"Sounds like 'Zelda of Hyrule' will mean something to this Ganondorf, then? What or where is Hyrule?" I ask, hastening to keep up with my new mentor.
"It's a land of legends!" he pants, descending the creaking staircase. "Some say it's the ancestral home of the Sheikah and Gerudo tribes, though you may not have heard of the latter. If it exists at all – which of course it does – it lies far to the south, past the foglands. It is supposed to contain great wonders from ages long past. Count Dragmire is a scholar of ancient Hyrule, and ambitious and greedy beyond measure. If he thinks you have a connection to that place – are from there – he will stop at nothing to find you. But Hyrule isn't what we need to focus on right now."
I let him catch his breath for a moment at the landing before I ask "So, what is our focus? What could be more important than the reason that I'm being hunted?"
"The gauntlet and your education, of course! Having seen what it can do first-hand, I thought we should go somewhere less fragile." He leads me down the corridor and back into the room with the wardrobes and pots. As we pass into the gloomy depths of the house and away from the paltry light of the boarded-up windows, he withdraws a tiny lantern from a pocket of his robes and dings it with a fingertip. A bright white light smoothly transitions into being.
"The Gauntlet and its powers are documented, but it's very obscure. I have one of the only tomes on the subject outside of Hyrule Castle library. The author, Dr. Onkled, claims that the Gauntlet chooses but one wielder every hundred years, but it doesn't seem to have been well tested. I suspect not many people get a chance to try and use it. Certainly it's been locked in storage in the castle for nearly a century now. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you ask me." I hadn't asked him. "You make a specific hand gesture when the gauntlet produces this rush of wind you mentioned, yes?"
"I hold my hand vertically, fingers together, thumb towards me," I say, demonstrating. He flinches.
"Bup-bup-bup! Don't do it! Into the circle!" He gestures at the metal ring set into the floor. I look at it dubiously.
"What is that?" I ask.
"It's a containment circle. It should prevent thaumic effects from extending through it – and such blatant physical magic is certainly thaumaturgy at its root. The Gauntlet is essentially a channeling device for specific thaumaturgical effects, a power amplifier. Please, stand in the circle." He sees my reservation. "You'll be quite safe. You can step out at any time."
I enter the circle. He continues: "The gesture you modeled for me is referred to in the literature as the Gesture of Wisdom. It's not unique to the Gauntlet. It's used in various thaumic rites, or 'spells' if you must. It came to you very intuitively, which says something about you. The Gauntlet is supposed to respond to two of the other most common thaumic gestures as well; practice them with me."
He makes a fist with his left hand, raising it in front of his heart. "The Gesture of Courage, used for abjuration and defense magic. Make the gesture, feel the Gauntlet and the Gem, and see if you can evoke an effect."
As soon as my fist is in place, I feel a rush of confidence and defiance. I let the warmth of the Gauntlet spread through my arm and release through the gem, and a rush of wind comes out from the Gauntlet. The Gauntlet shoves my left arm into my chest and the effect falters for a moment, but with some effort I brace my feet and manage to hold my left arm away from my body. It kicks up all the dust within the circle, and I can see the intense gale buffeting the space ahead of me. Only a gentle breeze pushes back at my face, and not one speck of dust reaches me.
"Oh, bravo!" the Professor says, unguarded excitement in his eyes and spectacles sliding down his nose. "What an artifact! To learn an effect like that without assistance, why, apprentices spend years! Decades, to gain that strength!"
I maintain the power, panting a little. "It seems to be a semi-sphere of guarding and cleansing winds. I'll call it the Hurricane Shield."
"Us Calatian mages would call it the Air Wall, but fine. Call your techniques whatever you want." He sniffs. "Air magic isn't popular in Calatia anyway, so I doubt anyone will contradict you. It's very difficult to get enough traction in such a fluid medium to produce meaningful results. A strong shield like this one, though, should be able to repel most ranged attacks and small enemies." He hobbles over to the pots on plinths, hefts one, and hurls it at me. The winds catch it and toss it away; it shatters against the wardrobes with a satisfying sound. One green rupee, forgotten at the bottom of the pot, skitters away across the floor. He seems satisfied and I release the shield.
"I don't think I could sprint or jump or even turn while keeping that going," I say, shaking the tension out of my arm.
He nods. "You brought it up in an instant, though. You'll need to practice dropping it, turning, and reinstantiating it quickly. Do you feel magically drained? Aches and tingles through your whole body? Like you've got an empty green bar where your brain should be?"
"Not at all. My shoulder's fine, too." I practice turning, bracing my arm defiantly, blasting out the Hurricane Shield for a second or two in several directions in succession. True to his word, the effect ends abruptly at the edge of the containment circle and Professor Quinlan's scant hair is barely ruffled. "It's a workout, but I'll get used to it."
"Excellent! As expected, the Gauntlet and the Gem are doing much of the heavy lifting for you. Now try the next gesture. This one is called the Gesture of Power." He holds up his left hand, palm away from him, fingers apart and flexed as if grasping a large ball. "This motion is often required," he explains and models bringing his fingers tighter together and pulling the hand a little closer to him. "Give it a try."
The Gauntlet of Gamelon flexes into place. I focus my will; the gem in the back glows slightly. My arm tingles with repressed power… and nothing happens. I frown. "What is this spell supposed to do?"
"The details of the powers of each gesture were redacted from the tome. That knowledge was only for the wielder and their close allies. You can be sure I will have the same discretion." He thinks for a moment, shrugs. "Step out of the circle. Maybe this rite requires more space, or a target. Use the gesture at one of these pots." He points to the two survivors.
I do so. Nothing happens.
"Well, magic is not normally intuitive. The spell may need different environmental conditions, or different mental conditions on your part, or you may simply need more familiarity to the gauntlet," he says. "Teachers usually demonstrate the rites many times so that students can anticipate their end result; expectations are such an important part of the discipline."
"Should we try that?" I ask reluctantly. "Have you try to use the Gauntlet to demonstrate the effect?"
"Oh, I don't think that would be advisable. I doubt I'm compatible," he says, avoiding my eyes. "Well, I'm not compatible. I made the attempt while you were sleeping. Terribly sorry about that, again, got very excited. Well, keep trying in new circumstances. The power of the Air Gem is bound to burst forth eventually."
"Wait a second, you recognize my mother's gem?" I ask.
"Of course, of course," he says. "It's all in the tome. The Gauntlet of Gamelon is keyed to work with four different elemental gems, the Air Gem, Fire Gem, Water Gem, and Earth Gem. You'll want to catch them all – err, collect them all, rather – but I'm afraid the Earth and Water gems were lost. The Water gem was stolen by a witch living in the foglands; and the Earth gem is reputed to still be in Hyrule, the lost land of legend. The Air gem vanished, but I suppose that mystery is solved. Only the Fire gem came with the Gauntlet to Calatia Castle."
"I-it's still in the Castle?" I stutter. "I don't think I can go back there."
"Eventually, I think you must." He says it flatly, a statement. "But fortunately for you, it is no longer in the Castle. The Calatians experimented on it, and found a way to draw out its power to provide heat for the great manufactory to the north-west which we call The Foundry."
"Are you suggesting I break into the center of the Calatian military-industrial complex and steal its very heart?" I say, awed and intimidated. "I'm awed and intimidated."
"I'm suggesting more than that. Come with me, I need to sit down." We leave the room, and he ducks into the kitchen for a moment before I follow him back to the sitting room. The hearth is warm, rather than hot, and its glow has died entirely. "You've had a lesson in power. We have seen what your Gauntlet can do, and I can tell you there will be three new spells with each new gem you put in there, one for each gesture. Twelve spells total, ten that are still unknown. To grow your power, you must find the three gems and practice with each of the gestures until you can use the twelve rites as if they were instincts."
I just nod. It seems like he's delivering a lecture, and I let him continue.
"If we had time, I could spend months teaching you about the theory of magic. As it is, I can't even lend you a book for fear that you'll be captured and it will lead them back to me. But still, I can give you small lesson in wisdom." He cocks his head at me. "You said your grandmother showed you the cantrip of Twilight, the shadow pocket. Practitioners who manipulate etherium refer to that energy as Twilight magic and say that it comes from a parallel dimension of sorts. I can't confirm or deny that; you should come to your own conclusions. As a child of the Sheikah, you may be heir to some of those secrets in time. But there are two other schools of magic."
I lean forward, soaking it in. I know some of what he's going to say already, of course, but only from my readings.
"In the legends of Hyrule, Hylian sages had their own Divine magic. Scholars have confirmed that the energy they manipulated exists, and dubbed it sanctorium. It's incredibly scarce and almost impossibly difficult to measure with instruments, but it's real. If you ever do find that land, you may learn far more than any living scholar. I'll be here if you ever want to share your findings," he says, grinning at me.
I grin back, though it seems far-fetched. Sanctorium and divine magic were mentioned briefly in one dry treatise I rescued from the library of a small town we passed through. It posited its existence as a sort of theoretical third pillar of magic, but said no divine practitioners have ever been known.
"What most people think of when they hear 'magic'", he continues, "is thaumaturgy. It can be splashy, flashy stuff. We Calatian mages manipulate the thaumic field to alter physical properties – weight, size, time, etc. Like Twilight magic, it also has a cantrip, and I propose to teach it to you now." He reaches into his robe with solemn dignity, and produces the empty milk bottle. He passes it to me as if I were inheriting an artifact of great power.
I look at it the slightly warm bottle in my hands and back at him, nonplussed. Then I make the connection. "It's a magic item, like the wallet!"
"Caught that, did you? It's pretty subtle. I don't think that Talon knows why I treasure my precious milk bottles so much. I threw quite a fit when he lost one and tried to bring my delivery in a regular bottle!" Quinlan chuckles. "Preservation is a major challenge with a lot of research, potion-making, and, yes, even dairy! Of course, most people solve sour milk with ice boxes, but what about potions that need to be kept warm or living specimens that need care? What would solve each of those – "
"Time!" I cut in, excited. "Each of those things needs time to happen! You have bottles that stop time inside of them!" I reflect for a moment. "That's phenomenally powerful. What happens if you stick your hand inside?"
He unstoppers the bottle and sticks his hand inside, fingers wiggling. "Now, if you could put the stopper back with my hand inside, I'd be in trouble. At least the hand would be perfectly preserved for the surgeon to sew back on. If the seal isn't airtight, the flow of entropy is too great. The bottle can't stop time, just dilate it – slow it, if you will. The tighter the seal, the greater the dilation. A basic stopper like this one will slow time by a factor of several thousand. A potion that takes five minutes to cool enough to lose potency will last for over two weeks in that thing."
"Does it take a cantrip to seal it?" I ask.
"No, no, any fool can do it. Talon does it all the time. Err, not that Talon's a fool. Salt of the earth, and all that. The trick is to invert the effect. Come, back to the kitchen." He stands with a creak and I follow him as he expounds on the theory.
"This application of the theory of chronal inversion relies on the principle that the balance of thaumic enthalpies is retained causally, though the causal relationship is not necessarily unilateral as one would conventionally observe –" He continues in this vein for a while, taking me to the kitchen, partly filling the bottle with water, stoppering it for a moment. He waves the stoppered bottle at me, and the surface unnervingly fails to slosh.
"The end result," he continues to his rapt audience, "is an inversion, both directional in the classic sense and chronologically, of the bottle's main effect. See here:" He lifts the bottle a tiny increment towards his face, and suddenly it is empty and unstoppered.
"The water vanished between one frame and the next!" I exclaim.
"Between frames?" he asks quizzically.
"It's a Sheikah term for the time it takes to blink – or, in other words, the shortest possible increment of time," I explain. "The idea is that the world is a series of quantifiable instants, and a truly enlightened observer or fighter could react in the very frame that information is available to them. It's not thought to be possible, of course, but it's something to aspire to."
He blinks twice. "A quaint idea completely incompatible with bimodal time theory as outlined by me five paragraphs ago."
"Five paragraphs ago?"
"A saying among scholars to mean 'something I just said before we got sidetracked'. Here." He refills the bottle and thrusts it at me. "Stopper it. Feel the thaumic time field take on the water. Then, move with deliberation as you remove the stopper and drink in one motion. Let the chronal resistance flow over you and drink not just the water, but the time it has repressed."
I take the bottle. "To rephrase your kind education, you mean that I'm taking the time that didn't happen for the bottle's contents… and using it to drink water while the world around me appears to slow down?"
"Well that will be your experience of it, yes. If you must describe it so crassly. Try it a few times. Are you hungry again?"
I nod, a little surprised. "How long was I asleep?"
"You had a good rest. You needed it. It's nearly morning. Drink." He starts making us another pair of sandwiches.
I smile, then focus. Stopper the bottle… feel the tingle of time slow. Slosh it around. In one smooth motion, remove the stopper and raise the bottle to my mouth! I spill water down my front, coughing.
"You're overthinking it! Drink again," Quinlan orders. "Don't move a muscle as you drink except to swallow. You'll break the field."
He's finished making the sandwiches and I desperately need to pee by the time I feel it working. I steel my mind, fully commit to down the whole bottle in one go, and raise it to my lips. The lukewarm water flows into my mouth, and Quinlan appears to stop mid-step. The light around me dims, and everything turns a reddish colour. I pretend to be a statue, pretend that I'm on stage but not in this scene at all. Just scenery. I move my eyes to look around and the world stays frozen, but when I blink Quinlan stutters forward a millimeter. I exhale a little in surprise, which causes a cough, which breaks the whole effect. The world returns to full speed and normal colour as my cough intensifies into a fit.
Professor Quinlan places both sandwiches on the table and claps. "You are an astoundingly keen observer and quick learner with an obvious gift for magic." Before I can thank him he continues, "but be aware that using powerful tools to create effects is not the same as true mastery. Stay humble, and be cautious in the presence of any practitioner. Now, let's eat."
The meal is simple, sliced apple and stamella shroom between slices of bread with goat butter. We eat in silence, digesting our own thoughts.
I refill the magic bottle with water one last time and go to stow it in a pocket before I remember what my grandmother told me. It's too big to fit in the shadow of my hand, so I collect the half-cloak from the sitting room. In the shadow of the cloak, the bottle vanishes readily into Twilight. I grin and return to the professor.
"I assume you have a third lesson for me before I go," I say, washing up our empty plates.
He nods. "Very traditional to give a lesson of courage to go with lessons of wisdom and power." Leaning back, he produces a toothpick and uses it as he continues. "Count Ganondorf Dragmire knows, as does every scholar of ancient Hyrule, the legend that there lies a sacred power capable of granting the wish of whoever touches it. Typically, the legend is seen as a cautionary tale or a metaphor for the merits of combining power, wisdom, and courage into one's actions. To the ambitious, the legend reads as a challenge. From what I know of him, he will accept such a challenge and pursue any opportunity to learn more."
"And he thinks I'm a source of such knowledge," I add, shivering.
"Even if he never finds Hyrule," Quinlan bulls forward, "his influence ever expands. He has already secluded the king from his other advisors, such as yours truly."
"You were an advisor to the – "
"My backstory isn't important right now! Calatia's military and its clockwork vanguard ever expand under Dragmire's influence! That crackdown you lived through wasn't the first, and it won't be the last. Each one grows more violent. The wind fish fly through the skies, and the people of Calatia look to him gladly for protection. I fear to even think what will happen to the young Prince Link in such a court should his father pass," Quinlan continues heatedly. "Someone – perhaps someone of great personal and magical power, someone with the drive to help others, someone with connections in places both high and low – needs to challenge his primacy and free the kingdom!"
"I escape prison after being falsely accused of fomenting rebellion, and you want me to go and – what? Actually foment rebellion? Challenge Ganondorf to a one-on-one sword fight on a suitably dramatic stage? Isn't that all a bit – a bit cliched?" I ask, eyebrows arched at him.
"It's just food for thought," he says, taking a last sip of milk.
A loud bell cuts through the house, and I jump. The kitchen knife slips from its improvised sleeve holster. Quinlan tuts at it as it clatters to the floor.
"You have a promising future, Zelda," Quinlan says, standing. "Don't ruin it by getting killed. If the guards at The Foundry see you with a blade, they'll murder you. Don't resist them, and they'll take you alive. You have a good track record for escapes." He shuffles to the door. "That'll be the city guard to search the house for you. Use the Fire Gem to guide you through the mists, board up the window behind you, and come back to visit some day!"
He's already in the sitting room, pulling a cord. I hear the door open below, and gruff voices at the base of the stairs. I mouth a 'thank you' to the back of his head and slip down the corridor without a sound.
