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New Beginnings: by Stalfos333
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Whoot Whoot! The whistle of the speeding train cut through the cool winter night like a knife.
An owl, disturbed by the sound, lazily opened its eyes and let out a hoot, cut
short by the sound of the train thundering by. On that train, a small boy traveled
alone and in thought, peering through the window at the dark world beyond.
A single tear splashed onto the book in his lap. Bound in red leather, the volume,
though both cracked and worn with age, seemed wonderfully preserved. The boy's
grandfather had had given the book to him mere moments before his death, paired
with his parting words.
"Please," he said, "please...guard that book. Don't let...anything
happen to it. Let this book...let it guide you through troubled times. It is all
you need. Believe it can...please...believe the Book of Mudora can guide you
to your...destiny." With that word still echoing in the little boy’s ears, the
grandfather's broken speech had stopped entirely.
The boy leaned his forehead
against the cool glass beside him and let another tear fall onto the book.
"It's all just so frustrating!" the boy thought, not for the first time. "How can I believe that this book," he thought, hitting it against his knees in frustration, "can help me through anything when I can't understand a word of it!? The blasted words
are in some sort of runes! My grandpa is dead, and I don't even understand
his gift!" Another tear splashed on the ancient leather, and the boy, overcome with grief,
fell asleep clutching his grandfather's legacy with both hands.
He woke from dreams of his family, all
but his grandfather long dead, to find the car in which he rode deserted except
for himself and a tall man wearing a long black coat and hat. "Last stop!" bellowed
the speaker "Kakariko Village Square!" The boy had missed his stop in London,
and was now lost.
Slowly,
the boy rose from his seat, both frightened and unsure what to do. The only
thing he was sure of was that he couldn't stay on the train, and with this
thought he began exiting the train. The man who shared the train with the boy remained
sitting, fingering his cane and looking with great curiosity at the boy.
Frightened by the older man's stares, the child quickened his pace, hurrying
to exit.
Blinking
away the sleep in his eyes, the boy stepped out of the train and into the
morning light in the village. He slowly turned about, taking in the scenery while
he looked for the station manager; a large tower in the center of town, a still
larger windmill to one side, the grassy ground instead of the cobbled stones
he had expected. Something else too...looking at the village around him, the
boy felt happy, as if nothing at all was wrong. For a brief second, he even forgot
the grief of his grandfather's death. The moment passed, however, when he turned
to look behind him.
"You, boy! No trespassing! Move along!"
The train was gone, instead
there stood a closed gate with a guard wearing shining metal armor and carrying
a spear. The boy blinked in surprise, as much at the man's strange uniform as
at the lack of the train he had just gotten off of.
"Where...what...the train?" the boy managed
to stammer in his surprise. The guard spat on the ground, then glared at
the boy with open disgust. "Look here, kid! I ain't got no bloody time for no
dirty thieves. Go bother someone else, 'fore I turn ya in to the King's Guards.
Them's got no time, neither, so they'll prolly hang ya sooner 'an look at ya.
Mayhaps I should off ya for 'em?" he shifted his grip on the spear as if he meant
to do just that. The boy looked at the gleaming point of the spear, and
the gruff guard holding it. He was still forming a question in his mind, when
the man stepped forward and raised the spear. So frightened was the boy that he
fell backwards in his haste to run, and rolled down a short flight of stone stairs,
ultimately knocking into the legs of the man below.
"I'm sorry!" the boy quickly said, afraid
it was another guard. His lip trembled and he wanted to cry again, but he held
it in for the moment. He looked up at the man he had knocked into, shocked to
see the man from the train. The man's eyes narrowed and his thick eyebrows knitted
into a look of anger, then the man seemed to lose the feeling and his dark,
bearded face split into a grin and he shone with merriment.
"My boy, you have nothing to
be sorry for. It was an accident, purely an accident." The man's grin grew wider
as he said, "Where are my manners, this day? My name is...You're bleeding, boy!"
The man
pulled the boy to his feet, then crouched again and lifted the book. For a split
second when the man's gloved hands touched the book, the little boy thought
the man's eyes flashed with some internal light, and at the same time the man's
grin dissappeared. He seemed to know the book, and was displeased about it being
found on the boy.
"Where did you get this, boy? Who gave you it! Who are you to have such
an item?" The man was bellowing, and the boy recoiled.
"I...I'm just a
little boy! My name is Chris...Christopher Walker. My grandfather gave me that
book and now he's dead, I'm just trying to go to the...the...the...orphanage!"
the boy managed to stammer out before he began to bawl. "Please! Just leave me
alone!"
The
man roared in rage, and brought back one of his hands. He brought it forward with
an intense speed, slapping the boy so hard that his vision went black and he
was brought to a kneel. The man seemed to surround Chris, roaring something as
he grasped the small child's shoulders and shook him viscously. Between the staggering
blow and the shaking, it took the child a long time to understand the
man in black. "Filthy thief, stealing my book! A liar and a thief, do you understand!
A liar and a thief! Mine, not yours!" Chris could only weep in reply.
A crowd had just
began to form around the enraged man and crying boy when a loud, shrill horn
sounded.
"An attack from the Field!" "Hold them back!" "Oh, no!"
The people of the village
cried out in a jumble of voices. Even the tall man in the hat, briefly, looked
up. But the shaking resumed, and the enraged snarls continued to berate young
Chris. Another horn, a deeper, more resonant sound, sounded, but Chris hardly
heard as he lowered his head and ceased his pleading. He was going to be killed.
Dimly aware
was he of a rush of people past him, coming to the gate holding makeshift
weapons and bows. Letting out a sigh as the man shaking him seemed to somehow
grow larger, stronger and more vicious, he resolved himself to his fate.
His hands drooped to his side, and he felt his consciousness fading under
the bigger man’s assault. He couldn’t fight it, better to accept his death.
His eyes sluggishly closed, he felt oddly at peace. The darkness
slid in on him, dimming out the pain. He surrendered himself to it, everything
fading and fading….His mind’s eye saw an owl, but then that too was gone
and the boy slipped into unconsciousness…
The man didn’t stop his attack when the boy passed
out; if anything, it gained new momentum. He hated this boy, hated him
for what he may have done and hated him for not fighting back against the onslaught.
The boy would die, if for no other reason than because the man could
kill him. He released the boy with one hand, drawing it back in a tight
fist, and screamed as the first of the beasts landed on him. The second
horn had meant an attack from the mountains.
Tektites swarmed in numbers larger than most
men in the village could count, leaping on each other to clear the fence.
The area was soon covered in the beasts, mindless killers of the land’s residence.
They seemed like large spiders, a foot and a half tall. These
wore red shells, grim reminders of the blood they could spill. Their
powerful legs could propel them to great heights, and each was tipped with a hard,
thick claw. And they were having no trouble entering the village.
Chris was
flung aside as the man struggled to defend himself against the powerful slashing
legs of the spider-like beasts. Things seemed to slow down, creeping to
a near stop. A claw tip pierced the man’s right eye and dragged down the
man’s face, releasing a torrent of blood; Chris thudded dully against a circle
of rocks. The man tore a tektite off of him and threw it to the ground,
and another tektite landed on it, embedding one of its large claws into its brethren.
Blood leaked down Chris’s face, his nose was broken and his head
had a large gash from the rocks; the man pushed off his attackers, only to be buried
in new ones. Briefly, he clawed his way to the surface of the living
flood of tektites and caught sight of Chris, small hands grasping him and pulling
him through a small, hidden opening. The man roared and was again
pulled under, losing sight of the boy sliding into the dark recesses of Kakariko
Village.
A brilliant light flashed through the entire village, and when the
blinking tenants of Kakariko Village could see again, the only things that remained
of the tektites near the mountain were a few twitching insectile legs.
Ganondorf’s onslaught was halted once again, but one bloodied man in a now
tattered black coat stood screaming, “THAT BOY WAS MINE!” just before he disappeared
through a shimmering purple hole in space. The leather-covered book
in his hands went with, but the boy had escaped his grasp, and would pay for
every injury done to him that day.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Slowly, young Chris
drifted toward consciousness; finally opening his eyes lazily. What he saw
was not at all familiar to him; a muddy ceiling, glistening with moisture and
dripping constantly, feeding a large dark pool. The earthen walls seemed
thick with snakes to Chris’s active imagination, giving him a shock and causing
him to squeeze his eyes shut against the horror. He might have stayed in
that self-imposed darkness for a long time had a fat drop of water not splashed
onto his face and caused him to open his eyes in alarm. On second inspection,
the wall was covered not with snakes, but with vines or roots of some sort.
Chris, fully awake and aware, further surveyed his cell. Indeed,
it was a cell; the only entrance was through a heavy wrought-iron gate, rusted
from its time in the dank hollow but seemingly as sturdy as anything ever was.
It was locked with a large old-fashioned lock and just beyond the door
was a thick canvas cloth stretching from floor to ceiling. As Chris was
furtively searching his mind for the reason he’d have been imprisoned, it came
to him that the cloth blocked his view of the world outside the cell and was muting
a conversation on the outside that came through only in murmurs. The
light flickered, and Chris saw that it came from a smokily burning makeshift torch,
little more than an oily rag wrapped around a thick stick, wedged into a
crack in the earthen wall.
With the intention of moving closer to the door, Chris tried
to get up and found that he couldn’t, despite not being restrained. His
body felt like one large hurt. He couldn’t recall why he had…
A sad train ride, an unfamiliar place, a disappearing station,
an angry guard,
a madman’s face shifting between sudden rage
and merry laughter, a book
bound in red leather…
“Whose book,
what happened?” Chris said softly to himself as he started out of the
lumpy, uncomfortable bed. Wincing as much from the pain that shot through
his body at the effort as from the sudden that the madman had stolen the book
that his grandfather had entrusted to him on his deathbed, he slumped back down
onto the bed, straw beneath more of the thick canvas, and held his battered
head with his torn with his hands. There and then, he made up his mind to
get his grandfather’s book back somehow.
One of the voices beyond the canvas rose
to an audible shout. A boy’s, though shrill and nasally, and it wavered
with the passion of fury. Still, to Chris it was barely audible at times
and at times slipped below hearing entirely. The other person of the conversation
was a mystery altogether.
“…nderstand…ruined everything!”
The other’s muffled
voice replied, a much calmer sound. Calm as it was, it drove a new fist
of rage into the disembodied boy’s voice.
“. . . .KILLED!”
This was followed by
another reply from the other voice; though muffled, Chris thought it sounded as
if it belonged to a young girl.
“……kill him. Ganondorf would want….” the boy’s
voice bellowed.
***
Pacing in his shadow-bathed
tower, the wizard was in a fury at having lost the thief who had had his
book. Too afraid to leave, his obedient creations waited in the shadows
and watched attentively.
“Where is he!?” the wizard said, his cane clicking rapidly as he paced.
The beasts stirred at his anger and, as one, thought of and dismissed
the idea of leaving.
“Where is that little thief that none of my eyes have seen him?”
spittle flew from his lips as he snarled in rage. A second later, a grin
seemed to split his face.
“An idea, yes! Such an idea!” he said, stalking
toward the vine-carved podium on which his book sat. Rapidly thumbing
through the leather bound volume, his quick eyes scanning the pages as he searched
for something he remembered from times long past, he didn’t notice as a tall
clumsy looking creature clumped into the room until it barked out it’s report.
“Master Mujora,
I couldn’t find the…”
The beast was dead before the sentence was finished, and the
wizard sat giggling to himself.
“My name’s Mudora. Stupid moblins…” and the wizards
giggles turned into an eruption of laughter as his gaze fell upon the smoking
skeleton with a doglike skull now fused with the wall.
***
The
canvas cloth beyond the cell door was pushed aside, admitting a short, pale boy
with an absolutely bald head. His prominent nose instantly reminded Chris
of a bird, especially when paired with the rest of the boy. Everything
about the boy instantly screamed “BIRD!” to Chris: his quick, jerky movements,
his shifting and darting eyes, the voice Chris had ascribed to him, his large,
hatchet-like nose, the claws on his feet.
“Talons?” Chris thought to himself and looked again. Indeed, the boy had two hooked
blades protruding from the front of each boot, digging into the earth as
he walked. Chris couldn’t imagine a use for such implements, but the words
“kill him” were still fresh in Chris’s mind. A shiver of fear climbed up
Chris’s spine.
“Well, you’re alive, runt. Count yourself lucky this far,”
the bald boy whined out.
Chris was incredulous. “Runt!?” he thought. “This kid couldn’t be less than a half-foot shorter than me!” Before he could respond to the insult, the boy spoke again.
“The name’s Eros,
if it matters. What are you, runt?”
“My name is Chris, don’t call me…”
Chris said, interrupted before he could finish.
“Didn’t ask your name, runt,” the
boy said, spitting out the last word like a challenge before continuing.
“You aren’t Kokiri; no fairy. Lucky for you, blasted things are annoying.
Kokiri and Fairies both. Your ears aren’t right for Hylian or Shiekah.
Ain’t no Shiekahs 'cept two anyhow, so I guess it don’t matter.
Your ears say Gerudo, but that just can’t be.” It almost sounded as if
this Eros was trying to puzzle it out for himself, and was merely speaking aloud
to be polite.
Chris was confused. “What was all this about ears?” he thought, and glanced again at the boy in front of him; to his amazement, he realized
that Eros’s ears were pointed and stuck out to the sides of his head like
antennae. Unconsciously, Chris thumbed his own ears.
“I’m not sure
what you mean,” Chris stammered out.
“Look, runt, are you stupid or something?”
Eros said as if annoyed. “Don’t you know your own species?”
Finally
pushed over the edge, Chris yelled at the short boy in front of him.
“Don’t call me runt! I’m…”
“in no position to argue,” a female
voice finished before he could himself. She smoothly entered beneath
the flap and glided to a place beside Eros. Chris’s first impression was
that she was singly the most beautiful and most graceful girl he’d ever seen; his
second was that this girl was staring at him with a look of such contempt that
only a fool would try to get close to her.
“If Eros so pleases, Chris,
he can call you anything he likes. You are a prisoner, you have no
say in it.” The cold way in which she said his name gave him goosebumps.
“Now, who are you, where do you come from, and how did you get to Kakariko Village?”
the beautiful girl snarled.
Chris, with a sinking feeling of dread,
recounted his adventure as best he could remember. It was impossible
to guage their reactions; at times they seemed disbelieving, at times they seemed
to recognize parts of his story. Telling of his grandfather’s death
the loss of the book brought tears to his eyes, but he refused to let them fall.
He had decided to be strong, until he could retrieve his book.
The
story finished, Eros turned to the girl beside him. “Come, Elise.
We have some things to talk about.
***
Having found what he was looking for on a page marked by an eye in an
ornate starburst, the wizard traced his fingers along the lines of runic code.
The sheer power contained in those few lines was awe inspiring, even for
one used to wielding it. “I wanted that boy dead! That little sneak-thief
Chris!” he snarled to his cringing minions before he began reading the
lines of the book.
“Let the eyes of the night sky aid me. Let
the stars above, those points of light, search the darkness for my prey!
Can de lach! Can de lach en tak a lah! Can de lach, misen woh!”
The
book sprang up from the podium on which it sat, slowly rotating as
the air became charged with energy. The darkness seemed to solidify above
the book, gaining form from the formless. The opposing shape was nearly
invisible in the gloom of the tower, but the wizard laughed at its sight anyway.
As the book slammed shut and dropped back to it’s perch, the newly formed
beast streamed toward the thick stone walls as if to dash itself to pieces against
them. After passing through a small winged shape and reaching the
wall, the creature seemed to twist and squeeze through the tiny cracks in it and
then was gone to stalk the night. As he tossed the now dead keese aside,
the wizard couldn’t stop his laughter.
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