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“I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I eternally come again to this identical and selfsame life, in the greatest and even in the smallest, so that I again teach the eternal recurrence of all things.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I heard this story from a talking fish, who supposedly heard it from a talking rock, who themself supposedly heard it from a talking bird, who apparently knew a princess from a long-time-ago kingdom in a land quite very far away.
So it happens, that princess is the focus of our story. So it happens, people have said many things about this princess. “Once upon a time, a princess,” as one might say. Or, in brief, just “once upon a princess”. And: once upon a time, a hero, and a demon, a golden power and a sword to vanquish evil. Then a triangle, scrawled on a sheet of paper, dabbed onto canvas or etched into some chipping of stone, as if a drawing could encompass all the intricate geometries of the Universe. Once upon a time, a cycle that has looped three times, or three hundred times, or the number contained in three infinities. Once upon a time, three Golden Goddesses. Always three. No more, no less.
You might have heard about some of those things. You might have heard that once upon a time there lived a princess named Zelda, firmly Zelda, one out of countless Zeldas, and that her father was an idiot, and that she loved fruitcake and frogs and tinkering and hated the Goddesses with a passion. “Hate” is too strong of a word, her father might have chastised her—perhaps “balefully resents” would be the better term, this pairing of words grasping the nuances just a mite better. After all, their special talent seemed to be dragging her (for that matter, every iteration of her: she reincarnates, that’s an important detail you should note down) through hell, worse than hell, and then some. You might say it’s her curse. You might have heard that an ancient demon emerged on her seventeenth birthday—in what one might interpret as a special “fuck you” directed toward her and toward the knight who follows her in every lifetime, in every timeline—then laid waste to her kingdom. You might have heard that when death tried to claim the knight from the arms of the princess, she said no to its face, and sealed him into a tomb that would become his salvation, and locked herself and the demon inside the cage of her ruined kingdom then waited for one hundred years.
You might have heard that the boy slumbered for that hundred years, then woke back from the edge of death, and slew the demon, and saved the princess and the kingdom. You might have heard that some years later, that demon returned with a new and mightier countenance, and the princess was stranded in another time, and the hero lost his arm. You have heard that the hero won once more, and the princess returned to her time, and they lived their promised, happily, forever thereafter.
You could say this is a story about that forever thereafter. About all the forever thereafters that have and could have been. In a sense, this is a story about the aftermath of stories. A story about the beforehands, too.
This is a truthful story, for the most part. In the sense that it’s a story where I’ve endeavoured to tell you some truth: to be candid to you, and to myself, on some level. Of course, some details might be garbled, might very well be made up. This is a legend, after all. And legends aren’t exactly known for their factual veracity.
For all I know, the princess of this story might be an apocryphal princess: another fiction to feature, rather senselessly, among uncountably many fictions. For all I know, she might be wandering by your side, still drifting, still searching, still unmoored in all her myriad lives.
Because listen: in this story, Princess Zelda briefly broke free from time.
During her brief stint as a dragon, Princess Zelda was drifting through time.
She falls asleep in her wedding bed and wakes up with a child suckling with budding teeth at her breast. She walks in through the kitchen door and walks out of a temple’s drawbridge. She jumps from a loftwing and clambers out of the ocean on a barnacled anchor chain. She starts one day as a Sheikah warrior and ends it as a foul-mouthed pirate, and Hyrule will be in sunbaked ruins, then it’ll be fish-chewed ruins in the black depths of an ocean basin. She leaves her bed as an old lady and enters Hyrule Castle as a green and doe-eyed princess. She sits down on a chair in a well and wakes up in her childhood chambers, and greets her long-dead, or is it long-unborn handmaidens as they bring her cream-laden cucumber sandwiches for breakfast one hundred years in the past, or is it one hundred thousand in the future—who knows the answer, who knows if there’s even a right answer, and in any case who cares.
At some point along the way, it becomes little more than routine. She gets used to it. She learns to live with it.
She learns.
That:
Somehow she cannot live a single anchored life, yet somehow she has lived for recursively hundreds of lives.
That:
No matter what recourse she has attempted, she can neither control nor predict the course or duration of her stays throughout Hyrulean history, which presents quite the frustrating conundrum for the scientific side of her, and means she must live in a constant state of improvisation and observation, the frantic flutter of a swallow before the marching stormfront.
That:
The only reason she knows for certain she isn’t dead is because she has died, too many times, and has experienced for herself the stretching-rubber-tube feeling of being reincarnated, being brought wailing and writhing back to life. She knows what it looks like, that liminal space that people like to call purgatory, or limbo, heaven or hell, the afterlife or—in her case—the between-lives. There’s a golden light, and some birdsong, she thinks, and something like water, lukewarm, or whatever substitutes for all those sensory descriptors her soul can provide, devoid of a physical body. It’s nothingness. She doesn’t think much of it. Not when living isn’t much different.
That:
The prelude to the jumps, or should she say the first jump, jump before all other jumps: that turned out to be the worst part. Like the first instance for many other things. The first instance of Princess Zelda getting jerked horizontally then circularly through time, she was falling to her death a hundred feet underneath the roots of her foremothers’ castle, and the sight of her knight’s shrivelled arm was still burning out her eyes when she woke up one hundred thousand years in the past and promptly vomited her breakfast—dried plums, some slurry of bile and muesli—onto the feet of her something-thousandth great-great-grandmother.
Not that she had the luxury of worrying too much about the discomfort of it all. She had bigger fish to fry. The creeping fact that she was stranded some hundred millennia in Hyrulean prehistory. Then the whole affair of a demon king, and an imprisoning war, and eating a glowing punctuation mark of a magic pebble, then turning into an immortal dragon. Somehow. Her life’s more of a comedy than she’d like to admit.
So it happens, Princess Zelda was born on the closing day of Hyrule’s winter, and as if Hylia herself was determined to spite her for choosing that specific day, the following week saw blizzards vomiting such a holy flood of snow across the entire kingdom that even the Gerudo would be shovelling slush out of the sand for a week straight. She was born a precocious and in truth rather eerie child, with seer-green eyes and a tendency for judging pauses and cutting words, eerie to all save her mother—then, shortly after her sixth birthday, eerie to just about all, after her mother drowned in a freak boating accident off the Lanayru coast that would be suspected but never confirmed to be work of the Yiga Clan. She was a rather beloved princess, I’ve been told, in actuality a very beloved princess, to the point where all the little children across Hyrule wanted to become princesses themselves when they grew up. All, save for the princess herself. She couldn’t have cared less. She would have been happy with books and gears and flowers—not picking flowers, to be precise, but planting flowers: toss her head-first into a stinking swamp and at her filthiest she’d be happier than a grinning catfish gnawing at a drowned pig’s corpse. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been born Hylian. Perhaps she was meant to be born a Zora, or barring that a frog or maybe a catfish, some manner of aquatic creature. But her father happened to care about her being a princess, so it happens. Cared about destiny and golden power and prophecy. A Sheikah soothsayer crawled out of some crack in the earth and proclaimed over a pipe of the finest Satori herb that the Calamity would be returning within the newborn princess’ lifetime, and so it happened, on the princess’ seventeenth birthday, after a decade of fruitless prayers to awaken the golden power, missing corner of the Triforce three, a power that would only awaken after the Calamity had killed almost every soul said golden power was meant to protect.
So Princess Zelda would tell herself. If only her power had awoken earlier. But her power awoke to protect her knight, and her knight alone. So she laid her knight to rest, and fulfilled her promised duty, and held one hundred years of penitent vigil.
So it happened.
So it happened that later, she would be cast to the founding age of her iteration of Hyrule, and watch as evil was delayed, and decide to delay herself in turn in the form of an immortal dragon, this time to watch for one hundred thousand years.
Speaking of.
When Princess Zelda finally reveals to the world how she was thrown haphazardly through time, it comes with no prior warning nor reason. It comes some three weeks after the demon king dies in a spectacular blister-boiling supernova that rips apart the clouds and the earth some thirty feet away from the footpath into Hyrule Castle and singes the corners of the dilapidated welcome sign, just slightly peels an incremental amount of the already-crumbling paint; after she sheds that reptilian form which has trapped gods and would-be gods and sky aliens into loops of eternal insanity and returns to her house in Hateno Village, and Link tells the parents of the schoolchildren that yes, she was on a trip, across the map in Hebra you see, that’s why she wasn’t around, unfortunately she’s fallen ill from a stomach bug on the road and will need to take some time off, thank you for your understanding. She is bedridden in the days before it happens. She is tired, does not speak, does not move a muscle. Sleeps for much of the day and all of the nights. Link is worried, naturally, and calls in a Zora healer.
Nothing is wrong with her, he tells the hero, the princess simply needs her rest. The healer is both very wrong and very right. Many people come to visit Zelda after that. A bird, a rock, a fish prince, a desert princess. None can stay for too long. None save for Link.
Then quite abruptly, one morning, she leaves the house and takes a horse to Rito Village and does an exclusive feature-length interview with the Lucky Clover Gazette. To the grave, Link will never figure out how she escaped from his notice that day. She reveals many things to Hyrule in that tell-all interview. She says that she’s the same princess who sealed the Calamity one hundred years ago, and that grappling with ancient demons does wonders for dry skin. She says that she was also the Light Dragon that’s flown over Hyrule for all those ghostly millennia. For that matter, she’s the same princess who’s been floating around since the dawn of time. In all the ways that count. She talks about the Triforce and Ganondorf, the Master Sword, curses and golden powers and the cycle of reincarnation. She spills the secrets of the Royal Family and the Deku Tree and Fi as casually as if she’s talking about what to have for lunch on a picnic. All of this came to me in a dream, she waves off, and I’ll tell you the secret behind that too. And she tells them.
“She says that when she was a dragon, she broke away from time,” Purah explains to a painfully confused Link, partially for her own benefit because if she’s to be honest, she is equally as confused. “She says that she’s met the Golden Goddesses, too, and they look nothing like the way we’ve been portraying them for eons.”
“Huh?” Link says.
“Apparently, they’re fucking Koroks.”
Zelda says that actually, there are more than three Golden Goddesses. To be precise, a whole civilization of them, crammed into a parallel dimension. Think of the Twilight Realm, she puts it—what’s the Twilight Realm, someone of this era might ask—just think of it like your house’s crawlspace, she amends, just as humid, but sunnier and with less mildew and with more mosquitoes and mud. She says that the goddesses and their kind live in a mangrove with golden skies and that the trees sport evergreen or should she say evergolden leaves, and it reeks perpetually of half-digested compost, and that they shape entire universes out of this compost. She says she presided over the creation of Hyrule at the dawning crack of time—three Koroks mashing together mud into the rough shape of a sphere, cue metaphysical maracas, let there be light, so there will be life. The first ever Hylian sprung from a Korok seed, Zelda says, she saw it herself. Korok seeds are golden. The Goddesses are said to be golden. Go figure.
She says she can drift through time because goddesses can drift through time. So it happens, she might say to you, if you ever get the chance to meet her. So it happens, she explains, because the goddesses do not experience time the way we mortals do. Time is not a linear sequence of events but a loop devouring itself, endlessly, end upon end. We mortals are shackled to the loop, to the illusion of causality. Goddesses have the privilege to gaze upon the loop from the outside and tell themselves, “so it happens”. And at the end of the day, she is the incarnation of a goddess.
In this story, chronological order has no meaning. We should speak of constants instead. Constants, Zelda comes to learn about, in every epoch, in every incarnation. Once upon a time, a destined princess, and a destined hero, and a demon, together, in a long-lost kingdom.
Once upon a time, war.
Zelda is a newborn cursed with a prognosis of war. Zelda is a girl in a tattered dress facing down the spectre of war. Zelda is a cage to contain war’s greed, then an arrow to dispel war’s wrath. Zelda is the ouroboros, the proverbial serpent, a Mobius strip with one singular and neverending facet, coiled about the sword that was promised to end all her wars.
Golden light, lukewarm water, birdsong, the citrus-sweet perfume of silent princesses in waxing bloom. Zelda is floating. Zelda is sinking. Zelda is submerged in leaden air, shivering with cold-blooded fever, when she begins the second jump into eternity, begins to dream of forever.
She leaves a kingdom crawling back out of the grave. She lands in a kingdom gripped by terminal illness.
She blinks and she is a child, peering through the wrong side of a windowsill, her head filled with visions of a wicked man dressed in depthless pitch. She blinks again, and her father is dead, and her kingdom has fallen, and she is no longer a silly princess with silly dreams, silly delusions of heroism and grandeur, she has forgone her silly purple skirts and her silly headdress because Ganondorf’s new world is a cruel world and there is no place for silly games if you wish to survive. She is training on a cliffside with her forearms scrubbed raw, breath burning, black rain pattering; Impa swooping like a vulture, teaching her to dance with death on the precipice. She blinks again and she is slipping away from Impa’s arms because there is a Lizalfo spear rammed sideways through her gut and from her throat to the tip of her clavicle she has been carved open like an overripe hydromelon. Dripping scarlet. Don’t you dare die on me, Zelda. That’s not her name, the thought flutters vaguely, not his name. He, she. A soul drifting for a form that will never fit. Zelda survives, barely. This won’t be the first close call. Impa whispers a Sheikah lullaby. The Hero of Time will come soon. You have to be there for him. She shuts her eyes and opens them again and she is back to nine and standing before the prophetic hero, a silly little boy with his whimsical cap who snuck through the gardens to see her. He looks more fairy than human.
The boy she has sent back to relive his youth, and in that fateful move Zelda rends the very fabric of reality. Time breaks at this juncture. Choose your own adventure. Except Zelda doesn’t have to choose. This is a multiple choice exam, and the answer is all of the above, in nonsequential order. Time makes the decision for her.
So she follows the boy. The Hero of Time, the child cursed to be a hero, is sent backward. Ganondorf is thwarted. The war is nipped in the bud. She leaves the throne room as her father’s guards restrain the would-be demon king, and walks into the gardens, and watches the hero leave for lands unknown. She climbs a peach tree and takes a nap.
She wakes to twilight, to war, and once again, to Ganondorf.
As she discovers, the Zelda of this era is a young and surprisingly competent queen. Her mother dies of what the doctors deem a wasting sickness, what the people whisper as being the curse of the vengeful dead—what the Sheikah, many dozens of millennia later, and the rest of Hyrule in as many later eons, will discover and come to dub as “cancer”. But to the Zelda of this age, there is no understanding of the intricacies of cellular biology, oncogenes or failed apoptosis or uncontrollable mitosis, much less hope for a cure; and so it happens that her mother dies a long and withering death, and that her father the now-widowed Prince Consort departs from Hyrule, never to step foot again in Hyrule. Her mother’s room is sealed off, doors bolted, cracks glued shut with wax, for fear of the deadly spirits that contaminated the late Queen’s body escaping from within. Among the collateral damage figures Zelda’s collection of pet rocks and her first toy sword, which she had brought into her mother’s room during the Queen’s last days in this mortal plane to entertain her, when it became clear that no salvation would arrive. So it happens that she never sees neither her rocks nor her toy sword again. So it happens that the Zelda of this age learns to rely on herself and only herself, learns to navigate and scythe through the intricate thornbushes of courtly politics with tongue and measured countenance, as aptly as she has learned to wield the sword and the bow.
At age sixteen, she accuses her uncle Faris, then-regent of Hyrule, of embezzlement. She is correct, of course. He’s been weaseling away treasury gold to fund a staircase to heaven. They find the blueprints hidden inside a scroll of erotic Gerudo poetry, and the jury breaks out into giggles at his trial as his chicken-scrawl notebooks of architectural impossibilities are read aloud. He becomes rather red in the face as a result, and is barking obscenities at her stoically-faced niece as they lead him out of the courtroom on a one-way trip into exile. (She bursts out laughing as soon as she retires to her chambers.)
With her uncle out of the way, she strongarms her mother’s former Council into letting her take the throne. You will grant me my birthright the throne of Hyrule, goes her ultimatum; or failing that, grant it to someone competent; else, I will chew out every nincompoop you dare to send my way, ending with tossing the whole lot of you to the bottom of Lake Hylia. So she is crowned Princess Regent of Hyrule on the occasion of her seventeenth birthday, Queen in all but name. A compromise. Her first act as ruler is to order all the assembled guests a chocolate mousse cake from the kitchens. Her mother’s favorite dessert, she remembered. Not a single crumb is left on a plate.
So it happens, her reign begins with three peaceful years. Then she loses her throne on an otherwise unremarkable midsummer’s eve when the armies of Twilight march into her kingdom. History’s annals state that the people of Hyrule were sundered from their physical bodies, twisted into untethered spirits, trapped like rats in a wall between light and shadow: all, save for Princess Zelda. Our Zelda reads this legend in a crusty corpse of a book, many epochs later, when she is fifteen and sleepless, venturing through the castle library. There’s a hero, and an imp, and a great battle, and the storied deaths of kings, and at the end of the day the realm’s salvation. “Link,” she then asks a hundred years or is it three hundred thousand years later, on the road to Kakariko Village, “do you know that you were a wolf in a past life?” And her hero says no, he didn’t know, what a funny tale, and that’s all the people of her time have come to remember.
It’s faded into legend. It’s been watered down into a funny story. So it happens.
“Do you remember me?” the princess asks at the end of the worn-out fairy tale, knowing all too well what the hero’s answer will be. And he gives it, that fair-faced falsehood and that terrible truth, rolled into a simple couplet of syllables:
“I do.”
No, he does not know. She knows his answer before he answers, and it is an unwitting lie. He is there in every life with her, yet he does not retain a single memory upon rebirth. His curse, it seems, is to forget, as hers is the doom to relive, remember.
She knows many things about the hero. She knows he likes apple pies and climbing tall trees, picking flowers and cooking for the people he loves. She also knows the more standard facts: that he bears the marking of a goddess etched into the back of his left hand, that he wields a sword forged from starlight, the very fires of creation. In some lives he is a knight. In some lives he is humble-born; in a select few, he is a noble, or a prince. In seventy lives he despises the princess; in ninety-two, the princess despises him back. In eight hundred, or just about two-thirds of their total incarnations, he falls in love with her. In six hundred fifty of those, she falls for him back. In two hundred and thirty-nine, they are married.
In two hundred and thirty-six, the Hero of Hyrule dies in the battle against Ganon. In a little over half of those lives, the Princess dies with him.
Zelda cannot say which is the crueler fate: to die with the hero in a lost battle, a doomed land; or to win at the cost of eternal solitude, living out your remaining days with half your soul murdered, a festering hole left behind.
In some lives, they meet as children.
There is one era when the hero is a little boy, is five, is small and seemingly ordinary. Zelda is six, and dreaming of freedom, an escapee from the royal castle, and so it happens that when they meet the boy will think her a ghost. On the evening they meet, he has mud on his shoes and he’s running instead of walking because his name is being whispered, goadingly, by the wind. He’s carrying a wooden sword strapped onto his back and his father’s borrowed cap gripped tightly in his free hand. It’s the cradle of the summer, air cooling with the sun’s descent, and he’s chasing the last of the runaway cuccos on the rim of the forest by his hometown, by the shade of wizened and swaying trees, when he spots her.
She’s glowing, is his first thought. She’s a ghost, is the second. She’s a glowing ghost, is his conclusion.
Of course, at his age, he doesn’t quite understand princesses, or death, heroes or demons or ghosts or goddesses: any of those silly and faraway notions that, to him, still only exist within the confines of dogeared picture books and his mother’s off-tune lullabies. He doesn’t quite understand emotions, either, or words, really, for that matter; he will not say his first word until a full summer after that evening, and later in life he will be sparse on both words and emotions. So he doesn’t say a word to the princess, then, who in his mind must be a glowing ghost, or a girl dressed up that way. It occurs to the boy that the ghost must have been a very rich girl in life. He takes in the creamy dress, diaphanously thin; the sequined jewelry that trickles like flowing water; the tiara made of tawny gold. She opens her mouth: “you are?” she asks, softly, and it sounds both like a question and an answer.
He hears a clucking noise from behind a thicket of trees. “Oh, there’s your cucco,” the ghost says, and as if on cue, the last escapee from Link’s father’s flock emerges with an unrepentant squawk. Then, before he can twitch a muscle, the ghost bends down, scoops up the bird, and places it into Link’s hands. It doesn’t go easily. For all the calm it showed with the ghost—to an eerie degree, he might say—the bird starts to squirm the moment it lands in Link’s palms. Though he may be strong for his age, he is still much too small, and the cucco is easily half his size. He wrestles about for a good minute before the bird settles enough for him to lift it above his head.
By the time he turns to thank her, the ghost is nowhere to be found.
“I want to become a hero,” he will later say to the first guardsman he encounters on the lip of Hyrule Castle. He is fifteen, now, on the precarious path hugging the crag over Lake Hylia, and he isn't sure why it's the first thing out of his mouth. "I want to figure out who I am."
He is granted audience to the King. Wait until tomorrow, he is told. He has run out of funds, he has nowhere to spend the night, so he sets camp on the sod outside: starts a fire, and sits, and thinks. He thinks of dragons and shooting stars. He thinks of his mother, and his father, a storybook princess, and goddesses, demons that maybe were and could be.
It’s where Zelda meets him, for the second time in this life. For him, that is.
“Do you remember me?” she asks. His silence is answer enough. “You seem a little far from home,” she amends.
In this era her eyes glitter a sweet lemon-gold, and she sports a dress the hue of pulped mulberries. Smoothly, she adjusts the strap of her sash: a plain white thing topped with a drooping hood that’s down and swallows up her shoulders.
“It’s Zelda,” she introduces herself, for the first and thousandth time. “Princess Zelda. But don’t tell that to anyone you might see, alright? I’m not supposed to be here, and I’ll get in trouble if I’m found. Not that I'm doing anything wrong, mind you," she adds hurriedly. "I just wanted some peace and quiet. To get away from it all.”
Another runway, he thinks to himself. He files that thought away and nods.
“You don’t seem very impressed,” Zelda comments.
“I guess not,” he says evenly.
“A boy of few words, are you?”
He pauses, then nods again. “You could say so.”
It was rainy back home, in Lanayru. As he now discovers, it is also rainy in central Hyrule. A mixture between the blowing gales of Akkala and the thin drizzles of Faron. He’s taken shelter under an outcrop of rock, inside the palm of a crevasse, and Zelda’s on the outside, opposite him, sitting cross-legged in the rain.
“How much do you know about the Zora?” she broaches.
“What do you mean?”
Once upon a time, there were and will be Zora. Think of them like fish, Zelda explains, except fish don’t have two arms and two legs, and they most definitely can’t walk on those aforementioned two legs and breathe in air and talk. There you have it, a Zora. Zora age differently from Hylians. They hatch from eggs and live out their infancies as tadpoles, in a matter of months, before they grow into their true bodies. What you might call their adolescent years then stretch on for many decades, until they have their first growth spurts, and only then can one be considered an adult. Thereafter, they live for many centuries, even millennia. More than any of Hyrule’s other peoples.
She reaches out with her hand, and raindrops collect in the creases of her palm, pooling into wobbling beads. “Some Zora,” she says, “will live to be older than the mountains themselves. Water always wins over stone.”
She’s a million years old, the princess is, and yet also sixteen. She’s smaller in stature than even him. She’s seen a hundred different epochs and yet nothing of the world beyond the halls of her father’s castle. She’s a princess, and a goddess, and also just a girl basking in the rain.
He asks her how it would feel to be so long-lived.
“It’s not a blessing. The Zora, they learned to grow numb to the rhythms of the world to tolerate the length of our lifespans. To see all the creatures of the land live and wither in what’s for us a blink of an eye. It’s the only way to bear it. That’s why their priests worship Nayru—She who laid down the foundations of physical law, of the fundamental and invariant—above the other Goddesses. Why they value memories and stories so dearly. Why, at times, they might seem detached from the passing rhythms of the world. And even then, they are still able to seek solace in the company of their own people.”
“So—if the goddesses are real and immortal—and they can feel like we do…”
The princess stops this time. She looks up, and scans Link over with amber-glittering eyes, once, twice, thrice, then she cracks a smile. A different smile from the lighthearted and polite air she's sported till now. This smile is more sincere, in a way, and smaller, solemn and sadder.
“It’d be a rather lonely life, I’d imagine.”
“Have you ever thought of resting?” she broaches to her hero, one day. “Just … putting down your weapons, and letting it all go. Letting others take over the fight.“
“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” Link answers.
No, Zelda supposes, he would not understand. That’s why she didn’t give him the choice, in the Sacred Realm, once upon a lifetime. Made the choice for him, instead. She thought it would be for the best. She thought it would grant him peace. She thought it would set him free.
Then, the vanishing fairy, the falling moon. A child trapped in an adult’s body, then an adult trapped in a child’s. She really should have known better. Lost and long-remembering is not a kind fate. She knows that all too well.
There was also a deep and buried part of her, a spiteful part of her—one she’ll never admit to aloud—that perhaps, just perhaps, knew precisely what she was condemning him to. That wanted him to remember. Wanted him to be lost, as well. Zelda went to Hateno, once, when she was young and her mother was still alive and her memory was blurry. Of that southbound journey she remembers faint snatches. Catching crabs in shallow pools, plucking seaweed from salt-burnished rocks, digging up seashells from thin gravel. Running and running with sand between her toes and the sun at her back. The crash of foamy waves upon a Necludan seashore. Unimportant details, all of those were. The important detail was the porgy on a sunbaked boulder. It had fallen, half-eaten, from the claws of an osprey, and then it was flopping on the boulder, and it was still alive. A gaping rend had been ripped out of its side, and Zelda could count sand grains and bits of shattered rib bones in the mangled muscle, embedded like buckshot within its lacerated offals. The gills, fluttering; the heart, pulsing feebly. The porgy was staring at her with a single eye, glazing over, and if fish could be said to show emotion, Zelda would say the porgy was irate at her in its final moments. No, not irate. Resentful. In the irrational sense. In the sense of a dying creature wishing to bestow its pain upon the entity beholding it with such innocent curiosity. The intrusive thought of punting a child who has done nothing wrong, off a cliff, for the simple crime of being happy when you are miserable.
Then her father came over, and took up a rock, and put the fish out of its misery.
So goes the olden myth of a goddess who stole flame for humanity. Who was chained for her crime to a rock on a mountain and cursed to be flayed open, liver devoured nightly by an eagle. She wonders if she is meant to be the goddess on the rock, the fish flayed open and laid bare for the hero to see. She wonders if she was the same as that fish, wishing for another to join its company.
She should know better. She should be better. Zelda is a goddess reborn. Zelda is the princess of peace, the sacredly-anointed purveyor of wisdom. But as she has found, wisdom is a rather nebulous and frankly fruitless quality: its cultivation a barren pursuit, the cosmos markedly lacking of those seeking its gentle counsel. The Universe is a cynical place. The Universe is a bitter place. The Universe is in bed with its ironies. To attempt to make sense of its insensate rules is folly incarnate. A father ate his own children to forestall his foreseen overthrow. A usurping god gouged out his own eye and hung himself from a tree for a glimpse of the future. A princess carved time asunder to grant her hero peace, just to doom her kingdom threefold. To steer the wheel of time is to flirt with the bleeding-sharp edge of insanity.
In her next life, she meets another fish.
It’s summer when she is catapulted from that life back to her original time, back to Central Hyrule. After almost an entire life spent under the rain, under the tropical sun and ocean brine, the cool heat of the Plateau is a welcome respite. A dry warmth that creeps like the touch of a soft and sundried towel into her bones.
“Hyrule Castle,” her sworn knight tells her in explanation: ever the helpful guide, even through scrambled time. “You came here because you wanted to look over the castle one last time.”
They’re in the ruins of her once-upon-a-bedroom. Here, the shredded remnants of her bed. There, hanging from a pole by the gaping hole in the wall: her used-to-be curtains, now reduced to roughshod tassels. She counts her table (collapsed), the crushed remains of her inkpots and flowerpots, her chairs (surprisingly intact), her bookshelf (half-toppled, half-folded upon itself). She has surveyed this space twenty-nine times already after the Calamity, by this visit, and she has catalogued every corner of it quite extensively. She knows the layout better than the insides of her palms, the angles of her face, she knows it as well as she knows the topology of Link’s face. She knows the castle, a million iterations of this castle, like an extension of her own body.
“Sometimes,” she muses to her knight, “I wish I was never a princess.”
So it happens that she is not a princess in that past life. Nor for that matter is she afflicted with the name Zelda. She is born Tetra, a wailing baby on a full moon’s tides, a speck of flesh and bone castaway over the ocean that swallowed her foremothers’ homeland. She is a creature of the ocean rather than a dweller of dry land. She learns to swim soon after she pieces together how to walk, when she’s three, when she tumbles through the deck railing and patters then clings to the rudder of her mother’s ship, with sharks circling beneath her kicking feet. It’s her first close brush with death. She has no father she can remember. It’s possible he died. It’s possible he never knew of her existence. Her mother is the misfit captain of a crew of misfit rabblerousers, and she explodes into fine mist when the gunpowder barrels set off just a smidge too early, and so it happens that Tetra succeeds her mother at the tender age of ten. She is not even aware she carries the blood of the Goddess until she meets the ghost of the long-drowned king—as it turns out, he’s been a boat, Link’s boat, this whole time—and he is her something-something removed great-grandfather, he says, and in truth it impresses her little. It could never impress her when she has been her own foremother and her own many-times-removed after-daughter. It impresses her even less, the reveal of the Triforce—her necklace flares from gold metal to gold-plated wisdom—nor when she is shucked out of her sailor’s fit and shoved into petticoats and finds herself named the princess of legend. Nor when Link is named the hero of the parable, successor of the Hero of Time. (The boy who sought his sister on the high seas would never get along with the boy who was a fairy: conflicting personalities, she'd know, she’s speaking from personal experience.) All too predictable. Then the abduction by Ganondorf.
“I coveted that wind, I suppose,” the once-demon king, now an old and tired man, says to her hero. Then, to her: “Of all the souls in Hyrule, I thought you would understand.”
He is a flayed fish, like her: and that makes two of them, two flayed fish in this vast and lifeless ocean. He steals the might of the goddesses and wishes upon a three-pointed star for the lush velds of a lost land. For fortunate winds to grace those lands once more. And it would be the death of them two, Zelda thinks, two wounded and cruel fish deluded enough to believe they could ever rule over these beautiful lands, hospitable to all but them. Then the king comes and condemns the first fish to death, and beseeches the second fish to live another day. The ocean closes its hungering maw. The man who was a fish in an arid desert, and now a fish in a drowned desert, he laughs and cries. She’s not sure who’s the villain in this story. If there is even a true villain. Or if they are but fish shackled to saltwater currents, birds trapped in the wind. Slaves to fate. Slaves to their nature. The frog eats the bug, and when the frog dies the bug eats the frog.
The man who was once a beast, who once yearned to be a god. Cursed to be the coveting heart to the princess’ mind, the hero’s soul. He dies with the hero’s sword in his skull, and his corpse turns to stone. So it happens.
In our present life, Zelda marries her knight the next year. At age eighty-four, she dies rather undramatically from a peanut snorted the wrong way. Link already passed the previous year. It was peaceful. He slipped away in his sleep. Her funeral is attended by her children, and her children’s children. Three hundred years later, another Zelda heeds her warning of the returning flood, and builds a great ark, and saves the people of Hyrule when the ocean rises to extinguish a kingdom engulfed in the flames of war. She is happy when she finds out. She smiles as she walks into that life, onto that ship. Then she throws up her breakfast, up and over the rails. In this newest life, she’s seasick. So it happens.
In one yet-to-come world, where palaces will be erected with crystal and metal, chariots pulled without horses, where humanity builds mechanical dragons and rides them into the stars: there, she will write another article. “One is all, all is one,” she will scrawl as the first line: some memorable quote from a woman on a talking pane of glass. Matter and energy, space and time, you and the greater universe, the borders all blur away. There is no divide, only aspects of a greater whole, and you glimpse flashes of that wholeness. Propel yourself through it. Like a swimmer rushing not through water but through the very fabric of spacetime, reality rippling and bending like a gravity well and you’re the singularity beyond the event horizon.
She is a goddess. She is a princess. She is a girl cursed to war. She is eternally old, is smaller than a mote of stardust, fragile like an eggshell, perched high and alone upon this bony limestone peak. A mythical peak. The deserted abode of long-forgotten gods. Now it’s nothing more than a barren and cloudless crag with the sun beating down far too harshly for her liking. Burn bright, burn fast. You aren’t remembered for how you live. The myth of you comes from how you die. Except she can’t die, won’t ever die, not permanently.
The demon dies and is reborn. The hero dies and is reborn. The hero dies when he and the princess are both seventeen with a hole blasted in his spine, and she carries him to that tomb that is also a shrine, and prays not to the goddesses but the ancient peoples who built machines to rival the goddesses: begs for their aid in bringing him salvation. She doesn’t know why. She knows how the story ends. How all the stories have started, how they will all end. It’s muscle memory, she supposes.
“You must flee,” Impa tells the princess, so Zelda shakes her head.
“No,” and Zelda says it simply, like it’s destiny.
She wades back to Castle Town. She wades on bare feet, in a broken gown, on broken and dying land. She walks alone. She walks among the dead and dying. She walks, and she is all, she is enough. She is a Sheikah. She is a pirate. She is a warrior. She is a dragon, soaring high in the clouds, and it is like a waking dream. She is Zelda.
Swords shatter. Arrows scatter. Demise’s servants burn to cinders with but a whisper of her touch. Castle Town burns like a grieving hurricane, and she is the eye of the storm. The corpses of her people, kindling on the purifying fire. She kills beasts of metal, then all of a sudden beasts of shadow, then beasts of salt and wind. The souls of the dead, marching with her. One in two, she will remember forever, in the era of Twilight. Two in three, in the era of the Hero of Time. Three in four, for the era of Wind, and equally so in the era of Sky. Nine in ten, in the era of Calamity. A chaplain sings on the rooftops as he beholds her arrival. Goddess, he proclaims her. Light from the dawn of time. He was speared through the chest by a moblin. He smiles as she passes him, and shuts his eyes forever.
Calamity senses her approach. But he is only a fish in a bowl, and she is the other fish, and in this kingdom there is only space for one to rule. In that secret tomb underneath the castle, the shrivelled corpse of a spiteful man twitches in its slumber, falls through a dream of death and shadow, while above the Princess forges a cage for the demon from the hopes of her fallen kingdom, and enters within, and shuts the door, throws the key away. So it happens.
So the fires die, and the corpses rot, and the bones vanish underneath that promised lush veld, while the wind hums its well-worn lullaby over that makeshift grave. A hymn of death, for the aftermath of deaths.
“Do you remember them?” she asks the hero, one hundred years later. And the hero thinks, and thinks, until he settles on an answer.
“Not enough,” he says, and the princess finds she cannot say it any better.
Once upon a time, a princess, and a hero, over the tombs of their long-gone people. There is a talking bird, somewhere over her shoulder, writing a poem; then further down, little mounds of dirt, rows and columns of them, like termite nests. Before her, there is a shovel, then a wheelbarrow, covered with a bundle of muddy cloth. Therein lay bones. Therein lay memories. She wishes she would know their lives. She wishes, beyond all wishes, that she could carry who they were. But she is Zelda, only Zelda. She waves away her hero’s hand and takes up the handles and begins to walk, a fish learning to swim on earth, in the air, under the sun and the blue sky. So it happens.
Behind her, with the wind, the bird begins to sing.