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The sun was rising.
It was hard to believe it could rise, again. Link watched, barely blinking, as the light spilled over Death Mountain’s peak. It flooded the fields, lighting up the islands in hazy blue and grey. The sky tinted slowly back into blue.
The same blue as her horns. Link knew immediately. He had spent all night staring at them, after all. At her horns. Her eyes. The fur, short and surprisingly coarse over her snout, where scale melted into pelt. Her hair, unmistakably yellow–– gold as sundelions and molten metal and honey. She looked different than the other dragons. A thinner muzzle, pointed almost like a beak. Shorter ears. Long, golden eyelashes framed her bleeding green-blue eyes.
They wouldn’t look at him. Not even once. Link stood, shivering, his champion’s tunic she made far too thin for the high altitudes she kept to, but he didn’t dare take it off. Not even… not even when he knew it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t recognize him. If she could, still… she already would have, hours ago. Would have done more than fly on and on, drifting on some endless current he couldn’t feel.
Link parted his lips with a crack. Something tore. He licked them once, twice, tasting blood. His tongue dragged uselessly across them. What moisture there was quickly wicked away in the passing wind.
“...Zelda,” His voice dragged out of him raggedly. His throat burned with the effort of it. Link swallowed thickly. “Zelda,” he tried again. No use. This was all he could do. This was all he… “Zelda.”
A thousand words came to mind. None of them made it past his lips. They clogged in his throat, running up against each other like fallen logs in a fast moving river. A chokehold in the current that rested, stone-like and painful, so thick he felt as if it would pinch his airways closed entirely.
He was never the one for words. That had always been her.
The silence felt wrong.
Even the other dragons made noise. They weren’t like her, he knew–– he knew now, that they likely were people once. That dragons came because people chose to become them. Each one of them, Farosh, Naydra, Dinraal, they each were probably someone like him. Someone like her. Not Hylian, not likely. Only two Hylians bore any of the Zonai’s sacred stones. They were… fundamentally different.
It wasn’t Zelda’s nature, to be quiet. She was now. Quieter now then she ever was even before the first tragedy. Her silence in Rhoam’s shadow, in the wake of the Calamity, had been different. A tense sort. The type that stood still, watching, pregnant with dread. It had tasted like blood in his mouth. Dirt under his nails. Callouses and bruises and army provisions.
Her silence now tasted like thin wind.
Link wasn’t sure which was worse.
No, that… that wasn’t true. He breathed in, whistling and sharp. Looked down at where his fingers flexed. It took monumental effort to uncurl each white knuckle from the golden locks under him. In the face of the Calamity… she had had friends. Family. Her father, though cold. Her friends, though weary. Her research, her people, her home. She had… she was herself.
Now she…
Now she had him.
She had him, and that was where she ended. Link had always been by her side. From as far as he could remember. All his memories, for what good they were after the uprising of the Calamity, centered around her. The champions had been an exception. Only an exception. She was the epicenter of his memories, his thoughts, his history, his very life–– he was a constant to her, when he was awake to be so.
It was as good as having nothing.
Even his continuity couldn’t protect her. What was the good of being there, of being present, of being trained or fated or blessed when it couldn’t even protect her once?
First the Calamity. Now the Upheaval.
Link stared, unseeing, at the haze of gold around him. The sky was brightening. Leveling out. A blue as calm and steady as his tunic, as the glowing spikes risen from her scales. A blue that only served to saturate her further, uncontested in light.
Zelda was silent beneath him. She curled and drifted through the air, claws swimming through her summoned breeze, and she did not even hum to fill the pressing quiet.
Link did not have to blink away tears. The wind did it for him, wicking the water away without a care. It glittered in the sunrise. Splattered into his clothes, his hair, her scales, only to be torn away from even that. He remained, cold and numb, knelt waist deep in the flowing golden locks of her mane. He buried his hands down until he could trace the uneven indentation of scale and skin. Warmth flowed up from her. Light pulsed through her entire body, twisting up the hairs and seeming to melt into him where they tangled around his fingers, up his wrists. A secondary heartbeat, warm where the wind blew cold and cool where the sun bore down. It bled into him. Soothed hurts that could not be soothed. A gentle, healing light, familiar in its etheral power even as it lacked the flickering way Zelda had once used it.
Now, it was steady. Stable. Unconscious, even. As if, in this form, she was simply made to soothe. Made to heal, light and time and power buzzing under his minuscule weight on her back.
The master sword thrummed tauntingly before him.
Link did not pull it. He could barely stand to look at it.
All this… all this. To empower the sword. To return it to him. To give them, him , a fighting chance against an evil predating the very kingdom that had birthed him. All this change, all this sacrifice, for him to maybe survive in a world that had twice now crumbled and torn at the seams.
Link loved his land. He loved the people, loved what was left of Hyrule. He did. He had already shown that. Proven it in spades. Spent 100 years and more protecting the flickering, bleeding remains of it. Lost his family to it, his friends to it. His king and his sword and his very memories––
Link squinted through the wind, his eyes feeling sore and raw. He stared at the blade.
Would it hurt her? It was embedded in her very skull . Could he really just pull it out? The thought alone made his stomach turn. Hadn’t he hurt her enough?
Hadn’t she gone through enough?
Were they really doomed to keep losing more and more of themselves…?
Zelda’s power pulsed under his trembling fingertips. It snaked up his arms like a living thing, threading liquid warmth into his very bones. He could feel it with every beat of his own heart. Any possible wound, from lacerations to bruises to the smallest scrape had been long healed hours ago. Yet it continued to soak into him as if it could still find something to soothe.
It wouldn’t. Even as it pooled in him, his chest remained tight. The stuffiness of his nose, the pounding headache, the rawness ringing his eyes, all left. But he still breathed heavy. His hands still shook. That wouldn’t change. It hadn’t since he had first alighted on her serpentine back.
The sun still rose. And his Zelda was gone.