He swings his sword and lands what must be the hundredth fateful blow, echoing the same fluid motions of the God knows how many slashes came before it. The villain falls, and the blade, which seemed so comfortable in his hands at the beginning of his journey, is all too heavy in them now.
Sitting on a rock, he sticks the sword into the rock and breathes, in and out, in and out. He is tired, too tired for one his age – but perhaps not, as one's body can be deceiving. Again and again and again he has set out on this journey to defeat the darkness, to seal him away, to save her, and finally he feels it all catching up to him.
He is so weary, and every breath is taken as if he were an old man about to collapse. Pain pounds in his head, and all the guilt and pain and toil that he's ever felt returns to him in a single instant and makes him want to sleep forever.
But he knows that when his heart stops beating, whenever that will be, that his spirit will leave and return again all too soon, and he will be as exhausted as if he had never rested at all. And this is what silently infuriates him, yet even more than that makes him dread the eternal, unending future.
He dreads the nights without sleep for fear of monsters, the ones dear to him getting hurt or kidnapped, that man's evil laugh and the fear inducing darkness that surrounds him; yet he knows that this monotonous journey, the steps that he will take yet again, stretch as far into the horizon as one could see, were such things really visible.
Weakly, he looks at the villain, dying on the ground, and the boundary between them seems to blur and shake. He asks him whether he enjoys this cursed immortality. For a moment, he swears he sees the same regret in the evil man's eyes, the same repetitious thoughts and realizations. He is soon proved wrong, however, as the dark man's blank expression transforms into a toothy grin.
No.
It's too amusing.
And the hero sitting on the rock can perfectly understand what he's saying, but that doesn't mean he has to like it.
--
Later, as he watches the sunset together with her as they stand serenely next to her, he turns to her and asks the same question.
She looks at him with utter regret in her eyes, and the sadness of a kingdom destroyed and rebuilt, and destroyed and rebuilt, and brought down to as low a kingdom can go without being completely dissolved, in agony, and she has already answered the question that despite her sense of duty and knowing that it has to be them, she still wishes for reprieve. She still wishes to be blind, deaf, ignorant, if only for a moment, so she no longer has to go through this eternity of returning in a different time only to find that everything you knew has gone and everyone that could be called a friend is long dead.
And as the sun sets and drags the rest of the light down with it, he can't help but think that this weariness is probably what really sets them apart, this hero and villain. Then again, this could just be another false truth that will be erased in one, two, three hundred years as he lives yet again.
Finally, when the night is so dark that even the moon and the stars seem to have disappeared, he closes his eyes.
Futile, really; he'll still be weary when he wakes up.
End--
…sigh. Based off the idea that in every game, the main character is a reincarnation of Link, the same soul... and if he were to know all his past lives.