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Over the years Hilda had drafted a million plans for Lorule’s restoration. Childish daydreams had turned into feverish commitment after she’d taken the crown. It was plan or cry, and the latter had never helped her mother, so she’d planned.
It’d payed off when the dying finally ceased and the healing could begin. She’d responded to their Triforce’s reappearance with a hungry efficiency, aided by people who now trusted her more than their own mother. Their mothers hadn’t saved Lorule, after all.
As a result, rebuilding was going smoothly. The deep gashes in Lorule’s landscape hadn’t closed themselves upon the Triforce’s reappearance, so they were building bridges. Where once there’d been endless, pitch-black nothingness at the bottom of these rifts, there was now simply earth. Preparations were being made to explore these valleys, held back by only a lack of resources. Ravio was managing the treasury with uncharacteristic competence, though, always managing to pull the necessary funds from somewhere between thin air and his magic hat. So she wasn’t worried about finding those resources eventually. Much.
The rifts were the only real hurdle left. Her plans had worked so far; towns had been rebuilt, farmland was being recovered, rivers were being cleaned. Everything was going far better than she’d ever dared dream.
But the Triforce was just floating there.
A crucial detail her younger self had never considered: what did they do with the Triforce once they had it? Obviously, they could not leave it out in the open, with their tattered Sacred Realm offering no protection. The castle, however, was wholly unequipped to house it. They did not have a guard so much as they had stray soldiers willing to patrol, and those soldiers had only recently started listening to her. There weren’t really any other good places to hide it, either; the best she could think of were the various former strongholds of evil, and Link had thoroughly decimated those. No, simply hiding it would not do.
She stared at the Triforce. She had been standing there for half an hour, unmoving. Beside her, Ravio awkwardly shuffled his feet. It was obvious he was itching to go inside, but he wouldn’t say anything. He was still walking on eggshells around her after his betrayal.
The Triforce glowed steady as the moon, looking down at her just as uncaring of its gravity. She did not like the plan she had come up with, but she couldn’t think of a better one.
“We should hide it in a person.”
Ravio startled, then looked at her with a frown. “A person?”
“You cannot rip the Triforce from someone’s body unwillingly, not without exceedingly powerful magics,” and the only one other than me powerful enough for that would’ve been Yuga, she did not add. “It is obviously less than ideal, but considering our circumstances I believe this may be the safest option.”
She looked at Ravio from the corner of her eye. His head was slightly cocked, and he was tapping his temple the way he did when he was thinking. He was so expressive. She used to believe he couldn’t lie to save his life, and it had put her at ease. Petty as it may be, that was why she could not forgive his betrayal, despite everything: he had become someone to monitor, just the same as everyone else. She would’ve looked at him directly, before.
“I think you’re right,” he finally said, giving his temple that one last aggressive tap he did when the thinking had reached its conclusion. “At least until we can figure something else out, just giving the Triforce to someone trustworthy is probably for the best.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding, and ensured he did not notice.
“Who did you have in mind?” he asked.
She stared at him.
“Oh no, no no no, absolutely not, your highness,” he shook his head so violently it was barely more than a blur, rapidly waving his hands and doing the little wanting-to-run-but-can’t dance with his feet. “You should not give me the Triforce.”
“Even in betrayal you remained loyal to me and Lorule,” she pointed out, speaking around the bile in her throat. More than anything, that’s what she hated: that she did not even have a right to be angry. But her feelings did not matter right now; what mattered was safeguarding Lorule’s future, and there was only one person in the whole kingdom she’d trust with that.
“My princess, your highness, Hilda —” she startled at the use of her real name, rare coming from him, “— I promise you, I should not be trusted with the Triforce.”
“And why not?”
He gestured at all of him. He’d taken to wearing that silly bunny hood around, hiding his face from everyone except her. He had large buckteeth she’d been surprised to see mimicked in Link and a perpetually worried look in his eyes. Some acne scattered on his face, hands with scabs from his bad skin-picking habit. He didn’t look like much, no, but Link hadn’t looked like much either.
“I don’t see the problem,” she said.
He buried his face in his hands and held it there for exactly five seconds, before he took a deep breath and looked at her again.
“Hilda, look. I’m.... honored? Flattered? Completely amaz—” he cut himself off. “Grateful you trust me that much, but I think you’re forgetting what I am. I’m —” he groaned. “Hilda. I crossed dimensions to try and save you and decided to make it a business venture. I grabbed all my rupees before coming in to talk you down. I love money, I love having money, I’m greedy.” He gestured at the Triforce, its alluring golden glow. “If you give me the Triforce I’ll eventually do something stupid like wish for unlimited rupees. I’m the kind of person we’re guarding the Triforce from.”
It took a few seconds to sink in. Hilda’s hand tightened on her staff; it was the only part of her that moved.
“I see,” she said. “I suppose we’ll have to find another solution, then.”
He stared at her. He chewed on his lip the way he did when he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the courage for it. Any patience she might’ve had for his neuroses had long since left her. She turned around and left, leaving the Triforce behind, glowing bright as ever.
Here was something nobody knew. She hoped, anyway. Ravio was observant, and with Sheerow as his little spy there likely wasn’t much in and around the castle that escaped his notice. But he’d never said anything, never mentioned it even in that roundabout nervous way of his, so she assumed that even he and his bird slept in the dead of night.
She’d lied, earlier. The Triforce did not glow bright as the moon: it glowed much, much brighter. When one visited the Sacred Realm it was easy to forget if it was day or night, the Triforce lighting up the area the same as the sun. Hilda kept track with a pocketwatch.
Nearly every night she came and sat before the Triforce. Staring.
Hilda understood evil. When you stripped it down to its bare components, evil was nothing more than a mixture made of arrogance, selfishness, desire and despair. There was much evil in Lorule, because there was much desire and despair. Nothing that could not be fixed, that wasn’t being fixed right now by meeting people’s needs. It would be a tough road, a difficult bridge to build, but they were already working on it.
It would be so easy. So, so easy to just reach out, brush her fingers against the Golden Power, let it solve all her problems and more. All she had to do was take it.
The old tales spoke of gravity, of allure, of temptation, all concepts that could not possibly be conveyed through words on a page. Hilda had read them and thought she understood. An never ending story, the fool chasing power that was not theirs to use. So simple to condemn when presented as a cautionary tale.
Hilda sat and stared at the Triforce.
The library was her refuge and her cage. She’d spent months at a time here, tearing through everything she could get her hands on in search of a solution for Lorule’s dying. In the library, she was in her element; she’d personally catalogued and sorted all the books, could cite a select few from memory entirely. The bureau in the corner still bore the scratch marks from her nails, carved into it after the fourth sleepless day of research amounted to yet another dead end. Her nails still throbbed in phantom pain whenever she stepped through the door.
As usual, the library provided no answers. At least she hadn’t expected it to, this time. Her ancestors’ solution to the problem of the Triforce had been to destroy it entirely, a decision that had nearly doomed them all. Prior to that, the best they could do was to keep it locked in the castle, or to separate the pieces and hide them across the land. Clearly, that hadn’t worked either. Their Ganon was dead now, destroyed along with the Triforce, but there would always be another Ganon. If it wasn’t Ganon it was Yuga, and if it wasn’t Yuga it was her. There would always be someone willing to risk it all to obtain the Golden Power.
Was there no choice but to accept this cycle of violence? To accept that every few centuries, like clockwork, Lorule would be ripped apart by war?
Pretty, privileged princess Zelda had been entirely too calm about her imprisonment. She’d already put things in motion before she was ever kidnapped, allowing Link to obtain the Master Sword. Hyrule was a land blessed by the goddesses. Its tools for fighting evil were well-oiled.
Lorule’s Master Sword had shattered when the Triforce had. The Golden Goddesses had abandoned their land when it had rejected their power. There would be no divine protection for them. Evil lived in the hearts of men, and men would have to solve it. But how?
It had been hours. Her eyes hurt from a lack of sleep. The stack of fairytale books had grown steadily next to her chair. The library rarely provided answers, but sometimes it still held something she sought.
A word caught her eye, snapping her to attention, making her scramble for pen and paper. She blinked the blurriness from her eyes and began to read.
“The Triforce goes dormant for at least a century after someone makes a wish.”
Ravio startled at his desk, knocking a scepter and several rubies off it. It looked like he was making another fire rod; maybe to sell, maybe for enjoyment. He caught the scepter and Sheerow caught the rubies, both putting their catches back on the desk at the exact same time.
“My princess,” Ravio greeted her with his clumsy little bow. He always used the wrong arm. She’d never corrected him. “Uhm, could you repeat that?”
“The Triforce goes dormant after someone uses it,” she repeated, dropping a stack of reference works on Ravio’s desk. “It doesn’t matter if the use is good or evil; for at least a century afterwards, it won’t be sighted again, until eventually reappearing where it was last used.”
She slid him one of the books, open on the relevant page, and pointed at a paragraph proving her point. No source had ever directly recorded the exact workings of the Triforce, but some works made its patterns more obvious than others. This particular book was extremely blatant about it.
Ravio’s eyebrows shot up. “No kidding,” he mumbled, tapping his temple. “It’s just gone?”
“I can’t find any records of successive uses, not even when Ganon took it for himself.”
“Only one reason for that.”
“Glad we agree.”
He stopped tapping. He lowered his hand to his desk in a slow, deliberate fashion, trying to control his body language. Unfortunately for him, he kept raising and then lowering his other hand, clearly resisting the urge to start biting his nails.
“I’ve been thinking,” Hilda started before he could ask. “On what to do with the Triforce. We cannot adequately guard it.”
“Maybe not yet, but once we get things set up properly —”
“Even Hyrule cannot adequately guard it,” Hilda cut him off. “There will always be a war as long as it’s around.”
But of course, they couldn’t destroy it. Ravio began to raise his hand to his mouth again and then froze, eyes growing wide, staring at the fairytale she’d showed him.
“We could just make a wish,” he said, and Hilda could not stop herself from slumping forward, holding herself just barely upright by the edge of his desk. She hadn’t been wrong again.
“We could just make a wish,” she agreed. Her legs were shaky. She could not stop herself from giggling, one hand held over her mouth to smother the sound. She was right. She was right.
“...Your highness...?”
“Ravio,” she said on impulse, words almost smothered along with her giggles, “do you still want those unlimited rupees?”
There was a beat, and then Ravio snorted, pressing a hand against his mouth to smother his laugh. Both of them hopelessly trying to maintain the distant professionalism they’d adopted over the last few months and failing miserably.
“Eh, I’d say we got better deals,” he said, with that amicable conman slur of his. “Like an open door to Hyrule.”
“Or for the rifts to vanish.”
“A few more hours of sunlight.”
“Protection for the crops.”
“Unlimited rupees but for the royal treasury this time.”
“A better fashion sense for you.”
Ravio squawked in indignation, puffing up the way Sheerow did when you poked him, and Hilda could not hide her laugh this time.
All this time, it had been so easy. She could have simply asked Hyrule to help them. She could simply wish for things to get better. There was nothing stopping her.
All she had to do was reach out and take it.