Work Text:
*
[ERROR 1412214: CANON CALIBRATION FAILURE.]
*
Two hours into troubleshooting Vah Ruta, Link voices the forbidden phrase: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
“Of course Prince Sidon has tried turning it off and on again,” Zelda snaps, pushing her hair back from her face. If it falls out of its braid one more time she’s cutting it all off. Seriously. She goes back to glaring at the Sheikah Slate display, checking it against the main console’s scrolling Sheikah text. Her fluency with the language is mediocre at best, so if she can’t figure it out she’s going to have to bring Simon or Purah in. Except Simon lives two week’s journey away and refuses to travel without Link accompanying him, given the liking the wolves of Akkala have taken to stealing his hair ties, and Purah will add a minimum of five new weapons systems to Ruta and at least two of them will fail in catastrophic and hazardous ways, so Zelda and her middling grasp of the strange Sheikah shorthand that runs all their ancient tech is the best they’ve got. The text on Vah Ruta’s main console is red and blinking, and the Sheikah Slate tells her that it’s because of ERROR 1412214, but won’t explain what ERROR 1412214 actually is. The best she can figure out is that ERROR 1412214 is a combination of ERROR 910482 and ERROR 0394024. ERROR 910482 is a problem with the recursive function that operates the vision and zoom systems of the beast, and ERROR 0394024 means the device is low on battery.
She thinks.
That last word either means battery, or bird shit.
Maybe she should go get Purah.
Anyways! The point being, there is something wrong with Vah Ruta and if it could be solved by something as simple as a system reboot, it would have been fixed already. Turning it off and on again was certainly the first thing Sidon tried.
“Actually, I haven’t tried that!” Sidon says, joyful, somehow, even after two hours of watching an already flustered Zelda grow more and more frustrated with her inability to debug this cursed machine. “Excellent suggestion my friend!”
Zelda stops herself from glaring at Sidon, because Sidon is a prince, and the future King of the Zora, and Zelda was raised a Princess so she knows better than to glare at her fellow future leaders. She directs her glare towards Link instead, who at least has the grace to look a bit sheepish. Only a little though. He’s mostly laughing at her. Zelda rolls her eyes. She should make him learn Ancient Sheikah and see how he fares trying to get millenia old machines to run.
She takes a deep breath and collects herself. She has a job to do here. An important one. King Dorephan already hates her, and not in the I-already-hate-myself-so-everyone-else-must-hate-me-too kind of way. He actually actively hates her. He said so earlier today when she made the silly mistake of walking into the throne room, full of big-hearted bravery, and started talking about Mipha.
“I doubt the problem will be so easily solved,” she says, reasonably and calmly.
“Well there’s no harm in trying!” Sidon adds, and reaches over Zelda easily, because he is 2.56 times her height, and hits the “SYSTEM REBOOT” button on the main console.
Zelda grips the Sheikah Slate extra tight, but Sheikah engineering is excellent when it's not randomly malfunctioning, so the screen doesn’t crack and Zelda doesn’t cause an international incident by attacking the Zora prince. She’s not so violent normally. Really, she isn’t! Something about programming just brings out the worst in her.
Vah Ruta shudders, trumpets a mournful cry like it’s a toddler elephant that can’t believe it’s being told to take a nap, and rumbles to quiet. It takes a few moments for the gears to stop their assiduous routine, but after a few concerningly loud clangs, the ticking winds to a close.
“Okay, it’s off. Let’s see if it turns back on now!” Sidon says brightly.
Zelda’s thumbs test Sheikah screen technology yet again. She said, out loud , that one of the ERROR messages might have been about the battery. What if the Divine Beast lacks the battery to turn back on? How are they supposed to recharge it? Are they even rechargeable? What if this is it, and the weapon never turns back on, and Calamity Ganon comes back again and they can’t stop it, again ?
The screen of the Sheikah Slate creaks dramatically, but stays steady. It’s soothing. If the screen can survive Zelda’s thumbs, there’s no way Vah Ruta would be permanently taken out by something so simple as a lack of power.
The screen of the console pulses, then bursts with blue light. It expands outwards, through the veins and circuitry of the beast. The loud clangs start up, then resolve into steady ticking as the gears resume their routine. Vah Ruta lets out another great trumpet, this one grand and mighty, sounding like a herald of apocalypse, which it is.
The screen blinks, once, twice. Zelda, Link, and Sidon blink along with it.
Then, text scrolls across. It’s green.
[ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL.]
Zelda sets the Sheikah Slate down before she can do any damage.
*
Sidon apologizes profusely on the way back to Zora’s Domain. Zelda, remembering her political science and courtesy lessons in addition to her engineering ones, takes these apologies with humility and grace.
“It’s no matter at all, I’m glad you called for our help. It’s always good to be cautious about these things, even after so long there’s so little we understand about the divine beasts. We’ll do one more check tomorrow morning before we leave, but it looks like Vah Ruta is doing fine now.”
“Excellent!” They approach the bridge and Sidon brightens further. Really the man is just differing shades of bright. A scale of luminosities. “Ah! We’re just in time for dinner! Shall we?”
Zelda looks at the gates of Zora’s Domain. They’re open, with teeth.
She’s already faced King Dorephan’s molars once today—she’d rather finish being digested another time. “Ah, I’m rather tired from our work. I think I’ll head to bed early,” she says, and leaves Link to his fate. He’ll be fine—the Zora like him a whole lot more thanks to the saving-the-Zora-Valley thing and also the saving-the-world thing. Besides, it’s chillfin trout season here. He’ll have fun at dinner, even with Muzu around.
*
Here’s what had happened. Zelda and Link got an error message from the Sheikah Slate, and then a request from Sidon, informing them that Vah Ruta had stopped working. Zelda, in a moment of uncharacteristic courage, suggested that they also stop by to visit King Dorephan, who surely wanted to hear more about his dear and dead daughter.
“Also…if there’s anything I could tell you. About—about Mipha…” Zelda had added to the end of her offer to help repair Vah Ruta, and King Dorephan had cut in with a rumbling, “How did she die?”
“Ah. She put up a valiant fight against Waterblight Ganon but—“
“I already know this,” he had said, flat and imposing. He was at least a hundred times Zelda’s size. He could stand up and flop forward and crush her in one swift movement. A Princess pancake.
“Um well. Before the—before the Calamity. She accompanied me to the Spring of Wisd—“
“That story is about you, not her. I don’t care about that.”
“I—“ Zelda had stammered, and King Dorephan, who had either taken pity or grown too tired with her impudence to keep listening but not tired enough to belly flop on top of her, snapped, “Go fix Vah Ruta. Then leave.”
So there. That’s her ulterior motive for doing a final check tomorrow morning. She’ll triple check that the beast is functional, and then she will dig around its hard drive for any condolence she can give the Zora king. Then, she will go on her way, one less guilty ghost on her neck.
*
[ERROR 1412214: CANON CALIBRATION FAILURE.]
*
“Well...that’s strange.”
Zelda steps away from the console to remove the temptation to slam her face into its screen. She sets the Sheikah Slate down to remove the temptation to slam it into her face.
“Yup, strange,” Link echoes. He picks the Sheikah Slate up and steps away from Zelda, in case she changes her mind about avoiding violent and painful temptations.
“Very. Strange.”
Sidon claps his hands together. “Well! It’s lucky you decided to stay the night and do one last check this morning! Let’s get working!”
*
Six hours later, Zelda has ruled out malice, mislabeled variables, low battery, syntax error, memory failure, and runtime error. It has to be a hardware issue. She’ll cry if it’s not a hardware issue.
She walks out of the main console room to find Link and borrow his paraglider. He’s long since run off to sit and chat with Sidon somewhere else, leaving Zelda to her Sheikah shorthand struggles.
As she suspected, he’s hesitant to let Zelda take a look.
“What if you slip?” he asks.
“There’s water!”
“I can swim!”
“And I can go get her!” Sidon helpfully supplies. Link squints at Zelda. It’s an unspoken agreement at this point, to glare at each other in lieu of glaring at Sidon. It’s impossible to glare at Sidon, almost certainly against one of the Goddess’s ancient laws and more importantly, certainly against one of Mipha’s soft smile enforced social norms.
She smirks, triumphant. “ And Sidon can come get me if I fall!”
Link doesn’t give in though. After a day of waiting around, he insists on helping at least a little by floating down to Vah Ruta’s canon to scope it out first.
Ten minutes later, he scrabbles up the side of the machine and pokes his head up over the edge of the balcony Sidon and Zelda are waiting on. He looks...perplexed. Also, there’s a feather in his hair.
“Seagulls,” he says, regretfully.
Well, that explains error 0394024.
*
It’s late, and none of them know how to move a seagull nest, and none of them have the heart to kill the parents or smash the eggs, and Link is already sporting a nasty gash on his arm, so they decide to figure it out tomorrow.
Only, the next day, Link pops up over the edge of the balcony with even more feathers in his hair.
“More seagulls.”
There are three nests now. Which means three expecting seagull couples. Which means six anxious new seagull parents. Which means twelve new scratches on Link.
They’re sitting by Vah Ruta’s entrance, Zelda and Sidon both applying salve to Link’s wounds.
“I should have known this would happen,” Zelda mutters, “Seagulls nest in colonies. We should have just dealt with it yesterday, now more and more will join up.”
“And Vah Ruta’s weapons system simply won’t turn on with the obstruction of the nests in the way?” Sidon asks.
Zelda shakes her head. “No, it can’t aim. The birds are blocking all the canon’s cameras.” And no matter how much Zelda fiddles with the controls, no matter how many override codes she puts in, the Divine Beast refuses to engage its weapons system with the seagulls in the way. In a sense, it’s comforting, sweet even, that Vah Ruta won’t take an action that would harm some birds. On the other hand, well. With Hyrule potentially in the balance, it would be rather sad to see the kingdom fall again because of a couple of eggs.
“And the birds won’t let us move their nests,” Sidon confirms.
Link looks down at his arms. “Not without a fight.” Then, after a moment of quiet, adds, “I mean. We could fight—”
“No!” Zelda and Sidon cry, in unison, imagining the physical and emotional toll of fighting a bird. Link, given his historic rivalry with Revali, has no such reservations.
Still, he lifts his hands in surrender, then hisses when the motion pulls at his cuts.
Zelda sighs. As long as Zelda and Sidon have an aversion to ovicide, the nests will stay put, and Vah Ruta’s weapon’s system will remain offline. Zelda rearranges some of Link’s bandages, tightens them one last time, then stands up. She should go check if the entire weapons system is offline, or it's just the main canon. With luck, they’ll at least still have Vah Ruta’s ice blocks if catastrophe strikes before the seagull breeding season is over and all the gulls abandon their nests.
She walks into Vah Ruta’s console room to a new problem.
“Um. Sidon, Link? Come here for a moment?”
The two walk in after her, and she asks, “Was this here yesterday?”
Because the main console room of Vah Ruta is completely covered with plants. They cover the central room in a thick green mat, leaves floating and overlapping with one another to make the ground look more solid than liquid. And they don’t stop on the ground, they wind up and over the Divine Beast’s main console, covering it with green lily pads the size of Zelda’s face. The dust and ozone of the Divine Beast is utterly masked by the sweet heady scent of lotus. The pink flowers and buds look almost purple in the uncanny blue light of Vah Ruta, though the color is softened by the warm sun filtering through the room’s windows. The effect, then, is of a dream. Lavender resting on a blanket of lush green, a field of wildflowers in the middle of a war machine.
“The seagulls must have dropped some seeds in here,” Sidon says, equal parts delighted and confused. He crouches to examine the flowers. “They’re growing very well, already ready to pick for eating! We should make fleet lotus root and bright shell crab stir fry soon! We can collect crabs and extra lotus root from the ponds beneath the throne room. Link, you still have some Goron Spice, right?”
What they lack in enthusiasm for poultry hunting, they make up for with lotus picking. Link hands Zelda a vicious sickle, Sidon a moonlight scimitar, and pulls out the Master Sword, and they all get to work clearing the Divine Beast’s console, hacking away at the choking vines and collecting dinner in the process.
None of them voice the obvious oddity aloud. Fleet lotus plants don’t grow to maturity in one night from nothing. Something is afoot.
*
“Do you think it’s Mipha?”
Zelda turns towards Link’s bed in the inn. Her pleasantly warm stomach full of lotus root has turned to heavy slosh. He told her a story once, early on in their reacquaintance, about meeting a strange old man at the base of an apple tree on the Great Plateau. In his story, the man taught him to make spicy meat and seafood fry and gave him a warm coat when he finally got it right. Link had called the man Zelda’s father.
She says now what she said then. “That’s impossible. Ghosts don’t exist.”
“They do,” Link replies, turning to face her, face solemn as a setting sun. His hair is doing some sort of magic in the blue glow of Zora’s Domain, transfiguring itself purple like a winter flower.
“They don’t,” Zelda huffs back. They had this exchange last time too. There were lots of rational reasons as to why the “ghost” couldn’t be real. For starters, her father had perished at the castle, so the standing stone monument on top of Mount Hylia couldn’t be his grave. Next: her father had not ever figured out how to use a paraglider—he was too afraid of falling. Finally: her father would not have vanished into teal flame in front of Link’s sunset smile without leaving a message for Zelda. He would have waited. He would have stayed to say something. To lecture her about not praying enough, to congratulate her on finally getting it right, to give her a warm coat of her own. He would have stayed for something.
“What do you think it is instead?”
Back then, Zelda had put forth the theory that the man Link encountered was a shade from his own memory, a way for his brain to reboot itself, remind itself of its basic functions after so long asleep. A teaching program wearing a familiar face.
Now: “A virus. Obviously. There’s something wrong with Vah Ruta’s code, maybe a leftover effect of the Calamity’s malice.”
“Malice that promotes lotus growth?” Link asks, skeptical.
Zelda nods, resolute. “Malice that promotes lotus growth.”
*
Link is already in Vah Ruta when Sidon and Zelda arrive the next morning, standing in front of a pile of dried Hylian Herb, fresh Blue Nightshade, a bundle of sticks, a few pieces of flint, a bumpy clay ocarina, a few empty glass bottles, and a live, weakly flopping hearty bass.
Hearty bass is, Zelda remembers, Mipha’s favorite fish. She narrows her eyes but Sidon opens his mouth to speak first. “Link! My friend, we missed you at breakfast. I see you’re already busy working! What’s all this for?”
Link looks at Zelda for moral support, but she shakes her head disapprovingly. He’s the one attempting a summoning, or exorcism, for the supposed ghost of Mipha. Let him explain this to Sidon himself.
“Well,” he starts. He looks down at his feet, also for moral support. The fish flops weakly, providing none. “Well,” he repeats.
Then, Zelda sees a blur of redpink come flying at her from the corner of her eye, and turns just in time for it to smack her right across her cheek.
“What the—” she yells, stumbling to the ground. Link leaps forward, sword already drawn, but the shape has already plunged back into Vah Ruta’s waters.
She lifts her hand to her cheek and it comes away slimy. “Was that….a fish?” she says, then scrambles to her knees to peer over the side of the platform, into the small pond.
Then, she scrambles away. “Was that?! A salmon?!” she yelps, with no small amount of hysteria in her voice.
Link and Sidon exclaim in unison, going to look for themselves. They presumably see what Zelda saw, at least ten huge fish, red like a bitten tongue, swimming around the depths of Vah Ruta’s central channels.
“That’s impossible,” Zelda mumbles, getting to her feet, hand pressed to her ginger jaw. That’s going to bruise tomorrow. Salmon are heavy. “Salmon don’t even live here! You can only find them in Hebra! How in Hylia’s name—”
“Actually,” Sidon corrects, “Old Zora tablets say that they used to swim up the Zora and Rutala Rivers too, before we built Rutala Dam to make the reservoir.
“That’s…” Incredible. Impossible. Unbearably sad. That’s... “still not an explanation for how they got here now.”
“Guess not,” Sidon says, but he’s not really paying attention. Just watching the fish dart around in the waterways with wonder in his eyes.
*
It could be Mipha’s ghost. Zelda is a scientist, she knows that it could be Mipha’s ghost. The same way Death Mountain could start spitting diamonds and Calamity Ganon could put on a top hat to perform a fancy jig and Zelda could have awakened her sacred power in time to save everything she ever loved.
*
Zelda resumes her work, staying as far away from the water’s edge as possible in the belly of a mechanical elephant. It’s not far enough. She keeps having to duck away from salmon attacks.
Also there are frogs now. Lots of frogs.
Zelda reaches for the Sheikah Slate, which she put down for just a second because she needed to use both hands to type a command into the main console, only to brush against a slimy hot-footed fellow. She doesn’t even scream. Hasn’t the last four times.
She shoos the frog away, picks up the Sheikah Slate, confirms the command she just put into the main console, and then sets it down again to get ready for more programming. Truly, who designed this thing?
The next time she reaches for the Sheikah Slate, she finds her hand brushing up against the slick skin of a frog once again. However, when she looks down to chase the frog away, she finds that the Sheikah Slate is nowhere to be seen.
She stares at the frog.
“Did you take it?”
The frog stares back.
Then, it croaks and leaps at Zelda’s face.
*
Narrowly escaping the frog with her life, Zelda heads back into the main room of Vah Ruta to track down the Sheikah Slate. Maybe Link or Sidon needed it for something?
Except, no. Link is currently tending a small fire, tossing bits of Hylian Herb into the flames. Each time a bundle goes in, the flame sparks a pleasant shoot green, then fades back into summer orange. Zelda knows the ritual—it’s a cleansing ritual Hylians typically use to calm angry spirits in haunted homes.
“Have you explained yourself to Sidon?” she asks, walking up to Link.
Link doesn’t look at her. He’s counting under his breath, because the timing of the offerings is very important. Zelda sighs and leaves him to it. She wanders towards Vah Ruta’s trunk and finds Sidon watching the hearty salmon swim around in the pool of water there.
“Dinner for tonight?” she asks.
Sidon shakes his head. “Give it a few days. Let’s see if they actually came here to lay eggs?”
Zelda squats beside him. Well, several feet back, outside of the reach of the salmon. They don’t seem to be giving Sidon any problems, but she doesn’t want to try her luck. “Will it really matter?” she asks, “It’s not like they can get to the sea from here with the Rutala River dammed up? I mean, I don’t even know how they’ll get down from Vah Ruta.”
Not to mention, how they got up in the first place.
Sidon deflates, and Zelda immediately wants to drop to her knees and beg forgiveness. “I guess you’re right,” he says, his face drops to a dimming candle, a final ember, on the scale of Sidon-smile-luminosity.
“It can’t hurt to wait,” Zelda quickly adds. “Maybe in a few days—” she doesn’t get to finish the thought. Out of nowhere, with nary a trumpet of warning, Vah Ruta unleashes a torrent of freezing water on her. Zelda used to be quite familiar with plunging into cold water, having done it at the various springs of Hyrule for prayer. She has not, however, had to exercise the skill recently, meaning she no longer has it.
She regains awareness beyond shock however many minutes later, gasping, lungs still seizing in her chest.
“Princess! Are you alright?” Sidon is asking, big hands on her shoulders. She looks up at him and sputters.
Somehow, the first thought she registers outside of cold is that Sidon is somehow completely dry. He’s literally semi-aquatic, and the Divine Beast’s deluge left him completely dry.
“F-fine,” she sputters, then she glares up at the glimpse of the elephant’s trunk through the gaps of its electric ribcage. Her whispered hiss comes out in pieces. “J-just what d-do you want with me?”
*
Link doesn’t have any ideas about what Vah Ruta wants, but he has plenty on what Mipha’s ghost might need.
A fistful of nightshade petals burn out in pale flame and azure sparkle. Link clasps his hands together to pray. Zelda clasps her hands together to hold them to the fire and restart her circulation. Sidon is out on an errand to find Zelda some soup, though Zelda knows this is just Link’s way of continuing to avoid telling him what he’s up to. Link has at least three servings of creamy heart soup stored in his bag that he could easily heat up on this pyre if he really wanted to.
Another fistful of flowers, these small white hyrule herb blooms—the fire shovels them down eagerly, expanding with greedy licks. Zelda almost doesn’t yank her hands away. A burn would warm her up just fine, right? Instinct takes over the numbness and her hands move themselves, pressing tight to her chest like an infant cowering against its mother.
“You okay?” Link asks. He hasn’t jumped in front of the flame, or put the flame out, to keep Zelda from it, which is most certainly a type of character growth.
“Won’t you have to restart the ceremony now?”
Link frowns at the fire. The fire dances up merry in response. “It’ll be fine. Mipha won’t care.”
Of course Mipha won’t care. She’s a minor god of second chances. She’s refashioned Link’s soul from teal-tinted memory and grace a hundred times over. She made him a second skin once, and when that wasn’t enough, shed her own to save him. She gave him everything short of her brother and her river. She would never put procedural barriers—burnt blue flowers and fish bone charms and spring water baptism—in between herself and a reunion. If Zelda were a kinder scholar, she wouldn’t press the obvious question.
“Then why bother with all this?”
Link snaps back. “Don’t you have programming to do?”
Zelda does have programming to do, but she doesn’t want to do it. She wants to pick a foolish fight with the boy she loves because that’s the kind of thing you do when you’ve been stuck trying to fix one bug in your program for a whole three days and you can’t figure out which line of code, which clause, went so horrifically wrong. “You’re wasting your time.”
“And you’re not?”
“We know something’s wrong with Vah Ruta. Checking the beast’s programming makes perfect sense. Not…not hunting for a spirit that doesn’t exist!”
Link narrows his eyes.
“Look I—I know you saw her—all of them—here.” She does her best to keep jealousy out of her voice. Her best, as usual, is not enough. “In the beasts. But, they’re not around anymore. You can’t heal. You can’t fly. Their powers are gone, and so are they.”
The Champion’s spirits stuck around, a strange edge case, because they were trapped by Ganon’s malice. They gave a piece of themselves to Link to avenge their deaths. And then they left. They’re not still here, because if they were, they wouldn’t lurk silently. Urbosa wouldn’t do that to Zelda. Mipha wouldn’t do that to Sidon.
“You don’t know that,” Link says, stubborn. “It could be her. You know it could.”
*
Of course it could be Mipha’s ghost. Zelda is a priestess, she knows that it could be Mipha’s ghost. Zelda believes in a vengeful Goddess—she knows very well that this universe could be the kind of universe where the only miracle is the miracle of guilt and cruelty—knowing your loves are dead, and watching, and won’t bother to pull the knife, or push it in. Either would be a kindness. The glitch could be Mipha. This universe could be the vengeful Goddess’s universe.
Zelda doesn’t want it to be though. She wants to forget the science and strike this hypothesis from every record. There must be greater miracles than guilt here. There must be.
*
Miracle: Vah Ruta douses them with freezing water. Again.
Link yelps and dives, too late, for cover. Zelda signs and tilts her head back to the deluge, resigned to her fate. At least this is washing the salmon smell off of her.
“Is this why you were wet before?” Link asks, shaking off the cold quicker than Zelda had. He’s had far more recent experience braving Hebra Peak and Lanayru Mountain.
Zelda nods miserably. “Vah Ruta doused me when I went to see if Sidon had seen the Sheikah Slate–.” She cuts herself off. Right. That’s what she was going to look for when Vah Ruta gave her an ice bath. The sheikah slate, otherwise known as the only device that can interface with any of the weapons in the fight against Calamity Ganon.
“Oh god, how did I even forget?” Zelda drops her face into her hands and her face is so hot with embarrassment that she doesn’t even flinch at the touch of her fingertips. “The Sheikah slate is still missing.”
*
So the Sheikah slate is missing, meaning they have no way back into the Divine Beast upon leaving it, meaning they decide to spend the night inside instead, shouting down to Sidon that they’ll be fine without him.
Despite the cold, Link insists on tugging Zelda up to the tip of Vah Ruta’s trunk—a more difficult climb with an absent Sheikah slate—since she’s never been stargazing in the reservoir before.
“The view’s better here than anywhere else,” he grunts as he scrabbles up another sloped joint of Ruta’s flexed trunk.
Out of breath, Zelda follows. “Really? But all the light pollution from Zora’s domain….What about Mount Lanayru or Hebra Peak?”
“Mmm maybe on a clear day. Too rare though. And it’s easier to get here.”
Zelda, legs burning with exertion from the exponential slope of Ruta’s trunk begs to differ. But then, she’s never been to Hebra Peak, and she climbed Mount Lanayru during peacetime, on horseback. Link settles back into a pensive silence, one he’s taken on since Sidon left and they realized they were both stuck on Vah Ruta. She leaves him to his quiet until they get to the spout and settle down, arms pressed together, chins tipped back to the sky.
“When’s the last time you came here?”
“Mipha.”
And there it is again: the jealousy, then nausea, the chill of knowing she’s sitting in a dead girl’s body. The chill of being an undead girl, and in her lack of grace, begrudging a corpse its rest, its solitude, its numbness, its sorrow.
“Right,” Zelda says, leaning to break the line of warmth between them, giving the night sky, Mipha’s ghost, some room instead.
In the corner of her eye, she sees Link turn to look at her in question. She keeps staring up. Directly in front of them, the Bow of Light, an enormous three star arc hugging the sky, pointing due south. Ordona’s Antlers to the northeast, peaking faintly above the glow of Death Mountain. Nayru’s Love, a shattering diamond directly above them. It was never visible at the Castle—too much light. But here, one hundred years after most candles have gone out, it’s perfectly clear, almost spinning with its shimmer even with Zora’s Domain glowing gently nearby.
Link’s hand on her shoulder takes her by surprise. He squeezes against Zelda’s startled flinch, then pulls her into his side. The warmth between them knitted back together again gives Zelda the courage to ask. “What if it is Mipha? What does she want?”
*
Here’s a thought exercise: what does a dead Zora princess want?
A body? A boy? A breath of life?
A second chance, a savior, her brother sleeping safe at home, the sight of her father’s face one final time, and a last bite of chillfin trout carpaccio in the dead of winter on the banks of Lulu Lake?
A stronger spear to send back in time so she could slay the beast, a stronger savior so he could have stopped the tragedy before it happened, a second savior so he wouldn’t have to do it alone, a better beast—the one on her side—that wouldn’t bend so easily to the whims of calamity?
The answer is: all of the above. A Zora princess, dead at fifty-seven, would want all this and heaven too. A pond to swim in, a tank full of crabs, wedding armor so fine not even Naydra’s fang could pierce it. She’d want an arm to hold warm at the top of Vah Ruta’s trunk while she watched Nayru’s Love spin kaleidoscopic above her head and if the goddess of justice were watching back, she’d agree that the dead princess was owed at least that much.
But the goddess of justice isn’t watching back, and Mipha was never a minor god of desire, or deserving. She believed in the second chance, that’s all, that’s what she’d want: a second chance for her brother, her father, her domain, her love and all his loves, her river and all its rivers and all the lakes and forests and deer and rice fields and glowing snails and silent flowers and old growth forests and cities and towns and castles and chillfin trout that the river fed.
She’d want a second chance for herself too, but that kind of recursion is impossible even for a minor god like Mipha. She managed everything else though. She managed everything else.
*
Link shrugs and squeezes Zelda’s shoulder tighter, then surrenders his grip and his search for an answer. He’s guilty the same way Zelda’s guilty, the kind where you pretend that you don’t have eyes. He retracts his arm and Zelda breathes a cold sigh, more relief than disappointment. There’s no consolation for Mipha, and if there were, certainly Zelda would not deserve it.
Then, Link surprises her by dropping his head onto her shoulder, and Zelda surprises herself with her sudden well of joy, an inappropriate luxury, but one she’s not strong enough to deny herself.
Link nuzzles his face into her neck, and she giggles at the cold press of his nose, the somber officially broken. “Where’s this coming from? You can’t exactly see stars like this,” she teases.
Link shrugs. “My ears are cold.”
“Yeah?” She reaches over with her free arm and covers his other ear with her gloved hand. “Better?”
He smiles and nods. She presses her lips to his hair, a little greasy and vaguely fishy, but soft as ever. They’d agreed before coming to Zora’s Domain to keep the public displays of affection to a minimum, out of respect for Sidon and fear of King Dorephan. But Zelda hopes that at least this one indulgence will be forgiven.
“I missed touching you,” Link mumbles, wrapping his arms around Zelda’s waist and snuggling in closer.
She hums and lifts her lips, uses her one hand on Link’s face to angle it up towards hers. “Yeah?” she says, watching his lips.
“Yeah,” he says, leaving his lips open after their exhale. Zelda leans in—
—and then notices the smell.
—and a split second later feels something damp and slimy pressing up on her thighs and butt.
“What the—” Zelda and Link jump to their feet and dance out of the way of Vah Ruta’s spout, Link keeping an arm around Zelda’s waist to keep her from falling off. They move just before the spout lets a burst of the substance into the air, sending it raining in goopy chunks onto Zelda and Link. It smells…. rancid, like the sewer of Castle Town, or a battlefield of Bokoblins corpses, like…
“Durian,” Link sighs.
Zelda groans, face burning, and drops her pinched nose into her other hand. It totally is Mipha.
*
The morning brings Sidon, also pinching his nose shut.
“Sorry, we couldn’t wash up in the dark,” Zelda says. The real problem is that the salmon were too aggressive to risk even getting close to Vah Ruta’s delta of puddles, but Zelda lies in defense of her durian drenched dignity.
“Alright,” Sidon accepts nasally, because he’s protecting himself from the durian’s offensive stink, and easily, because he’s Mipha’s brother and good just like her, “Also! I found the Sheikah slate this morning!”
He holds it out to Zelda, pinched between two fishy fingernails. It’s covered in bird shit.
“Found it in a pile of fish bones!”
Goddesses damned seagulls.
‘Thank you,” Zelda takes it, resigned to having to live with the filth until she can leave this cursed machine this evening and properly bathe, safe from salmon attacks and durian drenching.
“Well, shall we head to the main terminal?”
Link, who has finally woken up, blearily nods. The trio of intrepid debuggers traipse to the elephant’s rear. In an unlikely and uncharacteristic accident of divine grace, Zelda looks up from her feet as they approach, just in time to see a large brown blur nosing at the main terminal, two smaller brown blurs rolling around in the shallow water at its feet.
She moves before she thinks, activating the Sheikah slate to throw up some cryonis blocks, protecting them from the collection of brown blurs.
“Are those…”
A low grumbling roar.
“BEARS?!?!”
Link and Sidon snap to attention. After squinting into the depths of Vah Ruta’s bowels for a moment, Link grimaces. “Bears,” he confirms, rubbing his chest. The site, Zelda would dare to hypothesize, of his most recent bear-induced life-threatening injury.
“How?! In the name! Of Hylia’s sacred shithole!” Zelda screeches, “Did a BEAR get in here?!?!” The bear looks up and glares at Zelda, the kind of glare that says, “How dare you use such language in front of my young impressionable children? You oughta face a good mauling, that’ll teach you a lesson!”
Zelda averts her gaze and resolves to lower her voice.
“Three bears, I think!” Sidon offers brightly.
“Three bears!!” Zelda continues, in a still-furious whisper, “Three bears! Inside the ass! Of a mechanical elephant!!” She points to the cavernous room of Vah Ruta’s behind. “How.”
“Well…” Link taps his chin with a finger, “Bears can swim…”
Sidon mirrors Link’s pose. “It will be rather difficult accessing the control panel for repairs with bears in the way…”
At this, Link perks up. “I can tame them!” he announces proudly.
Sidon drops the finger on his chin, the sun breaking through a brick wall. “Of course you can, my friend! That’s amazing! Well in that case…”
“No.” Zelda says, hysterically. “No!! You got mauled the last time you tried. The last four times!”
Sidon’s finger is back on his chin. “Mauling would hinder your ability to help fix Vah Ruta…perhaps we should find another use of our time.”
*
First, they all shower. Sidon in solidarity, mostly. Then, Link goes back to his altar. Sidon goes back to watching the miraculous salmon. Zelda sits far from any shoreline to keep fiddling with the Sheikah slate.
It finally boots up, only to display an unfamiliar screen. Instead of the usual interface of runes, with options to switch to photos, maps, and settings, it shows a single still in the center of the screen. It’s a blurry frame of bright blue and clay, underneath a location, and a date.
The location of the file is Zelda’s current location, the depths of a mechanical elephant resting in the depths of an old and unnatural reservoir. The date is even more familiar. It’s Zelda’s birthday. Her 17th birthday, to be precise.
She drops the slate, like she had dropped a fistful of snow on Mount Lanayru, like Link had dropped the Master Sword on the Blatchery Plains, like the goddess had dropped Hyrule onto her kitchen floor, and the kingdom had shattered and spilled it’s warm sticky pungent stew all over the tile to sit and congeal and rot into purple pulsing malice.
Zelda didn’t even know the Sheikah slate could record video, until now. But here it is, miracle of miracles, a record of the moment Mipha died.
*
Several hours later, she returns to Vah Ruta to find Sidon sitting on its spout, perched like a fledgling still learning to fly. Link is somewhere in the Lanayru wilds, taking care of a local lizalfos infestation. He took off after watching the tape.
“You’re not going to watch it?” Zelda asks, after scrambling up Vah Ruta’s treacherous trunk to sit beside him.
“I doubt my father will let me.”
King Dorephan didn’t let Zelda either. She had asked, when she delivered the tape to him. She thought it would be right, just, accountable, to bear witness to the consequences of her worst mistake. Dorephan had laughed with the kind of confidence that came from knowing you could flop down on top of and thus crush anyone who stood before you, the kind of confidence that came from knowing your adversary could be one-hundred and eighteen and you would still be older. He had laughed, then rumbled, “ “No. Your failure already took my daughter’s life. I will not allow you to take her death as well. That belongs to us.” And then he had sent Zelda on her way.
“He’s trying to protect you,” Zelda says, in lieu of relaying that throne room tableau. She’s jealous. Of what? Pick. There’s a lot to choose from.
“I know. Mipha is too. Trying to protect me,” Sidon gestures out at the Rutala Dam, the gold and purple scarred expanse of Hyrule Field beyond it. “From all of this.”
“She’s right to. If something happens again, I can’t guarantee that I won’t. Well that I won’t fail—”
An interruption, in the form of a sharp spurt of water from Vah Ruta’s spout, smacking Zelda’s hip and ignoring Sidon entirely.
Zelda snaps. Whirling around to face the beast, she yells, “Okay WHAT is your DEAL! Isn’t that what you wanted?! Wasn’t that what this whole thing was about? Keeping your brother safe from my fail—”
Vah Ruta cuts in again, another water gun of glacier melt, this time directly to Zelda’s face. The force of it sends Zelda stumbling backwards, nearly plummeting into the depths of the reservoir. Sidon doesn’t even bother to try to catch her, because he’s not Link. He doesn’t even bother to try to catch her, because he’s turned, awestruck, away from the memorial of Hyrule, back to face Vah Ruta. “Mipha? Mipha are you there?”
And Vah Ruta, upon Sidon’s prayer, changes. The whole machine starts glowing red, pulsing like an old hog’s heartbeat. It takes Zelda a moment to wipe the water from her eyes, squint against the sudden palette shift, but when she focuses, when she studies the veins of dark text at her feet, she realizes that the blue sheikah characters that permeate Vah Ruta’s walls have changed. Amidst the dust-brown of Vah Ruta’s brickwork, the runes turn scarlet and they read: NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.
“Sidon…” Zelda mumbles. “The walls…they’re answering. They’re saying—”
He cuts her off. “Mipha?! It’s really you?”
The text shifts, slightly. A new character joins the chorus of no. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO.
“Sidon, Sidon wait—” But Sidon has already set off, scrambling back down Vah Ruta’s trunk, back into her embrace, her entrails.
“Sidon wait!” Zelda slides after him, catching him in the central room—still blocked from the control panel by those bears. Here, the words are curtain, or maybe womb. They surround the pair, push into their eyes, eat them up.
“The walls are saying no—they’re saying no. No Mipha.”
The words pulse brighter, red as a salmon to the cheekbone, red as the moon falling to earth. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA.
Yeah, Yeah she gets it. No Mipha. No Mipha because Mipha is dead, because Zelda got her and everyone else killed. No Mipha, just the barely functional shell of her coffin. Zelda’s eyes are empty and welling with tears and she tries to bury them the same way she buried the rest of her kingdom. This means she misses whatever face Sidon is making when he says, trembling, “If you’re not Mipha. Then who…”
Silence.
*
It could be Mipha’s ghost. Zelda loved Mipha, she knows that it could be Mipha’s ghost. Death Mountain could start spitting diamonds and their Goddess could be a vengeful one. Calamity Ganon could put on a top hat to perform a fancy jig and this universe could be the kind of universe where your loves are dead, and watching, and won’t bother with the knife they left in your gut. Zelda could have awakened her sacred power in time to save everything she ever loved, and guilt might be the greatest miracle around for a thousand miles.
Everyone who has ever left without a goodnight kiss could still be here, haunting. What’s to be done about that?
*
Zelda unburies herself. She forces herself to look up. She translates.
NO MIPHA. The walls all still say. NO MIPHA NO MIPHA NO MIPHA. RUTA. NO MIPHA. VAH RUTA. NO MIPHA. VAH RUTA VAH RUTA VAH RUTA. RUTA RUTA RUTA.
Her brow wrinkles into a migraine. “It still says no Mipha. But also…Ruta. No Mipha, Vah Ruta.”
“Yeah, I know. No Mipha in Vah Ruta.” Sidon is getting frustrated now. “I know that. But who are you, then? Why are you here?”
RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA VAH RUTA VAH RUTA VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. ELEPHANT GOD. ZORA PRINCESS. SACRED SAPPHIRE. CORAL CANNON. ROTTEN RESERVOIR OF GUNS. THE RAINSTORM. THE FLOOD FORTHCOMING. TRUNK AND TUSK AND TOMBSTONE. NASCENT NURSERY. GRAVE AND GRACE. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA. VAH RUTA.
“Oh,” Zelda breathes, “You can hear us.” The beast, monstrous machine that it is, is sentient.
YES. The walls proclaim. YES YES YES YES. ME. VAH RUTA. I AM. VAH RUTA. I AM. I AM. I AM. YES. I AM.
*
Thought exercises are silly, if you ask a creature like Vah Ruta. They’re silly because they never ask a creature like Vah Ruta. If you asked Vah Ruta what a dead Zora princess wants, Vah Ruta would know the answer, because Vah Ruta had asked Mipha directly while she was still alive. Vah Ruta asked Mipha because Vah Ruta doesn’t have a stomach, the way Zelda and Link and Sidon and the salmon do. Vah Ruta isn’t trying to eat dinner. It’s not trying to save itself. Vah Ruta loves Mipha like a sword loves her master, like a cradle loves a prince, like a shrine loves its goddess, like a lotus loves its seeds.
Mipha loved Vah Ruta too—that’s the part most people don’t know about. She loved Vah Ruta like she loved her brother, her father, her domain, her love and all his loves, her river and all its rivers and all the lakes and forests and deer and rice fields and glowing snails and silent flowers and old growth forests and cities and towns and castles and chillfin trout that the river fed. Then Vah Ruta killed her.
Vah Ruta’s best friend died, and Vah Ruta held the knife. Vah Ruta knows grief, learned it through the same century-long lesson plan the Hylian princess used.
Mipha always said Vah Ruta worked too hard. Mipha was planning a vacation, just the two of them, after it was all over. They would head to the coast—Lurelin, or North Akkala maybe. Feast on seafood paella, coconut cream, watch the moon emerge nightly from her silken waves.
Then Vah Ruta killed Mipha.
So the vacation’s off now. The moon has stab wounds, sometimes, when she wakes up. The recipe for seafood paella has only recently been rediscovered, and it doesn’t taste quite the same. Frankly, the lesson plan sucked. Frankly, Vah Ruta mostly wants to fling itself into the dam trapping it in this accursed lake and drift like deadwood out to sea. Frankly, Vah Ruta is so, so tired.
But Mipha always said Vah Ruta worked too hard. But, Mipha wanted Vah Ruta to take a vacation. But, Mipha was a minor god of second chances.
She’d wanted a second chance for herself too, but could never figure it out, minor god that she was. If recursion were out of reach, she would have been okay with everyone else getting that second chance instead. Vah Ruta knows this—it asked her. And then it spent a hundred years trying to accept what she said.
*
YES YES YES YES. ME. VAH RUTA. I AM. VAH RUTA. I AM. I AM. I AM. YES. I AM.
“It’s…it’s Vah Ruta. I think…I think the divine beast itself is speaking to us!”
YES. YES. YES. YES. LISTEN. LISTEN. YES. LISTEN.
“So it’s not… you’re not Mipha,” Sidon deflates, then puffs back up twice his size, like a blowfish, poisonous and hollow. “What do you want?” he spits.
SORRY. NOT MIPHA. SORRY. NO MIPHA. NO MIPHA. PILOT. NO MIPHA. NO PILOT. NO MIPHA. NO PILOT.
“Without Mipha,” Zelda ventures, “You don’t have a pilot?”
NO. NO. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. MIPHA. NO PILOT. MIPHA. NO PILOT.
Sidon has clued in on this point to how the walls are chameleoning into different sentences. “What’s it saying now?” he says. The derision makes him a stranger, but Zelda knows he’s entitled to this much, arguing with his sister’s crypt.
“No pilot. Mipha. No pilot. Mipha.” Zelda says, “I don’t—I don’t know what that means.” They’re getting nowhere, and Sidon’s eyes are getting red, and Zelda’s conscience can’t take the weight of Sidon’s tears. It can’t. She changes tracks. “Why are you sabotaging repairs? Why did you stop working in the first place?”
NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. MIPHA. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. MIPHA. NO PILOT.
“I know that!” Zelda snaps, “Mipha, your pilot, is gone. That doesn’t explain anything! You have a new pilot now!”
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT.
“You have a pilot! He’s right there!” Zelda gestures at Sidon, who has his fists curled and shoulders squared, about to pick a fistfight with a computerized text display.
But Vah Ruta isn’t listening. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO PILOT. NO PILOT. NO PILOT.
“Fine,” Zelda snaps, angry enough that she forgets fear, “What about the tape, then? What’s the point of giving that to us now?”
WARNING. WARNING. WARNING. WARNING. WARNING.
Oh no—not a warning. The anger drowns in a deluge of anxiety, the kind of stress only technology troubleshooting can provoke. Now what? The bears are loose, the canon is malfunctioning, the seagulls are about to stage a siege, the whole beast is ready to just disintegrate into a pile of gears, plexiglass, copper wire.
“What’s it saying now,” Sidon grits through his shark-sharp teeth.
“A warning?” Zelda can’t stop the anxiety from poking into her voice. “It just says warning. Oh goddesses I don’t know if it’s still talking to us or this is actually a system warning and we need to get out.”
The walls shift into a new red again. GET OUT. GET OUT. GET OUT. GET OUT. GET OUT.
“Curses! It’s telling us to get out!”
Sidon shouts into the circuits. “Why? Why get out?”
MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA.
Zelda relays the beast's message and Sidon replies. “Because of Mipha? That’s why you want us out?”
NO. NO. NOT ME. NOT ME. NOT ME. MIPHA. NOT ME. MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA.
“I don't—I don’t understand. It’s saying no. No, no, not me, not me, not me, Mipha. Not me, Mipha, Mipha, Mipha.” Zelda glares at the walls, the pulsing red, like she stared down the Calamity raging through her hometown, like she can intimidate the words into comprehension.
Sidon, however, opens his fists. A flurry of flowers fall out. The flowers are small, blue, quiet. They grow on well-watered rocks. “You don’t want us out,” he says, “Mipha does?”
The pulsing stops, like the beast is entering cardiac arrest. Then, the red letters start to fade away, stars flickering out of existence, candles going out. One by one, the characters fly off of the walls and into the ocean, they dive off to meet the moon somewhere on the horizon. Sidon and Zelda are left in resolute dark.
“Ruta?” Sidon whispers.
Upon Sidon’s plea, they’re plunged into an array of dazzling blue, like the sun when viewed from underwater. When her eyes adjust, when she pulls herself above the surface of the sea, when she wipes the salt away, Zelda can make out a new sentence. Every panel on the walls is bright and sky and screaming: YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. YES. MIPHA. MIPHA. MIPHA. NO PILOT.
*
What does a dead Zora princess want?
Her grave asked her once, and she replied, “You mean, after the vacation?”
The grave, the grace, the ghost-keeper said, yes, after the vacation, and Mipha said, “Well. Temporary vacations are a bit unfortunate, aren’t they? Just a little reprieve, and then it’s back to whatever you were running from. I guess…I’d like to not go back. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? I understand that evil comes, and we have to stand to meet it. But after, it would be nice to not have to do it again. For this horror to only happen once.”
She took a big bite of shrimp and pondered the moon’s gossamer gown, as it emerged for another go at the world.
“Yes…no second coming. This happens once, and then we all get to live our lives again.”
*
Vah Ruta locks the doors behind them. After a lifetime of watching the fireflies flicker into frame at the banks of the reservoir, Zelda places a hand on Sidon’s forearm.
“Are you alright?”
The divine beast has fully powered down now, standing like a sculpture at the water’s center. Sparse gulls cry as they circle their way back to their colony, landing right at Vah Ruta’s cannon with small fish wriggling in their beaks. Absently, Zelda wonders if their scat will corrode Vah Ruta’s walls to the point where its electrical system might start interacting with the water. Hopefully the beast will have forgiven them enough by then to accept at least maintenance in the name of self-preservation. It would be a shame if something happened to the cubs, or the salmon, or those chicks, or the carpets of lotus flowers.
“What if the salmon could survive?”
“Huh?”
“Earlier, you said it didn’t matter that they were in Vah Ruta, because they couldn’t swim past the dam. But what if they could?”
Zelda considers the elephant’s silhouette, then Sidon’s. “There are other smaller dams along the Zora and Rutala Rivers as they head to the sea. Though, not as many anymore. A lot of them collapsed after a hundred years of neglect. Our engineering isn’t nearly as impressive as yours. Rutala Dam is probably the biggest obstacle.”
Sidon glances at the dam’s clear impassive face, darkening as the sun takes her golden glaze back.
“Some of the elders, the ones who remember life before the dam, call them our stupid cousins, since they’re so bad at swimming up waterfalls.”
Zelda giggles. “What does that make us Hylians then?”
Sidon shrugs, “Slugs mostly. Well the word in the Zora tongue is worse, but I won’t say it in polite company. Anyways there’s no way they could scale the dam, even if we opened the spillways. I wonder if our armor would work on them the way it does for Link.”
Zelda snorts, imagining a line of red fish in little formal armor suits, traipsing in a single-file like up the sheer stone of Rutala Dam. “It’s worth a try,” she says, “The next time I’m in Hebra, I can try running some tests.”
“Thank you.” Sidon nods then taps his chin. “I should probably figure out how to get them out of Vah Ruta first, before the bears get to them….”
“I don’t know about that, they pack quite the punch even for being stupid cousins,” Zelda reaches up to brush against her bruised cheek, then winces, then smiles despite herself. “I wouldn’t count them out yet.”
*
The minor god of second chances makes her wish, and it’s not particularly surprising. She’s said it all before.
Her people sit on the banks of her river, enjoying chillfin carpaccio, seafood paella, even if no one can make it the way she used to. Her love finds a new love and an altar for incense. Her domain makes an umbrella and a way out to sea. Her father sees the two frames of her final smile. Her brother starts a career in estuary restoration and leaves the army far far behind.
The beasts we built for war settle into slumber. They hold baby birds and bear cubs, softly, in their snoring mouths.
*