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Some days it was easy for Link to convince himself that he hadn’t gone mad. Days when the world was bright and clear as a shining star, he would find purpose, a sense of self.
But then he would slip away. Quietly, without realizing he was lost in the fog (just like his memories), his eyes blinked slow and days passed him by.
‘Wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake—’
It was easier to fall into routine, to simply... succumb to the wild. A kind of tranquility awaited him there, where the mind could slip into a comfortable numbness, where he could forget what he’d forgotten in the first place. There, he was no longer the empty husk of a former hero. There, he was no one at all.
He was just a boy lost in the woods, struggling to keep his head above water like everyone else.
‘Wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move, sleep, wake, eat, move—’
Before Link knew it, the first month drew to a close. The shock of crimson tore through the haze of his mind as the sky warped red. It was all at once maddening, yet cleansing while Zelda, (yes, that’s her name ) relayed her message to him, the toneless voice cutting through the fog.
...The blood moon rises…
And then, finally , he was grounded again.
There was purpose, there was a mission. There was... her. He promised himself he would find her. Yes, that’s right. He would save her.
The girl he knew for all of his life and beyond.
The girl he didn’t know at all.
But just as quickly as he would plant his feet, he would feel himself begin to sink back into the mud.
Link eventually realized the cause for his insanity. The epiphany came when he happened upon his first lost memory. Just by mere chance he stumbled and blinked and—
She was there. Bright and blinding, of pink flesh and green eyes, real and tangible and the most beautiful person he’d ever seen and—
a bokoblin swiped at his face.
For a moment Link’s world was concrete. Vivid. He could see each blade of grass swaying green from the summer breeze, how the color of the sky was so vibrant and blue that it stung him. He felt the loud huff of a breath forced out of his lungs as the boko club connected with his side. Smelled the blood, tasted it, crimson and metallic on his tongue from biting his cheek when his head hit the ground.
It felt surreal. Link’s world warped from gray and numb to color and feeling instantaneously, snapping him into reality. Electricity coursed through his veins. He became like lighting: powerful, blazing, alive. Quick in step and faster in sword when he charged, roaring, back at the monster.
Link felt the wood of its shield buckle as metal met bark, watched it shatter into pieces in an explosion of splinters. His blade drove straight through the bokoblin’s arm to the belly, cracking bones and cutting flesh, halfway to the hilt. The monster howled and screeched, then crumbled to the ground as a useless heap of flesh.
“Must you always be so reckless?” she mumbled.
He washed the blood and muck off of his face in the river. Took the time to recoil at the acrid stench of bokoblin guts and dirt wafting off his skin, to gaze into the mirror of water and see how filthy he was. Blue eyes, tired and sagging. Golden hair, in muddy tatters. Tanned skin, scraped and bruised from countless battles that strung themselves into a series of blurred memories replaying in his head. He looked every part the madman he thought he was.
“You must take better care of yourself.”
He’d left her needlessly worried again, as he often tended to do.
“Promise me you will.”
The sweet sound of honey dripped from her lips. Oddly enough, for once in his life, Link felt obliged to speak. His lips parted and breath withdrew, ready to deliver the promise, but then snapped his mouth closed when he realized it was a promise he wasn’t quite sure he could keep.
Instead, he acknowledged her request with a half-hearted nod.
“Good,” she hummed in response. It was a distant reply, vague, like the words were there but lacking the thoughts to complete them.
Link glanced over the long pale scar snaking down the better part of his forearm and traced over it with the tip of his finger.
It was silent, but not uncomfortably so. He watched, patient and unflinching, as the princess tended to the awful gash slicing through the meat of his arm. Lizalfos blades were deceptively sharp and could cut through to bone. Their serrated edges often tore through flesh, rather than slice, leaving wounds that were hard to heal and uglier to scar. It looked quite painful, but Link was never one to complain. Even as the flesh on his arm sizzled and fumed from the experimental tonic that she poured over it, he didn’t flinch once.
He seemed incapable of such things.
Link winced at the stubborn pains stinging his side, lifting his tunic to inspect the wounds. A handful of reasonably-sized splinters leftover from the shoddy wooden club tore free from his torso when he peeled back his shirt. He grimaced at the sight. His right abdomen was peppered black and blue with bruises—even bleeding in a few places.
“Shit,” Link hissed, then blinked. He’d forgotten the sound of his own voice.
“There,” the princess smiled, looking satisfied with herself. “That should suffice for now.”
It was clear she was no expert in medicinal aid, for when Link moved his arm the entire bandage unravelled and fell into the dirt.
“Oh dear. That’s not supposed to happen,” she mumbled, eyes big and jaw slacked in shock.
Had her eyes always shimmered such a bright color of green?
“I was sure the bandage was to be applied this way. Was I wrong?” The princess whispered a quick string of phrases to herself while she fiddled away with her beloved Sheikah Slate.
Link found amusement worming its way up his gut at that adorable little quirk, but shoved it back down his throat.
“No, this is the way I have it written in my notes...” She tapped her lower lip, something she always did when she was thinking.
The unwavering hero almost smiled. As if the shell of his hard exterior cracked, the kind friend buried deep within himself clawed up out of the crevice of darkness to grasp his princess’s shoulder. He hadn’t even the slightest control to restrain himself, which he later found the most alarming part of the whole ordeal.
“It’s all right, your Highness.”
Barely any sound passed his lips. The words were a whoosh of air full of fleeting syllables, but somehow the princess managed to comprehend them. Her eyes were wide—again—at first, astonished he had spoken at all.
But when the shock wore off, her brow furrowed. “It is most certainly not,” she scolded, pointing a finger at his nose. She turned away in a rush, blonde locks swatting him in the face as she rummaged through her pouch for more bandages. “Need I remind you that we are in this predicament in the first place because of you , sir reckless knight.”
Link suppressed a wince.
“How many times did I explicitly warn you that Lizalfos preyed these parts? Nine? Ten? Yet, still you charged in as though you were an uncivilized cretin.”
“Your Highness, I…” Link started, but his words snagged on the tip of his tongue and died. He tried to will them back, though he knew it was a futile effort. His mouth might as well had sewn itself shut.
It seemed, by either a curse or blessing from the sisters, her highness had some patience in her today. She sat back on her heels and stared expectantly for an answer, ignoring the mud stains rubbing onto her trousers.
Link withdrew another breath through his nose. He held it there, reciting a silent prayer of mercy, before giving a long, quiet exhale. “It is my duty—” he started again, but failed. More unwanted thoughts and feelings clambered out of the fissure as his voice cracked when he spoke again. “It is my duty to protect my charge at all costs.”
There. He said it.
Her glimmering green eyes affixed to his. The silence between them stretched on, longer than he ever thought possible of his princess. He’d long since grown used to her absent minded ramblings. Nayru willing, he could even accept that he felt comforted by that sweet, excitable tone she always carried on with.
But there were no such ramblings now. Silence, which he’d believed to be his sanctuary, had currently become his enemy, especially under that scrutinizing gaze. Those damn green eyes!
Then, with just the right amount of disgust, the princess hissed, “You’re missing the point, Link.”
Link blinked—he hadn’t for the better part of a minute—when the foreign sound of his name fell off her tongue, and felt something in his chest alight with fire.
“‘At all costs’, does not necessarily mean, ‘throw your life away’,” she chastised, sighing and wiping the mud off of her trousers. “Who would we have left to defeat the Calamity if you died?” Her eyes looked to the water, sad and smiling, as she allowed a few seconds of silence for the phrase to sink in.
Link swallowed, mouth suddenly dry.
Like a battle ending with a critical finishing blow, she added, “Who would be more capable of protecting me?”
Link realized, as he hovered a palm over his wounded arm and felt the painful pulsing heat radiate from it, that she’d somehow managed to drive a wedge through the crack in his facade and split it wide open. All it took was one look and a handful of words to unravel him almost completely.
He clutched his pulsing arm tighter, fighting to hold back a grimace.
“I’m sorry.” his apologetic whisper sounded hitched. Fractured, even. His head spun, dizzy with an impossible madness he couldn’t begin to explain. The pit of his chest ached, heavy and hollow, desperate for...something. He couldn’t put a finger on what it was. A scream? A hug? A childish cry? “I’m sorry, Z—”
What a pitiful hero he was.
“—Your Highness.”
Link turned his gaze to the azure sky, lying back in the grass and taking a moment to watch the clouds pass him by.
“I’m sorry, Zelda. ” he muttered.
He let the name sit there on his tongue, sweet like honey but sour like apple. Somehow, he knew that was the first time he’d ever spoken her name aloud with his own mouth. There were tears in his eyes then. Uninhibited, shining, real tears that he let fall down his cheeks and drip onto the ground beside him.
Cracks and fissures be damned. There was nothing left now but a pointless, gaping, empty hole.
Link wept. A hundred emotions crashed upon him all at once, wave after wave of guilt— of anger, sadness, euphoria— tossed him around in the waves of a merciless ocean.
It was just one memory. A fleeting moment between two people, but to Link it was so much more than that.
“I’m sorry, Zelda .” he whispered again. It was breathtaking just to feel the name tickle his teeth, to hear it echo into the air and disperse as wishes off a dandelion. He almost laughed when he realized he only said the phrase aloud so he could hear her name again.
The name of the girl with a voice as sweet as water from a spring, with a smile brighter than sunshine and a warmth that he could still feel burning his chest and cheeks, even in the present.
“ Zelda. ”
The name he wouldn’t even allow himself to think in a past life.
Then, the grass that prickled the back of his neck began to feel oddly numb. A terrifyingly familiar, surreal sense of fog churned icy cold butterflies in the pit of his stomach.
Had he simply just imagined it all? Was his past self really so pathetic that he couldn’t bring himself to speak someone’s own name?
Link jerked forward (regrettably forgetting his wounds) and peered over the river into the water. He hovered his arm over the edge, a reflection casting off the natural mirror so he could see the long pale scar etched by a lizalfos blade. His eyes scanned over the jagged line, half expecting the scar to fade away. To disappear into the mud along with his new, single memory.
But it didn’t.
He felt the wounds on his side sting his ribs, the burn giving way now to slight discomfort.
I’ve always been reckless. Even before I lost myself.
It was in those string of thoughts that he realized the true cause of his insanity.
“ I’m sorry , Zelda.” Link said, this time with true sincerity. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m no longer a fool.” With a huff he fell back on his rump, heart empty with a hollow ache he couldn’t explain. “I don’t even know if you can hear me,” he laughed dryly, the sound a little hoarse and rasping. He waited a while longer before he spoke again. “I hope you’re not still too worried about me.”
Link kept on talking to her. To Zelda. To no one in particular. No one was there to converse with but himself, so he spoke to his reflection in the river. He imagined her reflection there too — blinding in blue, locks of sunshine gleaming off the water — sitting beside him at the river bank.
She had to be.
To a passerby, he likely would have appeared an absolute madman. But to Link, with each small confession he gave he felt himself begin to root back into solid ground.
For the first time in over one hundred years, the hero smiled. Truly smiled.
The sun had just dipped under the horizon by the time Link ran out of things to say. He stood, shaking off the ache of stiff bones in his sore body and turned to collect his gear, when a glimmer of gold caught his eye.
And she was there.
A brilliant golden spirit, light encompassing the ethereal form and dancing like the embers of a fire, hovering just an arm’s-length away from his face. The glow warmed his chest and cheeks as if she’d become the sun. She looked like an angel — no, like a goddess.
“ Zelda, ” Link breathed, the name more or less air.
She smiled at him. Genuine, serene, warm. Enough to steal all the breath in his body away.
And she was gone.
The glow faded near instantaneously, quick enough that for a second Link thought he was just seeing things. But then he felt the residual warmth radiate off his skin and knew it was real. The sky, darkened and blue and shining with stars, never looked so beautifully clear to him as it did in that moment.