Majora's Ghost - Chapter 1

Chapter One: Dawn of the First Day

Vean was woken up by the feeling of the sun on his face. The feeling startled him and he opened his eyes to see that the morning was already halfway over. He sat up abruptly, causing his little sailboat to sway back and forth on the water. The other small boy aboard, who had been sitting hazardously balanced on the edge of the boat, cried out with the effort of not falling into the ocean.
“Yoru?” Vean remembered as he brushed his floppy blond hair from his face. “What are you doing? You were supposed to wake me up long before morning.”
Yoru climbed to a more stable position in the boat and put his hand back on the tiller just as Vean had shown him to do last night. “I did try to wake you up,” the boy explained. “But you didn’t hear me.”
Vean highly doubted that notion. He was usually a very light sleeper, but then again, yesterday had been a very trying day. An evil demigoddess, her underground palace, a giant fire cat, and a rescue mission all in the space of a single afternoon. Not to mention the stray redhead that was currently sitting across from him in the boat. He still didn’t know what he was going to do with Yoru.
“Okay, well do you have any idea where we are?” Vean asked.
Yoru only shook his head in confusion, so Vean went into his bag for his sea chart and telescope. He looked through the glass out across the sea, but all he saw was a giant red and yellow eye looking back at him. Vean dropped the spyglass and shrank back from it as it hit the deck. A young mischievous laugh rang out at his reaction. “What did you do to my telescope?” Vean asked Yoru accusatorily.
“I didn’t touch it!” Yoru defended with a hurt expression in his big dark eyes.
Vean picked the glass back up and examined it for any sort of bug that might have crawled on the lens, but there was none. He then cleaned it off with the sleeve of his shirt and slowly looked back through it again. There was nothing, but the horizon this time. Vean dismissed the earlier incident as the lingering effects of a dream and began scanning for any sign of land. In the distance he did see to hills with large spikes protruding in every direction. The two hills then rose out of the ocean to reveal that they were both actually joined in the shape of a heart. The floating structure bounced on the horizon as if it was a stage and it was doing a dance.
“Vean?” Yoru inquired after Vean had been staring at the scene for a while. Vean lowered the telescope and the figure on the horizon disappeared as if it had never been there. He blinked his dark green eyes several times and then shook his head in disbelief. The mischievous laugh rang out again and Vean now realized it hadn’t come from Yoru.
“Uh, what’s the matter, Yoru?” Vean asked, trying not to sound alarmed. “You’re not afraid that your crazy sister is following us, are you?” Vean chuckled casually, but he was beginning to wonder if Helen was in fact behind the insanity in the lens of his telescope.
“No, she wouldn’t leave the palace,” Yoru replied as he looked out over the ocean thoughtfully.
Vean quickly got to work unfurling the sail while he mentally listed all the different illusion casting monsters he could remember.
*Blue Bubbles choked you with a fog that kept you from raising a weapon against them.
*Poes crawled inside your head to disorient you, making it impossible to tell up from down.
*And ReDeads had a deafening scream that paralyzed you.
None of these monsters fit what was happening to Vean now, which made him all the more worried. He remembered now why he had left his friend Siri behind him and realized that rescuing Yoru might have done the boy more harm than good.
The sail finally caught the wind and Vean’s small boat quickly picked up speed across the water. “You didn’t steer us near any of your former cranky neighbors out here, did you?” Vean asked, regretting the tone of concern that had crept into his voice.
“No!” Yoru moaned. “If you don’t trust me to steer your stupid boat, then you shouldn’t have shown me how!”
“Hey! I wasn’t yelling at you!” Vean scolded. “I’m just trying to get us out of here before something bad happens.”
The boat slammed to a stop with a loud crack, flinging Vean and Yoru out into the air. Vean held his breath as he prepared splash into the water, but instead he slammed against something solid which knocked the wind out of him. He slid about twelve feet across the cold uneven surface before coming to a slow stop. He was sure that he had landed on his right elbow, because that hurt more than any other part of his body at the moment. He picked up his head, gasping for air and found that he was lying on the reluctant surface of ice. He looked up and found that the entire ocean was frozen in mid splash for as far as the eye could see. That same laugh rang out again.
Vean glanced around and found Yoru lying a few feet in front of him, as still as stone. “Yoru!” he shouted as he struggled to his feet on the slippery ice. He slid over to the boy’s side and gently laid his hand on his shoulder. He wasn’t breathing. “Yoru? Yoru!”
The boy’s black eyes flew open and with a loud gasp he sat up. Vean sighed long and heavily, but hardly felt relieved. His heart was still pounding in his chest. “Are you okay?” Vean pressed. “Can you walk?”
Yoru didn’t answer; he just stared at the ice and rubbed his hand over it. “What is this stuff?” he asked.
“It’s frozen,” Vean explained. “The whole ocean just turned to ice.”
“Can the boat still move?” Yoru asked worriedly.
Vean glanced back towards his boat for the first time and found that the front end of it was stuck in the frozen waves. He skidded across the ice carefully and found that his boat had also cracked down the middle and would probably fall in two if it were freed from its prison.
Vean quickly detached the sail from the mast and folded it safely into a bag that held his other supplies. He then shouldered the bag and accidently slipped on the ice as he turned back to Yoru. He was now flat on his back looking at a sky that was completely white with clouds. Small white specks began to float down towards him and the air became as cold as the ice he was lying atop.
“What is this stuff?” Yoru asked, shrinking back from flecks. Vean sat up and caught one of the many falling crumbs in his hands. It melted into a drop of water and Vean knew what it was at last.
“Its snow!” he exclaimed. He’d only ever heard of the frozen rain from a merchant named Zanari back on Windfall Island. Vean was quickly beginning to understand why the merchant always wore a heavy coat, because his fingers were already starting to hurt from the chilled air. He carefully skidded over to Yoru’s side and wrapped his arm around the boy. “Come on,” Vean urged, hoping that there was an island somewhere close. The boat was of no more use to them and he knew that their Zora tunics would protect them if the ice decided to melt as quickly as it froze.

Yoru was utterly miserable at this point. He’d only been away from home for one day and already things were just as horrible as they had been there. He hadn’t had a wink of sleep all night, he’d clearly gotten them lost with his poor steering, the boat that had once been his salvation had flung him like a slingshot, then it abandoned them in the middle of “ice” and “snow,” and he was hungry because of the lack of breakfast. Running away from his mean older sister had been a spur of the moment decision, one that he had dreamed about fulfilling for years, and now he was wishing that he was back in the warm heart of her palace where lava flows kept every room hot and cozy.
“Where are we going?” the boy asked his traveling companion.
“We’re just going to find the nearest island and then I’m going to light us a fire even if it kills me,” Vean replied, looking back over his shoulder like he had heard something.
Yoru had heard his sister Helen use the phrase, “even if it kills me,” before, but it carried a lot more weight coming from Vean since Yoru knew that Vean wasn’t immortal like they were.
“Can you die from too much cold,” he asked as a cold breeze bit at him.
“Yes, but it has to be much colder than this,” Vean assured him.
“I don’t think it could get much colder than this!” Yoru replied, surprised by the shudder in his voice.
“Oh no, it can,” Vean said as he stopped to pull a small blanket from his bag and wrapped it around Yoru’s shoulders. “I know someone from a place that’s so cold; he has to wear a fluffy coat that’s twice his size!”
Vean smiled as he waited for Yoru to respond, but the boy was too busy mulling over just what a “coat” might be. Before he could ask Vean about it, the young man simply shrugged and said, “I thought it was funny.”
Yoru hadn’t had the opportunity to speak to anyone besides his sister for years and they had known each other’s minds so well that they seldom needed to share more than a word to convey what they were thinking. Talking with Vean was a puzzling endeavor that was frustrating.
They walked through the falling snow and across the slippery ice in silence for a few minutes before Vean stopped and stared at the ground with wide eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Yoru asked nervously.
Vean glanced back at the remains of his small boat and then busily checked the horizon for something that wasn’t there. Yoru was about to shout at Vean for ignoring him, when he too heard it. It was the quiet straining sound that an old wooden floor sometimes makes. The boy looked down at the uneven ice that they were walking on and realized that the surface was no longer smooth, but covered in small cracks like rocks over a bed of lava. He tried to take a step back, but the ice cracked even further under his weight.
“Run, Yoru! Just run!” Vean exclaimed as he shoved the boy forward.
Yoru dashed forward on across the ice as it broke into small sections all around him. As he ran, he realized that it had suddenly gotten much warmer and the sky was blue again. He had never seen the weather change this quickly before. What was going on?
Yoru turned his head to see if Vean was still behind him, but he lost his footing as he did so and smashed hard into the ice and through to the water below. Yoru thought he was cold before, but the water was freezing and his limbs felt numb as he flailed to keep his head above water.
He felt Vean’s warm hand lock around his arm and he grabbed wildly, trying to climb up Vean and out of the water. Instead, Vean fell through the ice as well and they both sunk down into the icy depths. Yoru was glad that his tunic allowed him to breathe even when underwater, but it was the cold that worried him now. He felt like his hands had turned to stone and the rest of him was quickly stiffening as well. Where was Vean?
Yoru opened his eyes, but all he could see was blackness. Then he realized that it was more like there was something black in front of him, because there was still enough light for him to see his own hand in front of his face. He looked up, but there was blackness there as well, so from where was the light coming?
A strange sting of scarlet red flew passed Yoru’s face and he gasped in surprise. It was then that he realized that he was no longer underwater because he heard the sound of his own voice clearly in the open air. Another sting flew passed him, this one yellow and tangled in the shape of a strange face. Then dozens of different faces made from dozens of different colored stings flew by the boy, all of them coming from below and flying up out of sight. “They’re not flying,” Yoru realized. “I’m falling.”
This was obviously some sort of magic at work. Yoru had never practice the stuff much, but he knew it when he saw it. Whatever this spell was, it reminded Yoru an awful lot of his father.
Yoru didn’t even see the ground racing up to meet him before he slammed against it, but thankfully the impact wasn’t nearly as bad as it should have been for falling so long. He looked around and realized that he was lying on golden sand that was warm in his cold hands. Above him was a blue and green sky where the sun was shining down brightly without a single cloud to cover it. He was in a desert that stretched for miles in front of him.
Yoru smiled as he took off his blue cap and let the sun beat down on top of his head. He’d once lived in a desert just like this one. Perhaps the last few years of his life in exile had all been a dream. Perhaps he was still a young prince living in a stone fortress that housed a bonfire that protected against any icy wind.

Vean opened his eyes and immediately shot up from where he was lying to wipe the sand from them. He hated sleeping on the beach! As he blinked the last of the grains away in tears, he heard the strange laugh again. He jolted around, but all he saw was Yoru who was standing a few feet away from him staring out over the sea of sand before them.
“Yoru, are you alright?” Vean asked as he got to his feet and walked over to the boy’s side. To Vean’s surprise, Yoru had been smiling brightly, which made him the happy and carefree child he should have been. Once Yoru caught sight of Vean, the smile faded into a look of confusion.
“Vean…” the redhead said as if he was trying to remember the name.
Yoru’s lips were still a bit blue from the swim they had involuntarily taken in the ice, but the color was quickly coming back into the boy’s face.
“Are you uh…” Vean began, unsure if he should ask if the boy was hot or cold at this point. “Are you hurt?”
Yoru’s face melted back into the frown that he’d been wearing since they met. “No, but…where are we?”
“I have no idea,” Vean sighed as he looked up into the sky for any sign of the portal they had fallen through, but there was none. The same echoing laugh rang in his ears again, the same one that he heard before the ice cracked beneath their feet. “Do you hear that, Yoru?” Vean asked irritably.
Yoru flinched at Vean’s disagreeable tone, but only shook his head in reply.
“I keep hearing this weird noise like someone is laughing,” Vean began to explain, but he stopped short when he noticed the strange dark figure standing silently behind Yoru. Vean quickly grabbed the boy and pulled him away from the shadowy figure.
“Vean! What’s wrong?” Yoru protested, but Vean quickly shushed the boy as he kept his eyes on the tall masked figure. Despite the bright sun directly overhead, Vean make out the man before him because his features were overcast in shadow.
“What do you want?” Vean shouted, trying to sound hostile despite the fact that he was unarmed.
“A matching set of marionettes,” the figure said in a strangely high singsong voice for a young man. “The fun we could have! The games we could play!”
“Did you bring me here?” Vean demanded.
A strong hot breeze began to blow over the sands, but the figure seemed unaffected by it. “Your boat was broken by the ice,” he said. “Now you’ll be broken by the sand.”
The dark figure disappeared, but its laugh continued to echo even over the blustering wind.
“Vean! Vean!” Yoru was now shouting as he pulled adamantly at Vean’s arm.
“Didn’t you see…?” Vean began until he realized the urgency in Yoru’s eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“We have to run! Now!” Yoru insisted before he let go of Vean’s arm and began running across the plains. Vean began to run after him, but he looked back to see just what had frightened the boy so much. Only a couple of miles out over the plains, a great cloud of sand was flying on the wind. Vean ran after Yoru as the tsunami of sand came rushing up to meet them.
As a dusty wind rushed up to meet them ahead of the wave, Vean spotted a stone structure just ahead of them, obscured by the dark golden mist. Vean’s heart sank as he realized that, even though they were so close, they’d never make it there before the sandstorm overtook them. Just as Vean began to realize the irony of a sailor drowning in sand, he felt a strange buzz like that of static electricity and then he tripped and fell into a prickly patch of grass.
Vean looked up; expecting the sandstorm to sweep over him, but the sky was black and quiet. Vean blinked in the light that blinded him despite the black sky and shouted, “Yoru? Yoru!”
“Vean?” he heard off to his left. “Vean, help!”
“How’d you get into this place?” hissed a harsh voice from the same direction. “Wait…did you say, ‘Vean?’”
Vean ran towards the noise and found Yoru in the grips of a pirate who was brandishing a small curved dagger.
“Tetra?” Vean gasped as he stared at the dark skinned girl with her blond hair tied in a bun.
“Great,” the girl sighed in disappointment as she loosened her grip on the frightened boy in her grasp. “Link’s evil twin is the last thing I need right now.”