The Legend of Zelda: War Wounds
By: killerninja258
Prologue: A Terrible Fate
Darkness…
Despair…
The very concepts used to be so foreign to him. No longer. After seeing the fire and hearing the shrieks of those who couldn't stop what was happening before them, begging for any sort of divine intervention, he became all too familiar with what awaited him should he fail. A terrible fate… One that would transcend death, and torment him for eternity. A torment that would prevent him from resting. Unyielding. The evil he faced was all too familiar to him. Same desire for destruction and power, just with a different face. Some things never change, but there was one thing that did. He cursed at himself, and then looked down at his wooden torso, feeling dejected about his easy defeat and this curse laid upon him.
That dejection evolved into anger. Anger then became fury. The very thought of meeting his end, whimpering like the people around him, staring his fate right in the glowing red eyes of that cursed moon. The Hero of Time, chosen by the gods… Now a downtrodden failure. Eternally cursed. Eternally reviled. A shadow of his former self. A shade. All while this possessed scarecrow cackled arrogantly, tossing his prized ocarina up and down like a child's toy.
No. Not like this.
He did the only thing he could do. He inflated a bubble of sap, and shot it out of his mouth, smacking his ocarina out of the scarecrow's hands. As soon as it hit the ground, he scuttled to it, and grabbed it as fast as he could, before turning around and seeing the moon descending upon him. If only he had time…
It was almost too perfect. With his fairy companion Tatl calling to the goddess of time itself, he went to put the ocarina to his mouth, watching it change shapes in his hands to a set of pipes, suitable for a Deku scrub to play. He knew the melody he had to play. It had already been the song that had changed his life so drastically before. The song that introduced him to the ultimate darkness that could one day ravage the lands and lives of the world… the song that introduced him to pure evil. Ironic… that it would also be the one to save him from it as well. And so he played the Song of Time… and then felt the world reset… and start over. It was strange to him, at first, the thought of turning back time. To him, it felt relative. Time was ever changing, like he would never be part of the same line that he originated on. It felt… wrong.
What happened to those people that I left behind? Are they here? Or did they just die without me?
He kept trying to rationalize his actions. Those people could be dead, in their own time strand, left behind by the one person who could save them… used as sacrificial lambs in order for him to figure out just what he was actually going to do to stop this evil that had permeated through his own reality, or they were with him again, still unaware of the real battle that was unfolding behind them. Throughout this ordeal, that thought had crossed his mind more than once. He felt like a coward for having to do so. He was forced to call on to the power of the dead in order to help him accomplish his goal.
In the end, after he had defeated the evil that lied in Majora's Mask, and freed the Skull Kid from its evil clutches, he felt like he had finally overcome that adversity, and the necessity of making those choices for the sake of at least saving someone. The cost, however, was more than he had ever conceived. For the ability to defeat his enemy, an enemy he had come to hate, he had accepted boundless power to satisfy his goal. Worse still, it was power offered by Majora itself, a mask and a being that promised all who wields it endless power. He was blinded by hate, by duty, and he accepted the power readily.
As he parted ways with the people he had come to hold dear, and rode off with his horse into the woods, he had no doubt in his mind that Termina had changed him, but he did not quite understand how much. It seemed that fate had one more twist for him, as that world suddenly collapsed around him. As that world went dark, as it went silent… as he fell into a pit of darkness that grabbed him out of nothing, he knew that Termina was only the start. The next thing he knew was that he woke up on a beach, on some foreign island, with his horse at his side. The trinkets he had received from his time in Termina, his sword, his shield, and his masks were all gone… just like that world he had grown to know. All he had was Epona, the clothes on his back, and his Ocarina. It was as if it never happened. It was as if Termina never existed. He went through so much, fought as hard as he could, all for nothing. Eventually, a terrible thought crossed his mind.
The power he acquired… all it did was destroy what he was trying to protect. Majora got all he wanted. Destruction, and power. All he got was nothing; nothing but regret… and despair. It was then that he remembered a conversation he had once while in Termina; a single sentence that would haunt him ever since that day.
"You've met with a terrible fate… haven't you?"
A terrible fate indeed…