Author's Note: Welcome, one and all, to my newest Zelda fanfiction: Moonstruck.

Moonstruck has been in the works for several years now, coming to me in bits and pieces of failed fanfiction, published literature, Celtic mythology and folklore, and Enya's music. Only this year have I finally stirred my faculties and begun to make sense out of this filed melange of plot ideas, characters, settings, observations, and prose. So far, I'm delighted with the result.

Moonstruck begins with Zelda, though Zelda is not my main concern. This novelette will follow Malon for most of the time, though complexities of plot will require that not only Malon, but Zelda, Ganondorf, Link, and even the fairies of Hyrule make an appearance, and contribute to its culmination to form the story's completion. Moonstruck is one of my more complex stories, in that I got a headache trying to figure out all the sideplots, in an attempt to render The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to its fullest, AU potential! Moonstruck also retells The Ballad of Tam Lin, which, if you are assiduous in your search, you can find somewhere on the Internet.

Part 1 is a tangle of introductions with allusions to the heart of the story; please bear with me. And with that, I now give you:

Moonstruck

By Selah Ex Animo


I sit here, in the prime of my life, and at the point of my existence most extolled by the poets, in a tower… upon a ledge with my shoulder pressed to soiled panes… My hands are wrapped in bandages and desiccated blood is upon my fingertips. I sew, weaving coarse threads through bits of baldachin I have taken from my ruined dresses, and endeavour to create novelty. It is a novelty that shall remain… black before my eyes, and shall be falsely exclaimed over by empathetic ladies, before they cast it, beneath my nose, into the flames.

But it is all I can do.

Proem

Stooped in the sullen darkness, where the very stone was rendered black, the shrine of Beauty crumbled, a tomb caged in the weary body of a young woman.

She had once been comely. Majesty lingered in the sweep of her brow, in the paling curls upon her shoulders, in the upward tilt of her chin. Her draggled clothes were of days long passed, but even here vestiges of majesty clung, in the Attic cut, the faded thread, the trace of orchid in her sash. Hers was the ageless beauty after which the poets hungered. And yet, despite her beauty, the girl was bent, ravished, and ruined. A tomb, to which Beauty was sentenced.

The girl shivered, ducking over her bloody fingers, the fragment of canvas, and the needle she held. The needle was dull and crimson-tipped, a testament to her lack of skill. She had destroyed her hands, in a mad attempt to be useful here in the dark tower whose shadow straddled the walls of Market Town. For many days she had gouged them, purposely driving the needle beneath her nails when spasms of wrath came upon her. The patience for which her child-self had been famous was now expunged, driven to madness, ravaged, hampered, destroyed. She could no longer wait for her skill to develop, could no longer lean against the stained glass panes, tracing the mullions with her blighted fingers and dreaming of lighter days. Could she have wept for innocence and innocent habit lost, the tears would have fallen. But they too had been expunged.

Driven out, alongside her vision.

She sometimes dwelt upon the lighter days, as she sat sewing. In the musty quiet, days when the breath of spring was upon the land came again to her, and she felt again the horse that she had often rode, in the company of noble men and maidens. How beautiful the world had been, breathless with colour, drunk upon daylight's dewy kisses! She remembered the dawn haze, and how it had washed the lake, boiling from the surface of the water to swallow the bars and beads of sunlight, the trills of finch and martin, the voices of nobles, thrumming the lakeshore. She and her entourage had often visited the lake, watching the mist clear and heaven unveil herself amid the remnants of filmy dew. And along the shore, where the gray Field crumbled into patches of brush and sand, Pleasure raised her lilac tent, in the form of picnics and excursions, cotillions danced al fresco, hours upon the lake.

How sweet life had been, careless and festive, without the weight of care! Mortals were not cursed by prophetic dreams, or driven from their castles, hunted by madmen, stabbed in their beds. Life was levity, the hours woven with laughter. And in one moment, as seemingly felicitous as the next, it had all been destroyed. Pleasure weighted with care, levity driven to exile, laughter stabbed in its bed.

How quickly did the goddesses take what they had amply bestowed!

The girl twisted the needle in her hands and gave a sharp jerk. The needle parted company with the thread and the girl, laying it carefully it in her lap, proceeded to knot the thread. The thread was full of knots, both of her own devising and of the device of misfortune, and the thread was becoming difficult to work with.

Her fingers were graceless, and the process of knotting arduous. She at last straightened, and ran her fingers down the short length of thread. The loops were too wide, and had come untied. She gritted her teeth, raised the thread to her sightless eyes, and pulled violently at the ends.

There was the muffled rip. The girl gasped, her hand flying to the cloth. The fabric was torn, the seams pulled asunder. A shriek escaped her before she could stop it; standing, the girl threw the fabric aside, and felt it brush her skirt as it fell to the ground.

The solitary ping of a needle upon the flagstones caught her attention. With a cry, and wild gesture, she felt her lap. The needle was gone. She fell to her knees, throwing the fabric away from her, landing with a shock that seemed able to shatter her fragile build. She ran her hands over the floor, patting the stone, uttering little cries. It was gone, no doubt having sprung away upon colliding with the ground, and vanishing into some black recess. Or perhaps it lay right before her nose. No matter if it did.

She rose, sobbing and tearless, and drove her fists into the window behind her. Her lady-in-waiting had not yet opened the shutters, and her fists thumped against the fragmented wood, blossoming into a shower of stings as her hands were pricked. Her mind registered the brief pain. Wildly, she flung her fists against the shutters. The rotten wood sagged beneath her blows. Lunatic buoyancy suddenly swelled in her chest. She beat at the shutters, willing them to burst open, to give way to the window, so that she might shatter the glass with her bare fists, and destroy it. Just as devils, as Time, as goddesses, and heroes and love and her Ganondorf had destroyed her—

"Zelda! Zelda! No! No!"

Her violence had deafened her to the entrance of her lady. One moment she beat the shutters, the next she fell against the solid breast of her lady Impa, wrists caught in a scarred, iron clasp. "What are you doing?" Impa was shouting. "What are you doing?"

She began to shake the girl, who drooped and sobbed and pulled in a vain attempt to release herself. Finding her efforts useless, she began to blubber, her knees failing her. Somewhere, in the turmoil of her thoughts, she saw the futility of pleading, of demanding, of explaining the wild joy she took from destroying something. Surely, that was what she needed in this tower! No fabric, or useless attempts to sew clothes for refugees, but something to hurt and destroy and blight as she had been blighted. Her hands, she slowly realised, had been her first victims. What next, when shutters and hands were exhausted? Herself?

"Zelda..." Impa stopped shaking her, and lowered her to the flags. "Zelda, what is wrong?"

"I-I can't stand it up here!" Zelda sobbed. "Why do you abandon me? Why do you leave me here? I-I'll shatter the window when you're gone. I'll throw myself out!"

In her mind's eyes, she raised a blade, and began to stab her beloved Impa.

Impa sighed. "Zelda," she whispered, "I try, and I try. Why don't you tell me you don't like it up here? I would have brought you down. You know I would rather you were not up here. But you wished— You wished to stay here. You remember—?"

"Yes." Zelda raised a hand to her face, to the bandage about what once were her eyes. "I do. Dear goddesses, I do."

A deep, terrible pain suddenly exploded in her head, and she fell against Impa with a dry sob. "But don't leave me here, please!" The pain waxed, as though Death purposed to take her then and there, and then subsided, revealing itself to be naught but a memory. Her lungs gasped for air.

"You will come down," said Impa, pressing her head gently. "I think it will be good for the refugees to see you. They have wished to see you since the Fall."

"His fall," whispered Zelda.

"Yes," said Impa, and her voice was like rock, steeped in strangled fury.

"They clamour for the destruction of this tower, also," Impa continued. Zelda felt her straighten and stand, and the chill air was again upon the princess's skin. "It is a blight upon the landscape, and they remembered how he used to stand at that window, with his monsters..."

"I remember too," murmured Zelda. "He brought me here, in the pink crystal, before he—my eyes—"

"Don't speak of it," Impa snapped. The memory of pain filled Zelda's skull once more.

"It wasn't his fault," she whispered.

"His fault?" Impa's voice had again waxed strangled. "Not his fault? Who, Zelda, who was it who—"

She paused suddenly, and her shoes scraped the flagstone, as she spun aside, hissing.

Zelda rose, rubbing at the gooseflesh that had broke out upon her arms. "I'm too exhausted to be angry now, Impa," she said.

"Well what was that before? When I found you pounding the shutters?"

"That exhausted me. I'd lost my needle, and the fact I've lost everything else came upon me, and I was angry..." Her voice slipped bitterly into silence.

"Angry," muttered Impa, "and yet you speak of him."

"Yes, I do."

"Angry that all you ever owned was lost unto you, and yet you speak of him—" spitting the word.

"Yes, Impa. I speak of him."

Zelda stretched out a hand, and made her way to the window seat. "I was not angry with him," she said, "or else I am angry with the entire world. But I cannot hate him, nor the world. Only myself, my damned love, only Time—" She stopped abruptly, hissing, and a remnant of the anger was upon her, as she drove a fist into the wall at her side. "He did not ravish me as Time has. As Time has destroyed me and Hyrule and our only hope—"

"Hope has not been destroyed." Impa sank onto the seat beside her. "Remember, the hero came again, and saved us all."

"And destroyed whatever hope kindled for Ganondorf—"

"Zelda!" She felt Impa turn on her. "For Din's sake, what do you want?"

"Him, again." Zelda paused, rubbing a hand against her chest. "Ganondorf. He was my husband, you know."

"And he blinded you!" Impa hissed. "Cut out your eyes!"

"But it wasn't him," Zelda murmured. "It wasn't him and I know, for I'd seen him, as himself, and he was a good, good man..."

"Misguided, surely!"

"Misguided, yes." Zelda paused again, turned aside. "Misguided, mavourneen. Misguided and possessed... Just as I am."