Chapter Text
"Rack them up, boys."
Link was jostled awake by the line shifting. His hands were bound in chains, same as every other man lined up against the wall. Dried sweat clung to his bangs, his hair was in tatters. A moonlit sky peaked through the broken rafters above. He shifted and grimaced. Wherever he was, he'd broken something trying to get to it. Or out of it.
"That one."
A pair of men in commoner garb wrested their new candidate away. The man chained next to Link had his head hung low. He was muttering something beneath his breath. Link tried to speak but all that came out was hacking and coughing. That was a shame. He wanted to ask the man if he knew who Link was, or how he got here. There was something else up there mingling with the moonlight. A golden aura, faint but growing with each minute. The night was ending.
Screaming came from the room the grafters had led the prisoner into. The sound of cleavers on hard wood. The prisoner's cries began to gurgle in his throat.
"Oh Marika above," the prisoner next to Link murmured. "Please grant me your grace."
Link stirred at that. Marika. Grace. Thoughts began to trickle in, but none of them were memories. That was only frustrating for a moment. He was Tarnished. He was lucky to remember his own name at all.
Tarnished. Yes, that...that is what he was.
"Next!"
They came for the man next to Link. His prayers increased in volume and fervor. One of the grafters smacked him across the face, but the prisoner kept muttering.
"Maybe we oughtta take his tongue first," the grafter said. "It'd be the first scion in history to have one, eh?"
The grafters chuckled, dragged the man away. Link was next in line. It smelled like ash in here. He was in blue tatters, leather vest and gloves. They hadn't taken his cowl, and the cloth was crusted dry and smelled awful. His scabbards were empty. He'd had swords. Did he like swords?
More hacking cleaver sounds. This one did not scream. There must have been some dignity, before the end. A rotten end it was. To leave in mind and soul and watch helpless as the cravens cut away the parts of you they liked best. Even if they buried you near the roots, as they should, there wouldn't be anything to come back to.
How did he know all this?
Link became aware of something cold clinging to his chest. Something metal. It hung around his neck. He tried to feel for it. The chains dug into his wrist.
"Next."
They came for Link, and he did not fight. He was still thinking about whatever it was that hung around his neck. He was thinking about the stars and how few of them he could see. That aura of gold washed out most of the sky. That felt wronger than the chopping block he was being dragged to.
They hoisted him onto the table. They bound his limbs once more. One of them had teeth yellow and rotting. One of them didn't have any teeth at all. He gnashed his gums, and spit trickled onto Link's cheek.
"This one ain't flinch once, chief. Where'd you drag him off of?"
The grafter's partner scoffed. "Nowheres, is what. Poor bloke was laid out on the coast, waterlogged and all."
"Blimey," the first grafter said. "Tosser tossed off his own ship?"
They cackled. Link was watching the last star twinkle out.
"Had a pair of measly scimitars," one of the grafters said. "All he had to his name, that is."
"Wee Tarnished thinks he's the Blue Swordsman, that it?"
"Either way, he's clay for the scion. Get the tools."
They started rummaging through his pockets. They ran knobbled fingers through his seams, through his leather. A cold, dry hand closed around his necklace. The grafter frowned.
"Eh?"
He yanked the necklace free. The pendant had a sharp edge. It nicked Link in the cheek. A fine line of blood trickled down his jaw. It snapped him back into the now, and he focused on what dangled just over him.
The necklace's gold had long rusted away, exposing the raw iron beneath. The pendant was a collection of triangles, three in all. They were arranged in such a way that they made one whole triangle in and of itself. It dangled overhead. It caught the golden light.
The images came to him all at once. Link tasted sea, and tasted current. He felt stalks of wheat between his fingers, and the light of sun on his face. The images grew more concrete. They were out of sequence. Silver soldiers marching in single file, row after row after row. Brilliant blue flags waving high overhead. An old weathered face peered into a cradle, waggled a chipped rattle. A sword being brought to each shoulder, one after the other. The slender arm that held it.
"Ey mate," one of the grafter's grunted, "he's struggling now—"
"Tosser got some fight left in him after all, don't he—?"
A head of golden hair. It fell past her shoulders in a forever river. Clear blue eyes. Full of scorn, once. Full of hate. Full of something more, right before the end.
She'd thrust the necklace in his hands. He wouldn't take it. Not when it could risk everything. But she wanted him to have something. Something to remember what he was, and what he was fighting for. Who was she? Why was she looking at him like that? Why was she crying?
"Blimey. Pack of elephants in this one's arms—"
"Just hold him down, will you—"
She blinked through her own tears, pendant clutched in his hands. "You will forget. I know you will. You need something to hold onto. Something to spur you onward when the ship lands, and the true hard work comes. You have to remember the task at hand."
Link's wrists were bleeding. The bolts holding down the chains were beginning to tear. A grafter was yelling at his mate to get the cleaver.
"Because you will think you are one of them. And we will make you like one of them. But you can never be one of them. Because they do not know where Grace truly lies.
And you will be the one to show them."
The bolts shattered free. Link shot a hand out and snapped a grafter's neck instantly. The cleaver slipped from his grip and fell right next to Link's head. Before any of the other grafters could do anything he grabbed the knife and freed his other hand. The other grafters began to draw swords. "Stubborn old git—"
Link was on them in a whirlwind. He snapped a grafter's arm at the joint like a chicken bone and silenced his cry with a swipe of the cleaver to his throat. He brought it down on another's skull, driving it through the bone. One tried to get him in the gut, but his limbs were so frail. The sword just grazed the leather, and now it was within arm's reach. Link wrenched the blade free from the grafter's hands and shoved it up his throat. The grafter crumpled to the floor.
That left just one more. He was scrambling across the worktable, suspended chains clattering against each other as he went. Link was in between him and the door. The grafter dropped his sword of his own volition.
"H-heheh. You're real handy with those, ain't you? You'd," he tripped, scrambled to his feet? "you'd make a good knight, I'd reckon. You'd work wonders in Godrick's keep, swear on me mum. I can take you there. I can help ya meet him. You'd only have to let me go, so I can lead the way."
Link drove the sword into his groin, and left it there. The grafter choked on his next words, the tendons tight in his neck as he collapsed with his hands clenched around the blade's handle. He hit the floor with a thud. The necklace lay splayed out across the wood.
Link bent down. He touched it gingerly, like it was an open flame. He picked it up carefully and wrung it around his neck once more. Nothing else came. No more wheat, no more sun. No girl with golden hair. He just stood in a butcher's shop with fresh decaying meat scattered all around him.
He went back out the hall, to the remaining prisoners. He broke their chains. They did not thank him as they went. A harder death probably waited for them out there, wherever 'there' was. And now it was time for him to see it. His footsteps creaked the wood as he went up the stairs into an empty chapel. A statue of a woman he did not know stood over him, arms held out, head hung low. He could not tell if she was in pain or not. He pressed his palm against his chest, into the pendant beneath the leather. He made for the doors. Time to see the sun, he thought.
When he saw the Erdtree, everything clicked into place, even if he knew nothing. He knew what he was here for, even if he didn't remember how or why or who he was fighting for. He knew what he had to do. He had to bring a kingdom to its knees.
He had to kill a god.