Hey, guys! It's been a while!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the reviews. We're averaging 10-20 a chapter now, which is so amazing. I know I say that a lot, but it means the world to me and I can't say it enough. You guys are the best!
I've gotten several comments inquiring when Link's going to go on a turn for the worse. I'd say, right now, we're about 40-50% through the story. The real action begins around the 60-75% mark. So hang in there, you'll get the bloodshed and gore that you want! And to that one anon, don't worry, no matter how much I soften him he won't be deciding anything without me! We have a connection, if you know what I mean ;)
So, Sheikahn. All you have to do is read it backwards! I was waaay too lazy to come up with an actual coherent language, so there you go. And yes, all the hints were made uber-seriously obvious on purpose. The winner of the contest was A Shadow's Lament, and she got her prize, so congratulations to her!
Hope you enjoy the (unbearably short, ugh) chapter. ~Alyssa
Non nobis solum nati sumus
…
Not for ourselves alone are we born.
Then
The silence was so thick that you could cut it with a knife.
We were in a snug ovular room with a giant circular grey slab of stone being used as a table, around which several teenagers sat, their expressions varying from confusion to disbelief to skepticism. In the middle, with his jaw hanging agape and his gray-blue eyes wide, sat a fairly handsome man, his sandy blonde hair graying at the temples, as he took in Archer, who was in a similar state.
After a moment I, too, realized I'd seen this man before.
Never in person, of course. Only in black and white, his eyes glazed over and his smile wide with his arm slung carelessly around the waist of an equally beaming woman, supporting a laughing little boy on his hip. I'd passed him several thousand times, every day as Linden shook me awake and dragged me out to play with her, every night as I threw off my clothes and climbed into bed.
Suddenly Archer's voice filled my mind—exponentially younger, full of laughter, matter-of-fact, on the first night that I had met him.
…They were planning to take me out of Hyrule, over the mountains where a lot of…retired Sheikah are. We were about halfway over Death Mountain, way past where Goron City was…and then we were attacked. My father was driving the wagon, he got taken out first… He got taken out first…
All these years, he thought for sure that his father was dead and his mother was alive.
How ironic that it would be the other way around.
After several agonizing seconds, a boy to the elder man's left stood, putting a coffee colored hand on his shoulder.
"Hoan, who's this?" he asked, his dark eyes alight with concern.
The man stood on shaking legs, having to use the table for support, leaning over to get a better view of what was right in front of him.
"…Archer?" he whispered in disbelief. "Son..? Is that you?"
Archer's knees began to buckle, his entire form quavering as he shook his head.
"No." He said loudly, though it seemed mostly to himself.
"You're dead!" he accused wearily. "You left me…" his voice cracked and he fell to his knees before I could catch him. "You left me alone."
Hoan took a deep breath, closing his eyes and sparing a brief second to compose himself.
"Eli, send for Uke, will you?" He turned to the dark-skinned boy, who ran past us immediately, then to address the rest of the teenagers. "Everyone else, if you would kindly leave us, we will resume this meeting at a later time."
A slight, curly haired brunette from the corner stood up, folding her hands over her chest. "Every second wasted is more lives lost." She interrupted, her chestnut brown eyes outraged. "Think of the children—my sister! Their parents are being slaughtered as we speak and yet we still sit aside putting off their respite!"
Hoan closed his eyes tiredly, running his fingers through his hair. "I know, Shadow." He sighed. "This will only take a moment."
She shot him a annoyed look before walking to the door, shoving me out of the way as she left, at least a dozen others trailing out after her.
After the door was closed, Hoan crouched down beside Archer, resting both hands on his shoulders trying to get him to look at him, but he roughly shoved out of his grasp.
"Don't touch me!" Archer hissed, throwing himself to his feet and pulling open the door, his face one of disgust. "Come on, Nox. Let's go."
Before Hoan could protest, Archer grabbed me by the wrist, throwing the door open and slamming it behind him, taking off at a run back the way we came.
I tripped over my own feet trying to catch up with him, yelling apologizes over my shoulder at the several children we stampeded, trying to pull him aside underneath one of the less crowded supports of the upper levels.
"What are you doing?" I panted, trying hard to make myself heard over the ruckus of the room, not succeeding in getting him to stop. "That's your father. He's alive! Why are you running away?!"
"Because," he muttered, refusing to meet my eyes. "We have to get back to Kassia and Wolfe."
"Bullshit we do! They'll be fine another five minutes longer!" I dug my feet into the stone of the cavern, but the only thing I succeeded in was nearly pulling my arm out of its socket.
He turned around with fire in his eyes. "I'm leaving." He said in a restrained voice, clearly about to go off the edge. "You can come with or without me. But let me remind you that you will never be able to get out if you don't have my help."
"Fine!" I snapped, throwing my hands up in exasperation. "It's not my problem! But if I had the luxury of ever even knowing either of my parents before they deserted me, let alone them being right in front of me, I can't say I would just run away!"
"You don't understand!" he growled, passing through the threshold of the giant antechamber and into the stone hallways, immediately making a sharp turn to the left through the wall. I sighed in annoyance at my disadvantage, following closely behind.
"Maybe I don't!" I fired back. "But I know you're making a mistake! Archer, that's your father in there, alive, in the flesh, not just in a pictograph, and you're letting him slip through your fingers! Why are you being like this? You're not this much of a coward!"
"A coward?" He stopped dead, turning around to face me, his crimson eyes burning with fury. "How dare you call me a coward! I would give anything to be in your shoes! Better I never knew my parents then to suffer like this!"
"Suffer like what?!" I roared, gesturing wildly back the way we came. "You have no idea what it's like, staying up at night wondering what your parents are like, why they left you, what you did to deserve being abandoned! And then there's your father back there, against the wildest odds, and you're LEAVING!"
"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HE WAS LIKE."
I was taken aback. Never had he ever mentioned a broken relationship with his father, nothing in his tone or demeanor in the few times he was brought up ever showed any kind of hatred.
But now, hearing him scream at me like he never had before, rabid spit flying from his mouth, and eyes full of anger and betrayal, I couldn't help feeling like I had missed something.
What had his father done to him?
He leaned against the wall for support, his head in his hands, his breath shaking his form.
I had never heard him this upset in all the years I had known him. I had never seen someone push him like this, push him until he broke, until he stopped functioning and shut down. He had always been an inward person, cold and calculating, never yelling, hardly letting any emotion show.
Seeing him like this, so helpless and broken, was astounding in a terrible way. Immediately I regretted my words, taking a deep breath and going over to him.
"Come on. I'm sorry. Let's get out of here."
For a long time he was silent, not moving an inch, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, slowly composing himself.
"Okay." He said finally, sighing heavily. "Let's go."
It was a short trip out of the tunnels but a long one back to camp. We wandered for a good period of time before I saw the light of our fire, nearly tripping over an overturned log in the process of running towards it.
"Nox!"
As we pushed back through the last bramble to the clearing in the camp, Kassia flung herself at me, burying her face in my chest.
Where have you been?" she demanded, her voice wavering and full of tears.
Over her shoulder, I saw Wolfe roll his eyes. "You'd been gone ten minutes and she was convinced you'd both been murdered." He said, though he was grinning. "So hysterical she almost burnt our dinner."
I smiled at the picture of her unnecessary franticness, kissing the top of her head once gently. "I'm sorry." I murmured.
"Good to see you ate without us," Archer noted, grabbing his pack by the fire and nodding towards his empty plate and her untouched one.
"Hey!" Wolfe said defensively, holding up both his hands alms up in surrender, without an inch of apology in his face. "You guys were gone for almost an hour. I'm a growing boy, you know."
Archer snorted. "You're not thirteen years old and nearly taller than me. You don't need to grow anymore."
Wolfe started to retaliate, but I was faster. "Whatever. Good thing you ate, because we have to pack up camp."
Kassia pulled away, opening her mouth to respond. "It's a long story," I said hastily, bending down to pick up a handful of the wet, dead leaves and pine needles from the ground and throwing them on top of the fire. "Everything's fine. We just…ah…ran into some people that Archer knows, and we have to go back to meet them."
"Fine with me." said Wolfe, throwing his clean plate into his rucksack and slinging it over his shoulder, grabbing the reigns of one of the horses. "As long as you know where you're going. I can't see a thing without the fire."
This hadn't occurred to me.
I pictured the trip to the mountainside in my head, thinking of all the twists and turns, the branches and brambles that twisted around your ankles and choked you, the fallen logs that are just looking to trip you, things that would be hazardous in the daytime, let alone in the pitch darkness of a night with a new moon.
"Do you know the way?" I asked, handing Kassia her bag and helping her onto the second horse, sliding my own back into the saddlebag.
He turned towards the fire, his expression darkening as he watched it sputter and die.
"Just as much as I knew my father dead." He said with a grim smile. "Which is to say, not at all. We're going to have a time finding it in the dark."
Wolfe groaned, muttering hell towards Baxter for making him come with the "irresponsible children" instead of him, shooting a regretful glance towards the dead embers.
"We could have lit a torch, you know." He said mournfully, his eyebrows turning down at the edges. "Or waited until morning. You know what's in the dark? Beasts. Lions and tigers and wolfos. I don't like those, you know."
"We know." Archer rolled his eyes. "And as I'm an improve type of guy, I completely forgot to plan ahead. But you know what they say!" he said in a lively voice, clapping his hands together once, but I could see the reluctance in his eyes. "Once you've chosen a path, walk it with your head high! Now let us traverse, gentlemen!"
"I'm a lady." Kassia said grumpily, crossing her arms. "And I agree with Wolfe."
"Too bad!" said Archer cheerfully, starting off back into the woods.
And we set off into the dark.
ox(O)xo
The sun was coming up when we finally made it to the correct spot on the mountainside.
Archer leaped off the horse, grabbing a ridge in the rock and pulling down, muttering those same words.
Now, in the light, I could see what happened.
The mountain seemed to split in half, the rock pulling away from each other with an earsplitting rumbling of a landslide, leaving a perfectly rounded half-moon tunnel open for us to walk inside.
As soon as the earth was still, a loud whoop resounded from the inside, followed by a groan.
"I knew it!" someone shouted, running forward, revealing himself to be the same dark-skinned boy we had seen earlier. "That's twenty rupees, Shadow!"
The girl from before, evidently Shadow, came forward into the light with her arms crossed as she had before, a scowl on her face. "Later, Eli." She said, turning to us. "I have a direct order from Hoan to take you—" she pointed to Archer. "—to his chambers, and for the rest of you to wait in the Hollow. Eli will take you if you don't know where it is. We've dealt with shifty Hylians like you before, mark you, so try anything funny and you'll be dead before you can apologize, hear me?"
"Heard and duly noted." Wolfe said in a disinterested voice, watching her and Archer disappear into the mountain. He looked to the boy that was Eli. "What do you want us to do with the horses?"
"You can tether them inside. We have a stable. Hurry up, though, I promised my friend I would look after his sisters while the meeting is going on."
"What meeting?" asked Kassia as she dismounted smoothly from the horse, grabbing the rope and pulling it forward.
"Anyone over the age of twenty five was sent to Hyrule to fight off the dark forces." Eli said, his expression turning grim. "It's been several months. In their absence the eldest child in every household becomes the new head and mouthpiece of the family, the breadwinner, so to speak. So they've been meeting almost every day for weeks now trying to figure out whether or not we can spare a few of our oldest to see how they're doing. I don't know what's taking them so long; we know Hyrule's a mess and if it's been so long without any word it seems plenty obvious to me what happened to them. If you ask me, I think they're in denial."
"How sad." Kassia whispered, her gaze falling downcast. "That's horrible."
"That's war." corrected Eli, not a trace of sadness in his face or voice. "It is hard, but it is the way of the Sheikah. We are bred to protect, and we do, no matter the cost. My parents left my brother and me when he was four and I was an infant when they got the call. They died before I even learned to know their faces. But they died with their purpose."
I couldn't imagine the world that he lived in. Never knowing when you would be dispatched to Din knows where, fighting until you died because that's all you knew how to do. Leaving your children orphans to serve a cause that would have never affected you otherwise. And then if you died, your children wouldn't even mourn you properly, instead demeaning you by simply saying 'They served their purpose.'
"How can you say that?"
Kassia's mindset must be along mine. She sounded horrified.
"Every death of ours went to a greater cause." Eli said calmly. "But don't think I don't think of them every day. I have them where it matters." He drew a fisted hand to his chest, banging at the approximate place of his heart. "Here." He said, but continued on. "However, I know my sense of duty better than anything. Although I've yet to swear the oaths, I understand what they entail. You wouldn't, though."
He turned left, and we followed.
"Help me understand, then." She looked frustrated, as she always did, when there was something she couldn't grasp.
"It's not something that is easily understood. It is a life. We take our oaths and die serving them."
"What oath?" asked Wolfe, looking vaguely curious, not as aloof as usual.
"I, blood of the Sheikah," he began to recite, closing his eyes. "do solemnly swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the name of the Sheikah. I pledge to serve and protect the blessed family of Hyrule and those in kinship to them, as well as all who walk the sacred soil of the motherland. I vow to be fruitful and to continue the lineage of my forefathers, as well as protect and raise up those other than my own. I promise my life and soul to the Greater Cause, no matter what it may be, and to live out my duties in Power, Wisdom, and Courage, so long as I walk the ground of the Sacred Three, forever and ever, until the day I die."
He opened his eyes, shooting Wolfe a grin. "That's how it's translated into your language, anyway. It's a lot harder to recite in Sheikahn."
Kassia looked intrigued. "Imagine, your entire life's purpose wrapped up into a few sentences. It must be dreadful to be so chained down."
Eli snorted. "I don't have to imagine anything. This is my life." He paused, his gaze staring off thoughtfully. "But I don't see it as a burden. Not all chains are unwelcome, you know."
We walked in silence from then on.
The Hollow turned out to be a smaller version of the giant antechamber Archer and I had walked through, only this one was filled with small children.
Toy swords and bows and arrows that looked suspiciously sharp littered the ground, and a small jungle gym was mounted into the wall, climbing ropes acting as a ladder to the second floor and rope netting acting as a connection from one side of the room to the other. The screeches and laughter of the children as they swung from the scarily high ceiling and jumped from the rock wall echoed through the room, giving it a sense of life that the other room did not.
"Since none of you are over twenty five, Hoan assigned your rooms off here instead of the Den." Eli half-yelled over the din. "Don't worry, though, you're me and the other ones who have passed their Rite. It's much quieter down there."
We scaled along the edge of the room, carefully avoiding the children playing tag and the one that was thrashing a wooden axe, taking a short time to deposit our beasts at the stable, and going through a door and a short hall until we got to the place Eli was talking of.
The room was perfectly circular and double-storied, with simple wooden doors at every turn, with littered notes or pictures tacked onto the front. Each had a carved symbol hanging above the door, giving a sense of individuality to the owner. Overall, though, the room was perfectly symmetrical and quiet, despite the dull roar from the other room still making it through the hall.
He walked up the ramp to the second floor with us following close behind, pulling open three doors in a line. "Take your pick." He said to us, nodding towards the door opposite the one on the left. "That's where I live. You're to wait here until you receive word otherwise, but if you need anything, let me know."
And with that, he walked off, unlocking his door and pulling it gently shut.
Wolfe helped himself to the room on the right, closing it immediately behind him, leaving Kassia and I by ourselves.
She turned to me. "Would you mind if I stayed with you for a bit?" she asked. "Something about this place scares me to death. I don't know if I would like being alone."
I took her hand and led her to the middle room, taking in the small, monk-like cell.
There was a sizeable bed tucked into the leftmost corner, the plain grey sheets perfectly tucked and pulled back, with a set of drawers acting as a nightstand with a burning candle on the top, all the drawers pulled open and bare. An empty bookcase sat along the opposite wall, with a plain wooden stool resting in the corner.
Closing the door, I threw my pack onto the bed, rummaging in it until I pulled out the snug blanket that I had brought with me. I spread it over the bed, almost disappointed in the fact that it was much too small to fit over the surface.
Kassia threw her bag on the stool, kicking off her muddied boots and lining them up with mine in the corner, going to sit on the newly placed quilt.
"Do you think Archer is okay?" she asked, pulling back the sheets and snuggling into the blankets, her eyes full of worry.
"It's his father." I yawned, throwing off my coat and joining her in bed as if it was the most natural thing in the world, putting my arms around her. She made no comment or protest. "This technically is his home. He'll be fine."
"I hope so." She murmured, resting her head at the crook of my shoulder, her eyes fluttering closed.
I thought of his response when he saw his father just a few hours ago, the pain in his eyes when I demanded what was so terrible, the fire in his voice when he screamed for me to let it go.
I closed my eyes, praying to Farore that I had made the right choice in convincing him to try to reconcile with him. Only then did I respond.
"I do, too."
ox(O)xo
Now
What is duty?
When I was with Zelda, we got into many arguments over that word.
I was bound to the Master Sword and my status as a Hero just as she was to Hyrule and her, a Princess. She believed that her duty to the crown of Hyrule was overpassed by nothing, where I thought that love was more important than any throne, or any sword, in my case.
Because of her crown we could never simply be Link and Zelda. It would always be Hero and Princess, or King and Queen, responsible for the well-being of everyone, never being able to think selfishly for ourselves.
And that was why she refused to marry me.
I understood, to a degree, even expected the no before it came.
But it hurt all the same.
I used to dream of a world where she was not the Princess and I was not the Hero, a world where we could be together without the terror of the kingdom and the threat to our lives and the burdens of our titles, far away from everyone else without a care in the world.
But now, looking back, I can see how foolish I truly was.
I shouldn't have let hope get the best of me. It was as implausible. I knew it was.
All happy endings are.
Cameos are still coming!
Sorry for the long wait, by the way. New endeavors include juggling the school newspaper, debate team, a boyfriend, trying not to fail math class with everything else I subjected myself to. Chapters might come out less frequently, but don't you worry, under no circumstances will I abandon this story.
The next chapter will probably come out a bit late as well, as I live in New Jersey and with Hurricane Sandy bearing down as you read this, I might lose power for any period of time. Thank you for being understanding!
Leave a word if you so please! ~Alyssa