I've always been an athletic person, I have to be with what I do, but that morning I woke up feeling awful. I'd been doing a lot lately, and my body was starting to really complain about it all. Still, I had a job to do. Despite the complaints from my calves, I got out of my tent and tried to face that day. Soon, breakfast had been eaten, Fi's laptop and my headset had been set up, and it was time to canvas the second half of the circle. Fi must have realized I wasn't feeling great, and didn't say much for a little while.

The quiet was actually starting to bother me, after getting so used to talking to them, so I broke it by asking, "Fi, can you sleep?" It was a weird question, what with Fi being an immaterial sword spirit and all, but I wanted to understand them better.

"Not in a way that correlates directly to an organic experience," was Fi's immediate answer. Like many of Fi's attempts to respond to my questions, I didn't feel like I'd actually gotten what I was looking for. Fi continued, as if to clarify, "I do not have a centralized nervous system, and thus do not require periods of rest to maintain cognitive faculties. However, due to the fact I was designed to exist for time in perpetuity, I am able to enter an inactive state for vast periods of time at my discretion."

Running their words through my head again, I put together what you meant. "So, you don't need to sleep, but you can just kind of half-turn off whenever you want?" They gave me the ringing sound they had begun to establish as the sound of me saying something correct, which made me laugh. I was making good time so far, though I still hadn't found any more secondary sites.

Continuing the trend they'd been setting the last few days, Fi asked me more about my personal life. "What is your...family like?" The way they pronounced the word almost sounded like they were tasting it as they said it. I idly wondered if the idea of family units were as foreign to the sword spirit as romance was.

It wasn't a question I super wanted to answer, but I also knew Fi was just curious, so I gave them a brief overview. "I've got a dad, still alive last time I checked. Haven't seen him in-person in years, he still lives in Kakariko. We send electronic messages back and forth on occasion though." I didn't tell them how I'd often felt pressured by his passive judgement of my life and my choices. "I've got no clue where my mom is, she left us when I was, like, four or so. Oh! And there's my younger sister, Paza. She's just heading off to college now." It felt...uncomfortable to think about her for too long. "We...used to be really close. But ever since I moved away, we've kind of drifted apart."

Fi didn't say anything about my family life, one way or another. There was no judgement, so far as I could tell. I did wonder what they thought about it all. After all, they'd existed for, what, thousands of years? Didn't families used to be a lot more close-knit back in the day? But, then again, everything I knew about her various masters told me that family was rarely a large part of their lives. Talking more about the whole subject was something for another day.

But right then and there, I had to stuff all of that in a darker part of my mind, and save it for another day. Because as I made another pass through the woods, I saw something. It looked like the top half of a building, though so much moss and other plantlife had grown on it that at first glance it looked like a small cave. It was more like the corner of a structure, with one end stuck in the dirt, and the interior only accessible from an opening in the front. It was large, too, but the trees around it were so thickly grown that seeing it before had been impossible. To get inside, I'd need to crawl down, the opening was pretty low to the ground. With no clue what was inside, and my heart hammering in my chest, I carefully took out a flag and tagged the secondary site on the side of the structure, into the moss.

I'd been doing everything I could to move quietly, but I'd moved to stick the flag in a bad spot. Setting it there dislodged a large clump of nature's detritus nearby, which fell to the ground with a wet slap, the moisture having come from the morning dew. The instant the sound entered the air, I heard something inside the structure, and began to retreat. Fear was coursing through my body, my heart hammering in my chest, as I saw the carapace of an insectoid leg emerge from the inside of the secondary site.

My sense of how time was flowing was radically warped by the adrenaline pumping into me, so it felt like the Gohma Queen took both an eternity and an instant to emerge from its hiding place, an enormous eye staring directly at me. But I hadn't come unprepared, and I was not someone to be treated lightly. I pulled out some knives, and my fight with the monster began.

Not to disappoint, but I will not try to describe to you my fight with the Gohma Queen. I barely remember it myself, and it's probably way cooler in your head. The best I can tell you is that I was running on training and instinct, and I was lucky. After what felt like a full day of combat, the Gohma Queen's corpse was bleeding out into the forest floor, it's eye punctured by a well placed through of a knife. I was uninjured, but sweat poured into my clothing as I tried to refocus and get back into reality.

"-'ra, are you there?" Fi's voice startled me, and I realized they'd been talking to me this whole time, I was just too busy to notice, let alone respond. They sounded worried, more emotion in their words than I'd ever heard before.

After double checked my enchanted flag marker was still planted correctly, I let her know I was okay. "I'm fine," I said between gasps for air. "Found where the Gohma Queen was hiding, killed her. As far as I can tell, I'm uninjured."

I got a reply right away. "I am grateful to hear that," they told me, and I could hear how true that was from the relief in their voice. "In the future, please advise me to such events occurring while they are happening. If the battle had turned out differently, I would have been dismayed to never learn of what occurred." Now their words carried a hint of anger, and I had to admit I hadn't even considered that. I mumbled another apology, and went back to work.

The rest of my sweep went by in what felt like no time at all, and soon I was back at camp, as late afternoon was starting to set in. Too tired to make a big dinner, I just grabbed a few protein bars to eat one after another. Even the effort of opening up the plastic for them felt almost like it was too much. I disconnected the headset as I sat near the Master Sword, looking at it as I said, amiably, "I think you promised me a story."

I hadn't forgotten how the day before had ended, and Fi apparently hadn't either. "That is correct," Fi began, with just a hint of an annoyed tone to it. "During my explanation of the qualities of the Hero of Light, I mentioned there existed a Hero who was a genuine Knight of Hyrule, while also being incredibly creative in his problem solving skills. Have you heard of a hero who slept for 100 years?"

Amazed to even hear that question, I nodded. "Of course, you're talking about the Hero of the Wilds!" Once again pumped up to share what I knew (or thought I knew) about my speciality subject, I started talking, "As far as we're aware, he seems to be the most recent Hero, most likely having had his adventures about 510ish years ago, during the Calamity." I shuddered at the thought, easily one of the darkest periods of Hyrule's history. "But, while we do know what he did, we don't know nearly as much about that hero's personality, or even his origins."

I was very eager to finally get some clues in that direction, and Fi was happy to supply them for me. "Born a commoner, he rose to the rank of Knight through hard work, even becoming the personal Knight of Princess Zelda before the Calamity. In order to protect him, Zelda had him sealed in stasis for 100 years, and when he emerged, he had lost all his memories." That was news to me, and I made sure to underline that point. "He regained his memories over the course of his journey, and reconnected with many friends, dead and alive, from before his sleep."

It was interesting to learn that he'd actually been born before the cataclysm. While some stories mentioned him being incredibly long-lived, most scholars thought the Hero of the Wilds was likely born near the end of the Calamity. "What about the stuff you said, about his ingenuity?" I asked.

"Where the Hero of Light always took a simple route, the Hero of the Wilds would get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line," Fi explained, their voice sounding warm. "He always would come up with the most ridiculous ideas, but they somehow often worked. He was never above taking any advantage he could get in reaching his objective. His only real failing was a lack of...determination." That sounded weird to me, and I looked at Fi, wanting to hear more. "Most incarnations of my master have faced seemingly insurmountable challenges, dangerously lethal odds, ready to risk everything. But this particular time...he was more cautious. No, that is not the correct word. It almost felt as though, whenever he saw something that looked too difficult, he would elect to redirect his attention to something more manageable, and face the first thing later, when he felt more ready."

That definitely sounded more than a little odd to me. Weren't the heroes...courageous? Weren't they the ones who held the Triforce of Courage itself? But as I turned over the idea in my head, I started to understand. "It wasn't like he was cowardly," I said, as I worked it out. "More like he wanted to be smart about it all." Fi made a noise of confirmation, but then I realized how dark it was getting. Even without a Gohma Queen to scare me, I still needed my sleep. The next day would be my last in that camp, and I had one last task before I had to take my findings back to the university. The fact that also meant saying goodbye to Fi weighed heavily in my heart, and made me restless as I tossed and turned in my sleep.