A/N: A little character study that kept trying to ~transfoooorm~ into something complicated. This tiny thing took months because I kept having to contain its ridiculous ambitions. Possibly I should have just let it be whatever it wanted to be, and, uh. Oops.
Zelda sleeps lightly. Poorly, she would say, but doesn't. She does not want to let herself become a queen of that sort, a greedy queen, insatiable; yellow fingers, pointed teeth. A cannibal queen like the ones from the Sheikah word-patterns Impa recited to her years ago when neither of them felt like inventing stories of their own.
And when she finds that thinking of Impa troubles her, that the name twists in her heart, she opens her eyes and stares at the shadows for an hour or so. Watches them sidestep the silver scrutiny of the moon peering through her window. Shadows accompany her wherever she goes, but she loves them best at night and does not want to sleep the weight of their presence away. Even though she should, and be wakeful by dawn. Impa would disapprove of her childish insomnia and little mistakes of fatigue, she is sure.
Rest of any kind, she reminds herself, is a luxury. She could not buy it if she emptied the treasury and sold all the land held in trust by the crown and taxed people until they were paying her in their blood; and she would not do that, so far as she expects. She is not a queen of that sort. She is not cruel, only tired and perhaps a little lonely sometimes. Perhaps, she thinks; perhaps.
Eventually she closes her eyes again, hears the strings of an old qanun plucking in a dark corner of memory that does not belong to her. Like tendons glittering in terror beneath the skin, like rain cutting drought down the middle; but ah, by the sound of it, so far away. Ganondorf taught her the name of that instrument, she recalls. Years ago. She described music she had never had occasion to hear in anything other than her prophetic visions, and he told her that it could only be the qanun. She did not ask him why it could only be that, and she still has not heard a qanun play for herself. It's strange, she decides, the way trust works. She sleeps trusting that she will dream, and she dreams trusting that the prophecy has gone out of her. There is nothing to fear if she sees long, grey wolfos slipping through open doors in the market, re-emerging with red mouths and round bellies. There is nothing to fear if she sees a boy named Sheik and cannot bring herself to meet his eyes because he has none.
Desert music threads itself on the needles of doubt in her head. It loops out between the seams of her skull and fills the halls of her castle, a word-pattern left unspoken, a dream outside of sleep.