Disclaimers: The Legend of Zelda belongs to Nintendo. The Firefly title theme belongs to Joss Wheedon.

Notes: I received Skyward Sword as an early Christmas present and felt inspired by playing a little ways into it. I'd barely gotten out of Skyloft and the inspiration was immediate. This fan fiction, however, is not a Skyward fic – this is set in the universe of The Great Desert, an alternate universe / future-timeline-set fan fiction of mine and Sailor Lilithchan's. This story takes place after the events of The Great Desert and, while you're welcome to read it as a separate fic, you aren't going to understand a lick of it unless you've read The Great Desert first. This is for fans of that fan fiction, and the rest – click my name to get my profile, scroll down and you'll find it. It's one of the very few Legend of Zelda Westerns in existence, if not the only LoZ Sci-Fi/Western in existence.

THE LAST KING OF HYRULE

"Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand," Link sang. He was riding through the Tantari Waste on a strong young gelding. He wished the horse was his beloved old mare, Rhiannon, but she was in no condition for riding. In fact, he expected her to pass on any day now, for her age was fading her.

A song had been going through his head. It was a tune he could not shake.

"I don't care, I'm still free, they can't take the sky from me…"

He looked up at the semi-cloudy blue expanse above him. The song was from a story he couldn't remember but it had been spinning around his brain for the last two days now, ever since he'd had a profound dream. The once-Hero had thought he'd run through all of his "visions" during his quest to bring balance to the kingdom back when he was on the cusp of manhood. He was thirty-five now, the King of Hyrule, a father and living a somewhat quiet life – as quiet a life as a king who took an active role in the lives of his subjects could have. Hyrule was at peace and had good relations with all of its neighbors.

This is precisely why receiving a vision had surprised him. The world was in no danger for the time being, furthermore, the "Hero of Tides" as he was called had gained a knowledge of his past lives. He couldn't remember everything about them at all times, but he'd had the general impression of having lived them. A number of Heroes from the Past had aided him upon the quest he'd taken in his youth, but a number of his past selves had refrained from appearing to him for whatever reason. Link was occasionally treated to a vision or a dream even in the days of his "retirement."

Always, for his benefit, the past Heroes appeared to him first in a symbolic animal-form before becoming who they were. They seemed to come whenever he needed some kind of assistance in his life – a sort of formal encouragement. There were some in Hyrule who'd heard of the visions who were certain that their king was mentally ill, but Link's authority was not challenged, for he was considered a fair and benevolent king. He let Zelda take the reins of power for the most part. He only shared his visions with her anymore, due to the fact that he disliked being called crazy. Magic was steadily coming back to Hyrule, but regarding some things, most in the land retained a pragmatic and cautious skepticism. The land had lived devoid of most of its ancient magic for entire lifetimes. For people who had not grown up with magic, even the fairies at the springs in the greening land were hard to accept. Link remembered how hard they were for him to accept. Rulers receiving visions proved to be too much for a majority of cautious, pragmatic hearts.

"The Iron Horse," also known as the "Engineer" had appeared to him when he was in the palace library going over a faded old train schedule from back in the heyday of train travel. This past Hero had helped him to re-establish working rail-lines all over Hyrule. The kid had appeared to him as a spirited young colt before showing himself as a young engineer who told Link everything he thought there was to know about trains and then some. The Hero of Tides would never have accomplished the project without the help of this particular former self. The tradespeople of Hyrule benefited enormously from the endeavor.

The vision that had him fixated on the sky today, however, was quite a bit different. Link had been visited in a dream by an enormous bird, as red as blood. He recognized the creature as an extinct animal, a mythical bird, in fact. The bird had metamorphosed into a young man who informed Link that "loftwings" were, indeed real – or at least had been in his lifetime and that he had been bonded to one. Link knew that this Hero was a particularly ancient presence – even older than the Hero of Time. This ancient Hero told the Hero of Tides that in his own time, he was simply "The Chosen Hero," but would take the title of the "Sky-Ward" for his benefit, "ward" being another word for "protection" or "protector." Link of Tides chose to call him "Hero of the Sky" instead. They both deemed that "uncreative, but serviceable."

The vision spoke of swords. The Hero of the Sky had apparently entered Link's dreaming state to warn him to keep the Master Sword close. This wasn't a problem – Link had plans to be buried with the thing, shirking tradition. When a Chosen Hero was done using the sacred sword in his quest, it was tradition to put it away in the place where it was found or to have it kept in the palace. Link wasn't comfortable with that. The whole business with the demise of Ganondorf and Ice Queen Cecelia had left him mildly paranoid. He did not wish to part with his greatest weapon just in case Hyrule was once again in greatest need while he lived. Besides, he figured it would be easier for his successor to find and enter his tomb than to go through the ordeal of finding gems or pearls or whatever other incarnation the sacred objects of the Goddesses took to get the thing. Link took his ancestor's appearance as a warning of approaching peril and made a mental note to keep alert.

The Hero of the Sky was impressed with how well the Hero of Tides had bonded with the Master Sword. "The bond is vital," he'd said. "She has saved our lives more times than we can think of to thank her for. The interface was a little more direct with me than it has been with you and others. Don't feel bad, though. You've bonded to your blade in an age when most people no longer respect the ways of the sword."

The Hero of Tides remembered giving his predecessor a broad grin in his dreamscape. "I enjoy my gun, too," he'd said, "There is a lot of power in it. It's a nice, easy ranged-weapon, but a sword has a crucial advantage over a gun: Swords don't run out of ammo."

"Well said," was the reply. It was then that Link awoke, nestled in bed next to his sleeping wife. Zelda cuddled into him, against the beating of his clockwork heart. He spared a glance to the wall next to the bed where he kept the Master Sword mounted. He told Zelda of his dream when she awakened.

He'd awakened before she did, of course. It was his custom. One thing he knew about all of his lifetimes is that his was, or had been, apparently, a rather lazy spirit. From the impressions that he could remember, he'd greatly enjoyed sleep in all of his lifetimes and had been prone to oversleeping. His current lifetime was almost the opposite. Link supposed he could have become a sleepyhead or a lazy Hero if he'd been left to his own devices but from his earliest days, his Uncle Russ had whipped the laziness right out of him. Everyone on Ordona Ranch was typically up at dawn and that included kids who had farm chores, too. If Link tried to sleep in so much as five minutes, he'd get the dinner-triangle ringing in his long, sensitive ears and maybe dragged up by the scruff of his pajamas and given a literal boot out of bed. As king, he could set his own hours now if he really wanted to, but being up with the dawn had been ground into him.

He was riding through Tantari today to remind himself that he was himself. Voices and impressions from the past felt like they overwhelmed him sometimes. Zelda had said that this was perhaps why he was slow to remember other lifetimes and sometimes didn't remember at all. She could handle such knowledge better. Link, on the other hand, had been feeling a bit "scattered," lately, like the past was threatening to take over.

He'd come to the desert because the desert was HIS. Hyrule had become a green, soft land after he'd balanced the powers. The forests were returning at a strong, steady rate. The seas and lakes had returned as well – hence his title "Hero of Tides." The Tantari Waste was a portion of Hyrule that had retained the austerity of a natural desert. It was a section of the map that was meant to be a desert and now was the only area of the kingdom that reminded Link of what he'd grown up in.

In creating a beautiful future for Hyrule and in saving the world, he had, in effect, destroyed his own home. He came here often to feel the baking sun on his face and to hear the shuffle of sand beneath his boots or the hooves of a horse. He came to witness the expanse and the stark shadows made by tall, thorny plants.

The desert was HIS. His vision. His personality. His symbolism. His home.

It was in this place that he truly felt himself.

Certain things awakened the sensations left behind by past Heroes. The Hero of Tides opted not to wear a watch if he could help it. He disliked the sounds made by clocks. This had never been a problem before his Hero-making quest, but it had been a problem ever after. The sound of time ticking by unnerved him slightly. He had played around with the fabric of Time in multiple lives, but he knew the uneasy feelings came from the memory-impression left upon him by the Hero of Time. He had been Time's Hero, but Time had not been particularly good to him. He also got some of the Hero of Time's neuroses whenever there was a full moon. Link had always thought the full moon to be beautiful until sometime after his quest. Nowadays it gave him a sense of apprehension and a profound sadness. Somehow, it reminded him that everyone and everything he loved was temporary and could end at any moment – like the moon itself might fall from the sky.

He felt other sensations from the full moon, too, the impressions of another Hero. On full moon nights Link would feel very primal. Sometimes he got the urge for exploration and would take long walks under such a moon. He caught himself singing more than once. The castle guards thought he was drunk. He sometimes got the urge to send a letter to Midna in the Twilight Realm requesting the stone that could transform him into a coyote so he could hunt on four paws on moonlit nights. He knew all of these impressions were leftovers from the Hero of Twilight with his wolfish nature. In either case, between feeling like the world is about to end and feeling enlivened, Link lived, laughed, ate and loved with more gusto during the full moon than at any other time.

He was pretty sure he'd begotten all of his daughters during full moon…

Rabbits, hares and handheld mirrors of a certain shape belonged to the Hero of Dreams. Seeing black cats cross his path gave Link stirrings from the Lost One. Going to the coast to see the ocean gave him overwhelming feelings of freedom and hope born in his lifetime as the Hero of Winds. The changing seasons in the new forests echoed to him of the Hero of Nature. He felt a thrill of fear whenever he got sick with anything that affected the lungs courtesy of the unfortunate death of the ancient Hero-King of Hyrule. The Hero-King, however, was also the source of the wonderful feeling when he and Zelda kissed – it always carried the thrill of the very first time. Link knew that the Hero-King took quite a long time to win his era's incarnation of Zelda.

The Hero of the Sky had his Zelda from the beginning. They'd been close all their lives. The Hero of Tides envied his past incarnation for that. He also envied him for the blue above his head. Thanks to the recent dream, Link knew now with a strong feeling and with utter certainty that there was a time when he owned the sky. He did not own the sky now. He sometimes wondered if he could ever find the Goddesses again if they'd find a way to send him into the black beyond the sky.

He might get a chance to own the sky again, he knew. There were people all over Hyrule who were developing new technologies – aeroplanes and devices using steam-power-chasing dreams of outstripping the birds on the thermals.

Back in the age of giant avian mounts, who needed an aeroplane?

That era had faded away long ago – along with all the other eras of the world. Link was actively trying to ensure the fading of his era – or at least the ancient way of things. Although he was the King of Hyrule, he did not like the system of monarchy very much. It had always worked well with the right people in charge – namely Zelda – but the history of the eras-between-the-Eras was rocky, shaky and bloody. The betrayal of the Sheikah came to mind as well as the near-extermination of the Gerudo and other things that left the land open to dark influences and the rise of recurrent evils.

The experiment with partial democracy Zelda's father had enacted had not gone well. Ganondorf was made the people's representational president, after all, but that had happened because of corruption. Link had always liked the idea behind it, however – that the people could elect representatives to present themselves before the Royal Family.

Or representatives that would replace the Royal Family.

Link envisioned a fully-representational government, a method by which the people of Hyrule could govern themselves. It was not perfect and he knew that the Council of Elects or the Congress or whatever they'd agreed on calling the thing was going to play hosts to lots of internal issues and petty squabbles, but he thought it might be a nice change from one or two people deciding the fate of the entire land.

Link knew that he and Zelda would rule the Hyrule that they knew until the day that they both were dead. They needed to. The people looked up to them and were not ready for a change so sweeping in this lifetime, but Link had already been setting up plans for the transition of power.

It was a passing of eras. Everything passed.

He looked up to the sky. He'd owned it once.

"So," the Hero of the Sky had asked him in that vivid dream, "If all goes according to your plans, when you become as me – a part of the Past - you shall be the last king of Hyrule."

"Yes," the Hero of Tides had replied. "Don't you think it might be better that way – a world without kings?"

"Do you think it will be a world as free as the sky?"

"I think it might possibly well be. That is my hope."

"Keep your sword close."

Link rode through the desert – his desert – with those words echoing in his mind. "Keep your sword close."

END.