I Lost Myself

I Fall In Love Too Easily

Hebra didn't really have seasons. It was cold, and dim, and snowy for most of the year round. The base of the mountains, where the lodge was and the road into Tabantha, always had the most frigid winds. The air only really settled at the northernmost snowfields, where nothing moved or breathed. Even in the hot springs, tucked away under clever rock formations or off an unmarked path, the air swirled and tumbled almost constantly, a chilly reminder of the icy mountains above.

Some lucky nights, the clouds would clear away and the sky would come alive with wisps of strange light, and if you sat on a peak high enough, you could watch the wisps twist into different shapes, shifting with the changing wind. Strings of green and blue, rising and fading seemingly at random, and never the same no matter how many lucky nights there were in a row.

It was on one of these nights that Link found himself sitting on the roof of the Flight Range, bundled in several layers of thick blankets over his tunic. Only his head stuck out, and still he shivered just a bit when the wind howled too close. But he hardly seemed to notice the cold. His eyes were too fixed on the lights above him, shifting and swirling among the stars.

He had never seen anything like them. They had appeared slowly, in little wisps and strands about an hour ago, when he had only been looking at the stars as a distraction from his own wayward thoughts.

It was nice to see the sky so clearly here. The last place he had seen the stars was on the Plateau, the night after he had woken up, before the task had crashed down on him in an unbearable weight. After he started the shrines, and the king told him exactly what he had failed to do one hundred years ago...well he hadn't been thinking about anything but finishing the task set before him. His thoughts had been dark and scrambled, too distracted to even think of looking at the sky and trying to calm himself down from the edge.

But now, now that he actually had a place to stay every night and someone to talk to who didn't stare at him with regret and anger in their eyes, he found himself on the roof, staring at the sky and thinking in circles. At least until the strange lights had shown up, and then he had been properly distracted by the show they put on. Endlessly dancing, casting odd glows off the snowy slopes around them, in big swaying streams of green and blue—they were captivating, in the least. He had been watching them for some time now.

The wind changed behind him, a shift upward which could indicate the arrival of only one other person. Link did not move, watching the lights shift and change.

"You've been up here for hours," Revali said, his taloned feet clicking on the wooden roof as he walked over toward him. He stopped beside him, frowning a bit as he looked down at him on the roof. "You're going to freeze if you keep this up, even with all those blankets you pilfered."

Link looked up at him briefly, the green and blue of the lights reflected off his eyes, which were a bit too watery to blame entirely on the cold. One of his hands emerged from the blanket mound, and he patted the patch of wood next to him.

Revali gave him a flat look. "Sit? No, thank you, I don't envy your spot at all."

He patted the wood more insistently, almost slapping at it in a much louder pattern.

"Alright, alright, fine. Pushy Hylians and their silly desires..."

He kept grumbling as he settled down next to him, trailing off eventually as they both turned their attention back to the lights. It was quiet, only the sound of the updrafts behind them to fill the air. Neither of them seemed keen to break the peace, their eyes too lost in their own distractions for the moment.

There was a peacefulness to the silence, however, unlike the pressing quiet they each encountered elsewhere. Somehow, they found an odd solace in one another, even if it was only for a few moments, begrudging and full of misdirection and sideways glances.