At low tide, Purah goes down to the beach and scavenges for guardian parts among the debris dragged in by the surf.

She toils under the light of the half-moon. The threads of a screw print ridges into her skin as she rolls it between her forefinger and thumb and drops it into her satchel; a gear gleams half-buried by sand until she snatches it up. She spies an orange glow ten paces down the beach: a guardian core. Covetous fingers delve through the pile of kelp strangling the priceless hunk of metal without reservation. Slime drenches her up to the elbow and collects in the wrinkles that have yet to iron free of her skin; she merely digs her hands in deeper to untangle a tricky tendril.

Purah is, first and foremost, a mechanic. When her hands dirty, something is working.

She submerges up to her knees to examine a suspicious white blob—an oyster, she finds, not a part, not useful for her work or for her princess, but Symin will be pleased—and stashes it in her satchel. The ocean's chill seeps into her flesh and bones. She shivers, but it's as much with pleasure as it is cold; the water soothes the muscles that writhe hot and nebulous beneath her skin as they sloo-o-owly revitalize.

She emerges from the sea as the waters run red with dawn, tissue-paper skin encrusted with salt and legs shaky from fighting the pull of the waves that threaten to set her adrift in riptides rather than in time. Down the beach, the first fisherman of the day drags his dinghy to the water. When he sees her, he gives the briefest nod, an acknowledgement worth little. The people of Hyrule will not forgive her so long as her hands are stained with the birthing blood of the machines that killed their loved ones.

Well. Good thing she's building new hands.

Snap.

One evening, she receives a letter from Robbie. The post has not run in eighty-one long years, and yet she opens her door to find a child bearing an envelope in their hands and mistrust in their eyes.

"This came for you, lady," they mumble, and cast their stony gaze upon the ground. She accepts the crumpled envelope with thanks, and watches the child nod, take two wary steps backward, and then turn tail in a flutter of navy wool. She turns from the doorway only when their back disappears into the darkening distance.

The paper quivers as she unfolds it, though the chronic tremors she'd endured in her old age have long ceased. It smells of autumn breeze and honey sweets and clammy palms. Nothing like her estranged friend.

Robbie writes that he has founded a lab of his own, north of the ruined Akkala Citadel where guardians still roam in mass numbers. He writes that he has married Jerrin, whose assistance since her relocation from Purah's lab has proved invaluable. He writes that he has just welcomed a son.

The letter falls to the floor.

Sheikah are long-lived, and her painstaking efforts have ensured her place as the lengthiest of all. None could serve or sacrifice as deeply for broken crown and battered country as she. Yet, she forgot the other part of the equation: where Robbie has lived, Purah has not.

When she pictures her decades spent scrounging for specks of dignity in the surf—squeezing her eyes shut against the afterimage of a boy hero painted crimson with his own viscera on the rare occasion she crosses Blatchery Plain—fiddling with a blue flame and a million bits of metal to transform her work and herself into something young and sharp and useful—her throat burns with bile.

If a mechanic could override the corrupting malice of Calamity Ganon, she would amass an army of guardians and storm that castle herself. She cannot. But she'll be damned if she keeps floating through the same haplessly faithful pattern like a living ghost.

Eighty-one years is far too long to feed on nothing but scavenged hope. She's going to sink her teeth into everything this broken, beautiful world can offer.

Snap.

The one-hundredth spring hits Hateno like a wagon accident: abrupt and violent. Landslides return nearby cliffsides to the sea. She and Symin spend a fortnight of frenzied beach trips attempting to restore an entire stockpile of guardian paraphernalia. Fortunately, their little team operates like a well-oiled machine at this point: a compliment Purah—ever the mechanic—gives only at its most-deserved.

Her now-youthful hands are buried wrist-deep in guardian wiring when the ground begins to shake. She initially meets the all-too-common interruption with bent knees and disdain—if they lose more parts, Symin can crab-walk in the shallows for them this time—but loses all internal and external balance when a tower so tall that its peak is lost to low-hanging clouds erupts from the convulsing Cliffs of Quince.

Felled like a tree, she can do little but sit on the damp earth and stare at that far-off, sunrise-orange glow. If she raises her dirt-caked hands to her cheeks and sobs until the afternoon shadows begin to lengthen, that's her business.

They celebrate over bowls of a traditional Kakarikan soup Symin adapted to feature porgy instead of sanke carp, and then…life goes on. They tend to the garden and tinker with the Guidance Stone. She pens letters to Impa, Robbie, and her newest penpal: a girl from Faron with a budding interest in ancient technology. After dinner, when they've cleared the table of dishes, blueprints, and notebooks, she deals them each a hand of cards for their nightly game. They whoop with abandon at their wins; rib one another at losses. She gives thanks for every one of her nigh-uncountable years.

One stormy summer evening, Purah opens her door to a scarred, sopping-wet youth with eyes unclouded by the pain she had seen in them a century prior. She takes his Slate, grasps his hands, and welcomes him to his first home of many.

"Snap!"

Author's Notes:

This piece came into being on a feverish, pine candle-scented evening back in September. I wrote the first section, and then it languished in my google docs for eight months. Let it be known that sometimes writers can finish their pet projects born from vibes alone!

Thank you, reader, for taking a chance on a character study! I hope you enjoyed it, and please feel free to discuss your own interpretation of Purah as well as my own in the comments! Thanks as well to my beta reader, cooking-with-hailstones (on Tumblr), for her fantastic feedback and assisting my mission to remain at exactly 1000 words and not a letter more.

TotK is coming up! YEET