Zora's Domain Again

Waking of Saturday, March 18, 2017 ~ 14

Zora’s Domain Again

I coalesced into myself near the gates of Zora’s Domain.

Rivan was the first person I saw.

He marveled to me at the clearness of the sky.

I felt different.

I walked inward, passing familiar faces, Fronk, Trello, Laflat....

I showed Laflat the pictograph I had taken of the charging Lynel, and she made a rather undignified squeak at the sight of it. But she was grateful to see it; it would help her scare the young Zoras from going near the mountain.

Scare away, Laflat. The terror of that thing was completely justified.

In return for my high-stakes pictography, she gave me a pair of Zora Greaves. She said they used to be very common—Zoras had gifted them to visiting Hylians after the Hylians had collaborated with the Zoras to construct the Eastern Reservoir wall. Now, however, you didn’t see them all that much, because Hylians didn’t visit so often anymore. The very pair she had given me was the last one in the stock room before her father had to close down their armor shop.

Well, I could certainly look the part now, couldn’t I?

But I didn’t don them just yet. It felt.... a little presumptuous, on my way to see the King once again.

Back in the throne room before King Dorephan. Sidon and Muzu were there, too, as were many of the Zoras I had met. A small throng of blues and greens and reds and blacks—I could pick out a few individuals....

There followed from the King some pomp and circumstance, but.... beneath all that, I think what struck me as perhaps the heaviest honor—or perhaps the most dearly bought by its bestower—was Muzu, repentant. He hoped, he said, that I would be able to forgive him for his words to me before, if not now, then some day.

Many of the elders I passed on my way back into the Domain still resented me for stealing away their princess. And I don’t suppose I can blame them, trying to see it from their side. But.... Muzu’s olive branch was a gracious and most welcome gesture.

The King awarded me with a treasure that had belonged to Lady Mipha—the Lightscale Trident—which reminded him....

“Where is your trusty sword, Link? The one with the power to seal away the darkness?”

I looked at him. “What sword?” I said.

“...So you have forgotten that as well,” he replied mysteriously, his eyes shrewd. He assured me that it was a weapon only I could wield, and that it was no doubt only resting somewhere in Hyrule, waiting for its master’s return.

The King lauded me a little further until the meeting finally dissolved into the cheers and shouts of gratitude and relief from the attending Zoras....

I spoke again with the King after everyone had left, and he asked after his daughter. After all, she had not returned with me. So the King had held out some hope yet....

“I met her spirit,” I told him after a moment.

He leaned forward all at once toward me again—that one his size could move so....

“Her spirit, you say? Did she say anything?” he asked.

And I told him.

“I see...” he said, “so she really is....”

What could I say?

What do you say to a father?

“She really loved you, Link,” he said to me. And he asked me to promise to him that I would remember her always.

“I’ll never forget her,” I said.

DEEPLY MOVED

Waking of Saturday, March 18, 2017 ~ 4

DEEPLY MOVED

When I traveled back to Zora’s Domain, I exited the shrine’s grotto, and came upon Gruve looking over a waterfall that spilled into the lowest lake at the base of the Domain.

He was impressed with my new Zora Armor, and told me to show him what I could do with it: dive down—with my most beautiful diving form!—and then swim back up the waterfall.

I peered over the edge. I’d combed the bottom of the Domain and scooped up plenty of fallen treasures down there, and I knew there were also plenty of rocks.

But I took a leap of faith, arced right over and speared into the water like an arrow.

Gruve was moved to tears by my graceful execution, and called me to swim back up the waterfall.

Well, King Dorephan had said I’d be able to do that with the Zora Armor.... now was as good a time as any to try it. I swam to where the roaring column of water pounded into the lake below in a swirling, churning froth.... and pressed A.

I shot up the inside of the funnel like a salmon!—leaping out at whiles like a dolphin!—until I shot out the top of the fall, high into the air, high above Gruve, and at the very height of my freefall clung onto my glider to hover slowly back down to the platform.

Gruve just could not get over the stunning display of my hydrodynamic form.

He gave me some seeds I can cook with that will make me run—and swim—faster.

Lord of the Zoras

Waking of Saturday, March 18, 2017

Lord of the Zoras

Well, it was time to follow Sidon, and go and speak with the Zora King.

I found him in the high throne room.

He was massive. Royal blue body and back, pale moon-white front and face, and a bulging lobe like a beluga’s with a lighter-colored slash across the front—the mark of his battle with the Guardian. Jeweled silver armor and regalia spilled over his great, pleated barrel chest, and his trailing head-fin—longer than many trees I had ever seen—had been pushed to hang down his left side. Towering, towering above me, he sat proud and tall between his son Prince Sidon on his left, and a bent old green-skinned, ray-headed Zora on his right.

He recognized me too. And he said so.

But Prince Sidon had not. “That Link?” he said, “THE Link?” He had thought my name sounded familiar, I remembered he had said before.

That the Hylian Prince Sidon had found to aid them would turn out to be no less than the Champion Link.... King Dorephan concluded that our meeting, then, must have been nothing short of destiny.

But I told him that I had lost my memory. He seemed aghast that I could not even remember his daughter, Lady Mipha. Shocked.... but not unsteadied.

All the Zora elders seemed to hate me because I had taken away their Lady Mipha—and here was Lady Mipha’s father. Perhaps the one with the most reason of all to despise me. And yet he showed no trace, gave no sign.... I had.... a great admiration for the civilized tone he still used with me.

He seemed a goodly king; had his head on straight—he was trying to think of all the people of Hyrule. Vah Ruta had the ability to create an endless supply of water, and if it wasn’t stopped soon, not only would the resulting floods wreak havoc among the Zoran kingdom, water-breathers though they were, but it would also affect countless Hylian lives in the lands downstream. Already the effects were showing—I had even seen Ledo, and an apprentice of his named Fronk, trying to work repairs on a number of support pillars that had become damaged in the downpour.

Vah Ruta needed to be dealt with, very soon, and the truth, King Dorephan conceded, doing me the courtesy of being bluntly honest, was that the Zoras could not handle the Divine Beast alone.

The four orbs upon its back, which controlled the waterflow, were offline and out of control, and they needed an electrical current running through them to stem the flow of water.

This was what I was here for.

Because my body was more insulated against the Shock Arrows they would need to stabilize the orbs.

They asked for my aid.

Well, I had good news for them: Princess Zelda had tasked me with nearly the same goal.

King Dorephan—the unbelievable bulk of him—shot forward in his throne. “Princess Zelda is alive?” he asked.

“Yes, in Hyrule Castle,” I said.

He concluded once more that our meeting must have been fated. If there was a chance to retake Vah Ruta, there was also a chance to seal away Calamity Ganon for good....

He would give me all the help I needed—and he gifted me a set of beautiful Zora Armor, which has been crafted by Zoran Princesses for generations.

At this point the ray-headed Zora, Muzu, had had enough. Hylians, he argued, were the reason the world was in the state it was in in the first place, ever since they had sought out and abused the ancient technology of the Sheikah one hundred years ago.

To give one of them a Zoran Princess’ armor—armor that was traditionally supposed to be crafted for the one the Zora Princess would marry....

And Lady Mipha had crafted that armor herself! How could King Dorephan just hand it over to the very one who led Lady Mipha to her death?

Prince Sidon rebuked him, telling him to watch the way he spoke to the King and his guest, and reminding him that working together with the Hylians was their best chance of stopping Vah Ruta.

But Muzu wouldn’t have it, and he left the throne room.

Prince Sidon followed him.

The King asked me to follow as well, to try and talk to him.... because Muzu was the resident expert on just where and how Shock Arrows could be found.

Zora's Domain

Waking of Friday, March 17, 2017 ~ 2

Zora’s Domain

I took my time meeting all the Zoras I could. I even found Gruve! So he’d made it down off that tower after all—dived off into the river, he told me. Said he was so deeply moved seeing his reflection in the water as he came down. Said a Zora’s diving form is his most beautiful form, the very pinnacle of grace and beauty. Diving is his favorite thing, you know, and he loves looking for diving spots. But his current favorite is Shatterback Point, at the top of Ploymus Mountain overlooking the Eastern Reservoir. I couldn’t help have seen that one on my map, with a name like that.

But, as Rivan had suggested, in meeting the people I tried to stay away from the elderly—they really didn’t like me around here.

But there was one wizened old dust-red Zora I found gazing into a pool beneath some waterfalls. Kapson was his name, and he told me he tried to condemn the action rather than the person, that he wanted to try to forgive, and that was comforting. He didn’t scowl or sneer or hiss at me like most of the other elders did. “Mortality lays claim to all,” he said, or something like it. I gazed with him a while into the pool, too.

And there was one little girl from the Prince Sidon fanclub, what was her name.... Laruta or Laruto? One of those. She kept singing a song about a scale of light cleaving or separating a veiled fall.... And I’d heard of a Lightscale Trident, and on my map I saw the Veiled Falls....

Things I wanted to keep in mind....

Something else interesting I noted.... Rivan and the elders didn’t seem to be the only ones who recognized me. The innkeeper, a pinkish lady Zora, addressed me excitedly as Linny.

“Linny! It is you, isn’t it!?”

Oh how I grinned at the response which simply read, “Precisely.”

But that wasn’t who I was in this game.

And one of the guards before the throne room, Bazz—though he seemed a little abashed to ask me outright to verify my identity, simply hinted to me that any member of the Big Bad Bazz Brigade would know their secret catchphrase or passcode or whatever it was.... “Fluffy white clouds, Clear blue....”

“Zora?” I supplied.

That was it. Somehow I’d known.

I think.... he said I used to train him. At the sword.

I must have come here often in my previous life.

I wish I could remember....

Whenever I tried to ask people about Mipha, they told me a little bit—she was the Zora Champion, she was Sidon’s elder sister, she had fallen to Calamity Ganon....

“But,” they kept telling me, “you really should hear this from King Dorephan.”

Dorephan. I recognized that name. That was the name of the Zora King who had defeated the Guardian. The account had said he still had a scar upon his head from the battle—a mark of his bravery.

How long do Zoras live?

I also caught a little of what the Zoras—or Prince Sidon anyway—possibly wanted me for. I’d heard that some of the Zoras had tried to quiet Vah Ruta’s ceaseless water-raging by using Shock Arrows. Bazz’s father, the former Demon Sergeant Seggin, was in fact hunched at the top of a staircase poking at a Shock Arrow repeatedly in an attempt to up his tolerance against them—the Zora are weak against electricity you see. They have trouble even touching them. And I recalled that Goron I’d met in the general store saying he was there because Prince Sidon has recruited him to help deal with Vah Ruta “because I can touch Shock Arrows!” He clenched his massive fist and grinned. But Prince Sidon had told him he’d ‘never be able to carry you on my back’....

What did it all mean....?

I wondered....

I really wondered.

Unsaved

Waking of Monday, March 13, 2017

Unsaved

I only walked about. I was weary from my long hike up the river.

I talked with some of the other Zora I saw moving about—and saw a few familiar faces! Ledo and Torfeau.... I found out Tona actually worked in a shop up here, but I didn’t actually see her until I bumped into a group of Zora girls downstairs on the other side of the . . . . do I call it a square? It seems to want a more elegant word than that, so high pillared above the beautiful waterfalls.

The group of Zora girls, it seemed.... were members of a Prince Sidon Fan Club.

Seemed the prince was quite popular with the ladies around here! Somehow I didn’t find it surprising. The man bled charisma.

Tula was the name of their club president. Laflat was the name of the secretary I had met before. Dunma was the name of Rivan’s.... daughter, it turned out. Not a son.... I had met so many Zora.... and a Goron.... There were a lot of people up here.

I suppose it was comforting to find so many goodly folk all together, and safe, in one place, but.... maybe just a little bit overwhelming for a small-town guy like me.

A small-town guy?

Maybe I only thought that because small towns were the only places I’ve been—or the only places I remember being.

I’m not a small-town guy. What am I?

A Resurrection Chamber guy?

I hope I can find my memories soon.

Not the least reason for which is because every aged Zora I spoke to in Zora’s Domain was unhappily disgusted to see my face.

What had they thought I’d done to their beloved Mipha?

....

What had I done to their beloved Mipha?

I couldn’t vouch for myself—I had no memory.

What had I done?

I went to see the king, and quit without saving.