Chapter Text
Four months. Chiaru opened his eyes in Hyrule’s past as the kingdom’s most powerful prophet, and stayed four months after the thief king’s yellow eyes found him through Zelda’s window. Never in his life had he spent so much time indoors, and never under so much supervision. Between Zelda and her tutors, and the hard, distant eyes of the king, he was always in the dreaded company of claustrophobia or his own quiet paranoia. He endured it with a fragile optimism that, when the Gerudo king finally died, he might wake up from this like he woke up from so many dreams involving both princess and thief from his life before.
Ganondorf’s trial came and went, and his execution carried out, but Chiaru never opened his eyes from this new forever. Instead, he dreamed himself free under the cover of dark trees by night, and by day wandered the town streets like a dog too smart to fight his leash lest Zelda reign him in.
On an afternoon full of grass whistles and pensive anger at a month lost in this strange past, Epona poked her head out from an alley of town and ate his crafted instrument out of his hands. She followed him through the street, through the market, and then to the castle gates despite his panicked attempts to shoo her away.
If Malon had brought her to the market with the intent of socializing her, it backfired. Zelda insisted they treat the filly like royalty and showered her in nothing but kindnesses, but Epona’s trepidation and vehement refusals to any handler but Chiaru overwhelmed her. To a gentle hand, Epona shied away. In the face of a kind word, she bucked. Her own shadow spooked her. She accepted Chiaru and Chiaru alone, and their relationship to one another prevented Zelda from ever coming close to either of them the same way two obstinate doors of a metal gate lock out trespassers and well-meaning neighbors alike.
“The two of you are very similar,” Zelda admitted, in a rare moment of frustration. “Always keeping to yourselves, and full of unreasonable fear.”
Only the birds and the castle guards should have been out and about now, but Zelda’s discipline remained even without Impa. Even at this hour, her hair was pulled into a neat bun beneath her silken hat, and the embroidered gold and red emblem of her family on the over skirt of her pink and white dress swayed with each step she took over the castle’s hilltop lawn. Chiaru stood on the far side of the lawn fully dressed in his green tunic, with sword and shield strapped to his back. No emblem adorned the sword, and the shield favored no house- only a red bird tangled in its own wings blanketed over where the royal emblem might be. Epona snuffled at his side, a pack on her back.
“You and the Gerudo king are also very similar,” he replied, in a rare moment of open distrust. She was the last person he wanted to witness him leaving. She might stop him by royal decree, or with a magic song, or any number of other tricks. “Shield eaters and world leaders have many likes alike.”
Zelda’s fair face set her mouth into an aghast circle beneath her dainty nose, and then wrinkled it into a watery frown. The manicured grass on the castle lawn tugged at the pink and white silks of her dress in quiet concern.
He scrunched his face together like a scrapped piece of paper scribbled with bad ideas, and tossed it over his shoulder. Epona snorted and nuzzled his forehead.
“That was uncalled for,” he admitted, patting Epona’s nose.
“Yes,” Zelda said. “It was.”
She squeezed whatever it was she held in her hands, and stared at the grass. The dew spread in an even blanket over it, and the sun glazed it with a crisp silver sheen. The birds scattered in the few sculpted trees chittered and tweeted songs of peaceful days while the green-tipped spires of the white stone castle rose into the sky behind them and adopted the colors of the sunrise.
She sighed, defeated. “You are unhappy here, aren’t you?”
He stopped petting Epona, and looked out over the kingdom peering up at him from the base of the hill unrolling at his feet. Grey cobblestone and red tile roofs outlined the capital and the lives of its citizens, and beyond its perimeter spread the open fields until they hit the borders of parts unknown. Hyrule appeared a kingdom of picture-perfect toys from the top of the hill, or like sugar figurines made to top the enormous cakes he sometimes saw in the window of the town’s bakery. It was perfect and full, and he was malformed and rotten in its presence.
“What have we done to make you feel this way?” Zelda asked. “You have saved our kingdom and left us in a debt I cannot imagine we will ever repay, but I cannot understand what we might have done to leave you so displeased. Is it something my father has done? That I have done?”
“No,” he said.
“Then what is it? What hurts you so?”
Chiaru gave Epona another thoughtful stroke down her muzzle.
“You have been nothing but gracious,” he said. “You welcomed me into your home with open arms and accepted my council these past months, and for that I should be nothing but grateful.” He caught her out of the corner of his eye. “But I don’t have it within me.”
Zelda’s clenched fists gathered at her chest, like whatever they held was her heart.
“Before I came here, I had a companion,” he said.
“The fairy, Navi,” said Zelda. “You told me.”
“She left me without saying goodbye. Do you know why?”
Zelda shook her head.
“Neither did I.” Chiaru moved to face her. “But I think I might, since knowing you.”
Zelda turned her back. The ends of her hat quivered like leaves in the breeze.
“You are already leaving this land of Hyrule, aren’t you?” she asked.
He sighed, like her implied permission lifted the weight of seven years from his chest and let him breathe deeply for the first time since he met any version of her.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” he said. “Nothing at all. You should know that. And as you were, you never meant to do any harm to anyone. That is the truth. But I,” he shook his head, “I am not obligated to be with you anymore. Now that my adventure is over, you are a reminder of the things I would rather forget. I don’t belong here, and I never did.”
Zelda’s shoulders trembled as her composure shattered.
The birds sang over one another on the lawn, and the sun brought new and beautiful color to the roofs of the town below. Zelda grew still, like an animal in its death throes struck down by a spear hurled in mercy, or a little girl silenced by the cruel revelation that being queen meant being alone.
“Even though it was only a short time, I feel like I’ve known you forever,” she said, finally. Her voice warbled with a quivering edge. “I’ll never forget the days we spent together in Hyrule.”
Chiaru pressed his eyelids shut with a long sigh. When he opened them again, he found Zelda staring at him with obstinate blue eyes and a resolute frown.
“And I believe in my heart that,” she sucked in a breath, “a day will come when I shall meet you again.”
Zelda’s clenched fists opened to reveal the blue ocarina. Sunlight ran from its shimmering surface like water. She held it out to him.
“Until that day comes, please take this.”
He refused her.
She refused to let him. “I am praying,” she said. “I am praying that your journey be a safe one. If something should happen to you, remember,” her expression crumbled like a dam holding back too much, “remember…!” She buckled beneath the pressure.
“Goodbye,” he said.
He took the ocarina and mounted Epona with one quick, practiced motion. When he gently clicked his tongue to move onwards, she obeyed, and Zelda watched him go towards the castle gate with eyes both empty and full at the same time. Her hands clutched over her chest like the ocarina was still there.
Chiaru looked to the guard manning the gate. The man’s helmet obscured his eyes, but the uncomfortable squiggle of his lips proved him guilty of eavesdropping as he glanced from Chiaru to Zelda. In an erased past, Chiaru gave him money to let him pass in the opposite direction, and he was prepared to do it again, if he had to.
“Don’t make me bribe you in front of your princess,” he said. “Please let me through.”
The guard looked between the two children one more time, and after a panicked gulp, turned the gate crank high enough to let Epona and Chiaru pass. It closed behind them with an earthen thud.
Fretful footsteps thudded not far behind. Zelda threw herself at the gate.
“The goddess of Time is protecting you!” she called. “If you play, she will aid you! If you play, she...!”
The distance between them grew and grew, and with it, so did the silence. The path through the town below was quiet, and in the early morning, so were the people rising from their beds. The fountain in the center of the market square burbled and bubbled with oblivious cheer in the shadow of the Temple of Time, unaware of what could have been. He passed by the clean, bright shops and quaint sidestreets, nodded to the handful of beggars loitering beneath the thoroughfare’s overhangs, and crossed over the drawbridge into the field as the first traveler of the day.
The path through Hyrule field carved a clear line through the grass, but none of its destinations were the one for him. His path was his choice, and it unfurled before him in an infinite number of directions. He set Epona on a course north, and let her run.
And with that, he was free. Free, and terrified. Up until this moment, his learned influence from the future guided his hand for every decision, but that future was no more. It was almost too much.
Grass flew up around his and Epona’s ankles, and the risen sun warmed her fur. She nickered, proud, and ran until she decided to canter, and then trot, and then stop for a snack. Chiaru dismounted and gave it to her with a wry smile, and then a generous amount of water to stave off the mounting sun.
He looked around. They had long since left behind any known trails. The field was peaceful, empty, and oppressive in its scope the same way a wasteland without water bore down on lost souls parched by thirst and overwhelmed without directions. A niggling regret tugged at his heart, at his throat. He swallowed.
When she finished her carrot, Epona trotted to his shoulder and looked around with him, her ears rotating in curious circles and deep brown eyes sparkling with interest at a place she had never seen before: a deep green swath of trees overtaking the horizon at the edge of the field. A sudden wind sent their leaves quivering in the wind and made them appear a hazy, emerald shroud blanketing over the secrets at the end of the world.
The Woods. At their heart was a familiar place. At their heart was his home. Home, and Navi.
Navi. The thought of her crashed into him the way a storm crashes into a mountainside. What would he say when he found her? What would he say to Zelda if she suddenly found him after he chose to leave her?
Chiaru didn’t know, but he might be forced to find out if he did not make a decision soon. Zelda could come rising over that hill any minute with an army of guards. She could change her mind and order him back to the castle, and he would be all but powerless to resist.
His thoughts swirled like ash on the wind, his head pounded like thunder in the clouds, and the cool glaze of the blue ocarina smarted against his chest like singed earth in the wake of a lightning strike. The sun above him could not have been any brighter, but the swelling heat of midday fell on him like a cruel rain of white-hot arrows.
Then, a cool, whistling wind breezed overhead, and the branches of The Woods waved like hands beckoning them into their shade.
The Woods existed since time immemorial and would exist until the river ran dry. They lived not as a collection of trees and brush, but a single entity. Their thin, invisible fingers stretched through the roots in the ground like a single, massive glove, and their eyes peered through every knothole of every tree, every divot in every pebble on the ground, and every ripple in every puddle of water. Their pulse was the sparking flicker of effervescent light stringing through the air, and their breath the deep mist gently falling between the trees.
He mounted Epona and urged her towards them. She grunted in trepidation.
“It’s alright,” he said.
Saria lead him through these Woods since his memory began. He knew them as well as any creature could hope. With a click of his tongue, he nudged Epona onwards, beneath the branches and towards the old suspension bridge connecting the Kokiri Forest Meadow to the rest of Hyrule.
Epona snorted, but trusted him enough to enter.
The trees spread overlapping shadows about the ground like a net woven from darkness. Each strand bunched thicker and thicker knots until the darkness blocked out the sun and enveloped Chiaru and Epona whole. Chiaru turned his head towards the entrance out of curiosity, but discovered nothing but brush and branches. He turned back around.
Softly swirling fog and spiraling tendrils of gossamer light poured over the ground, over the leaves, and around the trees in a cascading, piling gauze ribbon with no beginning and no end. Epona swam through it with soft, reverent strides while Chiaru’s eyes cut it with a wary edge. They pierced only the shallowest level: the trees surrounding him grew up from the ground like the columns of a temple unfathomable in size and unknowable in divinity.
The soft clip of Epona’s hooves slowed to a gentle halt.
He breathed in. Each cautious sip formed moist, cool pools of mist into his lungs. With each breath out, the air churned like a ghostly soup stirring together all things old and dead with all things new and alive into one cohesive being. The wet of the dirt and grass blossomed in Chiaru’s nose and stuck while the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure.
For all the mysteries The Woods were, they had never appeared to him so grandiose and so still before. They always walked him through their branches in the form of a maze, or a series of rooms, or a puzzle, or a winding tunnel obscuring a larger whole. Never had he been taken by the hand and lead in a straight line to their heart, and never had he walked through them without falling gently into the hands of the Kokiri Forest Meadow first.
He swallowed a mouthful of nervous thirst as the disbelief settled like silt in the bottom of his soul. He was lost in a way he never imagined he could be.
No life existed within The Woods without their permission, and death claimed nothing the Woods did not want it to. They arranged themselves into whatever labyrinth they wanted, and if they did not want someone or something to leave, they never would.
He crushed his eyelids together, and mashed his lips between his teeth.
Stalfos, Stalfos. Everyone, Stalfos. What The Woods did to unworthy trespassers, the Kokiri mimicked in games and stories. Those were the lyrics the Kokiri sang to one another in the dark and the trees when they played hide-and-go-seek. Those were the lyrics they sang when they played the role of a Stalfos intent on stripping the flesh of intruders and turning them into Stalfos, too.
His heart thudded in his ears. Was he unworthy? Was he unwanted? Were The Woods rejecting him? Were they drawing him and Epona deeper to twist them into skeletal soldiers?
A denial from The Woods was tantamount to a denial from Saria. The Woods were of Saria as much as she was of them. Had it not been so, they would have eaten her alive rather than let her act on their behalf in the eyes of the goddesses. But had The Woods forgotten Saria? Had The Woods forgotten everything, too?! Was he really alone?!
Oh, he was a fool to come here!
The Woods spared lost children the fate of a Stalfos by reincarnating them as a wooden skullkid, but he had been twisted and forced into the frame of an adult by powers beyond his means. Though they were gone, Darunia had recognized him as a real man, and Ruto had thought it suited him. And Navi, she-!
Navi.
How could he have been so stupid?! He needed the guidance of a fairy to find the forest meadow, and she had left him like a paper bird on a windy day! The one reason he was allowed passage into The Woods had sloughed off like gold paint off a fake coin! How could he have been so naive?! Chiaru sucked in another breath and looked behind him.
If The Woods had any reason to keep him here as he was, it was surely because they meant to mold him into the nameless, faceless monster that he always knew he would--!
Epona screamed in sudden terror, and threw Chiaru to the ground.
His head swam with visions of faces and faces and faces. A yellow-eyed mask wearing the body of someone he used to know robbed him of the ocarina, and then Epona, and then of the self. They lead him to a tunnel bridging the Woods and the end of the world, and then left him behind with one of the fairies. They left him behind with Tatl, who pried his name from him when he doubted it was even his to give anymore. They left him with Tatl, who lead him through the darkness for three whole days. They left him with Tatl, who never let him forget.
---
Four Giants stood beneath a clear blue sky, arms outstretched to behold a rainbow arching above their heads, above Clock Town, above all four worlds of Termina. The promise the seven colors told spanned just as wide, just as far, and just as vividly: today was new, today was bright, and today was the beginning of a new future. Today was the dawn of a new day.
Chiaru’s heavy eyelids opened to it with a slow disbelief. Tatl and Tael bobbed above his head in complementary colors like a set of mismatched eyeballs boggling out of the calm sky behind them. A high-pitched whinny nearby egged them closer.
“He’s awake,” said Tatl.
Epona’s snout blocked the two of them out, and licked him. It left a chilled, wet stripe over his face. He sat up with agonizing effort.
The southern clearing of Termina field sprawled around him with the light of the rising sun. The risen, wooden pathways and old stumps barely hid the faces of the handful of bewildered Clock Town citizens ogling the Four Giants in awe. Sonny’s mother had a pair of binoculars strapped to her face to see them more clearly.
Chiaru brought a shaky hand to his skull and shook out the latent fog from his mind, and then noticed the skullkid hunching next to him. His round eyes stared up at the Four Giants with tacky, sappy tears oozing at their corners.
The Four Giants stared back at him. Their dewy eyes swirled with clouds of sadness.
“You guys,” sniveled the skullkid, “you hadn’t forgotten about me?”
The Giants hummed a low note.
The skullkid’s stiff arms rattled. His head hung so low that the bright red raffia on the brim of his hat blocked out his eyes and obscured his beak. From this angle, he was nothing but a trembling scarecrow shaken by the wind. Anything stronger, and he might fall apart in a fluttering pile of sticks and straw.
“You still thought of me as a friend?” he asked. The pitch of his voice twisted up at the ends like his throat was a wet cloth wrung too tightly in his fingers.
Tatl and Tael hurried to him with cautious, uncertain hands, and nothing to say.
Neither did the Giants, until the Giant of the South threw back their great head and released an echoing refrain of the Oath to Order. It washed through the ears of Termina like a wave rolling over the dry shore.
The Giants were older than words. They spoke in the song of the earth and elements; in the language of this world’s creation. Chiaru could not put specific translations on their will, but he could understand their visceral regret and deep forgiveness with greater clarity than if it had come from within him. He looked at the skullkid’s trembling body, and felt the last of his anger’s teeth rot away into nothing. They were alike. They had always been just alike. All they wanted was to be remembered.
Tatl turned over her shoulder towards Chiaru with curious concern in her eyes, but he deep pity for the child blooming over his face answered whatever questions she had. She turned again to console the skullkid.
The Giant of the South finished their chorus, and after one more long look towards the skullkid, took a gentle step over his head, and Chiaru’s head, and the heads of all the citizens of Clock Town gaping in the open field, and began the trek towards Woodfall. The other three Giants turned their backs to Clock Town in their cardinal directions, too, and with careful progress, began their one-hundred step journey back to their chosen worlds.
On their way, the Giant of the North took up the Oath. It echoed from the mountaintops and shook the last of the ice from the feet of Snowhead. Next came the voice of the Giant of the West, and the ocean’s tumultuous currents calmed in reverence at the sound. The voice of the Giant of the East rejoiced with the new life reaching from Ikana’s scarred, dried earth, and with the lives left standing just below where the moon hungrily hung not half an hour before.
On their last note, the four disappeared into the clay beneath their feet, but Termina had not, and would not. The skullkid wept, and so did Chiaru, but not out of sadness. He wept because the land was beautiful, and because it would live.
All of his anger, all of his grief- none of it justified punishing the rest of the world just to bring some kind of consolation to himself. His feelings were his own, and they were his right to experience, but the people he met had no responsibility to endure them. Whatever he felt, it was his challenge to grow past it or put it away. Zelda meant him no harm, and she invited his return. Navi meant him no harm, but her path diverted from his. Those decisions were his to respect, not mar with unaddressed anger. The Woods may have forgotten him, but that was no reason to let it stay that way.
His days were hard, and the storm inside himself would never be gone for good, but it did not have to rage forever, and he did not need to build his life around it. The times change. People change. Feelings change. Time flowed on. It was everyone’s right, and his right, to let that happen.
He did not have to decide whether to return to Zelda today, or ever, but the possibility of returning- the possibilities of the future- were not something to fear. If he could find it in himself to forgive the days prior for all their hardships, he could finally see today for what it was.
A reedy voice interjected in his thoughts. “Did you… did you save me?”
He turned away from whatever point in the sky had grabbed his attention, and turned towards the skullkid. His wooden face had dried now, and his perfectly round amber eyes curiously roved over Chiaru from above his yellow beak.
He gestured to the distance. “No, but I called them, and they did.”
The skullkid looked over his shoulder- to the swamp, but the direction was totally arbitrary.
“I thought they didn’t want to be friends with me. But,” he tilted his head, “they hadn’t forgotten about me. Friends are a nice thing to have.” The skullkid jittered with a high-pitched chuckle. “Could you be my friend, too?”
He grinned despite himself. “Of course.”
The skullkid grinned and hurried over with a jostled walk like a puppet jerking its strings from its wearer with a burst of free will. He sniffed at Chiaru like a dog inspecting another dog, and thoughtfully pursed his beak.
Then, he said, “You have the same smell as the fairy kid who taught me that song in The Woods.”
He balked. “I, I, I you, uh, I what?”
Chiaru’s eyes flew open and he took a step back to brace himself. The fairy kid who taught the skullkid that song in The Woods could only be one person: himself, in another context. If the skullkid remembered him, then The Woods remembered him, and if The Woods remembered him, he had been led here on purpose. Chiaru had been fooled this whole journey.
“You knew who I was this whole time?!”
The skullkid laughed in his face.
Tatl slapped a mouth over a disbelieving guffaw. Chiaru felt his face turn red and his stomach churn in circles. He wasn’t sure if he should be angry or delighted, or keep standing still and looking an idiot in an open field. He decided on all of them at once.
The skullkid paid it no mind. He snapped his wooden fingers and fidgeted. “I know! I know! We can--!”
The Salesman appeared behind both of them where a moment ago there was only open field. His ostentatious clothing and oversized pack appeared almost natural in the open light of day, and the multicolored designs on the mask clutched in his hands were nothing but paint on wood. Majora’s Mask’s eyes failed to glow with any malice. They failed to glow at all. He held it in the air above his head, and positioned it so it appeared where the moon hung in the Four Giants’ hands an hour ago.
“So the evil has left the mask after all,” mused the Salesman. He turned to Chiaru, smiling. “Well, now. I finally have it back. Since I am in the midst of my travels, I must bid you farewell.”
The Salesman bowed low, with his arms flush by his sides, and then strode between Chiaru and the skullkid towards Clock Town.
The skullkid thrust his eyes towards the dirt and balled his hands together in shamed, repentant fists. The Salesman only smiled enigmatically at the distance like a parent who knew scolding their child would be a temper tantrum on their part, and nothing more. The masks on his pack bobbled with each step like a crowd swaying in celebration until he paused at the painted wood steps rising from the deep green field to the Southern Gate.
His neck craned to face Chiaru. “Shouldn’t you be returning home as well?”
“Excuse me?”
“Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow. However, that parting need not last forever.”
Chiaru’s guilty eyes searched the grass twenty feet from his shoulder.
“What about you?” he asked. “Will you appear again?”
“Whether a parting be forever or merely for a short time,” The Salesman grinned toothily. “That is up to you.”
He bowed, again. Chiaru watched with huge eyes, and a thousand questions he wondered if he could even begin to ask the man.
“With that, please excuse me,” the Salesman said, instead, and then turned to walk away.
Except he paused, again. His head turned to hang off the side of his pack like yet another mask.
“...But, my, you sure have managed to make quite a number of people happy. “The masks you have are filled with happiness. This is truly a good happiness.”
Chiaru instinctively pressed his hands to the inside of his tunic and at the bag hanging from his side. The Deku child’s mask grazed his fingertips with coarse and deeply textured grains. He dug deeper in a sudden panic, and realized every mask he surrendered to the children on the moon had returned. Darmani, Mikau, the Mask of Truth- every single one stared up from his bag, as did the strange white mask. He looked to the Salesman, perplexed.
The Salesman only smiled and turned away before disappearing into thin air.
Chiaru bowed. Whatever else he needed to ask, he would do it when they next met.
The tittering of fairy wings pulled him away. Tatl hovered between Chiaru and her brother. She bit her lip and fluttered over to the skullkid’s shoulder so she favored neither of them.
“Well, both of us have gotten what we were after,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh?” he asked, again.
She huffed. Her lip elevated her nose into a decided sneer. “You got your xylophone and your horse and your body back, didn’t you? So this is where you and I part ways, isn’t it?”
He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
How do you repay someone who gave you something priceless? That is what he should have asked the Salesman. That is the wisdom Zelda wished she knew.
“You know,” Tatl said, swallowing. “It was kind of fun.”
He nodded. Stupidly, like a bobble-headed doll with a lump in its throat.
Tatl looked away. “Well, it’s almost time for the carnival to begin.” She levelled him with her most superior, needling stare. “So why don’t you just leave and go about your business? The rest of us have a carnival to go to.”
She said it as a challenge, like he should do the opposite. She said it the way a child on the playground entices the other children to want to do what she was doing simply by telling them to do the opposite. He was too old for that to work, and they both knew it.
He smiled and reached out for Epona. She lowered her head and let him mount her with a nonchalant grunt.
Tatl watched, disgusted with herself. Her brother hovered to her side, and the skullkid shuffled to her, too.
Chiaru smiled. “Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow,” he said. “It’s a terrible way to say, ‘see you later’. It’s so cryptic.”
He laughed. It was stupid. It was such a stupid thing to say at the Salesman’s expense, but it didn’t matter. Chiaru could make comments as mindless as he wanted to, and know that they would not be his last words to Tatl. She and her brother were the skullkid’s fairy guardian. She and her brother would always be somewhere near the Lost Woods, and he would always return to the Lost Woods. The wet of the dirt and grass blossomed in Chiaru’s nose and stuck while the slow, sweet decline of rot and the harsh, pungent run of crystallizing sap plagued the trees in equal measure. He would find himself lost at many, many points in his life, but whenever he was, he knew he would always find his way again, even when the road grew hard and the obstacles thick and tangled. Someone would remember him when he least expected it if only he honored the journey and the people he met throughout it.
Today was a new day, and he was not afraid of it!
“Thank you,” Chiaru said. “Thank you so much.”
Tatl sucked in a deep breath, and bit the back of her hand.
“He’ll be back,” said the skullkid. “Don’t worry. He’s from The Woods. We all come back. Like the Giants did! See?”
“This isn’t the end,” Chiaru affirmed. “But I do have to leave, at least for now.”
“Why?” Tatl asked.
A big question. He suspected the reason he couldn’t put it into words was the same reason the Happy Mask Salesman never gave him a straight answer about anything. For the first time he was both free and unafraid, and though he had traveled far, he still had farther to go before he truly realized what it was he was searching for. He looked at his masks.
“I have,” he chuckled, “a job to do. I am a Happiness Salesman, remember?”
“Cryptic,” Tatl said. “Always. You always leave me behind like that. I hate it.”
“Goodbye,” he said.
Tatl shook her head and willed herself not to look at him. She was a glass all but overflowing.
He nudged Epona off with his heels. Grass and sky whizzed by above and beneath them.
A name rang out over the field behind them: “Chiaru!” Tatl cried, wound from wingtip to wingtip as she hurled the name into the world in an echoing reminder for the clay and trees.
“...Thank you,” she whispered, like a secret for the wind to carry to his ear whenever he might need a reminder that she, like so many others, were waiting for the day he was ready to return to them as himself, and nothing more.