Fire erupts around Link's hands and up from the frozen earth, sending birds scattering as clouds of steam billow past the skeletal tree branches. His adult self could have done better, but the circle of flash-thawed ground is still big enough for him to flop over and, just for a moment, remember how it feels to be warm.
Epona enters the circle almost before the flames have died down and lowers her head to crop the sparse grass which has been dead and buried by snow since last autumn. Link watches her until the pain in his skull forces him to shield his eyes from the suddenly too-bright winter sun. His pool of magical power was tapped out weeks ago, and then he pushed himself further and managed to draw upon reserves of strength he didn't know he possessed, and then those were depleted and he kept going anyway, because Epona needs to graze and they both need warmth, and all the wood he's tried to gather is too soggy for burning. He has no idea what's fueling Din's Fire at this point. Desperation. Pure stubbornness. Something inside himself. If he coughs too hard, he thinks he can taste ash.
He should have listened to Mica.
The stretchy band on his slingshot turned brittle in the cold and snapped one morning as he tried to take down a skinny rabbit. Throwing rocks and setting snares worked for a while, but there aren't nearly so many animals here as there usually would be in the Kokiri Forest at this time of year, and the scraps of meat he can get from hunting aren't worth the exhaustion of tramping through knee-high snow as his legs go slowly numb. Whatever edible plants he might have been able to identify are buried. He's tried playing the song of the sun, but daytime brings no warmth. He had stubbornly pressed onward in trying to find Navi until every step was a struggle and he didn't recognize the landscape anymore, so now he has no idea where he is or where the forest is in relation to the nearest town. It never got this cold back home. Even Zora's Domain wasn't so bad as this, safe from icy winds that bite through clothes like they aren't even there.
He should have listened to Mica.
He didn't even need to go with her and her friends. He could have turned back and stayed in that ghost town, feeding himself from the overgrown garden instead of just leaving all that food behind, wasting it. And the three fish the Zora gave him, he should have eaten all three instead of feeding that stupid fox. It followed him and Epona from the riverside and skulked around the edges of their camp for weeks in hopes of more handouts until it finally slipped away and didn't come back. It knew he was useless. Without Navi, he's just a weak little kid. He thought he could survive on his own, but nothing is the same, he isn't a hero anymore and this forest isn't anything like home. It looks similar but it isn't the same. He's so hungry.
If Mido were here, he would laugh his head off at Link for being such an idiot.
If that fox were still here, Link would eat it.
He should have listened to Mica.
A gust of wind carries the first thin flurry of snow into the little clearing, as if winter itself has taken offense at any effort to weaken its hold. Sunlight stabs in between Link's fingers, into his eyes. The world goes white and strange for a while.
When Link's senses return, there's a layer of frost on the furry ruff of his cloak and Epona is lying against him with her legs folded under her body. He pushes himself up with an elbow, grimacing at the stiffness in his muscles, and scoots back to lean against Epona's side. The hard ridges of her ribs press against his spine. She's shivering even harder than he is.
With hands frozen into useless paws beneath their mittens, Link fumbles for the leather bag under his shirt until he manages to extract the Ocarina of Time. It sits cradled on his palms, heavy and alive like an egg.
Before he left Hyrule, Princess Zelda told him to safeguard to ocarina and keep it from those that might yet try to misuse it. She told him that the goddess of time was protecting him, though she didn't explain whether she was talking about one of the three golden goddesses in one of their lesser-known aspects or some mysterious fourth goddess. Is Nayru the goddess of time? Is it Din? Link has failed to demonstrate any wisdom lately and he keeps using a spell named for the goddess of power in ways that she can't be happy about, so they both might have already written him off as a lost cause. Farore is a mystery to Link, but she's his patroness (if any of them are) and she's allegedly the goddess of living things. Shouldn't he appeal to Farore to save two of her children, and not Nayru or Din or some other goddess? Or what about whichever spirit or minor god rules this forest?
He hedges his bets and prays silently to all the goddesses as best as he knows how, the three he's heard of and any others that he hasn't. Surely they owe him a favor in exchange for being the Hero of Time, and he isn't asking for much. Just for Epona to be spared somehow. She never asked to be brought here.
"If you play the Song of Time, the goddess will aid you," the Princess once told him.
Link's fingers refuse to bend properly, so he sets the ocarina on his lap and pulls off his mittens with his teeth. Underneath—
Underneath, the fingers are waxen and puffy, with pale blue skin at the knuckles darkening to a dusky purple around the nail beds. He can't feel them.
Link's breath catches in his throat with a strangled sound, his blood frozen beyond anything the cold of winter could have inflicted. He needs his hands, everyone needs hands but he needs them, he has to be able to wield a sword and use the ocarina or else what good is he to anyone? If he loses his fingers then it won't even make a difference whether he survives until spring or not.
Link huddles into himself, useless hands pressed into the little hollow between his empty belly and the ocarina and his drawn-up legs within his cloak while he tries and fails to slow down and breathe, to think. Maybe this can still be fixed somehow. He has his sword and shield which he can't use and pieces of a broken slingshot somewhere at the bottom of his pack which he also can't use, plus flint for firestarting which is useless without dry wood. He could've gathered food from the abandoned town if he had stayed there, he could've listened to Mica. He can't do those things now, he can't go back in time anymore, whatever decisions he makes will need to happen now. But he doesn't know what to do. More magic? Farore's Wind got him out of a seemingly inescapable trap once before, but his whole body aches at the thought of trying to drag more of that power out of himself, and he doesn't know where or how far he would be able to go, and he wouldn't be able to bring Epona. He could try to make more fire, maybe. Maybe.
He wishes Navi were here.
Epona makes a funny sniffly noise and Link blearily raises his head. A fox is nosing the dead grass within the circle, as calm as anything and so close that he can count the delicate black whiskers around its muzzle. It must be sick, he thinks, or else maybe it's the same fox that used to follow him around. If so, then it's gotten bigger and fatter since he last saw it, and its fur doesn't look so patchy anymore.
The fox glances up at him, as calm as anything, then resumes its sniffing.
Maybe Link's prayer was answered after all. When he ventured away from home with Navi for the first time, a talking owl showed up to lecture him about his special destiny or something. When he went up Death Mountain for the first time and got too scared to climb down from the peak, the owl and flew him back to safety. It's a little hard to imagine some dead sage's spirit choosing the form of a scruffy little fox instead of a slightly more majestic animal, but then, a sage might have expected more from a hero than how he looks now.
The fox leaps back the instant Link tries to reach out to it. Epona snorts again and shifts around as if she might try to rise, and the fox's sleek coat flashes against the snow like a flickering fire as it darts into the underbrush. Link lowers his hand.
If his face wasn't practically frozen solid, he might have giggled. Or sobbed.
Link slides down to lie on his side, cocooned within his cloak, letting the ocarina slip down somewhere. A layer of snow is covering the circle like a scab forming over a cut. Maybe there's snow piling up on his face. He can't feel it. His feet are going numb too. Maybe they're going to freeze just like his hands. Epona isn't moving much anymore.
He's just so tired. His head hurts and he barely remembers what it feels like to not be hungry. Maybe he should just go back to sleep and let whatever happens happen.
Only now something is nagging at Link from the back of his mind, indistinct but insistent. It's like the feeling he sometimes gets when he walks into a room and forgets what he meant to do there, like he's missed something important. A little part of himself is waving its arms and banging things together for attention.
That fox...
Feeling as if his body were turning into lead and stone, Link pushes himself back up with his frozen hands and drags himself to the edge of the shallow circle. There's a V-shaped trail of dainty footprints complete with tiny claw-marks, one side pointing toward this spot and the other heading away.
Last autumn, that fox—if it really is the same one—looked so hungry and ragged that he'd felt sorry for it. There seem to be hardly any small animals around here except for the birds, as Link's empty belly proves, and the snowfall has been so heavy that digging up any burrowing creatures would he an exhausting task. But the fox looks healthier than it did before, bigger and stronger, its long fluffy winter coat all clean and shiny. If it was half-starving in autumn, how has it been finding so much food in winter? And where?
Except for her slow breathing, Epona looks like she could be dead already. Link's heart hammers in his chest and the cold is inside him. He wishes Navi were here so he could tell her what he's thinking and she could decide if he has the right idea or not. He can't afford any more stupid mistakes. But maybe he's past the point where further mistakes will make any difference. His hands are ruined. Maybe he should be glad that Navi isn't here.
Epona is here, though. And if Link does nothing, she'll die.
Getting his mittens back on won't help him anyway, so Link leaves them where he dropped them and uses the heels of his hands to get the ocarina back into its pouch around his neck. He clumsily pats Epona's forehead where she usually likes to be scratched, then sits back on his heels a moment.
He presses both useless hands on the ground, hearing but not feeling the crunch of frost and dead grass. With the pulse of magic comes a fresh wave of pain behind his eyes, nowhere near as bad as he was expecting, and little wisps of flame flicker up into existence at the edges of the circle. A few send sparks jumping up, a few nearly die down at once, until they settle into a small steady burning, fueled by something other than the burning grass.
However long the spell lasts, it'll be warmer here and he doesn't think any predatory animals would be brave enough to approach Epona. She might be able to step over the flames if she wanted to, but...
Link sits back on his heels, a little light-headed, and coughs, his mouth feeling funny and gritty again. He gets unsteadily back to his feet. Without words, hoping Epona will understand somehow, he promises to come back for her. Maybe it's a false promise, and he's being stupid, and this is the wrong thing to do, and he'll die even sooner this way. But he doesn't know what else to do.
He leaves Epona begins and follows the trail of footprints.
It was mid-morning or not much later when Link left. The glitter of sunlight on snow is doing him no favors as far as his headache is concerned, though at least it makes the shallow tracks of the fox easy to follow. Remembering what he's doing takes as much effort as solving a really difficult puzzle. At least he doesn't feel so cold anymore.
He doesn't even feel like he's here in the forest.
The heat of the desert beyond the Gerudo Fortress was like walking through a furnace; when he tried to draw the Master Sword, the metal hilt was scorching even through his leather gauntlets. The clothing he wore as an adult included long sleeves and leggings under his tunic, so he sweated buckets, but the Gerudo said it was better to leave it all on and endure the discomfort than to expose any more of his pale skin to the sun than he had to. They gave him water and a little pot of funny-smelling gel, too, which they told him to use when he inevitably burned. They could already hear the sizzling noises, one of them had said, giggling.
It was one of his happier days as the Hero of Time, for all that.
After a lifetime of thinking he was a Kokiri, waking up as an adult had been no less alien an experience than if he had been transformed into a Goron, but now that he'd had time to settle into this new body, he could appreciate the strength in its arms, the longer legs that let him run faster than ever before without getting tired, and he had learned to ignore the odd things other adults sometimes said about his looks (even though Navi didn't). As he passed beneath the stone colossus and entered the cavernous interior of the Spirit Temple, breathing the dusty air, he felt the way a bird must feel when it flies, or a squirrel when it climbs and gnaws. He danced between Iron Knuckles and nothing could hurt him, he laughed in their helmed faces until Navi shrieked at him to pay attention and take this seriously. But he knew what he was doing. He fought and killed every monster he saw. He was made for that. He was a hero, until he wasn't anymore.
Instead of medicine for his burned skin, water, and advice to keep him from frying in the sun—he was in the throne room and the Kokiri sword was on the floor, already twisted out of his grip, and Ganondorf had him hoisted up by the collar like a misbehaving puppy. The Gerudo king's laughter seemed to come from deep inside himself, a rich, ringing sound.
"Please tell me, your highness... is it the Hyrulean custom to keep deranged children roaming freely through your gardens as pets, or did I really just survive an attempted assassination?" Ganondorf asked the king of Hyrule, raising Link higher as if to provide a better look. He was grinning broadly, even chuckling a little, as if he had just found himself the target of a silly prank and decided to play along to show his good humor. "And at the very moment at which I, the king of such honorless thieves as the Gerudo, finally bowed to you and the laws of your kingdom... what should I do about this?"
Someone was screaming. Link himself or maybe Princess Zelda. Broken glass was scattered across the floor and he still had blood and dirt caked under his nails from when he and Ganon battled in the ruins of this castle on this exact same spot seven years into the future except never, and Navi was gone.
Ganondorf's laughter stopped. There was a rhythmic humming in Link's ears and he wasn't the only one who sensed the resonance of the three Triforce pieces. Link's blood was boiling and Princess Zelda was definitely here now, she was screaming something, trying to command the guards maybe. The king barked an order over her, Impa grabbed the princess and pulled her back as the Kong's guards converged, everything was noise and madness and it didn't matter to Link, he had to do what he was made to do, he had to act or else everything would go wrong in exactly the same way it already did and didn't and Link's hand swept up, clamping onto the wrist which held him though his fingers were too short to fit even halfway around, and there was fire. The smell of burning flesh.
Ganondorf's laughter stopped. There was a rhythmic humming in Link's ears and he wasn't the only one who sensed the resonance of the three Triforce pieces. Link's blood was boiling and Princess Zelda was definitely here now, she was screaming something, trying to command the guards maybe. The king barked an order over her, Impa grabbed the princess and pulled her back as the Hyruleans and Gerudo alike returned nearly to blows, everything was noise and madness and it didn't matter to Link, he had to do what he was made to do, he had to act or else everything would go wrong in exactly the same way it already did and didn't and Link's hand swept up, clamping onto the wrist which held him though his fingers were too short to fit even halfway around, and there was fire. The smell of burning flesh.
Screaming.
A wall of gray seems to jump up in front of Link, a dark blotch, and he's so stupefied by the cold that he almost bashes straight into it. Shuffling to a stop, he stares until the blotch registers as a coherent object in his vision: the mouth of a cave, nearly black against gray stone, not unlike the opening to a somewhat small bear's den.
Link drags an arm across his eyes, teetering nearly off his feet. As he draws closer, warm air tickles his face, humid like soft breath, and his body is already moving of its own accord, moving him toward the source the way a drowning person gasps unthinkingly for air. He limps further into the cave, squinting, seeing but not yet understanding.
Delicate flowers bloom as if it were the midst of springtime, softly perfuming the little cavern. A doe raises its head to watch Link with liquid eyes while two chipmunks dart into the undergrowth. He hears rustling a little deeper in the cavern, sees a flicker of rusty red fur in the shadows. At the center of the cavern, pink fairies bob and dart, chattering to each other with dainty voices, their light reflecting on the gently lapping water of the fairy fountain.
Link manages two more steps before his frozen feet give out from under him, his knees hitting the mossy ground and his hands splashing into the shallow edge of the pool. The water isn't hot, it's barely warm, but he's so cold that it feels like he's just plunged his hands into a boiling pot. He gasps in pain as tears fill his eyes, turning the fairies into vague pink smudges. Their conversation comes to an abrupt halt. They whirr around him and their wingbeats blend into a fuzzy murmur in his ears. His eyes are stinging.
When he blinks away the tears and raises his head, he sees the Great Fairy hovering just above the lapping surface of the pool. Like all fairies of her kind, she takes the shape of a tall, slender woman, nude except for the ivy clinging to her body and the pink tendrils of her hair falling in delicate tangles past her waist. She regards him with mild astonishment, this ragged little interloper in the heart of her sanctuary. There's a white butterfly resting on her bare shoulder.
Link swallows hard. "Help," he croaks, his voice so weak and cracked from cold and disuse that he can barely hear himself. "Help. Help us. Please."