Title: Through a Glass, Refracted
Rating: SFW
Wordcount: 1930
Summary: In Lorule, hope comes at a price.
Note: Written as a treat for lightningwaltz for Parallels 2014.
The night before Hilda's coronation, she dreams of new chasms yawning around the castle, cutting her off entirely from her rotting kingdom. A voice almost like her own whispers, "You will be the last to preside over this decay. You will live to see the end."
When she wakes, she tries to rub the dream away with the grit in her eyes. She tries to fix her eyes ahead during the ceremony, but her shock is weighed down by resignation when she feels her last narrow link to Skull Woods crumble away. The future has crept into her before like a thief, each time robbing her of a little bit more of her hope.
Her attendants recover quickly and move again to set the crown upon her. She turns her head and says, "Let us delay."
If she is never the queen, perhaps she will never truly preside. The only hopes left to cling to are threads narrow enough to pass through loopholes.
The abyss is ravenous; every day it opens more gaping mouths into her world and leaves tiny hollows in her heart. Every day the cries of her people pour into her mind, and all but a few are beyond her reach. The soldiers that she sends to aid them never return.
She will live to see the end, queen or not. Her fear dulls to dread.
The evening after the marshes are lost to her, Yuga requests an audience. He bows low, arm sweeping in a flourish behind him, and says, "Let me show you something beautiful."
Hilda scowls. "Do you mock me?"
"Never, Your Grace. Will you follow me? What I have found simply must be seen to be believed."
What else has she to do but wait for the next fissure? She rises and follows, hopeless and unafraid.
He leads her to the crumbling ruin of the Sacred Realm, where a black slab serves as the Triforce's gravestone. But even from a distance, she can see that the slab has changed. A crack runs nearly the length of it, leaking light.
Hilda peers behind the stone, but its back is solid. Nothing shines through it. Frowning, she turns to Yuga and asks, "What is the meaning of this?"
"Look closely. Why, you'll scarcely believe your eyes!"
For the first time since her aborted coronation, Hilda's heart is stirred, however slightly. Curiosity bids her cooperate. The crack is so narrow that she has to tilt her head to align both eyes with it.
Beyond is golden light, so pure and bright that her eyes ache. Air flows into her nostrils with the scent of living plants. When she squints through the veil of her eyelashes, she can make out unbroken ground, lush grass, and white pillars, and a sense of expectation pours into her, a giddy whisper under her skin—
She whirls around with a gasp. "That can't be! Yuga, is that..." The word won't come out of her, not without undamming every emotion she's ever had to hold back.
"I can't imagine what else it might be, Your Grace." His painted mouth curls. "Isn't it fitting that we should be the ones to find a door to Hyrule?"
As a child, Hilda was taught to dismiss Hyrule as a fantasy, the collective dream of those who yearned for the lost Triforce. She grew up ever wary of false hope. Now she scours the castle libraries for fairy tales and reads them late into the night, sifting through candyfloss for hard lumps of truth.
Yuga is a great aid to her. He has long been obsessed with legends of Hyrule, and he is eager to answer her questions and embellish the events that her books gloss over. So much is unclear—if the tales are all true, time in Hyrule is a strange and convoluted thing—but little matters beyond what stands between her and the Triforce.
Still, she is surprised to learn that Hyrule is also a world of certainties and cycles; the difference is that Hyrule's do not spiral downward inexorably into dread. How strange, she thinks, to gaze into the future and see flecks of light within it. How strange to pray and trust the ear of a goddess to bend. In Hyrule, legends are founts of hope, and masks are worn for amusement.
In Hyrule, she learns, the Triforce is also in pieces, but three balanced ones rather than a million specks of dust. They sleep inside the worthy, waiting for crisis to wake them. Perhaps Lorule's Triforce is inside all of her people; perhaps it still faintly stirs but is dispersed too thinly to draw together. Perhaps the emptiness inside her could be filled if she swallowed what remained of her land. Or perhaps Lorule's Triforce is nowhere at all, because no one was worthy of it.
When her eyes ache from reading, she splays her right hand and stares at the back of it, where the skin is only dull and pale, with only blood and bone beneath it.
Lorule continues to crack apart around and inside her, accelerating toward the end, but now some fractures lead not to darkness but to a sister world bathed in light. One one them appears in the wall of Hilda's study. When she peers through it, at first she sees nothing, but then the darkness flutters aside like a curtain caught in the wind, and she glimpses her room's reflection in soft gold, unbroken and unsullied.
She pulls her chair to the wall and does most of her reading with her finger sliding up and down the paper-thin crack. Once when she gazes through, she spies her own face in profile, washed in Hyrule's shining colors, before the breeze covers it first with golden hair and then with what she has begun to suspect is a tapestry.
Her reflection is surely Princess Zelda, for all the royal daughters of Hyrule are Zelda, just as all those of Lorule are Hilda. It was only a moment's glance, but it is burned into all of her senses. She tastes it in the back of her mouth, a sour mix of envy and preemptive remorse.
"You will live to see the end," she tells the blue-eyed girl staring out at her from one of her illustrated tomes. She tries to make it sound comforting.
When Ravio comes to see her, Hilda realizes that she has lost track of the days. Her people must worry, those few who still have any connection to her. Lorule's voices grow steadily, terrifyingly quieter.
"Yuga and I have a plan," she assures him, forcing a smile as she looks up from her book. "We are nearly ready to act. You needn't worry any longer."
He nods meaninglessly. The muscle in his legs tense as if he is fighting the urge to shuffle back out the door and leave her to her work. "We've never kept," he begins, then coughs. He starts over: "Is there anything more I can tell the people?"
"It's best if the specifics are not widely known." Because he is her Ravio, she adds, "But I have never meant to keep them from you. I've too little time to discuss the details, but take heart in this: there are cracks that lead to Hyrule, to the one thing that can salvage our world."
He has always been quick to think through implications. The joy on his face is eclipsed almost immediately by horror. "But then what will happen to Hyrule?"
His words wedge themselves into a crack in Hilda's heart; she would flinch if she hadn't so much practice in hiding her pain. "Fortune has long favored Hyrule. Perhaps the goddesses who cherish her so will intercede yet again."
Ravio says nothing, and she has no wish to see what might be written on his features. Her gaze drops back to her book. "You needn't worry," she says again, turning the page to hide Zelda's face. "Tell my people to endure just a little longer."
Still he is quiet, and still he does not leave. He infuriates her, sometimes. Hilda flips aimlessly through the pages until she stops at one with a crease in the corner and a crack in the spine.
The illustration stops her breath. She glances from it up to Ravio and back again. Lips pursed, she raises the book to put both in her frame of vision. How, she wonders, did she never see it before?
"Where were you?" she asks sharply.
He shrinks from her tone. "I'm sorry?"
She turns the book toward him. "This is the Hero of Hyrule. Time and again, when disaster threatened, he appeared to put things right. You are his very image, are you not?"
When Ravio is frightened, he freezes like a cornered rabbit. He is very still now, eyes wide and unblinking, but she can almost see the thoughts churning behind them. He isn't stupid; what probably scares him most is that she won't allow him to pretend to be. "It's a pretty good likeness," he replies slowly.
"And no coincidence, either. All of Lorule is reflected in Hyrule, and so too is Hyrule reflected in Lorule. All differences are a matter of distorted glass." She snaps the book shut. "When Hyrule came to the edge of its own destruction, a hero emerged to defend the Triforce. So I ask you, why not in Lorule?"
He flinches. "Well, I—I hadn't even been born yet."
"What does that matter? Hyrule has a hero who guards her from calamity, again and again, and Lorule has you." Her tone drips with venom; she will regret this later, but she cannot stop. "You are his very image, yet you stand before me a weak, craven fool."
He is silent. He will no longer meet her eyes.
Outside, far away, another piece of Lorule cracks and collapses, and Hilda feels it in her bones. "Where were you?"
He says nothing as he slinks away. Three days later, he is gone.
Ravio took more royal treasures with him than she would have expected him to be able to carry. Among them is an artifact that Yuga planned to make use of, and she wonders if Ravio understood its value. She curses herself for believing in him.
"It truly doesn't matter," Yuga tells her. "The bracelet he stole is not the only means of crossing over. Entrust this to me, Your Grace, and I'll not disappoint you."
Nor does it matter that Ravio himself has vanished. Hilda has never relied upon him, no more than she relies upon the ground to remain solid. Let Hyrule keep him, if that is indeed where he has fled, and she will consider the exchange more then equitable. Hyrule has been served by her hero often enough; it is only fair that Lorule take a turn with him. Hilda has already steeled herself against his eventual hatred.
They are as prepared as ever they will be.
Yuga flattens himself to the stone and slides through the crack in her wall into the world she envies. When he is gone, she runs her finger along the edge and lets it pinch her skin at the bottom. Zelda would do the same, she tells herself. There is nothing to regret.
Alone, she waits, echoing decay. Desperation trickles into her from the ragged edges of the world, and she can do nothing but drown it in the cold sea of her calm. She will live to see the end, she reminds herself. What is left for her to fear?