Chapter 8

Gaepora stood alone looking beyond at the archway of trees. His brother Daphnes should just be reaching lake Hylia now and negotiating with the Zoras for entry into their temple. Just then, as his eyes took in the shadowed forest beyond the archway, he thought his brother had gotten the better end of this deal since all he needed to get there was diving equipment and a Zora made re-breather..

No one in their right mind had gone into the Kokiri forest alone for hundreds of years, and then it was only in the stories of the sacred legends. Then, the only "sane" person who had gone in and come back out was, according to his parents, his own father. There was a reason why it had adopted the name "Lost Woods," and so the rest of Hyrule studiously avoided it, leaving the Kokiri and skull children in peace, which is how they tended to like it, as he understood it. The last time a team of guardsmen went in had been forty five years before, and that had been during a time of crisis.

Those who entered the Lost Woods without knowing how to navigate the forest trails never came back out. There was something "extra-dimensional" about the forest that couldn't be explained or mapped logically. As with the safegaurds on the other temples, this enchantment was put into place by Farore herself to ensure that the temple would remain unmolested. Only the Hero, the Princess, and apparently the Demon King had ever been able to successfully navigate it. And, although he supposedly shared the blood of two of these legendary figures, Gaepora was none of these.

His mother had told him the secret of navigating the forest. "Just listen for the Sage's song," she had said, "when the forest starts to become quiet, then you're heading in the wrong direction." It had sounded so simple there in his mother's hospital room the day before, when he hadn't been staring into a darkened forest with winter coming on.

He zipped his green and brown, wool lined field jacket up to his neck and pulled the cowl over his head as the temperatures began their descent towards freezing. Under the jacket was a steel and carbon composite breast and back plate over a long sleeve pullover shirt to protect his torso. He checked the straps on the field pack on his back to make sure it was secure. Strapped under the backpack was a standard issue, three foot combat ready blade. A sidearm was in a holster secured against his hip, and the strap of a standard issue, fifty round assault rifle was slung around his neck and shoulders. Strapped to his right arm was a rounded, enchanted composite metal shield that would stop the rounds from most small firearms, and give him good protection from edged weapons if it came down to the close quarters sword combat his father was famous for. This shield was small enough and light enough for him to not have to remove it to use his arm for other things.

He had essentially been dropped off there at the entrance to the forest by a guard captain in an all terrain truck three hours after they left Castleton. There were no paved roads, gravel roads, or even dirt paths which led here, and the all-terrain feature of the truck was tested sorely just to get him this far, but once they arrived he was on his own. His mother had been very clear about that.

"No one else can go with you." She had told him and his brother. "You are my sons, and the sons of the Hero. You are also from the bloodlines of the royal family, the guardians of the temples will understand and respect that, but only you may enter. No one else." She was adamant about that. The temples held a special relationship with the members of the royal family, but anyone else entered at the risk of their lives, or worse.

"Well, if dad could do it..." He told himself as he started walking for the archway. "I'm either the Hero's son, or I'm not." He said as he passed through the autumn colored trees that marked the boundaries of the Lost Woods.

Once he did, he immediately looked back. Hyrule Field was still there as he laughed at himself. Nothing had changed from the few feet he had walked. "Well, what did I expect?" He said to no one in particular. He turned back around and looked at the scene in front of him.

To Gaepora's surprise there was a slightly discernible dirt footpath which led into the woods. He couldn't hear any music yet. He hoped that wasn't a bad sign. Maybe you only started hearing it when you were deeper in. The path itself looked a little like an underused animal trail. Not seeing or hearing any other clues as to what direction to head in from there, he started along the trail.

The trees around him seemed to get thicker and more tightly packed together the farther he walked. Every once in a while he would check behind him or mark a tree with some chalk to indicate what direction he was heading. He was able to keep the archway from Hyrule field in view like this for about ten or fifteen minutes until the trail curved and led down into a small ravine where there was a wood and rope bridge suspended over about a twenty or thirty foot drop. The afternoon sunlight spilled through the canopy of the forest trees and left dappled shadows across the ravine from what he could see.

"Well, so far so good." He said. "I'm beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about."

He set one foot on the bridge and tested it. It looked old, but still very sturdy, and it took the weight of his booted foot without him feeling any weakness in the wood at all. Soon, he was striding across it, the old bridge bouncing a little as he walked.

Gaepora kept his eyes and ears open and kept looking all around him. The old forest seemed almost asleep it was so quiet and still. It didn't have the eery feel of dead silence, but of the quiet slumber of minute sounds and shuffling. There was a peace that had spread over the forest which he hadn't ever experienced in the woods around his parents' property in Ordon.

He reached the other side of the bridge and, turning around as he walked to see the bridge and path behind him, he kept going forward into the cool shadows of the deeper forest as the trees, roots, branches and foliage became even denser around him and formed a kind of corridor which led in only one direction through the woods.

Around him, a warm, familiar breeze blew through the trees, and he thought he heard the sounds of playful, whispered laughter around him. He stopped his advance to listen again, slowly turning around three hundred and sixty degrees again his eyes scanning the trees and path around him, but there was no one there that he could see.

He came around again and proceeded to walk forward until he nearly tripped over what he thought was a tree root. Except, the tree root said, "Oww! Hey, what's the big idea?!"

The soldier immediately looked down at his feet. Standing there was what looked for all the world like a Hylian boy of about ten years old with flame red hair and an annoyed look on his face. He wore a green tunic, cap, and trousers which reminded Gaepora immediately of the Hero's traditional dress. "Why don't you look where you're going?" The boy said.

"I'm sorry. I didn't expect anyone to be standing there." Gaepora said slowly, assessing the "boy." He had been certain there was no one there less than a minute before.

"Well, it would help if you used your eyes!" The "boy" said sharply. "Or are they too far up from the ground? Sheesh!"

Gaepora thought for a minute, and then said, "I'm trying to reach the Temple of Forest. I'm on an errand from the Princess Zelda." If the boy in front of him was what Gaepora thought he was, then he should at least recognize his mother's name and title. Everyone else did. Whether or not he kept up with current politics was more doubtful.

"The Princess?" The boy asked, a skeptical look in his eye as he looked the General up and down. "Prove it." He told him.

His mother had warned them both to expect some kind of challenge to their "credentials," and that their standard issue ID tags wouldn't suffice. She had instructed the both he and his brother to carry a small ocarina or flute. He had never been great at playing either, but the melody his mother instructed them to memorize was simple enough. Gaepora pulled out a small silvery ocarina which he had stuffed into a front pocket of his field jacket, and began to play the six notes of the "lullaby" his mother had sung them when they were little.

"You know the sacred song of the royal family?!" The boy's eyes grew wide as he stared at Gaepora like he'd just now really looked at him. "Hey, I know you!"

"You do?" Gaepora asked, surprised.

"Yeah..." He said slowly, scratching his head. "It was a long time ago, I think. When we had all that trouble with the monsters in the forest. You reminded me of someone I used to know." He said. "Gee, you've gotten a lot older since the last time you were here."

Gaepora didn't deny it, but on a hunch decided to try and go with it. "Yeah, I'm back, and I need to get into the Temple. Can you help me out?"

The boy scratched his head and looked closely at him again. "Well, I guess you did help us out before. And you know the song of the royal family, so I guess you're okay..." He thought some more. "But I thought you'd already been to the temple. How come you don't know the way, huh?"

He was sure of it now. The "boy" was a kokiri, one of the forest "fairy" people for whom these woods were named. Though very real, the reclusive mysterious people were the stuff of legends themselves. Very few living souls in the rest of Hyrule had ever seen a kokiri before as they very rarely ever left the village in their woods. Gaepora thought quick on his feet, "Well, like you said. It's been a long time since I've been there. And you know this forest. It always gets me all turned around." He tried to put on a convincing face with his explanation.

"Yeah, it does that with everyone but us." The boy told him. "Alright. I'll take you to the entrance to the Lost Woods. You can find your way from there I assume?" He asked, looking Gaepora in the eye.

"Yeah, I should be able to," Gaepora said. "Just follow the music like before. Thanks..." Gaepora was searching for the Kokiri's name. He knew for certain he had heard it before.

"Mido!" The Kokiri told him, his voice raised. "Sheesh, you do have a bad memory, don't you? It wasn't 'that' long ago."

Only a thousand years, give or take, Gaepora thought to himself in wonder.

The entry cave of Nayru's temple was quiet except for the constant drip of water from stalagtites overhead that seemed to have been growing for millennia or more. It would have been pitch black except for torches that burned brightly against the walls. It was damp in the cave, but oddly enough it wasn't really cold as Daphnes expected when he emerged from the water filled corridor which led up from Lake Hylia's bottom. It was actually quite warm and moist.

"I guess that makes sense," Daphnes said to himself as he looked around, thinking of the water born race that built this place.

He had never had the privilege of visiting a Sacred Temple before, much more the temple of his supposed grandmother. When his brother told him of his plan, his first reaction was to assume the family insanity was contagious and Gaepora had lost his mind as well.

"First dad has a psychotic breakdown and disappears on some gods forsaken wild cucco chase, and now you want to go traipsing around sacred temples looking for gods who won't answer when they're called in the first place?" Daphnes had almost yelled at his younger brother. "It's bad enough his majesty keeps up this delusion, but you too?"

"Mom wants our support, Daphnes." Gaepora had told him. "I don't really believe any of this either, but she wants and needs our support through this."

"That's why we need to stay right here with her!" Daphnes had shot back.

"And do what? Watch her meditate? Listen to her get angry at us when we don't buy everything she's saying about her past?" Gaepora had said. "If nothing else, you and I can go and at least try to make contact with the Sages and see if they've got any messages for Mom and Dad from the goddesses."

"You want us to risk our lives for the sole purpose of playing along with her delusions?" Daphnes asked in disbelief.

"Members of the royal family have been making regular visits to the temples for centuries without running into trouble. It's just a matter of knowing how to get past all of the enchantments that are set up to protect them. We go in, talk to the sages, and then come back and tell mom what, if anything they said." Gaepora seemed to have it all worked out.

Daphnes had chewed on it for a few minutes before he asked, "And what if the sages don't have anything, or anything positive?"

"Then we come up with something to tell her to ease her mind." Gaepora told him.

"We lie to her?" Daphnes had asked his brother.

"She's on her death bed, Daphnes. Do you really want her going into the shadows believing that her own goddess mother abandoned her to die?" Gaepora asked him. "I don't."

After that, it was a matter of getting special permission from Talon himself, and then he found himself being driven out to Lake Hylia with wet gear. That was after, of course, his mother had made sure they had every note of a lullaby she used to sing them pitch perfect with a couple of ocarinas. Yeah... That happened.

So, now Daphnes stood in Zora made wet combat gear at the entry to the temple, specially made tactical boots with flipper extensions leaving oddly shaped wet foot prints against the soft wet sand of the cave floor. He supposed there were worse things than a quick trip to a resort town and a diving session in order to help his mom out.

To be sure, he didn't enter the temple unarmed. His wetsuit concealed a carbon composite breatplate, and he carried a sword on his back the blade of which was specially formulated and forged for water based combat. Firearms don't do well when having to fight underwater, but he did carry a sidearm which had been specially designed for wet environments, and an assault rifle with spare clips. Did he expect combat here in a religious structure? Not really. But his majesty had insisted, and as he was once a sitting Sage who knew what the inside of a temple could be like, Daphnes had taken precautions.

As he looked towards the inner door which led into the temple proper, he voiced the thought that ran through his mind, "Should the Sage know I'm here by now?" He would have expected some kind of a greeting or something once he had made it even this far. From what he had been told, Sages didn't generally tolerate intruders. Something began to feel wrong, and the rifle he had carried in belted to his gear appeared in his hands.

As he walked across the sand, the floor around him hardened into weathered, slippery rock and he took more pains to be sure of his footing as the floor became even more uneven. The flames from the torches (who kept those lit, anyway?) cast shadows against the walls that danced and moved around him.

As he neared the door, he rounded a rock outcropping that he realized he was going to have to climb up on to reach the alcove where the door was placed. It looked like there had been a nice, useful set of stone stairs that had reached up to it at one time that some how found themselves smashed over time.

He turned three hundred and sixty degrees slowly to check his surroundings again before he attempted to climb. The last thing he wanted was a nasty surprise turning up while he was preoccupied with not breaking his neck on a slick rock. Overhead he could see possible targets for a set of clawshots, the unique device that allowed a person to shoot a grappling claw attached to a chain at a target and then be dragged by the chain as it powerfully rewound back into its housing, mounted at convenient points along the walls. Unfortunately, clawshots weren't standard issue R.H.M.G. gear. The only working clawshots he actually knew of, however, were housed in Hyrule Castle in the room which was magically sealed as off limits to all but the Hero. As far as he knew, his father hadn't set foot in it since before he and his siblings had been born.

"Wish Guard R. and D. had been able to replicate those. A pair would have come in handy right about now." He said to himself as he continued to look around the chamber and listen carefully for possible threats.

Not seeing anything, he slung his rifle back over his shoulder and proceeded to climb the rocks up towards the door. They were slick with some kind of slimy growth as he tried to get a good foothold. The tread on his boots had been augmented with small, rust resistant metal spikes for better traction and eventually he was able to get up and onto the rocks close to where the old staircase had broken off. It looked like once upon a time he might have needed to jump it, but some past trespasser had gotten the bright idea of causing one of the stalactites overhead to fall and create a kind of stepping stone over to the ledge. He briefly, and flippantly, wondered if that had been his dad in a past life, then he shoved the idea out of his head. "No way I'm going to get caught up in that nonsense." He told himself as he crossed over to the door's alcove. "It's bad enough I'm here as it is."

Rifle back in his hands, he came over to the door and studied it. There was no handle. There didn't appear to be any hinges. In fact, except for the fact that it was clearly made out of a separate slab of some kind of jeweled metal set into the wall, it didn't really look like a functioning door at all.

"Okay. So now what do I do, just lift it up?" He asked, looking over the "door." In the center was set a symbol. An upside down triangle with three solid circles, one at the top and two at the sides. "Nayru's seal." He said contemplating it. On a hunch, he pressed his left hand against the triangle. Mechanized sounds began to click and clang from the door's frame and the metal slab slid upwards so that there was an open portal deeper into the temple.

"Now, let's find the Sage." He said as he stepped through the door.

Link sat alone in the royal family's chapel in the private wing of Hyrule Castle. Talon had spent some time helping his father with breathing and meditation techniques to get him started back on the path to ascension, and then he had left him alone in the quiet space with orders to the castle guardsmen outside that he was not to be disturbed, and was to be given anything he requested, no matter what the request might be.

The sacred space held a few pew benches and an altar upon which sat images of the Triforce and the three goddesses in gold and silver relief. To either side of the altar stood white marble images of the Hero and the Princess Stained glass windows depicting artists' rending of scenes from Link and Zelda's past lives and adventures rendered the afternoon sunlight into a rainbow of colors which were splashed across the wooden pews. In between the windows were smaller icons of Hyrule's more minor deities.

He couldn't escape the irony that this chapel was what the being represented on the altar had studiously wanted to avoid. There had been a reason why the "Legend of Zelda" had been concealed by the royal family from the common people until a few hundred years ago. None of Hyrule's gods had wanted to be worshiped or prayed to. They wouldn't have interfered at all in the mortal planes of existence if it weren't for Demise and his crusade to enslave them.

No, this chapel and the religion it represented was the result of Malon not wanting their sacrifices to go unknown and unrecognized. She couldn't let go after he and Zelda had died within a day of one another. She made the Legend of Zelda, the temples, the Sages, the Triforce, all of it public knowledge and encouraged the public adoption of the religion she built around them. Suddenly the faith and belief of the people in the gods she promoted began pouring into Hyrule's ascended beings giving them power and responsibility they had neither asked for nor wanted, while at the same time draining the Hylians themselves of their own innate capability for ascension which had been engineered into them from the beginning by those who had first created them. And all of this happened because he had been forced to choose between being the husband and father his family needed right then, and being the Hero Hyrule had always seemed to need.

His eyes settled on the image of Zelda at the front which stood with arms extended towards the pews, a golden bow in one hand and gold arrows in the other like a benevolent warrior goddess. It was a good likeness and captured his wife's smile well, though he knew Zelda never liked the statue, even before she had fully regained her memories. She had come to fully detest the pretense which came with being royal, and the statue of her as a goddess just tipped it over the edge for her. During their wedding, she had asked to have both his and her statues removed for the ceremony. Eyes were raised, but it was obeyed. No one else in Hyrule, not even Talon, could have gotten away with that request and have it obeyed like she did, he smiled at the memory.

This time it wasn't about Hyrule. It was just about Zelda, the woman he had loved and been bonded to for ten thousand years and hundreds of lifetimes. He didn't have to raise a sword and shield. He didn't have to stare down a dragon, fight a death knight, jump into an abyss, or any other nightmare inducing thing which he had had to do in the past. He just had to sit quietly, be still, and let go of everything and then he could save his wife.

"You have to believe you can do this." This was the first instruction Talon had given him. "That is the most important thing. If you don't believe you can ascend, then you won't be able to. Everything else is meditation and letting go."

The problem was that he 'couldn't' do it before without help. As his mind continued to wander back to that ancient time across the Hylian Sea in what was now known as the ruins of the Great Palace, he had tried. It seemed like he had sat and meditated in his old age until he had developed a rash on his backside from sitting so much. But his physical body remained physical until Hylia returned to him on his deathbed and helped him finish the journey. He had brought this up with his oldest son.

"Then you must discover why. The physical capability exists within you, father." Talon had told him. "Until relatively recently it always had, otherwise you couldn't have ascended and been reborn continuously."

"What would keep me from reaching it?" He had asked the Sage turned king.

"You hadn't let go of something in this mortal life. Ascension requires that you release everything holding you here. You must let go of all of your fears, your guilt, your mortal relationships and attachments, all of these things in order for the process to come to fruition." His son replied as he sat in the pew in the chapel before he had left him.

"So what didn't I let go of?" Link had asked him.

"Only you can answer that, father." Talon responded.

Link asked himself the same question now. "What am I not letting go of?" His eyes caught the statue again as it stared benevolently out into the chapel. His own statue's expression was just as benevolent, if a little more menacing. But it was Zelda's face and image that kept drawing his eye.

And then, slowly, a light began to come on in his mind. "No..." He said aloud. Could it be? If it was, then he was certain that it would seal both his and his wife's fates, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it was true. And if it was true, then irony was a cruel mistress. And what about Hylia so long ago? Ha she really been able to let go of everyone in her life?

"I need to go talk to my wife." He said as he got up from the pew. "I've got something to ask her."