Day One
The rhythm of the forge is the rhythm of my world. It is the only language I have ever truly mastered. The hiss of hot steel in the quenching barrel is a word of finality. The ringing song of the hammer is a sentence, shaping the world to my will, one deliberate strike at a time. Today, the rhythm is wrong. The hammer feels too light in my hand, the fire not quite hot enough. I am forging a simple set of hinges, but my mind is on the fangs of a wolf and the look of terror I saw in my son's eyes.
My boy, Link. He has a stillness in him that unnerves others, but to me, it is a language as clear as the ring of my anvil. I see the world in his eyes. Lately, I have seen too much. I saw the truth of that charlatan merchant in his gaze long before the locket was found. I saw the sickness of the spring in his quiet refusal to drink. And after that day with the wolves, I saw a new, hard thing settle behind his twilight-blue eyes: the knowledge that the world is a place that requires a sharp edge.
It is a knowledge I have tried my entire life to shield him from. When Elara and I found him on our doorstep, a babe swaddled against the cold, he felt like a promise—a link to a quieter, more peaceful life. We had long accepted that our home would be without the sound of a child's laughter. And then he arrived, silent as the dawn, and our home was filled not with laughter, but with a profound, watchful peace. He was our gift from the Goddesses. But I am a blacksmith. I know that even the finest gifts can have flaws in the forging, weaknesses that can break under pressure.
A commotion from the village square shatters my troubled thoughts. It is not the sound of the market or children's games. It is the sharp, piercing cry of a girl's panic. Ilia. I douse the hinges in the barrel with a sizzle and step out from the heat of the forge into the cool, late-afternoon air. A small crowd has gathered, their faces turned towards the pastures, towards the dark, forbidding line of the Faron Woods. I see Ilia, her face a mess of tears, and her father, the baker, trying to console her.
"She just bolted!" Ilia is sobbing. "Straight for the woods! My fault… all my fault…"
I push through the small crowd, my heart starting a slow, heavy drumbeat against my ribs. "What is it? What's happened?"
The baker looks at me, his face pale. "Pip. The kid goat. Ilia's little one. It broke from the pen and ran. Straight into Faron." He gestures helplessly at the impassive wall of trees. A resigned sadness is already settling on him. It is just a goat, after all. A sad loss, but not a tragedy.
But then my eyes find my wife, Elara. She is standing at the very edge of the crowd, her hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide with a dawning horror. I follow her gaze and my blood runs cold. Link is not there. He is not watching from his usual quiet perch. He is gone.
"Where is Link?" I ask, my voice coming out as a low growl.
No one needs to answer. We all know. He is a shepherd before he is anything else. And a shepherd does not abandon one of his flock. A villager points a trembling finger. "I saw him… he ran towards the woods just a moment after the goat. He had his shield…"
The world narrows to the dark maw of the forest's edge. The Royal Decree, the shadow-wolves, the creeping blight—none of it would have mattered to him. All he would have seen was a single, frightened animal in need of his protection. My son's greatest strength—his boundless, silent empathy—has led him into the one place I would have forbidden him to go.
Action is the only antidote to the poison of fear. "Fado! Toren!" I bark the names of the two sturdiest men in the village. "Grab axes and torches. We're going in."
There are murmurs of protest. "Rohm, the decree… the wolves…"
"He is a child!" I roar, and the words are like stones in my throat. "My son!"
That is enough to silence them. Fear of the woods is a powerful thing, but the fear of being a man who did nothing while a child was in danger is stronger. We gather a small, hasty party. We are not hunters or warriors. We are farmers, a rancher, a blacksmith, armed with wood axes and the desperate hope of fathers.
We search the edge of the woods as dusk bleeds across the sky. We call his name until our throats are raw. My own calls feel hollow, swallowed by a forest that seems to be actively holding its breath. The air is cold, and the silence is a living thing, pressing in on us. We find the tracks—the small, frantic hoofprints of the goat, and beside them, the steady, determined footprints of my son. They lead into the darkness, and we can only follow so far. To go deeper at night, with the wolves we know are hunting these grounds, would be suicide. It would be trading five men for one lost boy.
We call off the search as the last light dies, and the walk back to the village is the longest of my life. The failure sits in my belly like a lead ingot. I have to face Elara. She meets me at the door, her face a fragile mask of hope. The look in my eyes is all the answer she needs. The mask shatters, and she lets out a single, broken sob before collapsing into my arms. I hold her, my own grief a cold, hard knot in my chest. There is nothing I can say. The words do not exist.
Later, when the village has fallen into a restless, fearful slumber and Elara has finally cried herself to sleep, I retreat to my forge. The house is too empty. The silence in it is no longer the peaceful presence of my son, but the gaping, screaming void of his absence.
I stoke the coals, the bellows breathing a weak, orange life into the darkness. I look at my tools, my hammers, my anvils. They are instruments of creation, of building. But they feel useless now. I cannot build a path for my son to walk home. I cannot forge a shield to protect him from a whole forest.
A cold rage, clean and pure, begins to burn in my gut. Rage at the wolves, at the shadows, at the forest. Rage at my own powerlessness. Rage at the fate that seems determined to claim my son. I walk to the heavy chest where I keep my finest materials. I pull out the ingot of high-grade steel I had been saving, the one that cost me more rupees than I care to admit. It is perfect, flawless, waiting for a masterwork.
I know, with a certainty that chills me to the bone, what I must build. I cannot protect him from his destiny. But I can give him a weapon to face it.
I thrust the ingot into the roaring heart of the forge. I watch it until it glows with the fury of the sun. Then, I take it to the anvil. I lift my heaviest hammer, its weight familiar and comforting. The world outside this forge has failed my son. I will not.
The first strike rings out, a sharp, violent cry in the mournful silence of the night. It is not a sound of creation. It is a declaration of war.
Day Two
The dawn arrives, gray and listless, as if the sun itself is in mourning. Ordon is a village of ghosts. The usual morning bustle is gone, replaced by hushed whispers and the heavy, dragging footsteps of people going about their chores with no heart. Every eye is drawn to the forest, as if by staring hard enough, they can force it to give up the child it has stolen.
My own home is a tomb. Elara sits at her loom, her hands moving automatically, weaving a pattern she has woven a hundred times. But there is no life in it. Every few minutes, her hands will still, and she will stare at Link's small, empty chair at our table. Her grief is a quiet thing, but it fills every corner of our house, every space that used to be filled with his silent presence. I cannot bear it.
The forge is my only sanctuary. The heat is a punishment I deserve, the labor a penance. I work all day without stopping, my body a machine fueled by grief and rage. I heat the steel, hammer it, fold it, hammer it again. The process is a brutal one. With every strike, I am beating the impurities out of the metal, aligning its spirit, making it stronger. With every strike, I am trying to do the same for my own soul. I am trying to hammer my fear into resolve, my sorrow into strength.
I see him in my mind with every blow. Link as a toddler, his small hands mimicking mine. Link sitting on the roof, his eyes on the distant castle. Link standing between his flock and the wolves, a tiny shepherd with the heart of a lion. Love, pride, terror—they all flow from my heart, down my arms, and into the steel through the head of my hammer. This will be more than a sword. It will be a part of me. It will be the father's hand he can hold when I am not there to protect him.
In the afternoon, the forge door creaks open. Impa, the elder, stands there, her ancient face a roadmap of sorrows seen and endured. She does not offer the empty platitudes the other villagers have given me. She simply watches me work for a long time, her silence as deep as my son's.
I pull the glowing blade from the fire and begin to hammer the edge.
"A fine blade takes a strong fire and a heavy hand," she says, her voice a dry rustle. "But it is the quenching that gives it its true spirit."
"He is gone, Impa," I say, my voice raw. I do not stop hammering.
"Is he?" she replies, her gaze distant. "Special souls are not so easily extinguished, Rohm. They are embers that can be fanned back to life by the slightest breeze. Their paths are woven by the Goddesses, and the pattern is not always clear to us."
She walks closer, her eyes on the sword taking shape on my anvil. "You cannot forge a shield strong enough to protect him from his own spirit. That is a truth all parents of such children must learn. You can only forge a sword that will help him face it. That is your burden. And his."
She places a wrinkled hand on my shoulder. It is light, but it carries the weight of a mountain. "Have faith, blacksmith. Not in luck, but in him."
She leaves me then, alone with the ringing of my hammer and her heavy words. She is right. I have known it all along. I am not forging a tool for a blacksmith's son. I am forging a weapon for a hero. And that knowledge is a far heavier weight than any hammer I have ever lifted.
As night falls on the second day, the blade is finally shaped. It is short, light, perfect for a child's hand, but it is flawlessly balanced and lethally sharp. I have done my work. The metal is ready. I look at its perfect, deadly form, and I feel no pride of creation. Only the deep, aching sorrow of a father who has just handed his son over to a war he cannot win for him.
Day Three
Hope is a finite resource. By the morning of the third day, the well in Ordon has run dry. The villagers now speak of Link in the past tense. They look at Elara and me with pity in their eyes. The baker's wife brings a loaf of fresh bread to our door, her face etched with sympathy, a silent offering of condolence. I want to throw it against the wall. My son is not a memory. He is not gone. He cannot be.
I retreat to the forge. My work today is on the details—the crossguard, the hilt, the pommel. It is finer, more delicate work, and it leaves my mind too much room to wander. My thoughts drift back, unbidden, to that cold morning seven years ago. The crisp air, the surprise of finding the bundle on our doorstep. The sleeping babe within, so quiet, so perfect. And the strange, luminous green stone clutched in his fist, a stone that now sits in a locked box in our home. We never told anyone about it. It was the first of his many secrets.
I remember his first steps, his first time holding a piece of cooled metal, the first time he played a tune on a whistle. He never spoke a word, but his life was a song. I realize, as I file the edges of the crossguard, that I have always known this day would come. I have always known that the quiet, simple life I had planned for him was a dream, and that his true life, his real purpose, lay somewhere beyond our small, peaceful valley. I just never thought it would come so soon. I never thought the world would be so cruel as to demand it of a child.
As the sun begins its descent on this third, terrible day, my work is done. I fit the leather-wrapped hilt to the blade, securing the pommel. The sword is complete. I hold it up. It is a good sword. A fine sword. Perhaps the best thing I have ever made. A monument to a boy I could no longer protect. My vigil of fire and steel is over. I feel hollowed out, an empty vessel filled only with grief. The purpose that drove me for three days is gone, leaving only the terrible, silent truth in its wake.
I am standing there, the finished sword in my hand, my own grief-stricken face reflected in its polished surface, when I hear it.
A distant shout from the pastures. Fado's voice, raw and powerful.
At first, I dismiss it. Another wolf sighting, perhaps. A new alarm in a village that has known nothing but fear. I don't have the strength to care.
But then the shout comes again, and this time, other voices join it, a rising chorus of disbelief, of shock, of a hope so sudden and impossible it sounds like madness. And carried on the wind, I hear the words, clear as the ring of my anvil.
"He's back! The boy is back!"
I freeze. The sword suddenly feels impossibly heavy. It can't be. My mind, broken by grief, is playing tricks on me. The wind is a liar.
But the shouting grows, becoming a wave of pure, unadulterated joy that crashes against the walls of my forge. The entire village is alive with it. I drop the sword onto a pile of leather sacks, its purpose, its very meaning, suddenly and completely uncertain. I stumble out of the forge, my heart a wild, frantic drum against my ribs, my legs moving before my mind can catch up. I run, pushing past villagers who are laughing and crying at the same time. I don't dare to believe. I will not let myself hope. Not until I see him.
And then the crowd parts. And I see him. Standing there in the twilight, small and dirty and alive. So terribly, wonderfully alive. He is not the same. I see it instantly. There is a new weight in his shoulders, a new wisdom in his eyes. And on his arm is a shield I made, but one that now holds the light of the goddesses. He is my son. And he is a stranger. But he is home. And in that moment, it is all that matters.