Some things are better left forgotten, but it had never been in Ganon's nature to let the past remain still and at peace.
Ganon sat on the wooden platform in front of the clock tower while he waited for Zelda. He knew she would come to him eventually. As he sat looking out over the southern square of Clock Town, elliptical flashes of memories followed each other through his mind, snapping at their own tails in a twisting ouroboros.
There was a tan sandstone castle in the desert, and a white marble castle on the plain, and there was fire, fire everywhere. The flames that rose in his memories disturbed him, but he embraced them – fire was the only thing that could light the darkness, the endless formless chaotic darkness of the gaps in his memory. He had a vague recollection that he had forsaken the sun-drenched castle of his people for the shadowed castle under the cloud-choked gray sky, and he was haunted by fragmented recollections of how he learned that this castle was built on a foundation of its own poisonous darkness. He had attempted to rule it as a king, but he was nothing more than a king of bones, a king of stinking mud and broken masonry. Every fiber in his being attempted to pull him away from these memories of shame and despair, but he desperately wanted to remember who he must have been. It almost tore his mind apart to be two people at once, the swamp witches' son and a king of darkness, but he would have to endure the cognitive dissonance until Zelda arrived. She was the key to all of this, somehow. He was drawn to her, drawn to her beyond all reason, and he had to know why. If he saw her again, perhaps he would remember.
After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, Zelda finally crossed through the portcullis of the southern gate. He watched her wind her way through the crooked streets, once again noticing how silently and gracefully she moved. Yes, now he remembered – it was her Sheikah training. How foolish he had been not to see her for who she was when she had disguised herself as a Sheikah moving like a shadow through his kingdom. He had not expected a woman who had not been raised by the Gerudo to possess the sorts of abilities she commanded; but, then again, the princess had always been special. As he had remarked to Zelda earlier, she saw things that other people didn't. She had seen him, and she had sensed his power, and she had known him for what he was, even right from the moment they first locked eyes, a tiny slip of a girl and the armored diplomat of a disgraced tribe. He had resented bowing to this child, and she had not been fooled by his facile pleasantries and his too-easy smile.
It hurt his head to see her both as a girl and as a young woman his own age; or, at the very least, not much older than he had been when he first came to her kingdom as a teenager. How old was he now? How much had he aged? He wondered how he could be two people at once, a boy who had gathered and dressed herbs for his mothers while slowly and meticulously laying a fresco of swamp glass into the walls of their treetop dwelling and a king who was hated and feared throughout a land similar to yet completely different from this one. How could that be possible?
But then, he wondered, how many people was she? A princess, a protector of her people, an administrator blessed with a skill he would never possess, a spy, the leader of the resistance against him, and even something of a witch herself. And yet she was still the same bright-faced girl who fixed clocks and fiddled with machinery and pretended not to grieve when her father passed away and made no secret of the fact that she admired his own mothers. In the end, Zelda was the only person who was willing to see him as an equal among all the people in this world or the other.
Ganon smiled bitterly to himself. No wonder there had always been so much friction between them. Even had they not been enemies, they were simply too much alike.
Zelda finally arrived at the base of the clock tower. She clenched her fists at her sides and glared up at him. The shadows cast by the scaffolding darkened the subtleties hidden in the angle of her eyebrows and the twist of her lips, but the steely glint of determination in her eyes shone like the point of a sword.
"Ganondorf," she said, her clear voice echoing like the peal of a bell across the empty stone plaza. "I have come to stop you."
He knew then the sting of the golden arrows she had let fly at him without mercy, and he knew he should hate her for all the misery she and her wretched family had caused his people in the years stretching back from those crystalline moments of pain, but it still gave him pleasure that she remembered his true name.
Ganondorf grinned down at her. "Come on up, Your Highness," he said, smirking as his lips twisted around her proper title. "The night isn't getting any younger."
He glanced up at the heavens, where the moon was suspended directly above his head. It had not been in the sky since it first appeared that it would fall, but here it was once again above the clock tower. The hands of the clock had disappeared from its wooden face, which was as blank and ineffable as the moon itself. Ganondorf instinctively understood that had he had seen this before – the moon would fall, and soon, but this time it wasn't because of the mischief of a broken child or the negligence of any half-forgotten elder gods. The moon would fall simply because it was time for this dream to end.
Ganondorf looked down at Zelda's upturned face. She betrayed no expression of fear, only a cold calculation of how much time they had left. Or perhaps she was merely evaluating whether he was luring her into some sort of trap. But surely she must know that he had no power over her here, and perhaps she did indeed understand this, for she climbed the stairs to join him on the platform.
He didn't stand to meet her. Instead, as he had on the dock in the swamp, he offered her a bottle.
"This is a top-shelf sample of the special Romani Reserve," he told her. "I took it from Latté, but I don't suppose anyone will miss it at this point."
"No, I don't suppose anyone will," Zelda responded as she took it and sat beside him. "There's no one else here now, is there? Was there ever anyone else here?"
Ganondorf didn't answer. Zelda sniffed the uncorked mouth of the bottle, gave a slight smile, and drank. She continued drinking for some time, and Ganondorf couldn't blame her. Even in this phantom world on the verge of collapse, there were still some things worth savoring.
Zelda exhaled and wiped her mouth with a bit of the ornamental cloth hanging at her waist, no longer using the back of her hand like a mechanic.
"The first time it fell, the moon had a face, you know," she remarked. "I always thought it looked familiar, not to mention more than a little unattractive. Now I remember – it was your face."
"For a princess, you're extraordinarily rude."
"Did you do this?" she asked, ignoring his jibe. "Did you make this world?"
"If only I possessed that sort of power," Ganondorf answered, grimacing. "But it wasn't my magic that did this. It was your little boyfriend. He did it with that flute you gave him."
"How do you know that?"
It was a fair question, yet Ganondorf resented her for asking. He had spent years researching what the Ocarina of Time was and how it worked, yet the princess had held it in her own hands in almost total ignorance. Still, he decided that he would gain nothing by refusing to answer her.
"The ocarina was created from a block of pure timeshift stone that originated in the mines under the desert," he began. "I searched for it in the Gerudo ruins before realizing that it was in your castle all along. You Hylians tend to burn your books every time there's a regime change, so you had no knowledge of how dangerous that instrument is, only that it opens the door to the Sacred Realm. It does open the door, but only at great cost: by splitting and fragmenting time. That's what creates a place like Termina."
"Think of it, Zelda," he continued. "There are a multitude of timelines, an entire cosmos of worlds, all ultimately doomed to nonexistence because an ignorant boy used a powerful tool indiscriminately. He doesn't have the blood of Hylia in his veins, so all the worlds he created are little more than facsimiles, but what you did when you used the Ocarina of Time yourself…"
"Just listen to you pontificate," Zelda snarled at him. "I would never have needed to do any of this if it hadn't been for you. You killed my father, and who knows how many other people besides."
Ganondorf laughed ruefully before taking the bottle from Zelda. He drank before answering.
"You foolish girl, you're just as bad as the boy. You may have been trained as a Sheikah, but you have no understanding of how magic works. The royal family of Hyrule is cursed. The dead that walked the streets of Castle Town, the monsters that made their lairs in the temples that you Hylians abandoned – do you think I did that? Do you think those creatures suddenly sprang into existence because of me? They'd been there all along, because it was your own queens who created them. And if it hadn't been me who sought the Triforce, it would have been someone else. Maybe it would have even been the boy himself, orphaned and abandoned in one of your father's wars."
Zelda met his eyes, a terrible understanding beginning to dawn on her face. "What are you suggesting?"
"It was the magic of the ocarina that created this realm, but it wouldn't have been possible without the Triforce, and the shape of this world reflected the shape of your hero's heart. The moon has fallen before; it has fallen many times. This cycle of the moon falling and falling and falling… I wonder how many times that boy used the flute to reset the past so that he could save just one more person, and then just one more? It's pathetic."
"There is nothing wrong with Link," Zelda snapped. "And don't try to shift the blame away from yourself. It's your face the moon bears, after all."
"I'm not interested in explaining myself to you." Ganondorf shrugged. "And the moon has no face," he continued, pointing a finger toward it for emphasis. "The boy just saw it that way when he was here, but that was nothing more than one manifestation of the monsters he must have carried with him. Who knows what other horrors he confronted here in the world of his own making before he could find peace? And when he could finally move on, he did."
"So you're suggesting that Termina – this entire world – is Link's nightmare?"
"Exactly so."
"And he drew us into it without meaning to, that poor child…"
"Save your sympathy," Ganondorf sneered. "He woke up, and we've been stuck here ever since. Now we have to figure out a way to wake up as well. If we don't, we'll disappear along with everyone else in this dying world."
Zelda shook her head. "You know I can't let you to wake up," she said sadly. "Even if it means I have to sacrifice myself, I can never allow you to threaten Hyrule again."
"That choice is not yours to make," Ganondorf replied. "We're both at the mercy of the gods, and not even you can release me from the Sacred Realm."
Zelda sat for a moment in silent contemplation. "The Sacred Realm… what's it like?" she finally asked.
Ganondorf was not certain how best to answer her, for he could barely describe it to himself. Instead, he deflected her question. "You wanted to touch the Triforce too, didn't you?"
"I did." Zelda nodded. "How could I not? But I didn't trust myself."
"Would a world shattered by the touch of Wisdom be better than the one tainted by an excess of Power, I wonder."
"It's a blessing to all of us that you'll never find out." Zelda took the bottle from him again and drained the remainder of its contents. "But I still worry," she said softly, almost whispering, "what will happen now that the Triforce is no longer whole? Will we fall to ruin? Will Hyrule stagnate, now that we no longer have Power to energize our growth?"
Ganondorf had his suspicions that her musings were correct, and for a fraction of a second he felt a sharp sliver of guilt penetrate what little conscience he still allowed himself to maintain.
"The Sacred Realm is still and quiet," he murmured. "I barely know myself there, and it is a soft place, and peaceful. Yet it rejects me, and I cannot stay there. I don't know how many eons it will take, but I will find a way out; I must find a way out."
"The Triforce must be made whole again," Zelda said simply.
"And it will be," Ganondorf agreed. "I can feel it pulling me back even now."
"I can too…"
With those words she got to her feet, and he stood alongside her.
Zelda looked out over the Clock Town plaza, where the contours of every cobblestone stood out in sharp contrast in the overbright light of the feverish moon. "I'm scared," she admitted. "This was such a lovely dream, while it lasted. I had friends, and people who were just as close as family, and I could be my own person. I suppose I always felt a bit out of place, but I rather enjoyed being a clockmaker…"
It seemed to Ganondorf as though she were holding back tears. Perhaps it was because of the influence of the years he'd spent living in this dream, if in fact it had been years instead of nothing more than a tiny bubble in the flow of time, but he reached out to her and took her gently in his arms. Her body stiffened and then relaxed as she allowed him to hold her.
"Were you always the Demon King?" she asked him, so softly that he almost couldn't hear her voice. "Is that who you always were? Just as I always had to be the princess?"
Ganondorf shook his head without answering. He could not erase the past, nor the damage he had done. He could not purify the fury in his heart, or his regrets, or even the ferocity of his determination to reshape Hyrule once more should he ever be given the chance – but in the eerie glow of the falling moon he could offer a pallid semblance of comfort to this woman, even if it was only in this one moment.
Her arms slowly crossed around his waist, and he could feel the slight trembling of her body as she cried. Something deep inside him resonated with her pain, but he had no tears left to shed. That ability had been stolen from him long ago, when soldiers with silver helmets bearing the royal eagle crest came to the desert with spears and fire.
He tensed at the memory, and she released him, glancing up at the moon as she stepped away. It was closer, ever closer, closer with each passing minute. It was inexorable, the end of a world, the end of a dream in which she was nothing more than a clock master's daughter and he was nothing more than the swamp witches' son.
"Do you think we'll remember each other, the next time we meet?" she asked in a voice still thick with tears, not looking at him.
He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He knew the horror lying beneath the surface of her question just as well as she did, and he hated the answer with every ounce of his being.
"It doesn't matter," he replied, meeting her eyes. "No matter how the dawn comes, we'll greet it together, one way or another."
The moon had begun to take on a sinister red cast, and suddenly the sky was filled with stars, all falling upwards, leaving behind streaks of light as they extinguished themselves in the blackness of an empty void. The moon fell, as it would always fall, as it was doomed to fall because of the hero who was fated to rise, cast alongside two opposing forces sharing the same endless fate.
The wooden platform underneath their feet began to shine with an unearthly radiance, and Ganondorf knew it was time. The world they would wake into was far more terrible than this nightmare could ever be, but they had no choice. There was no longer anything to say, nor any time to say it. Even in this eldritch light Zelda cast her own brightness, but there was no longer a mask on her face, simply her naked self, vulnerable and filled with regret. Ganondorf held Zelda's hand in his, fixed her face in his memory, and then closed his eyes.
THE END
