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She’d startled Zelda the first time she made the shadows move. And they both were startled with the swiftness of Zelda’s reaction, with how smoothly the Princess buried her gasp into a sigh, glanced down to hide widened eyes, and pressed her lips together lest any further sounds escape them.
It was much later when Zelda spoke of what had happened. “Can you do that again? With...a horse? Or something from your home. It’s the most entertainment I’ve had in-” She’d cut herself off, and Midna had offered nothing more than brittle laughter in return. Let the Princess dwell on what had been, in contrast to what it had become.
Never to forget even amid their games.
“What’s a horse?” Midna said, eventually, her grin as sharp-toothed as ever.
“You’ve never seen a horse? It’s an animal. There used to be a statue of one just outside the-”
Midna would learn what it meant when Zelda’s voice quavered in such a way, but she did not care then. She twisted the shadows around, darted between them faster than Zelda’s eyes could follow. “What are horses good for?”
“Riding. Hauling things. Eating apples.”
“Apples?”
Zelda held her hands out, long fingers cupped together to make a circle. “A red fruit. You haven’t seen one?”
The shadows shifted again, displaying long, sinuous legs, a neck stretching out to end in a circular head, a curve at the end to outline a red sphere in the glint of firelight.
“Your realm has such strange creatures.” Midna said, leaning over as she appeared to float in the darkness.
“Shorter legs. And bones in them, like this.” Zelda traced the shape of the main body in the air, then moved on to the head. Her hands seemed faint, memories of their fading into translucence overlaid atop that earlier meeting.
The shadow shifted, changed in accordance with those directions. The shape before them seemed clearer, a thing of almost-flesh rather than shifting, liquid shadows. Zelda ran her fingers over its ears, its necks, indicating the shape of it, the way the mane moved flowed in something that wasn’t quite flight.
“There, the shadowy one isn’t so bad, is it?” Midna cocked her head to the side, seemingly unbothered by the sheer weight of the helmet she wore. It felt heavier in recollection, or maybe that was just her more callous words.
“Maybe I’ll make you one of those,” she said to the memories, to the glimmer of light Zelda had granted her. “A shadow under the statue to make you jump. A little fun before we put the rest of your world back the way it was. Before we put you the way it was.” Her grin almost took the edge off those words. Almost.
Even the memory faded away into fragments of light and darkness. A spark of light glowed in Midna’s hand, the shadow it cast reaching back up against the small lines of her body. A single vein of light pulsing within it, a light that ran up the shadows to Midna’s heart.
“I’ll put all of us back the way we were.” Midna laughed, her voice a little too high-pitched, the grin she bore a little too wide to be convincing. “You’re more fun the other way, Twilight Princess.”
Her memory of Zelda’s form contracted, narrowing down to motes of light that melded in with that vein, a rhythmic heart that vanished back again into Midna’s shadows.
“All of us back,” Midna said again. “And I’ll never let you forget it was your fault I was the one stuck around to help him do it.”