Link's Awakening

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Tal Tal Mountains

I remember being angry as the rider flew off with Marin, and even more so that this person had attacked me without cause while I was still recovering from Stalfos. Of course, there was a cause, being that I was killing all his friends in order to get the instruments, but that was no excuse for kidnapping an innocent girl. If Agahnim had been there, he probably could've just blasted that giant bird out of the sky, but I was forced to handle it the hard way. It was almost funny, actually… the young man who left home looking for adventure was about to go rescue a fair maiden from a tower.

Link had no idea where this Eagle Tower place was, and since the owl didn't appear and tell him this time, the young man's only option was to go back to the library and use the map. Naturally, the people of Mabe Village were upset by what had just happened, but he assured them that he would not rest until Marin was safe. Before heading to the library, though, Link have the marimba to Tarin, asking him and some of the others to do him a favor by going to the old cottage and bringing the instruments at least as far as the village, and then he had to get moving.

It was nice to have access to a completed map of Koholint Island, but when the young man entered the stone building, he couldn't help stopping for a second to think about how much things had changed since the last time he had been in there. Back then he had still been trying to figure out where he was, and then the Moblins attacked… no, there was no time for reminiscing while Marin was in danger, so the young man went over to the desk in the back of the dusty building, and started studying the terrain.

This was a little easier now that Link had been to a lot of the places around the island, and he was able to identify places like Animal Village and Kanalet Castle, but there were still a few places where he hadn't been. No, there hadn't been any visible towers anywhere along the beach, nor in the forest or the swamp… nothing in the desert, either. After everything that had been happening to the young man since his arrival, the only place on Koholint Island where he hadn't set foot yet was the mountain range toward the north where the egg was supposed to be.

Before Agahnim had gone off, the owl had told him to head for Turtle Rock in the mountains, and… hey, that was actually pretty easy to find, since there was some kind of turtle-shaped stone at in the higher parts of the mountains all the way to the west. It didn't make since for two of the Siren Instruments to be hidden close to each other, so Link scanned across the map, moving past where the Wind Fish's egg was at the center, and… and that had to be it, there all the way over to the east where a single structure marked the surface of the mountain, but whoever had drawn the map must've made a mistake because only the start of it could be seen before running out of room.

From just looking at the map, it seemed like getting to the mountains was going to be the easy part, because it looked like Crazy Tracy's was the closest point to them that he was familiar with, but from there it looked like maybe those lines on the map were trails? Link was so jealous of Agahnim's ability to just magically put himself anywhere on the island, because now after leaving the library and assuring Tarin that he would rescue his daughter, the young man headed off. He found it strange that no one in the village had ever seen the rider before, since you figure someone would notice a man flying around on a giant bird like that, but one thing Link had learned during his time there was that things on Koholint Island didn't always make sense.

Thanks to that awful tasting medicine, aside from getting swatted by the giant bird, the young man was fresh and full of energy as he walked across the prairie, getting as far as the health spa without incident. However, Link was starting to understand just how unprepared he was for the more dangerous parts of the island, so maybe another stop at the spa was a good idea. No, he didn't have any rupees or whatever the people of the island used for currency, but thankfully Tracy was willing to give him some more of the medicine, provided that he took some for her husband as well.

Once he had two full doses of the medicine, Link kept going north, where the terrain began to get rocky almost immediately. Most of the island had been flat so far, with the exclusion of the downward sloping desert, but now the whole place seemed to be making up for that all at once. When he was younger, his father had taken him on a long journey to see some of the places where his adventures took place, and the Tal Tal Mountains as they were called on the map, were reminding the young man of Death Mountain in Hyrule's southern outskirts.

It had been difficult to follow Link Senior up into those mountains until they got to Spectacle Rock, where Ganondorf had been defeated, and now Link was feeling that same way again as he started up into the foothills. He had been hoping that the lines drawn on the map were easily spotted trails, but no, it looked like the young man was going to have to do this the hard way, by going over each progressively larger hill before even getting to the mountains. During this long walk/climb, the young man started to wonder how Agahnim was doing, laughing to himself a bit while imaging how his friend probably just kicked down the door of Turtle Rock, and started throwing fireballs at everything.

Creating the imaginary setting for what was inside of Turtle Rock was actually kind of fun, and helped to keep Link's mind off how hard it was getting to climb up the mountains once reaching the top of the foothills. He imagined a horrible place filled with spike traps and red hot magma like the stuff surrounding Death Valley in his father's second adventure. Yeah, don't want to make it too easy for Agahnim, so why not add in some flying monsters that spit globs of fire out of their mouths?

Laughing to himself a little as he imagined his friend vanishing and reappearing all over the place to try and fight them, the young man thought that it would only be fitting after all the trouble he had with things like Stalfos, that the monster guarding the instrument should be, uh… made of fire. Yeah, that's it, let's see how good your fire magic is against something that's made of the same stuff, oh yes you're in trouble now mister great hero of Koholint. But then Link remembered how the wizard had been able to freeze a large section of the desert into ice, and… oh well, so much for making Turtle Rock difficult for him.

Of course, this was just what the young man imagined was happening over on the other side of the mountains, since obviously he couldn't be there to see what was really going on. For all he knew, Agahnim could have been having a far easier or more difficult experience than the imagined one, so the young man shifted his thoughts on how he was going to deal with the rider once he got to the tower. Obviously, the giant bird was the biggest threat, since it just swatted him like an annoying fly back at Mabe Village, but there was also the fact that the rider had threatened to hurt Marin if Link came after him.

This meant that the young man was going to have to be really sneaky, which was difficult since it was the middle of the day. Why couldn't the rainstorms have happened right now? If it was pouring rain, it would have both masked his approach to the tower and made it more difficult for the giant bird to fly… you know, if this really was all part of the Wind Fish's dream, would it have killed the thing to do something to help him out once in a while? Honestly, sometimes it seemed like the Wind Fish wanted to stay asleep just as badly as the owl wanted to wake it up.

No more obvious trails now, leaving the young man having to climb up some pretty steep wall faces, and since he hadn't had the sense to bring any rope with him, this meant that without being able to find some footholds or something to grab onto, sometimes he would have to backtrack. This wasn't so bad if Link was just starting to climb up a new surface, but there were other times when he was almost at the top of the next ledge, only to have to go back down and find another way. Apparently the young man was paying for how easy it had been to reach the mountains themselves, because now the hours were passing and his progress was reduced to the speed of crawling.

"I bet Agahnim didn't have to work this hard getting to Turtle Rock." He grumbled to himself, straining to pull himself up over the next ledge. "My mother's a magician, home come I didn't get any magic? Because my stupid brother was born with it, that's why… oh, you just take after your father more than he does… yeah, thanks mom, that's a lot of help right now."

Struggling, and really struggling to climb over the top of the next ledge, Link was starting to wonder if he was ever going to be able to even find the place the rider mentioned, but then the young man gasped when he looked up and saw a structure sticking up from only one more ledge higher than he was. Easily spotted against the rough natural landscape, the tower was a lot bigger around than it looked on the map, and taller too, stretching up into the very clouds and making him understand why whoever drew the map didn't bother trying to sketch the whole thing… there wouldn't have been enough room on the paper.

Still, this had to be it; Eagle Tower, home of the rider, and the location of both Marin and the instrument he was supposed to retrieve. However, unlike all the other places where Link had just walked in and handled whatever was waiting for him, the rider had threatened to hurt Marin if the young man entered the tower, so this was going to have to be handled differently. That meant that he was going to have to sneak in, but also that he would have to keep sneaking until he found the young woman, because if even one creature inside saw him… well, then they could raise the alarm and the rider would be forced to make good on his threat.