Author's Note: Hello, everyone! thank you for reading! This story relates directly to my large Majora' sMask work, Facades, but you do not need to have read that to read this. For those of you who did and do read Facades, welcome back! this happens between the "Great Fairy's Mask" and "Odolwa's Mask" chapters. Thank you again for reading, and extra thanks to those who review!
The rooster crows, and the foremen call to one another across the southern plaza with a blend of impatience, arrogance, and fear. It is the dawn of the first day, six o' clock in the morning, and Tatl's familiar light does not haunt her companion's crown like some sort of crass halo. Instead, he stood alone beneath the Clock Tower with empty pockets, and an empty feeling in his stomach.
He looked around. Clock Town's normal rhythm ticked along with the maddening, cryptic sameness it maintained many todays before, but only now did it feel oppressive in its absolute, rehearsed choreography: the stubborn dread in Kafei's steps carried him from the laundry pool to the mailbox with a futile resolve, but for the first time, he truly looked repentant, like secretly, he knew he was making a foolish choice, but was doomed to repeat it.
He took a long, deep breath, turned his head away from that familiar tragedy, and instead found the familiar face of the Clock Tower.
"What," he asked, thirsty from his dried tears and exhausted from crying them, "have I not tried before? Where have I not looked before?"
The clock's painted perimeter clattered gently with every turn, and its face stared out over Termina. Kindly, placidly, reluctantly, the minutes passed. He could practically feel the river rushing in the ground beneath both of them, pushing the wheel forward, turning the gears in the mechanism, unheeding of the three-day cliff quickly coming to swallow it up.
"The river," he said. "I see. I follow the river."
Ikana. Crypt of Termina's first doomsday.
The northern waterfall careened from the red cliffs overhead, and followed the canyon's scar south, to the swamp. Mikau's body gracefully cut through its waters, and fought against the current's flow to the source. When he reached the waterfall, he leapt from the water and rolled to a stop on the stone outcropping by its foot. Bits of sunlight glinted from the dust floating in the air, and prisms spread from the arc of water flowing above his head. Mikau removed his mask.
The cavern's damp air raised goosebumps along his arms and the back of his neck as his skin changed from slick and scaled to pink and fleshy. He slipped Mikau's mask into his bag, and crept over the mud and rock to examine the ancient door hiding in the shadows. The waterfall hissed at his back as shattered into droplets against the river's surface, like a minute breaking into many seconds, and so many seconds making up a day, a month, a year.
He peered into the darkness, and let his eyes re-discover the details from his memory. The rusted sun emblem over the door was just as weather-worn and dark as the last cycle of days he'd seen it, and the cloth faces dangling from the water-logged ropes ogled him with no less unified lust than when they'd first seen him. They waited, undisturbed and unbothered, for his return. They waited like they knew he'd been here in some today before this one, and like they knew he'd come back all the while.
Hungry. Wanting. All of Ikana was desperate for something. The Garo wanted blood, the Gibdo wanted tribute, Skull Keeta wanted death, and the Stone Tower wanted pilgrims to swallow into the sky. This place was no different.
Cold sweat formed around his collar as he urged himself closer and closer to the doorway. The smell of rot and mold forced its way into his nose. He held his breath as he drew closer in case the sound of his breathing awoke an unknown monster from the ground and lead it right to him.
He swallowed his trepidation, and held out a hand towards the door. Silent excitement ignited across the rows and rows of cloth faces hanging from the ropes crossed over the door as his fingers nearly grazed one, and then dampened when he pulled his hand away.
He cursed. This was the folly of a drunkard pushing his fingers between the bars of a ravenous beast's cage, but he could think of no less reckless way to enter.
"What fool besides me would do this?" he asked himself.
Not Tatl. She said she'd never go with him inside the cave. She said she'd leave him if he went there, but she'd already done that. She left him in the great green pasture outside Cremia's house, when the moon was at its fullest and he was at his emptiest. Anything she might have to say about his life and his choices, she could keep to herself, and any concern he might have about her opinion was unimportant.
And why should he waste his time thinking of her? Who was she but a fair-weather friend? Who was she but a bit of dandelion fluff floating here to there on a changing breeze? What was he but a maverick storm churning the water and the wind, and spinning the world around him out of control?
What were they but the chance encounter of a summer storm and a bit of fluff? Two carts colliding at a crossroads? A starving dog and a vulture circling the same corpse? They were always meant to part. It shouldn't matter. He'd known this from the start. It shouldn't matter to him.
But it did.
Damn it.
He reached out and crushed the first of the cloth faces in his palm. It crumbled like charcoal in a flame, and sent the others fluttering from a sudden gust of wind that ripped through the cave and snapped the old ropes from the rotting door frame. They undulated through the air like writhing, rotting worms, whipping left and right as the air tossed them to and fro. He pulled his shield in front of himself, and hid beneath it until the wind died down and tossed the ropes to the ground. They dissolved into dirt against the stony ground.
He peered out from behind his shield. The rusted bars on the old door remained. They sat crookedly against the frame like rotted teeth, or like a flimsy muzzle over the mouth of a monster. The darkened sun emblem glowered at him from above, sullen and silent.
The door lacked the same thing Ikana Castle did- the same thing all of Ikana did. It lacked the light of justice, the light of truth, the light of life. The sun above baked the canyon into a red clay, but the spirits within never felt its warmth, and never faded away in its harsh glare. Theirs was an existence of middling nothingness from neither life nor death. Igos begged him to bring the light in, and bring justice to his kingdom- the justice of life, and of death. The waterfall cavern awaited it, too.
He stepped back into the prismatic spray of light kicked up by the waterfall, and bathed the mirror shield in its colors until it caught the light and gave off a sudden, white-hot flash. He squeezed his eyes shut to adjust, and when he opened them again, the reflected light danced over the cavern walls and ceiling like stars floating in midair. He tilted the mirror until one of them landed on the forehead of the sun emblem, and then looked around.
Paintings covered the walls - of the Four Giants, and the people of the world. They danced alongside the blue-white swirls of a river painted at their feet, and drank from it with their hands. They beheld their reflections on its surface, bathed babies in its waters, and in some places, left their masks behind on the shore and drowned in its pull.
Something in the cavern clicked. The sun emblem- the sun above the door, above the painted people along painted the river- opened its green eyes, and its mouth spread into a toothy smile under the light glinting over it from the Mirror shield. Its stylized, gold-and-ochre rays revolved clockwise around its face as it began to glow from within, and the rusted bars pulled away from the cavern door with a grinding groan.
He exhaled through his nose, and waited for something to come out from the other side of the uncovered door. Nothing did.
The door itself was wooden, and waterlogged, and its center depicted a stylized white serpent. Green fins crested the center of its back and its tail, and clutched in its mouth was a massive, blood-red heart. Its placement on the door made it appear as if it was rising from the river and to the sky, like the light from the sun above had released it into the world.
He edged to the door and pushed it open. Parts of it came off on his hands as it fell open to inky darkness. Immediately, he sidled the doorway and held his shield over his face to cover himself from any creature disturbed by the intrusion. None came.
He waited five minutes and fifteen seconds. Then, he pulled out an arrow, ignited the head, and crept inside the opened stone tunnel.
The air inside was damp, cool, and heavy, like wet clay draping over his shoulders and falling down his back. The uneven floor slanted beneath his boots, and the walls reflected the flame of his arrowhead with a glassy, wet sheen as he held it in front of himself. Flickering shadows drifting over the passage walls told him as much as the open flame did: weeping figures stilled to water-glazed stalactites and stalagmites cutting the path forward into a jagged, crooked line. Moaning, disembodied faces idling in the darkness disguised themselves as three-holed cloth tags in the light. An unceasing, echoing trickle of water chased him deeper and deeper into the darkness until he could no longer see the faint daylight of the doorway behind him.
He flinched as he stepped in a puddle of icy water, and then cursed as he stepped in a second one. They were unavoidable, and soon, he was walking through an ankle-deep swath of standing water. As he reached for Mikau's mask, the light of his arrow extinguished with a sudden hiss.
He lit another one and held it aloft. It went out the same way as the first, and a fat drop of cold water fell from the ceiling and landed on his head.
Except it wasn't water- it was saliva, and the stalactites were the teeth of a beast, like Jabu-Jabu, and he'd been swallowed alive. The cool darkness around him came alive, and warm, and undulated like the pink innards of a creature. A trap. It wasn't a cave at all, but a trap! If he didn't turn around and pry open the beast's jaws, he'd-!
In his haste, he tripped over a rock, and landed face-first in the icy water pooling at his ankles. He raised his head and gasped - from the sudden chill or from the surprise, he wasn't certain, because the illusion of the beast's stomach shattered instantly as a series of ancient braziers set into the walls suddenly came alight with an eerie foxfire.
He stood up, and drew his sword and shield. Mikau's impassive face swung from his belt, and his abandoned, extinguished arrow drifted uselessly in the still water. Nothing else happened. He looked around.
No longer was he enclosed in a narrow tunnel. The passage opened into a cavern encapsulating a shallow underground lake. Here, the water barely made it to his knees, and at its center was a man made island of compacted earth and piled boulders. In fact, the entire cavern appeared as if it was dug out by hand long, long ago. Wooden ribs supported the domed ceiling above him, and eerie, rusted lanterns hung from chains bolted to the supports. The yellow-blue flames held in their bodies fluttered in the still air like moonlight on a disturbed ocean, and dyed the cloth faces stringing across the room an eerie, shifting green. It was as if the cavern held hundreds of open-mouthed souls suspended in midair, each represented by a scrap of cloth. He gulped down the feeling of dread they dredged from his stomach.
A slouching figure in a violet cloak perched on the edge of the island- Ikana's gatekeeper. His staff made a dull thud against the ground as he tapped it against the earth in a slow, bored rhythm in tandem with the gentle swinging of his ashen feet in the shallow water below, though the water never stirred. His glowing red eye peered out from his tattered hood and sized up his guest.
"Welcome," the gatekeeper said, giggling. "Are you certain you are ready to journey into this place?"
"Y-yes," he said, startled by the echo inspired by his voice.
The gatekeeper's had caused none.
"Yes," he repeated. "I follow the river, and it lead me here. But what is this place?"
The gatekeeper held up a dirty, ashen finger, and tapped his obscured temple. Then, he tapped where his heart might lurk beneath his cloak.
"That's what this place is," the gatekeeper said, matter-of-factly, like it explained everything.
He pointed to his temple, and then his chest, too, perplexed.
"Yes," said the gatekeeper. "The spirits here have been waiting for you. Some for a long, long time."
He scanned the room for anything besides water, earth, and foxfire. Nothing. He reached into his bag for the Eye of Truth, and searched it again behind its red-violet lens. Still nothing. He pulled the Garo Mask over his head next, and then looked around, ready for an ambush.
"Yee hee hee," chuckled the gatekeeper. "Funny. Very funny, traveller. Your disguises will work in other places, but not here. We already know who you are."
"Who is 'we'?"
"Come here," said the gatekeeper. "I will show you."
He sheathed his sword, and looked to the chamber for any kind of bridge or ramp to the island. Nothing. Only still water and dancing foxfire. He reached for Mikau's mask.
"As you are," clarified the gatekeeper.
He looked to the glassy black surface of the water, and the reflected shimmer of light hovering over its surface. In the low light, the lake's depths were as black and impenetrable as obsidian. He had no way of knowing how deep it went, or what lurked beneath the surface.
"Come," urged the gatekeeper.
He took one step in the water, and then another, and another. His wet footsteps echoed across the chamber, and sent the dark water scattering in ripples beneath the low light. Though he was already drenched before he started, he shivered as its icy clutches claimed more and more of his body: it rose above his waist, and then his neck, and soon he could only touch the bottom if he extended the tips of his toes. He sucked in a breath and swam the remaining distance to the island, careful not to let the sword and shield on his back or the bag slung across his body drag him to the bottom.
The gatekeeper swayed his head from side to side with a playful impatience as he tossed his gear onto the shore of the island and pulled himself out of the water with a wince. The slightest stir in the air sent chills through his body.
"Who is 'we'?" he repeated, drenched and shivering.
The gatekeeper swung his staff behind him. As if on cue, more foxfire sparked in another set of braziers along the wall. Four uneven paths of stepstones and piled earth dotted the surface of the water, and at the end of each were tunnels dug from the cavern walls. Above each was a prominent, crude, abstract drawing in white chalk and white paint. He could not tell what they represented. More strings of faces hung in organized rows above each tunnel, and ogled their visitor with open-mouthed rapture. He felt the chill of eyes roving over him with a sickening, keen certainty colder and more sinister than the lakewater running down his neck and to the small of his back.
"The river outside rushes onwards beneath the light of the sun. The lake inside is very still," said the gatekeeper. "But inside, it's dark, dark, dark, dark. Understand?" he asked, still giggling.
"No," he answered, honestly.
"Mmm," said the gatekeeper. "You will."
"Is this not something you can explain to me?"
"It would ruin the surprise," said the gatekeeper. "Hee!"
He rubbed his temples.
"I am supposed to bring the light into the darkness," he said. "Correct?"
"Yee hee. And here I thought the fairy was the mouthy one, yee hee hee! It is harder to save the world without someone to tell you what to do, isn't it?"
He glowered at the gatekeeper, even though he knew he shouldn't. He suspected from the beginning that the spirits in the canyon may not be bound to the finite memory within each cycle of days, but for the gatekeeper to admit it so freely left him at a loss for words, and with an aggravating itch on his palms. He hated it when someone knew something he didn't, and he hated that this kind of naivete was the status quo for most of his life. He especially hated it here in Termina, where the repeating three days should have given him the upper hand with or without Tatl's input.
Worse, he hated that the gatekeeper had a point.
"You are very strong," the gatekeeper said. "Only the strong are allowed into this chamber. You are also clever, so I have faith in you."
Then, the gatekeeper grinned as much as a red-eyed void could grin.
"You are also alone," he added. "And that is very significant in a place like this, ehee hee!"
He bit his tongue and sullenly scanned the walls for anyone or anything else to look at. He found dirt, and an audience of ogling cloth faces shifting in the low light. His face heated up in outrage and shame.
The gatekeeper tilted his head like an owl.
"You have a gift for soothing the spirits of Ikana. But outside of the canyon, others wait with their own troubles. They find their way here, you see. They find their way here, and they wait. These spirits have been waiting a long time. Do you understand?"
No. He frowned at the gatekeeper and wracked his brain for something more intelligent to say.
"Hm," decided the gatekeeper. "Reflect upon it as the spirits receive you."
The gatekeeper slammed the butt of his staff against the dirt, and then waved his ashen fingers towards the four paths. He followed their lead, and turned to the four passages and the many cloth tags above them. None of them appeared more prominent in size or placement than the others, but each frame was decorated with more cloth and rope than the last.
He turned to ask the gatekeeper if they held any significance, but found only empty air and flickering flame.
"Hello?" he asked.
The cavern mimicked him with a fading whisper.
"Hello?" he repeated.
Stray drips of water echoed in the earthen chamber like faraway rain, and the eerie cloth faces above him appeared as gossamer spiders suspended in the unnatural light.
"H-hello?"
Something moved. Something- many things- chittered above him. He looked up. The stalactites and dark stone had disappeared beneath a solid swath of snow white spiders crawling from the darkness like maggots from a piece of meat. Their eight eyes and forelimbs turned towards him, reaching, hungry, as they descended to the ground, and then scuttled towards him in a mounting white wave.
He had a sword and shield like Mido told him to bring, but they were as far from his mind as the safe haven as Kokiri forest. Cold fear held his hands at his sides like a pair of still, dead fish, and his feet began moving far in advance of his mind.
He vaulted over the closest path of stones and dirt, and hurried up the sloping, uneven tunnel at the end. Around him, more spiders emerged from the crevasses and holes in the rock wall and gave chase. He tripped once, twice, and then almost looked behind him into the chittering throng, but to his desperate relief found a door straight ahead of him - a door with a white serpent clutching a red heart. A few stray spiders skittered over its worn wooden surface, but he feared the number of creatures at his back more than the few in front of him. He brushed the spiders away and pushed through the door before throwing it shut behind him.
Inside, what awaited him was a puddle of water, and the barely-there light of the bioluminescent algae and mushrooms hiding in the corners of the otherwise dark chamber.
He exhaled, and once he was sure the door to his back would hold, sank to the ground. It was soft, spongy, and smelled of decay, like this entire chamber within the roots of the Great Deku Tree formed from rot and ravenous insects.
He looked to his hands, and then shoved his face into his fingers. He was useless. How could he cure his father of the evil within if he could not even face the spiders living in his hollows? How would he even find what he was meant to be looking for if he could not bear to journey any deeper into the tree? His father would rot away into a husk of parasites and blight, and he would be trapped within it, alone, alone forever and ever and ever, all because he was afraid of spid-
-except, he remembered, he had never been afraid of spiders until after he saw Gohma.
He looked up.
Gohma's huge, glowing eye cut through the darkness around her like a knife through paper. Around her, a corona of her eggs dripped opaque viscera from the uneven ceiling and onto the wet floor like ooze pulsing from an infected wound. She blinked at him once, twice, and then crashed into the floor with a shuddering thud. Her eggs fell to the floor with her, stuck to her legs like wet, squelching tumors.
She reared back like a stallion climbing to its hind legs, and worked her glistening mandibles like a machine weaving an invisible thread. A sickening smell wafted from her matted hair- urine, blood, and mildew mixed together and left to sit- as she closed the distance between herself and her prey.
She was just as foul as he remembered. But this was not the great Deku Tree, and the sword and shield on his back were no longer the limited weapons of the Kokiri. They'd been sharpened, or been burned away and replaced by something harder and crueler.
He pulled his bow from his back, and aimed an arrow at the center of Gohma's eye.
It hit her right in her yellow pupil, and sent her writhing in pain. Her black, hairy legs trembled and flailed as her eggs fell from her body, and then, like a reflection coming into focus on a rippled surface, they changed.
It was not Gohma writhing in front of him, but a massive, one-eyed Wort surrounded by its translucent progeny. As the Wort's round, scaled body rolled around in blinded pain, it crushed and ruptured the cloud of round sacs safeguarding the embryos of its children. Their pus-yellow and cotton-pink slime innards splattered across the wet floor with each rolling fidget of the Wort's massive body until it finally stilled. Blindly, it stared at its killer as the dark blood pooling around the shaft of the arrow lodged in its pupil finally slowed, and the gelatinous flesh of its sclera puckered and wrinkled in the cave air.
He counted to twenty as he waited for another twitch, another trick, another final, desperate swipe given in its death throes. None came. Its death was final, and very real. Slowly, he circled the Wort's corpse to peer behind it.
Besides the creature, the room was almost identical to the rest of the cavern - dug by hand, upheld by wood, lit by foxfire, and decorated with unblinking cloth tags watching his every move, uniform in size, shape, and color- except one.
At the center of the back wall was a low altar of stone and wood. Directly above it was another three-holed face, but this one was larger than the others. A set of painted red and blue stripes cut through its center like war paint on the face of a champion.
The Wort's blood pooled in the standing water beneath it like dirt collecting in the basin of a bowl. He reached towards it, like he might touch it out of morbid curiosity, but then whirled around when he heard something near the entrance click.
The door- the one with the white serpent, slid open. He drew his sword and waited for something to enter- a monster, an illusion, a ghost, he did not know.
Nothing did. He was alone. Even the corpse of the Wort had faded into thin air and left him with his thoughts. He turned to give the face above the altar one last look, only to discover that the cloth tag had morphed into the rotting teeth and eyeless sockets of a creature he thought he'd destroyed in the bottom of the well beneath Kakariko.
Dead, white hands extended from the ceiling like spiders from threads, like faces from ropes, and tore at his clothes, tore at his hair, tore at his arms, tore at his face. He drew his sword and shield, and cleared a path for himself towards the exit.
He spared a glance over his shoulder as he fumbled to close the door, and found the creature's long, amber yellow teeth inches from his nose. Its horrific, rancid breath wormed its way through his nose and into his lungs, and even as he slammed the door closed, he could not suppress his echoing scream.
It made little difference - the arms and hands reaching down from the ceiling never let up, even for a moment, and soon he found his right arm pinned to the cavern wall. Its jagged, blood-black nails bit into his skin and left five red streaks as he pulled himself out of its grasp and towards the island at the center of the acid lake bubbling up from the earth's depths.
More arms emerged from the ceiling to obstruct his progress, and he struggled to keep himself from stumbling into the pool of white-hot flame and bile churning on either side of the raised dirt path. When he finally reached the central island, he scanned the low light for the way out of the well, but realized with rising horror that the figure in the flickering shadows before him took the shape of the creature's eyeless, drooping head and thick, fleshy body. Its pale neck extended from its folds like a white, rotting tongue from the lips of an undead beast, and then grew, and grew, and grew until it reached across the length of the entire island to find him.
He turned to the nearest path, ran until he found another doorway decorated with the white serpent, and threw himself behind it. It didn't save him. Inside, the dead hands were already waiting. They grabbed his arms and stretched him out before the doorway like an animal drawn for quartering.
At the back of the room, the creature melted out of the earthen wall. Its two burnt, amputated limbs hung from its fleshy sides like two plucked, beheaded fowl left out for the vultures, and its veiny flesh dripped from its frame in pools of bloat and viscera. Its head rattled with a sickening echo as it unhinged its jaw and extended its neck towards its prey.
He sucked down a breath of air and tried to think of a way out. The creature was blind, so it relied on its ears and its arms to find and capture its prey, except-
-except a cavern like this echoed terribly, so the creature's head and mouth should not be able to follow him so easily.
He swung his weight so his whole body crashed into the center space between the two arms holding him. Something invisible buckled on contact, and both it and him tumbled into the door, then to the floor, with a messy thud and clatter. Something ridged pressed uncomfortably into his back, and his fingers discovered the scaly texture of something reptilian. When he turned around, he found himself sitting on the legs of a stunned Dinofols soldier. He drew his sword and plunged it into the eye slit of the creature's helmet before it could react. It shrieked, and then fell still.
He whirled around to where the creature's head and body stood a moment ago. Instead, he found the yellow eyes of another reptilian soldier. It opened its mouth with a faint hiss, and soon a growing orange light mounted in the back of its throat.
He threw himself out of the way of the Dinofols' stream of flaming breath just in time. He rolled to his feet, and ran to the far side of a painted boulder near the perimeter of the room for cover as it turned its head to follow him.
Creatures of this size- Dodongos, Dinofols, dragons- could usually sustain a stream of fire for about ten seconds at a time before they had to take a breath. He drew and loaded his bow within ten seconds, and then circled to the other side of the boulder to charge the creature.
The Dinofols waited with its flat-bladed sword in its hand, ready for a head-on assault, but not for a freezing arrow fired at the shallow water pooling at its feet. It shrieked as a bolt of ice exploded by its toes, and then tripped as the ice travelled up its legs and held them fast.
Another arrow pierced its chestplate, and another ran through one of its eyes. It slumped over on its frozen legs like a ragdoll, and then wilted to the ground as the ice holding it upright weakened and shattered.
He scanned the room for any other creatures lurking in the shadows. When he didn't find any, he slung his bow over his back with a clumsy shiver. The magic of his first arrow coated him in a thin frost in place of the lakewater covering his body, and the chill of the air certainly granted him no favors. As he scanned the room for a third enemy, he rubbed feeling back into the tips of his fingers and muttered a series of petty complaints with a confidence he didn't have.
"Do not rush me," he said to the cloth faces hanging from the room. "Don't think I have any appreciation for these games."
He blew on his hands and then gestured to the wall behind the corpse of the half-frozen Dinofols, where another altar headed by a painted face stared at him with blank eyes and open mouth.
"Sacrifices," he muttered. "Either them, or me."
He shook his feet and focused wholly on wiggling his toes, determined not to fall for whatever illusion the cavern next showed him. He'd faced the monsters in his life once before, and once had been enough. After a long, deep breath, he headed for the door to the center chamber, and then to a passage he had not explored before.
To his surprise and cautious relief, the cavern and its decorations remained just that: a cavern and decorations.
The four chalk and paint symbols above the tunnels were drawings, he realized. One was the eye of the Wort, one was the flaming breath of the Dinofols, and this one was some kind of humanoid figure. If he had to guess, it symbolized one of the frozen, half-crazed priests he'd found in Snowhead's tower, much like the other two represented a creature trapped and abandoned in the strongholds of the swamp and ocean. What the fourth room held, he had no idea. Stone Tower's mysteries were not yet his to know. The uncertainty stirred butterflies in his stomach.
He chose the path he knew. At the end of it was a serpent door identical to the others. He drew his sword and kicked it open.
Floating in the air were forest fairies. Dozens of them. Their radiant light flooded the cavern and reflected off the crystalline blue waters of the fountain cheerfully bubbling from the center of the floor, and illuminated the murals of flowers and animals sprawling over the walls. They encircled him like mushrooms around a well, and invited him to step deeper into the fountain.
A gentle laughter bounced throughout the room as the fountain's Great Fairy appeared, dressed in nothing but vines of ivy and flowers covering her torso and winding in her long hair. Her rouged lips parted in a smile, and she might have offered to grant him his heart's desire had he not thrown his shield like a discus into her chest before she could form the first word. It flashed in the light as the fairies' glow dulled to foxfire dancing off white cloth, and the paintings on the walls transformed to crude tally marks and unintelligible writing.
The Great Fairy's body warped into that of a shrunken, undead man with blue skin and crazed yellow eyes. He hit the wall and slumped against it, stunned, until its killer sprinted across the room and slashed his face open with a stroke of his gold and silver sword, and then sliced the corpse again diagonally from right shoulder to hip left. Green blood sluggishly oozed from the wounds like an afterthought in the wake of its death.
As he wiped his blade, he seethed at the cloth faces watching him from the corners and ceiling of the room. The insults bouncing in his skull threatened to jump from the tip of his tongue, but dispelled when he realized that, floating in front of the doorway, a single blue fairy remained.
Navi. She wasn't real. She couldn't be.
He took a step towards her. She winked through the serpent's mouth like a candle's flame extinguishing on a puff of air.
"N-no," he said, stumbling for the door. "Wait!"
He ran into the main chamber. It looked the same as it had before he entered the third tunnel.
"Wait!" he cried, and winced as his voice reverberated over the lake.
"I know it's an illusion!" he continued. "I know! But how do you know? What do you want from me? What are you asking of me?! What are you trying to accomplish?! Isn't this enough?!"
His questions ran in circles about the room, one after the other, and then on top of one another. They pelted his ears with noise until they were nothing but nonsense zipping over the walls and water.
Know
Illusion
Know
How
What?
Asking
What?
Want!
Enough?!
He crouched to the ground and covered his ears, but somehow the echo grew louder and louder, like they were reverberating inside of his brain. The still air over the lake suddenly whipped around his body, like the earth above his head had torn open and sucked the harsh wind of the canyon outside into the depths of the cavern. Water and ghostly flame spiralled around him in sloshing, streaking, out of control force, and soon bits of the ceiling and the cloth garlands ripped from the chamber to follow. They came closer and closer with the wrath of a hurricane, and none of the solitude of its eye. He reached for his hat as it flew from his head, but it slipped through his fingers. He clutched at his bag as the wind pulled it away, and cried out as the masks and rations inside spilled out and spiralled into the wind before his hands could reach them. The buckle of the strap holding his quiver and shield snapped under the storm's strength, and bits of his skin and clothing began to tear from the force of its many vengeful hands. They pulled his sword from his sheath, ripped Mikau's mask from his belt, and plucked the ocarina from the inner lining of his tunic. It smashed against the cavern wall into a million pieces.
Know illusion know
Asking what you
Know
What?
Want?!
What?!
Do!
Enough!
The storm plucked him from the ground and stripped his shoes from his feet. He screamed, but that didn't stop the wind, and it didn't stop the mounting echo.
Know illusion
Asking what know
What do want?!
Soon, he was naked, and bleeding from hundreds of tiny cuts criss crossing over his body. He curled into a ball and smashed his palms into his ears, helpless.
Enough!
Know illusion.
Asking what?
You know.
What? Do.
Want!
He screamed until his throat was raw, and the pain of the wind turned his vision white and speckled. He screamed until he couldn't, and then collapsed into himself, spent.
Know the illusion.
Asking what you know.
What do you want?
He coughed. He could barely breathe.
Enough, continued the echo. How much is enough?
"Stop," he begged.
Stop, echoed the chamber.
You know.
You know.
You know how much is enough.
The wind stopped. He let out a gasping breath, and shuddered as his body hit the earth. The foxfire extinguished, and left him naked in total darkness.
Nothing stirred. Nothing moved. His whole world became the chill of the air on his bare, wet skin, and the slow trickle of water distantly dripping around him. He squeezed his eyes shut, and realized that without the ocarina, he was going to die here. A choking sob escaped his throat.
Hero of Time. He'd never been anything but a shadow cast on a wall. His tools and magic were gifts of faith given to him with the grace of beings more powerful than he. He was no Kokiri, he was no warrior, and he had nothing to offer anyone as he was. He wailed to the cave, and beat his hands against the ground.
Useless. Useless! He had always been useless when it mattered, and that had never stopped! Why was he here?! Why had he done this?! What made him think that he could make any difference in Termina's fate, or even his own?! Kaepora Gaebora said that this world was destined to fade away, and so was he! Why fight it?! Why? Why?! What could he possibly do to prove that he was worthy of fitting in somewhere, anywhere, when all he ever did was put on costumes and pretend to be something he wasn't?
Something light touched his head, like the brush of a butterfly on a flower. When he finally opened his eyes, he found a soft pool of blue light floating in front of him. A fairy. Navi.
She smiled warmly at him, and then floated to the tunnel leading to the cavern's exit, towards the waterfall.
He sat up, hesitant and dumb, like a drooling child struggling to walk for the first time.
"Is this a trick?" he asked, but it came out a whisper, and the chamber couldn't repeat it.
And perhaps it was a trick. But he was naked, and cold, and could see no other way forward. He could only see Navi, and where her light led him.
Then, he heard a soft chime from somewhere behind him. He turned around to find Tatl floating before the doorway of the cavern's last passage. Her white-yellow glow hummed argumentatively against the inky black of the water as she waited, arms crossed and head held high.
He looked from one to the other, paralyzed by indecision.
Navi held out her hand like she expected him to take it the same way a child took the hand of their mother when crossing the road. He reached out for it, like he could stretch his arm out over the whole lake if he tried. But he stopped short.
He came to Termina to find Navi. But he hadn't found her anywhere in its four worlds, and he knew he would certainly never find her here. Navi was an illusion. Both fairies were an illusion. Tatl said she would never come into this cave with him. This place would never give him what he came for. But it was a choice.
To his right, Navi, and the devil of a fate he knew. A return to the forest, and a quiet sleep in the obscurity of a fantasy he crafted for himself- him, a Kokiri, forever a child as he wanted to be, and how he had been promised to be.
To his left, Tatl, and the devil he did not know.
One was a lie, and the other inevitable. He could either run from it, or face it himself.
"Sorry," he muttered, more to himself than to the blue fairy covering her mouth in betrayal.
"I'm sorry," he sobbed, turning away from her.
Tatl sneered, like she wanted him to think he'd choose her all along. She flitted into the final doorway, and waited impatiently by the head of the white serpent staring at him from the doorway. The blood-red heart clutched in its jaws outlined her glowing silhouette like a strange cage. He followed with reluctant, shaky steps, and left pinpricks of blood on the door when he leaned on it.
And he wept.
Even when the thing he wanted most was right in front of him, he couldn't bring himself to take it. Instead, he turned away like a creature born in a cave turned away from the sun. Whenever he'd had the chance to turn around, to turn back, to stay safe and let someone else save Hyrule, he hadn't. He'd pushed forward, guided not only by an invisible hand that charted his course, but his own. It happened every time, every time, every time.
"I hate this," he hissed. "I hate this. I hate that I hate even my own choices. I hate this."
Hate, hissed the cavern. Hate.
He pushed open the door, fully expecting to see either the princess or the desert king waiting for him. Instead, he found Ikana's gatekeeper, and a room identical to the rest. His ashen feet kicked at the dirt beneath the altar on the back wall, and his staff threatened to knock the painted cloth face displayed above his head from the top of the altar and to the uneven dirt ground.
The two of them stared at one another - a shadow shrouded in clothing, and a raw, naked, bloody mortal- and dared not make a move.
"...Well?" he finally asked, when he was sure no other tricks of light, or wind, or fire might jump out of the shadows and rip him apart.
"You've gone as far as you can go," said the gatekeeper. "There's nothing more for you to do here."
He stretched out one dirty, ashen hand, and motioned for the door.
"Turn back."
He shook his head.
"I won't."
"You won't?"
He shook his head, again.
"I don't have what it takes to do that and be satisfied with the choice," he said.
The gatekeeper tilted his head.
"Oh? But you are not satisfied with this choice, either, are you?"
He snorted. His eyes watered, his head hurt, and his tongue was like cotton caught in his sandpaper throat.
"No," he said. "But I won't turn around."
The gatekeeper put down his staff and tented his fingers.
"You're an incredible person," said the gatekeeper, and he swore he heard the gatekeeper call him by his name.
He felt his heart stop. For a moment.
"Wh-what did you call me?"
"Hm?"
"What did you call me?! What did you say?!"
The gatekeeper grinned. He was sure of it. He was sure he could see his teeth somewhere deep in the shadows.
"Yee hee," chuckled the gatekeeper, throwing his head back as his voice grew deeper, and louder, and louder until it boomed throughout the room.
The gatekeeper stood to his full height, and his body seemed to grow, and grow, and grow until he dwarfed his visitor. He threw back his head and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
"Eehee hee hee! Aha ha ha ha ha ha! AH HA HA HA HA HA!"
The gatekeeper threw his head forward, and cast off his disguise. Standing on the altar was the desert king, the thief in black, that man, Ganondorf Dragmire. The studs on his black leather armor glistened in the light, but none so brightly as the huge orange stone fastened at the center of his forehead, full of the same roiling color as his eyes. His was a face of three holes, but instead of three voids, they held fire and fury, and a hunger for a power he could no longer appreciate or control.
"Did you think I wouldn't find you?!" he said, drawing a blade and rushing to corner his target. His voice boomed across the cavern and rattled his head like a series of explosions cracking throughout the room.
"I came to your forest, where none may enter!"
The king sliced at his unarmed opponent, who dodged and ran behind a pile of rocks lurking in the side of the room.
"I spread my seed there, so that your father would die, and my phantom made a home in the Woods where men would never dwell! I forced you to return as a man, and I stole what little innocence you might have had!"
Ganondorf appeared on one side of the rock, and when his opponent tried to make a break for the other side, appeared there, too. He skirted around the obstacle and cornered the child in front of him. The king's breath spread hot over his head as he leaned down to grin in his face.
"I have been your shadow, and I have been the catalyst that flung you from your home! I have been the thing in the night to keep you awake, and I have been the one feeding the hatred in your heart! You suffer because I-!"
He tore at the face of his accoster, and the desert king disappeared like smoke in the breeze from the moment he touched him. The Garo's mask came off in his hands. In Ganondorf's place were the glowing red eyes and shrouded brow of the gatekeeper.
"Any joy Ganondorf once took from that is beyond him now," he whispered. "I already took everything from him. He killed my father; I killed his mothers. He soiled the Woods; I plundered his fortress. I banished him to a place beyond reason, and beyond hope. Nothing awaits him but regret, and all of eternity."
He looked down at the Garo mask.
"He will haunt me for all of my days, because he and I were born to haunt one another. I fear him like I fear myself. I can no sooner escape him than I can escape myself."
The gatekeeper slunk to the altar at the back of the room. He craned his head up to observe the painted cloth face at its head.
"A terrible fate for him," the gatekeeper said.
"Yes."
The gatekeeper turned around.
"Have you figured it out? What this place is?"
The water. The darkness. The stillness of the four chambers, and the illusions. The mirror he needed to reflect light for entry.
"The inside of my mind," he said. "It's a reflection of the hidden parts of oneself."
"Is that all?" the gatekeeper pressed.
"It's yours, too. A reflection of your regrets, though I do not entirely understand them."
"It is more than that, too, but it is that as well. Not only mine," said the gatekeeper. "Yee hee. The canyon's sins are bigger than I am. But you've put most of them to rest. As for mine? Not yet. But you will. You will. Ehee."
The gatekeeper produced something from beneath his cloak. A blue ocarina. At the same moment, he felt his chest and realized he was unscathed from the wind, and clothed. His shoes and bow had never left his back, and his bag had never spilled. Everything was in its place.
He followed the gatekeeper to the altar, and reached for the ocarina. The gatekeeper snatched it away, and held it high above his head.
"Do not climb the Stone Tower by yourself," pressed the gatekeeper. "It is hubris to try. The trials waiting for you in the four corners of Termina were never meant for a person alone. The trials of Majora were never meant for a person alone. The trials of any deity were never meant for a person alone. That is why they failed."
He gestured to Mikau's mask hanging from his belt.
"All of them," the gatekeeper impressed.
"But I have only myself," he said. "Don't you know? Tatl left. She cannot stand me. I have only myself, and the spirits of the masks."
He reached for the ocarina. The gatekeeper held it away.
"It is dangerous to go alone," warned the gatekeeper. "Let the river guide you somewhere else before you return to this canyon."
"I cannot promise anything," he growled.
"Then you have no instrument!" thundered the gatekeeper, eyes piercingly red.
The cavern shook as if the ceiling threatened to give way- from the gatekeeper, from another illusion, or from something outside, he did not know. He realized with a start that he had no idea what time it was, or how long he had been in this place. His breathing quickened, and his aggravation turned to fear the way paper curls in a sudden flame.
"I-I'll go to the mountain," he said. "Or the ocean. Or the swamp! I promise! Please! Just, just give me the ocarina!"
The gatekeeper placed the instrument neatly into his outstretched hands. He pulled it to his chest like a lifeline.
"Hee. Yee hee hee," giggled the gatekeeper, like his outburst had never happened.
"Good! Now," said the gatekeeper, pointing to the exit, "on your word, go."