Chapter Text
It was quiet when it happened. The sort of quiet no one noticed, except the trees, which were scattered like pins across the bleak horizon.
Shad edged out, gasping as the ice pulled him in. Before he knew it, he was gliding away from the bank. As much as he loathed the feeling—like all the traction had been stolen out of his feet—he didn’t know how to fight it without taking the fall. He’d slipped over not too long ago. It was on his way down from the cavern that joined onto the river where the ground froze out into a plateau, more ice than water, more water than earth. He felt the sting of the recent thud in his elbow, which had caught most of his weight, knocking the air out from his lungs. But he couldn’t let it rattle him, not now. The best he could do was hold his breath and let it happen.
The ice below him was dark—darker than the rest of the lake.
Dark was good, he supposed. He decided he might as well follow it across, that he might cling to the frigid green like a raft, keeping time and safety in good measure. But winter was not kind to the eyes of any who dwelt too long in it. He squinted and wondered if the green was actually more of a blue. It was paler now, with thick scars of white, resembling the sky that he loved so much. He shook his head and did his best to judge the distance. There was a mound just ahead, a raised grey against the white. An island, he realised. He trembled and shuffled towards it.
The ground cracked.
He blinked and the damage shot out faster than he could keep up with, branching out at the sides before it tore apart at the seam. It felt loud. Loud enough to wake all the animals that slumbered beneath the snow. The fissure swallowed him before the sound ever reached his ears.
He plunged right through the sheets of white, which hovered daintily over the pit of black they concealed. All he knew then was agony. The cold burned through his layers of linen and cotton and leather, stopping just inches away from his heart. There was no air to scream out. No respite from the pain, which blanketed him, ripping away any memory of what it felt like to be free of it. He could not feel his legs. He could not move his lungs. His arms reached for the sky as the water flooded in through his nostrils, weighing him down to where there was no light.
Against the odds, he kicked his way to the surface. He couldn’t let it end, not like that, not so abruptly.
His hands met with a frozen ledge and he dragged his head above the waterline. He gasped—or more accurately, choked. The air was bitter and blinding, like razor wire raked over his skin. As the water left his nose and eyes, the comfort of it had begun to settle in. Goddesses, it was cold. It was so cold. And it was still the warmest thing touching his body. It was the only thing saving him from the freezing wind, which had him paralysed, unable to think or move. His lips parted into a snarl. He tried again and again to lift himself out, fighting the weakness in his muscles.
Eventually, the cold, as inescapable as it was, felt more like an embrace.
There was no sharpness, no roiling pain that left him kicking and struggling for breath. Only weightlessness. And the bleary thoughts that accompanied it. Like… maybe he wouldn’t die. That was impossible, some part of him whispered. He couldn’t live through this. He was too slow, too cold, too waterlogged to ever have any chance of saving himself. Logically, things in his position died. His vision blurred and he felt the racing of his heart convert into something slow and soothing. Even the shock that ran wild in his veins had started to bleed away.
He closed his eyes.
Okay, he thought. Okay. It was okay. Fighting only made it worse.
His fingers were fused to the edge, where he felt something pull—the goddess Hylia, he supposed—lifting him out of his body and into another realm.
There were shadows here. Shadows and an orange light, which flickered through the gloom, tricking his lidless eyes. There was no comfort to be found in this place. If anything, it was slightly hellish. His fears, as half-formed and aimless as they were, floated around him until he was numb to them and all that remained were the questions.
Had he been good? Had he been lawful, at the very least? He thought he’d been. Perhaps he’d prayed to Hylia too many times and not some other god he ought to have feared more, though he could never imagine scraping to anyone else in a last-ditch effort to get out of here. Perhaps hell would do, he mused.
But then, he sensed a presence.
He felt its gaze trained on him, though he had nowhere to run and no means of moving. It sat quietly, and he got the sense it was evaluating his worth, wherever he was, between life and death. He knew pleading wouldn’t get him far. Not when his lips were frozen together, much like his hands, which had dripped and burned against the ice before everything went black. He felt the memory of them pulling away from the edge—only this time, alarm surged through his body. The sensation was like a cold wind cutting through flesh.
‘No. You can’t. I’ll drown.’
‘You were dead already.’
‘Dead?’
He bolted upright.
His lungs wheezed some desperate and alien sound, roaring for the air that had betrayed him in his final moments. Water emerged from the depths of his throat and he coughed it all up, his eyes and nose weeping, and all vanity gone. He took a minute to gather his wits before his fingers touched something heavy around his hair. It was icy, or so it seemed, brittle and solid at the tips, especially where it faced away from the light. Din, he realised, it was a fire. A real fire, burning several paces away.
He had no idea how anything could burn in this place. Not that he knew where this place was, let alone who’d lit it.
The warmth wrapping his body soon anchored his thoughts. He looked down and noticed a hide, the perfect colour of winter, draped over the hard bed and downy pillows that supported him. Hmm, he thought. People didn’t usually receive those when they were dead. Then again, what the blazes did he know about the afterlife? Though the cover was weighty, the overall lightness of his body confounded him and he pulled it back—only to discover that beneath the fur, he was naked. Truly and completely naked, with nothing else to preserve his dignity.
He gasped and flung it back over himself at once. Well, at least his glasses were still on.
“Hm. You’re awake.”
He looked up. Goddesses, of all things, it was a woman.
It was a woman and he was inside of some strange, dark house.
“W-Who are you?” he stuttered. Feeling clawed its way back into his face in the form of pins and needles, as he scanned the intruder, willing his lips into a frown.
She was the opposite of him in this moment, pristine and composed. Her skin was bright and her hair was split into bunches of ebony that reached past her shoulders. The details of her armour seared back at him in the night. She was beautiful, he decided, in an unholy sort of way. Like a spirit or a wraith that murdered in cold blood and made its home in the mountains. Her eyes were impossibly dark, though he thought he saw glimpses of red when they moved. Her mouth twisted into a sour expression. Presumably, she was as unhappy with him as he was with her.
“Funny, that doesn’t sound much like a thank you.”
He exhaled and rewound his memories, finding no semblance of her within them.
“I might thank you when I know who it is I’m speaking to,” he relayed, “or for that matter, where my clothes have gone!”
“They were rubbish,” she scoffed. “Wouldn’t have lasted much longer in those. But they’re over there, drying, if it’ll stop you from fainting.”
Her eyes pointed towards a chair near the fireplace. He followed them and let out a breath. Indeed, everything was there.
He had to hand it to her—she’d laid it all out rather perfectly. He saw his own blouse, waistcoat and jacket draped over the upper frame, and his thermals, socks and boots sitting below. At first, the lack of underwear was unsettling, but he eventually noticed it hanging by itself on the end of a stick. On the table next to that was an even sorrier pile consisting of a saturated notebook, a compass, a map which was doomed to wrinkle for the rest of time, and his favourite bookmark—a ceremonial dagger, which glistened in the firelight, as blunt as it was delicate.
Ah. But that wasn’t everything.
He faked a smile and gave his attention to her.
“I… suppose I must thank you then. You did what needed to be done. A true pragmatist.” He gave a half-nod to the lower half of his body and allowed himself a chuckle.
He detected a small smile in return.
“Ashei.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s Ashei. That’s my name.”
“Oh! Indeed.”
It was a pretty name, if a peculiar one. She did appear to be human.
“My name is Shad. It is a pleasure to meet you, or it would be if I weren’t in this predicament.”
“Is everything a pleasure to you?” She smirked at him in a manner that didn’t connect with her eyes. “Maybe that’s why you fell in the lake. If you take anything lightly out here, that’ll be the end of you. You’re very frail and weak, you know. Like a bird.”
He blinked back at her, reeling from the barrage of insults, though she’d said them in the least malicious way.
“A bird?” he gaffed.
“A tenacious one, I’ll give you that. You struggled against your nature to get here. Can’t help wondering why, yeah?”
There it was, he discerned. Her suspicion. Of him.
Even so, he noted the sword strapped to her belt and the bow and quiver mounted on the wall facing the door. If she wanted to destroy him, she could do it at a moment’s notice. Yet, dragging him to this Goddess-forsaken place couldn’t have been easy. She had absolutely nothing to gain from not letting him drown, he mused, unless she happened to be guided by some high and overarching moral framework… though he guessed that was not the case either. Pragmatists valued survival. He knew this to be the reason why all of his weapons were gone.
“I am a scholar,” he explained, feeling her gaze stop on whatever half-friendly veneer he’d whisked up in this awful state. “I hail from Castle Town, if you hadn’t already guessed by the ears. Might I ask where you are from, Ashei?”
He decided to go ahead and omit the word ‘Miss.’ Manners never hurt, however titles were usually reserved for people who hadn’t seen everything.
“Castle Town,” she repeated back to him. “A long, long time ago. Couldn’t have guessed from these ears though, huh?”
Oh dear, he groaned.
“I apologise,” he said with a slight bow, taking care not to disturb the hide too much. “It seems I was being presumptuous. Though I suppose it must have really been some time, for I can’t remember seeing anyone there quite as astonishing as you.”
She made a noise. It was more airy than contemptuous.
“Don’t start whipping it out now.”
He laughed. Good, he thought. Perhaps she was less angry now. It was hard to hold any sort of bargaining power when one was naked and in the midst of thawing out in a stranger’s bed.
She got up. He jumped a little and followed her hands as she dragged something heavy from the table. She returned and kicked her chair over to him, sitting uncomfortably close, before she unsheathed the shortsword he’d been carrying on the road. There was a crest on it featuring a rounded set of goat’s horns—a parting gift from an older colleague, for appearances more than anything else. She snapped the sheath back over it and rested it in her lap.
He went still.
“You a fighter, too?”
“I do well enough with that,” he warned in a quivering voice.
She grunted. “Yeah?” she said, knowing the answer as well as he did. “You really don’t sound like one.”
She then pulled out a dagger—his actual, sharpened dagger, which would’ve plunged into the throat of any beast that bared its fangs at him. It was a failsafe, his last resort, not that it helped him out on the lake. She played with the tip of it, silently, watching the wheels in his head turn before he cracked under the pressure. There wasn’t a hint of use in the steel.
“Alright, alright. I concede! I’m no warrior, yes? It’s clear as day.” He gave a sigh. “And I lied because, frankly, I have no idea how to handle you. I’ve not the slightest idea why I’m still here or whether you mean to cause me some terrible manner of harm with my own knife.”
“Why not ask.”
“Do you?” he asked, exasperated.
“No.”
“Well, thank Hylia for that!”
He rolled his eyes.
Whatever he’d said or done—perhaps it was the delivery of the line—disrupted her facade, and for a fleeting second her eyes narrowed into someone softer and a little more gentle to be around. She laughed at him. It was melodic against the low of her voice, and he felt something luminous rising up within his chest. His humanity, he’d hoped.
“I don’t mean to harm you either,” he chanced. “I am harmless, as it were.”
“We’ll see.”
This seemed to work. She put his sword on the floor and tossed his dagger away without a hint of emotion. It landed at his feet, on the flat of the blade. He jolted on impact. He had no idea why, but he’d found himself smiling at her. It was genuine on his part, though he wasn’t sure what she might make of it.
“If you’ve gotten that impression, I must apologise again,” he soothed. “For saving my life, you have my respect—and dare I say it, my trust as well. I might understand your wariness at any who come to this place. It is not a well traveled path or the sort of place one visits on holiday.”
She mulled quietly over his words and nodded. Her face hardened. He watched her change and bit his tongue.
“Let’s say I buy the scholar line. What’s your interest in coming here?” The stare she honed on him was darker now and more intense. “Don’t tell me you’re a naturalist, there’s nothing special about this mountain.”
What was that look for, he wondered. Was she testing him? Was this some sort of trap? He knew if he lied again things could turn bad, quickly. He caught sight of a pile of junk in the shadows, of shields and gauntlets and things that were clearly not her size. He decided not to dwell on that for too long.
“I’m in the business of investigating ancient ruins,” he said, meeting her gaze, feeling every bump of hoarseness in his voice. “I had heard rumours, you see, of a house in these parts. Heavily fortified, with all the proper battlements and with no army to guard them. It sounds rather peculiar, does it not? Like something out of a fairytale. I simply had to see it for myself, for it bears resemblance to some of the other places I’ve documented.”
He gave another half-nod to the table, where his bleeding notebook sat.
“There are sketches and other bits and pieces in there, if you’d like to verify what I’ve said.”
“I’ve noticed,” she said quietly.
“Then tell me, Ashei of Snowpeak, have you heard of such a place?”
He stared right back at her, combing her for all the mystery she seemed to cloak herself in. Her frown deepened, and he began to wonder if he had contradicted himself. If he had in fact, done something harmful—by coming here. There was an edge of fear about her, despite the fact she was well-armed and he was utterly at her mercy. She looked away.
“Maybe,” she said, holding her position. “But who’s asking?”
“I believe I’ve told you who I am.”
“No.”
Her tone was different and she leaned in close, so close he thought he’d gotten the scent of perspiration mixed with steel. Or morning snow, brushed with pineneedles and dirt. It was earthy and wild. She was more like some sort of formidable beast that lived here, he thought, a creature who hunted alone and kept the order of the world. She could walk through the forest with her head held high, with nothing to fear. It made him envious, he could only grasp at what that felt like.
Her lids lowered as she asked, “I mean, what kind of a person are you really, Shad?”
“I… don’t believe I can offer an objective answer for that,” he fumbled, too cold to blush. “Until recently, I was a dead person. And there was much I had wished to accomplish.”
Mercifully, she settled back into her chair. Her shoulders remained stiff.
“I’ve seen others come by these mountains, yeah? You’re the least armed of them all. Haven’t decided whether that makes you brave or stupid.”
“Perhaps the latter rather than the former.”
He smiled a little. He’d figured it out—she liked it when he leaned into the more honest and self-deprecating elements of his personality. He chose to run with that.
“Ever since I’d learned to read, it was always my dream to, well… erm… uncover the greater mysteries of our world and open the hearts of those in Hyrule to them. If you would be kind enough to let me show you—”
He gestured in the direction of his coat. The dampness had rendered it more blue than purple in the dark, and she held it over the edge of the bed, keeping it away from his legs, which prickled with feeling again. He reached over, eagerly showing off the odd buttons that adorned it. She trailed her thumb over the faces on them and listened to him, quietly, her lips pressed together.
“These are the Oocca,” he elaborated. “A little monstrous to the uninitiated, yes, but I’ll have everyone know that they are remarkable beings with their own culture and a myriad of languages at their disposal before I hear of such talk. It is my utmost dream to meet them. They live in a place beyond the reach of any human, in a city in the sky above the clouds.”
She tilted her head. “You love these creatures.”
“Yes.” He held back a laugh. Nobody had ever said it out loud before. “They’ve captured my heart, if you could believe such a thing.”
“What would happen after you met them?”
“I’d write everything about it, of course.”
“Even if it meant they came to harm?”
“But… why would—”
“Answer the question.”
He paused.
“I’d find it hard to believe that anyone would set out to do that after reading my books,” he said carefully. “From what I’ve gathered, they think and feel just as we do. They are equal to us in every sense of the word. If my point happens to get lost along the way, then I suppose I haven’t performed my job properly.”
She threw him a withering look. “So you think they can be educated? People, I mean.”
“I choose to believe that, yes. Otherwise everything I’ve done is for nought. That and not just anyone can pop into the sky, you know?” He felt a smirk coming on. “There’s an entire process involved, beyond the scope of most people. If it were simple, I’d have made it up there long ago.”
“Not just anyone can make it through Snowpeak, either.”
“Indeed. You’re a creature of your own.”
She looked away. Perhaps she liked that, it was hard to tell. And although he had no way of seeing himself, he might’ve guessed he looked a little less like some poor, bedraggled bird that had been scooped out of the ice and more like a man.
She stayed silent. Then, in what appeared to be a snap-decision, she got up, hurled a log at the fire and returned with a cup of something dark and red, which she pressed into his hands. He heard a gentleness in her words.
“That’s enough chin-wagging for now. Go to sleep.”
“Sleep?”
He sniffed the liquid, made a face and brought it to his lips. They were beyond poison at this point. It rained a warm and pleasant feeling all the way down his throat.
She smiled. “If you’re strong enough, we’ll leave in the morning.”
“And where, pray tell, are you taking me?”
She didn’t answer.
He closed his eyes and locked away his impatience, fearing what it had wrought him out on the lake. There were no dreams that night. Perhaps it was thanks to the potion or his own sheer exhaustion, but he was out like a light and did not move again until her hands—which were bitingly cold—turned his head over and her voice murmured something like “Hey, you.”
It was bright in the morning.
He watched as the dawn unfolded onto the snow and Ashei blended into the light, and took to the path with gritted teeth. The slopes were littered with sharp rocks and inclines, and he was sure the whole ordeal was taking far longer than the route scribbled on his map. When he glimpsed into the valley below and saw the glittering clouds of ice keese and bottomless cracks in the earth, he understood the logic of it all. Her logic. She chose the hard road—because taking things lightly here spelled death. They stopped partway to listen to the calls of wolves and it raised all the hair on his arms. As arduous as it was, he couldn’t complain. The cold never touched him through her furs.
On their descent, they happened upon something tall and grey in the distance. His eyes widened and he stopped in silent awe.
Those who’d called it a house had missed the mark entirely. It was a mansion. It was an entire estate—with centuries old brickwork, branching out into two storied wings, enclosed around a courtyard. He hadn’t noticed it was snowing at all, until he watched it sprinkle over the sloped roofs and intricate black railings. It had taken his breath away. The only structure he’d seen with such a presence was Hyrule Castle itself. It was bold. It was timeless. And there was a wisp of smoke from the chimney and a glow in the windows.
She faced him at the steps. He noticed her leering at his weapons, curling her mouth in what looked like disgust. Her eyes were like ashes in the snow.
“When you walk in there, you must be brave. And you must be kind. You must show them not all Hylians are the same and that I made the right choice in bringing you here, or so help me, I will finish the job. I’ll tie rocks to your ankles and drag you back to the water myself,” she snarled, cementing his hunch that he hadn’t been the first to die by her hand on this mountain. “Got that?”
He knew better than to protest. He bowed, slightly, and plunged the sword he never used into the nearby snow, watching as it scattered around the handle like white fractals of dust. He swallowed the last of his hesitation and glanced up at the door.
Suddenly, she was close again. He felt her breath and the flat of her own blade at his back. He noticed her mouth in his peripheral vision and his heartbeat escalated, clouding his thoughts. He shut his eyes and basked in the threat, sensing her proximity, her warmth, her heartbeat.
“Be kind to them or I will end you, Shad, the scholar,” she said softly.
Then the cold of her blade was gone.
He whirled around and found her vanished, too. In her place, there was only the harsh breeze of the mountain and the dull roar of its slopes in the distance. He reached out, offering his palm to the snow, but all he felt was water as it kissed him and rolled down his wrist in a trail. It was quiet without her. Quiet, and a little more terrifying than before, which he supposed would help him live longer. He sighed and held onto his new coat, regarding the surrounding winter the way one might have regarded a knife.
“Thank you,” he called, hoping the words would catch her on the wind.