#sl sky

Link strolled on as the sun dappled through the leaves in the woods he was walking in. He was taking a break from the construction of his people's new kingdom on the Surfa—uh, Hyrule. It was officially named Hyrule a couple weeks ago, and since then, him, Zelda, Groose and their other friends had been working on migrating from the sky to the land after the defeat of demise. It was a lot of work! So naturally, Link decided to take a quick walk in the woods as a break.

Of course, it would have been quick if he hadn't noticed something shining in the light that leaked through the trees.

Going near it was his first mistake. It looked like a stone, swirling with moving colors of every type of blue imaginable, and the depth perception of it was just... off.

Link rubbed his eyes. He didn't need to get glasses this early, did he? He looked around, looked at his hands, and nope; all the details were perfectly clear, no blurriness to be found. But that stone...

It looked like it was a void. Like if you stuck your finger in it it would go down forever. Like it wasn't solid.

Normally; anyone at this point would have backed off and maybe even ran away. This thing was clearly some sort of magic that shouldn't be messed with, especially not while getting sleepy from the work of constructing an entire temple.

But Link was not the average anyone. No. Link was kind of an idiot. And thus he stuck his finger in the stone.

The air slowed. For a moment, Link thought he wasn't going to be able to breathe, but he could breath just fine. And the stone, was now wrapped around his left hand. It then jittered, in a chaotic motion, as if it itself was struggling to comprehend what was happening just as much as Link was.

Link tried to yank it off with his other hand, but it was stuck to him, like it was a part of him! And it was shaking and the world was spinning and everything was just...

It was no longer there. Nothing was. Well, everything was gone except for the dreaded stone, of course, embedded into his left hand, the mark of the triforce shining through it.

Everything around Link looked like the night sky, in a way. But like an ocean. He was swimming, but he could breathe just fine. It was like he was in a void of sorts—but a colorful one. Every color in the rainbow was slightly speckled through various areas of the darkness, the darkness looking like it stretched infinitely far and infinitely wide.

He was going to get in SO much trouble when he made his way back to Zelda.

...How was he supposed to get back...?

Link shook his head, shoving that thought away into a corner for later. Instead he just swam around in the void, looking for something, anything to have as a guide for location. Then he would try and make his way back after knowing where he was.

So he swam. And swam and swam. He was moving, he could tell, but he didn't see any sort of end the the dark void ocean. No land, no plants, no life at all—

There was something to the left of him. Link whipped around to look at it. It was a boat. At least... probably a boat? He wasn't fully sure, but everything here was so foreign he wasn't sure of anything except for THIS IS A WAY TO GET BACK AND HE HAS TO SWIM TO THAT THING NOW.

The boat was moving fast, but Link swam fast too, and the boat was a decent way behind him, so theoretically if he just kept swimming to where it would end up, he would make it.

After a few minutes, he made it. Clutching onto the hull of the boat, catching his breath, more tired that he felt in... actually, no, he was always tired. But swimming for 5 minutes straight at top speed took a lot out of him. He didn't even know he had the capability to do that. Must have had something to do with motivation and adrenaline.

The hull of the boat was carved with swirls and patterns. Link looked back to his hand, and the swirls and patterns were almost the exact same shapes as the ones on the stone that had fused to him.

Yes. This clearly had some sort of connection. Now just to get inside.

Link crawled around the boats exterior. Gravity wasn't a worry, he couldnt fall here, so he quickly scampered his way over to the other side of the boat and low and behold, there was a window to the inside.

Despite the lack of gravity, the boat was still moving fast. If he let go it might fly away from him, so he clinged onto the swirls of the hull, acting as places to put his grip. He slowly made his way down to where the window was, and, there were things inside.

Weird things. They were the same shades of blue as the stone, and the seemed to have a stone of their own; only fused to their foreheads rather than their hands. They definitely werent human, nor goron or any of the other creatures Link had seen along his journeys. They were speaking to each other in a language that Link just couldn't understand.

And they were also looking directly at him.

One ran back further inside the boat out of view, while the other, as there were only 2 of them, narrowed its eyes into a glare.

Then Link's head hurt. Like, really hurt. And all he could hear was some sort of warped message.

"You should not be here."

"What are you doing here?"

"This is not a place for mortals. Get out. Now."

At least... he was pretty sure thats what he heard before the pain went away. Link blinked a couple times, clearing his head, before he looked back down at the creature, still glaring at him. It had human-like features, as it had eyes and a head and all the other stuff, but it also had a tail and was genuinely really strange but interesting—

Link snapped himself out of his distraction. If this wasn't a place for mortals, these must be deities. And with that aggressive look they both shared as the second came running back with a spear-like weapon, these had to be the monster type of deities.

Demise did say something strange before Link killed him. Link thought he was bluffing as an attempt to scare him, so he brushed it off... but... maybe he actually did something.

Luckily, Link had his sword and shield still on him. Pulling out his sword, the armed creature pointed it's weapon at him, confirming, at least in Link's mind, that these people were bad.

BANG, BANG, BANG, Link started to smash the glass with his sword. The inside of the boat started to glow a red color, and before he knew it, he was hopping inside the ship and preparing to defeat the monsters.

The inside of the ship had a stable source of gravity, but Link didn't process that for very long before taking a jump slash at the nearest creature. The creature was hit, falling to the ground and breathing heavy as it bled a gold color from its right side.

...gold?—

"AH—" Link hissed, as he got stabbed in the back by the spear.

It hurt, but after adventuring for so long Link could tell it was far from fatal, so he whipped around and attacked the one holding the spear.

They were quick to dodge, but Link sliced again and again, eventually, knocking it over to where he could do a final blow.

The previous creature tried to punch Link's head, but these creatures were smaller than him, and he had his guard up, so he whacked them right back, causing them to splatter the gold blood across the ship's floor.

Still pinning the other down, Link raised his sword and stabbed it in the head, right where their stone was.

The stone seemed to explode in a white flash, knocking Link back against a wall.

But he was angry. He was finally making a life for himself, just to be sent here. And these creatures, whether they had anything to do with it or not, well, the battle was already far too initiated.

The one with the stabbed stone was dead. There was a sparkling white dust around the bits of the stone, and the last one of the blue creatures was grabbing their spear, holding their still bleeding side, and charging at Link, who was still against the wall.

Link grabbed his shield. Parry, Parry, and then he slammed the shield on the creatures face, starting to explode their stone too.

This explosion was less extreme, it fizzled with the pressure of the impact, and soon after it was silent.

Link stood back up, catching his breath. The floor was filled with the golden blood, as usual when he had to kill monsters, but, the monsters usually had... dark purple blood? Did he just—

No. There was no way he just killed a god right now. A god of light? Hylia? Zelda?

No, he didn't. These creatures attacked him. They were the same as the stone that sent him here—even if they were gods, they weren't the gods Link knew. He didnt even know if the gods of light actually had gold blood, anyway.

Link pushed those thoughs to the back of his mind. The ship was still glowing red in a pulsing motion, and, well, the bodies were still there.

Link simply picked them up and chucked them out of the broken window. Now he just needed something to clean up the blood.

So he started walking around the ship. It was a lot less like the sandships he had stumbled upon and much more like a moving house. It was hard to tell what was actually in the rooms when the light was dimmed, and Link really didnt feel like waiting between light flashes to be able to try and spot some sort of paper towel or whatever, so he changed direction to head to the front of the ship, in hopes to find a way to change the light.

Thinking about it, had the monster than ran off done anything but change the light to the red pulses? Did they run off just to make a cosmetic change? That seems strange, but there was nothing else trying to kill Link as he head towards the front, so he had to assume that's all it was.

The walls were smooth and dark, unlike the pale whitish color of the ship's exterior. Or.. maybe they were the same color and just weren't shown properly in this lighting. He didnt know. But eventually he spotted a room with a big front window, and what looked like some controls.

Perfect! Now to find where the lights were coming from. Link knew back home light were normally lit with oil and a flame, but some of the technology he encountered while on his journey taught him that wasn't the only option; somehow a switch could do it.

...Link didn't exactly understand how the switch could create a light source, but he knew it was possible.

There were a lot of buttons and meters on the desk. Looking out the window, he could tell the boat was moving him through the void far faster than he could swim, so that was a cool bonus. But back to the buttons and meters, he really didn't want to press and pull each at random without knowing what they do. He was smart enough to understand that about foreign technology, at least. So he looked around. And he kept looking around. And looked around some more. And some more.

And by the 7th minute of frustratingly searching for any kind of indicator of which mechanic was the red pulsing lights, Link finally gave up. He wasn't going to just hit every button. Not when he had gotten this far successfully. At least the lights were completely silent, so he could probably deal with it. He could try again later.

So Link sighed and wandered around some of the more house-like rooms, waiting between flashes of light until he finally found some sort of paper in a roll.

Hoping it wasn't toilet paper, he grabbed a bunch of it and went back to the broken window to clean up the mess on the floor.

After t—

There was a ringing in Link's hand. His left hand. The one with the mark of the triforce, and now, the stone.

It felt like a static, but a deep static, and it it seemed to slowly grow more and more intense.

First he felt panic, but he noticed after walking back to one of the rooms away from the captain's room that the feeling lessened. Then walking closer to it the feeling grew.

He didnt know what to think. The feeling wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but it wasn't pleasant either. He didnt know if going closer to what seemed to be its source would eventually hurt him... but there was this... pull towards it, like a subconscious part of Link's mind that just told him "you need to see what that is, you need to help it."

...Why did he need to help it? And why did it feel like it was somehow a part of him, yet so incredibly distant at the same time? And what was "it"?!

He couldn't get it out of his head, though. He just needed to get closer, he didnt understand it, but he needed to.

So he did. And it wasn't coming from the captain's steering room either, it was further. And slightly to the left of him, down a splitting path.

There was no visual for this splitting path, just a feeling. Link didn't understand, but he fumbled around until the red light's pulse illuminated just at the moment he was looking in the right spot, and Link could see that, in the middle of the desk with all the controls, was a large meter. This meter could go north, west, east, and south, rather than just forward and back, and Link realized this was likely the direction they were going in, pointed directly forward.

He needed to go west, right? To the left?

So he did. He turned the rotation of the stick around in its socket, and the ship shifted direction.

Link actually laughed a little bit at figuring that out! He would have laughed more if he knew he had a direct way of getting home (and that the lights would stop being so ominous), but it brought him a bit of joy throughout all the confusion, at least.

The boat kept turning, and eventually the static feeling in his hand became a stable hum. Then it went back to a static, as he turned past... a person? What?!

Link shifted the meter so that the boat was stabilized in the direction of the person, and the static turned into a hum again.

Something about that person, though... what they were wearing...

...That was Link's knight outfit.

It was slightly modified, quite a bit worn down with some patches of odd colors to repair it, but... that was his outfit.

The person shifted their position in the void to look at Link, made a surprised but hopeful expression, and then snapped their fingers. And suddenly the hum stopped.

Was this another person who got put in the void? Another lost person? Like him? It must have been—they had a knight's outfit, even down to a slightly off shade of green! They had brown, fluffy hair that Link didnt even know how they could see out of, and waved at him! They seemed to be beckoning his attention, making gestures to the boat Link was piloting.

Link tried his best to slow the boat down, and pointed to the direction of the shattered window. He felt a bit embarrassed realizing he still didnt know where the actual entrance of the ship was, but that didnt matter right now.

The person nodded abruptly and swam over to the window. Link sprinted over there, quickly out of breath, but he made it just in time for the person to gingerly wiggle through the gap in the glass shards and drop down into the stable gravity of the boat.

"Did you summon me here? You—" Link rubbed his forehead. "Sorry I'm bad at introductions, but I saw you snapped your fingers and the weird hum I was feeling stopped and..."

Link looked down. This person, they also had a stone on their hand. The same stone Link had. And under that stone... was the marking of the triforce.

Link's stomach dropped. Did... did Demise actually...?

Finally he broke the gaze and looked back up at the person's green eyes as they awaited for Link's sentence to resume.

He couldn't even speak for a moment. But eventually, voice wavering, he had to ask.

"What... what's your name?!"

They seemed slightly stunned at the sharpness and fear of Link's tone, but, after hesitating for a moment, they finally answered.