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You taught me the courage of stars before you left
How light carries on infinitely after death
With shortness of breath, you explained the infinite: how rare and beautiful it is to even exist
-Sleeping at Last
Mother isn't here now
Who knows what she'd say?
Nothings quite so clear now.
Feel you've lost your way?
You decide, but
You are not alone
Believe me,
No one is alone
-Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods
Zelda moves through time like an echo. And if the pair who find her are surprised to see the young Hylian girl in strange clothes who claims to be the Princess of Hyrule, they take the news in stride.
The woman calls the tear-shaped gem a "secret stone," and says Zelda has both light and time magic.
Zelda grips the stone, and wonders how it can bring her home.
.
She spends her time in Mineru’s library. Reading. Studying.
She can’t bring herself home. She can’t reach Link. Ganandorf will make it to the future.
She has never done well with feelings of powerlessness.
So she studies. She observes Sonia, and decides she is ready to practice exercising her own control over time
She starts small. A leaf, blown across the ground by the breeze. Think of the object’s memory. She thinks of the path she watched it take, the short distance it danced across the courtyard. How long had it lain on the ground, she wonders? Which tree did it fall from? Which branch? She imagines it clinging to its parent branch, waving, fading, and then drifting gently to the ground.
When she holds her hand out, the leaf doesn’t move the few feet back to where she saw it start. Instead it darts back, off the stone floor of the courtyard and high into a nearby tree, nestled so deeply amongst the other leaves that Zelda can’t see exactly where it has gone.
She relaxes her hand. Minutes later, the leaf floats down again, and lands at her feet.
“Oh,” she says. And then does it again, until she can move more than one leaf, and then she brings all of them off the ground and back above her head, and lets them all go at once so they float down around her like fat, golden snowflakes. She closes her eyes and raises her hands up, spinning slowly in a circle as the leaves spiral around her.
She stumbles and snaps her eyes open when she hears quiet applause, embarrassed, but not surprised, to see Sonia and Rauru both watching her from the stone archway of the temple.
“You’re a natural, dear!” Sonia cries. She glides across the courtyard and opens her arms, and Zelda leans in, awkwardly accepting her embrace.
“I only did what you told me,” she says, and Sonia steps back and looks down at her.
“You still did it, though, didn’t you?”
She isn’t sure what to do with the praise, so she just nods and lets Sonia give her another hug. Listens to Rauru as he starts to tell a story of the first time he saw Sonia use her time powers.
She already loves them, but she isn’t quite ready for an audience. And anyway, it’s just leaves. Still and waiting, giving her plenty of time to prepare. Not a cup, knocked from a table without warning.
Not a girl, tens of thousands of years in the past.
.
She asks Mineru if one of the steward constructs can help her, and Zelda spends the next morning letting it toss various items around so she can try and catch them in midair and reverse their movement. The first time she grabs it too soon. The second time she waits a moment before trying to catch the small block of zonaite, then sends it backwards with so much force it knocks the construct to the ground.
She swears, apologizes, and helps the construct to its feet.
”These items do not require such a vast use of time magic,” the construct chirps at her.
She thinks about this. It makes sense, and she asks to try again. This time, the construct only stumbles slightly when it catches the recalled the zonaite stone.
“Good!” it says.
"Can you try something heavier?” Zelda asks. “Or…perhaps if you could throw it further, or with more force like with a—" she stops.
Like with a bow.
“With a what?” the construct asks.
“Never mind,” she says. “Please, let me try again.”
She can access the magic easily enough, but controlling it is something else. The next time the construct throws the zonaite, Zelda lets it soar until it almost reaches the ground. She concentrates on the speed it traveled. On the time it took. She thinks about it cell by cell, trying to imagine every aspect of the stone, to understand it as thoroughly as she can.
Instead of flying backwards it disintegrates, black and green dust blowing away with the wind.
She tells the construct that will be enough, and leaves before it sees her start to cry.
.
“I’m not surprised it comes to you so easily,” Rauru says a couple days later over tea. “When you and Sonia helped me with those Moldugas, I could feel how powerful your light magic is. If your control over time is even stronger, with a secret stone to amplify it you may even be stronger than Sonia is!” He grins and places his hand over Sonia’s.
“I agree,” Sonia says, and gives Rauru a soft smile in return. “I only wish it could help bring you home.”
Zelda looks down and grips her teacup. She doesn’t feel strong. Certainly not strong enough to be of any help—not to herself, not to Link, and not to this Hyrule of the past. It all feels far too familiar, having a power that should be able to help, but not being able to use it.
This time she can find it. But she still can’t control it, and it feels like she may as well have nothing at all.
Sonia assures her the control will come, but Zelda has heard this before. She spent ten years clinging to those magic words.
She doesn't have ten years this time.
.
"Perhaps you are trying too hard?" Mineru asks one morning. "Take a break, or you're going to make yourself sick."
Zelda only stares at her.
Take a break? But she can't take a break. There are two wars now—one here, and one in her time, and she is just as useless in both of them as she was the last time disaster hovered on the horizon.
"I will if I feel like I need one," Zelda says.
Mineru purses her lips, but takes a sip of tea and doesn't say anything else about it. When Zelda leaves, she goes back to the courtyard and finds her construct aide.
She can't stop. She can't stop until she gets it right, because she is already here, and already taking up their time attention, and if she can't go home then all she wants is to be useful. And how can she be useful when she can't manage this one thing that she is supposedly born to be able to do?
When Zelda practices later she works until she collapses from exhaustion, surrounded by golden leaves and covered in zonaite dust.
.
She is twelve years old, and Urbosa has come to visit from Gerudo Town for the first time in years.
Urbosa assures her she can take a few days off. That she should take a day or two away from her prayers, and maybe when she goes back to them she'll feel better.
She spends an entire day with Urbosa in Castle Town. They ride through the fields, and Urbosa takes her to the Ancient Tech Lab and lets Zelda explain what the Sheikah are doing, and asks about the relics they have found. She feels more confident than she has since her mother died.
She returns to her own prayers the next day, certain that when she enters the water things will be different. She took a break, like Urbosa said. She feels rested, and that should make it easier for her to hear the goddess.
But the water is cold, and the statue in front of her is silent.
She stays there for hours.
"That's enough, little bird."
But it's not enough. She has to make up for the two days she was away. She has to dedicate the hours that she missed, that she took for herself.
She stays until she is numb and the world goes dark around her.
.
She dreams of Hyrule.
She dreams of soaring through the sky and looking down at the places that were saved from the Calamity, where she has spent six years rebuilding and meeting people and traveling with Link.
She dreams of Link.
He is speaking, but she can't understand what he says. His voice seems to be coming from inside of her, and she is reminded of the Calamity, and of her hundred year fight, and of the time after Link woke up where she could sometimes hear him on his journey to free their friends and regain his strength.
She dreams of Link, and she smells blood and the cloying rot of the gloom they followed underneath the castle. She pictures him the way he was the last time she saw him—reaching for her with his ruined arm, his skin pale and terror in his eyes.
Zelda!
She hears his voice the way she heard it as she fell. It followed her, until it was cut off by the same time magic that brought her to this place.
Zelda!
She hears it again. Near, like he is crying out in her dream. He sounds broken. He was broken when she saw him last.
Like he was broken when he was dead.
I'm here, she wants to say. But she has no voice.
She has nothing, except the feeling of Link's despair.
When she finally sees him, he is looking up as he falls away from her.
No, she thinks. Not again. He can't fall, he can't he can't he can't—
"Zelda!"
She wakes to the sound of her name and she throws her arms out, searching for Link.
When he isn't there the panic from her dream swells and she looks around, crying, trying to understand where she even is—
"Zelda—"
"Link!" It is not Link's voice that calls to her, but she still cries out for him, and she is met with arms around her shoulders. The arms pull her close, but the fingers that close around hers are thin and smooth and nothing like Link's strong and calloused hands.
"Zelda," the voice says again. It is gentle. It is filled with love and concern. The speaker has long white-blond hair and dark skin and for a moment Zelda thinks that she is dead, or dreaming, because how can both of her mothers be in one body?
She takes a few quick breaths, and then collapses into this figure, sobbing not only for Link, but for these arms she never expected to feel around her again.
Mother, she thinks.
Urbosa.
She doesn't speak. She can't speak. She only cries and cries, until she is finally so cried out that all she can do is lean against the warmth and comfort the arms around her provide. She's afraid to look up. She's afraid that anything she does will break this spell, and she will lose them both again. She's afraid she will be back in that place where Link is falling away from her. Or back in the place where she fell away from him, and back where she tries and tries to control movement through time, the same way she tried and tried to awaken a power that never would respond.
She will be back in the past, with—
She looks up. "…Queen Sonia?"
"I'm here, dear. You were having a nightmare."
.
She still is not used to seeing Hyrule this way.
"You read about things like that, but it's so different actually seeing it," Zelda waves towards the mountain in the distance. In Sonia's time it is still whole, and the river that will eventually cut a valley into the rock is nothing but a small spring.
"It's hard to imagine it split into two," Sonia says.
Between them is a basket of strawberries and plate of scones, and they sit on a blanket in the shade of more trees with golden leaves. Zelda thinks this is approximately where Riverside Stable must be in her time, but it's hard to tell with so many of her landmarks still untouched by time.
Zelda looks at her hands. Could she split the mountains apart, she wonders? Could Sonia?
She tries to imagine what that would be like, but all it brings to mind is gloom so thick she could choke on it, and a skeletal figure pushing the stone ceiling above them into the sky, and the ground shattering underneath her feet.
Zelda looks away from the mountain.
"I don't know what I'm doing wrong," she says. She holds her hands out in front of her. She has carried herself through time. She has amplified Rauru's light magic. She has reduced a tree to a sapling and destroyed so many zonaite blocks that the constructs are now wary of her asking them for help.
But she has yet to do any of it on purpose.
"I don't think you're doing anything wrong, dear," Sonia says. "Quite the opposite in fact."
Zelda feels herself flush. "But I can't control it," she says. "I should… I should be able to control it by now."
"With a power as strong as yours you should give yourself more time."
"As…strong as mine?"
Sonia laughs gently. "Well yes, Zelda. I could feel it in you when we first met, and in all of your training you have only ever proven me right. Surely it was the same when you learned to use your sealing powers?"
"When I—" she stops, and feels her eyes burn.
Sonia wouldn't know that it was not the same, because Zelda has never told her. Because telling Sonia would mean telling her about the Calamity. It would mean talking about the future that awaits this kingdom, and admitting that Zelda fears it means Rauru is going to fail.
She can't stand to say it out loud, because it means she is going to fail, and she cannot fail her kingdom for a second time.
Zelda says quietly, "I don't think it's quite the same."
.
She dreams of the Calamity.
She dreams of watching Link stumble towards the guardian, but when she holds up her hand there is not an explosion of golden light. Instead the scene rewinds in front of her: guardians crawl backwards, fallen soldiers stand up, wounds close, and rain streams upwards towards the sky.
She dreams of Link standing beside her, covered in flames. He is saying something, but there is no sound except for the persistent ticking of a clock.
.
She has almost mastered the small challenges the constructs have set for her.
This morning she has been able to pull a zonaite block from one precise point in time to another, but then Rauru finds her and asks if he can watch. Zelda nods in spite of the nerves she gets from having an audience.
She shatters the first zonaite block the construct throws, and then the second, and nearly hits the construct with the third. Shame burns through her, and when Rauru approaches she remains silent, waiting for him to scold her continued lack of success.
He leans against a stone wall and brings his hand to his chin. "I wonder," he says, "if you aren't being too singled-minded in this? I know you want to help, but there are many different ways of using one's knowledge and talents."
She freezes where she stands, her blood cold and her chest tight, and hears her father's booming voice as if he standing in front of her.
"You must be single-minded in unlocking the power that will seal Calamity Ganon away!"
Zelda turns and runs, ignoring Rauru's voice when he calls after her.
.
Sonia finds her in one of the gardens near the temple of time. She always feels closest to Link in this place, surrounded by flowers like the ones that grow near their Hateno home.
"Rauru wants to apologize," Sonia says, folding her skirts underneath her as she sits beside Zelda in the grass. "We both know how hard you are working, and he's worried he upset you by implying you should pause your training."
Zelda brushes her hands back and forth across the beads on her dress. She looks at the flowers, and then at Sonia, and then at the sky. She should be the one apologizing, she thinks. Rauru was just trying to help, and now she has made him feel like he did something wrong.
She opens her mouth to say this—but instead of speaking, she starts to sob.
Sonia's face breaks into concern, and it is a look that is familiar, and comfortable, and heartbreaking all at once.
She saw that look while Urbosa held her at the edge of the Cathedral spring and promised her that she was doing nothing wrong.
She saw that look when her mother took her to a garden just like this—when she pulled Zelda into her lap and told her that she was sick, and they would only be able to spend a little bit more time together, and wouldn't it be wonderful if they could just spend it here among the flowers?
She saw that look on Impa one night when Paya shared her worries about one day being Chief, and she saw it on Saki when she cradled Tulin after one of his wings was singed.
She has seen it on all the faces of the mothers in Hateno.
It is love. Unconditional love.
Zelda falls against Sonia, and at once she is six years old again, and this is the safest place that she is ever going to be.
And she tells her everything.
She tells her about the man under the castle who knew Rauru's name, and how she worries it is the same man who sent Muldugas to attack them and who knelt in the throne room with a false promise and an evil smile.
She tells her about the Calamity—about both of them. About the Sheikah technology and how she was forbidden to study it, and about her struggles with unlocking her sealing powers, and that Hyrule was nearly destroyed and she can't bear to see that happen again.
She tells her how much she misses Link, and that her concern for him is so strong it threatens to swallow her whole.
She tells Sonia about her mothers who were both taken from her, and that sometimes she can see both of them in her, and she just wants to return some of the help and the love that she has experienced here in the past.
She speaks as if she is vomiting poison, and when there is nothing left for her to say she collapses against Sonia's chest and lets her tears stream silently down her cheeks. Sonia strokes her hair and murmurs into her head, and sits there until the sun starts to sink and the shadows grow long around them.
Finally, Zelda sits up. "I'm sorry," she says. "I hadn't want to say anything—" but Sonia takes her hands and shakes her head.
"You are a girl first," Sonia says. "Not a princess. Not a ruler. You are not your magic or how well you can control it. I know you want to help us, but nobody can help, if that's all they think they are here to do."
"You've been so kind to me," Zelda says. "I owe you so much."
Sonia shakes her head again. "We have been kind to Zelda. I would love to see you try and be kind to her as well"
.
Mineru is excited to hear about the Sheikah tech. She shows Zelda a few books in the library, and introduces her to a construct she has been working on privately that seems to be a primitive version of the guardians. Zelda gives her a few suggestions based on her memory of working with Robbie, and Mineru's eyes gleam with excitement when the little construct starts to move.
Sonia begins taking tea in the small flower garden. She teaches Zelda the names of the flowers that are extinct in Zelda's present, and Zelda tells her about her students, and how Link built her a well so she had a place where she could grade papers in peace.
Rauru apologies for not taking her more seriously when she expressed her concern about Ganondorf. He asks Zelda to sit with him, and together they write out everything she can tell him about Calamity Ganon, and the figure she and Link found under Hyrule Castle. When he stands up from his desk he bumps against it and an ink bottle falls from the edge. Without thinking, Zelda waves her hand and the bottle rights itself again, with no sign that it had ever fallen.
Rauru grins at her. It takes a moment for Zelda to realize what she has done, and when it finally dawns on her she looks at him with shock.
"I'll be right back," she says, and runs towards the gardens.
Sonia greets her with a hug and a smile filled with pride, with joy, and with love.