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甲辰 003: 冬至

[video transmission]

Greetings, Crimson Corsairs.

[As usual, the elegant woman appears with a beaming smile amidst the warm steam rising from bowls of... something or other in her kitchen.]

I understand you come from many winter traditions, both in this land and in your homes. If you would allow me a brief intrusion... In Yan, it is customary to celebrate the Winter Solstice, the 'dong zhi.' As it is the longest night of the year, we give thanks that the light will return and the days will soon grow long once more. In the depths of midwinter, it is a reminder that balance and yang will be restored, no matter how dark the nights may seem. For those of us in agrarian communities, we give thanks also to the animals who have brought us through the hard times.

[A mischievous glimmer shines in her eyes.]

Of course, it is also the day that the venerable master of the stove, Zao Jun, reports to Tian on whether or not your house hold has been 'naughty' or 'nice,' which I understand is a part of some other traditions as well.

Please allow me to offer prayers to Tian on your behalf. What is it that you hope for when the sun returns in its full splendor?

[in person, all around]

[Shu appears at your door on this cold, long winter evening, knocking politely and awaiting an answer. Whether she sought you out specifically or whether she's never met you at all, she stands and waits in her warm coat holding an extraordinarily large soup bowl in her hands. Somehow, it does not seem to trouble her.]

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"Do you know, there is a portal to another world where I come from, too."

Shu smiles as she confirms that her thoughts are running along similar lines. There is an air of lightheartedness to her musings.

"Yet I never envisioned anything like this. You don't think about the complexities of another world altogether. It is simply a... hypothetical thought experiment if it comes up at all. ...Well, the portal in my world also leads to a dimension of demonic corruption, so it's hardly comparable."

This is not the sort of thing one usually says so casually, but Shu takes a spoonful of sugar soup.

"Where would you be right now, before the New Year, Link?"

Link blinks. A portal to a dimension of demonic corruption?

Huh. Sounds a bit like the dark malice and gloom that had afflicted his world, maybe. But Link chooses not to comment on that; Shu had asked him a question.

"...Hateno village," he says softly. "In our house."

Or 'Zelda's House', as most of the villages thought of it. People always gravitated towards her, remembered her, while Link tended to fade into the background. But he didn't mind; he liked it that way.

Shu blinks lightly at this, for it doesn't quite register. Even if she thought of Zelda, despite Link's obvious feelings for the woman, she didn't usually consider that a princess would share a house with her knight. Generally her vision of princesses coincided with castles or palaces and such.

"You and Pepper?"

She hadn't thought that Link's affection for the chicken would have extended so far so quickly.

Pepper says a faintly puzzled, Cluck?

Link, meanwhile, looks faintly bemused while shaking his head. No, he didn't share it with Pepper. Pepper hasn't even ever been to Hyrule.

"...With Zelda," he says. Maybe Link's cottage wasn't what Shu would have thought of as the home of a Princess. But...it was.

He misses it.

"Ah."

It takes her a moment.

"Ah."

Shu is suddenly all benignant smiles, for there are few things more endearing for an immortal demigod than young love. Link's bowl is refilled automatically after which she clasps her hands together.

"Of course. How stupid of me. You must forgive me for my prattling on about reunion and family. May I share something with you? It is a piece of Yan poetry that speaks deeply to me."

Link, of course, immediately begins wolfing down the second filling at a rapid speed. To Shu's benignant smiles however, he shows no reaction.

But he does pause after a moment, and tilt his head to one side in an unspoken, Yes?

If Shu wants to tell him a poem, he's listening.

She nods and exhales, releasing her breath lightly, her hands still clasped in front of her.

"Shang ye...!"

Her recitation is in Yanese initially, for it flows far more fluidly and dramatically in her native tongue. She imbues each word with emphasis and meaning, and though he may not understand the words, the sentiment of emotion and heartfelt passion is clear. It is not a long poem, and when it ends, she slips swiftly into the language of Esthere, an older form of her world's Victorian language.

'By Heaven!
I with you and you with me,
Forever with no wane nor end.
When the mountains fall
And rivers dry,
When winter brings thunder
And summer snow,
When heaven and earth collide
Then
Only then
Shall we ever break asunder.'

My love."

Edited 2025-01-08 02:21 (UTC)

Link doesn't understand one world of the Yanese; and even the Esterian is a bit of a struggle to follow along with. Imperial's a new language for Link, and he's not at all familiar with its poetry.

But he listens, giving Shu his complete attention. And he understands.

And thinks of Zelda.

"...Pretty," he says softly.

Link, alas, is very much not a poet. Deep, eloquent words are beyond him. But maybe Shu will get what he means, anyway.

Frankly, she would be shocked if he said much more than that. A chill wind blowing in from the seas sends the windows of the little dorm rattling as silence reigns for a fixed few moments.

"...Whenever I am apart from someone I love, I think of these words. For there is nothing under heaven that can truly separate our bond."

She cups her steaming soup and allows the heat to infuse her hands with warmth.

"It is not the same, of course. I have eleven siblings scattered across the world, and it is many years' passage between our meetings. But we are as one. ...So tonight, let us celebrate the solstice in the promise of reunion with the ones we love."

Link looks down, as something heavy lodges itself at the back of his throat.

Nothing under heaven or earth that could separate them. And yet...this would be the third time Link's been separated from Zelda. The first had him sleeping for a hundred years in the Shrine of Resurrection. The second had Zelda traveling through time, for thousands of years, as the Light dragon.

He'd spent a lot of time with the Light dragon. Sitting with her. Holding her horns. Crying himself to sleep on her forehead. But even when he was right next to her, they'd still been apart. Zelda had still been gone.

Now they were separated again.

Link liked Shu's poem. It was...nice. Meaningful. But he's not sure he can take as much comfort from it as Shu does.

But he doesn't want to ruin Shu's gesture with all of his gloomy, heartsick thoughts. So with his head still looking down at his feet, he nods. Yes, they can celebrate.

If she were privy to Link's private thoughts, she would gently try to encourage him. For insomuch as such tragedies have happened, the promise held true. They were souls linked through the cosmos, souls meant to be bonded. And though thousands of years might pass, kingdoms might rise and fall, the river of time be split and sundered in two, Link would return to Zelda, even through the worst of all heartaches.

But she holds her soup instead and continues to allow the chill of the winter night to whistle past the walls. The silence isn't comfortable, but she does not find it oppressive, either. Shu is thinking of siblings she can never meet again, siblings she fears to meet again, siblings who can never truly come together, even if they were one. After some time passes, she speaks again softly.

"...What do you hope for in the new year, Link?"

Link pauses, thinking about it. What does he hope for?

"Defeating the Empire. Going home." Home, where Zelda was. That was his biggest hope, more than anything.

But he thinks on it a little further, and then adds: "Get my stuff back."

The first two wishes go without saying. She glances quizzically at him at his follow-up, though.

"What sort of things?"

As far as she is aware, he has already had more than everyone else in the Corsairs combined owing to the magical bag he owns.

"My weapons. Bows. Shields. Amours. Zonai devices. Horse bridles. Purah Pad."

However much Shu thought Link had now, it was nothing compared to what he had arrived with.

"Are those things not stored in your bag?"

She asks, in genuine curiosity. Or it is possible that he has an armor bag for the same purposes and they were separated at some point.

"I have a few items I would like to reclaim as well... Is there any way I can help you hunt any of these things down? Do you know where they have scattered to?"

"...They took them out."

Because of course the Empire would scrape out everything they found within a bag that had near unlimitless capacity. Nevermind that all those things - and the bag itself - belonged to Link.

But he brightens a little, when Shu offers to help. "Found a list," he says - before pulling out a piece of paper, one that he and Nephenee found. Written in Imperial, it looks like a merchant's inventory list...and also like a list of stolen belongings. Some of them will be familiar to Shu - the strange fruits and flowers, the korok-enchanted pack itself, the Sword that is now propper up in the corner of Link's room. He's managed to get some things back.

But there's also a lot of other things. Like a whole lot of weaponry, and strange devices encased in giant glass balls. Strange items and trinkets. And a truly impressive number of outfits.

"Heavens."

It's like unfurling a scroll. Shu sets down her bowl and moves to a position where she can see some of what's written. ...Well, that description of Link was a little rude. He was a Growing Boy, even if he was one hundred and... whatever.

"...Why do you have a 'glow in the dark green skeleton costume'?"

Anyway, that probably wasn't the important part.

"What is your top priority?"

"...It was in the shop," Link says. “I didn’t have one yet.”

He doesn't actually wear that one much. It's fun, but it's not really...nice. But it had been there, and he'd bought everything else in the shop already, so...he couldn't not get it.

This kind of mentality might explain just how Link ended up with such a long list of owned items in the first place.

But on the question of what's priority, Link glances towards his Sword. He already had that. What was next?

"...My Champion leathers," he says softly. "Purah Pad. Armour sets."

Compulsive hoarder wasn't exactly the mentality she had pegged Link for, but... well, if she had an infinite bag, she supposes she would have a similar attitude towards life. Just thinking about all the fresh ingredients she could store year round... has her momentarily pause her train of thought to envision the possibilities.

...Er. Right.

"What is a Purah Pad?" That's the second time he's brought up that item. "It says here..."

She scans the list. The only thing that might fit the bill seems to be 'metal handheld tablet.'

Did Link become a compulsive hoarder because he had a magic bag, or did he have a magic bag because he was a compulsive hoarder? Who knows. It was a mystery for the ages.

As for Shu’s question, the answer wasn’t quite as simple as it could be - namely because Link didn’t actually know what a tablet was.

Link hums, as he thinks about how to describe it.

“A rectangle,” he says, his hands roughly indicating the shape and size. “Has notes, Compendium, map. Takes pictures. Teleports to shrines.”

"Something like a digital notepad?"

Save that last part, which is a combination of three words that doesn't quite parse for her.

"It says here..." She had no idea the Empire was so meticulous about record-keeping. Somehow, she would have thought they just tossed around priceless and irreplaceable treasures like they were common trinkets. "...it was given as a reward to the commander of a warship who fought a valiant battle, as he showed interest in its topographical and mapping capabilities."

At least it wasn't being entirely wasted.

"We will have to find out where his fleet is stationed."

The 'we' is fairly casual. She did offer to help, after all.

Well, maybe not so much the Empire itself as the Merchant House Link and Nephenee had retrieved the list from. They'd been the ones to take Link's things, inventory them, and then start distributing them.

The end result was that Link's things were all over the Empire.

"Don't know how to find out," Link admits. There's a reason he didn't have it back already, after all. Not everything was easy to track down.

But maybe Shu would know of a way?

"If this person is a decorated commander of a warship, I am certain Admiral Hildegard will know of him."

It was, after all, part of her job to know. And though she was not stationed in Flotsam, she had come to appreciate from the Flotsam evacuation that the Admiral was a principled and competent leader.

"She may have some contacts or some reconnaissance about his whereabouts. We can request an audience with her in the morning."

Link blinks. As if the idea of just asking Admiral Hildegard to help him find his things had never occurred to him. Which...it hadn't.

He's good at puzzles. Figuring things out, finding solutions. But not so much when the answer is, 'talk to people'.

"...Really?"

It is at times like these when she truly has to resist her urge to pat children on the head. To her, of course, all mortals were children. But she has learned from long experience that only actual children enjoy that.

Link gets a beaming smile instead and a simple response.

"Yes."

A pause.

"...She may not be able to fit us into her schedule tomorrow, but I am sure she will be able to give us guidance. Do not fret. I will take care of the correspondence."

Communication is not Link's strong suit.

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newmemorywhodis - 2025-01-17 11:32 (UTC) - Expand

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