Well, after much consideration, this is my entry for LegitElizabethWWEFan's M rated SSB Contest. I am trying something new and I hope you enjoy it. As always, please review.


The dream began as it always did. With smoke and blood.

One saturated the air that Zelda breathed in with ragged and scarred lungs. The other one saturated her dress, and continued to pour from the wound in her side where three long slashes left their mark. She ran with ruined sandals and torn silk. In calmer times, she would have stopped and adjusted her looks before she continued, but these were not calmer times. She had to run, anywhere! She had to escape the thing that hounded her through this dream.

She knew it was a dream. For the past twelve days she had done nothing but run through Hyrule Castle aflame, the insidious laughter chasing her as that… thing hunted her like a fox would do to a wounded rabbit. The stone alcoves of the hallways she was familiar with began to twist in random directions, adding to the sense of helplessness and defeat that washed over her.

"Come now, little witch… I have a gift for you." The voice was nothing that any mortal creature could make and Zelda's head ached with the sheer wrongness of the sound. Each smoke laced lungful of air she breathed in, more pain cascaded across her body. She had to keep moving. Maybe this time it would be different, maybe she could finally escape from him- it, she corrected herself as she stumbled over a pile of burning support beams.

"It doesn't matter how far you run, little witch. I will always find you. You cannot escape." It continued to taunt her. Zelda felt tears well up as the certainty of the words poured from the shadow would eventually become real. But this shadow was no where to be seen. Fire illuminated everything, there was no darkness or shadow of her own. Zelda continued forward, feeling the salty iron of her own blood fill her mouth. She pushed the crimson life force out with her tongue, and the blood sizzled in the open flames and heat that continued to batter her.

A flaming brazier tumbled over after being hit by a wooden support beam. The oil that was alight flowed over Zelda's feet, causing her to scream in pain. The fires licked up her calves as she ran through the fiery substance, unable to use any of her arcane gifts. Once she was away from the stream of fire, she paused in her run to tear her leather sandals off and smothered the flames with her hands. The sickly smell of burning flesh filled her nose and pain wracked her body. She needed to continue, she needed-

The sound of metal piercing flesh stopped her mind. Her head slowly looked down as the heat faded away, as did the pain from her preexisting injuries. Everything was insignificant, to the metal blade erupting from her chest. The thing laughed right behind her and a wet sandpaper like tongue ran under her chin. "Now, my little Hylian whore, would you grace me with a scream?"

Despite every instinct she could draw upon, Zelda complied.


She jolted out of bed, her body covered in a thin film of sweat. She was sucked in the cool late summer night air, thankful she could not taste the smoke she expected. Zelda felt her bare body with her right hand, making sure that even though it was a dream, she did not carry any injuries. She breathed out slowly with gratification that she found none.

She collapsed back into the bed, content and relived that it was nothing but a dream. But it was hollow hope to her. Indeed, what could she do now? No matter when she closed her eyes, the terror would come for her. It would find her, and it would kill her in such a gruesome fashion. There was no escape. She tried just about everything she could think of. Even tonight she stayed up late, working on her fighting skills in the hope that with her body exhausted, she would not be able even to dream. Now, ever muscle in her body ached and her heart beat like a drum, ringing in her ears.

She sat up in her bed, looking around her room, thankful she slept alone and there was plenty of soundproof insulation lining the walls. Often, she had woken up screaming just as she had done in her dreams. Tonight, the dream was slightly different. While she did scream, she had never felt the thing's tongue against her chin. She never wanted to feel it again.

She sighed and kicked off the sheets and made her way to her master bathroom and stepped in the shower. Pulling on the brass chain, the warm inviting water washed over her face and hair, slowly working down the rest of her naked body. She rubbed her eyes and let her body rela in the water. She was safe, at least until she would need to sleep again. She couldn't avoid sleep, so much depended on her being focus and alert. Even though the night terror plagued her each and ever time she rested wore down her mind, her body was partially recuperated. She could still participate in the fights, be active with various other activities, and function like a normal person.

She sighed as she reached for the cleaning lotion and poured it over a washcloth. Her body may be fine, but she had little hope that her mind could endure such things for much longer. It was true that she was a sorceress among sorcerers. She could bend reality to her will, summon bolts of Fayore's lightning from her fingers and Din's fire from the palms of her hands. But they failed her when they couldnot eliminate this haunting. She could not look at others though they may often look to her for strength and guidance both in the arena and beyond. She could not bear to see the worried look in their eyes when she began to reach for a bottle of pain killers for what she said was nothing more then a small headache. Zelda couldn't face the fact that there was something wrong, even with her, there there was nothing to fix it.

She felt her body relax as the water raised in temperature and she scrubbed her lithe arms and elegant chest. While the sweat fell away and exposed her skin free of impurities and shining like polished ivory, she could still smell the smoke and hear the dread laughter of her nightmares. Try as she might, she could not scrub that clean.


"Not much farther now, just through the woods here." Ike motioned with his great sword through the clearing the rough path offered. Behind him were his two of his mercenaries, following him through the thick brush that lined the nation's borders with their sister nations. In better times, these forests would have been full of wildlife, with hunters using their bows to bring home meat for their families or to sell to others who needed it.

Now, it was a war zone. The animals that were not culled to feed the invading army's appetite had long since fled. Those hunters were now employed rangers and assassins, attacking any who dare stand against them. The peaceful aura that once blanketed this patch of wilderness had become a fearful sense of icy foreboding, as every movement had to be checked to make sure that a small burrowing forest mouse was not a rival mercenary settling into a firing position to pick off one of the mercenaries at his back.

"It would have been a kilometer in a straight line." Soren, the cold mage, muttered under his breath but still very audible. "We should have reached the end of the forest long ago, but with this pathway it is hard to tell. Must have been designed by a lunatic."

"A lunatic with an aversion to straight lines." Ranulf, the snark-filled cat laguz and on of the best friends Ike had, agreed. Ike nodded and began another curve. The path was indeed crooked. Too many times they had taken a slight curb, only to find the way they were going for to be behind them, only for the curves to once again set them on the right path. "I still think you shouldn't have split our numbers like that. Who knows how many outriders this army has."
"Exactly, we will cover more ground this way. At least one of us will regroup with our allies and the others will follow in suit." Ike said but he heard something. It wasn't the grumbling from Soren who was usually the most dour of individuals Ike had the pleasure of knowing, nor was it the breathing of Ranulf. He massaged his head, but the buzzing sound wasn't coming from his head. "Quite." He sternly ordered the others. They stopped in their current position, heads scanning the surrounding. "You hear it too?"

"There, straight ahead." Ranulf gestured with his his hand and his feline ears twitched once he recognized the direction of the sound. The three picked up pace as the sound was not an omen of anything good. Once they were close enough to the edge of the forest, they managed to confirm that the buzzing sound was an insect noise.

Once they got free from the forest, they saw a whirling black mass that occupied everything in front of them. "What in the name of Yune is that?" Soren asked, knowing the answer to his own question, but asked it out shock.

"Flies. It is a cloud of flies!" Ike stated and flies with that number meant only one thing. He edged closer to the cusp of the storm of flies, and was battered with the stench of decayed flesh. Ike covered his mouth with a rag soaked in pine essence to filter out the reek of the decaying flesh. The ground they walked on was over saturated with blood that each time they set their foot down, more of the crimson life force and it splashed onto their boots.

Finally, at the epicenter, they saw the charnel mound that the flies encircled and fed upon. Stacked twice as tall as them and easily a hundred meters wide, was a pile of corpses and littered with those that had not been tossed upon the mass pile or had died after they dislodged themselves from it. Maggots writhed in each of the corpses, some freshly slain while others were swollen and on the verge of exploding. All strata of life was in here, and their killers were indiscriminate with how they killed them. The corpse of a young rural girl, dressed no more than rags laid at an awkward angle over and elderly priest, whose fine robes were sullied by the viscera and blood of his fellows. A toddler, barely more than two years old had been run through from the back was gripping the hem of her grandmother's robe in hands rendered tight by rigor mortis.

As Ike waded through the lake of blood and looked up and down at the slaughter, he could not shake the unvoiced truth.

This was his fault.


His eyes bolted open. His breathing was heavy and labored. Ike raised his hand and saw that it was trembling. He used those lungfuls of air to center himself and relax his tortured mind. A moment passed, in which his body was cast in the cold unrelenting light of the moon, and the trembling slowed to an almost undetectable twitch.

Ike buried his head in his hands. That even was almost three years ago, and still, in the dark corners of his mind, it came back to him. He had seen thousands upon thousands of horrors during his tenure as a mercenary, in both his home continent and abroad. The latter was from where this experience hounded him. The scale of the slaughter, that is what set it apart. None of them were armed or were fighters at all. They were put simply to the butcher's blade and that peaceful forest became a tomb.

He felt his gorge rising at the memory, and walked to a window. Once it was open, he took in a deep breath of air and spat the taste of bile out of his mouth. That vision had been at him recently for an unknown reason and while he had seen it many times since that event, they had been few and far in between. Why was it coming back now? Did something trigger it or was it plaguing him for a reason.

As a cool breeze moved in, Ike walked over to his nightstand and produced a plastic bottle filled with clonidine. He had taken this without Dr. Mario's permission, knowing that it was generally proscribed to soldiers with shell shock symptoms and that it would help him with these nightmares if they paid him a visit again. Ike could have gotten it if he admitted his problems, but he feared the stigma and ridicule. He was a warrior, born from warriors. He could not look weak.

He took three little white pills from there and popped them into his moth, following it with some water from a glass he left at the side of his bed. He shook his head as he began to feel the drugs claw into his body. He had taken twice the recommended maximum dose. His constitution was considerable, and a general resistance had built up.

He laid back down in bed, the ringing in his ears containing a slight buzz to it's tune.