He'll go ahead and take the stew off the fire, dole out a bowl, and put on a few apple and mushroom skewers to roast.

"Your father was here."

"I thought I recognized that beard. But then I thought, surely there's more than one person in the world with a big white beard. And my father died a hundred years ago. Apparently that isn't stopping him, though. What did he have to say for himself?"

"He asked me to protect you and vanished. He didn't look very dead."

"Hm. I wonder..." She shakes her head. "Wondering later. Food now." Om nom stew.

Link has already snacked and is not hungry, so he goes back to sharpening. When the skewers are half-done he rotates them, and when it's completely done he takes the whole spit off the fire, but lets it keep burning.

At some point he'll take out the Sheikah Slate and start poking at its controls again.

"Mff," says Zelda. She swallows her bite of stew and tries again. "Are you getting along all right with that thing?"

"I think it's missing some functions, but it works fine. What is it?"

He clicks on Magnesis and levitates a rusty shield off the ground.

"It's a Sheikah Slate!" she says, unable to suppress the excitement in her voice. "A marvel of ancient technology." Though half of her doesn't find it so marvelous anymore. ...okay, a smartphone that can levitate things is a little marvelous. "I did hypothesize that it might get out of sorts during its long wait, but we should be able to find a researcher who can restore the missing functions... or at least, so I hope. The state of the field might have deteriorated since the world was overrun by monsters. I might be able to fix it myself, if it comes to that, but I'd rather have help."

"The shrines restored some of the runes. The King said there's a fourth one in the mountains."

"We'll head there next, then?"

Nod.

"Who am I?"

"You're..."

She hesitates, searching for words.

"...My guardian knight. An accomplished member of the royal guard. Wielder of the sword that seals the darkness. And... someone I would like to call a friend."

"...Sure."

She smiles softly.

After a moment, "—Did that answer your question?"

"Yes." Enough. "Calamity Ganon... what happened? The King didn't tell me a lot."

"...well... a lot of things happened. Um." She puts down her bowl to focus on organizing information into a sensible order. "...Calamity Ganon... attacked the kingdom with his monsters. I was supposed to have the power to seal evil—it's what the princess of Hyrule is supposed to be for—but I'd never been able to touch it, all my life. I wanted to help however I could, so I learned about the devices of the ancients, and tried to find ways to use them against Ganon. The shrines, and the Guardians, and the Divine Beasts. I—wasn't our most important researcher, I was barely a researcher, but I was helping. Then..."

She shivers, remembering.

"Ganon's power crept into the devices somehow. He turned the Guardians against us, and corrupted the Divine Beasts. And I was still useless. I couldn't touch my power at all; all I could do was run... the castle fell, the world was coming to pieces around us. You protected me to the very last. And I found my power... too late to protect you in return. I stopped the Guardians that were attacking us, but not before they struck you, and you... were very badly injured. You wouldn't wake. So I had you brought to the Shrine of Resurrection, where I hoped you could recover. I made arrangements to be sure you would have all the tools you needed to save the world when you woke up. And I went back to Hyrule Castle alone, to keep Calamity Ganon contained. I... guarded your rest, I suppose you could say." She smiles, a small, weak, trembling smile. "A fair trade, for all the times you've guarded mine..."

"For one hundred years. You were in..." He hesitates. "What was it like?"

"...difficult," is what she settles on, after a moment's thought.

"It wasn't just... a matter of matching my power against the beast's and waiting. I had to think, plan, strategize. It was a constant battle, to prevent Ganon from growing stronger without growing too weak myself. And I... lost all the parts of me that weren't the power, a little. I think I forgot sometimes what it's like to have a body. To breathe, eat, sleep, to touch with hands, to see with eyes. I was just... a light against the darkness."

"But you're here now."

She nods, and takes a deep breath, and smiles hesitantly.

"Well, you see, that's where the really confusing part comes in."

"Take your time."

She ducks her head, a faint blush colouring her cheeks, and makes a sound of appreciative acknowledgment, and fiddles with the edge of her bowl a little to regain her composure.

"I... I don't know how to make this make sense to you, so I guess I'll start with how I made sense of it myself, and see where that leaves us." A measured breath. "There are legends that say that... you and I, the destined heroes of Hyrule, are the same soul born over and over again, forgetting our old lives each time we live anew. I don't know whether that's true or not. But it's what I thought of, when—I remembered another life. Not as the princess of Hyrule. As a sort of princess, I suppose, and one with a kind of power, but... in a world so distant from our own I hardly have the words to describe it. Devices like the Sheikah Slate are as common there as... as pairs of good boots. She was—her family—" She bites her lip and shakes her head, blinking back tears. "...anyway. Something terrible happened to her, though she never found out what. And in the space between life and death, or between one world and the next, she met a goddess who offered her incredible power."

She studies her hands. "She accepted. And she, and I, was reborn into this world, with no memory of my other life. I grew up as Zelda, Princess of Hyrule, and spent a hundred years fighting Calamity Ganon, and then you started to wake, and I spoke to you, and I... remembered my other life, and my other power. And, well. One of the things we were granted was the ability to..." She makes a diverging-streams gesture with her hands. "Become two people instead of one, who are both me? So..." One hand curls inward. "I'm here. And I, the other me," she gestures northward with her other hand, "am also back at the castle, still fighting Ganon."

It sounds like something out of a story, but so does everything else, really. He gets a feeling this was not an uncommon sentiment to his previous self. He feels only—weary, perhaps, at the revelation.

"A goddess," he repeats. "Not Hylia? Will I also... remember another me?"

The thought troubles him even as he voices it. He's already missing his entire life. If a different one fills into the gaps, what's left of this him? He's only seen so little of it, heard so little, but he already wants to cling to what he has. A princess. A sword. A friend who talks to him like he matters.

"...I don't... think you will. I have no reason to think you will except that lots of strange things are happening already and that makes further strange things seem likelier. My other life didn't know anyone who seemed especially like you—and my other life was like me, I can... see all the places where we fit together and all the places where we come apart, and guess why, sometimes, what difference there was between our lives that led us to grow differently. And the goddess who wasn't Hylia seemed... very specific. I don't think she would have reached out to most people. So—I don't think so, overall."

She takes another steadying breath.

"So... there being two of me, that's one thing. And the fact that I could run here from the castle, that's another thing—I'm much faster and lighter on my feet now, and I can keep going as long as I need to, but if I push myself too far I'll sleep for up to a day once I stop. There's... more things, but my memories of them are a little hazy and I don't know entirely know which powers I really have. Some of them are a bit—silly but very useful—I might be able to pull anything I've ever touched out of my pocket, that's the silliest one I can think of."

He nods, slightly reassured. At the last bit, he perks up.

"Weapons? ...The Sheikah Slate?" He holds out the Slate.