Sheik Ch5: Renewal

I walk through the enormous log tunnel that leads to the forest, wondering what the children who live here will think of me, with my red eyes and blood-stained uniform.

I wonder if they’ll even let me in.

The log tunnel opens up to a tiny part of the forest. Tall, skinny trees shoot up from the ground to join the dense canopy above. A rope bridge hangs in front of me, swaying in the light breeze. The air is thick with the sounds of the forest creatures and smells delightfully cozy.

Just like...just like...the garden...at the castle…

I shake my head vigorously. I’ve got to stay awake. It has taken me an entire day to cross Hyrule, and having to run from those bulbous flying death plants across Hyrule Field didn’t help me, either.

I slowly step onto the bridge, and when I find that it is completely sturdy, I walk across and then through another log tunnel into Link’s hometown, the Kokiri Village.

It seems empty but for a few quaint little tree houses and different-colored fairies floating around in small circles. The nearest one to me seems to turn around to look at me, and then jumps back in surprise, making a sound like a ringing bell.

“Ah, hello…” I say timidly, doubting that the fairy will answer.

“HI!!!” I’m so surprised, I almost fall over backwards as a little blond girl dressed in green appears right in front of me. “Who’re you? What’s your name? My name’s Fado. Why d’you have berry juice all over you? Didja bring any friends? What’s it like where you came from? Are there lots of trees, or plants, or--”

She stops to suck in a huge breath, gasping for air for a moment, so I take the chance to interrupt her.

“I’m here to see the girl with the green hair who lives here.”

“Oh, you mean Saria? She’s great. She’s a little sad, though, since Link left. She’s over in the Lost Woods. I can take you there if you like--”

“That would be great, thanks.”

“M’kay!” She turns and skips away, two little blond buns bouncing on her head, and I follow her as best I can. I look around me, and where before there were only fairies, little blond boys and girls in green play happily.

We reach yet another log tunnel on a hill, and Fado skips right inside, her fairy lighting the way for us. Before I go in, I notice a stone planted into the ground to the left of the entrance. Carved into it is the same eye-and-tear symbol as the one on my bloody smock.

“Wait!” I call to Fado before she gets too far. “What’s this?”

She turns around. “Oh, that’s a Sheikah Stone. It tells the time for us. Oh, look, it has the same thing that’s on your shirt. Did the two of you come from the same place? What does that symbol mean, anyway?”

In a fit of curiosity, I reach out to feel the stone, and once my hand touches it, the iris of its eye turns red. I jump back, suffering from the second heart attack that I’ve had in the last five minutes.

“Boing-oing!” it yells. “It’s 19:00!”

Fado gives it a lopsided grin. “Huh.”

I tear my eyes away from the stone. “Um… We should probably…”

“Oh, yeah! Right this way!” She skips away again, into the dark tunnel.

**********

She leads me through a series of twists and turns, through tiny clearings that all look the same. After a while, I begin to wonder if we are actually going in circles, and the repetitiveness of right-left-right-left-straight-left-right is making me dizzy.

Then I hear a faint strain of music coming from far away. “Almost there!” Fado quips. The lilting music grows louder the more turns we take, as we go deeper and deeper into the forest.

We finally emerge into a larger clearing that looks different from the rest. A gate of sorts sits in front of us a few feet away, with a wall of trees directly behind it.

“Welp, this is as far as I go! Good luck, and watch out for wild Dekus!” Fado turns and skips away.

I call after her. “Wait! What?! What are Dekus?!”

The girl disappears through the tunnel behind me, leaving me alone with the strange music thrumming in my ears. I turn back around and sigh.

I’m going to have to go through a maze, in the heart of the famous Lost Woods, where everyone but the natives gets lost.

By myself.

I walk in, trying to come up with a plan for figuring out the maze, and immediately I’m pelted with Deku Nuts.

“Ow!” I howl as I turn to the right and throw a knife at the little leafy creature sitting in a pile of its own leaves a few feet away. It hits the little pipsqueak right between its yellow eyes, and it squeaks loudly and disappears.

So that is what Fado was talking about.

I rub my sore right arm where I was hit, resolving to be more careful next time I turn a corner. There is a dead end to my left with a pool of water, so I turn right. Before I retrieve my knife, I peek around the next corner. There is another pile of red-and-orange leaves at the next intersection. I pull out another knife and get ready to throw.

As I leap out into the intersection, another Deku pops out of the leaf pile, and I throw my knife at it before it can shoot more nuts at me. It hits home, and the second Deku disappears with a loud squeak much like the first.

Okay.

I run through the maze, finding another Deku at every corner. When I get to the end, I find an old stone stairway with yet more Dekus at the top. The music sounds very close. I jog up the stairs, kill the creatures, and emerge into a clearing, where a little girl in green sits on a log, playing a little clay ocarina.

Her hair is a startlingly bright green.

When I come into the clearing, she looks up at me and smiles. The music stops.

“Oh, hello! You look so tired. Come, sit!” She pats the log next to her, and I gladly oblige, exhausted from walking for hours on end.

“Are you Saria?” I ask.

She giggles. “Yes, I am. I’m sure you could tell, though.”

Her hair is a bit of a trademark. Everyone else here has blond hair.

“So, what brings you here?”

I look at her. “What?”

“Well, you tried so hard to get here, I just figured, y’know…”

I turn and stare into space, wracking my brain. Why did I come?

“I haven’t the faintest idea. My friend Impa sent me. She didn’t even tell me why.”

I turn back to see her giving me a strange look. “You do look like her…”

After a moment, she seems to snap back into reality, and she stands up, offering me a and. “Well, you’re going to need a place to stay for the next few days, right? You can stay at my house! Oh, but you’ll have to get cleaned up first!”

**********

I wake up with a horrible headache. What a crazy dream that was, I think to myself. I dreamt that I was on the Surface, and there were strange creatures, and I was knocked unconscious… I slowly open my eyes, expecting to wake up in my room with the sunlight shining through my window, but when my vision clears, I find myself on the ground, grass tickling my nose. I sit up and rub my aching forehead, wondering just where on Skyloft…

Oh no. It wasn’t a dream.

I am sitting in a cage on the Surface, with three ugly red monster goons staring at me through the bars.

I stand up, ready to fight, and grab onto the bars of the wooden cage, causing the monsters to flinch. “You will let me out of here right now, or I will make you suffer!” I roar. Their eyes go wide, but they all stay put. I hurl all manner of threats and insults at them, but they don’t understand me, of course. One by one, they retreat back to where they had set up a tiny campfire while I was asleep. I scream at them until my voice goes hoarse, and then, giving up, I plop down onto the ground. I look around the outside of the cage for something I could use to break myself out with, but there is nothing useful within reach, just grass and tiny flowers.

Oh, Goddess Hylia, I pray, what am I going to do? What will they do to me? Are they going to eat me? I won’t get into a stew pot without a fight, but I don’t think that eating me is their intention…

Before I can think of anything more, I hear an echoing, booming sound coming from the forest. I and my captors turn toward the noise to see an enormous furry brown creature storm into the little camp.

I have no idea whether to be happy or terrified, so I watch as the thing approaches my captors and stops a few feet away from them. They stare up at it for a few seconds, blown away by its sheer size, and then they charge it, screaming and waving their meat knives in the air. The thing leans forward and falls over on its face, right on top of their heads. As the thing lays there, I hear three popping noises, and purple smoke curls from underneath its belly. It stands up, and where before there were three monster goons, there is nothing. The thing squashed them like bugs.

As the brown furry thing turns towards me, I begin to realize what it--he--is.

A giant Kikwi.

**********

I wake to find Fado standing over me. I jump up. “Whoa! Fado! W-what are you doing staring at me like that?!”

“I dunno. You look cute when you’re sleeping.”

I hear another female voice in the room. “Sorry, she has a habit of doing that.”

Fado rolls her eyes at her fairy. “Oh, shut up, Mafl. You know it’s fun.”

I interrupt. “What time is it?”

Fado shrugs. “I dunno. Lunch time almost, I think. Hey, have you met anybody yet? I mean, besides me and Saria? I don’t think Mido’ll be happy to see you, though. Sometimes he’s not very nice. He doesn’t like people who don’t have fairies. Or maybe he was just mean to Link because he lived here and didn’t have a fairy. Everybody here has a fairy, but Link only got one just a couple days ago. But you don’t live here, and you don’t have a fairy either--”

“No, I don’t. Nobody has their own fairy in the outside world. We only have each other.”

“Oh, that’s sad.”

“Not really. I’d love to have a fairy companion, but all I need is my friends…” My mind wanders to images of Impa, raising me, supporting me... Crumpled on the floor of the inn, lying there in that bed, motionless, hardly breathing--

I shake myself out of the flashback. “Do you know where Saria is?”

She sits on the edge of the bed, swinging her legs. “Nope. Well, actually, she’s probably in her place in the Lost Woods where she likes to go. I sometimes get worried about her, though. Any Kokiri who gets lost in the Lost Woods turns into a Skull Kid and never comes back. I hope Saria never gets lost. Have you ever met a Skull Kid before? They’re fun to play with, but they never want to come out of the Woods. Why do you think that is? I wonder if they ever get lonely…”

I tune her out and walk out of Saria’s little tree house into the village. Fado follows me, still talking.

“This one time, I was playing with a Skull Kid, and he was playing his flute and we were dancing--hey, you should go to meet the Know-It-All Brothers! They live up on top of that hill up there. They know all kinds of stuff--”

“Okay, okay. I’ll go up to meet them.”

I walk up the hill and head towards the tree house at the top, dreading meeting anybody labeled a Know-It-All, but I find something else more interesting. There is a small area at the top of the hill with fences set up in a pattern--sort of like a miniature obstacle course. I easily walk through and come to a hole at the base of a wall of vines. It looks just big enough to crawl into.

“Hey, you shouldn’t go in there!”

I turn around to see a Kokiri boy coming out of the tree house behind me. “Why not?”

He points to the hole. “There’s a monster in there.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

I pretend to think for a moment. “Thanks. I’ll watch out for it.”

I crawl through the hole, leaving the boy yelling behind me, and on the other side, it looks like another maze. A loud rumbling sound is coming from the left, and the springy ground beneath my feet vibrates. I run into the maze, knives ready, and am almost run over by a gigantic boulder.

“Whoa!” I jump to the side as the boulder rolls by, turning the corner as if it can control where it’s going. Well, there's your monster, I think to myself. I walk through the maze, slower and more carefully this time, until I reach a tiny open chest sitting in a corner, and look inside to find nothing but an imprint of a small sword. I look a bit closer into the imprint and see an engraving of a woman holding the U-shaped instrument I had seen in my dreams.

“The Great Deku Tree always told us a story about that thing.”

I jump out of my skin, whirling around to see Fado leaning over my shoulder. “Why do you keep sneaking up on me like that?!” She withdraws a bit, making me regret blowing up at her. “Sorry, I’m not used to, you know, people appearing right in my face, and coming up behind me and…”

To my relief, she perks up again. “Okay. I’ll try harder not to pop up out of nowhere. But let me tell you the story the Great Deku Tree tells us: Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a village above the clouds where a boy and a girl lived. They had these huge birds that they would ride around the sky on--” here she threw her arms open wide to show just how big they were-- “and one day, while the boy and the girl were riding together, a big black tornado came and sucked the girl down onto the ground. The boy went down to look for the girl, who was his best friend. He found that he played a part in a prophecy and was destined to save the world from an ancient evil, and the girl had an even more important role to play. She found out that she was an incarnate of the goddess Hylia, and she had to complete a quest to become the true Goddess. She was--”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “Sorry, I just remembered something. You said the girl in the story had a big bird--”

“Yeah.”

“--And she fell down onto the ground--”

“Yeah, and she got lost, but an old lady helped her find her way to where she needed to go.”

I stare open-mouthed at Fado. “It’s the girl from my dreams…”

“Wh-what?”

I’m excited now. There must be some connection between me and the girl from my dreams. Maybe if I learn more about her, it will help me figure out what to do! “Fado, you have to lead me to the Great Deku Tree! I need to speak to him!”

Fado gives me a look, and then her expression falls. She looks down. “The Great Deku Tree is dead.”

I am devastated. “What?! How?!”

“A few weeks ago, he called Link to him because he was sick. Link went inside the Tree, and when he came out, he left the forest right away. Saria went to see if the Great Deku Tree was okay, but when she got there, all his leaves had fallen off… And he was…”

A sob escapes her mouth. I grab ahold of her shoulders. “Hey. Look at me.” She lifts her eyes to mine. “I know the Great Deku Tree took very good care of the forest, and of you. But I also know that he wouldn’t want you to cry over him. No one ever does.”

“Mido thinks that Link killed him.”

“Link didn’t kill him. I met Link before I came here, and he was on his way to do what the Great Deku Tree told him. He died because he was sick, and nobody could help him. But you of all people should know that the Forest brings life, and makes old life new. That’s why the Kokiri never grow old.”

She wipes a tear from her eye with the back of her hand. “I guess so…”

“Fado, I’d like to go pay my respects. Would you take me to him?”

She sniffs and then smiles. “Sure. Follow me!” At last returned to her old hyperactive self, she skips away towards the village, gracefully avoiding the boulder as it rolls past her. I smile, relieved, and follow her to the Great Deku Tree’s resting place.

**********

As we walk through the village, all of the Kokiri children turn and smile at us. Some of them join us and talk for a while, then go back to whatever it was they were doing before, and some of them just wave. We get to the end of the village, and there sits a Kokiri child I haven’t met, head on his fist, plucking blades of grass and tossing them aside. He looks up as we approach.

“Who’re you?” He asks, sounding genuinely uninterested in who I am.

“My name is Sheik,” I reply. “I’ve come to pay my respects to the Great Deku Tree.”

He looks down, hurt in his eyes. “Whatever.” He begins picking grass again, this time more violently.

“Are you Mido?” I ask.

“Yeah, but what’s it to you?”

“I’ve been wanting to meet you. Would you like to come with us?”

“No.”

Fado speaks up. “C’mon, Mido, please?”

“Why should I? I’ve already seen him with his leaves fallen off, and I don’t want to see that again! And we don’t even know this guy, with his strange costume and red eyes. You can’t even see half his face! How do you know we can trust him?”

“Mido--”

“No,” I interrupt. “It’s fine. I don’t expect you to trust me at all. We’ll just be on our way.”
I walk past Mido into the woods. I can feel his eyes on my back. I hope you find happiness again soon, I wish for him.

Fado catches up to me and talks about nothing in particular as we continue down the path between the trees. We reach a large clearing, and what I see there makes my jaw drop. An enormous tree, gigantic beyond imagination, stands right in the center of the clearing. I can almost make out an old, wizened face outlined in the bark of the tree. Brown dead leaves cover the ground, and everything is silent. Wisps float lazily in the air, the only things moving.

I gaze in awe at the ancient tree, blown away by its sheer size. There is an enormous hole at the base of the tree, just below the face’s barky moustache. Fado walks forward and sits in front of the massive trunk, wiping silent tears from her eyes. I come and sit next to her, still staring.

“I never thought he would be so big.”

Fado smiles. “He was so nice to all of us. He took care of us, and told us stories…”

She falls silent. We sit together for a little while.

Why did you have to die? I wonder. What did Ganondorf want so badly that he would threaten your life to take it from you? Was it the Forest Emerald, or something else?

I stand up. “Come on, Fado. It’s getting late. It’s probably almost dinner time, right?”

“Probably…” She sits and stares at the ground.

“Let’s go,” I say. “There is too much sadness in the air here.”

I look back as we leave the clearing. Rest in peace, Great Deku Tree, Guardian of the Forest. Your long life was not spent in vain, I’m sure of it.