First Light, Last Light
Disclaimer: I do not own Zelda.
--
Death crept into the world in which they languished, sliding with sinuous fingers free of the shadows, sighing with impatience on the wind, transforming the patchwork-quilt fields to dross, the air cold and sharp, the sky from blue to brooding gray. It drifted, festered, worked its way into cracks of poorly constructed mortar and as it scrabbled against the walls of Hyrule's highest tower, that illusory stronghold, the princess imprisoned in its single room shifted and grimaced against the pressure of a pea.
Zelda considered this room, as she had countless times, the morbid stillness of this funereal sickroom. She had become too familiar with this room. Its walls were round – of course, a tower had no sides – its ceiling high, all but lost in shadow. What rested in the rafters of a night? Bats? Below her, scratchy against her bare feet, was the straw that had served as a makeshift bed. She would toss and turn upon it come nightfall, seeking insulation against the gelid wind to no avail, restless though her entire body screamed for sleep. She would lie on that straw staring sightless up at the ceiling and listening to the bats above, hunger gnawing at her gut, her skin cold with sweat.
Across from where she lay curled up like a fist, just right of the door, a pail overflowing with shit. They'd been here for quite some time. Next to the rancid pail – she'd need this, could never forget this – a pitcher half-full with rainwater collected with shaky pale hands. There, the door. She'd considered that door, making it the crux of her attention. Oaken and bound in iron, no obstacle to one imbued with the powers of the Triforce, surely, yet impervious to blows and cries, even the slightest hint of magic. No sounds issued from outside that door, not the merest word. Every day, a thousand times a day, she'd crawled over to that door, banging, scratching, demanding release, and still there was no sound. For her efforts she'd gotten gouges left by her nails, the faintest hint of blood, tears.
To her left was the window. There was no pane there, no glass. Back before the hunger had stolen her strength, she would creep over to the window, peer out at the expansive view. Even now, she had no idea where they were. The land without was old land. Tall evergreens sighed as they brushed together, giving way to wild undergrowth closer to the tower, all undisturbed by the trampling of men. They must have been close to the sea. On still nights, every night, she could hear it, the din of enormity crashing against some unseen shore. All around their prison whispered death, the rustling of the deep forest, the remembered sound of Ganondorf's men hastily leaving them to their death.
She imagined falling free of the tower from that window. It wouldn't be so hard, even now. Crawl over till she was in the square of gray light slanting through the window, pull her weakened body up to the sill, and sit there for a moment feeling the wind slice through her threadbare nightgown like a knife. Then she'd lean forward and let go, overcome by the irresistible urge to fall, falling deliriously to her death as the wind rushed past.
The thought tempted her. It begged more fiercely ever day. Only he held her back.
To her right, a rag resting on a clump of rags, was Link – her companion, the only thing right in this mess. He'd been a renowned knight, once, a terror in the lists, a soft-spoken blue-eyed warrior straight out of a maiden's dream. She fell in love with him without a second thought till his presence was something she craved and needed. Badly. All the time. It was all very innocent. They would walk together through her private courtyards at night, enjoying each others' presence, indulging in the mingled scents of sweat and jasmine. He would smile down at her and touch her cheek so softly, the slightest graze of skin against skin. They would lay sprawled out on her immense featherbed, discussing matters of court heatedly, teasing each other in dramatic whispers, she reciting poetry from a book when Link fell silent, entreating him to listen. Then letting the book of poems fall to the rushes when Link kissed her, eager for them to be joined.
Now they were joined, as Zelda had once wished, more intimately than she'd ever imagined. But there was no privacy, or rather, too much. She watched him grow thinner, paler, and more silent as the days wore on, almost as if he were drawing into himself. He watched her, too, the intensity of his stare making her feel edgy. Yet he proved to be a comfort as well. Link was always willing to provide a distraction from their thoughts with a quip, a proverb learned in his forest home. They lay together on the stained straw of a day, close as lovers, never touching as lovers, marking the passage of time in each others' eyes. In him she could find comfort and peace.
She must have made some sound, because he stirred and looked over at her. Zelda felt her stomach turn with uneasy guilt as he fixed her with that look, a stare that came from eyes sunken into what was no more than a skull. "Is it dawn? Zelda?" His voice was papery and weak.
She couldn't find the strength to answer him. Instead she turned to face the wall to hide the tears in her eyes, her bones protesting at the movement, the straw sticking her side. The sun rose and fell and rose again, and above them the bats shrieked and slept, but somehow dawn never came.
--
It began with a legend told to her when she was no older than seven, of a princess and hero blessed by the gods who'd sealed away a great evil. She'd been named Zelda, like her, was wise and patient and kind, unlike her. He'd been a nameless shadow, yet tireless, driven, and courageous as Link. The third, evil incarnate, was patient and powerful, sleeping now, but ever waiting for his next chance to strike. How stupid! she'd thought, even then. Hyrule had been peaceful and prosperous since time immemorial; certainly such a tale of strife would have been recorded in the history books, if ever it had happened.
It began with Link bursting into her barricaded bedchamber on a night alight with fire, telling her wild-eyed that the king was dead, the castle invaded, and they must flee or else die on the edge of a sword of a man who'd lived only in legend. Link's hand on her shoulder, Link's hand on her hand, Link's hand pulling her forward as they raced toward the stables, no time for a cloak or even to change into warmer clothes, and all around them sounded the clash of fighting, voices crying for mother and death, the sickening thrum of magic.
Then as her fingers – soft, useless, stupid fingers – fumbled with the tack, Ganondorf slid from the stable's shadows. He was a specter of legend, his name going back and back through time though he appeared before them fifty at most. He felled the horse with a gesture, backhanded her when she screamed – Link swore he'd kill him for that – and spoke. That was the most terrible thing, the way he spoke, his voice heavy with icy promise as if they would understand his intent. "First I'm going to fuck you," he said, making no move to do anything of the sort, "then I'm going to claim your crown, and then I'm going to leave you somewhere to die. It's so good to see you again, Princess Zelda."
That was when things went black. Her mind cringed, didn't want to look. Nevertheless, there were a few moments in time that flashed before her as they were escorted to their death: her flung over a horse's back like a saddlebag, watching the hard-packed earth below fly past as they galloped forth, blindfolded nights spent before some campfire, the Triforce of Wisdom glimmering on the back of her hand. It all faded. Wisdom was as nothing without the courage to act on it, and the power to make those actions worthwhile.
Then the tower, being carried up an endless spiral of stairs by one of Ganondorf's men, higher and higher, trying to suppress the sheer terror that came with not knowing where they were, the absurd helplessness and disorientation of it all. Then being unceremoniously dumped in a tower room, this room, with Ganondorf leering down at where they lay. "Here it ends," he breathed, deaf to their protests. Did he think the time he'd spent imprisoned by a princess and her hero a mere twinkling? "Every day, every damned day I spent in the Sacred Realm, I burned to show you two the courtesy you showed me. I do hope you suffer, as I have suffered, princess. Link."
It ended with him leaving them as they were, leaving them locked into their fate. Link throwing his weight against the door, shouting vile curses, while she curled into herself, weeping at the remembered feeling of Ganondorf moving between her thighs, weeping at the thought of dying here – no, we can't die! Farore forbid, we're only eighteen! – then falling into a shallow sleep as the darkness swept over them for what seemed forever.
--
"Do you remember when you first presented me to the king?" Link asked suddenly.
Startled, Zelda looked up from her hands – how they trembled, her hands, skeletal in the grayish morning light… Eventually her lips, chapped and painful, spread in a slow smile. "Of course I remember. I'm not like to forget that spectacle for as long as we live."
"Spectacle?" Link scoffed, paused. "You know, I don't think he was pleased to see me."
"Well, no," she admitted slowly, trying to lose herself in the picture he painted of earlier days. "I was promised to another lord, you might remember, when you took me for your queen of love and beauty. Why, he might have thought it an insult!"
"You were beautiful," he said wistfully.
Zelda's smile twisted at that. She had been beautiful, yes. She was not so now. Starvation and imprisonment had changed her, as it had him. Sometimes she would see her reflection in the pitcher of rainwater that was their livelihood. She looked like a corpse. Her skin, pale as death, was pulled tautly over the bone, showing starkly the skull beneath. Her hair hung to her shoulders, falling out in places, brittle as straw. And her eyes betrayed a hunger too profound for words, expressed only in half-remembered dreams, but she didn't like to think on that. "So you said to my father."
"…Over and over." His laughter came suddenly, brief and tinged with exhaustion. "I think that was all I knew how to say, I was so far gone."
"Yes. I know. You nearly cut yourself to ribbons with your dagger, for Din's sake, staring at me. But I knew then that you admired me for my beauty as well as my vast intelligence, sense of leadership, and all the rest." She dismissed it all out of hand, not liking to think on that dinner with Link and her father, on the satiety and promise of dinner (what had they had during that dinner? Swan? And cucco glazed with honey), not when hunger was on her so strong that she thought she might faint.
"All the rest, yes." His sunken expression turned thoughtful then, almost meditative. "You know…he was a fool, not to see it."
"Who?"
"Ganondorf." The answer, though expected, made her skin crawl. Link continued on, oblivious. "He must have known we weren't the ones he sought. Yet he cornered us anyway…"
"He knew it wasn't us that he sought," she said, as she said every time they explored this thought. There was no bitterness, no anger in her words; those emotions had long since left her as her thoughts resolved around death. "Remember what I told you, once? Men will see what they expect to see…and we happened to be what he was looking for. That's why we've ended as we have; no more, no less."
Link stared at her blankly for a moment. Then it was he who turned away, his face taut with a wordless fury. Zelda's heart ached for him then. She longed to reach out to him, to twine their fingers together. And she cursed her body, thin weakened useless body, for lacking the strength to move. The day trembled on the edge of ending. Link kept his stony silence, and still she could not summon the strength to rise. And she did not rise.
--
Starvation perpetuated insomnia, a tenuous sort of mania. When finally Zelda managed to sleep, shallow half-sleeps broken at the merest sound, she contemplated hunger.
Hunger was desperation, wild and loose. It was a monstrous beast, savaging and tearing at the hollow place where her heart had been. It was an emblem held as their need, as a wizard thief's terrible vengeance manifest. Hunger was desire, poison. It was the raging passion of her first love, and last, her ship pulled irresistibly toward its guiding star. It was the strange erotic energy that she had felt, once, sitting across a table from Link playing at tiles, watching his eyes filled with a heaviness she did not understand then.
Hunger was dreaming of eating. And eating. She dreamed of that dinner with Link and the king – Link bored and miserable in a borrowed surcoat, her father silently furious, and she taking a queen's portion from every plate. She ate mounds of potatoes, lamb crusted with mint, even swan that she loathed, on and on until there was no more room left. She apologized for eating so much, but she was so hungry, more than she could ever express, the hunger such that no amount of food could quiet it.
She dreamed of a thousand dinners, insatiable clawing desperate hunger, fingers to mouth tangy with the sudden taste of blood. Then she realized she wasn't dreaming any longer, that she was chewing on her fingers in the darkness, relishing the taste of blood, frantic for the sensation of fullness in whatever way that was possible. Hunger was being trapped in a tower way away, dying of hunger, with nothing to fill the void but flesh and the salty warmth of inexplicable tears.
--
It started as suddenly as their lives stopped. The pitcher emptied. The sky mocked them, cloudless yet gray, and their urine was so concentrate that neither could stand the thought of relying on it. Still, for a while, it served. Zelda tore her fingers to tatters, but it wasn't enough. And then they ran out of time.
The sun rose and fell and rose again, and Zelda found she could not move. She tried to calm herself, tried to concentrate instead on the beating of her heart, slow starved heart, as the sun began to fall again. "Link?" she called, her voice a shade below a whisper.
She tried to move again, and was this time successful. Zelda rolled over onto her side, looking at Link through dull eyes. His eyes were closed, yet his brow was twisted with pain, his breathing too shallow for her to follow. Alive? Good. She embraced the thought, wearing it like an emblem, returning to it like picking at a sore that had never really healed, repeating it over and over in her head as the bats awoke above and the sun fell again.
Daylight. Zelda awoke with a start, never realizing that she'd been asleep, her body trembling with the last protests of living, the faintest trace of sweat on her brow. Link appeared as he had last night, every night, still with that queer expression of anguish on his face. Was that the face of death? she wondered, her thinking far away now. Where was the promise of death, soft and slow, as she'd wished for it a thousand times?
Link? Had she said his name, or thought it? He didn't stir, even still, but she couldn't be sure. She wouldn't allow herself to be sure, not yet.
She tried to move toward him, wanting the close contact more than anything. She couldn't do it. She imagined his heart, how it must be beating like hers now, slow, weary, shriveled, and anxious for rest. That most of all. She imagined pressing herself against him now, feeling the hardness of bones, the concavity of his stomach encased by hipbones and the ribcage, the stillness of his heart.
She imagined death, as it had approached him. Like a tentative lover naked for the first time, soft, shy, slow. Like she had been before him the first time, marveling at the candlelight yellow against the muscles of his arms, the moisture glistening on his neck where she'd kissed him, the sudden chill she felt as she pulled her chemise over her head, baring herself to him. His eyes locked on her eyes and his lips on her lips, his hand between her legs soft, shy, slow. No past and no future and no terrible legend waiting to usher them to their early death. Nothing had ever been so patient, not even Ganondorf, trapped for years in that holy asylum. She wanted nothing more than to embrace him, brush away his tears if he cried in death, and stay close to him as they both faded away.