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Zelda played the lullaby notes on her ocarina, eyes closed like the goddess above. The melody sounded ethereal here, in the cathedral raised to hold it. Rising up to the ancient buttresses shoring up the Temple of Time from calamity the kingdom itself scarcely weathered, the lullaby echoed back down to her gentle as snowfall. The stillness that followed was just as cold, her fingers frozen where they curled around her smooth ceramic hope.
Nothing happened.
Nothing ever did.
She pressed her hand to the Door of Time’s seam, between the sun’s rays. The portal did not budge, not even with the pulse of gold humming underneath her skin. Another triumph of light’s power and Hylia’s design, this time over her own desperate will.
No matter how many times she tried to pick the lock, the Temple’s seal refused her. She had tried every song she’d ever known and others she ventured far beyond the gates to learn. Prayers, blessings, curses; soft hands to the sky and light plunged into stone. She had, once, even managed to gather all the Sages around her—one last act of favor, reeking of pity for a girl thrashing against fate’s tide. An attempt impossible to repeat now, with Darunia and Impa both passed on.
For 23 years the door had been closed. If it weren’t for the monument of ruin where her castle once stood, she might wonder if it had ever opened at all.
“You’re missing another big day,” she murmured into the adamant nothingness. “If you could only see the way he looks at her. It’s the same way, I remember…”
Could she?
Or did she only recall that she had known it, once upon a time?
“I knew I’d find you here.”
She started at the voice and the figure waiting at the entrance, who, for the stretch of a synapse, seemed all at once a ghost. The two decades since revealing herself on these very stones were a matter of moments, and she once more felt the thundering nerve in her chest as he found his lost Princess at last, bewilderment and awe sparking in eyes that had beheld every horror and revelation that this cursed land could conjure. In spite of everything, he had found her.
He had done everything, in hopes that he would.
But this boy was not the Hero—and not a boy, not any longer. Honed by his runs to the river and instinct for a bow, he’d transformed from her ruddy-cheeked child into a man who’d be right at home corralling ranch steeds, if reigning over Hyrule fell through. Now he was six years older than she and the ghost had been when they’d clawed through ruins and temples and shadows to reclaim the world from the jaws of extinction. Every inch the Crown Prince that the salvaged kingdom rejoiced to see, his birth the latest in a daisy chain of blessings unfurling in the wake of the Demon King’s demise. It began with the victory celebration that spilled across borders and lasted weeks, nearly ruining the realm all over in a tidal wave of frenzied joy. Then the plagues and pestilence evaporating like spring thaw. In the next breath, the swift announcement of her own marriage and its promise that once more, Hyrule would know the assurance of a proper King and Queen.
The man she’d married, Lord Rowan Garrett, was kind with a steadfast heart. Well-liked and from blood almost as old as her own. Born in the foothills above Kakariko Village to the sort of quiet nobility that weathered apocalypse like a winter storm. In the absence of the scattered Royal Family, it was the Garrets who had ushered the terrorized villagers of Castle Town to shelter within their gates. Flaxen-haired, a scant bit short for a Hylian. Rowan had no reason to question the son arriving eight months after their muted coronation, as if by divine fortune. Neither would anyone else.
And when she first held that warm, squirming wonder in her arms, the last remnant of that Hero she’d ever have and named him Link, the good husband did not balk. None of her people blinked. It would be inconceivable for her to neglect honoring the mysterious swordsman to whom they owed their very lives.
Today the line followed its next step forward, with Prince Link set to wed a gentle creature with a quick laugh and steadying hand. Lady Elira and Link had known each other since childhood, the same way that the Boy with a Fairy came to be Zelda’s only friend. Except that instead of scheming sacred stones away from allies and hounding a thief dressed as a king, Link and Elira grew up in the rosy sunrise of peace. Their greatest strife was a bad run at the Bombchu Bowling Alley. Summer nights catching fireflies in jars and trying to pass them off to the grown-ups as Poes, treading the ground still reverberating with her horse’s hooves. They could not comprehend the soldier blood and ReDead ichor that ran and dried and settled as dust beneath their cobblestones.
Because they didn’t have to know.
No one should have to know.
That’s what he’d said, wasn’t it? While the people danced and the bonfires crackled, and even the stars themselves seemed to celebrate his triumph.
The flow of time is always cruel.
“But you’ll know,” she’d warned, her hands fisting his collar, like she could wring destiny away from the yoke they both wore, somehow even heavier in victory. “You’ll remember, and you can tell me, and even if I believe you, I’ll never understand.”
“Yes you will,” he vowed, reaching to smooth the hair behind her ear, brushing the scent of leather and embers into the air between them. “You’ll know here. I’ll know there. Time can’t break that, no matter how hard it bends.” His hand, weighted with his gauntlet, closed around the instrument she held then, just as now.
Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it.
“I’ll find you there,” he breathed as he pressed his brow to hers for the last time. “I’ll always find you.”
She had known. From the moment she summoned the six sages to split open the sacred realm, she had felt the pull of time away from her, the borrowed slip of seven years a debt to the goddesses that must be collected.
Still she pretended. Not in her bliss, no. Those weeks between their narrow miracle and the heavenly reckoning were the most honest, most liberating of her stilted, cloistered, interrupted life. In his warmth she could almost forget the vortex of duty yawning open beneath her feet, whispering of the lives lost, the lands ravaged, the suffering calcified like a bone never set. All vanished, should she be selfless. Should he be righteous.
But she would never have been in his arms at all, had he not been staunch in his virtue.
Heroic to the marrow.
And she…
She could speak the words, I’ve done enough. We have answered every ask. What’s done is done here; a world that does not exist does not need saving.
He hadn’t fallen in love with a liar.
“What are you doing here?” Zelda asked her son, pressing light into her voice, buoying it above the lump in her throat she never fully swallowed.
He half-smiled with that devastating roguish affect; much too charming for his station. “I’d ask you the same thing.”
“Hm.” Too clever, too. Her own curiosity, his father’s fearlessness…thank the gods he’d been born to a land enduring the scars of monsters and not their dens. “You know I’ve always struggled with ceremony,” she said, tipping her head back to scan the ceiling, absorbing the edict of silence from the walls. “Your father and I were married while they were still burning Moblin corpses in the fields. We were lucky to have cake.”
“Right, and you couldn’t leave cuccos out at night because they’d turn into Poes,” he teased her.
“All so the spoiled children of Hyrule might know chocolate.”
Her lips curved in spite of herself, threatening to break into a smile. “Something like that,” she admitted.
He regarded her a moment, tilting his head in a pantomime of his father, trying to see through the scarves and smoke she’d once used to cast her Sheikah disguise. Then, as if deciding, he crossed the aisle to stand beside her and press his own palm to the door. “You saw it open, didn’t you?”
“I did,” she murmured, her gaze wandering up to the carved Triforce crowning the door. Once flooded with light from the Song of Time’s call, now dimmed to darkness, like it had never sparked at all.
Link pressed his nose to the stubbornly closed seam, as if he could peek through like a keyhole. “Is it really in there, then? The sword?”
Only 23 years—a blink in history—and yet the foundation of their story was crumbling. A legend battered by Hyrule’s tides of rebuilding and routine: Ganondorf’s reign was a strange and troubling inconvenience by those who were there, and an abstraction to those who were not. Of course a “sword to seal the darkness” sounded like a fairy tale, even to her own ears. So briefly was the veil between realms lifted, when the golden goddesses breathed truth instead of fable. Seven years was now nothing but a fever dream.
“As the Hero left it,” she recited like the last line in a poem. An act she had mandated, not witnessed.
He drew back, half-formed questions dancing in his eyes. “Why would he just leave?” he asked, with more reverence than she’d given him reason to hold.
She watched his fingers dance along the engraved stone, as if there were some secret latch he could discover, given enough patience and finesse. The same place she’d pounded her fists, screaming into the wall guarding the past/future’s possibility when she discovered, like a cruel joke, what the Hero had left her to carry. She clawed at the merciless stone, screaming his name until her nails broke and her fingers bled, and not so much as a whisper came through to comfort her. She sank to her knees, the light of wisdom dappling the marble beneath her tears, power that had held the raging beast Ganon captive for its final blow.
Not enough to unmake the seal cast by her own lips.
“No one really knows,” she said, because outside of the circle of Sages, they did not. There had been no attempt to explain to the people, already overwhelmed with the blessings and burdens of piecing their lives back together, that a version of themselves might escape their communal trials, should their savior intervene. Somewhere. Perhaps. It was better to shrug, and to wonder, until it was hard to remember if there had really been a boy from the forest at all. “I think the calm and the quiet can be difficult, when all you’ve known is struggle,” she tried instead. “One can give everything they have for peace, and still not know what to do with it, should it come.”
Was he as unsettled in serenity as she was? How did he move through that other world that sighed with relief at a close call it could not fathom? Its monster muzzled, his deeds unnecessary, their tightly wound fate an abstraction that did not exist. Could he even remain in Hyrule with his every achievement vanished by their ignorance? Or had he turned as restless as she felt, missing the old friends from her nightmares?
The Prince Link’s touch lingered on the door as he drew back, calm contemplation setting his lips to a melancholy smile. “You gave everything too, though,” he said. “And yet, you didn’t disappear into the sunset. You stayed.”
His murmured truth made her grasp at her middle, trying to steady herself the same way she had amidst the ruins of Ganondorf’s tower as it sank into the bones of her former life. “That’s an exaggeration,” she tried to explain away. “I was no Hero. My most important task was staying out of the way.”
“Staying out of the way while training in the catacombs of Kakariko Village? Or summoning the Light Arrows straight from the Sacred Realm to flay the demon?” he pointed out, unable to mask his grin.
“Who…who told you about that?”
“Once I graduated from picture books and realized you weren’t ever going to tell me the real story of the war, I started to ask Father instead,” he admitted, drumming his fingers on the stone, his eyes clouding with questions tended like seedlings behind an adolescence. “He’s very proud of you, you know. He likes to brag about how you were never confined to just wisdom. You rose to power from ash, and fought braver than the entire Royal Guard. I liked the way he’d tell it. Especially since you…downplayed. Who you were. Who you are, beyond out Queen.” Her son’s gaze, with its courageous pedigree, fell in the wake of her dawning shock. “He wanted me to know my real mother.”
“Link,” she murmured in the same voice from when he was a boy, with so much space left to grow into his soul and skin. “You do know me. I wasn’t ‘different’ then. The world was.”
“I know,” he tried to bury a laugh in a stretch, a gesture that made her ache. “It’s only that…well. Sometimes, Mother. It feels as if you drift. A bit. And I understand why. We all can understand why.” His hand dropped from his shoulder, meeting around the shell of her ocarina. The raft in the sea she kept daring to swallow her whole. And the boy, her boy, beside the father who’d loved them both, despite the life in another shadow. Watching, waiting at the shore. “Do you think that he means to come back?”
She gripped the instrument tightly beneath her son’s hands, warming the cool glaze before relinquishing her hold. “No, Link. His trials are complete. Heroes do not linger.”
He held the relic, testing its weight, another smile cracked. “Some do,” he said. “The ones who have to ink the history. And knit the world back together after the mess. Who else is going to remind the kids to enjoy their chocolate?”
She looked now, truly looked, at the boy who’d chased the trail of her sorrow on his own wedding day, still reaching, still reminding. Whatever she had done, what she could or could not become, for him, it was enough.
Not a relic of the love she’d lost, but the legacy of what they’d given.
For Hyrule, yes.
Not a banner, not a border. Not the treasure in the hills or the bounty of the valley.
Improbably, inconveniently.
To carry on its soul.
She brushed the straw-colored hair, like Hyrule Field in the fall, out of those storm blue eyes. Tucking the strands behind his ear, where they never wished to stay. “We’re so proud of you,” she said through the tightness in her throat. “I’m sorry I lost track of time.”
“You haven’t missed a thing,” he said with a smile. “Though I can’t guarantee that Father has managed to solve the mystery of a corsage without you.” He began blazing forward, then paused beyond the empty altar, turning back to face her. “Should I wait for you to finish up?”
“Not at all,” she shook her head. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He nodded slowly, then strode down the aisle to meet every wish she could hold for her child.
She followed in his footsteps, now larger than her own, not stopping until she reached the Temple's threshold. There she paused one final time, darkening the same archway she had so many years before.
“When peace returns to Hyrule,” she murmured from memory.
And like an echo, she could feel her heart call back.
Home…
Where you are supposed to be…
The way you are supposed to be.
“Thank you, Link,” she whispered into the stone’s eternal keep, just this once more.
She stepped forward, into the pardoned world, basking in the light of all that they’d given, and all they would carry.
Laughter bubbled from the Square. Hooves clopped on cobblestones, the city’s bones that would not burn. From the chapel, bells began to ring, sending the sparrows scattering free into the blue. The air was crisp with the moon’s last sigh, retiring one more unremarkable miracle back into the ether.
She filled her lungs with the imperfect clarity of morning air: the stirring dust of the razed castle, the market girl’s wildflowers, last dinner’s smoke and the promise of rain blowing in from the east. Vivid in its decay, vibrant in its life, steadfast in its promise that this breath, at least, was true.
And it was here that she, the Queen of Hyrule, at last, regained her lost time.