The silence that followed the demon's departure was heavier than any stone, more profound than any scream. It was the silence of utter and complete devastation. In the ruins of Ordon Village, the survivors stood like ghosts in a graveyard, their world reduced to a landscape of smoldering timbers, shattered lives, and the cold, indifferent light of a new morning. Hope was a foreign country, its borders now impossibly far away.
It was Paya who moved first. Her Sheikah training, a lifetime of discipline forged in the face of impossible odds, was the only thing that cut through the thick, paralyzing fog of grief. She moved with a grim, methodical purpose, her red eyes sweeping over the scene, triaging a catastrophe.
Her first priority was Link. He lay where Ilia had dragged him, a small, broken figure whose life was a flickering, guttering candle flame. The dark wound in his shoulder was not bleeding, but it seemed to emanate a palpable cold, a sliver of the demon's despair left behind to finish its master's work.
"He is losing time," she said, her voice a low, urgent whisper that broke the spell of shock holding the others. "We cannot stay here."
Impa, her ancient face looking as if it had aged a century in a single night, nodded in solemn agreement. "The shadow has marked this valley. It is a place of death now. We are not safe."
The work began. The hardest work of their lives. There was no time for proper funerals, for the long, quiet rites their people deserved. They made a single, great pyre in the center of the square, a place to honor the fallen villagers who had died defending their homes. But for their heroes, they dug graves.
They buried Elara in the garden behind her ruined house, beside the wilting remains of her favorite roses. They had no body for Korgon, only the great, blackened crater and his war hammer, which had been thrown clear of the blast. They planted the hammer deep in the earth at the edge of the crater, a monolithic, immovable headstone for the mountain that had saved them. And they buried Elwin, the cheerful postman, and Rohm, the unbreakable blacksmith, side by side on the hill overlooking the valley, two friends who had given their lives for the same small boy.
Ilia stood before the two fresh mounds of earth, her body trembling with a grief so profound it had no tears left. Her childhood, her home, her friends, her entire world had been burned to ash in a single night. She looked at Link, unconscious on his stretcher, and a new, hard feeling began to crystallize in her heart over the pain. A cold, unyielding resolve. She was all he had left of this place. She would not fail him.
The two groups of survivors prepared for their final parting. Impa gathered the few remaining families—Fado, the baker and his wife, and a handful of others. Their path was one of survival. "We will travel to the quarry towns in the west," the elder declared, her voice a thin but unbreakable thread. "We will tell them what happened here. We will endure."
Paya stood with Ilia, her gaze on Link. "Our path is more dangerous, and it cannot be walked by the wounded or the slow. We must enter the Faron Woods and seek the sacred spring."
A battered but still functional cart, the one Rohm had returned with, was prepared. Fado, his own arm in a sling, used the last of his strength to reinforce its wheels. "It's not much," he said, his voice thick with unshed tears, "but it will carry the boy."
Paya, with a look of profound reverence, took up the Master Sword. It was heavy, inert steel, its divine light completely gone, but she strapped it to her back as if it were the most sacred object in the world. It was a burden, a reminder, and a sliver of a promise.
The two groups stood at the edge of the ruined village, at a fork in a road of ashes. Impa placed a wrinkled hand on Paya's arm. "The legends say the Faron Spring is guarded by spirits who have not seen a Hylian in a thousand years," she whispered. "They will not yield the path easily."
"We will not ask them to yield," Paya replied, her red eyes burning with a cold fire. "We will demand it."
The refugees turned west, a small, sad procession walking away from the graveyard of their lives. Paya and Ilia turned north, towards the deep, shadowed eaves of the Faron Woods.
The fellowship was a broken, desperate thing. A Sheikah guardian whose charge was dying. A village girl who had lost everything but her own stubborn will to survive. And a hero, unconscious and unaware, his life and the fate of the world hanging by the thinnest of threads.
Ilia took the reins of the cart, her knuckles white. Paya walked ahead, a silent, deadly vanguard, the sleeping Master Sword on her back. They did not look back at the smoking ruins of Ordon. There was nothing left for them there. There was only the path ahead, a perilous journey into a legendary wood, a desperate race against a fading light.