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The storm was clearing over the mountain range. Link guided the horse towards the stable and dismounted, tethered his steed to the nearby post. He caught the eye of the fresh-faced Hylian stable hand and nodded once. The stable hand waved and went to take over from there. Princess Zelda sat under the eaves, one leg folded neatly over her other knee, parsing through notes on the Sheikah slate. Catalogs of armor and weaponry and a handful of recipes that only Link could decipher any meaning from.
He was muddied and an eyesore, but not injured. She had cradled his dying body once, so there was no shame between them now. The Guardians lay dormant, relics of a time long since past, and would cause no harm.
When he first brought her to Hateno Village, the Princess was exhausted beyond measure. She could not accompany him out on horseback, but she would ask him to catalog flora or fauna and read it aloud to her. Of course, in the days of King Rhoam's rule she would have had servants and assistants to call upon for such a task, but Link never once objected. He was her sole witness to the world that came before. The only evidence of its existence, beyond ruins, was a lingering sense of remorse. In a time where Hyrule once stood she would have been taken in to the great castle itself and crowned its Queen. But there were no servants or ladies in waiting to speak of, only her loyal knight.
Her connection to the Goddesses hadn’t deepened any more or less since he'd last stood in her presence -- a deficiency her mother had not shared, and her father, she once confessed, only ever understood as the nature of her self-induced inhibition. She would never have guessed she would be able to hold off Ganon for a day, let alone a little over a century. Perhaps her prior failings could be attributed to a mental block, of sorts. She'd not had much energy to question things, adrift in the void, holding the beast back for another day, another hour, for what difference it made or did not, the exhaustion was palpable. Even now, she admitted, she could not reason to herself why she had been able, without thought or fret, to act as was necessary when the time came.
In slumber, he'd passed down a lifetime of tacit intimacies and quirks unto himself that this Zelda still recalled with a certain fondness, and while he could not always recall so clearly, he had never found a reason to doubt her judgement. The ease of her company now was hardly any different than what his senses insisted, but it was all the more a relief for its tangibility. He had never asked whether she recalled her father, or the great halls of the castle itself, the old town and its bustling life. The smell of livestock and old tallow and smelters, preserved once in his senses and now in a strange, tempered melancholy. Faces trapped in time no more perceptible than the shadows that waned and waxed in sunset, until the sunlit, peaceful ruins of the Hylian Garrison became a substitute for their once-proud foundation. Link had never stopped to piece together his own memories. He had been so fixated on finding Zelda that little else mattered.
Where Ganon had surpassed the limits of mortality, subsisting on his wrath and hatred until he was greater than either man or mortal, insidious and eternal. So too would they pass on, Zelda surmised, for it was the same as the princess and hero that came before and defeated Ganon, and had been and would always be. In whatever time remained, they would rebuild what had been destroyed and begin anew on the foundation of what had once stood. That, she said, was why she had never doubted he would find her.
He had hunted down Ganon because it was his duty, as her knight and Hyrule's last surviving line of defense. Truthfully, he would have been pleased to fetch whatever flora and fauna she wished to survey for the rest of his tenure. He was glad, in that sense, that she still had a need for him, though he did not tell her so. Zelda would pick apart his answers and analyze him. It was no fault, simply her favorite method. If this quiet morning was all he would ever grasp of peace, then it would be enough for one lifetime.