The Faron Woods had become their entire world. For days, they traveled under its thick, emerald canopy, the light of the sun a distant, dappled memory. The journey was a slow, arduous crawl, the progress measured not in miles, but in the painful turning of the cart's wheels over gnarled roots and through muddy hollows. The woods were no longer actively hostile, as they had been when the fellowship first entered. Since they had passed the trials of the Ancients, the forest seemed to have accepted their presence, but its mood was one of deep, wary sorrow. It was a wounded kingdom, and they were petitioners moving through its halls.
Link was a ghost. He was awake, his body healed, but his spirit was adrift in a vast, grey ocean of grief. During the day, he walked beside the cart, his feet moving mechanically, his eyes fixed on the dormant Master Sword strapped to Paya's back. The blade was a constant, silent rebuke. It was a symbol of the power he had been granted and the worthiness he had already lost. The weight of his failure was heavier than any shield.
At night, he did not sleep. He sat by the fire, his own father's simple, well-made sword across his knees, and stared into the flames. The nightmares were waiting for him behind his eyelids, and he refused to give them purchase. He was a sentinel guarding the ruins of his own heart.
Paya watched him with the keen, analytical eye of a Sheikah. She saw the deep, festering wound in his spirit. She tried to engage him, to bring him back to the world of the living. She would show him maps, discuss their potential routes, try to impress upon him the urgency of their quest and the growing threat of Ganondorf. "The Princess is moving, Link," she would say, her voice firm. "The shadow has declared open war. We must find a way to reawaken the sword."
Her words, meant to instill a sense of purpose, did not seem to reach him. He would simply nod, his gaze distant, his spirit a thousand miles away, lost in the ashes of his home.
It was Ilia who saw not a broken component, but a broken boy. Her heart ached with her own grief for her home, for her parents, for Rohm and Elara who had been a second family to her. But seeing Link so utterly lost, so consumed by his silent sorrow, she found that her own grief had a purpose: to be a bridge to his.
On the fifth night of their journey, she found him by the crackling fire, away from the sleeping Paya. He was not idle. He had the whetstone Korgon had given him and was attempting to sharpen his father's sword. But his hands trembled with a grief-stricken palsy, and the sound of the stone on the steel was a clumsy, scraping noise, not the clean, rhythmic hiss of a practiced smith. He was trying to maintain his father's legacy, but his own sorrow was making a mockery of the act.
Ilia sat beside him, the silence stretching between them, comfortable and familiar. She watched his clumsy, frustrated movements for a long moment.
"He was so proud of that sword," she said, her voice soft as moss.
Link froze, his hands stilling on the blade.
"After you left Ordon the first time," she continued, her gaze lost in the fire, "he would work on it at night. I saw him once. He told my father it was the strongest, most balanced blade he had ever forged." She took a shaky breath. "He said he put… a father's prayer into the steel. A prayer that it would be strong enough to protect you, because he couldn't."
The words, meant to be a comfort, were the final, precise key that unlocked the vault of his grief. He looked down at the sword in his hands—this physical manifestation of his father's love, this tool he now felt unworthy to even hold. His father's prayer had not been answered. He had not been protected. And he had not been there to protect his father.
His hands began to shake uncontrollably. He let go of the sword and the whetstone as if they had burned him. He did not make a sound, but his small body was wracked with a storm of silent, repressed sobs, the grief and the guilt and the sheer, unbearable loss of it all finally breaking free. He hunched over, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders trembling with the force of a pain too deep for any sound.
Ilia did not try to comfort him with empty words. She simply moved closer and put a warm, steadying arm around his shaking shoulders. She sat with him in the sacred, silent woods, a friend holding the broken pieces of her hero, her quiet presence a promise that even in the deepest, darkest night, he was not entirely alone.
When Paya returned from her patrol, she found them like that. She saw the sword on the ground and the fresh, wet tracks of tears on Link's face. She saw the profound, exhausted sorrow, but for the first time since he had awoken, she also saw a flicker of the boy he had been. The first crack in the ice of his despair.
Later that night, after Link had finally fallen into a true, deep sleep for the first time, his father's sword resting beside him, Paya unrolled her map by the firelight. Ilia sat across from her, a new, quiet strength in her eyes.
"The grief is a poison, just like the demon's," Paya said, her voice a low whisper. "It must be let out, or it will fester." She looked at Ilia with a newfound respect. "You are a better healer than I am, shepherdess."
She then turned her attention to the map. "The Koroks have guided us as far as they dare. From here, the path to the spring is hidden, guarded by the three Ancient Elders of the forest. We cannot force our way through. We must find each one and ask for their blessing."
She pointed to a spot deep in the heart of the woods, a place marked with the symbol of a great tree. "The legends say the first elder is the Lord of the Wood, a spirit as old as the forest itself. His domain is the Grove of Sages, two days' journey from here."
Ilia looked from the map to the sleeping form of her friend. The path ahead was long and filled with trials. But as she looked at Link, she felt her own resolve harden. The journey was no longer just about healing a hero. It was about helping a boy find his way home, even if home was a place that existed now only in memory.