TO THE ANCIENT LAND
Chapter Eight: What Have You Done?
The great hall of Dormin's Tower was silent as threads of black shadow laid a body gently upon the stone-tile floor. The lovely queen lay still upon the altar. The Master Sword spun and struck itself through the stone-brick between the altar and the young man. His skin was gray and run-through with hairline fissures. His eyes were clouded and stared blankly as he pulled himself to his feet. They shone red, like those of his dark half had in another age. His hair had gone black. Just behind his ears, the buddings of horns began to grow.
Link, or the being that was once "Link" reached out. He pulled himself toward Zelda and toward his sword. The sword's hilt emitted a magical energy like sparks of electricity and it glowed slightly at its sharp edges the same way it used to in Hyrule when it neared evil beings.
Smokemen were everywhere. The shades ran toward the young man and poured into him. Link grunted and moaned. He felt the muscles of his body stretch against the faming of his bones and his skin twisting in unnatural ways. The once-hero felt himself fading as he could sense the dead spirits taking over, twisting him into something he was not and trying to consume him. His heart was becoming nothing but black smoke. He struggled against them, willing his dead-fleshed feet to step toward the altar, toward Zelda.
He reached for her as clouds of shadow billowed about him. Suddenly, a golden light shot out from the back of his left hand. Three golden triangles glowed through his torn leather gauntlet, making the shadows flee. They dispersed from him in a strange pattern, twisting his skin, his bones and his organs. Link screamed until the scream turned inhuman. His voice turned to howls and low moans. The voices of the Dormin screeched as if they were people who'd been burnt with a hot branding iron. The black shadow erupted into a fount of oil and smoke that vanished, leaving in their wake the worst of what they could do to the body of a grieving Hylian protected by a relic belonging to gods.
The Triforce of Courage had stayed with Link. It had tried to protect him, despite all that he had done. It had certainly taken courage to face dangerous beasts of awe. Courage had always been a neutral virtue – it usually existed for the good, but was not always good in and of itself. The actions of a hero take courage, but so, too, do the actions of many a murderer. The Triforce, however, even in fragments, had always borne a basis in good, save for the corruption inherent in the fragment of Power among those unbalanced in heart. The Triforce had attempted to save Link. His soul was kept from consumption. His body was another matter.
Doves landed on the stone by Zelda's altar and took off.
Epona stamped a hoof, waiting by one of the stairways outside. She had found her way all the way back here, alone – but not entirely. The ghost of the black mare she had chased had disappeared as soon as she had found a familiar path.
Slowly, Zelda's chest rose. One breath. Two breaths. Her eyes fluttered open. Stiff and strange, she sat up. She was aware of her blood coursing and her skin becoming warm in the light of the sun.
She shook her head and rubbed her temples. Had she been dreaming? No… she was dead. She had the memories of dreams. Spectral visions came back to her. "Oh no…" she said.
She feared turning around. The young queen felt like herself. Her fragment of the Triforce, that of Wisdom, glowed softly upon the back of her hand. She did not sense any corruption within her spirit. She was whole – wrenched from one world back to another. She'd never noticed before how weighty a body was, nor the many tiny aches and pains that pin-pricked her as she caught her breath and her bearings. She had no idea what had happened to the entity or entities that had joined her back to her body and had, apparently, staved off her decay.
Zelda did not want to see the sacrifice her knight had made for her. If he lay behind her dead, she could not bear it. If he lay behind her in some worse state, she did not know if she could keep her mind together. She gathered up courage within her, the trait that he was known for and turned around as she stepped off the altar.
"Oh, Link," she gasped. "What have you done to yourself?"
Link moaned, a sorrowful sound and the only kind that he could make. He regarded the Lady Zelda with pained blue eyes – somehow sadder than the ones he'd always had. He reached out an enormous hand, facing it palm-up so that she might step out upon it.
"Link…"
He lifted her up to meet his stone mask of a face. Link had taken on a form resembling the shape of a wolf. His forefeet, however, were as human forearms with great hands.
A mane-like flourish protruded from behind the stone horns that had replaced his once-proud Hylian ears. The long structure resembled the hat he'd worn in human-form. He was covered in greenish skin like concrete, dressed in stone armor and patches of thick blond hair. Parts of his body glowed as seals, the most prominent one having the mark of the Triforce as its center. He could barely fit in the space within the tower.
The newly-minted Colossus brought the young woman up to its stone snout and regarded her with a groan. Zelda wept and threw her arms around one of the decorated stone structures making up the "nose."
"Why, Link?" she sobbed. "You should have left me be! I warned you! I remember now that I warned you!"
She received a sad grunt in response and the light went out in his eyes. The mask-like structure darkened for a moment, before the sad blue eyes resurfaced. It was all he could do to manage a blink. His limited expression conveyed that he still had the mind of a man. He could understand her, but he was trapped in the body of a beast – a thinking soul inside a statue.
"You can never leave this place, can you?" Zelda asked, shaking her head.
Link looked up for a moment, his gaze out upon the wide world made of the Forbidden Lands. He turned back to her and she planted a tender kiss upon one of the smooth areas of his snout. The Colossus lowered his hand to set her down, moaning and shaking his great head. He was trying to express some grief-filled message, but he was incoherent.
Epona ascended the steps and walked up to her, nuzzling the young woman. The horse looked to the Colossus in the room, unafraid. "She'll… take me home?" Zelda asked. "She knows the way, doesn't she?"
Link did the best nod he could. His hair-trimmed "hat" undulated up and down with the movement.
"I am so sorry," Zelda said. "It appears I have done you evil yet again."
Link moaned, doing his best to shake his head in a negative.
"I never asked this of you, yet you persisted. And now… what have you done? Link, what have you done?"
He pawed his face with his giant palm and groaned as if he was trying to come up with a way to vent his very soul.
Zelda grabbed the Master Sword – a thing she could not wield in battle but could touch – and mounted Epona, arranging her skirts in a way to make her comfortable for a long ride without a saddle. She looked up at her former knight. "I will make sure that Hyrule remembers you as a Hero," she said, letting one last tear drip down her cheek before letting Epona take her out of the temple.
She stared ahead, over the empty land as the mare plodded along, following the broken bridge to the place where her memory told her she'd come in. Zelda patted her neck. "He'll be a part of this land, won't he?" she said to the horse, not expecting to be understood, talking to herself. "His soul will not be free until it is set free… but by whom? Will the suffering in these cursed lands just cycle back again?"
As the horse ascended the path out of the lands-that-were-not-supposed-to-exist, Zelda heard a low howl. It was like that of a wolf, but heavier. She looked back to see the shadow of a great stone beast shamble off beyond the tower in the empty lands beyond.
She would make sure that her kingdom remembered him only as a Hero. He had given his life for hers in a mysterious place where terrible miracles happened. Hyrule would know no other legend.
END.
