I'm not sure how it happened, but chapters 2, 3, 4 and this chapter have all ended up being on the same day. Chapter two was the first half of the day, chapter 3 was the afternoon, chapter 4 was the afternoon and well into the night. I guess now we're going to see what Link was doing that same night... The timings should become more stable soon, hopefully. So,

in the last chapter,

Vaati gave Mira the sword from the competition. Setting off to find the light force, he quickly found a map and using it, he was able to work out where he should search first. Vaati also began to become much more connected with the malevolence he didn't understand, which also resulted in people getting scared, and even hurt. Vaati's inner voice tried to show Vaati what was happening to him, but he simply squashed it down. Well past midnight, Vaati wrote in his diary, now one step closer to the light force...

Chapter 5: A Piece of the Puzzle

"Don't you think it's LATE, Boy?" nagged Ezlo, "I think you need some rest!" Link felt his frustration, however, Link's own protectiveness for Zelda and determination to save her, plus his fear of the nightmare, won over that. So he went inside the shrine. "So this would be the Deepwood Shrine that the elder spoke of..." said Ezlo, looking around at the crystal-powder cement (the odd material Link doesn't recognise) walls with the mouldy floor and the giant leaves. The whole place smelt like the forest. "He... said something about monsters being inside, didn't he?" Link took his sword and shield from his back. If he was going to save Zelda, he was going to need them. Link was not afraid. If anything, he was excited to see what might be ahead... However, Ezlo was nervous about this, and it didn't help that it was getting late...

"He- Hey now! No reason to be afraid or anything... I'll be waiting right here." Ezlo realised what he was saying all at once. No wonder he'd been a terrible parent to Vaati with THAT attitude! "No, wait! What am I saying!? I'm not letting you leave me alone in here!"

...Well, that wasn't any better.

Link was thinking that Ezlo was being annoying. Very annoying. He was also thinking that whatever Ezlo said, leaving him all alone when he needed some help wouldn't be very nice. Link walked forwards and pushed a large statue out of the way of a door (surprising Ezlo) and went through it.

It was very dark inside the next room. Link carefully moved around, accidentally stepping on some switches and lighting up the room, revealing some huge, fat, yellow slugs with blue stripes. They were monsters too, Link realised as he felt nothing coming from them. The slugs were half the size of Link's legs, and they moved very slowly, leaving sticky stuff everywhere. They disappeared in a puff of white smoke like all the other monsters. Link then put his sword and shield back onto his back, then opened the treasure chest, and pulled out a small, silver key. In front of Link, opposite the door he'd come in this room through, was a locked door. Link unlocked it, and it slid upwards, taking the key with it. He then went through to the next room.

In that room, there was a lot of deep water... "What are you waiting for, Boy?" Asked Ezlo, "Just swim across!" Link was a bit uncomfortable with admitting he couldn't swim because he used to be afraid that he'd drown, like in the nightmare. After Zelda had finally convinced him he was being silly, it was far too late for him to start lessons. Link looked around the room a bit more, and quickly spotted a lever. When he pulled it, the water was bridged up to a bit of land with a large blue mushroom on it. He carefully pulled it- but not far enough. The mushroom flung Link into the water, and Ezlo fell off Link's head because of the force, and Link was reminded of a certain part of the nightmare-

Water, lots of water, flooding a place he cared about.

Screams, splashes, everything was being washed away.

A familiar cry for help, a lot of struggling...

drowning...

Link struggled and splashed in the water, trying to paddle to the other side. For a second, from the mushroom, Ezlo saw three-year-old Vaati struggle and splash in the water. He jumped in the water and found a way to swim (by moving his 'body' from side to side) and pushed Link to the other side of the water, where Link climbed out, before yelling "Why didn't you TELL me you can't swim?! You could have drowned, Vaa- Link!"

Ezlo had nearly said 'Vaati' as a reflex before stopping himself just in time. Link noticed this and wondered wether Ezlo had a stronger connection to Vaati than he'd thought. In the next room, Link and Ezlo saw a humungous barrel. Link climbed up the stairs to his right, passing a red and white mushroom with feet and quickly skittering past the dust-like, yellow pollen it was leaving around it. At the top of the high area, there were vines connecting the barrel to the top of an unlit torch. Next to the torch was a switch, and Link stepped on it to see what would happen. All the switch did was light the torch, which in turn burned the vines, leaving one side of the barrel loose. Link looked past the side of the barrel and saw more vines on the opposite end of the room.

Link went back the way he'd come (holding his breath when he ran past the pollen) and went through a hole in the barrel. In the barrel, Ezlo asked, "Say, Link, what's the princess like?"

"L-loud." Link replied, thinking about all those times Zelda had chattered away, nearly talking his ears off once or twice.

"Loud?!" asked Ezlo, wondering how exactly one could describe someone else as 'loud', "How come?"

"Because she i-is." replied Link, exiting the barrel through another hole, then walking up more stairs, now on the other side of the barrel. There were two switches up there, a statue and another torch with vines attached to it. He tried to step on both switches at once, but they were too far apart for him to be able to push both of them down properly. Link soon found that they wouldn't work unless they were both pushed down at the same time, so he pushed the statue onto one of the switches and stepped on the other one. Once again, the torch lit up and the vines were burnt away, leaving the barrel completely loose. Ezlo wondered why the barrel didn't burn, and he took a closer look at it while the vines were burning. Upon looking closer, Ezlo realised that the barrel was actually a bit damp, and the flames were too small to spread.

Link went back inside the barrel, and when he walked inside of it, it began to spin since the vines weren't holding it any more. "Wha-?!" gasped Ezlo, "Be careful, my lad! The barrel just moved!" Link began to experiment with the movement, and found that new doorways opened up as the barrel rolled in place. It was as if those holes had all been carved in exactly the right places, and who knows, maybe they had. One hole led downwards, into a basement of some sort, but it was covered up with a gigantic, sticky, bouncy web. Link bounced up and down on it, much to Ezlo's annoyance. It didn't break. Bouncing on it, Link quickly discovered, was fun! He got off it after seeing that it clearly wasn't going to break.

So, Link soon found another new doorway leading to the other side of the room and went through it, then through another door just outside of it. A little further into the next room, Link found another stretchy blue mushroom, which was conveniently in front of another stretch of deep water. "Be CAREFUL!" Yelled Ezlo in Link's right ear, "I don't want to drag you out of there again!"

In answer, Link pulled the mushroom as far as it would go, then grabbed Ezlo's rim securely before he went sailing over the first stretch of water, the solid ground in front of a door to Link's left, over the stretch of deep water behind it, and finally over the ground behind THAT and slammed face-first into the wall at the end of everything else. Ezlo got dropped to the ground the second Link hit the wall, and he felt a bit dizzy. Ezlo looked over to the wall Link had slammed against. It had a large, Link-sized dent in it along with several cracks all around the dent. Link was on the floor, looking dizzy but not out cold.

"O-ow." He said. Two seconds later Link got up, just like that, and put Ezlo back on his head. Ezlo blinked.

"Are you okay, my boy?" he asked.

"Y-yeah." Matter-of-factly replied Link. Link looked at the Link-sized dent. Ezlo looked at the Link-sized dent.

(What is with that boy?!) thought Ezlo, (He just slammed face-first into a wall made of crystal-powder cement, and he just gets up and says he's okay like it happens all the time?! The material IS far softer then stone, but an impact like that should have at least knocked him out for a few seconds...)

(W-wow... I made a d-dent like that?) thought Link, (That o-odd blue stuff must be r-really soft! How L-lucky!)

Link felt Ezlo's shock and wondered wether the material was supposed to be that soft or not. Ezlo figured that he shouldn't question it and be glad Link was so resistant to hard impacts. Both didn't voice their thoughts, and Link looked to his right and saw a staircase leading to more high ground. Link went up the stairs, and saw a large treasure chest. Link opened it, and found a map of Deepwood Shrine inside. It would be very useful, but Link would clearly be unable to carry it everywhere as his bag was full to the brim at the moment... Ezlo noticed this problem too and announced, "You know what? I know a way to sort this out!" He hopped to the floor next to Link. "Pass me your bag." Link did so, and watched as Ezlo hopped around on the spot, and then suddenly, the bag looked as if it were completely empty. "Well, you can hold anything in that bag now!" Chuckled Ezlo. Sure enough, Link put his hand inside, and it was like reaching into an infinite amount of space... he found that he could bring anything he needed into his grasp as soon as he thought of it. The map certainly fit. Thanks to the map, Link had figured out where he should go next.

He ran down the high ground, then jumped back to the mushroom. This time, Link got it right and landed right in front of the door to the next room. There isn't really much to say on the next couple of rooms, just more switches, more monsters and another key. After all that, Link retraced his steps and checked the map.

Back in the barrel, Link's stomach growled really loudly. Realising all at once that he was really hungry, Link took out the box with his pack lunch from this morning in, and took out a cheese sandwich from it. "Finally!" cried Ezlo in relief, leaping off Link's head and grabbing the sandwich in his beak. Link ate the other one as Ezlo gobbled his up. After they'd eaten, Link asked,

"How is the e-energy of the w-world solid?"

"Through great magical power!" explained Ezlo, getting into one of his big speeches, "The four energies are said to be held together by the elemental powers of the world itself! According to speculative research, they are the very essence of magic, and all forms of magic could be deprived from the elementals! Apparently, their crystal forms are merely a thin shell, and theoretically, if that shell is broken, huge magical power will be released into the world and terrible natural disasters would bring it to ruin! I have my own ideas about this long-disputed speculation about these mysterious, legendary elements..."

Link felt more confused about it than before. However, he knew he didn't really need to understand. He had the main information in his head anyway: Four elements+sword=fixed sword+saved Zelda. It honestly seemed that simple. Link continued to listen to Ezlo's giant speech anyway. Ezlo completely lost track of what he was saying, and quickly got off the subject and forgot that it was a ten-year-old boy listening, not a room full of of experienced magic-users.

"...some of those ideas include their possible reactions to each other, for example, what if the water element was smashed with the fire element? Are some elements stronger than others? Vaati overheard one of my discussions one day and as it turns out, he thinks that the four great energies and the elements are, in fact, the same thing and that the elemental powers are drawn out from the four crystallized energies. Vaati even found evidence in general magical laws proving his theory to be plausible..." chattered Ezlo, totally unaware of who he was mentioning. Link, however, heard every word. He began to try and figure out just how connected Ezlo and Vaati was...

"...but in the end, nobody really knows anything certain about them, and it's thought to be impossible to find them as they're supposedly sealed in temples in The Human World, which then raises the question of if there's more than one connection between our world and The Human World than just the Elemental Sanctuary and the portal- oh, wait. I'm getting off the subject." Finished Ezlo, snapping out of his speech. "Does that answer your question?"

Link shook his head. Ezlo sighed. "Well anyway, can't you rest a bit? I mean, the princess should be fine, that magic doesn't cause much harm, you know."

"..." Link knew Zelda would be bored to tears being stuck in one place all day, but Ezlo had a point, but if he wasn't going to sleep because of the nightmare, he might as well get closer to saving Zelda tonight... right?

"I mean, really- HEY!" Ezlo shouted as Link just put him back on his head without a word. "Oh why do you hardily SAY anything?! Honestly, not even VAATI would just ignore me like that!"

Link stopped in his tracks. Ezlo finally realised he'd slipped. "Uh..." he said, a little worried. Link decided to try and find more pieces to Ezlo's puzzle.

"...You kn-know him?" asked Link. Ezlo panicked and quickly thought up a way to change the subject.

"Sort of," replied Ezlo, "but I can tell you this; he's allergic to jabber nuts!" This was actually true. A teacher at Vaati's school had made him try a tiny bit of it, but he'd instantly got covered in pink spots and he threw up. Ezlo had hated them even more after that incident. "Besides, they're no substitute for ACTUAL- AHHH!"

While Ezlo was talking, Link had left the barrel and come across another blue mushroom, then gone flying through the air once again, taking Ezlo by surprise. Link really liked the feeling of being fast. Soon, he did it again and ended up in a room with more slug things. "-LEARNING!" finished Ezlo without skipping a beat. "Did you know, they only last a week!"

Link wasn't really paying attention at this point- he was too busy pushing a statue onto a button. A door opened, and he went through it. The door closed behind him and a bunch of very large, red ladybug-like monsters showed up, as emotionless as the ones before them. Link soon defeated them (all it took was a good WHACK), wondering why people were so afraid of these things- one could defeat them with a thick stick if they tried! Yet another small key dropped from the ceiling. Link was beginning to think that Deepwood Shrine was more like a dungeon.

Back in the other room, Link went up some stairs and jumped down to a doorway leading to an underground room. In that room, Link spotted a switch and stepped on it- then a treasure chest appeared. However, it disappeared when Link got off the switch, so Link put a nearby pot on the switch to hold it down. When Link walked over to the chest, he saw that he couldn't open it from this side, but deep water and that very same chest were blocking the only way to the other side.

"Now there's a puzzler..." grumbled Ezlo, "I suspect there's not much we can do here. Maybe we can work things from another angle later on." Link silently agreed with him and went back up the stairs. This time he went left, to another doorway. That room was filled with the yellow dust-like pollen, and a lot of it flew right into Link's face the second he walked into the room.

"A-Achoo!" sneezed Link, eyes watering and nose going bright red. This stuff had been around earlier, but now it was everywhere! "Achoo! Achoo! A-Achoo!"

"Hay fever?" asked Ezlo to- well, himself, really, as Link wasn't listening. Link ran through the first archway he saw and slammed face-first into a sticky, bouncy web, which sent him running right back where he'd started. Link was trying to get away from all the pollen, and Ezlo got very dizzy because off all of Link's running around. Soon, Link found a locked door and unlocked it before running into the room.

Unfortunately, the door slammed shut behind them and they were stuck in the room with a gigantic blue caterpillar-like monster. "Ew, what is that? Is that a caterpillar? It's disgusting!" Complained Ezlo, snapping into focus the moment he realised that they were stuck in the room with a monster. "Hey kid! I'll just let you take care of this one!" (Not again! One day I'll get rid of that attitude...) thought Ezlo after realising what he'd just said.

Meanwhile, Link rummaged around in his bag, looking much better, before taking out a tiny box. Inside the box were some teeny-weeny blue gummy-like C.H.S.M.S (Children's Hay-fever Specific Medical Sweets). Link quickly ate one and put the rest back in his bag, now feeling much, much better. The giant caterpillar was heading straight towards Link- who slapped it in the nose. He didn't even use his sword, much to Ezlo's surprise. The monster was unaffected, though it did stop moving for a moment as Link got his sword off his back. The monster promptly tried to trample Link, but he was ready for it and whacked it in the nose with his sword, causing the monster to turn grey all over, and the end of its tail becoming a pink heart. Link stabbed the heart, and the monster exploded in a puff of white smoke.

A large chest appeared in the centre of the room. Link opened it after putting his sword back onto his back. Inside was a large-ish blue jar with a small pair of wings just below the rim of the pot's entrance. A note was also in the chest. It read,

'This is the Gust Jar. Use it to suck things up. Be warned- things that go in the jar will NEVER come out! How to use- focus magical energy into the handles of the jar. Grip them tightly. Remember, this will take practice and try not to suck up your companions!'

Link experimented with it by sucking up some nearby webs. (Apparently,) thought Ezlo, (the boy knows how to do it perfectly already!) Next, Link sucked up all the pollen in the last room with great relief, as well as weakening a few of those walking mushrooms- Link briefly wondered wether it was a bad thing that he enjoyed making the walking mushrooms 'go poof'. Link then backtracked to the barrel.

Ezlo noticed huge waves of magic potential coming from Link while he was busy sucking up the pollen. Suddenly, the strange strength and the fast learning made sense. However, neither were Link's gift. Ezlo knew that someone with Link's amount of magic potential would have a gift of magic- like Vaati, for example. Vaati could feel wether people were lying or hiding things from him. He could tell when one twisted their words or if it were a 'true' truth. His gift was the gift to sense truth- a rare and powerful gift only possessed by those of his ability. Ezlo felt guilty again about how bad he'd been at looking after Vaati... However, rare gifts had a corresponding price. Ezlo wondered what Link's gift was.

Next, Link sucked up the bouncy web which was covering the hole in the 'floor' of the barrel before putting the Gust Jar away in his bag. Link looked down at the faraway-seeming ground, feeling both fear and excitement- what an odd pair. Ezlo looked down there, too. Then he was suddenly hit with realisation. "You're not planning on JUMPING down there, are you?" asked Ezlo worriedly, "ARE YOU?!" Link looked up at Ezlo while Ezlo looked down at Link. Link's face had a large, adreniline-fueled smile on it, and his eye were sparkling with that rush Link had never felt before now... he liked the feeling. The combination of fear and excitement. Link nodded, then leaped down the hole. He kept a tight grip on Ezlo's rim, effectively using him as a parachute. However, he accidentally let go of Ezlo too soon, and Ezlo plummeted to the shallow water first. He was fine, considering he was now a hat and therefore had no nerves to feel pain with- until Link fell directly on top of him.

"HEY!" Yelled Ezlo, "GET OFF ME, BOY!" Link's cheeks went rose-pink for the third time that day and he got off him, before politely looking Ezlo in the eye and saying,

"S-sorry, Mr. Ezlo..." But then it happened again. Link felt exactly what Ezlo felt...

Annoyance. Frustration. Realisation. Shock.

...and then deeper, past Ezlo's large black eye and his hat form...

Fondness. Guilt. A bit of sadness, that lingered there like a tiny pin inside. Determination. A bit of Selfishness. Something was dulling all these emotions, like a fluffy cloud of non-existance. Deep, deep Care for a certain Minish boy, like a sort of spiritual familial connection.

"AAAH-HA!" announced Ezlo, snapping Link out of his connection. "Do you have any idea what a rare gift that is, Boy?" Link stared blankly at him. Gift? It wasn't his birthday. Or anybody else's. Maybe it was Ezlo's birthday? "The gift of sharing souls! An incredibly rare gift which can stop WARS if used to its full potential! And potential is just the beginning, my boy... They say that gift's true magic power can allow one to feel the very life force of the world itself!" Announced Ezlo, bouncing around excitedly, but at this point, he stopped and his voice darkened. "However, powerful gifts like that have a corresponding price that is paid from birth, though they wax and wane with how developed the gift in question is. In this case, one is incapable of feeling a certain influential emotion, though one can feel it from others. The emotion varies depending on one's personality... Hnm?"

Ezlo realised that Link wasn't even there anymore. He looked to his left and saw that Link was currently looking a bit exasperated and pointing at a giant lily pad that could easily fit Link's entire school class and the teacher on it, which was floating right at near the edge of the deep water. Ezlo got the wrong idea and thought that this was a way of Link saying he was confused (Ezlo isn't the best at reading facial expressions).

Vaati gave him a really confused look.

"Hnm? Oh, sorry. Basically, you'll do 'awesome' in magic!"

"...What price?"

"For your gift, it's an inability to lie- and that can indeed be a bad thing. Of course, magic is a very precise thing, so one can write a lie or twist words around, just not speak a lie. Go on, try!"

"My eyes a bl-red. Huh? My eyes are gre-red. Wha?!"

"Hah! You see, my boy?"

Link sighed and pointed at Ezlo, then at the lily pad. Link had decided that he'd done far too much talking for one day, so he was using other ways to communicate. Unfortunately, Ezlo was really hard to get though to...

"What now?" asked Ezlo, "Unless we find a way to travel across water, we won't be going much farther."

Link sighed again, much louder this time, and picked Ezlo up (At this point, Ezlo is really wet- not so pleasant to be on one's head) before walking on top of the lily pad and using the Gust Jar- which he'd used earlier to get the lily pad closer- to move the lily pad across the water. Ezlo finally got the idea. Link wondered about what Ezlo had said about his 'gift', having heard every word. Link didn't know the meaning of a word or two that Ezlo had said, and he didn't know what Ezlo meant by 'magic potential', 'magic ability', or 'magic power'. He decided to decipher it next time he got his hands on a dictionary.

Meanwhile, Ezlo gave up being grumpy about Link and started wondering just how many secrets Link was keeping. He clearly had incredible magic potential, but what would he be incapable of feeling? Fear? Joy? No... Not protectiveness, either... Hmm...

Link continued to travel by water, only stopping to leave a jar on a button to continue. Along the way, Link defeated a few very annoying, one-eyed bug-like monsters big enough to carry bombs. Eventually, he reached the room with the treasure chest from before. Now the puzzle was solved. Link put down the Gust Jar and put his sword back on his back before opening the chest and finding another small key. He then went back to the lily pad, where Ezlo was now dry again. Link put Ezlo back on his head. Secretly, Ezlo preferred being up there. Link used the Gust Jar to travel by water again, soon reaching a locked door on a patch of dry land, which he promptly opened and went through, leaving the lily pad behind.

Through it was another room filled with mushrooms and deep water. Link held on tightly to Ezlo as he went flying across the room, using the Gust Jar on the mushrooms he couldn't reach, soon reaching a large, blue chest at the centre of the room. He put the Gust Jar down on the floor next to him before opening the chest. Inside it was a humongous key as big as he was, with a big red gem, and the top was designed to look like horns. Link put it into his bag. (W-Wow!) He thought, (E-Ezlo was right! It really c-can hold anything now! I w-wonder how Grandpa will react...)

He next took the map of Deepwood Shrine out of his bag, and worked out where the room with the door for the giant key was. He traced his steps right back to the entrance of the shrine, and sucked up some webs blocking the way to the next floor. On the next floor was a really large door with huge chains and an even huger lock keeping it shut. Link, with no difficulty whatsoever, used the humongous key to open it. The chains, lock and key slid into the wall, and the giant door opened. As soon as Link entered the room, the door closed behind him.

Outside the minish-sized shrine, a regular green slime-thing (also known as the big green chuchu) hopped onto the roof of the shrine, the gloopy slime that was its body soaking through the mossy roof and into the room just below it.

Link and Ezlo looked around as huge drops of green slime, each drop as large as a boulder, fell into the room through the (very much weakened) roof. Next, a green slime thing came too. Except right now, Link was just smaller than his own thumb would normally be. Which made the slime-thing HUGE. It easily very nearly took up the whole room! A second later, Link was running around the room trying not to get squashed while Ezlo tried to figure out how to beat this thing at this size. "Try the Gust Jar!" suggested Ezlo after a few minutes of thinking. Link did. He took out the Gust Jar and turned around, sucking up much of the slime-things slime, causing the slime-thing to lose balance, teeter a bit, then fall over. Link tried to slash it's 'head', but his teeny-weeny sword had no effect whatsoever on the gloopy, green slime. The monster soon righted itself. Link did it again, quickly stabbing its giant eye this time around. It reared up, made a huge, earthreal noise, then completely explodonated into a lot of white smoke, sending a sparkling purple thing high into the air...

The purple thing floated back down, radiating great earthen power, power that felt like the forest, and all the plants and animals, its power felt like life itself, from the skies, to the lands, to the very depths of Lake Hylia. That was the true powers of the Earth Element- Link and Ezlo had finally found it.

"The power of the earth is the source of all living things..." Said Ezlo, filled with awe at the element's incredible power. Link picked it up and put it in his bag. Behind him, a magical portal appeared, and Link went into it. One flash of green light later, Link was just outside the shrine's entrance. Now that all the excitement was over, Link felt very, very sleepy... His eyes began to close... Darkness. Darkness, cloaking us, keeping us safe- THE NIGHTMARE!

"N-NOOO!" cried Link to the sky, almost like a ghost... His eyes snapped open. Link took a deep breath and calmed down.

"Wha? Huh? What?" asked Ezlo, disorientated. "Ah, we've got the Earth Element! You must go tell the elder at once! Then go to sleep! Did you know, you almost sounded like a ghost just now!"

At this point in time, the story was only just beginning. Neither of them had any clue what exactly those nightmares, or the ghostly cry, meant just yet...

Link had no intention of sleeping. Every time he slept, the nightmare came... He was scared of it, no, terrified of it.

"So!" said the Minish elder once they got to his house, "You have found the Earth Element! You are blessed with much courage and strength for one so young. If your commitment holds strong, head for Mount Crenel in the morning. There, you will find a man named Melari. Among all Minish, there is no-one more able to repair your sword. If you ask him, I am certain he will easily reforge your broken Picori Blade. I shall send word to him in advance. Travel safely. You are brave, but there are many evils now in the world." He then walked to the curtain on the left side of the room and opened it, revealing a secret door. "Leave through this door here. It will take you out of the forest quickly."

"Great elder, we are in your dept." Thanked Ezlo, politely, "We shall head to Mount Crenel first thing in the morning!"

They left through the door and used a portal/magic amplifier to grow, only to find that the way out was blocked by a huge pile of sharp, pointy rubble. They shrunk again and visited a minish mushroom house just outside the village in order to sak for some help.

"Green clothes? And a mystical hat?! Sir! Would you by chance be Link, the one who found the Earth Element? Surely you are! I have heard many people talk about you. I am Belari, researcher of antiques. I am also, well, a bit of an inventor. You know, you won't be able to get back to Hyrule Town, what with all the debris..." said the minish man inside the house.

"We already know that." cut in Ezlo.

"Here, I have something which might come in handy." He gave Link a Bomb Bag with ten bombs in it.

"Thank you." replied Ezlo, before Link left. Word travelled fast. They then grew again, and got back to Link's original size. It felt good for everything to be back in perspective. On the way out, this time Link stopped at a strange statue.

"Holder of the sacred powers, we grant you the power of wind..." Whispered a voice from the stone- then it exploded.

"Hm? Whoa! It... blew up? Hey, kid, look at where that stone marker used to be... there's some strange symbol on the ground. Yes, of course..." said Ezlo, realising what it was. A wind symbol reacting to Link's magical energy! "It must be... well, I haven't the foggiest, to be honest. Hm..." He covered up for it. Now was NOT the time to be explaining magic to Link. Link read the instructions on the Bomb Bag.

'Press a button next to the fuse. When it lights, drop the bomb and go somewhere else until it explodes. However, they will only work for those with sufficient magical energy due to how dangerous they are. Yes, like a safety latch. -Belari.

When Link got back to the rubble, he did just that with the bombs. He then left the woods and headed back to Grandpa Smith's house, Ezlo complaining all the while that 'kids shouldn't get bombs'.

"So this is your house..." said Ezlo, looking around, "Well, it seems like a nice place... So, where's my room?" Link first went to where Grandpa Smith was just finishing off a sword.

"Oh, welcome back, Link." said Grandpa Smith, "My, but you're looking so much stronger! Who's the hat?"

"I'm Ezlo." introduced Ezlo. "Yes, I'm a talking hat, no you're not crazy. I've been helping Link. You see, we went to see the Picori- as you call them -and as it turns out..." Ezlo explained everything that happened.

"Well then, Link, you should go to bed," said Grandpa Smith, "I'm going to have a talk with Mr. Ezlo." Link took Ezlo off and went to bed, but with no intention of sleeping.

Meanwhile, Ezlo stayed behind. "You don't seem very surprised that I'm a hat and I'm talking." he said.

"Trust me, you're not the strangest thing I've seen today." replied Mr. Smith, "All sorts of monsters showed up everywhere, and apparently, some weird purple guy called Vaati turned the princess- Link's best friend- into stone, and just to top it off, the picori are actually real. Tomorrow, Link won't be going to Mount Crenel- that's far too dangerous -I'll just reforge the sword myself."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Smith, but that isn't possible." explained Ezlo, "The Picori Blade is a magical item that requires magic-infused ore to be reforged. Not only that, but in order to find its power again, it will need the four elements. One of them is with us, one is on Mount Crenel, one's at Lake Hylia and the last one's near the swamp. In short, Link needs to do this."

"No, Hyrule's soldiers can take the elements." Argued Mr. Smith.

Ezlo sighed and explained, "Look, first off, we need to see a picori to fix the blade, secondly, it could be that all the elements are minish-sized, meaning Hyrule's soldiers would have no luck. I apologise, but Link has to do this."

"I... I know. I just don't want him going off and getting himself killed... Did you hear that his parents died because of an accident with that wild horse from Lon Lon Ranch? It was awful- Link has never been the same since. He never did speak much, but you'd be lucky to hear him say one sentence in an entire conversation, and he won't tell anyone why! Zelda said he said that it was his 'greatest secret of all'... Oh, but I'm sorry to bother you with that. You must be tired. Please, do rest. I have to make swords so the soldiers can protect Hyrule Town from the monsters. Please... look after my boy for me. He's only ten, after all, but... It's the only way." Smith sighed in relief. Secretly, he'd needed to talk about it for ages. It seemed that Link was the boy affected by Epona's accident. Ezlo pitied him. "It could have been worse..." murmured Smith, "...but Zelda was there for him during that difficult time... he couldn't have a better friend." He then muttered something about trusting Link to know how to use his medicines.

Ezlo just sat and thought for a bit. Here was a second chance, but could he take it?