One week later…
Ganondorf had abandoned his nighttime ritual, but Chusai had not. After walking him to his chamber, she headed quickly to Zelda's tower, unlocking the door with her key.
She always lit the fire in the grate after doing so with the torches on the wall, even though the mysterious power that held the Princess in her coma also kept her warm. Keeping the room cold made Chusai feel as if she were entering her ruler's tomb. Zelda needed no food or water, and Chusai could see that she had not moved in the slightest over the past week, not even in the normal tossing and turning of sleep. Each night Chusai checked to make sure her own strands of hair, which she had laid in strategic places on that first night, to ensure that she would know if the sleeping body had been touched by unclean hands. So far they had not moved either.
Chusai kneeled before her Princess as if Zelda was awake and merely resting. "Your Highness, today I argued with the usurper king over the bomb-making materials in the Goron territories. He seems insecure if he does not have some kind of explosives in his possession. Obviously I do not want him to possess such things, much less fight the Gorons for them. I managed to stall by telling him he should search less populated parts of the mountain for the materials."
She hesitated for a moment, then shifted tracks. "Please, Your Highness, if you have contacted the Hero, let me know what I can do to help the both of you." Chusai bowed her head. "I am your loyal servant. Regardless of whatever torture the usurper king would subject me to in the Temple of Shadows, I would never betray you."
The fire popped and crackled as it burned merrily in the grate. The torches responded in softer tones. Outside, a carrion bird made a loud, angry claim to territory. Yet silence hung over Chusai like damp, bone-chilling fog. She bit her lip, debating over whether or not she should speak the burning words in her mind even when she was sure Zelda could not hear her. "Your Highness, I do not understand why you speak to the Hero and not to me. Surely I am in a good position to work against the false king? Surely you do not doubt my abilities?" She kneeled down further, almost touching her forehead against the cold stone. "I beg of you, Your Highness, send me a sign! Bequeath upon me some role that I may play, to liberate our fallen country!"
Silence. Chusai kneeled still as stone for a full minute, then suddenly raised her head and stood. She extinguished the torches, doused the fire in the grate, and made a final stiff bow to the motionless Princess.
Fetching a lantern, she stalked down several flights of stairs and out the doors to the courtyard, ignoring the chill rain that poured down. If all I can do is speak to the dead, then at least I will speak freely to those who will listen.
She entered the graveyard and kneeled before the Ordana family plot, her knees sinking into the soaked ground. "Honored Grandmother, Honored Grandfather, forgive me for what I have done. Doubtless you have heard the story from my mother, father, and brother. I can feel the ire of their restless spirits as they wait angrily to be laid to rest beside you. Hate me if you must, but there is no one else to whom I can speak my true mind."
Chusai's body trembled as a dam about to burst, no longer able to hold back the rushing torrent. "Our Princess has forsaken us. She has grasped hold of false prophecies and the mutterings of old men, believing they will pull us out of the shadows. Meanwhile I stand here alone, trying to fight against the bloody tsunami that the usurper king wishes to unleash upon the Sacred Realm of Hyrule. For the love of my country I stand like one lone tree against a massive tornado, knowing that I will eventually be swept up into its ravaging winds and torn like a rabbit among ravenous wolves. I cannot even call my life my own, for the Princess pulled me back from the sweet sleep of death to endure in this endless nightmare."
Tears ran down Chusai's cheeks and mingled with the rain. "My only wish is to be freed from my enslavement, but I know I must fulfil my duty as my Princess has ordered. Honored grandparents, I cannot do it! I can feel the usurper king moving like the moon before the sun, blocking out all light and casting my very soul into eternal darkness. I beg you, forgive me for my weakness, the unwilling betrayal of my soul!"
Finally Chusai dissolved into great, wracking sobs, her arms shaking as she kneeled before the graves in the sodden darkness. She felt her body slowly begin to strengthen as the poison that had built up in her body since the invasion finally drained from her spirit.
Suddenly she jumped to her feet, her hand over the hilt of her sword. She relaxed, just a little, as she realized the shadow moving toward her was far too small to belong to the one she most feared.
The shadow raised its own lantern, and Chusai saw the face of Namu, the Gerudo guard who usually stood at her door at night, one of a few that could speak fluent Hylian. "Lieutenant? Are you all right? You didn't come to your chamber so I decided to look for you."
Chusai picked up her lantern and walked toward her, scowling. "You were told to do so by Ganondorf, you mean."
"The great Ganondorf has assigned me the task of ensuring your safety, it is true. But I decided to come out to search for you on my own." Namu lit the path for both of them as they made their way back to the castle.
"Szla Ganondorf," Chusai muttered in Gerudo, taking secret pleasure in Namu's shocked expression upon hearing her leader's name matched with a very unsavoury curse.
They walked in silence until they entered the castle once more. "I understand why you do not care for him," Namu said carefully, knowing she was treading on dangerous ground. "But we follow him not just because tradition dictates we should do so. He brought us out of our dying country to your rich, fertile one. I am sorry, at least for you, that it is your country he chose. But time heals all wounds, yes?"
Chusai huffed. "How much of this is your own words, and how much is more nonsense he has scripted to poison my mind?"
"It is all mine, Lieutenant."
"I suppose you envy my position."
Namu thought for a moment. "Well, I admit we were all hoping his right-hand woman would be a Gerudo. But none of us envy your position. Our leader is a great man, but I admit he is not easy to work with."
Chusai erupted into bitter laughter that echoed off the cold stone walls. "Yes, he is that."
"He respects you deeply, Lieutenant."
"I have no way of knowing that for sure. And I do not want his respect."
Namu frowned. "Would you rather have his ire?"
Waving her hand in an unconcerned manner, Chusai snapped, "It does not matter. What is done is done. There is nothing I can do, no hope for those trapped in the darkness, and no sleep for me tonight."
Glancing around, Namu fished a small flask out of one pocket. "I know our great leader has forbidden you from entering the pantry where the liquor is kept, but if you truly cannot sleep, perhaps this will help you."
Chusai took the flask gratefully and downed a few gulps of the harsh whiskey, making a face as the liquid burned down her throat to her stomach. "Thank you, I needed that."
Namu took back the flask as they reached Chusai's chambers. "Good night, Lieutenant, and sleep well."
"You seem distracted, Chusai," Ganondorf commented airily as Chusai picked herself painfully off the floor, a gash from his sword in her arm. "You need to concentrate during weapons training."
"Forgive me, My Lord," she muttered as she wrapped a bandage around her injured arm. "I am worried about Her Highness. I don't think she will wake anytime soon."
He sighed and put his weapons aside, motioning for her to do the same. "I have already told you that she is in no immediate danger. I know you are dedicated to your Princess, and I have stated before my admiration for your loyalty. But you have to move on, Chusai. For all practical purposes, Zelda has abdicated her throne."
The words hit Chusai like a slap to the face. "I beg your pardon, My Lord, but I cannot agree with that."
He watched her for a long moment, taking note of the defiance in her eyes. She braced herself for a confrontation, but to her surprise he turned around and motioned for her to follow. "Come with me, Chusai. I want us to have a long talk."
Chusai suppressed the urge to throw up, both spite and fear pulling at her gut.
He did not speak a word until they mounted their horses in the stable and began riding to the gate at the far side of the castle, facing the mountains. As they rode slowly through Hyrule Field, he motioned to the landscape around them. "Little has changed, Chusai. I know there has been a great shift in the castle and the town, as well as some of the villages. The regents, too, have changed their habits somewhat to deal with the new situation. But Hyrule itself remains unchanged, as it has for thousands of years."
He pointed to the side of the mountain, where an ancient lava flow spilled over the smaller hills and out toward the field itself. "When the Goddesses made this world, they wanted to ensure that it stood on a solid foundation. Animals and people are born and die, trees grow and fall, whole civilizations rise and then fade away. But the mountain will always be there."
Reining in his horse, he dismounted and motioned for Chusai to follow him over the ancient stone. "There are two lessons I want you to learn today. The first is that even though things may change on the surface, beneath that veneer is an eternal strength that cannot be shattered or even chipped. The second lesson I want you to learn is that even something that seems geared toward nothing but destruction can be useful for other things, but you must look hard within them to see this meaning."
He clapped a hand on her shoulder, leaning in close, and directed her gaze toward the mouth of Death Mountain. "Thousands of years ago, this very stone we stand on wiped out all life before it. But now a race of people cannot survive without those very stones! Not only does it provide food for the Gorons, but it also bestowed upon this land the materials needed for the essentials of our lives…iron for swords, carbon for ink, precious jewels for trade with other nations."
He bent down and picked up a large, gray, pock-marked rock from the ground and handed it to Chusai. She stared in surprise as the large stone weighed as much as one ten times smaller. "This is pumice," Ganondorf explained. "It is so light because it is full of air holes. It is expelled from the mountain with such force that it cools before the air inside can escape."
He wandered around for a bit, and Chusai wondered idly why the King of Darkness had such an obsession with rocks. It would have been funny if it were not so serious. She could only figure that they interested him because they had once been part of the fiery bowels of the mountain.
Handing her a shiny, deep ebony stone, he said to her, "This is volcanic glass, called obsidian. It also comes from lava cooled quickly, but it is so solid that there are no air pockets at all. But that is not the most interesting thing about it." He took the rock away from her and smashed it against the stone wall next to them, showing her the razor-thin, circular edges where it had broken. "This glass is sharper than any sword. Tales from the Age of Myths say that they were used as weapons before people learned how to forge iron." Now he raised his gaze up alongside the high cliffs. Finally he took her hand, pulling her closer and pointing up to a scraggly tree, where some brown strawlike material sat blowing in the breeze. "That is called Din's Hair(1), and believe it or not it is also volcanic glass. It is thin threads of lava that spin out over the winds, and are caught in trees or bushes."
Chusai looked down at his hand, hoping he would let go soon. She glanced up to see him watching her with an expectant expression. "Do you understand, Chusai?"
She dropped her gaze to the stone where they stood. "You're telling me that the mountain's destruction can be a useful thing. There are pieces embedded in its overflowing changes that are essential for new life. And their presence and complexity aren't always apparent when you first look at them."
"Very good, Chusai." The enthusiasm in his voice annoyed her and she closed her eyes just for a moment to compose herself. But as she did, she felt him clasp something loosely around her neck and her eyes flew open in surprise. A silver necklace lay there, with a polished stone similar to the ebony one he had given her, but a white mineral made a snowflake pattern over it. "This is also obsidian, with some impurities that have made it beautiful as well as potentially deadly. I was going to give this to you later on, but the occasion simply presented itself."
She suppressed the shudder that ran up her spine. "Thank you, My Lord," she said simply, resisting the urge to yank off an iron collar.
The savage cold bit deeply into Chusai's skin, teeth of ice piercing through her thin tunic and needling eagerly toward her heart. She wrapped her arms tightly around her body, but every breath of frigid air she took sliced her throat and burned her chest. She exhaled the warmth from her body in puffs of white mist, barely perceptible in the darkness. "Your Highness?" Chusai called out in the shadows. "Zelda, where are you?"
"Chusai, I am with our people." Zelda's faint voice barely brushed her ears. "You promised you would protect them…"
"I'm coming!" She stumbled in the dark. "I didn't forget…" Chusai groped blindly along the side of a cold stone wall, focusing on a pinpoint of light in front of her. It grew brighter, and she could see a doorway not far in front of her.
Chusai stepped out of the doorway, and found herself in the castle town at night. The air was, if possible, even colder, as a chill wind pelted her with tiny grains of ice. Snow carpeted the streets and covered the roofs of the houses, with brittle plants poking up here and there. The moon hung low in the sky, windswept clouds obscuring the stars. The naked trees stood hard and fast, their crooked branches casting eerie shadows across the streets and homes. Not a single living thing could be seen
Chusai waded through the snow, calling for Zelda. She walked up to the nearest house, noting the lack of smoke in the chimney, not just for that one but all of them. She knocked on the door anyway, deathly cold and planning to break in and get out of the wind if no one was home. No one answered her knock, but when she pressed her ear against the door, she could hear someone – or something – moving inside.
"Is anyone home?" A gust of wind shook the eaves and blasted Chusai in the face with snow. She shivered violently and hunted around for a rock or brick to break open a window.
The soft sound of shuffling feet reached her ears, as well as haunted whispers from behind. Chusai whirled round. "Who's there?" Her gaze fell upon a host of shadows, barely perceptible in the snow-scattering wind. "Who are you?"
"Chusai." The word drifted across the snowbanks, spoken in a familiar voice, one that she knew should not be heard. "Chusai, what have you done?"
"Who's there?" Chusai demanded.
Sinister laughter peppered the air around her, and she glanced around with horror to see more shadows appearing on all sides. "Chusai…how dare you flaunt your living warmth among us, in the land of the dead." A figure stepped forth from the shadows and Chusai's breath caught in her throat as she recognized her father. The flesh of his face had turned gray, the scattering of wounds on his body open and bloodless. "What makes you think you have earned the right to see us again without paying the price?"
Chusai steeled herself. "Where is Zelda?"
"She is both here, and not here." The dead revolutionary from the near-riot stepped forward. "She straddles the line between the two worlds, so that she may speak with the Hero."
Gritting her teeth, Chusai shouted, "There is no Hero! Tell me where she is, so I can wake her up!"
An angry hiss rose from the shadows. "Who are you to speak this way to us?" her brother demanded. "You stood by as we were slaughtered by the usurper king!"
Chusai clutched her hands to the sides of her head. "I couldn't do anything! He would have killed even more people if I tried!"
"You have not earned the right to live among us!" Chusai's mother cried. "If you insist on staying here, you must give to us the warmth that we have been without for so long!"
The host of shadows moved toward Chusai. She turned and fled down the streets, but more undead emerged from the shadows regardless of whichever way she turned. They pursued her with heartrending cries, clutching at her sleeves with clawlike hands, reaching for her heart.
Even running at top speed to save her life, all but the innermost part of her body felt frozen. Fearing she would freeze to death even as she ran, she instinctively turned toward the only heat she could feel, just on the edge of discernment.
The trail led her back to the gates of the castle. If the town had been uninviting, the castle gates were downright threatening. Even darker shadows haunted the corners, snickering like weasels and raking her with the gaze of sightless eyes. The spiky, jagged tree branches hung low over blood-red carpeting and torches that seemed to reflect the flames of Hell itself. Something sinister, nameless, formless, waited hungrily within for her to enter.
But it was warm.
Chusai glanced over her shoulder, watching the crowd of undead advance. She realized she had stopped shivering, not because she was no longer cold, but because her body had begun to shut down. Her mind, along with her body, grew numb. She stumbled through the shadows toward the only slight chance at life.
The doors slammed shut behind her with a devastating note of finality. But she could no longer hear the angry cries of the dead.
She walked slowly through the hallways, gray stone decorated only with crimson carpeting, the hellfire torches burning with an unclean heat and casting flickering shadows through the halls. There seemed to be no living things here, either, nary a mouse or even an ant.
Chusai walked past a doorway, then stopped and returned. A cheery fire burned in the fireplace, the room decorated with colorful tapestries and ornate, comfortable chairs. She paused for a moment, the strange echo of childhood fairy tales resonating in her mind, warning of gingerbread houses and too-friendly strangers. But she could sense no one's presence, except for the angry shadows of the dead, safely locked outside.
She entered the room and kneeled down by the fire, spreading her hands and feeling a strange joy course through her veins, as if tasting some forbidden fruit. She glanced around the room searching for a hidden owner, hoping that whoever it was that had nudged the flames to life would not object to taking a bit of warmth not being used.
As the frost slowly melted from her blood, she stood up and sat back in one of the chairs, watching the flames dance in the shadows. She took a deep breath and exhaled, finally relaxing, reveling in the softness of the chair and the heat of the fire.
She watched little curls of smoke undulate and rise up into the chimney, their dance in step with the flickering flames strangely hypnotizing. She grew sleepy, and imagined she must be half-dreaming as the curls of smoke seemed to coalesce into human form.
"Chusai." The familiar voice dripped danger. Chusai's half-shut eyes jerked wide open, and she tensed her muscles to jump out of the chair. Only her eyes actually moved. As she pleaded with her body to move, trying desperately to shift the dead weight that had somehow stuck to the chair, the smoke-person's shape became identifiable. Sparks from the fire erupted into flaming-red hair, and he looked with ember eyes upon the woman in the chair.
"So, Chusai," the fire-creature spoke softly, calmly, in Ganondorf's voice. "You come to warm yourself by my fire, then presume that you can leave without my permission?"
Chusai strained with all her might, managing to twitch a limb or two and shout to the flaming apparition, "Get away from me!"
"Chusai, I did not force you here. You came of your own accord, inexorably drawn to me."
She forced one hand into a fist. "I was just trying to get out of the cold!"
The creature stepped closer, curls of smoke swirling around the both of them. "You have to make a choice, Chusai. Heat or cold, life or death, hate or…well, you could debate what the opposite of the hatred and feelings of betrayal your people have for you are. Only know that you will be safe from it if you turn yourself over to me."
"No!" Chusai pulled with every fiber of muscle in her body, desperately straining to get away from the unclean heat. "I am loyal to Zelda and I only follow her orders!"
He chuckled. "You remain loyal to the Princess who deserted you?" His voice was mockingly impressed. "How valiant…also stupid. You're not such a fool as that. I can feel it in your soul. You have been cut loose, a rogue, a ronin. You yearn for a strong foundation where you can stand as a warrior once more."
"I said get away!" Chusai shut her eyes, trying to put up a barrier between her and the advancing shadow.
"Chusai…do not fight the inevitable. Every creature in this world has a role to play, and even if you do not know yours, I do."
As she opened her mouth to scream, black smoke entered her lungs and choked her. The fiery apparition dissolved and the smoke wrapped itself around her. Her chest burning, Chusai tore herself free from the chair and fell on her knees, gasping. Ripping pains coursed through her body, and when she opened her mouth it only allowed more smoke in. She wrapped her arms around her chest, gasping, staring with horror as the skin on her hands blackened and her fingers grew long and sharp.
Chusai stood, and looked for one brief moment at the red-eyed demon in the mirror before she shrieked and thrust her fist through it.
(1) Din's Hair is taken after Pele's Hair, which is a real type of volcanic glass. (Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano.)