Chapter Four:
The Keeper of the Well

My sword lit up everything around me in a bright bubble of light. However the darkness still hovered outside of my glow, lurking around me, taunting. But I paid no mind to it. I looked up instead, searching for Navi. It would be impossible to miss my light. She would know it was me. After a few moments I looked around myself and down at the ground. It looked strange; pale, perfectly flat, and smooth. It was difficult to tell exactly what it was. It didn't look like stone.

And then I spotted it. Navi's blue-white glow. She fluttered quickly over to me, her butterfly wings beating furiously in her urgency. She zipped over to my face more quickly than I thought her tiny little fairy body was capable of. Navi swirled around my head many times all the while squealing,

"Link! By the Three! I thought—I thought—Oh! I thought you were …"

I smiled up at her, showing her that I was fine. Better than fine. I had found my light. I would always be fine.

She stopped swirling around me and finally took notice of the glow coming from my blade. Before she could say anything about it, there was a small moan heard coming from my right. We both whipped about to face that direction, peering into the darkness. I took a cautious step closer, gripping my sword, ready for anything. My light created the shine of pale hair in the shadows and the vague outline of a person lying on the ground nearby.

I heard Navi take in a gasp at the same time I did. We both raced over to the figure. As I approached my light revealed my suspicion to be true. The tall and athletic form of my mentor came into the glow. It was her short white hair, muscular Sheikah build, and her violet blue and silver clothing. It was definitely her.

I slid to a stop and knelt down next to her quickly and checked for wounds. Impa was sprawled on her side; head turned to show me a nasty bruise and bloody cut where she must have bumped it, except for that she was fine. I reached into my pouches and pulled out a bottle with red potion in it. I dubbed some of it onto her cut with my fingers. Impa's limp expression tensed and she groaned again. I watched as the cut closed itself up and the bruise faded away back to healthy skin. Impa opened her blood red eyes, blinking them up at me.

My mentor slowly sat up. I smiled at her.

She put a hand to where her bruise had been, legs bent up as she took her own inventory of her condition. The Sheikah looked over at me and then took a long stare at my glowing sword, stone-serious face, but then I saw the very small curve at the corner of her lips. A proud smile. I had done well. I had come here and found her on my own. Impa and I never needed many words between us. We were both silent types of people, and in that way we understood each other perfectly.

Then suddenly the ground began to shake and quake beneath us. The emptiness seemed to groan back. Both Impa and I sat up straight, alert, staring around. Was it getting brighter in here? A dim greenish glow began to surround us. It lit up the chamber enough for us to see. We were standing on a large circular platform at the bottom of a deep cavern. The green light surrounding us was coming from some kind of liquidly goop. Perhaps the source of the horrible stench that I had first smelled at the hole in the top of the cavern. The shaking stopped and it was quiet once more. Impa stood to her feet with me.

And then we were abruptly shot up into the air with a loud bong! Like that of a drum only magnified. The noise rang in my sharp Hylian ears, rattling my thoughts. I stayed in the air a moment longer than Impa because of my boots, but then fell to my feet just the same.

"There!" cried my mentor, turning around us to point. I twisted around to see as well.

Drifting just over the edge of the platform were two giant pale and graying hands. They were attached to nothing. In fact, it looks like they had been cut off at the wrist. At the seams it was pale, gray, and rotting. The great nails were short, cracked, and dirty, as if they had dug themselves out of their own grave. One dropped down on the platform, which shot us up in the air again and created another loud bong!

At least I knew what the ground was now.

It was a huge drum.

Without looking over at Impa or Navi for instruction, I ran over to where I had dropped my hookshots. I clipped them back to by belt and pulled out the purple and red Lens of Truth from a pouch. The hands were steadily increasing the speed of their drumming, spending me up, which I simply ignored and continued to race along toward Impa in the air.

Upon reaching her I quickly shrugged off my quiver of arrows, unhooked my bow from under my shield on my back, and handed them to her. She took them without question, as if she had already read my mind.

I turned my attention to the hands, but not completely. I would let Impa handle them for me. However, there had to be something more. Perhaps they were attached to something. Perhaps I simply could not see it. It was interesting how the temple had changed my way of thinking. Instead of just seeing what was there, now I looked for what was not.

I raised the looking glass up to my face and peered through its lens. Between the two gray hands I saw a strange giant form. It seemed like a huge, naked, muscular torso of a man hung down from the ceiling shadows. I couldn't see past his waist. His body was like his hands, rotting, flesh gray and pale, though slightly darker than his hands. I felt it had a gender. He had no head. Instead he had a great eye embedded deep in his throat, where it was split all around it and peeled back like some twisted kind of flower to reveal the bright red center of his eye. His wrists were rotting stumps, I could see some of his bone exposed at its center, but it seemed he was still able to control his severed hands.

I was still scared. My fear was like a raging river under a calm stone surface. It was there but I couldn't let it affect me. It was as if he had seen me looking at him, knew that I truly saw him. The huge red eye stared right back.

It was the same terror of a child believing a monster to be under his bed or somehow invisible. Yet how often was that true? How often did they come face-to-face with the thing that went bump in the night? It was straight out of a nightmare.

He then showed himself to Impa and Navi, his hands holding still for that moment. I felt the fairy flutter down close to my neck. I could feel her trembling against me.

"It's—it's a phantom shadow beast …" she stuttered into my ear.

No, I felt—I knew he was more than that. As if I knew his presence from somewhere before. Somewhere very similar to this place. Why else would he be so attracted to it? It came back to me almost instantly. He was the thing that escaped the well, attacked Sheik, and damaged the village. He was the thing Impa said had been long sealed away.

The well. It had almost been just as terrifying as the temple if not more. There was something different about the well. Somehow, it felt more corrupted than the temple. While the temple was a place of worship, it seemed the well was a prison, a torture house. Perhaps it had been my fault he had escaped the well. I had gone back in time, the words of Sheik and Impa being true. If I placed the Master Sword back in the Pedestal of Time, I would go back seven years. It was then I had visited the well. I had drained it and went down. Had the water kept him away? Did it keep him from resurfacing?

I realized it then that I had stolen his treasure.

The Lens of Truth.

He remembered me.

I had asked Impa after I came back about the well and an interesting rumor I had heard around the village. One of the old men told me that a man once known to have the Eye of Truth lived in a house where the well stood today. My mentor became very grim, though she was always stern and calm. It seemed as if it brought back bad memories for her. All she told me was that he had been a Sheikah of her tribe. That he had gone mad. They executed him.

We no longer speak his name.

She never gave me more details than that, and I thought it unkind to press the subject farther. But I was certain now, after going down in his personal lair, all the grotesque devices and chambers I'd seen there, and now I stared at the headless spirit with severed hands. I knew he had done many horrible things down there with those hands. The spirits there were so tortured, captured by him still. Still his victims even after death. He bent them to his will, and he did the same to the spirits of the Shadow Temple.

I felt their pain so sharply. I had been them. They had touched me before with their emotions, their terror, their desperation, their wanting of rest. It was just now that I understood it all, and I ached for them.

He wouldn't let them rest.

His body faded away again and his hands started beating the drum once more. They swirled around the edge of the drum, beating slowly but getting faster. He started singing. It wasn't really as much of a song as it was a chant. His voice was low, deep, inhuman, and used no real words. It was of another world entirely. The sound of it crept up my spine with a prickly and eerie sensation.

Impa and I followed him around the drum, never turning our backs to him. My mentor had an arrow notched, aimed, and ready. I stood with my sword bright with gold glowing tendrils in my left hand and the vibrantly colored Lens of Truth in the other. The drumming suddenly stopped and the hands came in at us. One great shadow drifted over and I rolled away as one snatched at me. I slipped while trying to stand, the boots tend to do that, and in doing so managed to slip right past another hand that had missed Impa and came at me on its way back.

After failing to snag me with their immense fingers, they went for Impa again. One hand slapped the drum, sending us up, and the other grabbed at the Sheikah as she went into the air. I was knelt on the ground before this happened, trying to attach a chain around my wrist. It was a little gold chain, coming from the end of the lens handle that would keep it within reach without having to drop it entirely to use my other weapons. The slap of the drum sent me up, making it difficult to clip the clasp of the chain through one slender hoop. Thanks to my boots I got my extra second or three to finish the clasp.

I looked up to find Impa caught in one giant thick hand. It had got her when the other hand sent her up in the air. It was so big she had disappeared in it. I grabbed my hookshot from my belt and gave a cry, releasing the trigger. The hook went deep into one of the knuckles and yanked me toward it. I gripped the Master Sword hard in my left hand, and when I got to the fingers, I placed my boots upon the ridge of a finger below me and started slashing at the rest with the blade.

The hand didn't bleed. It was already lifeless, but my blade affected it in a different way. It burned where I slashed at the fingers, it singed as it cut through the dead, pale, clammy skin, turning it black. It was a holy blade also imbued with Light at the moment. I heard the flesh sizzle under the metal like meat on a frying pan. It made a horrible smell. Something far more foul than before, so bad that I had to gag a little. The hand automatically dropped Impa, and the other came at me, to grab and rip me off. I pressed the second trigger and the hook released, dropping me. This time I made sure I fell backwards so that my boots could not stop my fall. The hand missed and I bounced on my back when I struck the floor again. The hand went in quickly again to get me while I was down. I saw one rise up, palm and fingers flat to smack down on the drum and squish me like a bug.

I rolled, spinning away on the ground. It hit the drum and I was up in the air again, which I used to regain my footing once more. Impa must have been ready with the hands distracted by me. She started firing arrows into them, hitting their flesh with little thwacks. The first that had started receiving arrows twitched and writhed in the air, trying to shake the arrows out like a limb that had fallen asleep and as trying to shake life back into itself.

The other hand zipped after her. Impa waited for it until the very last second and then rolled away from its grasp. She rolled up to her feet, twisted around, dragging an arrow from the quiver, notched it, and fired. The hand slapped down on the drum again, dodging the arrow and throwing Impa up into the air. It rushed up to catch her. However, this time Impa anticipated the move and jumped up with the drum and doing a backwards flip. It missed her, and she landed perfectly on her feet, had drawn an arrow while in the air, had it notched when she hit the ground, raised it and released with perfect aim. It struck home.

I had to admire her. She was my mentor, an expert, and so perfectly trained. I felt so young, so inexperienced in her presence. Yet it was me who was supposed to save Hyrule. I knew that could mean one last battle with Ganondorf. He was probably just as old and experienced as Impa, had the boost of the Triforce on his side, and already a talented magic user before then as well. I was on my second to last temple. So why was it that I still felt so out-classed?

I snapped out of it quickly enough to remember my duty. The second hand was finally twitching and shaking like the first, having enough arrows to irritate it immensely it seemed. I clipped the hookshot away again and grabbed up the Lens of Truth from the chain it daggled. I searched the darkness around the drum for his form.

I found him; torso bent low between his two shaking hands, red eye down on the drum surface. He was starting to move his whole body across it. His hands were now useless so he wanted to sweep us off the drum into the green goop that smelled a little too strongly of rot. I ran forward to meet him in the middle. As I charged, I let all the medallions I had gathered from the other temples join the Light around the Master Sword. Glowing tendrils of several different colors erupted from the base of the hilt and wrapped, twirling around the blade.

The organic green of the Forest Medallion sprouted and grew around it. The hot red of the Fire Medallion danced up and around, sparking, buzzing with energy and heat. The gentle blues of the Water Medallion trickled around like a stream of water being poured from a pitcher, smooth and glassy.

With all of these shimmering around my blade, I ran forward and thrust it into the great red eye of the phantom beast. It went in deep, almost completely to the handle, because we both had been charging one another. The power of the medallions flowed into him with the sword, coursing through his body like electricity in little flashes of all the colors. His hands slapped the drum frantically, as if to express the pain it caused him, for he had no mouth or head to scream with. The rest of his torso convulsed with the energy I had sent into him. I jerked up and down with the thumping of the drum, but did not let go of the Master Sword.

Finally the hands stopped, but slowly, after feeble smacks of the drum. They lay still on the edges and so did the rest of his body. And then his whole form became a strange purple and shadowy substance. It seemed to melt, deflating, particles dispersing back into oblivion. His presence dripped and slid to the ground from my sword. I stood up straight, watching him go.

Then there was a flash of white light, enveloping everything, and soon I was shooting down, up, and around the vortex of blue-white light. I was surprised, not because I didn't know what was happening. I knew we were going to the Chamber of Sages. It was done. The guardian was slain and the curse was broken. It's just that I had forgotten about all that. My mind hadn't been set on that goal when I had killed him.

The one whose name we no longer speak.

Author's Note: Special thanks to my only reviewer so far. Glad you liked it and I hope this chapter was just as pleasing.