Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The woman in white visits his shop often.

“What are you looking for today, ma’am?” Amik asks from behind the counter when the bell on the door announces her arrival. “More yarn?”

(She’s been coming to him almost every morning for months, and still he doesn’t know what her name is.) 

“Yes, you know me so well,” her voice always has a sort of…ethereal quality to it that he can never actually describe. It’s like…It’s like if honey and sugar had a baby and named it Kindness, or something, it’s-it’s warm in a way that the sun could never be, even during the hottest of summers, and the smile she gives him wraps around his very soul and comforts it with a hug. “How is business lately?”

“You’re still my only customer!” he calls as she disappears into the many shelves that are lined with every item he could find during his daily walks: string, yarn, leaves, rocks and jewels, sticks, arrows-

“You’re selling bugs now?” her voice echoes from the back of his store. “So many beetles!”

“They’re my favorite!” he shouts back.

Her laugh is like the harp he watches her play for the kids on the street, melodic and uplifting. “I’m partial to butterflies myself!”

A few minutes later she comes up to his counter with an armful of blue and white yarn.

“Find everything you need?” he smiles, calculating the price and—Holy Hylia that’s a lot of yarn-

“Yes, I know it’s a lot,” she chuckles, smiling back, reaching into the pocket of her dress to pull out a small brown pouch. Her eerily bright blue eyes gleam. “I’m trying to make a blanket, you see, or maybe a sailcloth?”

“Sailcloth?” he repeats, raising an eyebrow. “You got a boat?”

“No, no, it’s more like a—Oh, what’s the word—I call it a sailcloth but it’s more like something that helps to slow your descent from a long fall, so you don’t get hurt and land safely?”

He shakes his head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am-”

“Never mind, never mind,” she shakes her head, pulling open the pouch and digging around inside of it with one hand. “How much for all of the yarn?”

It…It really is a lot of yarn, probably…No…

“Two-” his voice shakes and he clears his throat to steady it. She’s…She’s purchasing his entire stock of blue and white yarn- “Two thousand rupees, please.”

She dumps ten golden rupees out onto his counter with nothing but a friendly smile, pulling the ties of her pouch to close it and slipping it back into her pocket. Her long, golden hair sways from the tilt of her head as she tells him, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“M-Ma’am, wait!” he tries to stop her as she turns and walks towards the door to leave. “This is—This is too much! You can’t possibly need this much yarn!” 

“Oh, I do,” she says over her shoulder, pushing the door open, the ringing bell marking her exit. “I have no idea how to crochet.”

The door claps shut and she’s gone. Amik is suddenly two thousand (two thousand) rupees richer. With this money, he can pay off his debt to the goat farmer and finally work less than twelve hours a day. 

It is, coincidentally, the exact amount of money he had prayed for late last night before he went to bed. 

Maybe Hylia is real after all, he thinks as he scoops the money into his wallet.

— 

That night, Amik is at the tavern celebrating his newfound financial freedom with a drink. 

“You see Her today?” The man sitting next to him at the bar asks the bartender. 

The bartender shakes his head. “I usually see Her on my walk here, but today She wasn’t at Her usual spot on the road.”

“I wonder-”

“Who are you guys talking about?” Amik asks, curious. 

The bartender stares at him. “The…The Goddess Hylia?”

“The Goddess Hylia?” he repeats, incredulous. “You really believe she’s real?”

“You don’t?” The man next to him questions, looking at him like he has three heads. “She practically lives here, her temple is down the road!”

“Sure, but what has she done for us?”

“Oh, I don’t know, created us? Given us this safe haven, protected us from evil?”

“Evil?” Amik scoffs. “Like what? Plague? Famine? There’s still plenty of it to go around, it’s a wonder none of my customers have brought death to my shop’s door!”

“You have no customers, Amik,” The bartender points out. “I know because I walk by your ‘shop’ every day and see you drumming your fingers on the counter and mumbling prayers for business. Why do you pray if you don’t believe in Her?”

Because…

“Because it worked once,” he mumbles. “And only once. I have one customer, she comes in every morning and buys a few things, keeps me afloat.”

“‘She’?” The man repeats, raising an eyebrow. “What does she look like?”

Amik describes the woman in white down to the dimples in her cheeks when she smiles after finding a particular item on his shelves, how this morning she casually dropped two thousand rupees on yarn for something called a sailcloth. 

“She’s the woman who plays the harp for the children,” he clarifies when the two men stare at him. “You know, her?”

A glass slips from the bartender’s old, weathered fingers and shatters on the floor, drawing the attention of the rest of the tavern’s patrons and staff. He stares at Amik like he just told him he doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life. The other man’s mouth hangs open.

“You…” he falters. “You…”

“What?” Amik questions, frowning, glancing between the two with furrowed brows. “What’s wrong?”

“She’s been smiling upon you,” The bartender whispers, reverent. “The-The Goddess has been answering your prayers every single day for months and you didn’t know it?”

The tavern whispers. 

Amik laughs, shaking his head and refusing, “That’s crazy. Why would she do that?”

“Because the Goddess Hylia is kind,” A barmaid says, joining in on the conversation. “Just yesterday She healed my brother’s broken arm with the golden light of her blessing.”

“You…” The man next to him at the bar repeats himself. “You’re Blessed by Hylia Herself.”

“I don’t believe this,” he rises from his barstool, shaking his head, “She isn’t Hylia, she can’t be-”

“Why not?” The bartender asks.

“Because why would she pay for my items? Why wouldn’t she just walk into my shop and tell me she’s Hylia and make me give her things for free? Why doesn’t she just create what she needs herself?”

He shrugs. “You prayed for a customer, and a customer She became. If you don’t believe it’s Her, why not pray for Her to tell you who She is? It would be the easiest way to get proof.”

Amik chews his bottom lip. That would…That would be rude of him, wouldn’t it? To accuse his only customer, a woman he thinks of as his friend, to be some goddess only coming into his shop because he made one prayer months ago? And even if she were Hylia, why would she come almost every day? He never prayed for a daily customer, he only prayed for one, just so he could have some pocket change and some excitement during a slow day. He doesn’t want to offend her, and he doesn’t want to call her some kind of liar. He likes her.

“I’ll think about it,” is all he can manage as he leaves the tavern and walks home.

Before he drifts off to sleep, he thinks of the woman in white’s beautiful face and prays, If you really are Hylia, come into the shop and tell me your name. 

—

The next morning, there’s a never-ending line of customers in his shop, the whole village desperate to either see their Goddess in the flesh or see what items have apparently garnered her attention—her rupees—for months. 

Amik has never had to restock his shelves, before, but by noon almost all of the yarn and arrows are gone, and a little girl is begging her mother to let her have a pet beetle. The woman in white, allegedly Hylia, has yet to walk through the door.

“You said She’s usually here by now?” A woman asks as she hands him fifty rupees for a chunk of amber.

“Yes,” he shoves the purple gem into his bulging wallet. He’s going to have to start putting the money in his pockets before it bursts. “I, um, I prayed for her to come and tell me her name last night, and if she doesn’t show that’ll prove everyone wrong, that she isn’t Hylia.”

“Don’t you want Her to be Hylia?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t like the Goddess, what she stands for, what she means for us mortals. I think she’s an excuse we use to justify all of our wrongs.”

“Strange,” his 219th customer of the day—in history—remarks. “Thank you for the amber.”

“Hope to see you again soon!” he calls to her retreating form as she leaves the shop, greeting customer number 220 with a cheerful, “Welcome to ‘Amik’s-”

The bell of the shop’s announces yet another new customer to join the line that’s threatening to spill out the door. The rest of Amik’s sentence dies in his throat.

The woman in white has finally arrived, and there is a sword on her back steaming with black blood.

The blood of monsters, he knows, familiar with the creatures from his hikes that turn into sprints for his life back to civilization. He has plenty of scars on his legs from grazing arrows that bokoblins have fired at him, it’s how he has most of his stock.

A hush falls over his shop at the sight of Her. She locks eyes with him over the bowing heads of his customers and smiles. 

“I am Hylia,” she says in lieu of greeting. “Do you happen to have any medical supplies? I am bleeding and in need of stitches." 

—

He kicks everyone out of his shop and sits her down behind his counter, running into the shelves to get what he’ll need for stitches (two needles and thread, two needles and thread, where the hell does he keep the needles and thread oh there they are-) and coming back to her cleaning the black blood from her sword (she has a sword) with the rag he uses to wipe the dust from the walls. 

“Where are you bleeding?” he asks, searching her white dress for red stains. 

She puts her now-clean sword back on her spine and pushes her long hair off of her left shoulder, tilting her head to the right to stretch the skin of her neck. There, just below her jaw, is a thin, jagged wound that leaks gold. 

Golden blood, he thinks, staring at the fortune dripping down her throat with wide eyes. She…She has golden blood. 

“I was fighting an army of monsters,” she explains, like she’s telling him the weather. “They threatened the safety of my temple. Their Demon King is a foe I have clashed with for centuries, but this morning he finally broke through my guard and got a good hit in on me.”

“You…” Amik swallows. “You can’t just heal yourself?”

“Demise’s blade was made specifically to hurt me, just like my Goddess Sword was specially made to hurt him. If he had used mortal steel I would be unharmed, it would bounce off of me and possibly shatter on contact. Mortal means cannot snuff out an immortal life; only the divine can harm the divine.”

He holds up the two needles. “So how am I supposed to stitch you up? These are, um, mortal needles.”

The woman in white—Hylia, she really is real, she’s Hylia—waves a hand over the tips. They shimmer gold, and she pokes one with her finger, sucking in a breath before showing him a tiny, golden bead of blood on her fingertip. 

“There,” she smiles. “I would do it myself but, like I said yesterday, I’m useless at crochet.”

“So why come to me? I’m not a doctor.”

“You prayed for my presence. I like seeing you each morning.”

Amik readies the needle and thread, his usually steady hands trembling as he prepares to pierce a goddess’s skin. “Why? I just sell you things you could create at the snap of your fingers.”

“You didn’t know who I was. I liked being treated like I was any other mortal, it…it helps me understand what it’s like for all of you, why you all pray to me the way that you do. I find it all so…fascinating. You humans, I made you, yet I know so little about how you truly function.”

The needle sinks into Hylia’s throat. She winces.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “This would be better if I had some kind of potion, but there’s not a lot of manmade medicine to be found in the wilderness, or the ingredients for some.”

“It’s fine,” she breathes, voice tight as he pulls her skin together and seals it shut with a bridge of string. “Pain is a foreign sensation, I need to get used to it.”

“Why?”

She’s quiet. Then, “I should not say.”

He chuckles. “That bad, huh?”

“…I suppose.”

Golden blood stains his fingertips when he wipes a stray strand of her hair out of the way of her wound. It shimmers in the sunlight that spills in from the windows, and he wonders, distantly, how much it would sell for. He blinks away the thought the second he thinks it and instead asks, “Does it have anything to do with that Demise that did this to you? Whatever army he has?”

The Goddess stares at him out of the corner of her blindingly blue eyes. Up this close, they’re kaleidoscopic, her irises spinning in halting shifts like the gears of a ticking clock.

Hylia, he remembers, counting the seconds in the minutiae of her gaze. Goddess of Time. 

“You’re perceptive for a merchant,” she tells him. He’s not sure if it’s a compliment. 

He grins. “It’s what happens when I only have one customer. I spend the rest of the day after selling to you people-watching. I know a lot about my neighbors just from seeing them walk by my shop except for their names. I’m really bad with names, it’s why I never asked for yours before this. I would forget it in a heartbeat, so I don’t ask for names. I never bother to learn them. People are people, and I like watching them.”

She continues staring at him. He watches a minute pass in her pupils, pausing his hands where the stitches are half-done because he is not a doctor so he is slow. She finally orders, “You will promise me that you will say nothing of what I am about to tell you. If you break your promise, I will have no choice but to strike you down.”

His eyes drift to the sword on her spine. He imagines what it would look like sticking out of his chest. “I swear on my shop.”

“Your shop is that important to you?”

He gets back to stitching her up, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. “It is.”

Hylia swallows, and the quick swell of her bobbing throat almost ruins his work. He stops for a moment to collect himself before continuing, listening as she confesses, “With every passing day, Demise gets closer to my temple. It is imperative he does not reach it for a reason I will not tell you, but know that if he were to step foot inside the world as my mothers have created it will come to a bloody, burning end. Despite all of my efforts to beat him back, he grows stronger.”

Amik knows bad news when he hears it. “How long until he invades?”

“I…” she swallows again. “I made a sizable dent in his forces today, but they are never-ending. By next week, I estimate, this village will be overrun by him and his forces of darkness.”

Next week. Seven days. Seven days until death is staring everyone in the face. 

“I should not be telling you this,” she repeats. “But it is difficult to carry this burden on my own. My mothers, the Golden Goddesses, they are deaf to my requests for help or just a listening ear. They are deaf to my prayers, so I try and listen to every one that I receive. I…I am choosing to tell you because you are the only mortal I can trust not to break your word, and because you are wise enough to criticize me for the things I have done wrong.”

He finishes the stitches and pulls away from her, resting the bloodied needles on his counter and wiping her blood off on his pants. “So you heard all of that, what I said last night.”

“My ears are quite sensitive to the sound of my name,” she laughs. “I appreciate your honesty. It keeps me in check, stops me from becoming greedy like my…darker counterpart.”

She gets to her feet, running a finger over the stitches he’s given her. 

“You should be like new in a week or so,” he tells her, joking, “Just in time for your party.”

She laughs again. “Oh, good. I want to look my best for the coming battle. Thank you for your help, Amik. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He blinks and she’s gone.    

—

He does not see her tomorrow. 

There’s another long line in his shop, this time out the door, more people wanting to catch sight of their Goddess, but it takes him the entire day to get through the line and she has yet to make an appearance. 

Amik stays at his shop well into the night, long enough that he starts falling asleep at his counter, and still the bell above the door does not ring to announce her arrival. It never does.

—

At the Temple of Hylia the next morning, before daily devotions, Amik is swarmed with questions.

“Where is the Goddess?”

“Is it true She’s smiled upon you for so long?”

“Is She in love with you?”

“How did you not know it was Her?”

He answers all of them as best as he can:

“I don’t know.”

“Yes? I guess so?”

“No!”

“I didn’t even believe in her until yesterday!”

It does nothing to help his case. The priest asks him to lead the day’s service even though he’s been sleeping through the daily devotions since he was six years old. 

—

Five days later, on the fated seventh day since Hylia told him Demise’s army would attack, the world ends.

Amik is collecting twenty-five rupees for a bundle of wood he’s selling to the goat farmer when a chorus of screams enters his shop through the open door, and a crowd of people run past in the direction of Hylia’s temple.

“Monster attack!” A man yells to Amik and his customer. “The Goddess is fighting them off for us but-”

An arrow lodges in his back and the roaring squeal of bokoblins echoes from down the street.

Amik doesn’t remember much, after that.

(Shock, as it turns out, is one hell of a drug.)

He comes back to himself in the Temple of Hylia, curled in a ball in the corner and hyperventilating. 

“The Goddess is coming to save us,” An old woman is kneeling in front of him, holding his calloused hands in her wrinkled ones, stroking her fingers over his knuckles. She continues, “You’re Her friend, aren’t you? I have no doubt that we’re going to be just fine. She wouldn’t let Her friend die.”

A group is gathered in the temple, at most forty adults and only a handful of older children. Amik doesn’t want to think about what’s happened to the little kids Hylia would play her harp for, doesn’t want to imagine how the rest of the village met their Demise, so he stares resolutely at the old woman’s hands on his own and refuses to look elsewhere.

(He’s never been happier to not know anyone’s names.)

“O’ Goddess, please do everything within your power to keep us safe,” The priest leads them all in prayer in front of the grand doors that lead outside, as close to the Statue of the Goddess as he can be without being outside and actually in front of it. Safe, but devoted, but they aren’t safe they will never be safe because Demise is here- “Please protect us from those that wish to harm us, please-”

CLANG CLANG CLANG.

“There is nothing more you can do!” Hylia’s voice comes from outside, loud through the open windows. “Submit!”

“You too are greatly injured, Hylia,” The voice of death, a voice that can only belong to Demise, responds. Amik tries to imagine what the owner of that awful voice could possibly look like and the pictures in his mind are too grotesque to keep thinking of. He shakes his head to dispel the thoughts. “It is only a matter of time before I kill your precious creations and collect what is mine!”

“You will never have the Triforce if it is the last thing I do-” 

“It will be!”

CLANG CLANG CLA-

A guttural roar. A blinding flash of golden light. Silence. 

Amik thinks of Hylia’s face, of her kaleidoscope eyes and prays, I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to die-

“She won,” Someone breathes. “She won!”

“See, child?” The old woman pats his knuckles, smiling. “The Goddess Hylia never-”

The temple shakes with the force of an earthquake, and a storm of rocks crushes the old woman and a sizable amount of the people huddled in worship.

Amik screams, covering his head with his arms and curling into a tighter ball as the temple’s ceiling falls apart. 

I don’t want to die, he continues to pray. I don’t want to die I want to live I want to live a long life I don’t want to die I want to live please let me live-

A chunk of ceiling drops onto his head and shatters on contact with his skull. He does not die. He sits there, curled in on himself, as more and more life-ending boulders fail to kill him, crumbling to dust around him instead of flattening him into a bloody paste.

Amik dares to open his eyes. He nearly passes out when he looks out of a window and sees the Statue of the Goddess break through the clouds and into a clear, empty blue sky.

—

So…his village is in the sky, now. 

A lot of people are dead, but a lot of people are alive, too. He’s the only person to leave what’s left of the temple, standing at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, but a group of survivors comes up the road to meet him, also in search of more villagers. 

“Are you the only one around?” A man at the front of the group asks. He has dark eyes, gray hair, and a square jaw. 

“Y-Yes,” Amik nods, explaining, “There-There were more people in there but-but the ceiling collapsed as we were, um, as we were rising and-”

“The Goddess sent us up here,” he interrupts. “To protect us from those monsters and the Demon King that led them.”

“That part of the temple is completely caved in,” Another man says, squinting at the wreckage of the small piece of the Temple of Hylia that ascended to the heavens with them. “How did you survive?”

“I, uh…” That is the question, isn’t it? Countless chunks of ceiling fell directly on top of his head, and any other day that would probably crack open his skull and leave his brains spilling out on the floor but…none of that happened. Instead, the stone shattered against his skin like glass. “I honestly don’t know. I guess I got lucky.”

“It’s you!” A woman’s voice says, and a familiar face popping up in the otherwise unrecognizable pack of men and women. It’s the barmaid that spoke on that night he was at the tavern, where two now-dead men opened his eyes to the fact that the woman in white was, in fact, the Goddess Hylia. Her tunic is streaked with dirt and dried blood, but her eyes are bright with life as she meets his and exclaims, “Holy Hylia, it really is you! You’re the merchant with the shop on the corner! The one the Goddess smiled upon for months without you even knowing it! You’re the Blessed!”

“My name is Amik,” he weakly corrects. 

“Amik the Blessed, huh?” The first man raises an eyebrow marred by a jagged scar, holding out his hand. “I’m Rast.”

“Rast,” he repeats, shaking the man’s hand. He’s going to forget the name by sunset. “Nice to meet you.”

Everyone else introduces themselves in the same manner, shaking Amik’s hand and speaking their names, but it’s the woman from the tavern’s name that he makes an effort to remember because, up this close, she’s very pretty. 

“My name is Tove,” she says with a smile, offering her hand. Her eyes are brown and her hair is black and she’s possibly the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and he’s seen the Goddess Hylia up close and personal for months. “It’s a pleasure to talk to you for real.”

“Tove,” he echoes, taking it. Tove. Tove. Tove. Tove. “The pleasure is all mine.”

—

He makes dinner for himself later that night, grateful that there’s a hunter amongst the ranks that’s willing to find a meal for everyone. 

When he’s cutting up the rabbit that was decided to be his portion of the meal, he cuts his finger, the knife slicing across his knuckles, the blade digging into his skin, but when he puts the knife down to check the damage there is none.

“Are you all right?!” The woman—Tove—is sitting next to him and apparently saw him hit his finger with the knife. “Are you bleeding, is there any-”

“No,” he tells her, showing her his unharmed hand. “I’m fine.”

She grabs it and checks for herself, rolling her thumbs and stretching the skin of his knuckles.  Amik wonders if she knows how warm her hands are. “It really looked like you got yourself good there.”

“Guess I’m just lucky,” he jokes.

—

He’s helping a man—Rast, Tove is drilling him on everyone’s names, including her own, to try and help him remember them all, and he knows this man is Rast because of the jagged scar across his left eyebrow—gather and burn any remains of the deceased, whether it be human or monster. 

Amik can’t hold back his tears when he finds a mother cradling her two children, and when Rast comes over to see what has him so upset he puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Go tend to the fire, Blessed,” his voice is gentle. “I’ll do this part. This isn’t something for a merchant’s eyes.”

Tend to the fire he does, poking the kindling and logs with a stick in an attempt to keep it alive. When Rast finally rejoins him in the dirt, he asks, “Who were you? Before all of this. I…I’m really bad with names, Tove is helping me with remembering them all, but it means I’m good with faces. I don’t think I’ve ever seen yours. I haven’t seen a lot of the people here, before.”

“We’re from the outskirts, in the same area but not in the same town,” Rast stares into the flames. “We lived off the land, not wanting to rely on your village for resources, but when the monsters attacked we came to help, and then we were flying.”

“And now you’re here,” Amik finishes, “burning the bodies of people you were trying to save.”

The man nods. “It’s not all bad, though. I think it’s fun that we’re floating along up here, I just wonder if we ever have to worry about falling.”

“That…is not something I’ve ever considered.”

“But the Goddess sent us up here, I trust her judgement. If we ever were to fall, She would protect us, especially since you’re here.”

Amik chuckles, shaking his head. “I don’t know why everyone thinks she’s my best friend.”

“She answered your prayers every day for months!”

“Because she’s nice. She’s a goddess,” he holds his hands up to the fire, warming his palms. “That’s like saying this fire would burn because it likes me, too.”

“Then let’s test it,” Rast nods to the fire. “Pray to Her to protect you and see if you burn.”

“Wh-” he gapes at him. Is he crazy? “What?”

“If you’re not her chosen favorite, you’ll get a little burn that’ll go away in couple hours. If you are, you won’t get hurt at all.”

“Rast-”

“If you do it and you get hurt, I’ll stop calling you Blessed.”

It’s stupid. It’s really stupid. Who willingly sticks their hand into a roaring campfire?

Amik willingly sticks his hand into a roaring campfire, bracing himself for an excruciating burn. Instead, the flame’s warmth tickles. His fingers twitch and he stifles a laugh.

“Damn it!” he chuckles, thinking of the mirth in Hylia’s eyes when he found her out. “She really likes me then, huh?”

Rast’s eyes, in contrast, nearly bug out of his head.

“Blessed,” he breathes, gaping at his untouched hand. Holy Hylia. “You’re really fucking Blessed, aren’t you?” 

—

Amik finds Tove later that night sitting with the other women of the survivors—Kastia, Elto, and Palte are the only other names he can remember of the bunch—at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, a small fire illuminating their faces as they laugh, passing around a bottle of what looks like wine.

“Amik!” Tove waves him over, her smile wide and her face flushed from either the heat of the flame or the alcohol. “Come have a drink!”

He sits between her and Kastia, taking whatever mug is offered to him and taking a sip, frowning down at the sloshing liquid when he swallows.

“What is this?” he asks.

“Ale from the tavern that survived the trip up,” Tove flops against him, confirming that she’s definitely had more than a few cups. “Why, you don’t like it?”

“I do like it, I just…” he takes another sip and nope- “I’m the lightest lightweight I know. Usually I’d be feeling it already, but it’s like this is water.”

The women around him laugh. Kastia, her cheeks also rosy, slurs, “Maybe we’re lighter than you!”

“Just drink it,” Tove encourages, pushing the bottom of the mug up to his face so his lips are forced to wrap around the rim. “You’ll feel it eventually!”

Amik sputters, laughing as he shoves the mug back into her hands. “Relax! Let me pace myself before I fall into the fire!”

She just grins, hiccuping, and downs the rest of her drink. “Suit yourself, Blessed.”

He can only roll his eyes goodnaturedly. I guess it’s time I get used to that.

—

The next morning, he brings a canteen of water and a hearty breakfast to Tove’s tent, laughing when she chucks a shoe at his head for waking her up “so early”.

In the afternoon, when she finally rolls out of her tent, she apologizes by making an extra sandwich for him when she puts together a very late lunch/early dinner.

—

A cold spreads through their group of survivors, leaving a majority bed-ridden with exhaustion and a nasty cough while the rest are ailed with pounding headaches. 

Amik is the only one who has yet to get any sort of symptoms, even though just yesterday he was inches from Tove’s rattling coughing fit while he took her temperature with the back of his hand. 

“Here,” he takes turns spooning chicken soup into her and Rast’s mouths despite the older man’s protests that he can still feed himself and Tove’s insistence that she’s fine. “Both of you are as stubborn as a bokoblin. You’re not secretly related, are you?”

“Hope not,” Tove rasps with a tired grin, knocking her drooping head into Rast’s shoulder, “I don’t think I’d survive up here if he were my father.”

“Likewise,” he weakly retorts, coughing a laugh. 

Tove’s laughter also devolves into a cough, and Amik is firm in shoving another spoonful of soup into their mouths and ordering them to get some sleep. 

—

“Your immune system must be Blessed, too,” Kastia says a week later, after everyone has bounced back from the short-lived plague, helping him wash his clothes in the river, “It’s a miracle you didn’t get sick and were able to help the rest of us get back on our feet.”

He only shrugs. “I’m just happy to help.”

“You know,” Kastia bumps him with her hip, a sly smile on her face, “Tove was telling me all about you the other day.”

“What about me?” he wrings out a dripping tunic and tosses it in the basket they’re using for clean clothes.

“Oh, just the usual. That she thinks you’re kind, funny,” she hands him trousers stained with mud, “handsome.”

Amik stares at the woman, the legs of the trousers dipping into the babbling water. Tove said that about him? “That’s…That’s nice of her.”

Is it getting warmer, all of a sudden? Has he finally been struck with the sickness and he’s getting a fever? What is he-

Kastia laughs. “Careful, Blessed, if you think too much your mind will melt.”

—

To thank her for her kind words, he picks Tove some flowers he saw her eyeing on their daily walks through the woods. 

“Here,” he hands her the self-made bouquet at dinner that night. A hush falls over her conversation with Kastia and Rast. “I, um…Here.”

Tove stares up at him, then, taking the flowers and cradling them like they’re fine jewels. “Thank you, Amik.”

(Out of the corner of his eye, Rast elbows Kastia and Kastia elbows him back.)

—

The next morning, preparing breakfast with Rast, Amik wonders aloud, “Does everyone think Tove is the prettiest woman here, or is it just me?” 

Rast, in response, whacks him upside the head and says, “You’re as dumb as she is.”

“What do you mean?”

The older man shakes his head and mutters, “Children.” 

—

His house apparently didn’t make the cut for being a part of this chunk of land Hylia sent to the sky, but his shop is still intact. It takes him and Tove two months to find it through all of the fallen trees, destroyed roads, and altogether missing landmarks that would otherwise make navigating the new version of their village much easier.  

“You’re happier about your shop surviving than your house?” Tove asks, leaning against the counter and watching him check the shelves.

“The house is a house, it can be replaced,” Amik traces his fingers over his collection of gems, the amber twinkling and the emeralds shining. “My shop is priceless. If anything ever happened to it, I would be ruined. And I wouldn’t be able to get another house.”

She laughs, and if he could bottle the sound he would sell it for a fortune. “You know, you’re actually pretty smart for a merchant.”

“Why does everyone say stuff like that?” he moves on to the next shelf, looking at himself in one of his many mirrors for sale. His brown curls clump together, and he has more freckles than usual from being outside so much, helping the rest of the survivors clean up the damage that Demise’s army left in its wake. “Merchants are hardworking people! I’m a hardworking man!”

“Hardworking, sure, but merchants are rarely as intelligent as you are. They tend to care more about making a quick buck than doing any kind of real business.”

“Rupees are rupees,” he wipes a smudge of dirt from the bridge of his nose, leaning in close to his own reflection to check that it’s all gone. “I think-”

The rest of his sentence dies.

“You think what?” Tove’s voice is closer, now, she’s walked towards the shelf he’s in- “Amik?”

“Um,” his voice cracks and he swallows, clearing his throat, continuing to stare at himself in the mirror. He switches to another one to double-check, and- “Can you come here a second, actually?” 

She’s by his side in an instant. “What is it?”

He looks into her eyes. “What do my eyes look like?”

She frowns, her eyebrows furrowing together. “Your eyes are brown?”

“No, but-but look at them, really look at them,” he leans in close to her face, so close that when he speaks, his lips are a hair’s width from hers. It’s how close he was to Hylia when he stitched up her wound, when he looked at her eyes and counted the next minute of his life in her pupils. “What do you see?”

A minute passes in silence. Is Tove counting it, too? Does she see what he sees? Can she see how his eyes are a clock, how his pupils tick tick tick the seconds away and how his irises shift when the minute comes and goes? Does she know that it’s exactly five twenty-six in the evening, that now it’s five twenty-seven, and that her heart is pounding so fast he’s afraid it’s going to pop? Does she know that blood is rushing to her cheeks, turning them red, that she’s starting to look at his mouth instead of meeting his gaze?

Hylia give me strength, her voice echoes in his head in the cadence of a thought, and it’s the nail in a coffin that Amik will never be buried in.  

It’s no wonder he wasn’t crushed to death when the part of the Temple of Hylia he was sheltering in rose into the heavens. It explains why the chunks of ceiling disintegrated around him, why that knife never cut him, and why the fire never burned.

“Never mind,” he shakes his head but doesn’t pull away from her face. He’ll back off when she does. “I guess I’m just seeing things, then.”

Only the divine can harm the divine.

The question now is How? Why? Does anyone else know, is there a way for him to-

Tove kisses him, then, and he can’t be blamed for losing his train of thought. 

—

He has Hylia’s eyes. He has Hylia’s eyes and he can hear people’s thoughts when they think her name and nothing can harm him- 

Tove shifts in his arms, rolling over and settling her head on his shoulder. Quiet snores rumble from her barely-open mouth, and he pulls the blanket up to cover her bare chest.

(She had dragged him from his shop all the way back to her tent and they had…gotten really close. Now that she’s fallen asleep and he can’t seem to, he can actually think about his current predicament.)

If he has Hylia’s eyes, if he can hear prayers meant for her and he can’t be harmed by fire or get sick or fall asleep, then he’s more than just Blessed, right? He’s more than the Goddess’s chosen?

But what is he, then, if he’s more than that? He’s just…He’s just a guy, just some merchant who just so happened to sell yarn to a Goddess. He’s not…He’s not worthy of anything, he’s not important, so why…

Why is he the new Hylia?

Because that’s the only answer, isn’t it, that the Goddess passed her divinity on to him? Why would she do that? He never asked for it, he never prayed to her and-  

But he did, didn’t he? When the monsters attacked and the Temple of Hylia was crumbling around him, he had curled into a ball and prayed, I don’t want to die I want to live I want to live a long life I don’t want to die I want to live please let me live-

And then the ceiling had caved in and no harm had come to him, the stone instead shattering against his skin, knives didn’t cut him, instead gliding across his knuckles, and fire didn’t burn, instead tickling his palms. 

You prayed for my presence, Hylia had explained back in his shop, back when the village was on the surface and not in the sky. I like seeing you each morning.

Oh.

“Shit,” he breathes into the dark.

—

Rast dubs their floating village ‘Skyloft’ over a lunch of nuts and berries. 

“Skyloft?” Tove repeats with a frown, popping a blueberry into her mouth, “How did you come up with that?”

He shrugs, peeling the tops from a handful of acorns and roasting them over the fire. “Why not? We’re in the sky, and we’re very aloft. What do you think, Blessed?”

Amik, finding that over these past months his appetite has been dwindling and disappearing as a whole, shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter much to me. As long as I can call it home.”

I think I’m a god, lives on the tip of his tongue. I think I’m a god and I think Hylia made me that way and I don’t know what to do. 

“Try this,” Tove holds a blueberry to his lips. “They’re so sweet!”

“Yeah,” he frowns down at it. “It’s a blueberry.”

I think I’m a god and I think Hylia made me that way and I don’t know what to do. I need you to tell me what to do. 

“You’ve had these before?!”

“You haven’t?”

Rast rolls his eyes. Hylia help me, he thinks. “I guess we’re fine with calling this place Skyloft, then?”

“Where would I have these, Amik?”

“We practically live in the woods! They’re everywhere!”

I need you to tell me what to do. What do I do? 

Rast sighs. “Skyloft it is.”

—

Goddess, A man prays, please let my crops grow.

Goddess, A woman begs, please protect my son.

Goddess, A chorus sings, please bless our island with prosperity.

Amik shakes his head and goes back to counting rupees. 

—

“I love you,” he tells Tove, in the middle of the night when he think she’s asleep.

“Love you, too,” she mumbles back.

He goes rigid. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

She presses her lips to his shoulder. “Does that change anything?”

He presses his to her forehead. “Not at all.”

—

Skyloft has become a full-fledged village, the only remnants of Demise’s invasion the memories the people share over drinks. Buildings are repaired, houses are built, bridges connect each part of the land, and Rast single-handedly puts together a Knight Academy.

“So we’re prepared for another attack,” he explains, proposing the idea.

“We’re in the sky,” Tove argues. “What do you think is going to attack us, the birds?”

“We have no Goddess here, and She’s the only reason we survived down there. Without her around, we need to take the matter into our own hands.”

“We need laws, too,” Kastia inputs. “People to uphold them.”

The Knight Academy is built in two weeks.

The next day, Amik proposes a bazaar.

“A place for entertainment,” he says. “A center-point of the islands, so if you ever get lost you can find your way back. We can even open more shops!”

“Because yours is overflowing?” Tove nudges his shoulder.

“What are you thinking?” Kastia asks. “Another building? I don’t know how much land there is left to-”

“Why not a tent, then?” he decides. “Something bright, eye-catching. I have plenty of fabric stocked up from torn clothes.”

The bazaar, a massive purple tent, is set up in three days.

“I can move my shop in here,” Amik says, his hands on his hips as he admires the newest addition to the village, “And the old one can be storage space.”

Rast, hoisting logs and a bag of tools over his shoulder, pants, “Then you can build all of the shelves.”

—

Amik doesn’t need to sleep anymore, so he does, in fact, build all of the shelves for his new shop, done just in time to slip into Tove’s bed so she wakes up in his arms.

“Good morning,” he greets her sleepy face with a kiss.

“Good morning,” she yawns back, resting her head on his chest and wrinkling her nose. “You smell like wood.”  

“I was building my shelves.”

Tove picks her head up, squinting at him. “What?”

He grins. 

—

“The Goddess has abandoned us!” An old woman cries to a group of villagers at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess, preaching to anyone who will listen. “She hasn’t answered any of our prayers, She hasn’t shown her face, She is gone just like everyone else on the surface! We are alone up here!”

“I prayed for my crops to survive the harvest and they withered within the week,” A farmer laments.

A grieving mother sobs, “My son fell ill and passed on. I-I prayed for Her to help and still he died-” 

“Our island is aimless,” The old woman continues, turning to face the Statue of the Goddess and craning her wrinkled neck to meet her blank stone eyes. “We keep building and building but to what end? What happens when we run out of land? What happens when there are too many people? The Goddess is meant to provide us the answers, but what do we do when our questions fall on deaf ears?”

Amik bows his head and passes through the crowd, ignoring the way his ears ring with their unanswered prayers. 

—

In private, usually when Skyloft is sleeping, he tests himself, pushing the limits of his supposed immortality.

He doesn’t need to sleep anymore. He doesn’t need to eat. He doesn’t need to drink water. Blades still don’t pierce his skin, fire still doesn’t burn, and a careful, careful test ensures that he can’t die from drowning, large falls, or poison.  

(The last test in terms of his supposed immortality is if he ages, but that’s going to take a long time to confirm or deny.)

He’s able to lift insanely heavy objects, like giant boulders blocking roads from construction, and able to run so fast that he can weave through a downpour and not get a single drop of water on his body. He can hear women gossip about their husbands on the other side of Skyloft and the rapid little heartbeat of the fly that buzzes around his head. 

The scariest ability he discovers when he’s sitting by one of Skyloft’s secluded ponds, feeding the ducks. 

A duckling floats over to him, nudging his hand for more bread.

“I gave the rest to your mother, little friend,” he whispers to it. 

The duckling “quacks!” and stares at him as if to complain. Amik stares back, leaning in close to the animal’s face, close enough that all he can see of his reflection in the duckling’s eyes is his own, his pupils tick tick tick-ing in time.

“See,” he pulls back to roll his neck, “If you were a little older you wouldn’t-”

“Quack!”

Amik startles, scrabbling back from the edge of the pond.

The duckling is a duck. A fully-grown, adult duck that looks exactly like its quacking mother. 

It just…Did he…?

Hylia, Goddess of Time.

He leans into the not-duckling again, getting so close that the reflection of his eyes eclipses theirs. 

“Younger,” he whispers. “Go back to being a baby.”

His pupils tick tick tick-

“quack!”

Amik pulls away and can’t help the relieved, shaky laughter that leaves his lips. 

It’s a duckling again, flapping its little wings and begging for more bread.

He refuses to look anyone in the eye for weeks. 

—

Two years go by. 

Young children toddle the streets, followed by their terrified parents, and Amik practically lives in the bazaar. 

One day, Tove struts up to his counter and greets him with, “I want to sell you something.”

“Oh?” Amik perks up, leaning across the counter. “What is it?”

“A life with me.”

He stares at her. “What?”

“A life with me,” she repeats, grinning. “We’ll live together permanently, doing what we’re doing now until death do us part. Because I love you and you love me.”

“I…don’t understand,” he frowns. I don’t know if I’ll die. “What are you selling me?”

“Goddesses, Amik,” she laughs, leaning over the counter to kiss him on the lips, “I want you to marry me, silly. What do you say? Deal or no deal?” 

Oh.

(She wants to marry him?) 

Oh.

(She wants to marry him. Is Hylia allowed to get married?)

Oh.

(He should probably tell her, right? If she’s going to be his wife? He doesn’t want to lie to his wife.)

“Um,” he manages, very intelligently, “Before I say yes, I need to tell you something. And show you, I guess. Promise me you won’t freak out?”

“Okay,” her joy morphs to a quizzical confusion, and she tilts her head when he comes out from behind the counter, takes her hand, and leads her out of the bazaar. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere we can be alone.”  

—

Tove’s reaction, of course, is perfectly normal when he takes her to the duck pond and drowns himself.

She screams, first, and then tries to yank him out of the water, but Amik has the strength of the gods and refuses to budge. She then resorts to smacking him in an attempt to get him to come up for air and yells for help, but the pond is far enough away from the central, bustling village that no one can hear her. 

(It is, after all, why he chose this spot.)

When enough time passes that he should be dead, Amik pulls his head out of the water. “See? I’m fine!”

He almost wishes he could feel the sting of her slap across his face before she pulls him in and kisses him.

“Are you insane?” she screeches against his mouth, tears in her eyes, “I thought you were dead!” 

“That’s the point!” he pulls away just enough to explain himself, shoving his dripping hair out of his face, “I can’t die!”

“What?!”

—

“No one else knows about this?” she asks, sitting next to him in front of the pond.

He shakes his head, curling in on himself. “I was scared I was going crazy, but I know for sure, now. I don’t want to tell anyone else.”

“Not even Rast or Kastia?”

Again, he shakes his head. “Just you. If we’re going to be together, I needed you to know that I’m not sure if I’ll get older. I-” his voice breaks and his vision blurs and he chokes, “I don’t even know if I can still have children.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she assures, gentle, pulling him into a hug. “Children or no children, I’ll be happy as long as I’m with you.”

“Are you sure?” he leans his head on her shoulder, gripping her hands. He sniffles, “You still want to marry me?”

“For better or worse, right?” she jokes, smiling. “In my opinion, this is better. Means I don’t have to worry whenever you go off somewhere with Rast.”

Thank Hylia he can’t get himself stabbed, she prays. 

He chuckles. “I heard that.” 

She laughs, too. “Goddesses, I’m going to have to get used to that.”

—

They get married one month later, a quick ceremony in the bazaar.

Rast officiates, and he later insists that he didn’t cry when Tove asked him to dance.

Amik cried, though. He cried practically the whole night. 

—

He asks her if she can see his eyes.

Please, he thinks, watching another minute of their life together pass in the reflection of her pupils, Please.

“They’re brown,” her eyebrows furrow. “You’ve asked me this before, haven’t you?”

He sighs. “Yes. I was checking something.”

“Checking what?”

He tells her, then, about the day Hylia came to his shop on the surface, how he stitched up a divine wound and saw her face up close and watched time pass in her gaze, how his eyes are the same now that her power is his.

“I’m sorry, Amik,” Tove shakes her head, staring into his eyes, “I can’t see them.”

—

Loftwings are…a development. 

They first appear three months after Amik and Tove tie the knot, a whole flock landing just outside the Knight Academy where Rast is whipping recruits into shape, and each chooses a rider by hopping over to a person and gently pecking their chest. 

It’s Rast, again, who comes up with a name.

“Loftwing,” he says, stroking his giant bird that’s the same color as his silver hair, “That’s what we’ll call them.”

A red one hobbles over to Amik and pecks his hand. A purple one finds Tove. 

“What if we rode them like horses?” she asks. “They’re big enough. We’d be able to explore the skies, see if any other settlements rose up like ours.”

“This was the only settlement for days,” Rast replies, “but I agree that we shouldn’t be confined to these islands. We could even settle further out if there’s more land floating around, that way the future generations won’t all be stuck here.”

“I can test riding them,” Amik volunteers, sharing a look with Tove.

She nods, endorsing, “He’s very good with animals.”  

—

Flying Loftwings is fun when you know you can’t die. 

Flinging himself off of the edge of Skyloft? Easy. Trusting this giant bird to catch him? Even easier. 

Amik collides with the makeshift saddle they strapped to his Loftwing and whoops when it caws, soaring into the air. 

Down on Skyloft, Rast throws his hands into the air in celebration and Tove cheers. 

—

A drawback of the birds is that they won’t fly at night. 

We’ll have to train them out of it, Amik thinks, stroking the beak of his Loftwing after it freaked out refusing to flap its wings in the dark. Poor things. 

—

When Rast asks him to teach the Knight Academy how to fly, he’s more than happy to help.

“They’ll survey the skies for us,” The older man explains. “Gives them something to do other than run sword drills.”

—

The surveying knights report back that there are more floating islands other than Skyloft, but that they aren’t big enough to support more than one building each.

“We’ll have to pick who’s allowed to go and live out there,” Kastia decides. “Drawing lots, maybe?”

“Whoever wants to can go,” Amik shrugs. “I think the islands should be up for grabs for whoever gets there first.”

“First come first serve,” Rast rubs his chin, then nods. “All right. I’ll let everyone know.”

Tove says, her face lighting up, “I think Nak—The pumpkin farmer?—was talking about wanting to open an inn of some kind, but there’s no need for one here. His place can be a rest stop for Loftwing riders!”

—

Three years pass. 

His house with Tove is a real, bonafide home, and Skyloft is thriving.

Tove sits him down at their dining room table and clasps his hands in hers. She says, “I have to tell you something.”

“Okay,” he nods, squeezing her fingers. “What is it?”

She smiles so wide the corners of her shining eyes wrinkle. It’s the first sign of age in her he’s seen, and a look in the mirror confirms that he still looks the same as he did five years ago. She tells him, “I’m pregnant.”  

Amik opens his mouth, then closes it. He does it again. He manages a quiet, awestruck, “What?”

“I’m very late,” she adds, her voice shaking, “Which I never am, and remember how last night I asked for you to boil tree bark for dinner? Kastia said that’s what her sister asked for when she was with child. My sudden dizzy spells in the morning only confirms-”

“You’re pregnant,” he breathes, his vision blurring with happy tears. 

She nods, laughing, “I’m pregnant!” 

—

“It’s going to be a boy,” Kastia guesses over a celebratory lunch at the bazaar.

Rast shakes his head, taking a sip of his water. “It’s going to be a girl.”

“I don’t care what it is,” Amik tells them, grinning. “As long as it’s healthy.” 

Tove nudges his shoulder. “I think it’s going to be a boy.”

—

“Please let this go smoothly,” Tove whispers in his ear when they’re laying in bed.

“What are you talking about?” he whispers back, rolling over to face her. 

“I’m praying for an easy pregnancy,” she kisses his cheek, cupping his face and stroking her thumb back and forth over it. “If you’re going to hear me anyways, I might as well say it out loud.”

“I…” he glances down at her stomach. “You know I can’t do anything about that. I don’t know how. I don’t want to know.”

“I know,” she smiles. “I just wanted to pray. It feels much better when you know for a fact that you’re being heard, to know that someone is actually listening.” 

Please, Goddess, A voice rings in his ears, I need to know you’re there. I don’t want to be alone anymore.  

—

It hits him in the middle of the night, four months into Tove’s pregnancy. 

His child is going to be born, and his child is going to age, is going to learn to walk and talk and run and scream and love and hate and cry, and he’s going to stay the same. 

His child is going to grow up, and his child is going to, at the age of thirty-six, be older than him. His child is going to…going to die and he will have to live on in a world without them.  

Amik looks down at Tove’s sleeping face, at the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, and realizes that she’s going to die someday, too. Before their child. 

(Is this why Hylia never had children of her own? Why she created a whole species to watch over instead?)

He places a hand over Tove’s rounded stomach and bites his lip to keep from crying.

—

Five months later, Tove gives birth to a healthy baby boy. 

They name him Rama, after Amik’s mother, and when Amik holds him for the first time his hands shake.

(His strength…what if he presses too hard and crushes him?)

“It’s okay, Amik,” Tove whispers, smiling up at him, her hair matted to her face with sweat, “You’re not going to hurt him.”

“I never will,” he breathes to the little life bundled in his arms. “I’ll never hurt you.”

Rama—his son—finally bursts into his first fit of tears, squirming in Amik’s hands, and he can only laugh as he cradles the child in his elbow and rocks him back to calm. 

—

Nights become a lot less boring with a newborn in the house. 

Amik is up and in the nursery seconds before his son starts to wail, picking him up and soothing him back to sleep. When he slips back into bed, Tove is still fast asleep, none the wiser to his excellent parenting. 

Three nights later, when he’s about to get up to soothe the baby again, she places a hand on his chest to keep him lying beneath the blankets and sits up with a yawn. 

“Let me get him once in a while,” she mumbles, rubbing at her eyes. 

“You should be resting,” he tells her, grabbing her arm before she can stumble out of bed. “I don’t need to sleep, I can-”

Rama howls from down the hall.

“I’m his parent, too,” she leans over and pecks him on the lips, her warm gaze bleary. “Let me help with this part.”

Frowning, Amik watches her go, waiting patiently for her return. When she does, she’s back to sleep before her head even hits the pillow. 

(He resolves himself to sitting outside Rama’s door, at the ready to come to his aid.)

—

Rama’s first attempt at speech is a pleading, “Apa,” after Amik dangles a stuffed Loftwing just over his little hands. 

“Apa?” Amik asks, trying to encourage the sound, “Is that me? Papa?”

“Apa,” Rama babbles, reaching in vain for his toy, “Apa!”

“What is he saying?!” Tove calls excitedly from the kitchen. “What-”

“I think he’s trying to say ‘Papa’!” Amik calls back, cooing, “Come on, little one: Papa. Pa-pa.”

“Apa!”

—

It happens like this:

Amik is acting as a sparring partner for the about-to-graduate Knight Academy members, under Rast’s watchful—albeit aging—eye, when the young knight he’s sparring against trips over his own two feet and his sword veers to the right, sliding past Amik’s guarding blade and tearing through his tunic and CLANG-ing against his chest like it’s colliding with a wall of steel instead of running him through and ending his life.

Everything stops. The room goes silent. The CLANG echoes through the tense air. 

“Um,” Amik swallows. Clears his throat. Drops his sword to the floor. “Um.”

“Everyone clear out,” Rast orders, approaching the middle of the room to stand by his side. “You’re all dismissed.”

The knights don’t move, all gaping at the hole in his shirt and the unmarred skin of his chest. 

“Now!” Rast yells.

They stumble out, tripping over themselves to try and keep looking at Amik. 

Amik, who stammers, “Rast, I-I don’t-I just-Isn’t it funny that-”

Rast turns on him and grabs his shoulders, his expression serious when he lowly demands, “Tell me everything right now.”

He motions to the floor. “You’re going to want to sit for this.”

The older man looks him up and down. “We’ll go to my office.”

—

Rast’s office is on the top floor of the academy, a large room filled with books and a wooden desk. 

Rast sits in his large chair and Amik stays standing.

“It’s the most privacy we’re going to get,” Rast tells him, crossing his arms, “How-”

“I’m Hylia,” he blurts. 

His friend stares at him.

“Well, I’m not Hylia, it’s not like she turned into me or something, I-I’m still me, I just-I have her powers? I’m really fast and really strong, I can hear things from super far away, and when people pray to her I hear it all instead. Also my eyes are clocks? Because Hylia is—was? She’s not dead I don’t think, but she’s also not here—the Goddess of Time? Can you see them, by the way, the clocks?” 

Rast shakes his head, saying nothing.  

“A-Anyways, I can make living things older or younger by looking them in the eye and I’m not aging and I can’t be killed by mortal stuff, so that’s why I didn’t die when that recruit tripped and accidentally stabbed me and please say something so I can shut up. Please?”

Rast continues to stare. He uncrosses his arms and leans forward on his desk. He says, very quietly, “Does Tove know?”

Amik nods. “I told her before we got married.”

“Does anyone else?”

He shakes his head. “Just her. And you, now.”

“Amik, why didn’t you tell me? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We are!” he’s quick to reassure, “It’s just-I don’t know. I thought I was going crazy while I was figuring everything out, and everyone kept calling me Blessed and that seemed to make it all true, and I just…I don’t know. I was scared. I didn’t want people looking at me any more than they already do. But now…”

“Now those kids are probably telling everyone they see,” Rast sighs, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m betting everyone will know by nightfall.”

“I’m sorry, Rast, I really am, I-”

“I understand,” his friend opens his eyes and gives him a wry smile. “It’s no wonder that fire never burned you, huh?”

It takes him a second to remember, but when he does he laughs. “Yeah, I guess so.”

—

"I'm sure it's fine," Tove tells him that night when he explains what happened, bouncing Rama in her arms as he hiccups through exhausted, refusing-to-sleep tears.

"I don't know about that,” Amik shakes his head, pacing back and forth in their living room, “The knights are-They’re kids, and Rast said they’ve probably told everyone and-”

“What do you think they’re going to do?”

“That’s the thing, Tove, I don’t know-”

There’s a knock on their front door. They go silent. 

Another knock, harder this time.

“Open up!” A man’s voice roars. 

They lock eyes. Amik tiptoes to the window and pushes the corner of the curtain aside, peeking out and sucking in a breath through his teeth. 

There is a mob of people just outside of their front door, armed with torches and farming hoes and swords and books of Hylia. 

Pounding on the door. "Open the fucking door, Blessed!"

"Amik," Tove pulls him back from the window, her voice shaking. Rama's fingers tangle in her long hair, tugging on the few gray streaks that have started to appear over the years. "What do we do?"

“Take Rama into the nursery,” he whispers. “Barricade the door with his crib. I'll talk to them.”

“What? Amik-” 

“Tove,” he grabs her shoulders, ignoring the way his son tries to ask for his attention. He can have all of Amik’s attention when the mob leaves their property. “Please, go. I’ll be right back.”

She kisses him. “Just be careful. I know you’ll be fine, but those people out there-”

“It’s like you said,” he smiles. “I’ll be fine.”

The second Amik opens his front door he’s met with a chorus of angry yelling, a cacophony of, “What are you?” and, “Tell us what you’ve done to the Goddess!” and, “You liar!”

“What is the meaning of this?” he shouts over the noise. “What business do you all have with my family?”

“Not your family, Blessed,” A large, burly man at the front of the crowd growls, a thick beard on his face and a snarl twisting his lips, “Just you. The knights were telling us that a sword didn’t pierce you.”

Amik recognizes him as the blacksmith that started working across from him at the bazaar. He always smiled and waved to him each morning, talking with him about Tove and Rama while waiting for the forge to warm. 

“Give me your hand,” The blacksmith orders, pulling a knife from his belt. “We want to see for ourselves.”

Amik looks back over his shoulder, listening for Tove and hearing her heartbeat and gentle soothings of Rama’s distressed whimpers coming from the nursery. He turns his attention back to the blacksmith and steps out onto his front porch, locking the door before closing it behind himself. He offers his hand. 

The mob holds its collective breath as the blacksmith approaches and slices the tip of the knife across his outstretched fingers. The blade skids and skips over his skin, the metal sparking as it shings down over his palm to the tendon of his wrist. He feels no pain, only the distant heat of the friction of the knife against his invulnerable body and the shock wafting out from the gasping mouths of his fellow Skyloftians, the fear that permeates them in the aftermath when the ringing of the reverberating metal ceases once the blacksmith puts the knife back on his belt.

“So it’s true, then,” The man breathes, staring at Amik’s unblemished skin with wide eyes. “You’re…”

“What did you do to Her?” The old woman who was preaching at the foot of the Statue of the Goddess pushes her way to the front of the whispering crowd. “What did you do to the Goddess?”

“I don’t know what you mean, miss,” Amik shakes his head. “If you’re insinuating that I’ve done something to harm her-”

“Of course you have! How else do you have Her eyes?”

He sucks in a breath, stepping off his porch towards her, ignoring the way the mob steps back. “You can see my eyes? The-The clocks?” 

“I used to be a priestess, child,” The old woman straightens her spine, haughty. “I spent every day of my youth with the Goddess Hylia. I know Her eyes when I see them. How did you acquire them?”

He explains everything, then, how on the day Demise’s army of monsters attacked he prayed to not die and then the ceiling of the Temple of Hylia caved in and the stone didn’t crush him, how fire didn’t burn and knives didn’t pierce his skin and how he’s not aging, how his eyes are clocks and that he has no idea where Hylia is. 

“The last I saw of her she was fighting the Demon King,” he tells the old woman, the old priestess- “and then we were flying. I don’t know what it means, but I-I can hear all of your prayers when you pray to her, I can-”

“You what?” The old woman staggers back, raising a hand to her chest. “You could hear our prayers this entire time?”    

“Yes,” he nods, laughing, “It’s—It’s insane, I know it is, but-”

The blacksmith says, his voice dangerously soft, “You could hear us this whole time, these past five years, begging the Goddess for help? And you did nothing?”

The mob murmurs. The torches bob.

“What?” Amik stares at the man. “What did you want me to do? I don’t know how to farm, I-I can’t heal illnesses, I can barely even figure out how to raise my son! You expect me to abandon my job as a father to-to what, do everything for you?”

“The Goddess is meant to protect us,” The old woman projects her voice, turning her back on him to face the crowd that appears to be growing larger and larger by the minute. Is that Kastia, in the far back? Is that Rast right behind her? “She is meant to perform miracles meant to help us, She is meant to help us prosper. It is under Her guidance that we as a species of life have lasted this long, it is because of Her that we even have Skyloft! It is because of Her that this man, this merchant, stands before us Blessed with Her divine gifts, but it is because of him that we stumble. It is because of him that the crops are dying, that sickness is killing our children, that we are running out of space to build-”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” Amik shouts, storming up and grabbing her by the shoulder, forcing her to face him. He glowers at her, arguing, “It’s not my fault you people don’t know how to take care of yourselves, that all you’ve done is rely on someone else to survive. You may see me as Blessed, but I see myself as no more than a merchant trying to make a living for my family, one that just so happened to have the Goddess as a customer.”

The old woman’s mouth twitches, her bright blue eyes gleaming as she wrenches herself out of his grip and continues, like he never spoke, “This man is a liar! He is a liar who has used the name of our Goddess to thrive on our island, and he is not one of us!”

Inside the house, Tove whispers to their wailing son, It’s all right, sweetheart, Papa will be right back. He’s just talking to the people outside, he’ll be back soon. 

“Please,” he begs, grabbing the old woman again, “Please, stop. My wife and son are inside, they need me-”

“We needed you, too!” A farmer yells. “We needed the Goddess!”

“You made us think She abandoned us!” Another raises his fist, yanking a torch out of someone else’s hands. “You insulted Her name!”

The mob pushes forward, and Amik guides them away from his house, moving himself off of his property and backing away from it. He leads the chorus of angry shouting and demands for his head all the way down the road and to one of the bridges connecting the mainland to an outer island, nothing but the clouds below.

That’s far enough away, he thinks. They won’t come closer if they think they’ll fall. It’s dark, the Loftwings are still scared to fly at night. 

Led by the old woman, the mob comes closer. Amik backs up again, but they crowd him until he’s standing at the edge of the bridge, the endless sky at his back and the clouds at his feet.

“What-What are you guys doing?” he stammers, his heart pounding. He raises his hands to try and push them back so he has space to stand. “I’m gonna lose my balance-”

“Pray for help, then,” The old woman practically spits in his direction. “See if She answers you.”

“I don’t-” his back foot meets the open air, and he windmills his arms to stay upright. “Are you guys serious?! I have a family!”

“Amik!” Rast’s voice. “Amik, hang on!”

“It’s repentance for all of us,” she says. “Maybe this way, She will answer us again.”

He’s hedged back again and his feet meet the air and he tips backwards-

“No!” he swipes his hands at nothing, looking for a handhold- “Please!”

“Amik!” Rast bursts through the mob, surging forward, holding out his hand. 

Amik reaches and-

His fingertips brush against Rast’s and then he’s too far gone, falling off of the edge of Skyloft and plummeting through the clouds.  

(He can still hear his baby crying.)

—

He wakes up underwater.

It takes him a second to remember, exactly, why he’s underwater, but when he does, when he remembers, I fell off of Skyloft, he swims as fast as he can to the surface of whatever pond or lake he’s landed in. 

Please be close to a village, he thinks. Please be close to a-

His head breaks the surface of the water and he’s gasping into fresh, salty air, and-

He’s in the middle of the ocean. 

He whistles for his Loftwing, staring up at the cloudless sky, and when his bird doesn’t come he whistles again, as loud as he can. 

There is no familiar caw, no flap of wings, no help coming to bring him back to the sky. 

The ocean, he thinks, trying to remember what that means, trying to remember what’s around from the maps he glanced at years ago when he was in school as a child. The ocean means-

“Lanayru,” he says to himself, treading water. The closest land is- “The Temple of Time.”

(He’s only ever heard about the Temple of Time, doesn’t know anything else about it except for the fact that it’s for some reason in the middle of the Lanayru sea.)

People are bound to be there, right? Worshiping the Goddess of Time? Especially if Hylia won against Demise. Maybe she’s there, too, and she can answer all of his questions and take her powers back and send him home to Tove and Rama. It’s going to be that easy. It will be that easy. 

Amik closes his eyes and listens. 

Two faint heartbeats, but no voices.

(Is he too far away? Are there really limitations to the extent of the Goddess’s divinity? If all he can hear of Tove and Rama are their heartbeats, how is he supposed to know what’s happening up on Skyloft?)

O Goddess, A girl’s voice, coming from the south. I kneel before you today asking for your Blessing-

He opens his eyes, turns in the direction of the prayer, and gets to swimming. 

—

It takes him three days to reach the shore of an island that’s home to a small city made of marble, watched over by a gigantic temple topped with Hylia’s crest. The sun has barely risen, yet the streets are bustling with white-haired, red-eyed people robed in black. 

Amik wonders how they aren’t sweating at all in this heat, then remembers that he hasn’t been affected by the temperature of the weather in years. And that he’s soaking wet, water dripping from his torn tunic and squishing in his soggy sandals. 

He stumbles in the direction of the giant temple, guessing it’s the Temple of Time, ignoring the strange looks he gets from passing villagers and the whispers that vibrate in his sensitive ears. 

I’ve never seen him before.

His clothes are so strange.  

Is he from the north? 

Did he swim here?

O Goddess, A new prayer echoes in his head, this time the voice of a man, I kneel before you today asking for your Blessing in these upcoming trials-

As he walks, Amik closes his eyes and sifts through the noises of the surface, tilting his head to the sky. 

Two faint heartbeats. The distant, Caw! of a Loftwing. 

Still alive, he thinks. Still breathing.

He opens his eyes and walks faster, picking up the pace in his hike to the Temple of Time. 

—

The Temple of Time is filled with bodies robed in white. It makes the hair of the people that stare at him blend in with their clothes, makes the red of their eyes all the more striking. This group gathered in the temple, however, each have a crying eye painted on their foreheads in gold. 

The temple itself is just a large room packed with pews, a Statue of the Goddess standing tall at the end, almost as high as the ceiling. 

Amik searches the bodies for blonde hair and blue eyes, for a divine sword stained black with the blood of demons, and comes up with nothing.

“Damn it,” he whispers, his chest heaving despite the fact that it’s impossible for him to be out of breath, “Damn it.”

“Can we help you, stranger?” A woman approaches, slim and slight, her features sharp. A red belt around her waist bears seven daggers, their hilts encrusted in glittering diamonds. “What have you come to this temple for?”

“I…” Amik trails off. I need to go home. I need Hylia to send me home. “Is Hylia here?”

The woman looks back over her shoulder to the rest of the gathered people, who all share a glance. She looks back to him and says, “The Goddess is forever with us in our hearts when we pray. It is our belief that-”

“No,” he cuts her off. “I mean is she here? Is she, um…still walking the mortal plane?”

She shares another glance with the group, and hesitates before answering, “She disappeared from this realm five years ago, after a long and arduous battle against a dark force. May I ask how you know-”

“I come from the village she frequented, where the Temple of Hylia-”

“There are many Temples of Hylia, stranger, and plenty of villages Her Grace-”

“I come from the place where she slayed the Demon King,” he snaps. “Where the hell is she if she’s not here, then? I need to talk to her.”

The woman blinks, taking a step back. “I told you, She is gone. I don’t know where She goes when She is not here. How in Her name did you get to this island from your village? She told us all about how far it is from here, all the way across the sea, how the people there were the kindest she had ever encountered.”

Do…Do these people not know about Skyloft?

“I had a boat,” he finds himself lying, sure that if this woman knew about the barge of land Hylia sent to the sky then she would ask how he survived the fall back to the surface, and then he would have to explain how he has Hylia’s divinity and he would get absolutely zero information because the topic would change to him and only him and maybe they would run him out like the old priestess on Skyloft- “I took it out when the Demon King attacked, trying to escape his wrath. It, um, crashed against some rocks in a storm and the next thing I knew I was washed up here.”

She looks him up and down, nothing but concern on her face as she says, “Oh, that’s terrible. I can have someone get you a change of clothes, we have plenty of spare robes-” she glances back at a man behind her and he nods, scurrying off behind the Statue of the Goddess. “What is your name?”

Hylia apparently told this woman about his village, about the people who lived there. If she really liked him so much, she probably told her all about him, and if the old woman on Skyloft was a priestess and she could see his eyes he can’t count on this woman not being able to see the clocks, either, and connect the dots between him being a favorite of the Goddess of Time and his tick tick ticking pupils. 

“My name is…” he wracks his brain for a name and suddenly wishes it wasn’t Tove that named their son, that he wasn’t so awful with names and that he could actually think of one- 

Outside of the temple, a beetle chirps.

They’re my favorite! he shouted to Hylia what feels like a lifetime ago, back when she was just the woman in white who bought yarn from him every day, back when she was just his only customer that was keeping him afloat. 

“Beedle,” he blurts, immediately regretting his choice of a name, but he’s made his bed and now he has to lie in it so, “My name is Beedle.”

“Beedle,” The woman repeats, smiling, holding out her hand. “I am Impa, chosen to be the right hand of the Goddess Hylia. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the island of Kakariko.”