Chapter 3
It’s on her eighth birthday that Link wakes up screaming one night.
She dreams through the eyes of a boy, perhaps not much older than she, travelling through a forest of twilight. Heavily cloaked and on the back of a young filly, the boy searches for something.
The last of dappled light fades away through the canopy above, and a westerly wind blows a drizzle right into the boy’s face, and still he pushes on. By chance the boy glances down at a deep puddle in the mud - the eyes that stare back look utterly incongruous on the round-face.
They are very, very old.
It's then that Link springs up in her cot, legs and arms flailing wildly about as she turns her head frantically around her room. Through great heaving breaths, Link attempts to assure herself it’s a dream. Merely a dream. And so she refuses to call for her mother.
The girl stays awake the rest of the night, blankets wrapped tightly around her thin body, and stares blankly at her own reflection in the mirror.