Disclaimer: See chapter 1 for the disclaimer.
For the longest time it seemed pitch black in the Keep. In truth there were lit torches on the walls, but they were only a dim glow compared to the torches, fires, and starlight we'd been accustomed to outside. My eyes had barely adjusted while we scrambled about in an attempt to assemble order, hard as it was to do when the Rebels were literally beating on the door and shouting.
We found that the highest-ranking soldier amongst us was none other than Lieutenant Falod, the second-in-command of my Hylian cavalry troop. As some soldiers grabbed a few torches off the walls, we did a head count and found twenty-nine of us total, two severely wounded.
"Alright, listen up," Falod ordered as we gathered near the statue that hid our exit route. "I haven't been through here, but from what I've gathered it's a very long and cramped hallway that's going to take us out into the mountains. There's no light down there at all, so we need to stay together to ensure no one gets left behind. If you think you're going to pass out or fall behind in any way, let the nearest soldier know. I don't want any of us being left, so we will all stop and help if someone's lagging, am I clear? Good. Now stay together, these torches are going to be our only guides."
With that, he turned and pulled the arm of the statues, which slid back to reveal a stairway leading into a square hole. We filed down quickly, a man with a torch at the very front. I was one of the last ones down, and I turned to see the statue begin moving back in place, and Lieutenant Falod dropping into the hole and rolling down the stairs to get in before it shut completely. He stood with a torch in his hand.
"I'll stay in the very rear. No one, and I mean no one, gets behind me, am I clear? Then let's move, calmly please. We don't have much room in here, so the last thing we need to do is panic."
He could've said that again. Two men could barely stand shoulder to shoulder in that hall, but neither could move their arms much. We all had to watch our steps: we couldn't go too fast for fear of stepping on the heels of the men before us, but we didn't want to be too slow for fear of our own heels being trampled. The cramped corridor, the exertion of the battle mere minutes earlier, and our two wounded compatriots meant our progress was horribly slow. Every few minutes someone would trade off helping carry those wounded men, and I carried one of them more than a couple times, my arm around his waist and his own arm over my shoulders.
We shuffled along that path for what seemed an eternity. In truth, it was in fact several hours. I don't remember much other than a few breaks, and how quiet and miserable we all were. The wounded men had it the worst and their struggles to not slow us down were the loudest thing in that corridor.
Until one's struggles stopped. When we halted for a break he was alive. When we rose to resume our grim exodus, he wasn't. Someone suggested we leave him, lightening the burden a bit and allowing us to move faster. We overruled him and his few supporters and took the body with us. We had left enough behind already. Too many.
Near the end of the corridor (though we didn't know that, we'd almost lost hope in there being an end) someone told us what he had seen during the fighting, and soon everyone was taking a turn. Then one said something that shocked and confused more than a few of us.
"Then when the North Wall blew up…the Hero started telling us to fall back, so we started running, but one of the cannon guys from the twenty-pounder battery was shouting 'What about you? You need to come on too!' But the Hero just tells him to keep going, then he runs right at the parapet and dives off into the whole charging army! That cannon guy and I went to the parapet and looked, and I couldn't believe what I was seein': he was actually in the middle of that whole swarm of Rebels cuttin' 'em down like corn wheat! Then he screams back at us 'Go on! I'm going to get Vael's head, and I'm not coming back without it!' Then he starts cuttin' his way toward Vael's camp off in the west, and those Rebels couldn't touch a hair on 'im."
"Hold on a minute," another Loyalist said. "That can't be right."
"What do you mean? You think he couldn't do it?"
"I think he could, but I know he didn't. 'Cause when we were falling back I saw him on the North Wall running through every archer he could get his hands on, getting them back for Bargus."
"You're both full of it," yet another said, and soon we had a large shouting match going until Rusl quieted us all.
"Right now it doesn't matter what happened to him," he glowered, anger and pain evident in his face, eyes, and voice. "What matters is that we do what he wanted us to do and get out of here alive. He can't see his family anymore, but he stayed to make sure we all could. Now what do you all say we stop this pointless bickering and just get back home."
A few hours later that finally seemed possible: we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I don't know how the wounded man took that, but we all rushed to it eagerly and found ourselves on a high ledge above the ground of the Kasuto Pass, mountains and rocks all around us. We took a few moments to breathe the air, feel the sun and the wind, and let it sink in that we were out of that fortress. The next hour saw us making our trek down the small concealed path carefully and slowly. By the time we reached the ground and continued our way southeast back to Hyrule, the sun was in its afternoon stages.
I don't remember how long after that we walked but Rusl, who was out front as our scout, suddenly gave us the signal to halt. We did so and drew our weapons, tired and haggard but too stubborn to not face whatever threat might await us. But it was no threat. The slow, relaxed trot of a horse carried a beautiful steed around the next corner of the Pass, one we all recognized: it was the Hero's.
Rusl sheathed his sword and approached her with a smile on his face, and as he grabbed Epona's reigns and pet her nose, we all saw the searching look in her eyes as they scanned our motley crew. Searching for her master. Rusl noticed too, and what he said to her was too quiet for us to hear, but we all heard the tears that came to his voice. For a moment we were silent, and then Epona raised her head and neighed. More neighs came in response, and around the corner came even more horses from Liberty Rock. There were only six, but we put them to as much use as we could: one carried our fallen escapee, and another carried the wounded man. We all took turns riding the other four, though we all came to the unspoken agreement that Rusl alone would ride Epona.
For hours we forged on. We had no supplies and so were miserable with hunger and thirst, and we had no medical supplies. So we rarely interacted with the wounded man, who was in too much misery of his own to want to enjoy company, and so no one knew when he died. Someone simply looked at him and noticed he was gone, his body still upright in the saddle, though slumped forward a bit.
It was nearing sundown when we saw men in armor arise from behind rocks with bows and arrows aiming at us. Their armor was that of the Grand Army of Hyrule.
"Are you from the garrison at Liberty Rock?" their leader asked as he stepped forward.
"What's left of it," Rusl answered simply. The Hylian solders seemed to deflate at hearing this, and they lowered their weapons as their leader continued addressing us.
"We're the scouting element of the Lanayru Provincial Regiment. Our outfit is the one that was preparing to relieve you…when was the fort captured?"
"This morning," Lieutenant Falod said. "Before dawn. The sun was still nowhere in sight when we had to abandon it."
The scout leader nodded his head sadly, then looked amongst our group again.
"And where's the Hero of Twilight? Wasn't he in the fort too?"
For that, no one had an answer.
The sky was a beautiful mix of oranges and purples when we came to the gate at the Hylian end of the Kasuto Pass. We were lead through and saw the field where, fifteen days earlier, the cavalrymen of Troop 2 had set up camp until Captain Rhodus and my squad returned, hopefully with Link. It seemed forever ago, when we made our way through the gates on the path to a fort we only knew of by name. A fort where most of us would die.
Now it was much like the camp our troop had had that day, only much, much larger in scale. Thousands of soldiers were gathered with tents set in uniformed lines and rows of perfect spacing. We were taken past gaping soldiers and curious eyes into the tent of the regiment's commanders and staff. They spoke to us and we told them of the Rock's final battle, and learned the horrible truth: the reinforcements we had been waiting for so badly had finally been fully gathered, and were preparing to head out tomorrow. Vael's timing had been perfect.
We were lead to spare tents and slept through the night. The next day we were put on carts and sent to Hyrule Castle Town, where it finally hit us all that it was over.
The Calatian Loyalists who had escaped with us were sent home through the passes we still held. The Kasuto was the only one to have fallen, and when the surviving thirteen men of Troop 2 stood in the throne room of Crown Princess Zelda herself, the Layanyru Provincial Regiment was engaged in the Battle of Kasuto Pass, a violent stalemate which would last six full days before flanking divisions from the other two passes caught Vael's army in a pincer movement and retook the pass.
In the throne room of Hyrule Castle the Crown Princess asked us all to choose our fates, considering the least she could reward us for our ordeal. We could accept an honorable dismissal from the Army, our service done, or we could stay in one of two manners: we could return to the King's Cavalry, reassigned to another troop for immediate deployment, or we could remain in service and transfer to the 1st King's Royal Guard Battalion, which had the personal responsibility of guarding the princess herself.
Lieutenant Falod chose to return to the King's Cavalry, and would go on to become a hero in the Calatian Civil War. By its end three years after the fall of Liberty Rock, he had risen to the rank of major and was the second-in-command of the entire 2nd King's Royal Cavalry Squadron. He earned a name for himself in several battles where he stayed until all his men were safely out, whether he was wounded or not.
I chose to transfer to the King's Royal Guard, where I was assigned as a guard of the throne room. It was in this duty that, almost a week after the fall of the Rock, I witnessed a horror that haunts me to this day, worse than even the memories of the Rock's fall.
A courier arrived, bearing a message from broken negotiations. Vael would always send representatives with the same message: surrender now or there will be no mercy. It never mattered to him how outnumbered his armies were throughout the war, no matter how miserable and suffering his men were with infections and diseases and no supplies, he would never surrender the war.
But none of his messages were as memorable as his first. He sent a package with it, and when the courier opened it he screamed and dropped the small chest it had been sent in. It seemed that a ball of fur bounced out, but when it settled it became very obvious that it wasn't. The courier wasn't the only one screaming.
It was Link's head. The skin had decayed ever so slightly and holes exposed the red gore beneath. The hair seemed so thin and brittle, and some of the fibers did in fact remain on the floor in the wake of its rolling path. But the worst thing was the eyes: the lids had been sliced off so that they were always staring. When it settled to a stop it was looking directly at me, and his eyes seemed to focus on mine. They seemed to accuse me.
I wasn't the only one screaming.
Author's Notes: I had to force the task of writing this chapter down my throat. Not because it bothered me or something, I just didn't feel like doing it. But I know that if I wait until I feel like doing it, I might be waiting a long time. And I've given myself a deadline of July 30 to post the Author's Notes chapter, ending the story on the year anniversary of starting it, just like Multiplayer Chronicles: Mombasa. So I've got to post the actual final chapter between now and then. This might be my only Zelda fic for a long time, all my ideas are focusing elsewhere. Hope some of you follow me around though. Leave a review and some constructive criticism please.
