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A smile fought its way across the Old Man’s face when he beheld the blushing bounty peeking up from beneath the wildberry vines. We’re much too far south, the crotchety town shopwoman had insisted when she refused to bring the seedlings in from Kakariko. You’ll burn them alive.
He did not explain to her the north side of the cottage and how the stable roof sloped just so, shielding the patch of soil from the coast’s proud midday sun, away from its scalding blessings coveted by the mighty bananas and palm fruit. How the vines, bumping up against the cool exhale of the cellar, were spared all but the kiss of daybreak. The Old Man did not see fit to explain his wishes to anyone, not out of arrogance, but because the futility of such efforts exhausted him. And exhaustion cost him in ways that it hadn’t in other ages. He preferred to speak to those who were familiar enough with his life and ways to answer their own questions without his help.
The Old Man would rather saddle his horse and ride up to the north Necluda town to procure his old starts. A journey that would take most travelers a day, but the Old Man two, steering around ruins and ghosts. A long loop taking switchbacks up and down his memory—what had been recovered, once. What he could not purge, now. Aches he kept as sure as the sharp pains that plagued his right elbow, and the dull ache that switched knees, depending on the phantom’s mood.
The smile coaxed from the sight of ripe berries had become unfamiliar to the Old Man, though there was a time, long ago, when it was the only way he knew to greet and end the day. That era, like so many others, had passed. In some ways, it was a consequence; others, circumstance. It did little good, he found, mourning the difference.
But today, in the warmth of his old smile and the triumph of his sweetness, he did not remember and he did not grieve. He planned. His oldest friends, the Domain’s King and his Queen, would visit soon, as they did every month. That gave him enough time to study. He’d read up on how to boil down the harvest into jam, then present the Lurelin Sea’s first jar of preserves. His victory over nature suspended in time like amber, a flag spread on toast. The next time they visited, he’d hear about how much their children fought over the last dregs of the jar, and the Queen would dance around asking for a second, which he’d already have waiting on the counter. They would all know that he couldn’t help the need to be helpful, but never would they speak it. There was comfort, he found, to be known and not named.
And it was in that slip of vigilance, that moment of forgetting himself, that the Old Man glanced up from his garden and saw the Boy.
The Old Man hadn’t known the Boy. Had not been aware of the Boy’s existence until he stood now between the garden and the sea, his cloak folded against his broad shoulders to reveal thick red locks adorned but untamed by braided plaits clipped at his neck. His skin, naturally deeper and richer than the Old Man’s own, had been kissed by the bronze of a childhood spent chasing the shore. He’d traveled in plain, common clothing: a loose linen shirt and trousers cropped up to the knees, obscuring his distinct gifts of heritage as much as a highborn Prince could manage short of enchantment.
Even dressed to net crabs on the coast, the Boy could not suppress the natural strength in his spine or regal set of his jaw. A vortex of a soul; a force of gravity gathering up the gaze of the space he entered, including this small patch of shaded earth.
There was no question of where he’d come from. A person need only have spent an afternoon in his parents’ company to see now the sum of that union’s parts.
All that the Old Man had ever loved. All that the Old Man had ever hated. Consummated and given breath, raised to know enough that here, upon this land, was all that the Boy was promised and denied.
He was not as tall as his father. Not as massive, either—though he hummed with the potential, should he choose. His right hand rested on the golden hilt of his inheritance, thumb paused at the grooves of his grandmothers’ names, etchings that had once been crusted with the Old Man’s blood, let from a failed dodge.
And through his eyes, those twin tide pools as endless as the prison-sky, he saw Her.
For the first time in seventeen years, that sadness he could not ease, the wound he could not close, stared back.
All of the days, the years collapsed like castles in the tide, and the Old Man no longer stood in the garden he raised to busy his hands and still the mind that looped through those longest of months over and over, as if the key to understanding what She had become and why She had left were a matter of remembering correctly.
If he had only known, on one unremarkable Tuesday like a thousand before it, it would all make sense in one glimpse over what he should have known. What perhaps, in the darkest, untended chasms of his heart, he always did.
Those last few days he had spent at Her side, held at arm’s length, that shapeless softness she shrouded herself within, now as sharp in the Old Man’s mind as they’d been living in their immediate wake, trying…
If she’d only come home…
Suddenly that terror in her stare was fresh in his mind’s eye once more; that muzzled, wild storm in the wake of the dynasty’s fall. How well he had convinced himself She was shocked and unmoored, reckoning with all she had lost and was forced to become once the shadow was extinguished and reality came to light.
He could not fathom
Zelda’s terror for her son.
The son she’d wanted.
As badly as the man he’d felled.
A truth, She knew, would destroy him.
And she was correct. Such notions would have been incompatible with the younger man with anger and need alight in his nerves, in the epicenter of his life’s greatest calamity. He could not have fathomed such an affront to his reality, in the wake and aftershocks of a victory that sank like steel in the sea, the searing rage and confusion searing his vision and guiding his shaking, seizing hands. It would be years before he could read Her last words and comprehend them with any trace of belief.
The Queen of Hyrule did not lie to you.
The Queen had chosen mercy.
And now, it was The Boy’s turn to choose.
The Boy could pass for a specter in his stillness, in the way his entire body honed in on the scene, as if nothing had existed before or after this moment. A life spanning the entirety of the Old Man’s loss bending toward arriving here, like a flower straining to the sun.
Had the Boy found what he expected here, only some yards from the place that his mother had vanished? The small cottage with the lantern in the window facing the south sea, should She ever be looking for her way back. The meticulous rows of tomatoes and sun pumpkins and Silent Princesses tended like a shrine. The Old Man in the tunic he’d let grow threadbare, lest he admit how much else had faded.
The Old Man stood upright from the wildberries, rolling his shoulders back, a surrender to the tide he could not change. “Come inside,” he offered, stepping toward the cottage door. The Boy would follow or he would drive the sword into his back. Either way, the Old Man knew, was fair.
After a few moments, the Old Man heard the clink of the sword and scabbard stepping over the threshold. He nodded, mostly to himself, gathering up the strength he’d need to speak, denied the swift mercy of the blade. The Boy sat at the kitchen table, and the Old Man brought the kettle to the hearth for tea.
The Old Man was smaller than the Boy expected. Though, to be honest, he did fit the description his Aunt Lena gave.
“He looks like your mother’s godsdamned sibling,” she said one night while they sat on the stable roof and she drank down one too many bottles of amber ale. “Don’t tell her I said that,” she quickly caught herself, “or I’m not teaching you how to flurry rush.”
It was Aunt Lena’s slips that built the bulk of the Boy’s knowledge of the disgraceful Knight and this kingdom he would have ruled someday. If not for his cowardly blade, plunging into the back of his unarmed King. This too, he only knew from his second mother’s slip-of-tongue, as his true mother, who had once been this continent’s Queen, did not speak of his father’s death.
He knew all of the glowing stories of his pride, his ferocity, his wicked humor and love for beauty and decadence in even the smallest things. He was told over and again, by all of his family in Avenshore, how much his father would have loved him, if only given the chance.
If not for this.
“When I told your father about you,” his mother liked to recall; when her smile was at its softest and her body relaxed as if slipping into bathwater, “it was the happiest I ever saw him. And I watched him conquer a kingdom he spent ten thousand years waiting to claim. It was the closest I ever came to seeing him cry.”
“But he didn’t cry,” the Boy pointed out, if only to remind her that he was still here. To tug her back from that precipice that clawed at her from time to time, where she went quiet. Where her arms wrapped around him so tightly, she seemed strong enough to break his sturdy bones by sheer will.
“No,” she said, her voice fading at the ends of what the Boy would only ever know by being told. “Your father did not cry.”
Ten years ago it was Aunt Lena’s quiet council that admitted what had happened to the father built like a mountain but graceful as a doe, who put too much sugar in his coffee. The man who loved his mother enough to bargain off of death's doorstep, over time and sky and fate, to find her again.
“Your Father cannot come back because he is not suspended between realms after swallowing a stone,” she said. “He cannot come back from an execution.”
By a Knight. His Knight. His mother’s, once upon a time.
“The Knight was raised a Hero,” the woman his aunties called Queen tried to explain, choosing her words like handling dynamite. “Just as your Father was raised to be a King. They both lived chasing what they believed was right. When two people both believe they want the same thing in different ways…someone gets hurt.”
The Boy did not care what the Knight believed. The Boy cared about the voice he’d never hear call his name. The Boy cared about the sobs emptied into his aunt’s shoulder when his mother was sure he was asleep. The Boy could not abide the theft of his life’s gravity. He could not stop staring into its vortex, of questions and disappointments and what no glowing story, no fond remembrance could ever fill. The Boy believed in justice. The Boy believed that crimes did not go unanswered. And from the day he begged a wooden sword to train, he knew his blade’s destiny.
He had trained to slay the warrior in his head: as wide and tall as the Rito whose ancestors chose Avenshore over the kingdom across the sea. Clad in the armor he’d seen illustrated in books, waiting for his next chance to sever bone.
But there was little suggesting that the Old Man had been a Knight at all, save for one corner of his small cottage, where a small display table stood beneath a framed clip of a newspaper. On the table were a series of medals, growing in heft and jewels, until ending with a golden helm adorned with red and turquoise feathers. Everything else in the cottage was a shabbier version of what he knew from his own home, down to the chipped cups where he poured the steeped tea. Dried mushrooms and peppers hung in bundles from the rafters—no dungeon chains, no waiting weapons.
The Old Man did not wait for his tea to cool. He drank it quickly, and the chipped pottery wobbled when his tremoring hands set it back to the table. “She is all right,” the Old Man stated as question before adding “...your Mother.”
The Boy’s molars ground at the sound of the name, its familiarity, rolling off his murdering tongue. But he nodded, and the Old Man closed his eyes, so long that the Boy began to wonder if he’d open them again at all.
“She does not know you’ve come,” he said before opening again.
“No,” said the Boy. “She didn’t want me to.”
“She wants you to be safe,” he nodded, as if his mother were right here at the table, searching for support. “Hyrule will never be safe for a Gerudo King.”
“Is that why he is dead? Because this land is not safe?”
He had planned so many lines he would say to the Old Man on this fated day. Many of them he’d scrawled into his notebook and hidden beneath the mattress. Some he’d muttered to the hay bales and potato sacks he stuck with arrows and blows. He could scarcely remember them now in the static of the moment, and the strange disquiet of an Old Man who seemed lost at his own kitchen table.
The Old Man stared into the tea, his fingers tracing the glaze’s imperfections that he seemed to know like his own palm. “If you imagined that I would deny what I’ve done, no. I will not insult you.” He settled his right forearm across the table’s roughened wood, his bare palm to the sky. “You found the man who killed your father. I hope it was not hard.”
It wasn’t. The women in the beachside shops were happy to gossip about the Old Man they still called Hero, even to a face they could not properly see. He had only reached the village’s docks an hour or so before, following the coordinates Aunt Lena handed over like a belated birthday gift. She’d been waiting for him at the boat, a sight that made his heart sink, though he had a nagging fear that she’d know exactly what he’d seek on the day, in another life, he’d have been made King.
“You will go, and you will do what you must,” she had told him, eyeing the katana sheathed at his side. “You will not linger there. You will come home and ease the worry in your mother’s heart that I will be forced to contain in your absence.”
“Why aren’t you stopping me?” he had asked.
His Aunt took a breath so deep it tipped her shoulders back, letting her eyes close in rare respite. “She would do anything to keep you safe,” she said at last. “But she knows better than anyone who’s ever lived that the safe thing is not always correct.” She stepped back, taking stock of the boat, packed with stocked fish and water. Her armor caught the moonlight as she turned, tossing her fading red hair in the sea breeze, and in the sliver-slip of shadow she looked just as fierce as she must have from the parapets, fighting to their reign’s last breath. “You will always be the son of the promised. You deserve to learn what that means for yourself.”
At the Old Man’s table, the Boy’s wrist brushed the hilt at his side, but made no move. Not yet.
The Old Man clenched and unclenched his fist, wincing at the action. “Tell me what you must know.”
This caught the Boy off-guard. A trove cracked open—he hadn’t expected the Old Man to talk, save for insults hurled as they crossed blades, savoring the chance to relive the glory of his deed.
“I have not had an ordinary life,” his mother had explained in pieces over the years. The Family Stories, she called them. The ones they were not meant to tell in town where they moved easily amongst those who were blissful and ordinary. Strange stories that went beyond the fairy tales and legends in the library, of falling through time and the lost eons to come back. Of saving the last scraps of her kingdom through a century of stasis. His father, both ancient and present, sealed beneath her family’s footsteps for thousands upon thousands of years, his heart only waking when her footsteps found him again.
There was only one question. He had his mother’s answer. He had an answer from every aunt. The Old Man was his glaring omission.
“Why did you kill my father?”
The Old Man nodded to himself, his own question answered. “Then you don’t know.”
“Know what?” he asked, seizing around his sword.
"That I loved her.”
The Boy’s fingers slipped, falling against his calf. “What?”
“She was right not to tell you,” he said, gazing down at his palm, a smile like a frozen sob. “Because it was not fair. I loved her, more than I’ll ever love anything.” At this he dared glance up, not quite to meet the Boy’s eyes, but settling at his chest, where his heart thundered. “But I needed her, too. And when you need a person as much as you love them, you can’t see them. You only see what they have to be to save you.” He cleared his throat, retreating back to curl around his cup. “And if you look too close, you start to see yourself.”
At this, the Boy was lost. It was difficult enough trying to imagine the great love his mother shared with a ghost whose outline he’d only glimpsed in newspaper clippings smuggled out of her fallen kingdom. His mother was adored, of course—by all in town and beyond, who sought her wisdom on matters great and small. By his aunts, who lorded it above him, when they felt he deserved it. Pah! You have no idea what your mother has done for you, voe.
And to try and fit the Old Man, deferential even to his tea, into the frame…
I have not had an ordinary life, she has said.
The Old Man stretched slightly, easing himself into the next sentence. “Once your father came back,” the words a struggle, as if he were chewing gravel, “once Hyrule was his, he gave her what I couldn’t. I was afraid giving her space to change…that I would lose her again.” An empty rattle of air from his lungs where a laugh would be. “How could she choose anything but me, I was sure, when I would only ever choose her?”
“She…” the Boy stumbled, the stillborn words flushing his cheeks.
Was with him?
Loved him?
“She thought your father was dead,” he cut in, sparing them both. “He made it clear, one day, he was not.”
They both retreated, the Boy trying to remember the footsteps he had practiced. The perfect slash. The counter-strike. All of the absolutes that he could train into his muscle and memory, to unleash as he felt certain was his destiny. Did the Old Man even have a sword any longer?
Outside, a flock of herons called their goodbyes, the sound cracking through the kitchen’s fog of ghosts.
He swallowed, finding a lump lodged in his throat where vengeance was meant to breathe. “My aunts. They said that his own blood overthrew him. And had help. It was a surprise and overwhelming. But they said that Hyrule was at peace.”
No…your father did not cry.
“Was my father a good man?”
The Old Man did not linger on his answer. “He loved your mother.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“You said you’d tell me.”
“I told you I would tell you what you must know.” A spark of something crackled behind the Old Man’s exhaustion, a puzzle he’d long since abandoned. “They call me Hero here, and yet I assassinated my King and stole a life from your mother. It doesn’t matter what he was to me. You see what he left. This kingdom. Your family. You. There isn’t even agreement here,” he admitted. “Some of my oldest friends still do not speak to me, or cooperate with the new Queens, because no one agrees on what he was. There has been no clean path forward.”
The Boy’s hands, now limp at his sides, traced the grain in the wood chair. He thought about his favorite question when he was small, one that he grew to resent having to ask. “What was he like?”
The Old Man sighed, his focus turning to the window. “Careful and cunning. In every sense. Fate itself wanted him to fail, but he refused. He gave up on nothing. Just like your mother that way.” His skin began to pale, as if the words were bile. The Boy did not feel sorry. “There was a sense of, I guess…poetry, you could say. Everything he did had a reason behind it. He did nothing for sport. There was an art to his logic. Even if you didn’t agree, if you hated it, you could see the craft of it. How it fit into everything else he was constructing, like a giant cathedral, and you were only a piece. I was a piece,” he mumbled to himself. “She was the goddess. He would tell you that I am an unworthy choice for your first kill. Not because I don’t deserve to die, but because I am far beneath the glory of your sword.”
Maybe Aunt Lena was right. He did sound like that.
The Old Man pulled himself back and tried to smile. “He was much too fast for being built like a Lynel. And I’ve never heard a voice that made everyone in the room stop like his. The way he looked at her, whether she was beside him or a ballroom away, enough to make me…” he trailed off, thinking better of his path. The Boy did not push.
The faint whiff of steam curling up from the Boy’s cooling tea died away. The Old Man’s remained empty, though he picked it up, staring inside as if unsure how to remedy the problem. “Is she…is she doing well?” He asked, an apology folded into words he had no right to speak, and yet begged the Boy anyway.
He had not, in truth, thought his mother anything but “well,” despite the sadness that rolled through her sometimes, like a cloudy sky. Like the sky, it passed. And everything came back. Her laugh, her stories; the way she sparred with his aunts just for the sake of it, and made special trips into town because she just finished a book and needed to discuss it with her friends. Her refusal to stop peeking into his room at night said wishing him sweet dreams, even in these latest years, when he begged her to stop. The candles he noticed burned down too far on her desk beside another notebook full.
She should still be a Queen, his aunts lamented.
But in his heart, she was simply Mom.
He bit the inside of his cheek, on the callous he’d already worn just shy of two decades. “Yeah,” he managed. “I think that she’s happy.”
The Old Man seemed to quake with relief. “I’m glad,” he managed to say at last. “She deserves that. She always did.” The glimmer of life in his eyes began to swim, threatening to spill to his sunken cheeks. “I didn’t mean.” He cut off the line once more, changing his mind in the middle of the sentence, clearing his throat instead. With both hands on the table he shoved back, letting the chair scrape along the bare wood of the floor. “Well. I wish I could give you the duel that you deserve,” he said, stretching his back until even the Boy could hear the crack. “I’m sure it was an epic in your head. But I’m not sure that I still have a sword that would cut grass. You might have to settle for a pitchfork. I know it was too much of a journey for so much disappointment. If you would rather,” the Old Man said, fiddling with his gauntlet’s strap, “you can cut your loss and make it quick. If I can ask for the garden. If you can show me which way to face…to say goodbye.”
The Boy fidgeted for the first time since he was small, a habit he broke by sheer will when it didn’t line up with the story of the man he wanted to become. A detail, like so many others, that seemed within his grasp to resurrect. If he could strike all the right notes into a chord, “your father loved you” would become “you’re exactly like him.” But all of the stories and the fragments, they would not line up. They overlapped and contradicted where they shouldn’t. There were gaps in the corners, stubbornly refusing to become whole.
Would he kill this broken man out of vengeance? Would he listen to his sparse words and feel nothing, knowing what he had done, he had chosen, with hands resigned to wildberries? Would the idea of running his sword through the Old Man’s back as he squinted toward the sea make him want to vomit?
But for this man, the Boy would not know. Only his own suffocating sense of pity, watching the one called Hero beg for the cardinal direction of the woman who would erase herself from her own world before she absolved him.
The Boy could only ever know the wild beat of his own heart.
“I would rather push out before dusk,” the Boy murmured. “I don’t have time to stay for all that. Maybe some other time.”
The Old Man stood waiting in silence, letting the door gap open, should the Boy change his mind. Almost, the Boy felt, coming up with an argument. Perhaps hurt that he was, after all, no longer worth the bite of the blade. Watching a shadow specter insult him one last time as the ghost spit on the floorboards, beholding the hovel with an innate disgust. You never change, Hero. Endlessly disappointing.
The Boy moved instead, folding the hood back over his head, concealing his distinct features away from the world he’d been assured would set itself ablaze to purge once more. Stacked his teacup on the saucer and moved it beside the sink.
“Before you go,” the Old Man broke in, already moving, swift now on the way to the stairs. “I know you won’t have room once you stock up on supplies, but if you can take one thing back with you. For her.”
The Boy waited with some trepidation while the Old Man moved through the loft, and he heard the scrape of a drawer opening and closing up above. A few moments later he reappeared on the narrow staircase, clutching a rectangular velvet box.
“This was lent to me a long time ago,” he said, offering it to the Boy, who accepted without promise. “I have kept it far too long, but I did need it. For a long time, I did. If she asks, and you wish to answer, you can tell her that she was right. I didn’t listen.” His fingers lingered on the velvet before falling away, his arms slack at his sides. “But now, I understand.”
He tipped the box slightly, a jangling rattle sounding as the contents slid from one side to the other. “I’ll tell her,” he decided aloud, turning to the door. “Thank you for the tea.”
And with that he left, stepping in the same footsteps from whence he’d come.
You could follow him, the Old Man thought briefly. An old synapse firing and dying in the same faint crackle. The old impulse to find her, over every mountain, every chasm, every sea and sky that stood to deny them.
To deny him.
She did not call.
In his palm he held the faded letter he had memorized as inherently as his own name. Slid out from its ruby nest when he retrieved the necklace from the drawer, a cipher now solved.
He smoothed the paper over the table as he had so many mornings and afternoons and evenings before, taking care not to touch the delicate ink or pull at the tattered fibers. The final ink she had spilled for him, the final time she would save him. Her hand still lilted in these loops and curves an ocean away.
She lived.
And gods, how she loved.
The blazing sunset finally pulled Link’s attention back into the house, as it filled the room with a swath of golden light. The Boy would be in the village by now, certainly gone if he knew what was best for him. He seemed bright, the Dragmire. Zelda would have nothing less.
He neglected to water the garden, he realized as he began the ascent upstairs. He would do better tomorrow. There was still another chance.
When he reached the loft’s landing he walked to the lantern in the window, with the candle flame stuttering on the wick. He stared down into the glow, shining out into the empty night fallen over the end of the world, the sea and the stars reflecting in one eternity. He leaned down, cupped his hands, and exhaled.
The light went out. And the Hero, at last, could rest.