"Good grief, Okuin. You've been down here for hours."
Okuin's head shot out of the book he'd been immersing himself in and his finger automatically shot to his lips. He glanced to the side to make sure Nokune was still seated at the table, where she'd fallen asleep reading, then finally looked to the steps to see whom the voice belonged to. "Hello, Iziz," he whispered in greeting, standing to meet her.
Iziz was an ancient woman, the current Sage of Shadow and leader of the Sheikah. Years had turned her hair ashen and diminished her stature. The heavy, wrinkled flesh of her face hung down in jowls, which caused more impudent trainees under her to nickname her "the bulldog". Still, though she was no longer strong, she was quick and wise, and the King of Hyrule kept her in close counsel.
She had a certain fondness for Okuin, but that made her strict with him. He was training to be her replacement, after all, and she was determined he would be worthy. She stood on the landing, her lips pursed, waiting for him to continue.
"I've been doing research," Okuin obliged. He could tell from the purple shadows of grass showing through the room's sole window that it was evening. He'd forgotten to eat. Probably missed dinner. But that wasn't important at the moment. He swung the charm that was still clasped firmly in his hair into Iziz's view. "I made this."
He had to bend down so she could study it properly. She twisted it between two fingers and her face folded into a scowl. "What kind of spells have you been using?" she asked.
He shrugged. "A Gerudo sent me the scroll."
"Gerudo?" The old sage abruptly jerked on his hair in surprise, and Okuin nearly lost his balance before he straightened. Iziz's tone grew sharp. "You shouldn't trust it. The Gerudo are thieves. They use black magic."
"Oh, pff. It's not black magic."
The light in the room dimmed momentarily as the candles flickered. Okuin opened his mouth to defend the spell once more when he caught a bad breath of air and broke into a violent fit of coughing.
Iziz's eyes widened in genuine concern, but he held up one hand, his go-to gesture to wave away sympathies. The side of her lip twisted slightly. "Good grief. Get some fresh air, boy, you'll hack your lungs out."
"Y-yes, ma'am," Okuin answered lamely once he'd gotten his breath back.
She turned and slipped back up the stairs, leaving no sound or trace that she'd ever been there—which was typical for one of their kind. Okuin often joked that one reason he was a sage rather than a stealth fighter was his noticeable gait—still quiet by Hylian standards, but blasphemously loud among Sheikah.
Recalling the wise old sage's words, Okuin glanced once more at the scroll in his hand, bemused. Certainly, he'd return it to the Gerudo. And he would do so in person.
Okuin expected much of the Gerudo Desert, but he didn't expect scaffoldings.
The horse he'd borrowed from Nokune tread gingerly over the shaky wooden bridge, ears flicking at every creak. The buildings before him were beginning to crack at the edges, worn down by time and desert winds. A coliseum rose behind them, stories high and unfinished, surrounded by platforms. He couldn't imagine anyone working in this heat. He pulled his hood tighter around his face to keep the scorching sunlight off of his skin, but it soaked through his dark Sheikah clothing.
It seemed the desert had been abandoned. Maybe everyone sought refuge from this sun. He'd never come here in person before. Perhaps they made their dealings at night. He pulled around the first building, the horse picking its hooves carefully around a sharpened fence. Okuin dismounted in the shade, looking around at the windows, but there was still no sign of life.
Hot wind pushed sand and dust into his face, and he covered his mouth quickly, coughing.
"You there!"
Okuin jerked his head up in alarm. The voice came from the closest roof, its owner a silhouette pointing down at him. Two Gerudo women dashed from the door behind him, spears bristling. Okuin threw his hands in the air, and the speaker above pushed off the roof to land in a cloud of sand before him.
"What are you doing here? This is Gerudo territory! You're lucky Gendooru didn't find you or she'd have locked you up without asking any questions." The woman circled him. Cloth masks covered the Gerudos' faces, and hers was a soft yellow, her dusty eyes glinting beneath it. She was the only one unarmed, but she sized him up in a second, giving the spear-women a subtle signal to give them more room.
Okuin's lungs pressed in on him as he stammered, glancing nervously at the weapons. "I'm sorry, I was wondering if—that is, I received—er, is this yours?" He produced the scroll carefully, taking a deep breath in wake of his ramblings.
She snatched it from him, pulling it open easily. Her eyes darted across only one or two lines before she waved. "He's all right, girls! I invited him. Take care of his horse."
"You invited me?" Okuin's eyes were distracted for a confused minute as a Gerudo gave him a wave and took the reins of Nokune's horse.
"Sure did." The woman in yellow gave him a shove that may have been intended as a friendly pat, or may have been calculated to herd him in a specific direction, considering she was waggling the scroll as a pointer. "I'm the librarian here! Follow me. The name's Gennish. I heard the Hylian library was lacking in stock and I figured if you realized we had scrolls here, too, you'd want to see them. Are you a librarian, too?"
He allowed her to walk him into a large building deeper into the enclave, past crates and more scaffolding and signs of renovation. "I'm a sage, actually," he answered as they went. "I study magic. My name's Okuin."
"Even better! Most of these scrolls contain some form of incantation or other. They haven't been used since our king vanished." She wrenched a door open. In the moment before Okuin's eyes adjusted, the room was a cave, endlessly tunneling into an uncertain blackness. Then the shapes of the walls came into focus and the long room and heavy curtains lining it became visible. There was a scratch of flint as the torch beside them was lit.
"Sorry there's not much light in here. This place used to be a prison cell." Gennish pulled a curtain aside to reveal thick, crisscrossed bars pulled aside behind them. Books and scrolls sat piled on a table inside and around the cage like an abandoned feast of knowledge.
Okuin gave her a short laugh. "It's all right, I'm used to that. Do you have anything on the Sacred Realm?"
Gennish brightened. "Yes! Our king was very interested in the Hylian goddesses." She pulled her facial scarf down and the hood fell to her shoulders. She had a round face, pointed nose, and gold-yellow eyes that missed nothing, flicking continuously around the room in her excitement. Her rust-colored hair was pulled to the top of her head in a ropy ponytail, and she tapped her cheekbones, both of which were decorated with a tattoo of three colored circles: blue, red, and green. Nayru, Din, and Farore. "So am I," she said, with a secretive smile. She pushed half of the mess off the table in the cell, beckoning him over with one arm. "What would you like to see?"
"The scroll you gave me was very old, and some of the wording was stained or smudged. But the spell mentioned something about a path to the Sacred Realm, have you heard of that?"
She dropped a scroll open with little flourish, holding the crude illustrations at arms' length for him to observe. "Some call the entrance the Door of Time. They say, in ancient days, our king actually traveled beyond it. He came back with knowledge of some horrible, ancient secret. Whatever it was, it turned Hyrule's princess against him."
Okuin's lips parted in an O of sudden understanding. "You mean Ganondorf."
Gennish sighed. "We're not permitted to speak the name here. Gendooru says he dishonored our clan."
"He's mostly known as the King of Thieves in Hyrule," Okuin agreed ruefully.
She regained her secretive look. "Indeed, he is. But do they ever tell you what he stole?"
The sage paused in surprise. "…No."
"Knowledge." She tapped one temple. "Still…he left an impact. They said he was so powerful, even the gods themselves couldn't kill him. But even if that were true, he just vanished after that." She passed the article to him.
The scroll had a musty, unpleasant smell, but Okuin was used to such conditions. He squinted at the hasty writing, stained and torn.
Though they have refused to let me in, I cannot forget I have been chosen. To obtain the…
…eld Shadows together. This must be how I was meant to find the way into the Sacred Realm. The Spiritual Stones are no longer an option, and I cannot find the Ocarina, so I will use this newfound power to open the Door. The time has come.
"Was this a journal?" he quizzed the librarian. "It's arranged in—what looks like—dates."
"It would seem so. But judging from the state of this, it's like someone went through it by hand just to smudge or tear the names off." She leaned over his shoulder, reading all that remained. "'…Nearly discovered my research. I was forced to destroy the…' Yeah, yeah, smudge, stain, tear, and then: 'Not all is lost, however.' There's so much missing. Then it just says 'They might be the only way to the Sacred Realm now.' With no clue of who or what they might have been."
Okuin bit his lip. "Is it possible he wrote this?"
"The king?"
"Ganondorf." He pointed to a sketch reminiscent of the summer heat he'd seen rising off the sands. "This is the symbol of a goddess. Didn't you say he held the powers of a god?"
Gennish's hand flew to the red circle on her cheek. "He documented his progress. But if he really did find a way into the Sacred Realm…" She straightened, her eyes wide. "Maybe that's where he went! Maybe he's still there!"
She was interrupted as the dust abruptly imposed itself on the sage once again. Gennish looked on in alarm as he hacked his airways clear, waving urgently to be led out into the clear. She obliged, pushing him through the curtains.
"You spend your days among old books and you can't take a little dust?" she said jocularly.
He cleared his throat. "It's the sand, I imagine. Not good for my—" the words sent him off on another round of merciless coughing.
The light outside granted him a new understand of the scroll's contents. The young sage's mind was reeling. The blurred, charcoal sketches on the page were crude, but he knew them. He knew the shape that the artist had so helpfully identified as the Door of Time. In hindsight, he should have known from the name. He passed the building it dwelt in every day on his way to the library. He whispered hoarsely.
"Could the gate to another world really exist in the center of Hyrule?"