Part 1
Five years is a lifetime to a child. To a village as quiet and unchanging as Ordon, it is but a single, long breath. The seasons turned, pulling the world through five cycles of vibrant green, fiery autumn, stark white, and hopeful spring. The boy who had been lost in the woods and returned, touched by a magic none could name, grew with them.
Link was now eleven. The lankiness of early boyhood had begun to shape him, adding length to his limbs and a quiet confidence to his posture. He was still the village shepherd, and a better one than Fado could have ever hoped for. He knew the flock not as a mass, but as individuals, and he guided them with a soft melody on his whistle and an unspoken understanding that bordered on uncanny.
The villagers had grown accustomed to his strangeness. He was a fixture of their lives, like the old oak in the square or the steady turning of the mill wheel. They respected him, for they all remembered the story of the wolves and the miraculous return from the forest. But there was a distance. They saw the old soul in his eyes, the unsettling wisdom in his silence, and it kept him apart. He was of Ordon, but not entirely of them. He was the boy who had walked in the shadows and returned with the forest's secrets in his eyes.
Our secret was kept at dawn.
Before the village stirred, when the sky was a soft, bruised purple and the mists still clung to the pastures, I would meet him behind the forge. This was the time for our true language. The sword I had forged in the crucible of my fear and grief was no longer a monument to a lost son. It had become our catechism.
I was no swordsman, no knight trained in the elegant arts of combat. I was a blacksmith. I understood balance, weight, momentum, and the brutal, honest truth of steel. And that is what I taught him. I taught him how a blade feels in the hand, how to make it an extension of his will. We did not practice fancy drills or elegant parries. We practiced footwork on the uneven ground until it was as natural as breathing. I taught him to feel his opponent's intention through the pressure of their blade, just as I feel the flaws in a piece of metal through the vibrations of my hammer.
He learned with a terrifying, innate grace. His silence was an asset. He did not waste energy on shouts or boasts. He simply watched, learned, and moved. His small body, wiry and quick, was a blur in the pre-dawn gloom. The sword, which I had crafted for a child's hand, now seemed a part of him, its movements as fluid and certain as his own.
These sessions were our sacred, silent conversations. With every blocked strike, I was telling him, Be careful. The world is a dangerous place. With every perfectly executed turn, he was replying, I will be ready. Elara knew of our training. She never watched. I would often see the flicker of a candle in the window as we finished, a sign that she had been awake the whole time, her mother's heart a silent witness to the harsh necessities of our love.
Today's lesson was over. The sun was just beginning to touch the highest peaks, and the village was starting to wake. Link wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, his breathing steady, his eyes clear. He gave me a short, respectful nod, sheathed the sword in the simple leather scabbard I had made for it, and secreted it away in its hiding place beneath a loose stone in the forge's foundation. The two of us had never spoken a word about where it came from or why it was necessary. We didn't have to. We had forged that understanding between us, just as I had forged the blade.
He left for the pastures, his shepherd's staff in hand, once again a quiet village boy. I watched him go, a familiar ache in my chest. I was teaching my son how to face monsters. And every day, he grew more capable of doing so. It was a father's greatest pride and his deepest terror.
Later that day, I saw him with Ilia. Their friendship had weathered the years, becoming a quiet, comfortable thing. She was a young woman now, her laughter a bright, welcome sound in the often-somber village. She was helping him mend a fence near the pasture, handing him tools, their movements easy and familiar. For a moment, watching them, I could almost believe in the simple, peaceful life I had once dreamed of for him. A life where the heaviest thing he would ever have to lift would be a hammer, not a sword. A life where his greatest worry would be a straying goat, not a creeping shadow.
But the shadow was still there. I knew Link felt it, too. Sometimes, I would see him at the edge of the woods, a place the other villagers still avoided. He would stand there for a long time, his back to the village, as if listening to a conversation no one else could hear. I knew he kept the secrets of his time in that forest locked away. His magical shield, its painted birds still holding their impossible light, was always with him when he was with the flock. The Keaton Mask he had returned with was a mystery I had never breached. I had seen it only once, a fleeting glimpse of it in his hands one night before he hid it away. It felt like a sacred object, a key to a part of my son's life I would never be allowed to enter.
The echoes of that greater world began to arrive more frequently that autumn. They came on the tongues of the traveling merchants who passed through Ordon on their way to the city-state in the desert, their wares a welcome distraction, their news a low drumbeat of anxiety.
"The roads are not safe," one told us, his eyes wide as he shared a jug of Fado's best milk. "Bandits are one thing, but this is… different. My cousin's caravan was found three days' ride from the Castle Road. Carts overturned, goods scattered, but not a coin was taken. The men and horses were just… gone. Vanished."
Another spoke of a strange, creeping sickness in the farmlands of the Hyrulean plains, a blight that withered crops overnight and made livestock aggressive and mad. And they all spoke of the beasts. Creatures never before seen, things of shadow and fang that stalked the roads at night, leaving behind tracks that belonged to no known animal.
Link would always be present for these stories, standing at the edge of the crowd, his face a mask of quiet intensity. He absorbed every word, every fearful glance, every hushed warning. I could see him fitting the pieces together, comparing these new stories to the old wounds of his own experience.
One evening, a merchant carrying a load of rare silks from the south stopped for the night. As the man displayed a bolt of beautiful, deep blue cloth, I saw Link, who was standing nearby, suddenly flinch. He brought a hand to his temple, his eyes squeezed shut for a moment. No one else noticed. But I did. Later that night, long after the merchant was gone, I saw a light moving in my son's room. Peeking through the door, I saw him sitting on the floor, the strange Keaton Mask on his face, his small shield resting before him. The red birds on the shield were glowing, casting a soft, pulsing light on the wall. He was communing with his secrets, trying to make sense of the echo he had felt from the merchant's wares.
A week passed. The unsettling rumors were filed away, another worry in a world that was full of them. Life in Ordon returned to its gentle, predictable rhythm. It was the night of the first real autumn chill, and Elara had a hearty stew simmering over the fire.
"Elwin is late," she said, looking out the window at the dark, empty road.
Elwin was the Royal Postman for the southern province. A cheerful, round man who, for twenty years, had passed through Ordon on the same day of every month, as reliable as the setting sun. He brought mail, news from the Capital, and always had a candy for the children. He was three days overdue.
A sudden, cold silence fell over our dinner table. Three days. The same amount of time Link had been lost. My eyes met my son's across the table. He was not looking at me. His gaze was fixed on the dark road outside the window, the road that led out of our valley, the road that led to Hyrule, the road that had failed to bring our friend home. The low drumbeat of anxiety had just become a sharp, clear note of alarm. And in my son's steady, unwavering gaze, I saw the quiet, sorrowful recognition of a call that had finally, inevitably, arrived.