A/N: The contents of this story borrow very heavily from the events of Ocarina of Time, in as much as many of the plot points are essentially transplanted from that game's narrative into this one. The setting for this Hyrule is inspired by Hayao Miyazaki's manga masterpiece and film adaptation Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, so there will be guns, vehicles on land and in the air, and nature that intertwines with genuine magic. It's also entirely written in the first person from the perspective of my Link character that I've named Captain. I've renamed Link each time I've started a new game for years now and I hope it isn't terribly offensive. This is my very first fanfic so indulge to your heart's content and feel free to leave feedback or message it to me directly. I work on this sporadic bursts so updates are big and can be close together, but not exactly often.

I HAVE lived my entire life in a green forest, but for no exact reason I feel uncomfortable. I often climb the trees because I am far too uncomfortable on the ground, the hide of the forest, its floor, feels unsafe. My world is full of green things, plant life and bugs alive like me but not, all of it benign and unresponsive. I walk among them and they flit and bow in the wind, leaves and little creatures, stalks and moss. I am meat and skin in all things, alien pink in a green world. Up in the canopy, I am closer to a whole world through the sky. I am raised from the diorama of forest life. The forest is a place of life and death in harmony, of cycles with exact components in perfect places. I live in a content world but I feel restless. In the boughs I find new life and dreams. Birds fly into the sun and over the whole world, free to land in the trees, on the forest floor, but also in any clime that can be perched in, in rivers and lakes, in any place under the sky. Yes, I am jealous. I keep my eyes closed but I don't want to sleep here, I am listening to the wind in the boughs, the shivering of leaves, rolling waves of life. I hope that destiny is not real. The pattern of things in my life would indicate that I am destined to remain here forever in this forest, should the world have designs at all for me. "Captain." Someone shouts from the ground. She shouts Hey, Hey and claps her hand against the tree. I tilt my ear toward the ground to where Saria is shouting up. Her green hair is far below and looks like a big leaf tilting up from the forest bed. Her skin is like new pale flower petals and even from here her eyes are each a discernable blue like the heart of a river. "Is it dinner time?" My eyes are open and the sky is obtrusively massive, scary big, the leaves wish for none to see it, and do their mindless best to lie to me as well. "Did you gather some wood?"

"It's there. Can't you see it? The pile."

"Good job Captain. This is perfect."

"You're too nice. It's woodcutting not magic."

"I'm nice enough." I lean over and look down at her staring up at me. She always tries to look impatient with me when she wants to boss me around, make me feel time waste between us. When her hair isn't in one of her shiny cloth headbands, she makes it a point to whip it around in front of her face for effect in times like right now. When I jump out of the tree something scurries off as my body thumps and I feel it in my legs and hands. I hear her sigh as loud as she can. "Did you have to jump? You could hurt your leg and it would be for no reason."

"You'd prefer I have a reason when I get hurt."

"I'd prefer if you just climbed down the way you go up the tree." I turn and look at the long-legged wooden machine resting against the bough I leapt from. The wind sways the high branch, and in turn the iron springs at the joints and the deep stakes in the two slender doglegs squeak while the wood creaks like the living trees all around.

"I'm fine."

"Maybe not next time."

"Maybe not." She sighs again and shakes her head curtly, a move that fails to discourage me. "Alright come on Captain." I walk behind her through the brush. All around things float and fly, glowing trains of luminescent bugs loop in the air, spores dash on every gust. She lifts branches up and away from her face and the leaves quake. I duck and push up on them with the back of my hand. This is a little sad because I am trying not to walk like her, her grace with the world around her an irritating source of envy, her perfect poise is the kind of thing I want to complain to her about but know I shouldn't. It's the kind of thing I complain about to myself about myself, cursing my person at night lying awake or in my midday tree. "What were you doing up there?"

"Thinking." Yes, thinking was a word for it. I was lolling back and forth with the branches in the breeze, swaying like a strand of spider silk. "What were you thinking about?"

"Nothing really, the birds and the forest. The same kind of quiet thoughts everyone has looking around at our world."

"Do you think happy things about the forest?"

"That's invasive, but of course." She turns around at me and begins to stomp her feet as she walks on the forest floor. "You're a bad liar. You look gloomy today too. You were up there lamenting again."

"Your opinion."

"Anyone's opinion, Captain. You look like you'd kill and eat any fun you'd come across."

"Well I wouldn't. I'm going to dinner aren't I?"

"You are, you are. I feel like I'm dragging you painfully along though. Like your toes are clenched in your boots or your butt is covered in a cold sweat." She smiles and holds her hand to her head, swaying back and forth in front of me. This is definitely funny, but I won't laugh no matter what. "Yeah yeah Saria, I get it. I'm zero fun and it's killing you. Pity pity."

"Oh no, you're not zero fun. You just try to be."

"It's just how I am."

"No, you're fun. It's irrefutable."

"Alright, how am I so fun?"

"Oh I could write a book." We reach the clearing where the village stands right then. The sun is low on the trees, a weak orange sphere that visibly plummets slowly into the foliage and out of the world second by second. The sky is dim and colorful in twilight, the world heavier for lack of light, more severe with darkness but at the same time lacking vitality, sleepy. We enter the village through the brush, a place of low grasses and flowers. We pass among the houses. Doors and windows carved into massive husks of old cut trees are dark as we pass, chimes ting in the wind hanging from posts all around. We hop along the big stones placed in the creek to allow crossing, her uttering goofy noises to exaggerate her effort, me stopping on one leg on a final stone. "Saria." I say, poised. She turns and lets out a laugh but dons a serious look on her brow. It looks just stupid. "No, dinner is imperative."

"You mustn't neglect your training."

"I must. Dinner smells great."

"Saria."

"I'm sorry Captain. There's bread that they baked with raisins in it."

"Oh."

"Yes." I leap out of my pose so fast that I slip and dump into the creek. I splash up and onto the bank and run past her as she keels over with laughter. Eventually I hear her laugh bob along behind me as I run like a wet animal. When I run into the lamplight in a circle of stones she is right behind me, out of breath and rubbing tears from her eye. She tries to pass the laughter and breathe as we approach the long wood table where everyone is sitting. The forest's glowing things gather heavily here as everyone talks at once to each other, moving faster than usual, more alive with them. The food sits on wood plates and blocks, bread in baskets. Steam seems to rise from the whole table as we get there and the final big stone bowls of thick vegetable stews are placed on the table. Mido gets up so fast that he rocks the bench he's sitting at the end of backward. "You are late and you have no firewood." Saria claps her hands to her face and yelps. "Ah we totally forgot."

"You had one job today Captain and you have utterly disappointed the community." I can see in his eyes he's preparing a lecture on my civic duty and my lack of kindness or love or something. His lip is quivering with excitement for it; he actually has a smile on his face in preparation for what's about to happen.

"Oh, shut up Mido." Saria doesn't miss a moment to say it after he's finished. Mido sits down immediately, his face humble and clear. That's the kind of guy Mido is. Everyone settles and quiets down. We're all still and people begin to hold hands. First I grab Dona's hand because I know Saria will already have mine. "The gun too huh?" Dona whispers at me.

"And the axe."

"Well I can't blame you for letting it slip your mind. Smell that bread; it's like condensed love. Who can think of anything but dinner at sunset?"

"Dona, Captain." She and I stare back down at the table, a show of shame that hides smiles glowing into the table. I close my eyes, as I know everyone else is, and my feelings sort of fade and morph in my gut, my smile droops and my mouth feels heavy. If there is anything that could make me forget dinner, despite Dona's bread and everything, it would be this ritual now that would do it. Forget perhaps not but suppress, cultivate a defense against a place and time where I know the events that will transpire and how I'll feel about them. I was building guts to hide away from my feelings in the tree; it wasn't working, it never will. Above my head and then around the whole table I can hear the gentle drone from on high, from out of the trees and drawing close. They descend in a horde to our feelings here. All of us gathered project across the forest together, calling out and waiting silently united. A vibrating glass tone rises. They are close now and everyone knows we can open our eyes to the fairies all wafting in the air above the food, some orbiting around their partner's heads, the glow that encompasses their form basking on smiling faces as they dart and bob. The drone up close is in truth many sounds together, occurring all at once with the rhythmic waving of crystal dragonfly wings. The hum of vibrating glass, a pleasant chiming, a tone of immortal power tiny to the world but all at once greater than anything now there, mystery taking on mock natural form. Some lift their hands where the little things land, glow emanating out of their cupped hands. People converse with the little superb beings, sounds like little bells ringing off as the fairies physically react to jokes and japes made on light lips below bright eyes. All of this happens as I sit here beside Saria. Her fairy is pink and darting in an arc around the back of her head, redoubling each time she reaches her shoulder, staying just out of Saria's sight despite her light attempts to catch it in her gaze. She laughs and the fairy sounds a chime, resting on the top of her head. She looks at me and I look at the bread. Something small and warm bounces off of my cheek and it tingles electrically afterward. "Gild says hello Captain."

"Hello, Gild." I hear the little creature whizz at the sound of her name, though Saria would perceive actual words. That is simply how a partnership works in the forest, two entities on a proper wavelength, communicating on high levels with forces impenetrable to all creatures outside. As I've come to understand, the pact is each woven unique with fibers dense with experience and heart, so much personal power is included as to make the relationship unique to each pair bonded and alien to all else in the world. Gild and Saria as I have come to know are tender to one another, both engaging in play and banter in spaces between laughter and half-hearted pouting. It is nice to see, they are all nice to see together. I don't know what I am to look at, alone here. I am the sole lone figure at the table, looking around at everyone quietly while everyone spends all their time on living magic. We are alone in our world until we meet our partners here, an individual of their kind most attuned to the aspects of one of us which only they can sense, things unknowable to the senses of flesh and eyes, perceived only by assets supernatural. Right now, I am the only one in the whole of our world with no partner, sitting still as the tree trunks with my hands under the table. Everyone knows and everyone pays it mind but they're nice enough to most of the time stay quiet about it. They're really good for that I'd say. It's a hard thing to just stay quiet about, to sit and watch every night something clearly amiss happen right over here. It worries some people. People see me at midday during the periods the fairies remain here, and they visibly remember what they subconsciously always know about me. I can see pity in upper eyelids and pulling corners of mouths, it screams through tear ducts as it gets retracted, causing echoes in the gaze even as placidity and normalcy returns. Yeah, let me tell you I wish I didn't have to walk around alone when the village is messy with laughter and magic. Other people look at me on those days and they look away as fast as they look away from carcasses and the graves. Mido once waved his hand around the empty space where a fairy partner would fly and made a comment I didn't hear and Saria grabbed his shoulders and drove her knee deep into his gut. He puked salad leaves and bile and river water for a minute and cried profusely. I propped him up and walked him home as he wretched and moaned so loud that some of the others thought a headsick animal had wandered in from the Lost Woods. Saria once explained that as it stood right now I had her and she would be my partner, my friend forever just like a fairy. She is my best friend who knows deeply of me. I never question this, but I know as well that she is the only one. The others, even Dona, have trouble with me, the anomaly, and in turn I have trouble with them. Even Saria I can have trouble with, I can wake up and meet her outside and have no idea what to say or do. It's as if my person misfires and jams like a dirty old rifle in those moments; it's enough to make me want to smash every apparatus of my mind, to become blank instead of defective. She never cares a bit even though she knows when I do it. A look in her eye reveals to me she knows my mind and everything else about her proceeds as normal without me having to say anything. I look at her and Gild and she's got her chin on her palm, Gild rests on the tip of a stretched finger. "I don't really think you need one."

"Yeah you've said that."

"Have I?"

"Too many times I think."

"That sounds a bit like scolding even though I haven't said it enough times."

"Yeah because you do and think whatever you feel like about me."

"I do and think what you feel I shouldn't about you."

"Yeah because you're a sorceress and we aren't even friends."

"You're definitely perfectly fine with me as your forever friend."

"Yeah because" I say but stop as I look at her and then past her to all the fairies alight on all the fingers and floating on all the heads and then back to her and just then want to tell her that I'm fine with her because she is all I have but it hurts too much already just to know it, and uttering it becomes unfeasible. She raises her eyebrows while I roll out my silence and she utters a loud hum from her throat that inflects upwards real sharp at the end. "Because what Captain?" I turn back to the bread, snatch a loaf and tear it. I thoroughly bypass chewing and basically shove the bread down my throat.

"Let me eat Saria." The bread in my throat deepens my voice as it waggles and stretches my gullet. "You are far and away the worst. I've had better relationships with angry bees that I was stealing honey from. Do you hear me, Captain? Little bugs who can't even talk, who are only emotionally capable of being angry and vicious, and who try to stab me when I steal their only form of livelihood, that's your competition."

"Yeah but I help you make your sweets."

"That means nothing."

"You and I both know you'd rather be surrounded by entities that will let you do whatever you want with honey."

"I don't need you."

"Oh so you'll train someone else to decorate your tarts so late in the season?" I turn and look at her with the bread held up. "That would be unwise." She snatches the bread from my hand, stands up, turns and throws it overhead with a guttural yell. It spirals through the air and into the darkness of the trees as Mido slams his hands on the table and yells SARIA, PLEASE. She slinks back down and I have trouble stifling my laughter as Mido takes to glaring at us both unendingly.

I MOUNT the first rung on the ladder when she startles me. "Great tree is your house ever high."

"I get nicer breezes high up."

"You'll wake up chilled to the bone and sick to death."

"Better than all the ovens everyone else sleeps in at ground level. Your brain already cooked years ago." She had been carrying a stick to trace in the soil with and she breaks it on my ribcage. I moan at the smarting while she enters her introspective disposition. "I don't think you're a bad friend."

"I know you don't. I can be bad to you sometimes though."

"Yeah but that isn't something I hate. I don't hate anything about you Captain, I want you to know that." I dismount the ladder fully and hug her. "Goodnight, Saria.

"Goodnight, Captain." I begin climbing the ladder again and I'm at the top in time to see Saria turn and wave before rounding the corner of the bluff standing like a wall beside my home. I wave a little despite her not stopping to get a response. That was the most I'd touched her in years I think. It was a lot and it was desperate. I feel myself slipping in some way and I need to reach her in some way to maintain. Maybe I need to reach more than her. I wish I could reach the world and the sky and escape to the universe at large just to see it once. But it would appear that fate is real, and it is mine to remain here and see only what I am meant to.

I AM standing upon a road that leads to an old city wall. Bright halogens beam through the fat raindrops, their power lines slapping the bricks in the wind. The sky is dark and thunder rolls across the entire world. A great bridge begins to swing across a river, a great and old portcullis rising with resounding action. A rifle is in my hand I realize and by its weight I can tell that it is loaded. Lighting flashes and illuminates all of the dark corners of the constructed world and plains behind me. A sound is rising over the din of rain, a hurried buffering of wings or blades in the wet air. A moment later a gyrocopter rises over the wall and tilts to the plain, lurching then whizzing forward while descending in altitude to me. It is near ground level and beside me when I see barely in the dark riding passenger a flash of bright gown staring at me with blue eyes that cut darkness. In the next moment the gyro lifts off and away high toward the sky over the far plain, the eyes visible and still fixed upon me until they turn to the sky to which they travel. A loud roar erupts behind me and I turn to the bridge and the gaping maw of the gate. From deep within the noise grows louder, a roar resounding and shooting into the sky. A black shape launches from out of the portcullis, a mass of plates hunched onto four wheels. Its engine whistles and a flash of lightning turns the tinted windshield white. It screeches to a halt on the road of which I stand at the side of. I lift the rifle into my other hand as my stomach drops into a pit of my own dread. The roof pulls back and the side panels on the front slide back like plate lips. In the vehicle's dark body something slides forth just into sight in the opening, something possessing a pair of yellow eyes that pierce like the blue ones had, but seemed heavier, violent and oppressive in the purpose behind them. I lift the rifle to my hip and stumble back on my foot, retracting the bolt and fumbling to set it back home. I raise the gun and see a massive hand now facing me from inside the darkness, palm first and fingers splayed. I tense up and blink hard as sweat ignored floods my eyes, and open them to find myself on my bed, damp and lying on my back. I'm quiet and measuring my breath, inhaling, thinking of that song Saria plays with its three notes, exhaling, three notes again. Through the big mesh window above my bed, I see the night sky lightening to azure with the coming of the sun. I feel my heart calm beat by beat, and I close my eyes again only to find myself in another dream.

IT IS a strange feeling when I realize I am locked in a world of a dream, as I was not moments before. My consciousness inhabits the body of a fairy but I cannot speak. Where many dreams possess a blurry quality to their feelings of possession and purpose, this one I find myself enraptured in now was so clear in intention that it was clear my mind had tread beyond. I am also not this fairy as I dream; I watch the sylvan dream world with my own eyes only my vision is noisier than usual with static that looks like the result of treatments by clouds and waves. The trees and forest they stand in look much like the world I am familiar to, only when the fairy turns it faces a massive colossus of one pure tree. Its single canopy is like a cloud of leaves bound to the mountainous trunk, a rising sun thrusting spears of light through it to the various points of the great indented section of forest bed in which the tree towers centrally. In the very center of the trunk is a pair of symmetrical gnarled galls, separated by a long downward ridge that billowed at the bottom to make it triangular. Below this is stranger gnarling that runs from even more galled trunk mass that exists horizontally, its two corners swollen to sharp points standing off the tree. In the dream haze it takes me long to realize this is the Dekumekuna, the Great Tree, an ancient being of synthesis, of unison between magic and life. This being is known to all of us as our guardian, the being to which we owe our very existences. Our village and our people continue to exist such as we do with forest and all things that trees and shrub and soil entail on all sides because of this one tremendous life form covering the entire forest with its persuasive magic. I have seen it only once in my memory, during a funeral for the single casualty of a forest fire. Even then, myself and most were quite far while the remains were committed to the roots of the Tree, while the fairy whose vantage I share is hovering the tree indents and galls that formulate the Dekumekuna's face-like protrusions. It had been a thing of tapestries and wooden doorway friezes, the tree with the massive mustache, big nose and eyebrows, up until I saw the actual natural formation of which the art borrows from. I can hear the wind blow through the trees, and gently rising on the whispering of the leaves came a gentle deep voice that fills my mind and spirit. "Navi…Loyal, clever Navi, I beseech thee to come." The fairy flies closer and jostles as I then hear its voice, soft and pleasant. "I am here Great Deku. What is it you wish of me?"

"Navi, gentle, swift Navi, listen to my words and heed them. This I beg thee. I know thou hast felt that which hangs above this world…a shroud…doom…descending. For long as that which bids me to be has existed…for as long as this realm has been and things have roamed upon it…this forest…this place of pure life…has been both boon and barrier to this land. This forest has maintained the order of life…it has protected it endlessly. Soon though, little Navi…the dark force beyond our sight…the entities that have cast this veil…shall attack and destroy…this forest…all…and my power is as nothing to stop it."

"What is there to be done Great Deku? What power exists that can prevent this?"

"None…no power…only courage…cunning…wisdom. Fortune and hope."

"But this forest is seeped in magic, and you yourself Great Deku are one of the most powerful beings in all the world. How ? This evil will not rely on these, so why are we?"

"Little Navi…the logic carried in thy being makes thee stronger than a beast a thousand fold greater in size. Navi…thou must trust others the way I trust thee."

"Then who do we trust with the world, Great Deku? Have you a plan to inform the king of the Hylians and his armies?"

"No…only the princess. The king too…loses his power by the moment. It must be the princess."

"Can Hylians truly be trusted with this? If they could be trusted with this realm we would not wield the responsibility we do."

"Trust and have faith Little Brave One. Time runs short…you must go to the boy among my children…the boy who has yet to find a fairy partner. Thou must bring him to me that I might see him and know…know whether he may bring justice to this land the sun shines upon."

"I know the boy, Great Deku Tree. What do you require of him?"

"No, Navi…all will be revealed in due time…now you must fly and fly swiftly. The fate of the forest…nay…nay…the world hangs on the wings of thee." I can hear the little fairy whose vantage point I share shift and begin to stutter, but faithfully she does as the Dekumekuna begs and flies with the wind out of the sacred grove, through the birches standing slanted in the earth like tall old bones. She enters our village high above the darkened homes and the lit lamps as the sun rises. I see people I know out of their homes, stretching or singing. Some notice the little fairy as it flits through the sky, surprised and calling. She searches and searches, flying through vines and the fences, bumping into things and walls in her great hurry. A person called Riko swipes at her but she flies through his fingers. She flies high above the village so as to see all of it, to gain vantage as to the location of the person whom she seeks. When she focuses upon my home, I awake. It was the best dream I had had in weeks, free from omens and the black vehicle, the gyro and the eyes. Instead, I dreamt of the Great Deku speaking of me and sending me a fairy partner, of being freed to the sky to visit a far away princess. "Oh well" I say to myself, and plummet back into sleep.