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“No! I will not allow you to take her again.”
…
“Again.”
…
For several days, Mipha had cradled that word within her mind.
In the few quiet moments she would carve out for herself, she would cup it in her thoughts like a delicate hatchling. She held it close, cradling it as gently as she could with invisible fingers; even while it struggled valiantly against her hold, desperate to break free.
It was a tiny thing. Barely stronger than a newborn bird, yet its fluttering movements made her heart freeze in her chest.
…
“Again.”
…
Ice curled within her veins the longer she held onto it. The winter’s grasp crept up on her steadily, taking over her blood until there was nothing left in her untouched by the cold. It consumed everything it touched, just as it had coated the floor underneath her feet within the deep, darkened bowels of a great Beast.
Whenever she breathed, now, she wasn’t sure if she was imagining the frost which she felt brushing past her lips, as it froze her mouth shut. Its stinging cold clung to her skin, and claimed her with its greedy fingers, even when she stood in the open daylight and stared up towards the inanimate form of Vah Ruta. There, she saw both her sanctuary and her worst nightmare wrapped up within the Beast’s gears and stonework.
Several times she had been tempted to ask someone, anyone else if they could see the breath leaving her lungs; but the question always froze over inside her throat before she could try, forming a hard lump she couldn’t speak around.
No-one seemed to realize the numbness that she had felt, since that fateful day.
Yet, when she had finally fled from the dark tomb, she knew that Ganon had left her a parting gift.
The chill that had possessed Vah Ruta had gone with her.
…
“Again.”
…
She knew what it meant in the way it resonated within her memory, and the sound of it glowed bright blue against the darkness which continuously swirled around it.
In the quiet moments, she stared down the decades of agony and loss which had been encapsulated by those two syllables. It was all there, whenever she looked at her reflection and saw the glaze in her dull yellow eyes. It was enough to make her want to rage, to cry, to scream.
She buried it deep, instead. She sunk it to the very bottom of her vast memory, and hoped that would be enough.
It still fought and struggled to rise to the surface, to make the magnitude of its tragedy known to her. When the battle became too much, she froze it within her heart and chained it to a large, familiar spiked ball so it couldn’t break free.
The bright azure its memory hummed with made her want to be sick.
The irony of that was staggering, to her. The notion that she never wanted to see that color again, when she once wore it on her body as a badge of honor, and still lived within its comforting tides and currents, seemed impossible.
She was Zora. She belonged to the blue tides and bottomless depths. She commanded water itself at her fingertips, to fix what had been broken. She was the embodiment of her people’s hopes and accomplishments, a Champion selected to defend her homeland against a shadowed threat.
Now, however, she could only look upon her Champion’s sash with disdain. The innocent fabric burned against her skin whenever she was forced by decorum to don it. Most days, she could barely bring herself to run her fingers across the small insignia of Ruta’s silhouette, where it stood along the bottom hem.
She couldn’t force herself into the water. The chill beneath the waves was simply too strong. Instead, she kept her feet firmly on the shoreline, and from a long distance she watched the younglings traverse the water with ease. They laughed and played in the lakes and the rivers, blissfully unaware of the despair and destruction of the world around them.
She couldn’t admit the cause of her fears aloud. She could barely acknowledge the realization to herself, and only when she floated silently within her chambers during yet another sleepless night.
In a single day, the once comforting shades of blue had become the mark of failure. Of death.
And that was the beating, aching heart of the matter, wasn’t it?
Dying.
Mipha was more than familiar with the concept. She had barely been of an age capable of realizing what it meant, when her own mother had been given over to death’s quiet embrace. Years later, when she had grown and come to know the boy who would become the key to sealing away a great Calamity, she had stood in silent witness within the brightly vaulted halls of a grand temple. Under the gentle gaze of an ancient statue, she had watched as Princess Zelda’s mother had been laid to rest at death’s feet.
Countless more had followed in their wake. Her memories of them flowed together, forming an endless stream of faces staring up at her from the depths, their names had become lost even to her.
Such loss was inevitable, in the perilous world they lived in. One after the other, or sometimes in large squadrons, entire ranks of her own kingdom had fallen over the years in defense of their homeland. The Zora may have been a long-lived people; but death was indiscriminate, and it came for them all in one way or another.
As the decades flowed past her, she had honored her fallen brethren, as was her duty as the heir to the throne. She had stood in silent vigil as they all passed through the veil which separated the living from the dead.
She had almost joined them.
She was meant to have joined them.
She would have joined them. In her final moments, a mythical sheen of white light had fallen over her eyes, as she released the last breath which had remained between her and death; with its single, glowing eye looming over her, piercing her in place. All she could do was close her eyes against it all, and wait for the inevitable crash against her body which would have ended her existence on this mortal plane.
She had accepted her death, as it rushed at her in the form of glowing blue ice. She had been prepared to die. She would have died if not for Sidon—
Sidon.
Her younger brother. The pride of her life, the future of the Zora.
She wondered, some days, if she was hallucinating what she had witnessed; if she had in fact died, and had gone to a realm where an inconceivable magic had brought her brother, through the barrier of time itself, to her side.
What had happened should have been impossible. And yet, it was unmistakably Sidon who had stood before her, her younger brother and yet so much older.
In the span of a heartbeat, she had witnessed his growth. Her memory of the child who barely stood tall enough to reach her waist had become overshadowed by the man who towered over her with steel in his spine and the sun in his eyes. She saw how he had developed from a youngling, with a body too small for the head fin which dragged over the ground at his feet, into a warrior prince.
They had stood together in Ruta’s control room, and faced down the Blight that would have ended her life. And she had seen everything that had happened which led her younger brother to where he stood, bearing the marine blue sash which marked him as the crown prince of their people, one hundred years in the future.
It was laughably easy for her, to realize just how old he was; after all, the Zora were a long-lived people. It took many years for them to reach adulthood. Mipha had only just barely achieved hers in the last few years, after several decades of growth. The Sidon who had stood before her appeared to be much the same, just barely out of his childhood and yet already far older, far wiser than he needed to be.
She understood what that meant, as his grief-stricken words reverberated inside her head.
As they fought side by side, a small, despairing cry had become lodged somewhere in-between her mind and her throat. It hadn’t left her even after they, with Link’s timely aid, had struck Ganon’s abomination down within the control room of Vah Ruta.
In that place, she saw who Sidon would become.
She saw how he had grown in her absence.
And she had bit that lingering scream in half when she smiled at him, only allowing herself the thought that she was so glad to see what he had become in the face of her failure.
..:|:..
Being the closest kingdom to the shattered foundations of the Hyrulean capital, where its streets now ran thick with streams of Malice and horrific bastions of monsters, Zora’s Domain had become a refuge for the battered survivors of Calamity Ganon’s revival.
For days, scores of Hylians had flowed on the roads which led out of Hyrule’s borders, their crowds streaming like a misshapen river towards where the Zora would harbor them behind walls of marble and sharpened silver spears, braced for the oncoming tide of possessed Guardians and bloodthirsty creatures under Ganon’s direct command.
The citizens of Hyrule were stricken with grief, with agony, with fury. They were burdened by their volatile emotions, weighed down with them just as much as they were with their meager belongings which they carried in whatever sacks, crates, and even blankets which had been available to them before the darkness had descended on them from the depths of Hyrule Castle. Cries and screams could be heard rising from the crowds of refugees, their voices intermingling with one another in a great symphony of mourning.
The inhabitants of the Zora kingdom were harboring the shattered Hylians as best they could; but a country of aquatic species was terribly ill-equipped to handle such an influx of land-dwelling denizens.
What few accommodations the various settlements had for non-Zora visitors had overflowed in less than a day, filled to capacity with those in most desperate need of proper shelter; and even then, there were still dozens more who went without much needed beds.
In short order, beige tents and multi-colored tarps had been spread out alongside the packed dirt roads. The landscape quickly became overrun with temporary shelters, the forests trampled down by urgent feet.
The degrees of suffering radiated outward from the center-point of the roads; the most critically injured remained close to the muddied paths, where the healers could easily access them. Those who were mildly hurt were spread out further back, encompassing several rows which stretched towards the great pine forests of the Zora’s wilderness and up the shallow mountainsides.
Underneath the canopy of those endless trees, the rest of the civilians had made their residences.
Campfires smoldered underneath the pine needles, emitting smoke which choked the sky with thick, gray plumes. The Hylians gathered around their fire pits, cooked the fish and the venison their Zora benefactors had rationed out to them, and traded frightened whispers about what was going to happen to their kingdom in the days to come.
Revali kept himself away from the broken remnants of Hyrule’s citizens as best he could. Being so close to them, their suffering clung to his feathers like tar. No matter how hard he fought to ignore it, he could feel the pain weighing him down whenever he flew too close to the numerous encampments.
As an excuse to stay away from the large concentrations of misery, he had volunteered himself to work with several other factions of Rito who had been employed as couriers.
Their efforts were critical to the coordination of written discussions and relief efforts which spanned around the perimeters of Hyrule. They traversed the skies, all while giving the region of Central Hyrule, where malevolent clouds of purple smoke could be seen swirling in a vicious circles, as wide a berth as they could.
There was nowhere in the vast land the Rito hadn’t been seen in; from the white-sand coasts of Lurelin Village, to the tranquil mountains which sheltered Kakariko from the Calamity’s violent stare, to the vast tundras of Hebra.
Within a week, Revali became certain that he had flown more distance in that time than he had in all his years since he had taken his first flight.
That realization wasn’t something he particularly enjoyed discovering. Nor was the task he had taken on. He was, after all, a Champion, not a carrier pigeon.
And being in the air was also providing him with rather unwelcome sensations.
Every so often, as he soared above the clouds in the blue-gray light of dawn, he would be distracted by a quiet glint of purple. It would streak towards him, faster than any oncoming arrow, always remaining just out of the corner of his eye.
Every time it happened, it was enough to make him want to drop like a stone, and crash into the unwelcoming earth below.
He fought the urge whenever the hallucinations slammed into his mind, even when the fear tried to pull him down, down, until he couldn’t fall any further. Thus far, he had been successful. He still had a task to accomplish. For the time being, it was enough of a distraction for him to get by.
It also had a secondary benefit, in keeping his mind off the topic of his rather unlikely savior.
He had given it as little thought as he could, since the day the Champions had been spared their gruesome fates.
But at times when he was lulled into wandering thoughts, he always returned to what he had seen. He wondered, and worried; if the story he had been told was to be believed, the Rito warrior who had saved him— who had called himself Teba— had come from a distant, broken future. One where the Champions had failed.
Where Revali had failed.
That was not a possibility he wished to consider. Especially when, in some ways, he already had.
He hadn’t defeated his malevolent opponent in the turbulent skies, on that fateful day the Calamity had returned. He hadn’t been able to emerge victorious from the onslaught. It was a simple stroke of luck, no matter how cruel he may perceive it to be, that he had survived to witness the consequences of his defeat in this version of reality.
His pride stung and ached to think that he had required assistance in that fight. To know that his own skills, talent, and training hadn’t been enough to save his life. That two Rito warriors hadn’t been enough to beat back the creature which had assailed him. That Link, of all people, was the one to ultimately change the course of battle in his favor.
That, perhaps, was what wounded him most of all. He had required the aid of a boy chosen by a goddess; a knight wielding a sword destined for his hand alone. He lived only because Hylia’s Champion had been there when he was about to perish.
In the days following the arrival of those who claimed to be from the future, he became increasingly certain that his continued existence, and likely those of his fellow Champions, was the primary difference from the time Teba supposedly had come from. The time in which Revali had fallen to the wretched Blight which had consumed Vah Medoh, and had wrested the Divine Beast from his once unshakeable grasp.
It wasn’t a topic he had heard freely discussed. In fact, none of the warriors who had come from the future had outright stated what the circumstances of the Champions had been in their futures.
But the truth was clear to Revali in the way they all carefully skirted around the topic of their own world’s history, and that of the fates which had befallen their predecessors: to those who had travelled through time, the Champions had long since fallen. Hyrule itself had fallen, far further than it already seemed to have.
If the story was to be believed, the Calamity had won.
If the story was to be believed, Revali— and the rest of the Champions— had died.
It was a truth he didn’t want to face.
So instead, he flew.
He pushed himself harder, faster, and further, quickly approaching the point of collapse with every stumbling landing he made. He fought to outpace the thoughts which hounded at the tips of his wings and singed his feathers, burning him just like the violet beams of light which had consumed his vision in those final heartbeats that had remained before his approaching demise.
Because of his frenzied attempts to escape the horrible truths he suspected, he had seldom seen the other Champions, in the days since the winds of battle had turned and Zelda had unlocked her sacred powers. He eased the guilt which prickled underneath his skin by telling himself that there was no use in him wasting his time trying to interrupt the essential duties they had been entrusted with. After all, each of them were too preoccupied with their own vital tasks:
Urbosa, with securing the defense of her homeland against the oncoming horde surging and roiling within the great expanse of the Hyrule Field, in preparation for a scenario where Zora’s Domain could fall to Ganon.
Daruk, with the coordination of supply lines between the various refugee camps spread out along the banks of the Hylia River, and overseeing the demolition and clearing of the blasted ruins which blocked the ground forces from traversing the destroyed roads.
Link and Zelda, with preparing themselves to face the Calamity and accustoming themselves with their newfound powers.
Mipha, with tending to the wounded and the dying.
Despite not interacting much with his compatriots, he knew they were still alive, in some form or another. It was enough to satisfy his thinly-veiled curiosity, as he travelled to all the corners of Hyrule.
But out of all the various Champions, present and future, the Zora princess was the one Revali had seen the least of.
The realization of this particular fact came on slowly, through hours of pondering what was different between the interactions he had with his allies. Something had felt off for days, causing an unnameable concern which had rankled him with its ceaseless presence. He hadn’t known where the thought originated, at first; although he hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with the Champions, he had still been afforded the chance to observe most of them, to varying capacities.
He had spoken with Urbosa for sporadic lengths of time, whenever he had been given letters to deliver to the Gerudo chief. Whenever he flew low over the plains of Akkala he had caught glimpses of Daruk, steadfastly helping his Goron brethren clear away the empty carcasses of Guardians from the roads.
Even Princess Zelda, with her skin now barely candescent in a golden hue, would typically be the one to give Revali his next directive whenever he returned to the crystalline structures within the Lanayru basin. Link was never far from the princess’s side; the glint of the Master Sword on his back always gave his silent figure away.
Yet, no matter how long he looked for a sign of her— once he realized that was what he was searching for— Mipha was never anywhere to be seen.
No flash of crimson would glimmer out of the corner of his sight, whenever he hovered above the vast pine forests and flowing rivers. No bright amber would meet his stare when he scanned the endless crowds below.
It was an absurd, bewildering thing for him to notice in the first place. He reasoned that it was only logical to have the expectation that he would encounter the Zora Champion more often than any of the others. The fact that he hadn’t was merely an anomaly he wished to rectify. There was little explanation for it otherwise.
Though, he told himself that this particular concern was only owed to the fact that he was spending a majority of his time in Zora’s Domain, in her homeland. The relief efforts were most concentrated in that location, as well as where the makeshift center of command which Zelda personally oversaw was located.
Still, it hadn’t been cause for alarm, at first. His focus, first and foremost, had needed to remain on his tasks, and on preparing Vah Medoh for the quickly approaching assault on Hyrule Castle. Thus, he kept himself busy, and continued to make his deliveries.
Those duties hadn’t stopped him from musing on the oddity, in the back of his thoughts. He picked at it from every angle whenever he had the chance, effectively keeping the quiet, sore worry from scabbing over into something less preoccupying.
The irony of that was not lost on Revali; yet he continued reopening that same wound, while he spent his free-time fretting over the healer who was well-versed in such things.
When he had finally inquired about the situation before leaving for his next round of deliveries, Zelda had assured him the Champion was well; that Mipha was simply busy trying to handle the overwhelming amount of injured Hylians.
Revali didn’t quite believe the princess, as she spoke. Not when her eyes were hardened and her voice was laden with the barely-concealed guilt she still carried from the late awakening of her powers.
Out of all the Champions, he was aware that Mipha had been given the most arduous role. The pained cries Revali could hear rising up from the ground had hardly abated despite the time which had passed since the camps had been established, despite the healers’ best efforts. They ran between the tarps like frenzied rabbits, darting underneath the canvases at every opportunity they got. There never seemed to be enough time for them to take time for anything other than sleeping.
As such, he was willing to admit that even a small part of Princess Zelda’s explanation to him had been true. It didn’t seem outside the realm of possibility to him that the Zora princess could just be underneath the cover of the stifling tents at most hours of the day, tending to the endless numbers of the wounded and dying.
But as the days wore on, with no sign of her becoming evident, a heavy feeling began to settle deep in his stomach. It grew larger, darker, whenever he returned to the jutting crystal mountains and left without ever seeing crimson and silver.
And so, when he next returned to Zora’s Domain bearing letters for the heir to the Hyrulean throne, he didn’t immediately venture back out to brave the dangers which laid beyond the borders of the aquatic kingdom.
Instead, he decided to ask after Mipha’s location.
His first course of action was to spend an entire afternoon speaking with any Zora he could find, scattered throughout the various settlements in the Domain. He kept his questions short, even polite by his standards. To him, his goal seemed like a simple thing to achieve.
Yet all of the people he spoke with hadn’t had the slightest idea where their heiress was; though they acknowledged they had seen plenty of her throughout the days.
Their recounts didn’t seem unusual on the surface. True to Zelda’s word, Revali learned that the princess spent a majority of her days in the refugee camps and tending to the wounded. She would arrive at dawn, and only leave in the late afternoon when another of her people could fulfill her role.
But that was the limit of what they could describe.
The pit in Revali’s stomach burrowed itself deeper into his flesh when those he asked said they didn’t know where their princess could be when she had finished with her duties.
It was their lack of concern which seemed out of place, to him. Though all the races held their own Champions in high regard, none were so wholly respected and loved by their people as Princess Mipha. She was the pride of their civilization, beloved by her citizens to the point of reverence. It was clear to all that the Zora Champion had cultivated a level of respect and familial love that her companions simply couldn’t match.
Yet, the longer Revali spoke with her subjects, the more it seemed like they weren’t concerned. It was as if there was nothing at all wrong with the fact that the woman who was so dearly loved by her people could disappear from underneath their noses.
That, on its own, was almost enough to bother Revali more than the princess’s actual absence.
It quickly became apparent that his investigation on the ground was proving to be fruitless. From there, he deigned himself to flying in lazy circles, remaining just above the cliffs which encased the great walkways of the Zora’s capital city.
The method had just as much chance of producing results as wandering around like a headless Cucoo had, but he was growing increasingly frustrated the more times he heard the words, “I don’t know,” in answer to his questions of where Mipha was. If he had to endure those words one more time, he wasn’t sure he would be able to restrain the vicious string of insults which sizzled on the tip of his tongue.
He stayed high enough that he knew no-one standing on the distant riverbanks would immediately spot him. So far, none of the refugees had ascended the tall mountains of Upland Zorana, leaving him with a clear vantage point of the deep verdant plains which were unoccupied by any living creature other than the occasional, bright orange fox.
Yet, there was nothing of what he sought.
No flash of red scales in the towering waterfalls. No amber eyes tracking him as he coasted on the breeze which washed over the vast basin below.
It was as if Mipha had vanished from her own kingdom. No-one acknowledged her existence. No-one knew where she was.
Revali’s temper was rapidly beginning to run even thinner than it had before, all while he spun in circles with only the distant thunder of the waterfalls for company.
This endeavor was pointless. He hadn’t put this much effort into finding Urbosa, or Daruk. If they were previously occupied before he arrived with their next instructions, he simply left their letters with the nearest authority figure and moved on to his next task. If Zelda was busy, she designated one of her underlings to give him his next assignment. And the goddesses knew Revali wasn’t going to seek Link out on his own volition.
He knew, instinctively, that the reason for that was because they weren’t Mipha.
That knowledge baffled and infuriated him in equal measure, the longer he ruminated on it while circling the evening sky.
Somehow, the absence of the Zora Champion throughout the days had become an unusual gash in his soul; a piece missing from the tapestry which encompassed his existence.
It wasn’t like him to be so impaired. Attachments were something that had previously been unnecessary to him. All that had mattered was training to defend his homeland and to reach heights none had ever dreamed of.
The mere suggestion he was seeking Mipha out for some petty concern should have been beneath him. He should have known better than to try and fill the void. He should have continued with his work, and stitched the wound shut, over and over, until it couldn’t tear itself back open searching for a particular shade of ruby red.
He continued flying, instead. The sun continued to sink below the distant ocean. The Calamity continued to surge on the opposite horizon.
For a brief time, he descended back down towards the vast camps which held the Hylian refugees. He weaved slowly throughout the smoke plumes as he went, and studied the chaos unfolding beneath him.
Even so late into the day, many of the Zora healers were still hard at work. Revali watched with rapt attention as they trotted between the numerous tents, their arms filled with bandages and buckets of water, and ushered the injured onto straw cots laid out along the roadsides.
Every so often, he would catch flashes of crimson, shimmering like dying embers in the evening light, as his eyes darted through the crowds. His heart would jump in his chest at the merest sight of red, thinking he had finally captured a glimpse of his goal; but none of the crimson Zora were adorned with the intricate silver ornaments he was familiar with. None of them bore the bright blue cloth of a Champion. None of them were Mipha.
When his repeated circuits around the majority of the campsites provided him with no answers, he once again rose on the cold currents of air, and went even higher than he had gone before. He buoyed himself high above the mountains encasing the capital city, and finally resigned himself to the bitter defeat of not accomplishing his goal.
In truth, it was probably for the best. Revali hadn’t given any thought to what he would say to the princess, if he had eventually found her. If she had asked him why he was so determined to see her…he wouldn’t have been able to give her an answer.
He couldn’t give himself one, for that matter. The drive he felt was foreign, this urgency to see Mipha whole and real before his eyes was unlike anything he had experienced before.
The corner of his beak curled into a snarl at the sharp, yearning pang which echoed underneath his ribcage, just as it had for the past several days at the mere thought of the Zora heiress. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than for that stinging pain to disappear.
So it was just another instance of his Hylia damned luck that, in the moment he was preparing himself to complete his latest lap and finally angle himself for the Gerudo Highlands, the smallest flicker of ruby caught his attention at the edge of his sight.
His head tilted with a harsh jerk towards the glint, before he knew what he was doing. Before he could pretend he hadn’t seen it, and move on with his duties unimpaired.
Several meters below him, at the other bank of the great lake he had been circling all evening, his eyes were met with a vast precipice which jutted out into empty space. It rose steadily in a steep incline, extending far beyond the deep gray cliff-face which spread out on either side. It sat hundreds of yards in the air above the lake, which he belatedly realized was the Eastern Reservoir, with its depths walled in with towering sheets of aquamarine marble.
The cliff wasn’t that much different than the surrounding mountains, which had similar protrusions of crystalline rock that formed wave-like shapes to surge out of the earth. At first glance, the scenery shouldn’t have captured his focus. A part of him tried to convince himself he had only imagined the color, in his desperation.
Yet, the longer he continued to stare at the very edge of the point, the unmistakable shimmer of crimson stood out in stark contrast against the bright, viridescent grass and gray-blue rock.
As he studied the unusual speck of color, he recognized the slightest glint of silver reflecting the light of the sinking sun.
He resigned himself to making this final effort, and angled himself fully towards the cliffside. He slowly sank in altitude as he went, until he could circle around towards base of the peak.
A few minutes later, he landed several paces behind the small figure who sat alone atop the mountain, overlooking the vast land and water stretching out far below.
..:|:..
The grass was damp and cool against his feet once he finally touched the earth. Revali’s talons dug into the soft dirt, causing it to squelch underneath his weight while he reacquainted himself with being grounded.
He treated the task of standing on his feet with an absentminded focus. He was more preoccupied with the red and silver figure who sat before him.
Mipha’s posture was immaculate, even in such an isolated place. Her back was as stiff as wood, her shoulders set in a firm line as she rested her hands demurely in her lap. The delicate outline of her head fin fell down her back, where the curling ends of her tail wavered gently in the breeze, just above her waist.
Revali’s brow furrowed when he noticed that she was lacking her Champion’s cloth; in fact, her body was bare of any covering, save for a white silk sash which was attached to the delicate, tear-shaped metal pauldrons she wore. The fabric draped down her left shoulder, and ended at the middle of her back, just barely brushing the very tips of the grass at her sides.
His eyes darted down towards his own azure scarf which was tied in a loose knot around his neck, before returning to staring at Mipha’s back, just to make sure he wasn’t misinterpreting the sight before him.
In the time he took to look at her, he received no acknowledgement of his presence; which seemed unusual. He had only landed a short distance away from the princess and her precipice. Surely she had seen him coming. She had most likely watched him flying in endless circles for hours on end throughout the evening.
The feathers on the back of his head bristled once that suspicion had wormed its way into his thoughts.
“What are you doing up here?” he finally asked. As he spoke, he took a couple of steps forward. He folded his wings behind his back as he went; treating the situation as if he had merely stumbled upon her hiding place.
“Thinking,” Mipha answered softly.
Revali paused, and halted a step away from her shoulder. His shadow was cast out over her form, eclipsing the crimson of her skin with the sun at his back.
She had only spoken one word. Yet her voice sounded wrong.
“Do you typically climb a mountain to do that?” he ventured.
That comment earned him a small sigh; but whether it was from amusement, or exasperation, he couldn’t tell.
Mipha was always unusually difficult for him to read. Often, he wondered if she even possessed the ability to give her temper, or any negative emotions, free rein. Her polite nature simply didn’t seem to allow anything other than courtly manners an easy expression across her calm face.
He knew the reason wasn’t because she was meek; far from it, in fact. The Zora princess was just as much a warrior as her fellow Champions, and she had proven herself dozens of times over to him, both on the battlefield and off. She was entirely unlike what he had once assumed her to be, a haughty royal who had been handed her position through birthright alone.
Yet she never broke her gentle cadence. She had no need to; she could cut anyone down to size with her quiet voice and reserved smile. Her dignified poise wasn’t a farce, meant to project a condescending politeness; it was inherent to her character.
And so, while her tone itself may not have been off, something about her demeanor in that moment struck him as different. She hadn’t turned to look at him; she hadn’t spoken, until he had made the first move.
Eventually, once it became clear that Mipha wasn’t going to respond to his probing question, he lowered himself to the damp grass at her side. His talons hung off the edge of the cliff they sat on, and for a few moments, he contented himself with placing his wings in his lap, and staring out across the domain far below them both.
This far up, the air was cool enough to touch his skin, even through the thick layer of his feathers. It wasn’t entirely unexpected; the season in Hyrule was just beginning to change, with autumn quickly overtaking summer’s long nights and warm breezes.
As the quiet stretched on, he wondered if Mipha was bothered by the chill.
“This place is called Ploymus Mountain. A few months ago…there was a Lynel here.”
Revali’s head barely shifted at the sound of Mipha’s voice. His eyes darted to the side; it was enough for him to be able to watch the princess out of the corner of his sight.
Her eyes were half-lidded as she gazed down towards the distant lake beneath them. He stayed silent as her fingers gently wrapped around each other.
“It had gotten past our defenses during an invasion. At first, our forces were spread too thin to notice it.”
Mipha’s head dipped forward with a slow, minuscule bow. She seemed lost in thought, while her shoulders rose and fell with the heavy breath she took.
The pit in Revali’s chest rapidly became deeper, the longer she went between her sentences.
“My brother loves to come up the mountain, even though he knows he isn’t supposed to leave the city without an escort. But he had disappeared during the battle, and the reports of a Lynel had just started to come in. So Link, the princess, and I went to look for him.”
The quiet tones of her voice had fallen low enough to become little more than a whisper.
Revali tried to picture the scene she was describing to him. He had met the prince, both the present and future versions of him, only a few times; yet it was hard for him to imagine the miniature young royal simply slipping out from underneath the watchful eye of the royal family’s countless guards.
“Eventually, we found him.”
He finally turned his head to the side, so he could fully look at the princess.
Being so close to her, a wonder occurred; of how impossibly small she appeared to be, compared to him.
The top of her head, where the two delicate fins which framed her face peaked, barely reached the base of the spaulder he wore. Her shoulders were barely in line with his chest, and sunk further as she bent forward in her seat. One of his wings alone could likely encompass the width of her body.
The one closest to her twitched away from his lap, moving as if there were some sort of invisible string pulling his arm towards the princess’s back—
He pulled himself away from the overwhelming draw, before he could do something he would regret.
As his gaze continued to linger on the reserved outline of Mipha’s profile, the polish of her intricate silver tiara winked and glimmered on her forehead and the bases of her fins. He didn’t register the movement, right away; he was too focused on the distant, deadened look in her amber eyes, as they remained hooded underneath her pale red eyelids.
By the time he realized she was shivering, she had begun to speak anew.
“Sidon had found a spear, somehow. He was trying to fight the beast alone.” Her shoulders raised again, as she drew in a deeper sigh. “Link, the princess, and myself were able to distract it before it could attack him.”
The breath which left her lips once she paused came with a heavy sense of finality.
Revali glanced back towards her eyes with a furrowed brow, as he stared at her profile and tried to parse where she was taking this one-sided conversation. It felt like Mipha was leading him to an unknown conclusion, a dangerous crescendo that he couldn’t yet perceive.
The rapid pounding the thought elicited in his chest made him want to speak up, to say anything to disrupt the crash course she seemed to be on; but he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt her monologue, no matter wherever it was taking them. To do so felt like a betrayal of the quiet trust she must have placed in him, in choosing to talk to him about this at all.
At the height they sat at, the strength of the wind was enough to stir his braids into a quiet frenzy. He felt the emerald jewels which fixed the plaits in place snapping against the back of his neck, and he focused on the dull thuds they elicited as he waited for what Mipha would say next.
“I was so afraid something had happened to him…he was so young. And yet, he was so brave. In a way, I was proud of him.”
The corner of her lip visible to him lifted by a small margin, though the gesture was a mere shade of the typical gentle smile she wore.
“We defeated the Lynel without Sidon being harmed. But by that time, the capital was nearly overrun by the horde, and we were too far away to be of any use…our only hope of victory was for someone to try and pilot Vah Ruta.”
Mipha’s fingers unfurled over her legs, like the petals of a rose blossoming in the spring sun. She reached forward, and gestured down towards the reservoir far below them, where its waves lapped gently at the marble walkways which extended into its surface like the spokes of a great wheel.
He assumed that was where the great Beast had been once it had been unearthed; or unsubmerged, as it were, and where it had floated in the center of the great reservoir. He tried to picture what it must have looked like as it remained dormant, and awaited the moment its master would enter its quiet halls. As he stared, pale tan stone wavered before his eyes over the deep indigo water below.
“I didn’t hesitate to try. I took Sidon, Link, the princess, and her Guardian with me, and we boarded it for the first time.”
Revali’s brow furrowed while he tried to picture it; that odd group entering a Divine Beast in the heat of battle, with Mipha leading the charge. Determined to save her kingdom without knowing whether their plan would work.
Clearly, her efforts succeeded. She had attained command of the ancient machine; she had mastered it far faster than even he had Vah Medoh.
That fact had always inspired a quiet, begrudging admiration in him, even if he had never expressed it to her. Out of all the Champions, Mipha was the first to fully control her Beast. He couldn’t imagine the urgency of trying to bond with the nearly-sentient technology for the first time, as all the Champions had to, while his country was under attack.
“My father didn’t want me to become a Champion, at first. It wasn’t until I had already taken control of Ruta that he gave me his blessing.” Mipha’s words took on a slow, solemn pace, upon mentioning her father.
Revali tried to imagine what his life would be like, without Mipha as one of his fellow Champions. He thought about what would be different without the calm she carried with her wherever she went, without the quiet strength she belied with her gentle voice and slow movements.
He couldn’t do it.
He had rarely interacted with the monarch of the Zora, but what little he knew of King Dorephan caused him to think that the man was incredibly difficult to convince, once he had made up his mind. Now that Revali knew what had almost been lost to him, he was glad that Mipha had disobeyed her father’s wish.
“But he had a condition. I had to promise him that I would come back safely.”
The minuscule lift of her mouth fell, and was pulled downward by some great burden.
Mipha’s voice had been breaking in strange places the longer she spoke, the melodic shape of it sharpening and falling flat in strange intervals.
“You understand, don’t you?”
The disturbances grated on his ears; in all the time he had known her, she had never been anything less than composed. He was only used to her calming presence, her gentle words.
The pit that had settled inside of his stomach finally opened wide to greet him with a cold, wide maw. Wherever Mipha was going with this, her words were about to throw him headfirst into that dark place he had felt since he had first noticed her absence.
“We were supposed to die.”
His heart plummeted as she uttered that final word. It fell out of his chest, further and further down towards the merciless water.
No, Revali immediately wanted to say. No, we weren’t.
For so many days, he had fought not to think about this. He had pushed himself too hard to let himself dwell on this very topic, which Mipha was now insisting on digging up from the shallow grave he had dug it in his mind.
He wanted to stop her. He wanted to cut her off before she could make the situation worse— but his tongue was weighed down in his beak, and all he could do was stare at the princess while she kept her focus on her lap. Her head lowered so far forward that he thought she would tumble off the cliff from her own mass.
He could only pray he would be fast enough to catch her, if that happened. He imagined the press of her torso against his back, the wind whipping in his ears, and what he could only guess the feeling of her fingers pressing into his feathers would be like; gentle and whisper-soft, barely discernible through the layers.
Mipha’s eyes finally clenched shut, the bright amber fully hidden behind the dusty red of her eyelids. Her shoulders shook and wavered from some invisible weight; even as she was handing it over for him to hold.
Revali’s throat ached as he swallowed around the painful memory of violet light and thunderclaps.
“And I…I—”
Mipha’s thin fingers tightened even further around each other.
He feared they would snap from the strain.
“I accepted it.”
What?
Revali’s mind blanked; his thoughts turned to bright, unending white as forced himself to blink. He could hardly breathe through the crushing force which was pressing into his shoulders with every word Mipha continued to speak.
His beak parted, just slightly, though he had no idea what he could say in response to the confession he had heard.
Mipha had accepted dying?
The thought seemed antithetical to everything he knew of her. She wouldn’t be so willing to leave her father and brother behind, would she? She would have fought the Blight to the very end.
He desperately wanted to believe that, despite what she had said.
“Your family,” he started. His voice wavered and nearly rose with the aborted question concealed in what he said, as he made the choice to step out over the thin rope which hung over the despairing cavern which awaited in his chest.
It was the wrong thing to say.
Mipha flinched, full-bodied and fierce, against those two words.
Revali’s brows pressed lower, and he felt the apology rising in his throat before he had the chance to stop it.
Mipha spoke before he could, urged on with the tidal wave of her thoughts finally breaking through whatever dam she had built up around them. “When Sidon…came through the portal, the Blight was about to kill me. I had…closed my eyes, and waited for it to be over.”
He could scarcely fathom what that must have looked like; Mipha, overshadowed by the terrible, sludge-like shadow of Ganon’s malice, standing still and alone in the face of her own demise. Mipha, with her eyes shut just as he saw they were now, preparing to die.
Fissures broke out across the surface of his heart as he pictured what that sight could have been. Where had she been within Ruta’s vast frame, with her fingers wrapped around the hilt of the Lightscale Trident even though she wouldn’t fight the fate rushing to meet her?
Had her Blight looked like his? With a body of thick purple oil, and angry red fibers flowing down its back from behind its stone-like mask, where a single Guardian eye pulsed with blue ripples? Had it borne a strange stone cannon at the end of its arm, and tried to at shoot her with those purple beams he still saw now whenever he flew, or had it carried a different weapon tailored to combat her own prowess?
“Can you imagine what he said, as he came through?” she asked, finally addressing him for the first time since he had sat beside her. At the back of her head, he watched her large fin as it shook with the tremors which were beginning to wrack her body with increasing fervor.
He couldn’t answer her question. There was nothing he could say to stop her from continuing down this broken path, even while those small fissures on his heart were gradually growing wider underneath the pressure building behind his eyes.
“He said, ‘I will not allow you to take her again.’”
A quiet part of Revali acknowledged the final puzzle piece which Mipha’s explanation inadvertently slid into place. Her words were answering the unspoken topic that their future counterparts had been dancing around, since they had first arrived through those glowing blue portals.
The shaking of her shoulders grew more prominent as she hesitated. He could hear her breath hitching in the back of her throat, as she struggled with the insurmountable misery that was reflected in her voice.
Revali’s heart pounded within his chest, pushing against the confines of his bones as if it were trying to break free, and bring itself closer to the pull of Mipha’s lonely presence at his side.
“The Sidon that came to my aid grew up without me— to him, I’ve been dead for decades,” she whispered.
Once she finished speaking, she gasped, as though she had run out of air in her lungs. A glimmer of water trailed down her face, carving a small trail across her pale skin despite the absence of rain in the sky.
Revali’s eyes traced the crystal drop as it descended, and lingered for a moment on the soft edge of her jaw. When it fell, it moved slowly; it hung suspended in the air, and shimmered in the dying sunlight at their backs.
More droplets followed in its trail, leaking from the dark corners of Mipha’s eyes and down the smooth expanse of her face.
He felt like he was in free-fall, even as he sat still on the edge of the cliff. The world spun underneath him, all while the weight pushing behind his eyes continued to grow stronger.
Yet all he could do was stare at the broken princess beside him. Her tears fell atop the backs of her hands with quiet patters, growing increasingly frequent in their intensity.
She was disturbingly silent, despite her misery. She shuddered against her grief, while all around them, the only sound was the gentle rush of wind across the top of the mountain.
The sky grew darker, the moment he realized that. A purple glow flickered at his side.
The underpart of his left wing suddenly began to sting, as if it had been struck by a beam of fire. It prickled, just where a new patch of feathers was beginning to sprout back from the bare patches left in the old ones’ wake.
As if he was experiencing his motions from outside his body, he felt his other wing lift upward, shifting away from his lap as it went. He watched the appendage extend to his side, and slowly move behind Mipha’s shaking back. He wasn’t in control of his own actions; he simply was moving on instinct.
Mipha didn’t notice what he was doing, at first. She remained bent over her lap, with her clenched hands held close to the center of her chest.
A shadow was cast across her shoulders by the length of his wing, blocking what little sunlight remained in the sky from touching her skin. She must have felt the chill, the absence of the sun’s warmth on her; she twitched, her back straightening just enough that she could tilt her head to the side. Her eyes parted, and she peered in his direction through the film of tears which wavered in her eyes.
Revali had never been good with managing another’s grief. He left that to the more compassionate Rito, whenever tragedy struck his people; truly, all he ever knew was how to fire a bow. Providing comfort was…outside his realm of expertise.
But in his younger years, he had seen the embraces afforded to those who had experienced pain and loss; a bitter injury, the death of a family member, and more.
He hoped she understood what he was offering. He couldn’t bring himself to speak in that moment. If he tried, he feared the still-building pressure behind his eyes would burst forth.
Mipha’s back straightened further, bringing her away from the precipice they sat on. The bright yellow of her gaze darted frantically between his wing and his eyes. The slim ridge of her brow lowered, with the three light red spots which arched over both her eyes flattening and reversing into a low curve. Her bottom lip wavered, as she continued to take in whatever she saw on his face.
He breathed in slowly, and kept his wing extended, even while he could feel it beginning to tremble. For a Rito, such shuddering couldn’t have come from exhaustion. He ignored the implications of that, in favor of waiting for what would happen in response to his unspoken offer.
Revali didn’t register the moment Mipha leapt at him, moving far faster than he had ever seen her before, until she was already pressed against his side.
He wavered when her arms wrapped around his back; yet, her hold somehow remained gentle, as she burrowed her face into the hollow of his throat, just above the ridge of his steel breastplate and the layer of his Champion’s scarf. A second later, her legs straddled the feathers which encased one of his own, while the webbed ends of her feet dangled precariously over the cliff’s edge.
A damp warmth quickly began to spread underneath the layers of his feathers, originating from the point where Mipha’s eyes were pressed into his body.
Her arms trembled around him; her fingers brushed into the plumage over his shoulders.
With slow movements, he folded the wing he had extended inward, once Mipha had settled, and pressed it against the middle of her back. His fingers curled around her side; he kept his touch as light as he could, even though everything within him was screaming to pull her as close as possible.
It was a dizzying, foreign need. He could barely comprehend the overwhelming desperation that washed through him, the moment she had touched him. He wanted to draw her inside himself; to carve out a hollow in his chest, to keep her safe and warm and away from the waves of pain which shook through her and into him. Nothing was close enough, in that moment.
He didn’t fight the urge. His other wing came forward, and wrapped around the other side of her body with gradual movements.
Mipha gasped into his neck upon sensing his touch on her skin. The sound of it, so close to his ears, was broken, hollow.
Together, they held each other in relative silence, and Revali watched the last of the sunlight die across the land in front of his eyes, while he held Mipha against him. The dark shadows of dusk made the world feel so much smaller around them, causing reality to close in on every side.
It felt like they were the only two living souls to remain in Hyrule, with the Calamity swirling in the distance, just barely visible on the far horizon he faced.
That feeling emboldened him, filling his veins with something sluggish and warm despite the bitter mountain air. Slowly, he lowered his head until the bottom of his beak rested against the top of Mipha’s head, between the narrow crease of the pectoral fins which draped down the sides of her face. His fingers pressed tighter around her sides, wrapping around and lightly touching his own torso.
Mipha didn’t move once he settled back into an unmoving state; though he could still discern the quiet whimpers which still emerged from where her mouth was pressed into his throat. Small puffs of air pushed through his feathers as she breathed; but he drew his own form of comfort from the sensation. It was enough to remind him she was alive in his arms, when he couldn’t see her face.
He kept his eyes firmly on the darkened shape of Hyrule Castle, and the malevolent smoke which swirled around its ruined form.
It wasn’t until the dusk had turned into the stillness of night that he returned his focus towards the woman he still held, and the way her feet were still hanging off the precipice.
Her tremors had slowed in small increments, as the darkness descended on them. There were no stars in the sky that night, nor the bright light of the moon; deep gray clouds shielded them from the earth, leaving only a pale glow to shimmer weakly through the thick layers.
Slowly, he began to shift both of them away from the cliff’s edge, towards the more solid ground at his back. He drew Mipha with him, such that she barely had to move herself, until he could sit cross-legged on the cold ground. He pulled her between his legs once he had settled; she went willingly, and her arms relaxed around his shoulders a moment later.
At some point, her tears had fully subsided, though he couldn’t quite recall when. But the moisture in his feathers hadn’t grown for some time, and Mipha’s quiet cries had abated into the night breeze.
“We’re still here,” he said, speaking as quietly as he could without resorting to a whisper.
We’re still alive, he wanted to continue. We still have each other.
It was the only comfort he could think to offer her. In that moment, there was no-one else who had experienced the horror they had. They had both survived the Blights which had plagued their Divine Beasts. Being alive was all they could ask for, even if the ordeal had left them both broken and emptier than they had been before the attacks had struck.
Mipha startled in his hold, likely surprised at his sudden words; but she settled back into a tranquil quiet a moment later.
His fingers twitched against her as he looked down towards the dim blue shine of the Zora’s capital city, so far below them that it appeared to be little more than a slight glimmer.
The color of the light was just similar enough to the pale purple beams which had nearly ended his own life, and as he stared down towards the glow, he couldn’t stop the shudders which began to run through his bones.
Mipha’s arms pressing against him pulled his thoughts away from the thunderclouds building rapidly inside his head. He shut his eyes, and allowed himself the brief respite of sinking fully into her hold. Even though he engulfed her, he focused on the way her arms wrapped around the backs of his shoulders to steady him.
His earlier imagination of what her fingers in his feathers would feel like didn’t compare to the grounding presence the real thing possessed. While he mused on it, he felt her hands twitch and burrow deeper into the layers, drawing closer to his skin as though she had sensed his thoughts. The solid press tethered him to the earth beneath them.
It wasn’t going to last forever. Eventually, the solitude of the night would give way to the dawn. He would have to return to his travels around Hyrule, to trying to outrun the memories that had plagued him since the day he had nearly lost his life.
Slowly, his fingers began to raise away from Mipha’s sides.
“Please don’t go,” she whispered, immediately, into his neck. Her breath warmed his skin through his feathers.
Revali paused. His eyes parted, just enough for him to peer down towards the red figure he still held, and the silver tiara which adorned the top of her head. Her voice was slow and lethargic as it met his ears. She was leaning further into him than she had before, with her chest now pressed entirely flush against his breastplate.
In many ways, he wished he wasn’t wearing the armor in that moment. Having such a barrier between them felt inherently wrong.
He tightened his arms around her as she spoke, hoping that would be enough to satisfy his need for the time being. When he shut his eyes again, he lowered his head further over hers.
“I won’t.”