Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Of all the creatures in all the lands, in all the planets and worlds and spaces, cows must be the single most boring, Malon reflected. The ten or so cows that the ranch had were out to pasture in the space of the field just beyond the ranch, lazily chewing cud and meandering about. Malon, armed with a springy piece of birch, rested against the walls of the ranch, idly cleaning the dirt off her shoes with a twig. She was there to watch and ensure that no cows wandered off or bolted, which they never did, making the job, on the whole, pointless. But, she supposed, it was better than actual labor. Even if it did make your brain liquefy and seep out your ears.
Now, unbeknownst to Malon and the other inhabitants of Lon Lon Ranch, the unusually and unnecessarily high walls of the ranch provided more than sufficient cover from prying eyes for anyone with more subtlety than an elephant. And naturally, the Gerudo elite had dexterity to spare.
From their places, hidden in the nooks and crannies about the ranch, they had an easy view of the market town and capital in front of the castle, and yet, neither the casual observer nor the trained guards from the palace would spot them. If anything, the biggest risk was if the farm girl strayed from her cows, and stumbled into someone. It was an easy mission.
In truth, sending the elite warriors had been overkill, since it was just a spy mission. They were only to watch the comings and goings of the market, when the drawbridge was opened, when it was shut, and how long it took to raise it. They scoped out the number of guards and alternative entrances and whether their warriors could scale the walls. It was simple enough.
Although the Gerudo were technically not forbidden to enter the city (which they did often, though they tended to gravitate towards the rather dingier districts), it would be best not to raise the Hylians' suspicions at such a crucial point in their plans. Negotiations hadn't even begun, so a low profile was imperative.
Hours passed as they watched. They light waned in the sky before fading into a blackness punctuated by a few stars. One by one, the Gerudo began to slip away from the ranch, to reunite of the border of the desert.
As if in tribute to their skills, not one inhabitant of the ranch even sensed their presence.
The king of Hyrule was not amused. His brow was furrowed in a mix of frustration and concern, while his lip curled slightly in disguised disgust. Exhaling deeply, and running his wrinkled fingers through his white beard, he pressed his forehead against the window pane, vaguely appreciating the cold relief of the glass against his skin. A rather rotund man, but tall nonetheless, with white hair and beard, the king had an unquestionably regal bearing, but with recent stress, today he looked older than usual.
Beneath his window, the Gerudo procession marched through the market place, as his worries increased exponentially. The gilded parade shown with unexpected splendor as each highly decorated warrior strode past, each dressed in silky, geometric patterned fabric placed lightly over their breasts and legs (hardly appropriate for the climate, the king mused. They must be freezing) and each with flaming red hair and two polished scimitars bound to their hips.
The townspeople had already begun to gather about the procession, gaping, pointing, a few jeering, but most in complete awe. They had likely never seen one of the infamous Gerudo tribe, and no one had ever seen them gathered in such numbers. It was almost terrifying, the king though, as he leaned against the glass.
As Zelda entered the office she noted her father's humor immediately. Even at the age of ten, she was adept at noting the subtle changes in a person's behaviors and moods. The way her father subconsciously clenched and unclenched his fists behind his back was a surefire indicator that he was not idly staring out the window.
"What is wrong, father?" Zelda asked quietly, then immediately regretted it when her father started and spun around so rapidly he knocked three quill pens from his desk in the process.
"Oh, Zelda dear. Silly of me," he chided himself, though his breathing was still slightly harder than usual. Slowly, he bent over to retrieve his pens and forced his mind to return from its reverie to the warm, cherry oak furnishings of his office, and to the little blond girl in front of him. Zelda really was quite petite for a ten-year-old, barely reaching the king's waist. She had her mother's clear, blue eyes and delicate facial structure, and was clothed in the traditional dress of the Hylian Royalty, including the rather cumbersome headdress wrapped around most of her long hair. Admittedly, the outfit was for the most part obsolete, in addition to being rather heavy and a tad bit ridiculous, but Impa insisted that it would make a strong impression on the Gerudo, so Zelda obediently suffered in silence.
"Are you alright, Father?" Zelda asked again.
"Yes, dear, yes," the king sighed, "trying times, is all."
"I thought treaties were supposed to be a time for celebration and peace," Zelda countered, with a hint of know-it-allism in her voice. The king noted the tone but didn't comment. He understood that his daughter needed to feel intelligent and believe that she was "right", since she was not particularly graceful nor beautiful nor witty, and thus received much of her pleasure from flaunting her knowledge. It still surprised the king, from time to time, how much a girl that size noticed. Yet, despite all her powers of observation, she lived in a strange bubble of naiveté. She was always picking up a new crusade for a hopeless case and lived under the strange delusion that she could actually change something. The young princess walked a fine line between harsh, cold reality and a land of childhood idealism. It was this balance, this separation, which made it so difficult for the King to explain what was happening to her.
"This treaty," the king sighed, "is not like the other ones."
"But I though you wanted peace with the Gerudo, so they'll stop stealing and such."
"We do, but it's more complicated than that."
"Why?" Zelda asked. The king withdrew a breath to respond when the heralding of trumpets alerted him that the parade had reached the outer walls of the castle. He had to leave to go greet their king, whom he suddenly realized he had never seen. The Gerudo had an odd custom in which the king followed behind his people in a procession, the opposite of the Hylian tradition. Ah well, the king thought, he can't be hard to pick out from a group of all women.
Zelda was still waiting patiently for his answer. The king was about to excuse himself when the door to the office opened suddenly. Impa, the muscular, white-haired Sheikah guardian entered and, after a hasty and informal bow to the king, grabbed the princess' arm and escorted her out, strangely silent all the while. Not that Impa was ever particularly talkative, but over the last few days she had become even quieter than usual, and spoke only in harsh rebukes, even to Zelda. Her silver eyes were harder than usual and though Zelda couldn't understand why, it was all too apparent that something was bothering her.
Impa led Zelda down the halls of the palace at an uncomfortably fast pace for her tiny legs. After a few sharp turns the woman finally snapped, "You have an awful knack for disappearing at the worst moments, you know that?" She didn't pause in her walking, though, and Zelda began to stumble as she tried to keep pace. Finally, on the verge of tripping on her overly-long skirt, Zelda decided that she would take no more.
On impulse she halted in her tracks, employing the best of her weight to force Impa to stop in her tracks. It didn't work completely, since the girl was so much lighter than her nursemaid and she was still dragged forward a few inches, but Impa got the general idea.
"What is going on?" Zelda asked, trying to be more firm than she felt, with Impa's gaze on her. To her surprise, however, the woman softened.
"A great deal many things, chiat," Impa replied, resorting slightly to her native tongue to deal with the young girl.
"Why will no one explain it to me?"
"Because, my girl, it is more complicated than most people would like to believe."
"That's what everyone keeps saying. It's complicated. It's complicated. Why?" The little girl was fed up, Impa recognized. If there was one thing that she couldn't stand it was when other people withheld information or treated her like she was a child. Of course, she was a child, but this argument hardly held sway in her headstrong mind.
"Very well, I will tell you. But we must walk as I do so; you are late as it is." And so the pair set off again, possibly faster than before, to make up for the lost time.
"You are, of course, aware that there will be a treaty signed tonight between the Kingdom of Hyrule and the Gerudo Nation, correct?"
"Yes, of course. That's why we're having the party. But that's a good thing."
"Not necessarily. Not everyone agrees that this treaty should be signed."
"Well, of course not everyone," Zelda began, citing one of the first lessons she ever learned. "There's no way to make everyone happy."
"I suppose so, chiat," Impa sighed.
"Why don't they want the treaty?" Zelda asked, curiously.
"Many reasons. First, if we sign a treaty with the Gerudo, then it means that we consider them equals- or equal enough to negotiate with them."
"Shouldn't they be equal?" Zelda asked, with a childlike innocence.
A guard drew near in the hall, and the pair instinctively quieted. They both knew that this was not a conversation that they were meant to be having. They waited until he had passed and they were in a different, stone hallway, which looked conspicuously like the rest (gray, with torches on the walls and little in the way of decoration and light), before they spoke again.
"Impa, why shouldn't they be equal? They can think just like us, can't they?" Zelda asked, persistent as ever.
"True, very true, but many people would not agree with you."
"Well they should! That's not fair."
"Ah, princess, it is a long story."
"Well, I want to hear it."
"Another time, perhaps. But now we draw near to the banquet hall, and it would hardly be proper to speak about these matters in front of the Gerudo themselves, would it?"
Zelda sighed in resignation and permitted Impa to fix her headdress on her head and adjust her attire ever so slightly in a mother-ish way, until she deemed the child presentable. Finally the pair walked into the banquet hall, heads held high and shoulders straight. Impa retreated back from her charge to the respectable distance of where a guard should stand, careful not to betray the personal nature of their relationships. A friendship with a nurse would be acceptable, but a friendship with a Sheikah would not. Even though the shadow folk were the traditional guardians of the royal family, this custom had fallen out of favor, and it was only with great cunning that Impa had reached her position. Zelda, for her part, carefully upheld this charade, though she did not particularly understand the reason behind it.
The banquet hall had been transformed, almost miraculously, overnight through the endless toil of a careful staff. The curtains had been drawn back from the windows and fresh, clear sunlight flooded the room as it rarely did (the staff was ever afraid of letting the sun bleach the cloth coverings on the chairs and tables. Then it had been realized that the curtains were dusty and they had been taken down (heaven only knows how), beaten, and re-hung. Finely woven tapestries adorned the walls, while beautiful tablecloths covered each of the grand mahogany tables. Zelda was relieved upon entering to see that the Gerudo party had not arrived yet. Such were the difficulties of large parades- impressive to behold but notoriously slow.
At the front of the room stood the most important table. It was made of a deep, reddish-brown wood with ornate carvings down the legs and with matching chairs. Atop the every chair and spread across the table was a hand-stitched covering embroidered in golds and scarlets. This was the head table, at which the most important dignitaries of both parties would sit, one Gerudo next to one Hylian, to symbolize the end of the divide between the two nations. It was a formality always taken at the signing of a treaty. Zelda herself would sit at this table, surrounded by Gerudos. She couldn't help but feel a little excited by the thought.
Beyond the head table were three other tables, larger and plainer than the first, but by no means uncomfortable. They were for the remaining crowd of assorted nobles, warriors, knights, and dignitaries from other nations who were not directly involved in the treaty but had come to witness its signing. They would be seated according to rank.
From this rule, however, there had developed quite a few problems, which Zelda had heard the various workers debating over the days spent preparing for the signing. How did a Gerudo warrior rank compared to a Hylian knight? Were they higher, lower or the same? What about lower level guards? And where did the Goron and Zora ambassadors fit in there? Everyone was trying so hard not to offend anyone else that it was borderline absurd. The seating chart had been rearranged so many times that even Zelda didn't entirely know where to sit anymore.
It was in this initial seating chaos, before the Gerudo party had even entered the hall, that Zelda first noticed something.
"Impa," she commented, "there are no Sheikah here!"
"No, chiat, there are not."
"Shouldn't there be?"
"We prefer not to meddle in affairs that are not our own," she responded coolly, though she gave Zelda's shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
Zelda knew for a fact that this statement was not true. Impa stuck her nose into almost all of Zelda's comings and goings, whether or not it in any way related to her duties. Still, the absence of the mysterious shadow people puzzled her. After all, a treaty between two of the largest nations was surely everybody's affair. Of course, this raised another, peculiar question.
"Impa, where will you sit?"
"I will not."
Zelda was slightly affronted. "Why not. Surely there is a seat for you somewhere."
"It is not an insult, Zelda. By no means. I simply cannot perform my duty from a seat since, by this bizarre arrangement, I would likely be on the other side of the room wedged between of the guards. No, dear, I will stand."
Zelda wondered to herself how this could stop her from fulfilling her duties. She was a nursemaid, of all things, not a guard. Perhaps, Zelda reflected, she thought that she couldn't chastise her charge from any farther away.
However, the young girl could not puzzle the situation much longer, because another long brass note announced the arrival of the Gerudo into the banquet hall itself. The party was much larger than it had seemed from the window, and the servants went into an uproar trying to get everyone seated in their proper places. The king thanked the goddesses that the Hylian party and other delegates had all been carefully seated before the desert-dwellers even arrived. He hoped against hope that this small breach of protocol would not offend anyone. That was, of course, the idea of all the formality surrounding the banquet. No one must be offended. A single, poorly-worded comment could lead to more deaths and possibly stop the treaty itself. Such was the delicate game of diplomacy.
Slowly, the lower-level Gerudo were in place, leaning in their chairs with a conspicuously casual air, as was their way. They had been made to leave their weapons, in the hall, for this was a room for peace, but those around them still eyed them cautiously, for many did not doubt that if they felt so inclined, they could murder a person with their bare hands. Soon, as the rest of the warriors filed into place, only the head table remained empty.
The king and his daughter stood waiting to greet the Gerudo leader and his highest ranking followers. The Gerudo king always followed in the back of his procession, and so he was the last to enter the room. Zelda, whose attention span was still growing, had lost her concentration and was busy observing the scarlet-haired members of the crowd when he entered. She did not noticed his presence until her father spoke to him.
"Good sir, I and my people bid you welcome to my home. I hope that this treaty will mean everlasting peace for both our kingdoms."
"Indeed," the other man replied, apparently not much for words.
Zelda swiveled her head to observe the man and gave a little jump to discover that he was only a few feet from her, exchanging a hand-shake with her father. He was a large man, even a huge man, much taller than the Hylian king, who was by no means diminutive. His armor was freshly polished and evidently made by a smith who rivaled Hyrule's best craftsmen. He too had left his blade outside, but she imagined that it would have been an impressive piece, much larger than anything she could ever hope to lift. He had the scarlet hair and wide-set nose and mouth that signified his desert heritage.
But his eyes were the part which attracted Zelda's attention. They were a strange, gold color. The more the girl stared at them however, the more they seemed to transition to a red, like a fire was burning inside of them. Soon she could not tear her own eyes from his and she tried to scream, but nothing came out. Then the fire was burning his entire face and the rest of the room was ablaze.
Then, the vision consumed her.
Although her mind was too far from the banquet hall to know it, Zelda fainted and hit her head hard on the stone floor, before Impa was instantly on her.
She was sitting, alone, apparently somewhere in Hyrule Field. Where was Impa? What was happening? She wanted to cry out as she saw that the entire landscape was ablaze. The air was heavy with smoke, which clogged her throat until she couldn't scream and could barely breathe. Father, Impa, she thought. Please, help me. Where are you? She tried to locate the direction of her home but the heavy smoke and ghastly dark clouds in the sky hid everything from her view. Everything but him.
The Gerudo king stood there, so nonchalantly that she instantly knew that he was the cause of all the devastation. He didn't seem to notice her, however, so she decided that first she had to escape him, and then decide on a plan. However, as she tried to move away, she noticed that her arms and legs were chained. The iron bindings were so heavy that she could barely lift her limbs, let alone move. She pulled a little, trying to escape, but to no avail. Once more she wanted to scream, but her throat would not work.
Attracted by the noise, however, the Gerudo king turned around to face her. He walked slowly towards her, his face impassive. She waited for rage to flash in his eyes and for his hand to reach out and strangle her. Instead, he sat down beside the girl, trailing his hand over her cheeks, laughing quietly to himself.
Between his chuckles, he was whispering words to her, but in her panic she could not understand them. She was simply shaking her head, tears forming, trying her hardest to move away from him. Then, faster than she imagined him capable of, he reached out and grabbed her arm. She could have sworn his hand was glowing yellow! The chains fell off instantly and he pulled her to her feet.
He was running then, and so was she. She couldn't control her legs and they kept following him. She ran with him as fast as she could, although, more often then not she was pulled off her feet and flew in the air for a few seconds before landing, once more running. She didn't want to follow him. She wanted to fight back. And yet she couldn't stop herself, and before she knew it they were standing before a wall of fire.
He adjusted his grip to her shoulders and holding her tightly, pushed her into the flames before following himself. To her surprise, they both reached the other side unscathed. Now she was sobbing. What was happening? Where were Impa and her father? Why weren't they stopping this?
"Do you see now, princess?" he asked her. "Do you see?"
She coughed slightly, and found a thin tendril of her voice. "I see nothing," she whispered, trying hard to inject her voice with as much venom as possible.
He laughed in response, a cold, hard laugh with no humor in it and no warmth. "You are still so blind. Don't you know that I am your only chance? You would still be chained up back there, waiting for the fire to burn you. " She tried to jerk away but he held her even tighter, lifting her an inch or two off the ground, still laughing all the while.
"Now you are free. Now you can walk with impunity through the flames. As long as you follow me. As long as you stay with me you are safe. Do you see?"
Zelda steadied herself as best she could and, through her tears, she answered, "You- you started the fires."
He just laughed harder in response. "Prove it."
Zelda struggled to come up with an answer but it was just so hard to fight him when she knew that he was right. If she followed him she would be safe. Where are you, Impa? Impa, she knew, would be strong, she would do what was right. Then why couldn't Zelda bring herself to say the word 'no'?
He had stopped laughing, and was impatient for her response. "Tell me, princess," he began, almost conversationally, "have you ever burnt your hand on a stove or a candle?"
Eager to delay her choice, Zelda answered, "I have."
"Do you remember the pain? How you couldn't stop it. Even after you removed your hand, it ached for hours. Do you remember how no amount of water could quench the pain, and nothing could stop the steady searing? Now, imagine that all over your body. The heat and the pain until you died. It could be hours before you finally died. Do you see now?"
Zelda breathed in to answer but she inhaled only smoke and was beset by a coughing fit. In that moment, everything changed. A bright light, a pure white emerged from a point somewhere on the horizon. Squinting, Zelda could just make out the trees in the distance. It is the forest, she thought. Where the light spread, the fires were dowsed and grass and trees re-grew, the dark clouds broke up and the air was purified. It flew over the land like the cool breath of life itself. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw a silhouette form with the cloud of brightness.
It was a boy, she saw, with a fairy. They were dancing and playing and laughing. But then the boy straightened. He began to walk with a purpose, straight-backed like a soldier. The fairy, too, found a perch on his shoulder and did not play as it had. She wondered what had happened to the boy when she was suddenly dropped to the ground. The king was staring at the cloud of light, slightly pale, and Zelda seized the moment to back away from him. As the light approached them, it paused before the evil king. He looked at the light and for a moment grew bolder. Then the cloud gathered itself and plunged straight for his heart. His entire body disintegrated, leaving only the last echo of his screams.
Then they cloud reached Zelda, and there was no escape. Still, she ran, but it followed her. Somehow, she felt that it was curious. Finally, she reached a dead end, the light had enveloped everything but her. Slowly she turned around and did her best not to be afraid as the cloud approached her own, small body. Then, before it could act, she awoke.