Thread. It was everywhere. Ganondorf could hardly believe the amount of work even the wretched exiles of the remote settlement could conjure up. Ganondorf found folded commissions, extra fabric, piles of scraps, and pilfered spools of thread on nearly every possible surface of the crowded room. It was a wanton, tangling mass; in the center, like a spider amidst cobwebs, sat Zelda.

"Please, do you have anything to do?" she asked, eyes flitting from stitch to stitch. "It's hard to work with you leering at me."

Ganondorf sat in the scratchy chair, surrounded at every vector by unfinished garments in queue. "In my experience, you are troublesome as a prisoner," he said, "and I will not leave you to your own devices."

"Maybe you are my prisoner?" Zelda said. "You cannot leave me, it seems, and you would not be able to persist here if not for my earnings."

Zelda cut her thread, knotted it, and shook out the jacket she had mended. Ganondorf scoffed at her where she sat.

"In my power, you are my prisoner," Ganondorf said. "I have taken everything from you; you have lost far more than me."

"Both you and I know that is not true."

She didn't understand. She could never understand; any pretensions from her were loathsome.

"You and I, we have for centuries been pulling each other down," Zelda said, reaching for the next piece of work. "My ancestors finally managed to throw you into a ditch, and now you have reached up to grab my ankle, and pulled me into the mud with you."

Ganondorf racked his brain to think of something, anything to stop her. It been so simple for her, hadn't it, with the ability to silence him with a single command? Ganondorf had no such luxury; he recalled exactly why in the past he had locked her in sleep or paralysis, or bound her. Or gagged her. Or cut out her tongue. Soldiers and kingdoms were easy to conquer. Free mouths less so. Instead, he did his best to ignore; he should have known that his attempt would fall instantly to his own greed for conflict.

"You may boast about how much you have taken from me, but I don't exactly see you holding the spoils," she said. "Your threats are those of a filthy exile feigning lordship over another filthy exile."

Ganondorf's stare could blister the mirror on the back wall, but to his annoyance he found the woman's flinch was gone, replaced with a cold despair that felt so distinctly wrong to him that he wanted to command her, 'be Zelda!' With hysterical bitterness, he found an opponent in himself: he had longed, ached for the day that Zelda's spirit finally would be broken. He had tried for so long and with such ferocity, and yet when the day came, he wasn't the victor. And now he resented it, quite suddenly.

He hardly craved familiarity, but Zelda as a constant foe was perhaps the only landmark he could recognize through his ages spent upon the earth. He found he did not appreciate the snuffing of that beacon light as much as he had thought he would.

There was no way to communicate any of this to her. And so he struck her where she sat, without a word. She cried out, knocked to the bed's surface, reeling in the stained sheets. Her spools of thread scattered, order transformed into tangles. Ganondorf's knuckles stung, a familiar pain mirroring the unfamiliar bruise spreading across Zelda's right cheek. She was fragile, he realized. For all her status as his eternal foe, for all that he had paranoia for his own mortality, her life was far more delicate than his own.

"This is no worse than what Calas would do to me, had he caught me. What bandits, bounty hunters, or anyone in this pit would do to me should they learn of me... I do not expect any less." Zelda said, licking the blood from her split lip. "I am ready to suffer."

"Enough!" A single, hawkish blue eye peeked out from under her mess of brassy hair. Ganondorf supposed he had her babbling attention. "You disgust me," he said. "Your ancestors fought for generations to defeat me, slaughtered until my sword bathed red in their blood for eight hundred years, and before that into ages past. And yet, for every damned time you have prevailed over me, this is all you have to say for yourself when forced to suffer a single defeat? That you are content in your punishment?"

She was still enough to have died. Good riddance, he thought.

"Perhaps I do not need to watch you after all," he spat, "If you are so eager to stay in your cage."

He was at the door, and she was still frozen where she lay, reeling.

"I am not so content, Zelda."

He shut the door on her, feeling the bang of an army drum abusing the inside of his skull. Even so, he did not forget to lock the door behind him as he swept off in search of more worthwhile tasks.

She may have wallowed in her own sorrows, he thought, but she still was a Zelda, and mere emotions had never stopped one before.

The correct answer for all of this mess, Ganondorf knew, was to decide on where to go next, and what to do there. The proper way to decide on these things, Ganondorf also knew, was over several pints of ale and with no interruptions. The only problem with this was the wallet with whatever he and Zelda had between them remained securely in their room, and that was a place that Ganondorf had no wish to face again any time soon.

Leaving had been unwise, he admitted, but he had done so many unwise things in his lifetime It was beginning to get tiresome, actually. But similarly, there was no way to sit himself down and bother about it all without said pints of ale.

He could steal the money, he admitted to himself, and it would be easy. Even something as unsophisticated as taking a fool behind an alley and beating them to death for spare rupees could go unnoticed. However, the chance that the target could belong to some brotherhood or part of a smuggler cartel was not one that Ganondorf wanted to deal with; the world was far larger than the politics of this wretched place and he had no ambitions to rule over the depraved and the poor.

He did not exactly have a limited amount of free time, anyway. For that reason, he found himself doing what he had least expected.

Ganondorf unlocked yet another stall door, basket of bristle-bare brushes hooked over his bad elbow. The beast inside snorted in discomfort, never taking his eyes off the man. Yes, he thought. 'Honest' work. How the mighty fall. Carefully, he reached out to the horse with a dull iron curry comb, and began to rub the loose hair from its hide. It tolerated him warily.

The task was boring beyond belief, but at least at the end of the day there would be pay, and it put him somewhere off the streets: somewhere quiet and without the screeching throng of bodies that haggled and crowded his thoughts away. The ash-grey hairs of the animal itched his hands where the already-thin coat was wearing thin. Ganondorf had brought the animal in well enough, but the beast had faced a lifetime of poor care earlier. Every Gerudo had once been taught how to care for their horse; it was a rite of adulthood and an honor to care for one, the steed that would carry them through raids and even to war. Never before had he seen as scant care as in this stable, however; not even in the middle of the desert.

These were not of the ancient and hardy, scrub-eating stock of the desert's history. Liberated from caravans, these were the spoils of highwaymen or riderless orphans stolen from battlefields. Animals of Hyrule's once-lush fields, they did not handle their diets of dried weed-hay, or the bitter crab-grass. There were no oats to fatten them; they persisted as bony creatures, let out once a day to chew at the moorland's meager pasture. Ganondorf moved to the hoof-pick, turning the sharp hook of steel over in his good hand before he realized that with only one arm getting the animal to pick up its feet would be difficult. How mundane a difficulty, he thought. Once, I concerned myself with the workings of divinity and the fall of kingdoms, and now my thoughts are those of a horsegroom. He managed, however, and began excavating cakes of foul-smelling muck.

There was much to do, he thought. This mess was just the same, he told himself, as what he had considered a 'setback' as while imprisoned in the castle. Perhaps it was even an improvement; he was free to go where he pleased, within reason. Yes; from this place, he could move forward; perhaps even to re-establish his army. Surely savage folk and wild beasts still existed in the world, even with Hyrule's dominance so hard-formed. It would then be only the simple task of re-ganging them into his service.

It did not matter what wills any of them could have established in the time he had been gone, thought Ganondorf as he picked the horse's last filthy foot clean. Such thralls were easily shaped to match their masters.

Finished with the animal's hooves, Ganondorf wiped the muck off his good hand on his breeches and stood straight, cracking his back. There was a problem with his plan, however... the question was if his sorcery would behave or not.

Ganondorf looked at the gangly grey. It was the same beast that had borne them into this gods-forsaken settlement, and perhaps it would do to bear them out again. It looked back at him knowingly, pleadingly. Please, its eyes implored: no more. That was impossible, however; it was just a dumb beast. It could hardly protest as Ganondorf invoked the impossible complexity of a spell of domination: passed down from the Twinrova centuries ago... though a few substitutions had to be made. Small, hiccuping power for the usual dark sorcery... but it hardly mattered. It was just a horse; not a thing of mind at all. A test was in order; he stepped out of the stall to make safe the preparations.

The first task was a simple paralysis spell; easy even with a diminished wellspring to draw from. The beast bellowed through raw, flared nostrils, white-rimmed eyes darting in horror. The second step was to impress his suggestion of servitude upon the creature; laughably easy, for a horse had nothing to replace. The third, to bind that contract of obedience to Ganondorf's will in the physical sense; it's very existence could easily be shaped to the master's wishes. Easy, too easy. If this rite had required so little power before, he wondered, why then had he applied so much, so many times in the past?

Ganondorf looked up from his spell at last, to inspect his newest thrall. It was a horse, shrieking and terrified in its stall. It bucked and reared, spooked at the temporary loss of its mobility: unchanged. No horns? Not even a little breath of fire?

Ganondorf's question answered itself. No, he thought. Your sorcery will not behave.

"Commotion?"

The voice had so quickly levitated to his side that Ganondorf almost drew his sword. But it had only been the useless stable-master. While Ganondorf occupied himself with sorcery, the old man had drawn near. Sightless eyes stared blankly at Ganondorf's collarbone. It took a longer, more embarrassing moment than Ganondorf was willing to admit to realize that the man had referred to the horse. Not spellwork that a blind man could never have seen anyway.

"Merely a horsefly," Ganondorf said,

"I see," said the stable owner. "You do good work, boy. Here is your day's pay."

The man held out a single, chipped red rupee. Ganondorf's hand hovered around the gnarled, withered fingers before closing around the wrist, palming the money. Knowing that his payment had not been dropped, the stable-master slipped out of Ganondorf's grasp.

"Any idea what you want to use it for?" the man asked. "Drink? Board?"

Ganondorf thought. "News," he said.

It was a moment before the slow, old man reacted. But that reaction was jovial laughter that shook the man's whole frame. He reared like a snake, unfurling from his hunch, throwing back his head to the thatch roof. "You are smarter than you seem!" he said. "Get yourself down to the Naked Eye, behind the brewhouse. You tell them there that Talon sent you. You'll soon be sorted straight on whatever truth you're looking for."

The Naked Eye was one of the larger, well-kept buildings among the settlement's sprawl. Unlike others, its mud daub had few to no cracks spidering up to the roof. The doors were wooden, and wicker. The smoke that hazily twisted out between shutters and from under eaves scented of incense and myrrh, creating a cloud of welcome for a few yards in front of its street front. Amidst the shady shops and the outcast peddlers, the Naked Eye was an establishment of wealth, an establishment with distinction.

Naturally, it was a brothel.

Ganondorf was unsure about the proper etiquette. Houses such as these, he thought, were for those who didn't have the needs of an entire race to attend to. A little too late he remembered it had been countless lifetimes since the Gerudo's population been a concern in his life at all. The men inside took little notice of him; the parlor was busy at work and the escorts did their jobs well; those who paid for simple company were not to be disrupted. But Ganondorf was aware of the eyes. The eyes of the girls flicked, they pointed, they danced subtly from him, to the door, to the serving boy, to each other.

A code, to be sure, for seemingly out of nowhere, their queen materialized.

"What brings such a fine man to my house tonight?"

She was tall, and fair: so fair, her skin seemed translucent, and her hair a shining, spun-glass bleach twisted up into a forest of braids. Obviously not for sale, for her gown was of modest cut. No; modest was not the correct word. It was sewn with feathers and gauze in extravagance. She wore no jewels, and was silent in delicate slippers; in the stead of beads, a silken scarf was delicately knotted around her neck. Intricate kohl framed her eyes, curling down a pale cheek to point at dark red lips.

"I was told by a stabler Talon to seek news here," Ganondorf said. "I trust I have not been misinformed, Madam?"

The woman's laugh was low and restrained, but hardly mocking. "Please, you will find enough madams and my-ladies in Hyrule herself. Here I am simply Impaz, and this is my house." She clapped her hands with unexpected vigor, and conjured a petite girl to her side. Ganondorf could not have observed a more obedient, perfect response in any soldier of Calas' army that he had the displeasure of watching weeks before. "The old goat was right to send you here. This is Arin, she will tell you all that you care to know."

"And if she does not know what I ask?"

"Then it is not known to anyone in this village, nor to anyone upon the roads, or to anyone within reason within the castle's town," replied Impaz. "Perhaps it is not known at all, Lord...?"

"Dragmire," Ganondorf replied, dismissively. It had been a title once, or a false surname; he did not care. It served as a substitute for his own name well enough.

"Lord Dragmire, indeed," Impaz said. "Twenty rupees, and you may seclude yourself however you wish. There is... privacy in my house."

Ganondorf handed over the chipped rupee piece. Impaz cleaned it on her dress, as though it had been filthy. Ganondorf doubted that such a woman (and a stranger, more suspicious woman he had rarely seen!) had seen cleaner payment than his. Without another word, Impaz gestured at her girl, and before Ganondorf had seriously considered a destination they were in a small, secluded room on the second floor, walls draped with curtains to keep out the draft. A small fireplace burned within, consuming the same aromatic fuel that the whole place stank of. Ganondorf began to resent it; up close it was considerably less pleasant. Within, there was a real feather bed. The girl Arin clambered up upon it,and instead of stretching out languorous, crossed her legs and sat up straight and alert.

She could not have been older than sixteen: dark-haired and olive-skinned. Ganondorf had no desire for such a frail girl, and was glad he had bought only for news.

"Please sit, sir," she requested quietly. Her accent was Hylian, one of the low, peasant tongues, but she lacked their characteristic slurring or pidgin-dialect. "What do you wish to know?"

Ganondorf obliged her only reluctantly. It was not done to take orders from a stripling maid, but whatever small society they had made it was far more familiar to Ganondorf than the chaos of common bandits. Likely, he thought, this girl was the smallest of many sisters.

He chose his words carefully. "The Queen of Hyrule is overthrown," he said. "What has become of her?"

The girl's conduct was similar: pausing, and then forming her answer as if working a craft. "The throne has declared Queen Zelda an apostate and a pretender to the throne: the last of a long line of tyrants. She escaped with the help of her monster servant, but her whereabouts are unknown. I am sorry."

"That will do," Ganondorf assured, somewhat relieved. "What of her King, Calas?"

"Calas of Springspass, he is now the sole ruler of Hyrule, and recently has sent out dispatches to every corner of his kingdom: to the Gorons, to the southern villages, to the Kakariko hills, and to the northern spring pass. Others patrol the roads. They are probably looking for the lost Queen. I don't know. But I do know that many of the villages in Hyrule have been left alone for a long time. They aren't very happy that press-gangers are on their doorsteps. But they can't really do anything about it."

"What has become of the Moblins? Of the Bulblins, of the Lizalfos?"

The girl was very taken-aback by that question, and blinked for a few seconds, dazed. "Um," she hesitated. "That's not really current events. I don't know so much about savage folk. Do you really want to hear it?"

"I paid for you, did I not?"

"Er, Okay,' she mumbled. "A traveler I entertained once mentioned forest Moblin, so they may exist. Which I guess would be important, because the Moblins in the mountains got wiped out ages ago," she said. "Bulblins are still employed by the throne; they serve the strongest, and they've done that for generations. I don't know anything about lizard-men. I'm sorry, but the only other things I know about this are fairy stories."

"Has there been any talk of a hero emerging in Hyrule of any kind?" Ganondorf asked carefully. "In troubled times, swordsmen may rise to the task."

"None, sir," the girl said. "The only person I know called a hero in my life is Calas of Springspass, and that is why he married the Queen I suppose."

"You mentioned the Queen had in her service a monster servant. What do you know of it?"

Arin wrung her hands, and her words were halting; through her façade, she seemed truly frightened. "A demon," she said, voice lower than she probably realized, "of fire and black magic. It killed a dozen people in one hour, and nearly killed the King before it was forced to retreat, flying on dark wings. Simply for sufferings sake, I'm told, it animated a great statue and laid waste to the castle town square. It sought the blood of soldiers and nobles; all killed were military staff, or of the high court."

"Interesting," muttered Ganondorf. That was all he supposed he needed to know, but a few more questions could not have hurt. "Tell me all you know about Talon the stabler," he demanded.

"I don't know anything about horsegrooms," the girl admitted. "But I do know of Talon the Flesh-Rake. He was a favorite assassin of the High Court, once. However, once the man who sold Talon's services learned of some disloyalty, Talon was removed from service. That has to have been years ago."

"Could he not simply function as a free agent?"

Arin stared at Ganondorf, shaking her head. "You don't leave work peacefully if you're someone like him," she said, tapping her brow. "His master probably took away his talent, somehow, or had him executed."

Ganondorf began to form an idea of what had likely happened. "That will be all," he said. "That is all I need of your services."

"I hope I have been helpful," said Arin. "Please, would you leave me? You have not paid for more than news, and we do not accept debts in this house."

The feeling of eyes on his back returned. Ganondorf, with eyes trained of thievery and eons spent in darkness, picked out the distinctive glint of steel, of a crossbow bolt, set into a tiny hole in the wall beside him. And then he spotted another. And another. Every natural crack in the plaster was a murder hole, and the serious stare of the young woman in front of him impressed exactly how seriously this house took the safety of its girls. As seriously as in the past, as women of his own had taken their duties and the safety of their sisters.

Ganondorf smiled; it was a wide, unflinching smile that clouded the young girl's face with doubt and behind the walls set crossbow winches cranking. "You have been very helpful," he assured. "May you keep that virtue in the times to come, girl."

Helpful sorts, Ganondorf reasoned, could be spared in his ascension to power. So long as they remained such.

By the time that Ganondorf returned, night had fallen and the locals had begun to clear off of the streets. The inn patrons crowded tight inside, the house dense with vagrants that could not afford rooms. By closing hour, they all would be forced to find elsewhere to haunt. A giant among them, Ganondorf parted the bodies and thundered up the stairs. The floor under him throbbed with sound. Ale surplus? A caravan's arrival? Ganondorf didn't particularly care, but he was quickly growing tired living at the whim of rabble.

With luck, Zelda would be asleep. Ganondorf fit the iron key into the lock and with one hand braced and turned it. He'd learned the trick, but had mixed feelings about such a small action being a 'triumph.' Tired, tense, and reeking of horse, Ganondorf stumbled into his cramped room. Zelda was asleep; he could see her breath rise and fall faintly under the linens, but how she was able to drift off with the angry buzz of sound below was unknown to him. The work she had accumulated sat in dark piles around the floor. In the small window's light, the scattered midden and heaps of finished work were an abstract landscape of dim hills.

A landscape, Ganondorf noted, that was not cut by the shadows of steel-bar shutters. The window high on the wall was bare-open.

Zelda. Ganondorf surged forward, expecting to find some substitute in her bed. A shadow moved in Ganondorf's wake; the man stumbled. Hiding in plain sight, sprang to life and leapt at the wall. Ganondorf's arm reached across the gap, and yet the foe slipped through like water. Ferretlike, the figure was up the tall wall and through the small window faster than Ganondorf could stop it. From the view of the inn room, Ganondorf could see only a thatch-bare shed below. And no intruder.

"What?!" a high voice in his ear gasped, hardly audible over the dull thud from a floor below. Zelda was awake. "What's going on?!"

"An intruder," snarled Ganondorf. With a sharp flourish, he lit the candle on the table, revealing Zelda's wan face. He pointed demonstratively at the bare, open window. Picking up the candle in its cast-pewter holder, Ganondorf could see its flame quiver in his hands. Some part of him was quaking in rage, images flashing through his mind. Zelda dead, his only token of victory robbed from him. Zelda escaped, spirited away by some rescuer. Either possibility, even if neither had been true, boiled Ganondorf's blood.

"What did they take?" Zelda gasped, and frantically pawed at the mattress, where Ganondorf supposed she had hidden their collective wallet. How petty, he thought; money was replaceable. Any fool could have some.

"I don't care," Ganondorf said, "So long as it was not you. The last thing I need is some poor rescue. It would be a waste of my time, and yours." In the candle-light, Ganondorf inspected the rough edges of the window. Signs of filing were obvious on the flat stubs of the iron bars, and the grate had been removed; the telltale shavings alighted on the sill like rust-and-silver snow. Ganondorf could not see how anyone could have reached up so high to wear through the bars, for that took time and a tool to brace. He supposed the intruder had found a way. Perhaps the interloper was an acrobat, or had some sort of climbing gear. He would have to inspect the outside of the building by day.

"I don't particularly want a 'rescue,'" Zelda admitted softly. "I hate to admit it, but the safest place for me is here. Only the heavens know the size of the bounty placed upon me."

Ganondorf turned sharply to Zelda. She slumped back onto the bed in her white slip, rubbing her eyes. When her slim fingers alighted on the bruise over her temple, she winced. It had become quite purple over the course of the day. "Ward the door and windows. You did so to your quarters in the castle. Why are you so careless now?"

"It would have shut you out," Zelda said. "You would have had to break in to enter the room. My magic does not, and cannot distinguish one source of ill will from another. The King of Evil looks just the same to any ward as an assassin."

"I have taken down your pathetic wards before," Ganondorf said witheringly. "I can do it again."

"I am not so sure," said Zelda. Her eyes glittered with realization. "In that case, why ask your captive to make a barrier that by all rights should be simple to such a master of sorcery as you?"

Damn. Damn her. Damn her kin, and her ancestors, and all franchise ever given to her bloodline. "Go to sleep," he snarled, and snuffed the candle. But in the dark, Ganondorf could see her sit up in bed. Her pale eyes stared.

"You once summoned terrible beasts with a gesture, once ran across the fields on a demon steed, once enthralled a kingdom with darkness and despair even before the Triforce was yours," said Zelda resolutely. "And yet, I have hardly seen you perform more than a simple cantrip in my captivity. Not since we emerged from the aqueduct."

Ganondorf was silent. Maybe if he sat very still, and said nothing, she would grow tired of her endless stream of needling and end this business of being too close to the truth for comfort.

"Something's wrong," Zelda said, slowly.

"I am not sure why you care," said Ganondorf.

Zelda's reply was immediate. "I care when you are likely all that stands between me and the enemy," she said.

Hyrule, Zelda's enemy.

Interesting, Ganondorf thought.

"What did you do," asked Zelda, "that you are no longer able to even cast protective wards?" A pale glow surrounded her hands, and after a few heartbeats of setting the spell's scope and limits, the soft sheen of her shield suffused the surroundings. Even the sound of the chattering inn seemed muted. There would be no further disturbances that night.

"I did nothing," he said, taking a gamble with indulging her sudden need to know. "That is why this is maddening."

In the moon's light, Ganondorf could see Zelda's mouth form a sudden 'o,' and she began to speak. But as she seemed to reconsider that, she fell silent, and soon lay down to bed. Ganondorf doubted she slept, at least for the little while longer he remained awake. But, for all her maddening talk and interest in affairs she should have kept silent on, Ganondorf was relieved that at least she was Zelda again. This was within her role, to provoke him, to work within his restrictions.

Ganondorf then realized with dread that even if Zelda had submitted to him and fell into despair, it would not have pleased him. For Zelda did not succumb, the foe he sought and kept in triumph was not so easily crushed. There was no overcoming of her that he could say would satisfy him. He had grown too used to losing, he thought. He had come to identify Zelda with her success in opposing him.

That was why she was worth it. That was why she was important. That was why she was dangerous. When others fell and died at his feet, she won. When kingdoms crumbled in his grasp, she won. The Hero was her tool, and he hated the boy, but at the end of days it was the throne of Hyrule that benefited from Ganondorf's defeat. Zelda was simply not Zelda unless she was fighting for victory. And she was never more herself when she finally prevailed. And that triumphant Zelda was the one worth keeping captive, the one that was a threat.

His goal was to crush her, keep her, and use her until she had no more value to him. But if all of that came to pass, thought Ganondorf, what he held in his hands would not have been worth conquering anyway: stripped of all value and burned to dead cinders. It was not his intention to conquer a cremation.

Ganondorf concluded that it was only a matter of time. Time wasted, an itching, impatient part of him nagged. But it was unavoidable, he thought. It was not his nature to hide, or to cower from a challenge... but if he was to keep Zelda, to use her to find the full Triforce, he would have to have freedom of movement. From what he could tell from the Naked Eye's news, and from what little he heard in the thief's town, the roads were anything but free. Goods and food became scarcer. People starved, and even the unlikely began to turn to banditry to make ends meet. Iron taken from Hyrule's empire, scraps of imperial armor and swords claimed from dead soldiers, began to turn up en masse in the bazaar. Ganondorf did not doubt his ability to handle any mere footman or rider he encountered, but to his shame uncertainty plagued him in the case of being faced by a large group.

He'd forgotten this, he thought, as he braced the iron fork in one off hand. Being the small, being the fugitive, being the criminal. In the past, he thought, his sisters were sneering. How used to privilege he'd become, to trappings of nobility, to being able to venture wherever he pleased simply on the might of his fists and the potency of his sorcery. How was it possible that despite centuries of oblivion in the middle, and yet the voice of his aunts snapped sharply in his ears?

You have become like them! How long have your ears grown, boy, that you think yourself entitled to walk anywhere you want?

He'd meant to change that, of course. Without their King, he thought, the Hylians would lose what claim they had to the heavens, and that by removing them he could take the throne of divinity and rip asunder the judgement placed upon him. It was far too long ago to remember exactly how it had all gone sour. The opposite had occurred. His people had died, he had become cursed for all time before the gods, and most of all nothing had changed.

Ganondorf tossed the weed-straw at the wall bitterly, separating the waste from what could be saved. The last point, he thought, was the astounding part. For all his might, for all of being the embodiment of power on the earth, Ganondorf had failed to change a thing. Whatever he built was always broken.

A sharp scream of a horse split the barn, followed by yells of a man. Ganondorf straightened, his back cracking painfully. The heavy thuds of hooves on the dirt-packed floor stomped back and forth, pounding against abused wooden walls. Stepping outside the thatch-and-mud stall, Ganondorf was met with the sight of a mud-bald pony being beaten by the other hired hand Ingo with a hefty oak switch. It cried out, bucked, but could not escape where it was tied to the cross-harness by thick knots.

"Damn you, animal! You will pick up your feet! You will be shod!"

Foolishness, thought Ganondorf. Foolishness and stupidity. Such an animal was likely infested with rot and mites, making the legs tender and the beast testy. And yet, this idiot Hylian scum could not understand, would never understand what commodity he was beating to death. What wasted value. How common, to assume defiance when the issue ran deeper than mere stubbornness.

Throwing the iron fork down, Ganondorf strode out of the stall he had worked on and waited briefly for Ingo to raise the rod. Ganondorf snatched it and easily wrenched it from the older, smaller man's hand.

"This doesn't concern you, boy," spat Ingo. "Don't interfere with the breaking of this beast."

Ganondorf's answer was simply to take one end of the switch in his teeth and grip hard. Wrenching it with the full strength of his good arm and the corded muscles of his back, what might have been an old broomhandle shattered into a fan of splinters. Ingo went milky, the nerve draining out of him like a barrel with a hole in the bottom. If Ganondorf would not have been wrong to propose Ingo had sprung a leak in more ways than one.

"You will never waste a beast again," Ganondorf said, hardly needed to; Ingo was on his heels and running almost before the end of the statement. Moments later, all that remained was a quaking, frozen horse on the cross-ties and the awkward remains of the wooden switch. Ganondorf spat a few fragments out, and massaged his numb jaw.

The horse stood warily, uncomprehending. I saved you, beast, thought Ganondorf. And you hardly understand. Charity. Useless; he was the same as he was before. It had not filled his time, nor given him someplace or something to think about. There was no reward in it, nor had it been a step in approaching a goal.

Though, Ganondorf amended, that was not entirely true. As he untied the knots binding the horse to the stable rings, he quietly and bitterly amended one aspect of his philosophy. Perhaps it was not his reward, but a ruined horse served no purpose, had no value. He had not thought of any sort of reward when he'd stepped between Ingo and his victim; there was only anger and disgust at wasted worth. That was an old sentiment of his, very old.

How he had seen wars rage, how he had seen spoils won. And how he had seen starving women, his people, get none of what they had fought for. It was appropriate that his home had once been called wasteland. And how he had yearned, burned, for the power to step between Hyrule and his own lands, to smite their throne with exactly the value of the Gerudo. As the centuries wore on, that want transformed; a lust for the power to halt the heavens themselves, and remove their mastery from the earth. His earth.

The beast back in a stall once again, nursing its tender flanks, Ganondorf leaned against the mud-brick wall of the stable tiredly. What of the middle, he thought? Too many lifetimes, instances, and deaths bled together; none shaped him. There were hardly any waypoints in the murk of that long consciousness to find, no paths to navigate. Perhaps there were pearls, hidden in the muck of his memory, but to extract them would be like sifting for sand in silt.

Ganondorf even ventured to call that time wasted.

He gathered up his small sack, job half-finished, and that day did not seek Talon for payment. As he stepped on the street, his scowl parted the crowd. Wasted! His long, grand life, wasted! How sour it was to think more deeply upon it and realize that Zelda, with her infernal storybook, was right with his single mention. What more was there to say, of the past nigh-thousand years? Beyond that, the truth faded into antiquity, unknown to all but himself.

For a long time, Ganondorf had deemed his existence some great cycle of hatred and abuse, some tyranny upon him that he constantly tried to shake off. And yet, when he rose, he was always punished for it, always beaten down again. The idea that all that, everything, had been a waste of time, was enough to bow any lesser man. Ganondorf did his best to leave those thoughts behind, in the prints of his boots and the dust of the filthy street as he plowed through the street.

He crashed into a wall of men, and snarled in surprise. When they did not part ways, he looked up from his thoughts to see them all with backs turned, gazing at the sky. The entire bazaar stared, awestruck, for once unconcerned with Ganondorf's imposing height and force of travel. That was all it took for the man himself to follow their gaze, for what they could be so rapt in watching.

A huge plume of greasy black smoke towered up from only a few lines of jumbled buildings away, from the main square. The fire was new, for the towering cloud had not yet blown in the wind: minutes-old, if that. In such close quarters, surrounded by such waste, the flames would certainly spread, and quickly.

They would spread from the town square.

They would spread from their inn.

Zelda.

Ganondorf ran.