Chapter Text
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There has never been a sunrise so beautiful.
The earth still trembles with the giants’ distant footsteps. Skull Kid trembles too, swamped by the same relief that has turned Link’s limbs to water. He leans against Epona’s flank and stares skyward. Deep blue has washed away the grinning pit of the moon, and a new day rises to the east, bright and clean.
Skull Kid shambles over, snuffling and giggling. “You have the same smell as the fairy kid who taught me that song in the woods!”
Link blinks at him sluggishly.
“You know! The one that goes like…”
Skull Kid starts to hum, off-key but close enough for Link’s eyes to widen. He shivers with a sudden memory: a forgotten clearing, a lonely child, a song he learned from his best friend. His best friend—it’s been so long since he thought of her. For three endless days, he’s dedicated every breath to the next minute, never to the past.
His fingers find the Ocarina, tracing the notes of Saria’s song in time with Skull Kid’s humming. No more ticking clocks or falling moons. It’s like waking from a dream—though when his hand brushes the masks hooked to his belt, he wishes that were really the case. Dreams fade, but he’ll remember these three souls forever.
Four souls, now. His newest mask scowls up at him, the one he exchanged for many more, the one that helped him through that hellish battle inside the moon.
“Link,” Tatl says warily, drifting past his ear.
He looks up to find a figure watching him beneath the brightening sun. The Salesman lifts his head, grinning wide with all his teeth. “Not to worry,” he says when Link’s gaze lands on the awful spiked mask in his hands. “The evil has departed after all, and at long last, the mask is mine again.”
“The evil didn’t just depart,” Tatl snaps. “We defeated it. You’re welcome, by the way.”
The Salesman bows to Link as though she said nothing at all. “Now, since I am in the midst of my travels…I must bid you farewell.”
Tatl bristles indignantly as he sweeps past. When Link shoots her a tired look, she settles down on his shoulder, wings still fluttering with annoyance. An old pang goes through him. She’s finally begun to listen. He’s going to lose that all over again.
The Salesman pauses before the walls of Clock Town, turning back to Link. “Shouldn’t you be returning home as well?”
Home? He meant to continue his search. Termina has pulled him off the path for long enough—or perhaps it’s only been three days. The thought burns like bile in his throat.
“Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow,” the Salesman continues. “But whether that parting be forever or merely for a short time…that is up to you.”
He turns his back, allowing the morning to swallow him whole in the blink of an eye. Tatl swears under her breath. Link doesn’t dwell on the mystery. Not with the dream of daybreak and those words warming a part of him that grew colder every time he wore someone else’s face and paid someone else’s debts.
Navi understands things no one else does, things he’s been carrying alone since she spiraled up into that sunbeam. But the dire need to find her has faded somewhere along the way. Perhaps when he helped Darmani and Mikau pass on, or when the people of Ikana traded their fury for peace, or just now, when Skull Kid learned that his friends never truly abandoned him.
He could go on. But the world is wide, and Link—at the end of all this—is still very small. He imagines dragging Epona down an endless road, never unpacking his belongings, a stranger everywhere he goes. Hyrule isn’t much better in that regard—with some noteworthy exceptions.
Tatl has fluttered away, swirling around Skull Kid’s head and laughing at something her brother just said, and he can see the three of them falling into place like puzzle pieces. He felt that sort of belonging as the Deku Scrub, racing his father through the maze. As Darmani, stepping up to lead his people. As Mikau, listening to Lulu’s song on the shore.
As Link…
Something curls through his chest, dark and sinuous. The fourth moon child asked what lies under his masks. Standing here in the billowing dawn, Link still doesn’t know how to answer, or whether anyone else can dig out the truth.
No matter how wide the world, only one person has ever gotten close.
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Fog and foliage rob him of the sun. He hums to Epona as she weaves through the towering trees, fixing his mind on finding the woods where he grew up, where Saria’s song lives in every bird and every blade of grass.
The time has come, a voice booms.
Link draws the Gilded Sword in one swift movement and twists around in the saddle, searching for the source of the voice. He and Epona seem like the only moving things for miles. But he knows he heard those words, deep and grim and furious as the heart of Death Mountain.
Foolish. As if that blade could stand against me.
He scans the grey forest wildly. Mad terror bubbles up at the thought of some new interruption dragging him down into another world in need of a hero. But Epona keeps plodding along, faithful and calm. Surely that voice would spook her if she could hear it.
Has he lost his mind? Termina gave him plenty of reasons to wonder. The residents of Clock Town were eerily reminiscent of people he’s met in passing back home. Link tried to dismiss it until he met Cremia and Romani, unmistakable copies of Malon on either side of the seven years he lost. That’s to say nothing of the smiling moon and time circling round and round for a song that only ever had one purpose: opening the door that unleashed Hyrule’s doom.
Fueled by madness or not, the ordeal is over now. Link killed Majora with a brutality he shudders to remember.
We killed Majora, boy.
Gravity drags his gaze to the newest mask on his belt: a Hylian face frighteningly similar to his own. He sensed its power from the start, but how can it speak to him?
You opened your mind to mine. The window has not shut. And the time has come for you to pay your debt.
“My…my debt?” he asks hoarsely.
Could you have stood against Majora alone? You, a child who steals the faces of others to supplant his own?
Link took nothing he didn’t earn. He healed everyone he could, saved everyone he could, wore his fingers to the bone for three days, and three days, and three days.
Make no mistake: your path was a wise one, for it brought you to me, and I delivered you freedom. Use the mask, and grant me the same.
“What are you?”
More than your mortal mind can comprehend. You have saved two worlds, but together we could shape them.
Link slides down from the saddle, taking a few steps away from Epona before he unhooks the mask from his belt. Few people know what he did for Hyrule. Navi, who left months ago. Impa and the king, who reluctantly arrested Ganondorf on the word of a young boy with the Triforce branded on his skin. And Zelda, who convinced them to do so, who gave Link a bedroom next to hers and promised to be his friend. The familiarity in her eyes was not the sort he craved. When her counterpart split time apart to give him another chance, she severed herself too.
So he carries the memory alone. The deity in the mask can’t possibly—
Yet I do. Just as I know the name Zelda.
“No,” Link breathes.
Your mind labors beneath a great weight. Put on the mask, and it will be no burden to me at all.
Inside the moon, this mask scoured his soul and unearthed a rage older than time. Tatl watched in silence as he tore Majora limb from limb. That’s not him. He’s never been cruel.
It was enough to lose seven years and wake in a body that didn’t feel like his. It was enough to learn and accept that body only to be shoved back into one he’d outgrown. Then came impersonating the three lost souls of Termina, and vanishing under the Stone Mask’s spell, and swelling into a giant to choke the life from Twinmold. When Link returns to that flower garden, he wants to be someone she’ll recognize. He can’t let this mask change him, any more than he can endanger the world with its power.
“Thank you for your help,” Link says, opening his fingers to let the mask fall, his other hand lifting the sword.
Do you think it so simple to kill a god?
When he blinks, the mask is still in his hand. Again, he tries to let it go. Again, his muscles fail to respond.
Ungrateful child! There will be no peace until you pay your debt. Today or tomorrow, you will have need of me again. There is always another battle. Another evil. Another wound.
Link squeezes his eyes shut against the thunderous voice. If the deity was capable of forcing his hand, he would already be lost. Turning stubbornly, he mounts Epona, one hand still white-knuckled around the mask. It’s just another fight—though not one his blade can win.
And what is it you fight for?
Trees hide the horizon in every direction. Fog chokes the way behind and the way ahead. In Termina, he had a clear goal, driven by every person who needed his help. Navi was his purpose before that. What’s left now? A thousand holes in his heart, and only one he might be able to fill.
He wants to go home.
To that little girl? The one who understands nothing of the world, nothing of you?
“Don’t,” Link snaps.
To his shock, the deity pauses long enough that he pries his fingers from the mask and hooks it onto his belt again, though he still can’t leave it behind. While Epona makes her patient way through the dim forest, Link withstands the deity’s siege.
Maybe someone else would fold. Darmani and Mikau would be tempted by the boundless strength to protect those they love. The hero within Link feels the mask’s lure for the same reason. But the greater temptation is the complete lack of fear and regret he felt in that form, the complete certainty of who and what he was.
But he didn’t relive those three days over and over just to succumb to a cruel god. The same part of him that refused to break beneath everything that followed the Great Deku Tree’s death rears its head again to face down this nightmare.
As he rides through the endless trees, the voice reminds him that his upbringing was a lie, that he was never meant to belong. As he dismounts and tends to Epona in the falling light, it whispers that time has forgotten his victories and losses alike. As he curls up among the dark roots of an elm, the deity stirs up memories of all the other masks that twisted his shape and chewed at his soul.
You know much of sacrifice. What do you have left to lose? What difference would one last surrender make? It is your purpose, child. What are you to Zelda, if not a tool?
“Her friend,” he says through gritted teeth.
So she sent her friend into danger to collect the Spiritual Stones. A mistake that brought Hyrule to its knees—yet rather than face it, she wore a mask of her own and deceived you. Perhaps the only truth she gave you was at the end, when she ripped one last choice from your hands because she did not want you.
She never said that. She did want him. Why else were there tears on her cheeks when they kissed, hard and hungry and heartbroken?
Tell me—have you regained your lost time? Have you returned to the way you are supposed to be? Was she a good friend to you?
Link tightens himself into a ball and clamps his hands over his ears uselessly, trying to fill his mind with better memories. Sheik may have been a mask, but she was everything to Link—a song to fill the ashen silence of that Hyrule, a constant light against the darkness. And when Zelda brought the Ocarina to her lips, she meant the best for him, no matter how it turned out. A lifetime later, her eyes shone bright with hope as she returned the instrument once more and said they would meet again.
This Zelda has grown up free of the dark circumstances that forced her counterpart’s hand. She’s a second chance. She’s spring after all this winter. Whether that parting be forever or merely for a short time…that is up to you.
The deity is wrong. Link has so much left to lose.
Your self-deceit amuses me, boy. You long for her—yet how you envy her laughter. How you resent her peace. She sees dawn in your eyes, and you see burnt kingdoms and lost chances and time coiled around your throat.
He struggles against a sudden ache in his chest. “That’s…that’s not all I see.”
No, the voice agrees with cold amusement. Yet beauty frightens you more than sorrow. Is that truly the home you seek?
“Yes,” Link answers fiercely, feeling that truth right down to his core, even if he’s never looked it in the face before. “It is.”
The deity simmers in silence for a moment. When it snakes through his mind again, the force seems diminished somehow. By the time a grey mockery of dawn reaches through the dense canopy, Link is exhausted with grief, but the voice no longer crashes like thunder against his skull. He pushes himself upright warily, gazing down at the mask.
“You’re getting weaker,” he says. “Without a…a host, your power fades. That’s why you were silent when I found you inside the moon, isn’t it?”
The deity is quiet long enough to confirm his suspicions. Link rises to his feet and goes to press his face in Epona’s mane, trembling with the knowledge that this will end, as long as he can outlast it.
A mortal outlasting a god? the voice growls. I will be here. I will know every frailty of your body and every shadow of your mind. I am the wrath of Termina, and you are a faceless child floundering in the dark.
Maybe so. But he’s still going home.
The time will come again, the deity replies coldly. And until then, neither of us will be free.
Later that day, Link emerges into Hyrule Field, wide and glorious even with winter’s first bite dragging swaths of dead grass through the hills. The voice has dwindled to a whisper. He should be awash with relief. Instead, the cruel wind turns him into a small, shivering thing. The familiar peak of Death Mountain darkens the sky like a jagged nightmare, and the castle’s distant spires fill him with dread.
None of it seems real compared to what lives in his mind now, least of all his own pale hands and shaking legs. He presses his fingers to the sharp jut of his jaw and wonders if he really took the mask off. If there’s anything left underneath. If the sun ever rose at all.
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