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The first time it’s brought up, Wild doesn’t think too much of it.
Wind has leaned closer to the fire, slightly too close for comfort. In the darkness, the firelight reflects off faces gathered around the flames like pale moons hanging suspended in the black.
“His face is still burned into my mind.” He moves his hands as he talks as if he is weaving together his tale from thin air. He’s got them all hooked on his story and he knows it.
“He had red eyes burning under the shadow of his horned helmet, and with one hand he beckoned me closer. It was no ghost or sprite, but a demon made of dark magic, hovering above me in the skeleton of the old fortress. I’m no fool, so I didn’t go any closer to the phantom specter. But he didn’t like that. He was furious. I could feel it. The armor was shaking so bad I’m surprised I couldn’t hear it rattling,” Wind says in a low voice.
“What did you do?” Wild whispers. He’s leaned in closer. His long hair is tied up and does not trail through the fire. This time.
Wind looks around, making sure he has all their attention. “Well, I was caught off guard. All I had in my hand was a bottle of soup-”
“What was the soup for?” Hyrule interrupts. Wild takes the moment to glance down at the ashes. The glowing coals in the pile still radiate heat enough to cook the yams nestled into the pile of white ashes. It’s a classic winter treat in Kakariko, but apparently not one that the other heroes had experienced before. He pokes at one that looks ready with the charred end of a stick they’d been using to adjust the firepit while they’ve been camping here.
“I got hungry.” Wind shrugs. “So all I had in my hand was a bottle, right? Well, the phantom- it’s Ganondorf’s phantom- the phantom is doing some evil spell.” Wind wiggles his fingers, holding them slightly above his head in a familiar position. He looks like a wizzrobe. Wild stops poking the yams when Legend scoffs.
“Was it the lightning ball.” He deadpans. His voice is so dry it’s not even a question. It kills the spooky story mood.
“Yes-” Wind pauses and aims an impressive scowl toward Legend for interrupting again, “It was the ball. I dodged the first spell, but I was able to parry the second time. I hit back each volley until the phantom finally missed and he floated down and hit the ground. I was able to smack him good after that.”
Those who’ve experienced the wonders of Ganon’s lightning “spell” adopt similar expressions of disdain. Legend, resident veteran hero of the group, had parried that damned ball of light too many times. Wild does not know what the lightning ball is so he busies himself with peeling the charred skin off of a yam. There’s steam coming off the soft flesh and perfumes the air with the lovely caramelized scent of cooked yam. He’s about to take a bite, but he blinks in realization.
“Wait, I don’t get it. How did you parry lightning?” Wild asks, unintentionally interrupting Wind again. He’s pulled on a pair of gloves and is rolling the charred yams out of the coals but his attention is still on Wind.
“With the bottle.”
Legend looks up from the yam he’d started to peel. “What.”
“All I had in my hand was the bottle! So I just-” Wind makes a swiping motion. Time nods as if this makes sense, humoring the boy.
“That’s impressive. I’ve never been able to parry lightning.” Wild says mournfully.
“Did you try to…?” Four asks. Twilight gives him the stink eye, and Wild decides not to bring up the rubber armor. So what if he still can’t move his shield fast enough to parry lightning strikes? He’s not sore about it or anything. He nods his head and sighs as he bites into his yam. It’s perfect.
Unlike his ability to parry Lightning.
Meanwhile, Legend holds his hands over his head in a strange pose. “This lightning spell?”
“Yes!” Wind groans in exasperation. He holds his hand above his head and mimes throwing something.
Legend drops his hands. “You parried that with a bottle?” He asks incredulously.
“I thought it was more like this.” Hyrule holds up two hands, joining his fingers together over his head and forming a circle with his fingertips. “Never tried to parry it before, and not with a bottle of all things.”
Time shifts in his seat. "I have."
"Parried lightning?" Wild says quickly.
"Among other things." Time waves his hand. Wild and the sailor hang onto every word.
The conversation derails into lightning spells and away from bottles, but Wild notices something. As he passes the bowl of hot yams around, there’s a strange sense of camaraderie between the Old Man and the Sailor. Wild concludes that sharing yams over a fire made them closer.
It was not the yams.
He starts to notice it more and more often. It seemed to creep on him. As they got closer and became a better working unit, Wild began to learn more about the people on this journey with him. They all seemed to share this one thing.
The others were… weird about bottles.
“Where do you keep getting these?” Sky asks. Since he has experience helping out the potion maker back home, he’d volunteered to help Wild restock. He’s carefully holding one of Wild’s bottles so that Wild can pour elixirs into each one. Wild doesn’t think the lineup of twenty bottles on the table is that impressive, but he keeps on gaining more and more looks from others.
“I guess just buy them?” Wild shrugs helplessly.
Sky frowns thoughtfully at the bottle he’s holding now as he firmly presses the cork in. “I hope we find someone who can work with glass back home.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, no one back home knows how to make bottles. We just reuse them. Most of mine came from the surface and I only had one bottle before that.” Sky speaks about them with a strange gentleness, but Wild can still relate. Plenty of skills were lost in the days after he slept, not that he’d know about all of them.
“Would you like to take some of mine? I think I have five more empty ones in the slate…?” Wild offers. He puts his ladle back into the pot and scrolls through his slate, but Sky’s unusual silence gives him pause.
He’s unprepared for the shock on the Chosen’s face. “I can’t do that! Those bottles must be precious to you!”
They really aren’t. Wild looks back at the slate. He has dozens, and none of them are the same size or color. Wild just buys them in bulk every time he visits Gerudo town.
“It’s alright if you take a few Sky, I can buy more,” Wild says uneasily. He summons the two sturdiest-looking bottles and sets them down on the stone hearth by Sky’s knee.
Sky takes the two bottles gently as if he’d shatter them with only a touch. It makes Wild feel kinda bad. He used to toss them over his shoulder while climbing. Were bottles more serious than he thought?
Wild picks up the ladle again and stirs the pot contemplatively. “You can take the extra ones as well, I don’t think this batch will fill all twenty. Maybe the postman will be able to take them with him?”
“... Thank you. That’s very kind of you.” Sky says, with near reverence. He takes another empty bottle with the same care and holds it steady while Wild pours in more neon green stamina elixir.
Wind almost cried when one of his bottles cracked. Miraculously, it hadn’t shattered, but there was a chip in the lip of the bottle and a large crack running down the side.
“It’s not the same size, but you can have one of mine instead?” Wild said gently. The bottle probably had sentimental value, but Wild could at least replace the bottle if not the memory.
Wind almost sniffed. He looked devastated. His eyes were watery. “That’s alright. It was my idea to test if we could parry fire arrows.”
Wild twitched. “I have a lot of them. You can have one.”
Bravely, Wind blinked away the tears and put on a wobbly smile. “That’s fine. I have three more, I can live without this one. It’s okay if this one won’t hold water any more.” The way he cradled the bottle like a baby bird said that it was not fine.
“Just… don’t tell the Old Man I broke a bottle.” Wind said quietly.
“I won’t?”
Wind looked like he was marching to his death as he walked back to camp. He flopped into his bedroll without speaking to anyone.
He had almost forgotten about the bottles.
Wild found this odd little cave not far from the road. Twilight said that there are caves like this all over his Hyrule, and they usually had something inside, be it a chu-chu hoard or a pile of pots. Wild decided to investigate anyway.
Wild casually kicks over the clay jar resting on the floor. It tips over and rolls down the dais and off the short three steps to the floor. A couple of rupees spill out of the now cracked jar. Wild jogs over and collects the scattered gems from the floor.
Hyrule whistles appreciatively as Wild shows off his handful of blue and red gems. He nudges through the shards of the clay jar with the tip of his soft-soled boot but doesn’t find any rupees himself.
“There’s a couple more over there.” Wild points to the top of the dias, where there are a few pots scattered in a shadowed corner at the top.
“Thanks for the tip!” Hyrule says and hops up the stairs. Wild crouches down to nudge through the rubble at the bottom of the stairs. There’s an interesting-looking vine growing out of the corner of the old stairs he wants to check out.
He ignores the sound of Hyrule breaking open a pot, instead poking at the base of the vine. It kinda looks like the ivy that climbs up the side of his house, but he’s never seen it grow in such a dark place before. Using the slate as a torch he shines it on the base of the vine.
It’s a small pot. The light of the slate shines off of its matte surface. Wild frowns and tugs at it, and it’s unearthed without much effort. It looks like someone had a vine planted inside this little jar a long time ago and forgot about it. The vine is way bigger than the jar. He considers it for amount longer while the sound of Hyrule smashing another pot reverbs off the cave walls.
After another moment of consideration, Wild decides to break the pot. Without harming the vine he tugs the pot a little closer. The slate is tucked under his chin while he breaks the jar with a rock.
Hyrule comes up behind him with the torch while he’s busy shaking the shards off the roots.
“Find something buddy?”
“Just a vine. Thought it could use more room than a pot.” Wild says. He pricks his finger on a shard and sticks it into his mouth. The light shifts as Hyrule bends closer to look at the vine.
Hyrule gasps.
“Wha’?” Wild says around his finger.
“Aww, It’s glass!” Hyrule says disappointedly.
Wild tries to see what is so surprising about this. “Yeah?” He says, nudging the ball of roots into the little divot where the jar used to be.
“It was a glass jar! I wish you hadn’t broken it.” Hyrule says with a slight frown, squatting down beside him to nudge the shards with the tip of his finger.
“Oh my bad, did you want to break it?” Wild had already broken most of the post in this room and found rupees inside, maybe Hyrule’s pots didn’t have anything inside.
“What?” Hyrule exclaimed. No, I would’ve kept it! Bottles are rare finds.”
Wild looked sideways at Hyrule. “What about all those jars over there?”
At the top of the slightly collapsed stairs leading down into the save was a pile of broken pot shards.
“Those were all clay jars,” Hyrule said as if that cleared up anything.
Wild got that feeling again. That there was some hero thing he was missing here. Normal people did not care about bottles and jars this much.
“I can give you glass bottles.” He said.
“Oh no, that’s alright! I wouldn’t want to take any of yours.” Hyrule dismissed, standing up from his crouch.
“No, really. I have dozens. Just take one of mine” Wild insisted.
Wild finally caved and asked about the bottles.
“I have no idea why they’re like that.” Warriors said. He looked a little lost himself.
“Can’t they just, buy bottles?”
“I’ve looked. No one sells bottles in any era we’ve been to.” Warriors says. He has one of his own bottles in hand. It was comically large, more like a jar than a bottle. It was ornate too, the neck of the jar had old wax on it from when the captain had bought it at the apothecary in his era.
“Besides ours,” Wild said.
“You know Legend only has five?” Warriors looks haunted. By glass jars.
“You’re joking.” Wild deadpanned. “The collector. He keeps shovels in his pack. Three of them.”
Warriors shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. The Crown commissioned glass blowers to keep us all supplied with potions during the war, and I still have plenty from then.”
“I buy them in bulk,” Wild said quietly as if it were an admission of guilt. “The Gerudo merchants give me a discount because I bring my ingredients. I have 52.”
“I don’t even know if I own these bottles. I think they belong to the Hylian Army.”