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“There’s a blood moon coming,” I tell him, the two of us lazing on the hill one cool, early morning. “Very soon.”
We’re just north of the village, overlooking the still-sleeping stretch of my home. Behind us, the skies around Hyrule Castle shift and glimmer, traversed by Calamity Ganon’s ribbons of malice. Link isn’t used to the sight of it the way we are here; his eyes dart back to it every time they cross his peripheral vision.
It’s a private, early breakfast we’re having together, never mind the cooler breeze than usual. I didn’t know he was coming, but I was ready for him when he arrived late last night. I’m always waiting for him, these days. He was out like a light as soon as he hit my pillow.
We snuck out in the glum, early hours, armed with blankets and baskets stuffed with fruits.
I sit cross-legged facing the wind, threading blades of grass together when I’m not using my hands to push my hair out of my eyes. Link lazes sleepily on the blankets just behind me. He’s still exhausted after his journey, but his fatigue clearly has no effect on his appetite. Ever a glutton. It was one of the first things I ever learned about him. Is there a cooking pot nearby? I flushed and stammered and ushered him in to see my grandmother. He confounded me.
Things have changed now. I’m not so much a blushing ball of nerves anymore, this being Link’s fourth visit here. You develop a familiarity with someone. An intimacy. It’s easy when there’s no pressure to speak.
“There was one only last week,” he says. He speaks so little that he’s perpetually hoarse, and his manner threads an incredible line between being gently, softly-spoken and the most curt, abrupt young man I’ve ever heard. He never means to be rude, is the sweet part. He’s just designed that way.
“I can’t explain it.” Not so much in words, but I can feel it. A prickling in the air in the late hours of the night, a shadowy presence in the too-empty, too-quiet corners of the village, a sickly yellow that seems to curl around the edges of the moon more and more with each coming night. Nobody else ever seems to see it. And anyway, She told me. There are spirits in the twilight itching to spill back out. Listen, Paya.
His eyes are serious, interested. “Can you feel it?”
“Yes, but I hear it too. I told you this. Goddess Hylia answers me when I pray.”
His eyes rove over my face, gentle, searching. He doesn’t answer me - not in words, at least, but he holds my hand and kisses my fingers when I finally lie back down beside him. I watch him as he takes in my Sheikah white hair, the thumb-smudged paint of Hylia’s eye coursing down my nose.
He treats me like an enigma, as though he isn’t a walking mystery himself. There’s something about him, and his smell, and the familiar press of his body plaited together with mine. He always looks at me so strangely, as if I remind him of someone he can’t quite place. It’s funny, if I think about it. He reminds me of someone too. Some archaic, disjointed memory of someone I never knew, from another life I never lived.
“I knew a girl who could hear the Goddess,” he says quietly. Frowning. “Once. Long time ago.”
“Are you talking about the princess?” I ask. His hands are closed around mine, warm, safe.
“I’m trying to figure out where I know you from.”
Walking mystery, indeed. I don’t think he can ever speak clearly enough for me. I can never seem to understand him.
The clouds roam pink and opaque above us, Hylia’s great unblinking eyes forever watching over Kakariko Village. The moon rises red that night.