Link pulls out with a stack of papers with doodles all over them. There are maps, notes, and an especially vivid nude drawing of half-woman, half-fish Ruto. “In many ways, this is my life’s work,” he declares.

He sets them down on a table and arranges them into three neat piles. “It’s the story of my incredible adventure with the Ocarina of Time. I’ve written out every moment in great detail, from when I break the Deku Tree’s curse to when Princess Zelda transports me back in the time to live my childhood.”

“Everything is in here…” he continues. “…except the Water Temple.”

The ageless Hylian man smiles sadly. His pointy green hat wilts in the sweltering Dodongon heat. He’s sitting at his favorite spot to write: inside an active volcano. It’s very private. Off in the distance, a lava chute spews.

“It’s not that I don’t remember it,” Links says. “I do. I remember strapping on the iron boots, sinking to the bottom of Lake Hyrule, and solving a bunch of complicated puzzles that had to do with raising the water levels so that I could get to this and that… I just don’t remember exactly how I figured it out.”

“I remember it was a lot harder than the other Temples. And it was very wet. That doesn’t make for good reading, though.”

The book’s editor, a talking owl named Kaepora Gaebora, patiently awaits in the Sacred Realm for Link to hand in the rough draft of the manuscript.

“Frankly, I don’t care so much that he can’t remember one tiny puzzle,” the reincarnated sage tells Hardcasual. “We’re probably going to cut out most of the ‘He shoots this target with an arrow’ and ‘He pushes a stone to this dark spot in the floor’ stuff anyway. No one cares so about those details. They want to hear more about the stuff he stabbed while on horseback.”

But Link wants to tell his tale as thorough as elfishly possible.

“I’m sorry, but I have to know. All my other accomplishments are accounted for. I even wrote in the location of all the Skultellas. What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘And then I went down to the Water Temple and beat some puzzle and killed a boss and left’? That wouldn’t fly. Hylians deserve to know how I solved an ancient riddle with my superior intellect.”

The possessor of one third of the Triforce takes a jar out of his knapsack and cracks it open. A faerie flies out and swirls around his head several times before dying. He stares at his hands for a long while and sighs.

“I keep thinking that maybe one of these is gonna jump start my memory.”

Navi, the faerie who accompanied Link throughout his quest to stop Ganondorf from achieving power, tells Hardcasual that she offered to tell Link how he solved the notoriously tricky temple, but he refused.

“Link said he had to come from inside him. Which is a pretty typical Link thing to say,” Navi says. “HEY! He thinks he saved the world all by himself. LISTEN! It was me putting myself in the line of fire again and again just so he knew what the hell he was supposed to be looking at. LOOK! I didn’t have a sword or a shield. Nothing.”

Though the stars are visible through the mouth of the volcano, time seems to slow to a crawl down here by the lava pit. Link sits on his rock and goes over his papers once more, as if waiting for inspiration to come to him. After a long while he writes down a single word on the back of a paper: “hokshoot?”

With additional reporting by Hardcasual’s own Filipe Salgado.