The waste is buried and the pot has been cleaned. In theory it's their pot so they don't have to, but it'd be silly and rude to leave around a muck-coated cooking pot.

He's ready to go now.

There's a little reception booth at the front of the stable manned by a man with a hat, with another man next to the booth wearing a similar outfit. There's also a similarly uniformed woman by the stables, tending to one of the horses. Whom shall they approach?

Zelda tries the booth first because it seems more official.

"Hello! This is the Dueling Peaks stable; how may I help you?"

"Well, we're looking for a horse. Is this a good place to get one?"

"You can register a horse here, or retrieve one if you had it stabled here or sent from one of our other branches. If you don't have a registered horse, you can bring a caught one here to register for a fee."

"I see! Thank you!"

Horse bank. It's a horse bank. That's adorable?? How do you even bank a horse??? She doesn't know how to ask the question.

Regardless, it seems they cannot buy a horse here. But they can... catch one? And then... bank it???

She glances at Link to see what he thinks of this prospect.

"Where can we catch a horse?"

Is that the typical way for people to acquire horses? He's vaguely aware wild horses exist and can be caught, but this feels... weird.

(It feels so weird. They are united in this.)

"Well, the best horses aren't anywhere around here, but you're not picky, there's always the herds in the plains out east. But watch out for the decayed Guardians—they've been more active lately."

"No one...  owns them?"

The stable guy looks confused.

"No? No one's going to leave their horse just wandering out there... if an unattended horse in the wild has a bridle or saddle, it might be someone's lost horse, and there's a small reward for bringing them back."

...ah. It's the apocalypse. This explains everything.

"Oh, good to know about the reward!" she says, instead of saying anything that would be weird coming from a normal person who grew up in this time and place.

Link feels, instinctively, that he knows how to handle a horse, but not the steps to tame one. If he was knight and member of the royal guard, he probably... had an assigned horse? Or bought one?

"How do I catch a horse?"

"Well, if it's a wild horse, you have to sneak up on it from behind, making no noise so it doesn't notice and startle"—he mimes a slow walking motion with his fingers to illustrate—"and then, once you're behind it, you jump on and grab onto its neck!"

He makes a grabbing motion.

"I'll try to buck you off, but you just have to hold tight and soothe it until it calms down. Slow stroking motions down its neck. Make sure not to hold too tight—you're trying to stay on, not strangle it! After you have it subdued, it won't take to being ridden immediately, so you'll have to give positive reinforcement when it follows your lead. Apples help! Take it to a stable before you get off it, or it might run away. Once it's bridled it'll be less unruly."

...this all sounds reasonable so far as it goes, and yet, somehow, she feels like this is not how horses ought to work. Maybe it's the apocalypse's fault. Maybe she is just wrong about horses.

No, yeah, Link's expression is full of DOUBT.

"Okay," he says.

Well. If nothing else, she thinks she recalls something about one of her strange powers applying to taming animals. So if the stable guy is pranking them, they can succeed in spite of his advice. Probably.

He looks at Zelda. She looks satisfied, so...

"We'll come back when we have a horse?"

Zelda nods agreement.

The man waves them goodbye, and then the plains beckon.

As they venture out, it becomes immediately obvious that it's not only a grassy plain, but the remnants of an abandoned battleground. Fallen stones litter the field, and the odd shapes of the water-holes they pass are reminescent of the furrows and craters left by ancient beam fire. Broken-down ancient technology can be found poking out of the soil and ruined pillars—scavenged to the bone, all of them.

In the far distance, where the plain passes into the mountains, an crumbled wall of stone and wood stands, and a gatehouse that has seen better days.

Fort Hateno.

Link takes in the sight without a hint of recognition.

At first, Zelda sees nothing out of the ordinary either. It's a bright, sunny day and the grass is green. The old, decayed Guardians don't look familiar at all. She's thinking about the path ahead, not things that happened a lifetime ago.

But then they pass close to one, and as its shadow falls over her, as she sees its silhouette against the sky—then she remembers. And looks up, and finds the wall and the gatehouse, right where they should be.

She stumbles in the sudden shock of memory.

Link reaches for his sword, but another scan of their surroundings shows nothing in sight. He looks at Zelda.

"—sorry. I just—"

She feels dizzy. She shouldn't feel dizzy. She is literally supernaturally graceful and probably couldn't fall over if she tried.

She sits down anyway.

"...this is where it happened," she says. "We fought these Guardians. I found my power."

He tries to remember what Zelda said about discovering her power, and—

"I almost died here," he says.

He takes in the scenery with new eyes. The broken wall afar, the destroyed Guardians around them. He was here. Perhaps killed these Guardians himself.

He picks his way over the the body of one and imagines it running after them on those mechanical legs, glowing purple, gears ticking and eyes flaring, like those malfunctioning ones he saw on the Great Plateau. The back of his neck prickles.

He closes fingers around a sword as he stops down to the base of the wreck and swiped at the ash. Even after a hundred years, it hasn't all blown away.