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“I am not Link. Link is dead.”
He can feel his heart pounding in his chest, a staccato rhythm that reverberates throughout his bones.
The Hero. The Hero. They were looking for the Hero.
The one named Sky straightens up, alarmed, as all eight pairs of eyes are turned on him. “What? What do you mean, dead?”
He places a hand over his chest, tries to calm the fluttering of his heartbeat. “Link… the Hero… he died a century ago.”
Link died a century ago and left the world to rot.
Alarm changes to confusion, as he’s gripped with the urge to run, run, run. “Wait, but- your name is Link.”
“No. I- I am not him. I am not the Hero.” His fingers itch to grab the Sheikah Slate again, to run away from this conversation with these… these strangers. “Hyrule has no Hero.”
Some of the travelers look between each other, and he rolls his shoulders, trying to ease the tension that’s built up in his body. Tries to focus on the buzzing of the Faron Jungle around him, the squawking of the birds and the humming of the insects and the rushing of the river’s water.
“I think we’re going to need a bit of an explanation. Your name is Link-”
“I am not Link,” he hisses. “Link fell a hundred years ago in the Great Calamity. I shared his name, but that is it. I am not him.”
“I’m sorry, but what’s the Great Calamity?” The brown-haired traveler--Hyrule?--pipes in, peering from behind the one in the red shirt. “That doesn’t sound good.”
the sky is black and choked with malice and smoke, he can’t breathe but he needs to run they need to get somewhere-
He digs his fingernails into the palm of his hands, tears his gaze away from the travelers and looking northwest, past the spring, towards the emancipated husk of Hyrule Castle.
“The Great Calamity was just that. Calamity.” He closes his eyes, focuses on the breeze that brushes from the nearby mountains. “All of Hyrule, ravaged by Calamity Ganon. Many lives lost. Link, the Hero, fell in battle protecting the Princess.”
She was so bright. So warm.
The strangers are silent. Stunned, if he had to guess. He doesn’t look at them. Doesn’t want to see the expressions on their faces.
“What happened after that?”
“The Princess sealed Ganon away for a century. Hyrule rebuilt. Regrew. Nature took back what was hers. It was only a few months ago that the Calamity was vanquished.”
“Who vanquished it?”
“Princess Zelda.” He may have been the one to fight Calamity Ganon, but… if these people were thinking that he’s someone he’s not… No. Better to keep it a secret.
Link was the Hero, but he died. He was just the one to finish the job. That didn’t make him a hero.
“Oh, come on, you can’t think we’re that stupid,” the red-shirted traveler snaps, stepping forward. “Someone other than the Princess had to fight this- Calamity Ganon or whatever. And I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say that it was you.”
“Maybe I did. That does not make me the Hero. The Hero has been dead for a century.” Link died in a graveyard of bodies, metal and bone alike, with the hopes and the dreams of every citizen Hyrule resting on his shoulders. He died in a metal graveyard and the person who came out of the Shrine of Resurrection was merely a replacement.
Link died a century ago. Why can no one seem to accept that? He’s, well, himself. Not Link. Not the echo of a dead hero.
In an effort to escape the conversation, he grabs the Sheikah Slate and taps through it for some wood, adding another log to the fire to keep it going for a little bit. The fire consumes the wood greedily, flames crackling and sparks popping in the makeshift firepit the travelers had constructed.
The traveler named Sky steps forward, drawing a sword from his back.
No, he realizes a moment later. Not just any sword.
“Do you recognize this?” He asks, holding out the Master Sword, who chimes softly in his hands.
“Of course I do. Everyone does.” Well, almost everyone. But that one particular traveler had a torch in place of a brain. “The sword that seals the darkness, wielded by the Hero. But, as I know it, she is currently sleeping in Korok Forest.”
She had cooperated with him, long enough to rid the castle of Ganon and pretty much every guardian within a twenty-mile radius of the castle. But their relationship was merely transactional; she needed someone to wield her in place of Link, and he needed a weapon strong enough to fight against the culmination of hate itself.
“I have already introduced myself as Sky. And I’m the first Hero of Hylia, and the first wielder of the Master Sword,” the hero says, still holding out the sword. “All of us here are Heroes from different times in Hyrule, brought together by the Goddess herself to chase down a monster known as the Shadow.”
“I doubt our meeting is pure coincidence,” Time continues, and he crushes a stick between his fingers. The man, either oblivious or uncaring, moves on. “It seems Hylia wishes for you to join us as well.”
He closes his eyes. Thinks of Hylia and her golden light, Hylia and her presence at his statues, Hylia and her failed child.
“Why me?” He asks, truthfully, and tosses the stick into the fire. Stares into the beautiful, writhing flames, just had he had done so long ago when he built a pyre for every soldier that died in that plain outside the fort, the hero included. “I am not Link, nor do I wish to be. I am not a Hero, nor do I wish to be like him.”
(Picture this; you are told you are a hero. That the fate of the land and its people rests on your shoulders.
Picture this; you are told that, a hundred years ago, you failed.
Picture this; you are told that you failed, and that the land suffered and lives were lost and your best friends died because of that. People that were so significant that, to this day, their absence still affects every major settlement in the city, the loss of their lives leading to a matching loss in the whole community.
You are told that you had a job, one job. And you died. And you died and you failed and everything went to shit because of it. And you lost your kingdom and your friends and the worst part is you don’t even remember them. You can’t even mourn them properly because you don’t know them. How can you mourn someone you don’t know?
You can’t, which makes it worse when you’re told that one of them loved you, and she thought you were going to save her from certain death and you didn’t because you failed. And everyone she ever loved blames you for it and it means nothing to you because she loved you and you remember nothing more than her name.)
If he must go, he will. But he is not Link. He is not the failure who died in a field of metal corpses with the tears of the goddess’ failed child falling upon him.
Impa called his loss of memory a blessing. That is the only thing about Link that they had agreed on. He did not fight and battle his way across Hyrule, doing the job the Hero failed to do, just to be called him.
“Then if you don’t want to be, we won’t make you.”
Wild looks up at Time, and there’s a reflection there in his singular, undamaged eye. A reflection, but more than that, acknowledgement. Understanding. Even though Wild does not know this man that well, there is a shared understanding that passes, silently, between them.
“You do not have to be a Hero. Just a hero. One whose willing to fight for others. Does that make sense?”
Yes, Wild thinks, watching as the Master Sword is returned to her sheath. It does.