KAKARIKO VILLAGE — Link, the Hero of Hyrule, has sadly passed away at the age of 17. After rolling over shards of a ceramic pot he broke while looking for rupees, he suffered a lacerated kidney and died of catastrophic blood loss.

As the sun set on Kakariko Village this weekend, a procession for Link’s funeral said their farewells after a 10 hour ceremony that began in the Castle Town Plaza and moved all the way to Kakariko Cemetery. People from all corners of Hyrule came to pay respects to the woodland child that aided Princess Zelda in thwarting the king of Gerudo’s vile plans, against impossible odds.

“Wisdom without courage bears no fruit, that’s why we call upon heroes to help us in our hour of need,” said Princess Zelda, as she shed a tear by Link’s tombstone. “Link’s courage certainly helped me discover my own as we worked together to fight Ganondorf, and I will always be thankful to him for that. But, alas, courage also proved to be his own downfall. Maybe his upbringing in the forest was more feral than we imagined, or perhaps the perils of the mission left him traumatized; we will never know for sure. We shared a few months together after evil was defeated, and let me tell you, Link was pretty cavalier about his life. I saw him jumping off the roof of a three story building holding onto a cucco, throwing rocks the size of his torso over his head, placing bombs near boulders in Hyrule field and waiting for them to detonate just a few feet away. He would jump into dangerous river rapids or crawl into caves infested with monsters just to get a few rupees and a couple of nuts. He once also proudly showed me his collection of bottled ghosts. There’s a fine line between courage and adrenaline junkie.”

While appreciative of Zelda’s wise words, some of Link’s friends present in the ceremony expressed their disbelief over the whole affair.

“Link was like a small brother to me,” said Darunia, Patriarch of the Goron Tribe. “The kid was a little daredevil, but he was as strong as they come. Still, I too noticed how particular he was about pottery. I don’t know how many afternoons and bomb bags he wasted trying to destroy the giant vase we have at the center of Goron City, but he kept on trying til the day he died. A person as brave and driven as that, taken down by baked clay? Sounds like divine intervention, maybe the Goddesses were not on his side that day.”

Others, however, did not experience his passing with regret or incredulity, but downright vindication.

“Of course he died like that. Half of Hyrule could’ve told you it would come to that,” an eye-rolling Castle Town guard said after asking to remain anonymous. “I saw that little shit come into the guard house by the city gate week after week and just smash every single fucking jar in the room. He’d use his sword, bombs, magic, you name it. Most of the guards used to store our wages there and he found nothing better to do than to steal our rupees whenever he felt like it. Mistress Impa once told us to help him in whatever way we could so that was it, we just had to keep our mouths shut and take it. We thought it was just about the rupees, so a few weeks ago, after Ganondorf was taken away, we moved our money elsewhere. Still, he’d come into the room and wreck the place, like he was on a warpath against the concept of ceramics. One day he decided to try bombchus to spice things up. One of them went right out the window and up the wall, set part of our quarters on fire. Good riddance!”

At press time, Gravedigger Dampé covered the grave with dirt and crushed terracotta tiles as a tribute to the young hero.