The Waters of Nayru
Chapter 48: The Waters of Nayru
By, Frank Hunter

Rigo worked his way down the stairs, back into the main chamber of the ruined Temple of Time. Each pace felt as if it were through a fire in his body. Acid coursed through his joints and burned every time he lifted his legs. He knew this was exhaustion. But, he also knew there was nothing to be done for it now. He couldn't succumb, not until this was finished. The responsibilities of a king now rested on his shoulders, and they weren't light.

Link followed behind Rigo with his bow drawn. If the green-clad Hero was in any greater rush, to his credit, he didn't show it. He kept Rigo's slow pace, perpetually two stairs behind and silent, as indeed he always was.

As the pair reached the bottom of the stairs, Link's silence seemed to grow exponentially and envelop the entirety of the space around them. The battle was over. All around, Rigo could see nothing but death. The grass, which had been the emerald green of pristine nature when they had arrived, was now the blood-red of ruby. Everywhere, indiscriminate, were the corpses of Hylian and Gerudo alike. They lay still, like marionettes discarded in a room where a child had lost interest in some fleeting game.

It was death on the scale that he had worried about. And despite everything, he had failed to prevent it from happening.

You don't have time to waste, Nabooru said with an urgency Rigo no longer felt.

What does it matter, anymore? he asked, feeling an oncoming sense of disassociation. He had dealt with a lot in the past few days, more than he could have hoped to be mentally prepared for. But this? This massacre?

This is exactly what we were trying to stop, he said, sullenly. We failed.

Amili is still alive, Nabooru said.

The statement cleared some of the haze away. Amili?

She won't be for long, the spirit insisted. Get through the doorway, Rigo. Right now!

He remembered the mission she'd been on, that he'd sent her on. She was to claim the Fountain. She'd taken a team in with her. Were they still alive too?

If any Gerudo still lived, it was Rigo's responsibility now to lead them back safely. He latched onto this mission, and the hope that through all of this, he still had not lost Amili. It was all he had left.

"Let's go," he said to Link, and without looking backward, pressed on.

Rushed as he was, he still had to take each step with care, willing himself not to glance down at the dead that unknowingly hooked and clawed at his feet. Too long thinking about the carnage around him, and his resolve would waver again, his thoughts turn to failure. Instead he focused on the Gateway ahead of him, and tried to remind himself of the need to press on, that any life saved at this point would be a victory, and that he could not let that devil Tydus come out on top. After all of this, Tydus couldn't win.

As he reached the stairwell back up onto the landing, he chanced a look over onto the field where a conspicuous blank portion of crimson-stained grass glared back at him. That was where the arrogant bastard had fallen, and it was now empty. Rigo knew Nabooru hadn't been lying, but still his heart wrenched. If he had just taken a moment, hell, half a moment to finish the job right, instead of leaving his enemy to the pain and suffering of his injury, this could have been over and done with. Instead, he had unnecessarily risked everything in the end game.

Vengeance is never the answer, he reflected as he mounted the stairwell. Vengeance only leads to more pain, more killing. It doesn't solve a problem, nor does it make a person feel any better. The best you could hope for is justice. He'd had the chance to dispense quick, clean justice. He wished now that he had.

Rigo drew on energy now that he didn't even realize he'd kept within himself, one final push to get him through to the finish line. At the top of the stairs, he tried not to stop and grieve over Pureet again, whose broken body still lay beside the Gateway. And he could not stop for Cila either, the guardswoman he had trusted to hold the Gate. Over her dead body, Rigo had said, would anyone enter the Gateway. So, it appeared, they did.

He steeled himself as he took hold of the handle that would open the Gate, still unlocked by the cursed Chalice that he had been destroyed. The only way to reseal it now was the Master Sword, strapped to his companion's back, but no sense doing that while his companions were still inside. While Amili was still in danger.

With a powerful heft, Rigo put all of his strength into a massive pull. The door was solid, though made of what, he couldn't say. It was heavier than it seemed to have any right to be, but once he had given it the slightest bit of inertia, it seemed to slide open through a will absent of his own. It was slow and grinded against the floor, but it opened.

Rigo stepped back as the crack in the door widened. At first, a light brighter than the sun of a summer day shone through the opening. Rigo shielded his eyes with his forearm from the sensory overload, but as the crack widened, the light dispersed, and Rigo got his first clear glimpse into the Sacred Realm.

The scene he saw wavered and rippled, as though he were watching it through a screen of transparent seawater. But the image behind it caught his breath in his throat. He was looking at the Temple of Time. Not the Temple as it stood around him, in ruin, decay, and overgrowth, but the Temple as it must have stood in Hyrule in its prime. It was a grand, beautiful chamber with pillars and tiled flooring, a marble cabinet in the back, and the crest of the Royal Family set in the floor. Standing on that crest though, like a blemish on the face of the Temple itself, was a one-armed figure with a ragged tourniquet tied around his stump of an arm. His back was to the doorway.

"Tydus!" Rigo snarled as he charged through.

The film of reality shifted around Rigo in an unsettling way as he pierced the veil and entered into the lost Temple. The rippling stopped as the Sacred Realm became his reality, and he quickly descended the stairs back down into the chamber. At first, he only had eyes for his enemy and did not notice the rest of the room. But as his feet touched tile, he had no choice but to see.

There were more corpses, of course. More casualties on both sides. But the majority of soldiers inside the Temple were left alive. There were several dozen of them, and for whatever reason the Hylians were taking these Gerudo prisoner, not just killing them outright. They had his people kneeling on the ground, hands bound behind their backs. And as they noticed Rigo entering the room, many of them stepped forward, weapons drawn. But they did no more than that. The sight of Link behind Rigo, beside him, stayed their hands, made them unsure of themselves. Though their allegiance was to Tydus, they could not so easily turn on the Hero they had spent their young lives hearing stories about and admiring. They held their positions beside their prisoners. Rigo caught sight of Amili kneeling down the line on his right, a soldier beside her pointing a bow in his direction.

Tydus himself did not bother turning around. Rigo noticed now that, at his feet, lay a shattered pile of white marble stone. In places, he could see evidence of ornate decoration, and beside the man's boot, a replica of that three-sapphire pattern that had been so prominent on the Chalice. Much of it was wet, too, with water that had already spread across the floor and begun drying, its magic dispersing uselessly into the air. The Fountain had been right there, and must have shattered when Rigo had destroyed the other relic.

"You," Tydus said. His voice was all but a rasp, forced out of his throat by wounded, burning lungs that by all rights should not have still held air. "You did this, didn't you?"

"It's over, Colonel," Rigo said, forcing a calm he did not feel into his words. Trying not to sound like he was inches from crushing the life from this man with his bare hands. "Surrender now, and I promise to spare you. The bloodshed needs to end here."

Tydus didn't answer at first, and when he did, a note of incredulity had slipped into his tone. "Surrender?"

"The Hero of Time is here with me," Rigo said, rationally. He took another slow step forward, then two. "He will return with you and your men to Hyrule." Rigo glanced over his shoulder, and Link gave him a quick nod, encouraging him to continue.

"You can plead your case in front of your own people. You'll stand trial. It's your best option left."

The soldiers standing around the chamber began to look uncertain, but Tydus let out a sharp chortle that Rigo knew had come through bared teeth. "Still playing the hero, are we, boy?"

"It's over," Rigo repeated, emphasizing the point. "Don't make me kill you now."

"Oh, your Highness," he said, filling that last word with as much contempt as he could fit into it. "You won't be doing any more killing today."

Tydus turned to face him. As he did, his one good hand came into view. Rigo had expected to see him holding his sword or at least a weapon of some sort. What he held instead was an animal's horn. Rigo had seen these before. They were cut and hollowed so that a soldier could blow a tone through them to announce the coming battle. Tydus must have taken it from one of his men, but he held it in such a way, with his finger over the small mouth opening, that it had become a vessel instead of an instrument. And inside the vessel, Rigo could see that it was full to the brim.

Inside there was a liquid sloshing around, transparent and nondescript by sight, but Rigo knew there was only one place it could have been drawn from, and so his throat tightened in horror at the sight of it. Before the Fountain had collapsed, Tydus must have filled that horn from within it. The horn now contained all that remained of the Waters of Nayru. Tydus alone held their powers in his hand.

"This is far from over," Tydus sneered at him, his bloody face gloating with the certainty of victory written in his eyes. "In fact, I'd say we're just getting started."

Before Rigo could react beyond a shouted "No!", Tydus took the horn and tipped it back, pouring the full contents into his mouth. It ran from his mouth and drizzled from his chin, some falling to the floor in droplets of excess. But most of the liquid was imbibed, and the man took the power of the Waters into himself, the first mortal to taste them since the dawn of creation. And the change happened to him almost instantly.