Darkness. Darkness was the first thing she was aware of.

Emilia sucked in a breath, her first one since she woke. The air was stuffy.

That was good. Not pleasant, but good. She could feel, she could move. Somehow she knew she hadn't been able to for a long time.

What she didn't know was how she had ended up here, wherever here was.

Her attempt to sit up was slow and strenuous from the weak state she was in. She didn't get very far, though not due to her debility; her head banged into something. Her upper body fell back down, and she raised a shaky hand to rub at her forehead. When something crawled over her leg, she used her other hand to flick it off. As she moved, she felt skin brush against skin, making her realize that she was wearing nothing at all for some reason. Another something crawling up her shoulder reinvigorated her need to figure out where she was so she could get away.

Trying to feel for something that she couldn't see, she reached her hands up. Whatever was above her head seemed to be above her entire body. A wooden ceiling that close to the ground? She moved her arms out to her sides and found she couldn't extend them very far outward either.

A box. She was laying down naked in a box. An oppressive, unventilated, dark box...

It's nighttime outside—her back is against the earth and a blurry face is above her and she's frantically struggling to get away—she reaches for the knife but she can't get it out of his grip—he's pressing it to her throat—and then—

And then when she was left reeling in the darkness, her heart feeling like it was about to explode, she regretted wishing to remember.

Knowing that she had only been reliving a memory didn't make it feel any better. It made it worse. Because now she realized what she was in.

She remembered the moment where she knew, with what she had thought was absolute certainty, that she was going to die.

But she was moving. Feeling. Thinking. She wasn't dead. She was alive.

And she was in a casket.

"Get me out!"

Emilia started to scream, pushing and banging against her confines with all the might she could muster. A few tears slipped from her eyes. She gasped for air between screams, but no matter how much she took in, it wasn't enough. She couldn't breathe.

What if nobody got her out? It hardly felt like a 'what if.' It felt inevitable. Nobody was going to get her out. She was going to die in here. This, this would be how she would spend the rest of her days, up until she actually died. That was just her luck—miraculously survive attempted murder, then die after being buried alive.

She thumped and scratched on her casket until her hands went numb, and screamed until her throat burned and her voice fizzled out. Then, she thought, maybe it was better to be quiet anyway.

She could wait until she heard someone pass by above ground, and then she could put all of her energy into trying to be as loud as possible to garner attention. She just had to hope that the six feet of dirt between them wouldn't prevent them from hearing each other.

If she could hear no one, if no one could hear her... She didn't want to think about it anymore. She didn't want to think about how long she would be stuck in her head, alone in the dark. Days? Weeks?

She'd go insane. She was already going insane, and she'd been awake in her casket for minutes.

Had it been minutes? She wasn't sure. She couldn't keep track of time.

Against her will, Emilia's brain decided to fill in the nothingness with more memories of her last agonizing moments outside of her underground prison. With nothing to hear or see to help bring her out of it, it was hard to tell herself that they were only memories, that it wasn't happening anymore.

So she started to sing softly to distract herself. Her voice sounded terrible through her tears, but it was better than the silence that allowed unwelcome memories to run free in her mind.

Wake up. Kill bugs. Cry. Sing. Sleep. Wake up again. Kill bugs again. Cry again. Sing again. Sleep again.

That's how she thought everything was going, but there were times when she wasn't sure if she was awake or not. There were times when she wasn't sure if she was alive or not.

Maybe this was simply what death was like for her. Maybe her casket and her body were nothing more than imagination, representations of her consciousness.

But how would she be conscious if she was dead? She couldn't be dead. She was alive. But was she really alive? How could this nothingness be considered life?

Her thoughts went in circles, like everything else. With time, the facets of the circles gradually became more intense, harder to bear, like the air that became even harder to breathe. Flashbacks became impossible to distinguish from reality. Pleasant dreams became nightmares. That was the worst change—losing her dreams.

At least when she had good dreams, she wasn't conscious that she was here, even if it hurt to wake up and realize that she still was. But when they turned into nightmares, they were always like her flashbacks. She had no escape. Being asleep was hell, and being awake was hell, too.

She wondered frequently if that was what this was. Hell.

That theory came, in part, from her realization that none of her assumptions as to how she'd gotten here made sense. If she had been found after she was attacked, someone should have realized she was dead. She should have been autopsied and probably should have been embalmed before her burial. So, if she really was found, then she hadn't been properly looked over by professionals before she was buried, but her very own mother was a forensic anthropologist. How could any of those oversights have slipped by her? To top all of that off, why would her family have buried her without clothes?

Being buried by the very man who tried to kill her didn't make sense, either. He would have had to have attended to all the wounds he gave her, or else she would have eventually bled out and died, but why would he have bothered to do that? Why try to save her after he tried to kill her, and why put her in a casket where she could have died from suffocation or dehydration after he tried to save her from blood loss? And why even bother with a casket? They weren't cheap. Why not just put her in the ground?

Both of those theories had gaps, and she got stuck in a circle of going back and forth with which one she believed in. That circle always came back around to her only other theory: Hell.

Eventually, Emilia ran out of tears. Her bouts of crying became nothing but episodes of staggered breathing. Not long after that, the circle of her life broke. It was no longer wake up, kill bugs, cry nothing, sing, sleep.

It was wake up, kill bugs, and scream and thrash around, because she couldn't drown out the screams clawing at her throat with songs anymore. Scream, scream, scream, and cry no tears as she screamed. She tried to make herself stop screaming multiple times when the sound brought back memories of screaming for her life the night she should have died, but she could never make herself stop for long. It was too much. She couldn't handle it anymore.

It repeated in her mind like a broken record, a new circle: I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore.

I.

Can't.

Handle.

This.

It felt like it would never end. She thought she would be stuck in a circle of teetering on the edge of her sanity for eternity.

But she was wrong. The circles broke again, and she could hardly believe that it wasn't a new hallucination. She saw something that she hadn't seen in what felt like years.

Light.

It was so bright that she saw nothing but white even when she closed her burning eyes, but after all that time in the dark, she was terrified at the thought of losing the light. She wondered if this was it, if her end had finally, finally arrived, or if she was finally being saved from her casket, though she was leaning more toward the death that she'd been longing for. Surely, she thought, she couldn't still be alive after all that time with no food or water or fresh air.

Regardless of whether humans or angels would greet her, knowing that her time in this hell was over left her euphoric.

Crisp air washed over her. She heard shuffling and felt arms wiggle their way under her neck and the backs of her knees. Her eyes blinked open, and they began to adjust to the light as she was lifted up out of her casket. A tannish blob was leaning over her, and the blue sky was behind it. The features of the blob slowly started to become more distinct in color and shape, forming the person who had freed her from her casket.

It took her a few seconds after regaining her vision to realize that he was a boy. His face was pretty, pretty enough to belong on an angel, even with concern distorting his features. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late teens, with hooded blue eyes, long and shaggy blond hair, and light skin littered with scars. That last feature made Emilia uncomfortable—not because of the scars, no, especially not now that she had to have her fair share—because of the mere fact that she could see enough of his skin to even know that he had so many. He was shirtless, only a belt over his shoulder covering up a small fraction of his skin. She didn't like the idea of some half-naked guy digging her from her grave, whether he was an angel or not. She didn't like that he was still holding her, either.

Her cheeks heated as she remembered that she was naked herself. Mortified, she pulled her hair in front of her chest and tried to cover her lower half up with her hands, though she knew he'd already seen everything.

Something even stranger than the strangeness of this stranger's partial nudity suddenly caught her attention—sticking out on either side of his head were long, pointed ears. They definitely looked real, but either they were real because they were in heaven and he was some nonhuman, angelic creature, or they were good fakes because they were on earth and this boy was a nutjob.

"This... This isn't heaven, is it?" Emilia croaked out.

His voice was soft and his face was caught somewhere between sadness and confusion as he answered her. "No..."

So he was just a nutjob. A grave-digging, shirtless nutjob with elf ears that reminded her of Link from the Legend of Zelda.

In any case, his answer brought her relief. Not that she had anything against the idea of eternal paradise, but she was happy that her life hadn't been stolen after all.

Her eyes still burned from being so unaccustomed to light. Positive that she wouldn't be losing the light anytime soon now, she let them close. She sighed as the burning subsided.

"Will you put me down?" she asked.

He maneuvered her to the ground at her request. Words could not describe how satisfying it was to finally feel something other than a hard casket beneath her, to feel the sun against her skin, to feel her lungs fill with fresh air. The only thing keeping her on edge now was that she wasn't wearing any clothes in front of a boy.

"...You look very ill," he said slowly.

She blew air out of her mouth. "I just spent God knows how long—" her voice started to taper, so she had to stop to clear her throat, "—trapped inside a casket. Call 911."

"Call nine-one-one...?" he repeated, emphasizing each syllable.

"Unless you're taking me to the hospital yourself... I know I need to see a doctor. Or ... do you wanna call my parents?" Just saying the last words excited her. Whether he took her to the hospital himself or not, she'd be seeing her parents soon, and her little brothers and little sister, and then the rest of her family and all of her friends...

...She wondered if they would be mad at her for being such an idiot and letting this happen.

Several seconds passed before the boy's voice broke her out of her thoughts. "...I'm sorry?"

Emilia furrowed her brows and hoped that he could tell that she was glaring at him even though she kept her eyes closed. Did he think this was funny? "Use your phone to call 911, or call my parents." She tried to speak her demand loudly, but the effort made her voice crackle out toward the end.

"I don't know what you're talking about... I have severe memory loss right now. I wouldn't even know my own name if someone hadn't told me it."

Maybe his memory loss made him forget that shirts existed, too.

She sighed again. "Can you please take me to someone else, then? Or bring them back to me... The nearest person you can find. I'd walk, but... I don't think I can."

"I'll carry you," he said.

His arms tucked back underneath her, and she wished that she hadn't suggested he take her with him to find someone. Her body went rigid in his grasp. She tried to occupy her mind with thoughts of being reunited with her family instead of focusing on how she was completely naked and some random half-naked boy was holding her.

"It may be a while until we come across someone," the boy said. "It can be dangerous out here."

For as many times as she had relived the last waking minutes of her life before she found herself in the casket, she had never managed to recall much of what had led up to them. The clear words that suddenly rung through her mind—"Let me drive you home. It can be dangerous out here."—were accompanied by a fuzzy image of being in her car at night while what could only have been the man who would go on to almost kill her was outside speaking to her.

Nice. So she had been lured to what might as well have been her death like an idiot. What had been wrong with her that night? She knew better than to trust a stranger, but for some reason she had, and that lapse of judgment nearly killed her.

...So why trust this stranger after the price she paid for thinking she was safe with one last time?

She kicked her stiff legs out of his arms and stumbled to the ground. The movement left her lightheaded, and her vision went black as she got to her feet. If she'd been found, her family would have buried her in their city's cemetery, and there was a cotton mill right by it. She could try to walk to the warehouses herself to find someone without amnesia who knew what a cell phone was.

Her plan to run off to the warehouses collapsed when her vision returned and she realized that she wasn't in the Memorial Park Cemetery. She wasn't in Eloy, period. She doubted she was even in Arizona.

Ahead of her were two colossal mountains that looked like they were one that'd been split down the middle. Not once before had she seen those mountains in person, but they were still familiar.

She told herself that she only found them familiar because the boy's appearance had planted familiar thoughts in her mind. After so long being deprived of stimuli, her brain was trying to connect dots where there were none. It was only a coincidence that the mountains happened to look like that. Just because the boy looked like Link didn't mean that the mountains were Dueling Peaks. That was ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. She mentally reprimanded herself for even indulging that impossible fantasy for a second, but the words she told herself did nothing to calm her heart or her nerves.

The boy walked in front of her and opened his mouth to say something, but he didn't get a single word out, because Emilia screamed.

He wasn't just shirtless—aside from his belts, he was everythingless. And those belts covered nothing.

"Dude, what the hell?!" she yelled. "Why are you naked?!"

His hands moved to cover himself up, but she'd already looked away. "Sorry..." he said. Quietly, he tacked on, "But so are you, you know."

Though she'd only inadvertently glanced down there for one horrifying second, she knew she'd seen something on his hip that looked an awful lot like the Sheikah Slate. But other things, things she couldn't attribute to this stranger's eccentricity, things even less deniable, were to her left. One of those things was jutting out of a river, and the other was far, far over the grassy hills beyond it. She had to do a double-take when she first saw them. She turned fully to her left, her eyes darting from one thing to another and her jaw slack.

So many emotions swarmed over her at the sight, fear being at the forefront. She couldn't find it in herself to scream again, but the urge was bubbling up.

In the distance was a volcano, and in the river beside the mountains was a tall tower that glowed blue in the center. The scene before her very eyes looked like it'd been ripped straight out of Breath of the Wild.

"Where are we?" she asked in a whisper.

"Between the Hills of Baumer and the Dueling Peaks," he answered.

His answer was exactly where she thought they were, and it was exactly what she didn't expect to hear anyhow.

It wasn't enough. She needed to hear him say one more word.

Her voice dropped so low that she could hardly hear herself when she finally managed to ask, "In what kingdom?"

"Hyrule."

Maybe it was spurred on by his answer, or maybe it would have happened regardless—but that was when vertigo hit Emilia full force, and she felt herself begin to fall before everything went black.

AN:

HOO BOY. Thanks for checking out the first chapter, and hope you enjoyed! I wrote the original version of this chapter June 19, 2016... Just days after ~Zelda U~ was officially revealed as Breath of the Wild, and three years ago as of today. I've always loved OC/SI stories, but something I never really liked about a lot of them is the unimaginative methods of inserting the OCs (like just getting pulled in through the TV). One of my ideas that I'd had for quite some time was having an OC be buried and wake up in a fictional world. So, with Zelda being my main fanfic jam, Breath of the Wild seemed like the perfect game to finally put that idea to use with.

Of course, we still didn't know all that much about the game back then, so I couldn't write much further than the point where Emilia was saved. When the game did finally come out and I played it ... I couldn't picture myself actually writing a full OC/SI story set in it. It just seemed like a lot to handle at the time, so I moved on. But, I started playing through BotW again earlier this year, and it made me want to come back to this. I tidied up what I'd already written, finished what came after where I'd left off, and decided to post it on third anniversary of this chapter...

And then the BotW 2 trailer dropped last week. Was not expecting that at all. I'm admittedly kinda nervous to post this now on the chance that something in the sequel ends up not jiving with my plans for this story. Part of me thinks it might be better to just wait. Buuut I've been waiting for three years to get this chapter out there already, so I'm posting this anyway. If I need to go back and make revisions after BotW 2 comes out, so be it. With my track record and the fact that the game looks to be reusing a lot of assets, I might not even be that far into this story before the game comes out.

Anyway! Rambling over. I'm almost done with chapter two, so that should be out fairly soon. In the meantime, feel free to drop a review!