Their bond reaffirmed and strengthened beneath the watchful gaze of the goddess, the trio enjoyed the New Year's Festival long into the night. John and Aradia made a mutual agreement not to imbibe alcohol, which as a show of good faith, Roxy followed to an extent, only allowing herself two drinks.
With that said, the liquor of Forest Haven is very subtle in taste yet strong in content, made with hallucinogenic herbs, and for once in her life she felt that she had had enough before she'd even finished the second cup.
"You guys go on and have fun," she said, lying down on a lily pad that was just big enough for her, spilling the rest of the acid green potion into the water. It fizzled and hissed, and a little shrimp-like creature floated up on its back. "Go do coupley things and leave poor old Roxy by her lonesome to stare at the fireflies," she said, her pupils dilating. Sweet suffering Signless, Skaia was magnificent tonight. She could see it through the Deku Leaves fluttering high above in the breeze.
"You okay Roxy?" asked John, squeezing Aradia's hand. Dear Gods they were holding hands, it was too cute.
"Fine, fine just," and then she mumbled something incoherent about destiny.
"Come on John," said Aradia, looking at her friend pityingly, "let's just go enjoy the festival. We'll check up on her until she feels better!"
"I dunno," said John, string down at the prone Sheikah, "can we really—"
A silvery-blue crescent arced its way through the air just by his head; he jumped back and yelped. The thrown weapon zipped through the air, doing a big lazy turn through a cloud of fireflies and returning to Roxy's hand. "John Egbert," she hissed, still looking straight up, "you will go into that festival and win your moirail something that is cute and stuffed. Then you will buy me something excessively sweet and fattening, at which point I will regain feeling in my face. Go and do thus."
John took a step back, lips twisted in a slight grimace. "Um," he began, but Aradia picked him up and hopped onto the next lily pad. "Don't worry about your food," she called back, "we won't be too long!"
To Roxy it felt like they were gone for days, but it was really less than thirty minutes. She had waking dreams, and stepped outside her body to witness the majesty of creation. The universe was a gigantic tree she saw, with bark of stone, situated in a grove of one hundred and eight identical trees, but that was just an illusion of her limited perception; it was actually a frog.
She thought she envisioned a conversation with that creepy old man, Old Man Ho Ho. He was strolling through the water with tiny boats on his feet, and there was something horrifying under his hat that she refused to look at, but it fizzled and smoked and clicked and whirred like a diabolical crab. He glared down at her with eyes of coal, but she didn't care, she was floating in space with the Golden Goddesses and discussing John's fine ass. Nayru asked the most inappropriate questions.
Snarling and swearing and hissing low so no one could hear, here at the edge of the festival, with steam shooting out of his ears, Ho Ho disassembled his cane. The hooked handle came off, and he clicked some kind of mechanism. It was hollow, Roxy could see, looking up at it as she was, and he held it like some kind of weapon. "I don't have my own day," said Nayru, somewhere up in the cosmos. "I don't even know why, I'm the hottest one. Din's flat as an ironing board and Farore looks fucking ten."
"You just slay girl," Roxy muttered to the Demiurge of Law. "You just fuckin' do you and you'll get what you deserve."
Ho Ho squinted. "I'm sorry what? I am threatening you to give up the Triforce!"
A grey fist emerged from the darkness and collided with his face, splitting his lip and knocking a tooth out.
"Get lost, you, uh, creepy old man," muttered Roxy's savior.
In her eyes he was shrouded in a blue cape made of cloud, and his horns were tipped with stars. "He's cute," said Nayru, fiddling with her décolletage, tail wagging.
"You said that about the mechanical monkey man," Roxy drawled, indicting Ho Ho with a wave; he had gotten the drop on Tavros and started drowning him in the waist-high waters, "get some fuckin standards girl, at least Farore can tell a choice ass from a less choice ass whether she looks ten or not."
"Speaking of," slurred the goddess, her skin flushing rainbow colors, "I am pretty sure you were checking out Aradia's."
"Man I don't even like girls like that!" Roxy shouted, as Tavros struggled with the surprisingly strong old man in the water, barely managing to escape his grapple and landing a pair of uppercuts just below his ribcage. "But like, if I had to pick a chick, you know?" she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
"Totally," replied Nayru, dissolving into a mass of peach colored bubbles, each of which contained the proud, sad visage that so often adorned her temples in Chosen, "I mean of course I understand you completely, I'm just a representation of your of thoughts after all."
"You're not really Nayru then?" Roxy asked, a little despondent.
"Sure I am," drawled the bubble storm, "I can be two things. It's subjective reality, man." The bubbles popped one by one, dissolving into quanta.
"That's beautiful," said Roxy, watching Ho Ho retreat from the Forest Haven, Tavros splintering the man's cane over his knee. "We are all God!" Roxy shouted loudly into the night, pumping her fist crazily and flipping her lily pad into the water.
It took the cold shock to make her realize something important; unlike almost every troll she'd met, Tavros had no wings.
She blacked out for a moment, during which she was pretty sure she actually talked to Tavros, mostly because she kept opening her eyes and seeing him looming over her, saying something. "I mean, it's not like I was faking or anything," he said, clutching his shirt collar. "I didn't just start calling myself the Breath Waker because I felt like—"
When next he spoke, or rather when next Roxy remembered him speaking, he was tapping a ring on his left hand. It was made of pale Azurine, and had a red stone shaped like a flower. "They let me keep it because it was a gift," he explained, "without it I wouldn't be able to walk." Roxy said something to the effect of 'that's nice' before dozing off once more.
"—nd I let go," said Tavros, chocolaty tears streaking down his cheeks. Roxy was certain they were delicious. "And he said my name once, and then the waves washed over him and he was gone." He was bawling now but Roxy had nothing else in mind other than how hungry she was. "They never even found the body," Tavros said, or was about to say, before Roxy leapt up and began licking the tears off his face. She passed out again, her stomach rumbling.
"Hey get the fuck lost!" John shouted, throwing a rock or some other suitably hard thing that plopped satisfyingly in the water. "Taking advantage of a drunk girl you sick fuck!?" He sloshed over to the lily pad menacingly.
Tavros leapt to his feet, soaking himself once more. "Six in the morning, you'll talk to your friends?" he asked, looking down desperately while John let out a stream of virile expletives.
"Sure fuckin' thing Mr. Éclair," she said, giggling loudly. Roxy had no clue what he was talking about. "You really do taste like chocolate!" she shouted as he ran off into the dark.
John hugged her and Aradia spoon fed her the most delicious cinnamon roll she had ever tasted. It was smothered in cream cheese frosting and those delightful honey-roasted Deku Nuts. She cried as she ate it.
Once she was lucid enough to walk, in about another thirty minutes, the three of them were actually able to enjoy the festival as a unit without worrying about each other. "I swear to Din if that asshole shows his face around here again I am going to kill him," John muttered, looking around shiftily.
"Shut up and eat your nikuman," Aradia said, slapping his back good-naturedly, almost knocking him over. "I swear, are you the one keeping me calm or am I the one keeping you?" she asked, sticking her tongue out.
John stuck his tongue out in return before biting into his little meat bun. Steam rose out of it into the air.
"Could you really even kill a guy, John?" Roxy asked, spinning on her toes as she walked—she'd clearly had dance training—and staring at things that the other two could not see.
"Of course I could," John said, quirking an eyebrow. "I killed Dualscar didn't I?"
"He was already dead," said Roxy, dramatically flipping her hair.
"And what about all the Bokoblins I've killed?" said John. "They're…basically people. Scaly, shouty, ugly monster-people, but still people."
Roxy started to chuckle, but then she saw the tight look in Aradia's eyes. She remembered something about attendants, ghosts that haunted the troll girl. Surely there were Bokoblins among them, clamoring and gibbering, condemning the trio for their role in the persecution of their race. A race of child-eaters and monsters yes, but sentient, or close enough, with clothing and culture all their own. The thought was more sobering than any amount of cold water.
The rest of the night passed by as warm and sweet as the lazy southern winds in spring. The children did not forget their quests and their vows, but set them aside to enjoy the festivities. The Carapacians of Forest Haven are a more refined, more deeply spiritual people than the trolls of Dragonroost, and their festival was thus more intimate, more comfortable than the trolls' farewell, but no less fun or full of food and song. They danced the night away and devoured earthy forest snacks, nuts and spiced pastries, by the basketful, never seeming to get full. The smell of the heady green liquor filled the air, and it must have carried with it hints of its strange intoxicants, for the children found that things blurred together towards the end, as they grew tired, their mouths numb with sweets and noses burning with alcohol.
At the end of their journey, the four children mainly remembered tasting things, and very little else.
John didn't know when they went to sleep, or for how long, but he awoke before the rosy fingers of dawn began to show through the splotches of deep indigo that stuck out between the Deku King's leaves. He felt fully rested, his body warm though his face was chilly, his mouth slightly crusted over with maple sugar. Sitting up, he realized that Aradia and Roxy were lying next to him, tangled in their party robes, dribbling slightly onto the floor. The three of them were lying in a bed of Deku leaves, as big as dinner plates, all red and gold. All around, the forest had turned colors, and the trees were shedding their leaves.
He saw the great amber eyes of the Deku King watching him through the disrobing branches all around. "Good morning, young Breath Waker," he said.
"Morning, you Majesty," said John, gawking at the colors. "Back home the trees don't really turn this suddenly," he added. "They do it in weird patches at random times through the winter, and by the time spring comes around most of them already have their leaves back."
The woody giant nodded. "The climate so far south is not conducive to brilliantly colored autumns," he rumbled. "But the magic of our festival lures all the trees to sleep at once, and gives us falls such as there were in old Hyrule." With a sigh, he extended his wooden arm, the one that held his massive staff of office, reaching over the canopy of John's grove. "I have dallied long enough," he muttered, as much as a tree could be said to mutter, "Our deal is complete. I give you Farore's Pearl."
The Pearl detached from his staff and fell in a slow spiral, as if it were a poplar seed. John caught it before it hit the leafy ground. It cast a lime green light all around him, the feel of it warm as a summer breeze, its heft as light as air. "Thank you, your majesty," he said. The Deku King nodded sadly, at long last relieved of his ancient duty.
"Go west now," he commanded, extending a branching finger. "Lady Cetus guards the Pearl of Nayru. She dwells beneath Greatfish Isle in a mighty cave and has done so since time immemorial. She will be your penultimate challenge, O Breath Waker." He retracted his mighty head and limbs, sighing heavily, as if all this talk and movement had drained him. "Meet her with courage."
The blue hour passed and true dawn broke on the ocean, a sprawling work of impressionism in blue, pink, red-gold and orange, the gentle waves going from indigo to pink to gold, like an ocean-colored sea flower catching fire.
John stashed the Pearl in a compartment under Jaspers's neck; its glow mingled with the light of Din's Pearl and with the shard of the Triforce, creating an eerie yellow light. John slammed the hatch shut, glancing around, and seeing only his companions. "That tickles," Jaspers purred.
"Afraid someone's gonna steal it?" Aradia asked with a wide grin. "Pirates maybe?"
"I don't think pirates would attack our ship," John said, with the tone of someone who was sure they knew what they were talking about. "Especially since I almost technically am one," he finished with every ounce of his smoothness. The girls ooohed, only slightly ironically.
"Hey new friends!" called a voice that was all too familiar to John. He'd become acquainted to its tone, the way it rose and fell as if the speaker was unsure of how, exactly, sentences should go, and was experimenting with every other syllable, the way the voice creaked like inferior wood under too much strain, just about to snap, the slightly phlegmy reverberation, as if the speaker was too polite to clear his throat and just let it hoarsen forever. John spun on his heel, eyes flaring, and gazed upon the countenance of Tavros Nitram.
He was holding a blue pack made of the same leathery leaves as his coat, bulging with supplies, and had a staff of living Deku wood leaning against his shoulder, wider and flatter towards the bottom end, its pale-and-green flesh gleaming like pearls in the sunrise, is tip crowned with a cluster of tiny Deku leaves shimmering red and gold, with an intricately carved spear-point of some darker wood rising through them. John did not notice the weapon though, merely the needle-filled, idiotic smile on his foe's face.
"What do you want?" asked John, rolling up his sleeves.
"Put the guns away John," said Roxy, patting his bare arms.
"What's a gun?" John asked, with the exact tone he'd just addressed Tavros.
"I think I invited him," said Roxy, walking carefully over to Tavros's side. A Leaden ball zipped between Tavros's horns, loosed by John's slingshot. Tavros blanched at the sound of the ball smashing into the wooden walls of Forest Haven behind him. Roxy put her hand on Tavros's shoulder and glared, ears flattering against her skull.
"You're a great friend and I trust you with my life and all Roxy," said John, loading another ball into the pocket and drawing the string taut, "but I would really like to know why."
"He…" Roxy began, a smile blooming on her face and then falling as she tried to remember, then remembered that she had forgotten. "Um, we had some kind of a talk last night…? Tav, help me out here."
Tavros sighed, stepping forward, as another lead ball zoomed over his head, this time ruffling the tips of his Mohawk. "Um, okay, this thing," he said, pulling his metallic blue guitar pick from his coat pocket, "it's a breath waker form Zephos! H-he gave it to me himself," he trailed off, losing his bit of steam that had set him talking in the first place.
"What's he look like?" John asked, narrowing his eyes.
"A big blue frog…" Tavros noted the look in John's eyes and stammered, "He really is! I swear!"
"Hey John," said Roxy, furrowing her brow, "Jaspers gave you yours! You wouldn't know what Zephos looks like anyway."
John flushed. "Well actually," he said, afraid to sound like he was making things up to compete with Tavros, "I had a vision, the first time I conducted the breeze. Zephos came to me as a giant frog and said that I was the true Breath Waker of this generation."
"He said I was a Breath Waker too," said Tavros, raising his voice slightly, taking another step forward with first unconsciously clenched. "He said there's breath wakers and then there's Breath Wakers, or something like that."
John sighed, knuckling his forehead. "I think…" he paused for a moment, tipping his head back up to the sky. "I think Zephos is a capricious jackass!" he shouted into the clouds. In answer, they thought they heard a whooping guffaw on the wind's breath, but it may have been nothing. Or it may have been something from the bellows-like lungs of a gigantic frog.
John sighed, lowering the slingshot. "I guess you just thought you were the only one who could do anything, huh?"
Tavros nodded his head shakily. "He told me that I would have to help pave the way for the true Hero."
"That's what we're doing!" Aradia declared.
With a nod and a forced smile, John said, "hop on the boat. Let's get paving." He hoped that he could learn to like the troll. Otherwise, it would be a very long Quest.
As they steered the boat northeast, Tavros talked about his adventures, haltingly, as if he was sure no one actually wanted to hear it. He'd begun in a country far to the west, where trollkind were few and far between, and had no dragon god to give them scales to fly. It was instead a theocracy ruled by a wise and ancient oracle, and those who could play instruments were pressed into her service, granting her strength with their music. Without her, Tavros said, the Seawall would cave in around them and drown all of Labrynna.
When the Cataclysm hit in ancient times, drowning Hyrule and the surrounding lands, the three oracles of the goddesses, who lived outside is borders, did what they could to protect their peoples. The Oracle of Secrets, it was said, changed the shape of the people of her country, turning them into Carapacians and scattering them across the world. Of the Oracle of Seasons, none knew her fate, for none could ever sail far enough east. The Oracle of Time however, placed a seal on the encroaching disaster, a gigantic tidal wave that could drown mountains, and froze it in time.
Tavros had been among her musicians, whose prayers kept the Seawall from falling in, but Zephos came to him in the full light of noon and commanded him to go east, to slay monsters and make himself ready for the coming of the hero. Tavros did as commanded, stealing a boat and climbing the seawall. Frozen in time, he said, the seawater was like thick slush, drained of all color and neither hot nor cold. He could not sail his boat over its sheer surface, so he strapped his little coracle to his back and began to climb, part of him certain that he would either fall and drown, or that there was nothing on the other side and he would simply fall off the end of the world upon reaching the top. Instead, he saw the open ocean for the first time, the Great Sea, and at the very edge of the horizon, the peaks of its thousand-thousand islands.
He saw many strange things as he paddled east; the mechanized ships of Calatia, the Great Temple of the Ocean Spirit, the Island of the Tokay, strange creatures indeed, and a pod of magnificent windfish, great leviathans who swim through both sky and sea. He could swear he saw the Dreaming Island, Koholint, which sails the sea like a gigantic ship with a volcano for a mast, a pod of rainbow colored windfish for sails, and glittering palace for its forecastle. Like any other mariner however, Tavros could never be sure if it was real or a dream.
John mainly tuned him out and focused on working the rudder. He was still irked about not being the one and only Breath Waker, though he knew it was a selfish thought and that Dave would need all the help he could get. It's not like John was bad, he told himself, he'd let Tavros come along after all. And John had never doubted that he would need help on his own journey; there'd been no question of letting the girls join him after all. It was simply that he'd assumed he would play a key role, when it turned out that there were at two Breath Wakers. Dave could not be replaced; there was only one Hero per generation, his mighty Breath passing from a spent body to that of a newborn. Breath Wakers must be the redundant parts in this world-saving machine, then.
Somewhere at the halfway point, a strong wind began to blow against them, making Jaspers stall in the water. John let go the tiller and played the Wind's Requiem, pointing it dagger-like into the wind and changing its direction.
A storm was brewing on the horizon with alarming quickness. Storms grew fast on the Great Sea, they all knew, but within seconds, the blue-tinged puffs of white on the horizon had bloomed like poison mushrooms into towering hills of steely grey. Mere minutes after that, they had become enormous thunderheads, bigger than mountains; heavenly cliff faces gleaming silver where the sun hit their flanks. At their centers though, they were bruise purple, darkening before their eyes to dim grey and then to black, illuminated by blue and gold flashes.
Worryingly, the clouds were heading right towards them like a celestial tidal wave, flying against the wind John had conjured. Admittedly, John didn't know how high he could affect the wind with his Breath Waker, whether he changed the whole wind or created a new one just big enough for Jaspers and crew, but it was unsettling nonetheless. The edges of the clouds that still caught the sunlight became blurry and streaked, and the ocean in the distance turned fuzzy. "Brace yourselves guys," John said, glaring at the rapidly approaching storm, ears back. His hair and fur were puffing up with the charge in the air; Aradia's had swelled to twice its size. Tavros pulled out his leaf guitar and began to play.
The storm hit them like a physical thing and Jaspers screeched as if he were in physical pain. John's conjured wind clashed against the storm's, which carried with it driving rain that stung the face. It came before the clouds like a herald, and for an instant the rain caught the sun, making it seem like a wall of gold.
Tavros struck a chord, and they were through, the power of his Breath Waking keeping the boat steady on its course, and then an instant later, they were inside a world gone dark.
The girls clapped. "Way to go Tavros!" Roxy said, her ears flapping like pink sails in the gale, elbowing the boy who was already turning brown with the praise.
"Can you do something about this rain?" John grumbled, taking off his glasses; it had become impossible to see with them on. He squinted around in every direction and his heart sank. The clouds above were so thick and the rain so harsh, he could see nothing after a few yards. He said it again, louder, to be heard over the sound of the rain and thunder. The air thrummed with the force of it, but the darkness was so profound that lightning flash rarely illuminated the scene. Jaspers hissed at the storm as if it were a true cat and not a boat.
John felt the thin skin of his left ear tear, a trickle of blood bringing him warmth before it was whipped away in the breeze. He tore a strip from his sleeve and wadded it against the ear, then drew his hood tight around his head.
"Um no," replied the troll, after a few moments of experimental strumming. He'd been replying for a little while in fact, but had not managed to shout loud enough. "Sorry!"
"Don't worry John," Roxy assured, as she bound a strip of cloth around her ears to keep them safe from the wind. She inched her way to petti Jaspers's neck and began to pet the hissing figurehead like a beloved pet. "We can get to Greatfish in this weather no problem! The wind you made hasn't changed and you aimed it true."
"And I can do something about the dark," Aradia chimed in, pulling a glass bottle from her inventory. She uncorked it and breathed into the bottle, and a little red flame sprouted up, floating in its center like a will-o'-the-wisp but steady and bright as a candle before corking it up again.
The sea was illuminated for several yards around, but after a certain distance the red light simply reflected off a wall of rain, surrounding the children with something like a theater curtain, except it was cold and wet, and it stung. The shadow the Jaspers's head cast on the curtain ahead seemed like the body of a monster cut from nothingness, a hole in the air with tentacles and horns. He twitched his whiskers and began to purr beneath Roxy's hands, breaking the illusion.
The mind of a sentient being can become accustomed to anything, and in time the noise of the storm became a dull roar. The children shouted to be heard, but did so automatically, in speaking tones, but louder, as if they were simply struggling to be heard at a loud party.
"Never seen a storm like this before!" said Roxy.
"It's like something out of a legend," John agreed.
"Like the cataclysm," muttered Tavros. No one heard him.
Aradia said nothing but produced a pair of buckets from her inventory, looking a bit embarrassed, and handed one to Roxy, motioning for her to start bailing. No one else had noticed, because the storm-wall had soaked them instantly, but there was water up to their ankles now. Roxy sighed and left the figurehead, and began to hurl the water from their boat. Aradia hung her makeshift lantern from the mast, and joined her.
Something hard hit John in the face, right between the bridge of his nose and his eye. He started, giving a little yell and letting go of the tiller, and the hard little something fell to the floor. He bent and picked it up, gripping the tiller tight. There was a lump of ice the size of a walnut floating on the water about his feet. "Huh?" he muttered, just as it began to hail in earnest.
The sound of hail on the sea is like stone dropped into a bucket of water, played a hundred thousand times in succession with extra reverb from all the times it happens simultaneously. This particular hail was interrupted by the sound of children being startled and hurt by the massive hailstones. In a single fluid motion, John unslung his shield and lifted it over his head, then put his other hand back on the tiller. The hail bounced off the enchanted boards, never hitting him again on the way down.
The girls hid under their buckets, crouching under the mast. John could hear Roxy swearing under her breath. Aradia was giggling, a harsh giggle that was almost like sobbing. John had heard it before, in Hephaestus's Forge.
"Aradia," he called, and she stopped. "Look at me."
She turned, twisting slightly around the mast, and lifted the bucket off her head enough for her red and grey eyes to peek out at him. Her crimson eyelashes were hung with water, and her hair was sparkling with droplets and hung with hailstones, all glowing like embers in the light of her fire. Yeah John?" she called, voice small as it could be and still be heard. Even in the face of an apocalyptic storm, John thought, she was the prettiest girl he'd ever known.
"We're all going to be okay," John said, his voice hoarse from the chill that was starting to set in. "We're all going to come out on the other side, to a brighter world." He laughed a bit to himself, looking up around his shield. "It's like when we were back on Dragonroost, and Pyralspite's clouds made everything look dim from the bottom. But, when we were climbing the mountain, we got high enough that we could see over and past them, and the rest of the world was as blue and clean as it always is." He felt a snippet of a quote in his heart, something very, very old that his Nana had taught him while he lay sick in bed as a child. "'In the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.'"
Aradia's lips parted in a small, tender smile, and just then the boat shook as if struck by a catapult and jumped five feet in the air.
The girls were thrown to the floor, their buckets ringing with the impact, and John only avoided being flung into the mast by gripping the tiller so tight his nails dug into the wood and were broken by the blow.
No one looked for a culprit, but Tavros made himself immediately suspicious by playing his guitar as fast as he could; the storm around them eased to the level it had been at less than a minute ago. None of them noticed that Tavros had continued to play through the storm and still the waters and winds around them to the point that they could sail in comfort. "I stopped because of the hail," he admitted, "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking!"
John growled. "Get over here!" he barked, "my shield's big enough for both of us!"
It wasn't quite. But it was big enough to keep Tavros's guitar safe from the falling hailstones and, huddled cheek-by-jowl, it kept the worst of the hail off the two boys.
Despite the uncomfortable heat of Tavros's body pressed up against him, John's arms were cold and stiff, and would not feel warm again for a long while yet.
It probably wasn't the smartest thing to continue sailing through the hurricane (there was no denying that it was no mere storm at this point), John thought, the feeling gone from his hands, Tavros bleeding from his fingertips as he continued to play. Still, what else could they have done? Turned around and weathered the hurricane in Forest Haven, wasting precious time? They would probably not have been able to outrace it anyway. At least now, the hail had let up, replaced by a soft drizzling rain, and high, high above, the sun was at its zenith, turning the once black clouds to an almost normal grey, as if this were nothing other than a regular day on the Great Sea with a regular rain.
The girls came out from under their buckets, and John allowed Tavros to stop playing. "Break time," said John, "I am starving and this is as dry as we are going to get."
The food was fortunately stored in a waterproof container. Roxy laid out biscuits baked with Deku nuts and a tangy green jam while Aradia fussed over Tavros's bloodied fingers and then John's shattered nails and torn ear. She sat beside him on the rearmost bench, nudging him aside so that the tiller lay between them and then grabbed his hand. He noted with dull surprise that his fingers were caked in clotted blood; Aradia mere let out a little fascinated "hmm".
It barely hurt when Aradia washed them clean with sea water and two of his nails fell like crusty snowflakes. "Did you honestly not feel this?" she asked, picking one of them up off her lap. She stared at it a second, before flicking it over the edge. Tavros watched them while pretending to tune his guitar.
"I did," he whined, and the tone he took made him blink, as if trying to reassure Aradia that he could, in fact, feel pain. He winced exaggeratedly when she dabbed on red chu jelly with a cotton ball. In truth, it felt like the sting had happened to someone else. A few seconds later though, he felt a dull, hot ache start in his nail beds and flow up his arm until it nestled in his elbow like a snake returning to its den.
"If you're feeling that, it means the potion is reviving your blood because your arms are frozen," she scolded, smacking his forearm. Aradia bound John's three injured fingertips in silvery bandages made, like all things in Forest Haven, from the fibers of Deku wood. By the time she finished, the ache was trickling down his other arm, and John beginning to be in genuine pain. Aradia grinned and kissed his bandaged fingertips. "All better, helmsman," she said.
"Thanks, ship's doctor," he said as sassily as he could, trying not to smile too hard as he rubbed the tender bandaged nubs to his opposite palm. She moved on to his ear, which smarted much more sharply when she rubbed it clean. The warmth spread much more quickly this time, and pooled in his stiff neck.
"Yo, I better be first mate!" Roxy shouted as she handed Tavros his food. "Also you two are super gross and adorable."
"Jaspers, what are you?" asked John as he accepted a biscuit.
"Captain," said the boat. John almost choked on his food, and the vessel wagged its tiller like a tail.
"One day you need to tell us your deal," John said, giggling round a mouthful of biscuit.
Jaspers turned its head, gazing at the Breath Waker with huge, wooden eyes. The floor rumbled as it began to purr, tilting its head back, eyes rolling back into half-shut lids. "Soon," it said. "All secrets will be laid bare."
John shivered. Again, the beast displayed some oracular power, just as unsettling as it had been before. There was a tension in the air not brought about by any storm, but by the gulf that lay between the children and the creature they sailed upon, the creature that seemed to friendly and simpleminded, and yet was filled with arcane knowledge. Was Jaspers a messenger of the gods, John wondered, some strange wooden angel of Farore or Nayru?
Tavros crunched a hailstone between his teeth and everyone made of flesh winced and turned to glare at him. Jaspers merely shook the water from his head and yawned luxuriantly. Eyes wide, he slowly raised another to his mouth, popped it in, and crunched. "What?" he said. "Did I do something wrong?" He swallowed, pointing at the figurehead. "Is he not normally all…mysterious and prophetic?"
"Nope," said Aradia. "He's usually just a cat, but pink and tentacled and a boat."
"That looks fun," Jaspers mewled, and lowered its head into the water, filled its mouth with a pile of hailstones, and began to crunch them between its wooden leucrotta-teeth.
John and the girls winced at the sound. Ice was hard to come by on the great sea, so John and Aradia were particularly susceptible to the pain that Jaspers unwittingly subjected them. "You force your way onto my crew," said John, glaring at Tavros, "teach my boat bad habits—"
"On this, the day of his daughter's wedding!" Roxy snapped, contorting her face into false rage. Everyone giggled, except Jaspers, who continued to chew ice.
Some two hours later, it had begun to rain hard again, he sky darkening into evening. Aradia made more lanterns and hung them about the boom like little red St. Elmo's Fires. "We're close," said Roxy. "We'll probably make it before dusk. John nodded and grit his teeth, sipping from his steaming canteen. Roxy had spiked the water with chu jelly and warmed it with magic, making an emergency restorative that worked wonders for warming up the ragtag crew. Tavros thrummed his guitar, getting ready to break out into proper song at a moment's notice.
As the day wore on and the light waned further and further, an island appeared on the horizon, one of jagged peaks and odd curls. "What is that?" John asked, squinting over at it.
"Yoink," said Roxy, snatching the telescope from his inventory. She extended it with a smart *snap* and aimed it towards the island. "Hmm," she said, pulling out their charts to get a look. "This is really weird," she said, tracing lines along the quickly dampening map. "This part of the sea is really well mapped," she explained, "better than the waters around Outset and Forest Haven. But assuming that we are where I think we are, and that we didn't see any of the islands we might've seen between here and the Haven because of the hurricane, Greatfish Isle should be right there," she said, pointing at the strange isle.
"But it doesn't look like that," John concluded. He felt a coldness in the pit of his stomach. He remembered having a feeling when he, Dave and Rose passed Greatfish, seemingly so long ago, that because he had failed to see it that time, he would never get to see it, that somehow it had been his only chance to lay eyes on the reportedly beautiful island and its famous town.
As they sailed closer, debris could be spotted in the water. They took it for driftwood first, just branches and bits of wood. Then there were entire uprooted trees still bearing leaves and fruit, and then wads of hay, clearly thatched together, bits of walls, whitewashed, painted with fragments of iridescent murals, accidental rafts made of red tiled roofs.
Then at last, a body drifted by facedown, its flesh as pale as a dead fish.
"Oh gods," Tavros muttered, breathing hard and making the sign of the Triforce in front of her. "The hurricane must have been even worse around here."
They approached the jagged island until they could see the surprisingly green slopes of its hills, the slumping remains of its village. Above it, the clouds swirled angrily, and the children feared a waterspout. An odd thing happened; the waves grew in frequency as they approached, but they were coming from the island, not heading towards it as the laws of nature dictated.
"We need to avoid that place," said Tavros, beginning to play in earnest. "It must be cursed," he eyed the waves warily, as if they were hiding gyorgs, or the hungry souls of the recently drowned.
"No," Roxy snapped, "we need to get to that island and help the survivors!"
"It really is cursed," said Jaspers, "but we can't avoid it." Everyone's attention was now on the carved head. Its ears were pricked up angrily, and there was the beginning of a hiss in Jaspers's voice. "We can't avoid it because it's our destination," he went on.
Roxy gasped as if she'd fallen into the frigid sea, and in fact John checked over the side to make sure that that had not happened. "That is Greatfish Isle!?" she screamed. Burying her head in her hands, the scream became a moan. "Janey is going to be devastated."
Note: Highdily ho readerinos! It's been a bit, but not as long of a bit as it could have been, or indeed as long of a bit is it has been, historically. I was actually working on this chapter with something like regularity, knocking out a passage an average of every two weeks, but I was also busy. See I spent most of April and May writing an original story that I have submitted to . Fingers crossed y'all! This is a great opportunity for me, and I'll link it here if they decide to take it.
A few things to note for folks that have been following me for a while, since it has been so very long since we covered them: Jane is in this story, is being held along with Jade at the Forsaken Fortress, and is from Greatfish Isle. Also John got his Breath Waker from Jaspers, not Zephos specifically, and Roxy taught everyone Din's fire like ten chapters ago.
Thanks to Lordlyhour for the Labrynna headcanon he submitted like two years ago that I incorporated into Tav's backstory. Also, Tavros's new weapon is based on the Deku Spear from Hyrule Warriors, but also the Maori taiaha, which is a much more interesting looking weapon.
*Ahem* Tavros joined your party! Tavros is a skilled troubadour and a fellow Breath Waker, using a combination of magic music and the long reach of his spear to keep enemies at a distance. He is strong like many trolls, but his body is frail due to CHILDHOOD ILLNESS. Tavros would rather avoid fighting, and when possible uses his TAURUS PSI POWERS to DOMINATE THE WILL of animalian enemies. Hearts: 3. Magic: 7. Likes to CRUNCH ICE like a fucking KNOB.