Chapter 1: A Seeking Dream

Link was searching for something.

He wasn't, exactly, sure of what it was, only that he'd know it if he found it. The Hyrulean landscape seemed empty, quiet; a little too deserted to be peaceful. Empty and somehow melancholy, haunting, without birdsong or the scent of even an animal to give life to the cold air. It was a landscape of questions that he couldn't answer.

The wind sighed through the rocks as he approached the jagged edges of the mountainside, the first sound he'd heard beyond his own breath, his own footsteps. It reminded him of something. It was familiar.

If he concentrated, sitting and listening, he felt he could almost pick out a lonely song, a distant howl raised in memory, and in sorrow, in loneliness and in regret, inexpressibly sad and yet also resigned, a sound drawn from cold wind and hard, unforgiving rock or from a throat far away yet not so distant as it seemed. Something about it almost frightened him, like a chasm he could fall into and never escape, like a premonition of doom. And yet, that sound… somewhere in that sound were answers he was searching for.

He listened, almost spellbound, only his head moving as his sharp eyes scanned the rock face, looking for the voice, looking for… there! Seemingly without seeing him, a softly glowing figure sat on a high, inaccessible crag, head raised to the deaf and silent sky. A golden wolf, and a sound that no-one else could hear.

The musical howl fell silent, and the other wolf bowed his head for a long few moments before slowly rising to his feet. Blind right side to Link, he didn't seem to have seen him as he turned his head away, preparing to leap down into nowhere and vanish.

"Wait!" Link finally found his voice, though it was his wolf's voice, the word a sharp and desperate bark, and the other wolf turned sharply, looking over his shoulder at him for a startled moment before leaping down to flee. But where he landed was somewhere real, and Link shot to his feet to chase him, driven by a burning desire to catch up, to ask, to finally know.

Fleet and untiring, they ran after one another, one fleeing, one following, as the phantom stars wheeled across the sky and silvered night gave way to ghostly day, over and over again. Link wasn't gaining, but he wasn't losing ground, either, silent countryside slipping by, mountain to field to woodland, following faithfully every move, every daring leap or sharp turn, his golden counterpart made in an effort to shake him from his tail.

Until finally, with a greater, deeper forest looming before them, the golden wolf at last vanished from sight over the crest of a hill, and Link could see him no more.

Bemused but not yet dismayed, he trotted to the top of the hill and looked around. There was no sign of his strange counterpart, predecessor, hard-edged teacher. No visible sign… but what need had he to rely on his eyes? It was almost second nature after so long to lower his head to the path, seeking out the other's trail.

When he found it, it sent an electric jolt through him, at once recognisable though he didn't know how, eerily familiar and yet unquantifiably strange. The trail led onwards, and he followed it, staying alert yet focused in the strange and silent landscape, half familiar and half not. He traced the other along an earthen path, one that picked a narrow route among wild high grasses that reached to his shoulder, somewhere habitation was either an afterthought or a distant memory, and the wind that swept the grasses slowly curled again into a faint and unimaginably distant melody.

Ears pricked, Link followed the trail along, until it turned sharply once again, leading him up onto a low outcrop of tumbled stone beside the path. As he raised his head and rocked his weight back to jump, he froze.

There was a boy there, sitting on the rocks: a Hylian boy with his long ears dressed all in green, blonde hair as golden as wheat in the sun. He held an ocarina to his lips, but the music died away as his head turned, showing no surprise, no fear, only an age-old weariness in blue eyes far too old for his youthful face.

"You shouldn't be here," he said, and the words were a calm and almost cold pronouncement that again seemed far older than his years. "Go back."

"I'm looking for someone," Link said, the words coming out normally, and he realised without surprise that he had hands again as he gestured with one, standing before the boy. "I need to speak to him. Please."

The boy sighed, glancing the other way to where the towering trees of the great forest sheltered the small narrow path, winding into its shadows and lost to view behind the ancient, grasping greenery.

"Go back," he repeated, and the world seemed to spin with it as if Link had been pushed, everything falling dizzyingly away, his last clear sight not of the boy himself but of the trees that loomed behind him. Sensations blurred; he was…

…He was lying down, the familiar home he'd known all his life coming into focus as he blinked sleep from his eyes, cold where yet again he must have pushed the blankets off during the night. By the pale light creeping in around the shutters, by the chirruping birdsong, it was early dawn.

Link leant off the bed to grab a blanket and tug it back over himself, staying lying on his side as it began to warm up around him, focusing on the dream that still hung vividly in his mind. For once it hadn't been a nightmare born of memory, nor yet something bittersweet that crumbled to dust in the morning's light. It was a memory, or parts were, and yet…

Who was the boy? The scent had led right to him. He was familiar, yet he was no-one Link had ever seen before. Was he, too, the golden wolf, someone the spirit had been when younger? He spoke the same way, with the same weary finality, the same old, resigned acceptance.

The great forest had loomed behind him: the same place Link had first seen him, unsought and unknown. The path he'd been on led into it, vanishing behind clutching branches. Would it tell him something, if he went back?

Or was it, after all, just another dream?


Last diversion (probably) before I go back to my current project, the Sword of the Goddess series. This is going to be an ongoing story, but it will update "as and when" rather than on a deadline-based approach.

The very first "public" incarnation of this idea appeared in an RP between my old friend Sparky and I. In 2007. It's been a long time, but I thought, what the heck, I'm posting again, why not write this old idea up?

On a very meta level, if you look closely, you can just about pick out some of the same patterns that I use in Only Yesterday. It's kind of odd looking back over my work and spotting where I tend to use similar constructs. It doesn't surprise me, of course - it's tied to how I think - but it's odd and mildly interesting to actually notice.