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Home... What’s the first thing you remember?

“I had a dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

“A bad one.”

“How bad?”

“You were alive. I had a dream, and in it you were alive. You didn’t die. How did that happen? What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything. You never did any of the things you were supposed to, when you were supposed to, when the time was right and everyone was standing on the crumbling precipice, waiting for you to push the monster back into the closet. That’s why you’re here, aren’t you?”

“Huh?”

“Because you messed up the first time. Because you’re going to try again.”

“I had a dream,” Zelda says. “Where Hyrule fell.”

Impa flicks a chess piece in her direction. “Uhuh. Not going to happen.”

Zelda frowns. She moves her knight forward. The details of the chessboard swim like a set piece passed under water, the squares wobbling, the pieces floating up into the space between them. Outside her window, a bird titters.

After a pause, she puts her knight back and picks up a pawn. “It absolutely could,” she says. “It will, if I don’t awaken my powers in time.”

Impa shrugs. “But you will. So what’s the problem?”

The birds outside have started to bicker. “Why are you so confident?”

The birds outside. The birds inside. Impa titters under her breath. “Why are you so afraid?”

Zelda is confused and annoyed and nursing a long-term insecurity about her inability to do anything for the people she cares about, and Impa is indignant. In her indignation she has stood up and knocked the chessboard over. She glares at Zelda, then realizes what she has done and rearranges her expression, passing a hand over the collar of her tunic tersely. Suddenly, she is unrecognizable. Who is this person, with Impa’s bun and Impa’s pout and Impa’s habit of drumming her fingers on the side of the table? Who is this person, full of conviction built on false grounds?

“You’re going to figure everything out, your highness,” the stranger says in a familiar voice. “Trust me. I know how this story unfolds.”

“That’s not very Impa-like of you,” Zelda replies distractedly. There’s a strand of hair falling into her eyes and she can’t quite get it out of the way, can’t quite make out Impa across the table. Impa with the long hair and the knives. Impa with the all-seeing eyes of Hylia. She finds herself wanting to say more, wanting to know about all the secrets hidden in the sleeve of Impa’s shirt, but by the time she picks up her voice from where it’s fallen to the carpet amongst the dead knights and dead queens, she’s already pushed her chair back and stood up. She excuses herself from the room with a nod, shutting the door firmly behind her. It’s barely four o’clock.

“You never told me why,” Zelda says with a touch of regret, blowing her hair out of her face. “You never told me why you know everything.”

The bird perched outside takes off in a flurry of feathers and tree-leaves. It’s a sparrow, with blue-tipped wings and a yellow beak, and small, beady eyes. It takes off from the branch of a tree and heads for the world beyond the castle, carving up the sky as it goes, leaving everything behind it in tatters. She picks up the fallen knight and stares at it for several moments. Perhaps she should have moved him forward after all.

/

[The setting is the Royal Ancient Tech Lab. The ceiling lights are BLUE while a single YELLOW bulb hangs over ZELDA’S face, so as to better illuminate her myriad of changing expressions to the audience.]

Robbie: This thing came from the FUTURE.

Purah: That’s right. The FUTURE.

Robbie: Hyrule is going to get super fucked up if YOU don’t do something.

[The ‘thing’ writhes enthusiastically in Robbie’s hands. It is shaped like an egg. From now on it will be referred to as ‘the egg guardian’.]

Zelda: Oh no. [She takes a step away from the table, her hands clenched into fists on each side. Behind her, someone sucks in a sharp breath. She can feel eyes on the back of her neck. The disarming gaze belongs to the knight who has been assigned to her personal guard for the first time, replacing Colin, with the gray eyes and the slouched shoulders. This knight is young, fast, and powerful. This knight can take out a moblin in ten seconds flat, nine if you don’t blink, and yet he is frightfully small and frightfully young, only seventeen, the son of some-knight-or-another. Her father was pleased and impressed and secretly, horribly relieved. If his daughter cannot protect herself, at least there will be someone to take the knife for her. This boy will be her salvation. This boy will be her second chance.] What do I do?

Robbie: Something.

Purah: Anything.

Impa: [Readjusting her hair.] Your highness, what do you want to do?

[Her newly-assigned knight probably has a name. If she knew it she would call on him right now, and demand that he provide an answer to Impa’s question or risk permanent exile to the mountains. Unfortunately, she does not know what it is.]

Zelda: [After a pause.] I want to save Hyrule.

[Her newly-assigned knight is thinking about whether there will be roast chicken at dinner tonight. Upon hearing Zelda’s words, he stops, looks up, and is momentarily blinded by light.]

Egg guardian: [Happy beeping sounds] Now that [it hauls itself out of Robbie’s arms and makes a beeline for Zelda.] is a very good answer.

/

His name is Link. Link saves her life when they get ambushed by the Yiga clan and Sooga throws a knife at her face. As the tiny, spinning blade makes its way across the square to her, she thinks that she might die before she can unlock her powers, and begins to feel terribly and grotesquely relieved. In the next moment Link has dived in front of her and batted it away. Like a ball in a ball game. Like a monkey with a metal club. The throwing knife clatters uselessly to the floor of the plaza, and Zelda is so mad she could cry. Link is breathing hard and shaking all over like he’s just run a marathon, even though he’s not the one who has to save a kingdom, even though he’s doing everything that he’s being asked to. All he has to do is swing his stupid sword, and he clearly knows how to do it properly. She bets no one’s ever yelled at him before. She bets he’s never stabbed the wrong body.

She thanks him anyway, because she may be a failure, but she can’t bring herself to be rude. She thanks the egg guardian too, because it dove in front of her before Link did, even if all it did was get batted aside with someone else’s shield like a frisbee. Link doesn’t say anything because he never does. The egg guardian blows its top cheerily, like she imagines a dog might wag its tail after returning a toy to its owner. She tries not to feel too disappointed.

Link seems to have earned the egg guardian’s respect. It scampers after him and he does an awkward little dance to the side to avoid it. Forward, forward, back. Left, left, right. After a while Link gives up and just stands there while the egg guardian attaches itself to his left leg and proceeds to scream at everything that comes within a mile of them both. He scratches the back of his head miserably, turning to look at Zelda with an expression that seems to say: help me. Zelda laughs at him.

“You’re not going to die from that,” she says, hiding her smile with the back of her hand. If I could, I would make you immortal so you never have to die from anything, she doesn’t add. If I could, she doesn’t say, because telling someone about a wish you’ve made prevents it from ever coming true, I would save everyone.

/

But she can’t save herself. She has to be herded from point to point in the Great Hyrule Forest like a gift horse rolled into a castle, Troy burning on the tip of her tongue while Impa watches her back and Link takes her hand and leads her forward. Down the winding paths they go, following the sound of Hestu’s maracas in the darkness, a legion of fake soldiers in a fairytale about the power of friendship where no one has to be sad and everyone lives forever. Ignore the skeletons in the grass. Ignore the fortune teller’s voice, the bleak and looming prophecy. She scrunches her eyes shut and lets Link tug her deeper into the woods, feeling the air around her flash hot and cold all at once. When she opens them again, he has let go.

A bad man in a black hood has set his sights on Hyrule. He laughs in a horrible high-pitched voice as he sends a wave of monsters shaped like her champions, her people, after Link, who swings his sword the way he always has, the way he’s been told to, in beautiful seething arcs through the air, his blue earrings flashing, his soldier’s greaves singing, everything about him moving in harmony to take down the evil of the day, and for a moment she’s disappointed. Why doesn’t he ever lose? Why doesn’t he ever have to be the one to lower his head, and say sorry?

Then he falls. Violently. Daruk’s shadow takes a swing at him and it’s too much, for once, for the first time in all the weeks she’s known him. He hits the ground with a thud. His sword snaps in half.

Then the bad man with the terrible laugh is laughing at her, not the knight with the blue eyes. Then the bad man with the terrible, disgusting laugh is telling Fake-Daruk and Fake-Mipha and Fake-Urbosa and Fake-Revali to ‘get her’, which she supposes means she is going to die, which means it’s all over.

The center cannot hold. Things fall apart. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, girl to sky to heaven.

At the very last moment, before Fake-Revali can notch an arrow at her throat and let go, she hears someone call her name. Then everything blurs to white.

/

Link can’t take his eyes off of the master sword, which would seem like a matter for reproach if not for the fact that the stupid thing is glowing. It’s singing in his hands like a bird in a courtship ritual. Hyrule has a hero now, and he’s five-foot-four with blue eyes, blue hands. A big, bashed-in heart.

“Link—” she tries to stand up. Confused, she brings her hand to the sleeve of her shirt, and it comes away wet.

“Oh.”

He’s beside her in the blink of an eye, sword forgotten at the pedestal, kneeling in the grass at her feet. She’s stunned at how red everything is. It’s too red for something that hurts so little. She would laugh, if she could find the air in her lungs to do so. Link isn’t laughing. Link’s face is half-hidden by his hair, his brow knitted, biting his lip like he’s the one who got cut and not the one who got thrown at a stone pedestal like a rag doll in a dollhouse. He bats her hand away from her sleeve, tugging the fabric open with a thumb and forefinger. She winces. He flinches. Sorry I got hurt. Sorry I touched you.

The cut is small. Several inches long, half an inch wide, and clearly not very deep judging by the way her skin has puckered around it. It’s a shallow cut. It’s a small wound. The redness is at odds with the childishness of the whole affair, which is why she’s upset that Link seems so upset at her. He shouldn’t be. She has to tell him.

“It’s fine,” she says. There. She’s told him.

Link ignores her. He peels off her sleeve and tears a strip from his uniform, and begins to wind it firmly but carefully around her arm. The pressure smarts a little, and she tries her best to hide her discomfort, but he’s looking. He inhales sharply. He knows. She looks away.

“It’s not.”

She blinks. “Sorry?”

He keeps his gaze lowered and his eyes on her arm. “It’s not fine,” he repeats quietly.

He finishes tying the makeshift bandage and knots it neatly at one end, just as Impa and the others crash violently through the trees into view. Seeing the empty pedestal and the sword on the ground, they put two and two together and immediately come to the worst possible conclusion. Hyrule has a knight now. Five-foot-four with the big, bashed-in heart, and a voice like knives on the surface of a pond. Bad with words but brilliant at disaster. Hyrule has a savior.

/

His name is Link. Link will talk to you if you get stabbed by a knife in a sword fight with evil, and Link will tell you if he thinks you’re being stupid, but he won’t say a word when he walks out of the throne room after forty-five minutes of soft conversation and muffled thuds, and there’s a hand-shaped imprint on his face.

“What did my father say?” Zelda asks, because it seems like it would be rude to ask him what her father did. Although he clearly did something. Link’s hands are in his pockets, his ponytail half-undone. His shoulders are hunched, and the tension carries over to the rest of his body, making his walk look weird, making his weirdness look nervous.

He reaches the end of the hallway and turns down the staircase. Zelda follows.

“Was he mad?”

Link’s eyes dart to her bandaged arm. Bingo, she thinks. Wait, no, she thinks as an afterthought. No. Not-bingo. Extremely-not-bingo.

She switches priorities. “Are you okay?”

They walk out of the courtyard, down the winding path and to the outer wall of the castle. Here there are fewer people and more guards, soldiers patrolling the skies, the skies full of birds who want to kill you. Link unsheathes his sword. She takes a step back in mild apprehension.

He holds it carefully with both hands, testing its heft, re-learning the shape of his history, et cetera. The master sword seems pleased with its handling and shines just that little bit brighter, so that all the gods watching over them will know that this time, too, they picked the right boy. He’s not beautiful, just graceful. He’s not graceful, just five inches shy of divine. The sun is setting and the castle is slipping into darkness, casting a long arm of light across its heaving breast. The gold sticks to his hair, his shoulders, the skin on the back of his neck. He’s all stern and shiny, like an angel in the dark. She wants to touch him.

Then Divine Seventeen-Year-Old Prodigy Swordsman Link draws his sword arm back and stabs the master sword into a tree. He leaves it there for a moment, then seems to give up on pulling it out altogether. He turns around.

“I am,” he says, answering a question she must have asked him a century ago. He must have answered one of them, but watching him watch her from across the grass with his head tilted forward, his lashes painted silver, her memory fails her. What did she ask? It must have mattered. It must have meant something.

“I am, but you’re not.” He shrugs, then goes to retrieve his sword. “I’m sorry.”

Her father definitely slapped him. She can imagine the scene, the brusque, one-sided conversation, her father giving in to a moment’s impulse and bringing his hand across his cheek. Link wouldn’t talk back in a situation like that. Link only talks when someone else’s life is on the line. Link only talks when it matters, which, if you think about it, seems to suggest that his own life is of minor importance to him as compared to the ones he finds himself surrounded with. He pulls his sword out of the tree, stopping to stare at the gash it’s left in the bark. Strange. That doesn’t seem right.

/

They hold an inauguration ceremony for the champions a few days later. The bulk of it takes place in the throne room, attended to by several high-ranking soldiers and a handful of representatives from each race who nod along and doze off at the appropriate times and perk up visibly when their respective champion is mentioned, if not in passing then amongst a flurry of other words they do not care for. Each champion has been given an article of clothing which represents, among other things, the hope of their people, the writhing snake-like anxiety of a kingdom, the faith that the world has placed in their hands, et cetera. It is also supposed to represent the priestess’s blessings, but the priestess is just a princess right now and the princess is having a hard time. She’s taking a break for lunch. Come back later.

On Daruk’s suggestion and Revali’s aggression, they hold a separate ceremony later, just for the Knight. The bulk of this particular contrivance takes place on the Sacred Grounds, which are a stone’s throw from the castle and therefore refreshingly devoid of fidgety onlookers. Link kneels in the center of the Triforce and Zelda stands an arm’s length away with her useless decorated hand held out before him and then she says some words she doesn’t believe in, about twilight and destiny and heroism. It’s a faithless, fruitless process. Her hidden powers don’t come bursting out of her chest at the sight of the boy with his fist on the floor, though the fan of his lashes is distracting enough that she forgets her lines just once, towards the end of the script. The ceremony begins with nothing and concludes with nothing because everything that she touches turns out like this. If you want the hands of Hylia, look to the sky. There’s nothing holy on the ground.

The other half of the ceremony takes place in the great hall later that evening. She usually takes meals with her father in the private dining hall with its grim chandelier and tapestries of dead people, but he’s been spending his evenings in a locked room with all the other old cynical men more and more often, so she lets herself out of the empty hall and into the one downstairs. It’s bustling at this time of the day, packed with sweat and sounds and laughter. Link is sitting next to Urbosa in a circle of onlookers, with a roast chicken in his mouth, bones and skin and all. They don’t think he can eat the whole thing. There’s money riding on this. Cue anticipatory laughter, cue the drumroll.

Watching him crunch the bones and break the flesh and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, which is probably now disgusting, which is disgustingly lovely, Zelda pours herself a glass of fruit punch from the other side of the room and wonders what the gods saw in him. Was it the same thing she saw that day in the Breach of Demise, when he held up his shield and deflected the red laser of death? Because what she saw was sacrifice, bravery with a knife in its heart. What she saw that day was an angel.                                                                                                                                        

/

Sooga is the personal retainer of the Top Banana of the Yiga Clan, Master Kohga. His job is to retain him. He does this by making sure there are always at least fifteen bunches of bananas in various stages of ripening in his personal quarters and picking him up when he gets cornered by his enemies and pretending he isn’t in love with him. In case you were wondering, he isn’t in love with him. Also the bananas are ripening beautifully. Also, he’s an M.

Also, one of the Hylians’ stupid mechanical beasts has just crashed into their hideout and more or less annihilated the front hallway. He thinks it’s the camel. It’s probably the camel.

The camel gets right up to the entrance to the living room and then gets stuck, because there are designated objects a giant mechanical camel can destroy and ‘evil villain hideout’ is not one of them. Unfortunately, the stupid camel is followed by several stupider people. There’s the stupid Sheikah warrior, and there’s the stupid princess, and there’s the stupid knight with the sword that seals the stupid darkness, all of them holding obligatory weapons and yelling obligatory lines like go get it and give them all you’ve got and push forward. As if there’s anything at the end of this line. The Yiga are not a circus, you know. They’re a cult.

The princess of Hyrule takes out fifteen bokoblins with a minecart. She’s got a Sheikah Slate in her hand (he knows what it’s called because he’s the retainer of the Top Banana of the Yiga Clan, and retainers either know these things or find ways to make them known) and the thing is a bitch. They’re unstoppable enough with the knight, because big glowing swords are fundamentally unbeatable in situations like this, but the slate has transformed a one-sided battle into a one-sided party. Where did she get it from, anyway? They’re supposed to know what a photograph is, not how to stop the flow of time and space itself. That’s for later, according to Astor the shitty fortune teller. Astor the shitty fortune teller is flabbergasted. So is he.

Unfortunately the idiot conglomerate battles its way into the secret room at the back of the hideout, which is to say, the metaphorical closet with the dead bodies, but Sooga makes sure he’s there to greet them when they get there. He’s not going to let anyone lay a finger on Master Kohga. Or a toe. Or a minecart. Love is a powerful force. Love can fell a kingdom, or save it.

He fails to stop them, because he doesn’t have a minecart in his moveset even though he, too, can stop the flow of time and space itself. It’s super fucking sad. They beat the shit out of him and then run indifferently past his body on the ground, smashing open crates and shoving mighty bananas in their pockets as they see them so Sooga has to send for an errand boy to bring him a new bunch from the hidden storage room, which is to say the metaphorical closet without the dead bodies. He wolfs down seven without a single phallic image passing through his mind. Sooga is a powerful and well-disciplined warrior. Every day Ganon tests his devotion, and every day he emerges triumphant.

They lose. The Gerudo champion has joined the fray and she has a sword with a curved blade which, beyond looking absolutely hideous, can also summon streaks of lightning from the sky. She blasts the living shit out of him and singes all the hair off of his forearms, while her comrades shout obligatory boring stuff like keep up the good work and I’m leaving it in your hands and don’t let us down, and the princess watches from the side of the room. She’s been relegated to observational duties. She looks pissed off as hell. If Sooga could read minds, he bets the princess would be thinking something like this:

If I had my powers right now, I could probably beat the shit out of them in ten seconds flat. Sooga laughs to himself, even as Urbosa snaps her fingers and shocks the last bit of life out of him, and he goes down like a banana tree in a forest. If a banana tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, is it still a banana tree? What if it’s just a tree? What if there was no forest to begin with, and your body was lying in a field of corpses? Honestly, whatever. Keep on being miserable, little Hylian princess. Your powers wouldn’t work against us Yiga anyway. We’re not the enemy. We’re the trees.

/

[The setting is the field outside Fort Hateno. The lights are RED but severely dimmed. There are several GUARDIANS placed around the stage at uneven intervals. When the scene opens they make their way towards stage center, but stop when they take notice of ZELDA and LINK.]

Zelda: Please, save yourself. Go!

[Link struggles to lift his sword. He is badly hurt and bleeding from several wounds on his back, though the audience cannot see these. The head Guardian crawls on top of the other guardians and fixes its laser on the pair.]

The Laser: BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP— 

Link: (Do I look like a joke to you?)

Link: (I could never answer to your father if I let you die here.)

Link: (They gave me a sword. I’m going to swing it.)

[Link makes to swing his sword. The beeping of the Guardian’s laser gets louder. At the last moment Zelda steps in front of him, her hand held out; the stage lights change quickly to GOLD.]

Zelda: NO.

[A beam of light erupts from her open palm, pulling the malice violently out of every guardian on the stage. Zelda stares at her hand, bewildered. It is her seventeenth birthday. She has finally unlocked her powers.]

[All the GUARDIANS on stage are dead.]

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP— 

[LINK is dead.]

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP— 

[BLACKOUT.]

/

He’s standing guard outside her room and trying to count the number of stars in the sky when he hears it. The small, muffled voice on the other side of the door; the panicked note; his name. He’s standing guard outside her room and thinking about the chicken he had for dinner that day and how they really should have kept the skin on so it would’ve charred nicely when he hears the princess call for him like she’s reading the front page of an obituary on a Monday morning.

He goes to her. Of course he does.

/

“I had a dream.”

Link looks at her like she’s crazy. His hands are on her shoulders and her shoulders are shaking, her legs are shaking, the contents of the room are slowly tilting in one direction, as if the world has fallen over on its side.

“I had a dream,” Zelda repeats (her hands are fisted in the front of his shirt, pulling him towards her, though she isn’t aware of this and he doesn’t inform her). “Where you died.”

He doesn’t say anything. He never says anything. He just looks at her blankly and bites his lip and according to the Guidebook For Deciphering Link’s she never received that’s supposed to mean he is 1) worried about her 2) worried about what he’s going to have for breakfast tomorrow or 3) thinking about rocks? Is she a mind-reader now as well as a priestess? Wonderful. Now she can fail at both of her duties. She shrugs off his hands, though it was him that pulled her out of the gaping mouth of Hateno to begin with. She wipes her eyes, is surprised to find they are wet, and blushes furiously.

“I’m sorry,” she says, looking down. The front of her nightgown is stuck to her skin with sweat. She looks up again, embarrassed. “I showed you something unsightly.”

Zelda wishes suddenly that one of the castle attendants had found her. They would have patted her on the head and brought her warm milk in a mug and then tucked her back into bed with a fresh bouquet of flowers in the vase on her dresser table. She looks up at Link from under the curtain of her hair, her eyes narrowed.

Link seems uncomfortable. A part of her wants him to stew in it, wants to poke a finger at his ribcage and see if he’ll crack right open so she can walk inside and point a looking-glass at his heart. Two months and three days and he still hasn’t revealed all the important things you tell someone when you agree to become their personal knight, like: what was your childhood home like? And: how do you like your eggs done? Or: what will you do when the swords of destiny are pointed at both of our chests, and you only have one shield?

The other part of her is in Hateno. The other part of her feels sticky and gross and unpleasant and asks, with a hand obediently raised in the air, if she will return to the dream if she closes her eyes now. No, Zelda thinks. I’m not doing that. Hateno can stay right where it is. She’s going outside.

/

The current Hyrule castle was built several hundred years ago, at a time when dragons roamed the land indiscriminately instead of confining themselves to several designated pathways and architects spent their entire lives trying to engineer increasingly desperate ways to avoid them. This might explain how her bedroom and study came to be. Two dwarf towers connected by a small bridge with plenty of space to pass under or above: a dragon would have no problem getting through this particular pocket of the universe. Or a dragon might have cleared out all the space underneath. Who knows? The dragon. So, not her.

“You can sit down, you know.”

Link seems surprised at this statement. He’s pressed up against the side of the bridge with his sword in his hands and his hands behind his back, which is altogether an uncomfortable-looking position, which is altogether very depressing. She is literally sitting on the staircase. There is space for at least five bodies here, six if you slam someone into the wall. They can make this work.

After a beat, he sits down. He leaves several inches of space between them like the polite young man his parents raised him to be, but draws his legs to his chest and puts his head on his knees. It makes him look smaller than he looks under sunlight. It makes him look seventeen.

He gives her a look. She doesn’t try to read this one.

“What else happened in your dream?”

Link’s hands under his knees are still, for once, not fidgeting the way they tend to be when he’s nervous about something or trying to interrupt a conversation he has every right to be in. His head is tilted so he can look her in the eye, and his expression is eerily calm. Like she could tell him she saw the blood on his back and the monster cleave into him like a chicken in a chicken pot pie and she could tell him she saw him die on a field full of rain and she could tell him she saw the worst case scenario, she saw the what-if scrawled on the back of the page, she saw the nightmare spring to life across the water, and he wouldn’t flinch.

Would he? Would he balk at the weight of her misery? A sacred duty is a wooden chair full of metal stones. Someone gave it to you when you were too young to know any better and now you can’t put it down. You have to carry it everywhere with you, even when you’re climbing the side of a mountain, even when you’re fighting the monster in your dreams. You have to hold it in your arms like the sibling you never had even if your arms get tired and your back starts to hurt and your skin starts to bleed from a thousand tiny cuts. If you put it down, the world will end. If you don’t, it’ll end anyway. A sacred duty is a scar on the back of your hand that will one day kill you.

“Something awful,” she replies, forcing a light into her voice though there’s no point in being optimistic now. The egg guardian, which she recalls suddenly they had left in her room behind the shut door, had warned them about this. On your seventeenth birthday, Hyrule will fall. On your seventeenth birthday, on the day that you were brought kicking and screaming into this world, calamity will rain from the heavens.

She stretches out her legs, letting the passing breeze send her dress billowing up past her knees. It’s cold out tonight. She exhales in a cloud of stars and warm air.

“Hey, Link. Tell me a story.”

He looks at her like she’s just asked him to bring her a horse.

“Any story,” she continues, leaning back on her arms and giving him a small smile. “A story from your childhood. A story from your future. Whatever you want. I promise I’ll listen.”

His expression flickers for half a beat and she thinks bingo, she thinks tell me how you like your eggs. He looks away from her, sighing quietly, a hand coming to the back of his head.

“When I was younger,” he begins, rather uncertainly. Never mind. He will gain confidence as he tells this story. It is a small but terrifically important story. It is a story about people like them. Zelda leans in, faintly mesmerized.

“When I was younger, my mother used to say that dreams were just the memories of people from another world.”

/

Once there was a rabbit who lived in the snow. The rabbit was clumsy and irresponsible and spent a lot of time lost in the mountains, though she had lived in the same spot of winter her whole life. She also had a tendency to daydream. If you left her alone for five minutes, she would be gone by the third, and by the fourth she would be riding a white dove in the sky, running from wolves in the green valley, scavenging for blueberries in the fields near her home. This didn’t bother the rabbit. She quite liked dreaming. It was easy for her to tell the difference between a dream and reality, because dreams had a smudged quality to them, like pawprints in the snow after a storm. Reality was cold and confident, like a block of ice you could put your paws on. The rabbit had many dreams about many kinds of fantastical things.

One day, the rabbit fell asleep while baking a pie for her grandmother. One moment, she was stirring apples in a pot and humming to herself; the next she was standing on a vast, empty field.

What an interesting dream, she thought.

She picked a direction and began walking. The snow was soft and thick and came up to her knees, and the sky was dark and moonless. After a while she came upon her village, and, excited to talk to a familiar face, she hopped into the general store in search of Kenji, the baker’s son who worked there. But the general store was empty. The rabbit took a carrot from the shelf and wandered into the next building, which belonged to the baker. The bakery was empty as well. She grabbed a loaf of bread. The apothecary’s was empty. She grabbed a salve for itchy skin. The town hall was empty. She checked her name on the registry, and found no one else on the list. Her house was empty. No grandmother, no apples. No fire.

The rabbit began to dislike the dream. Her favorite part of dreaming was getting to meet all sorts of interesting characters, even if they wanted to kill her or cook her in a pot with their vegetables. There was no risk involved when you were dreaming, after all, which meant she could do anything she wanted as long as she kept to the rules of the dream:

Rule one: never go to sleep.

Rule two: don’t tell anyone you’re dreaming.

There was no one for her to talk to, and so no way for her to break the second rule. As for the first, well, the rabbit resolved simply not to lie down in bed or stop moving. She would keep walking around the village, and then beyond the village, until she found someone to talk to, and then she would obtain purpose, and accordingly, ambition.

But she never found anyone. She walked and she walked and she walked and the vast snowy field seemed to go on forever, and yet the moment she turned around, she found herself in the village again. It had been nighttime for days now. She was hungry. She wanted to leave.

So she went home and she cut the loaf of bread and she cooked apples in a pot and she spread apple jam over the bread and ate it while staring out the window at the black sky outside. She went home and suddenly felt incredibly tired. The bread had tasted very good and alarmingly real and morning did not seem intent on coming. She lay down in her bed. She blinked at the ceiling for hours and hours until, tired and cold and lonely, her eyes slipped shut.

When she woke up, she was still in the dream. The village was still deserted and the bread loaves in the bakery were still soft and stacked to the brim on the shelf and there was still only one name on the registry. She became terribly afraid. She ran to the edge of the field and fell off of it. She opened her eyes in the village.

She closed them. She opened them. She closed them. She opened them. She cooked apples in a pot and cut bread from the bakery and went scavenging for blueberries in the fields, and she cut up the registry with a pair of scissors, and she set the general store on fire. Years passed. She began to forget about her grandmother and the baker and Kenji, the baker’s son, with his gray eyes and his story book collection of fairytales.

Finally, when she had become so accustomed to her life in the empty village that it felt like the only life she had ever lived, the rabbit heard a single, thin voice in the quiet. She looked up at the moonless painting above her.

WAKE UP, said the hand which had cleaved the sky in half. THE APPLES ARE BURNING.

The rabbit woke up.

She was stirring apples in a pot over a fire. The apples were burning. Her grandmother was pointing at her and yelling in a panicked voice about scalding your tail in a kitchen fire, how terrible it could be for your mental health, how hundreds of rabbits simply never recovered after the ordeal and she had personally known one of them, had seen him lose years to the ghost of his missing heart.

The rabbit blinked at her grandmother. “I feel like I was asleep forever,” she said.

Her grandmother clicked her tongue. “Fool. It was only a hundred years.”

Suddenly all of the complexities and complications in the universe made sense to the rabbit, like how a weapon can be a wish if you bring it to the right soldier, or how sad people sometimes go missing in rivers, or how dead rabbits can come back to life if the situation is dire and the gods are mad enough to let it happen. She touched her nose with her paw. Her fur was warm. She touched her chest with her hand. Her body was breathing. She was overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of her existence.

“A hundred years seems pretty long to me.”

Her grandmother took the apples off the stove and gave them to heaven. “Not when you’re dreaming.”

And so the rabbit never dreamed of anything ever again.

/

She’s asleep before he reaches the end. He had left a few inches of space between them when he sat down because he was afraid that the big ugly fuck of his destiny would ruin her kindness, but he closes that distance now. Her head lolls onto his shoulder, her hair falling in white streaks down the front of her gown. Inexplicably and without warning, his left knee begins to hurt. She’s beautiful.

Tomorrow they’ll go to the Spring of Courage, where she’ll ask Hylia for a sign and Hylia will give her nails for the front of a coffin. Tomorrow they’ll be ambushed by monsters while she’s still trying to untangle the ghost from the shadow of her mother, and he’ll pull her through the woods by the hand while Impa watches their backs with knives between her teeth. Tomorrow everything will come to a frightening, terrifying head in the night, When Princess Zelda Turns Seventeen, when everything goes up in flames and Ganon emerges from the burning building. And then they will know why the egg guardian came to them from the future.

For now, he presses his lips to the crown of her head, says a prayer to their gods, and hopes that this time, they’ve fallen out of the sky into the right field of snow.

Excerpt from an interview with Hayashi Yosuke, producer of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

Interviewer: What inspired you to make this game?

Hayashi-san: We wanted to tell a different story. I’m sorry— we wanted to tell the same story. I’m sorry— if I’m to be completely honest, you’ll just have to play the game to find out.

Chapter Text

Calamity strikes early. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-fast. One moment you’re walking out of the castle in a white dress, praying for the nightmare to leave you living; the next moment the long bastardly wait is over. You can barely see where you’re going through the flurry of bodies and guardians so you tell yourself to focus on the hand pulling you forward, on the monsters falling to the wayside. You are going to make it out of this alive. You are going to leave this world wanting. Your father is somewhere in this sinking bleeding castle, and you will not rest until you see him out of it.

War cries in your ears in the voices of your comrades. PUSH FORWARD/GIVE THEM EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT/LEAVE NO ONE STANDING. Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. NEGG/UMA/KENJI.

The guardians have turned on you. You want to be surprised, but for the most part you’re just afraid.

“Please, your highness, we have to get out.” Impa is pushing from behind and Link is pulling from ahead and you have a minecart in your left hand and a bomb in your right but you have never felt more vulnerable. You have never seen a guardian shoot a man in the face, until today. You have never believed in the power of dreams, until today.

The two people you trust the most in the world right now herd your Trojan body through the castle in search of your father’s corpse. You pass by places from your childhood: the library, the dining room, the underground dock, its waters soaked in skin. None of this registers to you. In your mind you are still standing outside the castle in a white dress, waiting to ascend the mountain.

Then you’re retreating out of the castle, running because the water’s too high, then Link is pushing from behind and Impa is pulling you forward and this isn’t what you were thinking of when the prophet said calamity will rain from the heavens but it’s worse somehow, but you’re bleeding, but no one’s going to berate your knight in red armor now.

You are saved by your father near the outer wall of the castle. He is carrying a sword in one hand and a prayer for your safety in the other. Your knight in bloody armor pulls out the sword at his back and begins to walk towards the guardians at their feet, though you both know he cannot defeat them.

“Knight of Zelda, princess of Hyrule,” your father says, soft-loud, sad-angry.

The knight stops in his tracks, sword half-drawn, his tunic dripping with light. Your father turns away from you.

“I trust that you know your duty.”

You count to ten in your head, dawdling at the side of the path like a fool, unable to draw a sword, unable to summon the minecart. The knight nods. He turns to face you in all his childless glory.

He takes your hand. You count to ten in your head. You realize what is happening.

A protest forms at the back of your throat as he begins to pull you down the path. Your father’s figure starts to blur.

“No, wait, let go of me, Link, you have to let go—

“Link. LINK.”

Link doesn’t let go. Link keeps dragging you down the side of the mountain even as you claw at his arm and you press your heels into the ground and you swipe at his beautiful indifferent face with your hands, your holy worthless hands, your hands full of holes. His name is Link and he’s the knight the sword chose, he’s the knight your father put in front of your grave. If you fall he falls first. If you bleed he bleeds first. His name is Link and he’ll talk to you if you get stabbed by a knife in a sword fight with evil and he’ll talk to you if he thinks you’re being stupid, but when your father tells you to go and he carries you, kicking and screaming like a banshee in a bottle, out of the castle grounds, he won’t say a word. He won’t let go. The two of you are going to make it out of here alive, or not at all.

A laser goes off as you round the last bend towards Castle Town, which is crying softly in its sleep like a baby left by the river. You want to throw up so badly it hurts, but instead you squeeze his hand, and you imagine slapping him across the face and leaving a palm-shaped imprint, and let him take you down the steps and into the darkness.

/

Hyrule field is a corpse. It’s a corpse and they’re standing right in the heart of it. Impa looks down at the grass at her feet and is distantly surprised to find that it is red. Everything is red now. Red sky, red body, red grass. Red moon hidden behind a smokescreen of red clouds, red laughter, red monster twisting and turning its way across the water.

In spite of their best efforts, the castle has fallen. She bids the old King a quiet farewell.

And yet how laughable it is that from an operation that had started in the thousands, they are left with only three. The Princess, the Knight, the Warrior. Wisdom, courage, and a fast girl with sharp knives. What can she do for them now? What can they do for each other? What can they do for anyone, with the way the sky has fallen to the scorched earth, with their Champions so far from home?

The egg guardian opens its crooked mouth and drops the Sheikah Slate at Princess Zelda’s feet. She picks it up with trembling hands and Impa leans in closer, her chest swelling with hope despite herself. Give them an escape route, a recovery plan, an ancient Sheikah trick that will allow them to skip past all the screaming and dying and to the part where they begin to rebuild. Salvation looks good on blue and brown. Miracles look good in leather. Meanwhile Link isn’t even looking anymore. He’s standing an arm’s length away from the Princess, gripping the hilt of his sword with superhuman force. If she touched him now, Impa thinks dryly, she’d probably burn her hand.

“What’s this?” asks the Princess, tender as a rose even at the end of the world. She touches the egg guardian’s head like she expects a response. “What do you want to show me?”

They’re allowed five seconds of hope before the image of the corrupted Divine Beasts flashes across the screen. Then it’s fifteen seconds of despair. The Princess cries into the scorched grass and the egg guardian plays a stupid song and Link grips the hilt of his sword and tries not to unleash his inner demons. Then it’s fifteen seconds of confusion. There is more to this story than misery. Then it’s three seconds of surprise.

Lights, hopeful music, et cetera. Impa squints at the egg guardian. If it’s going to give them another depressing fact about how utterly fucked they are, she’s going to stick a knife in its mouth and be done with it. But the lights are brighter this time. But the music is louder.

Suddenly: a scream. A bird’s scream. Vah Medoh soaring above them, red as blood but still soft in some places. Still only starting to bruise.

The Princess looks at the egg guardian looks at Impa. Impa looks at Link. Link looks at the Princess. He’s going to cleave someone in half if they don’t give him something to do, and soon. Ah, the flames of youth. Ah, the flames engulfing the castle, the dead bodies in the library, all those books. Impa’s sick and tired of tragedy, and it’s only just begun. The chessboard has never felt more far away.

And yet the Princess has found something to pray to amidst the death and destruction. After all, Impa is the knife and Link is the communication problems and Ganon is the evil and the malice and the greed, gluttony, pride, jealousy, whatever, whatever.

“We can still make it?”

“Beep-beeep. Beep.” (“Yes. Actually yes. Have I mentioned that you are the light of my life?”)

She wipes her eyes. Impa wipes the back of her hand with a handkerchief. Link practices ten-second breathing exercises.

Impa is the knife and Link is the question and Ganon is the thing that will bring ruin to the world. Impa is the eyes and Link is the teeth and Ganon is the lung, the corrupted air, the dirt in the mouth of the coffin.

But Princess Zelda? Princess Zelda is hope.

/

[ENCORE.

Link takes her hand on the way down the mountain and she lets him. She’s still processing the fact of her failure, half-ruined and half-frozen by the desperate searching cold. The Spring of Wisdom had given her nothing. She had stood there in her stupid white dress for hours, begging them to make her something holy while her skin turned wrinkly and blue and her fingers began to go numb from the cold, and yet Hylia had given her nothing. Damn you Hylia. Screw you Hylia. You Will Regret This Hylia.]

[ENCORE.

They don’t talk on the way down. There’s nothing for her to say that she hasn’t already tried and Link doesn’t talk unless you prompt him anyway or there’s a knife at your throat. There isn’t a knife at her throat. She wishes there was. Maybe then heaven would want her more or at all, now that she had obtained the secret to getting better, which is to get so much worse that everything around you begins to look like relief. There isn’t a knife at her throat but there’s a rock in there, a big rock from Death Mountain, and it’s burning. She’s frost-bitten and miserable and her throat is on fire, and oh. Oh well shit. She’s crying.

Link notices this immediately because Link notices everything. He stops walking and turns to face her, his expression blank as snow.

They don’t talk. There’s nothing for her to say that she hasn’t already said and Link doesn’t talk unless it’s the end of the world. It’s not the end of the world just yet. It’s the precursor to it, the prologue, the part where the fake soldiers and the fake girl are all stuck in the fairytale where no one has to be sad and everyone lives forever, and all of them still think they’ll live forever.

They’re on the cruel side of a snow-capped mountain and the world is going to end very soon. She blinks at him wetly and reaches for his hand again, needing some kind of reassurance, needing an anchor in the waves; he hugs her. Briefly, awkwardly, like he has no idea what in hell he’s doing or why he’s doing it to begin with. And yet he holds her very carefully, like he wants her to live forever.

She doesn’t stop crying, her tears just dry up. It’s very cold on Mount Lanayru.

They make their way down the mountain. They meet up with the rest of the champions at the East Gate. Calamity strikes, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-fast, and everything goes to shit. Her father dies. The soldiers in Hyrule Castle die. Everything goes to shit. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-fast.

She looks up from a field of bodies. The sky’s the color of the earth. The earth’s the color of death.

So it begins.

ENCORE END.]

/

Interviewer: Do the champions die?

Hayashi-san: It depends on who you ask.

/

If you ask Sidon, who comes barreling into Vah Ruta ten seconds before Waterblight Ganon mutilates his sister’s dead body and drags it up the steps of the control center and impales it on the wall with its big glowing water trident, they do. If you ask Sidon, the elephant died yesterday, and he can tell you exactly how it vanished into the reservoir, how his sister vanished with it, how they couldn’t get the body out no matter how hard they tried.

He deflects the finishing blow with his shiny, grown-up trident. It feels satisfying and empty all at once. Did he do something? Did the rabbit wake up? Did they make it into the right dream?

“You can’t be real,” his dead sister says. She looks up at him in disbelief, wounded but alive, alive but dead.

“But I am,” Sidon replies, smiling through a mouthful of glass. “But I’m real. But I came from the future.”

[Encore: Waterblight Ganon mutilates her body and drags it up the steps of the control center and impales it on the wall with its big glowing water trident.] [Encore: Sidon is hiding in the bomb shelter with the other children, waiting for his big sister to come back from the war.] [Encore: The champions die. They don’t make it. It’s too late.]

“I see,” says Mipha. The entire sequence of events is so abrupt, she’s still struggling to fit the monster and the brother into the same room without all the walls breaking apart. Everything happens so fast. Death almost finds you. For reasons unbeknownst to yourself and the rest of the world, it doesn’t.

She’s not sure if she believes him, but she believes the blood on her hands is hers, so she follows them out of the mouth of the elephant and up the side of the mountain, carrying the broken mirror of faith over her left shoulder.

[BLACKOUT.]

They save four bodies from the jaws of death. Mipha, Daruk, Urbosa, Revali: four bodies brought back from the precipice hanging over the great white unknown. They save four bodies with four more, four miracles sent from another world, and because they do so no one has to be sad and everyone lives forever, and because they do so no one has to die.

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” says Impa. Impa can’t believe this is happening.

“I don’t believe in anything,” says Link. Link is talking to himself in his head. Link is possibly asleep.

Zelda kneels in the grass outside the epic soaring heights of the Hebra mountains. “You did this for me, didn’t you?” she asks the egg guardian, who blows its top like a dog who has just carried the universe back in its jaws instead of the toy.

“You did this for us. You brought them back.”

[BLACKOUT.]

Sooga is the personal retainer of the Top Banana of the Yiga Clan, Master Kohga. His job is to retain him. He does this by keeping his eyes on the back of Kohga’s ass and keeping his hands on the ceiling and throwing knives at objects which piss him off, like princesses and knights and fruits which aren’t shaped like dicks. In case you were wondering, most fruits aren’t shaped like dicks. Also, the ceilings of the Yiga hideout tend to have pathways dug into the rock above them so you can, like, keep an eye on things even if you’re not technically in the room. Also, he’s in love with Kohga.

Also, the shitty fortune teller they teamed up with has gone insane. He thinks he’s insane. He probably is.

“I’M GOING TO TAKE YOUR SOULS AND FEED THEM TO MY CHILDREN,” the shitty fortune teller tells them. He’s already taken a few from their underlings to prove his point. There are several bodies on the grass between them and they’re not moving. Their faces have been sawed off. It’s all very brutal, very grotesque, and super artistic.

“Fuck,” says Sooga.

“Don’t say fuck,” says Kohga.

“Fuck fuck shit fuck Fuck,” says Sooga.

 Astor the shitty fortune teller produces an intensely unattractive copy of the Knight and sends him after Kohga in a major dick move to end all other major dick moves. Really? Does he have to do this? Does he have to waste his time fighting the guy who’s supposed to be on his side while the heroes of Hyrule go traipsing around in their giant robot thingies and take out a hundred bokoblins per second? Ganon isn’t going to rise like this, Sooga thinks with a sigh. Also, he liked the guys that died. They were thoughtful and considerate and could appreciate a good debate about the inherent eroticism of the banana.

Unfortunately, Astor the shitty fortune teller is kind of strong. The Fake Knight may look hideous but he compensates for it not with his skill, exactly, because he doesn’t actually do anything very interesting and really just does downward slashes like a character in a picture book, but his strength. He’s overwhelmingly, horrifically strong. Things begin to look bad. Behind them the castle continues to look Epic and Cool with its wedding veil of malice and the bright purple train trailing down its back, and Sooga begins to sweat.

Is this it? Is this where the Yiga meet their end? Sooga continues sweating. His armpits start to get kind of gross. He blushes and tries to hide his armpits from Kohga’s view as he dodges a hit from the fake knight and gets a foot in his face instead, which sends him flying backwards, which breaks his left arm and dislocates several ribs in his ribcage.

If I were the Princess of Hyrule, Sooga thinks, I could probably beat the shit out of him in ten seconds flat. It’s unfortunate and altogether depressing that he isn’t. It’s a pity he’s found himself on the wrong side of the wrong side of history, which it turns out isn’t the right side but rather the hidden third side above the fake ceiling where traitors go to get their heads cut off. All his life he wanted to be a tree in a forest. All his life he peeled bananas for a good man.

“Please run away, Master Kohga,” he says, trying to sound Epic and Cool and not like he is dying.

Master Kohga begins to run away and then stops and turns around and comes back.

“Oh my god I can’t split you’re my best lackey,” he says, sounding Epic and Cool and altogether kind of devastated.

Oh my god he’s in love with me, thinks Sooga. And then Fake Link swings his Fake Sword at him and carves a nice chunk out of his chest and he goes down in a shower of fireworks and heart-shaped bloodstains, et cetera, and he’s not quite sure if he dies, doesn’t quite have the eyes to tell, doesn’t quite have the heart to see if Kohga’s crying. If a banana tree falls in a forest and no one hears it did it really fall? Was anyone watching? What if there was never a tree to begin with, and you were actually lying in a field of corpses and watching an insane fortune teller hatch a plan to destroy the world that, for some reason or another, hinged on your death? Sooga frowns through a mouthful of blood and then chokes on it, which is very not epic. Never mind. Never mind the philosophy behind this whole affair. They were never clowns in a circus or soldiers in an army, never that kind of hard-core-fist-on-heart procession. They were just trees. Trees in a forest that had been burning since the first king of Hyrule lit the torch and hurled it at their heads, screaming in forgotten tongues, searching desperately for a way to be found.

[BLACKOUT.]

Akkala Citadel has never looked more beautiful. Lit up like a bonfire in the twilight and missing half its limbs, it coughs out concrete and men and screams at them to run faster while they carve a path through the sea of bodies towards it. Robbie wants them to take their time saving his life. He believes in mathematics and magic and miracles. His men are not quite so faithful. His men don’t think they’ll last the night.

For what it’s worth, they have a giant mechanical elephant with them. Vah Ruta’s short-range attack involves an elegant swing of its trunk, which destroys nearby projectiles and enemies and reduces large outcroppings of rock to a pile of rubble. Its standard attack is a sharp jetstream which turns bokoblins into fine wines and knocks wizzrobes out of the sky like bowling pins. Its special attack is a bath of icicles. It is recommended that you save the special attack for when an area is especially densely-packed with enemies and your quota is clamoring to be filled, and that you keep your protective shield up at all times.

Mipha keeps their protective shield up at all times. Sidon throws spears into the water. Zelda and Link and Impa make their way through the Citadel one more time, for hopefully the last time, and it would be nostalgic and kind of nice if not for the fact that the guardians have turned against them and the sound of metal on metal hurts her ears and she is very scared.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says, faltering at the gate to the Citadel. There’s a dead guardian on the floor. There’s a dead body. The body probably had a name. It was probably Samuel.

No one stops to listen. War is fast and loud and unforgiving. Her voice has been drowned out by the cannons, which spit a barrage of bullets from the red sky. Zelda looks around her. Where is Impa? Where is Link?

Someone’s still screaming at her to hurry up. Gripping the Sheikah Slate like a lifeline which will one day carry her into the ground, she takes a step forward, and then another, until she’s right in the heart of the fast loud unforgiving night, and she can’t hear anything but the sound of blades.

[BLACKOUT.]

“Thanks a bunch y’all,” says Robbie, readjusting his glasses to hide the fact that he was secretly afraid that he was, like, actually going to die.

“Thank fuck,” say his men, who were fully convinced they would die and are now in shock.

“Thanks guys,” says the body on the floor. “For letting me die.”

There are a lot more where it came from. There are a lot of dead men in Hyrule. You can’t tell any version of this story without leaving out this part. In every vast empty field, buried under layers and layers of snow, there are bodies, waiting to be put on the roster of remembered names, waiting to be let in by heaven.

[Encore.

Link can’t take his eyes off her. He literally can’t. If he takes his eyes off her for a second she’s going to fall over and if she falls over she’s not going to be able to get up and if she can’t get up they can’t keep going through the wet dark forest to wherever it is that they’re going. Where are they going again? Link, talk to me. Where are we going?]

[Encore.

Link can’t take his eyes off her, which would seem like a matter for reproach if not for the fact that everyone they’ve ever known is dead. Everyone they’ve ever known is dead except for the champions, who are trapped in their divine beasts and would probably rather be dead anyway, and her father, who is going to be dead by the end of the day, and them. They’re not dead yet. A knight and a princess. Courage and wisdom. Two pillars in a valley of crows.

She’s still thinking about how everyone she’s ever known is dead when she falls over (and not because he takes his eyes off her, he hasn’t blinked since they left the corpse of the castle behind, hasn’t breathed at all). There’s a tree near her shoulder when she falls over. There are trees everywhere because they’re in a forest and the forest is full of teeth because calamity struck when no one was looking but this one has something sharp and metallic embedded in its bark and it rips into her arm when she falls over, it tears her skin right open, and there. It’s a gash in the bark of a tree. It’s a girl.

“Link—” she tries to stand up. Confused, having not processed anything since they left the spring of garbage, she brings her hand to her arm. It comes away wet.

“Oh.”

He’s beside her in the blink of an eye, sword clattering to the ground, kneeling in the grass at her feet. There’s a river of blood flowing from her arm and she doesn’t even know it. She opens her mouth to laugh, but nothing comes out. Guys, this is so funny, she wants to say. Sorry, I meant guy. I forgot the rest of you are dead.

Link isn’t laughing. Link looks like someone just died, which makes her want to laugh even harder, because it’s a bit hard to keep track of things right now but several people are, in fact, dead. Several thousand, actually. Is this a delayed emotional reaction that he was supposed to have when they ran to the front gate of the castle and found the whole thing covered in blood, or is she just that important to him? HIs face is covered in dirt, his hair matted to his forehead. He’s biting his lip so hard it’s bleeding. She thinks absently that she would lick it clean for him if he’d let her, and opens her mouth to ask.

Then he touches her arm and she jolts forward like she’s been punched. No one told her pain could hit you like a minecart flailing down from the sky. She curses under her breath. He hears it. She curses again.

The cut is deep and ragged and runs from the top of her shoulder to just below the crook of her elbow. The flesh has split open and the opening is comically large. She is in so much pain she is going to throw up. She wants to cry. She doesn’t.

“It’s.” She tries to form a coherent sentence and screws it up. She tries to breathe and screws it up. She thinks she might start crying anyway.

Maybe if she cuts off her arm. She perks up at the idea. Her voice comes back.

“It’s Fine.” She moves to pat his shoulder with her good arm and misses by a mile. “I’m Fine.” There. She’s told him. Can they get going now?

He looks up at her with such pure and unrestrained anger, for a moment she forgets a piece of metal in a tree cut her open.

“It’s not,” Link says slowly, articulating each word with immense care and precision, like he’s talking to a child, like he’s telling someone a bedtime story. No, wait, he’s telling her. She’s the child. She did something, didn’t she? She let go of his hand.

She blinks and misses by a mile. “Sorry?”

He doesn’t look away. Funny Link. He doesn’t give up on putting his thoughts into words because he’s bad at public speaking but good at disaster, good at taking things apart, terrible at gluing them back together. Funny Link. He doesn’t breathe. When was the last time he breathed? Should she kiss him?

“It’s not okay, princess,” he says, and he sounds so goddamn sad, she has to stop laughing in her head for five whole minutes. “None of this is fucking okay. Please don’t pretend it is. Please let me help you.”

He tears off a strip of the tunic she made for him in the hopes that together they would protect this kingdom and takes her arm with so much care she may as well be a corpse in the wind and it hurts a lot and it hurts enough to burn candles in the rain for and she thinks through smoke and mirrors that she might be dying, that the center cannot hold, that everything falls apart eventually, she thinks she should have stayed in the castle when her father told her to run with his fist in the air and then vanished into a sea of metal, and then it’s over.

Her arm is dead and weightless and bound in blue. He leans in and kisses the corner of her mouth, his lips tasting like apology. She can’t take her eyes off him.

If only everything were this simple.

Encore end.]

Twilight still. Fort Hateno sticks out of the sky like a limb waiting to be cut off, waving at them in the distance. It doesn’t scream at them to hurry up. It doesn’t have the strength for such niceties. It’s a fort; it’s job is to stay standing. It’s doing everything in its power to do so.

They do what they can to help. They split up and conquer each base, they take out guardians with big bullets, they pull Fort Hateno to its feet and then keep it there, propped up by its armpits, dangling in mid-air like a chandelier in a ballroom. They do everything right. Everything they touch dies. Everything that dies goes away.

Then the bad man in a black hood pulls four puppets out of his pocket and it all comes back to her in that moment: the crimson interior of each divine beast, the bodies not impaled on the walls, the lives not lost. They’re standing outside Fort Hateno in a field full of flames and the monster has finally caught up to them.

Tag, you’re it. Your turn to run into the burning building.

Only Zelda doesn’t get the chance to run, because her father stuck a knight to her side when he found out the world was going to end and a knight’s duty is to swing his sword in an arc through the air, a knight’s duty is to clear a path through the sea of blood, a knight’s duty is to die first.

Would you die for her, King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule asked in the throne room that day. Kneeling on the carpet with his fist to the floor, the knight nodded.

I’m okay, but you’re not. I’m sorry about that.

Actually, fuck this. Actually fuck the whole thing where she has to stand around with tears in her eyes while people line up to get shot in her place. Actually fuck the part where she runs away from the warzone and someone else stays, and someone else gets left behind, and someone else doesn’t come back.

She runs back into the burning building. She runs towards the monster at the end of the hallway, towards four blights and a fifth full of malice. She runs towards the boy, her arm stretched out in front of her like if she reaches hard enough, if she wants him hard enough, she’ll be able to take the knife before he does.

Would you die for him? Kneeling in her bed with her hair falling into her eyes, the princess nodded.

I would. I’d spend a hundred years in hell for him.

[******.

She’s going to spend a hundred years in hell for him. She’s going to send him to the Shrine of Resurrection and she’s going to leave the master sword in the Great Hyrule Forest and then she’s going to walk into the castle and shake hands with Ganon and she’s going to spend a hundred years with him. The sword says these things to her in a weak, silvery voice and she takes its words as gospel. She clings to them. There’s no one else to listen to anymore, after all.

Link’s dead. He died a while ago. They were moments away from Fort Hateno and there was a guardian perched on a mountain of corpses and in a moment of desperation, with salvation on her tongue, she flung out her hand and stopped it. She pulled the malice right out of its hulking metal body. Hours after he world ended, god made her holy.

And for what? She cries into his tunic and touches his face with her good hand and kisses his mouth. He’s cold as snow. He’s never looked more like a child. For what, she thinks, standing up shakily. She pries his sword out of his fingers.

For what did she spend her whole life in prayer, if not that when the heavens finally cracked open and rained down upon the earth, the water would not bite at their ankles? And yet it did.

She chokes back a sob and it turns into a laugh and the laugh dies on the floor at her feet. Damn you Hylia. Screw you Hylia. You cruel, childless goddess. You monster.

****** end.]

“This is bullshit,” Revali comments. He came out onto the field because he got bored of standing on Medoh and pressing R and then waiting for things to blow up. Zelda shrugs. She shoots a golden arrow into a crowd of enemies, killing two hundred bokoblins and fifteen lizalfos immediately.

“This is bullshit,” Revali repeats for dramatic emphasis. “It would take me ten seconds to pull that off with Medoh.”

Daruk shrugs and it makes a sound like two rocks grinding together. He came out onto the field because he finished blowing things up and now technically has nothing to do. “Well, you know,” he scratches his ass. “You’re not the descendant of a goddess. It’s hard to compete with that.”

Revali has been waiting for someone to say something stupid. Thank god for Daruk. He points at Link, who is right where he needs him to be, surrounded by an avalanche of monsters and swinging his sword like a madman.

“Yeah, well, then what about that guy?”

Daruk laughs and it sounds like two rocks smashing into each other at breakneck speeds. “That guy is in love with the descendant of a goddess.” He claps Revali on the back with genuine paternal affection. “What, you think you can compete with that?”

Revali can’t believe he left Medoh so he could watch two teenagers act out a scene from a romantic drama and save the world. He literally cannot believe himself. All this talk about calamity and disaster and the end of all times, all this stress and gossip and gaslighting, and yet when it really comes down to it, what, exactly, have they lost?

Daruk unties his blue champion’s sash and lays it on the floor like a picnic mat. Revali cuts a loaf of bread on the battlefield and smears apple jam over it. They watch the theatrics unfold from inside the indestructible fortress that survives in every version of the story, because some things have to stay simple, because someone has to write their obituary, and when they get tired, they lie down, close their eyes, and go to sleep in the snow.

[BLACKOUT.]

Everyone, hear me now.

With Calamity Ganon awakened, we now stand at the threshold of the ************. In spite of the horrors we have witnessed, in spite of the ****** we have suffered among our ranks, we must not give in to ******. We must not despair. We must stand and fight.

Hyrule wields the Divine Beasts and their Champions. We are armed with the ****** whose sword will seal the ********. And, we shall strike with you. You, brave ********. Everyone, you are mine to lead now. Calamity Ganon… will be sealed away forever with the power I possess. Together, standing in strength, we begin our march.

Hyrule’s fight— to ****** all within it— is now.

[BLACKOUT.]

[Why has no one given her a cloak? She looks cold. Poor thing.]

/

They take turns carrying the body. Impa volunteers to go first, partially because she’s the strongest, partially because the other two are still trying to process the fact that the knight that was supposed to save them from this whole mess has just died. The make-believe fairytale about the power of friendship is over. Now everyone has to be sad and no one will live forever. It’s a hard truth to swallow, harder still when one has to pick up the body and sling it over their shoulder and then watch the princess limp away in the opposite direction. To be honest, things aren’t any easier for Impa, seeing how the knight was her friend and the princess the light of her life, but someone’s got to go first, so she catches the bullet between her teeth. It’s her specialty, after all.

[Zelda wheels her wooden horse onto the Great Plateau at the helm of a procession of bodies. Impa dawdles at her back and Link hangs around in front, glancing over his shoulder every few minutes like he can’t quite believe she’s real. Maybe he’s right. Maybe none of this is real and everything ended at Hateno, when the first guardian pointed a laser at her face and someone pushed her aside and onto the grass. Granted, she wrote the speech and she told the troops to press on and she was the one who pointed at the plateau and said we are going to save them and then dragged everyone forward through the crystal of the dawn, but anyone can write a happy ending. Victory is a shorter story than failure. She could be dreaming; could be stirring apples over a fire; could be waiting for her grandmother to come home.]

The rain follows them all the way to the Great Plateau. It’s hard enough to carry the body of your dead friend when the sun’s shining and your skin is blistered and warm. Now it’s just unbearable. Link is still bleeding like he didn’t die half an hour ago and his blood mingles with the rain, soaks into their clothes and makes it harder to keep him aloft. At several points in their journey, they drop him. He flops over facedown in the dirt like a ragdoll in a dollhouse and Impa is so fucking sorry, Impa will never be able to face the Princess again, Impa is going to dedicate the rest of her life to saving people. If only they had arrived half a minute earlier. Maybe then they would have stumbled onto a battleground and not the site of a funeral. If only they had known things would end up like this.

[The Great Plateau is vicious. Its terrain is rough and its creatures are cruel and even with the combined strength of all her people, all the soldiers she gathered under the sweep of her arm, it’s hard. Guys, war is hard. War is hard and scary and people die when you don’t mean for them to. She has a bow made of light and heaven’s holy symbol in her right hand and still she can’t keep everyone from falling over, can’t stop the volley of arrows from the sky. You can’t pray to a god who won’t save you. She cannot be their salvation. Only the girl in the white dress at the helm of the procession, only the voice telling them how to move forward. She tells them how to move forward. She talks around the hurt in her throat and the hurt in her heart and carries her troops closer and closer to the Temple of Time, to that sacred building at the top of the old hill, until they arrive, at last, in front of the great stone doors.]

How do you put a body in a swimming pool? With your hands, of course; but let’s say your hands are cut and bruised and tired. Let’s say you just dragged a seventeen year old boy up a hill. What do you with all that exhaustion, with the absurd bleakness of it all, how do you recover for long enough to put the body in the pool then? After a moment of silent conference, they move reluctantly into action. Fiddling with the buttons along the side prompts the platform to spring open, revealing the chamber inside. The liquid sloshing around is bright blue and luminescent. It seems to be single-use only, like once one person has been brought back to life, the rest of the world will have to content itself with staying dead. They count to three, then lower him as gently as they can into the water. He’s still bleeding from those horrible cuts on his back. The red mingles with the blue and makes it look like they’ve just sent him to hell. Someone begins to cry.

[The path to the Temple of Time is blocked, so Purah tells them to head back to the Sheikah tower. He’s the first one to reach the bottom and the last one to reach the top because he gets distracted by the scenery on the way up, by the way the Great Plateau rises out of Hyrule’s hands like an untouchable fortress, but Purah doesn’t comment on it. She tells him she’s found a convenient hotspot for teleportation, just a little further up the hill, and then waves him goodbye.

When he opens his eyes, it’s dark. He’s standing in an unlit room and there are symbols carved into the walls and the floor and the ceiling, which is close enough to his head to feel claustrophobic. He rubs his eyes. There’s a single square of light at the end of the hallway, beyond which he knows is the rest of the Great Plateau, the massive cliff jutting out of the side of the hill, the pine trees with their birds and their beetles. Once he’s left all he has to do is turn right and run down the slope, past the monsters and their outposts, and then he will reach the Temple. His father brought him there once, a long time ago, to attend a wedding.

But something stops him from leaving. He squints at the symbols on the wall; they look familiar, and not only because of the towers and the slate and the temple they unearthed in the middle of Hyrule Field, full of monsters that won’t die. He can’t read them, of course. No one taught him how to speak the language of his ancestors, only how to swing a sword and make sure it lands. But he can tell. This is not a place for people like him.

At the last moment, he glances over his shoulder. The cordoned-off door to the Shrine of Resurrection stares at him with cold, dead eyes.

I’ve been here before, he thinks, and then turns and runs out of the room.]

The moment Impa and the other two lower him into the water, Zelda looks up. She pictures the master sword sleeping under the green eyes of the Great Deku Tree, half-swallowed by stone, gathering dust and light and leaves. This is what you wanted me to do, right? This will save his life.

She didn’t have time to say goodbye. One moment she was holding his face in her hands and thinking about how Hylia was a sham with a mouth full of nails; the next moment he was gone. Off to the Great Plateau, to his second chance high up on a hill surrounded by silence. Having fulfilled his duty as knight to the princess, they could only hope that the gods would return him the rest of his life as a mortal. She spent a long time staring at the direction in which Impa and the others had vanished with his body. A silent funeral, for a silent knight. And yet calamity raged on still. In the heart of the wreckage stood Fort Hateno, sticking out of the sky like a white flag, waving at her in the distance. Help, it whispered. Help us.

She held Hateno up by the neck and nailed it to the wall and made it holy. She saved the men still fighting, the men half-dead in the burnt grass, the village that lay beyond the tiny stone fortress. And then she left.

The walk back to the castle is scenic. The sky is bruised and delirious and the monsters come at her like waves in a whirlpool, first the moblins then the hinoxes and then the lynels, striped and silver and gold, and who could forget about the guardians? The guardians are stone cold divinations of horror and destruction who cannot laugh for fear of upsetting their creators, the guardians are terrifying. But she is more terrifying than all of them. She is a force of evil in a world gone good.

At the last moment, she glances over her shoulder. Castle Town is nothing but a body now. All of them bodies, all of them built for some higher purpose, all of them dead. Hyrule has fallen, and in exchange, she has been set free.

Part of her is still standing at the foot of the mountain in a white dress, waiting to be rescued from the nightmare. The other half of her thinks: I will never know this world as it is right now again.

Still carrying the ghost of the boy in her left fist, she turns around, walks through the gate, and vanishes from sight.

/

In the vast empty field of snow, the little rabbit met her dead father. He had been saved by a piece of metal she dreamed up in her childhood and found in a box full of old possessions. Neither of them actually remembered seeing the metal object in their respective pasts. It had the quality of something conjured from a dream and, looking around her at the infinitely white world, the rabbit thought that this might well be one. Still, she knew better than to question what she had been given. Her father had come back from the dead. The point was not how he came back, but that he had come back at all, and that she could hug him very tight and he could put his hand on her head and they could have the conversation they should have had the day he went missing, and she thought she would never see him again.

“Your faith and boundless compassion saved my life,” her father said.

“Everything you’ve ever done was for my sake,” the rabbit said.

“You are my greatest pride,” her father said.

“I need to go cook the apples,” the rabbit said.

She would see him again. The apples were important, and this war more so. The rabbit left her father on the steps of the Temple of Time, shining with sunlight and pride, and then ran all the way back through the snow to start preparations for the final battle.

/

“I had a dream.”

Zelda looks up from the table, the sun bleeding across her face like a star. “About what?” she asks.

He presses his cheek against her hair, inhaling the scent of flowers.

“A dream where I died, and you were stuck in a thousand different dreams, trying to find the one dream where I could come back to life.”

Zelda frowns, then turns him around and kisses him.

“That sounds like a bad dream.”

She tastes like apples and sun and happiness. She looks like Hylia gave heaven a name. She is everything the world could have ever asked for, placed in the palms of a girl with eyes like the ocean.

“It was a bad dream,” he agrees, sighing softly. “I hope I never see it again.”

/

[The setting is NOWHERE. The ceiling lights are WHITE. The stage is empty save for ROBBIE and PURAH, who stand at stage left and right respectively. They are both holding a sizeable pile of Sheikah instruments in their arms.]

Robbie: When Princess Zelda was five, she found a little guardian.

Purah: No she didn’t.

Robbie: Yes she did.

Purah: She absolutely did not. There was never anything like that in my records. You’re lying.

Robbie: For the sake of this story, let’s just say she did. [He clears his throat for dramatic effect] When Princess Zelda was five, she found a little guardian, and she fixed it up. She gave it a name. Its name was Terrako.

[From now on the egg guardian will be referred to as TERRAKO.]

Terrako wasn’t super evil or super good. Terrako was literally a piece of machinery and machinery, as we all know, blows stuff up and makes it look cool. But Terrako had been saved by the Princess, and so instead of becoming a monster, it became endeared to her.

Purah: And then?

Robbie: Then what?

Purah: What’s the point of this? What are you trying to say? What does it matter if the Princess saved a hunk of metal when she was five? Am I supposed to cry here [she mimes crying] boo-hoo, I’m devastated, look at this egg. It’s not even dead yet. It’s right there. On Hyrule Field. See? [She points at the very back of the theater, beyond the audience]

Robbie: The point is—

Purah: [Calming down, visibly becoming serious and earnest about the whole situation] The point is—

[Their voices are drowned out by the sound of a war horn from afar. Blackout.]

/

They charge the castle at daybreak and it’s epic as hell. Sooga watches them from a glass room in the sky and slams his beer into the table approvingly. He’s been presumed dead since the whole ordeal with Astor yesterday and, due to his ambiguous place in the last leg of the story, has been relegated to observational duties. He can’t complain. It’s an easy job.

Hyrule charges Hyrule Castle and it’s super fucking cool. It’s Hyrule Warriors Two. It’s the way the sassy bird fires a bomb arrow and the way the edgy Sheikah warrior drops frogs from her pocket into the sky and the way the princess of Hyrule takes monsters out a hundred a second, a thousand a minute; yeah, the math doesn’t add up. But does Sooga give a damn? Damn right he doesn’t. Sooga’s been wheeled off-stage on a stretcher. He’s recuperating now and will not be available for official comment until shortly after release.

Ganon’s brought his whole party with him. He’s invited the entire fucking Malice family, which means all the bosses now have the surname Malice instead of, like, whatever they had before that, and they’re twice as strong. He’s got the castle wrapped up like he thinks it’s Christmas. What’s Christmas? Sooga doesn’t give a damn. Someone whispered the word to him in a dream. It’s his now.

Luckily for him and unluckily for Ganon, the Hylian princess has brought a bigger party. Her party comprises five races, four champions, four Gundams, one king, and one badass knight who’s in love with her. Also, her party is teleportation-friendly. Ganon has to tell his minions where to go and use Google Maps to figure out how to get them there without losing half his army off a cliff. The Hylian princess has the Yiga’s lesser counterparts, the Sheikah tribe with her, and the Sheikah tribe has a lady with vanilla soft-serve for hair. She figured out the secret behind the towers. She got everyone onto Hyrule Field.

They charge the castle. They swing obligatory weapons at obligatory enemies while shouting obligatory lines at each other like don’t give up hope and the end is in sight and I believe in you and splendid. It’s the fight of a lifetime, though by no means is it his, which leads him to wonder, idly, if he should be sad. Why’d they leave him out of this story? Why not the rest?

None of them look stupid anymore. They are not a circus, after all. They are ghosts.

And Master Kohga looks the coolest of them all, swinging his metal ball through swathes of screeching monsters, shooting a belly-beam at the moon. Master Kohga is part of this effort too, which only goes to show how outrageous this whole thing is. Look what you’ve done, Sooga thinks, knocking back the rest of his beer. Look what you’ve done, little Hylian princess. The trees. You listened to them.

/

[MENU SELECT.]
Mission Eighteen: The Great Plateau
[SWIPE LEFT.]
Mission Nineteen: All Hyrule, United
[SWIPE LEFT.]
Mission Twenty: The Future of Hyrule

[MENU SELECT.]
Mission One: The Sleep of Resurrection
[SYSTEM ERROR.]
Mission One: The Sleep of Resurrection
[SYSTEM ERROR.]
Mission One: The Sleep of 

[Blackout.]

She prefers long-range combat. It’s easier to aim a lightning bolt when you don’t have to worry about accidentally frying your comrades, which isn’t to say that she’s done it before. She hasn’t. When she first got ahold of Naboris and, by extension, a bit of real-estate in the skies, she would lug it out to the middle of nowhere for two to three hours a day and practice electrocuting hydromelons. This went on for the first few months of her courtship with Naboris, and increased to four to seven hours a day after she accepted the title of Champion. The matter of Calamity Ganon concerned not only her people, but several others as well. Most of all, superseding even the matter of her own life, it concerned the daughter of her old friend. Urbosa snapped her fingers harder. One hydromelon, two hydromelons.

One bokoblin, two bokoblins, three bokoblins and bust. She snaps her fingers without looking and her comrades spring out of the way like rabbits in the snow. The field empties itself out. Not bad for her first bolt of the morning, though the princess continues to leave them behind in the dust even now. Urbosa isn’t really watching her back so much as she is cleaning up after it. Zelda’s mother would be proud. She would be so goddamn proud, if only she knew.

The castle is in tatters. It’s half standing, half sitting under the blood red moon like a puppet in a puppet theater, and the new layout is so inaccessible they have to be airlifted past the outer wall by Revali, who complains about it in a snobby voice and then nails the landing anyway. They set off up the winding path. They stick together. Urbosa snaps her fingers and sends lightning streaking down from the sky, and you would have thought she had been doing this for the last hundred years if you were there. She snaps her fingers and it’s blood and guts all over again. One, two, three, bust.

The whole thing is frighteningly well choreographed, considering the sheer number of troops under her command. You would expect some of them to run down the wrong hallway, or end up at the bottom of the moat instead of under it, and yet: sunshine and rainbows against a red sky. It goes well. They stick together.

Divided, our strength would never have been enough. But together, all of us united in our great power, together we are unstoppable.

Possibly so.

/

If you ask Riju, Urbosa is the great-great-great grandmother she never got to meet. If you ask Yunobo, Daruk is a hero. If you ask Teba, Revali is… kind of disappointing? In the way that meeting your childhood heroes always feels a little like getting stepped on by god, no matter how nice they are to you in the photo booth. Like it could have been something greater. Like you just missed the right moment to make things awesome.

If you ask Sidon, Mipha’s dead. Mipha’s a rabbit in the snow. Mipha’s more alive than she’s ever been, guiding Ruta into the mouth of the monster, fulfilling her part of the prophecy with steady hands.

They charge the castle. It’s their last day on earth. Better make it last.

/

Astor dies in front of them in such grotesque fashion, it feels almost voyeuristic. Like he should have died in a room with no walls or in a field full of flowers, coughing up blood, with no one for company but the souls he stole in the name of a superior philosophical concept. After the incident in the Korok Forest and the affair in front of the castle and the part where he may have killed Sooga, effectively turning the entire Yiga clan against him in the biggest dick move of the century, he dies. It’s very good. Harbinger Ganon, which is to say Evil Terrako, does not die. This is very not good.

For their final magic trick, Terrako pulls out an axe.

Link does not feel great about this. He was never a fan of excess violence to begin with, which may sound ironic given his title and place in this story, but sometimes someone gives you a role you don’t want and you can’t say no. Link, who rarely says anything to begin with, doesn’t say a word.

They do a little waltz together. Forward, forward, back. Left, left, right. At some point Terrako stops and gives Zelda a miserable look that seems to say: help me. Then it dies. Thanks Link. We knew we could count on you Link.

Zelda cries. Boo-hoo, she’s devastated, look at this egg. It’s dying. I rescued it from a dumpster when I was seven years old and gave it a name and it fell in love with me, or it decided it wanted to be my strength, whatever. Images from her childhood flash past on the screen but she doesn’t actually remember any of it, doesn’t quite remember finding a hunk of metal in a wooden box. Anyway, she’s devastated. Cue Auld Lang Syne. Greensleeves. Et cetera.

So, she’s had a change of heart. Terrako is the reason for her ire now, not her almost-dead-father or her almost-dead-friends or the almost-dead-boy she saved by the skin of her teeth, that she almost watched walk into the fire. Terrako is the reason they made it this far, so it must be the reason they will see it through to the end. Does this make sense? No. Do dreams make sense? No.

Cinematic parallels. Literary references. Troy, and a horse full of knives.

She’s not beautiful, just angry. She’s not angry, just five inches shy of divine. Ganon, wherever you are in this nightmare, get ready. They’re coming for you.

/

He didn’t die at the precise moment at which he looked up at Zelda’s tear-streaked face and then let his eyes fall shut. He was very close to it, certainly, but purgatory and hell are two very different concepts and neither exists in Hyrule. So we return to the scene of Hateno, rain and teeth everywhere, the knight bleeding out like a dying star and his princess kneeling over his body.

The implications of his not-death are simple. First of all, that the master sword had not lied, and that there was a chance that they could save him. Zelda picked the right gospel. Zelda followed the right story home. Second of all, that he could still feel the rain pelting his body, and that it was very cold.

Third, that when Zelda knelt over him in the rain and then kissed him, he was aware of the warmth of her beautiful sad mouth, and despaired quietly at the knowledge that even if he were to return to this world in a hundred years with the same body and the same set of scars and a soul as clear as glass, even if they were to escape this frightening age of calamity, he would never know her as he had known her in this life again.

/

[MENU SELECT.]

DEFEAT GANON NOW, OR LATER?
 

/

Interviewer: What made you do it?

Link: It’s not like you gave me much of a choice. No one did. You put me in a blue tunic and told me to swing a sword, and I was in love with a girl, and the girl was in love with the world. If I didn’t do it, then who would?

Interviewer: What do you think of the quote ‘courage need not be remembered, because it is never forgotten’?

Link: Who said that? (Link scratches his head in confusion) Do I know them?

/

YOU HAVE CHOSEN TO DEFEAT GANON NOW.

/

[The setting is a house in Hateno Village. The ceiling lights are YELLOW and a single desk lamp is lit on the table at stage center. ZELDA sits in front of the table, poring over some documents. IMPA walks past her as the scene begins, and stops to stare at the pages.]

Impa: You destroyed the space-time continuum for a boy?

Zelda: [Turning a page over, scribbling something on the back.] Yes. And what of it?

Impa: Isn’t that kind of, I dunno, extreme?

Zelda: There were a thousand possible outcomes and only two where he would live. So naturally, I had to see both of them through to the end. Even if they turned out to be different from what I wanted, even if things were lost in the process.

Impa: So did you succeed?

[Zelda stands up, pushing back her hair. The documents on the table fall over in the process, scattering across the floor around her. She steps on them without flinching as she walks around the table to the front of the stage, suddenly somber.]

Zelda: ...I don’t know. I don’t remember. I think I did, but no one came back from the future to tell me I did the right thing. Did I do the right thing? Did I save anyone at all? [She wipes her eyes angrily with the heel of her palm.] I did what I could. I did everything in my power to stop it. I looked at every single possibility, every symbol on the wall— if this isn’t enough, then nothing will be.

[Blackout.]

She stumbles over a piece of debris on her way out of the Sanctum. Link is by her side in a flash, always half a heartbeat away no matter where she is in the world, but this time, she smiles at him and shakes her head.

“It’s fine. No, really. Don’t give me that look. It is. I promise.”

He backs off and falls into step beside her. She should feel relieved at this, but strangely enough, it feels wrong. Like she should have let him tend to her. Like he had every right to be worried and she was the one who underreacted. She bites the inside of her mouth.

The Sanctum opens up to a big gorgeous balcony with several rails missing but most of its floor intact. Everyone sticks close to her side even though there is space enough here for several hundred people, more if they slam a few against the wall. She is literally just standing here. They don’t have to be this protective of her, really.

She’s about to open her mouth and say so when the metal screw in her hand begins to glow. The screw is all that’s left of Terrako, the robot who leapt through time, who threw itself into the nightmare and turned the calamity into a monster. She turns around, to where the rest of their small party is gathered.

Riju nods. “Looks like it’s almost time for us to go. But before we do—”

Daruk rumbles a laugh. “Group hug!”

Group hug. Riju and Yunobo and Teba and Sidon and Urbosa and Daruk and Revali (reluctantly, with aggression) and Mipha and Impa and Link, and Link, and Link, and Link, and Link, and Link, and Link, and at the center of this big, bone-crushing congregation, Zelda closes her eyes and thinks, for the first time since she walked into the water, that she is happy. That she is grateful to this world for letting her exist in it. That she is loved.

All this warmth and sweat and saturation. All these sounds and smells and sights, this beating heart, this fragile thing they call life. All of it enduring, through an endless corridor of horrors. All of it emerging into the sudden sinuous blue.

“Thank you all for believing in me,” Zelda says, her heart welling up with joy. “I will never forget the miracle of today. How all of you fought by our side, and how we overcame adversity together.” She takes a deep breath, feeling her throat close up. God, she’s so relieved. She’s so relieved she could die. What do you mean no one was washed away by the floodwaters when calamity rained from the heavens, what do you mean no one had to leave? I mean this: I mean miracles are real.

She glances at Link. He nods at her. Go on. Say what you need to say.

“You must be proud of yourselves,” Zelda continues, feeling dizzy suddenly, losing air in her lungs. “I have never met such a brave group of warriors in all of my life. And yet, even as I believed fiercely in our combined powers, a part of me wondered if we would make it. The calamity seemed so unstoppable, and our numbers so small.”

Someone’s tapping on her shoulder. It’s Link. He seems to have something to say to her. He looks anxious. Wait, she mouths at him. After this.

“And yet we made it.” Everyone is looking at her with kindness in their eyes. So this is what acceptance feels like. “And yet in spite of all our shortcomings, we won.”

Link is actively shaking her now. He’s standing in front of her in her bedroom in the middle of the night, trying to wake her from a bad dream. She’s in Hateno. She’s on the balcony. She’s giving her final speech as the princess that saved Hyrule, and her first speech as future queen.

Talk to me, she thinks. Talk to me if it’s so important, Link. He doesn’t say anything.

If he won’t tell her what’s wrong, then she’ll just keep talking. There’s not much left on her mind, anyway. Just one more trite observation. Just one more thought she wants to share with them, before they all go their separate ways and the miracle comes to an end.

“My dear friends,” says Zelda. “With the way the events of the past twenty-four hours have progressed—”

Zelda. Zelda remember what my mother said. Zelda look at me. 

“—it almost feels—”

Please don’t do this. Stay with me. Rebuild the old world with me.

“—like I’m—”

Once upon a time, there was a rabbit who lived in the snow. The rabbit was hardworking and honest and spent a lot of time working on her research, alongside all the time she spent training to awaken her powers. She also had a tendency to daydream. If you left her alone for five minutes, she would be gone by the third, and by the fourth she would be riding a dragon in the sky, running from monsters in the green valley, scavenging for wildberries in the fields in Hebra. This didn’t bother the rabbit. She quite liked dreaming. It was easy for her to tell the difference between a dream and reality, because dreams had a stained quality to them, like glass smeared with blood. Reality was warm and welcoming, like a campfire set up in the heart of a dark forest. The rabbit had many dreams about many kinds of fantastical things. One day calamity struck and the rabbit found herself all alone. After doing all that she could, she walked into the castle and resolved herself to wait a hundred years with a monster. But she overestimated her own resilience. A hundred years was a long time. After a while, the object permanence of her surroundings began to falter, and she began to forget about the events that had led to the passing of the old world. After a while, she forgot that she was sleeping on a pallet of knives. When she opened her eyes again, she was sitting in her bedroom at four o’clock in the afternoon, playing a game of chess with her friend. The sun was shining through the windows and the chessboard swam before her eyes like something passed through the bottom of a pool. A bird tittered outside her window. She moved her knight forward. She changed her mind. All the pieces fell to the floor.

Once upon a time, a knight died, and was brought back to life.

Link has given up. Instead of the tapping and the shaking and the stopping, the motion of absence, he pulls her against him, squeezing her so tightly, she can feel his heart hammering through his chest. He’s trembling from head to toe. Behind them, the sky yawns bright and blue and empty. In front, the eight people she rescued from the jaws of death beam at her, waiting for her to go on.

With the way the last twenty-four hours have gone, and I hate to say this, because I believe the world is something you build up with blood and sweat and tears, so I really do hate to say this, but it almost feels like I’m— 

Would you die for him?

Kneeling at the altar, the princess nodded.

I would wait a hundred years in hell for him.

Everything around her shines so brilliantly, it brings her to tears.

Like I’m—

She picks up the knight. She puts it back on the chessboard.

You’re going to figure everything out. Trust me, I know how this story unfolds.

Like I’m dr— 

WAKE UP. THE WORLD IS BURNING.

Chapter Text

You wake up.

You’re standing on the crumbling precipice. The world is burning. He’s riding a horse on a field below, wielding a bow made of light and gesturing at you panickedly in an attempt to convey his confusion across the seam of time and space between you. He doesn’t know how to manage his mental health. He doesn’t know how to use the bow. He’s a ghost with a missing heart, or a heart with a missing ghost, and the monster in the closet is free now. You let it out. You had to.

You tell him how to move forward. You tell him what to shoot. You cannot be his salvation, but you can be the voice at the end of the tunnel, the way he has always been yours.

You wake up and he is here. He follows your voice to the end of the tunnel. You are full of an indescribable sadness that starts in your toes and ends in the space between your lungs, where once a candle had been lit and then extinguished, and you have forgotten about your father’s forgiveness and your friends’ indignance and what victory feels like when no one you love has to die for it to be won, but you hurt all the same. The absence of that which was never yours to begin with still defines you.

After a long time, the monster falls. You step off the cliff to meet it. After a long time, you walk across th field to meet him.

He blinks at you. “I feel like I was asleep forever,” he says.

You laugh. “It was only a hundred years.”

He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know there were a thousand possible outcomes and only one where he would live. He didn’t walk through a thousand versions of Hyrule, bleeding from a thousand cuts on his body, while the clock ticked slowly towards infinity.

You had a dream and you were so happy you could die. He didn’t. He closed his eyes in a different story.

“A hundred years seems pretty long to me,” he says quietly.

You peel the blue sash off your arm and hold it up to heaven. The skin has long since scarred over, though you never really gave it the time to heal. The blood on your dress is a memory now: old, worn, gathering dust.

“Well.”

You rise out of the long unending night to the sound of angels. You rise out of the vast and empty field of snow. You rise out of hell, out of the old world and its specters, into a broken, childless present. The breath of the wild rustles your hair. It sings against your skin. It tells you how steep the path ahead will be, and how beautiful everything will look when you have reached the end of it.

You shrug. “Nothing feels that long when you’re asleep.” You take his hand in yours and pull him across the field. “You could have been fighting a hundred lynels in a big mechanical bird, or dashing through the snow on a deer, or waiting for your grandmother to come home. You could have been doing anything, as long as your eyes were closed and your heart was still beating.”

“So tell me, Link. Are we still dreaming?”