One. Two. Three. Five. Ten. Twenty. A hundred.
Such menial spans of time were hardly significant to him. A minute, a year, it made no difference. He - a being born of resilience, having lived through centuries, eons even - could not hope to keep track of his life span. For all he knew, he simply existed, and his existence would not end until an undeterminable point in the future.
Perhaps it would not end at all.
In hindsight, he should have seen this coming. This emptiness. This stagnancy. This nothing.
It had seemed like such a harmless affiliation… He, by some divine prank, spared and cast back into the world without purpose. A punishment? At the start of their partnership he would have viewed it as such, but even he could not resist his own nature – to serve. With the demon king gone, he - the sky child, the successor of his master - was the only one fit to do so. A blade without a hand to wield it was hardly of any value after all. And after everything had been taken away from him, value was all he had left.
In the back of his mind he knew it was foolish, to allow such a bond to be forged between them, for this very reason. Again, it seemed like a punishment, the most cruel of all. How long had it been since he'd watched the boy wilt? It could have been minutes, it could have been days.
But the crumbling walls of the goddess's temple told otherwise. Vines ran along whatever parts of the frame were still standing, sunlight freely shining down into the structure. The Master Sword was still in its pedestal, untouched since its spirit had been sealed within it permanently. The surrounding woods had grown thick, hardly traversed by what humans remained in this part of the land; most had branched off from the settlement at this point, beginning anew in other parts of what was once known as the surface.
He stood before the holy blade, the blade he'd clashed with many a time before, but he didn't spare it a glance.
The demon knew that the cycle set forth by Demise would perpetuate itself infinitely. He could pursue his former master – either of them, if he so desired. But was there really a point to that? Should he find his fallen king, defeat would only follow – should he find his hero, time would only claim him once more and he would be forced to watch as he withered and died.
It was fate that brought them together, and it was fate that would tear them apart, again and again.
An anger, so intense it made him cold, surged within him. How could he leave him like this, in this torturous state of limbo? How could he suffer defeat by his hand, suffer being saved by his hand, only to be abandoned by him? How much more of this could he take before he went mad?
As quickly as it came, it sputtered out. Time to grovel, time to contemplate, time to decide what he would do when the opportunity came was something he had plenty of.
He stood, frozen in his own immortality.
He waited.