its chest. The Blight screamed, its own sword vanishing in a flash of fire as it reached for him, but he was already off and away. His laughter was loud and raucous, even moreso than the beast's fury, and it was this laughter that proved to the people watching him who he must have been.
Again the two traced arcs in the sky, Revali leading the Blight around and away before doubling back on it for another attack run. Dozens of bomb arrows exploded against its chest and its wings and its face, and the beast answered by firing the cannon-bow on its leg indiscriminately in Revali's direction. The shots went wide, the spaces between them filled by the arcs of hissing explosives, and the village shook with the force of the bomb arrows hitting home.
The whirlwinds that battled for supremacy in the air were the framing for the battle; Revali's Gale was smaller, less powerful, but surgical in its precision, and every Rito on the ground could feel it in their guiding feathers as the warrior's skilled manipulation of the air created pathways for his attack and his retreat, as the beast's overwhelming power was brought to nothing by the careful application of precise degrees of force. Revali was fighting perfectly. Revali was winning, against this monster.
The Blight fired a shot and then three bomb arrows struck it directly in the eye. Its screech was cut off by the blast as its masked head was snapped backward, and it went momentarily limp in the air, beginning to fall. Revali dove after it.
The monster recovered, righting itself and stopping its descent directly above the flooring of Revali's Landing.
Revali stopped in front of it, removed by four lengths of the monster's body. He hovered there, observing the Blight, the Gale whirling around him, promising perfect quickness and precision of motion.
Every eye in the village was on him, every ear attuned as he said to the Windblight, Ganon: "Is that really the best you can do? I suppose I shouldn't be as disappointed as I am. Who could really expect a capering construct to stand a chance against a real warrior?"
The Blights did not feel anger; they did not feel fear; they did not feel challenge. They were more like storms than they were like monsters, and trying to parse their reactions was like trying to parse the reactions of a landslide. Anyone who saw them understood this, not from observation but because something about them spoke to the observer on a base, instinctual level: they were too grand, too evil, to be described with the emotions of thinking creatures beloved by the gods. If the Blight felt anything, then the Rito could not put a name to it, much less understand.
What they understood was that the armor of the beast's mask was segmented along its outer edge, and when Revali challenged the Blight those segments broke away, floating into the air. The objects that rose and rotated were like arrowheads—or miniature versions of the Blight's cannon. There were six. And all of them were now pointed at Revali.
The Champion stared at them for a long moment. Then his eyes found the Windblight again. "Is that supposed to be your answer?"
All six weapons fired their tiny lances of blue light.
Revali rocketed into the air. The miniature cannons rotated, tracking him, and as their master pursued the Champion they rose to follow.
Revali spun, dancing through the many smaller projectiles that now filled the air. He tracked the trajectory of each, eyeing the mobile weapons that launched the attacks and predicting their firing angles just before they discharged.
Revali, we can't keep this up!
"I beg to differ. Really, I'm just getting started!" He had to fight the urge to laugh again.
Look at the weapons! They're not bound to their master!
He looked. She was right, of course. Now each of the six miniature cannons was darting off in various directions, each trained on him, and they were quick enough to track him even when he was moving with all speed, far quicker than the Windblight itself. Still, that didn't seem too much of a problem.
Revali, if they find the right firing angle, they will fill the air with projectiles that you won't be able to completely avoid! Every time they fire, they draw closer to an ideal targeting solution!
"Aren't you just a ray of optimism," he muttered. He dove, and the interlacing lances of glowing death filled the air above him like a web. "I would have been able to dodge all of those, never minding that I did, just now."
Yes, but they're drawing closer!
"You worry too much," he said. He did not even feel the speed at which his head was turning, his eyes taking in the relative position of each weapon several times every second. They were moving according to a pattern, which was probably being dictated by the predilections of the will driving them. The Windblight probably didn't even realize it had an ingrained pattern for these motions. All the more pity for it. If Revali wanted to, he would have been able to destroy all of them before their next volley.
I'm sorry, you would be able to what?
"I didn't think that where you were supposed to be able to hear it," he said, irritated both at his own carelessness and at her unambiguous nosiness. "Leave the problem in the air to the person who has some experience with it, hmm?" He kept tracking the weapons, now more mindful than ever of their positioning, and though he could feel Zelda nearly burst with the urge to scream at him, to take control and swat these attackers out of the air with celestial power, she restrained herself. Good. It was really much better when people recognized that they were operating outside of their area of expertise.
He threw a look beyond the Blight, beyond the weapons, to the sky. Measured the distance, the speed. Darted his eye away, having done all of this so quickly that Zelda wouldn't be able to register that he had done it.
"All right," he said. "Now's the time."
The time for what?
The weapons fired. He twisted easily between them, contorting his body as if dancing so that they all burned harmlessly through space. Only one came close to him, singeing a single feather on his diaphragm. He inhaled.
"AAAAARRRRGH!"
It was the loudest sound he'd ever made in his life, a pain to his own ears. His wings clutched at the single singed feather, he leaned his head back and dropped straight down. Zelda was screaming at him, and he blocked her out as he plummeted.
The Blight howled. If nothing else, the thing could feel triumph enough to signal it. All of its floating weapons drew near to it again; it would not use them for this, just like Revali had predicted. Instead it raised its primary cannon, painting the air beneath Revali with red light. The sounds of its capacitors charging was almost deafening. Light gathered, focusing into a single bright iris.
Then Teba smashed into the Blight's back, plunging his sword between its shoulder blades. It shrieked, its shot going wild as its weapon discharged. All of its miniature, floating weapons spun away from it.
Revali tumbled as he fell. All eyes were on Teba; no one saw as the Champion drew his bow and loosed two volleys.
Teba plunged his sword into the Blight's back. The beast's weapons spun away from it in the next instant and then promptly exploded, detonating with all the force of bombs going off. Revali fell and Teba hacked at the Blight's shoulders and wings, not feeling or not minding the burning blood that was spewing all over him. The Blight began to fall, and still Teba hacked at it. He could feel nothing but the act. Saki was in the village. Tulin was in the village. This thing wanted to hurt them. He would not let it. He would not let it.
Revali's Landing rose to meet them, and Teba kicked off less than a second before impact. The wind grabbed hold of him, lifting him away as if to protect him of its own volition, but he didn't realize that either. His eyes were on the Blight as it smashed into and through the landing. It crashed against the stone of the spire, bellowing in pain, and Teba dove at it again. His sword was in his hand.
The monster was pushing itself up with the first joints of its wings, lifting its head slowly. It saw him. Raised its weapon. Not fast enough.
Weakened by Revali's earlier assault on it, the monster could not hold Teba back, and he danced in and out, the light Rito blade singing in his hands as he cut at what should have been its joints and major arteries. He was not fighting; he had no intention of this being a contest. Every blow was a killing blow, every stroke meant to bleed the thing out, and that it kept fighting was not due to a lack of trying on Teba's part.
Its sword came up, and he tried to parry it.
The force was colossal, tens of times what he expected, and he felt his shoulders scream under the impact as he was sent hurtling backward. He skipped off of the rock of the spire, righting himself in the air, and by the time he had recovered enough to see straight the Blight had risen, kicking off the stone, hurtling at him.
He climbed furiously and its reaching claws sliced through the air that he had occupied only moments ago. Its teeth snapped up at him. He did not look down at it. He needed space. He had to lead it, force it to ground. He couldn't beat it in the air. He looked up.
The hole in Revali's Landing beckoned to him. He closed his eyes, praying to gods who had never answered him before, and beat his wings with all the force in his body.
It was beneath him. He knew that. He could feel the currents in his feathers, knew its proximity more intimately than if he had been looking at it. It was wounded, its flying was sloppy, but it was still faster than he was. Still stronger. He couldn't have imagined that this was possible, could he? Just before he'd arrived he'd seen this thing shoot Revali out of the sky.
Revali. What was he, compared to that? What did he have that made him believe he could be a match for this monster?
"Dad!"
Tulin.
"Dad, fly!"
Who could deny such a call? He flew.
Teba shot up through the hole in Revali's Landing, spinning and relaxing his wings to land solidly on the platform.
The wood shivered and shook as the monster slammed into its underside, the loss of fine motor control making the beast's flight imprecise, even clumsy. The long claws at the ends of its wings reached up through the hole, digging deep furrows in the polished surface as it hauled itself up and through. Teba had not really had a good look at the beast up until now, but he almost had to admire its hideousness: its face was hidden behind an enormous stone plate, save for its gaping mouth full of teeth the size of short swords, and the weapons it held in its legs were still clenched tightly in spite of the beating that it had taken. It was a thing of almost singular will and power.
He held his sword up, turning so that he led with his right side, presenting as narrow a profile as possible to his enemy.
"Come on, then!" he shouted at the beast. "Do you think you can get past me? You'll choke on this blade!"
It considered him for a long moment, moving with its wings as if the wings were legs. He understood, then, that facing it on the ground was no different from facing it in the air. He was going to die.
Then I will die for my family. It's all I've wanted.
Something in that thought, however true, made him sad.
The beast bellowed the call of a predator. The landing shook. The entire spire shook. Vah Medoh screamed from above, as if in answer to it. Yes. Now it would end.
Beneath that cacophony there was a hiss that traced a lazy arc through the air.
The Blight's roar was cut short as a bomb arrow exploded in its face.
It howled, staggering back again, nearly losing its footing, but it did not fall. Teba dared to look away from it, to trace the arc of the arrow.
And above him, high above him, a Rito held a Swallow's Bow, her pink plumage trembling with the effort of drawing a weapon she had not touched since she was a girl.
"Saki?"
"Rito!" Kaneli's voice, echoing across everything.
Then Teba really saw: Saki had fired the first, but every man and woman in the village was gathered, bows in every wing. Nekk, and Verla, and Gesane, and Harth, and Saki, and Amali—he stopped trying to count. They stood on every ridge, on the sides of houses, on rooftops, and every eye was focused on the monster who had come to their homes. Saki was nocking another bomb arrow, and everyone else had drawn their lines taut.
Kaneli's voice echoed again: "Attack!"
The sky trembled with their fury.
The sound of bomb arrows striking the Windblight Ganon was a low rolling thunder that went on and on, never ceasing. The first impacts made the beast stagger; the ones that followed, a hail of fire and force, would have sent it into retreat.
Would have.
The beast staggered away, holding its wings over its head and back like a shield, and at its first step a more conventional arrow punched into the joint of its shoulder—it could not know, of course, that it was Teba who fired upon it then. Its wing gave out, and it fell with a scream that was drowned out as still more bomb arrows rained on it. Arrows were going wide, now, the heat and force of the explosions both making the Blight impossible to see and prematurely detonating some of the projectiles, but this was no relief; every eruption, near or far, still reached the monster, digging fingers of invisible force under its flesh, shaking the Malice, clawing at its very bones.
The heat and the eruptions sucked the air from beneath the eyrie and sent a roiling updraft shooting into the sky, twisting light into a hazy mirage that was almost impossible to see through.
They were a village, and they protected themselves, but they were not an organized military force and they could not order themselves like one. That should not have mattered, but it meant that there was a gap, at one point, when too many people were readying their bomb arrows simultaneously, when there was a lull in the beating that the beast took. It shouldn't have mattered; by all rights, the monster should have been grounded, and dead, and more, and a moment's chance should have been equivalent to nothing at all.
But in that gap the beast leapt into the air, carried high on the updraft, and it screamed in pain and fury and triumph and brought its terrible weapon around, red light shining.
No, it would be inappropriate to say that the Blights did not feel at all, or that they experienced no emotion that the average mind in Hyrule could not grasp. There was evidence to the contrary before the entire village: the Windblight traced the arc of the first bomb arrow that had struck it, and there leveled its weapon. The capacitor in its arm sang as red light shone down on a pink-plumaged mother who shielded her eyes from the sudden radiance, unaware of death staring at her so openly.
Teba did not cry out as the wind carried him up.
The warrior slammed into the monster, driving his sword into the joint of its knee. It did not howl—it squealed. It bit. It clawed. Feathers and blood and stone and Malice went out in a spray, and Teba was silent as he threw one wing out. The updraft pulled at him, and with that leverage he forced his blade to the side, and up, and there was a sound like a branch ripping free of its bough, a soft wet tearing sob.
The Blight flung Teba away, and the warrior spun skyward while Ganon's severed leg, light still shining from it, plummeted toward the landing. Malice spewed from it when it struck the flooring with a thud.
The Blight howled, looked up at Teba climbing above it. It saw as the wounded archer stared back down at it, eyes narrowed in something like triumph. It did not see the other Rito catching the updraft, too.
Plain arrows struck it in the torso, in the wings, in the throat. Miniscule, meaningless things, but every blow was a spurt of Malice, a gradual weakening. It did not flinch. It tried to attack.
But the Rito were a whirling wall, the body of a gale written in feathers and talons and arrows, and as it swung its sword its back was decorated with wooden shafts. Many punched clean through its wings, leaving miniscule holes—holes that connected. Touched. Grew.
The Blight howled and plummeted and Kass swept by, not to attack but seeking his daughters, and when Ganon struck Revali's Landing the bard landed next to Kaneli and shielded his children, all the village's children, with his body—no warrior, he, but his parental instinct was irresistible.
No one came near to the Blight, now. From above it rained arrows, both plain and explosive, and the impacts shook Revali's Landing. The beast tried to crawl, now, and was pummeled into motionlessness by the fury of a village, of a nation, and all its darkness could not hold back that assault. The landing cracked, the wood smoking and heaving as its support structures were slowly shaken apart. The Blight reached out, seeking with a tendril of darkness—and this, too, was struck by bomb arrows, and the monster was obscured by the light of the explosions.
Perched just out of sight on one of the walls of the spire, Revali watched. Zelda watched with him, a silent observer, but he was not showing her, in truth; he was seeing for himself.
"Do you see them?" he asked her, and his voice was quiet and reverent but controlled, even. Not unmoved, but certainly not... emotional.
I do, she answered him.
He closed his eyes; some smoke was irritating them. It was not the sight before him that he could not bear to take in, that filled his heart until it was too full to stay in his chest; it could never be that. He could hear, though, as the Rito shouted out commands and instructions and warnings to one another, as they ran to get fresh arrows for the self-assigned warriors, as each of them, in their courage, fought to protect their home. Fought and won.
"Aren't they beautiful?"
A crack, louder than all the rest. Revali opened his eyes. His landing broke, flaming detritus falling down the face of the spire. The Blight was falling too, clawing at the air with tattered wings, engulfed in fire, trailing smoke and Malice. It wouldn't be enough; no physical force would be sufficient to kill the Blight, now. But for one moment—just the space between Zelda's heartbeats—he let himself pretend that it was. That his people had killed the beast.
"End this for them," he said. "Show them that the gods actually care."
He ceded control back, sinking into that shadowy space they shared.
Enormous golden wings erupted from Zelda's back, greater than the Blight's, as richly feathered as a Rito's, and she launched herself after the falling monster. The golden power was in her hand.
Zelda, Paya, Teba, and Kass looked back in time to watch the Divine Beast assuming its rightful place.
Vah Medoh's shadow dwarfed the spire that housed the village, and its bulk seemed too enormous even to move, much less fly, as it alighted with delicate precision at the top of the spire. With its wings spread it looked like an ancient drawing of a monarch of all birds, and it was with that same regal air that its targeting systems zeroed in on the final goal. Red light illuminated the side of Hyrule Castle, so bright and so insistent that the Malice there recoiled before reasserting itself.
Zelda breathed a sigh and realized she'd been holding her breath.
"Relieved?" Teba's question could have been amused, save for the strain in his voice. He had hurt his diaphragm in the battle with the Blight, as well as his wing; every injury that Revali had pretended to, Teba had actually shouldered.
"I suppose I am," Zelda said. She didn't look away from Vah Medoh, for another moment. "Is that silly?"
"Nothing silly about hoping that the last piece of your plan comes together, I would say." She finally turned back at Kass's words, then had to fight down her amazement at how collected he seemed. For all the world, one would think that he had not been so near to an apocalypse less than an hour ago; he had the air of someone who had been reading about events in a book or listening to them in a song. He must have seen her bewilderment, because his eyes turned up in a smile. "We all have moments like that. It's when we're closest to our goals that we're also closest to catastrophe, after all."
"Speak for yourself," Teba said. Kass laughed, and Teba winced as he fought down the urge to react. His right wing was in a sling, and his diaphragm was carefully bandaged; Zelda could see the bare, raw skin where a number of his feathers had been burned away in combat with the Blight.
For the third time, she offered: "It would take me only a moment to mend your wounds, Teba." Then she added: "I promise it would be no trouble, and it wouldn't tax me in any way to do so."
Teba blinked at her, eyes wide. "You really do assume the best of everyone around you, huh."
"Pardon?" She thought she heard a titter from behind her, but when she looked over her shoulder Paya was absolutely stone-faced. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."
Teba shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Thank you, but I don't want these healed."
"It looks... painful."
Kass stepped in beside his friend, almost-but-not-quite nudging the injured man, who almost-but-not-quite leaned to avoid him. "Oh, it is painful, have no doubt about that, but Teba has always been the sort of man to mistake suffering for valor. Isn't that right?"
Teba scowled at Kass, then shook his head again before returning his attention to Zelda. "It's not about it hurting or not hurting. I... need this, right now."
Paya said, "You need the limitations that your injuries place on you."
The white-feathered man nodded, plainly relieved. "Yes. I will spend time with my wife and son. Tulin will be sad that I cannot take him to the Flight Range, but—"
"'Sad?'" Kass scoffed out loud, earning him a look so dirty, so searing, that he cackled in answer to it. "Yes, friends, Teba does need the free time with his family, if he doesn't anticipate the hero's welcome that will be waiting for him, first from the village and then from the boy who already worships him. Pity this poor soul! He, who fears the attentions of others more than death itself, must labor under the adoration of his peers and his loved ones! Think of him in the days to come, as his son hounds him for stories of the bravery he showed when he faced down death with a sword and sheer deter—"
Teba shoved Kass with his good wing, and the bard laughed, dancing away to regain his balance as the warrior fumed.
Then Teba sighed. "He's not as wrong as I want him to be. I'll be getting a lot of credit for what you did."
Zelda had known this was coming; she had hoped that she would have words prepared, by now. She found herself disappointed, then decided that she might as well push ahead anyway.
"For what it's worth," she said, choosing her words carefully after covering for Revali for the last hour, "I think that Revali would want you to be the one who's acknowledged, rather than him. He wounded the beast and could have beaten it in a fight... but, foolhardy though it might have been, he lured it toward the village so that the Rito could fight for themselves."
There. That is the truth, at least.
The wind was blowing around them, pulling lightly at the cloak on her shoulders. Teba and Kass and probably Paya were staring at her, now, as if really considering what they'd heard.
Teba said, "If Revali weren't dead I would beat him senseless, broken wing or no."
Kass looked thoughtful, still smiling as he spoke: "I would help. Still. It's quite the thought, isn't it? That you channeled the spirit of an almost invincible hero, armed him with power greater than he had in life, gave him the opportunity for perfect and absolute glory... and he consigned himself to ignominy instead. Making himself the fool, a mere foil to Teba, who led the Rito to victory on their own terms."
Zelda realized that the color had risen in her own face; the shame was proof enough of culpability, she thought. She bowed low at her waist, hands clasped in front of her. "I cannot possibly express my sorrow at having been party to that endangerment. I know that I cannot make amends for what happened, but I hope that—"
"Enough," Teba said, and his weariness was so obvious that Zelda felt another rush of shame.
"Come now, Teba, can't you see that the girl is distraught? Here, Zelda, stand up, no more of this bowing." Kass's wing gently tapped her shoulder, and she straightened. "There, much better. Still, I know your type! Not so far removed from Teba, are you? It's not enough to be contrite or to work to fix things—you want us to feel better, and for Hylian royals, in every history I've ever learned, that usually means you assume you need to shoulder some punishment. So."
Kass's plumage really was beautiful. He lifted one wing in front of her face, and she was so struck by the colors that she didn't notice as he bent one stiff feather against another—and then flicked her nose.
"Ow!" She recoiled, stars dancing in her eyes as she instinctively covered her face with her hands.
Kass laughed again. "Judgment had been passed and carried out." He turned to Teba. "Would you agree she had paid her debt to society?"
"Mm." It was clear the warrior was trying not to join in Kass's amusement.
Well, thought Zelda, at least Paya didn't attack Kass over this. She did not turn around; if Paya had been laughing, too, then she was fairly certain that she would have sunk into the earth and disappeared.
"Where will you go now?" Kass's question suggested its own answer, his eyes darting to her ultimate destination.
"I need to make my final preparations," she said. "There are strategies to be made and power to be collated. Once that is finished... I... suppose we will go to the end."
Teba stepped forward, then, stopping in front of her. He had a raptor's eyes, to be sure, but something in his expression was warm. "Zelda. When you are finished, and the Calamity is dead... I hope that you will come back. You're leaving in a hurry, but we'll want to celebrate you. Saki will want to cook for you, if nothing else."
Something in that promise pierced the firmament of Zelda's heart. She didn't show that, though. She was confident in her voice and her expression when she said to him: "Treat her well."
Teba nodded solemnly, bowing to the princess.
Zelda and Paya bowed in return, then walked across the long bridge away from the village. They did not look back, so they did not see how long Teba and Kass stood watching them go.
Vah Medoh perched above the valley. Below it, the Rito rose into the air all around the spire, filling the heavens.