Bounds

by Valdrada

In the aftermath of Ganondorf's fall, the loose ends of a dominion fray and curl over the kindling ideas of a queen, tangle in the fitful winds of an incorrigible boy's passionate flight, and solidify into ballast in the fiddling hands of time. Link/Sheik

Bounds

I. Din's Fire

The flutes, how they falter!

They bring forth no water

for these shriveling lips,

these driveling ideas;

smote spread in me now

with no body to live.

With respect to the woman he had stole away from the preening eyes of the council. They were just as she said they would be: knitted brows, swiveling eyes lost in baleful scrutiny from anything to doorframes to the orchids spilling forth like milk out of the extinguished fire basins crouched across the span of the hall. With a twinge of anger thrumming through him like a sour note plucked from a lyre and captured by the infinitesimal space of apse, he watched as one greasy old man delivered penance to the queen's bodice, so close he was apt to dig out some meat while he was at advantage, he felt sure of it.

He had been itching to pitch his boomrang since the beginning of the assembly— to hell with ancient laws, stiff upper lip! It was a holocaust of everything she stood for, his Queen, and there was no way he could sit aside and watch the scourge of the ancients wash her mouth out with every harrumph and grimace. She could speak through storms, though, through their steel hearts linked in a crescent around where she would stand, slightly elevated in the middle on a platform. She would do nothing to let on to their riff-raff. She would blink the soot spots away, continue to orate, swirling language that Link imagined reaming the chasms in the spots of their soulless bodies where there was nothing collecting. It was a shame, for talking with any sort of passion behind her wouldn't make them do anything but wheeze more atrociously. It was such a trend at dinner parties, making eating as hard as chewing nails one would think, the way Zelda's molars struggled heatedly with her cud, which was exactly why the queen refused to flock her fleet together anywhere else than the hall they were in, eyes of the goddesses bearing down from the altarpiece and into the bat-eyed silence of her trusty, dusty council and relatives.

Link knew his Queen. He knew every single knuckle from small socks to his gut, every single part in her scalp from watching it fling out from its opulent manacles on horseback. He knew each freckle between her breasts, connecting them on rainy days like a kid with the tip of a feather quill when she sat glum doing paper work. There were bruises, big, masochistic bruises lounging on her lap from a history of bad suitors, a stickle-backed father, and a mother never known, taking her and dragging her under the weight like a nubile throne for them to get fat on. Because she was so used to the harshness of her life he was often heady with the desire to want to protect her more. It was fantastical in his mind, she, a humble dervish that never ceased to wipe the sand and sweat from her brow for even a second, but she was diminishing, diminishing, arms clapping against her body in deathly pirouette, eroding, reforming, receding, evolving. He remembered seeing her eyes at the entrance of the Spirit Temple six months back, two flecks of shale marooned and poised like scorpion stingers as her skin had blended with the swirling terrain in the sandstorm. He had known then, looking at her in likeliness to the usual eyes he met under the hood, though he was too warped by the heat and strain of his joints to assemble coherently the difference he sensed. He just knew it wasn't him anymore, the usual crows feet punched in the youthful face, regarding the hero always with sly amusement. Since the beginning, Link had promised to never surrender until he glimpsed that dry smile again, the tapered eye tooth holding him in gleeful wonder, like he had just struck on gold in the dolorous captivity of a mine shaft after years of breathing pure coal. Only once had Link been able to pull the mask around his neck and really look. It had been fleeting, but enough time to be able to superimpose the image on the white scrim covering the lower half of his face every time afterward, pegging it on when he witnessed the same expression in his eyes that went along with that smile.

He remembered, to his dismay, and a small whine surfacing from his throat, that any amount of happiness that happened to trickle in and fill up those hollow cheeks, the deep gulches below the man's eyes, it never truly stayed for long. Even when it did, the tick mark of worry between his eyebrows, a forever bleeding third eye, could never completely erase.

Those eyes. Those eyes like red rupees. The wear and tear of the face that being in a metaphorical mineshaft had brought him. The hooded man stamped with time's curse. The man with three eyes, one never-blinking, color of blood, on his chest. The man who was still a man, thank gods, or Link would have never known his own curse, the persona locked in paradox of having two souls full of the ancients, buffering him with teasingly similar images. Having being given the run-around with these two, man and woman, split off at the same ideals, there was one thing he could grasp in the confusion, one thing he was assured of better than anything. Those eyes of the Sheikah could not be compared to anything in this world. This he knew, just like a baby bird knew which rustle of wings to feed from.

Link, thrown for a moment, shifted his perched position on a rafter beam near one of the high windows, streaming with so much sunlight a curious soul would go blind, perhaps even mistaken him for a pointy-eared hoodoo, before they spotted him for real. He couldn't tell if Zelda knew of his presence or not, especially when the dust sifted off under his footing to powder the heads below or when his oscillating weight on the balls on his feet made the woodwork below them bellow like a cow in labor. He would wince but he doubted it couldn't be noticed amidst the cacophony of voices sustained in echoes that circled due to the height of the nave's ceilings. Even after the initial sound faded, the clover-shaped array of apses in the ceiling brayed back sounds garbled and inhuman.

He felt asinine for all it was worth, especially when his legs began to throb and he was forced to move and disturb a dust mote. "So much for stealing," he muttered. Not like he'd ever been the master of stealth, per se. When money had been tight at a couple points during his quest he had attempted pocketing a few Deku nuts in a shop only to be chased down the street with the owner's slingshot and impeccable aim, surprising for a hunchback hag with one glass eye. Even to this day his pride was still a little sore from his encounters with the sharp-eared, harpies of the Gerudo Training Ground, coupled with his several trial and errors in breaching it. Whenever he got too unruly, Zelda merely had to bring up plans of a tentative patron visit to the grounds to maybe hone up his skills, cool his head in the desert amongst all the beautiful women. That shut him up pretty quick. It was at these particular moments he offered to take mundane watches of deserted parts of the castle as treaty, though Zelda suspected he probably didn't want anyone to see him out of element, so puce in his cheeks and feverish with repulsion beyond anything rational.

It was with his own tyrannical trend in mind that he guessed the queen would be ready for his unheeding choice of antics nonetheless. He had really been brushed the wrong way when she had touched his shoulder in her private quarters that morning, occupied by the idea he was to accompany her, boomerang strapped to the bare of his back like a reminder of his crooked fury interlaid over his spine. She had felt the weapon under his tunic when she embraced him, pressing a whisper to his pulse noticeably flaying the flushing of skin on his neck.

"Take a stroll in the gardens, give Epona a stretch, play with your blasted boomerang on the ramparts, chase out the doves roosting in the armory, challenge one of my insipient brothers to a duel if that is the answer, but please, Cucco, not here."

He scowled with the memory of having to comply as she clung to him like a ReDead and wouldn't let him go until he swore on each of the three goddesses. He hadn't slept the night before, or the last. He usually spent that time pacing the perimeter of the castle walls, making no noise but his heavy, forced breathing, because he didn't want to say anything at all. He had been waiting for the right moment, hide twitching like it was full of fleas because of the self-afflicted imprisonment. He had laid dormant with the louts like a broke puppy ever since his quest had ended, waiting with a rancid eye that made even the guards flit about uneasily when he took his agitated rounds.

He stole glances at Zelda now and then from her chamber window, in the same sleepless state, pacing very like her father, hair knotted into rags, ears and jaws flexing out her strides in rhythm. He didn't have to tell her he'd been watching. She knew. She opened her window once to consult him, without, of course, initiating the chat with a childish shove that threatened his smug, tomcat façade, when he had crouched expertly on her sill. The boy was proud. Tweak one hair upon his head the wrong way and he would spit. It was a trait unbeknownst to most, except those like Zelda, who dealt with his cocky, metro sexual rituals like her days ran on a fulsomely polished, temperamental clock.

She loved the boy: fussy, prying younger brother who happened to trounce off and save the world now and again. "Hot-headed Cucco," she called him, and he shot right back, "Mother Celibate; fag hag." She had no qualms with testing the limits to which she could reel out her stress on his balls before they began to question whether they had nested under the appropriate skinny bum.

"So?" she would offer as she took swipes out of the thick of her train and dodged his trim but strong hands struggling to grab a hold of her, "I thought your manhood was already usurped, O cunning hero of the shadow glade, O reaming cutlass—"

He'd change tactics and reach for a pillow instead, walloping the queenly brow out of her as they giggled like incorrigible children. Who the hell could call them off, though, the heros of Hyrule?

"Um…my queen, you are due for—"

Link would be quick to flash a roguish grin at the wide-eyed maiden at the door. "No! No! How dare you pronounce yourself at such a religious a time as this, Fayen. Be considerate next time!"

Meanwhile, the boy would be smothering the queen's head under a gilded and tasseled pillow, a muffled laugh like sobbing emitting from underneath. Zelda would try to shrug at Fayen to convey the fact she could not help the fallacies of fickle clocks being brought forth to play her life, but the attendant would not stay for long before she went to seek the help of a higher authority. Fayen was usually too disturbed by the behavior to sort it out herself until later that night when she brimmed with gossip to her mates at the town's tavern. Zelda was sure all her over-wrought attendants frequented this place, and, by god, with her zealous blessing, indeed!

Link finally managed to stow his restlessness and sit cross-legged on a cross beam, not far from the window that blotted him out. He shielded his eyes and peered out at the late afternoon grounds, the grasses suspiring in the light breeze around gleaming gypsum stones and other boulders flecked with brilliant mica. Aspens rustled with their leaves like birds. He breathed with the wind. He told himself he was this warmth trickling in the window, not a solid boy hovering with solid ears and bad manners. He was diaphanous; he filled the entirety of the room like the voices. That's all he was. He could tell Zelda this after she tore him up later and maybe she would listen, or maybe she wouldn't, too taxed from the meeting, and leave him to brood.

The sea of once doubters themselves were down-cast and sullen in respects to their flat-out erroneous judgment.

More for the sakes of the their hides, Link thought, propping his ever-deepening frown into his hand, elbow rocketing up fits of jouncing from time to time where it was positioned on his knee.

Well, I suppose maybe the saggy jowls are in fact caused by the age of some of those bent and withered folk mawing it up like they were still great, stout prigs down there, look at them! They're going to talk their stinkin', cracking old jaws to unhinge.

It could be genetics, those plump ol bastards that look far too much like they belong with the Gorons, or they should at least be getting flat-ironed by one. Some of them would make nice medieval throw rugs. Set them down by the hearth in Zelda's study so she can dig her heels into them from time to time, wipe the mud on their beards! Let's see, it could simply be too many helpings of pie for some of these goons. Linked to medical abnormalities maybe? Born ugly, raised by sick wet nurses, depressed?

Link felt like he had hit the nail on the head with the last query posed. They were indeed holding an attendance out of a blubbering sense of pity for themselves, just to get the justification they couldn't reinforce with sheer mental ilk otherwise. It had to be proved they weren't at all the sleazy toad tongues they actually were, unattached, flopping around with idiosyncratic insolence. It made Link so sick he thought gladly of spearing one of the mutant sludge-pies on the hook of his fishing pole, casting each one off the deck in his mind to be picked apart instead of seeing them amass all together, twitching independent though whisked away from the hubbub of nerves.

All had their palms opened with practiced pious expressions fixed as soon as they heard the two oak doors creak open for Zelda's slow and benevolent precession.

Under that repose, he was aware of the force always at the ready to unleash like a Piranha Plant from the spriggy, seemingly demure earth. She was, after all, the chameleon princess who had pounced the throne before any of her three younger and five elder brothers could even pardon with the idea or notice the world outside, let alone, be apt to clean up a messy outside world in less than a week. Link ground a laugh that was fit to burst against his gums, fizzling out with a hiss. He had gotten his fair share of whooping to know her hands and arms were attached to the base of her soul, and they gave portent of this force away as a warning in their various gestures. When she was happy, her fingers would twitter about, plucking at unseen strings in the air. When ill-tempered, her arms could be granite columns one moment, and then another, volcanic eruptions.

As she pronounced herself down the aisle, both were clasped tightly around each other, knuckles flashing white like rows of teeth just above the woven triforce on her swaying tapestry front. Link leaned forward and the murderous looks and mockery that had been working his face spread to vacant. There it was. The man, so subtle, in her swift gait and crisp jaw lines woven in a grimace. The spread, defensive stance as she was made to balk unexpectedly down the pews.

"We are truly in your debt, O Queen Zelda!" the groveling old man spewed from under his thick mustache. He looked like he meant to cling on the fabric of the queen's habit, to sell a point undue, but thought better of it. Link, who was chewing on his thumbnail, brought a piece loose between his teeth and puffed it in the direction of the sputtering mound. Zelda's eyes remained stolid but something in the iris from time to time wavered like it was tired of keeping her brow from collapsing.

"Stay yourself, Uncle." She waved a hand dismissively as though she were only chastising him of his ridiculously exceeding portion sizes at the dinner table. Link had sat across from him once, almost clocked him in the nose with a fork, but Zelda had slipped most of his utensils away with the amused aloofness she so showed since she was young, five years old to be exact, and hadn't been caught with wine in her goblet until it was staining her mouth and bib, half drunk, but enough to give her a sensation that goaded her to mouth off to each brother with a special quip and pocket her uncle's flasks and Aunt's rings until she had a fine collection of both. "Woman doesn't need man," was the cry that had been the last and most heard before she was stifled by her nurse's hand. It had been flung toward the eldest brother Avrom, at the head of the table with a bug-eyed looking bride at his side, due to be married that time tomorrow.

Zelda still possessed a simple silver ring from her loot on that night, though she had obviously been made to return each item with a curtsy and a fleet of tears, her father strictly facilitating this to the point of having to milk her eyeballs of it. The ring was one that wasn't missed for it had belonged to a cousin of the bride who met an untimely death two weeks later. Some said she was merely overcome with envy of her sisters and girl cousins, and some said it had been plain mental illnesses biting her to the crux. Whatever it was, it had given her the incentive to lasso her ankles taut, the leads other end knotted to a horse's saddle, and flick the beasts rump with one switch flick, pulling her down and out the stables, skimming the rocks like they were only white crests of water she could blow through.

The girl had been sixteen back then and the little girl Zelda had first worn the ring on her pointer, the night she didn't return it, moving it down the digits as her hands grew with her to finally rest snug around her pinky. She regarded it from time to time with a curious expression Link could never place. That night at her brother's wedding dinner had been the only moment she had openly lashed out in public. That ring had been the start of something in her, he knew it to be true. He had never seen her take the ring off completely but she would spin it in contemplation or when she was pretending to listen to a droll report, nodding noncommittally to the news she knew scores more of than the orator himself. It was custom that she usually prophesized events weeks in advance, trained her eyes to focus in wavering candlelight, looks for trends, signs, redundant figures. Always deliberating, always robbing the future of it's fickle surprise by pouring over her charts and maps, mountains of papers, pale as a statue, until the sun took it's hands over the horizon and rubbed the cool sky's cheeks, as well as her own, with pink.

The man moved aside but didn't get up from the ground right away, unhinging like a gate on a garden croft, protesting in mesquite squeaks that needled at Link's brain. He smirked as his queen whisked away to the front of the assembly and made no delay announcing as she walked, "I do not wish to tarry this meeting. I mean so for the sake of not swapping, tapered unpleasantries so repetitious they draw blood or to stretch out the feeling we are all dancing a canon around a plateau of hot coals…" She pivoted and the back of her heels clicked smartly. "Or beguile you to the terror of milling around like stock, enduring stiffness and ladies balancing on their party shoes like they were trembling on tightrope."

Someone coughed, either an Aunt with the flu or an antagonistic spirit-breaker from a brother. Zelda smiled but her eyes did not. "What I really wish of all of you is to leave this room not feeling cheated and abandoned. Unconditional love is a better salve in this instance then a tactical approach, a simple staunch on the battlefield, a temporary cloth covering. We need not cover this wound, but let the blood flow.'

I forgive you all if you in turn will forgive me for being weak-minded and atrociously stubborn, letting pride rule over heart. I could not warn you enough, wasn't able to bring you into understanding as I should have, so I gave up. I was playing my part with assumptions carrying me through and I forgot how to communicate with heart's stout vulnerability. To you all, my family and friends, I give my word of an unbridled council, a free space to discuss all that has occurred without butting heads…" She eyed a few of her brothers who were scattered from the each, hands reflexively gripping their sword hilts since they entered the hall. "…or exalting accusations. I have already planted the blame in all of our hearts. Let us take turns not to spit on it in bitterness but to plunge into ourselves, cause rupture, and bleed it out, cast it aside. Do we feel fair with this request?"

Link was about to give a throaty 'nay', thinking no such wrong of her, beginning to feel cheated himself. There had been approaching warning signs for a decade at least that the rise of Ganondorf was bound to manifest boldly. When the Dark Lord arrived on the royal family's doorstep, Zelda's father acted by stealing his only daughter away with his tail between his legs. He had suffered cruel delusions on the run, stopped in the road by monsters he did not believe rose before him. That was where he died, head in the lap of ten-year-old Zelda as she armed herself with both his sword and her cutlass, swinging through the massive downpour at the hazy, black shapes with little to no training in combat. As the rain let up she had been found, dress in ribbons, streak-faced and calf-deep in mud, staring down her father's ravaged body with weapons loose in hand like she didn't know if it had been her own defiance of leaving the castle that had killed him. She was disoriented herself by storm clouds and the wild riding on bareback that had left her heavily, bejeweled head feeling like it was engulfed by a convex pattern of chains like a beehive that clanked forcefully along with every hoof fall and bruised.

She did not resist when the Gerudo women had found her wandering aimlessly, dragging sword to make tiny rivets in her wake and wearing the saddle of the fallen horse like a pack across her shoulders. She did not know where her brothers were and she did not care. For once she felt like she had gotten what she wanted, as she was led away by the bandaged hands and the oily faces, moving like flickering flames in her vision. Abandonment. She was free to act without fuss of nurses, but she did not celebrate the new scars as she bent down to wash in a trough at the training ground that evening. No more skinned knees, she thought, not just pricking a finger on needlepoint anymore. But she did not celebrate. She did not chance a look in her eyes for she knew now they were mirrors to the world and could not be used for suffering over a crooked circlet again.

If Link could have set after her on that hellish night, after she had desperately flung the ocarina in his direction to land in the mote, as he held his breath, wide-eyed, when Ganondorf reared forward on his pitch black steed…

"You wouldn't have saved me," was how Zelda interjected whenever his bereaving began. "You had to retrieve what was dutifully given, hero. Otherwise, I would have turned on you and flayed your hide along with the shadows."

He knew she was right. His fantasies of chivalry were mostly a charade covering insecure and self-important feelings, consistently spurned by his tenuous affairs with the Gerudo women. He tried to forget that they had housed and personally trained Zelda. He also tried to forget that was where Zelda had discovered her messenger, held in captivity deep in the earth by means of a magic lyre's enchanted songs. The two hundred year old exiled criminal, perched impossibly in slumber on the tip of a stalagmite, finger-painted bloody eyes all over the mummified, fetal form. That was where she spent her time for three days, drawn to the strange man's aura, pacing the cavern fitfully but to nibble bread and cheese and retire to the surface for bed. That was where she had found her Sheikah.

It was then that Link realized a pair of eyes trained on him from the mass. It was the heel, Rainer, a younger brother of Zelda's by two years, making him eighteen in body but without the maturity of voice or wits to vouch for it. He had eyes like flint, unlike his brother Issak who had similarly colored eyes yet they lacked the hard, blunt edge of his twin's, having eyes bright and soft like talc made from laboring in the gardens and his study, fingers never having touched a sword. Those eyes were boring into him now and he met them, just as cold.

Rainer slumped deeper into his bench, arms crossed, and raised his eyebrow as if trying to tag Link with it. No other alarm was raised. Though Rainer could be an ornery and smug tool for his older, conniving relatives and let his dumb anger fuel his words in duels instead of his blade, he was never keen on drawing attention to himself outright. Being the snitch was the last thing on the boy's mind but it would be best for Link to expect a confrontation sometime in the future in the form of a tiny tear that made the whole fabric of a day unravel. Nothing more and nothing less. Rainer was a lad uninterested in long-term relationships.

He rolled his eyes as Link stared, then turned his attention back to his sister. Link backed up closer to where the sun's glare had moved in the time he had been crouched in his spot and resumed eaves dropping lying flat on his stomach.

Tillo, the fifth oldest next to Avrom, stood up from his bench. He lowered his head but didn't let go of his sister's gaze, and said softly, "It is we who betrayed you, my queen. I do believe the desire for reconcile for our unscrupulous faults is indeed involved with the catechisms of this meeting today, but there is also a more immediate concern afoot." The room's intent silence weighed upon each word with sacred force. Tillo, rendered to a pervious state, eyes tearing at the condensing air pressure, murmured, "What now becomes of the Shiekah warrior?"

Before more voices could erupt in the concourse, Rainer's voice rose, dull in comparison to the melee of frivolity. "He's let free, isn't he? That was the bargain you wrought. Dangerous service that you couldn't ask of those you love for the price of freedom."

As Zelda looked upon her brother, whose body had not stirred from his slouched position, her expression was a patchwork of pity and respect. She answered firmly, "Yes."

Florian, the second oldest brother, as stiff and impersonal as their brother Avrom, leaned forward ardently. "A murderer and a thief and you let him run rampant in our lands? You encourage this monstrous presence?"

"And you boys think I am daft? Do you think I didn't reason from Avrom's constant disappearance as well as our finest fleet of men and horses, that he has been tracking his trail since our homecoming? It seems you have this well under control yourselves."

She spat out the last word with animosity. Link's eyes narrowed. So Avrom was the insipient brother he supposed to hunt down and pick a fight with.

Florian growled, "He's a slippery little nuisance."

"He's eluded your grasp, brother, not because he is cunning but because you are ignorant and foolish as to what you are dealing with. Time. He surpasses it. The land we all know is his close brother. Lastly, what you fail to pick up on or figure into your invalidated reasoning is that the Sheikah warrior has not ceased from being bound to me." There was immediate disorder all around as uncle's veins bulged as they brayed and aunt's continued to cool themselves with their scalloped fans even more feverously. Florian grit his teeth and shook his head while Tillo looked dumbfounded and Rainer pushed further back, eyes closed and sporting a churlish grin.

"You assured he was cast away!" cried a voice.

"Cast away! On the run! You speak contradictions in your confound stupor, my kin. He is indeed free of spirit, alleviated from his weighty sins, though he may still be bound by service."

Rainer finally rose and Link could see for the first time that his hip held no weapon to it.

"Well, since it seems you can make no decision that pleases us it can only be deduced that you are in fact the ruction we are fighting. We still do not trust you. You withhold information as though we were infants whose diets regularly rely on innocence." He gripped the pew ahead of him and smiled. It was like seeing Zelda's mouth twitching on another face. "My dear, you serve us that ignorance on silver platters. You do not hold council with us. You speak at us as though we were only alabaster relics in your menagerie of unopinionated paperweights. Naturally, we will stray on the trust front."

A repugnant silence grew steadily from Zelda's side of the court. She took a small step back but her and her brothers eyes stayed locked like there were silent refutes and bartering still going on in the stormy symmetry of their faces.

"'It seems', to be fair, is not a thorough comment. It is and I so acknowledge it, as I did forthright in tackling this whole mess on these grounds."

Link had never seen his queen look so cloven, like her limps were disjointed and hanging like a puppets without the mastery behind it. Her once towering neck had stooped a few inches to cradle in her clavicle and was protected by the battlement of her boney shoulders. "What more would you have of me?"

"An unrehearsed explanation. And your word."

"Then, on the golden brows of the three goddesses, I tell you now." Something in her eyes flared up, but was cooled as soon as she blinked calmly at her audience. "I wish to never marry," she said with brilliant candor, voice the color of her raw, red lips. "I shall be stilted on the apex, in between light and shadow. That is the triforce I have wrought and it need no council. It is comfortable." I small smile graced her lips. "You will bode well to heed it, brothers, for it is my heart's content."

Florian spread his arms and allowed a momentary bow starting from his torso. "I shall stand under this fixture and keep it mended." Link saw his mouth twitch, eyes glazed over in thought. He wished to stick knives in his neck while he was still lending it available for target practice.

"As I," Tillo barely breathed, struggling upward again.

Rainer hesitated, rummaging in is head for the choicest words. "This strife in holding this equivalency is a noble plenipotentiary. On this cross you will see everything and suffer much for the peace of your people." He bowed his head. "It is an honor, my queen, to serve you under this mold."

"Swear it to me." At this point many in the congregation had dispersed, leaving a racket with their shoes on the marble that embodied many spades disrupting the empty plain between them and her, a trench now being cast into commission, their grumbling voices like spraying, sharp rubble behind their turned backs.

The others, including her brothers, wandered to the outcrop of the platform and knelt down before her. The matronly offered their blessings and the men offered up their sword hilts or sweaty palms. They swore upon each of the three goddesses, and Link, from his divided sanctuary on high, mumbled along with them. His were melodious words and they were significantly tremulous above the rest. Zelda raised her eyes to the ceiling, where her warrior was curled up, eyelids fettered shut softly in a recanting meditation. She whispered a blessing up to him, and as if he heard it, reverberating to unshackle his stiff bones, he sighed, and a single dust cloud, ambivalent to it's making, wrestled with itself in the air for a transitory period, then fell to the swathes of rosy light shining through the windows.

"My inchoate boy. I pray you go hither and seek your shadow. You make me balance, over-spent, on this precipice, but I shall wait knowing you to be successful. Bring back our Shiekah."

Link stirred, unconsciously, and made no delay. He loaded his person in the armory and the kitchens and readied Epona in the tack room, whose eyes shone already with eager light, as if she knew. As he flew through the furrows of Hyrule Field, her hooves never seeming to hit the ground, he knew there was no questioning it. He surrendered, eyes rolling back, eyes shivering at the oncoming night, eyes full of stars.