We grew close, learning
Much from each other
Lulu Gogo, "A Carnival of Loss"
The man loved the study of magic. He had enjoyed it in his boyhood, and needed it in his solitude. The world of the atelier was something much different. He could put away the thoughts of life and death that had dominated his mind for so long in the wild, and found, in this world he had stumbled into, that the charm and pleasure of books and discussion had taken its place. He had never known true society. Now he spent every day in the company of his master and fellow apprentice. They were all three seekers after knowledge of the same sort, even if they differed by temperament and interest, and their conversation was free and easy. In this way, the months passed. They debated the open-ended obscurities that their master was so fond of posing, or discussed the specifics of their personal researches. The man's work on minimizing the caster's risk when unlocking magical traps, for example, or his fellow apprentice's attempts to unify the magic of sculpture with arts like drawing and painting. With masks, of course, there was the difference of materials and the intrinsic magical properties that they held. The master here suggested that he might consider working his drawings in blood, as it too held a portion of the body's magic, though he was unsure how well it would react to being used in such instrumental fashion.
The conditions of acceptance to the master's atelier were a a complete mystery. The man supposed that it might have something do with the irregular manner in which he had arrived in this country, or else his own unique personal circumstances as a member of his race. His fellow apprentice had lived his entire life in the Southern Swamp before their master had plucked him out of this obscurity. Mapmaking had been his prior occupation, earning him enough to live on and an excuse to see the world, but little in the way of intellectual stimulation or artistic interest. His father had considered him a disappointment. He was himself an amateur pictographer of good technical ability and a keen eye for composition, who believed himself an excellent judge of artistic quality (and in this the apprentice concurred). The apprentice had displayed talent for drawing from his earliest youth, which had caused the father to pin his hopes on the boy's success in the galleries of the capital.
But that success had eluded him. He had built up a portfolio of work that both he and his father believed could make a strong impression on the public and that would catch the attention of the few serious critics in Termina society. Patterned abstraction was in favor at the time, and so the future apprentice had the impulse to apply that sensibility to the more traditional genre of portraiture. These images, with their unnatural colors and remodulated planar faces, had a disquieting effect on all who studied them. The awards had instead gone to well-known favorites of Clock Town, all of whom painted in academy styles. The only audience that seemed interested in him had been a group of fairies, who invited him to show his work at the Fountain. After the closing of the competition's show, he brought his paintings to the cave on the northern edge of town. The Great Fairy had been impressed with his artistry and offered to purchase the lot if he would accept her blessing. She could only bestow it once (hence could not be his patron) but promised him that he would not regret it. The young artist had accepted this blessing but had little understanding of its practical use or specific attributes. Really, he had no idea what she had done at all. The Great Fairy gave her hoarse tinkling laugh and sent him on his way back to his home in the swamp.
He had thereafter tried everything he could think of to uncover the Great Fairy's gift. He had spent weeks living rough in the woods of the swamp, fasting or else living by the fruit of the land, hoping to attract a stray fairy and make a companion out of them. He had done the same on the shores of the Great Bay, among the gravestones of Ikana, and beside the frozen pool of the Mountain Village in the far north. (These travels were the seed of his idea to become a mapmaker.) He had even begun considering himself a fairy, so desperate was he to discover and connect with what in himself the Fairy had changed. His singular mode of dress had already been enough to make him a target of mockery. He had just turned thirty-six years old. He carried the disappointment of his father, his failure as an artist, his inability to grasp the nature of fairies, and the loneliness of his boring chosen profession. And then one blistering day while he was surveying the Ancient Castle of Ikana, a red-haired Hylian had appeared as if from nowhere and offered to apprentice him in the arts of magic. He would learn the capacities that the Great Fairy had imbued, along with other hidden arts. His future master's silent approach in that empty place had been intensely disturbing. The man knew, however, from his own experience, that it did not matter how uneasy one felt in the master's presence, nor how perplexed one might be at his sudden offer. It would have been impossible to refuse him.
The man's fellow apprentice had three primary areas of practical focus in his work. One of these, the simplest, was replication. It was possible to recreate the effects of certain masks, and their master used these exercises as a way for the apprentice to check his ideas and practices against a functional model. The mask that the apprentice happily announced he had just completed was a replica of the very same that the man had been tasked to present to him on that first day of his arrival. The purpose of that mask, the master informed the man, was utterly prosaic. It served as a pass for entry into Latte, the milk bar in the town's eastern quarter. The master gave one of his discomfiting smiles and suggested that the two of them take the pair of masks and pay the bar a visit after they had finished their supper.
Later that night, the man met his fellow at the door of his apartment and they walked the busy streets of Clock Town together. The man was, by now, a known entity within the walls of the town. He made a striking figure, with his great height, wide shoulders, dark skin, and crimson hair. There was no one else like him that anyone had ever seen, or even heard of. He was understood to be apprenticed to that extraordinary and rather terrifying Hylian with the masks, and treated consequently with a great deal of deference—when the townspeople were for whatever reason unable to give him a wide berth. The other apprentice did not receive quite the same regard from the townsfolk, who had after all known him for years before his entry into the maskmaker's service. He was considered queer and ludicrous by those who had not forgotten his interest in fairies, and who (it must be readily conceded fairly) questioned his choice of attire. Still, for the most part, he was by now well established in the world of the town. And if he, like the newer apprentice, and like his master for that matter, preferred to keep to himself in that unnatural clocktower of theirs, then the consensus sentiment of the town was to leave them all to it.
The bar itself was new to both. The fellow apprentice had not been allowed to use the original mask until he managed to create his own, so it had been impossible for him to visit previously. He had been in no rush, though, and the delay was simply a matter of finally getting around to the task. It was not a particularly difficult mask to create. The magic was completely straightforward, only a simple one-way signal that would emit a characteristic frequency of energy when worn. The materials, too, were simple to acquire. Romani Ranch was only a day's ride and its owner would occasionally bring one of their animals to the slaughter. The man, of course, was not subject to the same test and so was given leave to tag along. The interior of the bar was filled with shadow. Three lights were hung on long cables above an empty performing stage, and patrons of every race crowded the patterned counter top. The shelves behind the bar proper were lit with a purple hue, and displayed the variety of their wares. On the wall opposite the stage were suspended three enormous tanks of milk, which the man assumed supplied the taps. They ordered drinks.
The two apprentices settled into an open space beneath one of these tanks, nestled and jostled together by the rowdy clientele. The other apprentice was in a celebratory mood, for he had finally made a breakthrough in the third field of his magical practice. Aside from replicating known masks and creating his own, the apprentice had been working on a novel application of magical aesthetics for flat surfaces and had made a breakthrough. (Their master had pursued the art of sculpture to its pinnacle through his work on masks, and this degree of accomplishment allowed him to see how his pupil might one day surpass him in a field of his own creation.) All of the time he spent working on masks had trained him to see faces more closely and intimately than he had done before. He had been struck recently by the thought of his old paintings. Several realizations occurred to him in rapid order, he explained to his friend and colleague, as their order was brought over to them. First, that he had worked in portraiture. In other words, an art of the drawn and painted face, just as the mask is an art of the sculptured face. Second, that he could draw better now. He was more observant and more sensitive to magic, and in particular to the contours of the face in which its magic was strongest. Third, that the disquieting style of his young work was perfectly suited for his current problem. It was a technique of flattening, which did not just represent depth but actively sought to translate that depth to the conditions of the surface. Finally, his magic had been conferred in payment for precisely those otherwise unloved paintings. Which meant that the Great Fairy's gift was inherently bound up with that particular technique. Piecing together these revelations had given him the direction he needed.
The man was happy for his friend. It gave him a warm feeling to see his success and enthusiasm. He loved magic, and he loved to study it, he loved learning and advancing, and he loved his time in the clocktower. And the feeling of warmth he had always loved, ever since he had been a boy. He was, in that moment, actually and simply happy. It amazed him every time the thought crossed his mind, that he could live and be himself and thereby happy and satisfied. He wanted to know what his fellow apprentice would be using this new technique to achieve. The Hylian smiled. He had many ideas and was fantastically excited. The master's suggestion had been another crucial piece of his solution, but it meant that his scope was limited by the difficulty of acquiring blood. He had been using his own to experiment—he was, as well, most familiar with his own magic—and drawn himself in various attitudes. He could not achieve anything like the comprehensive power of the mask technique, for one's magical signature was too diluted in the bloodstream, so he had chosen to isolate some of his smallest and most distinctive quirks. One of his drawings, for example, could shower the onlooker with confetti; another could pronounce the catch-phrase that had become his private joke within the clocktower. He intended, of course, to experiment with different effects, and with different materials in the coming months. He asked, hesitating slightly, if the man would share his blood.
It was not just simple happiness the man felt. There was an element at play of admiration, the recognition of one practitioner for the skill and achievement of another. He had felt something like it years before, in observation of the blonde Hylian soldier, who had cut down assassin and Lynel and worse with technique of exquisite perfection. (He sometimes wondered at that soldier's fate, whom he had last seen taken, barely alive, to some Sheikah healer; and the same with regard to the woman, who had gone to fight the Calamity and sealed him from his home. Their presence was exceedingly faint now, he in this new world, and they in their golden cage. He thought of them less and less often as time wore on. Had the pair ever spoken of their feelings for each other? That moment of climax had been too sudden, and the moment after too quiet, for the man to observe all their whispers.) The green-clad Hylian made a vastly different first impression, and his skills lay in vastly different areas. But the man was as much a sage now as he was a soldier—and he had always been a bit of a witch. The apprentice's artful magic was impressive. It had caught the specific attention of their master, who saw its potential for revolutionary innovation, and its wielder's potential for delivering on it. The wielder, indeed, had ideas, which he was continuing to describe to his friend. His next experiment would be to copy the Indian cobra he had—and here he stood and turned to display—sewn into the back of his outfit. Its purpose was to intimidate his enemies, and its magical version would bite them. Or, at least that was the plan, if he could get it to work.
The hour had grown late. They left the milk bar together and headed in the direction of the central square, where they both lived in the immediate vicinity of the clocktower. The Hylian asked the Gerudo if he would like to join him for a final drink. And the man followed the man up the stairs and into the privacy of the other's home. The man had never been so close to another person as he had become to his fellow apprentice. What he knew of people, he had learned only from distant reports and distant observations. His evidence and experience were incomplete. But he had, of course, learned from his mother's stories, and from the poetry of the Gerudo, what it meant to hear the call of one's voe. So he listened to these first stirrings of his own heart with nervous trepidation. Also the thrill of the new and the beat of desire. These were in him too. The queer Hylian's favorite proverb flashed through his mind—might as well hang for a stolen lamb as for a stolen sheep—and in his mind's eye he crossed the mythical threshold. Then in his own voice he spoke the words he had read in the endless variations of literature, and confessed his intentions to the man he was drawn to. The Hylian smiled. Then they crossed the physical threshold, together, of his rooms. And then they crossed the physical threshold, together, of his body. It was a new kind of magic. The man had always loved magic.
So the months began to pass in a different key. The two apprentices' life in the clocktower was not much changed, for they had always worked and dined together, but from that point onward they saw each other outside the tower walls with increasing frequency. When the man's landlord asked if he would like to continue letting his rooms, the man turned him down and moved in together with the other apprentice. The man felt more and more, as time went on, that he was becoming truly complete. He had ambitions in magic. He wanted to use the power of the earth in his warding schemes that would require equivalent levels of meditated connection in order to break. He was continually refining his ability to sense the weaknesses of barriers, and the decay of aging wards. He felt on the verge of several breakthroughs. Their master observed it all with his eternal look of mystical satisfaction. His students, he often remarked, he was pleased to see, were doing well.
As things were going well between them, the man's fellow apprentice decided to invite his lover to visit his childhood home in the Southern Swamp. His father, who ran the Tourist Center in addition to his pictographic dabbling, was enthusiastic about their visit. The relation between father and son had improved considerably in the years since the latter's accession to the master's atelier. It had turned out that all the artistic training and promise had, against the odds, been noticed and approved; similarly that all the business with playing at fairies had also been noticed and approved. Vindication is sweet, in general, and it was hard to remain disappointed in the face of such recognition from such authority. The father's disappointment had, as well, always stemmed simply from anxious concern for his son's success in professional and social senses. Now, his kindhearted boy was not just apprenticed to a master of magical art, but had obtained the love of a likeminded man. It gladdened him to see how well matched their interests were, and if this foreigner happened to be beautiful in a striking fashion, well, what sort of father would he be if he did not think his son deserved the best?
The man had never really seen a father and son together. His beloved was overjoyed to show him off, which flattered him. The father had the same kindhearted quality that he found so appealing in the son. His house was hung with his pictographs of the swamp and of his children, interspersed with the paintings and drawings of his eldest son. The man was astonished to find that the center also employed an elderly Gerudo witch, who offered to set them up on a boat ride. Everything was romantic simplicity. Another friendly witch, her twin, lived deeper in the forest. The man was feeling ever more at home.