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Chapter Text

PROLOGUE

Ten Thousand Years Before the Upheaval

“Stupid, stupid girl.”

The thick consonants felt good punching off her tongue, the curse blotting out the glen’s chorus of cicadas and hidden songbirds. She pressed her temples between her palms, her nails raking against her scalp as the afternoon replayed itself on loop in her head. This wasn’t the first time this particular boulder had served as her throne, a sole surviving witness to her private curses and muttered thoughts. Beyond Rauru and Sonia’s Palace gardens and gazebo, this tucked-off nook was just far enough away from the monarchs and guard shifts and constructs manufactured to fret. It was the perfect place where she could scream and curse and cry outside of their purview, without being away so long that they began to notice and wonder and want to know, oh sweet Zelda, what’s the matter? Don’t you know that we’re always here to listen? You shouldn’t worry, all will be just fine?

She could still feel the strain in her cheeks from tugging her lips up into a smile, her bobble-head nodding at Rauru and Sonia’s reassurances because that’s what they expected her to do. In the two years since plummeting into their world she had come to suspect her place in their esteem. Hinted with the reassurances that were always a little too fast to pass their lips; small deferrals promising to pick up a question at a later time that never came. The answer to this problem lies in study…for this reason, and others, I want him close…

She’d sensed her role; this afternoon only confirmed it.

There was nothing to worry about. She had swallowed Rauru’s assurance like bitter medicine, not because she believed it, but because she knew that they wanted her to. 

They didn’t want to hear that Lord Ganondorf’s intentions were insincere because they had already decided his depths for themselves, independent of her council. If they believed that she was right, that he was capable of much more than petty antagonizing in their burgeoning kingdom, it would mean they might lack the capability to stop him. Which was, in the glaring blur of their light, impossible. They had the Stones, the strength, the very alignment of goodness on their side.

She could not make them see. They could not comprehend the mindless infection of a thousand Guardian heads swiveling in blind obedience to malice’s will, destroying a world on behalf of which no divinity saw fit to intercede. Of course Rauru could keep an eye on his latest pledge, trusting his power and influence to keep such an outlandish, outlying threat at heel. Everything had to be okay because they had never known the alternative.

And it didn’t matter that she had felt that same ripple of hatred slamming its knee to the Palace stone thrum against her heart for a hundred years. Or how many others outside of herself had risen and fought and schemed and given all they were to halting a threat they’d chosen to heed, only to be ground to dust by hatred's arc of might. The Sheikah, the Champions, these alternate entities must have been flawed, just as she was. They did not have the talent and foresight of the Zonai. They would be blessed because they always had been. 

Why should they think otherwise? Even she, even she herself, did nothing but nod and smile to their assurances, because being disagreeable felt abominable in the wake of their confidence. What was another hundred years, another thousand, another ten thousand if it meant her hosts would be spared the uncomfortable glare of offense?

Unable to reach home and impotent in correcting the past. She could practically hear Hylia’s laughter as she beheld her least favorite daughter once more, cursing her with the blessing of foresight. “You’re as worthless as everyone else,” she muttered, digging her sandals into the fertile, unscarred earth, the Zonai stone bracelets rattling like chains.

“No wonder you’re so sweet-natured to the rest of the world. You save your wrath for yourself,” a voice snaked into her tiniest corner of the world, sending her crying out in surprise as her spine shot her up like a cannon. A self-satisfied chuckle punctuated the Gerudo King’s carefully chosen entrance, and she didn’t need to turn to see the smirk shaded with a narrow-eyed stare, fixing down his impeccably sharp nose with the force of an archer tracking a skittish doe in his sights.

The eyes that had wandered everywhere in the Throne room save on Rauru as he droned on about honor and fealty, first lingered on Sonia, glazing over with tedium bordering on contempt before locking on her. She’d met them a moment, the sharp, fearless glint of gold nearly making her start in its naked boldness. Sending her own focus slanting sideways just to avoid being caught noticing. 

“This is all the evidence I’d need to implicate you in a threat,” she spoke, keeping her voice even as her fingers curled around her rock. 

“Does an oath of fealty not grant me the right to move about the Plateau of my own volition?” Ganondorf challenged, still behind her, making no move to cross her sights. “Or is your mere vicinity sacred territory, my Lady? You’ll have to grant me a measure of grace, if your infinite wisdom would allow it. Your people’s customs are strange and overwhelming to this bumbling outsider.”

“There is a difference between crossing paths and sneaking in unannounced,” she pointed out, refusing to turn, to give any validity to his presence. “I can’t imagine our cultures are so different that you’d be unaware of the two.”

“I made myself known as soon as I got a moment in edgewise,” he claimed. “You’ve been so intent on berating yourself, it’s difficult to find an opportunity’s peace.”

“You’ve been watching me.” she said, the words sounding foolish as soon as she’d spoken them. Not so much an accusation as a realization, slipping out loud. 

“Only because it seemed rude to interrupt.” A weariness sanded the edges of his tone, fatigue she recognized almost as well as the contempt. The faintest hint of a sigh as his presence shifted, quieted, taking on a trace of regret. “I did not see another way we’d have an opportunity to talk. Not freely, at least.”

Maybe he does feel misplaced , that small, sweet voice inside her tugged. Maybe you’re wrong, and that’s not hatred vibrating off of him like current, only your biased suspicion implicating a man who’s been nothing but cooperative to your side.

That doubt…that simpering weakness she couldn’t shake, even now, after everything she’d learned and endured. If she was so right all the time…why didn’t anyone believe her? Wouldn’t she have authority if she deserved it?

The uncertainty wafted beneath Ganondorf’s nose, freeing his hands from their snug fold against his mighty chest, squeezing her bare shoulders. “You spoke to Rauru against me,” he whispered into her ear as fact. There wasn’t a whiff of question, nothing muffling the statement he did not present for argument, only explanation. Nor of anger, only acknowledgment. A strange tendril of guilt teased her stomach like an enchanted vine, its spores clouding away the iron-clad certainty that had shored up in her solitude.

“Your vow seemed insincere,” she said, practically an apology.

“Insincere?” He tsked, his thumbs gliding over her knotted shoulder blades as he spoke. “I could say the same thing about you, my Lady. You feign tolerance in my presence and spew venom in my absence. My fealty was predicated on conditions,” he went on, his breath tickling the short hair grazing her neck. “Conditions I’m starting to wonder whether Rauru is willing to uphold. Especially considering such…hostile counsel.”

“Rauru doesn’t take my counsel,” she said, an absolute that shrank her even further. 

“And why is that, Lady Zelda?” He asked with a self-assured squeeze.

Tell him to take his hands off of you.

He’s only being polite. 

Why are you so adversarial?

“I’m only Queen Sonia’s niece,” she said, the lie flowing naturally after two years of living within it. “I don’t have the experience to advise a King on his Kingdom.”

“Is that what he tells you?” Ganondorf’s voice dropped somehow lower, scarcely a tone and more of a rumble. “You see, I think,” he went on without urging, “that a chorus of opinions and experience that do not echo my own enriches any decision I might make. A throne has many blind spots,” he went on, dragging his fingers along the back hem of her dress as he stood, his katana rattling as his grip naturally settled back against it. “He might do well to wonder why a Hylian’s niece sees nothing but a monster.”

“I don’t see a monster,” she said reflexively, leaping back to her feet, her hands shaking with the need to smooth whatever rift she accidentally opened. Her fear was like a stain blotting onto Rauru’s robes. What could she say for certain about the shadows glimpsed before the fall? How could she leap from a corpse mummified to dust to a man willing to bend his own royal knee to quell the discord?

Because you’ve known evil beyond carnage, beyond death. Because it seeped into your cells, probed into your heart—because darkness possessed you just as surely as your light held it back.

If he had wished to hurt her, he could have done so by now. Malice did not stand on formality, arguing her to death. It did not negotiate assimilation of independent territory. It did not kneel as its adversary smiled in victory. Evil was not patient.

Ganondorf shifted his weight to his left, leaning into his weapon as he examined her, relaxing into the sharp pillar he could trust. His gold, muted in the dim filtered light of the palace throne room, blazed to life in the high afternoon sun. An intricate series of chains and jewels made only for his singular form, bespoke finery that made Rauru and Sonia look like paupers with their simple jade and stone tabards, the muted fringes and tassels. Carved Hylia, with her bowed head and folded hands, would seem rapt in worship within his presence.

“Tell me then, dear Lady,” he said, taking in her whole form at once, like one tiny morsel he could swallow whole. “What do you see?”

A Secret Stone skittering across the floor, catching the torch-light. Infernal curiosity compelling her hips to bend, her fingers to snatch the treasure that was not hers to claim. The desecration of a tomb crystallized in eternal agony. Eyes ablaze at her presumption, her nerve . Power surging, protecting itself from her onslaught, tipped to action by her unholy intrusion. A sin even the Master Sword could not excuse, absorbing her punishment, decaying in her place.

She saw her failure.

She saw her fault.

He cocked his head, his stare tunneling, burrowing into the space her silence left open. “Something too awful to state, then?”

“No, I—“ she fumbled, her mind refusing an explanation as the moment yawned open. “I’m sorry, I see…this has become an awful misunderstanding, and you should think ill of me, but not of Rauru. And not of Sonia.”

That same stare held, unshaken as her ire shrank, scurrying like a squirrel back into the bushes. “This friction digs at you, doesn’t it, Lady Zelda?” he murmured, the tease wrung out from his voice. “You always trip on your own feet on the way to peace, don’t you?” He stepped closer, undetectably slow and fluid, as if the ground itself were knitting them back together. His thumb hesitated before journeying beneath her chin, tipping her face up to meet him with the slightest curl of his filed nail. He tilted his head like a bird, omitting no detail from his memory. “You spend your breath protecting those muzzling your truth rather than speaking it. What is so starved inside of you that demands the approval of those who aren’t even worthy of your respect?”

It was as if her mind went blank at the question, nesting dolls of shock splitting open as each revealed a secret deeper than the last. How did he…

He relaxed into an easy smile. “I don’t think our aspirations are so opposed, my Lady,” he said, his nail stroking her skin so gently she didn’t register the motion as separate from her breathing. “And I can see how mightily the discord weighs on you, even tempered by your nagging suspicions. If only you could let go of this vendetta,” he said with a tsk , flashing the threat of his disappointment. “Be truthful, Zelda. Does this anger and distrust make you happy?”

“No,” she breathed, reflexively.

It was what he wanted to hear. What he wished her to be.

His smile returned; she’d passed the test.

“I shouldn’t think so. Such a good girl, willing to admit it.” She sat on the edge of his talon, lost in the approval softening his topaz eyes, easing his brow as he beheld her agreement like a rare reward. 

With a quick turn he broke the spell, crunching last season’s leaves beneath his feet as his broad steps multiplied their distance before she could think to stop him. Her fingertips rose to caress the place his nail had just been, to feel the intent the sharpness coaxed into the soft underbelly of her chin, an indent she now only felt within his absence.

Chapter Text

Zelda hummed as she made her way down the hillside, catching the most magnificent glint of the sun burning out to meet the edge of the distant sea. The days were getting longer now that summer was in their sights, coaxing the Warm Saffina and Sundelions from their stubborn slumbers. Frogs and crickets echoed the excitement in her heart, singing loudly enough to wrestle the uninitiated from a deep slumber. This was Zelda’s seventh year in Hateno, however. Her seventh year home. The lullaby reverberating from the riverbed and tall grasses had grown indistinguishable from her own heartbeat.

She clutched the parcel of notepads and dog-eared books to her chest, loving the way they made her work felt like a tangible thing, a small weight she could carry back as a reminder of the day. One tether kept between the self she gave her students and the woman she melted into behind the sturdy walls. The first week or so of school was always the most challenging, with her best-laid plans sabotaged by the peppering of questions from a new pack of children flabbergasted that a princess was their teacher . And a particularly strange Princess indeed, the Light Dragon tracing invisible rings in the sky for hundreds, thousands of years, only to return against all logical sense and probability to…live on the other side of the bridge, showing them how to press and dry wild ferns. A trajectory they struggled to grasp, let alone deconstruct into a coherent inquiry. Instead they wanted peripheral details, quick facts and figures that were easy to remember and rattle off to friends, to trade as currency to brag that they knew Hyrule’s most famous figure better than anyone else. 

Eventually they grew bored of her vague answers (the only ones she had to give) and the novelty wore away into the routines of their lessons and friendship. She was just Ms. Zelda, whose most regal adornment was the occasional gifted daisy crown.

She did feel the riddle radiating every so often from the parents, though. The way one would linger after walking their child up the hill, a child far past the age of toddling or dependence, memorizing her as they stared. The way they stammered when she went to greet them at the threshold, fighting the impulse to blurt out and want to know, this…for that? Fortunately most of her charges came from families from right here in Hateno, and they’d collaged their own reasons together long ago. Knowing enough and knowing better.

This class, though. This was different. “Let’s get all your questions out in the open first,” she’d begun this first day as she did all others, trying to squeeze out the most reflexive “DO YOU STILL HAVE SCALES???” inquiries at the pass. But today, the boldest ones shooting up their hands first led off with, “is it true we’re gonna take a field trip to the ocean?” and “how many beetles will I need to find to dye my dress?” It wasn’t until lunch, when she was basking in the day’s first moment to herself in the apple tree’s shade, that she realized—this summer school cohort of Hateno children, they had all just finished kindergarten. They were six, seven at the very most. Many of them hadn’t even been born when she fell from the sky, pried from an eternal slumber from the divine hand of fate. Their lifetimes had been free of her absence, without context of a Hylian family reign. She had, at last, transcended.

Her mind wandered through the possibility, the strangeness of being nothing but that woman in the school, the one who traipses back home to the achingly handsome man with his flaxen hair streaking gold in the sunlight, tilling a fortune of bounty from the earth. Speaking of which… 

“Link?” she called, squinting at the strange lump on the roofline. 

“Oy!” he hollered back, the silhouette of an arm cutting against the last blaze of tangerine sunset. She shook her head, setting her books down next to the front door before heaving herself up onto the doorway’s shading pergola, the entrenched ivy lending a natural foothold.

“I have dinner,” he called down proudly, nudging a plate of thick cheese slices and fruit toward her as she settled down on the sun-baked thatching, the buttery leather of his gauntlets anchoring her beside him.

The fresh strawberry juice stained Zelda’s fingers as she plucked the final fruit from the plate, saving it in her grip from Link finding it first. He would give her everything, save for the last bite. Even the faithful Chosen Knight of Hyrule had a line in his loyalty. 

“We’ve had more berries this year, haven’t we?” she noted, distracting him from the now-empty dish. It had taken seasons of work turning over the dirt in the gardens left craggy and dry in their split Upheaval absences. Their homestead wedged against a cliff and across its own bridge, easy to spot with its crooked chimney but an effort to reach. A compromise, giving the townspeople and travelers a glimpse of their lives without the invitation to an interruption. A tentative, unspoken peace they’d brokered after destiny granted them the breadth to breathe. 

From here on the roof they watched the sun in its final slip, and that moment the sky flushed an emerald blaze she’d trained her eyes to catch, unblinking for almost a minute, refusing to let it crest without her. The nightly roof-ritual was a silly tradition, one she couldn’t remember now how it had begun; most likely the little cottage house had grown too hot in the summer swelter, the grass of the yard too dry. The cool air off the creek spun up and around the thatching, and the sound of hot-footed frogs and fireflies calling out to one another soothed her. The openness of the sky, the way she could trace the entire path of the moon as it shepherded in one day from the next. And still, the solid anchor of home beneath her, tethering her back to this world, this man, this life. 

“Mmm,” Link nodded, swallowing his last mouthful of cheese. “Most of the time slugs get to them first.”

“Tell me,” she nudged, dipping her shoulder into his arm. “How did you win in a race against slugs?”

He side-eyed her, his narrow eyes appraising her worthiness to hold such a secret, before reaching down between his legs for an almost-empty bottle that he held aloft in a solitary toast.

“Ale?” 

“Kakariko Pilsner,” he said, taking the last warm swill, letting the amber-colored glass dangle from his fingertips. “The only thing more irresistible to slugs than fresh berries. They love it so much, they’ll drown themselves just to stay gorged on the sweet, sugary bliss.”

“Even though they know it’s killing them.”

“Eh, as much as a slug can know anything’s killing them,” he shrugged, scraping his nail around the molded lip. “I guess drying off and facing the world again doesn’t feel worth it at that point.”

“Where’d you pick this morbid tidbit up?” she asked, a wry smile on her lips.

“Dedicated research. You’re not the only one with a library card,” he said, snatching the strawberry right out of her grip and scarfing it down before she stood a chance.

“Link!” she shrieked, pretending to pry open his lips. “That was mine!”

“Gardening tax,” he shrugged, deftly shaking her off. “You should really talk to someone in charge about that. The price of getting ahead in this kingdom’s getting out of control.”

From the stable shed below, Zelda heard her horse Storm whinny in protest, anxious at her mistress’s cries. Link’s beloved steed Epona grunted in return, beating the dirt with her hooves, berating them all for the interruption. “All right, all right!” Zelda called, nudging herself down toward the front door’s pergola. “We’re coming down, you can have your yard back.”

Link instinctively reached to grab her hand and ease her down off the roof’s slope, but she batted it away, dropping herself slowly until her tiptoes met the wood. “Unhand me at once, vile knave. I don’t consort with thieves.”

He bit back his response, savoring every moment of her awkward shimmy—the swivel of her hips, the drag of her breasts across the thatching—until she vanished down the opening into their waiting sanctuary below.

Open your eyes .

The breeze on Zelda’s exposed skin was cold, almost numbing as she stirred from sleep. She endured it as long as she could, tugging at the pillowy ostrich-down blanket with her eyelids squeezed shut, the half-dream logic insisting that as long as she kept them from parting, she could drift straight back into warm, wonderful sleep. She nudged her back closer to the left side of the bed, trying to steal a bit of Link’s radiating snugness for her own nefarious comfort. 

Open your eyes .

With a groan she squinted into the loft, the shapes and textured shadows arranging themselves into the home that was so effortlessly familiar in the light. The moonless darkness hinted at the space between much too late and much too early. She rarely glimpsed this hour; maybe a handful of times in her adult life. During her childhood, the less charitable maids and governesses that flittered in and out of castle employment had weaponized the dead of night with stories of what lurked underneath the foundation of her home, what could only find her when the moon was this high in the sky. “You don’t know why this castle is here, do you?” they taunted, an eyebrow raised at her wide eyes staring back, still so many years away from understanding.

Even here in this most familiar of places, on an evening otherwise indistinguishable from all others, something in the furthest depths of her mind twitched relentlessly, a primal command that would not be quieted. She scanned the small loft, with its desk still cluttered with her growing collection of notebooks, and pictures tracing an emerging lifetime hanging neatly from the wall. Everything was as it had been, as it should be–except, that breeze.

Straight across from the bed, the gauzy white curtains gently fluttered, like the flags standing sentinel atop each of Hyrule Castle’s spires. The loft window was wide open, letting the night spill in and over and around. The sight of the absent glass pane, swung wide from its hinge, felt like a hummingbird let loose in her heart. 

“Link,” she whispered, her hand sliding over to wrest the Hero awake. Her palm faltered, falling into the bedding’s sunken cavity, wrenching her even further out of her drowsy peace. In her periphery she caught his profile already raised, the Master Sword’s hilt within his grip. His shoulders were ribbed sharply; a startled elk in a glen. His chest was still as he held his breath, vibrating with power to strike.

“ Don’t .” A voiceless command, one huff exhaled as faint as his bitten breath, one halting syllable freezing her back in place. 

It was then that she noticed the silence. Not the familiar hum of night, punctuated with the distant stirs of busy wild creatures and the muted sound of the occasional wagon creaking down Hateno Village’s road. This soundlessness was absolute, not a rest from the day, but the absence of life itself. 

She shifted slightly forward to catch a glimpse from over the rail of the loft, but Link’s left arm raised at her waist, compelling her to stillness. 

The worn polish of his leather gauntlets was out of place here in the stripped respite of bed; a familiar presence wandered into the wrong room, scaling up the night’s unease. In the minimal space between the house’s stir and Zelda’s waking Link had yanked on his tunic and boots, the ones folded at the ready each night beside him, a hardwired habit from his earliest training as a Royal Knight. For all these years she’d found the pattern amusing, an endearing callback to a past that now felt unimaginably distant—the time before they knew each other.

In all that subsequent time, she’d yet to see him put it in practice.

In that moment, a tittering laughter cracked the emptiness. Her mind scrambled to excuse it at first; it seemed far and removed, enough to be a trick of the imagination. Maybe something down in the well—last winter she’d forgotten to seal her study up properly, and a swarm of Keese took up residence. Squirrels had a bad habit of chasing each other up and out the chimney. But in between each of her shallow breaths she could feel the throaty laughter growing closer and louder, until it rattled her eardrum. Link’s fingers ferociously gripped her wrist, until his nails scraped half-moons into her skin.

A burst of the chilling air sent the curtains sailing up toward the ceiling, drifting down again to cloak a mountainous figure radiating with a relentless red glow. His demon cat-eye slits cut through the dreamlike darkness, boring intently into the awakened Princess and her Knight.

In Hyrule Castle, Ronan struggled to stay awake. These graveyard shifts in the Entrance Hall were the worst, not even allowing him the luxury of pacing the empty Sanctum and towers in a pointless patrol. Just guard the door and its growing collection of kingdom curiosities. “The Docent Shift,” his buddies in the Royal Guard called it, laughing off his assignment amongst the lovingly restored ancient weaponry and armor greeting slack-jawed Tarrey Town families and Purah Pad-toting Gorons on holiday. His friends loved pointing out that they were out where the real action was, corralling drunks around New Castle Town and the odd Bokoblin straying too far from its cave for a local’s liking.

In truth, there were no exciting deployments any longer, and hadn’t been since Ronan and his brothers-in-arms were still in school. In their earliest memories they had watched Calamity Ganon snake through this very Sanctum, knowing nothing but the specter of ruin staining every corner of what had been, one hundred years before, the kingdom’s stronghold. Though it was hard to feel the terror that the history books described; born in the shadow of crackling malice, the seized Castle was as ordinary a sight-line as Dueling Peaks’ sever and Death Mountain’s blustery steam.

Only a few short years after the Hero and Princess brought Calamity’s mad beasts to heel, Ronan watched helplessly as a volcano of Gloom Storm catapulted the battered fortress into the sky. It seemed as if for another generation, dark horizons and unspeakable dread were made permanent. He enlisted, he trained, he was ready to die for a freed Hyrule the likes of which he’d never known.

But then, with an unseen battle of mythic dragons in the sky, the threat vanished as quickly as it had reappeared. This Hyrule of restoration and leisure had little use for any of its last lines of defense, the dangers and terrors of just seven years ago receding into a past most people seemed content to forget. The world clamored for music, and dance shoes, and champagne, and confetti. Even the sight of their uniform fell out of fashion like a candle snuffed; the clanking of metal and rivets harkening back to a not-so-distant age where even the greatest knights could fall, the most holy of blades decay like tools left in the weather. The townspeople slid their eyes when he passed to the brighter, novel things, and he couldn’t rightly blame them. He’d taken up his vocation to gift this reality to his children, his children’s children—merely expecting he’d actually have some hand in securing it.

Even Princess Zelda was rarely in the castle nowadays, putting off her accession indefinitely while the monarchy’s seat was lovingly restored only to become this testament to the past. The Royal Guard force was just as ceremonial as the last-stand cannons hauled in from the Citadel.

“When was the last time you saw her?” his parents would ask when he visited, usually on Sundays for his mother’s roasted bird and pudding supper. A question they couldn’t resist even when his answer went unchanged for months on end. She doesn’t live here, Mum , he reminded her. 

“Court should be meeting,” she tutted as his father’s lips drew tighter, just wanting to enjoy his meal without the requisite politics. “What if there’s an emergency?”

“There’s no war anymore, Mum. The chasms are closed and even the wildest monsters are almost dead. How are we going to have an emergency?” 

“That’s the best time to meet,” she said, stabbing through the crisped, salted skin. “To keep one from rising in the first place.”

“Good potatoes,” Dad would cut in, and they both rallied around the praise that distracted from the dissatisfaction, smothering it away for at least another week.  

At this hour there was a palpable spookiness within Hyrule Castle’s museum that cloaked the soaring ceiling and imposing throne, an energy fed by the storytellers and whispered legends of the evils that had manifested above this very stone. Even this collection of objects–masks and jewels and shields–hinted at an eerie purpose, and a terrible price.

Which is why the creak of the Sanctum doors sent him jumping out of his skin. 

From the parted doors emerged Princess Zelda, giggling as she side-stepped between the narrow crack the portals left, as if this was still her father’s castle and she was sneaking in after curfew. Her hair was shorter than it had been during her last visit, months ago, now in the same style depicted in so many paintings and murals and children’s art projects celebrating the Dragon Goddess’s Triumph. Her clothes too were almost identical to the hood and bodice that was deemed so iconic to recent Hyrulean history that he could effortlessly conjure them in his own casual mind’s eye. As she wore them now, seven years later, they looked strangely ceremonial, almost as if she were in costume. 

A few moments later the door opened wider, heaved by the Hero of Time who also seemed in unusually good spirits. Even with his increasing absence alongside the Princess in the seven years since The Upheaval, Ronan had found himself in close proximity to the knight enough times to brag about it. And, in fact, he’d never seen a grin like this. It was refreshing, if not a bit unorthodox. Maybe all that time holed up in Lanayru was good for him. Maybe some of his Princess’s wisdom had rubbed off on him. Maybe Ronan should look into transfers.

“Your Highness,” he said, snapping to attention. The Princess turned her smile to him, brushing her fingertips against her lips to silence the creeping laughter. “We weren’t expecting you,” he blurted out, instantly regretting the implication. This was her home after all, Hateno Village hideaway or not. 

“I’m sorry for coming in so late,” she said. “We’ve just been traveling all day and I’m exhausted. The last place I wanted to spend the night was an Inn, you know?”

“Of course, your Highness. Your chambers have been maintained.” The staff was small, now on a rotation, most of their time spent cleaning up after the museum’s tourists and keeping the vacant Castle’s dust somewhat at bay. “Would you like me to send anything up for you?”

“No no no, I’ve troubled you enough already,” she assured him, taking a long moment to examine the towering Sanctum. He hoped she was satisfied with how they’d kept it in her absence, that this minimized watch did mean… well, something. This was, after all, her legacy. Perhaps the only such purpose she’d ever been able to choose for herself. Her eyes turned to Link, summoning him forward with the slightest tic of a nod. 

The Hero followed.

Closely.

Not the six paces back of an unfamiliar bodyguard, not the three paces back of a trusted knight, not the step behind of an intimate protector. Side by side, almost touching, leaning into each other like children sharing a secret.

Ronan hadn’t had the pleasure of a conversation with the tight-lipped Hero of Time. They were only vaguely contemporaries. But if he could be certain of one thing about the legendary stranger, it was that he was not one to forget himself. Especially amongst his brethren, even if that was only a brethren of one amidst an almost-deserted castle.

The equation snapped together in Ronan’s mind and, with a loud cough, he backed himself toward the wall behind him. Link and the Princess turned just in time to see the column pedestal wobble, and the egg-shaped pottery placed atop it trembled before slipping to the stone floor.

Zelda simply watched, unmoving, as the precious vessel shattered into a thousand fragments.

Her conspiratorial giggle darkened as she turned to Ronan. “Well aren’t you the clever little patrol,” she snarled, taking a step closer to his drawn spear. She examined the pile of lavender rubble at his feet, a little tsk escaping from her lips. “That useless academic of a princess never would have let that happen, would she? Personally, I’m not one to bruise my shins to save dead people’s pottery.” She took a languid step forward, stroking her cheekbone with her fingers in a pantomime of thought. “If she were so worried about Hyrule and all of its fragile little treasures, wouldn’t she be here? Being Queen is an awfully big job to leave to the watchman.”

“YIGA!” He shouted at the top of his lungs, the curse ricocheting off the buttresses to no one. The closest reinforcement was Captain Hoz in the Guard House, taking these hours to draft out his battle histories. Another relic in the library.

She let the hollow cry fade from the rafters before speaking again, smiling as if savoring the sound. "You should feel proud," she said, "I figured we would be welcoming our true King to the throne before you puzzled out the truth. That must sting, not only watching that sharpened body go to waste, but that keen mind of yours as well. Atrophied in a job they could have entrusted to a well-armed cuckoo." She giggled again, the darkness pooling in her deadened eyes. "And yet, you keep forgiving her, don't you? Even now you can't bring yourself to question her failures, her abandonment, even as they bury you alive."

Ronan scarcely felt Link emerge behind him before the Vicious Sickle ripped his throat straight out of his neck. “Don’t worry,” his missing Princess whispered as the torchlight faded from his eyes. “This new world won’t miss you.” 

“How disappointing.” The Demon King’s voice was low as he stared down into the bed, the unnatural topaz glint of his eyes swallowing everything, reflecting nothing. His dark robe, cloaking a mountainous shoulder, did not respond to the stirring wind, and the Gerudo golden necklace hung eerily lightless against his chest. It was tempting to believe he wasn’t real at all, if it weren’t for that calculated, unmistakable voice. 

“And yet.” He shifted his weight back, giving himself enough breadth to take in the intimate space, which appeared miniature compared to his towering form. A doll’s house. His hand raised from the elegant sword at his waist, plucking one framed picture from the low bookcase to his right. It was an image Link had taken only a year before, on the beaches outside of Lurelin Village. The place they went when even Hateno became too noisy, when the necks of fashionistas and foodies craned a little too far in their direction. That morning he’d caught her around the back of the hut when she’d thought he was still sleeping, plucking herself a banana snack from a tree.

“YIGA!” He cried out, lifting up the Purah Pad fast enough to catch her befuddled reaction. “Princess Zelda, confirmed YIGA! I’ve got the evidence!” he cried, taking off running toward the water. “I’m sending it straight to the Lucky Clover Gazette!”

She shrieked, tearing after him, the pad bobbing just out of her reach, taunting her as Link kept pace just one second faster. “Give it up!” She cried as he jerked it away. 

“Come get it! C’mon, thought you wanted it!” The glint in his eye was new, a shimmering kindled over the years between ruin, flashing in the moments he knew were absolutely and only their own. It reminded her of children she’d seen, never the child she was. Certainly not the child Link was ever allowed to be.

The beach grass scratched at her bare legs and then gave way to sand that sent them both stumbling, falling out of breath with laughter. She crashed into him just inches from the tide. “MINE!” She cried victorious. “By Royal Decree!”

Before she could rise from the surf he had his hands tight around her waist, sending her falling back against him. “Mine,” he said simply, drawing her into a sun-soaked, delirious kiss. The photo appeared on her desk a few weeks after their return, the words HARD EVIDENCE scrawled onto the back. 

Ganondorf examined the image with a sneer. “And yet. So predictable. The two most powerful beings in all of Hyrule, playing house and collecting trinkets in the countryside.” The frame slipped between his fingers, the glass shattering with a feeble tink ! on the plank floor. 

The lock of his gaze returned to the two of them and their quilted island refuge, his smile gleaming with self-satisfaction. “Just like every ancestor and incarnation before you, altering the heavens themselves to bring me down but then– always then –” He paused a breath, his bared teeth betraying the rage foaming from his throat. In a blink he swallowed it back, the menacing grin back to taunt them. “You return to the smallness of your insignificant flickers in time, learning nothing of ambition. Content to let your power sink and fade back into the Depths the moment it peaks.” His specter drew closer, his voice softer. “You’ve wasted my eons of suffering.”

The Master Sword flickered beneath the Demon King’s breath, the blue light pulsating in the dark. “The Sacred Blade, forged by the Goddesses, sent through time to…sit on your nightstand? In this hovel? Of all the pathetic heroes I’ve endured, you must be the most inept.” Zelda could feel Link’s muscles tighten; her heart beating so hard within her eardrums, she could scarcely hear him whisper, “you were a weak boy who’s become a useless man.” 

And then those cursed eyes were fixed on her, not simply seeing but staring into her. “You, Princess… Princess ?” His voice quaked with derision, the word a vile curse, unpalatable on his tongue. “You refused me for this? You snubbed all I offered you to bury me alive and leave your birthright vacant, our kingdom a testament to inertia? This is what you pledged your able mind and noble hands to those doomed idiots to secure? A life that will be forgotten before your body cools in the ground you’ve forsaken?”  He reached forward, his thumb grazing her quivering lip.  “I failed to imagine you dissatisfying me so completely, Zelda.”

That faintest touch she’d entombed, not forgotten; a ten thousand year-old lament echoing in her ears as the memory electrified to life. How is it you cannot see your own power? What is it that pulls you toward those who dream of less for you…away from me?

That calloused skin barely had time to catch the warmth of her short, frenzied breath before Link’s body splintered out of her touch, lunging the full force of the glinting blade toward Ganondorf’s neck.

The burst of snaking red tendrils burst from the Demon King’s head like an explosion of fire in a barren field. His right arm shot forward, knocking the Hero out of the air and into the loft wall. The sound of crumbling plaster mingled with her scream of his name, drowned by Ganondorf’s thick laughter. Standing in the height of his potency, every capability honed and sharpened as their own had languished, their reflexes relaxing to stretch and savor. 

He’s been ready , a note of clarity rang out in her racing, panicked mind. You are not .

He leaned in closer still, so close that the mass of his chest pressed into her own, the gold and jewels of his necklace impressing through her thin cotton nightgown. “How pitiful,” he whispered straight into her ear. “You deserve so much more than this.” His thumb pressed ever so slightly, just enough to curve her bottom lip. “You always did. Haven’t you wondered why I find you like this always? So…neglected?”

Like a berry from the vine, Ganondorf plucked the Secret Stone from around Zelda’s neck, his power engorging the faintly glowing glass. Reflexively, her right hand flew up against his chest, a pulse of dormant white engulfing her wrist and bursting forward. Ganondorf grunted and stumbled back, collapsing the desk and smashing through the thin loft rail into the floor below, as she caught him an instant before his fully magnified malevolence could awaken and gather. Already she could see the licks of glowing red evil rising from below, the prize perking his true nature to life.

She’d landed a strike of luck. One she knew wouldn’t come twice.

She scrambled from the bed to the Hero, crumpled around the Master Sword on the floor. A slick of blood caked his flaxen hair, his blue eyes shaded by heavy eyelids. He pressed his weight against the sword to rise back up, but her hands firmly weighted on his shoulders. The light in her palm dimmed, dulling down into a soft triangular glow that highlighted his face in the shadows. The intense brow still cutting sharp while the cheekbones rounded kindly over the years. 

“Where is he?” Link asked through a ragged breath. 

“I was able to use the light to knock him back, but we don’t have much time. He’s already coming to. Link. Listen to me.” She pressed his temples with his head between her hands, punctuating her desperation. “He’s too strong for either of us right now.” She glanced down at the Triforce brand, quickly fading back into her skin. “I only have a tiny bit of power left, and he has the Secret Stone.” Her hands squeezed his shoulders, impressing the weight of this last possible wish. “I have to get you out of here.”

The realization lifted his eyelids, suddenly brimming with panic. “Zelda. No. No . You cannot do this. I will never leave you; I can’t.” He tried to shake off her grasp, but she only held on tighter. 

So much she hadn’t told him. Everything that was never supposed to matter. History shelved in her heart, mourned only within its cavities. 

She choked back a sob, emerging as a croaking laugh. “You know I’m right. I’m always right.” 

“Zelda–”

“If you die, Hyrule goes right along with you,” she said. He was quiet now, his mind sinking in the magnitude of this sudden nightmare. 

“But what if you die? Haven’t you thought about that? Do you ever stop to think about that?!”

She shook her head, resolute. “He won’t kill me.” 

“What makes you say that?” 

Because he needs me. Because, I need … “Because, he’ll need me to get to you.” 

A darkness crossed his stare, a cloudiness she recognized in the far-off look that crept in when she asked the wrong question, or brought up the memory she hadn’t known was meant to fade well into the past. Accidental chasms that emptied the night of its remaining conversation. “Death isn’t the only punishment, Zelda.” 

The lingering moment was elastic, stretching and holding every sacrifice and sorrow they had collected, both a brief lifetime and unfathomable millennia, pushed and pulled in the name of what they could only accomplish together. What they could only do apart.

“You can’t come find me,” she warned, leaning in close. “Not until you’ve found the way, do you understand? You will be our last possible hope. I’ll be okay. I love you, so it all has to be,” she whispered, her final kiss memorizing the meld of his lips, the comfort of his hand cradling her head and shifting through her bed of soft, golden hair. Love she had clawed through to reach, blinding out the dissent and its wobbling voice in her mind, a conduit for her force. The greatest testament to its strength, arcing reality to her will. With one last glimmer of her straining light, he vanished, replaced by the thick strokes of a rising shadow.

The callouses crushed around her neck. “You think you can shield him from who you truly are? That your delusional protection is merciful? So be it,” he said, his fingers squeezing with a feather lightness, knowing just how much air was vital. “There will be no agony for his mind to compare with seeing what you’ll become.”

I’ve missed you, Princess . The tender notion in its familiar cadence caressed her mind as his grip loosened, the corners of her vision blurring before slipping into black.

Chapter Text

With an enveloping flash of light, Link hit the ground. A clumsy fall from too high onto hard, caked dirt below. He cursed the sky as he eased himself up, raking his hands through his hair, catching dried blood and twigs in his fingers. The thudding pain in his head amplified when he pressed his palms against his skull, pain that distracted from the panic and anger scrambling his thoughts.

She had done it. Simply done it, the very same way she’d thrown herself into every other worst-case scenario that abacus in her mind catapulted her. Whether it was charging head-first into a prison of malice for a century, swallowing a stone that condemned her to a mindless limbo for a hundred centuries, or whether they should stop at an inn instead of pushing through the field at night. There was no debate, no questions once she set her torch against the writing on the wall. And tonight, the message had been clear.

You’re too weak .

Instinctively his arm whipped back behind his shoulder, grasping the Master Sword’s hilt. The spike of panic wavered for half a breath, a delirious space between a single mercy and the devastation’s totality. The weapon had made the journey. But not Zelda. 

He combed through the last words she’d impressed upon him, each an apology she offered on her knees, her cooling hand raking through his bloodied hair, thumbs pressing against the tender flesh that would certainly plump and bruise. I only have a tiny bit of power left, and he has the Secret Stone . 

Zelda’s Secret Stone. Was her neck bare when she came to him? He hadn’t noticed, not in the splinter of reality, his attention locked in her wild, searching blue eyes the only betrayal of her body, her voice’s timbre slipping into an eerie state of calm. The recent memory slipped into his imagination, watching the demon fondling at her breast in his instantaneous defeat, its fingers luxuriating in the rise of her softness. Helping itself to the bounty of her bed. 

Their bed.

Had she even considered trying to bring herself along? Or did her power only work when she was locking in her own suffering?

The sword slid out of its sheath and he let the blade wedge into the stubborn earth, leaning to bring himself up off the ground. An old man and his cane , his imagination taunted with that sadistic laughter that had broken in and infected his very soul. Blight finding its likeness stained within him, threats that echoed in the aches of his knees after too long of a day; in the sudden, sharp pain that would spike through his arm’s nerves without warning, at the scar left by its faded sever. It would have been more satisfying to overcome a worthy foe .

How cheated he must feel tonight; hardly time to curl his claws before claiming his easy victory. Link had put more effort into wrestling the tomatoes into trellises last summer than he’d expelled tonight on the one imperative of his existence. The single vow he had made in his declining life, putting off any others. Her hand, her crown, her throne, all nebulous formalities in the wake of day after quiet day. 

With a wild cry he began hacking at the grass around him, his muscles searing with impotent rage, cleaving down to the dry earth that spun and clouded in his stumbling, aimless footsteps. 

Is that all?

Pathetic.

After a few minutes he staggered back in the freshly bare knoll, and only then did he notice how remarkably high above Hyrule he stood—surrounded by imposing arches and stairwells weathered down by the constant wind whipped off the sea, rapidly overgrown as the ivy and weeds reclaimed the stones as their own. A bitter laugh arose as he realized his beloved’s power had unloaded his worthless body in the Akkala Citadel Ruins, as if even the Goddess herself wanted to properly enunciate his failure.

“Perfect,” he muttered, coming to rest against a dubious pillar. The wind whistled through the fractures surrounding him, a haunting melody as his mind ricocheted from one regret to another fear. 

Link couldn’t sense things. Whether curse or blessing tethered his blood to fate, the mantle of Hero came with no counsel from divinity, no intuition beyond what his soldier’s eyes and ears were sharpened to catch. He could pick up the soft pad of deer hooves from across a meadow, or the prickling silence that swept into their space when an intruder had crossed its threshold. But here, cast to banishment, there was no innate pulse of her spirit. Out of sight, out of the sphere of protection he’d pledged his life and heart to preserving, Hyrule’s Princess was nothing more specific than Lost.

Still, in every way he could twist this game in his head, Zelda was right; whatever Ganondorf had come back from total annihilation for, he wasn’t getting it without her. Corpses were easy to steal from; he’d shown as much with the dispatch of Sonia. A prisoner was a liability, and in rousing them instead of snuffing out their defenseless lives, he frayed the tidy edges of victory with a loose thread. 

The risk of his opposition slipping free was a price he was willing to pay, if it meant a Princess going along without a fuss.

And she wouldn’t have fussed. No, not convinced of her value. Thinking whatever leverage or prize the Demon King was after granted her a means to control him, as if this were Court and she was mediating a dispute over a planned bridge. What she didn’t seem to calculate, didn’t even seem to consider, was how vague the promise of being taken “alive” could be.

She should know that. Of all the people in Hyrule, she had to know that.

His back slid down the stone, soft from the sanding wind and velvet moss. He let his head fall against his knees, replaying that last breath before she emptied the light of her heart out into his exile. 

I’ll be okay.

How many years since The Upheaval had she woken up in bed screaming, lurching forward as if halting herself from the precipice of a giant fall? Turned a two-hour journey by horse into a full-day’s ride to avoid so much as passing a chasm, long boarded up and covered by the Restoration Crew? Hidden in the crevices behind bookcases on the rare castle visit to dry-heave and beg into his shoulder that this had to be quick, that she couldn’t breathe in here, they had to get out? 

He tried to make it okay. Bringing her forehead against his own, counting a deep breath in, another out. Doing the same in tandem as her gasping evened and her heart slowed. He’d smooth her hair and try not to forget that her presence here was a miracle. Time smoothed everything away, even wonder. Her humming as she thumbed through notebook pages, her smile seeing breakfast, the squeeze of her legs around his hips, her unquestioned closeness slipped from a marvel into simply becoming his life. 

The light shifted; resting against the pillar, he slipped in and out of almost-sleep until the sound of his name made him jerk back up. 

Linky! Link! 

From the side of the hill, Purah’s platinum bouffant bobbed, and the sight of her old friend tucked into the ruins sent her into a full sprint. Her assistant Josha followed closely behind, but held back when her mentor fell to her knees at Link’s feet. “I thought we were going…to be too late,” Purah said through short huffs of breath, reaching up to adjust the glasses slipping off her nose. “Did I mention…this hill…is really high…?” She flicked her golden goggles over her eyes, wordlessly scanning Link as if he had any valuable clues. She and Zelda were birds of a feather, certain that they could study their way out of any scrape. Find the right combination of rules, shore up the arguments, as if being correct was salvation. 

“How did you know I was here?” he asked, not bothering to fight the intrusion. She was going to get the data she wanted either way. 

“We didn’t,” she said, apparently satisfied enough in her results to re-crown herself with the goggles. “The evidence just suggested it.” She leaned back on her heels, tapping her telescope against her wrist as she narrated the evening. “I was up in the Research Lab, working on the same Luminous Stone mapping project that I’ve been doing for months.”

“There’s a definite connection between significant Zonaite deposits in the depths and Luminous Islands in the sky,” Josha broke in, humming with pure excitement. 

“Josha,” Purah hissed, cupping her hand in a wholly ineffective partition of her voice. “Time. Place. Read. Room. We’ve talked about this.” She began fiddling with her pigtails, shifting her focus to the Restless Crickets catapulting through the grass.

“As I was saying…” she went on, shaking off the interruption, “between routine scans last night, the sensors started picking up an outrageous amount of energy. Low-frequency, strange, nebulous stuff. Stuff I’ve been trying the better part of a decade not to pick up. But it was pretty tough to ignore when it just so happened to be gathering at the exact coordinates of the Hero and Princess’s house. Before Josha had time to confirm that we were seeing a surge of gloom manifesting on your front step, there was a second pulse–except this one, this was the highest frequency range I’ve ever seen. Just a few moments later, that reading repeated itself, riiiiight…here,” she said, landing a playful boop on his nose. “After that, we didn’t need a telescope to see what was happening.”

“Why… what happened after I was sent here?” 

A weary glance passed between the two researchers. Finally Purah nodded, taking the Pad from Josha. “There’s a caravan, a full cavalry of Yiga and deflected Gerudo warriors. They call themselves the Varina.” She turned the screen to face Link, loaded with an image of the swarm galloping across West Necluda. A cavalcade of Yiga on hovercrafts and carts made up the rear flank, looking laughably ramshackle next to the equestrian warriors that preceded them. Ganondorf led the charge from his titan of a black, strawberry-maned steed, flanked by women riding in black robes, their faces obscured by silk masks, a somber style that recalled the traditional Sheikah style. Behind him, pulled by two blanketed horses, was a golden carriage gilded with roof turrets and curtain tassels. That heady cocktail of rage shot through him once more, and he pushed the image back into Purah’s hands. 

“How did they get out of Hateno without being spotted?” Link asked, forcing himself to be tactical, even if the words felt divorced from his wretched, racing mind.

“What do you mean?” Josha gasped, anxiously pulling at her braids. “Of course they were spotted. They just…” She stopped herself, not needing to see the sharp glare through Purah’s red-rimmed glasses.

“They were spotted. They were confronted. Quite a few villagers heard the ruckus and came out to help,” Purah explained in an even tone. “They didn’t last long. It’s a wonder that he left the town before razing it. Maybe they knew that no one was going to outrun them? And if they could, for what? To alert that one guard they keep around to chase the mice from eating away at ancient royal robes? Gan must be chomping at the bit to get into Hyrule Castle.” She paused a moment, then tipped the Pad back, and tapped her elegant nail against the carriage in the photo. “Do you have any idea about what might be in here?”

Her name jammed in his throat, and he could only nod at Purah’s foregone conclusion. “She sent me here before they left. It was all she had the strength for, after pushing him back long enough to save me. Because I couldn’t stop him.” His stare shifted out to the horizon, where daybreak bathed the kingdom in warm, blossoming light. 

“Well of course you couldn’t stop a full rage-spiked Demon King. Your biggest battle in the last seven years has been with ChuChus attacking your pumpkin crop.” Her voice was balmy and he could feel the sincerity, even if he was far beyond soothing. “And the Princess…it’s astonishing that she was able to send you this far, this fast. I thought we’d find a much bigger mess up here splattered on the stones, if I’m going to be honest.” 

“It doesn’t make sense,” Link tried to argue out of this reality. “I watched him explode in the sky.” 

Purah pursed her lips, tapping the telescope against her chin. “Who, exactly, did you see explode in the sky? Because I don’t think it was that man on the horse.”

“The Demon Dragon. Exploded. In the sky.” As much as he appreciated the wise scientist and her expert analysis, the last thing he needed was her Patient Teacher act. “During the battle, Ganondorf swallowed his Secret Stone to transform so he could…he didn’t want to…” 

He halted, recounting the story aloud for the first time since it had happened. It had been a jolt at the time, that called paw grasping up to tear the power straight off his face, and Link felt the suffocation of an inevitable fate as he clutched the vibrating sword, the demon’s eyes flaring with the netherworld’s prism light. Had Ganondorf known the trade as Zelda had, or was it a muscle spasm of a man crushed in the jaws of defeat? Why would he sacrifice himself for a vendetta that was said to die along with his mind? Where and how was his will allowed to exist and flourish despite the price the Stone exacted? Something of Zelda had remained, despite all she had been told. 

“I think we’ve all been happy to think for the last seven years that destroying the beast meant destroying the man,” she said. She stood, shielding her eyes for a moment as she noticed the sun cresting near Death Mountain’s summit. “We shouldn’t linger here. Once Ganondorf reaches the Hyrule Castle this afternoon, all of your friends are going to have to start laying low—at least if they want to keep their heads intact.” 

Once he reaches the Castle. Another inevitability that made his stomach lurch, an implication he hadn’t bothered to parse amidst the visions of Zelda’s surrender. Beneath the fall of the woman was that of its town, brought back to life from ash; the Castle as remembrance and its rotation of devoted guards warding off any attempts to steal the Royal Family’s artifacts and jewels. Layers of people who would suffer all over again, deaths yet to tally, aching strides forward flattened back to the earth as he crumpled, worthless and bloodied, against the loft wall’s baseboards.

Purah winked at her sinking friend as his mind spiraled down, a playful tic that seemed deranged in his sorrow’s wake as she gave his knee a playful slap. “Come on,” she insisted, yanking his wrist with enough strength to shock him out of his head. “Let’s go find some higher higher ground.” 

“Mom! Mom!” Karena poked her head over the counter, sliding her tattered copy of Hyrule: An Abridged Compendium open to another faded page. Like every other in the book, she had looped entire sentences in red pencil, underlined passages and marked big, sloppy stars in the margins. When you star every page, they stop being special , she’d tried to patiently explain to the 11-year-old girl. But it was no use. To Karena, everything was special.

Her mother Cara paused, letting the soapy rag rest in a sticky track of last night’s ale. “Yes, darling?”

“Do you know what a hookshot is?”

“I can’t say that I do.” 

“Look, it’s this,” she said, pointing to a faded picture of a hooked chain grappling through the middle of a forest, sinking into the soft bark of a mossy pine. “You can use it to pull yourself up from one place to another. See? Like you can jump from tree to tree without letting your feet touch the ground. That way you don’t have to touch lava.”

“I don’t think there are many trees around lava,” Cara pointed out. 

“They say the Hero had one, way back,” she said. “That’s how he was able to get through enchanted woods and places like that.”

“Hylians say a lot of things about a lot of ages,” Cara muttered, picking at a lodged lump of gunk with her fingernail. She could vaguely recall, in the distant echoes of her heart, the same spark of wonder that used to crackle when her teacher traced the long line of Heroes and Princesses back up to the Goddess and sky. Marveling at the menagerie of mythic creatures and monsters, trying to puzzle out what had happened to the vanished cities and civilizations that had, in theory, tread the same ground she called home. The color and wonder had faded by the time the truth revealed itself in a volcano of gloom raining rubble and rock from above to pummel the small life she’d built in the Castle’s shadow—each epoch of this doomed kingdom may have been assigned a savior, but none of them had succeeded in salvation.

“You don’t think it was his?” she asked, mirroring her mother’s skepticism in the tight draw of her mouth, looking suddenly, achingly like her father.

Cara smiled in spite of herself. “I’m just saying. If the olde Hero of Tyme really had everything they keep in that museum, how would it all fit in his knapsack?”

Karena blinked back, unmoved. “There were lots of Heroes, you know. If you spread all that stuff out over a hundred thousand years, it can fit in a bunch of different knapsacks.”

“Of course, darling,” she said, an easy concession.

“Are you almost done?” The child pressed, closing the book back up and hugging it against her chest. “We can still go today, right?”

“Yes, I promised you as soon as I’m finished cleaning up, we’ll go.”

“It’s just that there’s usually a line already before they open it up in the morning,” she continued, unfazed by the length of last night’s celebration stretching before her mother. Uninterested in the fact that no one would want an after-work pint in last night’s mess, and that after almost a decade of living in rubble, she wasn’t about to let the glimmer of success they’d had slide away.

The pub door swung open, and in waltzed her older daughter, Ellie. She’d sent her out hours ago to get some Swift Violets for freshening up the tables, and now she carried the woven basket brimming with bread, mushrooms, scarcely glowing Blue Nightshade…and Voltfruit? Where in all the goddamn Great Plateau had she been getting Voltfruit!? Ellie was carefree and charming, the kind of girl who ended up with thank-you gifts for simply existing. A completely different breed from her mother and sister, who couldn’t help but wonder at whether she was related at all. Perhaps a stray, like a rogue sunflower seed whisked to the neighbor’s garden on last summer’s breeze. Her presence was the reason, her mother had to admit, that the bar was packed night after night. The Mt. Hebra Stout was only ever going to take them so far.

“Mom, you won’t believe what I just heard!” She sang, arranging herbs and Warm Saffina together in a vase. “Do you know yet? Everyone’s talking about it. Link and Zelda are back here!”

“Back where, in the castle?” Karena cut in. 

“Yes, the castle,” Ellie said shortly. If there was one case where her charms ceased, it was with her little sister. “They’re not going to be caught dead in this hole, that’s for sure.” 

“Ellie,” Cara warned.

“What do you think it means?” She pressed, leaning her elbows on the counter and cradling her chin in both hands. “Are they going to have a Royal Wedding? Or a Coronation? Oh my goddess, can you imagine what Cece would design? How many people do you think they can fit into the Throne Room to see? How will they pick who gets to go—maybe an essay contest? You could actually put all your heartfelt yammering to good use with that, Kar,” she sang, batting a rosebud toward her unamused sister like a fairy wand, granting her own favors.” She pushed herself off the counter in a twirl, sending her pinnafore skirt sailing as she waltzed with what she could only conceive as destiny. “Maybe they’ve been waiting for New Castle Town to get this nice again, so the party could be perfect.”

“That’s not happening,” her mother said, the opinion she typically guarded slipping out in the chaos, grudges and scars she hid lest the girls have their own discoveries skewed. There were a dozen other occasions that would have aligned with the Hero and Princess accepting the throne. The first lowering of Castle Town’s drawbridge, or the ribbon-cutting for the museum that seemed to stand in memoriam to the monarchy rather than in conversation with it. The first anniversary of the Demon King’s defeat. The fifth. Each milestone passed with a deepening quiet from Zelda and Link, the only word being gossip of their entrenchment along Hateno’s hills. Did you know you could buy chutney made from Link’s tomatoes at the market? My cousin’s neighbor’s daughter had Zelda as a teacher last fall; she looked common. But still the peace endured, the town slowly grew to City, and Cara had no business beyond returning her focus to the rag and the cooling suds. 

“Why not?” Ellie pouted. “There has to be something to look forward to in this boring old village. Here we are, living next to the world’s most incredible castle, and we don’t even get royalty sightings. What world would leave a Castle empty forever?” 

“Zelda doesn’t want to be Queen,” the small voice of Karena rose up from above her book. 

“Oh you’re one of those people,” Ellie rolled her eyes, dramatically draping herself against the barstool. “Why would Princess Zelda spend all these years restoring the castle, filling it with treasures, and living out the most incredible romance of our lifetimes to just…not be Queen, ever?”

Her sister’s voice dropped even softer, cut down by the effervescent confidence sucking all the air. “I didn’t say she doesn’t love Link or Hyrule. But she didn’t do any of those things to be Queen. Before the Calamity, she—”

A silhouette suddenly cut into the doorway’s light, leaning their body into the entrance. “I’m sorry, we’re closed,” barked Cara. “We’ll be open at twilight.”

The blue beret and sharp cloak easily marked the intruder as a Royal Guard, a rare sight in the daylight. There were so few now, she normally only saw them after-shift, when they were making a fresh mess of her counter. “I apologize for the interruption, ma’am,” he said with a bow of a nod, “but you may have already received word that the Princess and her Knight have returned to Hyrule Castle. They have asked their citizens to gather at the gates this afternoon, if you can possibly spare the time. I do understand it’s quite last-minute, but I have been impressed of its importance.”

Ellie lit up like a fire fruit, while Karena drew herself further behind the stools. “Why, is there something special happening?” Ellie prodded, twirling a Silent Princess stem between her fingertips as she turned her dream-cloud gaze to the visitor. 

“I’m afraid I have no more information than that,” he said, immune to the girl’s charms. And yet, he hovered, staring back at the trio expectantly. 

“You will be there, won’t you?” He asked after a strange, lingering beat.

“Of course we will!” Ellie gushed. 

“That’s good. I would reiterate that it’s important,” he said. “And that I’d highly recommend that you make the time.” With one final nod, he was gone, off to dictate everyone else in town’s day.

“It’s a proposal! Link’s actually doing it! Of course he’s doing it,” Ellie squealed, bounding up from the stool in a burst of bouncing red hair and tossed flower petals. “We have to get everyone! We have to dress up! Do you think the shops are already out of everything Cece? Oh god. I have to hurry!” She grabbed the half-empty basket, floating out the door with glee.

“Well that’s downright odd,” Cara murmured before noticing that her small child’s eyes were welling up with tears. “Oh Karena. I’m sorry. I’m sure that means the Entrance Hall is closed today, but…”

“They don’t want to be here, Mom,” she whispered. “Something isn’t right.”

Cara chewed her lower lip, not sure which daughter’s resolution to believe. There had been dire warnings, evacuations, unspeakable chaos almost a decade ago when she forced her heavily pregnant body to keep running out of Castle Town in The Upheaval, her husband’s scream for her to GO deafening her ears, her last of glimpse of him running out the door, the fire and blood of gloom reflecting off his armor. She could still feel the heaviness in her lungs from the running, the soot and smoke, not looking back for any sound no matter how horrible or desperate its plea for her attention, not resting until she was safe underground in Lookout Landing. She could remember the drills and protocols developed more out of a need for some semblance of control in their tiny refuge than any effective protection against the monsters and Gloom forcing them undercover. Over the years she’d tried to keep these memories from her youngest, while indulging her oldest out of guilt for her endurance of them. And still the worry seeped, as if in the water.

“Hey, come on. We have no reason to think that this is anything but good news, right? Maybe today you’ll get to be part of history instead of just visiting it.” She tossed the rag in the bucket and squeezed Karena’s elbow. “Let’s go follow your sister’s lead a little and find something halfway-decent to wear. It’s not every day the pub gets a personal invitation to the castle.”

Chapter Text

The gates of New Castle Town were closed as the invasion approached. It had been one hundred years since Zelda had last seen the drawbridge clamped shut; she wasn’t even aware that the mechanisms still worked. She watched through the slits in the curtains as the bridge slowly opened, granting the siege unquestioned passage onto the cobblestones paving the heart of Hyrule’s restoration. 

No one was outside.

It was afternoon, when children should be coming home from school. The pub would start entertaining small impromptu parties of old acquaintances and new friends. She remembered the flower carts and grilled meat stands out greeting those making their way through another day, the enticing smell of their wares mingling with the burning stove fires and stabled horses. Everything had felt new and fresh and hummed with boundless energy; years of stifling struggle now fueling a kingdom’s center astounded by its own existence.  

But these streets were cleared. Neatly. The clothiers had tucked their mannequins inside, and the shopkeepers dutifully turned their window signs to CLOSED. This was no sudden Calamity; the town had tucked itself up into tidy, neat folds.

As if they were waiting for them.

Zelda had only awoken a few hours before, after dawn had already ushered in what the oblivious sun would consider just another day. By that time the slopes and bridges of Lanayru were behind them, giving way to the yawning planes of farmland and fields that wrapped Hyrule like a wreath of plenty. This had to be a Gerudo golden carriage, judging by the rich turquoise silk she’d slept upon, lulled and rocked so soundly that they had nearly breached the capital by the time she came to. She imagined the farmers and stable girls setting out with their chores, the churn of routine and solitude of the plain snuffed out by the stampede of invaders and this atrocity of carved finials and screeching snakes plated with enough leaf and inlay to afford a modest village’s meals for a year.

May they all linger in doorways, she pleaded with the goddesses, despite long considering them departed. Stay near your fires and your children. This isn’t the day to be brave.

Her companion in the carriage said nothing, choosing to glower in silence while making sure the glint of her Gerudo Scimitar was never out of Zelda’s view. The woman was robed in black silk, her blazing red hair whisked out of her face by a vivid desert-patterned scarf. A mask concealed most of her expression, but her eyes fixed on her in a cold, obsessive hold. The way you might look upon an abomination you’d long studied and imagined, and to glimpse in the flesh after so much time, so much rage and expectation, brought a furious sense of disappointment. The specter was mortal; the menace’s teeth were filed. Zelda lacked the fortitude to stare her back down, and so her focus skewed to the side, counting the saves stitched into the curtain’s hems, trying not to make her deep, settling breaths so obvious—grateful for the gracious cover of churning wheels on uneven road.

Unkempt road, she realized with a pang of guilt. She was so scarcely here. She’d thought they were fine.

The invading swarm slowed as it wound through the center of town, around the proud resurrected fountain and up, toward the castle. Zelda leaned forward in the seat, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the entrance, as if it could solve the riddle of how her world had, once again, descended into chaos.

“Sit DOWN,” the woman commanded, yanking on the rough ropes binding the Princess’s hands together, sending the sharp fibers digging into her skin. 

She gasped less at the pain than the shattering of silence. The last words she’d heard were those of Ganondorf, before she’d lost consciousness: I’ve missed you, Princess . 

Four words stirring up all the sands she’d happily let settle, memories she’d kept buried even from herself, lest they scatter about the land sowing needless discontent. They hadn’t known each other well. Not as well as he would have liked, that had been clear from their first conversation to the last. And yet that strange sense of loss… The Demon King… he must be … An ending she had been denied witness, for her own good, the fates seemed to say. Sleep now, Princess. This world of Kings weighs heavy on your heart.

She didn’t bother pressing the guard with questions. This soldier, even if she had answers, would surely sooner gag her than fill in the blanks. Instead Zelda straightened her body up, pulling herself into the dignified posture of a monarch returning to her home. Even if she was still in last night’s tattered nightgown, tied at the wrists, her face feeling puffy and coated in what she could only imagine was an alluring mix of plaster dust and tears. She could bear this, whatever this was, however long an occupation this usurper was able to hold. This victory would be as temporary as it was hollow. 

It wasn’t until they had cleared the gatehouse that she could hear the storm of confusion and dread descending—baffled shouts and a swelling murmur, a crescendo of horror as whatever sparse Royal Guardsman and soldiers still in the ranks caught their first glimpse of this manifested nightmare. A wildly anxious energy crackled in the air as thousands of hearts seized in the same moment. And then, her own voice booming above it all: “Captain Hoz! Let them through! We have so much to celebrate today.”

Zelda’s pure bewilderment made the Gerudo guard’s eyebrows tick up, the perk of witnessing the Princess’s reactions sending her spirits skyward. 

The carriage rolled to a stop, what had to be just short of the Entrance Hall. The Gerudo slid out, cracking the door just a few moments later to slide a bundle of fabric onto the floor. Wordlessly she grabbed Zelda’s hands, cleaving them free with one quick swipe of the Scimitar. “Get dressed,” she commanded, nodding to the presented heap.

Zelda held up the clothes at arm’s length, which unfurled as an ancient Princess of Hyrule’s dress. Hand-stitched by Cece herself as part of the From Tunics to Trousers fashion retrospective exhibit, it was almost laughably formal, with intricate Sheikah and Hylian crests embroidered up and down the skirt, and decorative gold armor plates weighing down the sleeves and breast. A showcase garment, the linchpin of the exhibit, grabbed from the mannequin display and smuggled down into the Trojan horse.

Sensing her hesitation, the warrior scoffed. “Or swear fealty in your nightgown for all I care, but know the King has requested this specifically,” she warned, slamming the door for what she knew to be the last time.

In the microscopic privacy of the carriage Zelda peeled off the nightdress, sending the scent of fresh air and grass into the air that filled her with a visceral pang of rosy nostalgia. She could practically feel the first time she and Link spent a week at the Hateno house in her skin, their longest stretch away from the castle. Link had come in from the garden caked with mud. “I didn’t think the ground would still be so wet from the rain yesterday, especially with all the sundelions soaking it up,” he explained, stripping off the soiled tunic and hood to reveal the svelte, honed torso beneath, back when such a blatant glimpse could still make her blush. “Do you have anything that needs to be washed? We should probably set a laundry day, if we’re not going back to the castle tonight.”

She stared down at the dirty clothes balled up on the kitchen counter, a second flush spreading to the tips of her ears. 

“Wait. Have you ever done laundry before?” Her embarrassed silence made him smile in spite of himself. 

“I never…well, it always just happened,” she admitted. “You must think I’m a useless…” what, exactly? Technical Princess, aspiring historian hermit, make-believe wife? Eons of life, and she still wasn’t sure where to plant her feet.

“Hey. It’s just me, and I’m here,” he said, squeezing her shoulder as he dipped down to her eye level. “We can help each other with things. What I know, what you know, we can put it together and maybe get somewhere.” 

In the small kitchen he’d found a bar of honey soap, and walked with her downstream of the river. They hung their garments between the trees in the yard, and fell asleep in the grass, watching the fabric rustle in the breeze. Waking up in the caress of afternoon sun, seeing how soft Link’s face looked in between dreams, the creases of frustration and responsibility undefined and maybe, here, erasable. That was when she knew, whoever she was in Calamity’s wake, resurrected from the mindless loop of sky, this was home.

She bunched the fabric up to her face, breathing in the fading memory. He can never take that, Link .

The stiff, uncomfortable fabric of the museum dress was barely yanked over her body before the door was flung open once more. The warrior seized Zelda by the forearm and dragged her out of the small carriage door, letting her stumble and fall onto the plush red carpet. A wave of gasps rolled across the crowd packed against the Entrance Hall’s soaring columns, the horrified spectators spilling out into the courtyard and ringing the Sanctum—the few Royal Guardsman, the fewer Hylian Soldiers, and every citizen of New Castle Town promised an unforgettable afternoon at the Castle. 

The crowd was a blurring horde of drained, slack faces; paralyzed spectators now captive to the slow unfolding spectacle. The soldiers and guards gripped their meager weapons in an uneasy hesitation in the absence of command. The townspeople clung to their partners and children in tightly-packed clusters, intertwining hands and arms as their only defense. Without waiting for her chaperone guard, Zelda stood, her stare fixed ahead through the Sanctum to the throne where the Demon King now sat. 

Her gait down the aisle was slow and deliberate, giving each New Castle Town citizen their moment to witness the square of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the blank expression she passed as fearlessness. Without a word she implored the mass to survive. 

In the middle of the stone Triforce inlay marking the center of the Sanctum, a counterfeit version of herself smirked, paired with a false Link to match. “Welcome back, Princess!” announced this cruel, dead-eyed trick of the light. In a flash she was at Zelda’s shoulder, gripping her elbows as she leaned that apparition of a head against her own. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “We’ve kept everything nice and warm for you. Including that abandoned throne.” 

With a shriek of laughter the pair vanished, re-emerging with their Yiga Clan camarades near the throne steps. The rise was thick with Yiga and the not-quite-Gerudo warriors. To their left stood the castle's Captain of the Guard Hoz, his eyes bouncing between the gathered foes, the villain on the throne, and his disheveled Princess in the middle of the towering chamber. He was joined by the four Sages, each covered closely by their own warrior captor. 

King Sidon’s teeth flashed a seething grimace, his fists clenched tightly at his sides. He could scarcely look at Zelda as he funneled all of his rage and uncertainty for the absence of his best friend into Ganondorf, and she could almost see the myriad of calculations running through his head. The projectile angle of his jump, the pressure of the water, the pitch of the stairs, the seconds before the much less lithe King could react. Yona, in all her calm and grace, clung to her husband’s fin as an anchor from the madness. A pained look of horror pinching her face didn’t quite see Zelda herself, rather the sum of the spectacle so perfectly designed to whittle her down to a myth, even those knowing her best skewed by the holy shadows in which she was cast.

Tulin shrunk back, his parents Teba and Saki hovering behind him. He’d proven himself as nimble and brave beyond his youth, but surrounded by this sprawling court of enemies he seemed small and lost. As usual Yunobo’s mouth hung open in wide-eyed mystification, three steps behind the game unfolding before his eyes. All of them were transfixed on the throne and the apparition from their past.

All except Riju.

The Gerudo chief ignored the scourge of her land, the brutal force about to claim the kingdom for the first time in their hopelessly intertwined histories. Instead, her radiant green eyes stared straight into Zelda’s own with a precise, undeniable coldness. She hooked that lock on the Princess as long as she could, making sure her strike of condemnation would not go unnoticed. The ice in Riju’s glare surprised her more than anything else in this Sanctum horror show, but as the dagger of its intense blame gored further into her heart, the last seven years of peculiar conversations and creeping distance aligned in stunning clarity. The almost practiced overtures Riju had offered, unsolicited, on the responsibilities of a sovereign. Her miraculous ability to dodge any and all invitations to Hateno, their rare visits relegated to the festivals and occasions here, at the Castle. Link’s peculiar agitation when he returned from meeting with his old friend on her desert turf, and the way he’d spend the rest of the day hacking around in the garden, coming back to bed only after Zelda was much too deep asleep to ask questions.

Ganondorf stood from the velvet-tufted throne, and the stone crimson loftwing crest behind him gave the magnificent illusion of his already imposing breadth gaining a wingspan. He regarded the crowd in silence, relishing the heady anticipation that drew the air tight as a drum. “Princess Zelda,” he finally said, his voice rising up to the soaring rafters. “You and your people have done a magnificent job of bringing this castle back to its former glory. I especially love these fascinating trinkets you’ve dug up from across this ruinous land.” His right fist unfurled, revealing a gold crown dripping in expertly-set gems. The Dragon’s Helm, they’d called it. A gift she had received upon the christening of the new Hyrule Castle and the town, designed and crafted by Gerudo and Goron artisans to showcase the distinct beauty of the north and south. From there it had sat under thick glass in the Royal Library as visitors and schoolchildren passed in awe, awaiting a coronation that had yet to happen. “And yet, how curious to leave such treasures open for anyone to claim. I return from slumber to find the land I have coveted,” he mused, pivoting his palm for his glistening trophy to catch the most blinding light, “this place of potential and plenty, languishing in mediocrity, its greatness locked beneath glass, its bloodline stymied to the recesses of its peasantry, all but begging for dilution. A world which has everything and has still remained less.” One of his warriors swept in from the wings, plucking the crown from his grasp. He knelt just enough for her to place the jewels upon his thick red mane that settled as if an extension of his being; each made for the other. “Such a flourishing land deserves a rightful King.”

“As light breaks through shadow, as shadow eases away the light,” the crowning warrior proclaimed, “so shall the lands of Hyrule unite in faithfulness and service to the word and will of their King.” Words of anointment begrudgingly memorized by every grade-school student in all regions, a lesson hastily committed and then dissolved. Dislodged from meaning and consequence but for once in a generation. “In the name of the Goddess Hylia, under the eyes of Din and Nayru and Farore; Ganondorf Dragmire, may you accept this crown and all such rights and privileges as our undoubted King.”

For a moment she felt as if she were plunging underwater. That muffling in her ears, the dizzying panic as the truth pummeled against her.

He’s right . 

The retreat out into the countryside, the shrinking of the Guard, the disbandment of the Sages and the distraction of their Hero. They had done everything to bury their tragedies, but nothing to prevent them from resurrecting. Victory had felt absolute, and in its wake, they were foolish enough to believe it so. 

A revenant kneel rippled out from his closest warriors, down the stairs to the Yiga Clan. From the balcony he stared down at her with the same indulged smirk she had first witnessed so many millennia back. Her people stood behind, their fates hinged on a gesture.

Her right knee met against the stone, the thick linen of the dress offering little buffer. She spread her fingers wide as she pressed her palms into the floor, her hair falling forward from her shoulders to mercifully block out the periphery as the entirety of her kingdom shifted to the floor. 

It was quiet enough to hear Ganondorf’s remarkably soft footsteps pat down the throne’s stairs, the soft clink of his sword in its sheath. The sheer heft of his figure before her blocked out the light as he reached down with a single index finger, tilting her head up by the chin up to face him. “I’m proud of you, dear Princess,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear. “You’ve learned such wisdom in our time apart.”

A vision of him in the shade and shadow of the ancient palace gardens, that same finger now reborn to behold her once again, as he had that night of no return. No one has to suffer, Zelda. Wouldn’t that be the sweetest gift you could grant this cursed land, its peace absent of its slaughter? Those flecks of topaz catching the faintest hints of candle and moonlight struggling to cut through the darkness, strumming a heart that she’d thought was set in its sureness with its bewitching promises. I wouldn’t trust my ambition with just anyone , he purred against her as he pressed the vial into her palm. Things tend to get messy otherwise .

“Princess Zelda of Hyrule,” he boomed once more, snapping her from the trance of memory, “your Kingdom has denied me my true place within it for ages beyond memory. You have spurned, fought, and doomed me for seeking what is mine. The monarchy and its subjects deserve no mercy for your continued defiance. But I did not rise again to squander all the potential you and this land hold. I’ve become less wasteful in time. And chaos is such a weary consultation for splendor.” He lifted her to her feet by the elbows, as if rearranging a rag doll. He clasped both her hands in one single grip, his slight squeeze a reminder of the utter fallibility of her bones. Despite the throng his golden eyes remained locked with her own, dancing with the triumph tempered from the rehearsed, even tone of the vows she’d had to memorize and recite as a girl for grossly overcompensated tutors. “Will you accept your place as my wife, the Queen of Hyrule, continuing to inspire your people with your submission to my reign? Will you defer to my command in all matters both heart and state? Will you observe and hold the spirit of each land and its people with equal weight in your heart, as you serve me and only me, from this breath until your last?”

She could practically feel the leaning of the crowd, their strain to hear her reply. The Sages looked on and around, as if still expecting Link to rappel from the arches. Even she, in the pulsating self she now pressed down beneath her heels, held a breath just long enough for the emergence of a miracle. The moment hung in the air, vacant.

Her voice cracked in her throat, dry and brittle as summer straw. “Yes, my King.”

How many versions of herself had he known before this one, now caged by his wide, sharpening smile? How many Princesses and Goddesses and Priestesses and Sages had he managed to corner as time kept folding in on itself, the three of them—Power, Wisdom, Courage—cursed to triumph and fall over and over for what, all eternity? How many times had she surrendered? How many times had she sooner died? When would the gods ever have enough?

One simple tug of her wrists and her lips were against his, the softness shocking her with its familiarity. In the blur of his closeness he felt absolutely human. Warm, anxious breath and the faint scratch of his beard against her jaw, the faintest groan of satisfaction vibrating from his throat as his hand traced to the small of her back, cementing her against him like a sculpture commissioned in her museum. An image to sear into the memory of Hyrule itself. She froze herself like marble, a slab he could whittle into a vision of whatever it was he seemed so set on possessing.

Long live the king!
Goddess save the queen!

The chorus thrummed from the lofted throne, down the stairs, up and down the columns of the Entrance Hall, vibrating her skull. Over and again, one singular voice of hundreds, incanting her doom. 

“Bastard!”

The single voice soared through the air like rotten produce, splattering against the fearful crowd’s befuddled compliance. Zelda whirled around to see King Sidon straining on tiptoe above the Varina blocking him, his fine, delicate scales rumpled and wildness in his eyes, as if he’d already scuffled with someone between the “invitation,” the transport, the staging. 

“She is not yours to take!” he cried out, compelling Riju’s hand to shoot forward and squeeze around his back fin. Zelda could only surmise the words she muttered through gritted teeth to compel the proud, foolish fighter to silence. Without a prompt from the new King the soldier slammed the hilt of her cutlass into his kneecap, sending him sprawling to the floor, writhing in agony as he clutched at the bone, desperate to hold the fragments together. Yona screamed, falling into Riju’s deceptively strong arms, hiding her face in her bare shoulder like a child roused from a nightmare.

“How is it that Hyrule’s second-best shining hope presumes to speak for the Queen?” Ganondorf mused, his tone as frigid as death as he advanced on the crumpled noble. 

“Ganondorf,” Zelda murmured under her breath, her lips unmoving. 

“Do you insult her capacity to make decisions, or merely her taste? Either way, what an inexcusably rude outburst. Treasonous, one could say,” he considered, teasing toward the fallen would-be champion of Zelda’s honor; integrity she herself hadn’t fought for. The air thinned as the crowd drew in its communal breath, and she could practically feel the crackling thrill as the fumes of their rapt alarm hit his nostrils, collective fates hinging on his every move.

“Ganondorf, please…” she tried again, warily watching his sharp gaiters step within inches of Sidon’s scrunched eyes. 

“But this is a joyous day for all of Hyrule,” he went on, leaning to scrounge the Secret Stone from its place atop his hand, “and I’d hate to see one rotten, arrogant apple spoil it for all of Zora’s Domain. Wouldn’t that be dreadful, Queen Yona?”

Without a moment’s waste his wife threw herself on the castle stone, her glossy skin smearing the blood and dirt while her hand grasped her husband’s emptied grip, committing headfirst along in mercy or death. “We will find a way to repay this grace, your Highness,” she promised into the floor, her tearful voice muffled. “May Hylia bless your reign.”

“And may she bless your arrogant husband with discretion,” he warned faintly, a promise only for the nobles’ ears. “He shatters so easily. I can only imagine how you would fare.” 

“Tulin!” His mother’s voice cracked from the crowd, desperate to claw him from any youthful ambitions of pride. Reluctantly Tulin removed the Secret Stone from around his ankle, sliding it across the floor toward the King. Yunobo silently followed. 

Riju reached up to remove the earring containing her Stone, then held it at arm’s length toward the Demon King. With a nod to her guard she strode forward in surrender, dropping it into his waiting paw. She lingered between them, narrowing her brow as she regarded the woman whose honor had just lost her dear friend his life. “You seem to have made quite the comfortable arrangement for yourself, haven’t you, Queen Zelda?” Her tongue stumbled on the title, practically spitting it out. 

“Your Queen knows what’s best for you all, cousin,” Ganondorf said, his mocking tone lilting with giddy derision for his fellow Gerudo. “I thought you were quite adept at groveling to authority yourself, Riju. Or are you always this bitter when fate turns against you?”

She pursed her lips, burying her rage in a dramatic bow as she backed away. “Your bride is beautiful, Heb-iya ,” she said, tucking the foreign phrase, indecipherable to Hylian ears, into her blessing.

Grimacing down at the Chief, Ganondorf curled the Stone up into his hand, churning it to dust in his palm. “Oh yes, that reminds me,” he said, taking a few deliberate steps toward the crowd. The last two stones crushed under his heels, virtually unnoticed in his gait. He snapped his fingers, and a tall Gerudo woman emerged hesitantly from behind one of the hall columns. With both hands she balanced a blue silk pillow, weighted by a kaleidoscope of sparkling gems. “In case you doubt my appreciation for your acquiescence, sweet Princess. A special gift of devotion for Hyrule’s new Queen.”

The woman bearing the treasure brushed against a retreating Riju as she made her way to the King, hanging her head in apology and sidestepping the rivulets of blood. She knelt to present the most ornate necklace Zelda had ever seen, designed with the Hylian royal crest’s wings dripping in gold-set jewels fluttering outward from one strange, ominous dark center stone in an emerald cut. Flickering in shades of red and black, it seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it.

“That freedom for you, unshackled from the power you’ve so deftly run from; and a bit of security for me, to keep a reincarnated goddess’s nuisance of a light from flaring up,” Ganondorf said, brushing the hair from the back of her neck to fasten the glimmering collar. The cursed stone was much heavier than what its size should have allowed, and its closeness to her heart made her feel suddenly dulled and cloudy. A sort of throbbing, numbing grief. “Just in case,” he said, combing her hair back into place with his fingers. “Let’s walk, darling,” he instructed, his hand between her shoulders ushering her forward, around King Sidon’s broken body and toward the stairs. Next to the throne, a collective of four black-robed Gerudo guards linked behind them forming a small procession, trailed by the Link and Zelda Yigas. The collective continued through to the back passage, ascending the stairs serpentining up the massive central Bell Tower.

The vertical climb gave her the sway of vertigo, and she forced her eyes forward, tunneling in on each red velvet step as it came. Whittling down her world to stair and the hem of her unusually long dress, and the care of each foot forward to keep from tangling up and tumbling to her death as they ascended up toward the clouds.

It wasn’t until they reached the top landing of the Observation Room, with its wide circling balcony, that Ganondorf spoke. “The entire kingdom can see us from here,” he noted, pointing to the courtyard crowd appearing like tossed confetti along the cobblestones from this, the castle’s grandest vista. “The land is vast, but news flies, doesn’t it?” He raised his arm, waving to the end of the horizon. From above the castle bell began to ring, resonating brass that made her teeth chatter. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard its eternal, rippling chime. The morning her mother died. The Christening Celebration of Hyrule Castle and its town, after its long journey from Tarrey Town and back for its master craftsman rebuild. And now. Today.

My coronation .

The mockery was inescapable. The perfect amber glint of the sunset, bathing the red rocks of Death Mountain and sparkling packed snowdrifts of the Hebra highlands in their most profound possible glory. A slightly muted but rising cheer from the town below rising like steam to buoy the new King’s triumphant spirits even higher. Even her strange dress, handmade and drenched with hours of intricate work and research, was intended at heart for such an occasion. 

She was still staring down from the edge of the balcony when she heard Ganondorf conferring with the Guard. “The town gates are to remain closed until further notice,” he said as they retreated back toward the windows. “There must be a heavily armed presence at any point of ingress; no wagons or carts enter or leave without a thorough search. Anyone attempting to enter must be searched and questioned. Anyone determined to be so much as vaguely suspicious is to be brought into the Gatehouses for more invasive questioning.” The Yiga hung on the fringe, taking furious notes in their books as the elite Gerudo nodded in turn. “Escort each remaining Sage back to their village, but leave a robust post at their gates. We’ll be surveilling each of them constantly until I’m satisfied with their obedience, and at that point, we’ll surveil them even more intently to ensure that my trust is not misplaced. Is that clear?” 

“Yes, your Majesty,” they replied in unison.

“We’ll need a team at every fortification and tower within our borders, and random patrols on the more remote roads and passes. Nothing moves in Hyrule that we don’t see. I’ll also need someone to head into the Tabantha Frontier tomorrow and extract that newspaper reporter for a visit. We’ll need to make sure she understands her place within the realm now. And speaking of roles, this castle hasn’t been properly staffed in what, twenty years? See if you can properly compel some of the townspeople to take up new positions in service of their beloved rulers, won’t you?” He stretched his arm out like a cat in the late afternoon, shifting between naps. “We all deserve a celebration tonight, but I’m afraid we’ll have to wait until we’re slightly more settled. I’m headed to my chambers.” He chuckled slightly in satisfaction at the notion, the ease at which he could claim every last bit of this fortress.

Zelda turned her back to the vista and inhaled a deep, steadying breath. This was the price she paid for a shot. To bide Link’s time. To keep the King distracted and satisfied in a trove of spoils. He strode back through the tower toward the stairs, and she solemnly traced behind in his shadow.

Until he stopped.

“What are you doing?”

The question jolted her out of a resigned daze. “G-going with you?” she stammered, frantically searching his contemptuous scowl as anxiety twisted her stomach. 

He turned and crossed his arms, barricading her exit. Gone was the mirth and jubilation alight in those gleaming eyes, memorizing his unfolding victory throughout his most auspicious day. His stare was begrudging, beholding sins that had festered for millennia. “Going with me to…the bedchamber? What, exactly, do you intend to do there?” She could feel her cheeks burning so intensely they practically itched with the shame. “What was your plan exactly, to seduce me with this stiff-upper-lip, for-the-good-of-the-kingdom act? You think I want to ‘have my way with you’ while you’re staring up at the ceiling, convincing yourself it’s really some lost little knight that’s fumbling with you instead? You truly believe that after countless lifetimes, that is the satisfaction that I crave?” He snorted, faintly shaking his head. “You insult me, Princess.” 

“Ganondorf, I—” she groped for an answer, humiliation blossoming about her neck and chest as she came up with nothing. He’d known everything, right down to her reaction’s percussion. And now nothing remained but his cold, condemning appraisal, a wall she could not scale.

He squinted as if she were difficult to make out from his lofted perch, his frustration a rolling boil sputtering to spill into the fire. “You have been very well-behaved, so I will grant you the courtesy of telling you this once,” he said, his voice tumbling down an octave. “Do not make the mistake of counting our past intimacy as an advantage in your paltry arsenal of wit and charm. You will address me as your King when I haven’t directed you otherwise. Are we quite clear?”

She nodded her head violently.

“Answer me.”

“Yes, my King,” the words squeaked out of her throat.

“I do like this version of you,” he admitted, a ghost of fondness passing before evaporating in his molten fury. “You have improved significantly in your decision-making.” One snap of his fingers, and the guards surrounded them. “Take my precious Queen somewhere secure,” he commanded. “The Lockup should do nicely.”

“No… no! ” She screamed as the black silk arms enveloped her, the useless cries muffled and drowned by the tolling castle bell. 

Chapter Text

Link hadn’t been up to the Sky Islands in years, and certainly not to this particular empty, godforsaken shard in the Eldin Sky Archipelago. Like most of the specks and barren fragments, there was little here to compel anyone to visit, let alone recall its existence. There was a small stone, gazebo-like shelter with a long-extinct purpose, and a few yellow elm trees clinging to their meager apple harvest. A single pond was home to a society of the tough, prehistoric fish that mysteriously remained here, one of which he’d skewered over the fire for a dinner neither he nor Purah felt inclined to eat. Milky-eyed and char-scaled, the meal wouldn’t have been appetizing on the best of days, let alone in the wake of a nightmare.

“We can’t go to the Great Sky Islands,” Purah had said as a way of apology when steering the Zonai glider away from the abandoned metropolis ringing the Temple of Time. “That’s the first place they’d look if they realized we went up. We’ve got ages until they’d be able to scour the outliers.”

So instead they were here as the fire dimmed, their intense focus fixed into the embers, compelling the sparks to jump and snap. On any other night he’d be asleep by now, lulled by Zelda’s drowsy closeness and the nighttime crickets’ conversations. Now all he could do was mark the time between now and her last desperate kiss. The gap would keep yawning open for, what, days? Weeks? Eons? What was the price this time, destiny? 

His last kiss. That night, before the monster had appeared, she’d brushed her fingers down his spine when she rolled into bed, at least an hour after he had—always after. To go to bed early was to waste another chapter read or written. “I’ve slept enough for a thousand lifetimes,” she would say, though she tended to drag in the mornings, waiting for the smell of fresh coffee to rise from the kitchen into the loft. He was sore by the end of the evening, when the last dish rattled into its place in the cupboard. Tending the earth felt better at dawn, as though the day’s slate was so clean, no other soul was around to spoil it. 

Those elegant fingers dancing down his back’s column, probing his interest while she pressed a kiss into his shoulder blade. He had ignored her, feigning sleep. He was close to drifting off, and had spent an extra hour spreading rich new soil into the beds to feed the tomatoes he’d soon be planting. Tomorrow he’d make it up to her, he told himself, a half-promise who knows if he would have even kept, given the chance. She was always there, after all, her warmth opening to him whenever he wished, or tucking back into itself when he didn’t. He heard her resigned sniff of a sigh, felt the mattress dip as she rolled back to her side.

Like everything else in his world he had left to drift and grow hungry, ripe for the taking.

Purah curled her knees up to her chest, resting her head down against her shoulder. Her glasses reflected the flickering fire as she stared at Link. He could feel the hesitation in the way she held her breath, her analyzing mind brimming with questions she didn’t know how to start asking. Could she see straight through to how useless she was, sniff his weakness like sour breath? She hadn’t seemed surprised hearing that Zelda had sent him away. Hadn’t so much as second-guessed why the Princess would opt to face the Demon King alone. They had to know, had to have seen it, long before fate came to prove it.

“Josha should be back any time now,” Purah said at last, officially forfeiting the silence game. The apprentice had turned the glider back almost as soon as they’d landed on the island, headed to find the priestess Paya from Kakariko Village. 

“The Yiga will be chomping at the bit to take over the Sheikah’s home,” Josha was certain. “She won’t be safe, and I don’t have long.”

Link kept his gaze locked on the fire as he nodded. “You didn’t tell me how he returned,” he responded. The words surprised even himself; they seemed to rise of their own accord, outside from his train of thought. He didn’t need to fill the quiet, was used to it; preferred it even, much of the time, spending swaths of his life alone between wilderness and the sporadic outpost. His heart, his soul, his subconscious mind was eating itself alive to know.

Purah was just as shocked as he was, pulling back from her pose to sit up straight. “You mean how the Demon King—Ganondorf—is here?” Her eyes shifted back to the flames, and she shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. From what you said, he didn’t mention anything that would help us solve that.” She paused a moment in case he wished to contradict, and took another breath when he gave nothing. “What I find interesting is that Zelda should not have returned from dragonification, based on what Mineru told her. She made it very clear to the Princess that to swallow a stone was to lose one’s self in a forbidden act. The price for immortality was her mind, will, and body.” The flames crackled with the incoherence of a hundred disembodied hands, the nightmares he would never live to shake.

He’d seen the memory suspended in the Dragon’s Tear. Listened as Zelda first described the primeval conversation to him in her own words, then to the Zonai Survey Team, and the Sheikahs and Sages gathered to witness her official account. Which was not good enough, not for her. All of Hyrule should be able to learn from this new history she’d spun, from now and all ages, her traumas catalogued like butterflies and beetles for strangers to squint and study. He was napping one afternoon when she was working on her write-up for the Royal Library Collection, when her voice from the loft desk nudged him awake. “You can see the Dragons, can’t you?”

He stretched his legs out to the foot of the bed, still groggy. “I saw you,” he conceded. 

“I know, of course,” she said, blushing faintly, hinting at the strange story of the tether lodged in her brow. “I mean… you can see the others too, can’t you? There are others, aren’t there?” She dropped her voice, certainly knowing that she was pushing.

Here now, far above and away from it, he squinted his eyes as if he could blot out the memory. Slip back into it and tell her of how he had never seen anything as majestic as their shining, rippling bodies paddling through the sky. He’d take the box of colored pencils from her drawer and sketch the fluorescent lightning rod crowning Farosh, the ice shards dotting Naydra like a rolling mountain range, Dinraal’s wicked horns crackling with immortal inferno. What he wouldn’t give to see her face spark with delight at the wonder, her eyes brimming with gratitude as they did anytime she realized she’d be able to share something unseen or forgotten not just with this Hyrule’s children, but in perpetuity, her gift from one age to another. 

Instead he’d huffed like a child, breezed straight past her without a word, skulking out of the loft to retrieve his shoes from the landing. 

“Link,” she called after him, scraping the chair to leap up and follow, to soak up the blame in his torrent of smallness. “I’m sorry. You’ve told me you don’t like to talk about it more than once. That was unfair of me.” 

“But you still have to ask, don’t you?” he groused, yanking the laces loose. “So you can tick that box on your investigative list, make sure the ‘Hero’ has no comment. I don’t want everyone in Hyrule knowing what I can and can’t see,” he mumbled, shoving his feet into the yielding buttery leather, not finding the fight he was after. “They know where I came from, where I’ve been, the minutiae of every stupid journey I’ve taken and any loss I’ve ever counted. Just like they know every single thing about you that could have been dead and buried a century ago, but you still give it, you still let them take a look at all your pain and sadness. And why? Whose life is going to be better because you let them sift through your life like they’re owed it? God dammit, Zelda. Don’t they know enough by now? Haven’t we given them enough?”

It seemed like such a perfect plan at the time. If he didn’t pick around at the past, it would stay there. So he left the woman he loved more than the sun in the sky alone in the loft as he went off to pout in the garden, confident that she would still be there after his storm of a mood had passed with her pages and her pencils, sweet and well and forgiving for all their days.

Purah removed her glasses, fiddling with cleaning the lenses with her blouse as she continued to puzzle aloud. “Mineru said that, but it doesn’t quite match with what happened, did it? With either of them. Not even during the battle. When the Demon King swallowed his stone to spite you, that vendetta should have died right alongside him. But the Demon Dragon had all of the anger and vindictiveness of Ganondorf. And the Light Dragon, that was Princess Zelda through and through, rushing in to aid you and save you. I’m sorry, I mean Hyrule,” she said, flashing a kind smile that Link didn’t have the heart to return. 

“We still defeated him,” he pointed out. “Zelda wasn’t destroyed. That meant there was some sort of chance for her to come back.”

“You defeated the dragon. Zelda didn’t turn out to be truly in the Light Dragon. Her body and her mind were safe in the Sacred Realm. Right? Please tell me I’m right. I wasn’t there. I just read the books,” she said, her speech clipping up with anxiety. He vaguely registered a nod of agreement, sprinting with her to the same conclusion. “And if Zelda was safe in the Sacred Realm, where divinity could eventually come and vouch for her, make the case or use their power or whatever to compel her into another chance at life…”

“Then so was Ganondorf,” he finished. He raked his hands through his hair, his body too frantic to contain. They all knew not all gods were good, that there were dark intentions that sought to shape the world. Light may have been looking out for Zelda, but it wasn’t the only force that could seek a resurrection. The infernal balance that shaped every turn of their cursed lives. “How could we…why did we sit on a lie like this!?”

Purah leaned toward him, squeezing his arm in a tug back to reality. “Because everyone wants to believe that it’s going to be okay. We have to believe it. It’s the only way we survive at all.”

From the distance, Link could hear the familiar sound of Zonai fans chopping through the air. Josha’s glider made a graceful landing on the south side of the island, depositing a petrified Paya to blessed solid ground. She sank down on her knees, her fists clenching the grass. Tented by her overwhelming cone-shaped hat, she looked like a frightened construct. 

“Paya!” Purah tore herself from the fire, swallowing the Priestess up in love and relief. “Are you all right? Did the procession come through Kakariko?”

Purah helped her up to her shaky feet, and she nodded solemnly toward Link. “The invasion came through Kakariko Village on the road to the castle. It was early, so only the last of the night watch and first risers caught a glimpse. They didn’t even pause at the gates, they rode their horses straight through. We scarcely had time to wake up, let alone try and stop them.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t stop,” said Purah, tapping her lip thoughtfully. “It wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience to toss some torches on the roofs. Dispatch a small team to round up enemies or examples. Not that I’m willing it,” she said quickly, apologizing to the shaken Priestess. “I only mean, it seems so strange when they had every means to cause chaos that they’d just continue on with their business.”

“It is strange,” Paya admitted, pursing her lips. “There were no monsters, no terrors. Nothing like the scrolls depict every other Demon King in the history of Hyrule. Only the Yiga and Varina barreling down the road together as if it were nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

Link’s ears perked at the name he’d only heard from Riju. For years the Varina’s existence was a legend, much like Ganondorf himself. A story to scare the rowdy Gerudo girls at sleepovers into settling down for the night. But as the years wore on, the Chief felt the threat growing exponentially, she had told him. There was an anger simmering within the crevices of Gerudo Town’s open hospitality and grace. An impatience. Arguments spilled out from dinner tables and closed doors into the market and streets. Slowly, that resentment turned into disappearances. Incredible warriors spiriting away in the night, never to be seen again except in stories of ambush in the deepest recesses of the desert. This and the strange stories whispered within trusted circles, lest the stain of treachery or madness taint their name. They say a Lord has risen .

That’s what had forced her hand, she’d said. The morning one year ago, when her guard patrol returned from the dawn, calling her away from the throne, to the five letters smeared across the town’s front gates in blood that had quickly cured in the morning sun. 

R I S E N .

The message arrived in Hateno hours later, while Zelda was busy at the school. A Gerudo guard clattered across the small river bridge to find Link elbow-deep in the garden, yanking out the latest round of weeds. 

You know I wouldn’t disturb your peace if it weren’t urgent , his old friend implored in a letter addressed to both of them. I should have caught up with you under better circumstances, but please . 

“Will the Princess be joining us?” his escort asked while Link roused Epona from the stable, buckling the saddle snugly around her middle.

“She’s working,” he said, nodding toward the front door, where he’d hastily shoved a note. Riju asked me to check in. Be back by morning, take the soup out of the fire at seven. “There’s no reason to upset both our days.”

“There used to be so few of them, it may well have been a fairy tale,” explained Riju, one legendary fighter to another from the sanctity of her throne room. “For as long as legend traces back, they’ve been deflected warriors who were dissatisfied with the tribe’s loyalty to Hyrule and its deference to the Hylian royal family. Rumor has it that the first of them conspired with Ganondorf to attack King Rauru and Queen Sonia’s kingdom thousands of years ago.” She wandered toward the balcony, her hands clasped behind her back. “But now there have been too many sightings to keep sticking my head in the sand. Too many powerful women suddenly vanishing from town to chalk it up to a coincidence. They’re growing in numbers and abilities, and from today’s display of confidence, something is invigorating them. Like a rally cry.” 

“Why now?” Link had asked.  “Why would they be mobilizing when there’s no threat? Do they think they can create one? They’d have no allies outside of their own borders.”

She raised an eyebrow, tilting her hip into a question mark. “Hasn’t the Royal Guard been tracking the Yiga?”

“Master Kogha hasn’t been spotted in years,” Link shrugged. “There’s not much to watch except for some shacks in the depths.”

“That’s interesting,” she said, a chill edging her tone. “Our sources have been watching those shacks ballooning out into full-grown fortresses. Are the Hylians even patrolling the Depths any longer?”

“Talk to Hoz,” Link shot back. “I’m not the Commander.”

“You’re right,” she shifted, breathing in her patience. “I didn’t want to speak with you to give a lecture about defensive strategy. I’m only trying to tell you, as one of my closest friends, that all of this seems to be a reflection of a…deep dissatisfaction.” Her green eyes fell, as if suddenly hesitant to hold his gaze.

“At what?”

She drew a deep breath in through her nose, filling her lungs with courage to speak the festering truth. “Many of us—the entire tribe, not just the zealots—there’s a sense that Princess Zelda has been absent from Hyrule Castle for too long. People don’t understand why there is no Queen of Hyrule. We know that she loves her kingdom and her people, and being away, just letting the crown fade like a forgotten temple, it makes no sense , Link. It doesn’t feel right. How has the coronation been put off for almost a decade? There’s no reason to delay. She’s been of age since The Calamity. She’s found a worthy King. You know how traditionalist we are here in the southwest, but I believe the sentiment spreads beyond our borders.”

“So that’s it?” he snapped in the moment she paused for a breath. “You think you can speak for everyone in Hyrule now? Don’t project your world onto ours. Not everyone needs a goddamn figurehead to know that they’ll be okay.”

“Where is she even?” She leaned forward, her even expression twisting with disgust. “What’s so important that she can’t be bothered to hear our concerns?”

“What’s so important that you have to crash into her life unannounced and demand she pay attention to your problems? You’ve got bitter warriors who don’t like the monarchy? That’s not exactly a new trend for you, Riju.”

“We have been nothing but loyal to the Royal Family for centuries!” she fumed. “But what is left to be loyal to now, when all that remains of the family just…” She trailed off as Link took deep strides toward the stairs, where Epona waited to take him back home. 

“Link! I’m only trying to warn you…as a friend!” She leaned over the balcony, her crown blinding in the sun, obscuring the desperation across her face. “Hyrule needs both of you!”

“Come and visit then,” Link shot back, adjusting the saddle in preparation for the long ride home. “Look Zelda in the eyes and tell her what she’s done for her people isn’t enough for you. Let her know that she doesn’t deserve to enjoy peace like anyone else.”

“She isn’t anyone else! She’s the Princess of Hyrule, Link!” The clop of Epona’s hooves on the tender terracotta drowned out his friends’ last words, left rising with the heat.

If she won’t claim the throne, someone else will! 

A fresh strain of guilt, blossoming from the regret weighing in his gut since the moment the dust began churning behind him in that furious exit. His friends. His closest confidants would be effortless to find, even without torches and raids. 

“The Sages,” he broke back into Purah and Paya’s soft conversation. “Do we know where they are now?”

Paya lowered her head, clasping her hands at her waist as if holding an apology. “We do have some hints,” she admitted, her focus bouncing between her allies, holding Purah for strength. “A few hours after the cavalry came through Kakariko VIllage, a small legion of Zoras arrived to share what they’d seen in their Domain. They told us that a team of Ganondorf’s warriors were dispatched separately to retrieve King Sidon from his throne. I can only assume the same can be said for Tulin, Yunobo, and Riju as well. As I understand from the Zoras, there was no struggle. The invaders told the King unequivocally that his audience was required at…” Her voice trailed off, her knuckles turning white in her own grasp.

“Paya.” Purah was gentle, but clear. “Link has to know everything to stand any chance against this.”

She drew in a breath. “Required at the King of Hyrule’s coronation.” 

A coup so fluid, so unopposed, they rallied the opposition with civil invitations. “Commanding an invading army to the castle for a formal Coronation. No demons or monsters, no fire and gloomstorms.” Purah paced the edge of their camp, nervously fiddling with her telescope. “Since when did Ganondorf start acting positively human?”

The soft, hesitant voice of Paya emerged from beneath her shroud once more. “And not just the Demon King. They vowed the Coronation of the Queen as well.” 

“Well the only way a Queen is ascending the throne is through…” 

Purah sucked in her breath sharply as she cut herself off, her eyes wild with regret as she caught the slump of the Hero plunging wordlessly into reality’s abyss. “A meaningless bargain Zelda would only make to buy you time,” she tried to recover, strangling the telescope in her hands. “Link, she has to survive for you, for your home,” she said, imploring the other women with her flailing stare.

“She would endure anything to save you,” Paya said, an intended comfort kindling his greatest fear. They could never understand the way that he did, the same way the Demon King must…that there was nothing that Zelda would not do. 

Chapter Text

“Zelda, wake up! I’m here to save you!”

Her eyes, caked in crust from the fitful doze on the dungeon floor, pried open to discover Link’s face staring back at her, so close that his sandy blonde hair tickled her nose. Lips chapped by his permanent residence in the sun drew together into a smile as her vision drew into focus on his careful, considering face. Those curiously thick, disarming lashes hooding dead, matted eyes. Without hesitation he leaned forward, his cider-scented mouth angling to meet her own as the cold bite of armor pressed against Zelda’s bare arms.

Zelda seized on the open shackles beside her and swung them with all her weight, slamming them into Link’s jaw. “Yiga bastard,” she cried as the apparition recoiled back, cackling. 

“Oh good, you haven’t lost it down here,” the doppelganger tittered, wiping his mouth with relish. “I’m sure the King would be disappointed to have you break that quickly.” 

She scooted her back against the wall, drawing her knees up to her chest like a hermit back into the respite of a shell. She had stayed awake for what felt like an abbreviated lifetime down here in the arena of a cell that the Yiga and their Gerudo escort had thrown her into without fanfare. The torches mounted around the sprawling cell made her sick with memory. That same warm, comforting glow that she clutched confidently drawing shadows against the uneven stones and inlays as she descended down to investigate the Gloom, an assignment she didn’t think twice of taking on from the busy survey team. Perhaps the nefarious plumes were emitting from an undiscovered mineral deposit radiating too much energy, or they were a gas disagreeing with the stagnant moat. A rogue bog acting up. She’d written all these ridiculous ideas down in her study so she could return triumphantly and circle the correct best guess. She found that page splayed open on her tower desk, after several years and an epoch trapped in the sky. Had to grasp the wood to keep from falling as her study spun around her, her legs rubbery and useless against the force of that ghost of an unwitting girl and her optimism wafting from the yellowed page. That was the last time she went into the study tower, gracefully accepting the Zonai Survey Team’s offer to catalog and preserve her findings for the archive, to box up this former self onto a shelf, forgotten for another age.

“Are you quite finished?” the Yiga’s Gerudo partner scolded from the doorway. “You’ve wasted enough time already.” 

“What’s the point of winning if you don’t get to enjoy it?” He shot back, those telltale dead eyes raking over the soiled dress and the darkening soles of Zelda’s feet. Spotting a Yiga in disguise wasn’t intuitive; most Hylians had to hope that the shapeshifters somehow slipped up. Acted out of character, or became too aggressive to keep up the ruse. The likelihood of surviving an attack was largely dependent on the victim’s familiarity with the mimicked character. Their sorcery’s tell had been largely contained in the desert wasteland, a footnote in Zelda’s admission to the archives. She had meant to write a paper on it, but she’d tried to cut back. She worked too hard, Link was quick to remind her. The Yiga were essentially extinct anyhow. Why was she killing herself to catalog useless trivia?

“You forget your place,” the warrior scoffed at her companion. “Now hurry up before I tell his Highness that you’ve decided you’re worthy of torturing his Queen.”

With a huff the Yiga soldier skulked back to the doorway, returning with a tray he kicked across the stones, sending its sparse contents of stale bread and water flying. “See you in another three days, Mrs. Dragmire,” he sneered, pulling the door shut tightly behind him. 

A whole schematic of calculations ran through her mind while watching the revolting refuse disguised as sustenance settle comfortably into the soiled stones, the blinding hunger gnawing at her belly against what putridity her stomach could take, divided by the last tattered remnants of her pride. Perhaps running this calculation would keep her sane, if she could stave off temptation…

She forced her focus upward, away from the scraps. Along the dark stone dungeon wall, rusty sets of chains hung at the ready, spaced just far enough to deprive any prisoner the possibility of another’s touch. The guards who’d roughly dragged her from the small boat through the lockup passage hadn’t bothered to bind her here, so deep amongst the catacombs and forgotten foundation. In this triumph of a prison confusion and despair were knitted into every turn, a maze with each dead end identical to the last. 

She had never ventured down this far into the bowels of their family fortress, save for that one day. That single, cataclysmic lark. It was a wretched corner of the castle that had been partitioned off and unused for centuries. At least that’s what she was told by her father, who bristled when she’d asked him about the wretched keep mentioned in her books. From this vista, folded up against the wall, the crimson stains circling the center drain looked too vivid, even in this scant light, to be ancient.

The fresh memory of King Sidon’s blood pooling at her feet, forever tainting the Sanctum, made her press her forehead into her knees, clasping her hands above her head like a child under the bed, sheltering from a bad dream. 

Sidon and Yona were always so kind to her, even if it was more a residual afterglow of their undying affection for Link than anything she was or had done. They welcomed her to the Domain with their bone-crushing hugs, always insisting they stay an extra day, take another hike up the falls, linger as family. It was an invitation Link would indulge with a quick it’s all right, right? glance over to Zelda, his blue eyes sparkling with delight at the chance to be here, hidden beneath the forest and falls, in the close orbit of his best friend. 

On the surface, the charismatic Zora King and the stoic Knight couldn’t have seemed more contrasted, but up close behind their thick walls, watching them race log sailboats or trap crabs in the caves like boys let loose in summer, she could see the stripped-down wonder of this world that had tethered them together. Without the audience of subjects they were two minnows in a pond, ferociously loyal to the few that were able to scale their guard. 

And he had fought for the honor of his best friend’s love, with a hundred times the ferocity that she herself had managed.

She spread her hand across the jewels locked around her neck, the cold Gloom Stone humming at the heart of her palm. The loftwing shape flared up above her collarbone, snaking around her throat and hugging it snugly. It wasn’t a necklace, it was a collar. A gleaming shackle masking as luxury. 

Her wedding gift.

“Wife.” She breathed the word into her knees, the warm exhale tangled in the dress fibers, hot on her cheek. How many times had she felt the familiar, balmy truth of the word as she weaved Link’s fingers between her own, but when had he spoken it? A role taken for granted, deserted as the throne, untended until claimed. Seized by one who understood its power.

Clap, clop, clap .

Her head shot up from its resting place. She had been alone for what had to be hours since the Gerudo guards left. They’d thrown their laughter off the stone walls as they walked away from the cell, cackling all the way back to their tiny ferry, making an extra show of how abandoned she was now. 

Clap, clop, clap . 

Almost mistakable for the sound of dripping water painstakingly carving through solid stone, but no. It was coming closer. The crystallized Gloom shone blood red in the darkness as if ignited. Pressed against her jugular, she could swear it was vibrating. 

Clop. Clap.

Clop .

A sliver of faint torchlight peeked through the barred door, spreading like sunrise with each leaden step. The unmistakable contour of Ganondorf’s form filled the entry, seizing her heart with dread but also the slightest, most curious relief. At this depth, the presence of anyone was a respite from the void of no one. 

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he said as he stooped to fit inside, his eyes flickering with an unnerving sense of joy. “Then again, turnabout is fair play, hm?” He aimed the torch to the floor, extinguishing it against the damp stone, letting it slowly sizzle in anguish as the light died. Between the Observation balcony’s wave and this prison visit he’d changed into a black silk robe mirroring the uniform of his most trusted guards. It strained against the broadness of his shoulders and chest, contouring to the muscle he carried with self-assured grace. He was a creature who’d known nothing but strength and power, and the ease with which he wielded it was disarming. 

His sure-footed saunter through the darkness sent her reeling back ten thousand years, to the first visit she’d witnessed in King Rauru’s court. How he dwarfed the imposing Zonai monarch, making his warriors look like toy soldiers lined up by a child. The conspiratorial smile Queen Sonia had shot Zelda’s way as Ganondorf kneeled at her feet in forced, humiliating fealty, an attempted joke that only served to make the young Princess blush.

He paused just shy of her reach, crossing his arms as he stared down his nose at her. The presumption in his grin sent her hands clasping around her body, feeling inexplicably exposed. The sight cracked his smile wide open as he feasted on every tortuous morsel of her uncertainty. “For souls bound to torment one another for all eternity, we get so little time to talk. At least in this particular epoch.” 

In the gap of silence, her most maddening question tumbled out. “How are you possibly here?” 

He laughed, shaking his head with the amusement normally reserved for watching a pet fail at a trick. “Oh yes, how could I forget that I was dealing with Hyrule’s resident librarian. We certainly can’t move on to why I came back to your fair kingdom without establishing the exact parameters of how I could be standing before you now. As simple as that explanation may prove.” He kneeled down to her level, his hands thumbing at her temples, testing the strength of her skull. “It’s the same reason you’re not still up there in the clouds, shrieking mindlessly through the sky.” He knelt down, sitting casually like a storyteller beside her. “Because it wasn’t so much ‘you’ up there, was it? That mind, that soul, that body, they were all tucked away in the boundless reaches of the Sacred Realm for safekeeping. I was no different, though overseen and revived by less…benevolent forces.” He paused a beat, letting the mystery fester. “But unlike you, I wasn’t made to sleep in the banal comforts of denial. I spent seven years watching Hyrule. Watching you.” His index finger traced the line of her jaw, cradling her chin. “Seven years is merely a blink for us, isn’t it? But that’s the strangeness of time. Almost a decade is a long time to sit with your thoughts, mistakes… your self. You’ve been down here a scant evening, and I can already see that contemplation eating you alive.”

“What I saw, after my failed scaled form’s quick fall, was resilience.” He drew his hand back, staring into her eyes, unblinking. “Only a decade after The Calamity and its relentless chaos, and Hyrule doesn’t merely stand. Its people scrounged around for every stone and brick and nail, and built your world back. They uncovered its newest riches and oldest treasures. Your kingdom came so close, so very close, to realizing its own true potential. And then… you, the Princess, the living goddess, the lifeblood… vanished.”

“I never vanished,” she shot back.

“Oh yes, how cruel of me,” he snarled, that smirk eating her alive. “You retired. Became what, a milkmaid content to watch her life shrink like her Hero’s fading glory days? A reincarnated Goddess Hylia, cataloging flower petals for the neighborhood school?” He smacked his lips, as if the words themselves sparked bitterness on his tongue. “The rage I felt watching you resurrect this land, only to leave the resources untapped, the people untamed, the Castle stronghold a meeting ground for leisure days and picnics; you and your pitiful Knight moved heaven and earth to ensure that Hyrule wouldn’t be mine, only to leave it untethered, without so much as a ruler to see against those who would possess it? It sent me to the brink of madness. Until…I understood what it was that you needed. The missing piece between what you’d begun and what you were meant for. What you craved to be more than anything in all of time.”

She held her breath as he leaned in closer, nuzzling her earlobe with his nose. “You wish to know, don’t you, petal?” He certainly caught the jolt of her neck straightening at the name she hadn’t heard in ten thousand years. “You’re as subtle as you always were, opening up so splendidly for me before you breathe a word.” His hands smoothed over her hair in hypnotic rhythm, whisking away the strays falling into her face. “You know, I wasn’t expecting my return to go so flawlessly. Almost bloodless, even, minus your Hero’s licks and Sidon’s compulsive idiocy. It only confirmed the thoughts I’d been sitting with. Tell me. Why do you think that is?”

She shook her head, chewing through the fat of his snare trap musings. “Come, Zelda,” he purred, “be objective. I know you’d crack this puzzle in mere moments if it weren’t for these monoliths of delusion you’ve built to blot your own eyes.” He sighed, dragging her down into his disappointment. “Why did you send the Hero away so quickly?”

Her eyes sparked, seizing on the inch of argument. “So quickly? You expected me to keep him there, out-maneuvered and unprepared, so you could toy with him like a cat with his dinner? Did I rob you of all the proper gloating you’ve been plotting for these years?”

“Oh, such noble, selfless love in that heart, smothering away any memory of what might make you feel less than holy,” he snarled, then dropped his voice to a whisper.

You know I couldn’t have killed him .

She felt her mouth drop inadvertently, frozen in an argument she couldn’t make as his grin turned feral, tugging her shocked form flush against the silk of his chest. “Of course I couldn’t, petal. Do you think I’m brazen enough to think you’d ever speak to me, let alone cooperate, with that rusty blade’s blood on my hands? I knew I’d have to contend with your Hero’s survival. Naturally he’d be a bargaining chip, but you…you didn’t give him a moment’s chance to explore the terms of surrender. You were so eager to be alone, ‘forced’ to surrender, you eliminated him before he could breathe a word otherwise.”

The flinty smell of creosote after a merciful desert rain filled her nostrils as her mind tilted these words, examining them like a chess piece, refusing to admit to any of their truths. Sensing her hesitation he pulled back, gently pressing her back down to the cold floor as he stood, leaning into her shoulders. “Which means, my dear, that we wish for exactly the same thing. A chance to discover what could have been in the absence of such regrettable, ruinous mistakes.” His thumbs kneaded the blades, his voice pure velvet. “I haven’t returned for the vain, fleeting satisfaction of annihilation, but the enduring glory of possession. All of which will be made so much easier if you merely admit to your desires and submit.”

“I made no mistakes,” she said, the response that should be the correct one.

A labored, deep breath swelled his chest, a faint shake of his head betraying his disappointment. “You honor the unworthy with your intelligence and truth, and then turn around and afford yourself nothing but lies,” he said. “Brittle, useless lies that only serve to degrade you.” 

The air felt suddenly cloaked in the suffocation of death, becoming almost unbreathable. She instinctively grasped for her throat, struggling for breath as a pool of silvery gloom spread from the middle of the floor, rapidly seeping toward them. Blood wept from the walls as five spindly arms sprouted from the death pool’s depths, twitching as demon hands unfurled from their stalks, glowing yellow eyes pulsating from each of their palms. Before she could scramble to her feet the Gloom-soaked limbs had twisted around her own, yanking her down, down, unfathomably deep below even as her body surged to the ceiling. 

The storming chasm felt as if it were pummeling her with eternity itself, and she could taste the confounding rot of it—the leaden heft of years too great for any mortal mind to grasp. The compounding madness of every lesson learned and then lost, only to be painfully repeated with more blood and agony, slipping through the slats between ages. There was no end, no bottom for this abyss, only insatiable need for everything it could pull and absorb and sink back into the darkness as ash, as if it never existed at all. With every relentless moment in its grip she felt herself further from ever brushing against light again, as merely smothering would be a blissful relief from the endless harvest this incarnate Gloom would reap upon her soul. The ways it would make her forget and remember only to rip her mind apart again, over again for the remainder of reality. Amidst her own screams she could hear the echoes of every Goddess incarnate from the birth of the kingdom and its founding curse that bound them as Wisdom to Power and Courage. Begging for a release from destiny, that every lifetime given was sufficient, the demon’s voice crackling as it squeezed and gorged: Never Enough . 

In the surging evil sea she found Ganondorf, grounded calmly on blessed ground, watching patiently as her illegible screams ricocheted from the walls. She clawed vainly at the air, knowing and desiring nothing but the unshakable respite in his grip. 

Say it, Zelda . Words not spoken but pulsated, an all-consuming demand. Confess your yearning for once in your thousand lifetimes.

“Save me!” cried the girl captive in the Calamity, the woman lost in the Upheaval, the Queen in his grasp all reaching out to what now seemed inevitable.

“Isn’t that your indentured Hero’s job?” he snarled as the hands ratcheted, threatening to snap her body to bits while siphoning her soul little by little, dragging her suffering into another eon.

“He’s gone!”

“And why is he gone, petal?” he asked, his nails thrumming against his crossed arms as he impassively watched her sputtering, siphoning struggle. 

“I sent him! Away!”

“Why would you exile such a Hero? He destroyed me before, why such a sudden loss of faith?”

The Gloom tightened, snapping into the softness of her flesh, burning what must be permanent into the untouched skin. “To see…what would happen…if I’d been yours…” she managed to exorcise. “If there was only you…and I was good, and yours, like I could have been…” She had forgotten—she’d implored herself to forget—how glorious his attention had felt. How badly she needed to be wanted amidst the abject failure; unblinking, pinpointed attention that heeded her suspicions, recognized the foreboding in her prophecies. The tug of longing whenever that sharp face softened into approval, confirming that her insight was more than tactical. A brightness that she, only she, could shine into him.  “Forgive me, and I’ll prove…that you should forgive me…and that I’m sorry…” She begged the beauty of these promises with her whole heart, clawing toward them as salvation, for all she could be if he’d only have her, in this one last chance before oblivion. 

And then she felt those calloused fingers clinch around her waist, tearing her from the terrible fate that receded back into nothing at its master’s will. He held her firmly against him as the room still swayed, her frenzied heart electrifying her nerves. “You still make pretty promises, don’t you?” he murmured, his hand snaking up her scalp, folding her into a stifling kiss. She parted her lips, welcoming his tongue in to caress her own as she reached up, tugging the coarse hair of his beard pleading him closer, to stay, to understand how badly she wanted this warmth, this inverted hunger from the clutches of Gloom.

Instinctively, the tiniest moan, a tendril of blossoming pleasure, escaped her throat. The alien sound of it, like the voice of a stranger, made her heart race even harder with the thrill of surprising herself. That flutter of excitement created an echo, louder this time, and core tightened, an invisible string spooling her ever closer into his hold.

He tilted back, clasping her upper lip for a parting breath between his teeth, toying with the teasing hunger that threatened to get the best of him. “There’s so much passion trapped inside of you, isn’t there?” he mused. “So much you’ve been denied by everyone whose worlds rely on you being less.”

He straightened and licked his chops, dewy with the taste of her tender, grateful obedience. “We have earned the chance to start over now, haven’t we?” he said, more than a little wistfully. “Remembering what I did about my pragmatic little treasure, I felt confident that we’d come to an understanding, as much as the truth may have grieved you.” He smoothed her matted hair, a hint of lamentation as the tangles snagged his skin. “The staff are prepared to take excellent care of my precious wife. I’ll have the Varina escort you upstairs to rid yourself of all this…unpleasantness,” he said, glancing at the grime beset into her skin and nails. “In the meantime, other matters require my attention.” He offered no additional explanation as he strode to the door, leaving her to gather the tatters herself back up for the waiting guards to discover.

Chapter Text

“Let me escort you home, your Highness.” The lockup door opened only a short span after Ganondorf’s departure, enough time to for Zelda to catch her breath from her undoing. Through it stepped the warrior at once familiar and impossibly distant, the woman who’d sat in the carriage with her in what felt like her last lifetime. Her hostility was polished down into practiced indifference, staring just past her with her jade-lidded eyes that sparkled in the light of her wielded torch. A small, ruby-crusted gold barrette kept her red hair clipped back in its tight top bun, almost identical to the Demon King’s own crowned style. 

Scraping her stiffened body up from the floor with all of the grace of a newly hatched duckling Zelda was offered no hand or help, though at least she was spared the indignity of being closely, conspicuously watched. It felt like a fair compromise; the closest to a warm hug that she and the guard might ever get. 

Perhaps it was the supernatural silence of the wretched foundations, or the slight sliver of safety that she felt now with her offerings tentatively accepted. But as they walked, Zelda a pace behind, she at last found the courage to speak. “You were responsible for his bounty and oversaw his Coronation; now you’re entrusted with his wife,” she pointed out. “Are you the Chief?”

Her gait threatened to halt with a noticeable pause, which would have made Zelda trip had she not been moving so slowly. “Gerudo have Chiefs.” She swiveled her head back just enough to cut her sharp silhouette in the light. All the elegant angles of the King but somehow faster, more nimble than her more methodical superior. “The Varina have Commandants.”

Varina . She had heard the legend, even Riju’s mention that it endured along the desert’s most desolate fringes, in space so forsaken the Yiga wouldn’t even touch it; last bastions of a schism that had split sister and mother and daughter. 

“There are so many of you,” she realized aloud—beset on stampeding horses, ringing the Sanctum, in numbers rivaling what she’d seen in Gerudo Town. 

“I’m pleased that you’re surprised,” she said without turning. “You were never meant to know.”

They reached the docks on the east side of the castle, coming up the rough stairs carved into the cliff foundation to the back entry to the Royal Library. Already two of the other Varina were stationed at the lovingly carved back doors, etched with the same sacred crests as her ancient dress’s tabard. Here in the light she could see clearly how filthy the delicate white fabric had already become, between the splatters of King Sidon’s protest and the mold creeping through the Lockup’s floor. Golden embroidery threads split in ruin as their designs unraveled. 

Opening the doors revealed her favorite sight in the entire palace. It appeared almost exactly as it had the last time she’d left it, save for the empty glass displays now gaping, useless along the first floor bookshelves. The jewels had been pillaged, the regalia reclaimed away from view. At the far end of the sprawling two-story atrium was the room’s showcase, a miniature scale model of Hyrule. As her guard prodded her closer forward, she could see that all the markers schoolchildren had left behind, commemorating their visits by pinpointing their homes, had all been removed. She made a point on any visit to come in and peek at this little population density study disguised as an exhibit, feeling a thrill as she watched the pegs swell up from the places like Dueling Peaks and Deep Akkala so devastated by the Calamity, and the random hideaways up in the Hebra mountains or Gerudo Highlands marking their convergence in this collective space. In their place, black and red figures swarmed at the Castle and the four Domains, as well as the towns to the east. A single green peg had been placed on the edge of Hateno Village. 

The warrior’s skin kissed Zelda’s as she wedged herself in the way of the map like a stubborn book on a shelf, her narrow eyes daring her burden to protest. “This is the King’s tactical room and office now,” she noted sharply, as if sniffing out the wistfulness in Zelda’s exhale. “It will be important to reserve it for such uses.” Whatever pleasure she took in vaguely barring her from what she had to know was her most beloved space was well hidden, as she urged her on without the faintest crinkle of a grin. “This way, your Highness,” her escort invited, gesturing toward the west doors, the ones leading to a wing of the castle she’d spent little time in, especially after childhood. The tight, winding stairs spiraled two flights up to the main castle chamber. The room her mother and father had shared, much larger and grander than the cozy Princess suite she left behind when Link suggested they regroup in Hateno House. She had vague recollections of finding her mother preparing for holidays within the room, surrounded by maids plaiting her hair and weaving flowers. She seemed so grown-up to the child version of herself sitting on the fuzzy bear fur beside the fireplace, watching the women spin their special occasion magic. Now she realized that she was now the same age the Queen was then, scarcely before her death. The simple fact sent her heart clattering into her stomach, a longing she had been too distracted to feel quaking the full force of grief through her again, so close to this tender place where she lived and then, suddenly, died.

The commandant nodded to her counterparts at the entrance, prompting them to open the door. Zelda stepped inside, unfollowed. Everything appeared almost as it did in her distant memory, the bear rug still frozen in his last roar. Even the dressing table was still set with the silver brushes and pins used to rein in her mother’s hair. A formidable four-post bed marked the center of the chamber, the thick velvet curtains tied back to reveal the sumptuous Rito-embroidered coverlet. On the nightside table, the only sign of any shifted presence—the Dragon’s Helm crown, twinkling with the natural light pouring through the arched glass windows. 

From the far side of the room, a girl lugging a large basket of towels and cool saffina fronds emerged through the bathroom door. Her wavy auburn hair bounced as she tucked through the passage, crossing the threshold like a swan. The second she saw Zelda her expression exploded with awe, a squeaky yelp popping free as she hugged the basket to her chest. “Princess Zelda! Your highness! I mean, the Queen? Oh no,” she blushed, bowing much deeper than expected in such an informal setting. “I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t insult you.”

“No, not at all,” she said, relieved to see another Hylian who wasn’t corralled or trapped or in peril, even if she was gawking at her with unnerving excitement. 

“I am so sorry, I didn’t know when you were going to arrive. I’m Ellie, your new attendant.” 

The castle hadn’t staffed attendants since before the Calamity, and she’d never seen this remarkably young woman before—she couldn’t be more than 16. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Only since this morning,” she said.

“Barely a day and they’re already staffed?” Zelda wondered aloud. 

A dark cloud rolled across the girl’s expression, hinting at some hidden ordeal predicating her swift arrival. “They worked their way pretty quickly through the town,” she said simply, banishing the recent memory with a shake of her head. “Would you like to start your bath?” 

From behind Ellie she could see steam rising from fresh hot water, fogging the intricate mirrors and glass lining the royal bathroom. The tub was set into the floor, rising just above in a solid marble basin. A skin of bubbles skimmed the surface, their floral perfume wafting in the fog. The mere sight of it felt like a balm on her frenzied, heightened nerves, and she waited with excruciating longing as the girl took her time to untangle the matted knots in her hair. Stepping out of the ruined dress, feeling the pads of her feet against the smooth, polished tile, flooded her with a sense of presence within her skin. Cloaked by the steam and the warm seclusion of the bath was a brush with normalcy, sanding the ragged edges of fatigue and hunger and dread to give her soul a chance at breath. 

“What would you like me to do with this?” Ellie asked as she picked the tattered gown from the floor, running her hands over the embroidery on the once-lavender bodice and tabard, now fraying like straw. 

“Burn it.” An instinctive wish, one that only became more appealing spoken aloud. Grind it to ash before it could make its way to its next museum exhibit. Of Complacency and Compromise: What a Princess Wouldn’t Do . 

“Burn a Cece ?!” the girl squeaked, as if Zelda had just commanded her to drown a basket of kittens.

“I don’t think there’s any saving it.”

“I’ve had to get some nasty dirt out of my favorite dresses before. The carriages through town don’t stop on a rupee. And the threading’s still good, it just needs to be shored up. I could try, if that’s all right with you,” she offered with such sweetness, such pure promise and optimism, that she couldn’t summon the sort of monster to deny her.

“If you promise not to worry too much about the results,” she said, earning a squeak of joy as she swooped down to gather the full layers of once-white skirt into her arms. “Remember it was doomed when you grabbed it.”

“I won’t,” she said through a grin, nudging toward the exit. “Do you need anything, your Highness?” 

“No, thank you Ellie,” she excused her, watching as her stained, ragged evidence flounced with new life as it waltzed out the door.

Perching at the lip of the tub she let herself seep, her back sliding down the slick marble. Her face slipped beneath the isle of bubbles, suspended in the heavy warmth until her lungs threatened to burst. Leaning her head against the edge, she fanned her arms through the water, its gentle resistance lulling her into a meditative pattern. The bundles of fresh saffina Ellie had tucked into the mounds of towels deepened her breaths, inviting a tentative peace she knew she could not contemplate long, for fear of shattering it. 

She tried to whittle her focus into the words they’d exchanged, to line them up and examine the gaping spaces between them, to craft her thesis on what he’d come back for. “You” was idiotic; this was conquest, not romance. She might be a fringe benefit of claiming Hyrule’s throne: an expedited path to legitimacy, a balm on the public’s nerves, or even insurance. With her in such close, tangled proximity to his clutches, it would make any loyal faction hesitate to mount an ambitious act of resistance. 

A long sigh let its way out. How long had it been since her last true, honest bath? Not ducking in and out of the river, then running inside to wash her hair in the scant warm water that the sink could manage? She stretched her legs out to their full length, her toes rising up to meet the skim of bubbles before sinking once more, suspended in weightless, timeless splendor. 

The lavender, the saffina, the just-laundered linen gave the luxurious space an extra air of indulgence, and the confusion, the hunger, the fatigue seemed to belong not to her, but that scruffed and threadbare version of herself discarded on the stone floor. Confess you yearning for once in your thousand lifetimes , he’d demanded. He wasn’t always wrong; that was always the maddening part. 

But no one liked hearing that part. That the shadows did not cloak a mindless, insatiable monster. The fortifications of righteous men could withstand a mace, not a scalpel.

How tired she was of trying to convince them otherwise. How little it had ever mattered.

Absentmindedly her right hand waved against her floating inner thigh. She let her touch linger there, where plump softness sheltered the taut muscle she’d carved through that blissful chosen life of mounting horses and scouring fields. Her fingers effortlessly slid from the feminine suppleness to brush against her entrance, and the lovely bead of pleasure at its gates. As her fingers lightly teased with her instinctual rhythm, her mind drifted to the small study just behind the Royal Library’s miniature Hyrule. 

Back in the early days of peace, when they were still living in the castle as the restoration work raged. Craftsmen and construction crews were present all hours of the day and night, racing to make the ruined stronghold a cultural pillar once more. Link and Zelda had been traveling from Faron and the tropical Zonai ruins, where she was leading a school field trip on the wonders of archaeology. 

The activities had gone long, stalled out by a cloudburst storm that drenched and scattered everyone, resulting in an extra hour spent trying to locate a student who’d found the “best” place to take shelter. Heading to the castle on their horses, simmering in their own flavors of annoyed, they’d gotten into it about the best route back.

“Let’s just cut through Hyrule Field,” Link pleaded. “It’s a straight shot.”

“People will see us if we go through the field,” she argued, insisting on following the Hylia River’s banks. 

“Who cares!? How are they going to tell it’s you, let alone what you look like, while you’re speeding by on a galloping horse?” 

“And if we end up having to stop? I can’t be ‘Princess Zelda’ to anyone right now, all right?”

She could feel the fibers of his filter snapping as a retort sparked at the end of his tongue, but she dug her heels into the stallion and took off east to the river, leaving him the only choice he ever had: to follow.

By the time they got back that afternoon, her carefully selected “adventurer’s costume” of khaki-colored cotton and leather boots was drenched in the soupy tropics and her own sweat. As soon as the horses were safe in the gate house she made a beeline for the library, the quickest space to reach without having to slink through the Sanctum. She dumped her pile of reference books onto the reading table, hurrying Link on to follow. “I need to hide,” she hissed, leaning her shoulder into the trick bookshelf at the head of the room. Through the narrow slat of a passage they slipped, concealed in the King’s Secret Study.

The cool, musty air sent a thrill of relief as she kicked off the mud-caked boots and unrolled the long stockings beneath her skirt. She tossed the damp pith helmet onto the floor, shaking her hair free as she leaned back on the desk, stretching her sticky frame out in blessed respite. She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the ecstasy of comfort. 

Suddenly she felt the buttery leather of Link’s gauntlets gripping the flesh of her hips, his lips wicking the perspiration beading at her collarbone. The exasperated knot growing in his throat for all those miles snagged them together off-kilter, her skirt bunching and arms flailing for balance as his deceptively strong body slamming against her precarious perch, nips disguised as kisses tracing the straight shot between her breasts to her waistband. 

“Link,” she gasped, teetering against the desk, “I thought you said not here!” They’d spent the last year making love as nomads in caves and tents and beach huts, anywhere but the crowded castle grounds, where Link was still a Royal Guard and astutely conscious of protocol. He wouldn’t walk within three paces of her, let alone reach within her.

She couldn’t make out his face in the torch-cast shadows and splay of his hair, but there was a flash of recklessness she’d rarely glimpsed in her Knight, pulsing in his touch and the plunging octave of his voice as he whispered, “you can’t make a sound.” A dare; one she tested making a high-pitched cry as he tore at the buttons on her once-crisp shirt. His hand flew up, squeezing her cheeks. “ Shhh , I said quiet,” he commanded, retrieving one discarded stocking from the floor, balling it up with his fingers before sliding the muffler between her lips.

In the bath she stroked herself faster, falling out of rhythm into a frenzied pace as the memory of Link’s tongue uncovering her every pulsating crevice, her hands deep in his hair begging him forward, further, forever. Her rapturous whimpers filled her head, trapped and ricocheting behind the gag. His hands stroked the inroads of her thighs beneath her hiked skirt, resting behind her knees to tilt her up ever closer, until his own body couldn’t resist her any longer, and he stood to fumble himself free to enter her.

And there in her mind he rose, the King with his red hair unspooling like fire, his long tongue running up and down the length of her calf, pressing himself against her just enough to test her eagerness. She squeezed her eyes tightly and she shook her head, trying to knock out the image as she heard the very real sound of the bathroom doorknob clicking open. 

Zelda ducked her head down into the bubbles, leaving just enough room for her nose to graze the foam. Ganondorf held himself in the arched doorway, his nostrils flaring as he savored the cloudy air fused with saffina and lavender. Ancient memories of those scattered visits he’d made to King Rauru’s palace for their decadent celebrations re-emerged in Zelda’s mind, and with them the alarming pull he always had on her gaze. Through the tiers of olive and grape trays, and the girls in their feathered skirts and elaborate masks pouring enough wine to drown a Goron, she locked onto that viridescent skin lurking within the respite of shadows. No matter how crowded the ballroom, how vibrant the entertainment or persistent the other company, she was keenly aware of his proximity and place from her. She’d felt self-conscious of him catching her staring, and so forced herself to look away, to listen to what Sonia was gossiping about, to pretend that it was only a coincidence that he happened to fall square in frame wherever she glanced up. The way she had not only allowed him, when he began appearing in her glen and on her tongue, the center of her conversations with Rauru as they turned sharp; she had manifested him, the need to be heard above the din of dismissal a pull she had not, could not resist.

He plucked the porcelain pitcher from its perch on the wooden stool left of the door, and let it dangle from his fingertips as he sauntered around the bath basin, his eyes flicking from her hovering blue gaze to the opaque water and back. “Do you remember the first time I met you?” he asked, as if glimpsing her thoughts.

“Yes,” she said quietly, tipping her head back up above the water. 

“Indulge me,” he commanded, coming to a halt behind her. “When was that, Zelda?”

“In Rauru and Sonia’s palace, on the day your swore fealty.”

“Ah yes, that preposterous charade.” His tone was almost jovial, as if unearthing lost battle stories with a friend at the pub. “An entire grueling day’s journey to kiss the hand of that simpering farce of a King and his worthless Queen, all too thrilled to sneer down at me and the greatest warriors known to this Kingdom, the realm he had the nerve to call his own. We should have torched them all alive.” He knelt down right above her head, pressing the pitcher through the froth to slowly fill with water. “But there was a special guest whose presence had started stirring the lips of that miniature empire, wasn’t there? Sonia’s little niece, isn’t that what they called you? They were such prolific liars, you’d think they’d have been better at it.” His paw pressed firmly down, just above her hairline. He cascaded water down her gathered hair from the pitcher, his palm damming her forehead to keep the stream out of her eyes. He reached down just above her locked necklace, sweeping up a handful of soap. The delicate constellation of bubbles trembled in his hand, their absence leaving a porthole on the surface with her round, cream-colored breasts bobbing underneath. 

He massaged the soap into her scalp, his fingertips tracing slow rings around her hairline and above her ears, the entrancing pattern lolling her head back as her eyelids sank in spellbinding relaxation. “I didn’t think twice about your presence in their sham of a court, until I arrived. And you surprised me. The way you locked onto me and the Varina assembled in the midst; I could feel your fear and misgivings radiating off the dias. Past the vapid grins of your long-lost idiot relatives, content to think that they’d quieted the nuisance in the south with one gesture. You saw straight through all of it to my true purpose and power. You understood it in a way no one else had. As if it were a part of you as well.” His hands wove lower, kneading the base of her hairline, and a rumbling of approval purred from her throat. “And then, you used that sweet voice to beg for something, anything else than the fate they knew you knew , even if that meant a pardon for the demon from your nightmares spilling from those precious lips. You were wise enough to admit weakness. If you’d convinced your reigning fools, I never would have stood a chance.”

For as long as she could remember, this procedure was a chore assigned to maids and attendants, one task out of a long list they had to tick off before bidding her good evening and taking off for their own lives. Never had anyone lingered here, basking in a source of delight she herself had forever overlooked.

Link hadn’t.

She recoiled at the thought, seeping in over the partition she’d tried to erect in her mind, keeping him cornered off from this nightmare. To avoid these ghastly comparisons. Of course he hadn’t thought to wash her hair; how was he to know how wonderful it would make her feel?

But then, how did Ganondorf know?

“Because that ambition and its destiny, that was part of you, wasn’t it?” The King continued as he worked his fingers deeper into the lather, her skull rocking along with his pressure. “A cursed fate only those three interlocking pieces of it could grasp.” Another splash of water, rinsing away the lacy lather strands twisting through her golden hair. “How many times, I wonder,” he murmured, his hands dipping below the surface to grasp at the silken skin below. “In these years of hiding away from your truest potential, did you wonder why—after tens of thousands of decades-–why did I awaken in the single pinprick of time that you found me in the depths beneath this very floor?”

Her breathing suddenly stopped as he pinpointed her most recurring nightmare. “Make no mistake, sweet Princess,” he murmured. “Hyrule was always there for me to take. I was only waiting for you.”

His left hand curled around the left succulent mound of her breast, thumbing those same, intricate massaging little circles at her ripe, swollen nipple as his right hand continued to trace and memorize her form, luxuriating in its long slide down her mermaid silhouette to her deepest crevice below. Two fingers effortlessly curled inside of her, tentatively exploring her walls and corners. She felt her velvety muscles clamp around him, a welcoming plea for more. Her heightening moans sank into the thick, damp stone like vapor as her hips hitched forward, begging him further. 

“Not yet, Petal,” he growled, his fingers curling into a desperate grip at her chest, his wrist digging against her heart. “What did I make clear about what I want from you?”

She bit her lip as want spasmed through her body, heaving against her illusion of control. “You’re not just going to take me,” she sorted, that sinking bell tower revelation. “I have to want it.”

“Oh I can see how much you want it,” he chuckled, warm with deep satisfaction as he flittered his fingers playfully within her. “Tell me how badly you crave me, knowing full well that your Knight is still out there, desperate to return.”

“Please,” she exhaled, all of her past and future seeming utterly irrelevant here in this crystallized, singular prism of want. “My King…”

He pinched her nipple hard between his thumb and forefinger, twisting as a third finger slipped in to draw thick curlicues within her plush depths. “My name,” he insisted through bared teeth. “From your lips.”

“ Ganondorf .” She tilted her head, bracing against the marble, gripping the lip of the bath as her chest crested the water, and the torrent of rapture hiking up her core drew closer and closer to its peak.

“Yes, Zelda.”

“Ganondorf. Please.” Her mind combed through the commands, the rough words her tongue wouldn’t form even as the tearing, plunging, brutal images flashed in her head. Being held and stilled and quieted until even her mind wouldn’t argue, only the imperative of muscle and nerve to finally reach the precipice that would send every cell shattering. “Release me.”

“You ache so badly, don’t you?” he murmured, slowing the thrumming of his fingers, savoring how ferociously she squeezed back. A growling moan seethed through his clenched teeth, his rough red hair scratching against her cheek as he drew ever closer. “I dreamed you’d be this receptive, all those nights I spent planning how and when I could have you. You’ve been craving this too, haven’t you, Princess? Deep down in the places your heart won’t even let you glimpse?”

He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know, of how perfectly his mass enveloped her imagination, capable of molding her into a thousand reasons for regret. Only her own admission would manifest it, one she could easily deny. It wasn’t too late if she wanted it to be.

“Yes,” she breathed, his words blurring together as she lost any notion of what she had or hadn’t ever wanted, only wanting to rise and fall within this sweet precipice. “I always knew…it would be different…it could be…”

His hands withdrew, leaving her bobbing as she choked on a whimper. He spoke deliberately into her ear, as if carving the words on her mind’s slate. “I want to watch you cave into every pleasure that this cruel world had you believe that you were too good to want.”

He plucked her like a mermaid from the sea, her slicked body pressed tightly against his chest as he carried her over the door’s threshold, into his conquered domain.

Chapter Text

Ten Thousand Years Before

She was going to get in trouble, that was for certain.

Then again, what could Rauru and Sonia actually do to her, she fumed to herself, picking at the fingernails worn down to slivers from over a year of displacement’s stress. She wasn’t their prisoner or captive, she wasn’t technically an obligation. Her otherworldly hindsight, a wrinkle in order, had elevated her into the Court. At the time she’d regarded the invitation to observe and advise as a sign of Rauru’s enlightenment, validation that she had something to offer this flint-spark of a world. That perhaps not every King’s line-of-sight did not cease at the tip of his nose. 

They could stop helping you , she thought. 

Those fever dream first weeks she’d spent high on the cocktail of shock and panic and confusion, laced with a delirious sense of wonder—amidst the wreckage, the world was new again. The demon had not followed her down through the shaft cracked in reality. Optimism fueled her wanderings through the Palace, the libraries, the gardens and grounds, the nearby shrines and temples set as a testament not to an unseen goddess, but a pulsing power. The possibility of Zonaite captivated her; she spent nights without sleeping, sketching diagrams and testing equations, possessed by the idea that this vanished miracle did not only hold her key home, but would lack everything her kingdom had been wanting in that wrung and ruined distant century. A frog-leap’s worth of progress over the decades burned in Calamity.

When she spoke of her theories and discoveries in the Throne Room, enrapturing the gathered Nobles and Sages with her enthusiasm and strangeness, it was impossible not to catch his grin in her periphery. How novel, how affirming it must have been to have this strange girl falling from the sky, claiming a pedigree exceeding his own by millennia, utterly fixated on the spoils of his domain. Not just acknowledging, but praising how superior they were not as descendants, but ancestors. 

Then the months began to pass.

In Mineru’s workshop she built contraptions. Bicycles that could hover, tracking beams that froze unlucky Keese. Sonia entertained her afternoons in the garden gazebo, catching her least-favorite porcelain serving dishes before they could shatter on the ground. She watched the gentle giants, the Constructs, smelt and press the Zonaite carted from the depths into concentrated cells of power. Concentric circles like the ones etched into the walls and floors, time spent with nothing in return. The only thing bringing her closer to Hyrule, to home, were the days amassing forward like a league of ants stacking atop each other with aspirations for the sky.

And as the novelty wore into routine, the craggy borders of its world began to scrape at her. 

“A daring move this afternoon, considering you’d yet to be excused.” The rumble broke her concentration, making her jump in spite of herself. 

“You’ve followed me,” she accused Ganondorf reflexively as he watched her, for who knows how long, from the spaces between her glen’s brambles. 

His lips curled into a smirk as his crossed arms flexed across his chest, the same satisfied smile he’d flashed when Rauru spoke his decree. A default for inevitabilities. “I hardly needed to follow you when you scamper back to the same spot whenever you’re feeling sore, Lady Zelda,” he said. “If you truly wished to be alone, you wouldn’t have come back here.”

He passed through the brush in the span of her flustered silence, then paused a scant pace before her, the late afternoon sun glinting from his bands and chains of gold. They caught her eye like a wild animal flashed a trinket, snaring her in a glory so much bolder, brasher, more brazen than anyone she’d met in her myriad of lifetimes. 

There was no way he missed her stare. He folded it up in his mind, tucked it away with the tightened hitch in her shoulders, the tentative press of her lips caging back a secret.

“You felt no need to hide your displeasure from your betters,” he pointed out, shattering her concentration with the razor barb into her most tender side. 

She chewed at the meat of her inner cheek, raking out the least incriminating version of the truth. Stepping off the dais, past the throne, behind the soldiers lined at attention, letting the Throne Room echo with her slapping sandals as the entire assemblage watched didn’t leave much plausible deniability. “This was not a proud day for Hyrule,” she decided, unable to avoid her eyes averting down to the wild grass.

“A proud day in Hyrule,” he repeated slowly, a dark chuckle rattling his chest. “I would love to hear, my Lady, what a ‘proud day’ in this Kingdom looks like for you.”

“A day when sovereignty is not dismissed outright would be a good start,” she said, still livid recalling the way Rauru had stood, smirking down at Ganondorf brought back to heel on his knee, as he had to appease the same being hungry for his fealty. He had turned that smirk to her, met her eyes for a fraction of a second, where it curdled into a pucker. A foul, bitter rejection of all she had reminded him, begged him only hours before Court began.

“It’s a small concession,” she had said in his chancery as Mineru and Sonia stood behind his seated highness, staring down his snout at her with fury thinly veiled as disdain. The women didn’t meet her gaze, shifting instead to the books or stacks of papers or jewel-fringed ears that twitched with his mounting irritation. “The Zora have, and continue to have, a deferring monarchy for time immortal. He has offered the annexation of Faron for your Temple Grounds. That land has far more potential and consequence for you than the desert could.”

“We’ve all been made to entertain your prophesied fates of a Hyrule we’ll never know,” Rauru replied, weariness seeping into his barely restrained tone. “You assume to know what your ancestors desire as well?”

“If we’re able to make peace with the Gerudo now , if we foil this war from here…”

“It is my peace to make,” Rauru cut her off, rising from his chair in clear dismissal. “You are a guest, Zelda. Advocating for the man you so breathlessly warned me against what, one season ago?”

“Because if he could be bargained with, if we could contain his rage and diffuse it,” she tried again, desperation heightening her voice like a child’s.

“We do not reward traitors with victories,” he said, punctuating the last word with a fist, spilling parchment and ink from the desk to the floor. “And my decisions will not be dictated by the demands of a distant epoch.”

And still, she had hoped. Through Ganondorf speaking for the women bent behind him, invoking the names of his mothers, drawing out the legacy of Gerudo ferocity and independence and spirit that should not die for a misunderstanding between two worthy Kings. She had held her breath, on the cusp of containing his pride not perfectly, not eternally, but long enough to dissipate in the land that had birthed both his inheritance and rage.

Stupid, stupid girl. 

“We will welcome not only Faron, but the entire Gerudo territory into Hyrule’s fold,” Rauru had declared, signing the fate of her world with the same tone and gravitas he used to order new banners flown or a feast in honor of the Goron elder’s birthday. 

A soft brush of leather against her cheek jolted her from the memory, flicking her stare from its distance to meet Ganondorf’s searching eye. A question sparked in that glittering topaz as his gaze raked across her face. “As tender as a petal,” he murmured to himself, his thumb spinning a slow circle into the soft spot between her cheekbone and jaw. “Did you really think that I arrived here today with any delusions that Rauru would do anything but exactly what he did? Speak,” he clarified into her frozen silence.

“It would have been fair,” she said, swallowing hard between his fingers.

“Fair?” He laughed, tightening his grip. “My Lady, what context have you built to judge ‘fair’?”

One of the soldiers must have watched her storm away from the Palace. The Gerudo would not have left without their King. They were glaring omissions in the afternoon, she thought as he drew close enough to wave the loose strands of her hair with his rising breath. If she had enough time to scream, would it spook him enough…was she fast enough…

“‘Fair’ would be the worthiest voice in the room’s word as law,” he said barely above a breath. “Fair would be the spirit of truth imbued with the force of strength. Fair would be worthiness that transcended blood. What Hyrule have you known, my Lady, that resembled Fair?”

Her expression settled, unreadable as his own. “Such a Hyrule does not exist.”

He cracked, a smile engulfing her entire horizon. “That’s right, Petal. I knew we would understand each other.”

Present Hyrule

The Demon King was patient.

She’d expected him to toss her on the bed and ravage her senseless, to knock away her frustration and conflict in a tearing, clawing frenzy. So the setting her down on the edge of the mattress and placing an armful of fresh towels in her arms while he walked to the fireplace caught her off-guard.

“Take a moment, dry yourself off,” he said, sensing her confusion. She wicked the bath water from her skin and squeezed the droplets from her hair as she watched the absurdly large King eclipse the fireplace by kneeling in front of it, arranging the kindling to his liking before striking the flint. A night she’d long forgotten emerged in her mind, in her room at Rauru and Sonia’s ancient palace. It was the Vineyard Festival that they celebrated each year, when the grapes that grew along Necluda’s gentle slopes were plucked and smashed and sequestered in barrels for next year’s celebration. Not long after Ganondorf’s false promise was given, when she had yet to consider the talisman hanging around her neck like a noose, waiting patiently to birth her mindless, martyred stasis. 

Guests from all around the burgeoning kingdom convened on the castle grounds for the feast, setting up small camps in the courtyards and gardens; mini domains where they could rest before the journey home but, most importantly, let the celebration spill out into the tents and bonfires, stretching the night as far as they could. From her balcony she could hear the Ritos drunkenly firing arrows into the trees, the Zoras dashing off in pairs for clandestine swims in the moat. The Gorons were ordered the furthest away from the premises, as one of their impromptu bowling tournaments had once knocked out the first gate watchtower. 

It was the subdued Gerudo camp that was erected beneath Zelda’s room. The new arrivals, never present prior to the show of fealty. Compared to the other sets of visitors their gathering was small, only four lean-to tents for the women journeying in from the desert, and one much larger, octagonal structure bearing their unmistakable tribal patterns for their King. Just like now, in the Hyrule Castle chamber, she had watched the broad shoulders hunch over the humble gathering of sticks, sparks leaping from his hands as he ran a jagged rock against the waxy flint. The women leaned against each other as they clutched steaming mugs around the promise of fire, switching out the wine for thick ladles of chocolate, speaking to one another in tones she couldn’t hear from her vantage. 

From her vantage, they looked harmless.

“Zelda! Zelda!!” She grimaced, hearing Sonia crashing through the door, spilling the pile of books she’d planned to return to Mineru on her way inside. Sonia preferred the wine sparked with over-ripe dazzlefruit, which gave it an effervescence and strength like nothing Hyrule had produced before or since. She usually could handle it with a sparkle and a wink, rising the next morning as fresh as snow. But tonight she’d taken a glass with afternoon tea, accepting each ready refill from her steward construct long into the night.

Zelda stepped back into the room, keeping her voice low. “I’m right out here, I’m getting some air,” she said, and to her dismay the Queen began zig-zagging her way toward her, taking another gulp of her drink. 

“You came up to bed early, didn’t you?”

“I wanted to get some reading done before I see Mineru tomorrow.” It was a lie; the celebration was untenable. She was tired of being asked strange questions by those not buying her “niece” backstory, of the jokes and stories she didn’t understand within the context of this world. The comfort of treating this place as a field study was growing threadbare; a blanket letting in the draft through its rot.

Sonia collapsed onto the lounge chair, holding her glass up to the moonlight. “I know how important it is to you to get back to where you came from, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how, maybe, you’re coming at it from the wrong angle. Did you ever think maybe you were sent back here to learn to enjoy life?”

This didn’t surprise her much. Sonia wrapped her wishes in the thin tissue of “relax” and “don’t worry” and “it will all be okay in the end.” She could. It had. “I have to save Hyrule,” Zelda muttered, well aware of how idiotic and grandiose the imperative sounded, especially out here in the fumes of this joyous kingdom’s revelry. She’d abandoned a bacchanal to chase ashes.

“Save Hyrule,” Sonia repeated with a snort that caught her attention—frustration she’d yet to glimpse behind the patient lessons and forgiving smiles. “After it’s fallen into an apocalypse? The Goddess is showing you mercy, and instead you’re obsessed with repaying a price you already flayed your soul to fulfill. Why not settle in here, before the land is spent and destroyed ten times over? We could arrange the best marriage for you, a life worthy of your promise and lineage, and you’d never have to lift a finger for the rest of your days.”

Zelda drew back from her vista, startled by the seriousness in Sonia’s tone. Not once had she considered just… not returning. “But my people need me.”

“Your people? You mean the ones who scorned and shamed you for divine failure, because hating a girl at least made sense? Don’t they have their Hero to solve their problems? Or… is that why you can’t stay here?” She smirked, never missing an opportunity to needle Zelda’s most tender side. “Come on. We’ve got swordsmen here. Good ones! Archers. Champion spearfishers. They’re overseeing lands that are lush and flourishing. We’ve secured new alliances that, I understand you don’t particularly like from your ages-on perspective, but that promise not just peace and prosperity, but true fortune.”

“I can’t abandon them,” she said, Sonia’s intrusions wearing her patience thin. “And I won’t abandon them. Link won’t rest until he finds me, and I won’t stop trying to get back to him.” 

“For the ‘Kingdom,’” Sonia rolled her eyes.

“Why do you want me to stay here so desperately?” She crossed her arms in her angry teacher stance, her own dam of patience reaching its end. “Are you after another truce or alliance? Is there some attractive arrangement you can make if I’m around to barter with? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“No! Of course not!” A look of genuine hurt shaded Sonia’s heart-shaped face, a sense of fatigue as she stared up into the night sky. “But Rauru and I… there is no daughter. No Prince or Princess. Once he and Mineru are gone, that will be the end of the Zonai. And when I’m gone, that will be the end of all of us. If you stayed…”

She let the thought hang on a sigh, swallowed up by campfire smoke and distant muffled laughter.

“Just think about it, please?” She asked, pulling herself back up off the lounge. Without another word she teetered back out, vanishing through her bedroom door.

Zelda closed her eyes, shaking her head. She turned back to the balcony, slumping her shoulders as she leaned against the edge. When she opened them back up, the Gerudo’s fire was raging, warming their chilled bones in the absence of the desert swelter. The King stood behind it, the glint of his red eyes staring up at her own, his long red hair blending seamlessly into the flames.

“You light your own fires,” she said now in the castle chamber, hugging the damp towel against her like a pillow.

He didn’t answer immediately, perhaps startled at her nerve to break the silence. “I do,” he eventually conceded, the sound of struck flint punctuating the answer.

“You’re the only King I’ve seen who doesn’t have a servant do it for him,” she said.

His olive shoulders hitched in a low chuckle. “And how many Kings have you known?”

She considered while the unearthed memory of Sonia glowed in her mind’s eye, the colors sharp and pulsing with stardust. “The one you maimed, the one you doomed, and the one you killed.” 

A constellation of sparks flew onto the kindling, turning it red as iron. “You’ll have to be more specific, Petal.”

“A Queen,” she said instead, her heart crying from behind the line she’d redrawn a dozen times before transcending and settling into the downy softness of the monster’s claimed bed. “You killed the only Queen I’ve known beyond childhood. Or is that still too imprecise for your body count?”

“A preventable consequence, as you well know,” he pointed out, his back still turned, reaching heedlessly into the fire to ignite the next dried sliver of tinder. “And I could have commanded that puppet to rip that dagger into your own heart and taken the very same prize. An even better victory, in fact, damning the light that was strong enough to drive me down into ten thousand years of slow, merciless rot. Or are we still parsing out what is and isn’t fair as if the three goddesses didn’t abandon us eons ago?”

Back in the ancient courtyard, amidst the frenzy of her denial, in the fervor of his wrath, she hadn’t wondered. Only mourned as Rauru softened, quieted, listened. The Secret Stone teasing against her heart with its cruel bargain at her fingertips. Atone , it had called, a siren beckoning from the guilt that lapped in waves within her, endless and unspeakable. 

She had yet to hear the song of Sundelions peeking over the grave mound and their drowning refrain: It should have been you. 

“And to answer your question, I don’t care for servants,” he circled right back, the first crackles of wood beginning to snap beneath his gaze. “What I demand from those who serve me is extraordinary.” Rising to his feet, he closed their distance in two long strides. “It takes time to cultivate. And I won’t spend the effort on anyone I deem less than exceptional.” He cupped her chin in his hand, tilting it just so, admiring its pliability, unchanged in millennia. “It’s rare and quite special.”

His lips molded against her own, hands gripping her hair, sliding down her back to squeeze her ass, lifting her off the bed as easily as she’d pluck a glass from the table. Her legs wrapped around his waist, meeting the soft silk of his robe and linen scarves and wraps. The prickly bite of his beard scorched her lips and chin as her hands clasped behind his neck. He lifted her even higher still, setting her feet up atop the bed, to stand on the thick baseboard. 

“Stay still,” he commanded as he untied a long turquoise scarf from the small collection of bunting at his hip. He tore the delicate fabric down the middle with ease, producing two strips he proceeded to knot loosely around her wrists. He tied each hand to its neighboring bedpost,   splaying her body across the front of the bed. Satisfied he stepped back toward the fire, finding a bottle of amber-colored liquor on the side table, which he poured into a waiting snifter glass. 

“I…”

“I didn’t ask for you to speak, did I?” He sank into the tufted leather chair, swirling the drink in his hand into a whirlpool before taking his first sip. “You are here, and you will stay, and you will enjoy yourself beyond regret. Or is the Princess of Light incapable of defeating water-silk?”

Her shoulder blades unhinged, her arms caught in the sight slack and careful pull, the fabric caught only slightly  on the natural knots of the polished wood. She settled, lest she accidentally pry them loose.

He answered with a toast of liquor to hide his smiling lips.

“Spread your legs.”

You can’t , she thought as her toes curled into the bed’s footboard, twitching to comply. Performance even deep within herself, so far removed from the dark churn of her neglected want. Denied and starved and hidden but somehow alive, wrestling away her control, her sanity, refusing to yield back to stasis. 

The glass paused at his chin, then swiveled to the side as he leaned his elbow into the chair’s arm, giving her a unflinching view of his full attention. “Petal, you’re not deciding,” he said, his voice lower, drained of its mirthful lilt. “You’re doing. Exactly what your King asks of you.”

I must .

Carefully she slid her feet apart along the length of the polished, lacquered wood, opening her calves and thighs between the distance. The scarves held her surely, and she discovered a wispy thrill in the slight movement that strained her arms against them, the smooth restriction trapping her within a will that was not her own; all of the agonizing through her options or tracing the end-game was futile here. Flags of surrender unfurling from her wrists, run up the bedpost as the Demon King crossed his leg, relaxing into his view.

As her feet met with the bedposts her exposed sex ached with want, and she yearned to press her thighs back together if just for one moment of relief, though she knew this would directly defy what she'd just been commanded. She buried her face into her left shoulder, muffling a tortured cry as her hips tipped uselessly forward into the vacant air.

“You seem distraught, Zelda,” he mused, drinking in her anguish with his deliciously satisfied smirk. She pressed her cheek deeper against her collarbone, the rough facets of her choker’s jewels clawing against her skin in a temporary distraction from the torment pulsating between her legs. “I thought you, of anyone, would have learned to accept the grind of time against your spirit.”

He nursed the drink in his hand as she whimpered, her slightly twisting torso doing nothing to quell her flames. “You’re doing so well for me, Petal,” he said, all velvet and campfire, “take a breath and think of how wonderful you’ll feel when I grant you everything you’re suffering so beautifully for.” With a swallowed cry she let her anxious body go slack, held up by no force but the scarves. As her muscles eased her need began to ebb, the ache of it receding. She exhaled, slumped and pliant. She closed her eyes, sinking into the blurred dream of emptiness vanished in the fervor of being held and secured and taken and enveloped, unconcerned with love but bent on satisfaction. Her head lolled back, groaning from her greatest depths.

“You’re perfect like this.” 

Time went by, her daydream slowing, all colors and warmth and pulse. She was nearly eased enough to sleep, suspended and drifting, as she heard the empty glass come to rest on the side table. The sound of his katana tilting against the chair, the faint chink of his necklace and golden bands as he removed his robe and wraps. A callused finger tipping her chin, drawing her from her daze. 

“Zelda. Open your eyes.”

A heavy blink and he manifested before her, the sharpened stone from the fire in his grasp. With two quick swipes he severed the bond’s gauzy fibers, sending her tumbling backward against the opulent embroidered bedding. He lapped up her form an instant longer, towering above her, blotting out the firelight, the last embers of ten thousand years of want. He lowered himself down and she wrapped her legs around his hips, welcoming his cock within her, her back arching sharply as it filled and soothed her.

He eased into a rhythm, working himself deeper with each stroke, his hands languishing over her corporeal pleasures: the fullness of her plump breasts whipping with each plunge, the steep curve of her waist and hips, her sensitive soft skin responding to the slightest brush. One hand slipped beneath her knee, tracing the route of her inner thigh, finding the place she’d been trying to please, teasing a throaty whimper from the slightest circle of his finger. “Now,” he groaned, the growling order itself enough to stir her into ecstasy. Grinding her hips faster as she tensed, desperate and losing pace, at last she crested her pleasure, tumbling uncontrollably down as her own cries roared in her ears.

Her muscles melted against the bed, the shuddering euphoria ferrying her to the threshold of slumber. She could feel his gauntlet brush her cheek, fingers teasing  at the jewels of her collar, their awakening ushering another wave of obliterating peace. The pulse of that center stone felt like falling asleep in spring grass as the laundry fluttered above, too blissful to keep track of the afternoon. The last thing she could remember was an arm hooking around her middle, flush against the faintly slicked wall of his chest, and lips close enough to nibble at her ear as they incanted:

I knew you’d adore being mine.

And even from the firelight of her deepest dreams, she could not deny how perfectly her shattered fragments nested against his enduring, endless entirety. 

Chapter Text

The first timid ahem s absorbed into Zelda’s dreamscape, reverbing from the vanilla clouds and craggy islands and the scream of air as her body plummeted through it, hands outstretched clasping at nothing, the ground and its promise of death spreading beneath her like a zooming telescope.

Ahem .

Sluggishly she yawned, taking her time to blink awake. The doe-eyed maid from before stood rigidly at the foot of the bed, clasping a bundle of fabric in her arms while nervously clearing her throat for the umpteenth time. A fire had been set in the hearth, and the candles staged around the room were sparked to life. The ethereal orange glow of two dozen wicks caught the black silk folds Ellie held as she kept staring at Zelda with the blatant dismay of someone forced to watch a Horriblin toy with its prey. 

“I’m so sorry to wake you up, your Highness,” she managed as Zelda forced her eyes open, “but I’ve been asked to get you ready for dinner.” 

“Dinner?” Zelda attempted to sit up, realizing her left arm was still knotted by the lively turquoise scarf the King had tethered to the headboard. That half-formed memory of waking, groggy and soft, his lips lost in her neck—she hadn’t dreamt it? 

I promise I’ll let you rest , that purr indistinguishable from her own thoughts. You’ll have to forgive me, Petal , it shook her loose, hands as pillars slipping behind her back, lifting her like an offering. Sleeping beside you is agony .

Contrition froze her in place, with Ellie’s stare refracting the evening outside of Zelda’s sunken presence within it. The last hours seeped like ink as what had felt destined and inescapable within the unlit throes tilted, dragged into waking light. 

But this girl, she did not see a compromise. She stumbled into a sacrifice. 

This sweet, sincere maiden would weave a narrative of virtue and woe like a chain of daisies—spells and threats and overpowering force absolving the dear Princess of her appetite, obscuring any hint that her heart held such capacity for betrayal. The Goddess, the Light, held the line of the Kingdom with her boundless wellspring of selfless patience, enduring his feast.

Zelda reached over to free herself as the girl made a point of pivoting her whole body away. “How long have I been asleep? It looks like midnight out here,” she said, trying to distract this delicate creature from the disarray.

“I’m not sure how long you’ve been in bed, your Highness,” Ellie replied, still focused away on the bear rug. “But I haven’t seen you since yesterday.”

A day . And it still wasn’t enough; she yearned to borrow a decade or so from her former self. “What’s that, then?” she asked, pulling the bedsheet tactfully around her naked torso as she gestured forward. 

“I think it’s a dress?” Ellie held it at arm’s length and the obsidian smoothness unspooled, revealing an intricate kimono inlaid with gold sweeps, the inside lined with scarlet. “The woman outside gave it to me with the orders.”

“Woman outside?”

“The guard.” 

“Ah,” Zelda nodded. Apparently he knew better than to give a Yiga a Varina’s job. “Why don’t you give me a moment, and then you can help tie the sash. All right?” Ellie nodded, turning her back as she stretched her way out of bed and tugged the robe around herself. The folds dipped in the front, accommodating the drop of her necklace like a portrait frame. Each piece made for the other. A question crept into her mind, and at once its answer—she could easily envision the facsimile of herself standing for hours without protest, as the Varina seamstress pinned and tucked together a proposed wardrobe to cast this carefully plotted victory. 

Everything had gone exactly as he’d dreamed, an entire life built in the land’s furthest recesses as her days went on indistinct and unchanged. Still burning pies, still grading papers, while ghosts hemmed the trimmings of her inevitable reign.

He’d taken her with a confidence not simply in himself, but in her as well. Moving a beat ahead of her, an intimate familiarity with the timbre and pace of her pleasure. There was no fumbling, no odd, rearranging pauses as they scrambled to chart each other’s shifts. He knew how faintly to kiss her clavicle, how savagely to sink his nails into her pinned waist. When to fill the room with his roar, when to slip a slight “oh, you like that, Petal?” into her ear.

He knew.

Stirring her, needing her beyond the bounds of morning and night; appetite she had begun to accept that she could no longer inspire…

Link .

Her hand seized at her jeweled throat, as if she could shove back the guilt rising as sharp as bile. How fleeting he’d been in her thoughts since arriving here, his presence in her heart hurtled into the wilds alongside him. Only to re-emerge in comparison, in deficiency, to such a novel alternative. There had been so much to parse, so many delicate moves to make, she had failed to make room. Ensuring his escape was a tidy box she could tuck on the shelf as she dealt with all else.

Indulged in all else.

She had a vague sense that he was safe, or at the very least alive, although it was hard to tell with her muffled powers whether that was a delusion of convenience to buffer this new calamity. A fantasy of return when he was ready, where he would understand that everything she had done was for Hyrule.

Not for Hyrule. For them.

Link would believe it, and then she could, too.

“I’m ready, Ellie,” she instructed, pulling the ends of the kimono tightly around her middle. The girl knotted the sash against Zelda’s back, then nudged her toward the dressing table. 

“I don’t think there’s much here,” Ellie said, half-apologizing as she pawed through the mostly empty drawers of the vanity. Her mother had left nothing behind within them—either that or it was already long gone. Zelda would have checked, wouldn’t she? After the rainy procession and parades of black, would she not return for the last whiff of jasmine lingering where her mother’s quietly failing body had tred? Slipped one last shade of her visage into her sleeve, before she was officially forbidden from coming back? Her father hadn’t barred his wife’s mention but he did not make it, and Zelda knew better than to cry with any chance of witness. So young, so shocked, so afraid…she could scarcely remember the day, let alone the woman’s face. “I brought some cosmetics with me from home, but they’re all in my quarters. Did you leave anything here, in the castle?”

Laughter spilled out of Zelda’s throat, giving her companion a start. “I might have some hundred-year-old lip stain in my old bedroom,” she said darkly. “I’m not sure if pre-Calamity looks are still in.” She could viscerally remember the weight of her floor-length blue gown sagging with velvet and gold like a dirge, paired with minimal maiden’s adornments that made her look soft and pale and undefined, spurring everyone’s tendency to treat her like a child. If nothing else, the Gerudo silk skimmed like second skin—a mercy.  

“Oh look, here’s a little powder,” Ellie said, retrieving the faded jar from the back. “You really don’t need much more than that anyway.” 

As she dusted Zelda’s cheekbones, the guard Ganondorf had called Lena emerged in the mirror’s reflection, checking in on the meager progress of her charges. Her sharp green eyes flicked from Zelda to Ellie and back, her breath huffing at her new mistress’s neck as they sank to the bind at her waist. “For Din’s sake, have you ever tied a robe before? Move,” she demanded, unraveling whatever mess poor Ellie had left behind and re-affixing it snugly in place. She appraised Zelda’s appearance in the glass, rearranging her settling golden hair around her shoulders. “Where is the kohl?”

“I, um, don’t have any,” Ellie admitted, “I was just going to put on some powder and lip stain.”

“And what, present a dowdy Hylian mouse to His Supreme Highness?” she scoffed.

“She is a Hylian,” Ellie pointed out with more conviction than Zelda deemed wise. 

“She is the wife of the Promised,” Lena snapped back, elongating her rigidly toned figure that towered over the girl, nearly as imposing as the Demon King himself to the maid, whom Zelda guessed had rarely encountered any disagreements in her short life. “The Queen to Hyrule’s only legitimate throne in its history. It is your singular job to make sure she appears as such, not like some wilted damsel. Can you handle that much, or do we need to have those idiot Yiga dig up some other pretty, worthless girl from Castle Town to wait on her instead?”

Ellie’s lovely, rosy hair fell forward as her head hung in defeat. Without another word Lena exited the room, off to retrieve the tools to meet her standards. “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s being firm to spare my feelings,” Zelda said, reaching out to squeeze her hand. “You’re more than capable of looking radiant with nothing but the kiss of the sun. Some of us need a little more help, that’s all.” 

“We were there, in the Throne Room,” Ellie said softly, her shoulders still slumped in a hunch that was ill-fitted to her fresh, disarming beauty. “My mom, my sister, and me. My friends and I were all dressed up.” The faint spark of a smile sparked in the mirror glass, the excitement of the day and all the promise she was convinced it held. “That was my idea; I said, this is it ! We were finally going to see the Royal Wedding. It felt like something you and Link would do, you know, not wanting to make too big of a fuss over it, just kind of surprise everyone and keep The Gazette from being tipped off. But then we heard the gates close, and the guards yelling to each other, knowing they were outnumbered a hundred times over. We didn’t know whether we should run or stay. Then you and Link appeared from the Sanctum, and you—well, not you, but…they…told us everything was fine. You ordered the commander to stand down. My sister, right next to me, started to panic. Link and Zelda hate surprises, she kept saying. Is that true?”

Zelda pursed her lips, considering. Confronted, she struggled to recall a surprise that had delivered any semblance of happiness. “No, I suppose we don’t,” she decided. 

“I’ll tell her next time I see her. Maybe. I won’t hear the end of her being right,” she said, her voice breaking with a chuckle. “She’s just a kid, already a total history bookworm. You’d like her,” she said, perking back a bit.

“What’s her name?” Zelda asked softly, welcoming the distraction, the reassuring ease with which she could be what her people needed. 

“Karena,” she replied, an absent smile returning. 

“And where is Karena now?”

“Back at home, with Mum,” Ellie replied. “We run the pub in New Castle Town.” She didn’t flinch or grow wistful at the mention; a good sign. 

“The Dodgy Well?”

Her smooth, freckle-dusted face ignited with joy. “You know it?!”

“Of course! It’s the only pub in town, after all.”

“But we would have known if you’d visited…”

“Would you, though?” Zelda’s eyes glinted with mischief, the spell between them only broken by the creak of the door and Lena’s return, her hands full of small palettes, tiny jars, and slim brushes. Ignoring Ellie she leaned into Zelda, painting thick, bold strokes across her brows and cheekbones, dotting between pads of shimmering red and gold concentrated color. The sweep of the wispy bristles felt indulgent, a ritual she had all but forgotten in the years buried in research, study, and the quiet village. 

When satisfied, Lena drew back, and Zelda opened her eyes. An unfamiliar woman blinked back: a Queen with dark horned eyelids, tapering off into winged tips, shaded in gold dust and crushed ruby. Her lips were painted in a permanent pout, dripping in glossy burgundy. In the periphery, she could swear she caught a vague twitch of a smile across the warrior’s face. “Let’s see your neck and those incredible jewels,” she said, twisting Zelda’s hair up to the crown of her head, securing the bun with abandoned pins scattered in the mirror’s groove. “There should never be a doubt of how high you hold your head.”

She lingered in her reflection, tilting her chin up and down, admiring how the paints and angles played with the candlelight. Wondering at this strange interloper with her exotic fabrics and new chambers, who could never be confused for the Princess. 

“It’s time,” Lena pushed, rousing Zelda from her seat and leaving Ellie behind to tidy up after her alchemy. 

Hyrule Castle’s hallways were mostly empty, just as Zelda had always known them. It was so large for one family, especially when it shrank from three strained in orbit to two in opposition. Even before the Calamity she used to play a game, counting the steps she could take before seeing another person. One thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two was her record until Link was sworn at her shadow, and the drumbeat of steel against blade announced her presence to whomever was left to listen.

Lena was much more subtle, her conquering boots switched now for deerskin slippers to pad down the hallway, only the faintest swish of her baggy golden trousers betraying her presence. 

Unlike Link she kept three paces in front of Zelda, measured by the echoing clicks of her sandals on the barren stone. She wondered for a moment if her telltale shoes were by design, before batting away the question. Of course. Everything was.

“You called him the Promised,” Zelda noted as they continued their descent down the wing, nudging once again against the boundary, testing a hypothesis. “Were the Varina waiting for a Gerudo King, or Ganondorf specifically?”

“Our concerns are irrelevant to you,” she replied, not halting a single step. 

“My husband’s history is irrelevant to me?” she asked, the structure of her obi strengthening her spine. She may owe these new forces her cooperation, but not idiocy. 

Lena stopped but did not turn, her hand trailing to the scimitar brushing silently at her hips. “That is between you and your King. You are my assignment, not my comrade. The Varina owe the Royal Family nothing, least of all an explanation.”

Riju’s Sanctum stare flashed in her mind as Lena began her march anew, and Zelda folded this lesson up along with every other.

Walking into Hyrule Castle’s cavernous dining hall set with a single table felt eerie, unchanged save for the ghosts. The last time she’d had a meal here, everyone she’d go on to lose was congregated around the slab tables set beneath the iron chandeliers, toasting each other in blissful ignorance to the Calamity frothing right beneath their feet. 

Link had been there of course, still refusing to be within arm’s reach of her, though she could hardly blame him. How she choked on her resentment toward his success at everything: falling into a chosen Knighthood, awakening the Master Sword, charming the Gorons and Ritos and Zoras and Gerudo alike out of what felt like, at the time, thin air. In the meantime she parried gossip and expectation, falling short in everyone’s esteem in all categories—her goddess connection, her royal ascension—a dud, certain to end the bloodline. 

But she kept showing up here, sitting at her father’s shoulder, accepting his ambivalence because at that point, she knew nothing else. She watched the noblemen and women, the court and the Champions laugh and drink and stuff themselves with such lightness, such ease. Never second-guessing whether they belonged, or would ever be worthy of existing within their pre-ordained expectations. She could remember glancing over at Link, hanging back in the corners, watching her not because he wished to, but because it was his sworn duty to do so. She wasn’t sure, even now, when that obligation had melted into admiration and then want, but in this immense yet suffocating room, it was still a far way off. 

Ganondorf made a show of standing as soon as she was in view, meeting her in the middle of the hall with a kiss of her clasped hands, his thumbs caressing her knuckles. The glint in his eyes told her that Lena had done well; he held her at arm’s length, savoring every inch of her as if regarding sculpture he’d traveled ages to behold. “Thousands of years in the blink of an eye, and at last…” he marveled, too faint for his guests to catch. “Nothing remains but you, the way you were meant to be seen.”

His posture rose suddenly, standing the way he had over her, the Sages, the entirety of Hyrule as the crown met his head. “Has she ever looked so beautiful?” he posed jovially to the guests, whom Zelda only noticed now, seated along the length of the massive table. Penn and Traysi observed her entrance, confusion and dismay unfurling like panels in a fan. The Rito Penn, rivaling Ganondorf in stature with his impressive wingspan, started to choke on whatever morsel he’d snuck into his beak. Traysi bit down on her lower lip so hard it was turning purple, choking on a thousand questions she wanted to hurl at the unrecognizable ruler and her unthinkable companion.

“I trust you’re familiar with Hyrule’s intrepid news team,” Ganondorf said, twisting her shoulders to face the company. Her reflection in Penn’s wide goggles, Hyrule’s worst nightmare holding her close, made the room spin.

She was so hungry.

“I understand it’s late,” said the King, edging her toward the far end of the table and taking his own seat opposite. “I don’t take dinner until I’ve worked up an appetite.”

Zelda stared down at the porcelain plate, trimmed with a ring of golden triangles and brimming with the most elegant meal she had seen in an age: charcoal-roasted pheasant drizzled in wildberry glaze, earthy glazed mushrooms, and charred peppers beckoned her back into the land of the living after almost two days without food. She struggled to keep from shoving the entire bird into her mouth, ravenous but all too aware of the audience absorbing the minutiae of her movements, her dress, her posture, her words she’d yet to speak. Fluttering insect wings beneath beveled glass.

Her relationship with the Lucky Clover Gazette had been tenuous at best, even as their stories morphed from speculative “potential Princess sightings” to fawning coverage of The Princess Returns ! and The Knight Triumphs ! She hadn’t minded giving them a few extra minutes alongside events at the Castle or around the towns in the first few years. After all, the more people knew about the supply needs at Hateno School or how to spot significant artifacts that needed protecting on the kingdom outskirts, the more support they might receive. But then, as New Castle Town began standing on its own feet and Link and Zelda spent less time at its center, she started to notice patterns. Speeding horses and quick Purah Pad flashes as she crossed the bridge into town. A single Rito circling low, then taking off. And a few days later, the “ZeLink Watch” feature with its gallery of images taking up the first full spread. 

It didn’t take many cycles before Link rode out to have a conversation with them, one she wished she could have witnessed. “I have some choice words for them as well, you know,” she pointed out, trailing him out to the stable. 

“They’ve gotten enough of you already,” he said as he swung his legs up onto Epona, his jaw set in that fiercely determined line that promised to speak scarcely and clearly. 

He’d always liked to handle important matters on his own.

They both did.

“You have the unique honor of being our first audience here in our humble home,” Ganondorf drolled, nodding to nibbling Traysi and Penn, who’d stuck with just the foliage. “It was critical to speak with you as soon as we possibly could. Your work is pivotal to keeping the people of Hyrule informed of what they can expect from this new era. And more importantly, what’s expected of them.” 

“And…what is that, exactly?” Traysi asked, testing the waters. She was still wearing her thick snow parka and green chunk-knit sweater, looking as though she was kidnapped straight off the presses in the Hebra Mountain foothills. Which, actually, she likely was. 

“Obedience,” he replied, without hesitation. The table seized like a sharp breath, Penn’s feathers standing on end. She could feel their stares creeping toward her, trying to catch a haze or glassiness of enchantment in her eyes, or a tendril of gloom notoriously denoting a puppet. She gave nothing, holding her face as evenly as she had so many nights in this hall, refusing anyone the satisfaction of the sadness they expected. “As any other ruler would desire,” Ganondorf went on with a chuckle, lapping up the tension tightening in the air. “But also opportunity. There is much to be gained for anyone in Hyrule who is willing to put in sacrifice, prove their loyalty, and move forward out of a primitive, superstitious existence. Isn’t that right, Queen Zelda?”

She swallowed the last bites of food and cleared her throat with a splash of wine, giving her voice a clear path to resonate across the table. “Yes, my King.”

Traysi’s eyebrows betrayed her, arching up to her hairline. Penn’s tight beak, Ganondorf’s satisfied smirk, all three of them gorging on her three syllables, drawing out everything they needed to know. She could feel the flush of embarrassment reaching to the tips of her ears. What narrative were they writing now in the midst of her transformation? Would they be able to somehow bore through to the molten core of her, down to the truth she wrestled to sort? 

Somewhere within the last night and day, when she’d flipped herself up from the ravages below to ease herself down onto the Demon King’s rigid shaft, gripping her breasts in rapture as he guided her hips inch by inch down, down, down until he was buried as deep within her as possible, slowing her eagerness with his stilling hands holding her firm, watching as her body’s sheath made him grimace as he wrestled the waning specter of his self-control, she had indeed felt possessed. Certain that if she stole a glance into the dressing table mirror, red glowing eyes would blink back, a dark version of herself drunk on unforgivable euphoria. 

But it was only her writhing and stirring the sweet invasion within her, only her hair tossed back in the shadows, her imagination calibrating how lovely and eager a sight she must look. She was captivated by how pleasing she wanted to be. 

“I’m sure we can work on some of these stories,” Traysi said at last, prompting a complimentary nod from Penn. “Once I get back, I can put together a feature on the, uh, Coronation.”

“But you’ll stay here, and operate the Gazette from the Castle,” Ganondorf clarified, taking the time to swirl the red wine in his chalice before lifting it to his lips. “We’ll have your equipment moved shortly. You’ll want to be here at the source, won’t you? Wouldn’t want to miss any of the exciting revelations unfolding here.” 

“Our offices really aren’t that far,” Traysi pointed out behind a creeping choke of laughter.

“In Hebra? Fighting an ice storm half the year? Nonsense,” he waved his free hand, emptying his chalice down his throat with the other. “The people of Hyrule want their stories, and being out in the fringes helps none of us, now does it? Now Zelda,” he softened enough to take the finality out of his voice, “would you be able to share your story of ascension with Traysi in the morning? Help her color in some of those lovely details these modern-day Hylians may not know about their King and Queen’s history?”

She smiled at her audience, cordial but clear. “I would be delighted. It’s been too long since I’ve been able to speak directly to our people.”

He held the empty golden cup between his fingers for a moment of holding her in a grin missed by the gawking company, and then stood, prompting Zelda to her feet. “The guards will show you to your quarters, and you can begin working tomorrow. Lena will find you when the Queen is ready,” he said, slipping his arm into the crook of her own. “If there’s anything you need brought from that musky old stable, just let the guards know. But for now, I suspect she’s still exhausted.”

Feeling the eyes searing into her back made her feel strangely, unexpectedly powerful. How little these desperate idiots knew. What they wouldn’t give to glimpse a mere fraction of what had transpired only hours ago in the chamber above. They’d bleed themselves dry for one unsanctioned truth from her lips, a solitary insight into what had happened to the Hero or how she ended up here, within the walls they’d seemed so eager to chase her back to. The aura of anguished curiosity pulsating from the table fed her as surely as the charred bird and vegetables. 

This is for circling like buzzards , she thought, reaching up to nudge the King down to her level with a playful tug of his beard. “You do have that effect on me, my love,” she said, pulling him into a kiss that left his slate-colored lips flushed with Gerudo Queen red. His topaz eyes twinkled as a mischievous smirk curled in his expression, and he squeezed her upper arms with pride. 

Tomorrow they would chip at her, rearranging question after question to serve their best narrative. But that was tomorrow’s displeasure. Tonight, all that mattered was her reward.

Lucky Clover Gazette
Special Edition

HYRULE WELCOMES KING AND QUEEN IN UNFORGETTABLE CEREMONY!

The halls of Hyrule Castle are lively once more, thanks to the long-anticipated arrival of Hyrule’s rightful King, his Supreme Highness Ganondorf Dragmire. Hylians poured into the streets by the hundreds to witness this historic day, which saw not only the accession of the King to the throne, but the return of Princess Zelda Hylia, who had long been waiting for his return and by extension, her liberation from captivity. The specter of the King and Queen’s arrival is one that will certainly be passed down for generations, a day remembered as the turning point in which the entire kingdom of Hyrule crawled out from the curse of the dark ages and began a new era of prosperity. Varina steeds and Yiga technology parading together through the streets of New Castle Town was the perfect encapsulation of our King’s vision for Hyrule: a land where tradition is revered, but does not encumber our future’s progress. 

Queen Zelda was a vision of classic regal elegance in her Cece recreation of a Hylian Royal Family gown, a design dating back thousands of years and representing the peaceful surrender of the throne to legitimate custody. Also spotted as part of the Coronation ceremony was the Dragon’s Helm crown, a kingdom treasure reserved for years, awaiting its rightful owner. In a particularly touching moment, the King presented his bride with a newly commissioned heirloom, a 24-karat necklace cast in the same pure Gerudo gold as the crown, representing the Royal Hylian flag with its Loftwing setting and array of sapphires and rubies, mined from the core of Death Mountain. The center stone is a rare material never seen outside of the most difficult-to-reach chasms of the Depths, a beautiful symbol of the bottomless extent of the King’s affections for his bewitching Queen, our esteemed former Princess.

Our readers have been hungry for a love story for the ages, and that of King Ganondorf and his bride does not disappoint. Not only did Princess Zelda realize her destiny of ascending Hyrule’s throne after a decade of being hoarded away from duty by a Rhoam loyalist, the triumphant day also marked her reunion with the star-crossed King she met in her fall into Ancient Hyrule in the incomprehensibly distant past.

“Venturing into the past was a mission to find the Promised King and usher him into our Hyrule,” Queen Zelda at last had the chance to clarify from the comfort of her once-familiar castle home, resplendent in inky-black silk robes held together with the most opulent gold-embroidered sash, echoing both the return to structure and abundance one would expect from the marriage of sleeping dragons. “Unfortunately that was compromised when the Zonai, under Rauru’s direction, sabotaged King Ganondorf’s return and created the cruel, festering conditions that caused such catastrophe to our Kingdom—a legacy that Hyrule’s monarchy has continued to perpetuate for countless centuries. I cannot describe how relieved I am to see this land, after so much time and endless, cyclical ruin, fall to the care of the one born to resurrect it.”

“He vowed he’d find me again in this world, and I never stopped watching the horizon,” she added, somehow even more luminous when she’s blushing.

The glittering attire and accessories are all exciting signs for Hyrule’s aspiring fashion elite: glam is back! Citizens will be thrilled to learn that mining operations have resumed in earnest in both the southern desert regions and Eldin Canyon, guaranteeing a much richer supply of adornments for all. Additionally, opportunities are currently available in the formerly abandoned Great Mine below the Great Plateau. 

After her extended and harrowing absence, it was challenging for this reporter to personally contain her overwhelming sense of happiness at the sight of our heroic Princess not only safe, but flourishing in her new role. Glowing with a sense of true love and purpose, she has stepped into her King’s side with an open heart that inspires the hearts and minds of all their shared subjects. 

When asked about her prolonged absence from the Throne, Queen Zelda was clearly shaken, but unquestionably resolute in her issued statement.

“It’s been a long, painful journey to return here after almost a decade held away. Poisoned by his own sense of righteousness and a misplaced loyalty to an extinct dynasty, I was held back and away from my destiny, in the vain hope that this would prevent the promised King’s return. It’s a betrayal that I must continue to contend with, though I firmly believe that he is not outside of redemption. I believe with all the light in my heart that he has the capacity to continue to do good work within our new world, once given a chance to do so. That is why his safe and swift return to Hyrule Castle is so important not only to me, but my King as well. In the meantime, I apologize to all of the Hylians and our dearest Allies for neglecting this most important and sacred station for so long, even if my absence was under duress. Such a departure is inexcusable, but I am committed to proving my loyalty to you with every remaining breath as your Queen. My wish to all my people is that you come to know the bliss of exalting and serving His Supreme Highness, my King, as completely as I have.”

Watching the royal couple seal their union with a kiss within the Castle Sanctum, the bells rang out and echoed throughout Hyrule Field, as joy and hopefulness swelled in the hearts of all Hylians, the news of this triumph spreading to the outlying towns and domains by the newly installed Royal Guard soldiers, comprised of the Varina’s most elite warriors. 

Meanwhile, the hunt continues for the Knight Link, last seen by rescuing forces in Hateno Village. Any credible information or sightings on the whereabouts of this fugitive will be rewarded. He is wanted alive and unharmed for return to Hyrule Castle to answer these allegations under the just purview of the new Hylian Court. Citizens are to consider the Knight armed and much too dangerous to approach alone. 

The museum at the Castle will be closed until further notice for security considerations. To ensure public safety during this transitional phase, main roads and rural routes through Hyrule will be closed and patrolled by representatives of the Monarchy. Travel in and out of towns, villages, and domains is currently suspended to ensure the validity of those present, restrict the movement of any remaining enemy forces, and to swiftly assist any citizens who experience a sighting. The speedy apprehension of the former Knight Consort will result in a discontinuation in these precautions. 

Long live the King.

Goddess save the Queen.

Chapter Text

In the Great Plateau’s silken grasses, a lone fox tucked into its tail, satisfied with the peace he’d secured in nightfall. Link watched its plush fur fold into the waving underbrush as it settled, unaware of his presence as he crouched beneath a crumbling pillar mere yards behind. He pulled his bow taut, soundless even to his own ears. The Sheikah wraps Paya had blessed him with vanished his presence from the air. His footsteps, his breath, his heartbeat, all undetectable in her most sacred shroud. He was a ghost.

His arrow pierced through the creature’s brow, right between its shuttered eyes. Too quick and too stealthy for any reaction before its life was snuffed. He scanned the abandoned ruins and respite tree line for any shuddering, any sign that he wasn’t alone.

As the quartet of fugitives predicted, the ground was no longer safe for any of them. They planned visits to the surface after days of watching the patterns of patrols, Purah creating a detailed schematic for all of the pathways they could glimpse from their distant vista. She charted the ways the Varina and Yiga switched off, with the former bound to march in exact, regimented formation, and the latter prone to sneak off into abandoned camps or enclaves left behind by the rapidly vanishing monsters. 

On this first such mission Link had dropped behind the Riverside Stable, an inn and gathering post he’d visited a thousand times before, even after his mission in The Upheaval. So familiar that the boarded horses would whine and become irritable when Epona was absent, and the innkeepers strived to keep the nice Malanya Bed open should Link and his fabled companion come by, although such treatment mortified him. Nevertheless, aside from his own home, it was the place he felt comfortable enough to take off his boots and sword and simply sit at the fire without scanning above it, at least for a few minutes more than normal.

Old friends, far from the Sanctum, in a world that had only just tilted. He had thought such ties could weather this much, that Hyrule would heave a sigh of relief to see that salvation hadn’t forgotten them, had only been waylaid. 

When Ember the innkeeper glimpsed Link’s damning blue eyes between the wraps, all hues drained from his face. “I didn’t see you,” he said, sliding a crumpled handful of thin paper across the counter before yanking the partition down at the window. “If you come back, I’ll have no choice but to speak.”

Link’s heart sank as he retreated back into the shade of the trees, unfolding the latest issue of the Lucky Clover Gazette. The black-and-white, smudged image of Zelda gave him a start; a first glimpse of the Princess in the After, blurred and too worn now to make out the expression on her face. She was standing at a slight pivot, maybe in the library, where background fireplace flames lent the shot its light. Dark layers of fabric cascaded from her forearms, evoking the Empress version of the demon he’d fought to the death. Thick fingers slithered around the knot of her folded hands, Ganondorf’s grip powerful enough to pulsate even through the worn, discarded image. He’d been fitted with an impressive crown, though otherwise looked exactly as Link remembered him from the lair beyond the Forgotten Foundation. The hilt of the same Gloom Sword fitted at his side, the Gerudo fabric draping at his hips. 

Purah and Paya had tried to warn him about this, in waves of tender caution and blunt explanation. “He knows that Zelda is the most powerful weapon he will ever have against you,” Purah reiterated as Link sat on the edge of the island that morning, examining the stitching in his old paraglider. How it was still in his tunic pack was a mystery, one he could only owe to the fact that some version of himself knew he’d need it again. His old life was an inevitability. “Whatever she’s enduring right now, you can’t let it be in vain, all right? Don’t let pride get in the way of truly helping her. You’re not going to be worth a damn down in the Lockup or worse.”

He nodded, keeping his focus on the integrity of his equipment, hearing her sigh a bit before moving away and letting him prepare in peace.

He wasn’t an idiot. He’d seen the delight gleaming in Ganondorf’s eyes as he beheld her in their bed, her golden hair splayed out in waves around the pillow like sun rays, the loose and worn gauze nightgown slipping down her shoulder. Leering like a wild dog spotting its next meal. The way he reached for her tender cheek, as if the waiting Master Sword, the only blade powerful enough to part his flesh and seal him into another dimension’s prison, was inconsequential. A risk worth taking for the reward. Her body contained multitudes of promise for his dark design: not only the surest way to draw Link out from the kingdom’s underbrush, but a delight to behold, fizzing with possibility.

Up until that night behind the stable, despite logically grasping the contrary, he’d entertained fantasies that the Demon King would, for one reason or another, lock Zelda away, alone. Leave her cordoned off safely in her Study Tower, or even down in that dreaded castle Lockup, preserved as bait for their impending showdown. As awful as the solitude might be for the time, at least she’d be away from his clutches. For her safety, he told himself, a lie he half-heartedly accepted.

She was strong, much more so than she’d ever credit herself. Sharp enough to see all the layers of the world and its vying forces. If anyone could last down there…

Iron bars would not steal.

Reading the printed story, despair yawned open in his stomach, swallowing him whole. How utterly stupid he was, imagining her as some fairy tale maiden, not so much human as virtue with a pulse. Of course Ganondorf had taken her as his Queen the moment he had the opportunity. Of course she was walking around in the light of the Castle, granting interviews to the Lucky Clover Gazette and posing for official portraits. Of course she would indulge the Demon King’s every whim, if it bought him time to return.

Of course she would obey.

Of course.

At yet, the image made him retch into the bushes, dry-heaving as bile sloshed down low in his gut. Drifting mindlessly above Hyrule for ten thousand years was one torture. Hedging herself between the lust of a monster and the good of the Kingdom was another altogether. 

A slow, grinding, dehumanizing torture.

Zelda .

The infuriating, stubborn, measured woman her unfamiliars called a Goddess, because relegating her as unknowably Divine was much much easier than having to actually see her. To sit through her moods and silences because she was reeling off a new discovery or obsession. To endure her obliviousness for how stupid she could make you feel because she was perpetually running possibilities to their inevitable conclusions, leaving you behind in the dust until she told you on no uncertain terms how you must proceed no matter how you disagreed, and there was no argument because when she handed you the thread, all you could do was trace it back and see that she was exactly right. 

The girl who’d made his life hell for that span of years that fate robbed him of remembering, but she filled in honestly—yes, she resented his purpose, the way he fleshed out the role of Protector without question or complication while she flailed around her destiny as the Kingdom watched and snickered–an age long forgotten now, as each era seems to be; how quickly her “loyal” subjects divert and move on with the freshest directive. But she would still die for them, endure anything if it meant they could go about their placid lives in peace.

That impressionable nature of the public fanned his panic as he read this absurd story, one that he was sure Zelda detested.

She did… didn’t she?

He vowed he’d find me again in this world, and I never stopped watching the horizon.

He tried to imagine her saying these words aloud, her focus trembling ever-so-slightly the way it did when she was trying not to cry. The way she’d looked at him from her awakening amidst the grass, sliding together the pieces of her triumph over time. “You did it,” she’d realized aloud, her voice breaking, failing to so much as mention her own sacrifice. Hers was not a heart that would buckle.

Obviously she was under duress when she spoke, if it was her actually speaking at all. Certainly. Because Ganondorf didn’t have the power to manipulate her mind…did he? There was no way he could twist her maddening, unshakeable will. It was a force of light and time. 

But he couldn’t know. There was no way to tell the truth of what was happening within the walls of her estranged home turned prison. He had no idea if she was being treated with any fraction of kindness, or whether she was hurt or how, truly, she might be suffering. 

Goddesses willing he could save her. But he was powerless to stop the meanwhile hurt.

Satisfied that the Great Plateau was the unoccupied shell he’d long known, Link crept forward along its edges, dashing from moss-coated column to dilapidated arch until finally reaching the Temple of Time’s sinking steps. The saturated concrete gave way beneath his feet, leaving a trail of soft footprints up to the archway. 

There was something unnerving about this almost-forgotten place, making him feel particularly conscious of his presence within it. A sense that this was hallowed ground he had no place within, and yet, seemed as familiar as his own heartbeat. The haunting sense of being here before, like a waking dream. The force of this pull, down into memories that were not his own, was suffocating, and he rushed to the far end of the Temple, where the serene and kindly Goddess statue stood. Eternally smiling, embodying the peace she could only hope to inspire in the follies of each generation.

He knelt in the grass which had once been floor, dampening his knees with the midnight dew. With a deep breath he closed his eyes, letting his lungs fill and then release, working up the nerve to speak. Prayer was not his strong suit. 

“Goddess Hylia, the Mother of Hyrule, please hear my plea for your land and its heart,” he said, the words clamping up in his throat, welling up against emotion that threatened to overtake him. “Your Daughter, Princess Zelda, is in great danger, and with her, your Kingdom as well. I come to you, begging for the power to save her.”

Warmth streamed across his scarcely exposed face, a beacon of grace as gentle as spring meadow sun. He looked up to see the immense Goddess Statue awakened, alight with an orbit of fireflies and her own inner radiance beckoning his attention. 

Our Hero of Peace . The words rose in his mind from his core, like a parent’s council etched into memory. Tell me of this threat .

“The Demon King was resurrected from the Sacred Realm. His armies stole Princess Zelda and stormed the castle. He now sits on Hyrule’s throne, with the Princess…” he stumbled, unsure of how to explain this disgrace to the divine. “Princess Zelda has been forced to serve as his Queen. His power has only grown while ours has diminished in these years of quiet and harmony.” In fading scars and straining muscle, a Hero dissolved, leaving only a dull ache where resolve has been. “I don’t know what he’s done to her,” he admitted aloud at last, calling out to what he knew the gods must see from their vantage. “She’s doing what she must to survive, but she can’t do it forever. And every day I’m out there while she’s trapped in there…he’s tearing her further open and she’ll keep bleeding until it’s…all gone.” Her soul, her light, emptied from the jugular.

The presence stirred before him for an instant, absorbing his news. 

My heart weeps for you, sweet Protector. You have never asked for these burdens, and yet you shoulder them without question, not asking for mercy. You deserve the aid of the divine.

He feared he would collapse forward and swiftly braced himself against the ground, so great was this relief of the Goddess’s favor. 

However .

The light’s embrace faded from his skin, dimming to dust in the air as quickly as the power in Zelda’s palm. 

All things in this land. The sky above. The depths below. The castle north, the desert south. We hold their fates in balance . This is not a choice I can make alone.

Seek out The Brethren Below. Only our favor together can bring the blessing you seek. 

Just as quickly as her spirit had embraced him it departed, her afterglow faded as stars in the dawn. He called her back, begging her to wait, for her to understand the heresy of her very own essence stolen by the darkness. The wind whistled through the vanishing rafters, the only witness willing to endure his lament. He slid forward, gravity pulling him down to the earth, where the damp and the dirt and his tears were indistinguishable from one another.

The horizon ringing the sky islands swelled with an otherworldly emerald hue, shepherding dusk to night as Purah, Josha and Paya huddled shoulder-to-shoulder, a deer shank crackling on the spit, the only soundtrack to the somber feast.

In Link’s absence the women had overseen a complete overhaul of the island, scrounging the abandoned archipelago chain for forgotten debris: glider wings, boards and crate sides, chunks of stone decoration, fashioning it together into what Purah was calling Eldin Research Lab: Vertical Edition. With Josha and Paya’s eager hands she’d expanded the crumbling stone barracks house into a fully enclosed shelter, complete with an observation deck facing out toward Hyrule Castle. At the far side of the island they’d cleared a landing strip for the fan-powered glider, their lifeline to the ground below. 

Josha had taken on the role of scout, as the most inconspicuous member of the trio. Once a week she’d steer the craft down into the brush of the Trilby Valley, tenting it in leaves and branches, keeping it out of any creature’s sight lines. Ganondorf’s forces were overwhelming in their sudden appearance but far from exhaustive; there was no way for them to cover all of Hyrule at once. They studied these blind pockets, the areas his guards must consider the lowest risk, and scuttled within their shadows. 

From the nearby stables she gathered discarded newspapers, alongside the odd cooking pot or blanket to bless the expanding sky-bound homestead, things that weren’t too likely to be missed. 

When she returned they’d read the news together, hunched around the fire like this, an emerging tradition in a new and indefinite existence. In the month since the Coronation, there had yet to be anything to smile about, despite the rejoicing tone that Lucky Clover Gazette had adopted in the King’s wake.

First there had been the bizarre message from Zelda, the warped plea for compliance from her subjects. Then the running list of wedding gifts that read like a manifest:fifty tridents from the Zora, then the train of ore chugging in from Death Mountain, followed by crates of wing-tipped arrows hand-fashioned in the Hebra Mountains. Between the boasting swelled the demand for information on the Rogue Knight, Enemy of the Kingdom and Imprisoner of Our Beloved Queen. Always the same warning (armed and dangerous), always the same demand (taken alive). The threats now accompanied the rare special thanks to unfamiliar names, stable-hands and village patrolmen exalted to instant Lordships. 

They preserved this intelligence in the Lab for Link to review on his return, folded back up after they’d read and chewed through every line break and quotation to reassemble some version of the truth within. Between Josha’s nervous braid-chewing, Purah’s low, dark laughter and Paya’s pulsating, silent fury, their individual theories coalesced around a common truth: Ganondorf’s grip was tightening, and no one—not even Zelda herself—seemed capable of easing it.

Tonight, however, they neglected to mention the terrible news archive. Link’s report was enough devastation for them all to stomach.

After a long, considered silence, the returned Link began with the night in the Temple of Time, and the momentary glimpse of grace tempered by her caveat: as above, so below. Everything in balance .

The Depths were not so easily accessible now, seven years after The Upheaval. After the Gloom stopped sputtering from the chasms, they were no longer a threat or curiosity, but more of a public nuisance. As a result, in tandem with the restoration projects launched across the realm, Project Patchwork dispatched Hudson Construction to the closest and most immediate craters to the abyss. Wooden scaffolding was doused in concrete and rock, then landscaped with trees and flowers and rockwork along with messages carved for those who would grow to forget: Danger. Tread Lightly. This is a Chasm Site . 

These efforts, however, had failed to reach the more distant or inaccessible regions. The wounds in the earth left undisturbed up in the Hebra and Lanayru and Eldin Mountains, and the Gerudo Highlands. The nooks of Hyrule only glimpsed by gliding in from above, or scaling up sheer rock. The last vestiges of vanishing monsters and soothed collective nightmares. Places known only to wolf packs and Koroks and, in another lifetime, Link. 

From the Temple he made his way west around the River of the Dead, ascending Mount Hylia to the undisturbed entrance at its slope. It was his first journey into Hyrule’s underworld in almost a decade, and unlike his first foray chasing after Robbie and the clues to the Princess’s disappearance, these Depths had been kindled back to life. Not just the muted glow of the chain of lightroots, but from an alarming hum of activity. Blinding spotlights circled from massive Yiga forts, revealing the giant stalactites and underground mountain ranges that he’d once stumbled through, groping in the endless black. 

The all-encompassing silence he’d grown accustomed here was also gone, replaced by the low grind and sputtering of machinery. The Great Central Abandoned Mine that sheltered the Bargainer Statue he sought was not abandoned at all, but crackled and sparked like a torch, the furnaces licking up to the skyless above as iridescent fumes outgassed from the tallest spires. The forgotten constructs he’d encountered continued their eternal toil now accompanied by men, shoveling fuel for the flames as their companions hauled in sack after sack of freshly uncovered Zonaite. It was a scene he’d long imagined from the ancient past but never dreamed of glimpsing himself as he crept nearer.

The remnants of the massive conveyor belt connecting the Zonaite deposits to the mouth of the mine had been repaired, and now lurched forward, ferrying piles of the robin’s egg-colored ore. Shelves and carts brimmed with processed charges and batteries, being sorted by Hylians who looked as alarmingly out-of-place as the spewing chasms first had. 

The men and constructs were much too preoccupied with their toil to notice Link scuttling below, down into the cavernous basement where the cloaked four-eyed deity slumbered. As he drew closer to the enormous statue, a low voice rumbled through the chamber like a tremor. 

Hero of this realm. You grow older . 

This observation gave him pause—he hadn’t expected an eternal being to note a relatively minor set of years. “Time is elastic,” Zelda used to say, and he’d pretend to understand. 

Sit, Hero. Speak of what brings you here now, amidst this peace . 

Link dutifully lowered himself to the dry dirt, fine as sand, below the Bargainer’s blank stare. He crossed his legs and rested his hands upon his knees, like a monk deep in meditation. He did take a breath, and then another, centering himself around this one imperative precipitating this journey.

“The peace we brought to Hyrule has been shattered,” he said. “The Demon King Ganondorf has been freed from the Sacred Realm, and has taken over the throne. The Goddess Hylia has sent me to request your help in purging this evil once again.” 

Goddess Hylia . A blue flicker, like a wisp of lightning, cracked through the Bargainer’s carved eyes. Link waded helplessly through the expanse of silence before the otherworldly voice addressed him once more. 

Always sending another to do her divine bidding. Forever tasking the darkness with the difficulties. Tell me, Hero. What resurrected monsters enslave this land? What Calamity of Malice chokes the air away from the living?

Link swallowed against the lump rising in his throat. “There are no monsters. There’s no Calamity. This evil takes an ordinary form, only a man and his dark forces.” 

Evil men, dark forces… these are the judgments of mortals squabbling over vain desire. You oppose the man who has been declared King. Matters of politics are of no concern to me and my brethren . 

“But he’s captured Princess Zelda,” Link added, the words sounding flimsy in the wake of this dismissal. “She’s being held there against her will as a prisoner Queen.”

And yet she lives while you presume yourself capable of knowing her will. And yet you, yourself, live . 

“She had no choice,” he pushed, spit flying from his mouth against the absolute, righteous calm. “How is that balance? How can you say that one forcing the other—”

Did you come to save your Kingdom, or did you rouse the divine to salvage your pride?

Purah’s voice crept back into his screaming, grasping mind, and he took another breath to steady the dizzying rage. “The Goddess can’t help us without your blessing. Please,” he said, sinking forward, pounding his fists into the ground, as if he could shake something loose from the behemoth’s stubborn mind. “I can’t stop this. Ganondorf has grown more powerful while I’ve become less. I can’t go back to help Zelda without something, anything to wield against him.” 

The Goddess Hylia will always have a predisposition for tipping fate into her descendants’ favor. It is…a liability of being so closely tied to mortals. She chooses not to acknowledge the legitimacy of forces that contradict her preferences. We must balance what she might tip . 

The King you oppose is not a God. You wield the force of death, Hero . The battle above is that of your own desire . Not a threat to the Divine . 

The Princess you served may ferry Hylia’s light forward, but she is no more than flesh and bone and blood. And yet you fail to see her as such. You chase a Goddess, not a woman. 

It is not my responsibility to change you. Your fate is now your own, Hero, and I grow weary of these matters. The hint of light behind the frozen expression faded, and with that, Link’s audience vanished back into the void. 

“Did you go back to speak to the Goddess after you left the Depths?” Purah asked as fat slicked off the meat, bubbling on the kindling below. None of them had asked him about where the bounty had come from; he’d left out the part of the story where he’d taken the long, treacherous way back through the mountain, laying waste to the Moblin camp he’d found, massacring the starving creatures one by one as they yelped and scattered, heaving wordless cries of surrender as they waved their arms and tossed down their spindly spears. It was a merciless, conspicuous scene, a bloody footprint on the map they were desperate to keep untraceable. But Link’s sorrow was calcifying into fury, and each swipe of the sword was a release, the cleaving of unwanted, abominable flesh a balm that muffled the Bargainer’s verdict. He stole the roast right from their fire, their meager ration for ten a boon for the island quartet.

Link shook his head. “Why? There’s nothing she can do when she’s bound by ‘all things in balance.’” He stabbed at the coals with the Master Sword, ignoring its pulse of protest.

Purah bit the inside of her cheek, her charts and patterns failing her against the ambivalence of deities. “I thought she might have some idea of what we should do next.” 

“She did, and it was a dead end.” Plotting wasn’t in Link’s blood. He was born and raised and trained to find the best way through a directive, to arrive at anyone else’s desired end in the fastest and cleanest way possible. This aimless plight made him feel untethered; a soldier without a command, a Knight without his charge. So many missions to chase the darkness and slay the beast felt effortless now against this civilized foe and the sense of the ordinary coalescing around his presence. 

“Why does evil get to go on such epic runs?” Josha asked finally, brushing her lower lip with the tip of her braid. “It’s like the good side has to work endlessly forever to move a tiny bit forward, but then if you’re playing with darkness? Fate practically bends over backwards for you to win.”

Purah let out a huff, lacking the heart to shut down her spiraling protege. Instead, Paya’s voice sounded from beneath the brim of her hat. “Ganondorf hasn’t won,” she pointed out. “He’s stalemated. And as long as you avoid capture, he’ll keep looking over her shoulder, wondering when revenge is coming. And the more time that stretches out between his crowning and a capture? Each passing day is going to make him look weaker to the people getting sick of being holed up in their homes. We have all the time in the world,” she said, gesturing to the ramshackle island, the bounty of the feast. “His victory? It dies a little more as we speak.”

“Dammit Paya, were you taking secret warcraft seminars in between prayer blessings?” Purah said, slapping her knees as she jumped to life, pacing the campfire. “He’s not triumphant, he’s haunted. Sure the Hylians will put up with a lot, if it’s making their lives moderately easier. But when they’re stuck in limbo right along with him? He built his throne on a powder-keg.”

“So we do what then?” Link pushed.

“Watch,” Purah said with a flick of her telescope. “Wait. Let his cursed stew simmer.”

“Sit up here in the sky on our fucking hands?” he spat, sending Purah’s wild smile smashing back to earth. “He married her! You think he loses every day that goes past? That’s one more night she has to spend with him, and one more day she’s dying from the inside because this time the gods aren’t nice enough to knock her into a coma to keep her from losing her mind.”

“Link…” Paya offered, her shaded eyes pleading her apology. “We don’t know…there’s no way we can take what the Gazette says at face value. it could all just be for show…”

“Paya is right,” Purah jumped in. “There’s a big difference between marrying for a crown and any sort of legitimacy or…participation…”

“And you have Zelda working on the inside to help you,” Josha chimed in. 

Her three companions, including Link, tilted toward her curiously. “How do you know that?” Purah asked, not unkindly.

She blushed, twirling her hair between her fingers as her eyes fell back to the fat-splattered fire. “If she wasn’t, they’d haul you in dead. Bodies aren’t so much trouble.”

Each of them sat in their own sphere of silence, letting the flicker settle in their ribs, licking at their hearts. “The paper,” Paya murmured, still staring into the flames. Josha snapped up, handing her Link’s rumpled copy. “ That is why his safe and swift return to Hyrule Castle is not only important to me, but to the King as well ,” she read aloud. 

“She brokered your safe passage,” Purah said, clutching at her chest in relief. “Princess Zelda, that’s her. She made sure that you’re untouchable. But in a good way.”

“A path,” Josha said.

Open your eyes, Link . That ethereal voice knowing he’d see her, find her single thin thread cutting through devastation beyond lifetimes. The one divinity he’d forgotten to check. “To what?” Link asked, his voice hoarse.

Paya slid her thumb across the printed words as if sparking a rune. “A return…at the right time.”

Chapter Text

You could take her, Riju thought as she watched the Varina guard posted at the doorway, watching right back. Sixteen years old if she were rounding up, all lithe and no muscle. She’d probably run off to the caves at the same age that Riju was taking her Chief’s oath, spurred on by some self-righteous school friend or elder sister who claimed to know everything about what the Gerudo had ever had or been or lost or deserved. Before the Academy could teach her discipline, before the winds and the dunes could call forth the cords of strength beneath their skin. She’d probably been eager to prove she wasn’t just some random runaway, oh no no—she was a true believer, born better than her sisters and cousins, gifted. Special. Chosen. Not a subject, a warrior. Probably earned herself a smidgen of clout being brazen enough to approach the Town gates with her red paint and kindled fury, even if it was little more than a teenage prank. 

Kingdoms had been lost on less.

The town was likely crawling with these green recruits now, an invasion of teenage angst and mother issues. The best warriors were held back at the Castle, caging in the essentials. The B-team, thinned out with the least-bumbling Yiga were probably taking turns marching through New Castle Town, acclimating the lion’s share of Hylians to the new flags and drumbeats. It was insulting though, watching this girl who wouldn’t be able to lift a claymore on her own assigned to Potential Traitor Babysitting. 

And it was on purpose. Of course it was. That petty, pompous scourge of a snake knew that it didn’t matter who he sent to watch over the land that bore his curse. Cut off from the other Sages and stripped of her Stone’s power, she was in no position to make a stand. If she wanted the village to be safe, for the Gerudo to stand a chance at belonging within this warped version of the Kingdom. 

You catch more flies being a pragmatic bootlicker, Riju thought, running her thumb up a stack of papers left on her desk from Before. One week Before today when the women, undetectable in their old Gerudo clothing otherwise cast off in favor of their black wrapping tunics and jeweled hair clasps—surrounded the fortress and found Riju in this same chair, reviewing the uneventful patrol reports and barely looking up until a spear was at her throat. “Will you come with us quietly, or do you have a taste for war?” the small Varina wanted to know.

“What do we say about being taken alive?” she reminded the girl, letting the parchment float down to the desk from her hands. No second thoughts as she stretched open her fingers to scrape and claw and rip until the invaders made their way to her jugular. 

“We’re not taking you prisoner, Chief,” an older, steadier voice chimed from the back, muffled by a fluttery black mask obscuring the front of her face. A higher rank, she supposed. A secret worth keeping.

“Sneaking into my office and threatening to engage my soldiers? You’re not making a strong case for ‘just a chat,’” she snarled.

“We knew you’d bristle at the mere sight of us,” the senior Varina spoke from the doorway, dropping her scimitar to her side, letting it rest against her thigh in the slightest peace offering. “But we are only here as escorts. You’ve been invited to a royal engagement.”

“There are no ‘royal engagements’ any longer. The throne is empty,” Riju said slowly as dread crept up from abandoned crevices within, making a break for her speeding heart. “Or have you been hiding out in your caves for too long to notice that the Calamity ended?”

“How fortunate you are, Chief Riju, holding a sliver of power on this most memorable of days.” The delicate veil was hardly enough to hide the sneer seeping into the senior Varina’s voice. “How many have lived and died before you, never seeing a Gerudo King rise in glory? He has invited you himself,” she went on, and the smaller girl heaved the General from the chair, locking her elbows as her commander approached. “He wouldn’t want his ancestors to miss his big Coronation.” She leaned into Riju’s ear, the fabric tickling her lobe with each word. “Call off your guards, and we’ll have you returned to the Fortress as soon as you’ve bent the knee. You wouldn’t want to add a footnote of tragedy to the story, would you?”

Return she did, through the New Castle Town gates with her newly appointed Gerudo Town patrol. Their wagon crept beneath the hanging corpse of Commander Hoz, plum-pulped and rocking slightly in each departing stallion’s berth, visible only to those close enough to leave the locked city. Riju’s best evidence at the fate that the small remainder of the Royal Guard met, most likely in unmarked graves as their gruesome figurehead served as warning to the ferried Sages of King Ganondorf’s policy on defiance.

The best of his stolen warriors lagged behind to savor the true spoils: witnesses to the claim and transformation of Hyrule Castle into a corruption’s seat of power, the Varina dream that turned their heads away from their own homes and promises, toward a prophet who had never wrought anything upon his land that didn’t result in more death and suffering. 

Still. They hadn’t gotten everything. Princess Zelda, at last count, had her head. How bitter did that taste, she wondered, waiting millennia only to concede the landing? The return of the Promised was a prophecy with another wrapped within, an implicit vow running undercurrent and spurring their exile: burn the Hylian family tree to the ground and salt the earth, until Hylia herself cannot find the root.

It did help, knowing there was misery in their triumph. Not a lot. But a little.

Her focus fell back to her desk and the newspaper she’d been annotating with red ink. The schlock would be hilarious if it wasn’t narrating the downfall of reality. The whole thing read like a demented pastiche of aspirations and velvety threats. Traysi’s writing was dry but accurate; Penn’s was excitable but riddled with errors and lacking an eye for detail. The mugging voice here was pure Ganondorf, framing the cryptic quotes supposedly given by the Queen.

“Glam is back,” she mimicked to herself, reading aloud in a nasally soprano, remembering the undead nightmare accepting the Dragon’s Helm like a birthright, without a whiff of doubt. As if he’d already beheld victory and now it was merely a matter not of sealing it, but broadcasting it out, to make sure even the three goddesses heard from their heavenly perch.

The photo was staged, obviously. Vanished was the eerie historic Hylian Princess dress spending the last of its dignity on one last psychic kick-in-the-teeth to everyone’s fond memories of the Light Dragon. There would be no record of Zelda’s bruised knees or bloodied stone, and the wisest of the world would soon deny that they’d seen them at all.

Ganondorf looked like a Hinox packed into a toddler’s suit, once again unable to find a tailor with enough fabric and settling on exposing the entire populace to his self-satisfied altar of muscle. She was shocked the issue didn’t come with a complimentary frame to make sure the portrait was mounted above every bed in Hyrule.

Then the Princess…Goddess, the Princess. The memory made Riju’s eyes squeeze shut, wishing she could expel its vivid specter from her mind’s eye. Paraded under the eye of her subjects bound and rumpled, no more than a prisoner, collared like a loyal pet, and then, in one final swing of a cosmic joke, the fates’ punching bag had her married—married!---to a force that wasn’t content to keep her trapped for a century of torment within her own walls, or hurled from one epoch to another. He’d returned to devour the last few crumbs he’d left behind, what little she had managed to scrape back into a life.

But Riju had been so rattled, so furious on the blade’s edge of her “escort,” she hadn’t seen a woman coming apart at the seams. Only the consequence she had warned of, that vacuum now spewing the worst possible outcome, one she’d have felt foolish even speculating within the Before. And she hadn’t been content to swallow her bitterness for herself—oh no, of course not. Why hold the Princess’s grief, the whole of the kingdom’s sorrow, when she could forever impress how right she’d been?

She should have gone out to Hateno, she thought even immediately after Link had stormed away in his huff, when she stood at the balcony behind her throne, watching Epona blot her sight-lines with stirred sand. Link didn’t want reminders of obligation, at least not of the destiny her warning conjured like an exhausted ghost, called back from the grave so often it was practically resurrected. His vows were to Zelda, and Hyrule’s fate was a convenient entanglement: when she was well, so went the Kingdom. And as long as he could keep her safe, away from the wheel of fate and duty and sacrifice that would see to hook into her compulsion for peace, her taste for volunteering her being if the world only required it…then he was, forever, her Hero.

Zelda would have listened. Zelda always listened to the ghosts whispering in the walls. Riju had known this, and still she too had tried to soften the news that anything could upend the placid hum of their stilling lives. 

And when it went badly? She crossed her arms and hugged the grudge tight, assuming the Princess had heard her indirect call at all, letting the slight chew at her right on through the cruelty of her denouement.

And now her old friend could speak only here, her words set in typeface, a record out of her tied hands.

It was in those blocks of decrees dressed as conversation, in Zelda’s labyrinth of sentences, where she became confused. The voice sounded like Zelda’s, but then, not exactly. There was a hint of Ganondorf within them, like a ghost calling through the walls. And if she closed her eyes, she could hear a semblance of the Princess speaking them, though stiff and stilted. Puppet-like, which wasn’t surprising. She’d spurned the opportunity to rule so long she’d become nothing but a figurehead, a familiar banner the new King could wave for the simple people who just wanted the sun to rise in the morning and set at night, for the crops to flourish from the ground and fill their baskets. A sign they could take, regardless of its bearer, and see that yes, things may have changed but that wouldn’t mean they wouldn’t prosper, why look, it’s exactly what they remembered before…better even, perhaps, present at last with an explanation that could be plausible, if you squinted.

She could write her off as a vanished will, drifting through the castle corridors as she had the skies, a single imperative wedged into her just as it had been for 10,000 years. A vessel where a soul had been.

She could, but then. That plea. Wedged in between her vapid lines of praise and simping apology, a request at odds with all of the tidy, imperial structure.

…his safe and swift return…

She boxed the words in with her red ink, trying to imagine the shape of the King and Queen’s arrangement. Link had somehow evaded capture and cheated death, leaving a glaring hole in what was otherwise a rapid, tidy, uncompromising coup. Now, wherever he was, he was a living impasse: severing Zelda’s last thread of hope if he wound up dead, and an everlasting liability wandering or apprehended alive. Neither was ideal, but he didn’t have to have Zelda remain content or even sane. Not under lock and key, with her only force of will filtered through pen and scrutiny. 

Which meant that somehow Zelda had compelled him not only to allow her to beg for her Hero’s life in what the world was to believe were her own words, but ending the story with explicit instructions: He is wanted alive and unharmed for return to Hyrule Castle to answer these allegations under the just purview of the new Hylian Court . 

The space between Zelda’s nerve to ask, and Ganondorf’s confidence to acquiesce, haunted her. A private spar, an easy bargain? How much leverage did the Princess keep alive, and at what price?

She wasn’t in a position to make demands, and yet somehow.

It seemed unwise for Ganondorf to grant Zelda any leverage. Not before she was broken, not while rescue might yet emerge from a hidden passage or open window. Certainly not publicly, for any stable-hand or barmaid to parse through to that most deadly of conclusions: weak. 

It wasn’t a concession she’d make on a brand-new throne, that’s for sure.

Maybe he wanted her, but he didn’t need her. He was clever enough to know the difference.

Riju drew her scimitar-shaped, emerald-and-ruby-crusted letter opener across her desk, leaving a shallow divot in the lacquer. To what end, though? This is what she missed most in only a week shut up on this short leash within the Gerudo Fortress, not forbidden from movement necessarily, but watched incessantly, her every word subject to a hostile witness. To the same dissection she now performed on the Princess’s demon pact. She longed to toss these questions around with her Generals and favorite guards, lob them back and forth at the dinner table like they used to pass dishes. They kept her buoyant, laughing over even the darkest hypotheticals, a chorus that could sometimes clash in its cords but lifted her out of the same grinding hum of her own head.

The sound of a knock at the entrance forced her head up from its spiral, her watchdog’s expression turning just as curious as Riju’s own. An unfamiliar Varina leaned into the doorway and announced, “you have a visitor.”

Before she could react, the luminous, lush verdant figure of Queen Yona stepped in her place, bowing her head before striding ahead toward the vacant leather chair set up for what used to be her frequent audiences. Yona was always stunning, but she was positively luminous today, wrapped in delicate golden chains that clasped at her breastbone, segmenting down her rib cage to brush against her delicate waist, alluring in that bizarre way that the terminally elegant Zora tended to be. Slow to follow was King Sidon, leaning heavily onto an ivory cane while his bandaged legs struggling to keep up with her assured stride. He kept his focus on the tile floor, an unsettling turn for a man Riju had never known not to preen and grin like someone who hadn’t considered the possibility that anyone found him anything but charming. 

“Chief Riju,” Yona said warmly, sliding the chair out for her husband, patiently waiting for him to accept his place before taking her own. “It’s rare that we get the pleasure of your company twice in such a short span.”

Isn’t that delightful, Yona? How are your swift violets coming up this season? What on Farore’s green earth… 

Riju glanced down at the copy of the Gazette, nudging it nonchalantly toward the couple—a gesture that might just be outside view for her guard and the Zora escort, who had not bothered to breach the chamber. “You caught me by surprise,” she said, her eyes flicking suggestively down at the circles and underlines and scrawled HAHAHA s she’d annotated. “I was made to believe that travel through Hyrule was not currently an option, save for our esteemed new patrol teams,” she said, her fingernail tracing the line: Travel in and out of towns, villages, and domains is currently suspended to ensure the validity of those present, restrict the movement of any remaining enemy forces, and assist any citizens who experience a sighting . 

“That is true, there are quite a few security concerns in place now,” Yona nodded, setting her face in consideration. “But we’re here on behalf of the Monarchy, so the King was kind enough to grant us an exception along with proper escort.”

Her focus lobbed frantically between Yona and Sidon, trying to catch a twitch, a wink, any betrayal of the lines of a corrupted Construct. But Yona’s expression did not so much as flicker, serene and settled, faintly smiling as if truly pleased to be here, and genuinely appreciative of the forces making it possible. Sidon’s head was still bowed, but she could just catch his line of sight wandering to the page, glimpsing exactly how his once-comrade was drawing out the game. But his jaw remained locked, his knuckles rising as he squeezed the sapphire head of the cane.

Yona was fortunate her body had not shattered as well, the force with which she’d thrown herself on the Sanctum’s stone, wrapping her body around the pardon Ganondorf had ceded, a grace that could vanish at the slightest waiver of his whims. She could not, would not give the new King so much as a seed of doubt, thanking profusely as he locked the cage behind her, preening and glowing with goodness at the opportunity as the soul she saved withered in the dying light. Sidon would rather hold his head high in a noose beside Hoz and every other honorable corpse along the road to rule. 

But for her.

“It seems that the King has a true friend in you, Queen Yona,” Riju said, folding her hands in her lap. “That sort of dedication is rare. Don’t you think, Sidon?”

The cane circled within Sidon’s gloved grip, the sapphire’s facets straining at the fabric before his wife jumped in. “The King has shown incredible mercy for such an ungrateful kingdom,” Yona said, her smile only faltering at the mention. “He has no reason to make space for traitors and fools, and yet he has given them a place to learn and grow and thrive in ways the old Kingdom never could.”

“Traitors and fools,” Riju repeated, thoughtful and soft, tapping her lips with mock thoughtfulness. “I suppose you’re right, Yona. Princess Zelda is quite foolish, thinking that a traitor like Link could be reformed to serve a ruler he exists to oppose. And yet, he seems capable of tolerating both of them. I find it so curious, all these accommodations by someone completely in control of the entire world.”

“Queen Zelda is not a traitor or a fool. She was misled,” Yona said, her only movement in her right hand, which drifted from her lap to Sidon’s thigh, squeezing for dear life. “Hyrule has been beneath tyrannical rule for centuries upon centuries. Many of us are confused, but I believe with all the light in my heart that all of us have the capacity to continue to do good work within our new world. Though there will always be some, within any change, that refuse to let go of what they’ve known and see fit to demonize the future.”

“I just think it’s curious is all,” she shrugged, leaning back in her chair, pivoting the seat back and forth like a child play-acting on her parents’ furniture. “Wanting Link to come back to the Castle, alive? We all know him. He’d rather go down in a blaze of glory than face down being… so wrong. But okay, if that’s what Zelda wants, he might give it a shot. We don’t want our loves to suffer for our own selfish glory,” she said, slowing her syllables down to a crawl, trying and failing in a desperate bid to draw Sidon’s gaze back up. “What are they going to do, three sides of the Triforce holed up in the same Castle? How is that going to go? My ex moved all the way out to the Oasis because she would rather live in a tent than see me in the square.”

Yona giggled, louder than she should, covering her mouth daintily with her free hand. “Oh Riju, it’s a shame that we’re separated by so much space. You always make me laugh, no matter how strange the circumstance,” she admitted. “Of course we all know the former Knight Consort is proud, but he is not lost. He kept the King’s Princess safe for years before his return, even with his misguided ideas. He’s proven time and again that he can accept when destiny takes a divergence, and I’m sure he’ll come to see how happy Zelda has become, now that she has the chance to rule outside of her family’s dark shadow.”

“Have you seen her?” Riju asked, her composure slipping. 

Sidon’s jaw dropped just a tic, letting a sharp breath in before Yona leapt in. “Only at the Coronation,” she said, “but it is wonderful to hear her messages from the paper.”

“We saw Ganondorf,” Sidon croaked through a dry throat, swallowing hard enough for Riju to see the lump slide down his throat as Yona swiveled her body toward him, clenching a thin smile as her nails sank into Sidon’s soft, slippery flesh. 

“We saw the King,” she corrected quickly, loudly enough for the guard to hear around the wall. “It was the King who was kind enough—”

“We saw Ganondorf in the library,” Sidon said, his golden eyes at last finding Riju’s, narrowed just enough for her to catch and hold tightly. 

“In the Castle?”

“Beneath the Atrium,” he said. “That is where he is operating.”

“And Zelda wasn’t there?” The tiniest flick of his head told Riju everything she had to know.

“Queen Zelda is much too busy to be wasting her time with logistical operations,” Yona tore back in. “She has only just gotten married, and that’s what brings us here.”

“To spread her blushing bride’s glow far and wide?” Riju tried not to sneer, with little success.

“You may have seen it in the papers, and I’m afraid you’ll have the two of us to blame,” she went on, unfazed. “There’s been something of a movement started amongst the different regions and tribes to send some kind of offering to honor this union.”

“Wedding gifts?” Riju exhaled. Ganondorf had sent his pardoned captives on an interrogation for…wedding gifts? Good lord, he hadn’t changed at all. Nothing but a petty, preening Primadonna collecting heads for slights. 

“You might have heard that we sent a collection of tridents,” she continued without missing a beat. “The Gorons followed with some incredible Death Mountain treasures, and then it was the Rito with all new bedding to switch out what’s been moldering in that place for so long…I think Tarrey Town trucked in some kind of gazebo?”

“Is a thriving Kingdom and its people’s hearts not rich enough for His Highness?” Riju lobbed back.

“I think it’s a nice gesture of good faith,” Yona said through her teeth. “Especially from his homeland. It would carry an extra weight of meaning, receiving congratulations from family.” A faint tremor ran through her body as she leaned slightly forward, undetectable if not for her array of golden chains. The smile flattened as the lilt left her tone. “It would put everyone at ease, Chief Riju, to know that you’re willing to build with your friends. A small sign of favorable intent would shift elsewhere.”

Her imagination flooded with all of the things she’d love to send up north: crates of stinging beetles, rotting shock fruit, poison-tipped arrows. Her focus drifted down, down to the happy couple staring back up at her through the printed image. Zelda drawn in sharp folds, entombed in a sarcophagus of midnight silk, the intricate Gerudo embroidery up and down the lining a silent stitched mockery. Her eyelids flared with sharp wings, elongating her eyes to an absurd degree, rendering her very face unrecognizable. In the dreary hues and severe lines she looked just like another sullen teenage vai on her mother's last nerve, plotting her revenge with a deflection to the badlands. 

There had always been such power in her softness.

“You,” Riju called out to the girl at the door, making her start. “Send someone down into the shelter, down to the textile shelves. Bring up every bolt we have in blue, pink, and lavender.” A bouquet of light and spring, her conversion's rejection silent stitch by stitch. She smiled back, mirroring Yona’s emptiness. “Everything Cece will need to bring out her eyes,” she explained as the Varina reluctantly vanished, off to retrieve the only dagger she had left to throw.

Chapter Text

Ten Thousand Years Before

If the desert was Ganondorf’s home, the tropics were his hideaway.

Nothing in the whole of Hyrule compared to the sheer bounty of it all: the palm fronds large enough to shade the land’s greatest beasts; the trees laden with fruit that was always in season, always ripe, dripping like honey from the comb. Strange blossoms nursing thick-winged insects that buzzed like airborne jewels, and the stepladders of waterfalls spilling into lily-dotted ponds and lazy streams. And then just as suddenly as the decadent dream had emerged the lushness vanished, and your feet sank into the sand, facing out to the end of the world. The melancholy of the sea’s vastness eased as the wind whipped up off the waves—not harsh, not punishing, as those same gusts morphed in the wasteland. Salt-flecked and fresh, stirring the leaves and the petals, summoning the rain to fall on blessed Faron.

This love he kept to himself.

“Sentimental,” mothers had scolded their 10-year-old boy-king, shaking their heads at the discovery—one of the servants had come across a letter-box beneath the bed while she was cleaning, mistaking it for the property of the Queens themselves. Technically it was; a carved, gilded box with red paint and scrolling curlicues, a gift from a well-meaning guest who’d left it in the Throne Room after an audience. One of many tributes. He was sure it would not be missed. 

Within it they’d found one single, strange treasure. A lonely flower, dried and paper-thin, preserved in its pressing between two of the giant, forgotten tomes rotting in the fortress archive. White as bleached bone with a stain of ocean-blue radiating from its center. Gold stamens curled in the middle, with its glittery essence stirring free and leaving a residue in the box corners. Silent Princesses were not supposed to grow this far south, and yet he’d found it, scouting the highland pass. A solitary stem, a lost seed spirited away on the clever wind. Something so incorrect, so unnatural, it seemed to whisper “trouble” without reason. He wanted to have it, not for a brief week in a vase or one season to visit it here, on the remote road. Forever. Every time he lifted the lid, whether in one year or fifty, he wanted to see and remember a truth he couldn’t quite catch so young but now, a lifetime later, came together as clearly as the memory. The notion that Hyrule, the totality, the absolute matter of this world, was wilder than any sky-king could dream.

“Cling to nothing,” his mothers had told him as they tipped the box into the evening fire. “The man who loves nothing is beholden to no one.”

Hiding what he was had long ceased being a challenge. In hindsight he would kneel and give thanks to them for this gift and every other they had instilled into the son who could not afford to bargain. Not as the territory was slowly, steadily swallowed whole. There was power in the simplicity, of letting the lies and legends tell a story he did not answer, only smirking in acknowledgment. 

And it made spotting another liar an instinct he could sniff as sure as rain. 

Ah! Like this little liar coming right through the forest underbrush, pretty and pious on her Zonai mare, lost in all sorts of reasons why she had come for anything but him.

What he hadn’t expected was the silence that followed. No shadowing hoofbeats, no whirring cogs from those insipid, supernatural Constructs. Only the Lady and her white horse, both of them claimed in the jade and amber tassels of their Zonai keepers. How he loathed the garish, inelegant burdens weighing down the fabric of her shift dress, making it even more shapeless than it already was. Another crime to add to the mile-long scroll of offenses Rauru’s reign had wrought: obscuring some of the gods’ finest work.

The Lady tugged at the horse’s ornamental reins, the confidence in her high chin and regal posture faltering as she slowed in their temple’s wake. Perhaps she hadn’t expected the pack of Gerudo warriors upon their own imposing steeds, each fitted with their own set of golden chains and leather straps, their flanks adorned with silk Gerudo bunting fluttering like battle flags. This was not her precious secret meadow or the fortified throne room. Here, outside the gentle plains, she was grossly outnumbered.

“Lady Zelda,” he announced, stroking Phantom’s mane from his own saddle’s perch, “what have you done with the cavalry?”

She blushed. There wasn’t a time within his presence over the past year that she hadn’t. Her anger, her frustration, her blustery embarrassment all betrayed by that tiny blip of scarlet at the tips of her tapered ear, spreading like wild ivy to her apple cheeks and slender throat, settling into the valley of her breastbone where the Secret Stone bobbed, winking its power like an invitation. Such sensitive skin, so much lighter and creamier than her luscious aunt’s. Lovely, stupid Sonia. She must get it from her father’s side, he thought ruefully. 

The Lady sat back, regarding her audience, those eyes like the tidepools sweeping through the dozen Gerudo warriors and the few women on their way out of the temple, each of them holding a golden urn. Her focus lingered on these disciples of the High Priestess dressed in black as they silently continued with their labors, unfazed by the interruption.

“I…” Zelda hesitated, with the same awkwardness of someone stumbling uninvited into a family dinner, “...I didn’t…I mean, I told King Rauru that any additional guards would be unnecessary. For such a simple ask.”

Ganondorf had not wished to make any ask. He would have no debts on the ledger with the false King, be them cosmic or otherwise. But the High Priestess had sent word in response to the annex of sacred Faron, a signal he could not ignore.

We cannot face banishment without our relics. Make the arrangements. Security is imperative .

“This is hallowed ground to the Zonai as well,” Rauru had claimed in Court, gesturing to the sky, weaving a tale of thunderbolts and totems, harnessing power and all manner of vague rubbish that sounded exactly like reflections from one who’d only admired the land from afar. “Of course we’ll see that everything you wish to save is properly recovered before we begin to construct our own.” In its place, they both knew as well as the other.

In one fluid movement Ganondorf dismounted from the stallion, striding toward Zelda as the warriors shifted their attention to the women and their burdens, helping pack them in the waiting saddlebags. He let her sit there on her not-so-high horse as he approached, listening to the mare grumble as she sensed her Lady’s discontent, the tremor of fear in the wake of his casual approach. Such a smart girl she was, her cells cowering in the face of true power, feeling the pull of his potential. Oh but stubborn. An antagonist to her own body, denying its wisdom, tampering the preservation that threatened to appear primitive or, gods forbid, impolite.

He traced her horse’s bridle, the beast calming under his touch. “One might infer an insult from a great King assuming his new subjects are so subdued, they need no more than an unescorted Lady to oversee their eviction from contested territory.” The sharpness of her breath, the tightening of her boots around her pony, delicious tension suspending her between nerves and resolve, freed only by his laughter’s machete. “Steady your heart, dear Lady,” he murmured as if into the horse’s twitching ear. “What sort of Desert King would I be if I were unable to recognize an act of unsolicited kindness?” Slowly, carefully he turned his head, catching her captivated, her coral lips parted in the mere suggestion of a gasp, a release. “It was good of you to come, Petal.”

He unfurled his gloved hand to her, an offering she could gracefully refuse, were she also counting debts. Her thumb circled the reins for a moment, almost long enough for him to envision her defiance flaring and sliding herself free, alone.

Instead that small, absurdly small hand met the center of his palm, its touch too slight to feel through his gauntlet’s hide. She braced herself against it as she leaned forward, then slid down from its back, accepting the might of his torso as a guide back to earth. Her step away was hasty, all too aware of her proximity as she fussed with her hopeless skirt, making sure the stiff linen was still in place. Just out of reach she paused, staring up at the stone temple with its deity obscured by trumpet flower tendrils and clumps of jasmine, framing the statue’s ruby eyes in overflowing reverence. 

“This wasn’t…” she said to herself, catching her own breath as she stared, her brow furrowed in confusion. “That is, I never knew that this was here.”

“Well it won’t be very soon, thanks to your benefactors,” he noted. “By the strangest coincidence, in all the vastness of Hyrule, this particular spot is apparently just as holy to the Zonai as it is to the Gerudo. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the depths’ cavern beneath it.” A direct entrance funneling deep beneath the earth, the walls beset with enough Zonaite to fuel their ambitions for thousands of years. 

“And how are they to know what lies beneath this place?” she parried back, challenging him with one raised golden eyebrow. “I doubt they have had the honor of a tour.”

He smiled, letting her off with a slight shrug. Let her think she’d won a round. After all, he didn’t wish her to drown in doubt. Only sink into it, inch by inch, until she floated away from the imposters who’d claimed her.

“They have not, Lady Zelda,” he said, extending that hand once again, beckoning her deeper. “We have reserved that privilege for you.”

The Gerudo warriors pretended to be more interested in the packing of their horses than the sight of Rauru and Sonia’s strange protege stepping forward, letting his paw consume her as she conceded one more precious inch.

“Who is she?” she asked as they passed beneath the entrance, surrendering the bright sunlight to plunge into the darkness of the entrance hall, sparsely lit by an occasional torch. The way she flinched, angling her steps close enough for her body’s heat to kindle the silk fibers of his haori , gave shape to her fear of the shift.

“Who, the statue?” 

“Yes,” she said, her face sunk into an unexpected seriousness that he caught in fragments granted by the flickering lights. The sound of drips meeting stagnant water punctuated their sentences as the musk of miasma seeped in from the fissures in the stone wall and floor, providing the unescorted blatant cause to turn back. Self-preservation was, as usual, blasphemy to the Lady’s ears. The whiff of rot and ruin only seemed to fuel her sandal steps faster, to descend before her ignorance could rescind her invitation. 

“Din.” She may as well have hiked out to the shore and asked him to name the color of the sea. 

“Not one of the Heroines?” 

“What Heroines?” The lilt of certainty seeped out of his tone, leaving nothing but the graveled edge. She may have been sent from the same nameless hovel as her aunt, but a girl as well-read as Lady Zelda who moved through her world with such impunity and interest, must have even the most rudimentary understanding of the Scorned One. 

“Your Gerudo worship Din,” she repeated.

“ All Gerudo revere Din,” he clarified, halting between flames to stare down at the faint contours of gold in his grasp. “Worship is not a word we volley around without consequence or responsibility. The women being dragged from this place by royal decree have pledged their lives to her service. The rest of us respect that work without the need to claim their level of devotion for our own.”

“I’m sorry,” she offered reflexively. “I didn’t understand. I’m still learning about this place.”

“What place, Hyrule?” he scoffed, unable to sand the irritation from his voice. 

“It’s why I came to the Palace,” she said softly. “To learn as much I can before I get back.”

He rolled his shoulders back, commanding them to ease. The Priestess had warned him of such a slip, fumbling all of their work, this unlikely nurtured chance, at the base satisfaction of feeling correct. Don’t be so strong as to spook her , she’d said. Remember the hundred reasons this should not work against the one way it can . 

“My sensitivities over my people’s legacy are not an indictment of you, Petal,” he said, taking a step once again toward their destination. “It is distressing to realize how little our heritage has impacted the wider world.”

“Tell me then,” she said, falling back into step. “Perhaps I’ll teach it myself someday.”

Such a strange creature, speaking as if her life had already passed. “You know of the Golden Goddesses, then,” he said, not waiting for the answer. “The creators who distilled the soul of their gifts into the Triforce. Indulge me. How do they teach the legend to the children of Hylians?”

“The Golden Goddesses entrusted Hylia to guard the relic from those who would use it for evil purposes,” she recited like a poem.

“Unquestioned surrender,” he clarified. 

“Hylia was tasked—”

“Tasked?” he snorted. “What did the Golden Goddesses exist for, save to protect the fruits of their labors? What would compel them to abandon the single most precious object ever created? Hylia was not tasked ,” he insisted, laying into the loathsome, lying word. “Hylia demanded the Triforce to elevate herself above the deities she saw as lesser, those who did not subscribe to her vision of the virgin world. She harnessed the mortal’s inherent fear of darkness into a preference for her blinding light, the promise of purity, of salvation.” His eyes slid to Zelda, gauging her reaction, surprised to meet that hunter’s focus gaze fixed right back at him, as if she was trying to memorize the story he could tell by heart. “She expected the Goddesses to see her triumph and award it in kind. Courage and wisdom were quick to fall in step—wisdom seeing the past of least resistance to the peace she coveted. Courage followed close behind, always quick to defend her truth. But Din…” his voice trailed off a moment as the corridor tapered at its end. “Golden Goddess Din, carver of the red earth, would not pledge fealty to one image of the kingdom. Refused to see one light, would not bow down to one way. But in her defiance she stood alone. Away from her sisters, divorced from her creation.”

They stood at the door, now brightened by the flanking sconces, the story settling into Zelda’s whirring mind. “Did Hylia claim she was evil?” she asked, puncturing the silence.

“Evil is power. Evil is a force of will. Hylia’s name for Din was poisoned with pity, strangling any semblance of the Goddess’s true voice.” He raised his hand, now curled in a fist, and rapped on the chamber door in three measured knocks. An answer came before he could speak the tale’s final words.

Din, the Corrupted One .

The inner chamber was the temple’s molten nest. Womb-like with its red rock walls and domed ceiling carved with methods long lost to this epoch, a small world unto itself. Columns of water poured from narrow spigots lining the walls, each lit from behind by a sconce, giving the effect of an endless flow of ore spilling into giant golden basins. At the altar stood a version of the same woman whose statue crowned the entrance, but rendered standing now, her arms crossed and clutching one golden triangle to her breast. A ring of fire licked her feet, obscuring the treasure held safe between the surging flames.

They were beneath Faron’s soil now, as the long and gradual corridor wound down like a patient snake, obscuring the sense of depth one reached by this end. You felt removed, entering this chamber, from any semblance of the kingdoms above and below. This room held the space between them, as they imagined the Golden Goddesses had once called home. A respite before Hylia handed out her rewards and punishments in kind.

He watched as the space revealed itself to Zelda, who tiptoed forward with the surety of an enchantment; the instinct to see and touch and know a force untame-able within herself. This curiosity, this compulsion, he did not possess this. He knew no one else that did. A counterweight to the girl who agonized, who bit at her cheek, who conflated loyalty with correctness and flayed her spirit attempting to stretch between the two. The wonder as her fingertips brushed the ancient carved beams running from the floor to ceiling, it did not ask what was polite. It did not heed the danger that should be prickling the base of her skull. 

The boy he had once been was once blind to reason, locking his secrets away to savor in the dark. And she, now, prying open the box with her bare hands.

“ Sav’aaq , Hylian,” a woman’s voice broke like a bell, sending the Lady jumping out of her skin. It took her some time to spot the thickly robed woman sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor amidst the array of small tables and wax candle cities and tiny shrines set up and left by those whose conflicted hearts had begged the goddess’s resilience. The High Priestess’s damask robes were scrolled with scarlet and gold, melding seamlessly into the fire and stone. Her face was obscured as it always was in the presence of those with no vows, or barring that, a holy birthright. Shaded by a hood shadowing all that within, nothing but a clear voice and open hands.

“Come, traveler. How fortunate to be gifted with your presence in these final days,” she went on, her empty hands gesturing to the space in front of her. 

Zelda looked to Ganondorf first, her mouth slightly agape, and did not proceed without his nod from the entry; a deference that dragged at his core like an anchor. 

The Priestess turned her palms up in welcome as Zelda sat on the cushioned mat before her, diplomatically mirroring the Gerudo's stance. “The King tells me that we have a true advocate in you,” she said in that warm resin voice.

“I…” He watched her fair hair fall forward as her head bowed, sinking into contrition at the whiff of a compliment. “I am afraid that any of my sympathies are genuine but ineffective,” she said. “I am not a member of Hyrule’s Court or the Council of Sages. I am far removed from the order of succession. I am little more than a visitor at Rauru and Sonia’s grace.”

“Then you knew your efforts to persuade the King of Hyrule would fail, and yet you attempted regardless,” she spoke back to her like a reflection. “Doing so would not endear you to those in power. You stand with favor that is finite, and you spend it on those who are not your kind. Why?”

Zelda considered, perhaps for the first time. “Because you may not be my kind, but you are still…you still are a part of this kingdom. A brave, fearless, indispensable part of it,” she went on, her spine straightening as if remembering something. “I did not come here to disparage King Rauru’s decisions, but I am…conflicted, when I see goodwill extended to some tribes and not others.”

“What would he say if he could see you in this chamber?” the Priestess asked, once again bending the light. “Brought in arm-in-arm with his enemy?”

“They do not have to be enemies,” Zelda tried to say with conviction. 

“The place you came from before arriving as Rauru and Sonia’s guest. The small village in the mountains,” she said, “how would the people of your town respond to an invasion?”

He watched her shoulders rise and fall. “They would fight to their last breath.”

“And their Chief, their Mayor, their Queen?”

“Would slay the gods if it kept their people safe,” she admitted.

“You have a wise heart and a noble soul, Lady Zelda,” the Priestess said, reaching to place her hands over Zelda’s own. “Not in blood, but conviction. These two so seldom walk hand-in-hand. It is a pity that your mother was not born first in her family. You would make an excellent Queen.” She squeezed those slender hands, holding tightly a beat. “Your timing to visit, however, proves more fortuitous. We have one last treasure that remains.” The Priestess stood, bringing the Lady up to her feet along with her. “Without your interference, it’s hard to say that it would have survived.”

The Priestess led her visitor to the altar holding up the Goddess’s feet, pausing before the ring of flames. With the wave of her hand the fire died down, revealing the guarded artifact. There was no need to press the Lady for a closer look, who strained on her tiptoes to eke forward and get an even better first glimpse by Hylian eyes. “This,” the voice beneath the robes proclaimed, “is the Heart of Din.” A ruby sloped and sized like a curled-up cat that did not reflect the light so much as absorb it, slightly dull on the surface but shining, pulsing, glimmering within, practically alive with caged brilliance. 

He could see Zelda’s eyes widen in profile and her mouth slacken. Her body hovered above the ruby, hesitating with her hands anchored at her sides. Held back, violent in her stillness, the certainty of it ill-suited to her.

She was—at last—afraid.

“It’s said to have come from beneath this very chamber,” the Priestess said softly, reaching out to brush the unpolished facets of the roughened gems. “Have you been to the depths before, Princess?”

Had he not been stationed at the far end of the room, the wheeze of his breath would have tugged Zelda right out of the reverie she now slipped in, dashing their plan to pieces. He could practically hear The Priestess chiding in his ears: my King, for once in your life of bluster and clatter...

There was no reaction from the Lady. Perhaps the error in her title had been made before. She could pass for a sharper, refined version of her aunt, and her presence within the Palace could cause confusion. Maybe the war within her head was too loud, too ferocious, aching to touch what she could not say for certain was “good.”

She did not know that the High Priestess made no mistakes.

A grinding noise roared in his ears as he clamped down on his molars, scraping bone on bone. Certainly she hadn’t lied, he could imagine that clever tongue weaving, thrashing in the grip of the revelation. Lady Zelda had been her introduction. He had not pushed further. Did not interrogate the innocuous claim of royalty-once-removed, ascending only in the wake of utter catastrophe. 

You didn’t ask , she would say, breathing easily with her technicality, content to win another game of semantics. Living and dying by her rules.

For who would dare to break them?

“Yes,” she murmured, nearly in a trance. Her fascination was a snare, perhaps the only one tracing all the way inside, lulling her defenses to sleep.

“What a road-worn woman you are, dear Lady,” the Priestess purred. “Did you find anything down there as well?” She buried the question as if she already knew the answer. She stretched open her hands, grasping toward the girl still holding back. “Will you give us the privilege of a blessing?” she asked softly, sending Zelda’s fingers twitching. “You have stated your intentions to me and our King,” she went on. “Now give them to the stone. Let it preserve the hope of your esteem, so it may endure through our moment of darkness.” 

“Please ,” the Priestess incanted, the invitation coaxing Zelda’s hands at last forward, open to receive. To listen. 

To submit.

She wrapped her palms and forearms around the waiting stone, gingerly lifting it from its home. At the sense of her skin it activated, its center growing brighter, drawing the unseen light from its beholder. The Priestess drew herself as still as he himself did, holding their collective breath, as silent as sculpted Din while the Princess—the Princess !—trembled with the force of it.

“You’re doing so well, Princess,” the honeyed voice of reason lured her, bringing her own grasp up to hover beneath the vortex of a stone as reassurance, to show Zelda that she’d catch it should she falter. Affirming that she would not. “We are so fortunate to have you.”

Her lips pursed together, a distant part of her mind rebelling against the strangeness she could not compare, the invasion she could not name. But that compulsion had its teeth filed long before today, ceding her power to the cordial one reared in her place. 

And as soon as it had begun, in an invisible crescendo beyond the bounds of his vision, it was over. 

The ruby tumbled into the Priestess’s waiting hands as Zelda stumbled back, blinking the glass from her eyes, letting the room sharpen back in the corners as her pupils shrank back to their normal size. The moment was already slipping away with the stone’s retreat, lingering only as a tattered dream.

“Perhaps we will see you again, Lady Zelda, under happier circumstances,” the High Priestess eased her back to earth, nudging her bare shoulder away from the altar and back toward her chaperone. “You will continue to speak generously of us on the Plateau, yes?” 

She shook her head like she was wringing out cobwebs, ever-so-slightly unsteady as she walked forward. By the time she reached him she had shaken away the last remnants of the ruby’s force. “Are you all right, Lady Zelda?” he asked, daring to slide a touch from the shoulder the High Priestess had used as a keel. 

“Yes, thank you,” she answered a bit too certainly. “Taking time out from your arduous task to indulge me in such a rich and storied place was unnecessary, but very kind.”

“The pleasure is ours, dear Lady,” the voice most certainly smiled beneath its shroud. “Always.”

The Gerudo guards and the High Priestess’s disciples had dispersed by the time Zelda and Ganondorf re-emerged from the temple. Their two horses had been left tethered to nearby trees, facing one another with an abundance of trepidation. Phantom tossed his head, trying to distance himself from the Zonai mare, who kept huffing at her counterpart. 

Zelda had done most of the talking on the way back up through the tunnels, filling the darkness and unnatural stillness with anecdotes on what she’d read about the Gerudo and how not one book, not a single one, had mentioned anything about Din or this curious temple hidden like a secret cellar.

“Where did you read this?” he broke in at last.

“In the library.”

“What library?”

“Mineru’s.” 

“A library built and then maintained by those who are not served by our memory,” he growled, anxious to emerge again, to be free of this stifling prison and the clumsy grime clinging between her ignorance and his revelation. “The record is a buttress for a curated truth, not a rebuttal to what they fought to establish in the first place.”

She was quiet then, likely as tired of hearing his rage against the pillars of the world as he was regurgitating it. Both of them remained adrift in their own private agonies until, at last, squinting back into the light. 

Without a lingering moment Zelda made a line for her horse, toying with the buckles while he crept closer, letting her frustration flourish as he watched, offering nothing. Beyond her baseline nervousness she seemed angry, yanking on the straps too tightly, pulling too hard on the saddle and huffing when it slid off-center, her shoulders quaking as she wound up to try again. He should share the sentiment, he thought, after unearthing the secret she’d let slide on introductions and assumptions. But this deception didn’t flare his temper. In his eyes it stretched her taller, fuller in his imagination, this strategist who could keep truths like a crypt. Not just a lonely girl cursed with too much intuition and deduction for her own good…not a girl. 

A woman who could play the game.

Born not to serve the crown, but to wear it. 

“Are you going to escort me out of Faron?” he asked, coating his voice in derision as he leaned against the tree, taking his time as if fate was in his debt as he watched her struggle even harder in his shadow. “Make sure that the evil King has vacated the premises?”

She immediately whirled back from the horse as if waiting for the excuse to implode. “You truly are hate incarnate, aren’t you?” she seethed, slamming her sandal toe into the soft earth. “You mock and deride everything you perceive in me that does not fit within the world as you see it. I’m too hopeful, and trusting, and sincere, and loyal, and soft, and stupid , and…” She heaved for breath, clutching toward that golden heart of a chest as she caught herself. “Why are you here? Why do you continually summon and spurn me? What more could you want with me? ” 

Hornbill calls and shrieking monkeys wandered in from the distance to fill the gulf between the King and the Princess, their knives and contingencies waiting silently in their pockets.

She blinked those eviscerating spheres, all sea and rustling leaves, a wind whipping up what she could not let die.

How he loved that breeze.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” he said at last.

She recoiled, sinking into the surface of a cheap insult, ignoring the truth locked within. “That’s…vile,” she said, seizing on the high ground. “Rauru does not have me.”

“I am not talking about your heart or your body, although…” he cut himself off, swallowing the reflexive insult backward, bitter in the back of his throat. “I am speaking of your loyalty. What you will sacrifice your potential, your desire without bothering to ask why. Only if it is good .” 

Her defiant rage curdled as her lip curled, the shiv he’d spoken landing square in her gut. “I’m not doing any of this for him,” she almost whispered, a last confession. “I’m doing it for… someone else.”

Ganondorf leaned close, caging her against the ancient tree holding back her escape, the red bark yielding to his grip. His lips scarcely moved as he spoke. “Doing what?” 

She stared back up, her spine retreating into the trunk of the tree, the answer clawing to escape her tentative grasp. 

He repeated himself. “Doing what, Petal?” One hand, weak and famished, descended to trace her ear, lingering on its sensitive tip like a knife-edge, making her shiver beneath him. “Who else could there be who would demand the dimming of your light? And has he ever asked you, even once, what it is that you wish?”

She lingered. 

On the edge of depths and earth, fealty and betrayal, witness and enigma. 

She lingered.

Their lips met like cymbals, a collision of their most tender flesh, unlocked and tasting and claiming as he pressed her into the unyielding bole; those nimble, noble fingers gripping the hair at his temples, tugging until he groaned into her, frantically searching her opened form for everything, all at once—the dip of her waist, the swell of her chest, the small of her back, the sensitive ridge right beneath her ribs that canted her hips into his at their slightest brush. 

And then just as suddenly she ripped away, gasping for air as if drowning. Bracing herself at arm’s length she shoved him backwards, bolting sideways for her idle horse, scrambling onto her back like she was fleeing a fire. “You twist my understanding,” she panted, not waiting to jam her heels into the poor creature’s flank, sending her running. Her voice rose above the hoofbeats, filling the forest as she fled. 

I desire nothing from you. 

He brought his calloused fingers to his lips as he watched her careen back toward the life that would never be enough, brushing the pliant space where she had been, letting himself savor the smile of a man who’d just won his world back.

Back beneath the bowels of the temple, Ganondorf re-emerged to find the Priestess returned to her place in the room’s center, the Heart of Din clasped like a beloved pet in her lap. She had removed her hood, however, letting the torchlight reveal her bone-straight hair waterfalling down her back to sweep the floor about her hips, glowing the color of patina on copper. Her long, slender face that seemed more polished marble than skin. The milky white of her eyes, devoid of pupils or irises, viewed nothing while seeing everything.

“High Priestess,” he greeted once more, sinking his left knee to bow before her. She slightly nodded her recognition as her hands danced around the gem, coaxing its inner light to stretch and expand within its gilded cage. The ruby was markedly brighter now, fused with Zelda’s essence, the fingerprint of her soul left as a smudge deep within. “Do you have all that you need?”

“You were correct about her obedience,” the Priestess said. “She held it long enough to make the impression. I am ready to proceed at your command, my King.”

He absentmindedly brushed the fabric of his jacket, feeling the small glass vial safe within it. “Not yet,” he said, his thumb running down its beveled edge. “I have another plan first, one that will be less severe. I’d prefer to give it a chance before resorting to something more severe.”

“As you wish.”

“You do not believe it will prove successful,” he inferred from her flatness, her tinge of fatigue, her utter disinterest as she continued to tend to her imbued treasure.

He heard her sigh first, testing the jewel’s heat with her palms like a warming kettle on the stove. “She has a ruthless heart, this is true,” the Priestess conceded. “Injustice is intolerable to her, and this is why she consents to hear you. She craves balance and peace. But she is still building her back.”

“You do not think I can trust her,” he pressed, rising back up from the floor to stare down at the bitter contradiction. 

“She cannot trust herself.” 

“Is she lying?”

“Everyone lies, my King,” she danced in that maddening way she loved, every question the incorrect one, no useful answer free to give. He could spend the better part of a millennium down here and still not be closer to the exact combination to unlock what she truly knew.

He exhaled in a huff. “You called her Princess,” he pointed out. 

“I did. You think that is why I have doubts?” The Priestess allowed herself a rare chuckle, slightly turning up the corner of her lip. “Her jurisdiction is far outside the palace she now haunts, unreachable from where we are now. She is the court outsider you assumed her to be from the start, though in another place, at another time, she could eclipse them all.” She stood carefully, taking care not to tangle in her robes with the graceful balance of the stone. “This revelation is of little consequence to your current endeavor. Your faith, her fidelity. They will fall as they may. I am not here to direct you, only guide you,” she reminded him. “If Princess Zelda will not aid you in being gentle with fate, we now have our force. Though I will remind you, a puppet takes time to craft, my King,” she noted, taking her first steps toward the exit. “Send word to me in the Lightning Temple, should she fail you, so that I may get started.”

He felt a jolt in his chest watching her take her first tentative steps in surrendering this place, this home, her life’s protective shell. It felt as if this was a moment quickly fleeting away from his grasp, one he may never see again. “You know who she is,” he said, slowing her to a halt beside him. “You know who I am. Will you not tell me what you see?”

Her body pivoted, turning those eyes as empty abyss upon him, the thin line of her mouth drawing tight before she relented. “Your love for her will be your downfall,” she said. “But not only yours. Another will make the same error and follow your demise.”

Rauru . His nails bit into the leather of his gauntlets, the arrogant snout of that imposter sovereign materializing in his mind with all of his smugness and surety, not content to ensnare every last territory into his kingdom. Not satisfied with his luminous, devoted Queen who was simple enough to stand him. Insatiable to the end.

“Where you are dark, he is light,” the High Priestess went on. “What you nurture, he will suffuse. She may be ruin, but he is death.” She took a breath, hovering before him. “She is already on your lips. I pray the taste is enough to sate your suffering.”

“But he will fall,” Ganondorf pointed out. “As you said. She will help us, or she will not, but we will still topple him from his perch.” 

She stood as eternally as carved Din, settling her face into peace. “I may have visions, but you have a will that reverberates through centuries,” she said. “It is up to you what you do with anything I say or see.”

He huffed a nod, feeling the sureness of the world settle back around him. “Thank you for all you’ve offered today, High Priestess,” he acknowledged with another bow. 

“King Ganondorf. I will not endure such formality from the Promised,” she said, the fondness easing back into her tone. “Please, my King. Speak my name.”

He took the ruby from her outstretched arms, freeing her hands to lift her hem and make the long trek back up to the surface. Humming and vibrant against his chest, like a warm embrace. The fate he would write for his very own, set in royal blood and divine ecstasy. “As you wish, Varina.”

Chapter Text

Three months.

The summer warmth was waning as fall stirred from its slumber, gilding the trees and turning the green Hyrule Field into rolling waves of gold. The leaves were beginning to drift down into the Castle moat in muddy splotches of red, green, and gold. The castle gardeners, recruited from Kakariko Village if she had to guess (they moved much too quickly from Zelda’s approach to know for sure) kept baskets brimming with mums and dahlias throughout the balconies and entrances. Half of the familiar red, blue, and gold Hyrule Royal Crest banners flanking doorways, adorning the halls, and suspended from the rafters had been switched out for the red-and-gold Varina banner by the servants, a menagerie of Hylians, Ritos and Gorons she rarely glimpsed. They seemed aware of her patterns and how best to avoid her, though whether this was out of fear, disgust, or command, she could only guess.

She absent-mindedly cupped one of the pom-pom dahlias in her hand, with petals so thin and feathery they scarcely registered against her skin. As she twirled the stem, she admired the sunny flower’s secret blush along the underside, ringing its leafy sepal. 

A fading impulse floated through her mind, the thought to sketch the blossom in her notebook, cataloging the date and where she’d found it. She had no idea where her books and pencils were now that her tower office has long been dismantled, and she wasn’t sure if she was allowed in that wing of the castle, even if it remained. No one had explicitly told her she could not roam freely or leave the Castle, but with Lena ushering her from one entrance to another and the highest ranking Varina rotating between the Sanctum walkway and the gates, there was no way to exit without at least incurring a question. And she had very few answers left now.

She pivoted her hips slightly, from right to left, her body shifting around the blossom’s center. A celestial body existing only in relation to its star. What a lovely pose this must be, she thought, tilting her head to catch the light. Her silk kimono sleeve fluttered from her arm, the simple black fabric that had become her signature setting off the jewels encircling her throat. 

Everything now, in the space of these 90 days, had devolved into a series of poses. Images and gestures and narratives, cultivating the reality that the King desired. That was why she spent so many afternoons here on the Observation Deck, framed by the flower arrangements, with little to see out in the courtyard and town square, but well aware that she could be seen from here. The King wanted her to be glimpsed, at least here, on this self-contained stage where she couldn’t see or overhear something she wasn’t supposed to. The people must infer how marvelous their Queen is being treated, how elegant and sophisticated she’s become, how wonderful Hyrule Castle is now that she’s returned. These were his wishes, and he’d made sure she understood them. 

She clenched her palm around the honeycomb of petals, feeling its intricate network of pockets implode in her fist as it collapsed in on itself. There was truth in his story, wasn’t there?

Perhaps, she had mentioned, the barrage of sing-song congratulations to themselves were doing more harm to cementing this reality than good. She’d tried to make the point that Link might return to Hyrule Castle more quickly if he had evidence that she was in peril. “He wouldn’t be biding his time if he thought I was in danger,” she argued with Ganondorf over dinner weeks before, after Traysi and Penn had left with their notes and marching orders for the evening. 

“Is that what he’s doing? Biding his time?” He didn’t look up from the steak he was butchering, fighting against the grain as the knife screeched against the porcelain. 

“Since he’s not here, that’s my best guess,” she answered, holding her voice as even as she could. He would love nothing more than to seize on a crack in her fidelity. Righteous fury at perceived disloyalty would be easier for him than this—knowing that she had surrendered, believing her fealty, and still unable to secure the true vision of victory made perfect in his imagination. 

He shoved a bite into his mouth and gnashed at the gristle, washing down the abomination with a giant swig of red wine before speaking, once again straight to his plate. “And how do you suggest that we share these rumors of your imminent danger with a missing boy without poisoning the entire kingdom with the notion that you’re being held hostage by a monster?” he wanted to know. He accepted her silence as a response, taking another hack at his cooled dinner. “I thought the mere idea that you’d be subject to the Demon King’s barbaric whims would send him spiraling through the gatehouses blind to any sense of self-preservation,” he muttered, his empty hand curling and unfurling in tight fists. “Perhaps he’s less insecure than I imagined.”

They quickly stopped mentioning Link to each other. Then the Knight’s absence continued, and their conversations on any other matters tightened until strangling off altogether. Now she was startled to stir awake in the evening and make out the slope of his back to her in the same bed, so estranged his presence had become.

All those millennia of alleged want, only to sour in less than a season. 

Perhaps she wasn’t what he had dreamt after all.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps scaling the observation steps behind her. “Lena?” she called, arranging the crumpled flower on the promenade’s railing. Calling out in hopes that the King did want to see her would look desperate, a note that would boomerang straight back to him.

“No, your highness. It’s Ellie.”

“Oh. Ellie.” She tried to hide the disappointment in her voice, knowing she hadn’t done it well. In these weeks she’d come to prefer the Varina guard and her hostile undertow to the moon-faced Hylian, whom she perpetually felt the need to comfort in, well, pretty much every scenario. Lena said nothing outside of necessity, and Zelda enjoyed the quiet within the private moments she was tasked to oversee. She’d continued to correct the swoop of kohl and smeary flush of rouge rising above the Queen’s lid and cheek, a severe look that Ellie couldn’t (or wouldn’t) perfect, but that made Ganondorf’s chest swell with approval in the times he did see her, another morsel of proof that the world was yielding to his design. With so little else to occupy her, an outcast in her own home, that validation shifted to the center of her universe. “Come in,” she went on, sensing the halt in Ellie’s approach. “You’re not interrupting anything.”

The girl stepped forward carrying a tray of afternoon tea. Zelda had received customary snacks and treats in all the days before this one, which were beginning to blend together in their placid sameness—the constant she’d learned in an unnaturally long life of chaos and turbulence was that anything, no matter how jarring or unthinkable or impossible it may seem at the beginning, only remained so briefly. The first few disorienting mornings she woke up in the ancient palace of Rauru’s Hyrule, or coalesced in Calamity’s prison. And now, watching Hyrule rise outside of her hands, as if it were her own curse choking it out in the first place. Estranged from her love, her home, even the phantom now turned aloof. Everything became ordinary, soon enough. She had yet to encounter a horror she couldn’t swallow.

This afternoon, however, the ordinary tray had taken on a distinctly regal air with a new silver teapot and matching tray arranged with small cookies and miniature nutcakes spaced artfully apart. The teapot was lightly etched with her favorite flower, while the delicate accompanying tray featured the same blossoms in sculpted handles. She hadn’t seen intricate serverware like this in a hundred years. “Where did this come from?” she asked, tracing the outline of Silent Princess petals etched into the teapot. 

“It only arrived today. There’s been a bunch of silver coming out of Goron City lately,” Ellie explained. “It’s starting to make its way into the shops. Everyone is going mad for it, trying to put together the finest sets. Kind of a nice distraction, you know.”

This particular set arrived today as a petition of faith from its maker, or arrived today as a commission from a husband muffled by complication? A gift to say what neither of them could parse. An apology, an admission, a confession, a reassurance, smelted and hammered and engraved into an heirloom any other family in Hyrule would treasure for in perpetuity. Her fingertips reached up to graze the ruby churning with its heart of midnight at the hollow of her throat. Ganondorf would not give anything without recognition. Anything she would infer was coincidental.

“It’s exquisite,” Zelda admitted, pushing herself beyond the disappointment, lifting it up above her head to examine the craftsmanship. No seams. How had such skills survived the apocalypse? “It’s difficult for the silversmith to get it correct in one try, especially with something this detailed,” she pointed out to the girl, running her nail around the flawless sides. “This would have taken someone years to learn and days to finish. My mother used to have a collection of Goron silver,” she remembered unexpectedly. “Her hairbrush, upstairs, was made up in the mountains. And there was a vase kept in the pantry…she’d take me out to the fields and we’d pick flowers together, and she showed me how to arrange them. Never too much symmetry,” she repeated from the fading echo in her own mind, the notion bringing a rare smile back to her face. “If it’s too even it will look garish and unnatural. It’s about balancing, not mirroring.”

Ellie squinted, puckering into that look of discomfort that Zelda had grown familiar with over the years. There was a great deal that most people she encountered weren’t equipped or willing to face; her losses and unnatural expanse of life were chief among them. “It’s all right,” Zelda made a point to reassure her, once again. “I lost her a long time ago. It’s nice to have something beautiful like this to remember, sometimes.” 

“Oh yes,” Ellie said, her voice suddenly strained. “So many beautiful things are appearing now that people are sent into the Depths.”

The silver pot met the tray with a clatter. Zelda recoiled at the mention of her most dreaded place, shattering her awe. “What are you talking about? We sealed off almost every chasm years ago.” It was the first restoration project, before they touched the castle. It was when she discovered the possibility of stepping back, of saying yes to Hoz and the old monster crew, that the plan did seem sound, and no, she did not need to review or supervise the work. She’d had them draw her out an exact map of where each of them could be found, “for planning purposes,” she had written in the request from her Hateno desk. They didn’t need to know it was her personal guide to where she would not tread. Even after the gloom had long ceased rising like noxious steam, she couldn’t stomach the idea of that yawning nothing waiting to drag her down, down, down into the darkness to endless torment. A price she feared she had not paid, not enough to satisfy the Fates watching the Stone slip down her throat as an act of defiance. An unnatural rearrangement of their imposed destiny. 

The image of disembodied hands, winking and shrieking, reeking of starvation, yanking at the fibers of her being.

Neverrr enough .

Ellie seemed oblivious to the Queen’s inner torment, too busy sending her wide eyes darting from the railing to the doorways and back again, confirming that the nearest guard was still a generous distance down the stairs. Even still she leaned close, dropping her voice to a barely discernible whisper. “ He’s reopened the mines.”

“The Mines? The abandoned ones?” She had heard of these behemoths of industry in vague, passing mentions from Link, which were confusing. Rauru and Sonja hadn’t mentioned the Depths to her at all during her time, though Ganondorf had alluded to them, in that roundabout way he kept most things opaque from the past, and completely obscured in this present. But from Link’s account, they were in total disrepair by this point, relics of the Zonai empire vanished from memory.

“They’re not ‘abandoned’ anymore. The one beneath the Great Plateau has been running all night and day since just after the Coronation.” She cupped her hands around her lips, tunneling the secret into Zelda’s ear. “They weren’t getting enough people willing to go down there, so they started rounding them up instead.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she reasoned aloud. “The King hasn’t deployed any open hostilities against the general population.” Why would he, when he was working so hard to degrade the memory of Hyrule’s “former” Royal Family, that institution she was the mysterious exception to, because…why exactly? Her association with Rauru and Sonia could be explained away in his narrative as ignorance and coercion—a girl trapped outside of her time, manipulated by the same machine that had corroded ancient Hyrule’s sense of truth. But the same mechanisms, greased by this line of noble blood and supposed divinity for all centuries after, they were her legacy. They lived within her hand-in-hand with Hylia’s favor. Her existence was a crime, her freedom a contradiction, in any logical thoroughfare of the Gerudo King’s story.

Except that she had bent. 

First her knee, then her vows, then her body, until he’d grown sick of even that.

“That’s not what my friends say,” Ellie broke in, her tone still hushed. “Or the people I talk to at The Dodgy Well at night, when the Yigas empty out. The people out there, in the towns and outskirts? First they were trapped for ‘safety,’ and now they’re being taken.”

Zelda swallowed hard. She had not been beyond the Castle gates, had scarcely been outside at all since the Coronation. Her only window was the looking glass of the Gazette, the new issue delivered to her vanity each morning. For those first weeks she’d been sure to read, or at least skim, the entirety while Ellie braided and twisted her hair, and then Lena’s brushwork. It was an assignment no one gave her, but felt important to name for herself. She could arrive at the breakfast table with an informed perspective to keep pace with Ganondorf’s conceptualizing-out-loud, or steer her into concerns she might glean between the lines. It wasn’t as if she was delivered any real briefings, and any of the terminally self-important Varina close enough to know would sooner fall on their sword than enlighten her. “Who is being sent down there?” she rasped through her drying throat.

“Boys and men from the towns, at least the ones who aren’t already farming or running stores or stables, or haven’t been picked up by Hudson Construction for projects. They’re going after anyone who doesn’t seem ‘indispensable,’ from what I’ve heard.” Ellie stood back a bit, letting out a little sigh of relief as her secret safely passed. “My friend Amie’s boyfriend has already gotten Gloom sickness twice from being down there. And that’s just the operations happening down below. They’re also ramping up the digs in Death Mountain and the desert. They have these bombs that can take off a whole hillside in a matter of seconds. And even at that pace, they can hardly keep up.”

Zelda stared into the mirrored silver, her kohl-smudged face warping in the reflection. “He didn’t tell you, did he?” Ellie pressed, clearly thrilled with herself. “How can you possibly know what’s happening out there when you can only squint at life from up here? It’s not as if he wants you to learn about anything he really has planned, does he? He must not even let you into the library anymore. Not if he’s keeping secrets from his ‘beloved Queen.’” Her eyes rolled freely now, content to denounce the supreme leader of Hyrule with impunity. Zelda did not cut her off with the rebuke she should have, so lost in the vision of those craters cracking back open, inhaling all they could take, tainting their lungs and hearts with the miasma lingering where wind did not blow, leaving the putrid air trapped since the dawn of its cursed creation. “I’m not supposed to go in the war room, but the other servants see it and we talk… he isn’t happy.”

Her heart caught for a moment in her chest; it wasn’t just her. Even the servants noticed his deflating patience and withering nature. It was in the muted dinners, where he stared out the windows into the pitch black of night. His abrupt shortness with the staff and soldiers, a contrast from his former menacing charm. The nights she found herself alone in bed while he lingered on the chamber balcony, until she finally drifted off to sleep. His absence made her restless, a sort of purgatory between species of dread. The question of what was worse: the question of Link’s situation and state, or the certainty he’d face in confronting her own. Ganondorf’s affection was a distraction between the riddle of holding them both together in a shared space and time; now she felt as ornamental and useless as the banners hanging limp around the halls.

“The Varina patrols and the Yiga have been hounding the whole realm to help them find Link, but there’s only been a few sightings at stables and on the outskirts, and in the last two months, they’ve totally dried up,” she went on with impunity, clasping her hands as if handing off her knowledge like a baton. “He’s got to know that Link is coming back to save you. He’s much too stealthy and smart to be caught by his goon squad, and knows the corners of Hyrule better than anyone. And it’s driving the King insane ,” she confirmed, pitching forward with the gleeful force of the word. “When it’s safe, everyone at my mum’s pub talks about how you must have vouched for your Knight, and that’s why he’s allowed to live,” she said, tears welling into her eyes in her typical understated fashion. “I know he must have forced Traysi and Penn to downplay how romantic it is, begging for his life in exchange for your own. I don’t care how many times he tells us you both are destined to be, Hylians know the difference between right and wrong.”

Zelda’s eyebrows furrowed, cataloguing each strange revelation unleashed from the maiden’s lips, as if her reflection had begun talking back to her through the split of the glass. She hadn’t begged for anything…hadn’t had the need to, not with Ganondorf’s plan revealed piece by piece, like cards flipped up to slowly but surely show the hand. There was one way forward for the three of them, as they were both well aware. As Link would be too, should he ever come back.

It had all been ideal…everything she had seen. What he saw fit to tell, when he deigned to tell it.

“Can you tell me something, your Highness?” Ellie asked, wrestling Zelda from her daze with a remarkably strong grip around her wrist. Her plump pink lips quivered, aware she may live to regret the next words, but unwilling to squander this tender chance. “Why…in all the time between the Upheaval and the Coronation…didn’t you come back here to the Castle and marry Link? We were all waiting for you, every one of us. You are both so adored, we would have welcomed you with all our hearts, but all those years and you never came. Didn’t you love him?”

From across the moat, a siege of herons spread their wings, calling out a last goodbye to the valley as they headed south toward Faron. Zelda watched them climb up toward the clouds and islands until they vanished into a realm that used to be her own, but that she could not remember. Nothing but another dream.

“Didn’t. I. Love. Him.” The syllables fell from her lips like the crumpled petals released from her palm. “Didn’t. I. Love. Him.” Her delicate fingers hovered over the cookies and cakes on the tray, dancing above them as if she were about to choose. She ticked off each word as she spoke, keys struck on an invisible piano, Ellie’s question a botched chord. She wrapped her fingers around the steaming teapot’s handle, the delicate engraving impressing its image into her skin. She felt the metal singe against her sensitive flesh, just about to blister before she hurled the vessel at the castle wall, sending the scalding tea waterfalling down the stone like a steaming splash fruit. The dented pot clattered onto the patio, the lid’s finial rolling off the balcony. Ellie’s hands flew to her mouth in a gasp, as if she’d witnessed a true tragedy playing Maiden #3 in a festival theater production. “I had seven years out of thirty to spend as I wished. Out of my entire life, which has been cursed to stretch out to thousands of years , I had seven of them to spend where I wanted, as I wished, with the person I loved. He knew I loved him, the entire realm knew that we’d chosen each other, but it wasn’t good enough for you all, was it?” She stood over the cowering servant girl, not much larger in stature but in her heaving, fuming rage, all of her power above this subject fueled to life. The jeweled collar seemed to cinch tighter around her neck, flushing her face with wrath. Puffs of short breath staccatoed from her flared nostrils, and her nails dug into her palm from her balled fists, recalling how tightly Link had held onto her that last night to stop her from rising up and facing her claimant on her own; the thought like kerosine on her ignited nerves. 

“Why didn’t I come back here with him? Why I didn’t ‘marry’ him under the eyes of the Goddess, even as I lived each and every one of those days as his wife? Is that what you need to know so badly, Ellie?” The girl stared back, her hands still clasped over her mouth, a slow blink her only response. “Because that love between us was the only thing that was ours. That belonged to the two of us, and I cherished it. And I loved him enough to know how absolutely he never wanted to rule,” she admitted aloud for the first time, knowledge she spurned from the private monologue of her mind. She gasped at the cutting truth of it, her eyes widening as her hands cradled her abdomen, steadying her spiraling center as the balcony tipped ever-so-slightly off its axis. “That all he had seen not over one lifetime but two; one wiped away and one retrieved, watching curses and stones and oaths and pride destroy every person he met who sought or endured the crown…being exalted away again would crush what little he had regained of himself. Whatever I wanted…he would have to follow…how could I kill him?” her voice broke, breath shortening as her eyes drifted up to the absolution of the sky. “I couldn’t trap him in this prison where he would remain, without complaint, because he’d know it was demanded of him. Whatever I chose he would follow, straight into the grave, so I could never come back. I wanted him to be all right so badly, that I let myself believe that we’d taken care of all the threats this world could heave at us. I let that love make me foolish and soft, because that’s how safe I felt within it.“

Her memory cracked open, a museum of fractals all holding a sliver of the whole that only revealed itself now, cleaved from their entwined existence. The way he praised her work with the Hateno School to the heavens and back, smoothing her hair behind her ears as he whispered how proud she made him, pouring her heart into the hope of this town that had become his surrogate home. The coldness that fell like a shroud whenever obligation forced her to return to the Castle, where he wouldn’t walk beside her let alone touch her, insisting it was “improper for a Chosen Knight in any context.” 

Then glacially, over the years, she had learned the choreography of his will. Without thought she had discovered the responses that went down the smoothest, the threshold of correspondence and “kingdom business” before the sullen tasks and meager affection clouded her everyday sky. 

And now, through the agony of the tear and the yanking away to the other side, Ganondorf thought he could erase her from the throne he had only through her cooperation, the luxury relenting but by her grace? 

“You and the servants gossip about how the King isn’t ‘happy’?” she noted, straightening up as she vanished the tears into the silk of her sleeve. “That he’s losing patience trying to find the Hero? Their Queen isn’t happy about it, either. You can tell them that.” 

“Y-y–our Highness!” Ellie cried as Zelda stormed from the garden patio. “The tea! What do I—” 

“Clean it,” she ordered, her solo sound of her heels clicking down the Observatory stairs toward the Library. 

The two Yiga guards went rigid at the sight of the Queen flying down the hallway, her light sleeves and robe floating behind her like a trail of smoke. Caught in the middle of a mid-shift snack with their mouths stuffed with banana bread, they did their best impression of competent guard-staff by snapping to attention and crossing their spears in an X at her approach. “Open the doors,” she said coolly.

“Uhm, I don’t think… your highness… we’re supposed to let you in,” choked out the right-side guard through the fistful of dry muffin still lodged in his gullet.

“Oh I’m sorry, I must be under some sort of misunderstanding,” she said, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “You see, I thought this was my Castle and my library containing my collection of assembled articles and artifacts, and that’s my husband the King inside, who has never made any mention that I am not allowed to see him during the day. Am I correct in believing that I reside here, or am I actually a prisoner?”

“Uhhhh…” The Yigas pivoted to one another, each hoping the opposite wasn’t out of his depth. 

“If your comprehension of the King’s commands and the goals of your station necessitates that you convey to me that he does not desire my presence, I will find that directive to be quite upsetting.” Her narrowed gaze leaned against each of them in turn, a fierceness defying the clenching in her stomach. She hadn’t opposed anyone in the Castle, save for the one piece of Yiga trash menacing her in the Lockup months ago. In her mind they were all that same vile one, a singular anonymous mass that was an easy conduit for her festering frustration and hate. “When the King discovers how unhappy his Queen has suddenly become due to his policies and endeavors to learn the source of my agitation, I’ll have no choice but to tell him that it was the edict that his own guards relayed to me when I made the audacious request to visit my beloved within our own home that sent my heart so far astray.”

“We’re sorry, your Highness,” the quicker one on the left said with a bow. “We just, uh, haven’t seen you down here yet. I’m sure His Supreme Highness would, er, love? To see you?” 

They remained still another beat, until her throat-clearing sent the doors flying open. She marched in a daze, her legs propelling forward as hesitation clouded her focus. Her heart’s disposition was to keep the peace, but the tension was nudging her to madness, teasing out this unfamiliar urge to shake the problem loose. From the far end of the room she could see Ganondorf glowering behind his peg-marked kingdom, flanked by a pair of idle Varinas, as ornamental as Suits of Armor in a hallway. A stable hand stood in his audience, wringing his soft felt hat in his hands as he continued an explanation that “there hasn’t been anyone, not in days. The roads are closed, and all we see are your soldiers.”

All of them jolted to attention as she marched inside, the dozen Varina at Ganondorf’s side and lining the room drawing in a collective breath as they pivoted their focus to the King. One raised crimson eyebrow was enough to prove she’d succeeded in surprising him, and he straightened his stance as a hollow smile emerged.

“Queen Zelda. What brings you away from tea?”

The familiarity with her routine startled her for an instant; he was such a non-presence during the daylight hours, it seemed as if she didn’t exist until sundown. But of course, he could see everything in her existence now, and go on to shift or disappear it as he saw fit. Her window panes were like stained glass, leaving her guessing at shades of light and dark. To him she was encased in crystal, never far, never unseen, even as the loneliness of the glass cocoon saw fit to crush her. “There are urgent matters I need to discuss with you,” she said, white-knuckling the tattering threads of her dignity. 

He held her on the tip of a blade’s edge for a heavy breath, tipping between his options, perhaps giving her the latitude to lose her nerve. “Get out,” he muttered to his bewildered subject whose hat now had the consistency of an overcooked noodle, and who flew to the exit as fast as his body was capable. 

Ganondorf leaned his tailbone against the edge of the table, facing her and crossing his arms just below his golden chest-piece. When had he gotten the Secret Stone—her stone—set in the middle? 

“What’s troubling you, Petal?” His endearing tone and painted smile contrasted against the hardness in his gold-glint stare, marking well her intrusion. 

She thrust her shoulders back, keeping her loose fists neutral at her hips as she felt the needling of a dozen Varina stares and their fantasies of taking out her kneecaps. “What is this I’ve heard about the mines opening back up?”

“Opening back up?” He scoffed. “When have the Gerudo Desert mines been closed, satisfying your own people’s appetite for polished brilliance since before Hyrule was a kingdom? And wouldn’t the Gorons shrivel up and starve if they weren’t devouring their mountain from the inside out?” 

She shook her head, batting away the deflection. “I’m not talking about those normal operations. I’m talking about the caustic mines that were abandoned in the Depths. I’ve been told that not only are they functioning again, but you’ve been sending our subjects down to work by force.” 

His bushy eyebrows narrowed his eyes to slits, a fortress barricading. “Told by whom?”

She twisted the silk fabric of her sleeve between her thumb and forefinger, attempting to steady her nerves. “It doesn’t matter. I should have been told by you.” 

He tilted back, the smile turning to vapor as the shadows caught the ridge of his cheekbones and nose, shading away the patience and amusement he’d previously held her within. Leaving behind something older, sombre…unfamiliar. “So you’ve come to accuse me of…what exactly, your Highness? Some crime against your people, or not regaling you with debriefings on policy?”

“It’s hard to know what I should be most concerned with, when you’ve kept everything from me,” she said, his irritation heady in the air, a fume making the words light off her tongue. “It doesn’t seem that I’m even allowed in here with how heavily it’s guarded. I seldom see you and we speak even less. My only indication that the world I knew exists out there in some form is because I can’t smell smoke,” she declared, her sleeve fluttering as she threw her arm toward the window, her slippered foot slamming into the marble, adrenaline buffering the blunt pain that throbbed through her toe. “For three months I’ve shuffled through the same wing of the castle like an exotic bird you’re training for show. If I’m so inconsequential to your reign, why have me here at all? Why make the effort to convince me that I wanted you or this captivity…or is that what you need, to hear me say I want it before you take it away?” Out of her periphery she could see the eyes of the guards widening while Ganondorf’s shrank into simmering fractures.  “Why don’t you just frame me and tack me up in the archive with all the other treasure you’ve won in your coup?”

The King remained leaning against the table, ensuring that she’d finished before easing forward. He crossed the half-step between them and reached for the necklace around her neck, idly smoothing his thumb over the center stone. “You don’t know what this is yet, do you, Petal?” he stated as fact, watching the flicker of red light tremble within it. “I thought you would have placed it by now, but I have, as you’ve so eloquently stated, been neglectful. It’s easy to think you’re riding apace when in reality you’re out here, drowning in your own spinning mind.” The stone dropped back to the base of her breastbone, leaving his calloused fingers free to trace the hem of her robe’s collar, to feel the subtle arch forward into this vaguely interested touch. “These walls are getting to you, aren’t they, sweet Petal? I was waiting for the situation to be more ideal before I unveiled this emerging Hyrule to you, but things have not progressed as quickly as I’d hoped. That wasn’t quite fair to you, now was it?” He traced the rise of her neck with his nail, a lost gesture that smelled of wild grasses and ancient secrets whispered in the nest of a glen. “We should remedy that, shouldn’t we? Gisela,” he barked with a startling step back, calling the attention of a Varina in their periphery. “Alert the stable. The King and Queen require their horses.”

Chapter Text

This is a trap , Zelda reminded herself with every step descending down from the castle to the grounds below. As certain as she was that this was a horror yet to unfold, she couldn’t help feeling the renewal of her true heart beating as the grass yielded beneath her riding boots. Her body felt as it had before her return to the Castle, a distinction she only recognized now in the sudden absence of its stifling. She was outfitted in the only clothes Ellie could quickly scrounge up in an emergency scavenge of the former Princess’s quarters. She’d come back with her winter coat and trousers, along with the matching fur-trimmed riding boots, and a grave expression as if watching her true love ride off into battle. The outfit was overkill for the temperate fall, but still, a remnant that made the past recognizable. Connective tissue within herself she could sense fading; the physical evidence that she’d been someone else, some time ago. Lifetimes tended to blur as witnesses carried on with existences untouched by the unnatural stretch and skew of fate. Beholding the infinite skyline of Hyrule’s mountains and valleys, spiked by distant Skyview Towers surrounded her, and as her lungs filled with the crisp autumn air, it felt as if she had regained a pulse.

The sight of the unfamiliar Gerudo steeds milling around the stable sent a shiver of disappointment through her, and a question she hadn’t considered: what had happened to Storm and Epona, the horses she and Link left behind at their Hateno House? Had they been adopted into one of the local farms’ folds, or were they untallied casualties? What about their home–was it under heavy guard on the off-chance that Link would be foolish enough to return? The garden must be a wasteland after a whole summer with no tending hands. The rotting carrots and radishes, the crisped Blue Nightshade; the sight would break his heart.

Compared to what you would do to him… a voice crept in from her darkest corners, a haunting taking root in the emptiness between the departure she’d willed and the aching want she’d rediscovered, now plunged into the abyss between both poles. 

It doesn’t matter, she reminded herself again, letting in a deep breath, wrapping herself back up in the truth. She could do nothing to aid or ease Link until he was back. And so far, her careful, printed pleas had been useless.

Ganondorf’s horse lorded over his counterparts, scarcely able to fit in the barn, more elephant than stallion. The King and his steed looked so much alike it verged on parody: the horse sporting the same magma-hued hair as his master and outfitted in a saddle and bridle matching his robes and sash. The resemblance was a curiosity that she could imagine teasing Ganondorf over, a little joke they could share if he stooped to seeing her as a companion and not this contemptuous thing to both coddle and conquer. 

They had laughed together in the past, hadn’t they? They couldn’t have been all contemptuous glances and clandestine conversations. He often seemed “amused” by her, but that was with private jokes he kept with himself. She squinted backwards in her memory, trying to recall. After the Secret Stone had scattered those select fragments from the recollections it had claimed in her gambit, they had become their own entities separate from her own sense of self. Like she could remember what they looked like, watching them preserved and reflected, but not living them. Watching another girl wearing her costume as sure as the puppet let loose in Rauru and Sonia’s halls, with the Stone’s magic giving Link only enough to fulfill the Zonai’s last covenant. Her grief, her stagnation, her slow decay wasn’t needed to guide the Hero’s borrowed hand to his hilt. 

And it was right. The blunt, disembodied beats of the story had been all Link needed to know to dive head-first into the storm of gloom and monsters as she waited, yet again, for a respite from not-quite-death. Rauru’s hubris stirred no question strong enough to voice; neither had the first two syllables out of the corpse’s mouth at their approach, the last vestiges of a man honing in across the fabric of time and space on a pact he still felt owed.

Nothing.

Link hadn’t even asked how long she was there. 

He’d asked virtually no questions about the past at all, she realized suddenly, replaying the few conversations they’d had about ancient Hyrule—each one short, single-sided, and brought up by her own need to say something . He’s worried about me, she had thought. He knows how upsetting it is to lose everyone you know, when a lifetime lives only within your imagination. She thought it was sweet, another sign of how considerate her Knight was. She tried to match his pace to cope and forget; after all, his way must be the right way. Not the meanderings of a stupid, stupid girl who could not let a cataclysm wither and die, feeding it oxygen and light. 

She hadn’t had to hide the past. No one looked in the first place.

At the Castle stable she held back, watching Ganondorf approach his stallion, dipping its head and nosing around for the shining golden apple concealed in his grasp. which he kept pretending to lose in a playful pantomime. “Who keeps stealing my apples? Who would dare rob the King of his apples!?” As the horse chomped, he gathered his mane up in his hands, giving it a playful tousle before stroking the length of his neck. “Have you enjoyed your rides in the morning? You look so strong, Sashanna is taking such good care of you for me. We’ll have to give her a big thank you,” he praised as he retrieved a red lacquer brush from a hook in the post; the quiet, encouraging timbre of his voice scalded her roughened nerves like salt. There was an unfamiliar peace in his smile she’d yet to glimpse, and it thrummed the loneliness calcifying around her heart in a way that made her want to double over from the pain. 

“Here,” one of the guards broke her thoughts. A girl she had not seen before, set apart from the other Varina with her practical riding leathers sun-bleached and splattered in a patchwork of dirt. Her red hair, skewing more strawberry than most of the other girls, was pulled into a tight braid. Instead of the ruby barrette worn proudly by her sisters, she kept her trophy gems on a golden chain around her neck. Sashanna, she assumed. Keeper of underutilized steeds. Ganondorf really had thought of everything, hadn’t he? Probably-Sashanna presented her a pair of reins belonging to a petite black mare in Phantom’s neighboring stall, whose only distinction was a white diamond marking her forehead. 

“I…get to ride my own horse?” Zelda stammered, and Sashanna’s brows ruffled in confusion. 

“It’s not as if you’d run off, would you?” Ganondorf dared, his attention still fixed on his pet, who’d managed to tease out yet another apple from its indulgent master. 

She accepted Sashanna’s assistance in mounting the steed—even a petite Gerudo horse made Epona look puny by comparison. The warm mass of honed muscle between her legs felt like being home again, a familiarity that made her want to cry. She reached down, scratching the pony between the ears, murmuring “you’re such a good girl, aren’t you?” Leaning in, she indulged herself in the smell of the hay and sweat entwined in her fur, like a postcard from the boundless plains.

The King swung his leg up and over the horse’s back, clicking his tongue and nudging it toward the gate. Their waiting Varina entourage followed suit, and with a click of her heels, so did Zelda. They followed him through the archway, down the gentle slope to New Castle Town below. 

Zelda couldn’t help but notice the state of the homes and businesses, the way they’d flourished in this relatively short amount of time. The windows were crammed with new goods: hats blossoming with feathers and flowers, plump fish, glistening pans and pots, etched fine silver like her doomed teapot, a new shop dedicated solely to drawings of maps, monsters, flora and fauna. In her absence the school had officially opened, the students darted out to wave at the caravan as it passed, their teachers casting a wary eye on the history clopping at their doorstep. 

She clutched the reins, overwhelmed with the freedom of moving in the open air, seeing the jaunty banners and flags strung between the shops and rowhouses, celebrating the Hylian and Gerudo monarchs. It took a few blocks before the populace began pouring out into the street, wide-eyed with mouths agape, memorizing the specter of the imposing Demon King followed by their storied Princess. They bowed, especially low, consciously formal, on their best behavior in the first outside appearance of new royalty. 

Out of old instinct she smiled, lending a wave to the people as they passed. It didn’t occur to her, until they were halfway to the town gates, that she may be sending the wrong message. Would her relative happiness confirm what they’d gathered from the Gazette’s propaganda, fueling the doubt and darkening the prospects of Link’s return? By the time they looped the central fountain she’d tempered back her smile of relief, molding her face back into the stoic example her father had set so many years ago. Even with a century between them, she could hear his voice as clear as her horse’s hooves on the cobblestones.

Your desperation to be beloved coddles the peasants. They’ll never respect you, nor should they. 

As they came to Elaria Street, named for her mother upon her passing, the crossing choked with those who had heard the news, which tore through the cloistered city much faster than their careful horses’ clip. The crowd pressed forward, arms waving hastily grabbed bundles of saffina, amaranth and herbs, reaching in exchange for a brush of mane, of boot, of outstretched hand in offering that they could brag about for weeks. Lena cut ahead of the royals with a sharp kick to her horse’s side, blocking the swell off at the pass with his form. Before her hand could reach the scimitar wedged into her pack the King raised his hand, waving off her defense. “This is the Queen’s home,” he reminded her, flashing a benevolent smile to those gathered around. “We’re as safe here as we’d be in our own castle.”

The townspeople held back a breath, a collective memory surging with the Varina’s hasty reprimand. A dissonance, this embodiment of all they had hoped for alongside this confounding force of chaos arisen from what they had all understood as death… 

…But there was a proper King in Hyrule Castle for the first time in over a century, and their returned Princess with her cheeks still plump and rosy as apples; her sea-hued eyes clear and bright. More radiant than they had, perhaps, ever beheld her. Glimpsed so safe and happy, that pinprick of golden hair and black silk from the tower, now amongst them with her new husband. Yes, it had been a strange unspooling of events, but what revelation in the history of Hyrule had ever come down smooth? These people were versed in villainy, and this was not its tune. 

A small girl too young for school ventured to approach the Queen’s horse, daisy stems clenched into her fist. Zelda leaned low from the saddle to meet her on her tiptoes, accepting the crumpled flowers with a grateful nod. “Thank you, dear one,” she said, the soft fur of her coat brushing the girl’s cheek before she sat back up, tucking the fading blossoms behind the horse’s ears. One by one the crowd broke into tributes, offering their flowers for a blessing from her hand, the benevolent Queen they would not admit they ever doubted. 

She glanced over at Ganondorf to see if this reception caught him by surprise. Of course, she realized in the evenness of his chin, the smug smile of faint, flimsy exasperation, that he’d never admit if he was. 

“Thank you for your kind welcome and farewell,” she said to the crowd, feeling the responsibility to end this gracefully on her own. “We’re well-protected and will be back shortly. Stay safe while we’re away.” The people parted like a gate, earning a subtle nod from the King as they resumed the exit.

The Yiga stationed at the town’s gates instantaneously busied themselves with raising the gates at their approach, and a hearty “Hyahh!” rose from Ganondorf, taking off into the wide expanse of Hyrule Field at full gallop. She felt her heart lilt as she followed suit, gently chiding the horse to keep pace, savoring the wind in her face as they sped toward the Great Plateau. Any anxiety over what she would find there, prompted by her bold accusations, dimmed in comparison to the sensation of freedom she hadn’t enjoyed in what was starting to feel like a lifetime. The thudding of the mare against the earth, the strumming of her limbs as Zelda grasped tight to the reins, ignited her heartbeat from stasis. In view of the Observation Deck instead of perched upon it, the river water glistening, darners and butterflies yielding in their wake in clouds of kinetic life. Their destination was irrelevant amidst this precious taste of her old life; they could be headed out to dump her into a shallow canyon grave and she’d still take the reins over the stasis. 

Galloping further down the worn road, she noticed the resurrection of the garrisons and outposts that had stood before the Calamity. Small forts and clusters of stone shelters that she’d last seen as ruins, now regaining their walls and roofs, occasionally spotted with campfires or gathered patrols, reminders of what they’d been in her far-flung memories. Ellie had mentioned Hudson’s Construction. Maybe he’d been granted special privileges to carry out the monarchy’s vision with an exemption to the lockdown policy. Being able to move in and out of greater Hyrule would be an attractive recruitment scheme, one she’d gladly take up herself. Sure she’d thatch a roof if she was let out of the gates every morning. 

Why hadn’t she ever had Link show her how he fixed the damn roof? What had she even done in the past seven years except for dishes and convincing her insides that she wasn’t useless, she simply wasn’t needed the way she used to be?

The horses waded through the shallow ponds of the Plateau, slowing as they neared the north chasm. Unlike the other bleeding craters smattering the land, this void was no longer covered and smoothed, but torn wide open to gawk up at the sky once more. Wagons were lined in a tidy row with a menagerie of horses grazing within a neighboring fence. A station at the chasm’s mouth capped a length of track that spiraled down the infinite-seeming hole, the structure serving as an awning sheltering a collection of minecarts outfitted with propellor fans. A few Yiga guards stood near the posts, brought to attention by the unannounced royal entourage. Next to the carts, picking through a mountain of Zonaite fragments, a sight that made Zelda’s heart leap: a Steward Construct. Ignited by familiar blue-green light, its wide mechanical face reminding her of the hot-footed frogs she used to chase in the fields. How…

“Come along, Petal,” Ganondorf summoned her, sliding off the back of his horse, leaving the reins in a Varina’s hands. Wasting no more time, he wrapped one arm around her waist, plucking her back down from the borrowed pony. 

“Where are we going?” she asked, her voice clipping into a panic as he turned to the abyss.

“To see exactly what sort of operation is being cruelly run beneath your Kingdom, as your ‘source’ would have you believe,” he said, heading to the closest cart.

She felt the plane of reality sway, her knees buckling as she shot her arms out to catch herself against the startled pony. “No, please, I can’t go down there.”

He tipped his head without turning, lending her a silhouetted glimpse of his narrowing brow. “I didn’t ask you, beloved. This was your accusation and concern, not mine. Nothing will resolve until you face it.”

She swallowed hard, a small cry rising from her throat. There was nothing, nothing , that would compel her to go back into the Depths. She’d accepted the population’s enthusiasm for erasing the chasms from Hyrule’s surface with relief, cloaking her fear in praises for the people’s “desire to heal” and “restore the landscape.” Nothing manifested in her nightmares as readily as the crackling torchlight casting the two descending shadows on the forbidden walls beneath the Castle, the mysterious plumes of scarlet darkness slinking around her heels, the sound of crackling bone stirring to agonizing life. 

“I can’t,” she wheezed.

“ Zelda .”

But he was right—in that cruel way he was always right, no matter how vicious the truth. 

Forcing herself away from the horse with a shove, she fumbled an unsteady line behind the King, who resumed his march toward the track and its vacant cart. He lifted her up and placed her in the front, following behind her, taking up the modest space between her and the fan. A switch flipped and the ancient device whirred to life, nudging the cart down into its descent. 

As the span of the surface grew smaller, Zelda’s breath became short and labored. Her hands fumbled up to her neck, scratching at her necklace, desperate for more air. “One, two, three,” she tried to repeat, counting the way Link had taught her, when she lurched up from a dead sleep tortured by a night terror. Cradled against his chest as he calmly, quietly rose up and down scales of ten, smoothing the cotton night dress sticking to her back. “I’m going to die down here,” she panicked aloud, shaking as beads of cold sweat rose like dew along her skin. Just like she was always meant to, buried alive by the crumble of time, fate fixing its mistakes. The light was disappearing, giving way to the bioluminescent pollen and dust floating as eternity’s ashes.

Ganondorf’s steely eyes squinted in appraisal as she folded in on herself, her breath growing ragged and shallow, losing its rhythm in frenetic bursts. “You’re actually frightened, aren’t you?” It was an alien tone, a tinge of true concern in his usually even, unaffected timbre. She managed a jerky nod as she hugged herself tightly. His lips drew in a thin line as he realized she wasn’t play-acting against him. “Here,” he said, drawing her to his chest, running a soothing hand up and down her hair, not unlike the way he’d pampered his stallion. “Breathe along with me. Keep your eyes closed if watching makes you dizzy,” he instructed, drawing in deeply from the stagnant air as an example. “Hold, one, two, three. And out. And again.” 

The perspiration from her brow slicked his skin as she followed, feeling the tingle of oxygen returning to her fingers and toes. She felt like a messy child smearing her face against him, but the shame was fleeting in the midst of the respite she felt there. She could swear she felt the tip of his nose press into the part of her hair, but maybe it was only what she wished, playing tricks in the dark.

After what felt like hours the cart unwound to a stop, and Zelda emerged from the blinders of his collar to behold what appeared as a Zonai temple in the dust-filled murk. Pillars stretching up several stories, towering archways, carved dragons overseeing a series of conveyor belts and cart tracks illuminated by mounds of blue-green Zonaite destined for the mine’s smelter. Constructs were stationed alongside Hylians, watching the belts, picking through and snagging impurities, emptying more sacks dredged from the nooks and crevices of the craterous landscape and sheer cliffsides onto the line. At the end of the line, the material met its fate as it was fed by the shovelful into the incinerating fire. 

“Is it just as you remember it?” Ganondorf asked, making no move to exit.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve never seen it before.” Zelda shook her head. He snorted, a smile of comprehension devouring his brief flash of empathy. “I don’t know why I assume Rauru and Sonia showed you the breadth of their work. Look,” he instructed, pointing down into the gully running opposite the grand mine entrance. 

She squinted into the trench, empty and shapeless.

“You don’t see it.” Her stomach clenched again with the feeling of failing a test.

He reached down to the wraps binding his hips, retrieving a Purah Pad that he brushed to life, then handed over to Zelda. He guided her aim down into the gully, and the screen suddenly sprang to life with hundreds, maybe thousands, of wispy blue orbs levitating above the ground. Her eyes flicked from the image and back, trying to reconcile the sea of light with the apparent nothing. 

“Those are Poes,” he said. “Spirits of the dead, trapped between their previous existence and the next. They’re here as prisoners of an untimely end.”

“Lost souls,” she breathed. She’d read of this, a legend she put out of her mind with every other mystery she could not explain. More lifetimes than she could count mere yards away, infinitely helpless. 

“The Zonai didn’t drift down from the sky out of charitable goodwill to enhance lives that were languishing below,” Ganondorf said while lifting Zelda out of the cart to make way for his own disembarkment. “They gutted their own islands dry to power their cities, their devices, their construct slaves. When they debased themselves by touching their toes to the surface, they were after what was buried deep down in the shadows. You do recall the Temple they tore apart, don’t you?” he pressed, the question like his thumb on a bruise, testing the skin’s remembrance.

She spread her fingers across the span of jewels warming at her throat, lightly squeezing as if to pry the memory out of her stubborn soul. Yes, she did remember the gorgeous tribute to Din hidden amidst Faron’s rivers and shade. The glittering ruby eyes twinkling down as she entered. The smell of damp earth and crumbled clay. That first taste of Ganondorf’s strength unleashed, reserved but unyielding, nothing asked but everything known, the intuition that made it feel ascended and stained so deeply—a mark that she could only blot by running and forgetting and atoning with what she had promised to be…

…And yet…

What she had endeavored to bury alive remained, crisp and true, right down to the dry press of his thumbprint into her cheek and the scrape of red bark into her tender shoulders. What she could not see clearly in her mind’s eye was that center of the earth they had descended, the room of basins and fire, and the curious shroud of a woman in its center guarding…something. Her voice had vanished, remaining only in her rising greeting and swift farewell. 

But she was protecting something out of the Zonai’s sight. Was it the entrance to the treasure trove Ganondorf had hinted at then, the true reason for Rauru’s fractious insistence? 

“The amount of power embedded beneath the feet of Hyrule’s first people eclipsed what they’d found above,” Ganondorf went on, more focused on his own vigil. “The Zonai constructed these massive mines tens of thousands of years ago, invading what seemed to them a primitive wilderness. A rich land in the hands of people too far behind to realize its potential, they told themselves. It was the Zonai’s forefathers who indentured the beings they found at the surface, plunging them down here to die in the service of their ambition, churning them like grist into a mill. The Gerudo, particularly, were ravaged by their thirst. We were too necessary for our own good,” he said darkly, pursing his lips at the bitterness flooding his tongue. “Our knowledge and talent with ore, and penchant for survival in the land’s most punishing corners, the essence of our people, became our undoing.”

“Those Poes—” she breathed.

“Died in this mine, yoked to the Zonai’s ambition.” He stared down into the trench, miles and eons away from her. “Your source was correct, Petal. Only ten thousand years and one monarch removed.”

One of the revived Constructs, surveying the belt and track, craned its neck up to better glimpse the new arrivals in the cart. With stunned recognition it wound back down into a compressed bow, letting its long metal claws scrape the ground. “Princess Zelda,” it said in the scratchy monotone she’d become so familiar with in Rauru and Sonia’s world. “It has been ten thousand, one hundred and seventeen years since our last interaction. It is unusual for a Hylian to remain alive for that amount of time. I commend you for your impressive vitality.” 

“Go ahead,” Ganondorf pushed her, nudging the small of her back. “Go see the gruesome operation we’re running now.”

She took her first tentative steps toward the sweet-natured mechanism, comforted by the sight of what felt like a letter from home. She had missed these gentle beings, their wisdom and discretion, their endearing kindness and curiosity despite their engineered strength and immortality. Unlike most anyone else she met back in that time, the Constructs made sense to her. 

“You remember me, old friend?” she asked, giving its claws a little squeeze. “Did we know each other so long ago?”

“I only saw you once,” it explained. “I was being programmed by Mineru while you visited her library. I overhead the conversation between you.” The robot stopped short, still loyal to its ancient programming.

“Speak freely, friend,” she said with a grin. “It was a very long time ago. I don’t believe I have any secrets left to keep.” 

“You were unsettled after a party the previous evening,” it continued. “Queen Sonia was encouraging you to stay within her concept of the present, instead of working with Mineru to find your way forward in time. As you are here now in this time, I assume that you did not take the Queen’s counsel.”

Zelda’s smile tightened. “No, I did not.”

“I am grateful to see that you were successful in your research to find a way back into modern Hyrule, Princess Zelda.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s Queen Zelda now, however.”

“My apologies, Your Highness. I meant no disrespect.” It bowed its head, wringing its hands with the confirmation of error. “Work has finally returned to the Depths, and our purpose has been renewed. It has been difficult to keep up on any additional updates.” 

“No apologies necessary,” she assured the machine. “It’s done my heart a tremendous deal of good to see a kind face from my memory.”

“You may have better luck speaking with my counterpart, Miss Zanara,” the Construct said, wheeling away to reveal the young Gerudo girl nimbly picking through the river of rocks rapidly streaming down the belt. She half-glanced up, then bolted up straight, rubbing her eyes to make sure she hadn’t been on her shift too long. It was the Gazette’s darling peering over her workstation, a few yards removed from the unmistakable Gerudo King. “Miss Zanara’s has only amassed a small amount of years and is finer attuned to the nuances of post-Zonai Hyrule.”

“Your highness… your highness- es ,” she clarified, trying to curtsey in her utility pants. “It’s an honor to host you here, in this shift…or this operation…amongst us?”

“It’s all right, I’m only visiting to see how the work is going,” Zelda tried to disarm her, leaning over to peek into the occasionally sparkling rocks. “I’d love to hear more about what interested you in joining this project. We are very far removed from Gerudo Desert, after all.”

“I answered a call in the paper,” she said as she brought herself up straight, trying to brush off the ashy smears from her cheeks, but only making more of a mess. She noted the girl’s focus wander over to Ganondorf, the sweep of her eyes from his waiting katana to the dapper keep of his scarlet hair wound into its knots and plaits. The way her green eyes, so similar to his own, broadened at this first glimpse of the King up close, her cheeks tinting crimson beneath the veneer of dust and ash.  

“The Gazette?” She had glanced over the Help section in tiny type on the back page, but didn’t have time to make it there before the day swept her away into its meals and teas and interviews and swaths of empty waiting.

“Yes, your highness. They were hoping for Gerudo with any knowledge of minerals and mining, which isn’t as common as it used to be. But I’ve worked at the jewelry shop in Gerudo Town my whole life, so I knew a little, at least.” 

“So you came here because you…wished to?” Zelda clarified.

“I was never much of a warrior,” she said with a shrug, the smudges and darkness blotting her age away. She could have been fifteen or 52. “I trained, of course, just like we all do. But I’m clumsy when I’m not sitting and concentrating. Once the Varina closed the gates around town, I started to get stir crazy.”

“And what do you think of this, this work?”

“It’s calm and easy to just slip into. I can start and then I don’t even realize how many hours have gone by, how many belts and carts we’ve already moved. It takes my mind off,” she said, the kernel of a smile quickly fading as she remembered herself, waving her hands in apology. “Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong or to worry about, your Highness. Certainly not. I understand they’re there to keep us safe. And to try and find the Rogue as soon as we can. This would be an awfully good place to hide, after all.”

“Thank you,” Zelda said abruptly, cutting off the stream of caveats as she imagined Ganondorf would as he sidled up behind her, a hand on her hip steering her away from the audience. “I’m grateful that you’re here, bringing your expertise to this initiative.”

“Admirable efforts, Zanara. Keep the fools in check for me, won’t you?” he drawled, leaving the once-jeweler melting into the floor.   

Zelda turned back to the cart, more than ready to depart, but Ganondorf waved her off, toward the cluster of Hylian workers further down Zanara and the Construct’s line. They had noticed their unexpected guests conferring with their boss and now murmured between each other, awestruck by what may as well be ghosts descended from above. As they approached the workers knelt in stumbling jolts.

“Please,” she said, struck with self-consciousness. “There’s no need for that kind of formality. The King simply brought me here to see what was happening now that the mine has reopened. Would you be kind enough to tell me about it?”

They exchanged glances, daring each other to speak first. Finally the one in the middle, a strawberry-haired boy she imagined with a smattering of freckles underneath his sooted face edged forward. “We’re not running at full capacity yet, Your Highness,” he said, gesturing to the belt and its sparse population of people and Constructs spread across its expanse, from the jagged caverns to the elegant smelting tower. “We’ve only been fully up and running for a few weeks now, since they got it back into shape.”

“Who got it back into shape?” 

“Hudson Construction helped the Yiga figure it out, I think,” he said, glancing at his companions for confirmation, but only getting a round of shrugs. “I only got here once it was finished.”

“And how did you start working here?” 

“There was an ad in the paper, and I live in New Castle Town, so it was pretty easy to just go up to the Gate House to sign up,” he said. “They have a wagon train that goes in and out every day, since the roads still aren’t open.”

“And you?” she said, directly addressing the older boy to his right. 

“Same story, pretty much,” he said. “Except I was living near Outskirts Stable, so it’s too far to go home every night like Sam can. Which is fine, now I can afford a little place right near the castle. And the pub!”

“Have any of you gotten sick?” she asked, her voice faintly trembling with nerves as she dug into her worry’s heart.

“Sick, your Majesty?” Sam repeated, cocking his head.

“Yes, from the…Gloom…” she realized, as soon as the words spilled out of her mouth, that there were no metallic splotches of crimson to be seen, no plumes of malice poisoning the dim air. As with the surface, the splatters of toxic evil had receded away, further than even these fathoms below. 

“There hasn’t been any sign of Gloom since after The Upheaval, even deep down here,” Sam confirmed. “Parley here drank too much the other night, but that’s as sick as they come from what I’ve seen.” 

“I was confused, that’s all,” she tried to laugh. “It’s been such a long journey to reach this marvel of a place, so I’m not at my sharpest. But it’s wonderful to hear that everyone is in good health and spirits,” she said through gritted teeth, her mind seething to untangle Ellie’s knot of bold-faced, apple-cheeked lies. “Please stay safe down here. It’s dangerous work you do that shouldn’t be taken lightly.”

“Don’t worry, your Highness. These Gerudo geniuses have us sorted out,” Sam said, tipping his thumb toward the girl who’d resumed her examination of the hunks and shards driving past. “They’ve been running a tight ship for a billion years or something.”

“Then you’re in good hands.” 

“Your Supreme Highness King,” Parley cut in, tossing in an extra bow along with the thick title, drawing a welcome nod from Ganondorf. “If we keep digging and sorting through this mess, will we be seeing Constructs and things like this in New Castle Town?” 

He chuckled, smacking the slight Hylian heartily on the shoulder. “Constructs, self-propelling carriages, so many marvels hoarded in the past,” he promised, drawing out their boyish wonder as their mouths dropped, hope flooding their hearts with the boundless expanse of the stars. “Whatever makes life easier and brighter, we’ll be digging it up for ourselves this time.”

“Thank you,” Zelda cut in once more, smoothed with a smile, lest a chorus of Long Live the Kings extend their stay any longer. She bid her farewell, then began her retreat back with Ganondorf, who was nearly levitating with self-satisfaction. 

“What do you think, Petal?” he asked, sneering with triumph at the sight of her slumped shoulders and furrowed brow. “Do you have any labor violations to report?”

“I don’t understand,” Zelda murmured, slinking back into the cart. 

“It seems to me this is far from the first time you’ve been manipulated,” he said, restarting the fan for their ascent. “Although to be played by such a petulant child is embarrassing, I have to say. I’d have thought higher of ‘wisdom incarnate’ in such a circumstance.”

“But she’s just a starry-eyed girl from town,” she mused aloud, too distracted in her nervous shock to register his sarcasm. “What reason would she have to lie to me?”

“Just because she isn’t high-born doesn’t mean she isn’t wanting for something,” he said. “Perhaps you should ask her why she came to the castle in the first place. She did volunteer, after all. Just as all who serve the vision for New Hyrule have.” The topaz flecks in his irises caught the meager light, puncturing a reminder into her exhausted heart.

“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her gaze to her fidgeting hands. They still felt tender from the teapot. “I should have asked instead of running on a rumor.”

They were quiet as the track grumbled beneath them. “That was quite disrespectful,” he agreed, his voice a distant echo of sins unanswered. “And disrespect must be punished.” The fan whirred, and they wordlessly spun up toward the light, and all the savagery it could reveal. 

Chapter Text

Ten Thousand Years Ago

The Gerudo King had vanished. 

She did hear of him, mostly in passing, from the brief snippets of Rauru’s council she could catch without looking conspicuous while slowly walking the promenade ringing the Throne Room. Ganondorf was not attending himself; a surrogate Gerudo was sent in his place, saying nothing and staying only long enough to mark her presence and gallop back home. Some days Zelda lingered near the stables, in case the woman was waiting for the opportune moment to deliver a message to her hands. But this too was not the case.

For the first few months after vacating Faron, Zelda visited her secret glen almost daily, first telling herself that Ganondorf would be waiting here to beg her forgiveness. He had taken advantage of her vulnerability, alone and outnumbered, and should thank the sea and stars that she hadn’t told Rauru and Sonia of his entitled behavior. 

She did not tell Rauru and Sonia.

Then the time slipped away, and her loneliness coiled around her like a viper. Staring up at the empty ceiling above her bed, or across the gazebo’s tea table, or the water garden of bobbing lotus and lilies rising in tiers up the palace grounds. Kneading and stretching those few moments from their last encounter in her mind like clay, twisting their shape, trying to imagine the form they’d take if she had the audacity to linger—his hands slowing from their frenetic spark of permission, steading from surprise to purpose, stripping away at the foolish decoration down to the fire beneath. Electric warmth meeting her own, the intent of weight and flesh hovering and holding and heaving into her for the first time in two years ( two years!! ), slipped through her fingers as sure as sand. 

What would he have said, she wondered in this absence, had she not run off like a child? Would he have gloated at his triumph? Doesn’t that feel so much better now, Petal? she could hear him teasing some nights, like a phantom in her ear. My stubborn little martyr ; you put up such a strong fight . 

Or would she have finally earned his reverence as two points of resistance bowed in the middle, bending toward a shared relief? Gods…I’d kneel a hundred times more for this taste …

And she would meet him there, with that thick and bristling coarseness of his hair grounding her grasp in this least expected of places. You’ll yield to no one, my King , she would promise.

His swagger, his confession, were only theories she weaved in the emptiness. He did not come to find her in the glen. He sent no word with his soldier. Frost crept into the mornings as fall gave way to another winter, closing the mountain passes and sending the kingdom into its hibernation beneath a blanket of snow, suspending her in the silence of a tomb. 

The Palace had little to distract her from the relentless abandonment. Sonia kept her days short, retiring to bed early and waking with the late and waning sun. Some days she did not bother to make an appearance at all, blaming the “sleepy sky” for her absence. Rauru spent less time in the Throne Room and more cloistered in his chancery, taking long pauses from his correspondence and reviews to try and best Mineru’s newest construct models at chess. 

She spent most of her time in Mineru’s reluctant company now, a kind of penance for all the distraction and mess she’d made over the last year of indulging Ganondorf’s dark whispers in her ear. So long she’d spent letting the Gerudo King distract her, turning her head away from the one single imperative that she was now no closer to solving. In truth, however, the “dutiful studying” that Rauru had prescribed like a benediction was growing more difficult. As her residence stretched toward its third year, she had combed through most of the relevant books in Mineru’s collection. Her material skewed away from the fantastical or theoretical, more manual than suggestion. And so Zelda’s mind wandered further, back to that single idea she’d once offered her.

A forbidden act . 

She wondered what it would feel like, brushing that Stone hanging at her throat, knocking at her windpipe as if begging to enter.

You’d lose everything that makes you you .

Every memory. Every wicked desire. Every wish that weakened her resolve against the truth she carried, the madness that made her crave the attention of a monster present over the true love slipped through her fingertips. Repossessed by fates who only asked to claim her soul, unconcerned with its contents. 

Link could see the dragons. They revealed themselves to him in the way her kingdom bent forever in his favor. One day, ten thousand years from now, he could look up to the mysterious fourth creature and understand. Remember her as the woman he deserved, not this craven thing she had become. He could still love the idea that lingered like a chisel in stone. He could tell everyone that he was sorry in her place; she’d tried.

What else but the cleanse of oblivion could ever make her worthy of return?

The ground was just beginning to thaw the night she tasted it.

On her balcony, overlooking the ponds cracking back open to welcome yet another spring. When would she lose count of the days completely? Her time here could overtake the span of years spent in her own Hyrule…

…the new Hyrule…

…After the old Hyrule…

…And old and older still…

She should be dead ten times over now.

Bound by the threaded necklace, she raised the stone to her tongue, lighting a spark that bit back a warning. 

“Oblivion does not suit you, Petal.”

The buttery rich sound of his voice makes her cough on the charm, spitting it with sudden panic and disgust at the metallic taste singeing her tastebuds, and for a moment she’s certain she has gone mad with a ghost staining her thoughts.

Until she whirled back, and there he was, whole and unchanged as if she had only last seen him minutes before. As if she had never left. 

“You sent no word,” she grappled, her throat dry and mind emptied, this denial her only truth.

He raised his eyebrows, unmoving from the archway of the balcony, where he lounged with crossed arms and properly buttoned cloak concealing the respite of his chest. “Sent word? Of what? You provided me with no word to respond to.” His nails drummed his biceps, a barely controlled twitch as he held back, watching. “I only gave what you desired.”

Nothing from you.

The Stone dropped back to its resting place at the hollow of her neck, and she clasped her hands behind her back, contrite with guilt at being caught so strangely, so undeniably. So mortified that she did not ask how he had come in or chide him for presuming to enter, late and uninvited, to her private chamber. It was hard, after all, to remember all of the slings and arrows she’d been taught to throw when all she had wanted, all she could breathe for, was any sign she remained in his favor. Waiting relentlessly for a scrap of paper, a sentence, a word that she was forgiven. 

Her fingertips brushed the cold stone of the balcony’s railing as she remained as rooted to her spot as he was to his own, each refreshing their gaze with the other. She didn’t dare breach the tile expanse of floor between them. She might wake up from this dream, or spook his apparition away. She might throw herself at him like a hopeless maiden hurling herself into the sea after a long-lost love. She had become purely untrustworthy, even to herself. Especially to herself.

Stupid, stupid girl.

“I thought I might hear from you between now and then,” he said wistfully, kicking at the failing grout with the toe of his boot. The Palace was immense but shabby. Not unlike the Hyrule Castle of her childhood. She had thought that perhaps such ancient worlds did not have the means or interest in maintenance, though she was hardly one to talk. Her version of the Kingdom was little more than a ruin. 

“I was afraid,” the admission slipped before she could clasp it back. It was late; she was so tired.

“Afraid of whom, Petal?” he pressed, drawing the terms. The nothing she’d demanded until the surrender she’d withheld.

“I…” she took a breath, grasping through the detritus she’d buried, all of the gnarled sediment calcifying within. “Not you, it’s not…I…”

“Rauru?” The interruption rumbled, a rusted blade he’d been dying to sharpen. 

“No…I mean, in a way, but…he’s done nothing to make me afraid. He has been welcoming and kind, but I know that grace does not extend as far as it should,” she said, spinning back into her damned circles, her tiptoes away from the truth she couldn’t speak even if she’d wanted to. Oh how badly she wanted to. “I’m afraid…you asked me what it is I wish…and what that is, what that has become, would spell ruin for those deserving no such thing.”

He shifted back up from the wall, towering as a boulder before her. The faint brush of his breath made its way from above; would he not drive that sharp tip of his nose down the length of her sternum, flaying her open, snagging the burden of Stone free with his teeth. “You are afraid of yourself.” She nodded faintly, a hard swallow bobbing in her throat. He did not need to step, only angle down toward her, closing the inches and centuries of space. “Of what sticks in your throat, wanting what you could never say.”

“ Yes ,” she breathed, sure she would feel his paws snake around her waist, nudge her back close. Her lips split just a hair, ready to meet the refrain of a kiss still lingering on her breath like a brand.

Instead, he spoke.

“If that is what you wish,” he said, the moonlight catching the flecked glow of gold in his eyes, vivid as a cat’s, “then you are certain to help me.” 

“Help you?” she repeated, shocked out of her waiting stupor.

“We are done with living beneath the Zonai’s heel. This will be the year that rule ends,” he said with the certainty of reading text on stone. That gauntlet-covered hand, the one that should be busy pressing her into the bedding, slipped inside his cloak to reveal a small glass vial. Long and thin like a laboratory tube but cut with elegant, intentional facets like a crystal vase. She could see a bluish, viscous liquid sloshing within it. “Where me and my confidants differ is on the methods. But there is one voice that matters to me more than the others…one I may indulge at my peril,” he admitted with a faint smile, watching the fluid slide from side to side at the tip of his hand. “We can secure the downfall of this false King without a drop of blood, if only you will help us.”

“I don’t understand.”

He pinched the vial between his thumb and forefinger, holding it up to the moonlight. “Do you remember the Priestess in Faron?”

“Of course,” she half-lied, unwilling to admit to the weakness of her memory. 

“She is clever,” he said, “much more so than I will ever be.” He chuckled, a private joke she wasn’t meant to understand. “She was kind enough to gift me the means to deliver to your hands. A sleeping draught, powerful enough to enchant a lake with a drop,” he explained, both of them mesmerized by the languid thickness shimmering beneath the stars. “This vial will make one Palace’s water very, very potent for a very long time.”

“You want me to poison the water?” she lurched with a step back, the idea yanking her from the stupor of static want. 

“Please, Petal. Don’t be obscene,” he said, fangs flashing in tandem with the glimmering glass. “I’m asking you to facilitate the surrender of those squatters on the throne. A drop of concentrated reason to spare a torrent of blood. No war, no arguments. Wouldn’t you like Hyrule to be fair just this once?”

She stared at the pearly bubbles stirred in the vial, her hesitation all he needed to slip forward and fold her hand around the toxic spell. “What would you do…?” she whispered, squeezing the sharp facets hard enough to wince. 

“Empty the Palace of its occupancy and assume the throne,” he said. “There would be a brief detention before each staff and soldier had their opportunity to prove allegiance to the new order. An adjustment, for some,” he admitted, feigning a sigh while tracing the knuckles of her fist, “but with the wise and just Lady Zelda beside me, the transition should be much more,,,palatable.” She stared up, mouth agape, as his own winter of visions blotted against her own.

Stay here for her eternity.

And not only here, but conqueror here—abolishing the very seat of power that held her name in its wings. 

“Isn’t that what scares you so badly, dear ‘Lady’?” Something about how he sneers at the word, thrusting it off his tongue like a taunt, though his grip remained a caress. “You’re destined for much more, aren’t you?”

Was he asking her…

Was there even a question?

Or the presumption, culled from a hundred tastes of her yearning to please, staring down into the abyss of her solitude. Cracking the brittle confines of the refusal pre-empting her mournful desperation. 

What was there to propose with one so empty, she would drown herself with poison just to say she was full?

“Rauru and Sonia…”

His grin only widened with the mirth dancing in his eyes, joyous to speak his plan aloud to one who had yet to glimpse its breadth. “They gave me the chance to prove my fealty. To be a good dog and heel. I can afford the same kindness.”

She swallowed, tallying the men in their feathers as well as she could in her head. “And those who refuse…such kindnesses…?”

She could see him rake his teeth over his lower lip, leaving tracks down a path he had no further interest to tread. “I have gifted you the gentlest glove with which to crush a broken world,” he said slowly, his patience dying in the grind of his jaw down with each syllable. “This is a cataclysm, not a changing of the guard. But for once, it will not be my people used as grist from the mill.  Yours are fortunate to have a choice. It’s much more than the shades of apocalypse we have bled and begged to survive.”

Not everyone would surrender, she knew. But most. Rauru was not close with his soldiers. He did not consider himself a commander of men. Not these lightly trained glorified watchmen who lacked the understanding of his true power and had never set foot on the sky. He placed much more faith in the power and protection of his sister’s creations. Crafted gods entrusted with his most powerful weaponry and critical assignments. Their might could not be argued, but they were dependent on the attentive care of their masters. Constructs could be reset at the flick of a switch and would not retain the slightest memory of who they’d once served. 

Just like Guardians.

“There is a lone guard posted on the north wall,” Ganondorf said, loosening his grip. “He is rotated out twice each day. Every day. The sightlines are good from the western approach; we can see him from a mile out.” He lifted his hand away from hers, pointing instead out to the sentinel’s silhouette cut against the plateau’s snowy peaks. “One week from tonight I will return, and I’ll only need glance up at the wall to know your choice.”

“Ganondorf—” his name called after the rapid swish of his cape, wrenching back those gleaming eyes over his shoulder. Her empty hand reached out toward him, to stop, to beg, to freeze this space between the agony of election. Frantically she fished for something to say amidst the hundreds of questions and confessions crowding her heart and blotting the vision she had sworn on her life, and the grave of every goddess before her, to hold true. “You…said that oblivion did not suit me,” she blurted out from amongst them, her fingers brushing the point of her Stone, cooled now from its brief activation. “What do you know of the Stones?”

He stared at the seed of havoc with a measured distance, recounting something beyond her, nothing he was willing to share. “That I need one,” he answered at last. “And I prefer gifts to plunder.”

And with that he was gone, vanished from the balcony without a garish sound. It wasn’t until much later that night, alone in bed with the vial suspended above her like a wand divining fate, safe and intact and weighed, that she remembered to hate herself for holding it at all.