Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I don't have much art specifically made for this side-story, but here's a semi-relevant pic of the two main characters at age 6:

Link sat tucked between two pots in the shadow of a building, doing his best to disappear. Shuddering sobs wracked his body as he did his best to stop crying. If he made too much noise, he might be found!

His fingers clutched the fabric of his new skirt. Gabbi, his sister, had noticed him admiring one like it in a shop window and had commissioned a similar one made smaller for him. Just that morning, it had been all clean and new, with a shiny silk bow on the back. It was green, his sister had told him, like his favorite blanket.

And now the present he’d gotten for this 10th birthday was ripped and stained with dirt and shoeprints. A boy on the street had said hello, and when Link had greeted him back, the boy had been so angry. He and his friends had stomped his pretty skirt into the dirt and stolen its bow, and why? Because Link had said “hi”?

He knew he could be dumb about these things. People never made sense. They never said why they did certain things or reacted to stuff in certain ways, so Link had to put together the puzzle created by repeated mistakes or wait for his sister to explain. Maybe he just shouldn’t greet people anymore. The boys had said he was “lying”. Could you lie with a greeting? Link could lie very well when he needed to, but it didn’t usually occur to him to do so. It wasn’t very nice, and he could never tell when other people were doing it to him. Maybe it was even possible to lie without realizing? It seemed like others saw secret messages in his words all the time, so it must have been possible.

Link rubbed his wet eyes on the short sleeve of his tunic. It was also new, and a shade of yellow-gray-brown only a little darker than his skirt, but the boys hadn’t cared about ruining that. Uncurling from his tight ball, he peeked out from behind the big clay pots. When he’d run away, his head had been full of so much noise and confusion that he hadn’t paid attention to whether he was actually being followed. If he had been, though, the boys must have gotten bored by now, right?

His eyes met the surprised brownish gray ones of a young Sheikah. The small, thin boy looked about eight or nine and wore cream-colored clothes that were too big, like he’d borrowed them from an older brother. He had a dark blue mask pulled up over his nose that extended under his shirt, which made him look a bit like the scary guards that stood in front of important places. His hair was fully covered, but probably long. That bundled-up style was an odd one; Link had only seen it on a few Sheikah grandmas here and there.

Link stared at the stranger, frozen in fear. Would this boy accuse him of lying and attack him, too, if he said anything? Link had learned today that he didn’t understand other people as well as he thought; even worse, he didn’t have his big sister here to explain what, exactly, that lesson was meant to teach him. He didn’t want to do any more wrong things and get hurt again.

A sob jumped from his throat. He wanted to go home! People were confusing! He just wanted to pick up a hammer and work on some horseshoes, or lose himself to the sound and feel of magic as he composed an enchantment. Home was where his workshop was, and the experiments whose explosive malfunctions he could always figure out.

He wasn’t designed to be outside. It had been a bad idea, going out on his own without his sister to protect him and explain things. Every few weeks, it was like he forgot how scary other people could be and he got the urge to walk around town again. Why couldn’t he ever remember how awful it was to get yelled at or hit and not know where he’d gone wrong or how to keep it from happening again? There were no safety practices or standard procedures outside the workroom! People didn’t have simple, easy-to-follow rules about them written in a manual! He knew this all too well, and yet he still kept letting his urge to talk to new people get him into stupid situations like this.

The Sheikah boy stood still for a while, his narrowed eyes sizing him up as Link’s thoughts raced like panicked horses. Then he took a small step forward.

Link squeaked in fright and tucked himself back into his hiding spot. He clapped his hands over his mouth. Stupid! He shouldn’t have made noise. Who knew what he might have done wrong?

“Are you okay? Do you need help?” a sweet, high-pitched voice asked.

Link looked up. The boy was standing right in front of him now, frowning. Uh-oh. He probably wanted to hear words. Link’s mouth opened and closed as he struggled to find some. His ability to communicate, which had always been flighty, had run away from him when he’d been yanked off the main street.

“Let’s see…” The stranger patted around his outfit and pulled out a handkerchief and a wrapped candy from his pockets. “Here. For your nose. And, um, because it looks like you’ve had a bad day,” he said, crouching down and holding the items out.

After cautiously reaching forward and pausing to see whether the Sheikah might unexpectedly decide to kick him like those other boys had, Link took the offerings. He popped the golden honey candy into his mouth and immediately felt better at its warm, soothing flavor. His allowance always went to project materials before anything else, so sweets were rare treats saved for special occasions.

“Is my birthday,” he said once he’d calmed down enough to grasp his words again. He chewed on his lip, looking down at the handkerchief he’d soiled with his snotty, muddy face. He felt bad for dirtying something so clean, but his sister had taught him that it was good to accept help when he needed it. “Birthday candy. I was going to buy some.” He hiccupped a laugh. The boys who’d ruined his clothes had also stolen his wallet. At least he’d been smart enough not to put all his Rupees into it before leaving home, just enough of his gift money to get a few cheap sweets.

The boy’s face fell. “Your birthday? And someone beat you up like this?”

Link blinked in surprise. How did this stranger know that? Link could have tripped and fallen in an unpaved alley, after all. Castle Town still had a few of those.

“You wouldn’t have boot-prints and rips in a new skirt unless either you really hated it or someone else did. That’s a back-stitched hem; you’d have to work hard to tear it.” The Sheikah picked at a section of the hem where the stitches had popped and the seam was coming undone. “You’re a boy, right? Did someone attack you for wearing a skirt?”

“Oh!” Link thumped his fist into his palm. That made more sense than Link’s hypothesis! He didn’t consider himself a boy—“he” just caused fewer arguments than “she”—but those actual boys must have taken some kind of offense. Link understood the significance of fashion styles and what messages garments communicated, since he enjoyed studying other cultures. He’d been wearing the “wrong” clothing for someone with his deeper voice, and those strangers had been angry because he’d confused them with his manner of dress!

“You didn’t understand why this happened?” the Sheikah said in disbelief. “Did you really think you’d done something random to make them angry at you?”

“Thought I’d lied with ‘hi’. They said I was lying,” Link explained. “But it was the clothes! Now I get it.” He was relieved to know what had caused the conflict; few things frightened him more than a mystery problem he didn’t know how to fix or avoid. That was the kind of ignorance that caused repeated, dangerous mistakes in his family’s line of work.

The Sheikah smiled a little. “You’re not very good at understanding other people, are you?”

“Body-language yes, words and reasons no,” Link said, happy to clarify. Then, because they were exchanging questions, he asked, “Why were you back here? Are you hiding, too?” They were in a narrow, mostly un-traveled alley made almost nighttime-dark by the angle of the late afternoon sun. Granted, a dark alley wasn’t too odd a place for one of the Shadow People to be found, but Sheikah usually wore sneaking clothes when they were on a mission.

The boy looked around and tugged up his mask. “…Kind of.”

“From those boys I made mad?”

The stranger’s expression went intense. “You didn’t do anything to deserve that. Don’t think you did,” he said sharply. “Those people are assholes who don’t matter.”

Link gasped softly at the boy’s fierceness. Sure, it hadn’t been nice of those boys to ruin his clothes just because they didn’t like them, but it seemed pretty mean to declare that they didn’t matter. “Is it okay to say that?”

The Sheikah grinned, his eyes crinkling at the edges over his mask. “I can say whatever I want until I get caught.” He held out his hand. “I’m Avoka, by the way.”

“I’m Link.” He shook the boy’s hand. The Sheikah’s skin was soft, with the beginnings of a few swordsman’s calluses. Link wondered whether Avoka was starting his apprenticeship training early, like him.

“I can walk you home,” Avoka offered. “Do you live in town?”

“No, outside,” Link said. “Don’t worry. I know the way.”

“I’m not worried about you getting lost,” the boy replied. He clasped Link’s hand and helped him up. Link winced at the bruises that complained as he moved. Those were going to affect his work, and his sister might kick him out of the workroom until he healed. Maybe she wouldn’t notice them if he wore long sleeves?

“Do you need a healing potion?” Avoka asked, looking him over. He reached inside his wide sleeve and pulled out a curved metal flask.

Link stared at the bright silver material. That was rustless steel. It was an expensive material that few bothered with when enchantments to protect against rust were so much more accessible. Who would commission something as mundane as a flask made from such a valuable alloy?

“It’s not alcohol,” Avoka said, the tips of his ears darkening in a blush. “Normal glass bottles are bulky, is all. Metal doesn’t shatter, either.”

“I’m a blacksmith…almost,” Link said. He was both far too young to claim mastery and more focused on bluesmithing, which was a semi-related field of magical engineering. “I know metals. You’re rich.” He took the flask, made sure there was indeed a Red Potion inside it, and drank the thick, fishy-tasting liquid. His pain lifted immediately.

“Is this expensive?” Avoka asked, holding up the flask after Link had handed it back. “I see this metal all the time.”

Link raised an eyebrow. “You’re really rich.” He had a feeling Avoka didn’t go outside even as much as he did. Maybe that was why this boy didn’t find Link as strange as most people tended to; he was strange, too.

Avoka hid the flask up his sleeve again and looked down sheepishly at his feet. He wore chunky geta sandals, a commoner style of footwear, but Link could see where the straps were irritating the boy’s unaccustomed skin. Link, meanwhile, was wearing rough sandals of woven straw only because the city streets weren’t swept of horse dung often enough for his sister to let him run around barefoot. The Sheikah looked the part of a middle-class kid, except for his fully covered hair, but hadn’t actually lived it before.

“There’s a lot I don’t know. I wish I could get out more. Learn more,” the boy admitted. He hunched his shoulders self-consciously. “It’s just hard.”

“Because you’re hiding?”

Avoka’s eyes flicked away from his. “Yeah.”

Link thought for a moment. “Want to hide at my house?”

The boy’s head jerked up. “Wh-What?”

“You can look at the stuff there. See what less-rich people do,” Link said. He’d observed other kids his age inviting one another to their homes. That was a normal thing to do, right? And Avoka had helped him feel better, so wouldn’t it be the right thing to help him back?

He mentally patted himself on his back. Gabbi wanted him to socialize? Well, he’d just said a lot of full sentences out loud without making anyone mad and he’d offered to let someone his age visit his house! He’d hit most of the steps of a successful social interaction right there!

“Would it…would it be okay?” Avoka asked nervously. “People can just…walk into others’ homes?”

“Should knock and ask first,” Link advised. He pointed toward the southern end of town. “I live that way,” he declared before heading in that direction. If Avoka wanted to come with, he’d follow.

Link led the way down a few dark alleys, navigating by the sound of magic radiating from the Castle Town Bazaar. Whether or not it was busy, the number of enchanted and otherwise magical wares on sale always made that street loud enough to give him a musical headache. That was one of the downsides of his magical talent; he had better senses, and magic-attuned hearing that no one else in his family had, but that also meant his senses were stronger than his brain could handle. Though the headaches he got from all that input had lessened as he got better at dialing things back, there would never be a day when his head didn’t hurt at all unless he wore his hearing dampeners all the time. And he didn’t want to do that! He relied on his ears a lot; even if sharp noises hurt and the sound of magic could be overwhelming, he couldn’t imagine living with anything less.

As he navigated by ear, he took notice of Avoka’s magic singing behind him. It sounded like both a swarm of bees and a choir, the tune muted as though playing from behind a glass wall. It was a sign of disconnection—that the boy’s power had a particular thing it wanted to do, but its wielder was either used to making it do things it wasn’t meant for or held back from using it at all. Link wondered what Avoka’s particular talent was, since his magic sounded so intent on it. It was probably rude to ask. He’d learned the hard way that most questions were.

Link poked his head out between two buildings on the southern end of Main Street. The boys would be more likely to hang around the northern end where the candy shop was, right? They’d stolen Link’s wallet, so it made sense that they’d want to use the money in it.

He chewed on his lower lip and scoped out an escape route just in case. His magic boosted a lot of things about him physically, not just his senses. It was how he’d managed to outrun his attackers the first time. If he had to flee again…maybe he could run up that parked chariot over there, make the five-foot jump to catch the edge of that roof, and—

“If you see those guys, just tell me and I’ll figure things out,” Avoka said. Something ominous colored his cute, mousy voice.

Link gave him a funny look. What was that supposed to mean? “Okay?” He stepped out into the street, keeping an eye on that escape route up ahead so he could make a run for it if need be.

The sparse five o’clock crowd enfolded him. Main Street was always busy until sunset; there were only so many daylight hours and Stalfoses still popped up sometimes without being called upon by an evil mage, so it was common sense to get everything done while the sun was out. No amount of modern magical lightning would override thousands of years of Hylians avoiding the dangers of the dark. Late afternoon thinned the river of daytime traffic to a more manageable stream—one Link’s hearing could better tolerate. The sound of people chatting and haggling was easier to tune out, at least. He winced as a taxi drawn by two fancy white horses went by, the clack of horseshoes on cobblestones hammering through his skull. On his imaginary list of Bad Noises that always pained him, that one floated near the top. It was way different from the comforting ring of metal that filled his family’s smithy, and usually heralded a pile of smelly dung he’d have to step around.

Avoka followed at his shoulder, a loud shadow clomping along on raised clogs he definitely wasn’t used to. He had a serious, grown-up look on his face. Warmth bloomed in Link’s chest. He felt all important, walking down the street with a guard watching his back. Was this what rich ladies in Castle Town’s inner ring felt like when they swanned around with their scary escorts?

When they were almost at the city’s front plaza a voice rang out. It was nothing special, but the tone sent a jolt of fear and recognition through Link. “Hey! It’s the creep! We weren’t done with you!”

Link looked to the left, saw the three boys from earlier peeling away from a wall to come after him, and went into a sprint toward that parked chariot he’d seen earlier. The thing about self-driving chariots was that they were perfectly stable on their three wheels and wouldn’t tip over or wobble if a panicked ten-year-old needed to use them as a jumping-off point. He’d learned about the unreliability of horse-drawn vehicles as platforms a few months ago when he’d run to escape from a shopkeeper who’d mistaken him for a thief. Unlike that incident, he didn’t think this one would be fixed with an awkward, apologetic conversation.

Avoka sprinted ahead of Link—an impressive feat—gripped his wrist, and pulled him toward a side street to the right of what he’d been aiming for.

“What?” Link cried out. This street was a dead end!

“Calm down. I just want fewer witnesses,” Avoka explained over his shoulder.

Okay, forget Link being weird. This boy had him outdone. “‘Witnesses’?!”

Avoka slowed down halfway down the deep alley, turned around, and pulled Link behind him. “I don’t like bullies,” he said darkly, reaching into his sleeve.

The gaggle of boys was still running up, breathing hard. Their persistence was impressive, in a scary way. Link didn’t know how he kept making people so mad that they wanted to pursue and yell at him. It was just something that tended to happen when he left the house. Link put his hands over his ears. He could handle most insults without too much emotional trouble—ignoring words was so easy that his brain sometimes did it without his permission—but he did not like the volume they were usually shouted at. Loud, angry voices were at the top of his Bad Noises list.

“If you could afford clothes like that, why were you only carrying twenty Rupees, you cheapskate?” the boy in front demanded, his voice only half-muted by Link’s attempt to tamp down his magic-boosted hearing.

The boy tossed down Link’s wallet and stamped on it with a sneer. Link bit down on his lower lip and dropped his gaze to glare in frustration at the ground. That wallet had been a birthday gift from his grandma two years ago! Why couldn’t the boy have chucked the bag at Link’s face, or something?

Avoka picked up on Link’s reaction and bristled. “You’re not going to mess with Link anymore,” he growled, accentuating his words with a sharp clack of one of his geta. His hand was still up his sleeve. “If you do, you’re going to have to mess with me.”

“You know that’s a cross-dressing freak, not a girl, right?” another one of the boys said, jabbing a finger at Link.

Link flinched. He really hated that insult—“freak”. It could be applied to far too many things about him. Too quiet? Freak. Stared too much? Freak. Able to hear people’s magic? Freak. It would be easier to list the ways he didn’t creep people out without meaning to.

“I bet we caught him on the way to sneak into the girls’ side of the public bathhouse or something,” the other lackey said. “You should be thanking us, Mousy!”

The lead boy cracked his knuckles. “Yeah, how about you hand over your wallet? I bet you’re carrying more than that stingy freak was.”

Avoka hissed sharply, like a snake, and slid his hand out of his sleeve. A black and silver kunai flashed expensively in the dimming sunlight. Stainless steel, like the flask.

Link’s heart almost stopped. Who had given this cute little eight-year-old a knife?!

The trio of boys shuffled back a step. Avoka was younger than them and a fair amount smaller, but a Sheikah with a sharp object wasn’t someone to be messed with. “If you call him a freak again, I’ll make you bleed,” he snarled. “Now give him his money back!”

“We already spent it,” the lead boy said, puffing out his chest. He reached into his pocket and held up a large sweet wrapped in striped blue paper.

“Aw,” Link couldn’t help but sigh. Blue wrapping meant either Wildberry or violet flavor—it was always a pleasant surprise for Link, whichever one he wound up grabbing.

The sound of Avoka’s magic swelled as he called upon it. Part of the disconnection lifted, allowing the buzz of angry bees to overtake the choir. At the same time, the throwing knife in the boy’s hand flared with piercing white-gold light that momentarily blinded Link. He looked away, blinking after-images from his eyes.

“Drop it,” Avoka said with the most authority Link had heard from anyone under seventeen. His arm started coiling back in preparation to throw.

“A mage?!” the boys squeaked. Suddenly they were all fumbling candy out of their pockets and chucking it at the ground. The boy in front was the quickest to flee, shouting “Screw this!” They ran out onto Main Street and fled in the direction of the Bazaar.

Link waited until they were out of sight before rushing forward to collect his wallet and inspect the sweets his bullies had inadvertently bought for him. None of them was the pure yellow of banana flavor, so he figured he’d be happy with whatever these soft blues and vague browns translated to.

“You weren’t really going to throw, were you?” he remembered to ask only after he’d put his prizes and wallet into his skirt’s deep pockets.

Avoka had stowed the knife back in its hidden sheath. How much was he hiding under those too-big clothes, anyway? How much of it was weaponry he wasn’t supposed to have? “No. I’m not accurate enough to be reliably non-lethal yet, especially with my magic going,” the boy said. “I was bluffing…mostly.”

“It’s bad to threaten with knives,” Link said sternly. It was obvious to him, but maybe it was something Avoka wasn’t aware of. “Could hurt someone.”

“Those guys hurt you,” Avoka pointed out.

“Yeah, but…” Link’s face screwed up as he felt around for the right words. It wasn’t that he considered himself someone who deserved to be hurt more than others, but that he didn’t want to cause more pain just to get back at someone. It wouldn’t make things better if he hurt them back. He could cause a lot of harm to those who threatened him if he wanted to; he simply didn’t want to. “Don’t hit back, please. Not for me,” he settled on saying. “Hurting doesn’t help.”

Avoka stared at him for a while. Link could see thoughts turning like gears behind his eyes, but he couldn’t read the boy’s blank expression behind his mask. “How do you—”

A sharp pop went off at the boy’s feet, cutting him off. In the span of a couple of seconds, the side street was flooded with opaque blue smoke. Link clutched at his pockets to make sure the items within were secure and huddled on the ground. His eyes darted around wildly as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Where had that smoke bomb come from? Were they under attack by Sheikah? Was that who Avoka had been hiding from?

When the sulfur-scented haze cleared, Avoka was nowhere to be found. The only evidence that he’d been taken at all was the burnt-out casing of a smoke bomb.

Link sat there, dumbstruck. What…What was going on? Today suddenly didn’t feel real. He stared at the blackened shell sitting on the ground. There was the proof that he hadn’t made up a boy who’d suddenly disappeared, but…

He put a hand to his head. It was his tenth birthday. He’d been attacked on his way to the candy store and then cheered up by a nice, knife-wielding stranger who’d been kidnapped right in front of him. What a strange birthday!

Chapter Text

Somewhat more relevant art this time! Here’s Zelda at age 6, a year older than she is in this chapter:

“NO!” A small object, bright with gold-edged white magic, flew like an arrow from the child’s hiding place.

Impa ducked and glanced behind her. The apple had slammed into the wall with enough force to splatter it into sauce. “Princess, please, this kind of behavior is below you,” she called out. Her entreaties had become embarrassingly whiny over the last half-hour, but at least the storeroom staff wasn’t around to hear her. They’d cleared out once their irate five-year-old future queen had stormed in screaming and brandishing a knife she must have stolen from the kitchens.

“WON’T!” Zelda yelled. Her tiny hand appeared over the edge of her improvised fort of storage crates, clutching a carrot that flared gold with holy magic. Impa cursed and jerked to the side as the child pitched it with uncanny aim at her face. Zelda had a high affinity for her power as a sacred maiden, an unstoppable drive to achieve her goals, and zero appreciation for how life-threatening her improvised Light Arrows could be.

“Young lady, you will attend your lessons, and you will be dressed as a princess should!” Impa barked. It was a tone that Royal Guard trainees feared and respected, and a surefire way to make them follow orders without argument.

A rain of mushrooms pelted her hard enough to cause bruises through the steel-mesh armor she wore under her uniform. One collided with her temple, making her see stars. After this, she was drinking a Red Potion for sure.

“Not! A! Princess!” Zelda screamed, smacking her fists against her fort. “I’M PRINCE ZELDA TODAY!”

Impa groaned and dragged her hands down her face. She loved her niece dearly, but she genuinely could not fathom what went through the child’s mind. A couple of days ago, she’d been fine with being Princess Zelda, all dolled up in her pretty pink clothes and adorable hennin. Most of the time she was happy that way, or at least not irritated enough about it to do anything more than scowl and stomp around when her mother wasn’t looking. Her hatred of lace, stiff bodices, and skirt supports was a dependable constant that irked Queen Ambi day in and day out, but her affinity for other feminine things was like a light switch that switched off at random. One day it was “yes” and another day it was “no”, and the episodes of “no” had been getting louder and more violent as the formerly mild-mannered child’s temperament continued to sour.

What was Impa meant to do here? A princess was a princess. Zelda had been born into an immutable position in life, one that was absolutely vital for the continued functioning of the kingdom. No matter how much she protested it, the facts of life were set in stone. Zelda could not be allowed to shirk her duties. One day the girl would learn to accept her role. Unfortunately, Impa doubted that day would come any time soon.

“Zelda, please, it’s only a dress,” she said. She had to duck another glowing apple. Impa, Commander of the Central Kingdom Royal Guard, was not someone who cried, but she was steadily losing her grip on her dignity. A five-year-old was getting the best of her. And granted, it was only because that five-year-old could turn any object small enough to throw into a legitimately dangerous weapon, but this still had to be the lowest point of her career.

Magenta eyes—the princess had taken out her blue contacts, because no tantrum was complete without that act of defiance—glared at her from around the edge of one of the storage crates. “It’s not just one dress, Auntie. I have to wear nothing but dresses! Dresses and dresses and dresses. And not even ones I want! Heavy, itchy, fluffy, stupid dresses!” she screeched. “I’m not just one thing all the time! Not just dresses, and not just pink. I’m me, and I want trousers today! TROUSERS!” She stomped her foot, still clad in a delicate pink royal mule despite the rest of her being clothed in only a cotton chemise and bloomers. “And…and boots! Prince boots!”

Reluctance pulled at Impa from multiple directions. Capitulating to tantrums was how one raised a spoiled tyrant. On the other hand, trousers and boots were a reasonable request from a young royal who could certainly demand much more ridiculous things. Queen Ambi and general society disapproved of putting Hylian princesses in trousers, though; it went against long-held traditions that stretched back to the Old Kingdom, much like dressing princesses of the royal bloodline in colors other than pink or allowing them to cut their hair. Giving the princess what she wanted would also feed into the strange delusion she held of occasionally being a prince, which could be unhealthy. Impa honestly wasn’t sure; matters of the mind were for specialized doctors to worry about, not trained killers. On the other hand, refusing to let her niece wear the styles of clothing she often demanded or be referred to in the ways she sometimes wanted didn’t appear to be making the delusion fade. In fact, Zelda had only been becoming angrier and more difficult to make behave since her toddler days of stealing clothing from laundry rooms when left unattended. Now that the princess had figured out how to use a measure of her holy power, the demands she’d always been making had simply gained more weight.

Impa didn’t visibly sag with defeat, for she refused to show such weakness, but she let out a sigh that made Zelda’s expression of implacable fury gain a note of cautious hope. “I…will allow you to wear trousers for the rest of the day if you agree to dress properly for your lessons,” she said haltingly. There weren’t any masculine clothes in the castle that would fit her tiny niece, but that hadn’t stopped Zelda before. “Boots can be commissioned if you show a consistent pattern of acceptable behavior.”

Zelda’s eyes narrowed. Impa knew it wasn’t in confusion; the child was a voracious reader with a habit of looking up unfamiliar words. It took a certain number of bribes per year to convince the princess to keep her growing collection of memorized curses and epithets a secret between her and her aunt.

“For how long?” Zelda asked. She knew a deal when she saw one. “I’m not a princess every day, all the time. I’m not going to be one thing, even if you don’t listen and do the wrong things and make me mad. I’ll just be mad!” She hefted a large carrot like a spear. “If I have to be good, you do, too. It should be fair.”

Impa pursed her lips. “Fair” was giving into a small child’s irrational demands?

But, she supposed, a child was also a person. A very small one with a short list of experiences and a small pool of knowledge to inform their decisions, but an entire intelligent being nonetheless. While young and uninformed, the princess did have some right to choose her own clothes. Zelda could not know how unreasonable she sounded because she lacked the knowledge and experience to understand such things. Impa distantly remembered being that young, so sure in foolish thoughts and actions that had made sense at the time. As far as her niece was aware, her arguments in favor of cross-dressing were logical.

Zelda would grow out of this once she had more years behind her and a greater understanding of how the world worked; there was no harm in indulging her eccentricity in small ways to bribe her into normality, for the time being. As it was, the young royal’s behavior was so far beyond the abilities of her originally assigned governess to manage that Impa had been forced to delegate more of her duties as a Royal Guard commander in order to assume that caretaker role herself. It was up to her to rein this wild child in and assist the Queen in training her to be a respectable, responsible ruler. Impa would perform her duty, even if it required some strange deals made out of sight. The King and Queen wouldn’t have to know; they would only see their darling, well-behaved princess make a return.

She cautiously approached her niece’s box fort. Zelda eyed her warily, but the carrot in her hand didn’t start glowing. With slow, clear motions, Impa crouched down to Zelda’s level. “If you behave properly for me and your parents, I promise to do my best to do the same for you,” she said. “If you act like a good princess in your lessons and stop stealing boy clothes from my trainees, then I will call you a prince when you ask for it and buy the clothing you desire—within reason. Just don’t let your parents or the castle staff see you, or we’ll both get in big trouble.” She held out a raised pinky. “Do you so swear, Prince Zelda?”

The delight that bloomed on the child’s face made Impa’s heart leap. It had been ages since she’d seen such a look of joy from Zelda. How long had it been since her sweet baby niece’s dark moods had started outweighing her bright ones? Zelda had perfected her scowl at age three and had only been getting more use out of it since then.

Zelda dropped her edible weapon and extended a pinky as well. They hooked little fingers and gave a small shake to seal the deal. “I don’t like it when people break their promises. If you’re lying, I’ll find another knife,” Zelda threatened. The one she’d had earlier was currently embedded a few inches into a stone wall.

Impa smiled. Her niece took so much after her birth mother. She could almost imagine her sister Michi’s voice saying the same thing. “Understood, Your Highness.”

Chapter Text

“But why?”

Zelda ignored the unpleasant chill of the wooden surface under his cheek, tears of helpless frustration running down his face. He already knew the answer. His aunt had drilled it into his head since the first time she’d given him boy-clothing, and the punishments caused by his slip-ups in the last four years had only driven the message home.

He would always be nothing more than Princess Zelda, and Princess Zelda had no right to exist in a way that made her happy. She existed for other people’s sake. There were appearances to be kept up and people to stay in the good graces of. Those were things she couldn’t do if she were allowed to speak or dress or be referred to in the ways that pleased her. By her nature, she was a disgrace to the royal family. Zelda’s very birth was a potential scandal, the marks of her mixed heritage something to be hidden as surely as her true personality.

Zelda had been wearing contacts over his magenta eyes and concealing his telltale blond-gray hair under wimples and hennins for as long as he could remember. Nothing could be done for his golden-toned Sheikah complexion, but he was rarely allowed out of the castle and stayed pale enough to almost resemble his father’s Hylian pink as a result. It was just another layer of deception laid over the burdensome lie of him being nothing more than a perfect, gentle, soft-spoken princess.

“You know why your mother assigned a punishment,” Impa said from where she stood over him. “You have a very important role to play, and that role comes with certain rules. That is why I warned you to be careful when dressed in unapproved-of ways.”

“I got locked in my tower for being caught wearing trousers, Auntie! You can’t possibly call that reasonable!” the nine-year-old burst out. “People outside the castle aren’t held to nearly the same ridiculous standard! I’m sure you weren’t at my age, either.”

“Not all of us were born as the future ruler of Hyrule, Your Highness. There are different standards for different people and different cultures,” Impa said. “I will speak with your mother about this. She can be persuaded to lessen the severity of your punishment if you promise to better behave—”

“I’m so tired of it,” Zelda said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “The promises, the giving in exchange for nothing. I can exist as myself only out of sight, where no one but you will see. I’m the ruler of back rooms and unused servant’s quarters. The king and queen of my high, lonely tower.”

“Child,” Impa said with exasperation. “You’ve been grounded for a mere two weeks. It isn’t the end of the world.”

Zelda growled in aggravation. “I’m not saying it is!” He brought his fist down on the table, making his aunt’s eyes widen ever so slightly in surprise. “It’s just another one of the little wrongs that happen day in and day out! Can’t do this, can’t do that, must do this, must do that! I’m the Oni’s doll, is what I am!”

Impa gasped. “Zelda, you must not call the queen such a—”

“She has two horns and she’s evil,” Zelda viciously spat. His adoptive mother had done nothing but shove her horrible, old-fashioned, backward ideas down Zelda’s throat since as far back as he could remember. In front of everything he wanted to do, she would build a wall of “princesses don’t”. Princesses don’t yell, or say improper words, or slouch, or wear trousers, or run in their nice shoes, or wear anything other than nice shoes. Princesses don’t get to also be princes. Princesses don’t get to be anything but what others want them to be; they’re trapped within walls of expectation that others build around them with no escape.

“She doesn’t let me live,” Zelda said, his voice breaking. A sob welled up in his throat and his vision blurred with fresh tears. “I’m not what she wants me to be, and forcing myself to pretend every single day is so tiring, Auntie. I know it’s what the kingdom needs, but I’m so tired and I just…I don’t want to have to do this forever. That’s my nightmare. I wish I could just…just stop.”

Something flickered in Impa’s eyes. Fear? “‘Stop’ how?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Zelda admitted. Every time he tried to come up with a plan, his brain seemed to turn to pudding and his half-formed ideas scattered to the winds. “Run away? Or—or, maybe I could just…” He put a hand to his neck.

He’d had some occasional thoughts. Bad ones.

The castle had a lot of stairs. Tall, spiraling staircases like the one to his tower. Every time he had to go up to his room, knowing it might be days before the sentries would allow him to leave, he felt like he was dying a tiny bit with each step. His room was a cage, complete with bars on the windows and Royal Guardsmen watching the stairs. Supposedly for his safety, but all of those protective measures only made his chest ache when he thought about them for too long. It would be so easy to miss a single step on those stairs. Trip, and trust the unforgiving stone to put him to sleep for good on the way down. A few of his ancestors and distant ancient relatives had died that way. Why not him? Maybe the people around him would finally listen if they only had the memory of his voice to work off of.

Impa picked him up, turned him around on his wooden seat, and crouched down to look him in the eye. “I underestimated the severity of what you were experiencing,” she said solemnly. “This will be rectified. I won’t have my nephew forced to think of such things out of desperation. Your mother wouldn’t want this, either. Queen Ambi isn’t evil, Zelda. She simply doesn’t understand. I…I haven’t done my best to understand, either. For that, I apologize.”

“What?” Zelda said in surprise. He hadn’t expected his aunt to take him seriously for once. Though she was a very serious person, he’d gotten the feeling over the last few years that she was only humoring what she considered a temporary phase of foolishness. He complained to her about these things all the time, as they were things that kept happening like clockwork. Zelda would want to wear something other than his constant stream of dresses, he would get complacent and wind up being spotted by someone who’d report his “misbehavior” to the Queen, and then he’d be ordered to stay in his tower even more than usual for the next few weeks. Then Impa would talk his mother down and shorten the punishment. It was a cycle he was resigned to, even if he sometimes found himself wondering how much it would hurt to escape it.

Impa put her hands on his shoulders. “I will figure something out,” she vowed. “It might not be precisely what you want, but I promise to at least improve your current circumstances to the best of my abilities without causing a political upset.”

Zelda believed her without question. Impa had never done anything less than her best for him, even if his wants and needs often confused her. She wasn’t his mother, and had never claimed to be, but she was his dearest Auntie. He sniffled and nodded. “Okay. I trust you.”

She gravely returned his nod. “It’s a promise.”

A week after her aunt had made that promise, Zelda was called back down to the same meeting spot through the secret Gossip Stone her parents didn’t know about. Zelda looked around for any passing servants, then unlocked the small wooden door she stood in front of with a key her aunt had given her and stepped into the network of hidden Sheikah quarters built between the main rooms of the castle. They weren’t used much in peacetime, and it had been almost a decade since the last time the royal family had been under any kind of threat. Thank goodness for complacency.

Of course, it also helped that Impa intentionally stationed guards elsewhere whenever Zelda needed to have herself a “moment”, as her aunt would put it. She crept along the dimly lit corridor, keeping her head on a swivel and listening for footsteps. Her eyes were made useless in the dark by the Light-oriented nature of her royal magic, and her ears not quite as sharp as those of a full-blooded Sheikah. While being half-Hylian was what made her the first-in-line for Hyrule’s throne instead of a protector of it like her mother, being in places like this always made her feel a bit inadequate.

She came across another door and quietly let herself in. It was an old war room that had become something of a storage closet over the years. It was just one of the various forgotten rooms she was allowed to be a prince in.

Impa stood by the worn meeting table within, a wooden chest sitting on the bench next to her. Zelda eyed it curiously as she entered.

“How long have you been standing there waiting for me?” she asked. “You’re allowed to sit, you know.”

“There is value in being able to stand for hours,” her aunt said crisply. “It’s a ‘Sheikah thing’. Perhaps you might come to understand that yourself one day.” She gestured toward the chest.

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to sound enigmatic or just being weird,” Zelda said, trotting over. Was it a new princely outfit? Her favorite breeches were starting to get a little small.

“I see no reason why those adjectives must be mutually exclusive.”

Zelda rolled her eyes—yes, Impa was definitely both mysterious and weird—and swung one leg over the bench. She ignored her aunt’s faintly scandalized expression as she scooted up to the chest. Being expected to never separate one’s legs was easily one of the stupidest rules of wearing skirts. Why have all those pleats and roomy hemlines, then?

She opened the chest and frowned at what lay within, puzzled. Zelda’s princess clothes were all pink due to dumb old rules her parents followed and enforced to the letter. Her prince clothes were mostly in shades of violet to lavender because purple was Zelda’s favorite color. The clothes in this chest were blue. Not only that, but the garment laying on top had a red Sheikah eye symbol on the front. Zelda looked up questioningly at her aunt.

“Sheikah clothes?” She’d never owned any of those before. While she’d been able to convince Queen Ambi to let her wear less lace and things that required fewer layers of underskirts, Zelda’s feminine outfits were still very Hylian (and occasionally Labryn). The same went for her masculine clothes, which consisted of the same kinds of trousers, breeches, doublets, and tunics her father had worn at her age.

“I took inspiration from a paternal ancestor of yours,” Impa said. “Do you know of the princess who owned the Ocarina of Time before bequeathing it to the Hero of Time?”

Zelda thought back to her history lessons. That ancestor of hers had been the last ruler before the fall of the Old Kingdom. She had survived the great cataclysm that had led to the formation of the Great Sea and spent the rest of her life struggling to preserve what she could of her massacred civilization. After her period of rule, the royal blood of Hyrule had been concealed among the general populace for centuries before the Pirate Queen had established the New Kingdom. That was as much as Zelda knew of the Last Queen; a lot of her family history from before the Great Flood was either patchy or entirely lost.

“I know of her, but not why she’d have anything to do with Sheikah clothes,” Zelda said.

Impa pushed aside a set of shoes made of pale cloth and straw within the chest and picked up three thick, leather-bound journals. “These were passed down among your maternal ancestors,” she said, laying the books down on the table. “For a very long time, your mother’s side of the family has watched your father’s. We’ve often served as confidants for our assigned royals. Your father simply pushed that relationship a tad farther with my sister,” she explained. “I can’t complain with the results, though.” She gave Zelda a wink.

Zelda blushed. “Auntie!”

“People fall in love, dear niece, and oftentimes not in the ways one would expect.” Impa said with good humor. “But as I was saying, these protectors were often confidants, tasked with keeping their ruler’s secrets. Many of those were political, but some were of a personal nature.” She gestured to the journals. “I grew up hearing the virtues and faults of the family I would be tasked with the protection of one day. The language used in such lessons was very formal and distanced—rather mythical, one could say. It made it difficult to think of those past royals as living, breathing people. I was blinded to the real-world truth of those stories by the high pedestal they were placed upon. It took seeing the depths of your distress for me to realize what I heard in those lessons might hold more relevance to the present day than I assumed.” She opened one of the journals to show the careful, but still childish writing within. It was in a different alphabet, but it resembled Zelda’s own at her current age.

“These are the magically preserved journals of the Last Queen, the child and later young woman who assisted the Hero of Time in his quest and went on to lead the evacuation to the mountains before the Great Flood,” Impa said. “Did you know she took the guise of a Sheikah warrior to assist the champion of her era? A male warrior?”

Zelda pounced on the nearest journal and flipped through it. “She what?!”

“My teachers spoke of this as if it were nothing more than a particularly self-sacrificing act of subterfuge to fool the King of Evil into thinking the sacred maiden who could oppose him was still in exile. These journals say differently, however.”

Zelda hungrily scanned the pages of the journal she held. The Last Queen was long gone; she or he was beyond worrying about another Zelda reading these personal thoughts thousands of years down the line.

There—Zelda wasn’t fluent in Old Hylian yet, but she could make out a few sentences that sounded very much like her own thoughts a few days ago. About feeling trapped, made to exist as only part of what she was. This particular journal entry was about her ancestor wishing he could learn to wield a sword, much like Zelda always had. His father had been able to serve as a knight, after all; why couldn’t he? It couldn’t be because he was an only child and sole heir, because his father had been the same and he’d been allowed to fight regardless. It must have been because of the social expectations that snared him like clinging lines of spider-silk and dragged down his every action. Like everything else, the circumstances of his birth had cut clear lines concerning what he could and couldn’t be.

Zelda’s throat went tight. These thoughts were the same. She and the Last Queen were the same. Someone else had known what this felt like!

“As a man, he went by the name ‘Sheik’,” Impa said, her voice soft. “No one recognized him as their Queen until he made the decision to abandon that secrecy at some point in time after the destruction of his kingdom. For years, he was able to fulfill both his duties as the leader of the realm and exist freely under the noses of the citizenry.”

Zelda wiped her eyes and clutched the journal to her chest, for it was a precious thing. “So you think I could do what my ancestor did? Be two people and still do what I’m meant to?” Because Zelda was by no means a slacker when it came to her dedication to her role as the next monarch of the kingdom. She wanted to be the best ruler she could, to bring prosperity to the population and honor the goddess Hylia who brought her blessings wherever her people went. It was the other expectations accompanying the role that brought her anguish—the never-ending list of social taboos that princesses were never allowed to violate, even if they were harmless things that would bring them joy.

“It will be a delicate balancing act, and one that will require rigorous training on your part. The process will not be easy, nor will it be fun; your ancestor’s complaints about my namesake’s strictness will attest to that.” She met Zelda’s teary, hopeful gaze with a level stare. “But yes, I believe you’re capable of being both a Sheikah who may speak his mind and a queen who may put those words into law…eventually.”

Zelda let out a weak laugh at the tacked-on addition. Impa could always be depended on to be brutally realistic no matter the circumstances. “What kind of training would it be?” she asked with excitement. “Acting?”

A small, silly part of her really hoped it would be Sheikah warrior training. As much as she wanted to be a knight, she was well aware at this point that it was a pie-in-the-sky dream. Her parents would never, ever allow such a severe breach in tradition, no matter how much she kicked and screamed. She knew that because she’d done quite a lot of kicking and screaming when calm words hadn’t worked, and it had only resulted in her being locked in her tower until she became “reasonable” (i.e. depressed and defeated) again. Sheikah training, though? Many non-Sheikah thought the Shadow People’s specialties stopped at blending into shadows and sneaking into places, and that sort of thing would be far more palatable to her parents than knight training. Her own father didn’t know much about what the Royal Guard did, other than achieve what he asked Impa to have them do. He didn’t ask about their methods; royals rarely did, and those who thought to do so often regretted it.

“I made a request to your father, and he has granted me permission to teach you certain skills that would aid in your survival should the castle face a future attack,” Impa said. “Your birth mother’s name may or may not have been brought up.”

Zelda’s mouth fell open at her aunt’s confessed audacity. Her birth mother had died as honorably as a protector of the royal family could, in the act of saving her king from an attempt on his life. When Zelda had been a year old, the castle had been breached by an army of monsters and the evacuation effort had gone terribly. Everyone had been caught off guard by the first attack on the castle in forty years, and even the Sheikah on duty at the time hadn’t known the procedures by heart. Michi had fallen to her wounds while holding back a wave of monsters intent on killing the newly crowned young king and the unofficial heir he’d been hiding from the public until his arranged marriage to Duchess Ambi was finalized. Zelda’s father had never gotten over the violent death of his first love, which was why he never let his daughter go anywhere unguarded and only allowed her out of the castle on certain high holidays with a full retinue in tow. Michi’s name was a powerful tool where he was concerned, and not one to be used lightly.

She leaned forward. “What kind of survival skills?” Because whatever Impa must have used her birth mother’s name for, it must have been good.

“As far as the King knows, you will be learning how to conceal yourself from attackers, find escape routes, and defend yourself when absolutely necessary,” Impa said. “These lessons will be conducted in private and are not to be spoken of, so as not to make it known to the castle staff that the princess is learning something inappropriate for one of her station. Your mother insisted on such a caveat.”

“Of course,” Zelda scoffed. Queen Ambi’s adherence to Hylian traditions was admirable for a born-and-raised Labrynnan. Granted, the woman’s home country was much more uptight than Hyrule, so perhaps Zelda should be grateful that Ambi had adapted somewhat. At least her adoptive mother didn’t expect her to wear a boned bodice and giant, swinging hoops all the time.

“What other things will I be learning, though?” she asked eagerly. “Will I get to use weapons?” Sheikah weaponry admittedly played to her strengths more than the heavy emphasis on swordplay in Hylian combat styles. Even untrained as she was, the princess could make herself a force to be reckoned with if she got her hands on a sharp projectile.

Impa raised an eyebrow. “There will be many steps to this process, child, and combat is far from the first.”

Zelda let out a happy squeal. She hadn’t gotten a flat “no”, and that was good enough for her!

“Is the focus here not on you becoming closer to who you truly are?” her aunt remarked. “One would think you were more enthused by the potential for violence than anything else.”

“Violence is part of who I am, Auntie,” Zelda said sweetly, batting her eyelashes.

Impa let out a rare laugh at that. “True, you’ve certainly inherited Michi’s fierceness,” she quirked her lips slyly, “as well as her stature, I believe.”

Zelda pouted. “I’ll be as tall as Father one day, and you’ll owe me a whole box of mochi when I am! You’ll see!”

Her aunt only gave her one of her secretive smiles, the stern woman’s equivalent of a teasing grin. “I suppose we will, won’t we?”

Chapter Text

As he waited for the footsteps below him to fade, the ten-year-old perched on Hyrule Castle’s blue roof tiles closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and reviewed the parameters of his secret mission.

Today, Zelda was Avoka of Hateno, an orphan who had been taken in by Commander Impa as a ward of the state. Avoka had grown up among Hylian commoners in Hateno City, and so he spoke and moved like one. For Zelda to allow himself to lapse into his royal mannerisms was to risk everything, and possibly revoke any future chances like this for good. He had to be as firmly immersed in his Sheikah persona as his year of training would allow him to be. If he was going to severely displease his aunt, he would at least do so in a way that would also impress her.

Once the garden patrollers had walked around a hedge, Avoka clambered over the edge of the roof and scaled down the wall using crevices between the stone blocks and the grip-enhancing magic of his Sheikah climbing gloves. Like his current outfit, he’d “borrowed” them from the Royal Guard trainees his aunt was on the fence about letting him join one day. She might not ever let him join now, after this stunt, but Zelda—Avoka needed to do this. He’d go mad if he were trapped in the castle for another day, getting beaten over the head with all the things he couldn’t do.

Even Impa, well-meaning as she was, had been grating on his nerves like Queen Ambi lately. Being a convincing Sheikah boy took just as many corrections and lectures about his natural behavior as being a convincing princess did. His presence was always too big when he entered a room—too attention-grabbing for someone who was supposed to have inherent shadow magic. He had a habit of walking with short, quick steps, accustomed as he was to dealing with skirts that might trip him and royal mules that didn’t allow one to flex their foot. His Hylian dialect was too prim for a young Sheikah, let alone one of Avoka’s common background, his careful movements spoke of one accustomed to fine and easily-stained fabrics, and his posture was the wrong kind of stiff.

Clothes had become an issue with Impa, too, since she’d started training Avoka to divide himself into strictly separate personae. If he wanted to wear his purple prince clothes, he still had to do so well out of sight. He could wear Sheikah clothes in front of other people if he had red contacts in, covered his hair like he did as a princess, kept his mask up, and had his aunt hovering at his shoulder at all times, but only if he stayed within strict Sheikah colors and styles. No purple, no doublets, and no Hylian boots allowed. As his aunt had promised, his circumstances were better than before, but they weren’t necessarily what he would have wanted.

‘It’s better than thinking about throwing myself down the stairs, though,’ he thought with a shudder as he darted between hedges. He didn’t miss those nightmarish, unasked-for thoughts gnawing at the back of his mind.

After dodging the guards stationed right outside the castle, and reaching the main path down the mountain his home was built into, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was really just the people up at the castle he was worried about being caught by; they would know that he wasn’t a normal trainee and that he was supposed to be accompanied by the commander of the castle’s complement of Royal Guardsmen. They didn’t know why someone so important would take someone like Avoka No-Last-Name under her wing, but they were aware of that state of affairs. The patrolmen down the road, though, would have no reason to know such a thing. Avoka would only need to be careful not to run into any higher-ranked Sheikah who kept better tabs on what their commander got up to in her free time. If anyone decided to call his aunt and interrupt her meeting, Avoka was screwed. Impa would drop everything to snatch him up. As far as she was concerned, he was far from ready to be in public at his current level of acting skill.

Avoka nervously tucked his hands in his sleeves as he walked down the road and did his best not to look suspicious. The feeling of the sheaths on his arms reassured him. Not that being caught with weapons someone his age wasn’t supposed to have would make him appear less suspicious, but he liked knowing he would have something to throw if worse came to worst. While he wasn’t yet an expert marksman with his kunai, nor a master at the art of hidden weaponry, he could defend himself pretty well if he had to.

His knees shook as he entered the first guardhouse on the way down. Though he would have liked to go around, the only alternative was swimming, which his aunt hadn’t taught him how to do yet.

“A-Avoka of Hateno, f-future Royal Guard trainee,” he stammered, mentally kicking himself. He sounded too nervous for someone who was supposed to be here! “I was hoping to r-run some, uh, errands i-in Castle Town?”

The intimidating Sheikah guard he was speaking to quirked a gray eyebrow. “Are you stating or asking, boy?”

Avoka clenched his hands into fists at his sides and took a steadying breath. “Stating, sir.”

“Well, then, be on your way.” A glint of amusement shone in his dark crimson eyes. “I give you about two hours before the Commander catches on. Good luck.”

A lightning bolt of panic went through Avoka. Suddenly he recognized this man as a captain, and one he recalled seeing around the castle once or twice. He definitely knew that Avoka was sneaking out!

“Th-Thank you for the warning, sir!” Avoka squeaked before fleeing from the gatehouse.

His trip through the second gatehouse farther down the road was easier on his nerves, thankfully. It was staffed by mostly Hylians today, and he just looked like a normal Sheikah cadet in civilian clothes to them. His high-pitched voice had garnered a few doting looks that rankled him (he was not cute, dammit), but none of them had asked too many questions.

Avoka walked out the grand open gates that marked his passage from the tiny world he’d grown up, his heart hammering. He was free! For the first time, he was outside the castle with no one watching!

In his excitement, the passive grip he maintained on his magic slipped and sparks of light leapt from his fingers. He shoved his hands into his sleeves and mentally clamped down on his powers until they retreated to a whisper at the back of his mind. His magic was the exact opposite of the kind of talent a Sheikah mage would wind up with, and in fact was one of the reasons his aunt was reluctant to let him join the Royal Guard trainees when he turned eleven. While it had been long enough since the last time Zelda had demonstrated his abilities that few people outside the Hylian royal family would recognize them, the flashy power was a clear sign that Avoka had no affinity for the shadow magic that Sheikah were known for.

He ran down the road, dodging the commoners walking up to attend open court. The loud sound of his wooden geta on the stone brought a grin to his face. Without his mother or aunt watching, he could be as loud as he wanted! He happily clacked his way across the lowered drawbridge standing between him and Castle Town and then stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of the world.

While Avoka had seen the city before, it had been from within a cloud of hovering guards and servants during times when everything had been draped in obscuring decorations and banners. Today it lay in front of him in its natural state, with no expectations to see him. Avoka was eager to see how these people lived when they didn’t have to put on a show for the royal family.

As he walked toward the crowd of people milling around the open-air shops in front of him, Avoka had a sudden realization that brought him to a sudden halt. For all his training in how to play his current character, his aunt hadn’t shown him how to actually blend in. He’d never dealt with a crowd situation before.

Mentally floundering, he decided to employ what training he did have and went with the flow of what those around him were doing. There were people absently scanning displays of wares as they walked along? Avoka did that, too. There were others standing around fiddling with a Sheikah Slate or checking a shopping list? Avoka took a notebook out of his pocket and started writing down crowd-watching observations to look busy. Above all else, he had to appear as though he belonged here. It ran counter to his royal upbringing, in which his mother had encouraged him to look quietly in command whether he had anything to say or not. Right now, the goal was not to emanate importance, but to seem utterly unremarkable.

‘I wore the wrong shoes for this,’ he lamented, taking note of all the straw sandals and boots around him. Geta clogs were somewhat out of style, he knew, but he hadn’t realized how much so. They made him feel tall, though, and he liked their loud click-clack. He would have preferred them to be close-toed, though. The skin around where the straps rubbed against his feet had been complaining since he’d reached the bottom of Castle Mount.

He distracted himself from the annoying pain in his feet by perusing the marketplace. There were all kinds of things here, many of which would have been forbidden contraband if he were here in his other clothes. Adventuring seemed to be a popular sport, despite the many dangers it must have held. He saw all kinds of gear for sale, from shields to magic accessories to weaponry of all shapes and sizes.

Avoka stopped in front of a beautiful display of swords, his wallet hanging heavy in his pocket. He had enough money to buy the most expensive one of the lot—a gorgeous flamberge whose shining blade rippled like water—but he wouldn’t be able to bring it home. It was too large to hide on his admittedly small person, and the only Bag of Holding he had was limited to carrying Rupees. His parents and aunt all agreed that he couldn’t be trusted with the power of a personal pocket dimension.

Sighing, he turned away from the tempting swords and went over to the Potions Shop instead. He liked potions, and had in fact been learning how to apply his magic to them in order to shape their effects. Enchanting on its own was terribly dull to him; he couldn’t imagine spending hours upon hours in musical prayer, only to miss a single note and be forced to start over or abandon the effort. Potions were similarly uninteresting when not customized to his personal standards; sure, a Red Potion was always useful, but the effects of most elixirs were so simple and uninteresting without magical editing! Avoka was hoping to one day craft a drinkable illusion so he’d no longer have to disguise himself constantly, or maybe even create something that would allow him to shift his appearance to match his needs. He’d already come up with a potion that could turn books into frogs for an hour, so it was possible!

“Looking for anything in particular, dearie?” asked Syrup, the old lady running the potion shop. She wore odd black clothes that were neither Hylian, nor Sheikah, but still seemed familiar from Avoka’s culture lessons. Perhaps she was from Holodrum?

Avoka blinked, realizing he’d been staring. “Um.” He looked down at the spread in front of him. Now that he thought about it, he had brought a flask with him. It was for water, because he hadn’t been sure how long he’d be out, but perhaps a potion would be a better use for it. His aunt and parents had warned him many a time that the outside world was a dangerous place. While Avoka was happy to explore, he knew that he’d have to leave Main Street sometime if he wanted to see what Castle Town was really like. “A Red Potion, please. I have a container—hold on…” He took the flask out of his sleeve, chugged the water in it, and then pulled out his wallet to pay.

Syrup took the flask and looked it over with curiosity. “What an unusual container for a little boy to be carrying around,” she remarked before funneling a serving of potion into it.

Avoka fidgeted nervously after setting a red Rupee on the counter. “Unusual? What do you mean? It’s just a water canteen.”

She cackled. “Oh, is it?” She corked the container and handed it back. “Well then, here you are, Young Master.”

An unnerved shiver went through Avoka. What did this lady know that he didn’t? How had she guessed he was rich? Did she somehow sense that he was only a pretend Sheikah, too? “Th-Thanks.” He took his flask back and booked it out of there.

As he came to be more aware of his current moment of freedom growing ever shorter, Avoka’s curiosity about the dark spaces between buildings grew. There weren’t any of those up on Castle Mount. Everything was either spaced apart or continuous, so as to give potential marauders as few hiding places as possible. While the interior of the castle had its fair share of dark corners, those had lost their mystique long ago as he’d begun using them to assist in his various little heists. What went on in these dark corners? Could he hide from his aunt in there?

He poked his head into the narrow slot between a public bathhouse and an apothecary. Hmm, nothing of interest here, just one side of stone and one side of bricks. There weren’t even any pots to hide behind. He trotted down to the next alley. Oh, there were some nice big pots in this one! With his narrow frame, he could maybe even climb into one to hide.

When he was a few feet away from the possible hiding spot, Avoka suddenly noticed he was being watched. Teary bluish eyes peered up at him, round with fright.

Avoka froze, his mind scrambling to find the normal, non-royal reaction one would have to finding a kid his age already hiding among the pots he’d wanted to climb into.

The person he’d stumbled across was an odd one, as one might expect in the middle of a dark alley. They wore a confusing combination of sleeveless ox-themed tunic and ribbon-decorated skirt, both in shades of green. The cute silver owl hairclip struggling to contain some of the kid’s wild green-blond hair said “maybe girl”, but the defined muscle in the kid’s limbs and very masculine ox tunic said “probably boy”.

The boy let out a peep of fright upon seeing Avoka and pulled tight into his hiding place. He hugged his knees to his chest, sobbing quietly.

Avoka was at a loss. He’d never met anyone his age, let alone learned how to deal with someone else’s tears. He barely knew how to handle his own! Why was this kid crying, anyway?

He took in the boy’s disheveled appearance. The skirt was brand new under the dirt, with all the crispness of freshly starched and ironed fabric. Avoka’s mother had spent a lot of time tutoring him in the art of fashion and the surprising amount of observation that it involved. He could tell those tears weren’t from repeated wear, and those blotches of dirt were footprints, not normal stains. His Sheikah training kicked in when he noticed the bruises subtly darkening on the boy’s arms. Defensive injuries, going by the concentration of dark spots forming on the fronts of his forearms.

Was this kid a little bit like Avoka? Born with a mental sex that made it difficult for him to buckle down and live as one kind of person all the time? Impa had told him that one reason he had to be very careful about his identities was because some people in the world were cruel, and attacked what confused them before they asked questions. Avoka was lucky his mother only grounded him and checked his closet when he was caught in unapproved clothing.

He moved forward, causing the stranger to flinch. Avoka stopped trying to approach and instead reached out with his voice. “Are you okay? Do you need help?” he asked with concern.

The boy looked up, seeming terrified. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Had he been scared speechless?

Avoka was tempted to pull down his mask to show this poor kid he wasn’t scary like some of the Royal Guard trainees were. He’d never intimidated anyone before—not without a whole lot of screaming and throwing things, anyway. He didn’t know how his aunt dealt with this.

Wait, mochi. Auntie kept Sheikah candies on her to calm down little kids if she accidentally made them cry, since she frequently oversaw fresh Royal Guard trainees and looked over young prospects.

“Let’s see…” He felt around for his candy stash. While he wasn’t all that fond of sweets, candy was one of the few snacks that wasn’t gross or difficult to eat when he had a mask on. He took out a plain-flavored honey sweet from his snack pouch and a handkerchief from one of the extra pockets he’d stitched to the inside of his haori. Holding them out like an offering to a frightened animal, he said, “Here. For your nose. And, um, because it looks like you’ve had a bad day.”

Much like the frightened animal Avoka had just silently compared him to, the boy reached out, paused as if to test Avoka’s reaction, and then claimed the offered things. Avoka observed as the kid savored the candy and cleaned himself up. Under the dirt that had smeared his face, he was quite…cute. People thought Avoka was cute, but that was just because of his size and voice. This kid was actually adorable. He had sweet blue-green eyes with downturned corners that made him look a little sad, a wide mouth that looked designed for smiles, and a big, interesting nose. His shaggy green-blond hair formed cool, sweeping spikes around his head. Avoka’s long, silky hair couldn’t manage something like that unless he put a lot of styling wax in it.

The boy uncurled a little, seeming less terrified of Avoka than before. “Is my birthday,” he said in a quiet, deep voice. He sounded around twelve or thirteen. “Birthday candy. I was going to buy some.”

Avoka’s heart broke for this kind-eyed, soft-spoken stranger. “Your birthday? And someone beat you up like this?” He didn’t even know this kid’s name, but he immediately wanted to kick those other guys’ asses. No one deserved to spend their birthday crying, scared, and alone in a dark alley.

The boy blinked at him. In surprise, maybe? Avoka realized that, for all its cuteness, this kid’s face was oddly unreadable. Though still blotchy from crying, his features had smoothed out almost like a mask.

Avoka was going to treat that reaction like a silent question and see what happened. “You wouldn’t have boot-prints and rips in a new skirt unless either you really hated it or someone else did. That’s a back-stitched hem; you’d have to work hard to tear it.” He indicated the overlapping stitches meant to hold the fabric together at all costs. In fact, the fabric had torn away from the stitches in some spots instead of the hemline seam popping, it was that secure. “You’re a boy, right?” he prompted, pausing to give the kid time to correct his guess. “Did someone attack you for wearing a skirt?”

Realization flashed across the boy’s flat expression like a spark in a dark room. “Oh!” He dropped his fist into his hand with something close to a smile on his face.

Avoka blinked at him. He wasn’t the best judge of others’ weirdness, but he got the sense that this kid was a little odd. A couple of minutes ago, he’d been seemingly scared out of his mind, and now he was already over it? Didn’t he feel those bruises? And what was with that “oh”? Had he just…had he been sitting here confused? Had Avoka actually solved some kind of mystery for him?

“You didn’t understand why this happened?” Avoka asked, stunned. The boy gave a little nod in reply. “Did you really think you’d done something random to make them angry at you?”

Avoka was reeling. This deep-voiced, muscular, flat-chested kid had gone out in a skirt and hadn’t expected anything to happen? It was an utterly foreign way of thinking to Avoka. At the back of his mind lurked a constant, painful awareness of how others perceived him. His publicly displayed speech, mannerisms, and manner of dress were all calculated to cause the least amount of commotion possible. Even now, out in the open while dressed as the imaginary boy he was playing instead of himself, he had his disguise in place and had been modulating his accent to keep it authentically common. As much as he’d railed against his aunt about it, he couldn’t actually imagine himself stepping out into public dressed in his princely clothes. The mountain of scandal being known as the first Crossed ruler in the entire existence of the New Kingdom would cause—not to mention the amount of questioning about his mental health!

“Thought I’d lied with ‘hi’. They said I was lying,” the boy said, oblivious to the wrench he’d tossed into Avoka’s mental gears. “But it was the clothes! Now I get it.” He hummed happily.

‘I think I’ve found the one person stranger than me,’ Avoka thought in disbelief. This boy was so…so…He couldn’t come up with an adjective. “Pure” didn’t capture the correct feeling, but it was close. The kid genuinely hadn’t known why he’d been attacked, and instead of blaming his attackers, he’d tried finding fault within himself. And he didn’t seem even the slightest bit angry about the wrong he’d been dealt! Avoka had a fair amount of patience for the adults in his life doing things that frustrated him, but he became a wrathful hellion if pushed to it and he could nurse a grudge unto eternity. He would have been planning his revenge as soon as he’d escaped his attackers.

For this stranger to miss something so obvious to Avoka, and probably most people, was definitely odd, but also kind of endearing. It seemed like the boy couldn’t fathom people being cruel for such a shallow reason, and he’d done his best to work his interpretation of the situation around that.

“You’re not very good at understanding other people, are you?” Avoka said, trusting that the other boy wouldn’t take his observation as an insult. Given his simple, slow, and somewhat stilted speech, this kid seemed like a very plain-words sort of person. Avoka liked people who didn’t read double-meanings into things; they were rare in his usual social circle.

The kid gave a crooked-toothed smile that lit up his face like the sun. “Body-language yes, words and reasons no,” he chirped. He paused, tilting his head to one side. “Why were you back here? Are you hiding, too?”

That hit a little too close to home. Avoka fiddled nervously with his mask. Impa was due to appear at any moment; that meeting of hers had definitely ended by now. “…Kind of.”

“From those boys I made mad?” the kid innocently asked.

Anger flared in Avoka’s heart on this boy’s behalf. Maybe he was too nice to understand what had happened, but Avoka knew all too well. “You didn’t do anything to deserve that. Don’t think you did,” he said firmly. He used the same tone that his Auntie did when she noticed him spiraling into thoughts of inadequacy. “Those people are assholes who don’t matter.” He relished the opportunity to swear with no one around to chide him.

Link gasped the same way Queen Ambi did when she caught him saying something off-color, but instead of admonishing Avoka for his language, he asked with a hushed sort of awe, “Is it okay to say that?”

Avoka grinned. For the ten or so minutes he had left before his aunt gave him the lecture of the century, yes. “I can say whatever I want until I get caught,” he told the boy. He was tempted to say more—maybe teach this too-nice kid that it was okay to break some rules so long as no one caught him doing it. Being forbidden from saying “fuck” because of one’s age was stupid, just like having to let strangers kiss the back of his hand at parties.

Speaking of greetings…He held out his hand for the stranger to shake. How could he have forgotten his formalities? “I’m Avoka, by the way.”

“I’m Link,” the boy said, accepting the handshake. He had a powerful, rugged grip. ‘Where does such a nice kid get rough hands like that?’ Avoka wondered, mystified. Schooling shifted into apprenticeships starting at age eleven for everyone but royalty. Maybe this kid really was thirteen and just kind of baby-faced.

Avoka glanced up at the darkening sky. “I can walk you home,” he offered. The guys who’d beaten Link up could still be prowling around, after all. “Do you live in town?”

“No, outside,” Link said. “Don’t worry. I know the way.”

That brought a wry smile to Avoka’s lips. This kid really was innocent, wasn’t he? “I’m not worried about you getting lost,” he said, pulling the boy to his feet. Link winced as he did, seeming to finally notice the bruises decorating him. It had taken long enough. “Do you need a healing potion?” Avoka asked after giving the kid’s darkening forearms another look. He’d taken an impressive number of hits. Probably from multiple attackers. Reaching into his sleeve, Avoka unlatched his flask and pulled it out. Good thing he’d just switched out the water in there for something more useful.

Link stared at the flask with wide eyes. It took several seconds for Avoka to realize why. Booze was usually kept in hidden bottles like these, not potions or water. Impa had a collection of similar, confiscated containers she’d taken from Sheikah agents and Hylian soldiers who dared drink on the job.

“It’s not alcohol,” he said quickly, his cheeks flaming. Thank goodness for his mask and the alley’s darkness hiding it. “Normal glass bottles are bulky, is all. Metal doesn’t shatter, either.” He had tried it once, carrying little glass bottles on his person, but the realization that one bad fall could result in him winding up full of glass shards had quickly ended that experiment.

“I’m a blacksmith…almost,” the boy explained. Oh, so that was where the muscles and rough hands had come from! He must have been well into his apprenticeship already. “I know metals. You’re rich.” With that declaration, he downed the potion in the flask without questioning or complaint, then handed the flask back.

Avoka stared, dumbfounded, at the bottle. It was just…metal. Steel, probably. Most metal was steel, in his experience. He held up the flask and turned it around, as if it would give up the secret of how Syrup and Link knew he wasn’t common. “Is this expensive?” he wondered aloud. A blacksmith would know better than him. Such workers were a very distant reality to someone of his social position; he’d kind of forgotten that every bit of metal in the castle had to have been shaped by an actual human being.

Though Link’s face stayed mostly blank, amusement sparkled in his eyes as he raised an eyebrow. “You’re really rich,” the boy commented.

Though the tone was emotionally flat and without judgment, Avoka cringed. He shoved the incriminating flask back up his sleeve and clicked it onto a cuff on his forearm. How much about him was obvious to the eye of someone outside his tiny social group? As far as he knew, he’d been able to seem fairly convincing as an average citizen in front of people at the castle, but he’d never really spoken to anyone who wasn’t socially higher-up in some way. He didn’t even have much contact with the castle’s servant population because his parents didn’t approve of him distracting them with idle conversation. Servants were paid well to do their jobs efficiently and unobtrusively, and it only caused them trouble to disrupt their work.

How was he supposed to rule Hyrule if he didn’t know Hyrule? Even his father had spent some time as a knight, getting just as tired and filthy as the other men his age fighting monsters on the battlefield. Avoka only had Impa to talk to, and occasionally the guards who watched the stairs to his tower. What did his parents expect him to do once he was crowned, guess at what people he fundamentally didn’t understand would need in order to prosper?

“There’s a lot I don’t know,” he admitted. “I wish I could get out more. Learn more.” He lived in a castle with one of the biggest libraries in the land, and yet there was so much knowledge he had missed purely by not living through it or being allowed to speak to people who had. “It’s just hard,” he said with sadness and frustration. His life was as easy as could be, and yet making it seem worthwhile felt like climbing uphill through cold honey.

“Because you’re hiding?” Link asked. Despite having no way to know what had passed through Avoka’s mind, it felt like the boy could see through him.

Avoka’s skin crawled at the feeling of being perceived. Enigmatic intelligence shone in those vivid aqua eyes. He looked away from Link’s steady gaze. “…Yeah.”

“Want to hide at my house?”

Avoka’s brain tripped over its own feet before taking off at a Pegasus gallop. “Wh-What?” Of all the responses, he never would have expected that one. Inviting a stranger to one’s house? Was that a thing people did? Strangers walked into Avoka’s house all the time, but that was because the King held open court. It was different from casually saying “hey, wanna come over?” Was that a normal commoner thing to do? It must have been, right?

He was tempted to take Link up on the offer. Avoka desperately needed someone who could show him the ropes of being not-royalty. Impa couldn’t do it; her upbringing was even stranger than his. The guards at his tower wouldn’t do it because Princess Zelda was too important for them to casually speak to and Avoka would have no need to ask such things. His tutors wouldn’t tell him because Princess Zelda’s position put her above such questions and she had more important things to be learning about.

“Would it…would it be okay?” he asked hesitantly. “People can just…walk into others’ homes?” The only mental image that brought up for him was of an invading army battering down the front doors of the castle and pouring in.

“Should knock and ask first,” Link said matter-of-factly. He flung his hand toward the south. “I live that way,” he declared, and started walking.

Avoka jogged to catch up, then hovered at the boy’s shoulder like a real Sheikah guard would. Link led the way through several dark alleys with unerring skill. He easily sidestepped small things on the ground that Avoka just plain couldn’t see. Link’s orange complexion, teal eyes, and green-blonde hair weren’t Sheikah traits, but he navigated the dark like he had the Sheikah sight that Avoka lacked. Could Hylians be born with such a thing instead of their usual ability to better commune with spirits?

Link paused in front of an opening to Main Street. Avoka peered around him curiously to see where they’d ended up. The kid had managed to use the alleys to avoid the thickest part of the market crowd. Clever.

He frowned when he saw the fretful look on Link’s mostly un-animated, but highly expressive face. The point of Avoka being here was to keep him from feeling like he was in danger. “If you see those guys, just tell me and I’ll figure something out,” he promised. It was the same kind of thing his aunt would say to reassure him.

Link turned to give him a puppy-like pout of confusion. “Okay?” He hesitantly stepped out of the darkness.

They walked down Main Street, weaving through the crowd. Though Avoka had freely zig-zagged around earlier that afternoon, he took note of the fact that Link preferred to keep to the edges of the road to give the carriages and self-driving chariots a wide berth. Avoka supposed that was logical; getting run over was dangerous, and one couldn’t always see vehicles creeping through the throngs of shoppers. It had been reckless of him to ignore that potential danger earlier.

Avoka scanned the area closely, both to keep an eye out for Link’s marauders and to make the most of his dwindling freedom. He wanted to keep a solid sketch of what his people looked like when living their lives and not trying to impress him. This could be the last time he’d be in contact with the wider part of his homeland for some time.

A voice cut through the crowd noise. “Hey! It’s the creep! We weren’t done with you!”

Link looked to the left, and Avoka followed his line of sight. Three boys, two of them around thirteen and one closer to Avoka’s age, were kicking away from a wall they’d been chatting around. Scuffing footsteps caught Avoka’s ears, and he did a double-take at seeing Link shooting off like an arrow. That boy was fast!

Well, Avoka was nothing if not determined. He charged up with all the speed he could muster, his feet screaming as the straps of his geta chewed mercilessly into his skin. He caught Link by the wrist, causing the boy to slow down a tad in surprise, and steered him toward the nearest alley. He didn’t know what Link had been intending to do by sprinting toward the side of a random building, but Avoka had a better idea.

“What?” Link cried out in dismay.

“Calm down. I just want fewer witnesses,” Avoka told him as he just barely managed to pull ahead. It was an effort to keep the wheeze out of his voice.

“‘Witnesses’?!”

Avoka winced. Maybe that was more of an Auntie word than a normal one. He tugged on Link’s wrist to make him slow to a stop, then pulled the larger boy behind him. “I don’t like bullies,” he said as he turned to confront the jerks running up behind them. He put a hand to his hidden weapons sheath for comfort. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to use it, but Hylia help him if these assholes did anything more to hurt Link. The nice boy had been through enough today!

The three boys hesitated at the edge of the alley, then smirked and walked farther in. Avoka suppressed a smirk of his own. Idiots. If he were a real Royal Guard trainee, that would have been an incredibly stupid move. You didn’t fight a Sheikah in the dark unless you absolutely had to.

Behind him, Link put his hands over his ears. Avoka grimly braced himself for whatever foulness was about to spew from these jerks’ mouths.

“If you could afford clothes like that, why were you only carrying twenty Rupees, you cheapskate?” the boy in front loudly demanded.

Avoka sucked in a breath through his nose. The nerve of a thief complaining about the wallet he’d stolen! Sure, Avoka had always been a bit of a thief himself, but he’d been thankful for the use of the things he’d taken!

As if to hammer home what an ungrateful little shit he was in Avoka’s eyes, the boy who’d spoken tossed down a dark green leather pouch that matched Link’s outfit and ground his heel into it. Link let out a soft cry of distress and dropped his eyes to the ground.

Avoka’s fingers tightened around one of his knives, and it was only by the grace of Hylia that he managed to keep his magic in check. He hadn’t been this angry in years, and never so much on another person’s behalf. “You’re not going to mess with Link anymore,” he said with all the ominous warning he could muster, taking a step forward. “If you do, you’ll have to mess with me.” Damn his high, girly voice! It served him well as a princess, but not during times like these.

The boys snickered at him. Magic sparked at Avoka’s fingertips. He gritted his teeth as he reined it in. Not yet.

“You know that’s a cross-dressing freak, not a girl, right?” the boy closer to their age said derisively, stabbing a finger at Link.

Link flinched, sending another angry spark through Avoka’s hand. His knives were practically singing to him now.

“I bet we caught him on the way to sneak into the girls’ side of the public bathhouse, or something,” the other lackey said. “You should be thanking us, Mousy!”

The leader of the little gang cracked his knuckles. His teeth showed in what would have been a frightening leer if Avoka weren’t fantasizing about knocking gaps into that grin. “Yeah, how about you hand over your wallet? I bet you’re carrying more than that stingy freak was,” he jeered.

Link recoiled at the word “freak” as if stung, and Avoka lost it. He hissed, only because it was quieter than the roar building up in his chest, and slid a kunai from his sleeve. Spiteful glee drew a dark smile across his face as the boys’ eyes flashed with fear. They ought to be afraid for terrorizing that innocent kid the way they had. Link had done nothing but wear what he liked, and these pricks had made him afraid he’d done something to deserve a beating!

“If you call him a freak again, I’ll make you bleed,” he said with a vicious flash of teeth they couldn’t see behind his mask. “Now give him his money back!”

“We already spent it,” the lead boy said with one last puff of bravado. He pulled a pink-wrapped honey candy from his pocket.

“Aw,” Link sighed. It was the only sign of protest he’d shown through the whole interaction, as if he were afraid to be any more outspoken.

Well, Avoka would speak for him, then.

He let his magic go. It eagerly flowed into his throwing knife, making the metal flare a dramatic white-gold. “Drop it,” he snarled, one more warning than these boys deserved. His eyes darted around for a safe spot to aim the knife in the event these idiots still didn’t take him seriously. Maybe the ground; when he’d been little, people had seemed particularly intimidated by how he could plant kitchen knives firmly in the castle’s walls, which was why he’d stolen them whenever he’d wanted to get someone to finally listen.

“A mage?!” the boys shrilled. Suddenly they’d decided he was a real threat. They divested their pockets of their ill-won goods and sprinted off with shouts of fear. Avoka relished his victory. Maybe Link would actually be able to wear his pretty clothes in peace for a while.

Link looked around, then hurried forward to pack his wallet and candies into his pockets. Avoka returned his knife to its sheath kept watch on the exit to the alley, just in case Link’s fear of those muggers returning turned out to be sound.

Link’s flat, stilted voice drew Avoka’s attention back behind him. “You weren’t really going to throw, were you?” he asked.

“No,” he confessed. “I’m not accurate enough to be non-lethal yet, especially with my magic going.” It took more skill to intentionally maim than it did to accidentally kill. Impa had warned him about fools with swords, and Avoka had more sense than to act like one. “I was bluffing…mostly.”

“It’s bad to threaten with knives,” Link chided. “Could hurt someone.” His tone wasn’t fearful, or even angry, just mildly disapproving. Avoka was both flattered that this kid had enough trust in him not to be scared of a stranger armed with hidden weapons and worried that Link might not have a healthy sense of danger or suspicion. He should have been at least a little unnerved after watching all that; Avoka certainly would have been, in his place.

“Those guys hurt you,” Avoka pointed out. What was implied, but politely unspoken was, “and they deserved to be hurt back”. Avoka hadn’t done any more than scare them because he was useless in a fist fight but too potentially lethal with a knife, and so had been forced to take a higher road. If he’d been as big and strong as Link, though, he would have absolutely beaten those boys into the dirt like they did to other people. They’d earned it.

“Yeah, but…” Link’s face screwed up in adorable confusion. Oh, Avoka dearly wanted to hug him. He couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to put a mark on that sweet face. “Don’t hit back, please. Not for me,” Link said, his gentle voice firm. His eyes shone with iron resolve. “Hurting doesn’t help.”

Avoka gave him a slow blink. Link would have been happy to just…let those boys get away with it? Replace his wallet, never receive any returns from his stolen Rupees, and move on with his life? Avoka couldn’t fathom it. He nursed grudges accurately and in the long term—wrote down wrongs when he was left to seethe in his tower until his parents found him agreeable again. True, he hadn’t yet acted on those wrongs beyond giving those people a chillier attitude, but he never let them go. He’d always envisioned some distant day in the misty future when he’d fairly distribute his wrath to those who’d earned it. Some part of him had never stopped imagining that one day he’d make the people who’d made him feel small, and like only half of himself, learn firsthand what emotional darkness they’d put him through. His mother was still at the top of that list, even if he’d managed to turn most of his anger toward her into quiet resentment instead.

But was it worth it? The time spent hunched over tear-dotted ink, ripping his pen into the parchment as he added to his long list of small hatreds? He didn’t feel any better when he read through the instances of his parents ignoring his wishes, or Impa forcing him into another box that didn’t quite fit, or the compounded weight of all the other little reminders that the world considered him fundamentally wrong in some way. Was there merit in letting some of those things go? It felt like it would be admitting defeat, quietly letting the world roll over him like it always did when he didn’t plant his feet and threaten it with a knife. Faced with this utterly alien worldview, he found his own called into question. He didn’t know what to do about it.

Avoka opened his mouth to ask: “How do you do it? Let things go?” He only got a few words in before a sharp pop and ensuing hiss signaled the end of his freedom.

Smoke filled the alley and a hard, wiry arm snatched him up by the waist. Avoka was thrown over an adult’s shoulder like a sack of radishes and launched skyward by a Hookshot. He just sighed, resigned to his fate.

Impa hauled him across town in silence. Her simmering aura of “just wait until we get back home” was nearly palpable. Ooh, she was pissed.

He looked back the way they’d come, thinking of the too-nice blacksmith with the sunny smile that he’d run into. The one with interesting ideas that he’d like to hear about. His…potential first friend, in all his ten years and five months of life. If he hadn’t snuck out precisely on this day, at this time, he might never have run into that kid who was maybe a little like him.

Avoka felt like all the trouble he was about to be in was worth it.

Chapter Text

Link yawned and adjusted his pack of repaired weaponry. Ugh, morning deliveries were the worst . Morning just wasn’t his time of the day, and he doubted that would ever change no matter how often his sister assigned him this chore. How did anyone function at sunrise without having stayed up through the night to see it?

In his sleepy shuffling, he caught the toe of his back foot on the heel of his front and tripped over himself. He fell smack into a small, narrow back and then staggered off to the side.

“Augh!” A musical tinkle of shattering glass accompanied the surprised, frustrated scream.

He’d run into Maple, a girl who ran potion deliveries for her grandmother Syrup. She was always zipping across town when she wasn’t minding the potion shop, and thus Link stood a decent chance of running into her when he was doing deliveries for his own family’s business. Unfortunately, he had a bad habit of doing that literally when he was too tired to see straight.

“Link!” Maple roared. She took the Magic Rod off her belt and waved it to repair the broken bottles and return them to their carrying basket. Then she leveled it at Link, who went cross-eyed at the globe of quartz a few inches from his nose. “That’s the second time this month! I’ve had to start carrying replacement potions in my purse because of you,” she seethed. “How? Why?”

Link shrugged helplessly. He didn’t know why the worst of his sleepy morning stumbles seemed to target the poor witch. While there were other delivery kids for various industries scurrying around Castle Town in the early morning, he didn’t slam into them nearly as often.

“If you weren’t cursed enough as it is, I’d lay another one on you,” Maple groused, tucking her Magic Rod back into her belt. “Some guy was looking for you earlier. Why don’t you go run into him instead?”

Link frowned in thought. There were very few people in the world who would ever be out looking for him, and they all shared his last name. He gestured questioningly toward the family owl emblem stitched onto his tunic.

“Not unless you’ve got a twiggy Sheikah cousin,” Maple said. “He was about my size and trying to look bigger with some platform sandals and a Royal Guard trainee uniform. Loud, deep, scratchy voice and ultra-long hair ring a bell? He has his mask up, too, so either he thinks he’s way cooler than he is or he’s trying to hide a zit.”

The Sheikah clogs, long hair, and mask sounded right for that boy Link had met a little over a year ago. Avoka had been squeaky, though.

“He’s been puttering around the southern end of Main Street asking after you. I think Rupin’s about to lose it—the kid’s outfit is spooking some of his potential customers.”

Link grimaced. Rupin, who ran one of the adventuring gear shops on the southern end of the Castle Town Bazaar, had little patience for anything that cut even slightly into his profits. He had a particular dislike of Link, who was fascinated by the workmanship of his more expensive shields but had no intention of ever buying one.

“Thank you,” he told Maple before jogging down the road. Around him, latecomers to the market’s morning set-up were rolling out their mats and laying out price boards. Experienced street merchants with well-established shops were set up and smiling at the passers-by starting to trickle in. Beedle was already bickering with someone trying to sell him a Blue Potion that had gone a little green with age, and the Zora ladies who ran the Ring Shop were taking a water break as a heavily-armored adventurer walked away with a dainty, pearl-studded number that he carefully slid onto his pinky. Probably something to improve his swimming speed.

“Now, sir, I’m sure you understand the effect that one of your rank might have on the common working man,” Link heard as he approached Rupin’s Gear Shop. “A uniformed officer, even as young as yourself, is someone to be respected. I’m afraid that such a deferential atmosphere isn’t one I like to cultivate in my humble shop. Customers should be comfortable here!” The tone was at the most sickly-sweet the man could manage, which meant he’d been repeating himself for a while.

A Sheikah boy with lengthy silver hair tied up in twin double-loops that resembled butterfly wings glared up at the irritated shopkeeper. As Maple had said, he wore the dark blue hakama, haori, and collared uniform shirt of one of the Royal Guardsmen who protected Hyrule Castle. His broad leather belt and the lack of an eye sigil on his forehead marked him as a trainee, though his diminutive size was the most obvious sign. He stood with his arms crossed and his chin jutting out defiantly. “You run one of the most well-known landmarks in the Bazaar and Link is known to frequent your shop,” he declared. “If I can’t find him by walking around, I’m just going to stay here until he shows up.” His husky tenor voice was startling to hear. The boy looked like he was about nine, but he sounded a few years older than Link!

Rupin’s eyes bulged in frustrated fury behind his cheerful grimace. “But please, sir, I’m only a humble shopkeeper who lives on his profits, and you’re—” He caught sight of Link and a hint of relief slipped through his expression before the smile was back and somewhat less frightening. “Oh, look, he’s here! Does that mean your mission has been accomplished, young officer?”

The boy looked over. His brown eyes crinkled in a smile mostly hidden behind his dark blue mask. “It does! Oh, and here, for your lost business.” He pulled out a wallet, withdrew a silver Rupee, and picked up Rupin’s hand to lay the money on the stunned man’s palm. “Pretend I bought something,” he said before skipping toward Link.

For his part, Link was quite confused. This boy looked like Avoka, but his eyes were a much lighter and more yellowish shade of gray-brown. His voice wasn’t the mousy flute Link had heard last year, either. Could puberty change voices that much so fast? If Avoka was as old as he looked, he surely couldn’t have hit puberty, right?

As the young Sheikah neared, the sound of his magic hit Link’s ears. Avoka still sounded like both a choir and agitated bees, his power muted by the same sense of unfulfilled purpose and tight restraint as before.

A quieter melody chimed at the Sheikah’s ear, where he wore a cuff of metal, stone, and magical Bluestone crystal. Bluestone was a rock whose name could be deceptive; it was only blue when both charged with magic and actively running a spell with said magic. Most of the time it was an orange color that signaled it being magically charged, but not necessarily enchanted and definitely not active. The Bluestone chips in Avoka’s ear cuff were a telltale turquoise, singing sweetly of deception. It was an illusion spell spun from Sheikah shadow-magic—rare, expensive to commission, and very odd for someone around his age to be toting around. That would explain the slight shift in eye-color, though not why someone so young would need a spell like that.

Avoka slowed to a stop in front of Link, the confidence seeming to bleed out of him. He looked down at his feet, which were clad in taller geta than the last time Link had seen him, and no longer turning pink in protest. “Um, do you remember me?” he asked timidly. “I know I look and sound a little different. For…for reasons. But I’m still me.”

Link nodded. Even if he hadn’t had a good memory for people, how could he forget the boy who’d once threatened bullies with a knife for his sake? It had been the first time another kid had defended him. “You have an illusion on,” he remarked. “Still hiding?”

Avoka’s hand shot to his ear cuff. “H-How did you—?!”

“I can hear magic,” Link told him. “Are you okay? You got kidnapped.”

A pink flush showed above the edge of the boy’s mask. “Oh, that was um…That was my boss, sorry. I wasn’t supposed to be out, and she took me back to…work. She can be a little dramatic sometimes,” he said, fiddling with his sleeve. “What was that about hearing magic, though?”

“I’m a mage,” Link explained. Most people with magic wound up with a singular unique talent like Avoka’s, but Link’s fell somewhere between that and what Maple could do. Having one’s senses and strength boosted lacked the flashy versatility of being able to cast various spells from a Magic Rod, but it made him pretty good at wielding the heavier hammers at the forge and outrunning bullies.

“You’re a mage?” Avoka’s brown eyes misted over slightly in recollection. “But those boys last year…”

“Hurting doesn’t help,” Link declared. Just because he had magic, that didn’t give him an excuse to use it against people he didn’t like. “Do you still knife-threaten people? Because that’s not nice.”

The Sheikah shifted from foot to foot. “This is actually the first time I’ve been out of the cas—out of the house since you last saw me. I went through some stuff.” His eyes flicked away and he put a hand to his throat. “I got better, though. Actually, I was kind of wondering…” Avoka tucked his hands in his sleeves, nervously grinding the front peg of one of his geta against the cobblestones. “Is that offer to visit your house still open? I-I know it’s been a whole year, and you don’t know me at all, and I probably scared you last time we met—sorry about that—but I was just wondering—”

If Avoka started talking any faster, Link would lose track of all those words and any sense of understanding. “Yeah,” he cut in. As Maple had taught him since they’d first met months ago, interrupting people was sometimes okay and didn’t always lead to yelling. She did it all the time! “We can hang out. But I have deliveries first. You can come with.” He hiked up his backpack full of iron and steel.

While enchanted to be more durable than its materials, his backpack wasn’t an internally expanded Bag of Holding. Those were expensive, and besides, part of this chore was about building up his physical strength and the magical reserves that boosted it. Instead of a lightweight little satchel, he was toting about forty unconcealed pounds of repaired, paper-wrapped weaponry and tools to be returned to various soldiers and workers around Castle Town. There was also ten pounds’ worth of protective iron mesh and padding stitched to the inside of his pack just in case. It was a comfortable training weight for him to carry for a couple of hours—neither light enough for him to ignore, nor heavy enough to put him at risk of injury.

Avoka did a double-take at his pack, as if just now noticing it. “You can lift that?” he asked incredulously.

“Mage,” Link reminded him. He took his flipbook of customers out of his pocket and checked the names on the list. Next was Bashter, a Goron who lived on the west side of town and was a hot commodity among the local Hylian construction crews. His hammer probably made up half of the weight in Link’s backpack. “This way,” he told Avoka, pointing, before setting off at a swift walk.

Avoka jogged to keep up. “You mentioned last year that you were apprenticing as a blacksmith,” he said. “Do you do all the deliveries for your smithy?”

“I do,” Link said. “Not an apprentice yet, though. Just home-schooled.”

The Sheikah looked him up and down. “Wait, how old are you?”

“Ten. Eleven in two months.” Link’s somewhat Gerudo build and relatively deep voice tended to make people think he was a couple of years older.

Avoka gasped. “I’m older than you.”

Link gasped, too. “You are?”

“Yeah, by, uh…” The Sheikah paused to do some mental math. “Five months. I’ve been a Royal Guard trainee since my last birthday, but I started my training earlier.”

“Huh.” He wondered what Royal Guard training entailed. Sneaking, presumably. He didn’t really know what those guys did, other than look scary and stand outside important places.

Link yawned and absently sidestepped some dung left in the wake of a fancy black and white coach. He towed Avoka around it by the wrist when the boy seemed to miss the obstacle. “Watch the road,” he advised. “There’s stuff on it sometimes.”

“Oh,” Avoka said, seeming disturbed by the sight of horse poo on a horse-traveled street. “Does no one clean it?”

Link gave the boy a bemused look. He was making it sound like he’d never been on a street before. A mental image of a big Link duck tucking a smaller Avoka duckling under his wing crossed his mind. It was a terrible combination, someone who could barely explain matched with someone who needed many explanations, but Link seemed to be the only normal-ish kid Avoka knew. Until someone who was better at words came along, he was the only one on the job.

“Street-sweepers do,” he told the Sheikah. “But are lots of roads.”

“Ah, I see.”

They traveled down that street, turned a corner, and started heading north toward the town’s middle ring. Castle Town’s circles of social status were a little more literal than in some cities due to the place being built in a semicircle with concentric arcs. Most laborers lived closer to the wall that kept the monsters out during troubled times, but Bashter was sought-after enough to afford a house farther in.

Avoka buzzed around him, peering up at buildings and studying passing vehicles. He would clip-clop a few steps away to look at something, then scurry back, then trot off in another direction before returning to Link’s side. All the while, the boy didn’t speak but seemed to be vibrating with the urge to do so.

Link smiled amusedly. Some people assumed that because he was “stoic”, they ought to leave him to his silence. They considered it rude to speak first, for whatever reason. He was mainly quiet because he didn’t feel the need to speak unless he had something to say, and he often didn’t speak at all because he had a habit of unintentionally sparking tempers. If given the chance, Link would happily talk the ears off of anyone who asked him to explain something. It was just that conversations quickly turned unpleasant when other people expected him to keep up with their lightning-fast pace, spout long and thoughtless sentences like they did, and react loudly and often to whatever they said, then got mad when he couldn’t.

“It’s okay to talk,” he told Avoka. “Am bad at out-loud words, but I like talking and questions. If you want to talk at me with lots of fast words, that’s okay, too. I just won’t understand you.”

The Sheikah perked up. “Oh, is that why—? Wait, no.” Avoka looked away guiltily.

Link could guess at what he’d meant to ask, familiar with that reaction. “Mmhm, is why I talk funny,” he said. “I think better than I talk.” Thinking to oneself, spinning ideas into writing, and spouting those musings at other people were different processes, and he was only good at the first two. Explaining what went through his head in the form of conversation (spoken or signed) involved running it through a mental translator, getting a sentence lined up, and then pushing the result out into the world. The small amount of lag involved in the process was what caused his halting speech, and having to run the translation backwards when listening was why rapid conversations quickly turned into language soup that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Whenever he needed to get a complex idea across to his sister or coworkers at the smithy, he’d just hand them a document he’d written out with all the information they would need. Writing was such a wonderfully efficient and archival mode of communication. You couldn’t flip the pages of a conversation to review what someone had said, after all.

Avoka didn’t seem to know what to say in response to that. He shuffled his feet awkwardly before resuming his sightseeing, though this time he asked questions.

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to a bench with a yellow-painted sign posted next to it.

“Taxi stop. For convenience.”

“What’s a taxi?”

“Carriage that gets you places. You pay by the block.”

“People don’t have their own carriages?”

“Mostly rich people do. Horses are expensive.”

Avoka put a hand to his chin. “I guess you do have to pay people to muck the stables and feed them and such. Oh, and then the feed costs money, too…”

“Most people can’t pay people,” Link informed him. Hearing an approaching magical hum and the squeak of vehicle suspension, he took the Sheikah by the arm and tugged him out of the way of a chariot coming up from behind them. Those self-propelled vehicles had a bad habit of sneaking up on people who were used to the sound of horse hooves. They were equipped with bells and horns, but drivers rarely used them for the right reasons.

Avoka watched it pass with wide eyes. The three occupants paid him no mind, deep in conversation over something. “They could have killed me!” he exclaimed. “How could they drive so irresponsibly?”

“That’s how traffic works. Smaller one gets out of the way,” Link explained. “They thought you would move.”

“How entitled!”

Link shrugged. He was fine with dodging vehicles, but he supposed not everyone had the patience for it.

“Hmph.” Avoka glared at the distant chariot before finding something else to ask about. “What’s this?”

Link glanced to the side. “Sewer manhole.”

Avoka pranced away from it like a nervous horse. “Oh, right, sewers…Why does that store over there have so many clothes in it?”

“Because they made them already. You buy what fits.”

“What if the measurements aren’t quite right, though? Not everyone is standard in shape.”

“Then they fit funny.”

“And people don’t care?”

“Not really. Silly thing to care about.”

“…Huh.”

Link spied the familiar iron door of Bashter’s townhouse and walked up the front steps with Avoka at his shoulder. He took his backpack off, pulled out the iron hammer that had been making it a little lopsided, and rested the tool on his shoulder. Avoka looked up at the wrapped head with wide eyes.

“How much does that weigh?” he asked in a hushed voice.

Link hefted it a little. “Twenty pounds?”

“Twenty?”

“Isn’t a big Goron hammer.”

Link took up the claw-shaped doorknocker hanging at about eye-level and brought it down in three ringing clangs. Bashter’s door was the only one he didn’t hate using the knocker for; the sound still hurt his ears, but not in a Bad Noise way. Except for its painful loudness, the ring of metal on metal was rather pleasant.

The door opened promptly and Bashter grinned down at him. “Heya, Link! Glad you got my hammer back to me so quick! I’ve got a big job coming up,” he boomed. “Did the weight give you any problem?”

“No, sir.” Link held the tool out, bracing one foot in front of him so he didn’t tip over. Super-strength didn’t excuse him from the effects of holding almost a quarter of his weight at arm’s length.

“Thanks, Brother!” Bashter plucked the hammer from Link’s hands and exchanged it for a yellow Rupee to cover the delivery fee.

“You’re welcome.” Link gave him a short bow, then recollected his pack and set off for the next client.

Avoka kept glancing over his shoulder, his eyes wide. “I didn’t know Gorons were so big!” he said. “Are they all huge like that?”

Link nodded. Bashter was of average height at eight feet tall, and had a medium build for his race. Having been on a few construction sites before, Link had seen Gorons bigger than Bashter. “You’ve never met a Goron?”

“Only Hylians, Labrynnans, Sheikah, and the occasional Gerudo,” Avoka replied. “I’ve only seen a Zora once or twice. Gorons, Ritos, and Zoras don’t really interact with my social circle. Which is a problem, now that I think about it.” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “They belong to sovereign nations within Hylia’s realm, but it seems like they should get more of a voice in the central government…”

Link’s eyebrows went up. Did Avoka’s family share the same social circles as Hyrule’s monarchy? Because that was the only way what he’d just said made sense.

Hmm, a wealthy Sheikah boy with little understanding of the outside world whose parents had something to do with the King and Queen? And he had an apprenticeship as a future castle guard? It seemed like Avoka might have grown up in the castle or one of the fancy neighborhoods closest to it. His parents could have been high-ranking members of the Royal Guard, or super-rich people who rubbed elbows with other rich people at the castle. It probably was worrying that Avoka didn’t often see members of non-human races, then; it wouldn’t do for Hyrule’s royal family to discriminate against the peoples they shared Hylia’s blessed lands with.

Link’s delivery run went as smoothly as usual, his earlier run-in with Maple aside. Having Avoka around to commentate was interesting. The boy’s curiosity and willingness to ask any question that came to mind quickly endeared him to Link. Too many people assumed that Link’s simple speech indicated someone who knew and understood less than them. True, there were a lot of things others automatically seemed to know that took longer for him to study up on, but he was good at observation and a quick learner. He was worthy of being asked questions.

Avoka was patient with Link’s limitations, and yet didn’t seem condescending. It was accommodation without insult, a rare thing in Link’s experience. If Link needed Avoka to repeat something he’d said too quickly, the boy didn’t get angry about saying it again. He also noticed that the Sheikah tended to keep his speech very to-the-point, which he appreciated. Fancy wording with flowery dancing around the topic tended to confuse him, and silent implications or double-speak just sounded like strange phrasing instead of secret messages. Blunt, potentially insulting speech suited Link’s sensibilities far better than tactful politesse; it was how all his relatives spoke and what he’d grown up hearing at the forge.

“Now we can go to my house,” Link declared, leading the way to Castle Town’s main front gate. He stretched out his shoulders. Ah, they were nicely sore. He’d gotten a good workout today.

“Is there a reason you live outside the city?” Avoka asked. He peered into the small forest beyond the open gate with wonder. Link wondered whether he’d ever seen it before. “I thought it was too dangerous to be outside a town during times of trouble.”

“Monsters don’t break into houses much,” Link said. He didn’t have any memory of the last attack on Hyrule, but his sister had told him that keeping the lights off and the windows shuttered was usually enough to make Stalfoses ignore your house. Moblins and Bokoblins were a bigger danger, but it took a ridiculous amount of power to conjure up enough of those to raid the countryside. It had been almost fifty years since the last mass assault like that. Usually, kingdom takeover attempts were focused on cities and larger villages, since it was more feasible for most evil mages to conjure up a single battalion of monsters right where they needed it.

“But don’t they burn down buildings and cause massacres?” Avoka asked. He flung his hands toward the thick stone wall whose gate they were passing through. “What’s the point of this thing, then?”

“Armies of monsters are like that. Not one or two,” Link clarified. “You’re thinking of history books. They only talk about big things there. The little things are like…you see a Moblin outside and pretend you don’t exist until it leaves.” Or so his sister had told him. Link hadn’t even been a year old the last time Hyrule had been attacked, a coup focused mainly on Castle Town that had affected the area around it to a lesser degree. Fourteen-year-old Gabbi had gathered him up and hidden under a bed with him in her arms until their mother had declared the coast clear.

Avoka shuddered. “I’ve seen Moblins in those history books. They sound terrifying.”

Link nodded. Nine-foot-tall pig monsters who probably knew how to fight better than you were super scary. He didn’t know how people signed up to apprentice as knights at his age, knowing they might one day be expected to fight one of those beasts.

Avoka went quiet as they entered the forest. He took in the sight of the trees with wonder. Reaching out, he watched the dappled light streaming through the leaves slide across his sleeve. When he caught sight of an apple tree, he skipped toward it and stared up into its flowery white boughs. It was too early for fruit, but the trees in bloom were quite a sight.

“What kind of tree is this? Do you know?” Avoka asked, glancing over.

“An apple tree. Scrub Apple. Green and sour. They’re good for baking,” Link said. The trees were recognizable by their leaves, which were darker and more bluish than those of the more common Hylian Sugar Apple. “You haven’t seen an apple tree before?”

The boy shook his head. “Mother has terrible allergies, so we have to be careful about what we grow next to the…uh, next to our house.” He tucked his hands in his sleeves and deliberately turned his eyes away from Link. “All of these flowers would have her wheezing. I’d love to have a tree like this planted somewhere on the grounds, though. Maybe in a greenhouse so Mother doesn’t suffer in spring.”

Link let out a soft huff of laughter. It drew Avoka’s startled attention toward him. “Is ‘in the yard’, for most people. Maybe ‘in the field’,” he said with a smile. “Also, greenhouses are expensive.”

Avoka blushed. “It seems like a lot of things in my life are.”

“Can’t choose what you’re born into. It’s good you want to learn about other people,” Link said. He’d seen a lot of rich kids in his time running the front counter of the Bluesmith Forge, and very few were even half as agreeable as Avoka.

Once they had passed through the woods, it was only a short walk through the waving grass of Hyrule Field before they reached the cleared stretch of dirt around Link’s house. The non-grassy area was an ugly, but reasonable precaution in case the house’s Blue Flame forge went out of control. Link walked right up to the front gate while Avoka trailed behind him. The Sheikah seemed intimidated by the twelve-foot-high, outward-curving ironwood fence.

“I still don’t know much about commoners, but that looks expensive,” Avoka commented.

Link took a magic key out of his pocket. It consisted of a Bluestone crystal embedded in a small stone block, enchanted with a magical signature that matched the gate’s internal lock. “Never said I was poor. My family could be rich if we didn’t spend our money,” he said, tapping the key against the barrier of nigh-indestructible Sheikah stala. The lock clicked and the doors swung outward.

Avoka’s mouth fell open as he stared up at Link’s house. Link hummed amusedly at his reaction. He supposed it was an intimidating sight to people unfamiliar with his family background, but it was still funny.

Link’s home was a small fortress, designed by his parents to withstand attacks from anyone who might want to break down the doors and steal the technological secrets within. Spikes lined the roof and stala armor reinforced the thick granite walls. The front door was innocuous wood with a steel core and enchanted to be nigh indestructible, hinges and all.

“Heard of the Bluesmith family before?” Link asked slyly. He loved surprising people like this. No one expected anything extraordinary from someone as plain as him.

“Blue…Bluesmith?” Avoka stammered. “The ones who invented everything?”

Link laughed. “Not everything. Just some.” His ancestor, the original Link Bluesmith and the Hero who had earned his family their last name, had been the one to discover how Bluestone could be used for modern utilities like lights and power lines for large magical devices. Before that, the Sheikah had been using the crystals as batteries for their Sheikah Slates and other small enchanted things. Since the Hero of Lights had used her discovery to push Hyrule into an era of great technological advancement, her descendants had been working diligently to follow in her great footsteps.

“Who are you?” Avoka asked, wide-eyed.

Link paused to compose an introduction in his head. He wanted some longer sentences for this. “I’m Link Bluesmith. My ancestor came up with the Light Cannon. My sister invented Light Weapons. Light Weapons are big dangerous, but Hyrule Castle orders them,” he said with a note of pride. “My sister and I are working on a long-term project. We want to make walking all-terrain vehicles. Are just trying to make legs for now, though. The actuator spells are hard. Gabbi’s working on a new kind of joint for them to move.”

“You’re an inventor?” Avoka almost shrieked. “What are you delivering swords for?! Why does your family do blacksmithing work if you’re the world’s most famous bluesmiths?”

“Haven’t invented yet. Am working on actuators, remember?” Link corrected. He took another minute to come up with more sentences and was both surprised and grateful that Avoka didn’t interrupt. “We’re blacksmiths because science is expensive. Bluestone only grows around hard rock. Costs a lot to mine. And breaks or explodes if it doesn’t like your spell. You have to go through a lot of Bluestone before you find a spell that works. My family are experimental engineers. We don’t use industry enchantments; we invent them.”

The Sheikah stared at him, appearing to be at a loss for words. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for,” he admitted quietly after a long pause. “I shouldn’t have judged you by the way you speak. Sorry for making a bad assumption.”

Link smiled. “Thanks for telling me.” It took a lot for someone to admit their mistakes, even engineers in his family’s dangerous line of work.

They stepped into the courtyard, the gate closing and locking itself behind them. Link switched out his magical key for a standard metal one as he walked up to the front door.

“So the Mad Owl lives in a place like this…” Avoka studied the riveted stala doorframe. “You’re related to her, right?”

Link sighed. It was a good thing Gabbi thought that nickname was cute rather than mean, because it was what everyone in Hyrule knew her by. Their family crest was a Great Horned Owl, the Bluesmith style of goggles involved a distinctive nose protector, and descendants of the Hero of Lights tended to have chaotic hair that made them look like ruffled birds, so it had been inevitable that one of them would wind up being called that. “Her name is Gaebora. I call her ‘Gabbi’,” he said. “Big sister, kind-of mom too.” He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Gabbi was by the threshold, pulling on a set of boots. Half a sausage poked out of her mouth—breakfast on the go for someone in a hurry—and her hair stuck out haphazardly around the Bluesmith cap-and-goggles she always wore. He didn’t have to check the time to know that she must have forgotten to set her alarm again.

She perked up when she saw Link, then brightened further when she noticed his companion. “Link!” she gasped, taking the sausage out of her mouth. “Is that a friend?”

Link puffed his chest out proudly. “Uh-huh.” His very first friend. He was going to buy some candy later today to celebrate, and maybe brag to Maple about it. She thought he was a clumsy doofus, but now he was a clumsy doofus with a friend, so there.

Gabbi finished shoving her foot into her left boot and stood up. Avoka shrank into Link’s side as the woman unfolded to her full height. “You’re so big!” he squeaked.

“Yeah, I’ve been told,” Gabbi said with a good-humored grin. She was six-foot-five and two-hundred fifty pounds of magically-reinforced muscle on a sturdy, broad-shouldered frame. It was a common build for members of the Bluesmith family, a trait that reached three hundred years back to the Hero of Lights. “My Gerudo cousins still call me little, though! HA!” Her booming laugh made Avoka jump. “Well, I’d love to stick around and supervise your playdate, but I’ve got to open up shop and I’m running late. Do you remember where the snacks and first-aid kit are, Link?”

He nodded.

“ALRIGHTY THEN!” she said with a thumbs-up of approval. Avoka jumped again. “Just make sure your friend follows the safety rules if you guys go in the workroom, and don’t make anything explode until I get home, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Have fun, kids!” Gabbi started sprinting across Hyrule Field toward the dark building that stood a mile away.

“She’s very loud—um, nice. Loud and nice, I guess,” Avoka said. His eyebrows went up as he watched Gabbi fly through the long grass. “You Bluesmiths move like the wind! How do you do it?”

“Family magic. The Hero of Lights had it first,” Link said. He walked into the house and went about unstrapping his sandals. “Makes us strong and fast. Boosts our senses. Can’t always turn that off. Gabbi wears goggles because light gives her headaches.”

“Ohhh. Wait.” Avoka frowned. “Does that mean her nickname is rather cruel, if she has to wear those? I think most people assume the mad scientist look is a fashion statement.”

“It’s okay. Gabbi likes goggles. Thinks the nickname is fun.” He reached out and tugged the Sheikah over the threshold when it seemed like he might dither on the porch. “Shouldn’t leave the door open. The house has temperature control,” he explained as he shut the door.

Avoka looked around, spooked, when the cooler air inside the house enfolded him. “You can control temperatures, too? What can’t your magic do?”

Link laughed. “No, technology.” He pointed up at the stala pipes snaking under the rafters. “House has a Blue Flame forge. Blue Flame can run lots of powered things. Those pipes blow controlled-temperature air. Dial for it is in the kitchen.”

The Sheikah shucked off his geta and walked under a pipe to stare at it in wonder. “The air is cooler!” he exclaimed. “My house is too big and old for us to have power lines running through the whole thing. Blue Flame is too dangerous, and we can’t draw on the ground-tap generators for the city grid because of the huge power drain. We’ve only installed a few small ground-taps and modernized some sections here and there.”

“Really?” He wouldn’t have expected the rich kid to live a more old-fashioned life than him. Of course, being part of a family who set the cutting edge of technology made his lifestyle more appliance-assisted than most, but rich people could usually keep up. “Have you seen a self-cooling icebox before?”

Avoka tilted his head to one side. “You mean, like an icebox that doesn’t need ice?”

“Icebox makes ice if we push a button.”

“Ooh, I wanna see!”

Impa’s maroon eyes moved up and down Avoka’s form when he stepped into their meeting spot in an old war room. “You’re in one piece,” she commented. “I assume your meeting with that commoner went well?”

Avoka pulled down his mask and beamed. “He’s really nice! Link let me follow him around town and ask him about things while he did his morning deliveries.” He started taking his hair down from its butterfly loops so he could pull his clothes past his head and get redressed. “I made some kind of mean assumptions about him the first time we met. He’s actually an inventor, and really smart! It’s just that he has some difficulty with speaking and understanding. He reads as much as I do and knows a lot of stuff, though, especially about his family’s work.”

“And what family work would that be? Did you ask questions about his background?”

Avoka took the illusion-casting cuff off his ear and went from red-eyed, gray-haired Trainee Avoka to the magenta-eyed, ashen-blond Zelda who crept around back rooms in forbidden clothes. Once he put on a piece of his enchanted royal jewelry, he’d switch to the blue-eyed, golden-blonde Princess Zelda that the public knew. The magic disguises made him feel like a cool secret agent sometimes. “Auntie, the point of this was for me to establish a connection with someone willing and able to help me learn about the people I’m meant to lead one day, not to interrogate a suspect,” Zelda said with exasperation. “But yes, I asked him some things. Link doesn’t have any proper sense of suspicion or deception, I don’t think. He answers questions honestly and readily—too readily, for a member of the Bluesmith family.” He frowned. “I’m going to have to work with him on that. It isn’t safe for him or the kingdom.”

Impa nodded. “I should say so. Those engineers are responsible for inventing some of the most dangerous weapons in Hyrule. Should the Yiga, or any other force of evil discover how they managed it, the kingdom would be put at great risk,” she said. “Did he tell you of his connection to the Mad Owl?”

“She’s his big sister—thirteen years older—and the person who raised him. I didn’t ask what happened to his parents, but it doesn’t seem like he ever knew them,” Zelda reported. “There aren’t many pictures of them around his home, and only one with an infant Link.”

“They perished in a scuffle at their main Bluestone lab. A team of Yiga attempted to kidnap your friend’s father using a bomb as leverage against the others in the room. The explosive spontaneously ignited in the high heat by one of the Blue Flame forges and allowed the power source to escape containment. That area of Hateno Hill is still scorched to glass.”

Zelda shivered. Blue Flame was a wondrous, infinite source of energy when harnessed correctly, but one of the scariest things in the world when let off its leash. He could hardly believe that Link had something like that in his house.

Actually, on second thought, it kind of made sense that he would. The apparent propensity of Bluestone to explode under the strain of imperfect experimental enchantments—easily one of the scariest things Zelda had ever heard, given how depended-upon that crystal was in the modern era—didn’t seem to faze Link at all. He’d even shown Avoka the music he was tweaking for some kind of light-display alarm clock project, casually mentioning that his first two attempts to reverse-engineer a Sheikah Slate screen had exploded so badly that he’d been pelted by Bluestone fragments and shards of the glass he’d affixed the spell node to. It was a “high-safety” project now, as he put it, requiring him to add a protective leather tunic and metal face shield to the protections he already wore for his experiments. For the Mad Owl to be fine with her baby brother regularly putting himself in such danger, she must have been equally as comfortable with the thought that a single bomb in the wrong place could turn their house’s tamed blue sun into a massive, nearly unstoppable inferno.

“If the Yiga have targeted his family before, they might attack again,” Zelda fretted. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to take advantage of Link, as accommodating and friendly as he was. He’d been willing to let one random Sheikah into his house; a covert Yiga agent could easily convince him to do it again.

“Oh, they have. It isn’t a publicized thing, but the Bluesmiths have become accustomed to being targeted for their technological secrets,” Impa said. “Five years ago, your friend lost a distant cousin in one such attack. A Yiga threw a smoke bomb too close to an experiment of his in the middle of an enchantment and the power source exploded. Four deaths, no survivors. Since then, the Yiga Clan has been getting more careful and crafty, and the Bluesmiths correspondingly more paranoid. I’m sure you must have seen what one of their homes looks like.”

Zelda had thought the unclimbable fence, granite fortress blocks, and spiked roof had been a precaution against monsters, not mad Ganondorf-resurrection fanatics. He pitied Link. Just like Zelda hadn’t asked to be born into his position in life, neither had his friend. At least Zelda had his difficult-to-reach tower to live in. Link’s house needed to be located outside of a city due to its volatile and easily-sabotaged power source, so he and his sister didn’t have the protection of patrolled stone walls or other buildings.

“I’ll have to teach him to be careful,” he said determinedly. “He’s too vulnerable.” Link was strong enough to defend himself, but he had to know when and how to do so. As it was, the boy presented an easy mark for anyone who put on a friendly tone of voice and asked questions that seemed innocuous at first glance. Zelda, or rather Avoka, would show his sweet, guileless new friend the value of growing a few thorns.

A teasing smile touched his aunt’s lips. “You speak with such fire,” she commented. “Has that boy already captured your heart?”

Zelda gave her a baffled look. “Why does wanting to keep a nice person safe mean I want to marry them?”

Impa blinked. “…It doesn’t have to mean that, I suppose,” she said with an air of awkwardness. “You just spoke so fervently about meeting that boy again since your recovery that, well, I assumed you might have taken after your parents. They fell in love when they weren’t much older than you.”

Zelda made a face. He had never understood the appeal of romance. The way he’d seen it written in books and acted out in front of him, it seemed like an unnerving form of territorial obsession that he never, ever wanted aimed in his direction. Nevertheless, he was doing his best to become resigned to the idea of having his mind consumed by it upon marrying. The concept of love at first sight, looking across a room and suddenly having a significant chunk of his free will vanish because he’d locked eyes with a fated stranger, was even more terrifying.

He would get married and have an heir because it was his duty, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop dreading it. Well, having a baby was fine with him—he’d heard that they were tiny and cute and impressive knowledge-sponges—but not the making of one, which he’d made the mistake of asking his aunt about a month ago. He hoped he’d be able to come up with a workaround for that particular (repulsive, unsanitary, no thank you) process when he was older and smarter.

“I like Link because he likes pretty things, he answers all of my questions without being mean about the dumb ones, he has good ideas, and he smiles only when he means it,” he declared. “I’d never want to marry someone I like, because then it would be a lot sadder to hate them. I’d much rather marry someone I already hate than grow to despise a person I wanted to be friends with. Except Duke Ralph.” He made a face, thinking of the miserable betrothal ceremony he’d been forced to go through last year with the Labryn royal. His mother had made him wear a horribly tight bodice with a stomacher (ugh), and a ruffled skirt so big that he’d been afraid of catching its stupid bell-shaped crinoline in the fireplace. “Ralph is much too annoying for me to marry, even if I already dislike him.”

His aunt closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, like she suddenly had a headache. “Hatred is not meant to be an inevitable part of—” She cut herself off with a long, heavy sigh before saying, “I believe a long conversation may be in order.”

Zelda frowned quizzically. How could you not hate the person whose appearance took over your mind and made it hard to think about anything else? He’d read about it in books! Those people were under some kind of curse, he was sure. There was no way people could enjoy that feeling for real. The curse of lustful obsession would claim him, too, once he got married, but he wouldn’t give into it without a fight.

“We’ll unpack your ideas of love and marriage later. In the meantime, I’ll arrange to have someone monitor Link’s safety in town. Should anyone threaten him, I will know within the hour.”

Zelda brightened. “Thank you, Auntie!”

“You’re welcome, Nephew.” She walked forward and motioned for him to face the table. “Now sit still so I can braid all that hair of yours before it tangles.”

Zelda obediently kept his spine straight while Impa drew his hair into a simple plait with businesslike tugs. To pass the time, he considered the idea of having his first ever friend. He’d only been around relatives or boring people a lot older than him until he’d been allowed to join the Royal Guard trainees. Then he’d been surrounded for several hours a day by Sheikah boys who thought he was loud and clumsy and shrimpy. When their instructor wasn’t looking, they teased him for being so bad at training games that called for shadow magic and knocked him around extra hard in sparring matches because his undersized frame made it easy to do. He hadn’t complained to Impa about it because that was exactly what a whiny royal brat would do, but it had hurt to be rejected by the people he’d been hoping to join and make friends with.

Link was simply pleasant to be around. He had a warm, calming presence about him. Like Impa, and unlike most people in Zelda’s life, he felt comfortable to talk to. Zelda actually wanted to see Link again, which he couldn’t say for most of his peers. The Sheikah boys at training were mean and the only royals he’d met around his age were either evil bitches (the Gerudo princesses, Koume and Kotake), incredibly annoying (his distant Hytopian cousin, Styla) or sexist, conversation-hogging buttheads (Duke Ralph).

“Will I be able to visit Link again?” he asked his aunt.

The hands weaving the ends of his hair together paused. “I believe that can be arranged. I’m glad you’ve finally found a friend, Zelda.”

Zelda beamed. “I am, too!” It had certainly taken long enough!

Chapter Text

“What color is this?” Link asked, pointing at the thick, halved sausages he was cooking.

What a bizarre question. Avoka answered it anyway. “Uh, mostly brown? Maybe a little pink in the middle.”

Link clapped a lid back down on the pan. “More time, then.”

Avoka looked from him to the stove, which was one of those fancy modern appliances that littered the high-tech house. The iron coils that pots sat on were heated with magic fed by a power line rather than the coal Avoka was used to. “Why did you ask me what color a sausage is?” he asked.

“Because I didn’t know,” Link said breezily. “Not allowed to cook meat unsupervised.”

“You’re color-blind? And hold on, Gaebora’s not watching.”

“Avoka is watching.”

Avoka snorted. “You make it sound like I know a single thing about cooking.” He hadn’t been allowed in the castle’s kitchens since he’d been five. The cooks didn’t trust him around their knives, and his mother considered such servant work well beneath him. As a Royal Guard trainee, he could slide in with the excuse that he was bringing something up to the princess in her tower, but they still wouldn’t let him use anything in the kitchen.

“Put oil or water in a pot and heat it up. Water boiling, oil on low or medium until you get good at it. Put stuff in the pot. Smaller bits cook faster—more surface area. Make meat brown and veggies not burnt or too squishy. Spices are good. Don’t burn those, either,” Link rattled off. “Yes, am color-blind. No red or green. It hurts Gabbi’s eyes if I pick my own colors.”

Avoka ran through a mental list of what he’d seen his friend wearing. Link had a limited number of clothes that he cycled through as they were dirtied and washed; Avoka had observed one skirt, two sets of trousers, two pairs of leggings, three sleeveless tunics, one short-sleeved tunic, two waist wraps, one summer dress he was close to growing out of, and one sweater. All of those were gray, brown, muted orange, or some shade of green. Yes, he acknowledged it was a little weird that he’d kept track of that.

“The Mad Owl color-coded you to save her the headache!” he said with a laugh.

“Sometimes I got things wrong on purpose. I put yellows and blues together. People made funny faces.” Link flashed him a cheeky grin. “I grew out of those clothes, though.” He took the lid off the pan in front of him and squinted at the sausages.

“No more pink,” Avoka reported. “Now I’m wondering just how bad your fashion can get when you’re let loose. Your wardrobe is rather…utilitarian.”

Link turned off the burner under the pan with a spin of its control dial, then did the same to take the porridge simmering on a back burner off the heat. “Dressed like that when Gabbi and I lived with Mama Kappi. Our grandma. Mama Kappi is rich. Fun clothes are expensive,” he said as he put the sausages into two bowls. The savory porridge was ladled into another set of bowls, and all four dishes were ferried to the dining table that sat on the other side of the kitchen. He then poured them both drinks from pitchers in the self-cooling icebox—water for Avoka, who didn’t like sugar much, and apple-pumpkin juice for him.

Avoka tucked into the meal, feeling out the flavors on his tongue. He was accustomed to the wide variety of ingredients that the castle cooks had at their disposal and the rich foods his parents preferred. His morning oatmeal, for example, was usually cooked with milk and flavored with a pat of butter, a touch of sugar syrup, simmered apples, and a sprinkling of cinnamon. This porridge, by contrast, consisted simply of boiled oats with a bit of bacon grease and a dash of spicy pepper. Paired with the simple pork sausage, the combination tasted rather plainly of salt, meat, and fat with a hint of heat.

“Customer dropped a big commission last week. We’re lucky we can buy meat,” Link said upon observing Avoka’s unimpressed look. “We showed him the weapon he ordered before we finished the details. Silly customer got scared.” He sighed and poked his sausage with his spoon. “Five hundred Rupees gone.”

Avoka swallowed. “You know, I could give you some money.”

Link scrunched his nose. “It’s bad to owe people.”

“I said I could give you some,” Avoka insisted. “Give, as in gift. No strings attached.”

Link’s eyes narrowed. Funnily enough, the only time his sense of distrust kicked in was where money was involved. The kid had a knack for numbers and took pride in getting as much as he could for as little spent as possible. “Value”, he called it. Link had the standard market prices of most things memorized, too, which had helped with Avoka’s study of the outside world. “Give money? Without buying anything?” he said skeptically. “Only family does that.”

“Other people do it, too, if they’ve got enough to throw around,” Avoka said with a wink. He hitched up one of the legs of his hakama, reached into the wallet attached to a strap on his calf, and set two silver Rupees on the table. Link stared at the money like he could hardly believe it was real. “I get an allowance of three hundred Rupees a month to teach me basic budgeting, but it tends to build up and gather dust. I don’t lack for much,” Avoka said, sitting properly again. “I’d give you a gold Rupee, but I only carry around two silvers at a time.” His aunt had advised him to limit his on-person funds to make it less suspicious if anyone got ahold of his wallet in this persona. As far as anyone but Link and his aunt knew, he was an orphanage urchin getting by on his apprentice wages and Impa’s pity.

Link continued staring at the Rupees on the table.

“I promise I’m not going to guilt you with it later. You’ve known me for three whole months; if I were that kind of rich jerk, you would have noticed by now.” Avoka pushed the Rupees toward him. “I’ve got money, and the only people I have to spend it on are me and you; my parents have even more stuff than I do, and my boss is a weird ascetic. Better you and Gabbi get to buy more food than I get to buy…I don’t know, a Magic Ring or something.”

Still wide-eyed, Link hesitantly put the money in his own wallet. “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I am rich.” Avoka took a bite of his bland sausage and porridge. “Besides, I’m here eating your food sometimes. Might as well pay you back.”

Some of the tenseness creasing Link’s features eased. Cash gifts from non-family might have been a foreign and unsettling concept to him, but the business-minded kid understood a transaction. He nodded seriously.

“What kind of weapon did that rich guy order and then spook himself with, anyway?” Avoka asked. “How does that even happen?”

“Light Dagger.”

“What?” Avoka was glad he hadn’t had anything in his mouth to accidentally inhale. “Aren’t those reserved for knights? I didn’t know just anyone could order one!”

Light Weapons were part of a ridiculously dangerous class of super-weapons that only the most skillful of warriors were able to wield. Consisting of a razor-sharp glass blade and a strong Bluestone battery that flooded it with magic, the eerie blue-glowing weapons could cleave through flesh, bone, and armor as easily as water. Their main drawbacks were that they had to be recharged once a day due to their ridiculous energy burn and they were uselessly fragile without their enchantments running. It made perfect sense that the guy would have been terrified to hold one; Avoka had heard that the heat emanating from the ghostly blades could burn ungloved hands, and that the weapons pulled against their users’ grips like they had wills of their own.

His friend raised an eyebrow. “Commissions are paid half up front. The dagger was a thousand Rupees. The cheapest Light Weapon model.”

“And that’s…a lot of money,” Avoka said slowly. “Most people can’t afford that, can they? That’s why most orders of Light Weapons come from the Castle.”

Link gave him a patient smile. “Yes.”

“Hm.” There were several ensembles in Avoka’s closet that cost that much or more. His mother wasn’t exactly a spendthrift, for she threw balls mainly out of political obligation and commissioned public projects only to benefit the people, but she did have a weakness for clothes. Not the current trends, but whatever suited her personal sensibilities. And, as she loved her daughter very much and was painfully Labryn when it came to her idea of fashion, Zelda had always wound up wearing a lot of the itchy lace and huge, supported skirts that Queen Ambi favored. Lately, he’d been making headway in adding less ornate, Sheikah-influenced dresses and the occasional kimono to his closet, but he still had a lot of lacy frills in there. As Ambi gradually bent to his arguments in favor of taking pride in his hidden heritage and reflecting the current Sheikah influence on Hyrule, his closet was accumulating a bigger backlog of things his mother no longer forced him to wear. He’d been meaning to hand some of those clothes to his aunt so she could do something to make them vanish, but Avoka now saw an opportunity sitting in front of him.

Link was a thrifty person who admired the things he couldn’t afford and otherwise left them alone. Since Avoka sometimes had a couple of free hours to follow Link around on his morning deliveries, he’d seen his friend stare into certain shop windows. Link wasn’t at all picky about color and didn’t care about the differences between boys’ and girls’ clothing, as someone who defined himself as neither boy nor girl, but expensive ostentation consistently caught his eye.

“How do you feel about lace?” Avoka asked.

“Pretty. I like lace, but is expensive.”

“And ruffles?”

“Pretty and expensive.”

“Silk?”

A spark of intrigue lit in Link’s eyes as he noticed the theme behind Avoka’s questions. “Same again. Why?”

“Hearing the price of that sword reminded me of something. If I showed you some clothes that you could pick through and have tailored to your size, would you want them?”

Link looked him up and down. “You have ruffles?” he asked doubtfully.

Avoka had only ever appeared to Link in the strict Sheikah fashions that his aunt permitted this persona to wear, and most often in some permutation of his Royal Guard uniform. Since it was hot out, he was currently dressed in his skintight woolen sneak-suit with his uniform hakama thrown over it and his haori tied around his waist.

Avoka smirked. “My sister has ruffles,” he said, “and luckily for you, she can’t stand them.”

The next time he visited, Avoka came bearing an armful of rustling blue cloth. He laid it over the dining table and separated the different pieces.

“Alright, so here are a few skirts, a couple of jackets, and four dresses,” he declared. “There’s no way the bodices on the dresses are going to fit you, but the skirts can be taken off and fitted for your waist because they’ve all got pleating that can be let out. Do you know your measurements?”

Link was struck speechless by the sight of all the finery laid across the humble wooden table. Those were easily the fanciest clothes he’d ever seen! He’d never even touched silk of this quality before, and here was a whole pile of it right in front of him! He shook his head, having barely heard Avoka’s question.

“I figured, if you’re used to trying on and buying pre-made clothes.” Avoka made a white-marked leather tape appear in his hand like magic. “Are you okay with being measured? Just shoulders, waist, hips, and a few vertical lengths, since you never wear sleeves and skirts don’t require those awkward between-the-legs ones.”

Link did his best to approximate an optimum mannequin pose. Avoka stepped forward and started buzzing around him with the tape. He brought the measuring line across the fronts and backs of seemingly everything—shoulder to shoulder, shoulder to waist, across the waist, waist to hips, hip to hip, and hip to knee. Who knew the human body could have so many numbers applied to it? It was such an irregular, squishy, organic form. Link was accustomed to measuring things made of metal, wood, stone, and occasionally crystal; those were much more consistent in their shapes.

Avoka whistled at his list of measurements once they were all written out. “You’re going to be as big as your sister when you’re all grown up, aren’t you?” he said. “Those shoulders.”

Link wasn’t sure whether that was a compliment, but he blushed nonetheless. His namesake had wound up almost Gerudo-sized thanks to the physical boost provided by her magic. She had been legendarily popular at Gerudo get-togethers for her party trick of holding multiple women aloft on her powerful arms.

“Maybe I’ll be able to perch up there like a sparrow someday,” Avoka said wryly.

Link giggled at the mental image. His friend was light enough that lifting him wouldn’t be much trouble, so maybe he’d be able to copy his ancestor’s party trick.

Avoka swung his arm toward the silk-laden table. “Now take your pick! I’ve got your measurements, so I can do alterations to fit these to you. The seam allowances are all an inch, and I can use some of the bodice fabric to fill out those jackets with extra panels.”

“You?” Link asked in surprise. He would have thought sewing was a distinctly lower-class talent. High-skill, sure, but still too menial for someone whose parents could afford to give him three hundred Rupees a month for his allowance.

“I’m not the fastest at sewing yet, so I could use the practice,” Avoka said. “The goal is to eventually be able to make my own clothes.”

“Why?”

The Sheikah smiled enigmatically. “Sometimes you have to do certain things yourself because you’re the only one who understands what you want.”

Link nodded. That made sense. His sister hadn’t known his personal sense of style until she’d let him choose things himself, and now she just steered him toward a certain color at the store when he outgrew something. That was where his ox tunic had come from. When Gabbi decided his wardrobe on her own, he always wound up looking rather plain in his sensible and durable outfits. Though he appreciated his sister’s practicality, he liked to have a little silliness mixed in there. If people were going to look at him funny, he’d rather it was because he was wearing the loudest striped tights in existence than because he’d accidentally stared at someone for too long.

He fluttered his hands over the silks with trepidation before reaching out to gently touch them. Hundreds of Rupees in fabric slid under his fingertips. It was smoother than even the finest cotton weave. He gently handled the lace. The material was light as air, as gossamer as dragonfly wings. Someone had made this with their own two hands. Knocked bobbins together until lace had come out. He’d seen how it was made at the yearly Trades Fair that the kingdom held every summer to help eleven-year-olds and aimless teens of all sorts find their apprenticeships. Even in person, it still looked like someone weaving beauty from nothing.

“Your sister didn’t want this?” he asked, aghast.

“Lace is nice until you catch it out of the corner of your eye and slap yourself because it looks like a bug,” Avoka said. “It itches like the dickens when it’s against your skin, too, if you ask my sister. She’s particular about the texture of her clothes.”

Well, Link wasn’t. He preferred smooth and soft things, but unpleasant textures were easy to ignore for him. Touch was easily the least touchy of his senses. He plucked one jacket free from the other clothes. There was hardly any fancy stuff on it, just a line of ruffles around the tops of the sleeves. “Why didn’t your sister like this one?”

“Partly the ruffles, but mostly the pattern,” Avoka replied. “I mean, I’m sure it’s hard to weave, but florals? Ugh.”

Link squinted at the rippling satin. He could see somewhat darker spots of blue, but it was hard to make out the shapes of flowers. They were big, maybe? And a wobbly kind of round. “What does it look like? I see blue and blue.”

His friend burst out laughing. “Blue! Oh, if only,” he cackled. Link wondered whether he’d accidentally said a joke. It happened sometimes.

“It’s pink, Link,” Avoka explained. “Saturated magenta roses on medium pink, to be specific. My sister is color-coded like you are; shades of pink are the only colors she’s allowed to wear.”

What an odd coincidence. From the sour note in Avoka’s voice, the arrangement probably wasn’t voluntary, like it was for Link. He didn’t really care what colors he wore, so he was fine with causing his sister a little less visual suffering. “What color does your sister want to wear?”

Avoka straightened, blinking in surprise. “Um, violet. She likes violet.”

“Huh.” Link picked up one of the dresses to study the complex pleating in the skirt. People who knew how to work with fabric were magic, just like lace-makers and knitters. If Avoka knew how to do this stuff, he was magic even without his glowing knives. “What does violet look like?”

Avoka’s eyes crinkled with a pleased smile over his mask, like Link had thought they would. His friend loved talking about fashion and colors. “Well, it’s a kind of red mixed with blue, like pink, but it’s more like…”

Chapter Text

A strident voice cut through the cool morning air and dull crowd chatter of Castle Town. “So this is your boyfriend! Took long enough for you to bring him around my route.”

Link jumped at Avoka’s side, then turned around with a smile. “You snuck up on me!” he said happily.

“There’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?” the girl walking up said. “I bet it’s because I’m not carrying anything for you to make me drop. It was a light delivery day.”

The stranger was dressed in odd clothes that reminded Avoka of the famous potion-master in town. A pointed, wide-brimmed black hat shaded her pouting, doll-like features and her petite frame was hidden under an ugly, sleeveless, shapeless black dress that went down to her ankles. She had to be related to Syrup; that kind of outfit didn’t happen twice by coincidence.

“Link and I are friends,” Avoka corrected her. Like Link and this random girl he hadn’t known about were, apparently. His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“Maple Brewer, the prettiest witch in the kingdom,” the girl said with a twirl and a confident smirk.

Avoka assessed her make-up. She had strange lavender blush painted in circles on her cheeks, vivid purple lipstick, and green eyeshadow that complemented her dark green hair. He bit the inside of his cheek. That make-up definitely wasn’t flattering, but it was way more fun than what he was allowed to wear as a princess. He’d kill for that lipstick.

“I never thought Link would go for such a twig,” Maple said, looking him up and down. “What’s that mask for, anyway? Trying to look cool?”

“We’re friends,” Avoka snapped irritably. He didn’t intend to have his mind consumed by obsession until he was legally required to by his future marriage. Why would Maple assume Link would get a boyfriend, anyway? Was that a thing that happened? According to the romance novels he’d read growing up (as research for his future duty of marriage, not because he looked forward to experiencing one of those horror stories of subtle mind-control for himself), that form of love only developed between opposite sexes. Whether it was affected by the mentalities laid over those sexes (because Link was vaguely between boy and girl and Avoka was firmly boy-and-girl) was another factor, and Avoka certainly didn’t want to be the canary in that particular coal mine. Perhaps he ought to ask Impa about it during their upcoming “love and marriage” discussion.

Then the rest of what Maple had said registered. “I’m not a twig! You are!” he said indignantly. This girl had some nerve, criticizing his stature when she was even smaller than him. “And I wear the mask because it’s professional!” He gestured to the Sheikah eye symbol on his uniform belt. “What do you think I’m apprenticing as, a Postman?”

The girl smirked. “If you were, you could just use your hair as a runner’s banner. It already looks enough like a flag.”

Avoka puffed up indignantly. He’d put his hair in a simple ponytail this morning because he hadn’t felt like wrestling with it. The length of illusion-dyed silver reached his mid-back, responding readily to any shift in the breeze on that windy day. It wasn’t that long, though! He’d convinced his parents to let him trim it to above his butt so he didn’t have to worry about sitting on his hair when it was down. And long hair was cool! Certainly better than what Maple thought was fashionable.

“Well, your hair is green! What, did you mess up the dye?” Avoka asked snidely.

Maple scowled. “It’s natural, stupid. Your girlfriend’s hair is green, too!”

“At least Link makes it look good! And he’s not my girlfriend!”

The girl jutted her chin out in challenge. “Well, what is he to you, then? Because to me, he’s the dope that knocks me over every other Monday and you’re some fancy castle guard who hangs out with him for no reason. What’s your angle, officer?”

Suddenly a mental bubble of realization popped, and Avoka’s irritation bled away. The girl wasn’t a jerk; she was just prickly by nature and defending Link. A lot like Avoka would have in her place. He was still unsure whether she was friends or acquaintances with Link, but one thing was clear: Maple was testing him.

“Link’s nice and he answers my dumb questions. He knows a lot of things that I don’t,” he said honestly. “We both like fashion, reading, and nature, too.”

Maple stood tall with her hands on her hips, her dark eyes studying Avoka shrewdly. “Hmph, fine. That’s too sappy not to be true. But if I find out you’re playing some kind of rich-guy manipulation game here because of Link’s family connections, I’ll curse your balls off.” She put a hand to the broad leather belt she wore as a waist covering. Avoka did a double-take at the Magic Rod the girl tapped her fingers against. Holy shit, was that a quartz-headed staff? This girl had to have a crazy amount of magical power! “He’s the only guy I know who speaks Holodai in this dump, so I don’t like jerks messing with him.”

Ah, so she (and probably Syrup) were from Holodrum. That explained the foreign clothes and tiny stature, though not why Link would know that somewhat obscure tongue… “I do, too,” Avoka said in Holodai. “Just some basic words.” It wasn’t one of the languages that was more focused on in his education because Holodrum was a significant distance away from Hyrule, but he’d learned enough not to insult the occasional delegates from there.

Maple’s arched eyebrows went up. “You do?” she gasped. “Maybe you’re almost cool enough for that mask after all.” She looked to the left. “Get some good observations in, Owlie?”

Avoka frowned in confusion at the nickname, then glanced to the side. A startled jolt went through him when he saw bright aqua eyes steadily drilling into his soul. Link was staring at him and Maple like they were the world’s most fascinating puzzle. Had Avoka not become familiar with that particular expression through watching his friend study the shields in Rupin’s shop, he would have been frozen by the sight of Link’s piercing gaze and stony expression.

“He does that when he’s figuring people out. I call it owl-staring. If it’s just been you two puttering around his house all the time, you wouldn’t have seen it before,” Maple explained, gesturing toward Link like he was an impressive specimen on a shelf. Link blinked, his expression softening to its usual neutrality, and performed an obliging curtsy with his pink skirt. “Have a conversation with someone in front of him sometime and you might catch him doing it. He owl-stares at me a lot when I’m handling customers at my grandma’s shop.”

“Watching you teaches me new talking stuff,” Link said. “Do you hate Avoka? I hope not, but can’t tell.”

“Nah, it just seemed like he’d be fun to insult. I wouldn’t mind bickering again sometime.” She took a miniaturized broom off of her belt and waved her hand over it. The object grew to a comfortable size for the small girl. Avoka did his best not to gape at the casual show of powerful magic. “Well, I’ve got potion ingredients to gather and other people to make fun of. See you later, losers!” She hopped onto her broom sidesaddle, held onto her hat, and took off into the sky.

Avoka watched her fly away, then dropped his gaze to Link. “You didn’t think to tell me that you’re friends with easily one of the most powerful mages in the kingdom,” he said flatly. “Or that you can speak Holodai, of all languages.”

“I don’t know if I’m friends with Maple yet,” Link mused with a cute, doubtful pout. “And I speak eight languages. Am bad at Anouki out loud, but can read it.”

Avoka’s eyes bugged out. “What?” His whole future job was going to be about connecting with different peoples, and even he didn’t know any Anouki! More than that, he still wasn’t fluent in Holodai or Gerudo despite having a fleet of tutors!

Link shrugged. “I don’t just say things. You didn’t ask about Maple.”

“What other crazy things are you connected to that you never thought to bring up?!”

“Uh…my grandma lives in a flying house?”

“WHAT?!”

Chapter Text

Zelda sat cross-legged on her bed with a pillow in her lap, just in case she needed to hug it or scream into something during the course of the upcoming discussion. Her aunt stood in front of her in her usual parade rest stance, her expression a little too intense to be impassive.

“Do you feel sufficiently prepared, Niece?” she asked.

Zelda was only getting more anxious as the lead-up to this conversation dragged out. She pulled a blanket up around her shoulders. “Yes, yes, just get on with it before I panic,” she said. “I don’t get why it’s so pressing to talk about this already. Marriage is almost a decade away, and it was a mistake for me to ask you about human reproduction at my current age.” She shuddered. “I didn’t think you’d actually explain. Mother said she wouldn’t until she felt I was old enough.”

“Sheikah children learn of such things before the urges to seek them out arrive, thus lessening the chance of uninformed mistakes,” Impa said. “You are my sister’s child and old enough to start your menses any day now; thus, I gave you the same lesson she received at your age.”

Zelda snorted. “Received and later forgot, you mean. It isn’t wisdom to have a bastard with the king when you’re his bodyguard.”

“Child,” Impa said with a warning note. “I have told you before and I will repeat it until you believe me: you were born out of love. Michi and your father were pleased to have you. I know without a doubt that she would have worked gladly with the Queen to raise you if she had not fallen in battle.”

“But why did she pick Father, of all people? She could have gotten in so much trouble if she’d been caught!” Zelda exclaimed. “It would have been way smarter to choose a castle guard, Sheikah or Hylian.”

“Attraction is not something you turn on and off, or pick up and point in a more convenient direction. She and the king silently pined for one another, and in fact attempted to distance themselves for politics’ sake, before acting on what drew them together.”

“That can happen? In real life?” Zelda said, aghast. She had thought that the mind-consuming obsession that led to children was a product of marriage or spending so much time around one another that it was like marriage. You were forced into close quarters with someone of the opposite sex, and that caused something strange to happen that made you unable to think of anyone but that person. Breaking free of the relationship would free your mind because the locks of marriage, or whatever else, were no longer enforcing the mind-curse. For her birth mother and father to actually try separating and be mentally forced back together anyway…that was terrifying. Did that mean she wouldn’t be able to escape the obsession herself if she needed to? Marrying and reproducing were part of her duty as a future monarch, but what if she had to cut herself free from that marriage before the anguish drove her to do something drastic? What if she was forever tied to whoever she wedded, regardless of whether she’d cut the legal bond between them?

Impa walked around the end of her bed and sat down next to her. “I can see in your eyes that you have a very frightening misconception of what love is meant to be,” she said, peering intently at Zelda’s face. “Tell me what you think marriage is, and I will do my best to iron things out.”

Zelda took a deep breath. “Marriage is when you’re legally bonded to someone and expected to share the remainder of your lifetime with them, with divorce being available but discouraged,” she began. Impa frowned a little, but nodded. “Once locked into marriage, you become unable to think of anyone but your spouse. Their face, sensory details, the things they like, all of that. It’s a subtle mind-curse that makes the relationship seem enjoyable and eases the difficulty of producing children. Having a boyfriend or a girlfriend is like a milder form of the mind-curse, generated by two people of opposite sexes being forced to share space long enough to form the same infatuation.”

A long silence stretched between her and her aunt. Impa’s eyes were wide, the muscles in her face somewhat slack. Her mouth hung slightly ajar.

The woman breathed out a long sigh, her eyes turning toward the ceiling in a silent prayer, before leaning forward and solemnly laying her hands upon Zelda’s shoulders. “My dear niece, you are so wonderfully intelligent, and so horrifically incorrect. I didn’t realize this was a matter that would require education because for most, some level of understanding is instinctual.”

“Instinctual?!” Zelda squawked. She’d spent hours in the library poring over terrible tales of back-breaking feats performed out of lust for strangers the protagonists had known for perhaps a single day, and self-sacrifice made for the sake of women who were apparently just that pretty. “I did research!”

Her aunt’s hands withdrew. “And came to very wrong conclusions, I’m afraid,” she said wearily.

Zelda picked up her pillow and screamed into it. She could have been using those research hours for something actually useful, like focusing on her potion-enchanting!

“The draws of romance and lust are ingrained upon a person’s being. They are entwined inextricably with how that person thinks and how they perceive other people,” Impa explained. “If you saw an unusually attractive girl with a shape you found pleasing, what would you think?”

“That she’s pretty?”

“And a particularly handsome boy as muscled or soft as you like?”

“That he’s handsome.”

“And that is all? Would you feel no pull to interact with them—see if you could spend more time around that person?”

“At most, I’d want to stare at them for a while to observe what about their features made them pleasing. Why would I want to talk to them just because they looked nice?” Zelda asked in confusion. A pretty face was a pretty face. It didn’t say anything about who it was attached to, which was the only part that was relevant to any interaction, and it wouldn’t in any way twist her true thoughts about someone. While she still liked admiring the Gerudo princesses Koume and Kotake from across a room (and safely out of their lines of sight), her impressions of them had only ever gone from “oh, they’re pretty” to “AVOID”. Her betrothed, Duke Ralph, was also quite pleasing to the eye with his perfect teeth and wavy auburn hair, but that stopped mattering as soon as she had to interact with him. He had a habit of talking her ears off about whatever he wanted to talk about and he complained when she tried to get a word in edgewise. Seeing his (supposedly) charming grin just made her want to shove a sock in it before he started making mouth-noise.

Impa raised a finger. “Ah, and there’s the root cause of your misunderstanding. Most people don’t think that way, passively viewing without the urge to touch. For the rest of us, there is a pull toward what we find attractive. It can be resisted, but it is there. We don’t admire a person’s looks as one might a painting; we feel compelled to seek a closer and more in-depth interaction with them. Many would imagine what it would be like to be with that particular pretty person. And, in addition, we also feel compelled to bond with—and perhaps reproduce with—those whose countenances and personalities make our hearts soar. Children are most often an expression of love, not a product of the rigid expectations of duty, Zelda. Romance and marriage are things that people generally look forward to and find fulfillment in. That is why the concept of ‘love at first sight’ is so popular in novels.”

Distress throbbed at Zelda’s temples, for she couldn’t relate whatsoever to such a thing. It made no sense. How could people want what she’d read about? Did they willingly fill their minds with lustful thoughts, and obsessive dreams about the smell of some poor, unsuspecting stranger’s hair or the softness of their skin? Was it somehow pleasant to imagine…the process that produced children? One day she’d manage to train herself into not flinching at the thought of someone doing that to her, for it was something she’d have to endure for the future of her country, but not today.

“How?” she asked, completely at a loss. “I’ve read about it, Auntie. It sounds horrible. I don’t want to obsess over and stalk some stranger, and I don’t want to think of having…having s-sex with someone I actually like. I’d want to stab them for doing that to me night after night! It would only be more saddening to develop such a hatred toward someone that I don’t already despise.” She tugged fitfully at her long braid of hair. “How can anyone do such things to someone they love without being unnaturally compelled in some way? That kind of thing doesn’t mean love!”

Impa winced. “It appears you have spent quite a lot of time dreading this.”

“Of course I have! It sounds like mind-control and torture!”

“It doesn’t feel like that if it’s your natural inclination. It feels like love and happiness,” Impa said with a shake of her head. “If it’s natural to you, then it’s natural. If it isn’t…I can see where your misconceptions sprang from in the absence of anyone telling you otherwise.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “This will certainly complicate things in the future.” She mumbled something under her breath—Zelda caught the words “petition the Queen” and “maybe a sibling?”

“I intend to perform my duties to the utmost of my abilities,” Zelda insisted. She could do this herself! No way was she going to pass off her role to a younger sibling, nor did she want to force Ambi to bear a child. The Queen’s body didn’t handle such things well, and while Zelda resented her mother’s traditionalism, she would never wish death by miscarriage or childbirth upon her. “I’ll just have to get a divorce after bearing a child because I’ll hate my husband more than anyone in the world,” she went on to clarify. “He’d be happier finding someone who loved him in the way you’ve described, I’m sure.”

Impa delicately put a couple of fingers to her temple. “…I see,” she sighed. Leaning down to look Zelda in the eyes, she said, “Consider this, though: what if you did marry someone whose company you enjoyed?”

“Anyone I had to share a bed and several nights with—”

“Take that part of things out of the situation.” Impa flicked her hand to the side. “If you had to share your life with someone who made you happy in a way that is pleasing to you, not in the manner those romance novels I intend to confiscate would describe, do you feel that would be possible? Is your heart open to it?”

Zelda frowned. They didn’t live in a world where that was in any way feasible for someone of her social position, but… “Yes,” she said hesitantly.

The idea of her being happy after the exchange of flowers and rings had never occurred to her. She’d only ever been able to imagine living life to its fullest up until that point, and then enduring the stretch of misery that came afterward. Now that her aunt brought up the possibility, she supposed it would be nice to have a companion. Someone who made her feel listened-to, important, and warm. Her tower felt awfully lonely and cold at times, even though she had her own fireplace. She could imagine someday having someone to curl around at nighttime—someone whose arms she felt safe in, and that she could trust. All those books she’d read for her marriage research made her doubtful that anyone like that could exist; there were always strings of unspoken invitation attached to smiles and touches in those disturbing stories.

“If I were to find someone similar to myself, invent a workaround for the marital bed, and was never forced to succumb to the frightening obsession those books call love, then I believe I could take a husband without eventually hating him to the point of…drastic measures,” she declared with more confidence after a while of thought.

In instances of grim despair over what she was doomed to endure once married, she had perhaps ruminated a little too long on what methods she’d use to take her husband—or herself—out of the equation. Usually she shoved those thoughts into the same mental cupboard that she locked musings about throwing herself down her tower’s stone stairs, but sometimes she’d been tempted to brew an experimental poison instead of her usual potions. Just as a test, just in case.

“Then, in the intervening years before the expectation of marriage becomes more pressing, we shall find a way to make that kind of relationship happen,” her aunt promised. “While marrying and continuing your family’s bloodline is an important duty, it also wouldn’t do for the ruler of Hyrule to be driven to the point of madness. History has shown that tends to work out quite poorly for everyone involved, including the rest of the country.”

Zelda grimaced, recalling the story of an ancestor who had lived over a thousand years ago. The Mad Queen had slaughtered her husband, three of her advisors, and then herself in a fit of rage born of hatred for her circumstances. She had been in a different situation than Zelda, despising the entire concept of being queen altogether, and the pressure had built until she’d unsheathed her husband’s ornamental sword in the middle of a meeting and started swinging. The Hyrule family had almost died out that day, continued only by the woman’s young son. Zelda was well aware she had certain faults to her personality that could lead to very bad places if circumstances became dire enough; the dark thoughts she had to beat back with a mental broom every now and then were proof of that. She and the Mad Queen were very different people, but that distant ancestor’s situation kind of rhymed with hers.

“For now, banish the spectre of marriage from your mind. You are young, and it is far off. You have better things to concern yourself with,” Impa told her. “For example, how has your self-imposed sewing project been going? Does your commoner friend enjoy those altered clothes?” A slight smile showed at the corners of her mouth.

Zelda brightened, happy to switch to a far more comfortable subject. “He does! He’s been enchanting the fabrics to be soil and stain-resistant so he doesn’t have to worry about them getting ruined by the outside elements when he’s out and about. Link hasn’t even done that much studying on textiles yet—he’s just super great at magic and feeling what enchantments would work.”

“Oh, is he? Has he told you about the things he’s made so far? I imagine he must be a budding young inventor like most members of his family. They tend to be quite brilliant, even from a young age.”

“Yeah, he’s super smart,” Zelda said, pleased to praise her best friend. Link always shrank like a turtle when he heard compliments in person. “He’s been working on this thing called an ‘actuator spell’, but not just that—he wants to figure out how to make it work in conjunction with other spells next to it in order to, um…to ‘produce a harmonized motion across a highly articulated length’. So he wants to make a remote-controlled metal tentacle, basically. That’s what the picture he drew looked like. But first, he’s starting out with a humanoid elbow and wrist that can move synchronously and independently using a control board. I don’t entirely get it, but here’s how he wrote it out…”

Chapter Text

“Oh, yeah, I was thinking of starting big. Kicking off my career with a bang, you know?” A man in his early twenties hefted a grappling hook, flashing a confident grin at Link’s usual supervisor for minding the shop. He kept flicking his eyes down at her chest, something a lot of customers did. Iza had once explained to Link that cleavage made things sell better.

“Really? That’s a risky climb even for experienced adventurers,” Iza remarked, but in a too-bright voice that made it sound like she was complimenting his ambition. “It’s cold up there.”

“Yeah, but it’s worth it. I mean, imagine if I got a scale from Lanuatu, or discovered a new cave full of treasure!” the man gushed. “I could make a fortune in a day!”

Link’s face pinched. He was eight, and yet he understood adventuring better than this guy.

Solo adventuring was super dangerous. Despite that, most treasure-hunters, monster-slayers, and cave-explorers didn’t want to work in teams because they thought themselves Hyrule’s next Champion and didn’t want anyone to take away from their future thunder. At least, that was the only reason for it that Link could think of. They must have thought doing everything on their own was cooler, somehow. In reality, it meant dying alone in a weird place and not being found until another adventurer had the same exploration idea. There were monsters who haunted certain areas of Hyrule even during peacetime, animated by lingering malice, death, or negative emotion infecting the area. Temples were designed specifically to stop people from reaching the treasures and heroic artifacts they protected, and they were very good at their jobs. Many regions of Hyrule had extreme conditions that required special clothes or equipment to survive. There were so many ways to die, whether the kingdom was under attack or not.

Link was someone who worked in the boring, least-known side of the adventuring industry: gear construction and supply. His family made the tools that those extreme sports enthusiasts used—weapons, shields, items like grappling hooks, and basic plate armor. Through reading manufacturing guidelines and heeding familial warnings, Link knew things that starry-eyed people like the twenty-something chatting with Iza didn’t. For example, the fact that while adventuring could make you a lot of money, it also took a lot of money to start out and this man wasn’t dressed like he had a wealthy background or a sponsor. It also required tons of combat training and survival skills; Link couldn’t speak for this customer’s preparedness for the cold, but the guy had come in today to buy his first weapon.

In his six months of gaining experience in minding the shop attached to his sister’s busy smithy, Link had learned what a one-time customer usually meant and how to spot one. If a wannabe solo adventurer came in for their first weapon and beginner gear and didn’t come back, they were probably dead. The Bluesmith Forge was one of the best known and most respected blacksmithing businesses in Central Hyrule; a one-visit adventurer tended to become a repeat visitor unless something stopped them. Like death.

One-timers had a certain theme to them, Link had noticed. Often confident or desperate, wanting to prove themselves either because they thought they were the next Hero of Lights or because they wanted other people to respect them more. Rich kids tended to be the former, and poor kids the latter. Adults fell along similar lines. They would make a big declaration of what they planned to do, buy whatever looked the coolest because they hadn’t researched what they were getting into beforehand, and then walk out the door to never return. If they were from Castle Town, Link would sometimes see their photo and learn their name in an obituary weeks or months after they’d stopped by. His sister had forbidden him from reading the newspaper, though, after she’d learned he did it for the death announcements.

“So I was thinking…maybe a claymore like some of the City Guard have?” The guy had moved onto picking his first weapon, the grappling hook he’d chosen clutched in one hand. “They’re just super cool looking, y’know? I can imagine slicing a Moblin in half with one of those.”

“Ambitious, aren’t you?” Iza said with an encouraging smile. Link gritted his teeth. Someone buying their first weapon was nowhere near skilled enough to wield a sword that big and heavy, even if he had the muscles of a farmhand. Field work was a very different set of movements than swordplay. As he thought this, Iza continued happily leading the man toward his doom. “Let’s see, the Knight’s Claymores are right over here—”

Alright, that was enough. “No, no, no.” Link got up from his seat and walked around the front counter. He glared at Iza, who knew just as well as he did that this guy was going to die within the month if he didn’t correct his path. “No.”

Iza gave him a warning look with her eyes, a retail smile frozen on her face. “The customer asks and he receives, Link,” she said with a forced titter. “That’s how a store works; we sell people what they want. I’ve got this, kiddo. Just be prepared to handle the till, okay?”

Link looked up at the adventurer with a concerned frown. “Don’t go to Mount Lanayru. Colder than you think, there are ice monsters, easy to slip and fall, air gets thin. Faron Jungle is good for beginners,” he said. “A Knight’s Claymore is for knights. Big, heavy, hard to use. Learn a smaller sword first. Basics are important.”

The man stared at him like he’d spoken in Anouki. “Who the hell are you? The owner’s kid?” he asked incredulously. “What are you, ten? What do you know?”

“More than you,” Link answered truthfully. If he hadn’t known more than this stranger, he wouldn’t have needed to tell him anything. Wasn’t that obvious? “Solo adventuring is dangerous. Learn basics before doing big things. Joining a group would be smart.”

The man puffed up angrily. “You calling me dumb, kid? I know better than to join one of those packs of cowards! My career would be in the toilet even if I found something, with all those other names crowding mine! You don’t know shit, kid. Shut up and go back to the register.”

“You will die,” Link warned urgently. “Mount Lanayru kills untrained people. Is why monsters are still there in peacetime.” Why didn’t this man understand? He wanted to climb one of the tallest, most difficult peaks in Hyrule as someone who had never used a sword or a grappling hook before! It was so blindingly obvious that Link couldn’t think of a way explain it in simpler words. On top of that, a grappling hook wouldn’t even be useful on Mount Lanayru because the slick stones wouldn’t let it catch; Iza had steered the guy toward that shelf because contraptions like those were cool-looking, expensive, and popular among overconfident people who didn’t know better.

His words seemed to unsettle the man, but not in the right way. Link shrank under the customer’s glare. “What’s wrong with you?” he almost shouted. Link flinched and covered his ears. Oh no, not the yelling. He couldn’t handle yelling! The man marched forward and seized Link’s forearm, yanking the limb. “You’re a rude little asshole, you know that?” the man shouted in his ear. Link let out a hoarse cry of pain as the sound stabbed through his skull. “How about you LISTEN when somebody—”

“Hey.” Iza took hold of the customer’s wrist. “I think you should leave,” she said firmly. “Gulley Forge is in Castle Town, and it sells adventuring gear more specialized than what we make here without requiring a commission. I’m sure they’d love to see you.”

The man let go of Link with an annoyed huff. “Fine. I bet they treat their customers better there, anyway.” He shoved the grappling hook into Iza’s hands and stomped out.

After several seconds of silence, Iza spoke. “Link, that’s the fifth adventurer you’ve chased out with that fearmongering of yours this month,” she said with frustration. “We need to make money here! New adventurers are dumb and buy whatever you point them at! Don’t you get what customers are for, kid? They’re for keeping this place humming and our purses full.”

Link sniffled and stared at his feet. His head still hurt from that shout. Why had that man been angry? Didn’t he want to stay alive? Was he one of those people who wanted to die, maybe? Had Link just been getting in the way of that?

“Oh, kid.” Iza put her hands on his shoulders. “When it comes to customers, you have to grow a thick skin. They don’t come here to get preached at; they just want to get what they need and go. That’s why they keep getting mad when you warn them. It’s not what they want to hear.”

Link chewed on his lower lip. He wanted to say “I don’t want them to die!”, but he couldn’t talk. The sentence wouldn’t come together in his head, and his tongue refused to move how he wanted it to. His words had run away again.

“I know it feels bad to have the kids sign the liability forms and let guys like him sail off thinking they’re on top of the world, but it’s what you have to do,” Iza said with a shrug. “It’s the job of doctors and rescuers to worry about the ones whose dreams don’t work out. All we’re here to do is give them the tools to achieve those dreams, if they can. Does that make sense?”

‘But we’d be letting them die without even trying to hold them back!’ Link thought. The words stayed trapped inside his head. He reluctantly nodded, since he had understood what she said, even if he disagreed. If he shook his head, she’d just explain it again like he was a toddler.

“Good! Just do your best to forget those faces, alright? That’s what I always do.” She swept aside some of his tears with her thumb. “Hold on, let me find you a handkerchief or something.” Iza walked around the counter and started digging around under it.

Renewed tears filled Link’s eyes, because he couldn’t just forget. Even if he forced himself not to think about those people, some part of him would still be wondering how long it would take for their bodies to turn up. Maybe he ought to think about whether their Bluesmith gear would be in good enough condition for another adventurer to use? Focus on the tools he was familiar with instead of the one-time customers who bought them? Could you turn off concern?

In the next two years he learned that you could, in fact, come very close to turning off your ability to care about stubbornly suicidal strangers if you got yelled at enough. If people of all ages wanted to throw themselves at death so badly, they had the right to do so. He was just the one who sold them what they wanted; as soon as they left his sight, their decisions were their problem. Who was he to ruin their dreams?

Link unrolled a piece of parchment on the counter in front of him. “Liability waiver. Sign, please.”

The girl who’d come into his shop today was fourteen at the oldest, with a feverish light to prove herself burning in her eyes. She’d picked out a pig-iron sword, a small tin shield, and a little disc cuirass that was only big enough to protect her heart. Link could tell at a glance that she was an orphanage kid who thought she had nothing to lose and everything to gain—no sponsors, no friends coming with her for support, nothing. He hated that the age statute for signing important forms was fourteen, instead of seventeen like everything else.

“What’s a liability waiver?” the girl asked, squinting at it. “And, um, I can’t read too well. Kinda skipped school, since no one made me go.”

Link recited a memorized speech. “If you sign this, it means you’re agreeing that our products are not at fault for your severe injury or death,” he said dully. “First-time adventurers under seventeen always have to sign a form like this at any gear shop. We could get in a lot of trouble, otherwise.”

“Why would you?” the girl asked. “You’re not deciding our careers.”

‘I wish we could,’ Link thought. Technically he was allowed to refuse service to anyone he wanted, but his family needed the money and couldn’t afford to take that hit to their reputation. Their work with Bluestone was expensive and not entirely covered by the Royal Family’s research grants, which was the only reason they did civilian-sector blacksmithing at all.

“Because sometimes parents want to punish us for what their kids do,” Link explained. “If you still want to sign the form and check out, I can read for you and help write everything in.”

“Oh, thank you!” the girl said with a relieved smile.

Link looked up at her with hollow eyes—she was the third adventurer kid this month, and the youngest—before walking around the counter. The image of this stranger slumped against a wall in a dark cave flashed in his mind’s eye. How would it take for them to find her body? Would her new sword have started rusting from neglect yet?

“You’re welcome,” he said with a flash of teeth he’d learned from copying Iza. Customer-service smile. “Now, please say your name so I can write down…”

Chapter Text

Link swished down the street, spinning every so often to watch his new skirt swirl. It was made of heavy velvet whose texture looked wonderful under the afternoon sun, and he had a robust petticoat on underneath to keep the fabric from hanging straight down. Avoka had also described the faded blue color as an eye-catching magenta, which made it all the better. Link had been going through the clothes that his friend had given him one by one, laying down enchantments to protect their delicate fabrics. Enchanting the old-fashioned way, without Bluestone, was really hard because he didn’t have any cracks or explosions to tell him when he had conflicting musical phrases in his composition that needed ironing out, but his guesswork was holding up so far. His beautiful new skirt hadn’t picked up any of the pollen blowing in from Hyrule Field today, for example.

He skipped toward the intersection of Main Street and Rosa Lane, where the fruit vendors congregated. Sure, there was a grocery store, but they didn’t give him a discount for his smile and pretty clothes like the nice Gerudo ladies who sold desert fruits and spices did. It had been a while since there’d been money in the budget for special foods, so he wanted to stock up on Warm Safflina and get a Hydromelon while he could.

“Excuse me.”

Link looked up. A smiling Hylian stood in front of him. She was dressed in the civilian clothes and protective leather of a traveler, not armored or equipped heavily enough to be an adventurer. Her dark complexion, blue-black hair, and pastel-colored dress-and-pants outfit implied she was from the Southern Isles. Magic sang around her, a calm and quiet tune that spoke of great versatility but not much raw power. Link didn’t recognize her as one of the regulars around Main Street.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

The lady jumped a little at the sound of his voice. “Oh my, I thought you were a girl,” she admitted with a flustered giggle.

Link gave her a flat look, though he held himself back from rolling his eyes. It would have been nicer for her to ask how he was referred to if she were confused, not assume anyway. What if he were a girl, and not a vei in between voe and vai? His big sister had looked and sounded a lot like him at this age, and he knew that comment would have hurt her feelings. Hmph.

He kept a wary eye on the lady in case she took offense to his clothes. Today he had on a sleeveless silk jacket and his favorite new velvet skirt in addition to his trusty green ox tunic. While the expensive hand-me-downs were enchanted to hold up against dirt (in theory, because no Bluestone meant no troubleshooting), he wasn’t about to let himself be beaten into the ground when he was dressed this nice.

“I was wondering if you, or someone around here, could help me find a place,” the lady said, taking a scrap of parchment out of a pouch on her adventuring belt. “Um, there’s this café called the Bountiful Banana?” She showed him the address someone had scribbled down. There was a number, but no street. “I’m meant to meet someone there, but I’ve never been to a big city before and I could use some help.”

Personally, Link found it quite easy to run around watching the building numbers go by until he found the right one, but perhaps that was harder for someone accustomed only to small island villages. It felt like giving her an instruction and turning her away might be kind of mean. “I can show you,” he said. “That’s on the eastern side of town.” The address numbers were smaller over there.

“Oh, thank you so much!” the lady said with a bright smile. “I’ve been so terribly lost today.”

Link led the way, his empty grocery basket thumping against his side. He wasn’t usually one who dropped everything he was doing to help someone because he mainly went out when he was spending time with Avoka or had pressing chores to do, but his shopping could be put off for a little while.

The foot traffic thinned out as they went farther away from the heart of the city. Everyone of every social class congregated around some section of Main Street to do their shopping and socializing. All the major businesses in Castle Town were clustered toward its center, where the citizens worked and relaxed when out of the house. Toward the edges of town lay only cafés, small sundries shops, and the occasional basic-repair fixer’s hut, all of them meant to cater to the neighborhoods they lay in.

He’d never heard of a neighborhood café called the Bountiful Banana. Bananas were something enjoyed mainly by human members of the jungle-dwelling Zonai tribes and other Hylians who lived to the south; most people from Central Hyrule, Link included, weren’t fond of the smelly, strange-textured fruit. It made sense that an islander like this lady would like them, though. Maybe this place was a new business? How strange, to open up out here instead of doing a trial run at a stall on Main Street.

As he walked up the street the address was most likely on, several details started occurring to him in random sequence. There were only a few people standing around outside the houses. Not entirely unusual, since these were working and school hours, but one would think there would be some smaller children running around. Most of the windows around him were shuttered despite it being a warm summer day. This wasn’t a nice enough neighborhood for everyone to have air conditioning, surely?

The people standing outside the houses were a little…off. All of them were around the same age (vaguely late twenties to mid-thirties) and of a medium build, their features and clothes bland enough that even Link’s sharp eyes slid around them. They leaned against walls, some picking absently at their nails and others checking watches. One had a Sheikah Slate he was poking at and frequently glancing up from. Why did they keep looking around at regular thirty-second intervals? Were they waiting for someone? Hoping to catch a passing taxi carriage, maybe?

Link stopped in front of a building with the number that had been on the traveler’s note. There wasn’t a café here, just a small townhouse. He frowned up at it. “Are you sure that address—”

Powerful long limbs snared him. A cloth soaked in something that made his sensitive nose burn smothered his lower face. Link gasped and choked through his blocked nose and mouth, his eyes filling with tears from both the fumes and panicked confusion. What was going on? Who was that traveler? Why was she doing this to him?

The world started going dark, and he belatedly realized that he probably should have remembered to scream with one of those deep breaths. His eyes closed, and then he was lost to chemical-scented unconsciousness.

Impa lowered her red Gossip Stone and sighed. Well, shit. She’d been hoping this wouldn’t happen until Link had gone on to earn his own fame. The fact that he was nothing more than an unusually intelligent eleven-year-old for the time being had been one of the factors she’d been counting on to keep him safer than his older relatives.

The scout she’d assigned to watch him had been accosted by Yiga agents and drawn away from his post, allowing Link to be snatched up and dragged off to who-knew-where while he wasn’t watching. That guard would be replaced by someone less easily distracted as soon as there was a spare moment, but now Impa was faced with the mess of hunting Link down at least two hours after he’d gone missing. His supposed watcher wasn’t even sure of the time-frame, let alone where the Yiga might have stowed him.

She didn’t know whether a ransom note had yet turned up, but she didn’t doubt that they’d already planted one at the Mad Owl’s residence or smithy. Using Link as a hostage was the only motivation the Yiga could have had. They didn’t have a habit of torturing children and Link wasn’t likely to know much about his family’s less public work, anyway. His sister, though, had her fingers in a great many pies. Impa’s agents were allowed to know some of went on behind workshop doors in the Bluesmith family—a benefit of serving as the engineers’ royal sponsors—and she had some idea of what the Yiga could be after.

Gaebora and one of her more distantly related Gerudo cousins, Amendi, had been working on-and-off on something they called a “Light Bomb”. It was similar to a traditional bomb, though far less effective at this early stage, and meant to cut down on the current need for quarries and mines to have a steady flow of volatile explosives and black powder shipped in by train. Rather than being composed of real materials, Light Bombs were produced by a specially-enchanted Bluestone power source that summoned spheres of solidified magic—almost like spells one could hold—to one’s hand. It was a fledgling idea that had a very long way to go before it actually went anywhere, but it had great, and possibly terrible potential. What if, one day, soldiers could carry infinite explosives that they simply summoned to hand? There wasn’t a single country out there that wouldn’t immediately want every single monster-fighting unit kitted out well enough to beat the ancient King of Evil himself. If the Yiga got ahold of the blueprints for that gadget, let alone the sheet music for what had been accomplished so far, the outcome could be devastating. The Yiga were all fanatical idiots, but their spurts of unexpected competence made their capabilities dangerously unpredictable.

She set down the red Gossip Stone that allowed her to contact her officers on the table in front of her, taking out a different Gossip Stone out of a satchel on her belt. This one was a standard green model, connected to a single matched stone. “Contact Gaebora Bluesmith,” she commanded it. The enchanted rock pulsed with green light a few times before hovering and glowing over her palm.

The Mad Owl’s loud, distressed voice jumped from the Gossip Stone. “Impa! My baby—he—they left a note!” she said in a rush. “H-He was going to the market, and they SNATCHED HIM!” Her voice broke halfway through her shout. “They want the sheet music and blueprints for my royal commissions, Impa. All of it, Light Weapons and all. Or they—they’ll kill Link!” She wailed incoherently, trailing off into sobbing. “I d-don’t know what t-to do! He’s j-just a kid! HOW COULD THEY TARGET HIM?!”

Impa winced and rubbed her ear. Gaebora had the bellow of a Goron. “The Royal Guard will be mobilized once I end this call,” she assured the panicked engineer. “I understand the urgency of this situation and intend to do my best to resolve it.”

Gaebora loudly blew her nose. “Wh-What can I do?” she asked shakily. “Should I join the search? Protect my project documents?”

“Teams will be dispatched to support the defenses around the Bluesmith vault and guard you,” Impa assured her. “Stay safe and be prepared to receive Link when he returns. Hylia be with you.”

Gaebora took a shuddering breath. “A-and with you. Please bring Link home.”

Impa ended the call, picked up her red command stone, and started laying down orders. Her shadows would have this matter taken care of by the end of the day. The only factor in question was how many Yiga would be cremated in the coming week for their foolishness.

Zelda curled up on the floor in her closet, hidden among the froth of what she hadn’t yet passed along to Link. Her friend was gone. Kidnapped!

Impa had interrupted her history class in the later afternoon to quietly inform her that Link had been abducted from Castle Town and she was doing something about it. Then she’d left Zelda to spiral into a panic while she moved her troops around.

Zelda rocked in place, hugging her knees. All she knew about the Yiga was that they were obsessed with raising Ganon from his watery tomb in the flooded ruins of Old Hyrule and having him rule the New Kingdom. They were responsible for atrocities like the Massacre of Jabun, in which they’d poisoned an entire city-state of Zoras to death, and the Golden Valley Tragedy, in which they’d collapsed a canyon wall on a long caravan of Gerudo merchants. They were evil, and now they had her sweet, pacifistic friend in their clutches. Who knew what they might do to him? Link wouldn’t fight back, so they could do anything. His dedication to nonviolence had worried Zelda since day one, and now it felt like her worst fears were coming true.

What if Link didn’t come back at all?

She whimpered, though she wanted to scream. Link was the first person her age she’d ever managed to form a bond with. They’d only been hanging out for a few months now, but he was her big, bright moon in a sky full of dim stars. She had admittedly been staking a little too much of her mental wellbeing on him, using her friend’s calm and steady nature to stabilize her more volatile emotions. It had been helping, though; Link made her feel heard and understood, which made her head feel less like it might explode after a particularly frustrating day at the castle.

And now the kid who smiled like the sun and only ever did his best to help might be gone forever.

‘Please be okay,’ she prayed. ‘Goddess Hylia, please watch over him.’

Link awoke in a dark, quiet space. Awareness came to him slowly, accompanied by a thudding headache. He opened his eyes and blinked blearily. The area around him faded into focus.

He was in a root cellar. There were jars of pickled radishes and apple jam on the shelf next to him. Mmm, he liked apple jam…

‘Wait. Why am I in a root cellar?’ He sat up straighter and looked around. This wasn’t his house’s storage room. There weren’t any power lines or illumination strips here, just seams of light creeping in around the trapdoor entrance overhead. His sister also hated radish pickles, so they never kept that many jars of them sitting around.

He tried to get up, only to be stopped by a sudden awareness of desperately sore shoulders and wrists. Link winced, then tested his current mobility by flexing his hands. His wrists were secured behind him with maddeningly itchy rope. His ankles, too, were bound rather tightly. Going by the soreness in his shoulders and the crick in his neck, he’d been knocked out for a while.

The reality of his current situation fell upon him like a leaden blanket. He had been kidnapped. That islander lady had knocked him out and put him in her (or someone else’s?) cellar. Why? What could he have done to motivate this? Over the years he’d developed an awareness of why certain strangers sometimes started yelling at him for no seeming reason, but those people had always settled for chasing and/or beating him at worst. That was a potential danger of wearing nice clothes that he’d come to understand and now had mitigation strategies for.

Tears welled in his eyes as he looked around the cellar with increasing panic. What had he done? Why had this happened? What was going on? Would mean people in town start trying to kidnap him now? Had his more expensive velvet skirt caused those who hated his clothes to escalate in their anger?

He pulled at his ropes. Who knew what those people might do to him? Before, it had stopped at beating him into the ground, but what if they wanted to start breaking his bones now? What if they wanted to kill him?

Link whimpered in pain and fear as his yanking only increased the ache in his strained body. The rope was thick and tied too securely; pulling at it did nothing. He wasn’t strong enough!

He curled up and wept into his knees. Was anyone looking for him? Did they know he was even gone? Gabbi was busy at work most of the time and trusted him to look after himself when left unsupervised. What if she hadn’t noticed yet? Who could she even call to help her search?

‘I wish Avoka were here. He would do something,’ he thought miserably. Link wasn’t very proactive outside of his personal experiments and studies. He was someone most comfortable with doing what people requested of him, whether that was running errands, working at his apprenticeship, or going outside with Avoka when his friend asked. Quietly letting things happen to and around him tended to reduce the amount of conflict aimed in his direction, so it was what he defaulted to. Avoka, meanwhile, was someone who stood like a stubborn rock in the middle of a river. He spoke up, fought back, and struck out to accomplish his own goals with utter fearlessness. The threat of being yelled at was nothing to him; he’d just yell right back, possibly while waving around a knife. Link wished he could be that strong.

He took a deep, shuddering breath. Now was the time when he’d have to summon his inner Avoka, because it could be a long wait before he was found. The people who’d taken him would have plenty of time to do whatever they wanted to him in the meantime. Even if his sister was already searching, he could do something to help make her job easier.

First problem he had to deal with: the ropes on his wrists. He wasn’t strong enough to tear them and they refused to loosen, so he ought to get his hands in front of him to make them more useful. While his magic made him incredibly flexible in addition to boosting his senses and strength, his shoulders would only hurt worse if he dislocated them to bring his arms up and around his head. If he had to (goddesses forbid) throw a punch, he was going to need his shoulders to not be screaming.

He curled his spine forward and worked his hands under his butt, then shimmied them forward. Cursing the lack of extra joints in his legs, he fell on his back and struggled there like a flipped beetle. After much aggravation, he managed to get his hands in front of him.

Okay, now for the hard part: undoing the knot on these ropes. He wasn’t great with knots; one of his mysterious disability’s myriad symptoms was a lack of coordination in his fingers, which made anything fiddly rather difficult. Link yanked at the rope with his teeth, but quickly gave up on that approach when his gums and jaws began aching. If he ripped out a tooth, there was no guarantee he’d be able to drink a Red Potion in time to regrow it. He didn’t want to lose any of his permanent teeth for good; he was only eleven, and he was going to need those for a while!

Hmm, what would Avoka do? Make a knife appear from somewhere and cut himself free, probably. Link didn’t like handling sharp things very much. Aside from their uses in the kitchen, there wasn’t much knives could do that wasn’t related to violence in some way. Hammers, which Link favored, were mainly for helping, not hurting. You could mine rocks, build a fence, or forge tools with a hammer. Not so much with a thing made for stabbing people.

Still, though, a blade would be useful here. In the darkness, his night-attuned Sheikah eyes could make out several shelves, some fence wood propped up against a wall, some spare cheesecloth, and a fair number of glass jars full of preserved food. No knives.

‘The glass, you goober,’ he imagined Avoka’s voice saying exasperatedly in his mind. Oh right, broken glass was sharp! It just didn’t usually occur to him to break it on purpose.

Link reached out and picked up a jar of apple jam. After a moment of thought, he chose a jar of pickles instead. In case whoever had to clean up missed some spots, the pickling brine wouldn’t draw ants like the sugary jam would. He didn’t want to cause the owner of this cellar too much trouble, assuming this place didn’t belong to that scary traveler.

Before he did anything, he cocked an ear toward the cellar door and focused on his hearing. No magic. No footsteps. No voices. He sat there listening for two full minutes before dialing back his magic. It was possible his kidnapper had gone out to get something and he was being left alone for a little while.

Link held the jar by the lid and smashed it straight down on the floor with calculated strength. The glass splintered, but didn’t explode apart. He lifted the lid up, allowing the jar to fall to pieces and deposit its contents on the floor, then carefully picked up a dagger-shaped chunk of glass. He carefully, slowly turned it around in his clumsy fingers before sawing at the thick rope around his wrists. Luckily for him, both wrists were secured with a single loop instead of being individually snared. He didn’t have to cut all the way through the whole knot, just through the straight line of rope extending from it.

He sliced halfway through, set down the glass shard, and tried snapping the rope again. This time the fibers parted, one by one, in the face of his efforts. Gritting his teeth against the fire in his wrists, he poured all his magic into reinforcing his bones and muscles. Just snap, dammit! He didn’t have all day to cut himself free!

The rope finally popped after around half a minute of straining. His wrists were free! Yay! Link pumped his fist victoriously and started freeing his ankles with his improvised knife instead of attempting to undo the knot. Soon his legs sprang apart, too.

Link climbed to his feet and walked under the cellar door. There were broken metal brackets on the wall that spoke of a recently removed way out, and the exit was four feet overhead. He wouldn’t be surprised if the door above him was padlocked shut, too. Damn. No wonder whoever had taken him had been confident in leaving him unwatched.

Well, nothing for it but to see what he could do. He took stock of the room again, his eyes gliding over the shelves and settling on the spare fencing lying against the wall. The panels were a little too breakable for what he had in mind, but those posts looked thick and sturdy. They were more than four feet long, too.

He picked up one of the fence posts and carried it under the trapdoor, then oriented it to point straight up with one of his hands supporting it from the bottom and the other keeping it upright. Root cellars, as a general rule, were not designed for keeping prisoners in. Since this one seemed to be regularly used for its intended purpose, he doubted anyone had bothered to reinforce the wood or the hinges on this door.

Link breathed in and out, seizing his magic and pouring it into his limbs. His dark-vision faded to almost nothing and his ears suddenly filled with cotton, but his arms and legs felt powerful enough for him to grapple with a Goron. He thrust the wooden post straight up.

BOOM!

The sound barely registered in his dimmed hearing. The seams of light coming in from around the door became a little brighter, but he wasn’t free just yet. He bent his knees and heaved the post toward the trapdoor like a javelin.

BOOM! CRACK!

This time, the sound of thudding wood was accompanied by the snap of metal giving way. The door flipped forward, the hinges having broken before the lock. A neat square of the sunset sky showed through. Light and fresh air poured in.

Link grinned. Excellent; this cellar’s door led straight outside instead of into the back of someone’s pantry. He dropped the post, coiled his legs, and jumped straight up. Catching the edge of the opening, he hauled himself out of the cellar and tumbled onto a sandy garden path.

He staggered to his feet and looked around. Prairie herbs and sweet Hylian pumpkins grew in square patches of tilled soil. An apple tree cast shade over him. He stood in a commoner’s modest back yard. ‘Okay, I’m free. Now what?’ he wondered. What would his friend do instead of go straight home and cry himself to sleep?

‘Tell someone,’ he thought. Avoka was a castle protector in training, so it was his duty to report things. Link needed to find someone he could report to. A member of the City Guard, maybe?

After climbing over the six-foot fence, he ran down the street—one in the eastern end of town, he noticed—and made a beeline for the front of Castle Town at top speed. People and buildings flew by as undefined blurs. Surprised shouts chased behind him.

Link skidded to a stop in front of a wide-eyed Hylian City Guardsman standing on one side of the main gate. He tried to say something, only for no sound to come out.

‘What?’ he thought dumbly, swaying on his feet. The headache he’d noticed upon waking up felt a lot worse than before. The pounding in his temples was louder than his own thoughts. ‘I need to talk right now.’ He imagined words coming together, only for them to fall apart before they formed a sentence. Link grappled with the concept of communication like a wet bar of soap, trying and failing to dig his mental claws into the slippery idea.

The officer’s stunned expression shifted into concern as he stood there staring at her. “Are you alright, kid?” she asked, reaching out.

“Ah,” he said. He’d gotten sound to happen, but then his mouth had refused to cooperate. ‘I’ve been kidnapped! I need help!’ he mentally screamed. Half a minute of awkward, staring silence passed by as Link fought with himself. “Help. Nnneed,” he finally managed force past the mysterious barrier between his thoughts and words. He took a few deep breaths to help him focus and tied a line of syllables together one by one. Getting his brain, tongue, and voice to bend to his will was almost painful. “I. Was khi…k…kid-napped. Need help.” That headache was really bad. Ow. He wobbled on his feet again.

“Oh, shit. Kid, are you okay?” The woman dropped her spear and reached out to catch Link as his legs gave out.

Link’s eyes filled with tears. He wanted Gabbi to pick him up and tell him he was going to be okay. Where was his big sister? He wanted his Gabbi!

He keened in distress and curled up on the ground, his entire world consumed by a storm of emotion. Enough had happened today! He wanted to go home!

A while later, he became aware of a large hand on his shoulder and a deep voice humming a song with long, slow notes. Link focused on the sound of the tune and hummed along. Pieces of reality slotted into place. He smelled the sweet, apple-scented soap he and his sister used for their laundry. The worn linen of his favorite quilt was clutched between his fingers. He recognized his poster for the Great Inter-Kingdom Science Symposium on the wall. The song keeping him grounded was his sister humming the Last Queen’s Lullaby.

He was home. He could have cried in relief, but he didn’t have the energy. He was home.

Link closed his eyes and laid down. Gabbi’s hand adjusted his pillow, then pulled up his blanket.

“You were so brave today. I’m proud of you.” Gentle fingers brushed his hair away from his face. “Sleep well, Link.”

He fell asleep with tears crusted at the corners of his eyes and a faint smile on his lips.

Avoka paced in front of Link’s room, his body full of buzzing energy that refused to go away. His hands had been shaking for the last hour.

Was three days long enough for Link to recover? Was it okay for him to see people yet? Gabbi had said so, but Avoka wasn’t sure. Was he close enough to deserve to bother Link so soon after his ordeal? What did you do when your one and only friend was kidnapped? Was there an etiquette for this?

Link’s door swung open. “Could hear you pacing,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Am better. Just lost my words for a while.” He motioned for Avoka to enter.

Avoka stepped into the young blacksmith’s bedroom hesitantly. He hadn’t been in Link’s private space before.

Posters of famous Bluestone engineers were pasted to the walls, interspersed with a couple of advertisements for science symposiums and a yellowing illustration of the layout for the once-renowned (and now destroyed) Death Mountain Lightware Facility. His furniture was modest and scarce compared to what Avoka was used to. Two squat and overflowing bookshelves, a many-drawered desk with a strange-looking padded chair, a wardrobe, and a bed were all that filled the room. The table had a scratched-up steel plate bolted to its work surface, and a spray of divots scarred the gray-painted granite wall behind it.

“Sit.” Link gestured toward the chair before settling on his bed.

Avoka took the indicated seat, then white-knuckled it in fright when it slid. Not only that, but he seemed to rotate a little as it did. He looked down incredulously. Some madman—possibly Link—had put wheels on the thing!

Link laughed. “Spinning chair!” he declared. “Standard in Bluesmith labs. Height adjusts with a lynch pin now. New concept!”

Avoka made a mental note to ask what a lynch pin was, other than a figure of speech. Right now, he had other questions. “I see you’re feeling well enough to mess with me,” he said with a light note of teasing. Then, more seriously, he inquired, “But how are you? In detail, if you have the words for it.”

Link hummed, rocking in place as he thought. “Better,” he said. “But not all good yet.” His hands twisted in the worn quilt draped messily over his bed. It featured patchwork scenes of sand, sea, and palm trees—unusual to see on the mainland. “I got an explanation for what happened. If I understand why something happened, is usually less scary. I can come up with strategies. Keep the next time from turning out so bad. But this…” He drew the blanket to his chest, his shoulders hunching. “What can I do? Not help people? Not go outside? Not trust anyone?” He chewed on his bottom lip. Tears of distress sparkled at the corners of his eyes. “If I see the same factors as before, can I get away? What if I get things wrong? See the signs, run away, but just make people mad? It’s scary when people get mad. People yell.” He shuddered.

Avoka felt awful for him. Link’s kindness had callously been taken advantage of. It was one thing when someone was led by the nose through their greed or selfishness, but Link had been drawn into a trap simply by showing a traveler from a far corner of Hyrule where they wanted to go. And then that “traveler” had dismissed her disguise spell, drugged Link with some kind of Yiga poison, and dumped him into a cellar after knocking out its owner in a similar fashion. Link was lucky he’d been able to escape while Impa’s forces were keeping his captors distracted, because Hylia only knew what might have happened to him otherwise.

“It doesn’t matter if you accidentally make someone mad,” Avoka declared. “Your safety is important. If you feel like you’re in danger, get out of there. Or fight back, if you have to.”

Link’s expression pinched.

“I know you don’t like violence, but sometimes it’s your only option,” Avoka said. “You should at least let me show you how to punch someone without breaking your fingers, or make someone let go if they grab you.”

The constipated look intensified.

“Link.” Scooting forward on his chair’s wheels, Avoka leaned toward his stubbornly pacifistic friend with his elbows on his knees. “Yes, hurting doesn’t help. But there’s a difference between hurting someone because you want to and hurting someone for your own survival. If they’re causing you harm first, it’s not wrong for you to make them stop.”

“I make them stop by running away.” Link hugged the quilt to his chest. “Am good at running.”

“What if someone catches you? Trips you, or lifts you up so you can’t run?” he pushed. “If fleeing is your only option and you can’t do that, what’s your alternative?”

Link hid his face behind the blanket. “Don’t know,” he said in a small voice.

“That’s why you should learn how to throw a few elbows and punches to let yourself get away. Not for the purpose of hurting others, but to make sure you can come back safely to the people who love you,” Avoka told him gently. It wasn’t quite what he wanted to say, which was that some evil jerks deserved every ounce of pain you could deliver, but it was what would make sense to his friend. Link was someone who had a very difficult time conceptualizing cruelty for cruelty’s sake, even though Avoka had tried several times to explain it to him. He had a habit of assuming everyone else thought along the same lines that he did, with modifications drawn from his painstaking attempts to understand the rest of society. Malice was so anathema to Link’s nature that he couldn’t conceive of someone acting upon it, let alone see the justification in using violence to defend oneself from those actions.

Link slowly lowered the quilt. He narrowed his eyes. “…No knives.”

“No knives,” Avoka agreed, “but defending yourself from them?”

“Nnh.” Link’s nose scrunched. “Fine.” He reached out and flapped his hand up and down. “Shake on it! Not learning knives.”

Avoka smiled. If Link didn’t want to use blades, that was fine with him. At least his friend would be taking a step forward in protecting himself if the Sheikah watchman meant to keep him safe messed up again. Ideally, Link would never have to use what his friend taught him. Avoka clasped Link’s hand and shook. “Agreed. Just punches, kicks, and defense against knives.”

“Deal.”

Chapter Text

Link bobbed his head as he walked, his whole body bouncing with excitement. Testing Day! It was Testing Day!

His first prototypes for the Pegasus Boots were clutched to his chest. He’d been working on them for a whole month before today. Most of his personal project time had been spent composing an enchantment that established all the basic functions that he would add to with further prototypes, as well as ironing out as many potential internal conflicts as he could. Right now, he had to focus on making a solid base to work off of. Depending on how long the Bluestone lasted in this testing phase, assuming it didn’t immediately crack or explode once the spell activated, he’d go into the editing stage, and then rewrite the song and start the cycle again. Composition, testing, and editing would repeat with further prototypes until he had a magically stable and dependable model of Pegasus Boots suitable for mass-production. The Postman’s Guild, who delivered to everywhere that trains couldn’t, would kill for something like that.

Avoka trailed behind Link with an air of apprehension. “Don’t Bluestone things explode when they go wrong?” he asked. “If you’ve never tested this thing before, it has a high chance of doing that, right? Why not stick your boots on one of the dummies in your back yard first? I mean, they are testing dummies.”

“Will-based activation,” Link said. “The boots don’t automatically turn on. Have to think at them first.”

He held up the boots to show the shape of their spell nodes. The thing about spell nodes was that Bluestone didn’t really care what shape it was cut, melted, or sung into, just whether it was cracked, had magic, and was enchanted. Stress points weren’t a problem for a material whose physical integrity was tied mainly to its magical integrity. The size of the crystal affected its magical storage and channeling capacity, but it could be shaped like a duck for all the rock cared. Because these boots were his first model, they had specially-made, metal-backed testing nodes stitched to the outer side of each ankle, designed in this case to direct an explosion to the side and away from his body. Testing nodes (as opposed to production nodes) were shaped charges that sent the force of a failure in whatever direction the engineer wasn’t standing in, assuming said engineer guessed right and picked the correct node for the job.

“See these? Testing nodes,” he said, pointing. “I won’t blow up my ankles.” The backward force of an explosion could very well crack the bone sitting right behind it if it was bad enough, but he doubted his spell would fail so spectacularly. That was what the initial conflict-sweeping portion of his composition phase had been for.

“Oh, yeah, you’ll just have an explosion right next to your ankles,” Avoka said with nervous snark. “So reassuring.”

Link winked. “Glad you think so!” He skipped off toward his testing site.

Avoka stood there, stunned for a moment, before crying out, “Link, I know you can understand sarcasm!”

Link giggled gleefully at Avoka’s response—the correct response. He was glad to have a friend he could mess with a little without having their estimation of his intelligence permanently drop. Most people assumed that everything he said was literal, for some reason. He had studied things like hyperbole, figures of speech, and sarcasm so he could use them like other people did. Why did he have to put on an obnoxious voice for them to notice when he was being silly?

They stopped at a wooden platform that sat not too far outside the fenced-in perimeter of Link’s house. It was a flat disk staked into the ground with a narrow flagpole sticking up from the center, meant to serve as a marker for measuring the distance involved in some tests. An eye-catching banner of shimmering, electric blue Zora fabric streamed from the pole; originally it had been red, but Link’s sister had quickly switched warning colors in her workshop and forge when she’d realized that Link had trouble telling even the most vivid scarlet from grass, wood, or brownish stone.

“What are you planning to do, exactly?” Avoka asked as Link changed his shoes. He cast his gaze around the wind-blown grassy sea of Hyrule Field. In the distance lay fields of rice and wheat. A mile to the east stood the dark stone shape of the Bluesmith Forge, its three chimneys puffing busily.

“Run,” Link said. “I’m testing speed and stability.” He finished pulling on the prototype Pegasus Boots and stood up. “You’re my spotter.” Taking off the bag he’d stepped out wearing, he held it out to Avoka. Potion bottles clinked within. “For when I get hurt.”

Avoka took the bag with trepidation. “‘When?’ Link, what—?” He lifted the flap and his eyes went wide at the four Blue Potions within. Link had saved up to afford the basic ingredients needed to brew his own potions on the stove. He doubted they were half as good as Syrup’s, but a low-grade Blue Potion would fix him up better than a weak Red Potion and it was a better value in the long-term to purchase ingredients in bulk than buy the elixirs premade.

“These are blue,” Avoka said in an urgent hiss, as if Link weren’t aware. Which, to be fair, wasn’t an unreasonable assumption; he’d had to tell Link what color his cooking was on several occasions.

Link nodded. “I know. I made them.”

“Are you expecting to lose a limb?!”

This early model of the Pegasus Boots wasn’t too fast, since he didn’t trust them at all yet, but their current speed cap was enough to do some harm to his magically-reinforced body if he tripped over his own feet or slammed into a tree. The Blue Potions were calculated overkill. When you were running an experiment, you didn’t just prepare for contingencies; you double and triple-prepared for things to go wrong.

“It’s too much on purpose,” he summarized for Avoka. “Blue is for safety.”

“What do those boots do? You never said how fast they can go,” Avoka fretted. “Ten miles per hour? Fifteen? How long does it take for them to brake?”

“Thirty miles per hour. No brakes, just ‘go’.” Link started stretching his legs out to warm up. “I have to establish a baseline. Get the spell stable before adding extras. That way if an extra messes up, the problem is easier to identify.”

“Thirty?” Avoka shrilled. He set down the bag of potions and seized Link by the elbows. “Please don’t do this. I don’t want you to die!”

The words echoed in Link’s mind. How many times had he said that to the inexperienced, too-confident people who came into his family’s shop to buy weapons and didn’t survive long enough to return for repairs?

Although the difference here was that Link knew for certain how dangerous adventuring was and Avoka didn’t understand how Link’s magic worked. Thirty miles per hour wasn’t as dangerous for him as it was for someone else; he could sprint at close to that speed if he pushed himself. That was why he’d set the boots’ speed that high in the first place. It was enough to tell the prototype was working, but a speed he knew he could easily walk away from after taking a tumble. His friend’s worry was valid, but unnecessary.

“Hold on.” Link gently pried Avoka’s hands away, switched his shoes back to his usual sandals, and stood. “Dry run first. So you have a baseline,” he said brightly. It was so silly of him to have missed this step! He’d only ever worked with his sister before, so he’d forgotten his current “lab assistant” needed to be brought up to speed. “I’ll go to the pond over there and back.” He pointed in the direction he intended to aim his test run in. The pond would serve as the brakes he hadn’t included in his prototype enchantment.

He pulled his goggles down and secured them. There was enough pollen flying around that he didn’t want his eyes to catch it at his running speed. He got down in a sprinter’s crouch, then took off. Tall grass slapped against his trousers and scraped against the exposed patches of his feet as he flew through it. Link quickly surged to his top speed, his heart beating fast. Running wasn’t an activity he’d ever particularly enjoyed—it was just how he got to places and escaped from bad situations—but now a zing of exhilaration ran through him. This was the first time he’d ever intentionally demonstrated his speed to someone outside his family, since strangers thought he was weird enough without knowing he could run three times the speed of most people. He wanted to do his best to show his friend what he could do!

Link leaned into a hard turn just before the pond and sped back to the testing platform. Avoka stood there staring at him with round eyes, his mouth probably hanging open behind his mask. Link flashed him a beaming smile. “See? Thirty miles per hour is fine,” he reassured his friend. “There’s a pond. Will run there with the enchantment on and run back with it off. Testing ‘on’ and ‘off’ today.”

Avoka’s gaze kept sliding from Link to the trail he’d left in the prairie grass. “You know, when you said before that you could run fast, I thought you meant, like…for a kid,” he said a little hazily. “You’re a horse.”

Link laughed until his stomach hurt. “A horse,” he wheezed. He imagined a brown horse with spiky blond hair for its mane and tail, dressed in his leather work apron and waving its head around with a hammer in its mouth. His coworkers were ducking under tables as Horse-Link trotted by.

The tips of Avoka’s ears turned pink. “It’s an apt comparison!” he said defensively. “I’ve seen horses at a gallop before, and that was definitely a gallop speed!”

“You’re right, just…horse,” Link said once he’d caught his breath. “Hehehee…H-Horse blacksmith.” He coughed to head off another giggle fit. “But, um. Yes. Gallop speed. Twenty-three point five miles per hour. So don’t worry. I can handle a crash.”

Avoka’s face pinched. “I guess,” he said reluctantly. “I’d still prefer you had some kind of armor on.”

Link looked down at his outfit. He had on his experimenting clothes, which consisted of thick wool trousers with leather patches at the knees, a felted tunic that provided a level of cushioning, and a matching woolen jacket with leather at the elbows. The wool was fire-resistant and he had sleeves on and everything. Link never wore sleeves if he could help it, like most members of his family. How much more protection did he need in order to run?

Avoka sighed at his puzzled expression. “Okay, clearly your pain tolerance is way too high. Most people are nowhere near this okay with the risk of tumbling across the grass like they’ve been tossed out of a chariot.” He made shooing motions at Link. “Go on, do your tests. I’ll commission some knee and elbow pads from your sister’s forge later.”

Link gasped in excitement. “Commission?” he asked, bouncing in place.

His friend smirked. “I’ll get them in stala, too. You’ll have some fancy Sheikah-alloy kneecaps so I don’t have to watch you crack your natural ones on a rock.”

Link squealed and waved his fists near his chest. There would be enough money left over from a job like that for him to buy something nice. Like cinnamon sticks, or a whole jar of honey!

“Glad to know you’re more excited about making money than getting safer,” Avoka grumbled.

“Goggles, jumpsuit, potions, sleeves,” Link said, pointing to each thing. “Safe!” He sat down on the testing platform to change his shoes again.

“Mmhm.” Avoka crossed his arms skeptically. “I think I’ll commission a helmet, too. The wimpy little cap attached to those goggles isn’t going to do anything if you brain yourself on a tree.”

Link stood back up with the ends of his trousers tucked into his Pegasus Boots and went into a shallow runner’s stance. “There’s only a pond ahead. No braining myself on trees…yet,” he said with a mischievous grin that widened at Avoka’s look of dismayed exasperation. Then he thought of running like the wind and pushed into motion.

The Pegasus Boots responded immediately—too immediately. His feet went from zero to top speed as soon as he took his first step. Link found himself jerking forward, then getting dragged on his back through the grass. As soon as his feet got so far ahead that they lost contact with the ground, he was left lying breathless and bewildered with his shirt riding up, grass infiltrating his clothes, and an itchy spot of abrasion on his lower back. He peeled himself out of the crater of crushed flora around him.

After spitting out some of the plant matter in his mouth, Link wiped the dust and pollen off his face with his sleeve. “Huh,” he remarked. When he’d said he was testing “on” and “off”, he hadn’t meant it quite that literally. He jogged back to the testing platform. Crouching down by the potions bag, he took out a notebook and fountain pen and started writing down his observations.

The boots were very black and white about their function; they were on or off, with no in-between or build-up to top speed. He’d made the mistake of assuming acceleration would be natural by default when he’d composed the enchantment. The boots’ motion was traction-based, though, which was something that he’d done on purpose. As soon as there was no ground to run on, the enchantment would blink off and the magically propelled motion of his feet would stop. Link turned his ankles around to get a look at the spell node on each shoe. “Test 1 Bluestone Status: Nodes show no sign of strain. No flickering, runaway activation, warning brightness, or cracks,” he added to the end of that entry.

He stood up, picked the grass out of his hair and clothes, and got ready to try again.

“You just flipped on your back like you took a bad step on ice, and you’re going to do that again on purpose?” Avoka asked incredulously. “Do you expect something new to happen?”

“It might; that’s why I’m testing,” Link explained. “A baseline has to be stable. Consistent. Change is bad.”

Avoka narrowed his eyes in skeptical confusion. “And you intend to drag yourself feet first through the prairie until you’re sure the boots are always going to do that in the same exact way?”

Link clapped his hands and nodded. “Yes, yes! And then if the nodes don’t blow up, I’ll run with the spell off. Check for activation over-sensitivity.”

The Sheikah shook his head in disbelief. “Scientists are a whole different breed. Hard to believe I’ve got cousins in the Bluestone engineering circuit,” he muttered. “Please, continue. Don’t mind me. I’ll, uh…make you choke down a potion if you knock yourself out.”

“Thanks!” Avoka was such a good assistant!