INSOMNIA
based on The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

[In the land of Hyrule there echoes a legend. Held dearly by the Royal Family, it tells of a boy who battled evil and saved Hyrule. The legends do not tell of the scars that the horrors of war left on the mind of this ten-year old boy. They merely say that he crept away from the land that had forged him.

But the mantle of hero is not so easily shaken.

Robbed, cursed, and left to rot, Link joined with the slightly-unhinged faerie Tatl on a quest to save her brother and stop the moon from crushing the land of Termina. They had only three days to thwart the Skull Kid, who had long since succumbed to the dark power of Majora's Mask.

Their journey took them to the mountains to the north, home to a tribe of Gorons: benign but fearsome monsters made of living rock. An unnatural blizzard had taken its toll on the Gorons, rendering them alone and miserable. Its source was Snowhead citadel, an icy tower fortified by treacherous winds.

Armed with bombs and arrows and a strange new lullaby that sent Gorons straight to sleep, Link and Tatl were headed for Snowhead to end the wintry spell.]

-oOo-

Everywhere Link looked, he saw Gorons on the ground, eyes closed and gently snoring. The guards keeping weary sentry by the shrine doors: asleep. Those carrying bleary-eyed conversations in the halls: asleep. The ones preparing gravelly-looking meals for their Elder's wailing baby: asleep.

Magic. Or perhaps just sleep-starved minds pushed over the edge by a childhood lullaby. He wasn't sure how he'd know the difference.

"I have an idea," said Tatl.

Link turned to look Tatl in the eye. Her face was all business, and there wasn't a trace of mischief in her expression.

He exhaled.

"Tell me."

-oOo-

Snowhead
Northern Mountains

"A giant, invisible Goron."

"I'm just telling you what I saw last time," said Tatl, throwing her hands up, "it's not my fault you're having trouble getting your head around it. And yeah, can't see it any more. But the point is, we have a way to send Gorons to sleep now, so..."

"A giant invisible Goron that is apparently gone now." Link's brows were arched so high he could feel them beginning to cramp.

"Yes. But could you repeat that for the dozenth time, please? Just in case."

Link looked out across the ice bridge to Snowhead. There wasn't anything to see, or at least nothing remotely resembling a giant.

"And you don't think we'd have noticed all the snow gathering on top of it?"

"Look, it made just as little sense to me," said Tatl, "and honestly I'm still not sure it wasn't some kind of aura mirage." Seeing Link start to open his mouth, she went on, faster: "And no, aura mirages aren't a thing as far as I'm aware, but for all I know the Great Faerie just forgot to mention that in her lessons, or Tael was distracting me. Speaking of which. Tael. We're going to rescue him, yeah? That's kind of why we're here."

"We're stopping the world from ending."

"Right, right. You must be great at parties."

Tatl moved forward, beckoning Link towards the ice bridge. She scanned left to right across the breadth of the chasm — a subtle head movement Link only noticed from having spent so much time around her — and nodded.

"This way," she said.

"The winds on this bridge nearly got me killed last time!"

"But I'm pretty sure that was our giant ghost-Goron at work, and he's — it's? — gone."

"How sure is pretty sure?" said Link, eyeing her warily.

"Pretty sure."

Link took a deep breath.

"You'll tell me if it comes back," he said.

"Of course."

"You'll tell me if anything changes at all. If the wind picks up on the other side of the valley, if the shadows shift, if you notice the slightest movement anywhere, let me know so I can get back to solid ground."

"Oh, Deku boy," Tatl sighed, "as if I'd let you die on my watch."

Link risked a glance her way. As far as Tatl-facial-expressions went, she looked almost kindly.

(Almost. Well, not at all, really.)

After putting the Goron mask on for better traction, Link began his walk out along the bridge. Each step felt like a gamble, his footing ready to vanish beneath him at any moment. With another step the bank of snow dropped away behind him, and there was nothing but translucent ice between him and the fathomless drop.

He kept walking, one step at a time, forcing himself to look forward.

Five feet.

Ten feet. He glanced at Tatl, who was following him in the air just to his side. She nodded.

Twenty.

Thirty-

"Wait," said Tatl.

"Do I turn around?" said Link.

"I'm not su— Yes! Yes, he's coming."

Link pivoted around without a second thought. Goron legs weren't made for sprinting, but he managed his way back to terra firma within a few short seconds.

"Where?" he said, as soon as he was safely on solid ground.

"There," said Tatl pointing. "On that pinnacle — no, that one."

"I can't see a thing."

"It's invisible, of course you can't see it. Doesn't it seem weird to you that we're in the centre of the blizzard and there isn't a single flake of snow in the air?"

"You think it's hiding," said Link.

"Yes, I think it's hiding," said Tatl. "Come on, back to plan A."

Plan A was a four-step plan. Link knew this because Tatl had walked him through it at least a dozen times on their way to the Snowhead bridge, despite his continual protests that he'd already heard the darned thing the first time round. He had sat through worse, but not by much.

Tatl's reasoning went as follows: the lullaby Link had played in the Goron village had sent every Goron within earshot to sleep. Therefore, it would hopefully effect the giant invisible Goron (that she insisted was sitting in the middle of the chasm) similarly.

The four steps were thus so straightforward that spelling them out had been overkill the first time, let alone the dozenth.

Step one: put on the Goron mask. Link had fallen into the habit of spinning the mask in his hand as he took it out, so that for half a second he was looking into the perfect stone facsimile of Darmani's face. Seeing the Goron warrior's saturnine expression forever etched into the mask felt like a reminder of where this gift had come from, of the duty that came with it.

Putting the mask on was then just a matter of—

-pain, nerves calcifying in place, the weight of a thousand mountains rolling over his spine, pain, every muscle in his body cramping at the same time, lava and grit screaming through his veins, pain-

Step two: the Ocarina, or rather, the Goron drums. Link touched a hand to the clay strapped to his side and exhaled as it unfolded into a wave of hexagons and triangles, a geometer's flower blossoming from its seed. As the ocarina transformed, leather straps shot out from around it, slipping around Link's thick stone shoulders securely and taking the drums' weight as they settled into shape.

"I don't understand how it does that," said Link.

"How long did you say you owned that thing before you met me and Skull Kid?" said Tatl.

"I didn't," said Link. "But… less than a year. Or a lot more. Depending on how you want to count."

"Family heirloom?" Tatl dodged out of the way as a last piece of webbing whipped around Link's side to connect with another.

"Gift from a friend."

"Mm. Navi?"

"Another friend. Zelda."

Tatl pursed her lips. "You've mentioned that name before…" she muttered. "The horse?… No, not the horse. Hrm."

Step three: play the Goron lullaby.

He'd done this all an hour or two ago; there was nothing to it. An eight note refrain, moving steadily from beat to beat. He brought his left hand down and felt the drum reverberate beneath it, letting his right hand fly high; he brought his right hand down and felt the same. He felt; he felt the music just as much as he heard it, or maybe even more so, resonating through the bones of this Goron body more clearly than the tiny ears tucked away on the sides of his head.

Each slap of his hand against the drums shook the ground slightly, snowflakes leaping from around his feet and cavorting through the air. They drifted back down, swaying in time with the music.

The lullaby came to a close, Link's hands resting palm to palm on the centre drum.

Step four: wait to see what—

"Here we go," said Tatl, an instant after the music stopped.

Link opened his eyes, seeking out the pillar Tatl had pointed to before. Nothing seemed to have changed. The ice bridge continued to glisten deceptively, and the tower at Snowhead's centre still cut an imposing shape.

He opened his mouth to form a question but Tatl cut him off with a raised hand.

"Wait for it," she said.

A few seconds later, a long moan rang out from across the chasm, deep enough to shake the ground. The sound was somewhere between a wail and a yawn, inexorably sad and laced with a feeling of inevitability.

"It's falling asleep," Tatl said.

In his mind's eye, Link tried to picture it: a Goron nearly twice the height of Hyrule Castle, perched precariously on a pillar of ice, eyes beginning to close. He could almost hear the whistle of wind as…

No, now Link really did hear it as something incredibly large dropped past him. The snow at his feet rippled.

A second later, there was a tremendous boom as something hit the bottom of the chasm far below. The ground beneath Link shuddered, nearly throwing him backwards and off his feet. His ears rang in pain as the magnitude of the noise overwhelmed his mind's defences.

Stepping closer to the edge, Link saw icy shards of stalagmites exploding out from the middle of a smooth, oval depression.

"The…" Link's mouth moved but he couldn't hear the words come out. He reached for his ears. His temples rang with pain.

Tatl was in front of him, mouthing something with a look of concern.

Link pulled the Goron mask off, and the pain stopped.

"...can hear me," Tatl was saying. "Link?"

"What?" said Link.

"I said," Tatl half-shouted into his face, "say something if you can-"

"I can hear you," said Link, and winced. He kept forgetting how much colder things felt in his own body.

"Glad to hear it," said Tatl. She nodded towards the bridge. "We're good. Let's go."

As they started across, Link found himself looking down at the flattened snow where the invisible giant had fallen.

"Did it…?" he said.

"Did it fall asleep? Yeah."

"No, did it…" Link inhaled slowly. "Is it okay?"

"Is…? Oh. I… oh."

Now Tatl, too, was peering past the bridge's edge.

"Well?" said Link, already feeling his pulse rise at the thought of a death off the battlefield.

"It's alive," said Tatl.

Link let out a breath.

"You're sure?" he said.

"It's still snoring."

"You can see it snoring from here?"

"Trust me. It's alive."

Link scrutinised Tatl's face for the briefest of moments, then turned his eyes forward.

By the time they'd made it across the bridge to the foot of the tower, and were ascending the ramp to its entrance, his mood had lightened again.

"So, Tatl," he asked his companion, "what does an invisible Goron look like?"

"Um, invisible. That's a stupid question."

"I mean… when you're using your auramancy. Do you just see a Goron, or do you only see its outline?"

"Oh." Tatl pursed her lips. She appeared to give the question some thought, looking up only to occasionally advise Link to watch his step. "Both, but neither," she said eventually. "You get a sense of the shape of a person when you see their aura, because their aura radiates around them, but you're definitely not seeing them. Have you ever looked at someone through fog? Or smoke, actually. Campfire smoke?" (Link nodded.) "Well, there's an outline, like you said. But it can be hard to tell a Goron shape from a human or a Zora at that distance, especially when the sizes are jumbled up. It's the… taste, I guess you could say. Gorons tend to have a crystal-heart candy kind of taste to them."

"Crystal-heart candy?"

"I keep forgetting you grew up in a backwater. Mm, let's just say that at their base Gorons smell like one thing..."

"Didn't you say taste?"

"Will you stop interrupting me? Gorons smell like one thing, Dekus smell like another, so forth, so on. But then that's just at base. There's so many other little subtleties that layer on top of one another. The Great Faerie used to say that no two people in the history of ever had the exact same aura. The really great counterillusionists of the old ages used to excel in that kind of recognition."

"Right."

As they continued walking, Link remembered a question that had occurred to him earlier. . "Why didn't you mention you saw the Goron here the first time round?"

Tatl snorted. "Like you'd have believed me."

Link's brow furrowed. "What do you mean? I did believe you."

"You know, considering how I didn't even believe it myself, I think that says a lot more about you than me."

Touche. "I guess," Link said after a pause, "we should probably lay down a ground rule, then. Something like... I promise to take whatever you say seriously, no matter how ludicrous, and vice versa."

"Deku boy, I pull your leg all the time."

"You could stop doing that…?" Link said, not daring to hope.

"Fat chance… but sure, I can try to be more upfront with you." Tatl flashed him a grin. "For the mission-critical stuff at least. Fate of the world and all, we gotta be a team, right?"

"Thank you," said Link, and he meant it.

He paused, considering. They were almost at the threshold of the Snowhead tower, and he could feel the air freezing around him as they drew closer.

"Hey, listen, Tatl," he said, "I know we have our… differences."

"...uh-huh?"

"You know, differences in opinion, attitude. I mean… When we first met, you were a bit rude to me... But all in all..."

"Come on," groaned Tatl. "I don't give you trouble about your boy-scout attitude or your stupid accent. So you don't have to get all nitpicky about my mistakes."

"How is an accent a mista- I don't have an accent." Link threw his hands up. "Would you stop changing the subject!?"

"Oh, Deku boy," laughed Tatl, as they stepped inside the tower and daylight fell away behind them. "Don't you know anything about faeries? We never stand still."

-oOo-

Snowhead Citadel
The Northern Mountains

Snowhead, proper.

Where the cold outside the temple had been numbing, the cold inside was biting. It prickled the hairs beneath Link's thin linen shawl, and grazed the back of his neck like a menacing presence. They stood in an antechamber with a floor covered in frozen stalagmites, glowing from the light outside and casting no shadow.

"This place gives me the creeps," Link muttered, the words dissipating from his mouth in clouds of frost.

"So there are things that make you nervous. Good to know." There was a nervous edge to Tatl's voice, even as she tried to conceal it.

They made their way across the room in silence.

As they drew near the door on the other side, there was a hissing noise from right next to it. Link raised his shield reflexively... but saw nothing.

"Tatl?" he said. "What are we dealing with?"

"Best case, it's a nest of whiteboes. Worst case..."

Without warning, the cluster of stalagmites nearest to the door exploded. Link threw up his shield, heavy shards of ice shattering against the metal.

When the dust cleared, in the center of it all was a creature that itself seemed to be a stalagmite, fused into the ground but growing in detail and jaggedness as the eye traveled upwards. Finally, it culminated in a grotesque face that called to mind the stone gargoyles outside Zelda's window; it was no statue, though, with its dozens of red pinpricks of eyes all swivelling to focus on him.

"Run!" said Tatl.

Link did as he was told, and not a moment too soon. As he wheeled around and ran the ice gargoyle roared, shaking the floor beneath them. Link felt the feeling of cold on his back intensify, and he turned around to see a plume of blinding white mist flying from the monster's mouth like dragonsbreath. Wherever it touched his tunic, it solidified into ice straight away.

"Right!" called Tatl. "No, your other right!"

Link spotted where she was pointing to — there was a smaller passageway tucked off to the side of the room, narrow and made narrower still by the layers of ice jutting from its walls.

He dashed for that opening, the monster's freezing breath nipping at his heels behind him. He squeezed sideways into it, shield scraping noisily against the walls, and stumbled out the other side, his momentum nearly carrying him off the small ledge he found itself on.

This room looked to have once been constructed out of wood, and it had not weathered well. Water damage over the years had eroded the walls and floors, leaving little to stand on but a collection of frozen-over wooden beams floating over a nasty looking forty-foot drop. Adrenaline still racing, Link scanned the mess of footholds and beams, plotting out a dash to the next solid patch of ground ahead, one footfall at a time, assessing how risky the different patches of ice were...

"Whoa whoa, slow down!" Tatl reappeared from behind him just as he was about to make the first leap. "It can't follow us."

Link leaned over, hands on knees, catching his breath, as Tatl came up alongside him.

"Damn, kid, you run fast when you put your mind to it."

"What was…?"

"Freezards. They're basically indestructible, but they can't move so all you have to do is stay away, really. They're made entirely of frost magic, just like how dryads are made of..." She caught sight of Link's quizzical expression. "What? No. No. You've never seen dryads? Didn't you grow up in the woods?..."

She launched into an explanation of the finer differences between redwood and oak dryads, more or less ignoring Link as he started across the beams.

Link's footing was slippery with ice, but he'd gotten used enough to it that it was little trouble to dash across, grounding the pads of his feet down with each step. A couple of overhanging beams ducked, one Freezard circled around, and he found himself at a door, which opened through into—

"By Nayru," Link said reflexively, looking around him.

"...which usually makes their magic a little tangier but — oh. Oh my." Tatl came to a stop next to him.

They'd reached the main shaft of the tower. It stretched up hundreds of feet, hints of tiled walls buried under layers of ice. Sunlight filtered in through the ceiling, which glowed and refracted the light every which way, filling the place with soft, iridescent colours. The effect was not unlike the stained glass windows of the Temple of Time, only this place felt decidedly more melancholy.

"Pretty," said Tatl.

"Where to next?" said Link. "What do we do to stop the blizzard?"

"Gimme a second," said Tatl, "I'll scout."

She shot off upwards.

There were half a dozen floors visible from down here, each with a ring of doors overlooking the emptiness of the main shaft. The highest couple of levels had giant stone bridges spanning across them. There were no stairs or ladders visible; Link assumed there were staircases tucked somewhere behind all those doors.

Tatl returned a few minutes later. "Still alive there?"

Link smiled. "I'm still alive. Find anything?"

Tatl nodded. "There's faint life auras on most of the floors, probably whiteboes or Freezards or whatever else survives in a place like this. Oh, but one exception. The top floor? There's no life aura there, but the place stinks of evil."

"Does it… smell?… like Skull Kid's magic?"

Tatl shot him a look. "One, it's not Skull Kid, Link, it's the mask. Two, maybe? The magic tastes nothing like the giant screaming whatever-that-was in Woodfall, but it's on that level of crazy powerful. Ten-to-one odds that's where we want to be. Though," she added, a wry smirk playing across her face, "I am taking extreme liberties with the definition of 'want' here."

Link once again look up to the topmost level. A resigned sigh escaped his lips. "To the top it is."

"It's not like Skull Kid was going to make this easy for us."

"You just said this isn't Skull Kid."

"I dunno, maybe the mask supplies the evil, Skull Kid supplies the style?"

Link suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. "This may take a while. Shall we?"

"Let's."

-oOo-

The first few rooms were a bust; the next was covered top to bottom in razor-sharp stalactites and stalagmites, with a door all the way on the other side. Bashing through was simple but tedious.

The button-and-pulley system managing the door didn't look too different from those Link had seen in the past, but it had frozen over. He started knocking chunks of ice out of using the edge of his shield. Again, simple but tedious. He could tell this was going to be a long ascent through the tower.

"So, um, your idyllic little village," said Tatl, in between punctuated clangs. "Kids and faeries?"

It took Link a moment to work out what she was talking about. "Oh. Yes… The faeries raised us. They taught us about the woods around us, they guided everyone through… whatever trouble they were having."

"That's so strange, though. How does a faerie hive end up raising a bunch of human kids?"

"Well..." A second's pause. "They weren't human."

"...you're not human?"

"I am, but they—"

"You'd better be. I've seen your aura, you have a human soul, I refuse to believe you're secretly a… gods, I don't know, a chicken or something…"

"—what? No, I'm a human kid. But all the other children were Kokiri." Link glanced at Tatl's nonplussed face, and clarified: "Forest spirits."

"Oh, your woodland sprite friends. Gotcha… All the other kids? You were the only human there?"

"That's right. I was... adopted, in a manner of speaking. The elder tree spirit who looked after our village took me in when I was too young to remember anything, and I was raised just the same as anyone else… actually, I didn't realise I was human for a long time. I thought I was the same as everyone else. A lot of the others did, too. To them I just appeared one day, the same as them. I looked just like them. The sprites never aged but, well, I was young. I'm still not much bigger than them. Besides not having a faerie, I really was one of them."

"Wow. I… wow." Tatl let out a long breath. "It must have been one hell of a shock finding out you were human."

"I… guess it was. There was so much else happening that day, though. Finding out I'd been lied to — maybe not lied to, but misled — about who I was…"

The last of the ice jamming the button mechanism finally gave. Link stomped down, let the door slide open, and walked through into a narrow corridor with a number of doors.

"I never really got a chance to stop and think about it," he continued, "not until much later. There was too much else happening."

"What else was happening?"

"Well, for starters, that was the day I met Navi..."

(The room they tried next was a dead-end: a room so tiny Link could almost touch its opposite corners at the same time. A stool and the frozen-over remains of some books on the floor were the first sign of previous habitation they'd seen.

Link spotted a ring of keys hanging from a nail in the wall, shedding rusty flakes at the touch. With a nod to Tatl he stowed it in the folds of his tunic, before turning back the way they'd come.)

"So much happening, day you met Navi?" Tatl prompted.

—halfway up his arm, everything suddenly so sharp, thinking, no, he thrashed—

"I'm... I don't think I want to think about that just right now."

"Seriously? It was just getting interesting."

"Tatl. Please."

"...okay."

"What about you and Tael? Any interesting stories of your own?"

"Enough to fill a million books. Though I dunno, maybe most of them would offend your sensibilities." She poked her tongue out.

"Hey!" Link shot her a look. "I'm not some... aloof—"

"I know, I was teasing you. Nah, hrm, what do you want to know?"

(Another curving corridor. The gentle angles were throwing Link's sense of direction slightly; by his reckoning they'd made it about a quarter way around the main shaft, but it could have been a lot more.)

"Tell me..." Link paused, considered. "You've told me how you met Skull Kid. What about Tael?"

"Uh, he's my brother. We hatched pretty much together."

"Oh, right." Link turned away, hoping the dim light hid his reddening face. "Okay, well… were you two always like this?"

"Like what?"

"Like… troublemakers."

"Heh. Tuh-roobel. T'roobelmakers."

"As in, always up to no good."

"I know what it means, I was just copying— oh, forget it. And hey, I resent that word. 'Trouble' is such a… judgemental word, you know?"

Link laughed. "How would you describe it?"

"Not boring. Unboring. Not a total stick in the mud. Look at it this way — when people say 'trouble', they usually mean you're messing with the status quo. But what's so good about the status quo anyway?"

"...law and order?"

"I said good." Tatl pirouetted ahead of him, her golden light glimmering and refracting through the surrounding ice. "We're faeries. We live for dozens, gazillions, of your human lifetimes. If Tael and I just sat around letting society boringly march on… we'd be watching the grass grow. Literally. We would literally be reduced to coming back by the grass every morning and checking up on it and, oh, look at that, Grass Blade Jr over there's shot up another half-inch over the summer, aren't we all so proud of her?, say, did you hear about old mister Dotour on the other side of town?, he says he saw a cloud the other day, isn't that just the darndest thing?..."

"So you mess with people instead?"

"Hey, that's life. Sometimes what makes you happy doesn't make others happy."

Link gave her a hard look. "Perhaps," he said, "but sometimes it does."

"And we roll with that too! I mean, I get along great with kids! You saw me with the Bomber boys. And obviously Tael and I get along great with Skull Kid too, evil apocalypse incident aside. Animals love us. There was this dog shelter in the south part of town a couple of decades ago; we used to sneak in the back and teach them to sing. Deku elementary too. Oh, and The Great Faerie! The Great Faerie loved us. I mean, she never said that in so many words, but let's be real, here."

"She didn't sound too happy to see you the other day."

"She thought we were on Team Majora's Mask! Of course she wasn't happy!" Tatl threw up her hands in frustration. "The Great Faerie and me and Tael had our differences, but we're on good terms. Do you just assume I make enemies with everyone?"

It took Link a second too long to formulate an answer.

"Gotcha." Tatl rolled her eyes. "I keep forgetting you're the judging sort.

"The Great Faerie and us go way back. She took us under her wing when we were still pretty much hatchlings. Taught us the ropes. How to read an aura, how to talk to the lesser lifeforms — that's you, obviously — how to do a little healing magic to restore someone's vitality, or suck a tiny bit out in a pinch. Not that there was ever a pinch.

"I think it was kind of assumed that we'd end up getting absorbed into the hive mind? I mean, it wasn't unheard of for faeries to up and leave the Fountain, it's just, there wasn't really much to do if you did. I mean, what's a girl's options? Travel up and down the Great Bay Road, healing the occasional jellyfish sting? Hiding in a pot in some ruin and hoping you could dramatically save someone's life? When those were the options available, well... wingshreds are those wolves?; how in blazes did they get in here?"

"Where?"

"Shadows behind… that pillar and that pillar. Third one asleep at four'o'... I mean, that way."

"Okay. I've got this."

"You'd better. I'm not mopping up your entrails…

"Anyway," she continued, "most faeries just join the Great Faerie's hive mind, If you're going to do absolutely nothing for your whole life, may as well give up your sense of self first so it's not you going stir crazy. I mean, have you noticed how Great Faeries are always crazier than normal faeries? That's because they have centuries of utter boredom for them to go a little kooky. I hear there's a Great Faerie a kingdom or two south who only talks to mortals who can play her a song she hasn't heard before. You know what that sounds like? Someone with nothing to do.

"But me and Tael knew that we were meant for more than just disappearing into a Great Faerie. We wanted to do something fun — whoa, that one is playing dead, don't take your eye off it! — do something fun with our lives. And because unlike you humans, faeries are not lying cheats, and only make up stories when it's fun and not for our own sick agendas… we told the Great Faerie as much. Way before we left! So no, there is no bad blood between us. Except for the food dye incident. But that was a prank, not an argument.

"Honestly, I'm not sure why most faeries… Kid, are you trying to stun it with your shield? I've seen those things headbutt buildings. You've got to… There, better. Yeah… I'm not sure why most faeries don't go off solo like we did. It's a lot more fun. You meet more people, see more things. And once you get that silly notion out of your head that 'faeries are meant to serve', 'moral obligation to protect the lesser races', all of that, you can do so much more. The world is our oyster!... lemme guess, you don't know what those are. So sheltered.

"The world is ours to explore and do what we want with! And I — it's above you, look up — I am really, really glad to explore it. Even this whole mess with you and Skull Kid and the world ending? There's always more to see, and that really does make me happy.

"Oh, and kid? I know it's freezing out, but sometime before we get back to civilisation, you're gonna want to wash all that out of your tunic."

-oOo-

A long flight of treacherously frozen stairs led to the next 'floor' of the tower's main shaft. It was even more in disrepair than it had looked from below, stone walkways so badly worn by water and ice that Link didn't risk trying his weight on most of them. Instead, they crept around the edges of the path, moving cautiously.

"This place must have been pretty nice in its heyday," Tatl remarked, her voice echoing up and down around them.

"Really?" said Link. He reached a door that looked less frozen-over than the others, and started working his way through the keyring.

Tatl shrugged. "Everything looks nice when it's new."

The lock clicked open. (Naturally, it was the last key he tried.) Link turned the handle and pushed at the door, but it barely budged.

"Well it certainly isn't nice right now. Not to climb..." — he rammed into the door, shoulder-first; it creaked slightly — "Not to walk through either."

"Oh, yeah…" She hummed pensively. "Getting back down's going to be a nightmare."

"I'm aware," said Link.

Another ram and the door gave.

Link stumbled into the room awkwardly. It was bare and rectangular, the ground tiled with sandstone slabs made slippery with dew.

"For you, I mean," said Tatl. "I can fly."

"I know you can-"

"Wait." Tatl held up a hand. "Something's here."

"Something?" said Link.

He stopped, only a few paces into the room.

"I don't see—" he began.

Tatl breathed:

"No sudden moves. Turn around."

Link turned, hands slowly reaching for the hilt of his sword.

Behind him stood a creature Link might have described as an 'imp' or 'goblin'. Its teal skin was shrivelled; its limbs, spindly; its eyes, wild and ringed with had shrivelled, teal limbs and wild yellow eyes ringed with veins. It had most certainly not been there five seconds ago and it was eyeingstaring right at him likewith the expression of a hungry wildcat.

"Tatl?" he said, sotto voce.

"What, you haven't seen a Wizrobe before?" Tatl replied just as quietly.

Link shook his head. "Dangerous?" His hand found the edge of his sword and his fingers slowly began to curl around the hilt...

The creature — Wizrobe — moved all at once, a thick wooden staff in its hand whipping through the air and a blinding white bolt shot out from its end, straight towards him.

Instincts took over, and Link sidestepped the bolt.

"Dangerous," affirmed Tatl.

Something hissed near Link's foot and he jumped away with a yelp as the ground where the bolt had struck froze white in a two foot radius.

He looked up just in time to dive out of the way of a follow-up ice bolt.

"Talk to me!" he called.

Tatl followed close behind him as he dodged the next volley. "Talk? Right. Wizrobes have magic powers. What kind varies. Those frost bolts are elemental magic; you do not want to get hit by those."

"If we get some distance from it, will it back down?"

"Doubt it," said Tatl. "It's carnivorous. Probably been living off rats or Wolfos pups. You're probably a month worth of food by its standards."

Link winced at the mental image. "I'm too big for it to eat!"

"That's why it freezes its victims. That way your body won't go rotten."

"That's really comforting, Tatl," said Link dryly.

"You asked."

Time to go. With a single smooth movement, Link pivoted in the direction of the door he'd entered from and sprinted towards it.

The Wizrobe tracked his motion with its eyes, shrieked angrily and fired another two ice bolts: one at Link, which he vaulted over as it hit the ground beneath him, and one at the door, which froze half solid around the handle.

Link angled his body so that he hit the ice blockade with the sharp edge of his shield. Even with his full momentum against it, the ice barely chipped, and he bounced off it, ricocheting out of the way of the next spell entirely by accident.

Alright, have it your way. Link whipped his bow out from its spot behind his shield, spun around, and fired an arrow at the Wizrobe.

The creature threw up its hands reflexively, and the arrow bounced off its staff and fell to the ground, useless. The Wizrobe hissed and swung the staff back again, its eyes tracking Link as he strafed around it, preparing another arrow.

"Look out!" called Tatl from behind him.

The Wizrobe cast another ice bolt at Link as he fired another arrow directly for its head. The ice bolt missed Link as he sharply reversed course, whereas the arrow…

…hit the Wizrobe in the centre of its forehead, a perfect shot.

Strangely, the arrow shattered on impact, shards of ice flying away and the Wizrobe looking nothing more than slightly bruised.

The arrow skimmed past that last ice bolt and froze, he realised. It got lucky.

Two more arrows from Link, which the monster dodged and staff-deflected respectively. Three more ice bolts, one aimed for the head and two for the feet. The last one hit the heel of Link's boot and he stumbled forward, hard, his boot ripping out of the quickly-hardening ice with a painful squeak. He landed into a roll and kept moving.

"Time it, Link!" called Tatl. "You'll get your chance when it starts to attack."

"Starts to? It's already attacking!"

"You know what I mean!"

"No, I really… look out!"

The Wizrobe had spotted Tatl. The faerie turned just in time to see an ice bolt heading straight for her.

Ice exploded around Tatl, and Link lost sight of her.

"Tatl?"

Link skidded to a halt. There was too much snow and magical vapour hissing around the room; he couldn't spot her yellow glow amidst it.

His stomach sank. "Tatl…?"

The noise of another ice bolt startled him back to his senses. He threw up his shield reflexively; it absorbed the hit but began to hiss with cold, ice creeping around its edges towards his hand. He dropped it, cursing.

He drew his bow taut again. The monster, for its part, leant forward, staff ready to strike again.

For a few seconds they paused there, each waiting for the other to make the first move.

The creature's eyes flickered to Link's side and it fired a bolt well afield of Link, hitting a random spot on the wall.

Link fired and started moving again. What had it shot at…?

"Ugh!" A buzzing a few inches from Link's ear announced Tatl's return. "Here! Alive! Hi! Did I miss anything?"

Link exhaled, belatedly aware that he'd been holding his breath for quite some time.

"Thank Farore you're okay. I thought—"

"Try falling twenty times your height, covered in ice, and tell me how quickly you get up."

The Wizrobe growled, circling around them. Link matched its pace, keeping his eyes on its face, watching for a tell.

"So," said Tatl. "It doesn't like me either, apparently."

"Was this ever in question!?"

"I figured if it ate you I'd ask it to share."

(She was joking. Link was almost certain she was joking.)

"You're a really bad shot," Tatl remarked, nodding to the broken arrows littering the room.

"It has really good reflexes."

"Only 'cause it can see you..." Tatl's voice took on a more serious tone. "Okay. New plan. Well, first plan. I'm gonna flank it. As soon as it's not looking, shoot. Can you manage that, kid?"

"Easily," said Link. It wasn't bravado. The part of his mind that was watching the enemy's stance, its facial expression, its movement patterns, was already running through the manoeuvre, predicting how it might work, what he would need to do next.

"Well, then," said Tatl. She launched off into the air, circling the room.

The Wizrobe responded to the sudden movement by launching another flurry of attacks, alternating between Link and Tatl.

Its attention was split, Link noted, carefully tracking the creature's head movements even as he leapt and dodged over the next few bolts. Wait for it… He pivoted, slid along a frozen patch of floor to duck the next attack. Wait for it…

At last Tatl managed to get herself on the opposite side of the Wizrobe, and she wasted no time, charging straight for it. Link had no idea what she was planning to do if she made contact, but the bluff worked. The Wizrobe turned its head away from Link and swung its staff at her.

Link fired.

The arrow connected with the back of the Wizrobe's shoulder on its staff arm, lodging there. The creature stumbled, dropping the staff with a slight howl.

Without hesitation, Link also charged, drawing his sword.

The creature spun around, scrambling to grab its staff from the ground, and raised it above its head. It was at point blank range as it swung the staff at Link.

Link closed the distance, to a mere five feet from the Wizrobe and parried the staff away just as it went off. The ice bolt went wide, just wide enough, and he felt his ear and the hairs on the left of his head freeze over.

With his next footfall Link translated the parry into a diagonal slash, feeling something connect. His next step sent him crashing into the Wizrobe, knocking it to the ground.

Pain surged through his skull as the damage from the ice bolt finally registered. Link lost his footing, hitting the ground knees first, one hand clutched to his head.

He rolled over, pulling his sword free from where it had tangled, and landed in an awkward crouch.

The Wizrobe didn't get up.

It tried to. It was struggling to find enough strength in its legs, dark liquid oozing from its abdomen with each attempt. When that failed, it hissed angrily, a stream of incomprehensible syllables flowing from its mouth.

The Wizrobe stretched out its staff arm. Link grabbed the staff and firmly tugged it out of the creature's grip, tossing it out of reach.

"It looks out of commission," said Tatl, landing between them. "It won't last long."

Link took another look over the creature, and saw she was right.

"Let it be, or…?" said Tatl.

"It's in pain," said Link, and there was no further discussion.

Saria had been the one to first explain to him what a mercy killing was. He'd been young and she had described finding wounded deer in the glades of the Lost Woods, bleeding out after a Stalfos attack. But it was Navi who'd taught him how to do it, during the weeks they'd spent camped in the woods behind Kakariko, hiding from Ganondorf's army. She'd helped him survive off foraged berries and what little wildlife there was to be found in the area.

She'd taught Link how to use his bow during those weeks. And she'd taught him how to cut painlessly, as he did now.

Four hundred and forty one.

With this last act of exertion complete, Link fell back onto his knees, gasping for breath. Tatl was circling overhead, silent for now.

One of the last things Navi had said to him before she'd left was that she hoped he could have a proper human childhood, a simpler life. Link wondered what she would think if she could see him now.

A/N: TL;DR: the private messages checking in, the occasional fanart, the continued recs, etc. - it all means an incredible lot to me. Thanks for your support and for sticking along for the ride!

Next chapter: "The Second".