"If so, then if I take a sample of malice without a good jar then that may be bad even if it makes us faster. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

And they continue onward, with Griffie getting in spirit sense range of Ganon's malice. It looks … hostile, and powerful, but there's not much more detail ey can get from unaugmented spirit sense.

"I want to go look, even if I do not want to put malice in a bad jar," ey says. Admitting how much ey can see from a distance is too revealing.

"Sounds like fun. There might be an eye in there somewhere, there are eyes sometimes."

"Eyes?"

"The things you see with - mine are these." He points.

"Malice sees with eyes?"

"That's why I thought you'd want a warning."

"Thank you."

Griffie will approach carefully and try to be out of line of sight of anywhere an eye could plausibly be hiding.

There are sticky patches of it even on the steep hillside, clinging in amazingly viscous strands to the black pillars that rise from the middle of each puddle, full of shifting purple light. The sparks rise alongside dark specks as if the malice were on fire, but it doesn't burn away. From up close it's notable that the tower would be easy to climb if not for the malice surrounding the base and smeared in an uneven but unbroken ring several bodylengths up.

It's kind of tempting to fly up just to see what's up there, but there are other towers and presumably not all of them have spies. Now is not the time.

Malice visually looks sort of like a darker and more magical and less fungal Demon's Bile. Ey should ask whether it's infectious. …ey'll do eir best closer-proximity inspection complete with breaking out the color pencils for notetaking and using Detect Magic. Since it's better for the deception. And hey, it might produce some useful information despite eir terrible Spellcraft! Which it doesn't. Maybe ey'll use a Greater Detect Magic later.

Notes in hand, ey heads back over to Vaal.

"Malice … looks evil. It doesn't look destroy-y and not hurt-y? But I did not do the best looking. It could still be destroy-y. Can people or animals get sick from malice?"

"Uh. Hm. I think you maybe could? You can get hurt from touching it."

"Thank you. I like to know things."

And Griffie is ready to get moving towards Rito Village again, if Vaal is.

He is. They can keep going.

Cool. …Vaal is actually a faster walker than Griffie, it turns out, so ey should really transform so as not to slow the group down too much, which suggests an air elemental form. But less silvery this time, things seem less dangerous.

It's easier to sing while moving in this form. Is Vaal interested in untranslatable songs that are good for walking to, or would he like to teach Griffie a song, or neither?

Vaal is willing to teach Griffie a song but is also a notably bad singer.

This is intellectually interesting but not really the best way to pass the time. Griffie will sing. …ey will try to translate songs into Vaal's language, actually, which produces some non-rhyming lyrics that have to be shoved awkwardly into the meter. The song about flawed plans for blocking a river seems to mention lots of weird hard-to-translate stuff and have unclear subtext, but it's got a good tune. And a lot of verses. So many.

Vaal is interested in the subtleties and asks questions about that to try to get a better translation.

The context is this is a magic river that drowns people and unmakes them and is hostile to all life, and attempts to stop the river are about attempts to stop the unmaking of people in general … the unmaking of people who don't want to be unmade, the songwriter doesn't want people to suffer, and also even in the absence of the river and related phenomena people could probably still find ways to unmake themselves.

…Griffie is not sure whether ey should discuss Charon, and is kind of skirting the subject. It'll probably come up eventually, though.

"Is that a real river or a metaphor? - A metaphor is if it's a fake river but it means something important."

"It's a real river but it also means something important. It's big but the important thing is bigger? The river is a lot of the bad thing but not all. Like if I say 'the sun is bad' but I mean 'light is bad', sort of. …I do not think light is bad."

"That makes sense. That's called synecdoche. - Is the river in a bad place or something?"

"The river is very magic."

"I mean, are people falling in because it's running right by their farms or something?"

"No, dead people end up there. It pulls on them."