Zelda grunted and forced Impa's shoulder back into place.
The pair took refuge some miles from Hylium, deep within the uncharted lands of the east. Though the east seemed trapped in perpetual rain, the many caves and tunnels that ran beneath its surface hid them from the prying eyes of others.
The first of the two—Zelda—was shorter by several inches. Her flesh was dark of tint, a deep brown complemented by the bright red of her hair. She wore a jointless suit of plate colored black that's chest had been battered and bent, while the left arm of the suit had been ripped away as if by the claws of an animal, revealing skin beneath that remained somehow unharmed.
The second bore the name of Impa. Of the two, she was the younger by two years and was close to the age of twenty-two. Her flesh was fairer than that of Zelda's, but red warpaint covered much of her face, near washed away by the perpetual rain. It was Impa who suppressed a cry of pain as agony rippled across her arm and threatened to jerk away from Zelda's grip.
When it was over, Impa gasped, but calmed herself a moment later, falling against the wall of the cave. Unlike Zelda, she wore no armor. Her suit was blue and formfitting, and across its chest, a red eye with a white pupil stared out at the world.
Zelda was the calmer. She remained standing, holding an oil lamp in her left hand. "Is it set?"
Impa rotated the relocated arm. "Yes, princess."
"Good." And though more words seemed poised to follow the first, none did. Zelda narrowed her eyes and stared at the ground.
There was silence.
Impa stood. "You father will seek us out if we wait too long."
Though Zelda did not respond to the statement, she turned her head slightly in acknowledgement. "So much lost, all for nothing," she said, her voice harsh, yet little more than a whisper. She slumped against the wall and slipped into a sitting position on the floor, though her form seemed no less fearsome for it. "My father knew it all, even before I'd thought of it. He was ready for me from the start."
After some hesitation, Impa moved and stood beside her.
There was silence again.
"He didn't take everything, Princess," Impa said. She crossed her arms. Much blood stained the chest of Impa's outfit, but none of it belonged to her. "We are still alive."
Zelda's expression did not change. She pulled one leg to her chest and wrapped an arm around it, stretching the other out in front. She stared at the wall opposite, before closing her eyes and sighing. "Why do you stay with me, Impa?"
"Because I am yours, princess."
Zelda's expression softened. Her left hand continued to hold the oil fueled lamp, which cast both Impa and herself in an orange glow. In that light, the princess looked older. The lines across her face seemed elongated and withered, and the shadows tore at her eyes. At last, Zelda rose and turned to Impa.
She placed a hand upon the girl's better shoulder. In the slightest of gestures, she nodded to Impa, for it was all she seemed able to muster.
Impa placed a hand atop Zelda's. "You are stronger than the best of us, princess. You will find another way."
Zelda retracted her hand and turned away. The walls of the cave looked almost soft when cast in the light. They glistened, and soaked, and when Zelda placed a hand against one, refreshed her, and provided solace to dry flesh. She bent her gaze down and thought, and for a while, there was little beyond thinking.
"There must be something my father cannot prepare for," Zelda said, her voice a harsh mixture of rage and doubt. "Something he cannot prepare for. He is not eternal. There was a time before he came to Hylium." But when no solution came, Zelda slammed her fist against the wall. "Dammit!"
The flame of the lantern sputtered.
The beat against the wall till her fist began to bruise. "That assault was everything! Fourteen years of research and planning and preparation and—"
Zelda quivered and her expression twisted up into a contained scream.
"There must be something. The Master Sword cannot be it. If I cannot have the arrows of light, I will find some other way to kill him." She turned and paced, walking in circles as the flame coughed and sparked against the sloshing of its oil. "We must return to Catalia. I need to have the records—all of them. There must be something I missed."
"Princess, your father will turn his armies to Catalia next—"
"Irrelevant!" She sat the lamp on the ground for fear of spilling it. "We will go back. There must be something—" Zelda stopped and twisted her hands into her hair, slamming her eyes shut to hold back tears that threatened to compromise her. "We will go back and I will kill him. I will kill my father again and again and again until he stays dead!"
"…Princess, we are not alone. We must find the others who survived and regroup."
At those words, Zelda calmed. She stopped her pacing and began to laugh.
A short, desperate laugh.
"Of course," Zelda said.
Though the world outside offered little light, Zelda hefted the lamp and exited unto the jagged world; a landscape where the mountains drove towards the sky like teeth, and where there the dirt was naught but red. Silhouetted against the sky above, massive winged beasts that soared thousands of feet above the ground.
Even from below, they were intimidating in size, stretching twice in length what Zelda was tall, and covered in feathers caked in black tar. Where their heads should have been were gaping maws with no eyes and no nostrils. Though it seemed impossible for such blind, crippled beasts to navigate the skies, they managed, and emitted a noise that might have been breathing with every other flap of their uneven wings.
And in the reddened skies of the east, they numbered in the hundreds.
At the mouth of the cave, Zelda lifted a hand signaling Impa to stop.
"My father has the Amoroks searching for survivors," Zelda said, and stepped backwards into the tunnel, disappearing from view just as one of the featureless maws turned towards the pair, before moving on in disinterest. A moment later, the beast broke into a dive that sent a ripple through the air, disappearing into the teeth of the land before leaping to the sky with a half-dead figure clutched in one of its deformed talons.
Zelda turned and strode further into the tunnel, though her steps slowed as the path grew narrow.
Behind her, Impa followed with silent steps detectable only to the most sensitive of ears. Her form was only sometimes visible in the flickering orange light of the oil lamp, a glow that seemed to fade as the darkness around them grew deeper, till at last only the lower half of Zelda's arm seemed visible in the shadows.
Somewhere ahead, a moan of pain.
Zelda stopped, as silent paused as she was in motion.
Words followed the moan. "Princess Zelda?"
Zelda stepped forward and lowered the lamp, though the light still seemed so insignificant. "Commander Ralis?" she said, finding the crumpled form of a man laid against the tunnel's wall. He held a hand to his side, against thick gray armor built of metallic scales.
At the words, he looked up, revealing the fish-like extension of his head and eyes of pure black. But as he moved, he cringed, cried out in pain, and buckled against his left side, where he continued to press his hand against his armor. Blood ran freely from a clean cut in his pale blue flesh. One of the fins that would have normally extended from his forearm had been ripped away, but though the flesh was bare and pink with sensitivity, it did not bleed.
Zelda knelt beside him and set the lamp on the damp ground. "You're injured."
"It's nothing," Commander Ralis said, though they seemed words spoken on instinct. "I could stand… but I thought I'd find you—if I waited long enough." He smiled, though it was disingenuous. "I'll live… if you give me a little while."
Propping himself up against the wall, he forced his body to stand, biting his teeth down as he swallowed screams. The standing did little for him, and seemed only to accelerate the blood loss, but he maintained it, and looked to Zelda with as much sanity as he could muster. Though he made to move, Zelda placed a hand on his shoulder to hold him.
"I have gauze that can reduce blood loss," Zelda said.
Commander Ralis leaned against the wall, an act that seemed to cause him further pain, and nodded.
Zelda knelt beside him, tapping at the waist of her armor. When nothing happened, she slammed her fist against her waist, causing a small rectangular compartment built into the waist of her plate to flip open, revealing a resistant glass vial within that remained intact, despite the force of her blows. With her unarmored hand, she pushed back the seal and allowed the gauze to ooze onto her two front most fingers before reaching through the jagged edges of Ralis' pierced armor to administer the gauze.
At her touch, Ralis winced and cried out in pain, but did not move away.
There was silence for many minutes before Zelda withdrew, stood, and said, "I can do nothing more without proper supplies.
Commander Ralis nodded. Though the standing seemed to cause pain, the severity of his expression was lessened. "The water was filled with a type of toxin I've never seen. None of the antidotes you provided us could neutralize it." Though the words laid blame, the tone did not. The tone was matter-of-fact.
Zelda nodded. It was a numb gesture. "Did any of the Zoran forces survive?"
"Ninety, maybe?"
"None of them are with you."
Commander Ralis stared at the wall opposite. His inky black eyes grew narrow, and in the weak light of the lamp, his flesh seemed more white than blue. "No, they aren't."
"How did you survive the toxin?"
"…it didn't affect me like it did the others. The water gagged me and burned my skin, but I didn't die." He pressed a hand against the hole in his armor and pulled it back as the pain flared up. "I was closer to the water's edge—close enough that I could throw myself to the rocks and hope the others did the same."
Commander Ralis blinked and turned to the deeper end of the tunnel. Without a word or an utterance of pain, he began to walk, and the exchange ended. "What of you and your maidservant, Princess Zelda?" he said. "I… hesitate to ask if you accomplished your own portion of the assault."
Zelda said nothing.
"…I see. Forgive me, Princess Zelda."
"There is nothing to forgive." Over Commander Ralis' shoulder, Zelda lifted the oil lamp and peered further into the darkness, where nothing awaited them but shadows, and the silence of an absent army. "When we return, there will be no more failure from either of us."
At age twelve, Princess Zelda killed a man while sparring.
It was an accident—too much force behind blows that were meant for friends, not enemies. And although the man had been three times her age with twice the experience, he died from a loose blow to the head. But when Zelda hung her head and turned to leave the courtyard, still carrying the numb of death across her face, her father appeared and began to clap.
Her father was taller than any man, and seemed large enough that he could snap her in two with a twitch of his fingers, so when he clapped, it echoed throughout the keep, and Princess Zelda stopped to meet the gaze of her father.
He wore a grin—a grand, evil, approving grin. "Good girl," he said.
In the courtyard, Princess Zelda turned heel and fell to one knee before her father. The words that came next were reactionary. "Thank you, father."
Her father continued to clap for a moment. His skin was much darker than hers, and the red of his hair stained with strands of silver. But his eyes juxtaposed themselves against the rest of his form. They were a bright yellow, and they saw everything. They twitched in their sockets, almost madly, and consumed every detail of the world.
Her father approached the corpse of the man she'd killed. The corpse did not bleed, but its head was caved and soft, and its eyes stared up at the red sky perpetually. Her father pushed the corpse onto its side with the toe of his boot, before he turned again to Zelda. "You finally know strength," he said. "The men I have are weak. They are all weak."
He approached Zelda and placed a hand upon her shoulder, though the limb was large enough that it could have covered both her shoulders.
"But you know power—now you do. You are my flesh, and you must not forget the hold that gives you over your lessers." Her father drew his hand away, whereupon it disappeared into the black folds of his robe. "I will give you a second. You will train her, and then she will train you. When she is competent, your training will continue."
"Yes, father," Zelda said, and stood, her gaze remaining low.
"But do not forget that you are my daughter." His gaze turned harsher then. "When you fight, do not forget that you are Gerudo. You have endured far worse than them, and the pain you know is greater than any that can be imagined."
Her father walked away then and left Zelda in the courtyard, where she stared for many minutes at the corpse. It had been a man once—a knight. He had been strong, sure in his features, and not unkind. Yet he was now a corpse staring at the sky, his face broken and beaten till it was the putty of flesh.
Amidst the scuffle of servants, Zelda navigated the dark passageways of the keep till she found her room. As she entered, she shut and latched the door behind her before leaning on it. But as she relaxed, she allowed no sighs. Her expression did not change. And as she hid away behind her desk, taking up ink and parchment, her face remained determined. Her mouth balled up and her eyes narrowed, and she wrote.
To her right was a stack of parchment near one hundred sheets in size. Throughout, the handwriting varied, each was written in a cipher of letter fragments and randomized symbols. With that same cipher, she continued to write.
For nearly a day, Zelda did not leave her room, and one of the servants was permitted only enough entrance to replace her chamber pot.
The next day, someone knocked on her door.
Zelda undid the locks and drew back.
Her father entered. Beneath the folds of his black robe, he escorted a girl of ten dressed in rags who was all bones, with not a strand of hair on her head. She was paler than most who resided in Hylium, and flinched when she saw Zelda, only for her gaze to return a moment later during an inkling of curiosity.
"This is your second," Zelda's father said as he pushed the girl forward. "I've taken her name from her. So long as she takes to your training, she is yours to mold and name."
Zelda's father drew out of the room like a ghost dressed in black, and Zelda was quick to shut and latch the door behind him, paying no heed to the girl dressed in rags till her room was secure, after which she turned to the girl and said, "Did he purchase you?"
The girl in rags did not respond. When she lifted her gaze and opened her mouth, the words fled from her tongue, and she turned shy again. At last, she nodded.
"Do you have a name?"
The girl in rags seemed to think for a moment, but if a name came to her, she did not speak it.
"Then he did take your name." Zelda leaned against her desk with the posture of one much older than herself. Though her face betrayed a mask of youth, her flesh seemed aged, as did her eyes. "He has done this before."
For a moment, Zelda pondered.
"In the old world, there was a tribe who knew how to bend the shadows, and who took their name for it. Shéikah. 'Of Shadow'." But Zelda paused. "Eémpah. 'Of Nothing'. My father wants me to raise you as an empty shell."
The girl in rags' eyes widened.
"But I will not have that. You will take the name, nothing more, and I will make sure you remain whole. Eémpah. Impa." Zelda spread her arms out from her sides. She remained dressed in the sparring gear of the previous day, and it stank of sweat and dirt, and clung to her like a second skin. "Now hit me."
The girl in rags' expression changed. Surprise. Shock. Fear. Shock.
Zelda amended her words. "I will not hurt you, but I need to know your potential."
Like a sheep, the girl in rags lashed out. There was hardly force enough behind the movement to injure a child, but the girl in rags lashed out anyway.
By the girl's first step, Zelda was no longer in front of her.
By the second, the girl in rags' face was pressed against the stonework of the floor; both her arms and one of her legs bent and held till her attempts to move them brought tears to her eyes.
But the pain was slight and passing. Zelda released her a second later, and though the girl in rags lingered on the floor, she stood, and did not allow her gaze to leave Zelda's.
Though Princess Zelda's expression did not change, something in her eyes shifted. "Yes," she said, "I can mold you." Then she said the name again: "Impa. You are of nothing, and that makes you strong. You will be a shadow capable of dealing death where no death can be had."
Zelda held her arms out at her sides again.
"Hit me."