"The Legend of Zelda" and all related concepts are the property of Nintendo.
Caution: I was a bit uncertain how to rate this story. It may be leaning towards M at times. Judge for yourself, but please use discretion.
Another story which is drawn from and alludes to a larger work-in-progress. This one started out fine and grew quickly, but I just can't get it to and the way I would like.
Oh, well. Put it down to want of practice, and enjoy what's there.
Pax et Bonum.
(Peace and Salvation)
It was warmer. That was what everybody noticed first, the final proof that the danger had passed. The deadening chill that had been carried on the wind for the past seven years was gone.
It was warmer. That was what everybody noticed first, the final proof that the danger had passed. The deadening chill that had been carried on the wind for the past seven years was gone.
There were crops to be re-sown, families to reunite, and a nation to make strong again. But those were problems for later. Now, it was time to dance in the firelight and sing and pray.
Nothing inspires faith like salvation.
King Zora sat apart from the revelry, watching the assembled masses and listening to the Kokiri music and feeling the ground tremble with each step that ridiculously huge Goron took. He was glad that people were so happy.
He was glad. Really.
He was not sure exactly when the child began watching him. He may have been studying him at a distance for awhile, concealed by the merry-makers, but the King did not notice his attentions until he began drifting forwards cautiously, obviously hesitant to approach. After a time, though, some internal line had been crossed, and he had walked over as sat down in the King's great shadow.
King Zora wished he would leave. He did not want to think about children tonight. But no matter how silent he was, the boy just would not take the hint that he was not feeling sociable.
Turning one eye towards him, he watched the boy watching the party. Something was odd about his expression; there was a depth to it that did not belong in the young.
There was nothing for it. He had to say something. He could not call himself a Zora if he could not take the plunge.
"It's getting warmer, isn't it." He wanted to cast a spell to lengthen his arms so he could strike himself on the forehead. A lifetime of statecraft had come up with that?
Forcing himself to turn towards the child – the boy wouldn't be able to tell how discomfited he was; what did a child know about the art of conversation? – Zora saw him turn his head quickly, shaken out of some deep thought. Then he looked up at King Zora and said…
"Much better than it's been for the last little while."
…In Zoran! Word-perfect, unaccented Zoran!
The King's brain, which had concocted military and industrial strategies of uncommon cleverness, was struck and staggered by the absurdity of the situation. Then the boy, apparently noticing the King's distress, reached toward a shoulder as if to brush off a speck of lint. A flickering ball of light popped into appearance, floating up and circling the boy's head.
The embarrassment returned. "Of course, you're a fairy child."
The boy nodded. "We call ourselves Kokiri. My name is Mido. I'm the Kokiri Boss."
Zora shook his head, amazed that the boy could so easily switch between the chirping sound of his own language and the swirling syllables of Zoran, which most Zoras themselves could not manage when their mouths were not submerged. "How do you do that? Where did you learn it?"
"Dunno." Old Hylian. "Just something we know how to do." Zoran again. Good grief.
"Fascinating." Small talk was beginning to come more easily. "You said you were a Boss? Does anyone hold authority over you?"
"No. Wait…" Mido made a strange face, like someone who was not sure whether to cry and run off screaming or laugh and never stop. "I have to stop thinking that. The Great Deku Tree's alive. He's alive."
The Great…haven't I heard that somewhere? In one of those damn legends Darunia loves so much and had the nerve to get me interested in? He opened his mouth to ask about it, but his thoughts stumbled over apprehension – Why isn't Darunia here? – and that led to anger – Damn it, why isn't Ruto here? – and those were both interrupted by a blend of concern and wariness – Mido's expression is so strange. – and the words never got out. In desperation, he said the first thing that came to mind. "Was there ever a time when he wasn't?"
Zora wished he was an invertebrate, so that the boy's look would not send chills down his spine. "He…I thought…I don't know. I thought he had been…" Mido struggled to give shape to some huge idea, and gave up. "It doesn't matter now. He's alive." He said this with a bit of relief, a child lighting a lamp to discover the monster in the corner is a chair, after all. "Does it really matter?"
"I don't know. You just looked…" One webbed hand waved around. This was not Zora's night for communication; good thing his surviving advisors were off having fun. "…lost."
"You should see how sad you look, mister."
Mister. King Zora nearly smiled. "It was a long war. Far too long."
"Amen." The word was hissed with a vehemence that startled the king.
"I've read stories about the Kikori." Something about that was not right, but Zora pushed on anyway. "Rather, about the forest you live in. Aren't you supposed to be protected from harm there?"
"Supposed to be." Mido looked at him sharply. "Hey, can I ask a question, mister?"
"Of course."
"What happens to you when you die?"
King Zora frowned and swallowed. "Well…we are told our souls enter the water, and flow with it into the ocean, to distant lands…to the Goddesses too, eventually." It was all he had been thinking about for the last few months. He was so sick of death.
"Everybody says that. Hylians say they get sent into Shadow, and have to trust the light of their souls to find their way to the Goddesses. Gorons say they go into the ground, and find little caverns that Din digs them out of whenever the earth shakes.
"That doesn't happen for Kokiri. We aren't souls, not like everybody else is. We were created as a part of the Lost Woods, and we can't find our own way out. We're told that the First Kokiri is sleeping in the Lost Woods somewhere, and when Time ends she'll wake up and show us how to find heaven. If she…"
Mido paused, and wrapped his arms around his legs. "Can you keep a secret, mister?"
"I can," said Zora quietly.
"I though we were going to lose." Mido tucked his chin under his legs. "I was always so afraid. We let in somebody from outside the forest, see, let him into our sanctuary. We connected ourselves to the world." Now he buried is head in his arms. King Zora could just make out his voice. "When everything began going wrong, I thought the end times had come and that we had screwed up and let evil into the woods, and that the First had been killed and we were all going to be left behind. Then I thought that maybe the guy from outside hadn't done all the things I blamed him for, and that he was supposed to protect us and I had chased him off. Then I thought Saria was going to die." He raised his head, and his expression was miserable. "Then I thought she was going to come back, and that was almost worse."
King Zora waited for a moment, before softly prompting, "What happened to her?"
"Grandmother knows." With that strange colloquialism, Mido became silent.
A niggling thought at the back of King Zora's head demanded voice. "Do you have…a temple? One dedicated to forest spirits, maybe, one that your people protect?"
Mido looked at him strangely. "We don't need to do much protecting, but, yeah, we do."
"Did…" He had forgotten the unfamiliar name. "Your friend, did she go there?"
A moment passed with no response. Then, Mido stretched back on the grass. "Sounds like you've got your own stories to tell, mister."
"Stories? I suppose so. If you can call them that." It seemed too nice a word to attach to those kinds of memories. King Zora took a breath to speak, to explain how he had gotten the idea about the temple, about what happened to Ruto, but he could not. There was just no way right now he could fit words around everything that had happened. How was he supposed to explain how he felt, if he was not sure himself?
Instead, he blurted out, "Do you know about the civil war?" and then wanted to slap himself again.
"The Kokiri were never involved, but we got news about it."
He was waiting for King Zora to say something. Oh, Farore give backbone, there could be no stopping now. "How about the Sheikah?"
"I think we used to be friends with them, ages and ages ago. But they stopped visiting the forest and we couldn't leave. We know some historical stuff about them."
"In the war, they were always on the side of the Hylians. They had to be."
"It's their racial responsibility."
"That's what they say."
"Sounds like they haven't changed."
"The thing was, they never attacked. They would fight to defend themselves and Hylians, but they would never attack anyone. The old king never ordered them to, either. They didn't like him – he hadn't named his first daughter Zelda, did you know that? For some reason they really disapproved of that. And he was terrified of them."
"They're creepy people."
"They are that. Especially…there was one…" King Zora took a deep breath, and took a different direction. "I was married just before the war, you know. A lovely lady from a noble house, with the bluest scales I'd ever seen. I know that probably doesn't mean a lot to you, but to me she was beautiful.
"We were happy together, even when battles started going badly and supplies began getting low. We had a clutch of five eggs that hatched after a few years; it was close to the end of the conflict, although of course we didn't know that then. One of them, a little zola, we named Ruto. Children aren't usually named until their limbs grow in, because it's hard to tell them apart before that, but we could always recognize her. She was always the swiftest, always the most curious. She was the fastest to grow, too; she got her arms and legs almost a year early."
Zora swallowed, thanking Farore his voice had not broken.
"There was one Sheikah, some rebel who put his service to the King before anything else. He would obey him in anything, even the most awful…" He choked, swallowed, and pressed on, the story pouring out of him now. "He snuck into Zora's Fountain, the source of the river. And how could anyone have stopped a Sheikah?" His voice rang a helplessness he hated but could not do anything about. "There was a little dipping pool, where my Queen would go sometimes with the children. He put dragon poison in it."
Mido was silent, his thoughts kept hidden. King Zora himself was feeling the beginnings of anger, a refreshing sort of rage he had not felt since his the struggles of court years before.
"Sheikah had used poison before. It was always airborne. When she was the first of the children becoming listless, she made them all submerge themselves while she went for help." He closed his eyes. "There was already venom inside her, and she died within sight of the guards. When they were found, the children were barely recognizable as Zora."
He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again a hint of pride was creeping through the sorrow. "Except Ruto. The physician's only explanation was that she controlled the passage of water through her skin and forced out the toxins. That's something most Zoras can't manage until adulthood! And even so, the amount of poison they removed from her system…the few minutes of exposure my Queen suffered killed her, and even the guard who pulled Ruto out lost some of the feeling in his arms in a few hours. Ruto survived a dose of poison that could have killed a dragon, and she completely recovered within a month!"
Fatherly habit made him look in Mido's direction to check that he was demonstrating the proper interest in and amazement at Ruto's exploits. The boy was seemed lost in thought, gazing at the distant firelight. King Zora followed his gaze for a moment before frowning. There was something else that needed to be told.
"Around the time Ruto had finished recuperating," he said quietly, "I found out that there had been a revolution at Hyrule Castle, that some nephew had won the Sheikah to his side, kicked out the old King and taken the throne. The new King – may the Goddesses bless him – was calling for peace negotiations. We all met in a tent in the middle of Hyrule Field: the King, Darunia, Ganondorf, and I." He scowled. "Damn Ganondorf."
"The first thing the King made clear was that the Hylians were not surrendering. If the war went on, the Hylians would win. The Gerudo were getting fewer. The Gorons were sick of fighting and ready to retreat. The Zora remained a slight threat, because the Hylians couldn't dislodge us from the water, but even with that advantage we hadn't won a battle in a long time. The Hylians would win, he said, and then neighbouring nations would seize the opportunity to attack the bloody little kingdom that had upset everybody and worn itself out. The only way to endure, he said, was to come together. He wanted to create a group of autonomous kingdoms, all unified under the Hylian throne."
"Darunia jumped at it, and no wonder; even if the Gorons were not tired of fighting, the terms offered were better then the objectives they had entered the war to achieve. Ganondorf agreed also – reluctantly but with calm judgement, I thought at the time." He grimaced. "The damn slimy eel. I wonder how long he was planning the next war."
"I didn't agree, not then." He chuckled sadly. "I think I may have scared the King a bit. But I waited until the others had left and I could talk to the King alone. I had to know why he of all his family wanted this."
"He was soft-spoken and honest. He said he had a daughter, a Zelda. He said he wasn't sure if anybody deserved to win, but he was sure he didn't want his little girl to grow up in a land where so many people lost."
"And when he said that…" Zora shook his head. "I swear I had a premonition. I knew that he was telling the truth, and that I wanted the war to end. The fighting had cost me so much. If it continued, or if it happened again, I knew I could stand to loose everything I had left. So I agreed. The next ten years were the best the Zora people have had out of the last one hundred."
He sighed, and looked at Mido, who was now watching him. "And then Ganondorf embarked on a new war, and everything I was afraid of happened. My people were nearly wiped out. Ruto went to the Water Temple and didn't come back."
The two stared at each other for a moment, and let their gazes slip away. Somewhere in the storytelling, a sort of camaraderie had formed between them: they were united by a sense of loss.
At least something good had come out of this mess, thought Zora, watching the dancers.
Several seconds passed before a new thought came to mind. What an odd thing to think. The war wasn't a complete disaster, was it? I mean, look at the people.
Laughing, singing, dancing, celebrating…
All these little troubles have brought peace back to Hyrule. That's no small thing. People can get on with their lives.
"I wonder if she helped to do it," he said softy.
"Huh?"
"I wonder if Ruto helped win the war. With whatever she was able to do in the temple."
It is a fact that often, in times of great need, a bright and brilliant miracle will inexplicably and spontaneously not appear to make things better.
The Zoran people are big lovers of reason, and if you directed this statement at one of King Zora's councillors (currently joining in the optimistic revelry around the fire) he or she would say this means that, according to the law of averages, sometimes it will.
King Zora heard the grass rustle as Mido stood up. He looked over to see his young companion staring intently overhead. He raised his gaze skyward.
There were of course other coloured lights in the sky, but he did not see them. Nor did he see the stars, brighter then they had been since the day the Triforce split.
All he saw was the mote of blue light, soaring past overhead. There was something familiar in the way it swam expertly through the wind.
And maybe it was a message, or an overheard thought, or another premonition, but he was certain he felt a glimmer of the poise, self-reliance and audacity that was so undeniably Ruto.
The lights vanished in the direction of Death Mountain.
He jumped as Mido stomped his foot. "Of all the…how did she?...first everything else, and now…!" He stopped, sank to the ground, and mumbled, "Well, good on her."
King Zora's heart was racing. Something in that glimpse of light had shaken him down to his soul, had made him think of the King with his fretting over Zelda and Darunia trying not to tap his foot to Zora flutes and Link, walking with his head held high into the frozen waste of Zora's Fountain…all of them had worked in some way or another to create this victory the people were celebrating . Things were not completely different from the way they had been a week ago – there would still be hardship, still be struggle – but with this peace, things could be changed. Things would change: all over Hyrule, people were pushing to make it happen, to bring all their hopes to life and return things to they way they had been before all this sorrow happened.
King Zora had no idea where that revelation had appeared from, but he was relieved that it had.
Mido was fidgeting where he was sitting. Zora, too, was feeling a bit restless. He looked over at the tangle of people, which suddenly seemed a lot closer than it had a short while ago.
"You know," he said slowly, "I used to be able to dance quite well."
Mido's look said everything. "Yeah, right, mister."
"Seriously! All of this," he patted his belly, "is mostly air."
"I'll believe it when I see it, mister."
"Prepare to be amazed," said King Zora, and proceeded to get to his feet.
Mido watched for a minute before asking, "Need some help?"
"I'll manage. I've just got a strange centre of gravity, that's all."
Two new shapes joined the circle around the fire. Sparks of light broke free of the flames and spiralled upwards, towards the stars that were completely visible for the first time in seven years.
Trivia: I'm given to understand that is one of the largest fanfiction sites in the world. Yet, on the date of this story's publication, I challange anybody to locate another story that uses King Zora as a serious protagonist.