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| Chapter Two: The Rose Garden |
| I grew up about a mile outside of North Castle City in a small suburb called Garden Place. This was a cluster of villas. The home Jono brought me up in was called the Rose Garden, a gift to him from my mother. It would be a lie to say that my childhood in the Rose Garden was a calm and normal one. The fact of the matter is that nothing was ever calm around the Rose Garden. Someone was always visiting, usually uninvited. My father was not a very social man, but I loved all the attention his guests |
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| heaped on me. I never knew, back then, that these people understood my own origins better than I. For me, they were my only connection to the outside world. I don't want to say that I was isolated, but Jono was hard pressed to let me out of his sights for a long time. Although my identity was relatively unknown, there were plenty of figures, both in Hyrule and in Catalan who knew that there was a daughter of Artem Barr out there. |
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| Naturally, as Captain of the Guard, Jono's duties began to get in the way of his parenting. Being a religious man, he hired an old missionary sister named Emma to serve as my nanny. What she had to tell him absolutely shocked him. According to the ancient religious edicts of Hyrule, the firstborn child of a future monarch would be named a Triforce Guardian, a holy warrior endowed with special powers by the goddesses. As Amanda's only child, this title would fall to me. Much against Jono's wishes, I was given a tattoo on my left hand to signify |
| this special destiny. Jono grew afraid that I would be taken from him, so he made it absolutely clear that I was not to attend religious services or visit a Hylian mission until I was of age. Still, Jono was not entirely secure. To |
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| further protect me from kidnapping or harm, Jono called upon the help of a close friend of my father, Kallista Summer. Auntie Kally, as she was known to me, came to live in the Rose Garden when I was three, bringing along her own daughter, roughly the same age as me, Adriana. Only a little while after she moved in, she gave birth to a son, Philip, who also grew up in the Rose Garden. Kally would become my first real mother figure. Life with her was extraordinary. |