#aco post

The other Garo froze, swinging idly in the winds. One of the warriors had been investigating the explosives when they detonated. Those who saw were willing to be almost certain that warrior was no more. That was what those signs meant. Those signs meant that, as had only happened rarely in the undead unit's recent history, their already meager ranks had today been thinned.

The warrior's name did not matter, so few of them knew their names anymore. Whoever it was, they would be remembered nonetheless. The warrior on the Western District side gave and received the traditional gesture of respectful parting and left.

Mortal lives came and went as swiftly as candle stubs to an eternal race, but the loss of their own was different. It was a companion they had known and thought with for eons, one of the few members of a race that changed in the manner of a crumbling mountain, and with all the same speed. A companion they would never see again in all the further eons they might exist, and a companion whose fate they could not guess (the afterlife had become a tenuous myth for the trapped spies). Their numbers could never grow to replace those who fell, and so those losses remained, a slowly growing and irreversible missing piece. And like the crumbling mountain, they mourned the dust the wind ceaselessly swept away.

Impa was quick to find Zelda's journal, well aware of where the young Hylian hid it. Having it presented to her seemed to snap Zelda out of something, and she immediately reached for the nearest writing implement and curled up with the book in her lap, her eyes staring unfocused in the direction of the page and her pencil never leaving the paper.

And as she'd decided she must find a way to do something, anything, one of her ancestors decided the same. One that had, like all the others, always appeared with blue eyes, that night appeared to her bearing eyes of red.

It was very, very old magic, rooted deep within the bloodline and guarded so carefully that almost all memory had faded. It had been one of the duties of Impa's line to protect it, along with all other secrets the Sheikah oversaw, she knew the magic's legend well. She told Zelda all that she knew, and with her ceaseless loyalty and patience settled in to help teach the young Hylian a great deal more, words of both faith and caution ever-present on her tongue.

Both forms, the legend held, had existed from the day Zelda was born, but that knowledge didn't make the new body feel any more familiar. The princess and her attendant worked at night and whenever else their duties allowed, and it took a full day of meditation to learn to shift, several days more to become accustomed enough to the new shape to be anything resembling competent. Impa guided through each step, from helping Zelda adapt the basic hand-to-hand and stealth training the Sheikah had given to the new body, to assembling suitable clothing, to warning again and again not to attempt anything out of her league (her charge's skills were novice at best), to finally teaching the disguised monarch how to draw the sacred tear-shaped mark, detailing all that it meant to wear it.