Link found Oni sitting on a log near the house, so he went to sit down next to him.
"It would have been nice if you hadn't shown yourself so... Forcefully, " he said with a sigh.
Oni grunted as his only response, and Link sighed again.
"How am I going to explain this to Zelda? Well, I guess that keeps our secrets even?" said Link with a slight smile. "But I'm still wondering, why would Nayru want to lure Dark by making him think he could be me? Like he said, it makes no sense."
The deity grunted and passed a hand through his white hair. Link realized it was a gesture that the three of them seemed to share.
"Because I found the shadow amusing, and Nayru wanted to take my toys away, the same as she has done since time immemorial."
Link scoffed. "Toys? Is that how you see us?"
Oni grabbed Link's left hand and pulled off his glove for them to see the glowing mark of the Triforce.
"Do you think you are anything more than a toy for your goddesses?" he asked.
"I like to think I am."
"You are not," said Oni, letting go of his hand. "Because we cannot see mortals like equals. Do you see a cat as an equal? You can't. You just play with it and let it do what it wants as long as it doesn't bother you"
Link held his chin in his palm, thinking about the deity's words. "I like to think I'm more like a dog. One of those big, furry ones," he said with a smile.
Oni narrowed his eyes at him. "I see how similar the original is to the shadow," he said.
"That's mean," said Link. "The way I've come to see it, he is his own original. If I was a dog, I think he would be a cat. We're similar in theory, but not really."
"Hmmm, that comparison seems…adequate."
The wind picked up, shaking the leaves of the trees around them. The rain had stopped, but heavy storm clouds still covered the sky. Dark came back with an armful of wood for the fire.
"Having secret chats between you?" he asked, with less humor and more bitterness than usual.
"It's not a secret if you can hear everything," said Link, getting up and taking the logs from him. Then he turned back to the deity. "I don't know why I do it. The drinking thing. One day I was in some random in between Termina and Sakeer, and I realized that that was the day I had fought Ganondorf. I was seventeen then, but I still felt ten years old when I thought about the battle. It was a strange feeling, to realize that I was seventeen for a second time, and I still hadn't learned how to grow up. So I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate my nonexistent battle, by myself. It was the first time I had tried wine."
"And you got shitfaced," said Dark with a motherly sigh.
Link laughed. "I did. I also jumped on a table and threw a mug at a bard. Or so I was told the next day. I don't remember much," he said, and shrugged. "It was better than spending the night thinking about the battle, and dreaming about it, and…" he trailed off, his mind going to the nightmares and the screams. Reimagining a thousand different scenarios in which he could see every single way he could have lost. He smiled instead and kept talking. "I just kept doing it every year after that. There's nothing more there."
"That is terrible," said a voice nearby, making Link and Dark jump. They turned to see that Sheik had come out of the house without them even noticing him.
"S-Sheik! How long-?" asked Link.
"Long enough," he said. He reached out to help Link with the longs, but Link refused, and instead accompanied him back inside the house, leaving Dark and Oni alone outside.
"I swear, Sheik appears and he loses his head," said Dark, sitting down next to Oni. "Not that I can blame him. I do too, but it's so annoying when only he can get close to Sheik. So unfair…"
"Are your hearts linked too?" asked Oni.
"No, of course not. I don't have one, for starters," said Dark with a smirk. "But anyway, I am your cat and Nayru wanted to get me away from you? That's…crazy. Just flat out crazy."
"You are not my cat."
"But you said we mortals were like pets-"
"When the Hero said that, I merely agreed because the comparison of him with a dog and you with a cat was adequate. I did not imply that I have taken you two as pets. We are simply stuck in a situation in which we must share parts of the same physical form. Separating from each other would only make us weaker."
"Hmp, guess you're right on that," said Dark, putting his chin on his palm. "But that's enough stalling. Now that you know about Link's reasons, you have to tell me. How did you steal the moon?"
Oni nodded, and looked up at the shinning sliver of moon still visible among the clouds.
"I call it stealing because that is how Din thinks of it to this day, but I won it in battle," he said, and Dark found himself falling into a vision like a dream that enveloped him completely.
"Before the creation of your world, we existed. As we had always existed, completely, in the black space between the burning stars. Shapeless. Needless. Complete.
But Aware."
The absolute darkness surrounding Dark felt like he was suffocating, and he blinked away the vision, gasping for a breath that he didn't need. Oni grabbed his hand, and pressed their foreheads together, letting the shadow anchor his body as his mind went back to the vision of the emptiness of space.
"Among us, Nayru was the first to desire. She desired to create. She desired to separate law from lawless. Order from Chaos. She separated Energy from Matter, and created a galaxy of her own.
I saw no point in it. There were stars. Galaxies existed. Why create more? But she desired, and desire has no more reason for us than for mortals, so she created her own laws. Unlike your creation myth, where Din created the earth first, the reality is that the law was there first. How could it have been any different? Mortals are so irrational."
Dark couldn't help laughing at his remark, but froze when he felt their lips brushing, and his fake pretense of a heart jumped so hard in his chest, it was almost painful.
Oni paid him no mind, and went on.
"Farore and Din followed her. Din's power modified matter according to the Law, and thus created a world. I did not like the world. I wanted to fight. I wanted their silly creation to stop existing and for us to return to an existence without desire.
I knew Din enjoyed the lack of law as much as I did, so I descended onto her earth to fight her. I challenged her to fight for parts of the world the crafted, and as she desired to fight too, she accepted my challenge.
This was not in Nayru's law."
Dark saw Oni descend as darkness incarnate onto the barren, burning earth. Consuming, tearing it apart from the core. Din stood across from him, a towering pillar of crackling fire that roared with pure power. He had always imagined a warrior fighting a goddess, but what he saw with his mind eyes was two forces of nature trying to tear each other apart, crushing the earth with their very presence.
"So when I won the first round of our battles and took away a piece of the world for myself, she and Farore trapped me in the moon I tore away from their world. She changed her law to order the galaxies to move, forcing my moon to orbit her earth so it would remain under her law. There I remained for thousands of years, forced out of combat along with Din, who had been cast away to the core of the earth, just so Nayru and Farore could bring forth pathetic mortal lives.
I despised their creation. I despised their laws. And my only desire was to fight again. Fight them all. But the law prevented me from descending formless and lifeless into a world of living forms. So I called their attention by bending the law as much as I could. I sent whispers to their creations so that they would use the powers of the world to allow me into the world. I demanded sacrifices to bind me to the world, and performed shows of lights to astound them. The more they revered me, the more I could touch their minds, and order them to fight in my name."
Wars raged on across the centuries before Dark's eyes. Kingdom against kingdom.
"You made your followers fight the goddesses' followers?" asked Dark, forgetting all about the closeness between them. Oni didn't feel hot. Oni didn't breathe, or do any of the things that mortals did that repulsed him, and the feeling of his cool skin as their fingers entwined brought him a welcome calm.
Oni chuckled, but his answer came straight to Dark's mind.
"I made them fight themselves. Man against man, whatever shield their standards showed, I wanted them dead . They were all under the law. They all belonged to them, so as long as they suffered and died, the only winner was me.
Farore cracked first.
She desired her mortal toys to live on their own, without my interference, but there was nothing in the law that prevented them from listening to me. From following me to their destruction.
So she broke the law.
She created living vessels to contain us, and invited me in with the pretense of begging me to stop calling out to her mortals."
And Dark could see their forms as they had been in those ancient times, perfect vessels that looked like Hylians from afar, until you saw that Farore's green hair was a mess of leaves that grew and died, being reborn over and over, with colorful tiny flowers that fell on the wind to die and be reborn again. An absolute beauty. A moving altar of life. If he could, Dark would have cried from the vision of her.
So hypnotic was her beauty that Oni had to turn the shadow's mind eye away from her.
"She was gorgeous," said Dark in a dreamy voice. He felt his body relaxing, and Oni had to hold him up.
"She wasn't. She merely created the very concept of beauty, which suited her just well. And for me she created a lesser vessel, which only added to her pettiness."
But as Dark looked at the absolute white vessel, much like the figure he had when he had taken Dark to the moon, it didn't seem less of anything. He was greater, mightier, a savage god of war ready for battle.
If Nayru had created the very concept of beauty, then Oni might as well have created the concept of power.
"But of course, just like me, Nayru would never accept any agreement. She would not have her law trampled by anyone. Much less Farore. She inhabited a human vessel to descend into the world, and along with Farore, they imprisoned me within the vessel she had created."
Oni said it so calmly, so matter of factly, that when the images of the battle appeared before Dark's eyes, he could barely believe him.
Nayru had descended from the sky between them with thundering rage that split apart the sky, and attacked Oni right away. A swat of her hand, and half a mountain was gone. There were Farore's desperate cries in all the voices of her creations. And she had tried to stop Nayru, but the destruction ravaged the earth so fast as she and Oni fought, that Farore quickly shifted sides, and surrounded Oni with her power. It took less than a second for Nayru to strike, and Oni's vessel crumbled.
Oni let go of Dark, and the vision ended. He blinked and found himself back in the woods behind Kakariko. He tried to pull the deity closer, pressing their foreheads back together, but the vision would not come back.
"Wait! Wait! What happened?" asked Dark.
"I told you, they imprisoned me in the mask, which is the only thing that was left of my vessel. Then they sent the mask back to the moon," said Oni, with a completely deadpan tone.
"Ugh, you suck at telling stories," growled Dark, and realized that he was clinging and all but sitting on Oni's lap. He jumped up. "Woah, woah, sorry uhmm about that."
He felt a prickling over his skin, and looked out to the dark forest around them.
"Don't mind that," said Oni, frowning.
"I totally didn't even notice. What with you not having any body heat or anything," said Dark, but he was babbling away mindlessly. His attention was on the darkness around them. It seemed important. It made him feel like he should put all of his attention on it.
"I told you," said Oni, standing up. "Don't mind her."
But Dark wasn't listening. The darkness was calling. It called out to him, to the center of his being.
Oni made an exhasperated sound, and hit him over the head so hard, Dark passed out.
"Go away. Your son is waiting for you inside," said Oni, picking up Dark's unconcious body. "And don't try to do this again."