I'm only writing one set of author's notes for the two sites my stories appear on, so you might see some unfamiliar names. Bear with me, please.
There are a lot of people I want to thank- people without whom this story wouldn't exist, or at least wouldn't exist in its current form. First off I'd like to thank my girlfriend of- sweet Jesus, two years? Two years- Cutpurse, for patiently waiting to (read: almost killing me at several points before I let her) read the first two arcs- mostly because I didn't know how she'd take my writing Link/imp fanfiction- and for the God damned incredible banners she made for the second and third arcs, and for reading more than half of Prophecy before anyone else did just so I would have someone to tell me it was good enough to put up. Um. I love you. I've made some friends through this that I would not have made otherwise. I'd like to thank Titanium Phoenix for late-night distractions, Chaotic Serenity for wise counsel and very good advice, only about half of which I ended up following, and Dust Traveler for being, more or less, my hero. I want to thank Master GFX for keeping the tradition alive, and Cardinair for giving me my first real review and being an all-around great guy, and Wiseduck- he knows why- and Razzek for the fanart and also for being sad for Barnes, and everyone who reviewed me- you all know who you are. I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Without the epilogue, and including the first two arcs, what I am sitting on here is about one hundred and eighty seven pages of size 12 Times New Roman. It is not egotism for me to say that the last, say, ten pages are much better than the first, because the first were not in fact very good. At the very least it's been a learning experience. Nevertheless I'm proud. Looking back on one hundred and eighty seven pages I feel like I've accomplished something here. It sure as hell isn't going to outlive me but tonight I feel as if I could recite it by heart and that's certainly something. I've known for a long time I wanted to be a writer but like every young writer I know I have asked myself on many dark nights if I had the patience- not the talent, not the drive, but the sheer bloody patience- necessary to turn fiction into a profession. I still don't know about the talent and I still don't know about the drive, but as for the patience one hundred and eighty seven pages say hell yes. I think I might just be able to bring this thing in in under a page. Thank you all and God bless.
Epilogue
Paradise
"Hey, Midna."
"Yes?"
"Let's get married."
And there were battles- Goddesses, of course there were battles. The warlord's woman never forgave him. There was evil, crying crocodile tears in the forsaken wastes at the north of the world. There were battles and he fought them until the day he died.
And there were hard times. There were nights so long they might have been days in the lives of children. There were moonless nights so dark it seemed the sun would never rise, and sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. And there was blood on the ground when the war came, and afterwards there were crows- millions of crows, so many that they blotted out the sun with their wings. And there was death, because death had always been there, grinning at the gates of the carnival, wearing the faces of people you had known, once, a long time ago. One by one the reveler took them all away- all his friends, all his old friends. And sometimes it was his hands that took them away. And there were times when each believed the other to be dead. Those were the worst times.
Renado of Kakariko, who had fashioned a new philosophy from the bones of the old order, awoke at twilight to the soft strut of knuckles across the doors of his sanctuary and rolled out of bed still rubbing the cotton from his eyes.
The knocking continued as he shrugged his leather smock over his head, hastily and unsuccessfully tried to tame his dark thicket of hair with the palm of one hand. "Coming, coming," he muttered. Reached for his book of words before he remembered the clammy hole where he had left it.
"Damn," he said, and opened the door. "Is there something the matter?" he asked reflexively, and then stood stock-still on the top step, looking down on them.
She was two feet tall and shapely for an imp- the gentle rise of a belly, arms and legs tapering to star-shaped hands and delicate feet, naked in the dying light of the vespers save for what might have been fur and might have been skin and for a moment the shaman wanted to touch her and solve the mystery with a hunger sharper than his life had ever known.
Her arms and legs were manacled in light and her eye was gold and pomegranate and tangerine. Stone crowned her and bound her and her smile was the curve of a knife, and one tooth was a fang, and she was floating- floating!- three feet above the ground.
He heard Link's quick voice from somewhere in the periphery. "A good evening to you, Renado," said the Ordonian. "This is the imp you didn't find for me the other night but don't worry, because in the end everything worked out for the best-"
And all Renado could think of to say was "Hello."
"Eee hee hee!" laughed Midna.
But even so there was not a day that went by that they were not amazed at how much they had. Not a day went by that they weren't grateful for.
There were battles and they fought them together, back to back- the two most suspicious characters in Hyrule, learning to trust each other, every day. There were evils, petty evils and grand ones, lurking behind trees and enthroned in palaces of brass. They vanquished them and slew them. They walked roads and climbed mountains and swam rivers and they never stayed in one place long enough for his boots to get dusty but they watched the sun go down every damned night and they never felt like strangers anywhere they went. They ate fish pulled straight from the mountain streams, mushrooms fried in butter, loaves of stale bread and hunks of cheese hard as rock, and by the time he learned to make a perfect slice of toast they had both had the taste of char in their mouths long enough to have gotten used to it and she pouted at him until he went back and burned it properly. There was a goodness here that they were both aware of. There was a light about them that stood fast against the encroaching shadow of the world.
"I don't know if I can do this," said Renado, suddenly. Link raised one golden eyebrow in polite incomprehension.
"Is it that she's an imp?" he asked. "Because, you know, I do have a sword." Midna swatted him on the back of his head. Renado stood there, looking worried.
"No," he said, "it's not that, it's…"
He raised his hands, lowered them again. "I buried Barnes," he said, softly, "and I left my book of prayers in his grave. What you told me, that day in the spring… what I'm seeing now… everything I ever knew was wrong. And I gave up… I gave up so much to be the man I was a week ago. You want me to perform this ceremony, but I don't know that I have the authority."
Link nodded gently. "Say it again," he said, and the shaman blinked.
"I don't know that I-"
"No, I understand," said Link. "I meant the part before that." This time Renado had to think about it.
"You… asked me," he said slowly, "to-"
"You have the authority," said Link. "Now listen to me." And the shaman listened.
This is how Link died: the warlord's woman caught up to him in the end.
Or: he broke his back falling off of a ladder. Or: Midna went first, seventy years to the day after Link drove the Twilight from Ordonna province, and he held her hand as her last breath rattled out of her small body, carrying something with it vaster than the pokey rooms where the Hero of the Realms lived out his last days and lonelier, and she died there with a smile quirking at the corners of her mouth. The next day and the next day and the next he toiled from dawn to dusk in the wheat fields, doing the work of a younger man and speaking to nobody, and if the Ordonians noticed the way the tears rolled down his face and how he smiled brokenly through them, if the Ordonians heard his muffled sobs or heard him talking to her in his old man's voice- if the Ordonians know who listened for his words the thickness of a shadow away- then they said nothing, because it was understood that a debt was owed, even if nobody could remember precisely what the terms had been, or why. And then on the third night he dragged his weary bones from his narrow bed and shuffled to the door, and opened it, and stepped out into the fog. He had thought for a moment that he had heard something outside- an army, perhaps- but a moment's consideration showed that there was no army here. He felt light, ephemeral, and he did not notice the cold air's sting on his bare arms. The sensation was one he had not experienced for fifty years, and after a moment's consideration he recognized it for what it was: It was something beginning. It was an adventure. Link looked down just in time to see the Triforce fade out, and as he looked at the back of his hand naked for the first time in his life he laughed and laughed until the tears spilled down his cheeks, and when Ilia found him in the morning he was stone dead with his back against the door. Any of these could be true, or all of them, or none of them. Prophecy has left these lands.
"What happens after we die?" asked Link, and Renado shook his head.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know anymore."
"You do know," said Link. "You just don't know why."
"We go on," said Renado. "I think. Somehow we go on. But what good does that do anyone to know? Why should anybody care about the opinions of a washed-up old shaman who doesn't believe anything worth preaching about?"
"Why should you care what anyone believes?" asked Midna, honestly curious, and Link smiled, because Midna was so very often right.
"Because without a flock, what am I?" returned Renado.
"A righteous man," said Link, "and damn the lot of them if they don't agree. Do we go on?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
The Ordonian took a step forward and seized the shaman by the shoulders. Renado did not resist as Link drew him close. He was fascinated by the banking fires in the Ordonian's eyes.
"And if all Hyrule stood up in arms against you," he said quietly, "if all Hyrule screamed with one voice that there was nothing beyond the fifty or sixty years the Goddesses have allotted to us but a blackness and a monumental void, what would you say then, Renado? What would you say to that?"
"Nothing," whispered Renado. "But they would go on regardless." Link was shaking his head, slowly, marvelingly.
"And you ask yourself," he wondered aloud, "if you have the authority."
He let go of Renado and turned his face away.
And there were dreams.
Of course there were dreams- that didn't change. He had been dreaming all his life. But whatever had inspired him those few weeks, whatever song he had been singing, he sang no more thereafter. Gradually he learned not to question the meaning of his dreams, learned to accept that while sometimes they came true, often they did not. Slowly he remembered what even infants know- that the things you see in the night are smoke and embers. They can't hurt you. But he could never bring himself to quite believe it. Yet the visions, if that was what they had been, had ended- there was no denying it. He saw the wolf in his dreams from time to time until the day he died, but he did not see what the wolf was doing, was not privy to its lupine machinations. They talked, when they talked, of idle things. They did not talk about Kakariko. They did not talk about the future. He had known things in those Kakariko days that he had no business knowing. Only half of it had been guesswork. But he did not miss the prophecy, or rather tried not to miss it. Sometimes he would whisper to himself in the night. He would say: Will Zelda live to see her flag flying above Kakariko?
He would say: Where is the warlord's woman now, and what would she have of me?
And of course there were no answers for him. All the same, it continued to surprise him long past the point where he should have gotten used to the not-knowing.
"Do you love her?" said Renado, and tried not to be too satisfied when Link frowned in bewilderment.
"I had understood," he said carefully, "that there was a bit more ceremony involved."
"They're just words," said Renado. "They don't mean anything much. I may not know much anymore but that's something I can promise you. The words aren't important and never have been. It's the truths that matter. Do you love her?"
"I love her," said Link.
"Do you love him?" asked Renado, pointing one quivering finger at the imp. But Midna was narrowing her eyes.
"I ate from your table, little shaman," said Midna, grinning her toothy grin, "and bit his finger under it- do you remember what he said? Eee hee hee! He said it was an old war wound! I've ruled worlds you never even knew about and I've watched you in the shadows when you thought you were alone and oh, shaman, let's not even talk about what he's done. Between the two of us we've killed a dragon, a king, and one accredited god. Are you sure you're up for this? Eee hee hee!"
"Midna," said Link, consternated, "this was your damned idea-"
Renad held up a hand. "Are you afraid?" he asked her.
"Damn right I'm afraid," said Midna fiercely. "I've never done this before!"
"But do you love him?"
The imp fell silent for a moment. When she looked up again her eye was a perfect circle of surprise.
"I do," she said, and Renado smiled.
"Then you're married," he said. "I can't do you any better than that."
She turned to him with her candescent eyes wide but before she could say anything she was in his arms and he kissed her, and he kissed her, and he kissed her as Renado slipped demurely out of the room and Luda watched silently (approvingly?) from the doorway and the world, for all either of them were paying attention, fell to pieces around them.
She broke the kiss a moment later and looked into his eyes pleadingly. "Link?" she asked, "What happens now?" And he smiled.
"Now," he said, "you get to be Queen."
Link's dream:
He was standing in the grasslands with the wind waltzing down out of the mountains at his back, watching the clouds billow across the blue agave sky and enjoying the warmth of the noontide sun on his face. He knew someone was coming, knew it because you know things in dreams, but he wasn't afraid, he had left his sword and shield somewhere (the lost woods?) but he wasn't afraid, he knew that there was nothing to be afraid of- everything was going to be fine, fine, just fine- Was that him, loping across the grass? The discordant music of a broken chain chattered from the savanna. Was that him? Link didn't know. He kept his eyes on the clouds, far above him, because they were trying to tell him something, something vitally important. Was that him? Was that the wolf? But how could he have ever thought it was a wolf? Because wolves had four legs and the man who was coming to see him, running to see him, clearly had only the two for his support. His tunic was flattened against his chest in the wind and his blond hair was a magnificent halo about his head and he was laughing, laughing and running, running and laughing. His friend. His oldest friend. "What's so funny?" asked Link, and the other collapsed to his knees in front of him, breathing in short harsh gasps and laughing, and he bent in close to hear what he had to say but his friend had just been fighting for a good deep breath and what he had to say was meant for the very clouds to hear. "Goddesses save me-" cried the madman, "You were right!" and Link woke up with a smile on his face.