MEANWHILE
in the Lost Woods...
The green-haired boy stooped down, two fingers gingerly testing a patch of dried mud on the cobbled stone floor.
The Forest Temple was a mythical place, even for the Kokiri. They respected what it represented, but rarely went near it. Even Dilly, one of the oldest who was still among them, had only stepped foot in the temple one other time before. Then, as now, it was as part of a mission to understand what was happening in or around the Lost Wood. These were strange days, prone to stranger nights, and the Kokiri were anxious about what they didn't know of the going-ons beyond their forest.
Stalfos were known to walk the temple courtyard at night, and the eerie light of a poe's lantern could be seen flickering like the will'o'wisp, so the boy had been careful to approach the Forest Temple in the light of day. Which meant that the light coming in through the entrance to the temple marked a very real countdown, by which the boy would need to take whatever there was to learn here and be gone.
"Someone was here. There was a struggle of some kind," the child noted aloud, as the amber light of the orb fairy drifted overhead.
Black splotches on the stone.
Blood. Someone had been hurt. Possibly more than one 'someone.'
"I can't tell how they left," the boy mused, continuing to air his thoughts aloud as he examined the individual clues and tried to use them in his mind's eye to understand just what he was seeing. Someone came in here. Three, maybe four? A struggled ensued, but there were no bodies. Nor evidence of bodies having been dragged away.
It begged the question of whether they'd left at all. They could still be here, their souls trapped in the poe's light or shambling about as Stalfos.
Or worse, ReDead.
"I don't sense the presence of the Sage of the Forest," Ayala noted, the melodic voice echoing in the back of his mind, even as he looked up and contemplated the vaulted ceiling above them.
He remembered Saria. Her absence from the Kokiri Village had diminished them, and he found the notion that she occupied now a place alongside the Great Deku Tree as a protector of the Forest less comforting than he probably ought to have. Because she wasn't with them, she was here.
And, seemingly, she was not here either.
A shadow by the door prompted the Kokiri into motion. His footsteps silent as he crept into the shadows of a support pillar. The outline of a wolfos was cast upon the far wall.
Had the pack he'd encountered earlier managed to track him here this quickly?
That question was frozen in his mind as another shadow overlaid that of the wolfos. Gasping, his breath stuck in his throat, the boy risked a peer from behind the pillar.
"Moblin," he uttered softly.
Cyrania,
Guardian Angel Haruki,
Valen,
N3v3rM0r3,
ZwagXerathYT,
Lurking Krog,
vue2026,
RPM,
Finetales,
mattmanganon
