"We have got to get you air travel."

He watches Link. Link is definitely the best scenery.

Link is watching the river ahead of them. "We're getting to a slightly trickier part. Current's speeding up. We're not gonna sink or anything but I do have to pay attention now."

He's quiet and doesn't distract her. He scans the bank for places to come ashore if she's wrong and keeps a tight grip on his bag.

Further sailing is still relatively smooth. Though Link is too busy paddling this way or that to sing anymore.

After a while they're past that section and Link says, "I wanna take a nap. Wake me up when we pass the next set of beaches?"

"Sure."

Link naps, then.

The river is still peaceful. Valanda sees a monster about half an hour later - a Lizalfos, by Link's descriptions - but it's all the way at the top of some high cliffs and doesn't appear to notice them.

He tries some magic. It's too far to aim as precisely as he'd like. Most of its heart and part of a lung freeze as if turned to stone.

The monster convulses, reaches for a weapon, then keels over and explodes into thick black smoke.

He tries to see if there's anything burning where the monster was. Maybe he made it drop a match on something?

It's at the wrong angle to see the ground around the monster, but the smoke dissipates pretty quickly. Doesn't look like something is burning.

Then he has no idea what's happening. Maybe it's magic. Maybe they're both about to die. Link would know, he could wake her, but she thought it was safe to sleep...

He'll just wait here panicking until they get to where she wanted to be woken.

Absolutely nothing malevolent or dangerous-seeming happens!

That's probably the beaches she was talking about.

How do you wake people up.

"We're passing the beaches now," he says in case that wakes her.

He has to say it again, louder, before she startles a bit and sits up. "Right. Let's get beached, maybe have a snack. This is the spot for the first portage."

"Sure. There was a monster while you slept and it burned up in very dark smoke. Is that bad?"

"Ooh! Not at all, they do that when they die. Good job."

"Oh! That's weird. Where do you get meat, then?"

"Animals! Are a completely different thing than monsters."

"So the smoke has something to do with them being enchanted by Ganon? Does killing them weaken him?"

"A little bit, probably. He has to reinvest a lot of his power when he re-spawns them during Blood Moons, at least."

"When he... how do you know how much power he has to use?"

"I don't. But it makes sense, doesn't it? Remaking monsters whole cloth has got to be at least a minor evil miracle." Link is steering the raft onto one of the beaches.

"It makes sense." It's starting to seem like there's always some new danger to learn about even when he thinks he's heard of them all. "Do they reproduce the, uh, normal way too?"

"I'm not sure. You don't see baby monsters, which points to 'no', but you don't really see baby birds or whatever most of the time so it's hard to tell."

"Birds lay eggs and I think some of them hatch just about grown up. You'd think lizalfos would have eggs, since they're lizards, so if you never find any..."