Kakariko Village, ancestral home of the legendary Shiekah Tribe, border town between the Gorons of Death Mountain and the Hyrule Royal Family in Castle Town, and now the temporary residence of an untold number of festival attendees...
And
that dog.
The ridiculous mutt was a sight to behold, alright. Its legs resembled aquatic cattails, stumpy brown and white fur that was so puffed out that they looked like cylinders with no visible feet attached to a sausage shaped spotted body with an equally ridiculous tail, and a small squat head with a jaw that didn't seem to ever fully close, drooping ears, a pair of lower canine teeth that almost reached the upper lip, and two small black eyes that rounded out the appearance of the mutt to being quite possibly the dumbest creature in the lands, and that included presumably brainless creatures like Like-Likes and the man that was currently trying to climb the windmill. Of course, for Lev, the creature was an annoyance because it was the only living thing in the town that seemed to have paid him any attention, and was currently standing between him and the barrels of fireworks that he intended to detonate.
It wasn't that Lev was malicious, far from it, because if he were the dog would have been set ablaze by now, but rather he was feeling festive and feeling the inclination of watching the chaos of several dozen questionably stable explosives the Gorons provided for this event all detonated simultaneously and without being properly anchored first. For a dead creature, it certainly would liven up the party, and maybe, just maybe, out of the chaos, a particularly heroic sort would come and combat the cascading barrels of Dodongo-like flame and burning projectiles to save the plump little children from the least threatening cataclysm since ten minutes ago when Lev unlatched a Cucco enclosure and the birds were starting to realize freedom was at hand.
In Lev's eyes, the inclusion of panic-inducing fireworks incidents to the veritable time bomb of those horrible little creatures' presence could only make the evening even better, and while it would have been doubtless horrible for so many people, some less than adventurous sorts would claim that it would ruin the entire evening they were otherwise going to spend on rigged festival games and on overpriced food that was probably made up of goat slurry and pine cones, most people would proudly boast that yes, they were here at this most remarkable festival to remember.
And the only thing preventing such a glorious thing from occurring was this stupid,
stupid dog.
"Go, eaaat!" Lev hissed, his lantern set down on a table while the rest of him was invisible to wandering eyes, and the Poe stared the blank-eyed, yappy dog down. Sitting all around him were three sausages Lev had pilfered from one of the dozen or so stands exclusively dedicated to selling meat, and the dog refused to accept his peace offering, at least long enough to stop barking while Lev set his lantern against that really tantalizing wick that was dangling from a gap between wooden planks that made up the barrel's circumference.
Of course, tormenting the living and having standoffs with dogs weren't the reasons Lev had found himself in this festival today, although there was a chance he would have swung by on his own accord had he learned of its existence from other sources than a voice in his mind nagging him to go to the graveyard during the festival for the Hero of Time, the green character that saved Hyrule and had his story recounted enough times from so many people and so many books that Lev could recite it perhaps as well as the alphabet and Anne Fossiway's
Tales of the Crypt: A Collection of Hauntings, Peculiarities, and the Dead, which was one of the first tomes Lev came across when trying to figure out exactly
what he was, sometime in the last century when the King was about 200 pounds overweight and was rumoured to have perished after his horse's legs gave out under the weight, he rolled down into a ravine and was asphyxiated by a Deku-Baba that tried to consume the portly royal and in turn got stuck and died of starvation because it could not open or close its fiendish jaws again.
It was absolutely Lev's favorite story.
And so, while the other Poes that Lev knew for a fact were haunting the graveyard and were probably hoping for some hapless fool to get within swinging distance, Lev was in the middle of it all, trying to avoid mortal eyes while blending in among them, all because some feminine voice he was certain was not of his own conjuration told him to be here. How long had it been? He'd been here since sundown the night before, and already the rising sun had cleared the far horizon, illuminating the town and the river that bisected Hyrule Field down below with brilliant morning flare. Lev hated it.
Deciding that the voice was a fluke and he might have in fact been imagining it, Lev decided to make his move, the dog be damned, and go ignite that wick, when an overwhelming familiar voice filled his consciousness;
Β’ΟΠΌΡ ΡΟ ΡΠ½Ρ gΡΞ±Ξ½ΡΡΞ±Ρβ.
Β’ΟΠΌΡ qΟ
ΞΉΒ’ΠΊβΡ.
ΡΞΉΠΌΡ ΞΉΡ ΟΖ ΡΠ½Ρ ΡΡΡΡΞ·Β’Ρ....
The suddenness and the volume of it all startled Lev, an impressive feat at that, that he momentarily forgot what he was doing before realizing that something was tugging on his cloak...
"NO, GET! OFF! BAD VERMIN!", he shouted at the dog, swatting ineffectually at the creature that was hanging from his scraps of clothing with unexpected dedication. Heads were turning; this was not good.
Lev managed to shake the dog loose after managing to strike its rump, where it took off with a startled yelp to its owner, who was now looking around in Lev's general direction. And just like that, a voice in Lev's head ruined absolutely everything.
The Poe managed to float away as fast as he could manage, stealth be damned, and soon found himself at the gates of the graveyard, a couple startled voices and a particularly girlish shriek from a man in his early 40s in his wake. Lev was rather irritated, wondering exactly who or what was inside. He'd have words with them, although the nature of said words would depend largely on if the voice's owner was a mighty Great Fairy, or a goblin of a woman who knew a few tricky spells and somehow figured out how to communicate with the dead from all the way to Ordon Village, where Lev was trying to figure out exactly the large man was trying to do by wrestling with a goat.
Not immediately seeing anyone in the vicinity, Lev felt a ringing sense of disappointment.
"I will have you know, whoever you are, you ruined a perfectly planned evening!" he called, his voice cackling in the wind. One of the perks of being a ghost in a grave yard was no matter what you said, no matter how ineffectual or ridiculous, it still sounded incredibly spooky.
And so, without materializing, Lev set himself over a grave, lantern bobbing gently in the morning breeze for whoever it was to show.
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