Link paced himself as he and Navi skirted the woods surrounding the Great Clearing. His legs wanted nothing more than to break into a panicked, anxious run, and his throat was bursting to scream, cry or SOMETHING, because it felt as though his heart dragged behind him, rolling sporadically and catching on rocks. He might have left it behind for the hole where his spirit rested surged with the turbidity of a raging whirlpool. The boy dared not enter the Clearing. The others may still be sleeping like the bears of winter, but Link couldn't know for sure. Look how his morning had turned out...If early birds like Garia Clayhands and Kido Ropemaker and Naria Dyefingers had awakened, they would be gathered at the Kokiri's main living site, working on various projects or organizing forage trips into the summer fresh forest. If there were any chance one of his tribesmen might see him with a messanger fairy on the way to see the Great Deku Tree... Link did not even know what they would do, and it was always better to avoid a predator than incite injury for glory's sake.
The fairy, Navi, made no attempt at conversation, for which Link was both glad and dissatisfied. For all that he spent his life thus far in a society learned by the knowledge of fairies, he simply had no idea what to say to Navi, if communication and small talk were even appropriate. Link had never even spoken directly to Niva, Saria's fairy. When he thought about it, he realized that no one talked to any other fairy but their own, except in extreme emergencies. The practice was not recognized as a taboo like murder or lying, but neither was it encouraged.
Finally, desperate to take advantage of the silence, Link blurted the first question that popped into his head.
"Do fairies know everything?"
Navi, who was flying slightly ahead of the boy, stopped, wings flicking thoughtfully. She hung in the air, contemplative or shocked. Link could not tell, as he pulled up beside her, jaw clenched, hoping she was not offended.
"No," she said flatly, letting her thoughts congeal before pouring them into Link's ears. "We're more like collections of self-aware information. We live and die with the cycles and seasons too, but we believe that when the Deku Tree sprouted, he sent fairies, or the likes thereof, out into the Rest of the World. They gathered ideas, observed nature, elfin interaction, etc...The Old Ones grew so wise they learned how to pool their knowledge and the "Fairy fountains" were born."
Link chewed on her statement, deciding it made very much sense and projected his next logicality. "The fountains are where you generate?"
Navi glanced ahead, prompting them to keep moving and answered him. "Yeah, something like that. We can exist separately, but we still have a live link with the pools. Those of us born in the forest know much more about it because the local information is constantly being reinforced by Kokiri fairies and past messengers. If you talked to a Death Mountain pool-born, she would be far more knowledgable than I would about the mountains."
Also satisfied with this, Link then felt a little jealous rush, and asked, "Does that mean there are mountain people with guides?"
"There used to be," she said with a faux nostalgia. "Gorons who paid tribute to wisdom were gifted with a personal fairy. Mostly explorers and groundbreakers, who had the most dangerous jobs. But as their knowledge and technology progressed, the need for guides lessened. Now, Death Mountain houses but a sole Old One. The Gorons still visit her once a year."
Link was astounded by the ease with which Navi shared information. He also felt an excited jolt of foreshadowing with this talk of mountain men and the Old One atop the peak, but let it go quietly, depositing it in that unconscious bank of things-to-be-remembered-later.
A broken tree lay across the path, sunning its dead, flaking bark in a patch of greenish gold light. This was a marker to Link, the brittle dead crown pointing dawn's direction towards Saria's unparalleled living site. The new pair turned in tandem, heading slightly uphill into a mixed forest of pines, birches, maples, beech and a few struggling oaks.
"Technology makes fairies obsolete, then?" Link asked after a few silent minutes. He would have only another handfull of moments before they reached Saria's dwelling, and he wasn't sure at all if he really wanted to ask these kinds of questions around his friend.
"So do more people, easily accessible information and losing touch with nature."
"Goron expansion and benefit from the fairies caused their own...downfall isn't the right word," Link pushed the taste of mistatement out of his mouth, and ran his tongue between his gums and lip, scooping up the delicious bits of salted, smoked meat of his pemmican.
"Try extinction. But there have been countless types of animals that don't exist today, and not because they are obsolete," Navi said, using the boy's tone. "Storms, upheavals, over-hunting, all have effects, and circles end and begin in the same instant. We don't see the fern trees and giant grazing lizards anymore, but neither would they have ever known the deer and wolves of today."
"Lizards?" He imagined the little scooting reptiles, hiding beneath old logs and rocks, waiting to be speared with a thin skewer and roasted over open flames to delightful crunchiness...
"So to speak," Navi shrugged. "There are a few places in the world where the petrified skeletons of huge, ancient beasts are found. There were as many of them then as there are creatures today."
"Then, why do things have to die?"
Navi smiled a small grin. "Hmmf, nice try, but even if we knew, we probably wouldn't be able to tell you."
"Okay, so why can Kokiri die, but at the end of life, we take a new form?"
"It's part of the arrangement. The Deku Tree produces you and tells you to learn as much as you can. If you die, your body goes back to the mud and your flesh nourishes the forest. And if you survive long enough, you become a part of the ecosystem and your knowledge becomes instinct. Besides," Navi was saying as Link pushed aside a curtain of cultivated beard moss, revealing a sumptuous glade ringed in pine trees. "The question isn't why; it's 'What will I do today?'"
Link was struck by the simple beauty of her phrase. Like a flower opening to a new dawn, like the cracked shell of the baby bird, like a bone split down the middle to expose the fatty marrow, he did wonder, "What will I do today?"
In the middle of the glade, a tangle of yew trees bent into delightful topiaric wildness surrounded by thin, whippy coral-barked maple saplings drank in the unadulterated sunlight. The bulb flowers of spring, the tulip, daffodil, hyacinth and jonquil, had long since lost their blooms, and even their sap-filled leaves added patches of dying brown into the cacophony of rioting color, a perfect offset to the current carpet of violets and catmint. Sunny forsythia bushes, with their withes cloaked in clusters of yellow blooms, had been manipulated to grow with deeply purple rhyzome-rooted irises. Through the early summer foliage, Link saw where the evergreen and red-berried hollies would bear their fruit beside stands of rusty red sedum, and he could hardly wait to see the golden plumes of goldenrod entwined with green and purple topped asters.
"What a house," Navi breathed, almost reverantly, instantly appreciating the skill of the owner. Not only were there more plants per foot than the most diverse clearings and meadows, but everything was planted in such a way that color and texture never waned, and the scent of fresh blooms would persist long into the autumn.
"Link! What are you doing up so..." Saria emerged from her evergreen dome, a radiant grin plastered beneath her nose until she spied Navi floating calmly next to the Fairyless. As though a thundercloud had made an unpleasant appearance, her smile disappeared. Link watched as her normally catlike movements grew stiff and he thought he saw fear tighten her jaw and shoulders, and swimming on the surface of her blue eyes.
"Saria, this is Navi," Link said gently, supplicating. In his head, he screamed again, confused, no, perplexed, as to why Saria would react fearfully to the messenger. "She's taking me to the Deku Tree. He summoned me."
Like a brisk wind whisking away the impending thunderstorm, Saria's obvious discomfiture melted like ice in the fires of relief. Again, Link was confused. They were hardly the reactions he expected. When he was younger, he fantasized briefly about a fairy coming to him, helping along his induction to Kokiri brethren. Of all people, Saria was the only one to embrace it whole-heartedly upon first learning this fact.
What did she know that he didn't?
