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The Hero
He does not know who he is, and he is full of experiences he cannot remember. He lifts a sword for the first time, and it is the thousandth time, or the thousand thousandth, because it fits his hand like it has always been there. He stands before a campfire, and he knows the steps to make foods he cannot remember the taste of. He climbs into the saddle for the first time, and he feels the instant jolt of muscle memory as he kicks his horse into a gallop, the feeling of two creatures moving as one. He whistles songs he has never heard, hands twitching to strum a harp, to finger an ocarina, to conduct the wind.
He cannot remember any of it, standing in the cave. A voice reached out to him across a great distance (he does not know how great) (he does not know who, not really) and gave him a name, and it does not feel wrong, but he does not know who he is or who he has been.
He never remembers his dreams, but he knows they're there, just out of reach, filled with things too big for one lifetime, too much to fit in one man. He awakens from fevered dreams where he almost, almost touches something so much larger than himself (or larger than a person should be, because it is himself), but he cannot reach it.
His feet move on the road. His hand moves his sword, and he follows the pull in his chest toward that voice, toward his role.
He could be anyone. He could simply start on the road and never look back. He could build a boat and cross the sea to whatever lies on the other side, leaving this dead-and-reborn place to fight its own fights. He could lay down under the sky and be still until all life left him, never moving again.
He keeps walking and fighting and searching, moved by things he cannot remember.
***
The Princess
Between her lives, she could explain her existence. It is like going to the seaside and scooping up a bottle of the ocean. You could take that bottle with its bit of ocean anywhere, and it would still be the ocean, but you'd be able to make nearly nothing of its greater self, only roughly imagine the shape of the larger whole. Between lives, she is the ocean, and when she is embodied, she is the ocean in a bottle. She is still herself, but cut off from herself, able to imagine only her slightest shape, access the smallest parts of her power.
She is a princess. She has tried other shapes, a few times, but the world adores a pattern, and even a goddess is limited by the world. She is usually a princess, or a priestess, or something like both, and this small part of her, cut off from the rest, is in the mold of every part of herself she has ever cast into a body.
It is hard for her to understand what it is to be a mortal. It is hard for the whole of the ocean to understand what a glass is, to imagine itself so contained, even when it is reunited with a part of itself that has been separate. She gets a little closer each time, she thinks, a little more like the mortals who pray at her shrines, who ask for her kindness, who are bottles and can never be anything else.
She sets her own trials, watches herself struggle, stumble, and finally succeed at the last hour. She watches herself stay trapped and trapping for a century, and she is proud of that little part of her in the bottle, struggling against its constraints for her power.
***
The King
There is nothing left of him but scraps woven into a monster that does not know or recognize he is there. He is the burn of wind and sand and sun, and the monster cannot be hurt by such things. He is frozen nights, huddled around fires against a chill that can kill as surely as the day's heat, but the monster does not feel cold. He is the feeling of his mothers' hands in his hair, working it into braids, putting him in order, pulling him together, and the monster has no mothers, knows no comforting hand.
He was a king, and he loved his people. The monster loves nothing. He had loved his people so dearly, he had turned against the rest of the world, turned to violence to improve their lives, and he was justified, but the beast still came. The monster slotted itself around him as if he were nothing more than its missing pieces, as if it were only waiting for him to rise to complete itself. Like it was destined and inevitable.
He loved his people, and the monster would feel nothing to destroy them. It would not regret, and it would not take pleasure in it. It would simply destroy, the same as the sand and wind and sun and cold all did.
He does not think, like this. There is not enough of him left to think. He cannot appreciate what he—it—he has done, the threat they still pose to the world, to his corner of the world.
He does not know that there are legends about him. There are none alive who would know his face, not as a king and a son and a brother, not with so many generations passed—but there are legends of kings among his people, and there are legends of the king who became a demon, and there are a few among his subjects, his untold-repeated-greats nieces, who would recognize him, if he were somehow picked apart from the monster, built into something shaped again like a man.
But he does not know anything anymore, and it would not give him any comfort if he did, to know his failure is written so clear across history.
***
The Dance
The world loves a pattern, and none of them can escape it.
They are born and reborn, a chain stretching across much of history, stretching across such massive swathes of time that even to the divine, the memories become softened and blurry.
They are tied together, tied to Demise's threat to the world, tangled possibly beyond separation.
There are lifetimes where they pull away from it, resist the inevitable weight of their destinies. They are always drawn together, even if they are not playing the right roles in their story. Sometimes they all three fall together with such intensity, they have no chance to do anything but burn together, and that is another way of fulfilling their destinies, to die to each other's passion. They have all been lovers, in one life or another, or all at once, and it can never end happily.
The king dies, and the land is safe, whatever the princess and hero may feel about it. Or the hero dies, and the king casts the land into an age of darkness. It is rare that the princess dies as part of their tangled dance, but when she does, the Goddess Hylia weeps for that bottled part of herself, and it is a terrible thing to be seen.
They have each loved the others, each hated the others, and at least one of them must die. There is never another option, never a chance for all of them.
Once, the princess married the king and united their lands and peoples under one banner, her loyal knight their right hand, and if they were only individuals, they could have been happy. Instead, the monster reached out to take the king and twisted him, diminished him, and it started a war that ended with a queen mourning the husband she lost long before her hero put a sword through his chest.
In another life, the hero, an orphan (and so often an orphan, so often raised by his own hovering, untouchable memories of other lives), was raised by two mothers, raised one of only two boys in his entire world, and he loved that other boy deeply, fiercely, as fully as his mothers loved each other. They grew into men together, and then one became a monster, and the hero put him down, only to be celebrated by a foreign crown, embraced for the fact that he had killed his own heart.
In another, the king is good and just and righteous, and it is the princess who seeks to destroy an outsider, and it is still part of the back and forth game of Demise and Hylia, because at a certain scale, neither good nor evil care much for the lives they destroy. At an even larger scale, the world does not care about good and evil at all, as long as its patterns continue.
In another, they grow up together in the same royal court, thick as thieves, as close as siblings.
In another, the princess and the king are of one people, queen and prince, and it is the stableboy who ends the prince's bid for power that would have brought his mother's death.
In another, there are no kingdoms, no people to lead, and they all three fall together, lie together, desperate and in love, and they still die.
And another.
And another.
And another.
They have danced, are dancing, and will dance every conceivable role in their three part romance-epic-tragedy. They will grow up on legends of themselves and die becoming the legends they will grow up on in another life, and they will do it endlessly.
They will either break the cycle, or the dance will continue, on and on, until there is nothing left.