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Hero of Hyrule, chosen by the sword that seals the darkness—
She does not want to be here.
—you have shown unflinching bravery and skill in the face of darkness and adversity, and have proven yourself worthy of the blessings of the goddess Hylia.
How, exactly? What has this boy in front of her proven? That he’s chosen? That he has succeeded where she has failed?
Whether skyward-bound—
She knows how his hand feels in hers, and she hates it.
—adrift in time—
She knows how much hope she once held for him, and she doesn’t want it.
—or steeped in the glowing embers of twilight—
She knows him. She knows him. She doesn’t know him at all.
—the sacred blade is forever bound to the soul of the hero.
Just as she should be bound to her power. Just as her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother were.
We pray for your protection… and we hope that—
She doesn’t want his protection. She doesn’t want his hope.
—that the two of you will grow stronger together as one.
Princess Zelda lowers her hand. Just as this boy is bound to his sword, so is she bound to him.
She lets herself breathe. She forces her spine to stay straight, her shoulders to stay back, her knees to unlock. There’s no need to force herself to smile, so she doesn’t, and lets the solemnity of the occasion fall heavily upon everyone present.
(Gee, this is uplifting. She’s making it sound like we already lost.)
—————
There’s guilt in her father’s eyes, when he looks at the hero-boy. She doesn’t understand it.
(She doesn’t remember the old captain, how he used to make her father laugh. She doesn’t remember his wife, or her stories. She certainly doesn’t remember their son, and how he would wave at her shyly when he passed her in the castle halls—until all three of them were gone.)
Link, she reminds herself. She’s stuck with him now, she might as well know his name.
—————
He doesn’t want the Princess to hate him.
Link is drawn to her as a moth is to a flame, and tied to her as surely as destiny and fate are wrapped around his every limb.
He already knows that she hates pink jewels, and refuses to wear them. He already knows that she loves fruitcake above all other delicacies (if you can call fruitcake a delicacy, that is). He knows that the world weighs down on her shoulders, and that she straightens her spine and bears it.
He knows, even though she’s told him nothing. Refuses to tell him anything, in fact, unless it is a muttered complaint about being trapped or a rant about intricate technology that Link can hardly understand.
But when she sees that he’s guarding her quarters, she scowls. She glares at the soft echo of his footsteps behind her.
Really though, he’s only doing his job. The king would have his head if he left her alone for too long.
But it’s still making her hate him.
The door creaks open. Princess Zelda peeks her head out, and sees that yes--he is, in fact, still here. She frowns, and the door slams shut.
Link doesn’t let himself sigh.
—————
Zelda (and her father before her, along with Impa and everyone else who’d raised her) lives perpetually in existence.
She loves technology. She succeeds in science and research and writing, systems and patterns and puzzles.
She knows what is real, and what could have once been real. Sheikah technology is tactile and right in front of her, instead of the nebulous and unmanageable bloodline and favor of a goddess.
(Her ghosts look on sadly, hands pressed to the walls she unknowingly raised against them. No matter how they whisper or scream, she cannot hear them.)
The intangibility of fate bothers her, and it bothers her more that she’s so very aware of the tether that always brings Link’s echoing footsteps behind her.
(She knows him she knows him she knows him she—)
She’s never known anyone so far outside the boundaries of logic and predicability. There is no algorithm for her appointed knight. He follows instinct and is quietly resigned to the pull of fate and destiny and (he knows her) the inevitability of what they must become.
The shadows under his feet are darker than her own, and she knows why but she can’t quite remember it.
But pens fit well in her hands, so she does the only thing that she can do.
She writes. Because they’re leaving tomorrow, and she doesn’t know what will become of them then.
—————
Ghosts tie themselves to Link, and they always have.
He remembers giggling shadows, crimson feathers, skeletal fingers wrapped around a sword’s hilt, a little blue fairy dancing around him and—and song after song after song after song, filling his head and his ears until he can’t hear anything but a cacophony of notes that tear at wounds and aches a millennia old that never healed.
(There will be a thousand more ghosts that follow him before this is over.)
How proficient are you right now wielding that sword on your back? Zelda asks him, and he can’t answer her but she already knows that one anyway.
Legend says that an ancient voice resonates inside it. Can you hear it yet... hero?
She’s gone, he wants to say. She’s gone, and she’s never coming back, not the way I knew her. She hums sometimes, but I don’t know if it’s enough.
(It has to be enough.)
He doesn’t say it, because he can’t.
(Years of just being quiet collides with centuries of silence, and his voice has never really felt right anyway.)
—————
She’s done it. She’s lost him. She slipped quickly away in the early hours of morning while he kept his watchful vigil, looking everywhere but at her.
It’ll be a relief to have this time to herself, without his heavy-minded presence at her back. Without his horrid unpredictability, without the unknown in the equation.
The possible intricacies inherent in the shrines are endless. Why, she wants to know why and how and whom.
This is what she knows, what she loves. This is what she’s good at.
She feels him before she ever even hears him. She hopes to Hylia she’s wrong—just a few more minutes. A bit more time.
(She always has too much time or never enough. Too much time to herself, alone with her thoughts surrounded by stone walls slowly closing in, and never enough time away from the prison that was not of her own making.)
She’s wrong. Of course.
Link appears behind her on his favorite chestnut, and something inside her breaks.
She yells at him, screams at him, lets the words rip out of her throat blindly and without thought—
—————
He knows she hates him. He knows.
He can’t help but recoil, still.
He keeps himself impassive because he has to but of course he is anything but, and the part of him that refuses to cooperate with his practiced and perfected blankness absolutely hates this.
(She’s hurting, and he hates it.)
—————
—and she sees it. The briefest twist of his features, and she sees him tense and force his expression away. He steps away from her, once single step, and these things combined serve to hurt in a way that’s entirely unintentional, and that only makes it worse.
It’s so easy to forget that people are human. Her father forgets it. Her people forget it. (Even Link forgets it sometimes, who she is and what he knows exchanging places and shifting.)
She forgets.
He makes it easy to forget, does it on purpose. She should’ve known better, because she knows him.
(For the briefest of seconds, there is a feather-light touch on her shoulder and cheek, and it is familiar in a way she can’t place.)
—————
Failure, failure, failure. Link cannot reconcile the word with her, with Zelda. There’s so much she can do, she is so much—but she wears the word like a second skin. He wants to tell her otherwise, but the words get caught in his throat like they always do.
They’re in the desert and she’s tired. Vah Nabooris looms above them and surrounds them, just as Urbosa does.
Urbosa tells him of endured pain and relentless dedication.
She doesn’t say be kind, but the message gets across anyway.
He tries to tell her that he wants to be. His hands flutter with almost-desperation. I’m trying to be.
Urbosa can read his eyes better than most, and for once he’s glad for it.
(It might be because she was there for both funerals, the girl who refused to cry and the boy who couldn’t—maybe because somewhere out there is a world where he wasn’t lost in translation and sent away.)
There’s a mischievous glint in Urbosa’s smile.
A flash of lightning—and Zelda’s eyes fly open and she squeaks in surprise and shock and almost-exasperation.
Link can’t quite stifle a laugh.
—————
He saves her life and she’s not sure why she expected anything else.
She left him behind again and he still saved her.
She screamed at him and she hurt him and he saved her life.
There was everything on his face when the Yiga were dead and he turned to her on the ground, hand outstretched.
She takes his hand—and their callouses are in the wrong places, but it’s still the same as it’s always been.
—————
She tells him as brave as you are, that does not make you immortal.
She says the wound’s not too bad, but they’re going to the Domain anyhow so Mipha can take care of it there.
Link doesn’t care about the injury, personally. It’s so far from the worst that he’s felt that it’s almost inconsequential—what matters is that he gives her a flippant grin and she scoffs but she’s trying not to giggle, and she’s responding to his changing expressions and one-word answers like he’s telling her paragraphs of crucial information.
What matters is that she wrapped the bandage around his arm, and it was messy and clumsily-done but her fingers remembered the motions.
—————
This one here is called the silent princess.
It comes upon her suddenly—that Link means something to her. That on their back-and-forth travels through Hyrule, she saw his soft smiles and wry smirks and worried frowns and distant stares and half-conversations with no one and nothing, and she let him in. Like an idiot.
It’s a rare endangered species.
And now he means something to her, and she knows that she means something to him (she gave him so many opportunities to leave and never look back). She’s—she’s terrified, and anxious, now that she’s found him. The sword on his back still strikes an unpleasant chord. She needs him to know.
Despite our efforts, we can’t get them to grow domestically yet.
She needs him to know that she’s trying, and she’s been trying, but she has absolutely nothing to base her trying off of—and she wonders if there’s a limit to which a person can try.
The princess can only thrive out here, in the wild.
But here, here in this field, surrounded by flowers and herbs with purposes that they succeed in naturally—here, she is finally accomplishing something. (And she hopes to Hylia that he’ll understand.)
All that we can hope is that the species will be strong enough to prosper on its own.
—————
It’s raining.
There’s something about the rain that’s soothing to them both—the cooling effect, perhaps, or maybe it’s just the sound.
Your path seems to mirror your father’s.
Link hears the stories—of his father’s silent footsteps and cobalt eyes, wiry stature belying an incredible strength.
(You’re just like him, say the older soldiers. The King says nothing but his eyes are dark.)
I see now why you would be the chosen one.
(She says it as thought she ever doubted it, like she didn’t know him the second he stepped into her line of sight and his eyes met hers.)
What if... one day... you realized you just weren’t meant to be a fighter.
His sword fits well in his hands. Anything in his grasp is a weapon. He’s faster, stronger, quick-thinking but slow to realize pain. How could he ever be anything but a fighter? A fighter is all he’s ever been.
Yet the only thing people ever said... was that you were born into a family of the royal guard.
His mother was a healer. She, like him, could see fairies and woodland spirits and she told him a hundred stories. She almost believed him when he told her about the little blue fairy and the wolf.
And so no matter what you thought, you had to become a knight.
He lets himself look back at her, pauses his long-practiced forms.
If that was the only thing you were ever told... I wonder, then... would you have chosen a different path?
Maybe, maybe—but, he thinks, there are too many spirits and songs in his head to have ever chosen otherwise.
—————
They visit Kakariko Village. Link has to repair his Sheikah armor, and Zelda wants to see old friends.
Impa watches them together (as she has a thousand times before, over the course of millennia that she can’t remember.)
They are very young. Children, really. But they are children that exist outside of the laws and boundaries of reality and time.
The Sheikah wonder—can no one see how time fluctuates around them? The tethers of fate and an eternal cycle burning on their left hands?
Or the nearly-imperceptible but so jarring way that the wind curls around Link like an old friend? How the trees lean in towards him just slightly when he passes by?
And it’s a wonder, really, that little Zelda hasn’t unlocked Hylia’s gift within her yet. They can feel it burning just underneath her skin, radiating from her in waves. She is nearly blinding in her brilliance, but it seems everyone else is already blind.
—————
Her father catches her looking at the guardians, when they are finally brought to the castle to be controlled.
He’s been getting worse. Desperation drips off of his every feature, and he bows his head like his crown weighs the entire population of Hyrule.
(Something in her says you’re lucky to have him at all. Something else says but you’ve always worked better alone.)
They say you are a failure. She’s hardly deaf. She can hear the whispers.
Surely he realizes that the only thing he’s accomplishing is pain?
Surely that’s what he wants. If he digs the knife in deeper maybe he’ll carve the sealing power out of her.
Link is tense by her side. On his knees, because propriety demands it. She wants to tell him to get up.
—————
Zelda cannot stay at the castle any longer, and Link can hardly blame her.
They go to the Spring of Power, for the excuse of a long journey—and warmer waters.
Link has accompanied her to Springs before. Again and again, they’ve cycled through all three. But he’s never heard her sound quite this desperate.
(There’s a flickering electricity in the air, and it is thick with portent.)
He keeps his back turned, shoulders stiff, and pretends he can’t hear the statue singing.
What’s wrong with me?
—————
Link takes her to his home once, and it’s the only time Zelda ever sees it intact.
The old, retired captain who trained him does not bow to her. He raises a brow, glances at Link, and huffs. To her faint surprise, Link only laughs, and whispers to her that means he likes you.
The stable nearby houses a family that greets Link warmly, and their excitement upon meeting Zelda is that of welcoming a daughter. A grandmother insists you’re far too thin my dear, you have to eat more! A mother winks and says thank you for taking care of him, he can hardly do it himself, and a cousin berates Link on taking better care of his beloved chestnut horse.
A girl, about twelve, bursts into the room and when she sees Link she flings himself at him in a tight hug. He doesn’t hesitate to return it. She steps on his foot. You were supposed to visit ages ago!
He reaches into his pack and pulls out a simple silver chain necklace, hung with charms. Zelda recognizes a horse, a seagull, a cucco, and a few others she can’t quite decipher. The girl gasps, Link’s transgressions forgotten, and she hugs him again.
She eventually introduces herself to Zelda as Aryll, Link’s sister, and invites her to go on a ride.
Aryll tells her if you break his heart your arm is next.
Zelda knows.
In the morning, Link wakes her up early and they prepare to leave. He only says goodbye to Aryll, who doesn’t quite cry but twists her new necklace in her fingers. (She never takes it off, not even when the sky falls and malice coats and clouds the land like ashes.)
There’s one more place he wants to show her.
The light flickers and changes, and the sunrise outside dims to twilight. He says welcome to the Lost Woods, and gives her a torch.
She follows the embers, but really she’s following Link. The fog thickens, begins to envelop them, and the darkness is thick and deep and pale. Her sleeves snag on claw-like branches, and faces twisted in agony seem carved into their trunks.
Link flickers in and out of existence. From shadow to tree to murky fog to the embers trailing from her little flame. Sometimes she can hear a soft song on the wind, and it almost seems like he hums along.
Link takes her hand.
She’s never been able to see what he sees. Fairies, forest spirits. He’ll climb the castle walls into her quarters in the middle of the night with silent princess petals in his hair and mistletoe hung from his clothes, and set out bowls of honey and sugar-water on her windowsill.
But he takes her hand, and suddenly the trees are huge and wild and twisting and golden, and her torch illuminates the air with a hazy, bright glow.
And—they’re in a clearing. The soft wind-song reaches its peak, and Link’s hand tightens around hers and—
And she can see them.
Little pink fairies, fluttering through flowers and falling leaves, brushing against the two of them affectionately. Little wooden, leafy forest spirits—Koroks, she remembers—hang from the branches and hover above the ground, gleefully playing and chattering.
Link shows her the mossy stone where the Master Sword once slept, below the creaking, ancient face of the Deku Tree—who doesn’t awaken, but she can feel the fathomless age and knowledge of him just the same.
(This is important, but only later.)
—————
They go to Mount Lanayru, expecting something to be different.
It isn’t.
It’s Zelda’s birthday but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s no coming-of-age celebration in the air. Link’s planning on baking a surprise fruitcake when they get back, even though he knows it won’t be the same.
She spends the day with ice slowly creeping up her veins and quickly-fading hope.
This was the only idea they had left.
She leaves the Spring of Wisdom dejected. Link takes her hand, and he wants to say something but for the first time in a while, the words are all wrong and his voice is foreign, and it catches in his throat.
He squeezes her hand tighter.
The Champions await them at the base of the mountain, eyes alight with hope and fevered with fear.
The ground trembles and the castle roars, and any remaining hope drains from them all, leaving them hollow.
—————
I’ve left them all to die.
Bright beams of light—
I’ve left them all to die.
Red, blue, blinding, ashes—
How did it come to this?
His hand in her own, pulling—
So I really am just a failure!
Tears and rain, indecipherable—
It was all for nothing...
The city is collapsing, she’s collapsing—
I tried, and I failed them all.
She reaches inside and there’s nothing at all—
I’ve left them all to die.
—————
Surrounded by malice-corrupted once-symbols of hope, Zelda finds herself useless.
They’re everywhere. Like spiders crawling over each other desperate for a single caught victim, the guardians swarm them. Swarm Link, since he won’t let them get to her.
This is what the power of Farore and Hylia intertwined looks like. He’s taken down twenty guardians but a hundred come to replace them, and still he keeps fighting.
He’s burning.
His soul-bound blade is glowing with a desperate light, and if Zelda wasn’t so panicked she might have felt it (her) urge them to keep going, keep fighting, don’t give up now.
He’s slowing.
She’s never felt so incapable. Years of research and careful experiments can’t help her now.
He’s shaking.
She screams because she can do nothing else. Her left hand burns, but she hardly notices.
He’s falling.
He’s going to die. She won’t let him. She won’t let him.
She pushes him out of the way, so that she’ll burn instead. Link is the one the people need, not the useless princess who could do nothing.
She burns, but not like that.
Golden light erupts from her hand and it’s like the floodgates have been opened after building up pressure for an eternity. Hylia’s hands guide her own, and a hundred voices only she can hear cry out in relief.
He falls.
(She used to be able to heal. She wonders where that power went—when she lost something so fundamental, replaced by the power to burn.)
—————
Purah and Robbie tell her Link won’t know you when he wakes.
She nods. (She knows that they’re wrong. He knew her before he ever laid eyes on her, and he will know her again.)
The Master Sword is heavy in her grasp, almost like it’s mourning.
She lights a torch and ventures through the Lost Woods. She’s too exhausted to be terrified again, or to feel the wonder of the little village’s golden light.
The Deku Tree is awake, and he isn’t surprised to see her. Zelda briefly wonders just how deep his roots go, but there’s no time for curiosity now, and there might never be again.
She slides the blade back into its resting place. It feels like an apology, but Zelda waves it off. You did well, she wants to say. You did so well.
And now it’s her turn.
—————
Zelda steps slowly, deliberately towards the castle. Her footsteps scatter bits of malice, and her form wavers like a mirage. It almost seems like she’s glowing.
And then she is glowing, a light so radiant that you have to look away or be blinded, and then she is gone.
Zelda settles down to wait, and to fight.
A hundred spirits stand behind her. She knows each and every one. Her mother is among them.
There will be time for mourning later. There will be time for everything later.
—————
Time passes, as it always does.
But it won’t be long now. The dying hero isn’t dying anymore, and the princess is fading.
Hyrule holds its breath.
(And so it begins again.)