Chapter Text
No wind, no rain, no light.
Sizzling heat, like coals pressed to his palm or hot metal laid over his skin—no, under. He’s too hot. He’s a shell filled with something thick, and moving, and trying to burn through him from the inside out.
Link opens his eyes and there’s no dreamy blue lights in their alien form, nor the voice of a woman he wanted to know but didn’t. He sees pulsing black veins through white flesh, undulating and— no, those… tree roots? Stone?
Zelda screamed, the chamber collapsed, his sword shattered, and his arm— his arm?
He sits up and every knuckle in his back sparks, but his right arm is black and coiled with dull brass. That alien flesh sends black tendrils up his shoulder and across his chest like— not like malice. Something else. Like circuitry, if the Sheikah worked with hammers and not tiny pliers.
There’s a knot in his gut as he pushes himself to stand, pain firing from his knees to his ankles and running through the arches of his bare feet. He can worry about his clothes later. Right now, he can move and he isn’t slowed, but he hurts.
Ah, Link, finally you wake.
The last unknown voice that spoke his name took his arm and his princess and let him fall to his death and land here.
I’ve heard a great deal about you from Zelda.
Where is she? Where is she? The anger rolls up his throat but taking the breath ignites more of that fiery pain and he can’t show it. He can’t give a tell like that and show how weak he is, how hard it is to stand straight. He cannot trust—
Your wounds were severe. I am relieved to see you escape death.
…Link would almost prefer if the voice said the opposite. An enemy come to finish him rather than an ally seeing him like this.
Your arm, however, was beyond saving.
Don’t react, just breathe. Don’t think, just listen.
I had to replace it lest the injury endanger you further.
This forces Link to look at his arm and to simultaneously stop thinking about it. He doesn’t need to think, because then he’ll remember, and he doesn’t need to remember what it’s like to be a caged with no way out but the voice on the other side of the bars. He doesn’t need the pain of bones moving under his skin or his voice scoured away by his own inhuman howling and the confusion and the fear and the anger.
No, as he lowers his arm, Link can use the anger.
He needs it for when he sees the barely-there glint of a friend he has carried too many times, and he cannot think about what’s been done to her. Instead, there’s the tightness in his gut; the thickness in his lungs. It’s the gloom in his bones that sparks with every step-step-step across the cold, dry stones to reach her.
The Master Sword doesn’t chime when Link picks her up. There’s no resonance like moonlight over water, no tone like a song long complete but still hanging in the eves of a great temple. There is a heft to her pocked edges, the balance of her hilt completely thrown off by the missing length.
She doesn’t chime for the same reason he doesn’t scream: they both know wounded beasts die if they roar.
Whatever replaced his arm left only a worn strap he has to manipulate with too-long nails and pain-numb fingers into a sling for her to rest against his back. She has the same not-heat soaked into her tang, creating a hot flash against his back every time she bounces loose behind him. There is a hip-pouch with no magic to it and a frayed hole at the bottom, ancient as the leather he threads it on to.
He doesn’t have to leave the cave before he finds the palm full of water, a smooth stone with striations on front and back, and remembers the words to whisper so the stone holds the pouch shut and lets it carry more than a handful of acorns.
It’s not Hylia’s magic. This is what most children can learn if they’re patient about picking up rocks and can politely ask their belongings to be true to themselves. At least, it’s what he’s taught children when they’ve asked him how it’s done, and most of them seem to get it after a couple tries.
When Link lets himself think, he assumes he’s deep underground and that if he survived the fall then Zelda, with her magic, must have as well.
As soon as he reaches daylight, he stops thinking because he hasn’t found her and he is thousands of years away from himself. If he screams her name then the whole world will know she’s missing. That he’s lost her. That he’s—
Breathe, and don’t think. Breathe, and don’t think.
Just jump, and don’t hope for crimson wings to catch him.
When Link dies and his soul is reunited with everyone he is lost, he has made a private vow to find King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule and slug him in the mouth.
He intends to keep that vow, both to Zelda and himself. It feels like the only one he hasn’t broken yet.
There’s a connection between Rhoam’s ghost and Rauru’s, but Link knows better than to think about it. Instead, he stays crouched by this fire on this island floating impossibly high over endless clouds.
Rather than think, he holds one of the tiny blessings of light it has taken a blur of days for him to gather. It isn’t real the way rocks and trees and monsters are. It’s like a soap bubble wrapped around an idea, delicate and conjured from his essence rather than pulled from a bag.
Link holds it between Rauru’s clawed fingers and stares at it, trying not to think. He doesn’t linger on how the little blessing pushes some of the pain out of Rauru’s nailbeds, like dipping them in cool water to soothe the burns he can’t see or touch but that never escape his attention. Sleep is a nightmare, because it means letting himself rest heavy on the ground and send the gloom writhing like acid bubbling over.
Because of the gloom, his legs have no strength to push him up the cliffs. When he runs, he can taste it licking the back of his throat. His arms shake every time one of his makeshift weapons clatters against one of the dozens of hostile constructs patrolling these ruins. His body hurts so much that any mistake in combat puts him on the ground, winded and angry.
One of those machines caught him in the ribs with an arrow, and Link had to lay under the half-tumbled wall for what felt like a full day before he was able to will himself up and try to eat something. The shaft didn’t even hit bone, but it paralyzed him for so long he prayed it didn’t bring the ghost to search for him.
One more blessing and he can open the Temple of Time, find Zelda, and let himself fall at her feet and have her help him figure out what they’re supposed to do next.
Don’t think, don’t ask, don’t question.
How did she get behind the door? Doesn’t matter, just open it. Why does Rauru know her? Doesn’t matter, just listen to him. Why did the vision of her in the temple not open her eyes and look at him? Why wasn’t he enough for her to look at him? How could he let her slip through his fingers again and she wouldn’t even look at him?
Just breathe, find the final final blessing, and open the door.
He almost goes on his knees when the goddess statue transforms four soap bubbles of light into a bead of red oil that makes the gloom weep from his skin and vanish. The relief is as pure as it is brief, and he knows not to ask her what’s wrong with him. She won’t answer questions like that. Hylia doesn’t really speak the way his mind tricks him into believing. It’s more a compulsion, a blend of memories and instinct that move him like a sword dance to conjure the magic and let it come back as something stronger from above.
He’s not supposed to think about it. There’s no room under his oath for questions. He doesn’t need answers: the world just expects him to succeed.
Link has to just listen to the sword, slip it into the light, and breathe.
And when the Hero’s blade vanishes, and a dragon erupts from the clouds, and Zelda’s voice echoes in his mind despite the vision of her refusing to look at him. When he understands that she’s not here, that she’s somewhere impossibly far from him just like the sword he just surrendered when he’s never, ever, ever, ever done that before, this is when he has to stop thinking.
Because she begs him to find her and he can’t ask where she is because that means acknowledging that she’s gone and he doesn’t know why, and no one will tell him why, because he doesn’t need to know why: he just has to succeed.
This is when Link is supposed to jump.
And he will: he has no other way down, no other path forward, no other way to reclaim everything these golden trees and lonely ruins have taken from him. Link is supposed to jump.
But he doesn’t want to. Here in the wind and the light and the cold, blustery sky, he doesn’t want to jump.
And if he takes a moment to think about it, he realizes that and more.
He knows that instead of jumping he wants to wrap his arm around the borrowed one and scream first. He wants to acknowledge the gloom that runs so thick in his gut that even walking leaves him nauseous. He wants to scream her name, and wail it, and weep it. He wants to tell her he’s sorry, he wants the goddess to hear him and forgive him. He wants to claw through the spoiled earth until he finds that chasm and her body at the bottom of it so he has somewhere to lay when eternity takes him.
He doesn’t want to face that evil creature again, because he knows he’s no match for it. It is no more courageous to chase that monster down than it would be to cut his life short on these islands: both lead to the same end. Both break every oath he’s ever taken.
When Link dies and his soul is reunited with everyone he has ever lost, everyone he has ever failed, everyone he could not save because despite the soul he carries the essence around it is flawed this time, he is to punch Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule across the mouth.
Hylia alone knows what Link’s king will do to him after that. Link can’t think about it, because he’s the so-called-hero who couldn’t stop one calamity and who, by breaking the Goddess’s Blade, has now triggered another one.
And that’s why he doesn’t think about it: Link just jumps.