Chapter III: Waking Dream

...Link was falling…

In endless blackness, he was falling…

"Link…?"

A voice called his name, a voice that was almost familiar. He opened his eyes, the wind still rushing past him. He was falling forever.

Above him, far above, a light shone in the blackness, as if the sun was there but couldn't light up the sky. There was a shape across it, a figure: a person with arms half-raised; a sword with a winged guard; both at once? No, a woman, and the light shone from behind her, was her light.

"I am waiting for you."

Waiting…? Link couldn't speak. Was she familiar?

"The time has come for you to awaken."

She looked like nothing he had ever seen, blue skin merging into sculpted hair like a polished statue. Her eyes were blank and yet they seemed to look at him.

"You are vital to a mission of great importance."

He was still falling.

"Link…"

He blinked, only blinked, and the light was gone. Zelda was there, falling above him, face-down and looking into his eyes. No – no, he was falling face-down towards her; she was falling away, the sky all around the angry grey of a stormcloud. Link drew his arms and legs in to speed his fall, dropping like a stone; reached out to her, but she fell away faster still in defiance of all aerodynamics, and a dark, dark stain on the clouds below became an open maw about to engulf her, he could still hear the scream as she fell-

Link's eyes snapped open, his heart racing. He forced himself upright – he was lying down? – against the protests of his weakened body and spinning head. He was-

In his room?

Another nightmare? But it felt too horribly, awfully real.

"Ah, you're awake, thank the goddess."

Link gasped, snapping his head to the left. The tall figure of the headmaster stood up from Link's own chair, looking down at him in the dimness: only a single candle on the desk lit the darkened room. The familiar sight only made everything seem more surreal: why was the headmaster in his room?

"Why…?" he managed. His throat was dry; his mouth felt like cloth.

"Can you tell me what day it is?" Headmaster Gaepora asked gently.

"Wing… Wing Ceremony?" Link hazarded. Was it the Wing Ceremony? Had that been real? It felt real, too real, but if it was real then so was what had come after, and-

"Yes, or at least the night after it," the headmaster said, sounding both relieved and worried. "You and Zelda went for a flight. Do you remember?"

Link nodded jerkily, his heart in his throat.

"Your Loftwing brought you back unconscious less than two hours later, injured and distressed. Don't worry – he's being taken care of. You don't seem to have any serious injuries, thankfully, but this is the first you've woken."

It was all true, every moment of it, the flight and their conversation and the pillar of cloud and Zelda's fall- Link bowed his head, unable to even look at the headmaster. How? How had he somehow made it back here as if nothing had happened when Zelda-

One look at his expression was enough to tell Headmaster Gaepora that his worst fears were about to be confirmed. He kept his voice level, even gentle at first, but his fear and worry threatened to break it. "Link… what happened? Where is Zelda? What's happened to my daughter?"

Link clenched his teeth, and slowly forced himself to look back up. "She…" He made himself take a breath, trying to put the words together through the cloud still fogging his mind. "We were flying… S-south of Skyloft. It – it was just a normal day, the weather was clear. Then there was a flash, brighter than any lightning I've ever seen, down in the clouds; I only shut my eyes for a moment, but when I opened them, there was – I – I don't know what it was, Headmaster, it was a pillar of cloud, dark as a storm, right in front of us, and it was spinning, the wind was pulling us into it – Zelda came off her Loftwing, and I – the last thing I remember is diving after her…" He looked down again, let his outstretched left hand fall to his knee. He hadn't made it, hadn't been able to reach her.

Gaepora raised his hand to his face, eyes closed, and turned away, his shoulders slumped in grief and denial. Link looked at him helplessly for a long moment before turning to swing his legs out of bed, realising as he did that he was still mostly dressed. As he bent to pull on his boots, the headmaster turned back to him, raising one hand in clear refusal.

"You must not push yourself. You're still recovering."

Link froze with one boot half on. "But…"

Headmaster Gaepora shook his head, drawing himself up again. "You will do no good for anyone losing yourself in the night sky, Link." Some spark of hope seemed to have lit in his eyes, for no reason Link could understand. "In the morning, we will see how you are faring. Perhaps… perhaps there is still hope for my daughter… for our Zelda."

Link's breath caught.

"That thing you saw… it sounds as though it may have been a tornado. And we can be certain from what you describe that it was no natural one. Tell me, did anything strange happen today? Anything at all?"

"I don't know…" Link looked down again, thinking. "I guess…" It sounded ridiculous. But what if it was connected? "I had… a nightmare, last night. And just now. But in both there was… someone talking to me. A woman. And – and while we were flying, Zelda said she thought she heard a voice. Like someone was calling her. She said it'd happened before, but – she thought it was just worrying about today."

"Did she say anything else?"

"No… I don't think she wanted to talk about it. She just talked about the 'surface', and the books she'd been reading…" The memory almost hurt. It had all been so normal, such a perfect day.

The headmaster sighed. "I see. Well… These things, slight though they are, give me some reason to hope." He set his hand on Link's shoulder, reassuring. "If you think you hear anything strange, Link, tell me at once. We'll talk more in the morning. I have some books to read, and you…" He pushed gently down on Link's shoulder, and the young student reluctantly lay back. "You should rest yourself for tomorrow. I believe Zelda may still be alive out there, and we will find her, but you must recover, and there is nothing more you can do tonight. Try to rest."

Reluctantly, Link nodded. Oddly enough, it was Gaepora's comment that he had reading to do that gave him the most hope. The only reason he would be reading had to be because he thought there would be a clue to what had happened in some book, somewhere… and that meant he thought there really was a chance.

Headmaster Gaepora turned to walk away, picking up the candle as he went, and stopped at the door, looking back at Link. "Come to my office as soon as you wake next morning. We will find her."

Link nodded again, and a few moments later the headmaster had closed the door behind him, leaving Link in darkness. He sighed, trying to force himself to relax, trying to obey the headmaster's command. It made sense – even if he and his bird had somehow already completed all the night-flying lessons they'd be getting in their new class, even if the darkness didn't bother Loftwings one bit, they still wouldn't be able to see anything in the wide open sky. If he rested, he'd be more awake in the morning, when he could search for Zelda, follow whatever clues her father might have found. It made sense… but he couldn't bring himself to obey. All he could think about was those last moments of memory, of Zelda falling like a leaf in the wind; of something, just moments before, she'd been meaning to ask or to tell him or to say to him…

A faint sound, as much felt as heard, broke into his thoughts. Link lifted himself on his elbows, frowning at the door. Had he heard something? Something like a voice? From… from the corridor?

He sat up in bed, and as he did, the sound came again. He couldn't make out the words, but it sounded as if someone was speaking just outside. It wasn't a voice he knew, and yet something about it almost seemed familiar…

Was he dreaming?

Link pulled on his boots still asking himself that question; stood up in the dark and silent room with only a little moonlight shining through the small glass window to guide him. He felt steadier than he had earlier, but was that real?

The voice spoke again, a woman's voice, echoing strangely, still as much felt as heard, and Link crossed to the door, opening it cautiously. The Knight Academy was pitch-dark, the headmaster and his candle long since gone, but there seemed to be a faint glow from the direction of the stairs. Still uncertain, Link stepped out into the hall.

There was someone there, someone or something, a figure like a young woman, tinted blue and purple and dark in the night. She was hovering, somehow, her arms almost more like wings, but lowered and still. Link stared at her for a moment, recognising with a brush of strange familiarity the blank-eyed figure from his last dream. He walked towards her, and as he drew close, she swept back, a little almost sparkling sound the only noise her motion made. She drifted up the stairs, never touching them, and Link followed her, reflexively avoiding the squeaky step. As he reached the top, she backed away again down the long hall, stopping just before the upper doors.

Still Link followed, uncertain, the night dreamlike and surreal. He was dreaming, and so he could follow her… and so it was only half a surprise when, as he got close to her once again, she drifted backwards and vanished through the sturdy wood of the Academy doors. Cautiously, he tried the handle: it turned in his hand, and he slipped out into a moonlit night, shutting the door quietly behind him. The night air was cool on his face, on his hands, a little welcome shock of near-reality – but the same strange figure was waiting for him ahead, a little clearer in the moonlight, and Link ran after her. She moved faster, now, making him run to keep her in sight: out and across the bridge and up to the Goddess' Isle. There she waited, several paces in front of the closed gates, until as he got close she shot sideways, out over open air, then down. Link looked over the edge: there were ledges down there, the side of the island anything but smooth. The moonlight lit his way as he climbed over the edge and scrambled down after her.

The climb felt real. Very real. Leaping over the gap between one ledge and the next felt very real. Link wasn't sure he was dreaming, and if he wasn't, he was halfway around the underside of the island, his Loftwing asleep somewhere nearby, following some sort of impossible figure from his dreams, and no-one with any idea where he had gone…

She moved backwards, looking at him, and Link followed her. He'd come this far. What else was he going to do?

As ever, thanks for reading! I hope you're still enjoying; do let me know!

Patch Notes:
- Headmaster's mood no longer jumps at random from one end of the spectrum to the other.
- Headmaster has no longer read the plot.

I kind of like the headmaster, but the way the game uses him as a kind of inferior lore-drop mechanism means he never gets much chance to show a personality beyond that, and also almost never gets to behave like a real normal human. A man who's lost his daughter and desperately wants to believe anything else can absolutely clutch at whatever straws he can think of to tell himself she's still alive, but I don't buy that he'd be so chill about it and I definitely don't buy the implication his repeated "ah I thought so" gives that he's just believed Zelda was a deity since she was born. Even the most doting parent doesn't go quite that far.

I do love the eerie, dreamlike following Fi sequence, as well.