...Yeah, this got continued. Sorry about that. Many thanks to Zephiraz, who puts up with me throwing ideas at him and contributes to the funnies.

"That," Ghirahim said, "is a bird."

Link didn't respond, his brow set in a confused furrow. The two of them had wandered for most of the morning over this grassy plain, dotted now with strangely circular stone arches—not towards the Divine Beast, as Ghirahim had brought up several times, though Link still didn't see why that mattered to him. The sound of distant music had proven an impossible lure to resist out here in the middle of nowhere, and the lilting song hovering through the air had grown louder and clearer as they walked, until they discovered…

"It's a bird," Ghirahim insisted. "Just look at it! It's a Loftwing in clothes."

Link's head tipped to the side, and he tucked that away with every other reference Ghirahim had made since they met that he didn't understand.

"I think you're wrong," he said slowly, ignoring Ghirahim's affronted look, "but I don't know enough about birds to say why. Look at him, though, he's playing a—" Not knowing the word, Link sawed his hands back and forth a few times. "An instrument."

"That doesn't make him any less a bird," Ghirahim pointed out, and Link paused to consider that logic.

"If he could talk, would he still be a bird?"

"He has wings," Ghirahim said impatiently, as if that was the final say on the matter. "And feathers!"

"Look, I'm just going to go up there and ask if he's a bird," Link decided, clapping his knees and rising from his observational crouch. Standing tall beside him, Ghirahim had made no such effort to remain circumspect, but as far as Link could tell, the maybe-bird in question hadn't noticed their approach either way. "Are you coming?"

"To watch the two of you squawk at each other? No thank you," he sniffed. "You can inform me later that I was right."

Ghirahim dissolving into diamonds wasn't entirely unexpected given that he'd done it before whenever walking became boring, and Link sighed as those diamonds slammed against the sword on his back, leaving him in temporary solitude. It just didn't seem exactly right to him. Dragonflies had wings, and—and arrows had feather fletching. That didn't make them birds.

The logistics of catching the maybe-bird's attention provided a distraction from his musings, though. Scrambling up the step-like stones that he had chosen as a perch, Link waited awkwardly to be noticed for a moment before tapping him lightly on the shoulder.

"Umm…"

"Oh!" The maybe-bird's song cut short with a discordant wheeze as he whirled around, and Link leaned back carefully, his hands planting themselves automatically on his hips. "I did not hear your approach! I was lost in this song written by my late teacher. He… passed away several years ago, you see, and this was the last song he taught me." His tall, blue crest of feathers drooped despondently, only to stiffen again in shock as he caught sight of Link's Slate. "Th-that there, on your hip! ...No. I'm sorry—it's nothing." He looked away. "I didn't mean to pry."

Link's mouth was already open, the question that had motivated his approach burning the tip of his tongue, when he hesitated. Would he be prying if he asked? That had to be rude, right? You probably couldn't just ask someone if they were a bird.

"No worries," he said instead with a shrug. Maybe if they talked for long enough, the subject would come up organically.

"Allow me to introduce myself," the maybe-bird said, smiling warmly as if to put their awkward start behind them. "My name is Kass. As a bard, I spend my days traveling this land in search of ancient songs. I know a song about this place, in fact." He nodded towards the stone rings that had already caught Link's interest, holding up his instrument. "Would you like to hear it?"

With abrupt, consuming certainty, Link realized that he would.

It wasn't much later that Ghirahim reappeared in a cloud of diamonds to discover Link shooting arrows through stone rings.

"What are you doing?" he said in Link's ear just as he released his next shot. The arrow flew wide, whizzing well outside the arch he'd been aiming for, and Link looked ruefully back at him. Ghirahim already possessed an uncanny knack for emerging from his sword at the exact moment most likely to make Link jump.

"Shooting arrows." Link broke into a jog towards where the arrow had vanished, Ghirahim following after him with long strides. He didn't have enough money or arrows to leave them lying around in the grass.

"Yes, but why?"

"There should be two of these rings that I can actually shoot through with the same arrow." Link explained distractedly. "I just haven't figured out which ones they are yet." Or could he solve the riddle if he shot through one ring, picked up the arrow, and then shot through another with the same arrow? How had the song gone again?

"I see." Strangely, Ghirahim sounded unimpressed. "And this is going to accomplish…?"

Ghirahim's expectant look was met with a helpless shrug as Link bent down to yank his errant arrow free. Who was he to not do what a song told him to?

"At least tell me that I was right," the demon lord grumbled at last while Link looked around, half-listening. That pair of rings nearby looked promising. "Three magical words that I want to hear from you, Link: 'you were right.'"

"Right about what?" Link asked, starting to line up his shot, but then he blinked and remembered.

"The bird!" Ghirahim cried out in anguish, with a wide-armed gesture towards Kass still perched on his stack of stones. "The bird! You talked to the bird, didn't you? Is he or is he not a bird?"

Kass played placidly on, too caught up in his music to notice Ghirahim's shrieking. Kass the maybe-bird was not very observant, Link thought.

"It… never came up," he admitted. Pausing in thought, he added, "You were wrong about him squawking, though. I don't think he's a bird."

Ghirahim's glare seemed the sort that might quickly transform into daggers, and Link tried to think of something helpful to say.

"He is a bard, if that helps," he offered.

It didn't.

"I've figured out what's wrong with you," Ghirahim announced later that evening, with the grave air of one pronouncing condemnation. Reconsidering his words, he amended them to add, "One thing that's wrong with you."

Link looked up from watching his eggs, lined up carefully by the fire.

"What's that?"

"You—" Ghirahim jabbed an accusatory finger at him, "—are a blank slate."

Nodding, Link turned back to his eggs. A few had already exploded when he'd let them sit for too long, and another handful had cracked when he tried to set them on the flames, but he thought this newest batch might cook into something edible.

If not, there were plenty of eggs where these ones came from. The trees in this area were full of them.

"Your response only proves my point," Ghirahim insisted. "I had considered that I might try to mold you in my image or something of that nature, except I don't think there's anything to you to mold! You are an empty vessel, you have all the determination of driftwood—"

"Well, that's not true," Link objected, frowning. Not that the first part wasn't pretty spot on, of course—impressive, considering that he hadn't even mentioned amnesia yet.

He wondered suddenly if this might be the time to bring it up—he had yet to find a way to say it outright that didn't make everyone involved uncomfortable, and so preferred to let the subject come about naturally—but Ghirahim was already speaking again.

"You think not?" he said scornfully. "Come over here and let me show you something."

Looking reluctantly down at his eggs, which were fast approaching that thin line between cooked and vaporized, Link stood, walking over to where Ghirahim laid draped against a fallen log. The demon sword didn't bother to raise himself, flicking a lazy hand towards the forest floor. Peering in closer, Link noticed a line of ants streaming along towards some distant goal, barely visible in the fading light.

"Look at those insects," Ghirahim instructed him, so he did. "They have a destination in mind, right? Somewhere they want to reach?" Abruptly, his gloved thumb came smashing down on the line from above, catching a few unfortunate ants mercilessly beneath it.

Link frowned. "What are you—"

"Just watch."

The ants who had watched their companions die seemed not much put out by the experience. There was a bit of confused dithering on the back end over how to resolve the broken line, but by the end of it they were flowing along just as smoothly as before, dodging around the thumb in their path.

"These ants have more drive than you do, Link. Do you know what you would do if an enormous thumb appeared in your path one day?" Blinking, Link considered the strange scenario, but Ghirahim was already telling him. "You would wander off to the side, forever… and ever… and ever, and never remember that you were going anywhere else to begin with."

"You're exaggerating," Link said, and Ghirahim raised an eyebrow.

"Am I? Tell me, then: are we currently traveling towards that floating stone bird in the sky?"

"Well… no." Link had meant to turn back towards it once the riddle of the rings was solved, but then he'd noticed a mountain glowing in the distance. Mountains didn't usually do that, in his experience.

"I rest my case," Ghirahim said in smug satisfaction, withdrawing his thumb and flicking dead ants off the white leather.

Link watched the trundling ants for another moment, and was reminded of what he'd left unattended when he heard a loud, whistling splat behind him.

"You exploded my eggs," he told Ghirahim with a mournful sigh, straightening up and trying to remember which of the nearby trees he hadn't climbed yet. "Do you want me to help the bird?" He hadn't assumed that Ghirahim would care one way or another.

"What I want is to not spend the rest of your life watching you flounder through the wilderness," Ghirahim groused. "What a century in miserable solitude did not do to my mind, a decade with you just might, and I don't care how pretty you are to look at."

"You think I'll live another ten years?" Link asked, and Ghirahim shrugged.

"It's a generous estimate."

Grappling a tree by the trunk, Link hoisted himself up, his shirt catching against the bark as he shimmied his way to the top. No eggs.

"You can't just not go check out a glowing mountain," he said, falling back down with a grunt. He was determined to make these eggs work, and not only because he was hungry. Something told him that if he could only unravel the mysteries of food, his life would improve dramatically as a result.

"You can't," Ghirahim corrected him, his eyes falling shut wearily. "And that's your problem."

Maybe he had a point, Link conceded, climbing another tree.

It wasn't until later, crouching protectively over his fire with the newest batch of eggs simmering happily in their shells, that Link realized that they had never come back around to amnesia. He glanced over towards Ghirahim, still reclining against his log in a fit of performative despair. It might cheer him up if he found out that he was right. Should he try to bring it up now?

...No, Link decided as he reached his hand into the fire, hissing and juggling his blackened egg while he waited for it to cool. No, the conversation had moved on since then. Now it would just be weird.