Chapter Text
From where she wove in high circles above the castle, her keen eyes searching that dreadful dark silhouette for any sign of gold and blue, the Light Dragon had a singular conscious thought: that she had moments of clarity, sometimes.
It felt rather like a vivid dream—half-memory, half a thing too strange to exist in the waking world. It was full of emotion, of impressions, without enough connection to any physical sensation. Logic that made sense was rare, so when it came, it stood out as stark and real and in need of attention.
That was what a dream felt like, wasn’t it? She hadn’t dreamed in so long. She couldn’t recall one to compare this to.
Link was falling. She had to catch him. So she did.
He needed to go up—so she didn’t spare a moment's thought. She took him there.
He fell again.
A huge beast tried to devour them both. She evaded it.
Giant, mangled jaws snapped and she was almost shorn in two. She twisted and shot away. She could not die here—but neither could he. She wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t allow it. Any who tried to harm him, in strange dreams or no, would not only fail, but pay the price for trying.
More thoughts started filtering into her head, some disjointed and stiff and short, but others more complex. It threatened to give her the largest headache any creature had ever known—but at the same time, it was the sort of pain that made her desperate to push past it. It felt rather like stretching the soreness out of one’s body, using muscles that had lain motionless for ages.
Link fell again, and she swam down hard to be ready to catch him. How long had they been doing this—this cycle of battle, aid, repeat? How many years had passed in this dream?
Long enough, it seemed, for some things to change.
He landed on the beast again. She could see the shine of the dear sword whose voice she knew well—who chimed things time and time again in a matter-of-fact musical way, like Your name is Princess Zelda, daughter of King Rhoam Bosphoramus of Hyrule. You possess the sacred power of light that seals away evil. In order to ensure that the Master Sword reached the Hero, Link, in your future, you—
Her memories, even of the details that the spirit in the blade had repeated to her a hundred thousand times, were a great empty space now. But it was ordinary for such things to be fuzzy during slumber. Wasn’t it?
Her name was... what? She was the dragon of Light. She knew only one name, as far as she could recall.
Link. She didn’t know if she wholly remembered what the name meant, but the chasm in that memory was great and vast, and the sense of importance made her restless. She knew a few things: Link was a name. Link was this small creature. Link was a safe place. Link was—
The blade glinted white-blue in the murky red sunlight.
A blood sun? What a strange dream.
Every huff and grunt Link made reached her dulled-but-oddly-heightened hearing, and she twisted and clawed the air nervously. But then—
Atop the other dragon’s head, there was an impact—a shattering of ancient crystal, and a blinding flash so hot and bright that her vision went gold and a spot in her stomach reacted and caught fire. The feeling dulled, barely in time for her to sense Link falling again.
She doubled over to catch him, and heard the echoes of a mighty roaring. Roaring in agony. In pain, in defeat, in death.
Dead dragons didn’t fall right away.
She didn’t remember taking them away from the blast radius, but she was dimly glad she had. The eruption of power that followed felt strong enough to shear a hole in time itself.
There was blissful silence after. The sun stopped bleeding and the world once again was green and blue. She could see hills and mountain peaks and an old castle in the sky and even the curl of sand and water on a beach she wondered why she didn’t remember.
In a dream, things didn’t have to make sense. When her power dulled and weariness crept into her bones, she closed her eyes, but her spirit could still see two others standing above her, with a bright white silhouette between them. She didn’t question it.
It had been a long time, but she found that she knew their names too when she saw them. The queen dressed in ivory-green-gold studied her gently, a solemnity in her eyes, then smiled.
“The stones are very old,” Sonia said. “But everything once had a beginning.”
Rauru’s face twitched, mouth turning up at a corner and his eyes glistening with mirth and sorrow and—something sacred to his kind.
“Yes,” he mused. “Somehow, I don’t believe Link will mind helping us one last time.”
She was asleep—a vision within a dream, and couldn’t see Link. It was alright. They were safe, now. Something in her heart tugged in pain at the glimpse of these two spirits, but her mind fell to a deep slumber again, and the last she saw, they were raising their hands toward her.
Something inside of her froze, suspended in a golden blast of power.
With the ticking of a great clock that could go back a hundred thousand years, time rewound.
—
Link could not stop pacing.
“She may have just exhausted herself,” Purah suggested, making a small gesture with the red recorder she held. “You two fought the Demon Dragon. I trust that you know better than anyone what strength and energy that took.”
Beside her, lit warmly by the morning sunlight streaming through Lookout Landing and into Purah’s note-cluttered study, Josha nodded eagerly.
“We don’t have any records outside of legend of a dragon exerting itself so much,” the younger girl added. “And none that record observations of the dragon after. It’s definitely possible that so much sudden speed and sharp movement after years of slow, simple motion could cause an onset of sore muscle and fatigue. Like, when you’ve been sitting down studying all day and then take off running really quickly without stretching. Anyone could hurt themselves doing that.”
Link was quiet in his movements, but never as silent as the Sheikah. The soft thuds of his boots on the wooden floor filled his hearing in the silence and annoyed him. He barely spared a thought for hoping it wasn’t bothering the two researchers even more than it did him.
He paused for a restless moment in front of the window, peering up for the hundredth time to the cluster of huge islands that floated in the southwest sky.
Even a dragon? he lost the nerve to ask out loud.
That wasn’t polite. Yes, they did mean even a dragon. No, they didn’t have any better leads than what they could theorize. He should just—stay quiet.
It'd be easier to feel polite once he'd tired himself out. Calmed down.
When he turned and walked a few steps back into the room, Purah and Josha were exchanging a glance, as if they knew what he hadn’t said.
Purah looked to him again, frowning in thought.
“You did destroy the Demon King,” she noted carefully. “From what you described, that was Zelda’s purpose in becoming a dragon—to repair and strengthen the sword for you to do that. It’s possible her dragon form senses that her duty has been accomplished.” Purah crossed her arms partway and tapped the end of the recorder against her chin, eyes drifting to the window. Link could verify that that window didn’t hold any answers—he’d have seen them if so. “Maybe the change is unsettling her.”
That could be true. It was probably true. It made sense.
So why could he not stifle the crawling feeling that that was not what was wrong?
Link’s gaze dropped to the floorboards, faintly aware that he likely had the intensely emotionless expression he was famous for, the one he got when stressed. He resisted the urge to shake his head at his own thoughts or at Purah’s, and stayed silent.
The silence filled the room.
“Josha,” Purah finally said, setting a stack of papers on one of the tables. “Thank you for helping here. It’s well past lunch. Why don’t you go eat, and we’ll work on this more later.”
Josha glanced at the clock, looking like her desire to object was overcome only by her desire to be professional in taking hints about such things. She straightened her glasses and gave them both a little nod.
“Oh! Of course.” Her tone was agreeable, though he could still tell she was making herself say it—that she wanted nothing more than to keep trying to solve this. You and me both. She turned to go, but paused to try to meet Link’s eyes with a small smile. “You guys saved everyone, Swordsman. This is a much smaller problem by comparison, right? We’ll figure this out.”
She left, and the door creaked shut behind her. At last, the room was empty save him and Purah. She studied him a moment, then sighed in a way that sounded weary without remorse, and because of that, almost parental.
It had been strange enough getting used to the century-old six-year-old Purah—the tiny scientist who stood on tables to chastise people, who played pranks and made him look tall. In the span of just a few years, she’d re-aged into an adult again—though if that was really because she’d perfected the technology that’d made her too young or if she was just aging again at a much faster rate, he wasn’t certain. She didn't talk about her original plans for the process at all anymore—about using it on other older folk who'd seen the start of the Calamity—and there were times he wondered if he really could rule out the second one being the case.
All the adult Sheikah in their prime stood far taller than him, and Purah was no exception. When she paused and looked at him for a moment, her eyes held the look of one who was also young after surviving a century of the Calamity—but who, unlike him or even Zelda, had lived a life between then and now.
He wasn’t young, but in moments like these, he almost felt like it.
Purah’s lips pursed, and her brow creased. He must have been wearing a very noticeable shadow of anxiousness over his face. She folded her arms and didn’t take her red eyes off of his.
“I know you’re worried about her, Linky,” she said quietly, her voice gentler than her posture or expression. “I wish we knew enough to help. The best advice I can offer to you right now is to watch her. You know her baseline better than anyone—if we can help, tell us, and every Sheikah will do anything we can for our princess.”
There was an odd, solemn tension in her voice. He forgot, sometimes, that the tribe Zelda had so dearly loved learning alongside had also sworn to serve her above all others. That they all so dearly loved her.
“But for now, keep an eye on her. And notice your instincts. If you think she’s out of sorts, I believe it. See if there’s any changes—for better or for worse.” Her eyes glinted faintly as she gave him a humorless smile. “I don’t want to get my hopes up either, but look at it objectively: she was aware enough to help you fight Ganondorf. So don’t rule out the possibility of there being changes for the better.”
There was a twisting, snaking part of him that wanted to rule it out, to shield himself from hoping for the impossible. And yet—he was deathly averse to daring to rule it out.
Which would be worse? Giving up hope when hope would’ve driven him to fix things, or holding onto it, only to have it dashed beyond repair?
The first, of course. He was nothing if he couldn't stand and face pain.
Purah finally looked back toward the window again, her gaze catching on the scrap of blue sky visible over the walls of Lookout Landing. She looked back down at him, brow still drawn.
“If anyone can help her remember who she is, it’s you. You know what it’s like to have to remember.”
He did. He really did.
Purah offered him the kind of thin, weary smile that he thought would be all he could manage, either.
“Just... do what you can to help both of you, m’kay? Heroes included. I've known Zelda long enough to know she would want me to remind you of that.”
—
He found the Light Dragon where he’d left her—curled atop the highest of the Great Sky Islands, the one he’d awoken deep in the caverns of.
The island wasn’t small, but it was a tight fit for a creature as massive as a dragon. The end of her tail dangled over the broken railtrack that held a few old wing-gliders, and part of it crossed the ancient steps leading up to the top. One set of clawed feet was visible where they grasped a rocky clifftop near the path. Her body wound around the giant decayed tree stump that was rooted into the center of the island, lying in a huge loop with her head pointed toward her tail.
She lay still. Unmoving.
It was unnerving to see a dragon stay so still. After what he assumed was millennia of constant movement, stillness didn’t seem right for them.
It was giving him flashbacks to Naydra, curled atop Mount Lanayru, dripping in malice. The Light Dragon looked clean, and the world should be free of that now, but the similarity in their poses made his stomach turn.
With slow, measured motions, Link pulled himself out of the rock he’d ascended through (he still wasn’t certain how he felt about having Rauru’s arm, but this was far easier than scaling sheer cliffs to get up here) and tentatively stood up. Her head was far enough up the hill-path that he wasn’t sure if she’d seen him.
He took a small step forward. His foot bumped something that rolled.
It was an apple, lost in the grass beside the path. He crouched to pick it up, looking instinctively from it to the fruit tree nearest him.
It had been all but knocked over. It jutted from the rocky islandtop at a crooked angle, half-uprooted. Branches and bark-splinters lay scattered around it. Several other apples had rolled varying distances away.
Multiple of the trees on the island seemed to have shared the same fate—accidental damage by a creature so large they must have felt like stick-high saplings.
Apple in hand, Link carefully climbed the rubble-strewn path toward the Light Dragon’s head.
Her fur and scales were almost too bright to look at in the unfiltered sunlight that shone here. The gold-yellow hair of her mane shone like nothing he’d ever seen (...except her hair, really). Her antlers gleamed brilliant blue, catching light that mixed with their own glow as if they were colored glass around a flame.
He could tell she was breathing, because the air visibly traveled far into her body, which expanded, and then back again in a slow breath of wind. Her eyes were open, and stared unseeingly.
Was she asleep? Did dragons sleep with their eyes open? Maybe they did. Or could.
The Light Dragon continued to sleep, he assumed, and he continued to stare up at her without really taking in any more details. She hadn’t moved the last time he’d been here—after he’d searched the skies for hours and hours and had begun to panic at her disappearance, unable to fathom where she would have gone after they’d both spiraled downward together, her unconscious and him clutching to her mane, to a lonely pond in Hyrule Field. Finding her up here, so far above all of Hyrule but seemingly safe enough, was in some ways a relief.
In other ways, it was a sight that made him feel as though his body sat up here while his heart sank to the Depths.
He didn’t consciously feel it when he was moving, but now that he’d stopped for a minute—stopped and let the past months of everything catch up to him and start to seep into his bones—a weight settled on him that made his body want to shake under the heaviness of it.
With a silent huff of a sigh, Link lowered himself to sit cross-legged on one of the warm stones.
It was as warm here as it could be without being hot. He occasionally wondered why it was like that up here, when it was so cold on the snowy region of the sky islands, cold in Lanayru and Hebra, then warmer down in the lower areas of Hyrule. How high up a place was, it seemed, was not the deciding factor.
Maybe it was warmer up here, so much higher up than the rest of the world, because it was closer to the sun?
Maybe. That sounded like it could be a nonsensical idea, though. Zelda would’ve known the answer. Or if she hadn’t, she would have talked it through until she’d come to a conclusion that made sense to her, and was good as fact to him.
Perhaps the wind currents play a part in it, he could almost hear her musing. The eastern half of the Great Sky Islands are toward the Lanayru region, which exhibits a similar phenomenon. You’ve said the air is quite cold there, even at high altitude, correct? It’s possible there’s something similar at play here, but with a warmer air mass.
Her voice–her true voice—was faint in his mind, something he’d only heard again in the haze brought on by rewinding a crystalline pool of dragon’s-tear. The voice that kept trying to creep into his imaginings of her was the one he’d heard with his own two ears last. That version was too cold, too caressing, one that sounded so painfully like her—but dripped with too much honey and spoke to him in a way that made his ears and his vision go red. It felt like a cruel desecration of her memory, of her person, of them and whatever trusting, fledgling thing they had together. The thought of it made him want to run his sword through the Demon King ten times over.
Link closed his eyes tightly enough to hear the blood rush in his temples and drown out the thought of it. He already had slain the Demon King. The gloom was gone, the malice was gone, and every creature it had formed was gone too. The patrols had reported that most of the monsters seemed to have vanished, the rest dwindling to numbers unheard of in their scarceness—few and far between, living like wild creatures instead of servants of a dark master. There was no more of the toxic sludge that had made up so many monsters, the blights, or the Calamity. Nothing left to reach out in tendrils and eat people’s arms alive up to the shoulder. There was no more twisted Zelda-mimic, either.
At least not that one. If he saw the other one again, he wasn’t sure how well he could convince himself to let the Yiga soldiers spare themselves in retreat.
Link grimaced slightly and tried once more to think of something else. He leaned back on his hands with a tired breath, looking over his shoulder past the rest of the Great Sky Islands and toward the surface.
The view of the castle looked picturesque without the ooze and tendrils of gloom spreading from the chasm beneath it. An old castle floating on its island in the sky, framed by dark stone and lush green, like something out of a fairytale.
How often had the princess ever been the dragon in those stories? How many knights had ever succeeded in rescuing the one they were supposed to protect with their life from an impossible living prison?
There were none. None that he’d ever heard of. No stories to fall back on for courage, no legends of calamities long past to recount as proof that they could be the victor.
They had won against Ganondorf, against great odds and greater powers and hatred, once again. The skies were clear again. The stones beneath the very earth were clean again, free from the acrid, pitting gloom that rotted the land to its bones. The people and kingdom were safe, safe from that at least, and they could live on. That was what Zelda had wanted, wasn’t it?
Yes, whispered a tiny voice in the back of his mind. But she’d wanted to live with them.
And more than that. She'd lived so wholly, with her whole heart and mind set on learning more from and giving more to the world around her. Everyone who spent more than a moment with her came away with a new light in their eyes and the ghost of curiosity on their face.
And he’d spent years with her.
He'd adjusted to not having the familiar protection of the Master Sword while it’d healed in the Deku Tree’s glade. It’d felt like he was missing a limb for a while, sure, but he’d adjusted. But now? Now that he really was missing a limb, and had someone else’s grafted in its place? It paled in comparison next to the feeling that he was missing the half of his heart that’d ever had a purpose.
She had wanted to live alongside her people, yes. But more than that, she’d wanted to really live.
And she’d wanted to live with—
He shook his head so sharply his neck cricked.
He was not here, a million feet above ground and watching over a dragon, to sit and feel sorry for himself. He was here to—to do something. Keep an eye on her, if that was all he could do. Help, if there was any way he could.
Or at least keep her company. It seemed a lonely fate to be a creature who couldn’t—or didn’t?—interact with the world outside of dire circumstances. He hoped desperately that time must pass differently for dragons. More quickly.
Link slowly stood up, stretching the soreness from his muscles and unsuccessfully trying to tamp down the urge to do something. The apple was still cool and shiny in his hand. He, starkly but not for the first time lately, did not have the appetite to eat it.
He looked up at the dragon, and tried so hard to make his voice sound friendly and unaffected.
“Hey,” he called softly. “Are you hungry?”
There was a pause in her breathing.
The Light Dragon shifted.
The movement started in her shoulder, some twenty paces away—the muscle grew taut all the way to her head. Her eyelids twitched. Her jaw closed tighter.
An updraft started beneath her, strong wind flattening the long grass and buffeting the trees and flaring her mane and fur. She picked her head up off of the ground in a strange, floating movement—as if it hardly weighed anything, or was the burst of wind a far older version of Revali’s Gale?—and—
She looked at him.
Her eyes were still that unnatural blaze of jewel-toned colors, but for the very first time they were roughly pointed forward; roughly focused. On him.
Link swallowed. His entire body had gone rigid without his noticing. He wasn’t sure if he was glad for or utterly despised the instinct that made his hand twitch toward his sword. This was Zelda.
But it was also very, very much being a less-than-bite-sized creature staring up into the eyes of a massive reptile with many sharp teeth.
The Light Dragon opened her mouth, revealing a nearly scaly inside that glowed an eerie blue in the darkness of her throat.
Softly, but in a way that still shook the island and the trees, she grumbled. It sounded three-quarters breath and one quarter roar. The air from it blew his hair wildly, and when she closed her jaw again, he was left staring up into her almost-focused eyes the same as before.
She was definitely watching him.
That was new. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a dragon do that—save Naydra, coiled over the Spring of Wisdom, staring with many more glassy eyes than were natural to her body.
This, however... didn’t look like the distant, haunted stare of the malice-infected. This just looked like he was being observed back.
Was it safe for the tiniest bit of hope in him to skyrocket toward the heavens? Rauru and Sonia had done something before they’d faded into the wind, before he and the Light Dragon had fallen from the clouds. Whatever it was had taken a great deal of power. Had they aimed to awaken consciousness in the Light Dragon? They had seemed to care for Zelda as family. Zelda seemed to have held them dearly in the same way. Had they attempted to give her a chance at waking up from her millennia-long sleep?
Well. He could try to test that theory.
Link held up both of his hands in what he hoped was a sufficiently visible and nonthreatening hello, wait just a moment gesture. He held the apple in the crook of his arm and pulled the Purah Pad from his belt, flipping through options until he’d selected a few items to remove from the slate.
A small pile of ingredients and a blue, glassy Zonai orb filtered into existence on the ground in front of him. He spared a nervous glance up at the Light Dragon, hoping the sudden appearance of new objects hadn’t startled her.
She wasn’t moving now—but had her head tilted a little?
Link drew a breath that was a little deeper and shakier than intended, and got to work.
The Zonai cooking pot flickered to life, its blue flame licking the bottom of the basin. Link moved in what he hoped were predictable but still quick motions, preparing the wheat and sugar for the batter first, then the fruit to mix in. His grip on the ladle was a little less steady than usual, at first—but after working for a few minutes with no new movements from the dragon that was watching him, his nerves settled a bit.
Zelda had mentioned, once, that she liked hearing him hum to himself as he cooked. He hadn’t realized it’d become such a habit until he was regularly cooking with someone else watching. It had taken an embarrassing amount of courage to pretend he wasn’t all that self-conscious about it—but in the end, he’d grown to enjoy seeing her out of the corner of his eye, leaning on one hand and smiling as she listened.
So, he tried again now. Nothing special as tunes went—just an old lullaby his mind defaulted to, one he guessed he’d learned as a small child curled up into his mother’s side. The notes caught in his throat at first, and he wasn’t sure what sort of hearing capabilities a spirit-dragon even had—but the sound evened out into soft humming, and Link found himself relaxing further as he tended to the food.
Soon, the smell of cake and baked fruit began to fill the islandtop.
The Light Dragon was watching the pot now, looking somehow more intent than when she’d watched him. Had she seen or smelled food in the past untold thousands years she’d circled the skies?
How it would feel to live like that for so long? Away from anyone and everything else, with no conversation or sleep or food, away from everything that made a human human?
His insides twisted, and he was no longer sure he could stomach anything at the moment.
If you still can eat, he swore to her silently, and if you want it, I’ll make you something whenever you want. We can share meals again. I can come up here every day if this is where you want to be now. You don’t have to live alone anymore.
It was silly to make such promises and not tell them to the person you were making them to. Link stole a glance upward at the Light Dragon, and found her watching him again—her eyes as intently focused as they had been on the cooking pot.
A sensation of coolness and warmth crept over him—the same kind that came from landing on her back or touching her mane or spikes or scales. He’d come to associate that with her light power, emanating in the same way, he assumed, that the other dragons emanated fire or ice or electricity.
It was strange feeling it now, when he hadn’t touched her or felt it from proximity yet. A little flare of nervous hope rose again in his chest. Was it the smell of food that had woken her up a bit more?
“Hi, Zelda,” he made himself square his shoulders and project his voice to say. “This was your favorite, a long time ago. I made some for us again. Do you want some?”
A silence fell over the island for a minute.
Then, with a motion so large Link couldn’t help but draw back and flinch, the Light Dragon stretched out her head, and... laid it back down in the grass with enough force that he could feel the tremor run through the ground. Her nose was fairly near him, but she’d rested her head off to the side a bit, seemingly so she could still see him in the nearer eye.
Her jaw had sagged open a little. A little for her, anyway. From his perspective, it was an opening between her teeth large enough for him to stand in.
Link stared for a minute. Then—despite everything, or perhaps because of it—a weary, crooked smile worked its way onto his face.
While even a dog might come expectantly for food, it seemed far more notable for an immortal dragon to do so.
She answered? was all his mind could think, over and over. She answered. I asked a question and she understood.
Whether it was really the words she understood or just the practice of approaching expectantly for food, she had still responded. Never in any of his experiences with dragons had he ever seen one react to him unless something was causing them pain.
He gathered up the somewhat messy, pan-sized fruitcake in a korok leaf he’d pulled from the slate. (It may have been a Purah Pad, but to him, that was still a kind of slate.) Zonai cooking pots were strange in many ways, not the least of which being how food cooked in them was barely hot to the touch within moments. With hesitant, quick steps, he walked up beside her snout with it.
“I’m going to put it in your mouth now, okay?” he said, just a bit awkwardly.
He had to stand on his toes to reach, but he successfully threw the cake over her teeth and onto her long tongue.
Her jaw snapped shut immediately. So close to him, with enough force to snap a Guardian’s leg in half. Link backed away, and the Light Dragon tilted her head back sharply and swallowed.
There was an awkward minute where she fell still, and he just stood there watching helplessly, having too-late questions about whether it was even safe to feed cake to a spirit-creature that didn’t seem to ever eat.
The Lord of the Mountain likes apples, he remembered with a rush of somewhat silly relief. And he seems fine.
He was just beginning to have the thought that maybe he should temper his curiosity about feeding any and every creature he came across when the Light Dragon bobbed her head.
The Zonai cooking pot decided to dematerialize then, and the poof of glowing particles nearly startled him out of his skin. When he jerked his gaze back up to the dragon, her ears had drooped a little and her eyes had closed.
BRRRRRRMMMM, she boomed from her throat, flicking her ears, opening her eyes to look at him again. BRRRRRM!
A tickle of laughter rose in Link’s throat.
“Is that a happy sound?” he asked, momentarily ignoring the embarrassment that would come as soon as he acknowledged the fact that he was talking to the Princess of Hyrule in the voice he used to affectionately tease animals. “Did you like that?”
It was surreal to see, but the dragon tossed her nose toward the sky the way a horse might, and then laid her head back down in the grass beside him. She looked at him through one eye—really looked at him—and blinked in a way that seemed friendly.
Was it just him, or was her blinking not in slow motion anymore?
All the prior, instinctual fear his body had felt was gone. Maybe it was the horselike body language—one he’d known how to read for so long, better than he’d ever learned to read that of humans. Maybe it was the fact that she was really seeing him. That he had communicated with her.
Link couldn’t keep the watery smile off his face. He took one step closer to her, and then another. In a moment, he was standing next to her mane where it pooled out on the ground.
“Hey,” he said softly, his words not coming so stiffly anymore. It felt almost like the opening of a waterpipe—the way he’d always gradually slipped back into a sense of comfort and a lack of worry when it came to talking aloud with her. According to Zelda, she enjoyed it when he talked freely. “Can I climb up?”
Her eye was looking backwards a bit to see him there, and she blinked again, in that way that seemed less unnatural.
He took that as a yes.
Her fur was so thick that he wondered if she could feel him clambering around on her. In a few moments, he’d scaled her mane, and carefully walked down the bridge of her nose to crouch on her snout.
Link caught a glimpse of her trying to look crosseyed at him for a moment. Evidently, that didn’t yield very clear results, and her eyes returned to looking outward. He could feel her shifting slightly with each breath she took beneath him.
“Okay if I lay here with you?” he asked softly.
The Light Dragon let out a deeper breath, as if to sigh. It didn’t sound bothered. It sounded more like the breath an animal would expel after it laid down and felt comfortable.
Link pulled his scabbard over one shoulder and laid it beside him, then slowly settled onto her fur.
They'd done this often while she flew. It felt the same now, and yet different: calmer, quieter. Still painful, but now in a manner that felt like the soreness of a wound as it began to heal.
The breeze up here rattled the old leaves of the apple trees and whistled against the bark of the giant tree stump. Distantly, Link wondered what kind of tree it had been. A great Deku Tree of old, maybe?
Zelda would probably know. Maybe he’d ask her, sometime.
The sun was warm and the wind was cool. The Light Dragon was both to the touch.
They rested together like that—him lying back on her snout and combing his (his) hand through the soft pale fur, and her breathing more softly, her golden lashes slowly drifting closed.
His eyes drifted closed too, and his hand slowed.
A swordsman and a dragon fell asleep together there on an ancient island, high above the world.