BOOK 2: THE KING

The Waters of Nayru
Chapter 25: Five Years
By, Frank Hunter

An invariable fact of life: with youth comes stupidity. Granted, youth comes with a lot of things, many of them positive, but a great, heaping dose of stupidity is always there. Young Prince Rigo of the Gerudo had learned this lesson more thoroughly and more harshly than most. In his innocence, he'd thought he could undertake one glorious, grand adventure, to travel the sands for riches and bask in the rewards without ever taking responsibility for the consequences. He thought that he would become a king, solely because it was a title due to him and was something he'd always been promised was inevitable.

He had five long years in prison to reflect on where he had gone wrong.

Rigo's innocence and childhood were robbed from him, stolen by shadow enemies, people he didn't even really know. His destiny had simply been inconvenient to a Stewardess with dreams of glory, so he'd been trapped alone in a Temple and left to die. His appearance too closely resembled a monster to a Hylian commander, and so he was locked in a box and dangled above hungry crocodiles.

The ironic thing is that, as Rigo spent more time in that hellish place, even he came to see that monster in himself. His muscles grew big and his shoulders became broader. He got taller. His height was never such that he towered over others, but he came to compete with all of them. His orange curls of hair grew out, down over his shoulders, and he refused to cut them. The fiery color of his own hair was his only reminder of the desert sun, and the life he had come from.

The other inmates in the Hyrule Stockade were all wary of the boy from day one. All of them saw the legacy of Ganondorf in him, and even the most hardened of them had been taught to fear that visage since before they were old enough to even speak his name. As Rigo grew, and his appearance became even greater, more fierce, the inmates began to stay away entirely. The word even spread beyond the walls of that place, into the Castle Town outside. It became the kind of scary rumor men would pass along as they sat drinking before the evening firelight: that Ganondorf himself was in the Stockade below them, clawing to be free again.

The only times he did run into problems were when the appeal to certain inmates' wallets managed to overcome their terror.

The Warden of this place had struck an agreement with Rigo's jailor to orchestrate situations in which Rigo might be killed during day-to-day prison life. If that were to happen, the authorities would have no traceable guilt in the illegal execution of a prisoner without trial or sentence, and they would be able to cremate his body with the rest of the day's dead and finally, irrevocably, put him out of mind. The Warden supposedly paid in good rupees and privileges for inmates to try their luck at it. Rigo never found out exactly how good those privileges were, but whatever the man was offering didn't seem to be enough to keep any constant pressure on him. Only the occasional idiot tried it, and they always paid.

One of the more clever attempts came in Rigo's third year in the place. He was sixteen years old. His cellmate, a large Goron by the name of Gor Gurdy, had been pulled out of the cell for a parole hearing, something the both of them had known was nonsense. Rigo and Gurdy, after a tense initial meeting, had become fast friends and made a point of watching each other's mutual backs in this nightmare of a place. Not that Gurdy really needed it, his back was made of stone, but he had stepped in on more than one attempt on Rigo's life, and Rigo had come to see the big galoot as something of a guardian angel.

But, he knew that Gurdy had earned a life sentence in the Stockade. He'd earned it in the Bazaar, up in the Castle Town Marketplace aboveground. The Goron had gotten into a heated argument over the price of some imported wares shipped in from his home at Death Mountain. When he had exhausted the shopkeeper's patience trying to underpay, the shopkeeper insulted the Goron, called him a name not usually reserved for polite company, and tried to throw him out of the store. Gurdy, in return, threw the man into his granite countertop, killing him instantly.

Gor Gurdy hadn't meant to kill the man. He was actually fairly dim witted and Rigo expected that he didn't have the mental ability to plan something like that. But, one thing the Goron had tons of was pride. You hurt his pride, and he hurt you. It was as simple as that. And, that sentiment had actually become Gurdy's own defense at his trial, which of course did not fly well with the judge. The Goron was sent to prison for life with a list of good behavior stipulations as long as his arm. Following that, he killed his first cellmate. It was in self-defense, but that didn't matter in the slightest to the powers that be.

In short, there was no chance he'd be getting parole. He was pulled out simply so Rigo would be alone.

While Gor Gurdy was gone, the guards came again, and dropped off a man in the cell. "New cellmate," the guard told Rigo curtly as he locked up and left the two of them unattended. The new man was larger than Rigo, bulkier than Rigo, and bald as an eagle. Rigo didn't even need to get worried about it. He knew immediately what game was going on here, and was prepared for it.

Plus, he had his other guardian angel looking out for him.

The man wasted no time. Once the guard was out of sight, he produced a sharpened, jagged piece of metal from the waistband of his pants, behind his back. The shiv was crude and makeshift, and didn't even have a handle. It was a weapon as dangerous to the user as it was to his victim.

As he lunged at Rigo, a familiar female voice piped up in his mind, one he had grown to listen to and trust as closely as his own conscience.

Parry, it said. Wall.

"Cake," he said back to it, out loud, in a kind of short-hand speech he had developed with her over the years. He didn't need to speak out loud for the entity to hear him, but here, he preferred it. It helped his image if he was seen talking to himself, made the others think he was certifiably insane. Made them even less willing to come after him.

Rigo dodged the man's lunge, checking the inside of his body with a hard shoulder. He grabbed the man's wrist and, in a lightning movement trained into him over the years, twisted his body and smashed the man's hand at full force against the cell wall. The jagged shiv cut into his palm and fingers at numerous places, doing serious damage to his muscles and tendons. It would likely prevent him from ever writing again with that hand. Assuming he ever could in the first place.

The man dropped the shiv and reeled back, crying in pain. Rigo took the weapon delicately between his own thumb and forefinger and slashed out himself, opening a gash on the man's chest. The man scrambled to get away, but in the tiny cell there were nowhere to go. Rigo was after him a heartbeat later, and the blade was quickly lodged deep into his assailant's abdomen. The big man gasped for air, and went down like a sack of barley, clutching at his wound.

"Hey!" the guard called. He had heard the commotion and come back, bringing three of the others with him. "You!" he yelled at Rigo. "Back away from the door, face the wall! Hands on your head!"

Rigo complied quietly, interweaving his fingers behind his head, in his hair.

Hole, the voice in his head said.

"Hole," Rigo agreed.

The guards came in, took Rigo's would-be-assassin away, and gave Rigo the smash to the side of the head he'd anticipated. When he awoke, he found that he'd been placed in solitary confinement, and was left there for two straight weeks.

Solitary didn't bother Rigo so much, as a great deal of the time he spent in the Stockade was spent in a state of isolated meditation. In the recesses of his own mind, he was able to hold counsel with the spirit of Nabooru, former Stewardess of Gerudo and Sage of Spirit, and owner of the voice in his head. Nabooru had been training him daily, and though it was all mental, the spirit's projections into his mind were so incredibly detailed and felt so incredibly real that he might as well have been sparring in the Gerudo Training Center.

Over the years she had taught him all number of new things that he'd never studied before. The most prominent of these were lessons in armed and unarmed combat, and in Hylian history, though there were numerous other topics Nabooru enjoyed that were far more…pleasant. Rigo, who had seen the spirit's presence as a nuisance and a danger in his childhood, came to be immensely grateful both for and to her as he grew older. She did wonders to keep him sane.

When he finally returned to his cell at the end of his confinement, he'd never seen Gor Gurdy so relieved. The big oaf got up and toddled over to him as soon as the cell door was closed. "Rigo live?!" he asked in his simple way.

Rigo nodded. "Still alive," he said.

"Ohhh," the Goron sighed. He took Rigo and embraced him in a hug, which made the Gerudo incredibly uncomfortable given Gurdy's previous feats of accidental strength. He tried to keep his arms between himself and the Goron, but eventually gave up and just returned the gesture, patting Gurdy on the back.

"Not know what do. Not if Rigo gone," Gor Gurdy said as he held Rigo. "Rigo gone, alone again. Gor Gurdy no want. Make mad. Gor Gurdy make trouble. Gor Gurdy make them pay."

"That's sweet of you, Gurdy," Rigo wheezed. "Can you let me breathe now?"

The Goron backed off, but didn't seem to want to stop looking at him for hours after his return. Rigo eventually was able to slip back into meditation, and the Goron back into the state of hibernation that Gorons are apparently capable of when they sleep.

The only other friend Rigo had made in the Stockade was a scrawny imp of a man by the name of Little Sid, who showed up during his second year. He got to chatting with Sid when the two pulled maintenance work together, and were forced to clean the floors throughout the prison's lengthy corridors. Rigo got the impression that Sid took his chances with him on the off chance that the other inmates' fear of Rigo would rub off. If he were the friend of the resident Gerudo, no one else would bother him. It seemed to work out well, though it was exceedingly lucky for him that Rigo was actually sane, not a criminal, and not, in fact, Ganondorf.

Sid held a rabid interest in the goings on outside of the Stockade. He always kept one pointy ear to the ground, listening for news from the Castle Town. Rigo expected it was because Sid was one of the few inmates not here for his life, or even for most of it, so he wanted to be in touch when he got out. He'd earned his sentence by being something of an obsessive. He had taken an interest in a girl in the Castle Town who was not interested in him. The girl, and her father, had rebuked his advances at every turn, but that hadn't dissuaded him in the slightest. He climbed rooftops and walls to get close to her, to try and win her over. He saw it as courting. She saw it as stalking. C'est la vie. A plea went in to the guards and, when he was caught clinging outside the girl's window, he was sentenced to seven years of hard time.

Usually when Rigo saw him, Sid had "exciting" news. "Rigo!" he'd shout when they got within earshot. The news he carried was almost always meaningless, though. Usually it had no real impact on their lives in the prison.

"Did'ya hear?" This is how he'd usually preface the actual delivery of the information. "The Zora just gave Hyrule access to three of their fishing ponds! They're gonna start importing fresh Lanayrie Grouper to Castle Town!"

They didn't get to eat fish in the Stockade, so Rigo didn't care.

"Rigo, did'ya hear? Sinthia Goldrine, you know, the noble's daughter?" Rigo naturally didn't, but that wouldn't have mattered if he'd said so. "Well, she's getting married next month. To a blacksmith! Can you believe it?"

Rigo didn't particularly like the little man, but it would take too much effort to get rid of him, and, on some level, he did enjoy the conversations they had when Sid wasn't passing rumors. Other than Nabooru, Rigo didn't really get to talk intelligently with anyone. The guards were stoic with all the prisoners, and Gor Gurdy just wasn't capable of actual conversation. So, he kept Sid around.

Life went on more or less the same for him every day. Prison is a place centered around routine, and Rigo had his. Other than the occasional bit of news from Little Sid, or the occasional attempted murder from a stranger he'd never met, it went on. And over time, he began to abdicate any expectations he'd ever had about getting out. He forgot about the adventure he'd had as a child in the Desert Temple. He even, much to his own sadness, had begun to forget the details of Amili's face, and of his grandmother's. Prison was life now, and the only thing that made it any easier was to accept that fact. And so, that's what Rigo did.