Have you ever fallen to your death? It's slow, at least at first. The wind rushes by you, giving you a rush of exhilaration, and you feel like you're soaring through the skies. That is, until you realize that you are probably going to die on impact with the water below, due to the way that physics work with terminal velocity and all that jazz.
As I watched the water approach steadily, I couldn't help but feel like I should be able to do something about this. Maybe it's just my subconscious saying that the magical lights that brought me here wouldn't have do so if they knew that I would die, but I suppose that was more like a last ditch effort to save their world than knowing that we would actually succeed.
Regardless, as we approached the water, I closed my eyes, going into a half meditative stance. If I was going to die, then I might as well be at peace with myself. It wasn't until I entered my mind that I saw what was going on inside. My magic was going on a rampage, crashing into the bookshelves of memories that I had created for myself, breaking things left and right. That wouldn't do, so I grabbed ahold of my magic.
It thrashed under my hold, threatening to break my control over it, but I stood firm. Here I was, about to die, but I was not about to die someone who had no control over my magic. I looked to where it was connected to the wall, astounded to find that the hole was now the size of my torso. I looked down at my magic and decided, hey I'm going to die; I might as well free the magic in my mind, right?
I gave it a yank, forcing my magic to break through the wall that it had been behind. The amount of pure magical energy that crashed down was enormous, well over thrice the size that Midna had said I had left. I was astounded by the amount of magic that flooded my mind.
It was then that I could see the color of my magic. It was still a light color, not unlike the white brightness that I had only been able to see of it until now. It was a bright pink, glowing and undulating before me, calming down inside my mind now that it was finally free, and I knew that I could use this.
My eyes opened, and I was astounded to see that only a moment had passed in between when I closed my eyes and opened them. I focused on my magic, and heard a gasp from my back as Midna felt the power radiating from me, as though I was harnessing the power of a hurricane.
I grasped the magic in my mind and understood; this was a part of me, and I was part of the magic. It was just like any other appendage, like an arm or a leg, and now I needed to learn how to use it. My instincts flared out as I approached the water, and my magic lashed out, suddenly slowing both Zach's and mine own descent through the air. It reached out and grabbed the water below us, stirring it up so that we would not be hitting stilled waters, which I vaguely remembered would mean that the impact would hurt less.
And then we hit the water, and even though the strain of hitting it hurt like hell, we were still alive, and Zach and I swam to the surface. The first thing that we noticed was that the lake was merely a puddle at this point, with barely any room around us. We had been incredibly lucky that we had fallen right into the water, else we would have been flattened by the ground that was only a few feet away from us.
As we approached the shore, we saw a couple of spirits huddled around. Turning on our beast senses showed us that they were Zora, and they were talking about how the source of water flow must have been cut off, up in the Zora's Domain. I filed that information away for later, and we progressed onwards. We passed by a house, where a man was talking about how the Lake had dried up. He noticed a monster nearby, and instantly dropped into a fetus position and hid.
We wandered over to the monster, trying to take it down, but when we got there, it went over to some strange grass that we had seen around Ordon Village. It whistled through the grass, and a huge black twilight bird came flying down, and the smaller monster jumped on the black bird back.
The smaller monster had a bow with fire arrows, so it shot them for a bit before the bird came swooping down, and we took that chance to jump it, attacking the beast and knocking the monster on its back off. It didn't attack us once more as we took down its rider, and Midna quickly made her way up and sat on its back. it trashed for a moment, realizing that it had a new rider.
"Hey, stop that!" Midna called. "I'm your new master now! Settle down!" Did she seriously think that was going to work? Apparently it had indeed worked, because it quickly settled down. "Alright, we can use this to go up to the Zora's Domain!" She exclaimed before having the bird grab us in its talons carefully. It flew towards where the Zoras had pointed towards, where the Zora's Domain was located.
The bird flew us through a large cave, filled to the brim with monsters with bomb arrows. They kept shooting down stalactites from the roof of the café, making rocks rain down on us from above, but Midna pulled on the reins of the black monster bird, making it weave this way and that to dodge arrows and rocks alike. Eventually, we exited the cave, and the bird dropped us in front of a house. Midna let it fly away, choosing to join back up with us, and we ventured forward once more.
It wasn't until then that we saw the howl stone, across from us at the other dry riverbed. We stared at it for a moment before pretend face palming, since we couldn't really do it in our animal forms. We had forgotten to unlock the Hidden ability that was down near Ordon Spring! We checked our map, and sure enough, the marker was still on our map, glowing. How had we forgotten to go check it out?
No matter, we were in the twilight now, and we wouldn't be able to learn the song anyways. We looked for a way to cross the riverbank, but it was on a raised hill, and the bridge that might normally connect the two banks was lying as the bottom of the dried riverbed. There was no way that we were going to get to the other howl stone, at least not yet.
We continued onwards, and quickly found that the next area seemed frozen over.
"Hey, I thought it was getting colder…" Midna said, shivering atop my back. "But who would have guessed that is would be all frozen? This is the Zora Village, right? I don't see any spirits around, I wonder…Well, let's check things out and fin those Zoras." I nodded, and we walked forwards. Luckily, due to my being a snow leopard, the cold didn't hinder me much; my fur coat was fairly thick and protected my from the low temperature.
As we went further inwards, we soon realized that there was an entire waterfall that was frozen over, pieces hanging out and such.
"Hmm, I think that you guys should be able to jump up the ice ledges." Midna said, and she showed us a path up the waterfall, making sure that we didn't fall. Once we were up on top, we saw a cave with fancy looking metalwork framing it. We walked into the cave and were astounded to see some black beasts in the middle of an open room, surrounding a bunch of spirits, who looked to be cowering Zora. Upon further inspection, the spirits were in fact incased in the ice below, and we quickly rushed to kill the black beasts. Upon doing so, a teal and black portal appeared in the sky above us.
"We're going to need a way to thaw them out." I said. "We can't just leave them like this. Plus I imagine that the spring Spirit won't see us if the lake is all dried up."
Zach nodded. "If only we had a means to melt it. We could do with a really big piece of smoldering coal right now… Wait a second, the giant stone that erupted from Death Mountain! Do you think it's still hot?"
I thought about it, and nodded. We got Midna to warp us to Death Mountain, where we soon saw the giant rock in question and had Midna teleport us and it back to the Zora's Domain. Once we got there, Midna dropped the heated boulder into the giant frozen pool, and it quickly melted the ice, and even brought it to a boil, melting the rest of the ice as it traveled out of the cave.
"Who knew that something so dangerous would come in handy… Alright, the Zoras are safe now, so let's go. The ice melted and restored to water flow to normal. Can we finally meet the spirit of Lake Hylia?" Midna said, taking a look around at all the spirits that now surrounded the room.
We turned on our beast senses and saw that most of the spirits were just breathing heavy. This confused me a little bit, since they were spirits. Surely they didn't need oxygen in that state? Maybe it was just part of the magic? I didn't really understand the twilight curse that made others spirits. As we made to leave the room however, the image of a fairly tall Zora woman appeared.
"Please, you must allow me to thank you for revitalizing both my people and this spring, which is the water source for all the lands of Hyrule." The spirit like image said. "In life, I was the village elder, the queen of the Zora named Rutela."
Midna intervened. "Not to be rude, but we didn't exactly do it for you guys…"
Rutela continued nonetheless. "The dark ones, they raided this village and, as a message to my people, executed me before them. Young men, you two who take the forms of proud beasts. I have something to ask of you. When the dark ones descended upon our village, I sent my young one, Ralis, to Hyrule Castle to inform Zelda of our fate. But, I fear danger followed him from this doomed place. I feel it, his presence grows fainter to me over time. But my time in this world has passed, and though I would give it gladly, I no longer have a life to risk in his rescue. Please, would you save my dearest, Prince Ralis?"
I looked at Zach and said, "That must be the young Zora boy in Telma's care." He nodded, and we agreed to do it.
"Thank you. If you do this, I will bestow upon you the protection of water. This power will grant you the ability to swim and respire in very deep water as if you were a Zora yourself. Please, save my son."
"Hmm, so if we help her, she'll grant you guys the power to swim in water like a Zora, huh? So then, what do you say? Although I suppose you shouldn't meet the prince looking like a wolf and a giant cat, huh? Eee hee hee!"
We left the cave, and jumped in the water, letting it pull us all the way downstream till we were back at Lake Hylia. We quickly found that we were right near the door to the spirit's springs, so we entered. We greeted the spirit, got the grapevine looking things, and made our way outwards.
We killed another trio of black beasts, causing another portal to turn teal for us near the entrance of the spring, and made our way to killing all of the bugs. We killed the few that were down by the lake, and used to grass whistle song to howl for the bird to come back. It did, and Midna took the reins once more and we flew up to the area with the howl stone. Now that water was flowing through, we made our way to the other side.
The wind flowed through the stone, and after listening for a moment, Zach begun to howl. He was getting good at it, which I suppose was a good thing, considering that our ability to get new weapon techniques was based on it. We once more appeared in the area that looked like the in between of regions, combing mountains and grassy fields and the ocean all at once. Zach howled the sing once more, and the golden wolf showed up to sing his duet.
The golden wolf told us to find him, and this time another glowing mark appeared on our map near the west entrance to Castle Town. While we were looking at the map, we realized that one of the bugs was actually in Castle Town, and we decided to go to it last. A couple of Zoras stood nearby, discussing how the path ahead of us was the quickest way back to the Castle, so we resolved to come back this way once we had the remaining pieces of light.
After teleporting to the top of the Zora's domain, we killed the remaining bugs one by one until there were two spaces of light left. We headed back and towards castle town. When we got to the entrance, another portal showed up and dropped three black beasts. At this point, it was almost laughable how easily we killed them, and I grew suspicious. Either these things were the best that Zant could throw at us, or he was planning some huge fight later on.
Once in castle town, we quickly found and killed one bug, but that was all that was on our map, at least, until another mark appeared in the middle of the lake.
"What's this?" Midna said, looking at the map. "The last bug is in the middle of the lake? This seems fishy to me." We headed back down to the lake, and was astounded by what we saw. There, in the middle of the lake was a huge bug, probably the mother of all the others that we had killed. We knew that we needed to take it down, so we made our way onto some wooden pieces that were strewn in the water near it.
The battle was hard, since we could only move on the wooden planks in the water. Eventually, it would turn its attention towards one of us, and the other would strike, jumping onto its back and biting and clawing at it. We did this over and over again, until finally it curled in a ball in the water, unmoving but not dead. We jumped onto its now exposed belly and tore it to pieces, ripping its carapace from the rest of its body like when I tore the armor off that huge boar riding monster.
It eventually died, and we got the last piece of light in our grapevine thing. We returned to the spring, where we handed over the grapevine and the world turned to light once more, returning us to our human forms.
"You make sure to get that last Fused Shadow now." Midna said as she jumped into my shadow. The spirit of Lanayru came from the water, looking like a mighty snake, quite larger than the other three spirits had been. It introduced itself, and told us the all of the light spirits were now restored. It told us then that the Fused Shadow lay in the temple at the bottom of Lake Hylia, and then showed us a vision, claiming that we must see it. He said that the goddesses locked away the Fused Shadows for a reason.
There was chaos initially, and the goddesses created all life equally, and everyone lived in peace. The sacred realm held the power of creation that the goddesses had left behind, and soon people were clamoring to take this power for themselves. A powerful group of sorcerers took control, and attacked everyone that came near, claiming the sacred realm for themselves. It was then that the goddesses intervened, taking away the power that those sorcerers had, and split it into pieces, giving them to the spirits. This horrible power, that corrupted those men in times of peace, was the power of the Fused Shadow.
It warned us that power can corrupt, and that if we sought to use it for the sake of power, that the darkness would consume us too. Zach looked at me and we both nodded. This was something that we couldn't allow to happen; we would not be taken by darkness. After all, that's why we were here, to fight it.
Lanayru nodded. "Like I said, the dark power you seek is within the sleeping Lakebed Temple on Lake Hylia." And the spirit disappeared once more, leaving us to our work. We walked outside the cave and realized it was night time, so we set up camp outside the cave and went to sleep.