The second half of the ascent was a journey into an older, stranger world. The rock of the upper canyon was different—a dark, crystalline basalt that seemed to hum with a faint, dormant energy. The wind that howled down from the ridge was no longer a simple, physical force; it was a voice, a chorus of high, thin, whispering notes that spoke of eons.
Link's body, which had been a finely-honed machine of muscle and will, was beginning to break down. His meager supply of food was gone. His waterskin was empty. The initial, sharp pains had given way to a deep, cellular exhaustion, a weariness that settled in his very bones. He was running on the last, smoky fumes of his own resolve.
It was then that the canyon itself began to test him.
The whispers were not just in the wind. They were in the stone. As his raw, bleeding fingers sought purchase, the ancient rock began to speak to him, not in words, but in pure, overwhelming sensations, the geological memories of the earth itself.
He gripped a sharp outcropping, and his mind was flooded with the immense, crushing weight of a billion silent years. He felt the slow, inexorable rise of the mountains, the patient grinding of glaciers, the rise and fall of oceans. His own life, his grief, his desperate, scrabbling struggle, felt like a single, insignificant grain of sand in an endless, meaningless desert. A wave of profound, cosmic apathy washed over him, the temptation to simply let go, to release his grip and become one with the patient dust of eternity. He fought it, his breath catching in his throat, clinging to the small, fierce, and utterly illogical idea that his brief, painful life mattered.
He pulled himself higher. He reached for a new handhold, a section of rock that was strangely smooth. The moment he touched it, a new vision seared through him. He saw a battle from a forgotten age, fought on the very cliff face he now clung to. He saw warriors with wings of pure light fighting twisted creatures of shadow. He saw heroes of the past, their faces a blur of courage and despair, fall from these same heights, their bodies turning to ash before they reached the bottom. He felt the echoes of their final, futile struggles, the endless, repeating cycle of war and sacrifice that always ended in dust. The whispers of the stone told him a simple, terrible truth: You are not the first. You will not be the last. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Your struggle is pointless.
He gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw aching. He refused to listen. His fight was not pointless. His parents' lives were not pointless. He kept climbing.
He reached for a final, crucial handhold, a dark patch of rock just below a wide ledge. The moment his fingers touched it, a familiar, terrible coldness seeped into him. This rock was tainted. It held a memory of the shadow. He felt the cold, seductive philosophy of the old man, of Ganondorf himself, a nihilistic whisper that was the most dangerous temptation of all. Why do you struggle? The world is a place of pain. The cycle of life is a cycle of suffering. To fight is to prolong the agony. Let go. Surrender. Let the Great Silence bring peace to all things. Let it bring peace to you.
He hung there, suspended between the abyss below and the sky above, his body screaming, his mind a battlefield. The apathy of the stone, the futility of history, the seductive logic of the shadow—it was all a single, powerful argument for him to simply give up.
He was about to fail. His grip, weakened by exhaustion and doubt, was loosening.
He looked down.
Far, far below, a tiny figure in the darkness of the canyon floor. The creature. It was no longer sitting. It was standing, its head tilted all the way back, its ancient, green eyes fixed directly on him. It was not eating. It was not moving. It was simply watching.
The creature did not offer help. It did not offer encouragement. Its gaze was one of pure, absolute, and unwavering observation. It was the look of a god waiting to see if this tiny, struggling mortal was actually worth the atoms it was made of. A silent, cosmic challenge. Show me.
A surge of something, a feeling he had almost forget, coursed through Link. It was not anger. It was not hope. It was pure, unyielding, defiant pride. He would not fall. He would not fail. Not with this uncaring god as his witness.
With a final, guttural cry of effort that was ripped from the very depths of his soul, he found a strength he did not know he had. He lunged upward, his fingers catching the edge of the ledge. He pulled, his entire body a single, screaming knot of will, and hauled himself over the top.
He collapsed onto the flat, windswept surface of the canyon rim, his body a broken, trembling wreck, but his spirit unbroken. He had done it. He had survived the mountain. He had survived the whispers of eternity. He had survived himself.
He lay there, gasping the clean, sweet air of the highlands, the familiar sun a warm and welcome blessing on his face. He had escaped his prison. Far below, the creature, its purpose now fulfilled, gave a single, slow nod that Link could not see. Then it turned and, with a movement that was neither walking nor vanishing, it simply was no longer there, its presence receding back into the shadows of the canyon as if it had been a dream.
Link was alone again, under the vast, open sky. But he was no longer at the bottom. He had climbed out of his lowest point, both literally and figuratively, and had found in the process a strength he never knew he possessed.