Link had visited the Sacred Grove with Saria countless times when he was a child and knew the area well. But that just made it even more of a surprise to see how much it had changed since then. The trees had darkened and begun to wither. The bushes which lined the labyrinthian path leading to the main clearing had become overground and were filled with the sounds of Mad Scrubs rustling around in the distance. And above all was the deathly chill that drifted out from the entrance of the Forest Temple. It was less like the cold wind of the Ice Cavern, but rather the oppressive atmosphere of the catacombs under Kakariko Village where Link had fought that grotesque being of warped flesh which he could only describe as 'the Dead Hand'.
"This place gives me the creeps." Ruto shivered as she looked around.
"Is this the Forest Temple?" Zelda looked up at the ancient stone building with a sense of curiosity. "The architecture reminds me of the Hyrule Castle, though it has a more… militant feel, I suppose. It looks like some kind of fortress or outpost built by ancient Hylians. Though, I've never heard of such a structure having been built out here in the woods. How would they have even been able to get here, with the curse?"
"I never asked. I never even thought to consider it, before…" Link felt a lump form in his chest, as his mind fluttered over the many unanswered questions he'd never be able to ask the Great Deku Tree. "This forest used to be my whole world, and yet I barely know a thing about them."
"Hey, there, there," Malon said calmly as she put her arm around Link's shoulder, and the young teen slowly began to relax his posture. "It's alright. You were just a kid back then. It's normal to just take things for granted at that age, and it's not like you knew what was… that things would…"
Link stiffened for a moment before forcing himself to relax again. "That the Great Deku Tree would die and that my whole life would be turned upside down."
"You know, it's okay to cry." Zelda took a step forward and made a motion as if to comfort Link, but hesitated and dropped her hand back down to rest on the handle of the rapier sheathed at her waist. "You lost someone important to you, and no one here will fault you for mourning that loss."
"Well, I might." Ruto stuck her tongue out playfully. "Okay, not really."
"No." Link clenched his fists and shook himself free from Malon's grip, then took a determined step towards the Forest Temple. "I've already taken the time I needed for that. It's time to move forward now. We're here to rescue the Kokiri and we shouldn't let anything get in the way of that mission."
"How did you get here before us?" Mido shouted angrily as he walked up to the group from the hedge maze, along with Saria and three fairies. "We were ahead of you! You don't even have a fairy!"
"Oh, right, I guess I should have gone with them instead of you," Navi muttered.
"I told you, Link has magic now." Saria sighed and shook her head. "He probably just used Farore's Wind to teleport straight here, right?"
"We took a couple quick stops first to arm ourselves." Zelda gestured to her sword, while Link nodded.
"Yeah, having a mage around is super useful," Ruto said absently while leaning against the silver trident her father had commissioned for her after their last adventure.
"I prefer to think of myself as a 'magic knight'." Link shrugged.
"You aren't actually a knight, though," Zelda pointed out, then smiled. "But give it a few years. I'm sure Father would be more than willing to grant you a formal title when the time comes."
"Ugh, forget this," Mido groaned. "Let's just go."
"Problem." Malon pointed up to the old doorway that served as the only visible entrance. "The stairs are gone."
Everyone looked up, and sure enough the steps which should have lead from the forest floor up were almost completely missing apart from a couple half-steps still barely attached to the upper floor.
"That shouldn't be a problem," Navi spoke up. "Link can just use Farore's Wind again to bring us all up there."
"No need." Saria shook her head as she walked up to the front of the group, holding up her spear. "I've got this one."
With a twirl, Saria plunged the tip of her spear into the ground. At first, it didn't seem like anything else was going to happen but then a cluster of thick roots burst from the ground in front of her, writhing their way towards the stone entranceway, forming a makeshift staircase.
"What? Huh? Since when can you do that?" Ruto angrily demanded.
"It's this spear," Saria held up the sharpened wood stick, which appeared to be rather plain other than the gold ring set just below the tip and blue cloth wrapped tightly around it as a grip. "It was fashioned by the Deku Sprout from the remains of the old Great Deku Tree and infused with some of his power, allowing me some level of control over any plants connected to him. Although its power is weak at the moment, and there are only a few places in the forest at this point where I can actually use it effectively."
"And I was given the legendary Sword of the Kokiri!" Mido proclaimed while waving the wood-handled shortsword.
"Hey, isn't that the sword you used to use?" Malon asked Link.
Link nodded in confirmation. He considered pointing out that it was just a normal sword, the only notable thing about it that he ever noticed being that it was the only one he knew of made by the Kokiri, but decided against it. He knew far too well how fragile Mido's ego could be and figured that it was best to let him have his this. Plus, Navi would likely interrupt him if he so much as opened his mouth, as she had a habit of doing.
"A most impressive weapon," Zelda said politely. "Both of them. Now, it would be unwise to tarry here too long, as we do not know what fate awaits the captured Kokiri. Shall we head inside?"
"Of course, Princess." Saria nodded. "I'll lead the way, if you don't mind. It has been a long while since I've ventured inside the Temple and my memories are distant, but I do believe I can recall the general layout."
"Very well," Zelda motioned for Saria to climb the steps. "Then we shall follow your lead."
The sun beat down overhead as the army settled into position in a circular formation atop a large ring of sandy dunes overlooking a large, open area of the desert. A single large skull rested in the center of the area, topped with an ancient horned helmet of a style unfamiliar to the residents of Hyrule. To the unknowing eye, it would appear that a giant lay dead, buried in the sand. But the Gerudo, Gorons and Shiekah assembled for the fight of their lives knew differently.
There was an old Sheikah proverb, which translated into modern Hylian often ends up something to the effect of 'That which is dead may never rise, but in the shadows even death may only be lies'. It was said that the Sheikah knew death better than any of the other races of Hyrule and the experiments once held within the Shadow Temple were proof that was at least once the case. But the skull before them was different than the twisted malfactions and walking corpses which now plagued the underground due to mortal hubris, or even the ghostly specters that haunted locations such as the Forest Temple. Those were merely the dead given a corrupt form of new life outside the light of the goddesses. This was a soldier of the ancient demon wars waged long before the founding of Hyrule, brought back through unknown means. This was the demon, Skeldritch.
Ganondorf clenched his hand tightly around his bow. While the King of the Gerudo was generally known for his sword fighting skills and preferred melee combat when circumstances made battle inevitable, he was also among the most skilled archers in the Gerudo and currently held the highest score possible in the horseback archery range challenge held behind the Gerudo Fortress: 20 bullseyes in a row while his horse galloped at its top speed. While he had been against the idea at first, it had ultimately been decided that he would be the one of five archers spread across the army to carry the Silver Arrows they had received from the Zuna, each archer carrying but four of the magical items with their normal arrows. Ganondorf sincerely wished that they had a larger supply of Silver Arrows, but the Zuna only had twenty. He told himself that, if the process of making them still survived and that he himself made it through this battle, that he would have to personally commission the Zuna to begin fashioning them again, enough to supply an army the next time a demon reared its ugly head and began threatening innocent lives. But that was the future, and hopefully it would be a very long time before another demon invaded Hyrule, for now he had to focus on the battle ahead of him.
Ganondorf raised his arm, paused, and thrust his hand out. "Charge!"
As one, the first wave of their army charged, the Gerudo and Sheikah on horseback while the Gorons curled up into balls and rolled down the sandy slopes like boulders down a mountain. They were then followed by a second wave, and a third, before the archers followed last. As they approached, Skeldritch roared to life. Its hollowed eyes flashed and an intense red glow erupted within the skull-like head as it emerged from the sand, a snake-like body of armored vertebrae rising up, giving the demon the appearance of a tower of metal and bone.
The first soldiers reached the base of Skeldritch's spine, striking it as hard as they could and riding past so that others could do so in turn, before turning around and repeating the process. The archers, meanwhile, stayed back and pelted the demon with arrows. Not the Silver Arrows, as they were far too precious a resource to waste until they were sure they could land a killing blow, but a variety of more conventional arrow types. Ganondorf himself favored the Gerudo's prized Ice Arrows, imbued with freezing magic, while others preferred arrows charged with fire or lightning. Unfortunately, Skeldritch seemed to lack any specific elemental weaknesses they could exploit, meaning that the magic arrows didn't do much more than the standard arrows some archers used. However, a recent invention of the Gerudo made from the fibers and explosively volatile juices of the Bomb Flowers which grew around Death Mountain proved effective in damaging Skeldritch's armor plating.
But of course, Skeldritch wasn't going to let them bombard it with attacks unopposed. Almost as soon as the attack started, Skeldritch opened its mouth and fired a laser down at their forces, killing over two dozen soldiers in one go. Everyone was careful to avoid these attacks after that, but not everyone was able to. Heavy casualties were sustained and roughly a tenth of the gathered force lay dead or dying by the time the surviving forces managed to break away the last of the demon's armor. It pained Ganondorf to acknowledge that this counted as an 'acceptable loss' but he didn't have time to dwell on the growing pit in his stomach as he notched another Ice Arrow and sent it flying at the demon's spinal column. They had yet to expose any obvious weak point to target with the Silver Arrows, but they must have been growing close. And at last, the battle turned in their favor.
The vertebrae just above the sand, which had taken the most damage thanks to their cavalry charges, exploded. Skeldritch screamed a horrid, unnatural wail at fell, crushing several soldiers who weren't able to get out of the way fast enough, and its helmet clattered away from its skull.
"This is it!" Darunia's voice cried out as a young Sheikah archer fired the first of his Silver Arrows at the back of Skeldritch's skull and the demon .
Ganondorf rode around as the other chosen archers each fired one of their Ice Arrows, coming to see a veiny pink mass jutting out from a massive hole in its skull that the helmet had covered up. Fired his own arrow at it. Skeldritch let out one final scream before suddenly bolting upright and sinking beneath the sand before a second volley of Silver Arrows could be fired.
The atmosphere was tense, as every seasoned warrior left watched warily for any sign of the skeletal demon reamerging. It didn't take long before it shot back up from beneath where its helmet had landed. The armor covering its spine had somehow been restored, but it was notably shorter than before. The piece of its spine they had destroyed was still missing.
"Concentrate your fire on the base of its spine!" Impa called out. "We need to save resources by focusing on only one part at a time!"
Ganondorf nodded as he quickly grabbed a quiver of Bomb Arrows from one of his fallen sisters. The battle was far from over but they were making progress.
The inside of the Forest Temple proved to be designed as if it were an old mansion, which only raised further questions regarding its origin. Not helping matters was the way the hallways warped and twisted in ways that should not have been physically possible. One section of the building in particular was apparently built sideways and yet gravity itself seemed to curve with the floor.
Upon entering the building, the kids had found themselves in a large foyer with hallways leading out in several directions. They had ultimately decided to split into groups to cover more group and, after much debate over who would go with who, Link and Ruto went with Mido and Navi to explore the eastern side of the temple while Zelda and Malon went with Saria to explore the west side.
"I wonder if people used to live here." Malon said as she climbed up a large set of stairs.
"I don't know," Zelda replied, a few steps up from her. "It seems that someone must have, but zI have no idea who or when that would have been."
"The Great Deku Tree didn't talk about this place much." Saria reached the top of the stairs first. "All I know is that a wealthy family from Hyrule once lived here a long time ago, who worshiped an evil spirit called the Baga Tree, who was sort of like an evil version of the Great Deku Tree. Anyway, they apparently tried sacrificing their four daughters to the Baga Tree for power, but the Baga Tree betrayed them by… Uh-oh."
"What is it?" Malon asked, worried.
"The door's locked." Saria rattled the handle to prove her point, though the large chains shackled across the door made it obvious. "I don't suppose either of you have a key?"
"I guess we must have gone the wrong way," Zelda replied. "Let's head back. Wait, what was that?"
"What was what?"
Zelda pointed up at a painting hanging above the stairs they had just come up from. Though calling it a painting may have been generous, given that all that was depicted in it was a plain, black canvas. It was the third of its kind they had seen in that room.
"There was a figure in the painting," Zelda said. "It looked like a girl but she was only there for a second."
"It may have been a ghost," Saria pointed out. "Let's head back before it tries anything."
The three girls headed back down the two flights of stairs which made up the chamber they were currently in as quickly as they safely could and rushed for the exit. They were too slow, however, as a pair of chains shot up and wrapped around the door just like the one two floors above.
"No! We're locked in!" Zelda pointed out what was obvious to all of them.
Saria sighed and turned around, facing the first of the empty portraits they had seen. But for a few seconds, it wasn't empty. It was a shadowy figure dressed in a tattered red dress, wearing what seemed to be a wig made of straw and glowing yellow eyes, carrying a torch with a bright orange flame.
"I just saw her!" Saria exclaimed. "In the painting! I think she was a poe."
A high pitched cackle suddenly echoed through the room.
"More new friends! More new friends!" A girl's voice said excitedly. "I'm Joelle! Do you want to play? How about hide and seek? I'll hide, and you try to find me!"
"I guess we're going to have to play along if we want out of here." Zelda said. "But this shouldn't be too hard, right? We just need to check all of the paintings."
"Right!" Malon ran back up the first flight of stairs and turned to the second portrait, where the ghost was clearly visible. "Ha. there you are… hey, she's disappeared again!"
"You're too slow!" The ghost taunted. "You're going to do that if you want to catch me!"
"Ugh, she's cheating." Malon grumbled. "How are we supposed to catch her if she's just going to disappear when we find her?"
"Well, there were only three paintings in this room, at least that I saw," Zelda pointed out. "And there are three of us. If she can only hide in the paintings, then if we each look at one of them at the same time then she'll have nowhere to go."
"Of course," Saria agreed. "I'll head to the top level."
Saria leaped up the first set of stairs in a single bound, turned around and jumped up the second set just as easily.
"Wait, since when have you been able to do that?"
"I've been doing a lot of training the last few years, making sure that I can defend the woods until the Deku Sprout regains enough power to do it himself." Saria turned to face the third painting, where the ghost was plainly visible. "Got you!"
The ghost vanished from the painting and reappeared on the first level just long enough to see Zelda staring at her, then switched to the middle floor to find Malon still there before appearing back in front of Saria. She shifted between the three paintings a few more times before finally giving up and finally appearing outside of a portrait, next to the door on the upper floor.
"Aw, no fair. You guys figured it out too quickly." The ghost moaned as Zelda and Malon both ran up to where she and Saria were. "Oh, well, that's still the most fun I've had in a long time. Ooh, I know! Why don't you find my other sisters and play with them, too? Then we can all meet up in the basement with our other new friends and we can all play together! Yay! That'll be tons of fun! You can find my baby sister Amy if you keep going this way, and I think the kids who came with you are going to run into my other sisters. Ooh, this is going to be so. Much. Fun!"
With a twirl the ghost, Joelle, vanished. The chains which had been blocking the door disappeared as well, opening up the way.
"Well, that's not what I expected," Malon said. "Hopefully the other ghosts are that friendly."
"At least now we know the other Kokiri are safe." Saria walked up to the now-open door. "It sounds like they've been locked up in the basement, though, so we should hurry up and find that ghost's sisters."
"I wonder how Link and the others are doing," Zelda mused as she and Malon followed Saria into the next room.
"...so the family sacrificed their daughters and the Baga Tree gave them the power they asked for." Mido fell to the ground as the Wolfos he just sunk his sword into burst into smoke. "And by power, I mean it turned them all into Stalfos as the Baga Tree cast the spell that turned the Lost Woods into… well the Lost Woods."
Link parried the blade of an armed Stalfos and struck it one final time, the skeleton collapsing into a pile of bones and then also turning to smoke. "Good job, Mido! Your fighting skills have definitely improved a lot since I left."
"Heh, it's no big deal." Mido rubbed his nose with the back of his arm, a smug look on his face.
"Wait, you can talk?" Navi asked in apparent wonderment. Link was about to respond when Navi continued. "Or, wait, maybe I just keep interrupting you every time you try to speak?"
Link glared up at her. "You're doing it on purpose at this point, aren't you?"
"Maybe…"
There was a loud splash, as Ruto jumped gracefully out of well in the corner of the courtyard, somersaulting twice before landing on her feet, holding her trident in one hand.
"That's the last of the octoroks," Ruto said as she walked up to the others. "What's next?"
Link, Mido and Ruto all looked up to the top of a gazebo in the far side of the courtyard, where a poe dressed in a tattered blue outfit, weaning a hat and carrying a torch with a torch, floated there watching them.
"Wow." The ghost, Beth, said. "I can't believe you managed to take down all of those monsters so easily. Well, I had my fun. And I guess your friends already played with one of my sisters and are about to reach another, so I guess that just leaves you with our oldest sister next. So, um… bye, I guess."
Beth spun around and vanished, leaving them alone.
"Well, that was a thing that happened." Ruto shrugged. "Now what?"
Beth suddenly appeared again, directly in front of Link, her blue-flamed torch held behind her back. Before any of them had time to react, she wrapped her arms around him, she leaned in towards him and he felt something wet press up against his lips before she pulled away and vanished again with a giggle.
"What was that?" Ruto yelled angrily while Link just stood there wide-eyed.
Saria, Zelda and Malon now found themselves in a large open room full of blocks and toys scattered about aimlessly. In the middle of the room, a small poe wrapped in old green clothes was stacking blocks together, giggling loudly.
"Bah bah boo!" The poe waved her green-flamed torch around.
"I guess this must be Amy," Zelda said, approaching carefully.
"Wuwah?" Amy turned around at the sound of the unfamiliar voice, knocking over the blocks she had been playing with. She then turned back to them and then began crying loudly.
"Oh, uh… I guess that other ghost wasn't joking when she called this one her baby sister," Malon said. "What do we do now?"
"I don't know, I've never had to deal with a baby before." Zelda tried not to panic.
"I know how to work with baby animals, but not baby people… or, baby ghosts…" Malon replied.
Saria, however, was much more calm, approaching the infant ghost slowly while humming the tune she usually played, which many residents of the forest had taken to calling Saria's Song. Amy's crying slowed as Saria bent down and cradled the baby in her arms, rocking her gently as she walked back to the others and Amy's crying stopped altogether.
"Wow, I never imagined you'd be that good with babies." Malon whispered. "Um, no offense."
Saria laughed softly. "Who do you think raised Link?"
"I thought it was the Great Deku Tree?" Zelda answered uncertainly.
"Well, yes, the Great Deku Tree did oversee Link's development and education, and made sure he was properly cared for," Saria replied. "But for as powerful and wise as he was, there's only so much a big talking tree can do in raising a child. Most of that responsibility went to me, which is why we've always been so close."
"Wait, does that mean you're like Link's mom?" Malon asked.
"Hmm… I'd say I'm more like a big sister," Saria said as she thought about it. "Although now I guess he's bigger than I am. That actually feels pretty weird. Though I suppose I'm going to have to get used to that, since he's just going to get even taller as he continues to grow up, while I'm going to get shorter as I continue reverting back to a Korok."
"What do we do now that she's stopped crying? Zelda asked, getting them back to the more immediate subject at hand. "We're supposed to play with her, right?"
"I suppose that's up to her." Saria looked down at Amy. "What do you want to do?"
Amy looked up at her for a moment before turning to her blocks. "Bih casa!"
"What does that mean?" Malon wondered aloud.
"It sounded kind of like 'build castle'," Zelda said.
"Is that what you want us to do?" Saria asked Amy. "Do you want us to build you a castle out of your blocks?"
"Bih casa!" Amy repeated and nodded.
"Alright, then I guess we better get to work building the biggest castle we can," Malon said as she walked up to the blocks.
The three girls worked together to build a castle with all of the blocks in the room, which was quite time consuming given just how many of them there turned out to be. Meanwhile, Saria also showed the other two how to properly hold the baby and they took turns singing to Amy and sharing their respective favorite songs. Malon's was one that she learned from her mother before she passed away, which she regularly sang to the animals back at her father's ranch, while Zelda shared the lullaby that Impa had always sung to get her to sleep when she was younger. After a while, they had built something that vaguely looked like Hyrule Castle.
"How do you like it?" Zelda asked Amy as she set the baby ghost down in front of the castle.
Amy giggled and floated around the castle. "Casa! Casa!
The infant poe laughed happily as she climbed up to the roof and began playing around. Unfortunately, the block castle was not structurally sound enough to survive being whacked repeatedly with a ghostly torch and eventually collapsed back into a pile of strewn blocks. All three living girls held their breath, expecting the worst, but Amy continued to dance around happily, laughing and giggling before vanishing, her voice trailing off into nothing.
"Huh, I guess we did it," Zelda said, more to herself than the others.
"Now what?" Malon asked.
"I guess we head back to the foyer and wait for the others?" Saria suggested.
Unknown to Zelda's group, Link, Mido, Ruto and Navi had already returned to the foyer where they had just encountered the eldest of the four Poe Sisters, Meg. The purple poe had challenged them to a game of tag, which was proving quite difficult for the team due to her habit of teleporting around the room and making duplicates of herself to make things harder for them.
Ruto jumped off a railing and tackled what she thought was the real poe, only for the specter to vanish in her arms as she fell to the floor. Mido was seeing similarly poor luck as he threw a pot at another ghost, which shattered against a wall while the fake Meg disappeared. Meanwhile, Link managed to get rid of two more of the copies while using his hover boots to chase them through the air.
"Ugh, this is taking forever!" Ruto complained.
One of the poes twirled around and a voice came out from all of them. "Come on, you can't give up now! This is just starting to get fun!"
Ruto lunged her trident at the closest ghost but it was just another fake. One of them twirled again and purple flames erupted from all of their lanterns, chasing after whichever child happened to be closest.
"And why do you have to keep attacking us?" Ruto spun her trident around, dissipating the claims as they closed in on her. "Isn't this just supposed to be a game?"
"Mama and Papa played this with my sisters and I a long time ago, with knives and torches!"
"Wait, what?" Ruto dropped her guard just long enough for a wisp of purple flame to strike her in the shoulder and she let out a pained gasp.
"Of course it is, it's tag. It's like when Mama and Papa chased us around before they put us to bed for the last time."
Link grit his teeth, reflecting on the story Mido had explained to them earlier. He had no doubt that these poe sisters were the girls that had been sacrificed. If their parents were still alive, the young teen would have been tempted to kill them himself for what they had done. No child deserved that kind of fate.
"That wasn't a game." Link looked up at Meg, the one he was now sure was the real one. "Your parents were horrible people. They killed you, didn't they?"
"I know." The ghostly figure noticeably slumped in response while the others failed to react. She was the real one, for sure. "I've always known, even before it happened. I was old enough to understand but I couldn't do anything. My sisters were too young to… I just had to pretend it was all a game. I couldn't… I couldn't…"
Meg began crying, and while she was distracted Link ran through the air, small disks of colored light appearing as platforms under his boots with each step as he closed in on the ghost, before he jumped, arms outstretched. He grabbed her and held her tightly.
"It's alright," Link reassured the dead girl as they fell gently back to the ground. "What happened was a long time ago. They can't hurt you anymore. I'm sure it must have been awful and you were all denied the lives you should have had but that doesn't give you the right to hurt others."
"I know…" Meg sighed as Link let go of her. "I know, but… Fine, we'll let the other kids go."
Meg floated over to a large bronze torch set up in one corner of the room's central platform and a deep purple flame burst out of it.
"That was fun!" Joelle appeared over one of the other corners and the torch in that corner erupted in a red fire.
"Hi!" Beth waved shyly at Link from the third torch, which lit up in blue fire.
"Baba!" A green fire emerged from the final torch as Amy appeared above it.
A door opened from one side of the room and Zelda walked in, followed by Malon and Saria. The three girls rushed over to where Ruto and Mido were standing as the floor began to rumble.
"Are you alright?" The princess asked.
"Fine." Ruto replied.
"What's happening now?" Mido scowled.
The floor in the center of the room began to rise, revealing a small platform.
"This will take you down to the basement, where we left all the kids we took," Meg explained.
"We didn't mean to cause any trouble," Beth said. "We're just so lonely."
"When we found that we could finally enter the woods, we thought that it was a chance to finally have friends." Joelle continued.
"We're sorry we took everyone." Meg lowered her head.
"Wuhah?" Amy burbled.
"At least you understand that what you did is wrong," Zelda replied. "But I can't imagine how lonely it must have been being sealed away here for so long, not to mention how horrible what happened to you before that was."
"We haven't had the best unlife," Meg conceded. "But that doesn't forgive what we did."
"No," Mido nodded. "No, it doesn't. But as long as everyone's unharmed, we'll be willing to look the other way.
"And maybe more than that," Saria spoke up, to everyone else's surprise. "How would you feel about coming with us, but to Kokiri Forest?"
"What?" Mido turned to her.
"The woods are practically defenseless right now," Saria explained. "Until the Deku Sprout regains enough power, we're under constant threat of monster attacks. We've already had to abandon the village itself and we don't know what the future has in store. What I'm offering is that you four come with us so that you can help defend the Kokiri and the Great Deku Sprout. I'm sure that it will be a lot less boring than waiting around here for eternity, and some of the Kokiri will be willing to play with you once they've had time to get over the whole kidnapping thing."
Mido grunted. "Ugh, I guess that makes sense. Fine, I'll allow it."
"We'll consider your offer." Meg nodded. "Thank you. Thank you so much."
Author's Note: Oh Goddesses, it's been two years since I last updated this story. I'm sorry to keep you waiting so long for a new chapter and I'll do my best to try and update more regularly moving forward. I have a lot to get to in this series, my full plan being for seven books but at this point I'm just going to try and get through the first trilogy and see where we go from there. Also, as you may have seen if you also read Super Ridley Bros or guessed simply from reading this, I'm now going to start leaving author's notes at the end of new chapters (I may even add them to old ones). While I haven't been doing much writing the last couple years I have been reading plenty of fanfiction and found that I enjoy reading author's commentary on their work and have decided to do the same.
Writing this chapter was interesting. All I really had planned for this part of the story was to have the adults fighting Skeldritch in the Gerudo Desert while the kids fight the Poe Sisters in the Forest Temple to rescue some captured Kokiri, which narratively was just to keep all the main characters out of Hyrule proper for reason that will become obvious soon. While the Skeldritch fight has progressed about how I would have expected, the Poe Sisters plot ended up taking a life of its own as I was writing. My only notes going into this was basically 'the poe sisters kidnapped all the Kokiri so now the main characters have to rescue them' but then as I was writing the first encounter I realized that the Poe Sister fights in game are kind of like games (Joelle and Beth's fights are basically hide and seek, Amy makes you solve a puzzle and the Meg fight could be seen as a game of tag) and decided to play into that for writing out the encounters, making some changes for the sake of variety. And from there, I came up with a backstory for the sisters that explains their motivations for why they're basically just playing with the main characters. Then, as I was fleshing that out, I realized that it explains why they even kidnapped all the Kokiri in the first place and everything just came together from there.
I've already started writing the next chapter (I had another scene with Ganondorf's group written but realized that I needed to push it back so that the timelines of the two storylines sync up better) so hopefully it won't take too long for me to finish it and we can finally move into the actual plot of this book. I'm sure you'll be surprised to see who the villains are going to be this time around.