The Stalchildren were very real, Ganondorf found; Ganondorf would not be stopped by the remonstrations of the dead, the Stalchildren found.

Bones exploded into shards as he swept past them, bursts of purple magic erupting from inside of them and enormous hooves crushing them back into the earth, and every once in a great while Ganondorf would swipe at them with one of his twin Gerudo blades. When they fell they burned, and the ashes sank back into the earth, perhaps there to reform; Ganondorf did not know, and did not stay to find out. For the most part he was able to ignore them as they staggered clumsily after him and gave up the chase if he pulled too far ahead on his horse. The dead tried to stop him, but Ganondorf was of no mood to be stopped.

It was still early in the night, the air cool and bracing in his face, and he breathed deep the smell of the grasses. Small hills loomed in the night, peahats at rest, and he gave them a generous berth, not out of fear for himself but out of fear for his horse. They should not rise at night, he did not know if they could be roused at all without the sun, but he would not take that chance. Even those things, easily the most dangerous in Hyrule field, did not stop him, and he kept his horse at an open gallop, flanks heaving as they barreled down the field according to the map that Ganondorf had memorized.

The horse never tired, its eyes burned in the night, and what foam gathered at its lips was whipped away by the wind of its passage. His magic was strong in it, driving every muscle and strengthening every sinew, pushing it far beyond the endurance of any normal animal without so much as winding it. That his sisters had not guessed at its nature by now was a surprise to him, but for all that he was lucky.

They came to the edge of a tree line, and Ganondorf felt an enormous pressure begin to exert itself. What it was, exactly, was not immediately apparent, but the pressure became more powerful the closer he came to the trees. After a certain point his horse shied away, whinnying, and it only calmed at the touch of his hand on its neck.

"So be it," he said. "You stay here. If any Stalchildren should find you, crush them. Be ready for my return." The horse snorted, stamped with its forehoof, and he dismounted. Almost immediately it dashed away, and the distant clatter of bones grew only a little closer before he heard a great crash, of bones shattering and steel striking stone – and then again, and again, and again, and his horse neighing. It would be fine for his return, then. He turned back to the woods.

This force pushing back at him was vast and ancient, as old as the forest itself, and was probably the sole reason that the Hylians had yet to try to settle in the woods. Most men and women would not realize they were being driven away, and would give the woods a very wide berth almost by instinct – thus had the Kokiri Forest been spared in the civil war a decade ago, when so much else had been lost and burned. But Ganondorf was not most people, and he could feel the power of the thing in the woods.

He pushed through its influence, into the trees, and was hit with a wave of force that nearly sent him to his knees. He grit his teeth and looked up – there, in a stone wall, was the hollowed out trunk of a tree laid into the rock like a tunnel. The guardian spirit of these woods was exerting every ounce of its power to keep him away from that tunnel.

He grinned, because it would not be enough.

He lifted his hand, calling upon his power, and tendrils of purple light danced around his fingertips, snaking into the air before him, twisting and growing as they extended. His magic met the invisible force in the air, and there was the space of a heartbeat where the pressure exerted on him became a physical thing that pounded at his temples and pushed at the edges of his cloak – and then it was gone, as if it had never been there in the first place. The air was only normal air, and the moon was bright, and Ganondorf walked into the Kokiri Forest.

Ganondorf was of single purpose of mind, but he was also curious by his very nature, so although he did not slow in his walk he still looked around as he passed through the tunnel and over a crude wooden bridge which hung over a drop so short he probably could have pulled himself up from its floor. These woods were thick and dark and green, so green that it was only in that moment that it occurred to him that he now knew what "verdant" meant, and they were full of life. Not just insect life and plant life, though there was much of that; past that, between the leaves and in the air and in shafts of moonlight danced points of light, twirling in patterns so regular that they could only have been alive. The fairies of the Kokiri Forest, then. They looked like the greater cousins of fireflies, like the stars had come down from the sky to dance in this place. He passed them by, and did not see as the fairies watched him go.

He passed through another tunnel and emerged into a clearing, and here he stopped long enough to see: the stumps of enormous trees had been carved into crude houses, marked with brightly colored paint in different patterns to differentiate each from the others. Lights – fairies – danced between the doorways, and beaten dirt paths lead from each trunk to the others. This, then, was the Kokiri Village, where the children of the forest lived out their lives of eternal youth under the shade of their protecting spirit. Only a moment did he look at this and wonder, only a moment spent thinking of the inhabitants of that place and what it would have been like to speak with them: then he walked again, a shadow passing through their home.

He walked to the rear of the village, passing several houses on the way, and then he heard something that caught his attention, and stopped, and looked. There was a house unlike the others, actually built from wood on top of a tree rather than carved directly into a trunk, with a narrow wooden ladder leading from its edge down to the ground. From inside that house he heard the sound of a child groaning in terror, not the active terror of impending danger but the throes of nightmare. He knew well enough that fear. He wondered what the child was dreaming, and on he went.

At the rear of the village he found an opening in the rock wall that surrounded it, the beginning of a wide path, a hall of stone with no roof and walls draped with ivy. Down this path he walked, and then he felt the pressure of the guardian spirit again. This time it was not an attempt to drive him away – too late for that – but rather an exploratory thing, an attempt to get some measure of him. Let it try. He would take the measure of its face.

He emerged from the stone pathway into a clearing much larger than the last, and what he saw there was enough to put him in awe, however temporary: a single tree, larger than the entirety of the Kokiri Village, stretching a hundred paces into the sky, its trunk so large it would have taken a fair deal of time to walk around and its canopy so wide that in the middle of the day it would throw protective shade down on the village in its entirety. More than this, the ancient tree had a face, and that face was turned now to him as he emerged from the shadow of the path.

"Man of the outside world," the tree said, its voice vast and slow and soft, almost like the wind, "what is thy name?"

"I am Ganondorf, King of the Gerudo in the desert far from here." The tree looked at him, and he stepped forward into the clearing, the moon shining down directly on him through an opening in the canopy. "I have come seeking an audience, great spirit."

"Thy designs are clear," the tree said, and whether it was weary or fearful it was impossible to tell, "but I would hear thy words from thy mouth. I am the Great Deku Tree, guardian of these woods, father to the Kokiri whose home upon which thou trespass. What is the purpose of the audience that thou seekest?"

Ganondorf grinned. "A trifle for you, Great Deku Tree. Just a bauble, the smallest of jewels, which can be parted with at no loss to you."

The tree's branches shook with a sound like hundreds of bells ringing, and its enormous, ponderous face contracted in a furrowing of its brows.

"The Spiritual Stone of the Forest," it said, "is not to be given lightly to such as thee. Thou seek not the stone for its own value; alone, there is none in it. Verily, only one purpose must guide thee to seek the stone."

"The Triforce," Ganondorf said, and he felt something then, a shifting in the air, as the words passed his lips for the very first time. "The golden power of the gods."

"Thou seek that to which no mortal may lay claim; thy goal is locked away, and thou seek now the keys to free it. I wonder what desire drives thee, man of the desert, and what is thy desire that the golden power may grant?"

"That does not concern you," Ganondorf said.

"My concern is thine, so long as thou seekest the spiritual stone."

He inhaled through his nose, and breathed out again: his patience was already wearing thin with this old guardian, this forest god, but if an answer would get him the stone then that was all there needed to be. "I seek the power to grant my people what should be theirs in the first place, and to give them all the blessings that the gods saw fit to give the other races."

The silence as the Deku Tree considered this stretched on almost forever. He felt the weight of its thoughts in the shifting of its face and the vastness of its voice, but something in that infuriated him, made him wish for a torch. It was a very long time before it spoke again.

"It is said," said the tree, "that the Triforce will grant the truest wish of the heart of its wielder. Thy stated goal is made plain, and such doth thou promise to thine; but I wonder, what of thy heart? If it spoke for thee, for what would it wish?"

Silence, deeper and more terrible than before.

Much could be said of Ganondorf, of his restless dreams and the nobility of his ambitions and the deep, burning hatred, which he nursed in his secret heart and that burned more brightly than any of his sisters would ever possibly know. None of his sisters knew him, but he knew himself very well, and would not lie to himself when his eyes were turned inward. Thus were they now as he looked within, and pulled at the secret places in his heart, unfurling the dreams and desires of a boy and watching them blossom and grow as the ambition and drive of a man. The quest for the Triforce was, firstly, a quest of the self, of awareness and truth, and to deny oneself at all was to deny the golden power, the omnipotence, which might be granted to one. He thought of the boy looking out upon the green grasses of Hyrule, of the smell of the river that ran far below Gerudo Valley's deepest chasm, of his sisters toiling in the Sun and subsisting on so much less than any other race, of the Hylian king to whom he paid fealty, of the distant gods who had decreed that thus it was and must be and would be forever, of the hatred that burned in his heart, the inferno that had swallowed up his brain since before he had learned to talk and for which there might only ever be one answer so enormous as to quell it. He was not afraid, then: knowing what he knew now, he would never be afraid again.

"My heart and I are as one," he said. "I would have the world." He held out his hand, palm up, and beckoned with his fingers. "Give to me the Spiritual Stone of the Forest and I will leave this place and you will hear from me no longer. Be at peace, with all of your children, but give me the stone."

"Thou speakest true, and clear, and cannot feel the world shudder in terror of thee."

"Shudder it should, then. Give me the stone."

"I cannot." Ganondorf's wrath must have shown on his face, for the boughs of the tree shook again. "Thy heart is laid bare between us, Ganondorf, and know thou this: the golden power of the Triforce can never pass into thy hands, for thou art more terrible than any of its previous masters, or any of those who desired it in their hearts. I cannot give thee the stone, even at the cost of my life, for I am nothing weighed against the world."

"That is true," Ganondorf said. "You are not." He inhaled between his teeth, and power crackled over his body as he summoned up his magic, all of the old forms which even the witches Twinrova had been too fearful to study, and the air around him spit and sparked with the heat of the force he wielded.

He thrust his hands forward and screamed his fury and his hate, and that power surged from him like the fingers of a storm, clouds of black lightning passing over the Deku Tree's face, swirling into its eyes, its nose, its mouth. Dread purple light shown from within it, and there was a sound like the splitting of wood which grew louder and louder – and then sank, suddenly, into the pit of the earth, beneath the tree's trunk.

"What," the Deku's tree's voice was pained, though it could not show this in its face, "what hath thou wrought?"

"There is a creature in your roots," Ganondorf said, lowering his arms, looking up at the tree, and smiling. "A parasite the likes of which you trees may deal with a million times over the course of your long life, but no longer so ordinary. I have empowered it, and all of its children and all of its cousins, with my magic. They will eat at your roots, at the very source of your power, and their life will spread through you like a disease."

The Deku Tree said nothing, only watching him.

"You have two choices, guardian of the forest, god of these woods. Should you change your mind and decide that you wish to give me the spiritual stone, send one of your fairies with word and I will come and remove this curse from you, sparing you and all life in this forest. If you do not, then the curse will eat at you from root to canopy, and you will die, and I will return to take the stone from your corpse. Think quickly, because you don't have long."

Then he turned, and was gone from that place.

If there was anything that Darunia hated more than the particular pressures of being the big boss of the Gorons (and there were many) it was having to do all of the record-keeping. Goron traditions were primarily oral, rather than written, but economic compatibility with neighboring kingdoms necessitated the incorporation of the written word and a hundred thousand other things that he hadn't had to worry about before the different nations were united in the wake of the civil war.

So it was not enough that the bomb flower crop had been poor that year, and that rising prices would mean that only the Hylian military would be able to afford them. No, in addition to what would amount to a considerable economic loss for his people, he also had to keep track of that stuff. Every field and every garden was tallied and counted, with those tallies placed in columns next to last year's yield and the yield that had been predicted for this year – both numbers so much higher than the actual crop that it made his head hurt to look at them.

He set down his pen and his tablet, leaned his back against his stone chair, and ran his enormous fingers through his wild gray hair. Like all Gorons he was built like a boulder rather than the more human shapes of the other races: his torso was spherical, his head wide and squat, his back covered in stony growths, his legs stubby and his arms long. But whereas other Gorons tended to have thin arms, his were huge and well-developed, his muscles grinding together like rocks beneath the brown coarseness of his skin. Where his brothers and sisters all shaved their heads he had allowed his own hair to grow free and wild, so it complimented the appearance of physical largeness. He had not become Big Brother of the Gorons through paperwork. He had not become Big Brother of the Gorons for paperwork.

He was thinking of taking a break when there was an enormous clatter outside of his chamber.

"Big brother! Big brooootheeeeer!" He winced as the younger Goron, plump and thin-armed and shaved of head, rolled into the room, crashed into a wall, and slowly sat up. "Big brother! There you are! You have to come quickly!" He had begun hopping from foot to foot and waving his arms.

He closed his eyes for the brief moment it took to remember the young Goron's name. "Barmand," he said, "there is nothing that can justify being this excited right now. Calm down and tell me what is the matter."

Barmand stopped mid-jump, blinked, and lowered his arms. He breathed once, and turned his huge black eyes to Darunia's. He was absolutely serious, or as much as it was possible for someone so young to be. "There are monsters in Dodongo's Cavern."

"Monsters."

"Yes, big brother. There are roars coming from inside the quarry, as if the dodongo themselves are alive!"

"Dodongo," Darunia said, walking toward the door so that Barmand followed him, "have been extinct for generations. There is nothing left of them but their petrifying bodies."

"Only the sounds are real, big brother, and they started when that man appeared. I think he is a wizard."

That made Darunia stop, gears turning slowly in his head. "A man. A wizard. What does he look like? What crest does he wear?"

"I don't recognize his crest, but he looks like... he looks like the Gerudo do, only a man."

He looked at Barmand. "A Gerudo. Gerudo man."

"Yes, big brother."

He didn't say another word; Darunia tucked in his arms and rolled with all the speed he could muster, and Barmand followed him. Up the spiraling paths of Goron City they went, flying up staircases and rounding corners with such speed that Gorons of all ages had to scramble to get out of their way, and Barmand could only barely keep up. Darunia raced out of the city, taking a hard right across a desiccated bomb flower garden which had yielded only a single bud, and ramped off of the fencing there, breaking it, leaving a hole through which someone might easily jump in the future – but that was not his concern now. He fell and fell, unmindful of the height, and when he hit the ground it was with an enormous crash. Barmand hit the ground behind him only seconds later.

He rose, looking immediately to Dodongo's Cavern, and what he saw there froze his voice in his throat.

They were alive, far back in the reaches of the cave, the beasts whose bodies made up the quarry from which his people mined nearly all of their food. He could hear them roaring, see spouts of flame flare to life in the distance, and thought he saw green bodies shifting against the background of shadows. Torches, he thought. They would need torches, and a raiding party. Every able-bodied Goron in the city would need to be gathered at once, with all the bombs that had managed to sprout. Even that might not be enough to kill the things.

It was only after this thought had set in, and in his mind he found himself predicting the toll of bodies piled high in the killing of the monsters, that he saw the man standing beside the cave: tall and dark, his nose long and hooked, as thickly muscular as Darunia himself in spite of being so much longer of limb. A Gerudo man, a king, and the air around him crackled and stank with the effects of his magic.

"You there!" Darunia said. "Identify yourself, stranger, or you will be-"

The man lifted his hands, still facing the cavern, and the ground beneath Darunia's feet shook. He kept his footing but heard Barmand fall over behind him, and he watched in silent terror as the Gerudo worked his power. He had never seen magic worked before, and would not have learned of it this way by choice.

The rock cropping over the Gerudo's head shifted and broke away from the mountain proper, but instead of falling it floated, hanging in the air for long seconds. Only with another motion of the wizard's hands did the boulder come down, touching the ground in front of the desert man's feet – and then he thrust his hands forward with a roar, and the boulder slammed into the entrance of the cavern, breaking up the stone surrounding it, and after a moment it was wedged more tightly than a cork in a bottle. The sound was deafening, and the dust kicked up by the impact was blinding, but the wizard did not react to this at all; nor could Darunia allow himself to.

The Gerudo turned to face Darunia then, and he grinned, his eyes burning in the night like torches. "I am Ganondorf," said he. "I know you to be a proud people, and your leader proudest of all, so hear me: give me the spiritual stone of fire. When you do, I will remove this boulder and give you access to your quarry once more." He did not say that to refuse him would mean starvation, but he did not have to.

Darunia's hands shook as he balled them into fists; at that moment he could have very literally crushed stone between his fingers. Every thought in his brain, every fiber of every muscle in his body, was demanding that he attack the Gerudo, to break his bones like sticks and feed them into a fire, to pound him into the bedrock until there was nothing left of him. The screaming animal part of his brain, the young Goron who had fought his way to prominence in the era of the civil war, thought he would be able to. But the older Goron, the wiser one, the Big Brother that he had become, knew he did not stand a chance against this man and his dark magic.

So it was that when Ganondorf walked past him, and down the mountain trail, Darunia did not make a grab for him: he let him go, and did not watch him leave. It took all the will he could exert, especially knowing that other Gorons would see, but he did nothing, and moved not at all.

He stood there for a long time, until Ganondorf was definitely gone and then for a time after.

"Big brother," Barmand said, timid and a little fearful, "what will we do?" Another moment of silence. Then, "What will you do?"

Darunia rounded on him, stared him in the eye, and Barmand took a step back. He was not angry at the kid, but if he didn't control himself he would vent that rage on anyone near him. The wizard had demanded the spiritual stone. Only one reason possible for that – a bad one, the worst one imaginable. This was enormous. Something he couldn't handle on his own. He would need help, and that thought infuriated him even more than the arrogance of the wizard himself.

"I will be in my room!" Darunia said, and stomped past Barmand and began his way up the trail. "I will take the spiritual stone with me. Send word to the king, and tell him what has happened here. I will speak to no one but a messenger of the royal family!"

The figures and record-keeping was gone from his mind, but if someone had pointed that out to him he would have put them through a wall.

The King of the Zora sat off to one side of his throne, humming to himself, wondering where his daughter was off to. His attendants had been dismissed so that they might find her. It would not take long; she was probably tending to Lord Jabu Jabu even now, seeking to fill her mother's shoes as early as possible. He loved his daughter for that, in a way that was rare for a king to love a princess, with the heartfelt frankness normally reserved for commoners. He saw her mother in her, and wondered if that would become truer as she grew into a woman. Certainly he saw little enough of himself: he was huge and rotund, an echo of the fish from which legends said the Zora had been raised by the gods, where his daughter looked more like the common stock that his wife had come from, save for the royal carriage on her head.

He wondered if King Ganondorf was meeting her even now. He had passed by only moments before to pay his respects to Lord Jabu Jabu, even carrying the customary offering of fresh fish (though King Zora did not recognize the breed, and he had thought himself familiar with everything that swam in the river or the seas). A quick and perfunctory visit, as he was on his way to pay fealty to the King of Hyrule, but there would be another visit on his reutrn trip, Ganondorf had said. That one, he had promised, would bear considerably more fruit.

He liked the Gerudo King, he decided; he was still young and brash, lacking the refinement that he would undoubtedly cultivate with age, but something in the Gerudo's youthful vigor resonated with him. He should like to talk to him quite a bit more.

King Zora shifted his enormous weight to very little effect. Not for the first time he wished he could walk more normally. He had not paid his homage to Jabu Jabu while standing under his own power in decades. He should have liked to be there now, to walk Ganondorf through the proper protocols, to properly introduce his daughter to a foreign dignitary. So much learning to be done, he thought, and so little time for them to do it.

He wondered how the meeting between the king and the guardian god of the Zoras was going. Very well, most likely.

Nabooru never did rouse anyone to replace her on the watch. She should have, she knew; she would make a poor showing at the castle if they arrived today. Still, her nerves were shot, and she was not prepared to waken one of her sisters and explain why the king was gone. That would bring questions, both ones she didn't know the answer to and ones where she suspected answers that sent chills racing down her spine. She could not let them suspect as she did, or to guess at the answers suggested by the papers she had re-hidden so carefully in her saddlebags.

The first glow of the Sun was beginning to warm the sky far to the east, and it was that particular hour before dawn where nocturnal insects grew quieter and diurnal animals had not awoken yet. The world felt very quiet, the silence bigger than what noise remained. The fire was long since dead, the night warm enough that they hadn't needed it, and she watched her sisters sleeping. She was at that particular stage of exhaustion where there is no clear border between the countries of sleep and wakefulness, and long moments passed where she felt nothing, blinked, and wondered if she had been asleep standing up. The Sun would rise soon, and then they would need to move. The thought made her feel even more tired, and angry.

Then she heard hoof beats in the distance, and exhaustion was blasted out of her mind like mist before the light of day.

She turned, running to the sound, leaving the camp behind, and the Sun's rays fell on the ground so that the Stalchildren did not rise. Her swords were in her hands, not because she thought about it but because it was her first instinct. The rider could be anyone, she had to be prepared for anyone, but at the same time she knew this was not true, that the sound of thunder and the increased pressure in the air could only be one person.

Then Ganondorf was before her, his horse rearing, his face shining with triumph. She had not seen him approach. She was losing time; was that the exhaustion or him?

"My lord," she said, sheathing both of her swords. She saluted, bowed to him, paid her respects as automatically and formally as his position demanded. It felt easy, with her thoughts seared clean by a long night spent walking. "Did you accomplish what you set out to do?"

"Yes," said he, and he laughed. "Yes, that and more. Come!" He extended his hand to her. "Ride with me. We will return to our sisters and set out for the castle at once. We will arrive late, but we arrive today."

She took his hand, and he lifted her up onto the saddle behind him as if she weighed nothing at all, his horse not even shifting under the extra load. He spurred the beast almost before she could get her arms around his waist, the horse nearly charging out from under her, and she clung to the king like a child might. She pressed her ear to his back and listened to the steady drum of his heart, which sounded massive and powerful even then.

"Ganondorf," she said, putting as much emphasis on his name as she could.

"Nabooru?" he said, looking over his shoulder at her.

"What did you do tonight?" The question never would have been asked if she had gotten any sleep, but now it did not seem so huge and impossible.

"Everything necessary," he said, and the look on his face was not like the one she expected, not like the one he had worn when he held her on the night of his ascent to the throne, not the look of a man whose only concern was the welfare of his people. There was something else there, a fire burning, and she felt the heat of it in his eyes as he looked at her. "Well. Not everything, I suppose. But we will remedy that soon."

The chill was back, and the Sun could not touch it.