Zelda is shaking when they arrive back on Vah Medoh, and the sudden burst of cold air turns that shaking into a full-bodied tremor.

"We can't go to Hateno," Link shouts to someone. "Tell Amali to change course. Take us to Lurelin."

The wind cuts off around her as Link guides her inside, and then she's sitting on their bed in the guest quarters.

"Zelda, look at me."

"We have to go back. If we just do a better job explaining it—"

"We can't go back right now."

"We can. I can do it. I can make them see."

"They're not thinking clearly right now. Going back would be dangerous."

"I need this to work! I told Impa I could make this work!"

"Zelda, I need you to breathe."

"I am breathing!"

Her eyes snap to his, and he's kneeling in front of her. His hands are on her face, brushing away tears. She shudders harder and chokes on a sob.

"It's okay. It's okay. Shhh. We'll get through it. Remember when the Zora decided to deactivate Vah Ruto? It was disappointing, but we got through it. Right? You can only help people as much as they let you."

"They know us," she whispers. "They know us. We live there. It's our home."

She has no idea why, but he smiles at her.

"We should warn Purah," she says. "They've never liked the Sheikah being there. They've always been wary. And now they won't let the Divine Beast in at all..."

Link nods, back to being serious. "When you're feeling a little better, I'll slip out and see Symin. Get him to keep an eye on the house."

"You—You think they might do something to the house? Like what? No! They can't! No, they—You have—I have things there!"

"I know you do."

"You have things there! The Champion's weapons and—and that silly shield."

"The koroks gave me that."

"You have all that beautiful dinner ware!"

"You need to breathe, Zelda."

"Stop telling me that!"

Amali strides in, followed closely by Kass, who must have been the one to get her. "What happened?"

Link explains, "The people in Hateno weren't thrilled to hear you were coming."

"Since we're changing course, I assume that's an understatement." Amali tips her head back dramatically as if praying for patience. "Hylians! I guess that's not too unexpected."

Link nods. "The Calamity hit them the worst. They're probably the most afraid of ancient technology."

"And they never had their own Champion or their own Divine Beast to take pride in. They don't have a tragic story to resolve and overcome."

"The Hylians had a tremendous Champion!" Kass says, but everyone agrees that that's beside the point.

Zelda stares out the round window, watching the country roll under them as they head south. "Fort Hateno was the last stand against the guardian army," she whispers. "That's their tragic story. They've built their identity around fear. They've hidden behind their wall for a century." She buries her face in her hands, and Link shifts his grip on her to her knees.

"Well," Amali says after an awkward pause. She straightens, pushing back her shoulders. "So we skip them this round. Maybe the next few rounds too. Eventually they'll see us pass in the distance enough and they'll hear about how great we are, they'll feel left out, realize their mistake, and change their minds."

"But for that," Link says, "they'd need to speak to someone from outside of Hateno."

"Then convince Bolson to visit! Clear out the roads well enough that travelers start wandering in and complaining about why they can't get fabric where they're from and why the general store doesn't have sugar. If it comes to it, you can send Kass into town when he's done in the desert. You can set up a publicity campaign. Remember, you're playing the long game. It's just going to take some time."

Zelda nods without lifting her head from her hands. Yes. Yes, that she can plan for.

Link's hand slips to the back of her neck. It's cool there. "Are you okay for a few minutes?"

"I'm fine," she mumbles.

He clearly doesn't believe her. His is response is a kiss to the top of her kerchief and a "love you," before he stands.

Amali strokes her feathers over Zelda from head to knee, tucking her coat in at the hem, then shifting the ruby circlet peeking out from beneath her kerchief. The grooming is motherly and soothing and heartbreaking, and Zelda does her best not to cry more.

#

When Link gets back from Hateno, it's with a report that he swapped out some of his equipment, snuck some of his nicer home goods up to the tech lab for safe-keeping, and discovered that Symin had already been by, tripped the latch on a window, and relocated Zelda's flowers. Zelda corrects them that they're botany samples, not merely flowers. Link shows pictures of them sitting on the windowsill at the tech lab. They seem to be doing well. He says nothing of the villagers, and she doesn't ask.

When he returns, it's to find her in the middle of a mess of paper spread over the bed, where she's outlining her plan for visiting Lurelin. The problem in Hateno, she hypothesizes, is that they never came in and presented themselves and announced that the Calamity had ended. They assumed too much and moved the process too fast. Even though Link constantly ran errands around town and killed monsters down in the valley, he always did it as a resident, as "Link who lives down by Firly Pond," rather than as a force of reconstruction in a new era.

When they go into Lurelin, even though it is such a small village, they should treat it the same as their diplomatic excursions to greet the far-flung races of Hyrule. They need to say the Calamity is over, and what that means for Lurelin and the rest of the country. Then they need to offer up their services and let the people see that they can be trusted to help and to keep their word.

It would be a mistake to assume that they would automatically go along with the Vah Medoh plan.

They will speak to a single representative or they will speak to the villagers individually rather than addressing a crowd. (Link lowers his head in shame, but she plows ahead. They were both a fault, and whats done is done, and the worst thing at this juncture would be to fail to learn from their errors.) They will win the people of Lurelin over as individuals, a skill with which they have proven themselves more adept than speaking to crowds. (This makes very little sense to Zelda, but she can adapt.) Luckily, Lurelin has a village elder, who also luckily loves gossip about the wider world and loves Link and loves giving Link chores. He seems an excellent place to start.

This will require more time than they had initially planned. Vah Medoh can be over Lurelin in a matter of hours, but if they stop at Lurelin on this cycle, with this plan it won't be for at least a few days. They debate skipping Lurelin and heading straight to Gerudo Town, which is the more important destination. But Zelda worries that if any rumors about Zelda or Vah Medoh make their way to Lurelin, the village may feel slighted that they were skipped. More acutely, she worries that if any rumors make their way to Lurelin, they're likely to be from Hateno, and she would rather preempt lies about machines with canons coming to steal cattle.

Zelda will be damned if they don't win over a single Hylian settlement.

Vah Medoh currently has no passengers save Link and Zelda and no cargo save a thick stack of letters, which can easily wait. Amali waves their concerns away and says they don't mind waiting. They then debate if it's better to land atop Dueling Peaks or circle Hyrule Field. Amali decides it will be more pleasant to circle for a few days. Just a few days. And she wants nightly check-ins.

They warp to Lurelin, where the heat hits heavy and wet, and Zelda is shrugging out of her snowquill coat, and tucking away the ruby circlet and trying to tidy her hair, which immediately frizzes up to twice its usual size. She's sweating instantly, which is not going to make for the best impression. She's distracted in the process of taming her hair into a braid to watch Link tear out of his snowquill tunic. He always changes clothes as if he's in the middle of fighting a horde of monsters. He's shirtless for an annoyingly short amount of time as he bunches up his Champion's tunic with the undershirt still inside it and yanks the whole thing over his head, so there's only a split second where he can't see. He punches his arms through his sleeves, and he's dressed. Ready to run off and do something truly exciting, not willing to waste a second more on boring things like looking presentable.

He still doesn't have his sword on his back, and all his belts are in a pile by his feet, where he could grab them and run if he really needed to. When he sees her quietly braiding her hair, he slows his movements enough to put himself in order. He tugs out all his snowquill braids and yanks his hair into a messy ponytail on top of his head, clamping it into place with a Gerudo clip. She steals his hairband off his wrist and uses it to tie off her braid, which is even more messy than his hair.

He grins at her, and together, they head down to the village.

Elder Rozel is on a dock, perched on a barrel, watching the waves, but he waves a hand and yells, "Link! Haven't seen you in ages."

As if it's an answer, Link says, "This is Zelda."

"Zelda! Well!" Rozel's eyes sparkle as he takes her hand in both of his and nods a bow with a huge grin on his face. "I see!"

"It's a pleasure to meet you," Zelda says, ducking a curtsy, quick and shallow.

"It's my pleasure. Come! Sit, sit. Tell me everything."

Link dives into a dramatic story about Calamity Ganon and the battle with the Divine Beasts. The Divine Beasts. Link is suspiciously absent from his retelling of the battle. Not absent from the story is Zelda, who appears on Hyrule Field and holds back the charging beast with a single spread hand, calling on the power of the Goddess to collapse Ganon into a pinprick of light and seal away his evil.

Zelda burns with embarrassment, and Rozel gives her a sideways look like he doesn't quite believe this story, but he's grinning like he's entertained. It's a good story, regardless of if it's true.

"We can't see the Divine Beasts from here," he says. "But I did hear from Chumin that they shot some lasers or somthin' at the castle a while back. Then they shut themselves off."

"And you noticed there's no more blood moons?" Link says. "That means when you kill the monsters, they stay dead. So me and Zelda are going around, cleaning up the place. I can finally get Aris beach cleaned up for good."

He shots Link a meaningful look. "Well, that would be something worth seeing."

Link nods. "And you've still got that talus over by Gogobi?"

Rozel snorts. "And that night monstrosity by Temto Hill. Not to mention all those water lizalfos."

Zelda pulls out a journal and takes notes. They can just go to the tower and pinpoint what needs to be done, but taking notes shows that they're taking Rozel's concerns seriously. He cranes his neck a bit to see what she's writing, then narrows his eyes and adds. "There's something gross out in the water by Soka Point. And there's some sort of rot on the mighty porgies. And the last big storm took out three rafts. And rumor has it the gambling house is haunted."

All business, she asks, "What is it that's gross by Soka Point?"

He lifts his eyebrows. "A kind of black fluid. Floats on the water."

That doesn't sound good. "And that's where the sick porgy are turning up?"

"No. Those are from the bay here."

"May I see one?"

He looks taken aback. "Why would you want to do that?"

"How else will I figure out what's wrong with them?"

"You a fish doctor?"

"No. But the Zora possess vast amounts of knowledge about such things. If I can give them an accurate description, they may be able to help."

He snorts.

Link grins at her, and she has to admit that this is going well. Or at least better than last time.

"Want to look at some gross water?"

She does. As they walk, she breaks out the lotion she picked up in Zora's Domain to prevent sunburn and smooths it over her face and arms, her ears and the back of her neck and down under the collar of her shirt. Link takes the smallest possible amount and swipes it across his nose, while Zelda takes no chances and rubs it into the backs of her hands.

They head down the coast with Link charging ahead to get every last lizalfo. A few of them figure out what he's up to and decide to just wait out in the water and spit at him occasionally. He shoots arrows at them from the beach, which takes a while, and he keeps asking if he should use the cryonis rune to get out closer.

At the tip of the peninsula, there's a stretch of blackened water about forty-feet wide. It hovers on the surface of the ocean, not moving quite right with the waves. It shimmers with a blue shine if looked at at the right angle. A sharp smell reminds her of the inside of a guidance stone. The sand is dyed a sickly blue-black color. She gets out the slate and takes photos, gets out a vial and carefully takes a sample. The oil hovers over a layer of sea water in the vial. In the small container, it has a bolder hue of blue.

She switches to the magnesis rune, wandering if someone dumped something in the water that's leaking. When she sees nothing, she switches to the stasis rune and straightens.

"There's a guardian in the water."

Link looks in over her shoulder, the outline of a stalker toppled onto its side clear in bright yellow on the screen. Now that she knows it's there, sh can see where one of the arms near the water's surface affects the movement of the waves.

He shakes his head, then looks along the coast with a frown. "There weren't any guardians around here. How did it get here?"

"I don't know. But we should get it out of the water. And scoop out the mess." She lowers the slate to think. "Is there anything we can use as a metallic scoop? Then we can use the magnesis rune to lift it."

He thinks again. "There's a door at the base of the Great Plateau."

"That's hardly helpful."

"I have a big claymore? Wait, do I?" He digs through his pouch, then pulls out one of the biggest swords she's ever seen. "Whew! I kept it. Will this work?" They try it, and it shifts the guardian's legs around a bit, but doesn't move the main mass.

They backtrack down the beach and pick up a metal block from one of the monster camps. Using that, they're able to shove the guardian up onto the beach, with the block only slipping a few times and the guardian only getting stuck in the sand twice.

The guardian's arms still shine silver. The gold scroll work around its body is still visible. It looks fresh, as if it might lift off the beach at any second and focus an eye at them. "It must have only deactivated after Ganon was defeated." She trails her hands over it and finds a gash in its side where a hunk of rock the size of an octorock has broken through its thick plating. The rock has punctured the guardian's internal fuel sack. She can tell just from the smell.

She sits back on her heels. "The fuel is the wrong color," she says. "It's usually a glowing blue—the same substance that's in guidance stones. It's why they light blue when they're activated."

Link says, "They light pink when they're activated."

"Hmm." She looks down at the water. "Perhaps this is what its fuel looks like after a century of malice contagion? Or maybe the sea water has had an effect?"

Link shrugs.

Zelda sketches how she will construct a net to scoop the fuel from the water and store it in a barrel. Perhaps she can take it to Robbie. Or Purah. Thinking of Purah makes her think of Hateno, and she decides to focus on the oil slick.

The sun is starting to set, and they head back down the peninsula, then further along the beach, heading for a cove where there's a cute pond where she can wait while Link dispatches a Stalnox. They're back on Vah Medoh before midnight, but Amali is still furious they waited so long to check in. She uses the phrase "past curfew."

The next day, Zelda takes too many photos of dead fish. They look as though a dark purple mold is splattered over their scales. Four fishermen gather around her to tell her about the fish's strange behavior. They're lethargic and easy to catch. They tend to swim in circles and bump into things. The fishermen cut open one of the fish to show her how the discoloration migrates to its internal organs. Apparently one of the villagers tried to eat one of the fish and got sick, but he didn't eat much, and after a few days of intestinal discomfort, he was back on his feet having sworn off porgy forever.

Zelda uses the stasis rune to peek into the bay, and sure enough, there's a bright yellow spot out by the reef. She and Link take a raft out to investigate. It's another guardian, and they use Link's enormous claymore to pull one of its arms from the water, and—as she expected—it's another fresh one. It's wedged into a reef, which Zelda worries will be damaged further if they try to move it using their metal block.

Back at the village, they check out the haunted gambling house to find that there's a korok on the roof, which Zelda convinces to relocate to a nearby palm tree. Problem solved.

They set out west along the beach, dispatching lizalfos and checking the water for guardians until they get to a serious monster camp spread over a bay. "You don't know how many times I've cleared these guys out," Link says. "They just come back stronger. It's a pain."

The slate tells her that at least three guardian carcasses are tangled in the pillars supporting the monster camp.

Now, one guardian that deactivated and gets washed out to sea to wash up on Soka Point is not suspicious. Two guardians is suspect. Five is something that requires investigation. What on earth are they all doing in the ocean? Did they all walk into the water at the last minute? Did they all fall from a cliff somewhere?

Or did someone dump them there?

She and Link have a meal before he steals a kiss, pulls out his paraglider, and lifts into the air. Zelda sits with her back against a rock and the sun on her face and sketches out plans for a claw arm and pulley system that they can suspend between two rafts. She sketches and calculates late into the night, long after they're back aboard Vah Medoh, long after the rest of the passengers have gone silent. Link breathes slowly and evenly, one arm thrown over her waist, his body curled around her as she sketches, propped on one elbow, her eyes growing more and more itchy with each passing hour.

She's going to figure this out. She's going to save Lurelin from the guardian threat. Goddess help her, she's going to get it right.