1 Spinning Slash, Chapter 4: Research
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3 The sign said, "Do Not Disturb."
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5 The expression on her face said, Do Not Disturb? Do not disturb, my medallion!
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7 The deep, full drone wheezed in and out, an incessant roar that sent shivers through the stems of the farthest flowers in the darkest reaches of the Lost Woods. Its trembling tirade howled through the ears of everyone within a fifty foot radius and made them reel back in vexation. A lion would be jealous, an ancient dinosaur would envy, the snorting, growling barks of Link's snores.
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9 She tossed the waist-length mane of emerald silk over her shoulder and out of her face, the whispers as the glistening lines of viridian gossamer shifted the peals of silver bell. Long lashes blinked slowly over eyes set like a pair of single-rupee gems, though infinitely more priceless. Cheeks glowing and rosy perfectly complimented delicate porcelain shapes that twisted gracefully and enchantingly, though it was clear from the torque in the rose-petal lips that this living china doll was imped, as one could be expected to be after having to live through the constant dogging hubbub that filled the air in the Kokiri's realm.
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11 A deliciously flutelike voice, inlaid with the very pearls of laughter, sighed as the rupee-eyes glanced across the makeshift bulletin Link had placed upon the door. Although the humdrum noise was no new circumstance to her life, and so many had been the times when she had stumbled over that overly ornate, largely loopy handwriting, it was now that it cut into her nerves and caused what was so normally a figure of beauty to be distorted. She ran her soft, slender fingers over the grain of the scrap wood, blots of ink rubbing off and shamefully tainting her fingerprints. That ringing tone spoke again, saucy and scattering those jewels of laughter like marbles on a polished floor.
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13 "Sorry, buddy, but if I don't disturb someone's going to get arrested for breaking the peace." She placed her hand firmly upon the brass doorknob and shoved the door open.
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15 The library—if it could really be called that, it was more of a rather large study—was a complete and utter mess. A dejected quill blotted ink over piles and piles of creamy yellow paper, hastily scrawled with notes about theories of inner magic nature and of common tactics of battle. Pieces of parchment fluttered down from the tops of shelves, and priceless scrolls containing the wisdom of bygone mages were strewn about in a caddy- wompus manner. Esoteric volumes lay stacked in haphazard columns, and myriad tomes were erected in no conceivable order at all, pages flying open in the breeze from the newly-opened door. It was as if a particularly knowledge-hungry rabid dog had come tearing through the room, ripping apart the neatly assembled shelves in a quest for one single piece of information—a piece which as of yet still lay fossilized somewhere beneath the heaps of books, and the dog in question had fallen from fatigue whilst leaning over the edge of a rolling stepladder to the highest spaces.
Link was dozing into both the side of his arm and a rather large space in she shelves, whose contents now lay spilled to his side on the floor. One of his limbs was limp by his side, bare fingers still desperately clutching the spine of a bulky manuscript with a crimson velvet cover and embellished gold lettering. His other had been presumably going for the last encyclopedia left on the particular section of the shelf until he had blacked out completely, arm coming against the ladder's edge and Link's face nodding forward into its side. He mumbled something incomprehensible in his sleep, the turned his head and she could see the imprint of his hair on his skin.
The hot, pungent fragrance of the simmering stew, combined with the mouth-watering aroma of Chocolate Death cake, seemed enough to wake the man as it was. Yet there he still lazed, mouth hanging open and hand turning sallow as the pressure applied by his face cut off the better part of his circulation. She scolded him under her breath for being such a bum, then trotted up to his side, shaking her head. Sorry, buddy, she thought, but I gotta do what I gotta do.
"Psst… Link…" She hissed into his ear. "Link, get up. Get up. Up, you good-for-nothing!"
Link snorted and spat out a piece of dust. Still he remained unbudged.
Well, so much for plan A: Complain at him until he wakes. On to plan B, then: Insults.
"Link, you tramp! Beggar! You're nothing more than an overgrown, selfish brat who doesn't know right from idiotic and you're stupid enough to fall asleep standing up!"
"Nggg. Fi mo' minuf, Mom." His head craned about on his neck until it rested back in the crook of his arm, then he went back to snoring.
Odd that he should be talking to his mother in his sleep; she died before he was even old enough to remember her. She groaned and placed a hand on Link's shoulder. There was a blue end to spectrum, too. And she had a plan C in reserve, one that worked ninety-nine point nine percent of the time: Sickeningly sweetness.
"Shh…" She giggled, and whispered flirtatiously in his ear, "Oh, Link, you absolutely gorgeous hunk of Hylian, you… sugar bunny, sweetie pie, darling? Oh, fudge bar, my cupcake, won't you please get up? I need to stare into your sapphire eyes again, or else I fear I shall fall apart…"
Somewhere from the depths of his dream, Link sniggered, and broke into a coy smile. "Are you busy this Friday?" he asked the invisible maiden of his reverie.
That was it. Hands on her hips, she saw only one last way out. Fire blazing behind her eyes, she stared intensely at Link, bizarre crackling noises occupying the air between them and a sudden flash of heat torching the room.
Staring out the window of his home in Hyrule Castle Town, Randy snickered cynically as he saw a sphere of green light erupt from many miles away in the direction of the Kokiri Forest.
Flat on his back, thrown from the ladder by the instant eruption of fire, magic and electricity, Link stared shocked and unblinking at a pale, green ceiling. Rotten-looking red welts had already begun to spring from his darkened skin, and every strand of his blonde floss was repelled from his scalp and upward, into the air. The whites were large around his eyes and their pupils were shrunk into mere specks. Grotesque flecks peeled from scorched areas where the lightning had connected. Black cinders dotted the folds of a once perfect forest tunic. His mouth was still hanging, but now it was cupped into a dazed smile while sweat dripped from a reddened forehead. His entire body shone with burn.
"You know, pushing me off the ladder probably would have been a lot less painful?!?!"
She shook her head a final time. "Yes, and then it would have knocked you out colder than your were. I don't think so. Besides, you never fail to bend at my magical whim." He looked at her darkly and she couldn't resist the urge to laugh and kneel and stroke his hair with a mischievous cackle in her eye. "Oh, but don't you worry, you know I'd never hit you with anything powerful enough to actually do you lasting harm, just cause some temporary discomfort. Honestly, you've known me all the twenty-four years of your life and still you don't know me well enough?"
"Temporary discomfort…!!!" He began to stir with rage, but it was a false rage and he eased himself back into a placid state as he had tried to sit up, but immediately released back down again when he discovered the skin upon his palms to be far too tender to bear weight. Instead, he sighed, looked pleadingly up into her face with eyes that whimpered and howled with pain. She clicked her tongue in annoyance, but the gentle flutter of her heart came to her sleeves as she pressed a cool, smooth hand to his forehead and willed into being a brigade of prancing green sparks that ebbed and flowed their way down Link's persona and took with them all the dark, scalding flesh and returned the glimmering gold to charred strands of hair. The pain melted into a void and Link could sit up again, enough so to look into her face.
"Honestly, Saria, I don't know where I'd be without you… though how far I've gotten with you, on the other hand, is certainly a debatable topic."
Saria's voice, long having left the innocent tinkle of childhood behind for the deeper, more chimelike toll of the womanhood that was only hers by accident, nevertheless had always had the same laugh, a laugh that cut through the atmosphere at that moment and smothered Link in its glorious waves. The small, humid room, steam from down below billowing in, seemed to ripple all around with silver threads and motes of dust, illuminated by the last of the rays that trickled through the window, were touched by a flicker of golden fire whose jaws, in the middle of the great golden flames, was stroked by an earthy green that seemed part of only the Lost Woods and their keeper in particular. Pages ruffled in the absence of a cross-draft and a bound scroll tumbled over the floor before that laugh came to an end.
"But honestly," she cleared her throat and began, "I came up here to talk to you and that's what I plan to do. You've been holed up here in the library since dawn this morning, flipping pages and driving yourself to exhaustion chasing about scrolls. You've obviously been taking notes, but so hastily I bet you'd even have trouble reading them if you tried. What have you been looking for, Link?"
"Information." His reply was short, curt and very open-ended, and that was exactly the way he had planned it. He propelled himself to his feet and set one boot tip on the lowest rung of the ladder when Saria called to him again.
"What, that's it? You're just going to blow me off like that?" He turned his head. "Obviously it must be some very important information about something, because you never ate breakfast, you completely blew off lunch, and you actually fell asleep right before dinner! Link Hiro Blade being so preoccupied he has no time to think about food is like an Eskimo being so wrapped up in building an igloo that they can't notice the polar bear about to tear them to shreds!"
"OK. Fine then. It's important. You got a problem with that?" He hiked up the next few steps.
Saria clutched her forehead. "Darling…" She strode briskly to the ladder, gazing up into Link's face as his eyes scanned the shelves for the volume that he had been locked on to earlier. "Please don't do this to me; you know I love you and wouldn't ever do anything to make you feel bad… come on Link, I know this may sound a bit harsh, but… grow up. If a Kokiri can do it, then so can you."
Link sniffled a little and sneezed as a little cloud of dust entered his nose. He pondered this for a bit, then, reproachfully slid backwards down the ladder and shoved it aside. He stared into Saria's face, trying to pretend… this was an ordinary conversation. There were in the Sacred Forest Meadow, he just returning from a seemingly endless romp across Hyrule, she the Kokirish Saria of yesteryear, with a round, cherubic face, framed by curls and swirls of her trademark viridian hair, and lanky hands far too big for their own good. But the crystalline(and similarly hard) gaze of those rupee eyes knocked him far off balance, for the simple turquoise bobble that had once drawn calm from the deepest pits of his soul was no more. Where in the process they had changed was beyond Link's comprehension, perhaps it was a side effect of the spell that had struck her. But now, rather than instilling serenity, they invoked a fevered sense of passion; a one-two skip of his heart, a heavy breath, and it was like seeing her for the first time again in a mature body, bestowed by the ricochet of the spell, and falling in love with her over again. He was melting through her fingers, and by the triumphant smirk on her lips, she knew that he was. His body was falling away from his mind, leaving it vulnerable and open, and those deep-held furies begged to be released…
"Aye… fine then, you've won. I surrender. It… it's Posie."
Saria bunched her lips, but remained, for the most part, inarticulate. The only sounds she made we an Mmm-hmm in the bottom of her throat with a nod to accompany it.
"Well… you know… what happened Friday. She was… pretty upset about that. I… I already… told you…"
"Yes yes. What about what happened Friday? You told me that she tried to show off that little spin trick of yours, failed, and got pretty upset. I don't know about what happened there…"
"…But by the time she got home, she was terribly sad and cried for at least an hour after she woke up." The two finished, in unison, the sentence, and Link glanced up from the vivid gestures he was making with his hands to catch the tip of a smile from Saria's cheeks. It didn't take six years bound together under one roof for the two to start finishing what the other was saying. They'd know each other for so long that they'd been doing it since childhood. Normally, it made them giggle to know how prophetic they were of each other's words, but the look Link bore remained stone cold and dead serious, making Saria recoil as if she'd been tapped with a whip.
"I've been thinking." He fiddled with a pencil he'd bent down and picked up off the floor, sticking his tongue out in concentration. Saria dearly wanted to retort with "That's a first," but knew it was not the time. Despite the fact that she loved him more as a person than as a friend now, old habits died hard and occasionally, things would revert back to the ways they were in the good old days. "Seeing my precious little girl so upset really struck home, and I've decide I've got to do something about it. She's wanted to be just like me ever since she found out who I really was, and I want to give her that chance. I've tried to teach her my tricks of the trade, but it's hard for both of us. It's been a year now since she first tried to do the spinning slash…"
As if on cue, a miniscule, male voice keened shrilly, accompanied by a background drone and followed by "Hey! What have your parents told you about practicing in the house?!?!"
"Well, you were behind me, Glowball! How am I supposed to try not hit you if I can't see you?"
Saria groaned inwardly. It was true, several times had the firmly told Posie that she was never to attempt tricks inside, and her testimony against Atahl really had nothing to do with that. But it could wait… she was firmly interested in what Link had to say. She made beckoning motions with her hands. "Go on…"
"So I… I've been looking… for… any sort of answer, really… in these…" He turned around, making a sweeping stroke. "I know there must be a clue, a key, somewhere…"
Saria wore a blank mask. Her mouth hung slack-jawed, her eyes trailed unfocused. There was nothing there for an instant, just a black void that drained her soul, and then… she snapped back into reality, and, loosing a distressed breath, fell into a fit of horribly tired chuckling.
"Link… you nitwit, you… the slash is your family's best kept secret and one of the greatest enigmas of our time—how in Hyrule do you honestly expect to find…"
He stifled. "A hunch."
A "hunch." A "hunch!" Hadn't that man learned yet that his hunches seldom carried the mother lode? That unless he made an educated guess based on fact they never would? Just because her collection of books had always been large and arcane, that didn't mean she owned the knowledge of the world! Just because the Blades had been one of the most prominent warrior families in all of Hyrule didn't mean that their deepest, darkest secrets were going to be stashed away in her den. Why, one was just about as likely to find the ancient ways of the Blade clan in those books as they were of the family who lived next door to the pizza parlor in Hyrule Castle Town! In the olden days, people seldom knew how to read or write, even the knights of high blood, so it was unlikely any prehistoric Blade had written the secrets of their technique in a diary or journal. There was the journal of Link's father buried somewhere in that stash, it was true, but apparently dear old Jeremiah Emilio Blade was a clumsy man who had unwittingly spilled his morning coffee over his life's ponderings one day twenty-four years ago, leaving only one passage readable that depicted only a mundane argument he'd been recently having with himself about whether or not to leave his secret cottage to enlist in the war. Nowhere in all of that clutter—in all of the clutter of all of Hyrule!—was there going to be a book talking about the slash. Ganon's ashes in their grave, was there no sense in all of his mind?
It was easy to refrain from showing amusement—but it was difficult not to give in to frustration. Already her cheeks were reddening.
"Erii, erii," she mumbled darkly to herself, which was the equivalent in the ancient, spellbinding language of the first Kokiri to "child, child." Because Kokiri were always children, they had no particular word for the youthful sort, but an erii was a particularly young(or foolish) Kokiri who had little sense of how the world worked. Although Link had never bothered to learn the lie of the Kokirish tongue of old, he knew a few distinct phrases, erii being one of them. He often heard Saria sigh this when he was nigh to her and doing something particularly ridiculous, at which point her knew to stop lest he want to face the brilliant heat and terrible pulse of her thunder-spell again. More willing was he to hear her utter the word eriiko, which referred to an also young, but perfectly innocent, Kokiri who was sweet and likeable, much like a man or woman from the outside might call their significant other "baby" or "pet."(The Kokiri had no real word for a baby, as they hardly went through a "baby" stage themselves as they are born knowing how to walk and talk, and pets besides guardian fairies were unheard of.)
"Err… I take it you… you don't think my hunch is very… accurate?"
"Accurate? Link, PROMISE me that if Hyrule ever manages to get her hands on some of that fancy missile technology they've got over in places like North America and Asia—you know, the continents most people can actually see, not like good old shrouded Ebridane here—you'll never be on the launch team. Never."
"My aim is that bad?"
"You don't know the half of it, erii."
Link snorted, then crossed his arms, leaned his back into the wall and said casually, bracing his foot behind him, "Well, will you look at that? I can't even get a good word outta my best friend—my best friend and wife! Now if you'll ex-CUUUUSE me, Saria, I'll just head back to my research, thankyouverymuch."
"Fine then, starve. I'm heading back down to set the table for dinner. I ONLY came up here to tell you that dinner was just about ready."
"You said you came down here to talk to me," Link stated firmly.
"Well, yes I did, and I was going to inform you about eating anyway. So if you don't mind, I'll be away." She turned to leave. "Oh yeah, and one more thing, you ninny." Her head was perched backwards over her shoulders.
"What?" he bit, surly.
"Love ya." She flirtatiously flittered her eyelashes a blew a kiss.
The door creaked shut, but not before Link could practically feel the waves in the air from Saria's breath caress his face. A smile—a microscopic smile, but a smile nonetheless—itched his face, and he couldn't help but turn a bit dreamy. OK, so having her by his side day and night got a bit more claustrophobic than the old days—it didn't matter. The old days were just that, the old days and they were gone. Fingering lightly the spot where he swore Saria's kiss had hit, he marched across the room, loping over streamers of scraps while gazing dazedly forward. He'd always known the spell had been his fault. Maybe he did change Saria from a Kokiri to a true Hylian. He was glad about it every step of the way. Ajabando maho h erii, thyart ajabando maho gaqu erii. "He is a fool, but he is my fool—" and it was a bondage he had no resentments to being part of.
And maybe… he would stop thinking about what had happened last Friday. Maybe. Just maybe.
Maybe, at least, till he went to the Royal Libraries tomorrow. Now there were the answers.
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A clattering sound echoed through the stories of tall marble pillars and glossy marbled floors and polished marble ceiling that made the eyelids twitch about equally marbled gray eyes. A small poof of dust skirted over the peak of wiry gray hair sculpted into a rude bun atop the head of a vulture-necked old hunchbacked woman with cracking glasses poised on a crooked nose. Sinewy, veined hands pressed down with sweaty palms on the bronzing letters of a hand-copied book from aeons before. The weathered, brown skin was splattered with ink blots and printing-press imprints and the like, while aforementioned eyes plunged about glistening reflections in cold stone, and a voice as jagged and antique as the mountains themselves croaked out a few words before falling into a hacking fit: "Are you positive you're alright there, sonny?"
A dust-laden cough choked back. "Fine, fine! Just—hrough—decide to peruse the lower shelves, that's all!"
A concoction of leathery skin, the thick, dark lines of blood vessels, and the rickety shapes of old, arthritic bones molded itself about the head of a finely carved cane of support, which had the foot of a lion twisted about with strands of ivy. "Sounds more to me like you fell from the ladder! Are you sure you'll be fine, boy?"
"Ruto, I'm fine! And stop calling me 'boy!' I'm a grown man, for the Goddesses' sake! And I'm…"
"And you're married and you have a little girl named Posie, I know. Ha! I'll stop calling you boy, alright. The day you show me your great-great grandchildren!" The archaic old hag chuckled grimly and stiffly rose to her feet, as one might who had just taken a good long fall and landed smack dab on their rear end. However, it was quite clear she hadn't(which was a good thing, because if she had, she might very well have shattered into a million pieces), she simply had a very old skeleton, very old indeed, and wasn't quite as spry as she used to be. But for someone who had lost count of their years at least 30 of them ago, she had a remarkable amount of get-up and go—well, at least the go part. The getting up was a struggle. Her name was Ruto, yes, like the sage, and had been born in a time when the Sages were merely a legend that was as likely as the next to come true, but still made for a good and exciting story whose heroes nearly every child was named after in some way, hoping that they might be the reincarnation of one of those glorious mages. This particular Ruto was very glad it was the animated Zora princess and not herself who was destined to fulfil the role of the protector of all of Hyrule's waters, though she did cackle in her geezerly way whenever Link happened to look her way, as she thought blithely of the amorous young mermaid giggling frantically after the rather handsome young hero. But he was betrothed to another, she reminded herself, and ironically another Sage—Saria, green mistress of growing things. A sensible girl, she nodded. And thankfully so! Much better for him than that aloof, bubble-headed bleach-blonde Zoey. No, wait, Zoey wasn't right… Zia? Ack, she was terrible with names… whatever the name was of Mercutioe's spoiled daughter.
"I'd like to, but one or both of us is going to be dead by that time!" Link struggled ineptly to free his leg from a pile of ancient scribblings with rusty metal spines. Gray specks flecked his normally shimmering golden locks, giving them a dull, disconcerted look that would have fit him more back in his knight-errant days. Ah, but she had forgotten—it wouldn't have done much to him then, as he had temporarily dyed his hair brown to fit in more with his rugged lifestyle. How long that had lasted! After finding out that someone (who had most likely been Zima… no, that was STILL off…) had crept into his bedroom at night, shaved his head, and left the hastily scribbled note card of "You looked better as a blonde, signed, An Anonymous Fangirl," he quickly set about to re-grow his hair in its natural color—but not before tossing his entire supply of hair dye out the window, after which it promptly landed atop the wandering head of the
King, who had been ambling through his gardens. This might not have been so bad for the King, were it not for the fact he had no natural hair left to dye. All photographs of the King, casual or otherwise, showed his crown firmly cemented to his cranium for weeks afterwards.
"If you continue this way, boy, then it may very well be you who goes first!"
"Har har and ho ho, Ruto, you're such a laugh! This hills must've learnt all their tricks from you!" He clamped down on a heavy manuscript from amidst the lump of them at his feet and brushed a film of powder from its front, freeing the embellished gold leaf lettering from its prison of neglect. Dragon Taming for Dummies. Got his vote for scariest horror novel of the year. He crammed it back into the nearest level bookshelf with a space in it(which there was none) and proceeded to nit- pick fastidiously through the mound of heavy stacks of glue, paper and thread, shaking away long-abandoned bookworm cocoons and sighing at one after another of useless volumes. One by one he examined covers like a scholar, and one by one he stuffed them back into their shelf in a very un- scholarly manner.
"Well, my humor is world famous, you know! Even my early attempts were funny! I'm sure you're heard the one about the Cucco who tried to cross the road…"
Link ignored the old woman's ridicule and instead tried to focus on something outside the library he was determined to tunnel through with a fine-toothed comb until he'd either seen it all or found an answer. A bird chittering outside the gold-embellished window… the gentle whistling of the wind over the ancient branches it had warped and polished… silken footfalls on the tile outside…
A creek and the great golden doors parted.
Ruto began to growl to herself. There, in the threshold, stood Xena(That WAS correct, right?), blue eyes ablaze with a mystic curiosity, balmy ripples of murky blonde(Ruto would have called it dishwater, but the girl's bloody royal status put all thoughts of that away in her head) bouncing with newly primped curls down her back. Long, elbow gloves of finely knitted chiffon lavender delicately adorned shapely hands, while a long, crimped muslin skirt whorled over her feet. A thicker, more velvety and almost apron-like cloth was draped in front of the gown, embroidered with national images—a stylized eagle, a swirl here and there, and a blue- and-gold Triforce the major features. Paradoxical shoulder plates domed across hers, though they were golden and thin and ceremonial, not the heavy, steel and titanium ones the knights wore. In the tiny lobes of her triangular ears hung Triforce earrings, all features blending together to become the heir apparent to Hyrule, the future Queen of a land with strong moral values rooted in religion, but with the backup of great knowledge of magic and the ways of the world. It was too much to hope that she would find a way to link their land with the world(though that was secretly what everyone hoped of future monarch), though she had at least succeed in working with Link, her trusted bodyguard, assistant, friend and, at one time before he had found Saria, lover, to at least bring a few of their problems to light across the globe. Link, who had done the majority of the bargaining, hadn't had the heart to tell her that it was only in a "video game," an electronically advanced form of entertainment that, thought would have delighted many Hylians, had difficulty working in Ebridane like many foreign technologies because of the lost continent's magic overload.
"Hullo, Zelda," said Link dishearteningly.
Zelda…! So THAT was her name! Ruto, feeling rather stupid, went and tried to hit her head against the wall, but hit so hard that she fell unconscious on the floor.
"Link…?" Zelda braced her palms against the pressuring sides of the massive doors and swiveled her head from side to side. She spotted him gazing into the depths of a tome entitled Greatest Mysteries of Ebridane, and smiled. He continued to flip pages, and her smile fell.
"Are you alright?" She stepped into the library's light and the door fell shut with a great rushing of air behind her, a vacuum that threatened to drag her back into the great amber crystal light of the chandelier-illuminated hallway.
"Never been better, Zelda," he lied.
"Alright. What's up?" Either she hadn't heard him, or didn't believe him, the latter being the more likely of the two. "Now look, I know you hate council meetings as much as the next red-blooded, never-sit-still insatiable-hunger-for-action type of warrior, but actually calling one off, to look at books nonetheless, old books, is so unlike you! You got a bug of some sort? Something affecting your brain?"
"Fine. I've got strep throat and uh… have to get my tonsils removed. Just… finding out more about the operation?" He grinned, and then coughed for emphasis. "See? My throat feels so… uck, swollen…"
Zelda gave a discontented look, then eyed Link suspiciously and bent over to pick up a small sample of the documents that he had cached at his feet. "Great Knights of Hyrule? Beginning Fencing? All You Ever Wanted To Know About Magic But Were Afraid To Ask?" she said, reciting the titles of the three books she held out loud. "No can do, bud. Now tell me. Honestly. What in the name of heaven and Hyrule are you looking for?"
Great, a repeat of the "Saria" conversation. "Well… maybe I'm not sick… but I might as well be. I've got this problem, see, with…"
"Ah, a problem," Zelda interrupted. "Now we're getting somewhere. I'm listening, big guy…"
Link immediately saw this as an opportunity to stray from the beaten path and to try and take the princess's attention away from what she had come in here to do. "Stop it!"
"Stop what?" Zelda seemed genuinely confused. Her arms were crossed in front of her pale pink dress.
"Stop flirting with me!"
Zelda dropped her arms in shock. "Flirting?!?! I wasn't flirting with you! Even I know better than to flirt with a guy who's already got a wife, not to mention one whom he loves very much!"
"You to were flirting! You called me big guy! You haven't called me that since before Saria and I were married!"
"Oh, never mind!" She brushed in front of her face as if an annoying little shiny black buzzing insect were darting back and forth before her nose. "You were just trying to detour from the subject anyway. What's the matter, Link? Come on. If I can't get it from you, then I'm going to ask Saria or Randy. And who would you rather I heard it from, them or you?"
Link winced, and little subliminal prickles bunched up in the shoulders of his tunic. She did have a point. Even though he hadn't told Randy, Saria knew, and letting Saria make mountains out of molehills(and—even worse!—with that terrible cynical fairy Atahl droning by her shoulder) was a fate worse than death, or a burst of green lighting. His breath jumped out of his chest as he tried to take one painful look into Zelda's eyes. "Fine, fine. You know Posie…"
"Oh yes, Posie, your…"
"Daughter, Zelda."
"Right. Daughter. Charming." Ha, if she truly was Link's daughter, chances were she was anything but. Of course, she'd never met the child, but Link had promised to bring her to the castle some day. Though Zelda thought that the half of Posie that was Saria might at least be versed in at least a bit of proper etiquette, whatever of her was Link was doomed to be ill-mannered and probably need as serious of an attitude adjustment as her father. Oh, just what she didn't need, a tiny and high- pitched voice squealing "Well ex-CUUUUSE me, Princess!" at her every misfortune and upset moment. Hopefully Link hadn't rallied on the days when he had been a castle-dweller(and when she had shaved his head because of that awful color he had turned it) to Posie…
"Errm, yeah. Well… you know… I've got high hopes for that kid in my art… swordfighting, you know. Wants to be a warrior, just like her daddy. Would've personally thought she'd choose better than this skimpish trade for herself, but, might as well pass the skills on while I still can. You know my signature trick—charging a sword up with energy and then doing the whirling attack. Some call it the flameblade, some call it the whirling blade, some, the Hyrulean tornado… but me, I prefer the good old spinning slash. An old family trick, which I learned from my father… or, to be more precise, I taught myself and then learned what it really was when I met my father's ghost."
"Lovely, Link, lovely." She had her arms crossed again and was rapping her long, delicate fingernails up and down along her frail biceps. "So what's the problem here?"
"Well, she… she… she can't do it! No matter what I try and no matter how much she tries, still she fails. It just… it just really bugs me, you know?!?!"
"Mmm-hmm. And this is the big problem?"
"Zelda, you just don't understand!" Link made a livid gesture out of balling his hands into a double fist and ramming the side of the bookcase. It was made out of stone(like everything else in the Royal Library except the books themselves), so there was no chance of it collapsing on them, but it gave a violent shudder that sent one small, almost insignificant novel crafted with flaky, illuminated letters on brittle onion paper tumbling the long plunge over the carved precipice. It gave Link a solid thwack on the head that sent him dizzy for a few moments, then it trembled onto his shoulder where he picked it up and stuffed it under his arm. "This problem… it isn't just a problem, it's a handicap! It had preoccupied my mind, sapped my strength, and hung my soul out to dry over an abyss I cannot leap."
Zelda looked up and to the right of Link, punching together her lips and giving a few facetious rounds of applause. "Touching five second speech, Link. But what do you honestly expect to find here in the libraries that you can't find within yourself? Maybe if it weren't for the fact that you and Posie are the only two people in all of Hyrule and the world who can pull off this spinning slash whatchamacalit, I'd be more sympathetic, but really…"
"Maybe someday when you marry the prince of your dreams and have kids of your own, you'll understand how I feel. Unconditional love—and the pain that comes with it—isn't something that you can describe to someone who's never felt it before!"
Zelda sniggered evilly. "Try me," she said.
"Fine. It's… it's like… well, you know how you love all the people in your country, even though you don't know them? You love them because… because you're responsible for them. Or maybe, you just love them, no reason. That's unconditional. But… in my case… it's someone I know… my own flesh and blood, even! And seeing them in pain… you can't stand to see your people in pain, can you? Come on, Zelda, I know you're not as cold as you're pretending to be…"
"Alright, I'm not." She let her arms slither back to her torso and extended her right. "Truce, then. I'll leave you alone, and after lunch you can come back and have all the library to yourself to look up whatever you want about your little spinning slash. Deal?"
Link's face fell slightly. "Lunch? What time is it?"
Zelda's outward hand tore back to her breast pocket and withdrew a ticking gold watch inlaid with gems. "Oh… 'bout… twelve-thirty, whereabouts…"
This time, Link's expression was really drastic. "Twelve- thirty? Oh my Goddesses, I promised Saria I'd pick up Posie after school today! Arrg! I'm late! Late late late!" He scrabbled around his belt frantically, stuffing the fancy old book into the strap so it was cemented firmly between the leather band and the smooth, cool fabric of his tunic, and struggled against the band for a few seconds to draw out a small, blue, potato-shaped instrument riddled with tone holes. "Sorry Zelda, love to talk, got to fly!" The mouthpiece was between his lips and out was a haunting Nocturne with notes that seemed to glaze the room purple and form an invisible wall between the princess and her hero. Pressure mounted in her ears and then fell in a horrible pop that sounded like a Bombchu being detonated inside her head, and she opened her drooping eyes just in time to feel the gentle zephyr of coolness and the trickle of magic that sounded like rain on a metal roof. A whirlwind of purple sparks stood where Link had been, and they danced out the window, careening like mist, off in the direction of Kakariko village.
"Aye, poor lad," clucked Ruto, who had come to while Zelda and Link were speaking and hauled herself up and had been gradually clunking, one rheumatic step at a time, up to the circle of ladder, bookcase, and persona formed. "Had eleven of the tykes meself. Had a good point, about not knowing unconditional love till you've met it yourself. Took a book with him though… perchance see what it was?"
"Oh, don't worry about it, Ruto. It was an old book. Small one too, and thin. Tattered green cover… looked like iron edges, and rusty ones at that. Surely one book doesn't mean that much to you?"
"Not just any book, no. But the most valuable book in this library, however… very old, very thin, with a tattered green cover and rusty decorations? The only book left in Hyrule that tells of legends such as the Sacred Flower prophecy and The Sage's Dealings?"
Zelda turned grim and made a face as if she'd just swallowed something very sour. "Well… he's a good guy. He'll bring it back, I'm sure. And in the meantime, I'm positive he'll take good care of it."
***********************
Link's thrown tunic smacked Saria squarely in the face, and she got a nosefull of the odor of aging glue and dust before she peeled the sweaty garment away.
"Eww, Link, gross! Throw your clothes in the hamper, for the Goddesses' sake. Honestly, you have the mannerisms of a seven-year-old boy."
"Could you take it for me, Saria?" Link wiggled like a caterpillar out of his white undershirt, the high collar still sucking on his head as he drew his arms out from the clingy white sleeves and dragged the cloth away from his face. Upturned locks of smudged blonde hair flattened back down against his shining face, excepting for a few wispy ends charged with static that flittered about upright.
"No I will not take it for you! I'm your wife, not your serving maid!" Repulsed, she gave the forest robe one horrendous look before she flung it over her shoulder and into the corner. She expected it to sail off the breeze from the open window and be carried to the handle of the closest, but instead, it was weighted down by some mysterious ballast and thudded down halfway with a fwumph that released a puff of air, billowing upward the tunic's sleeves before they ruffled under gravity's pull to the heap of green, lifeless. She gave the rumpling sleeve a curious glance and a raised eyebrow before Link caught her attention again with his chuckling rebuttal.
"Ehh, same diff." She gave him a silent snarl and he a parrying cheeky grin with plenty of tooth. "Joking… joking… no need to electrocute me now…" The plain, off-blue nightshirt he squirmed into fell over his shoulders and dropped below his waistline before he took off his tights. "I'm sorry, Saria. I'll take my own tunic to the basket. Honestly I will. Happy?"
She snuffed at the air, shoulders raised into a sullen arch. Her lower lip jutted out noticeably below her upper one, and her pupils were tight, even in the low light. The normally pillowy green nightgown, trimmed with lace, was now stretched like a wire frame over her fine, modeled structure. "Fine. I'm happy. Just get it out of here. I'm tired of you always leaving your clothes about. It's bad enough when it's just you, but get Posie started with that and you're good as dead, you hear?" Her scrunched arm, cemented to her side, had its elbow raised in a robotic fashion to point a sculptured finger at his face.
"I'll save the will for later, then," and he strode over to the lumpy tunic and plucked it daintily up between his fingers.
"Offf. Old garb feels a mite heavier than usual, it does. What'd I leave in my pockets this time, eh?" He bounced the material up and down in his fingers, holding his free hand below, and, distorting the fabric as it fell, the little, fancy old book came fumpheting down through the viridian folds to land squarely in Link's palm. "Well now, what have we here?" He began to turn the small volume over in his hands, pondering the bumpy, faded cover, not totally different from the color of his clothes, and the crumbling rusted hinges, more red and decaying brown than the mottled, sturdy iron they had begun as. Thinner-than-wafer-thin pages, written on brittle onion skins(onion paper, it was called), were embossed with the traditional line of gold leaf, shining brilliant on the long side opposite the spine and traced with greenish ink on the short top and bottom. The dusty sheets, some brushing away to become dust themselves, gave away the scent of dark, moldy wetness that indicated at some point or another, this book, like his father's diary, had been spilled upon at some point. He fingered the velvety rims, open sores to the wood frequently pock- marking them, and with a tentative figure inched the tome open to the first page of antediluvian, illuminated letters carefully scripted into the form of the first language of the Hyleans.
"Ha! Looks like I must've accidentally taken this one with me when I left in such a rush." He tickled the pages like the edges of a flip book, riffling them and firing clouds of brown, foul-smelling grime into the air. Saria coughed. "Ahh, I'll be getting it tomorrow, I will."
"Ah, but Zelda—"—she formed the name with obvious distaste—"—surely a single book wouldn't matter, would it? It's not like she keeps track of every last one of the books, is it?" Saria bent to flatten her fingers to the first of the leaf of the prehistoric doctrine, scanning gentle digits across copper-toned words. "Besides, from the look of it and the language it's written in—it's obviously a very old book, yes?"
"Well, maybe the princess doesn't give a darn, but Ruto flips for this sort of stuff. Not that Ruto," Link added, noticing the confounded expression Saria was masked beneath, "the Minister—or to be more precise, Ministress—of Libraries. She'd have my head for a wall trophy if she found out I'd ferreted away one of her precious books."
The image presented by this prospect was too good to bear, but she sealed her laughter behind a powerful mental dam and inhaled sharply. "I suppose you have a point, but… you can take it back in the morning and she'll never know the difference. And I still don't think Ruto or whatever her name is, despite the fact that she's the Librarian minister, is capable of reading ancient Hylean. Only the true Sages still posses that knowledge."
"Well if you know so much about it then why don't you read it, Miss All Powerful Forest Mage?" Link pitched the book with a quick flick of his wrist to Saria, who caught it against her stomach double- handed. His disposition had turned slightly acidic.
"Fine, I will!" Two could play at Link's little annoyance game. She began to browse the runes at an aggravatingly leisurely pace, soaking in the texts and the meanings that she knew Link would kill to be able to skim for himself. But no, she was his only link, to coin an appropriate phrase, to the mysteries that lay inscribed on that flaky paper. From what she had observed so far, it appeared to be a book of old legends, written in the order of which they were predicted or first taken note of. Some were prophecies, such as the Sacred Flower prophecy(which betokened that, some day, a "soul of true Soul would redeem the false Soul from Soulless hearts to fill them with the great violet essence to complete the empty polygon frame." A load of complete nonsense, as far as she was concerned) or the scriptures foretelling of the time when "the reign of blackness and smoke will end and the legends of Zenderlla and her champion shall begin." Part of the Treantè(the Hyrulean holy book) were these divinations, and it was respected by most that Zenderlla was probably some past man's interpretation of the name Zelda, or perhaps Zelda's old form. She wanted to find for Link the piece most saturated with fancy, squirrelly writing and mysterious dialect as she could, for she knew how terribly he detested the speech of olden times and how he was inept at making heads or tails of the stuff. A particularly fancy passage, starting with a great, illustrated A(or the past equivalent), caught her eye, and a woodblock press of a sparkling sword set in a pedestal inlaid with diamonds and other expensive jewels indicated a particularly mythical tale. Plus, the paragraph or so of heavily decorated writing was so mazelike in wording she herself could just barely deduce the meaning. Grinning fiendishly, she held the book at vast length like a farsighted scholar and recited with the dull drone of a school child:
"And whereupon it be known that dwelling midst glacial ap'tudes peakst Ipanajou there live a Scholar of great mind, with his brethren aid hath he complied a large Tome en reading which tells of many great Battles and Wars, and many twixt his brother fought. Tragically his brother fell in one of these great Battles and he had demands't that he be rested in cold soils atop Ipanajou. Kindred soul Departed, the Scholar fell deeply dismay'd and ordered upon his death that merry, he, too, be placed inside that deep Tomb in 'twitch his brother lay. Anon, for frigid death upon white wings, and corpulence of his was found lying 'neath ice berry bushes. Laid down 'twas he in the musty Chamber, where his soul did Arise and meet his brother's passing. Set upon a great Pedestal was his brother's sword, 'twitch he imbued his Soul and Essence and his great Learning of the Ways of the Sword. Lest it now be known that he who first enters this Scholar's Tomb and places palms with the hilt of that Sword shalt gain the strength of Every Skill, for it is the sword of Obedience and giveth to the Holder its all power to control Every Sword by Every Name, for each unto its name spoken will instantly Obey, and perform any feet at the willingness of it's Holder's mind. Therefore, its Holder shall become the greatest Warrior ever known to Hyrule, for they shalt have command of all Swords."
"Pah!" coughed Link. "Will you get a load of that dry old trash? Listen to it! First of all, Mount Ipanajou is the coldest, wettest, most desolate place on this entire shrouded continent, for the Goddesses' sake, so I don't see why any person in their right mind, let alone a scholar, would want to live there. And a scholar having good relations with a warrior, brother or not… no. And a person rising as a ghost to imbue their nature into a sword… good grief, the greatest fabrication these point ears ever heard. Control over all swords, honestly." He bowed his head and pivoted on a foot back towards the bed. "I'll be off to sleep now, if you don't mind terribly. Not like our conversation was going anywhere…" He adjusted his pointy green cap on that hat stand where it, too, slept, and clambered wearily beneath woven blue covers padded with goose down. "G'night, Saria. Love you always, my precious eriiko." He then laid his head placidly down on a billowing, cloudy pillow, eased his watering eyes shut tight and took a deep, relaxing breath. Saria stood watching him for a few seconds, eyeing his chest as it fell in a steady, rhythmic tattoo that seemed to time with the blustering of the shutters in the chilled night wind.
Suddenly he had bolted upright quicker than a jolt from a Bari's tentacle.
"That's it!"
"What's what?"
Link had performed a break-dancing sort of move, spinning around wildly and flinging the covers over on themselves like an omelet. He vaulted on to his feet and scrambled over to Saria, shouting "Give me that book!" and firmly grasping it in his hands, making an attempt to wrench it from her grasp. She did not make an effort to fight back, but her arms were dragged out away from her chest where they had clutched the volume in a cross pattern over ways. She merely jibed slightly with "Careful, that book's old!" as Link turned it over in his hands, then furiously flapped it open and snatched huge lumps of pages, frantically searching back and forth exclaiming, "Where is it? Where the heck is it?"
Saria bumbled to Link's side and peaked over his shoulder, carefully extending a hand to try and quell the mad gallop at which it meaninglessly tore through the brittle parchment like a maniacal and ravenous carnivore that had just spotted a herd of easy prey. "Please, Link… calm down… what are you looking for?"
"That page! Where is that page with the thing you just read?"
"Oh! Please, stop it! You're destroying priceless knowledge!" Her hand, atop her contorted wrist, gripped the book by its spine, where all its pages came together, and a Link who had built up far too much momentum accidentally gashed through several pieces of the fragile report. He let slip from his hands the novel as easy Saria had let it flow past hers, and now the runic expert took the writings of the past and licked her thumb and forefinger to delicately pass pages through to come to the etching of the phosphorescent rapier. "There. This what you were looking for? I thought it was a load of dry old trash…"
"No!" Link greedily stole the book back in the never-ending game of keep-away, then cradled the document in the bough of his right elbow and indicated, with his Triforce-emblazoned left, the span of the yellowing sentences. "Don't you see? This is it! This is exactly what I've been looking for! I can't read it, but you can and you just did, and it's all I've needed all along! Oh, imagine, if I'd never smacked that bookcase and hadn't tried to leave the castle in a hurry…!"
Saria was utterly lost, and conveyed this to Link in a grisly face.
"This sword… this Sword of Obedience, Saria! It's the answer to all of my problems! All I've got to do is hike up Mount Ipanajou, get this sword, and bring it back to Posie! Voila, no more spinning slash problems! Heck, no more sword problems, period! This blade gives its holder power over all swords! Power to do anything, Saria! Posie would become… would become…" The fervently zealous words snagged on his vocal cords in his throat. Dare he speak those sparkling, great golden words, opened up like a door before him? The most powerful warrior in all of the universe! It could be their little Posie! She, more famous than he with more power than he could ever posses in all of his lifetime! The sweat was glomming down his forehead, even though the dark was brisk. Oh, it had been years since he had felt his adrenaline pumping more brashly than blood through his veins! Since the leather straps encircling his sword's glistening hilt had the feel of true magic to him! It was not the sword; it was not the solving of Posie's problem; it was the wild, haunting call of adventure! True adventure! Not "Save-The-Village-From-The-Moblins," not "Exterminate- The-Hoard-Of-Skulltulas," but "Go-Out-On-A-Mystic-Quest-For-The-Rare-Magic- Artifact!" What he did, what it was truly his position in life to do! Once more it would be him, just him, contending with nature! Just him against the odds! Just him…
Saria's voice cut with a record scratch through his glorified, half-waking dreams. "Not quite, Mr. Hero. It says it gives the first to touch it power over all swords. That would mean that Posie would have to be there to jerk the thing from the stone, which wouldn't mean that you'd have to… oh no. No no no no. Not that. Anything but that…"
But as for "anything but that," it would look more like Saria would have to settle for an "all but that." Link's eyes were the flint of his soul, and sparks flew in all directions from their sapphire nature. The old, lunatic glint dappled across the pools of liquid blue fire, and the dream-like, scheming smile took priority over the plains of his face. A hint of "big daddy" was still there, of course. It would be ineradicable, because of Posie. And the calm, logical brain still held its terra firma in twitching ears, their tips alert skyward like a pair of antenna on the watch for enemy presence above. But this was the new—or rather, old—Link, who had a plot and a plan that had all been ignited by her big mouth. She had regretted those words quite as soon as she had said them. She knew he was going to try into launch into some ghastly humongous explanation of his first contrivance in five years, since Posie had been born and Zelda had been sent "sleeping beauty" by the late—good riddance—Ganon, now composed of various ashes scattered about Hyrule and who definitely wasn't going to be bothering them in a while. But instead he simply stood, mouth silent but eyes positively giddy—glancing off into the brilliant moon outside the wind, blue irises reflecting the musical beams and the silhouette of a gawky bird that glided past, with a royal purple corona highlighted by a bristly mud-colored tail and a shocking white crest. Link could almost make out its hooked, olive beak and bulbous eyes. A strange species to be sure, but there was hardly anything that could be doubted in Hyrule.
"Good night, Saria," he said simply. "I must be getting rested. I have to go talk with a few members of the Royal Court tomorrow, if you don't mind." And with that he slunk back under the covers and drifted off into a dreamland full of legendary blades, grand adventures, and Posie Cassandra Blade, the greatest knight in all Hyrule's history.
Yawning, Saria moved her thoughts away from the intoxicatingly beautiful moon and led them to the dejected tunic still lying on the floor. Poor Link—he never had quite gotten around to putting it in the hamper. Sighing at the futility of trying to get her lazy husband to do any chores, no matter how trivial, she reached for the sad little dropped piece of clothing and foisted it up into her arms. But before hobbling over to the hamper to toss the thing in as a candidate for the next wash, she took a moment to bury he face in the caressing folds of the suit and to intake a whiff of the wild smells of outside Hyrule that still clung in curtains, a(sometimes grim) curtain that never shut. The patches, the stains, every minute detail, right down from the ratio of the smell of dark, moist caves to evergreen forests, told her that this was the adventure tunic, the one he had worn on so many of his great expeditions. The wildest one of them all. But, strange fantasies notwithstanding, the shirt was badly in need of a good scrub-down, so she set it on top of a neatly folded skirt and a doll-sized outfit in the hamper.
"What a twit," she mumbled to the dozing Link as she slipped herself into bed, "What a wonderful, wonderful twit."
2
3 The sign said, "Do Not Disturb."
4
5 The expression on her face said, Do Not Disturb? Do not disturb, my medallion!
6
7 The deep, full drone wheezed in and out, an incessant roar that sent shivers through the stems of the farthest flowers in the darkest reaches of the Lost Woods. Its trembling tirade howled through the ears of everyone within a fifty foot radius and made them reel back in vexation. A lion would be jealous, an ancient dinosaur would envy, the snorting, growling barks of Link's snores.
8
9 She tossed the waist-length mane of emerald silk over her shoulder and out of her face, the whispers as the glistening lines of viridian gossamer shifted the peals of silver bell. Long lashes blinked slowly over eyes set like a pair of single-rupee gems, though infinitely more priceless. Cheeks glowing and rosy perfectly complimented delicate porcelain shapes that twisted gracefully and enchantingly, though it was clear from the torque in the rose-petal lips that this living china doll was imped, as one could be expected to be after having to live through the constant dogging hubbub that filled the air in the Kokiri's realm.
10
11 A deliciously flutelike voice, inlaid with the very pearls of laughter, sighed as the rupee-eyes glanced across the makeshift bulletin Link had placed upon the door. Although the humdrum noise was no new circumstance to her life, and so many had been the times when she had stumbled over that overly ornate, largely loopy handwriting, it was now that it cut into her nerves and caused what was so normally a figure of beauty to be distorted. She ran her soft, slender fingers over the grain of the scrap wood, blots of ink rubbing off and shamefully tainting her fingerprints. That ringing tone spoke again, saucy and scattering those jewels of laughter like marbles on a polished floor.
12
13 "Sorry, buddy, but if I don't disturb someone's going to get arrested for breaking the peace." She placed her hand firmly upon the brass doorknob and shoved the door open.
14
15 The library—if it could really be called that, it was more of a rather large study—was a complete and utter mess. A dejected quill blotted ink over piles and piles of creamy yellow paper, hastily scrawled with notes about theories of inner magic nature and of common tactics of battle. Pieces of parchment fluttered down from the tops of shelves, and priceless scrolls containing the wisdom of bygone mages were strewn about in a caddy- wompus manner. Esoteric volumes lay stacked in haphazard columns, and myriad tomes were erected in no conceivable order at all, pages flying open in the breeze from the newly-opened door. It was as if a particularly knowledge-hungry rabid dog had come tearing through the room, ripping apart the neatly assembled shelves in a quest for one single piece of information—a piece which as of yet still lay fossilized somewhere beneath the heaps of books, and the dog in question had fallen from fatigue whilst leaning over the edge of a rolling stepladder to the highest spaces.
Link was dozing into both the side of his arm and a rather large space in she shelves, whose contents now lay spilled to his side on the floor. One of his limbs was limp by his side, bare fingers still desperately clutching the spine of a bulky manuscript with a crimson velvet cover and embellished gold lettering. His other had been presumably going for the last encyclopedia left on the particular section of the shelf until he had blacked out completely, arm coming against the ladder's edge and Link's face nodding forward into its side. He mumbled something incomprehensible in his sleep, the turned his head and she could see the imprint of his hair on his skin.
The hot, pungent fragrance of the simmering stew, combined with the mouth-watering aroma of Chocolate Death cake, seemed enough to wake the man as it was. Yet there he still lazed, mouth hanging open and hand turning sallow as the pressure applied by his face cut off the better part of his circulation. She scolded him under her breath for being such a bum, then trotted up to his side, shaking her head. Sorry, buddy, she thought, but I gotta do what I gotta do.
"Psst… Link…" She hissed into his ear. "Link, get up. Get up. Up, you good-for-nothing!"
Link snorted and spat out a piece of dust. Still he remained unbudged.
Well, so much for plan A: Complain at him until he wakes. On to plan B, then: Insults.
"Link, you tramp! Beggar! You're nothing more than an overgrown, selfish brat who doesn't know right from idiotic and you're stupid enough to fall asleep standing up!"
"Nggg. Fi mo' minuf, Mom." His head craned about on his neck until it rested back in the crook of his arm, then he went back to snoring.
Odd that he should be talking to his mother in his sleep; she died before he was even old enough to remember her. She groaned and placed a hand on Link's shoulder. There was a blue end to spectrum, too. And she had a plan C in reserve, one that worked ninety-nine point nine percent of the time: Sickeningly sweetness.
"Shh…" She giggled, and whispered flirtatiously in his ear, "Oh, Link, you absolutely gorgeous hunk of Hylian, you… sugar bunny, sweetie pie, darling? Oh, fudge bar, my cupcake, won't you please get up? I need to stare into your sapphire eyes again, or else I fear I shall fall apart…"
Somewhere from the depths of his dream, Link sniggered, and broke into a coy smile. "Are you busy this Friday?" he asked the invisible maiden of his reverie.
That was it. Hands on her hips, she saw only one last way out. Fire blazing behind her eyes, she stared intensely at Link, bizarre crackling noises occupying the air between them and a sudden flash of heat torching the room.
Staring out the window of his home in Hyrule Castle Town, Randy snickered cynically as he saw a sphere of green light erupt from many miles away in the direction of the Kokiri Forest.
Flat on his back, thrown from the ladder by the instant eruption of fire, magic and electricity, Link stared shocked and unblinking at a pale, green ceiling. Rotten-looking red welts had already begun to spring from his darkened skin, and every strand of his blonde floss was repelled from his scalp and upward, into the air. The whites were large around his eyes and their pupils were shrunk into mere specks. Grotesque flecks peeled from scorched areas where the lightning had connected. Black cinders dotted the folds of a once perfect forest tunic. His mouth was still hanging, but now it was cupped into a dazed smile while sweat dripped from a reddened forehead. His entire body shone with burn.
"You know, pushing me off the ladder probably would have been a lot less painful?!?!"
She shook her head a final time. "Yes, and then it would have knocked you out colder than your were. I don't think so. Besides, you never fail to bend at my magical whim." He looked at her darkly and she couldn't resist the urge to laugh and kneel and stroke his hair with a mischievous cackle in her eye. "Oh, but don't you worry, you know I'd never hit you with anything powerful enough to actually do you lasting harm, just cause some temporary discomfort. Honestly, you've known me all the twenty-four years of your life and still you don't know me well enough?"
"Temporary discomfort…!!!" He began to stir with rage, but it was a false rage and he eased himself back into a placid state as he had tried to sit up, but immediately released back down again when he discovered the skin upon his palms to be far too tender to bear weight. Instead, he sighed, looked pleadingly up into her face with eyes that whimpered and howled with pain. She clicked her tongue in annoyance, but the gentle flutter of her heart came to her sleeves as she pressed a cool, smooth hand to his forehead and willed into being a brigade of prancing green sparks that ebbed and flowed their way down Link's persona and took with them all the dark, scalding flesh and returned the glimmering gold to charred strands of hair. The pain melted into a void and Link could sit up again, enough so to look into her face.
"Honestly, Saria, I don't know where I'd be without you… though how far I've gotten with you, on the other hand, is certainly a debatable topic."
Saria's voice, long having left the innocent tinkle of childhood behind for the deeper, more chimelike toll of the womanhood that was only hers by accident, nevertheless had always had the same laugh, a laugh that cut through the atmosphere at that moment and smothered Link in its glorious waves. The small, humid room, steam from down below billowing in, seemed to ripple all around with silver threads and motes of dust, illuminated by the last of the rays that trickled through the window, were touched by a flicker of golden fire whose jaws, in the middle of the great golden flames, was stroked by an earthy green that seemed part of only the Lost Woods and their keeper in particular. Pages ruffled in the absence of a cross-draft and a bound scroll tumbled over the floor before that laugh came to an end.
"But honestly," she cleared her throat and began, "I came up here to talk to you and that's what I plan to do. You've been holed up here in the library since dawn this morning, flipping pages and driving yourself to exhaustion chasing about scrolls. You've obviously been taking notes, but so hastily I bet you'd even have trouble reading them if you tried. What have you been looking for, Link?"
"Information." His reply was short, curt and very open-ended, and that was exactly the way he had planned it. He propelled himself to his feet and set one boot tip on the lowest rung of the ladder when Saria called to him again.
"What, that's it? You're just going to blow me off like that?" He turned his head. "Obviously it must be some very important information about something, because you never ate breakfast, you completely blew off lunch, and you actually fell asleep right before dinner! Link Hiro Blade being so preoccupied he has no time to think about food is like an Eskimo being so wrapped up in building an igloo that they can't notice the polar bear about to tear them to shreds!"
"OK. Fine then. It's important. You got a problem with that?" He hiked up the next few steps.
Saria clutched her forehead. "Darling…" She strode briskly to the ladder, gazing up into Link's face as his eyes scanned the shelves for the volume that he had been locked on to earlier. "Please don't do this to me; you know I love you and wouldn't ever do anything to make you feel bad… come on Link, I know this may sound a bit harsh, but… grow up. If a Kokiri can do it, then so can you."
Link sniffled a little and sneezed as a little cloud of dust entered his nose. He pondered this for a bit, then, reproachfully slid backwards down the ladder and shoved it aside. He stared into Saria's face, trying to pretend… this was an ordinary conversation. There were in the Sacred Forest Meadow, he just returning from a seemingly endless romp across Hyrule, she the Kokirish Saria of yesteryear, with a round, cherubic face, framed by curls and swirls of her trademark viridian hair, and lanky hands far too big for their own good. But the crystalline(and similarly hard) gaze of those rupee eyes knocked him far off balance, for the simple turquoise bobble that had once drawn calm from the deepest pits of his soul was no more. Where in the process they had changed was beyond Link's comprehension, perhaps it was a side effect of the spell that had struck her. But now, rather than instilling serenity, they invoked a fevered sense of passion; a one-two skip of his heart, a heavy breath, and it was like seeing her for the first time again in a mature body, bestowed by the ricochet of the spell, and falling in love with her over again. He was melting through her fingers, and by the triumphant smirk on her lips, she knew that he was. His body was falling away from his mind, leaving it vulnerable and open, and those deep-held furies begged to be released…
"Aye… fine then, you've won. I surrender. It… it's Posie."
Saria bunched her lips, but remained, for the most part, inarticulate. The only sounds she made we an Mmm-hmm in the bottom of her throat with a nod to accompany it.
"Well… you know… what happened Friday. She was… pretty upset about that. I… I already… told you…"
"Yes yes. What about what happened Friday? You told me that she tried to show off that little spin trick of yours, failed, and got pretty upset. I don't know about what happened there…"
"…But by the time she got home, she was terribly sad and cried for at least an hour after she woke up." The two finished, in unison, the sentence, and Link glanced up from the vivid gestures he was making with his hands to catch the tip of a smile from Saria's cheeks. It didn't take six years bound together under one roof for the two to start finishing what the other was saying. They'd know each other for so long that they'd been doing it since childhood. Normally, it made them giggle to know how prophetic they were of each other's words, but the look Link bore remained stone cold and dead serious, making Saria recoil as if she'd been tapped with a whip.
"I've been thinking." He fiddled with a pencil he'd bent down and picked up off the floor, sticking his tongue out in concentration. Saria dearly wanted to retort with "That's a first," but knew it was not the time. Despite the fact that she loved him more as a person than as a friend now, old habits died hard and occasionally, things would revert back to the ways they were in the good old days. "Seeing my precious little girl so upset really struck home, and I've decide I've got to do something about it. She's wanted to be just like me ever since she found out who I really was, and I want to give her that chance. I've tried to teach her my tricks of the trade, but it's hard for both of us. It's been a year now since she first tried to do the spinning slash…"
As if on cue, a miniscule, male voice keened shrilly, accompanied by a background drone and followed by "Hey! What have your parents told you about practicing in the house?!?!"
"Well, you were behind me, Glowball! How am I supposed to try not hit you if I can't see you?"
Saria groaned inwardly. It was true, several times had the firmly told Posie that she was never to attempt tricks inside, and her testimony against Atahl really had nothing to do with that. But it could wait… she was firmly interested in what Link had to say. She made beckoning motions with her hands. "Go on…"
"So I… I've been looking… for… any sort of answer, really… in these…" He turned around, making a sweeping stroke. "I know there must be a clue, a key, somewhere…"
Saria wore a blank mask. Her mouth hung slack-jawed, her eyes trailed unfocused. There was nothing there for an instant, just a black void that drained her soul, and then… she snapped back into reality, and, loosing a distressed breath, fell into a fit of horribly tired chuckling.
"Link… you nitwit, you… the slash is your family's best kept secret and one of the greatest enigmas of our time—how in Hyrule do you honestly expect to find…"
He stifled. "A hunch."
A "hunch." A "hunch!" Hadn't that man learned yet that his hunches seldom carried the mother lode? That unless he made an educated guess based on fact they never would? Just because her collection of books had always been large and arcane, that didn't mean she owned the knowledge of the world! Just because the Blades had been one of the most prominent warrior families in all of Hyrule didn't mean that their deepest, darkest secrets were going to be stashed away in her den. Why, one was just about as likely to find the ancient ways of the Blade clan in those books as they were of the family who lived next door to the pizza parlor in Hyrule Castle Town! In the olden days, people seldom knew how to read or write, even the knights of high blood, so it was unlikely any prehistoric Blade had written the secrets of their technique in a diary or journal. There was the journal of Link's father buried somewhere in that stash, it was true, but apparently dear old Jeremiah Emilio Blade was a clumsy man who had unwittingly spilled his morning coffee over his life's ponderings one day twenty-four years ago, leaving only one passage readable that depicted only a mundane argument he'd been recently having with himself about whether or not to leave his secret cottage to enlist in the war. Nowhere in all of that clutter—in all of the clutter of all of Hyrule!—was there going to be a book talking about the slash. Ganon's ashes in their grave, was there no sense in all of his mind?
It was easy to refrain from showing amusement—but it was difficult not to give in to frustration. Already her cheeks were reddening.
"Erii, erii," she mumbled darkly to herself, which was the equivalent in the ancient, spellbinding language of the first Kokiri to "child, child." Because Kokiri were always children, they had no particular word for the youthful sort, but an erii was a particularly young(or foolish) Kokiri who had little sense of how the world worked. Although Link had never bothered to learn the lie of the Kokirish tongue of old, he knew a few distinct phrases, erii being one of them. He often heard Saria sigh this when he was nigh to her and doing something particularly ridiculous, at which point her knew to stop lest he want to face the brilliant heat and terrible pulse of her thunder-spell again. More willing was he to hear her utter the word eriiko, which referred to an also young, but perfectly innocent, Kokiri who was sweet and likeable, much like a man or woman from the outside might call their significant other "baby" or "pet."(The Kokiri had no real word for a baby, as they hardly went through a "baby" stage themselves as they are born knowing how to walk and talk, and pets besides guardian fairies were unheard of.)
"Err… I take it you… you don't think my hunch is very… accurate?"
"Accurate? Link, PROMISE me that if Hyrule ever manages to get her hands on some of that fancy missile technology they've got over in places like North America and Asia—you know, the continents most people can actually see, not like good old shrouded Ebridane here—you'll never be on the launch team. Never."
"My aim is that bad?"
"You don't know the half of it, erii."
Link snorted, then crossed his arms, leaned his back into the wall and said casually, bracing his foot behind him, "Well, will you look at that? I can't even get a good word outta my best friend—my best friend and wife! Now if you'll ex-CUUUUSE me, Saria, I'll just head back to my research, thankyouverymuch."
"Fine then, starve. I'm heading back down to set the table for dinner. I ONLY came up here to tell you that dinner was just about ready."
"You said you came down here to talk to me," Link stated firmly.
"Well, yes I did, and I was going to inform you about eating anyway. So if you don't mind, I'll be away." She turned to leave. "Oh yeah, and one more thing, you ninny." Her head was perched backwards over her shoulders.
"What?" he bit, surly.
"Love ya." She flirtatiously flittered her eyelashes a blew a kiss.
The door creaked shut, but not before Link could practically feel the waves in the air from Saria's breath caress his face. A smile—a microscopic smile, but a smile nonetheless—itched his face, and he couldn't help but turn a bit dreamy. OK, so having her by his side day and night got a bit more claustrophobic than the old days—it didn't matter. The old days were just that, the old days and they were gone. Fingering lightly the spot where he swore Saria's kiss had hit, he marched across the room, loping over streamers of scraps while gazing dazedly forward. He'd always known the spell had been his fault. Maybe he did change Saria from a Kokiri to a true Hylian. He was glad about it every step of the way. Ajabando maho h erii, thyart ajabando maho gaqu erii. "He is a fool, but he is my fool—" and it was a bondage he had no resentments to being part of.
And maybe… he would stop thinking about what had happened last Friday. Maybe. Just maybe.
Maybe, at least, till he went to the Royal Libraries tomorrow. Now there were the answers.
************************
A clattering sound echoed through the stories of tall marble pillars and glossy marbled floors and polished marble ceiling that made the eyelids twitch about equally marbled gray eyes. A small poof of dust skirted over the peak of wiry gray hair sculpted into a rude bun atop the head of a vulture-necked old hunchbacked woman with cracking glasses poised on a crooked nose. Sinewy, veined hands pressed down with sweaty palms on the bronzing letters of a hand-copied book from aeons before. The weathered, brown skin was splattered with ink blots and printing-press imprints and the like, while aforementioned eyes plunged about glistening reflections in cold stone, and a voice as jagged and antique as the mountains themselves croaked out a few words before falling into a hacking fit: "Are you positive you're alright there, sonny?"
A dust-laden cough choked back. "Fine, fine! Just—hrough—decide to peruse the lower shelves, that's all!"
A concoction of leathery skin, the thick, dark lines of blood vessels, and the rickety shapes of old, arthritic bones molded itself about the head of a finely carved cane of support, which had the foot of a lion twisted about with strands of ivy. "Sounds more to me like you fell from the ladder! Are you sure you'll be fine, boy?"
"Ruto, I'm fine! And stop calling me 'boy!' I'm a grown man, for the Goddesses' sake! And I'm…"
"And you're married and you have a little girl named Posie, I know. Ha! I'll stop calling you boy, alright. The day you show me your great-great grandchildren!" The archaic old hag chuckled grimly and stiffly rose to her feet, as one might who had just taken a good long fall and landed smack dab on their rear end. However, it was quite clear she hadn't(which was a good thing, because if she had, she might very well have shattered into a million pieces), she simply had a very old skeleton, very old indeed, and wasn't quite as spry as she used to be. But for someone who had lost count of their years at least 30 of them ago, she had a remarkable amount of get-up and go—well, at least the go part. The getting up was a struggle. Her name was Ruto, yes, like the sage, and had been born in a time when the Sages were merely a legend that was as likely as the next to come true, but still made for a good and exciting story whose heroes nearly every child was named after in some way, hoping that they might be the reincarnation of one of those glorious mages. This particular Ruto was very glad it was the animated Zora princess and not herself who was destined to fulfil the role of the protector of all of Hyrule's waters, though she did cackle in her geezerly way whenever Link happened to look her way, as she thought blithely of the amorous young mermaid giggling frantically after the rather handsome young hero. But he was betrothed to another, she reminded herself, and ironically another Sage—Saria, green mistress of growing things. A sensible girl, she nodded. And thankfully so! Much better for him than that aloof, bubble-headed bleach-blonde Zoey. No, wait, Zoey wasn't right… Zia? Ack, she was terrible with names… whatever the name was of Mercutioe's spoiled daughter.
"I'd like to, but one or both of us is going to be dead by that time!" Link struggled ineptly to free his leg from a pile of ancient scribblings with rusty metal spines. Gray specks flecked his normally shimmering golden locks, giving them a dull, disconcerted look that would have fit him more back in his knight-errant days. Ah, but she had forgotten—it wouldn't have done much to him then, as he had temporarily dyed his hair brown to fit in more with his rugged lifestyle. How long that had lasted! After finding out that someone (who had most likely been Zima… no, that was STILL off…) had crept into his bedroom at night, shaved his head, and left the hastily scribbled note card of "You looked better as a blonde, signed, An Anonymous Fangirl," he quickly set about to re-grow his hair in its natural color—but not before tossing his entire supply of hair dye out the window, after which it promptly landed atop the wandering head of the
King, who had been ambling through his gardens. This might not have been so bad for the King, were it not for the fact he had no natural hair left to dye. All photographs of the King, casual or otherwise, showed his crown firmly cemented to his cranium for weeks afterwards.
"If you continue this way, boy, then it may very well be you who goes first!"
"Har har and ho ho, Ruto, you're such a laugh! This hills must've learnt all their tricks from you!" He clamped down on a heavy manuscript from amidst the lump of them at his feet and brushed a film of powder from its front, freeing the embellished gold leaf lettering from its prison of neglect. Dragon Taming for Dummies. Got his vote for scariest horror novel of the year. He crammed it back into the nearest level bookshelf with a space in it(which there was none) and proceeded to nit- pick fastidiously through the mound of heavy stacks of glue, paper and thread, shaking away long-abandoned bookworm cocoons and sighing at one after another of useless volumes. One by one he examined covers like a scholar, and one by one he stuffed them back into their shelf in a very un- scholarly manner.
"Well, my humor is world famous, you know! Even my early attempts were funny! I'm sure you're heard the one about the Cucco who tried to cross the road…"
Link ignored the old woman's ridicule and instead tried to focus on something outside the library he was determined to tunnel through with a fine-toothed comb until he'd either seen it all or found an answer. A bird chittering outside the gold-embellished window… the gentle whistling of the wind over the ancient branches it had warped and polished… silken footfalls on the tile outside…
A creek and the great golden doors parted.
Ruto began to growl to herself. There, in the threshold, stood Xena(That WAS correct, right?), blue eyes ablaze with a mystic curiosity, balmy ripples of murky blonde(Ruto would have called it dishwater, but the girl's bloody royal status put all thoughts of that away in her head) bouncing with newly primped curls down her back. Long, elbow gloves of finely knitted chiffon lavender delicately adorned shapely hands, while a long, crimped muslin skirt whorled over her feet. A thicker, more velvety and almost apron-like cloth was draped in front of the gown, embroidered with national images—a stylized eagle, a swirl here and there, and a blue- and-gold Triforce the major features. Paradoxical shoulder plates domed across hers, though they were golden and thin and ceremonial, not the heavy, steel and titanium ones the knights wore. In the tiny lobes of her triangular ears hung Triforce earrings, all features blending together to become the heir apparent to Hyrule, the future Queen of a land with strong moral values rooted in religion, but with the backup of great knowledge of magic and the ways of the world. It was too much to hope that she would find a way to link their land with the world(though that was secretly what everyone hoped of future monarch), though she had at least succeed in working with Link, her trusted bodyguard, assistant, friend and, at one time before he had found Saria, lover, to at least bring a few of their problems to light across the globe. Link, who had done the majority of the bargaining, hadn't had the heart to tell her that it was only in a "video game," an electronically advanced form of entertainment that, thought would have delighted many Hylians, had difficulty working in Ebridane like many foreign technologies because of the lost continent's magic overload.
"Hullo, Zelda," said Link dishearteningly.
Zelda…! So THAT was her name! Ruto, feeling rather stupid, went and tried to hit her head against the wall, but hit so hard that she fell unconscious on the floor.
"Link…?" Zelda braced her palms against the pressuring sides of the massive doors and swiveled her head from side to side. She spotted him gazing into the depths of a tome entitled Greatest Mysteries of Ebridane, and smiled. He continued to flip pages, and her smile fell.
"Are you alright?" She stepped into the library's light and the door fell shut with a great rushing of air behind her, a vacuum that threatened to drag her back into the great amber crystal light of the chandelier-illuminated hallway.
"Never been better, Zelda," he lied.
"Alright. What's up?" Either she hadn't heard him, or didn't believe him, the latter being the more likely of the two. "Now look, I know you hate council meetings as much as the next red-blooded, never-sit-still insatiable-hunger-for-action type of warrior, but actually calling one off, to look at books nonetheless, old books, is so unlike you! You got a bug of some sort? Something affecting your brain?"
"Fine. I've got strep throat and uh… have to get my tonsils removed. Just… finding out more about the operation?" He grinned, and then coughed for emphasis. "See? My throat feels so… uck, swollen…"
Zelda gave a discontented look, then eyed Link suspiciously and bent over to pick up a small sample of the documents that he had cached at his feet. "Great Knights of Hyrule? Beginning Fencing? All You Ever Wanted To Know About Magic But Were Afraid To Ask?" she said, reciting the titles of the three books she held out loud. "No can do, bud. Now tell me. Honestly. What in the name of heaven and Hyrule are you looking for?"
Great, a repeat of the "Saria" conversation. "Well… maybe I'm not sick… but I might as well be. I've got this problem, see, with…"
"Ah, a problem," Zelda interrupted. "Now we're getting somewhere. I'm listening, big guy…"
Link immediately saw this as an opportunity to stray from the beaten path and to try and take the princess's attention away from what she had come in here to do. "Stop it!"
"Stop what?" Zelda seemed genuinely confused. Her arms were crossed in front of her pale pink dress.
"Stop flirting with me!"
Zelda dropped her arms in shock. "Flirting?!?! I wasn't flirting with you! Even I know better than to flirt with a guy who's already got a wife, not to mention one whom he loves very much!"
"You to were flirting! You called me big guy! You haven't called me that since before Saria and I were married!"
"Oh, never mind!" She brushed in front of her face as if an annoying little shiny black buzzing insect were darting back and forth before her nose. "You were just trying to detour from the subject anyway. What's the matter, Link? Come on. If I can't get it from you, then I'm going to ask Saria or Randy. And who would you rather I heard it from, them or you?"
Link winced, and little subliminal prickles bunched up in the shoulders of his tunic. She did have a point. Even though he hadn't told Randy, Saria knew, and letting Saria make mountains out of molehills(and—even worse!—with that terrible cynical fairy Atahl droning by her shoulder) was a fate worse than death, or a burst of green lighting. His breath jumped out of his chest as he tried to take one painful look into Zelda's eyes. "Fine, fine. You know Posie…"
"Oh yes, Posie, your…"
"Daughter, Zelda."
"Right. Daughter. Charming." Ha, if she truly was Link's daughter, chances were she was anything but. Of course, she'd never met the child, but Link had promised to bring her to the castle some day. Though Zelda thought that the half of Posie that was Saria might at least be versed in at least a bit of proper etiquette, whatever of her was Link was doomed to be ill-mannered and probably need as serious of an attitude adjustment as her father. Oh, just what she didn't need, a tiny and high- pitched voice squealing "Well ex-CUUUUSE me, Princess!" at her every misfortune and upset moment. Hopefully Link hadn't rallied on the days when he had been a castle-dweller(and when she had shaved his head because of that awful color he had turned it) to Posie…
"Errm, yeah. Well… you know… I've got high hopes for that kid in my art… swordfighting, you know. Wants to be a warrior, just like her daddy. Would've personally thought she'd choose better than this skimpish trade for herself, but, might as well pass the skills on while I still can. You know my signature trick—charging a sword up with energy and then doing the whirling attack. Some call it the flameblade, some call it the whirling blade, some, the Hyrulean tornado… but me, I prefer the good old spinning slash. An old family trick, which I learned from my father… or, to be more precise, I taught myself and then learned what it really was when I met my father's ghost."
"Lovely, Link, lovely." She had her arms crossed again and was rapping her long, delicate fingernails up and down along her frail biceps. "So what's the problem here?"
"Well, she… she… she can't do it! No matter what I try and no matter how much she tries, still she fails. It just… it just really bugs me, you know?!?!"
"Mmm-hmm. And this is the big problem?"
"Zelda, you just don't understand!" Link made a livid gesture out of balling his hands into a double fist and ramming the side of the bookcase. It was made out of stone(like everything else in the Royal Library except the books themselves), so there was no chance of it collapsing on them, but it gave a violent shudder that sent one small, almost insignificant novel crafted with flaky, illuminated letters on brittle onion paper tumbling the long plunge over the carved precipice. It gave Link a solid thwack on the head that sent him dizzy for a few moments, then it trembled onto his shoulder where he picked it up and stuffed it under his arm. "This problem… it isn't just a problem, it's a handicap! It had preoccupied my mind, sapped my strength, and hung my soul out to dry over an abyss I cannot leap."
Zelda looked up and to the right of Link, punching together her lips and giving a few facetious rounds of applause. "Touching five second speech, Link. But what do you honestly expect to find here in the libraries that you can't find within yourself? Maybe if it weren't for the fact that you and Posie are the only two people in all of Hyrule and the world who can pull off this spinning slash whatchamacalit, I'd be more sympathetic, but really…"
"Maybe someday when you marry the prince of your dreams and have kids of your own, you'll understand how I feel. Unconditional love—and the pain that comes with it—isn't something that you can describe to someone who's never felt it before!"
Zelda sniggered evilly. "Try me," she said.
"Fine. It's… it's like… well, you know how you love all the people in your country, even though you don't know them? You love them because… because you're responsible for them. Or maybe, you just love them, no reason. That's unconditional. But… in my case… it's someone I know… my own flesh and blood, even! And seeing them in pain… you can't stand to see your people in pain, can you? Come on, Zelda, I know you're not as cold as you're pretending to be…"
"Alright, I'm not." She let her arms slither back to her torso and extended her right. "Truce, then. I'll leave you alone, and after lunch you can come back and have all the library to yourself to look up whatever you want about your little spinning slash. Deal?"
Link's face fell slightly. "Lunch? What time is it?"
Zelda's outward hand tore back to her breast pocket and withdrew a ticking gold watch inlaid with gems. "Oh… 'bout… twelve-thirty, whereabouts…"
This time, Link's expression was really drastic. "Twelve- thirty? Oh my Goddesses, I promised Saria I'd pick up Posie after school today! Arrg! I'm late! Late late late!" He scrabbled around his belt frantically, stuffing the fancy old book into the strap so it was cemented firmly between the leather band and the smooth, cool fabric of his tunic, and struggled against the band for a few seconds to draw out a small, blue, potato-shaped instrument riddled with tone holes. "Sorry Zelda, love to talk, got to fly!" The mouthpiece was between his lips and out was a haunting Nocturne with notes that seemed to glaze the room purple and form an invisible wall between the princess and her hero. Pressure mounted in her ears and then fell in a horrible pop that sounded like a Bombchu being detonated inside her head, and she opened her drooping eyes just in time to feel the gentle zephyr of coolness and the trickle of magic that sounded like rain on a metal roof. A whirlwind of purple sparks stood where Link had been, and they danced out the window, careening like mist, off in the direction of Kakariko village.
"Aye, poor lad," clucked Ruto, who had come to while Zelda and Link were speaking and hauled herself up and had been gradually clunking, one rheumatic step at a time, up to the circle of ladder, bookcase, and persona formed. "Had eleven of the tykes meself. Had a good point, about not knowing unconditional love till you've met it yourself. Took a book with him though… perchance see what it was?"
"Oh, don't worry about it, Ruto. It was an old book. Small one too, and thin. Tattered green cover… looked like iron edges, and rusty ones at that. Surely one book doesn't mean that much to you?"
"Not just any book, no. But the most valuable book in this library, however… very old, very thin, with a tattered green cover and rusty decorations? The only book left in Hyrule that tells of legends such as the Sacred Flower prophecy and The Sage's Dealings?"
Zelda turned grim and made a face as if she'd just swallowed something very sour. "Well… he's a good guy. He'll bring it back, I'm sure. And in the meantime, I'm positive he'll take good care of it."
***********************
Link's thrown tunic smacked Saria squarely in the face, and she got a nosefull of the odor of aging glue and dust before she peeled the sweaty garment away.
"Eww, Link, gross! Throw your clothes in the hamper, for the Goddesses' sake. Honestly, you have the mannerisms of a seven-year-old boy."
"Could you take it for me, Saria?" Link wiggled like a caterpillar out of his white undershirt, the high collar still sucking on his head as he drew his arms out from the clingy white sleeves and dragged the cloth away from his face. Upturned locks of smudged blonde hair flattened back down against his shining face, excepting for a few wispy ends charged with static that flittered about upright.
"No I will not take it for you! I'm your wife, not your serving maid!" Repulsed, she gave the forest robe one horrendous look before she flung it over her shoulder and into the corner. She expected it to sail off the breeze from the open window and be carried to the handle of the closest, but instead, it was weighted down by some mysterious ballast and thudded down halfway with a fwumph that released a puff of air, billowing upward the tunic's sleeves before they ruffled under gravity's pull to the heap of green, lifeless. She gave the rumpling sleeve a curious glance and a raised eyebrow before Link caught her attention again with his chuckling rebuttal.
"Ehh, same diff." She gave him a silent snarl and he a parrying cheeky grin with plenty of tooth. "Joking… joking… no need to electrocute me now…" The plain, off-blue nightshirt he squirmed into fell over his shoulders and dropped below his waistline before he took off his tights. "I'm sorry, Saria. I'll take my own tunic to the basket. Honestly I will. Happy?"
She snuffed at the air, shoulders raised into a sullen arch. Her lower lip jutted out noticeably below her upper one, and her pupils were tight, even in the low light. The normally pillowy green nightgown, trimmed with lace, was now stretched like a wire frame over her fine, modeled structure. "Fine. I'm happy. Just get it out of here. I'm tired of you always leaving your clothes about. It's bad enough when it's just you, but get Posie started with that and you're good as dead, you hear?" Her scrunched arm, cemented to her side, had its elbow raised in a robotic fashion to point a sculptured finger at his face.
"I'll save the will for later, then," and he strode over to the lumpy tunic and plucked it daintily up between his fingers.
"Offf. Old garb feels a mite heavier than usual, it does. What'd I leave in my pockets this time, eh?" He bounced the material up and down in his fingers, holding his free hand below, and, distorting the fabric as it fell, the little, fancy old book came fumpheting down through the viridian folds to land squarely in Link's palm. "Well now, what have we here?" He began to turn the small volume over in his hands, pondering the bumpy, faded cover, not totally different from the color of his clothes, and the crumbling rusted hinges, more red and decaying brown than the mottled, sturdy iron they had begun as. Thinner-than-wafer-thin pages, written on brittle onion skins(onion paper, it was called), were embossed with the traditional line of gold leaf, shining brilliant on the long side opposite the spine and traced with greenish ink on the short top and bottom. The dusty sheets, some brushing away to become dust themselves, gave away the scent of dark, moldy wetness that indicated at some point or another, this book, like his father's diary, had been spilled upon at some point. He fingered the velvety rims, open sores to the wood frequently pock- marking them, and with a tentative figure inched the tome open to the first page of antediluvian, illuminated letters carefully scripted into the form of the first language of the Hyleans.
"Ha! Looks like I must've accidentally taken this one with me when I left in such a rush." He tickled the pages like the edges of a flip book, riffling them and firing clouds of brown, foul-smelling grime into the air. Saria coughed. "Ahh, I'll be getting it tomorrow, I will."
"Ah, but Zelda—"—she formed the name with obvious distaste—"—surely a single book wouldn't matter, would it? It's not like she keeps track of every last one of the books, is it?" Saria bent to flatten her fingers to the first of the leaf of the prehistoric doctrine, scanning gentle digits across copper-toned words. "Besides, from the look of it and the language it's written in—it's obviously a very old book, yes?"
"Well, maybe the princess doesn't give a darn, but Ruto flips for this sort of stuff. Not that Ruto," Link added, noticing the confounded expression Saria was masked beneath, "the Minister—or to be more precise, Ministress—of Libraries. She'd have my head for a wall trophy if she found out I'd ferreted away one of her precious books."
The image presented by this prospect was too good to bear, but she sealed her laughter behind a powerful mental dam and inhaled sharply. "I suppose you have a point, but… you can take it back in the morning and she'll never know the difference. And I still don't think Ruto or whatever her name is, despite the fact that she's the Librarian minister, is capable of reading ancient Hylean. Only the true Sages still posses that knowledge."
"Well if you know so much about it then why don't you read it, Miss All Powerful Forest Mage?" Link pitched the book with a quick flick of his wrist to Saria, who caught it against her stomach double- handed. His disposition had turned slightly acidic.
"Fine, I will!" Two could play at Link's little annoyance game. She began to browse the runes at an aggravatingly leisurely pace, soaking in the texts and the meanings that she knew Link would kill to be able to skim for himself. But no, she was his only link, to coin an appropriate phrase, to the mysteries that lay inscribed on that flaky paper. From what she had observed so far, it appeared to be a book of old legends, written in the order of which they were predicted or first taken note of. Some were prophecies, such as the Sacred Flower prophecy(which betokened that, some day, a "soul of true Soul would redeem the false Soul from Soulless hearts to fill them with the great violet essence to complete the empty polygon frame." A load of complete nonsense, as far as she was concerned) or the scriptures foretelling of the time when "the reign of blackness and smoke will end and the legends of Zenderlla and her champion shall begin." Part of the Treantè(the Hyrulean holy book) were these divinations, and it was respected by most that Zenderlla was probably some past man's interpretation of the name Zelda, or perhaps Zelda's old form. She wanted to find for Link the piece most saturated with fancy, squirrelly writing and mysterious dialect as she could, for she knew how terribly he detested the speech of olden times and how he was inept at making heads or tails of the stuff. A particularly fancy passage, starting with a great, illustrated A(or the past equivalent), caught her eye, and a woodblock press of a sparkling sword set in a pedestal inlaid with diamonds and other expensive jewels indicated a particularly mythical tale. Plus, the paragraph or so of heavily decorated writing was so mazelike in wording she herself could just barely deduce the meaning. Grinning fiendishly, she held the book at vast length like a farsighted scholar and recited with the dull drone of a school child:
"And whereupon it be known that dwelling midst glacial ap'tudes peakst Ipanajou there live a Scholar of great mind, with his brethren aid hath he complied a large Tome en reading which tells of many great Battles and Wars, and many twixt his brother fought. Tragically his brother fell in one of these great Battles and he had demands't that he be rested in cold soils atop Ipanajou. Kindred soul Departed, the Scholar fell deeply dismay'd and ordered upon his death that merry, he, too, be placed inside that deep Tomb in 'twitch his brother lay. Anon, for frigid death upon white wings, and corpulence of his was found lying 'neath ice berry bushes. Laid down 'twas he in the musty Chamber, where his soul did Arise and meet his brother's passing. Set upon a great Pedestal was his brother's sword, 'twitch he imbued his Soul and Essence and his great Learning of the Ways of the Sword. Lest it now be known that he who first enters this Scholar's Tomb and places palms with the hilt of that Sword shalt gain the strength of Every Skill, for it is the sword of Obedience and giveth to the Holder its all power to control Every Sword by Every Name, for each unto its name spoken will instantly Obey, and perform any feet at the willingness of it's Holder's mind. Therefore, its Holder shall become the greatest Warrior ever known to Hyrule, for they shalt have command of all Swords."
"Pah!" coughed Link. "Will you get a load of that dry old trash? Listen to it! First of all, Mount Ipanajou is the coldest, wettest, most desolate place on this entire shrouded continent, for the Goddesses' sake, so I don't see why any person in their right mind, let alone a scholar, would want to live there. And a scholar having good relations with a warrior, brother or not… no. And a person rising as a ghost to imbue their nature into a sword… good grief, the greatest fabrication these point ears ever heard. Control over all swords, honestly." He bowed his head and pivoted on a foot back towards the bed. "I'll be off to sleep now, if you don't mind terribly. Not like our conversation was going anywhere…" He adjusted his pointy green cap on that hat stand where it, too, slept, and clambered wearily beneath woven blue covers padded with goose down. "G'night, Saria. Love you always, my precious eriiko." He then laid his head placidly down on a billowing, cloudy pillow, eased his watering eyes shut tight and took a deep, relaxing breath. Saria stood watching him for a few seconds, eyeing his chest as it fell in a steady, rhythmic tattoo that seemed to time with the blustering of the shutters in the chilled night wind.
Suddenly he had bolted upright quicker than a jolt from a Bari's tentacle.
"That's it!"
"What's what?"
Link had performed a break-dancing sort of move, spinning around wildly and flinging the covers over on themselves like an omelet. He vaulted on to his feet and scrambled over to Saria, shouting "Give me that book!" and firmly grasping it in his hands, making an attempt to wrench it from her grasp. She did not make an effort to fight back, but her arms were dragged out away from her chest where they had clutched the volume in a cross pattern over ways. She merely jibed slightly with "Careful, that book's old!" as Link turned it over in his hands, then furiously flapped it open and snatched huge lumps of pages, frantically searching back and forth exclaiming, "Where is it? Where the heck is it?"
Saria bumbled to Link's side and peaked over his shoulder, carefully extending a hand to try and quell the mad gallop at which it meaninglessly tore through the brittle parchment like a maniacal and ravenous carnivore that had just spotted a herd of easy prey. "Please, Link… calm down… what are you looking for?"
"That page! Where is that page with the thing you just read?"
"Oh! Please, stop it! You're destroying priceless knowledge!" Her hand, atop her contorted wrist, gripped the book by its spine, where all its pages came together, and a Link who had built up far too much momentum accidentally gashed through several pieces of the fragile report. He let slip from his hands the novel as easy Saria had let it flow past hers, and now the runic expert took the writings of the past and licked her thumb and forefinger to delicately pass pages through to come to the etching of the phosphorescent rapier. "There. This what you were looking for? I thought it was a load of dry old trash…"
"No!" Link greedily stole the book back in the never-ending game of keep-away, then cradled the document in the bough of his right elbow and indicated, with his Triforce-emblazoned left, the span of the yellowing sentences. "Don't you see? This is it! This is exactly what I've been looking for! I can't read it, but you can and you just did, and it's all I've needed all along! Oh, imagine, if I'd never smacked that bookcase and hadn't tried to leave the castle in a hurry…!"
Saria was utterly lost, and conveyed this to Link in a grisly face.
"This sword… this Sword of Obedience, Saria! It's the answer to all of my problems! All I've got to do is hike up Mount Ipanajou, get this sword, and bring it back to Posie! Voila, no more spinning slash problems! Heck, no more sword problems, period! This blade gives its holder power over all swords! Power to do anything, Saria! Posie would become… would become…" The fervently zealous words snagged on his vocal cords in his throat. Dare he speak those sparkling, great golden words, opened up like a door before him? The most powerful warrior in all of the universe! It could be their little Posie! She, more famous than he with more power than he could ever posses in all of his lifetime! The sweat was glomming down his forehead, even though the dark was brisk. Oh, it had been years since he had felt his adrenaline pumping more brashly than blood through his veins! Since the leather straps encircling his sword's glistening hilt had the feel of true magic to him! It was not the sword; it was not the solving of Posie's problem; it was the wild, haunting call of adventure! True adventure! Not "Save-The-Village-From-The-Moblins," not "Exterminate- The-Hoard-Of-Skulltulas," but "Go-Out-On-A-Mystic-Quest-For-The-Rare-Magic- Artifact!" What he did, what it was truly his position in life to do! Once more it would be him, just him, contending with nature! Just him against the odds! Just him…
Saria's voice cut with a record scratch through his glorified, half-waking dreams. "Not quite, Mr. Hero. It says it gives the first to touch it power over all swords. That would mean that Posie would have to be there to jerk the thing from the stone, which wouldn't mean that you'd have to… oh no. No no no no. Not that. Anything but that…"
But as for "anything but that," it would look more like Saria would have to settle for an "all but that." Link's eyes were the flint of his soul, and sparks flew in all directions from their sapphire nature. The old, lunatic glint dappled across the pools of liquid blue fire, and the dream-like, scheming smile took priority over the plains of his face. A hint of "big daddy" was still there, of course. It would be ineradicable, because of Posie. And the calm, logical brain still held its terra firma in twitching ears, their tips alert skyward like a pair of antenna on the watch for enemy presence above. But this was the new—or rather, old—Link, who had a plot and a plan that had all been ignited by her big mouth. She had regretted those words quite as soon as she had said them. She knew he was going to try into launch into some ghastly humongous explanation of his first contrivance in five years, since Posie had been born and Zelda had been sent "sleeping beauty" by the late—good riddance—Ganon, now composed of various ashes scattered about Hyrule and who definitely wasn't going to be bothering them in a while. But instead he simply stood, mouth silent but eyes positively giddy—glancing off into the brilliant moon outside the wind, blue irises reflecting the musical beams and the silhouette of a gawky bird that glided past, with a royal purple corona highlighted by a bristly mud-colored tail and a shocking white crest. Link could almost make out its hooked, olive beak and bulbous eyes. A strange species to be sure, but there was hardly anything that could be doubted in Hyrule.
"Good night, Saria," he said simply. "I must be getting rested. I have to go talk with a few members of the Royal Court tomorrow, if you don't mind." And with that he slunk back under the covers and drifted off into a dreamland full of legendary blades, grand adventures, and Posie Cassandra Blade, the greatest knight in all Hyrule's history.
Yawning, Saria moved her thoughts away from the intoxicatingly beautiful moon and led them to the dejected tunic still lying on the floor. Poor Link—he never had quite gotten around to putting it in the hamper. Sighing at the futility of trying to get her lazy husband to do any chores, no matter how trivial, she reached for the sad little dropped piece of clothing and foisted it up into her arms. But before hobbling over to the hamper to toss the thing in as a candidate for the next wash, she took a moment to bury he face in the caressing folds of the suit and to intake a whiff of the wild smells of outside Hyrule that still clung in curtains, a(sometimes grim) curtain that never shut. The patches, the stains, every minute detail, right down from the ratio of the smell of dark, moist caves to evergreen forests, told her that this was the adventure tunic, the one he had worn on so many of his great expeditions. The wildest one of them all. But, strange fantasies notwithstanding, the shirt was badly in need of a good scrub-down, so she set it on top of a neatly folded skirt and a doll-sized outfit in the hamper.
"What a twit," she mumbled to the dozing Link as she slipped herself into bed, "What a wonderful, wonderful twit."