I Lost Myself

I'm Watching the End

The door slipped open, and he hurried toward the rays of sunlight streaking over the floor, too desperate for freedom to hear the voice calling to him again. All he knew was he needed out and now.

He scrambled up the rock ledge and out the broken open doorway, tumbling into the grass and panting the fresh air, taking big, desperate gulps of it as he sprawled out on his back. The little box slipped out of his hand in the fall, skittering along the ground until it came to rest a few feet away, a yellow pointed marker blinking up at the world.

It went unnoticed for now. All he could see was the sky, blue and wide and bright. It was mostly clear above him, a few weak clouds floating lazily by. But it was the sun that he craved, and the warmth it brought with it as it shone down on him. He hadn't even realized he was shivering until he stopped, the heat of midday warming his shaking hands and tingling toes. At some point, his eyes slipped closed, and there was nothing but the warmth and the sounds of the world around him.

He laid there until he caught his breath again, sighing heavily and holding it for a moment. Then he pushed himself up on unsteady legs and looked at the unfamiliar woods around him. Hunger loomed on the horizon, and he would need to find something to tide him over until...until he figured out what had happened to him. He looked around quickly, taking in as much of his surroundings as he could stomach.

There was a worn stone path leading down somewhere, and below him a smattering of trees and unfamiliar stone ruins and further, further, the dark shadow of a great castle, too distant to make out much more than its eerie silhouette. Like a dark omen, waiting on the horizon.

He looked away, and started down the hill. The need to move outweighed the fear blooming in his chest at the threatening darkness looming in the distance.

******

Two days (and one incident of near frostbite) later, he climbed the ladder up to the roof of the Temple of Time, as the old man had called it. He had no memory of this place, no memory of anything at all. He was as empty and confused as he was when he first stumbled his way out of the cave.

The girl's voice had spoken to him a few times, all but begging him to remember, to hurry before it was too late, whatever that meant. But nothing, no amount of introspection (or hours lost staring into the campfire, trying desperately to think backward) could drag up anything but panic at the emptiness and cloudiness in his mind.

So he tried not to think about it. He had a brief, uncomfortable, awful conversation with the old man, who recommended he check out the shrines on the plateau. There were four. Lumpy little stumps of odd stone that glowed blue when he held the little box—Sheikah Slate, apparently—up to them, letting him in and forcing him to do odd puzzles. The slate could do many things, and none of the puzzles were terribly difficult. But the old man had promised him a reward for completing the shrine tasks.

The shrines were interesting and all, but it was the paraglider which really caught his attention. The plateau was surrounded by cliffs, all of which were too high for him to make it safely to the bottom. A jump would kill him, and he couldn't climb down sheer rock for that long. No, he needed that paraglider to leave, and...he...he wanted it.

So he pushed his way through every puzzle, every fight, every endless additional task he had to do until the old man had disappeared before his very eyes in a haze of green fire and told him to find him where the points of the shrines would intersect if he connected them.

After a bit of map reading, he headed for the Temple, and here he was. Climbing its endless ladder toward the eerie green glow in the bell tower, feeling shaken and strangely afraid of what he would find when he pulled himself up into the alcove. He had a painful, unsettling feeling in his chest—a horrible sense that he was going to discover something he wouldn't like at all.