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Chapter 21

Aspen appeared in my line of vision, his eyes rimmed with red and his neck peppered with scabs.

"Hanna!" he said, though it came out more like a gasping sob or grunt than an actual word.

I could feel stone pressing uncomfortably against the joints where my wings met my back. My limbs tingled as my strength slowly returned. The more I remembered Link's face in my dream (or whatever it had been), the more clear my path became. The raw pain in my chest was still there, but with the return of my strength came a momentary relief, as though a cooling balm had been pressed over the wound.

Aspen jumped as I sat up.

"No! You shouldn't move."

"How is he?" I asked.

"Link?"

"No, the freaking fat guy just outside our cave—of course, Link! Who else?" But I had already made out a boot behind Aspen. I leaned to the side and more of him came into my view until I was looking at his pale face and bloody lips.

Heart in my throat, I crawled around Aspen to put a hand to Link's shoulder.

"He's been fading in and out," said Aspen quietly. "I didn't expect him to be affected by the imprint like this. He had looked just fine back then."

I touched his chest, his face, ran my fingers through his hair.

"Link. Come on, Link, I'm going to pull you out of this."

Carefully, I picked up his head, slipped off his green hat, and cradled his head against my chest in a way that he could hear my heart beat. I wrapped my wings about him to ward off the cold.

"Aspen, you said you left for food."

He gestured to several bloody lumps that could have been rabbits at some point and piles of peeling, grayish wood.

"Get to it." I said. "We could use the heat."

Soon the cave had become filled with the scent of sage and cooking meat. Link's hands had begun to warm underneath my diligent rubbing. Now and then I'd lean down to a leave a kiss on his forehead, fervently praying to breath the warmth back to him. Feathers from my wings wiped off the specks of blood off his skin.

Aspen fluttered about the fire, expression wan, elbows tucked in close to his body.

"I'm sorry, fledgling, I thought he was more human than this, I thought he'd be fine."

"There's nothing for you to be sorry for."

"There's plenty for me to be sorry for. My purpose, my life, is to serve the children of my gods." He gave his back to me, wings hunched over his head. "I abandoned not only your mate, but also one of the last. Because he was raised by humans, weak, and wingless, I had suppose him just like them. I had suppose him unaffected by imprinting."

"We both thought that. Even my mother was telling me that imprinting just didn't happen with humans."

"You misunderstand me, fledgeling. My duty is to care for you and him. Regardless of his appearance and powers, I should have watched over him as I did you. This is my responsibility, not yours. Don't try to comfort me."

I complied, my heart too much in my mouth anyways. Link had yet to give a sign of life other than the soft thumping against the pads of my fingers when I pressed them to his neck.

Just as Aspen started to pick roasted rabbits from the fire, a hair rising cry came from the bright noon sun outside. Instinctively I coiled tighter around Link, only to flinch back when he gave a weak cough and opened his lids by a fraction. His storm blue eyes looked into mine through frames of blond lashes, and careful to encourage his recovery, I caressed his brow and cheek. A rush of air ran from his lips, like a sigh. He leaned his face into my touch.

When whatever was outside let out another screech, even closer this time, he snapped to attention and struggled against my arms, gasping for breath and reaching out for something, probably his sword.

"Calm down," I said, easily holding him back with my greater strength. "Aspen put up a barrier, remember?"

"A-Aspen?" he croaked.

"That's me," said the green man. He had a skewered rabbit in each hand, one of which he held out for me until I could maneuver a hand out from underneath Link. The poor swordsman had started to shiver again in my arms, despite the warmth of the day and fire. Aspen told me to open my wings so he could look in on Link, who watched him warily.

"Whaddya do to me?" Link asked.

"Why do you automatically assume it's me?"

"You're the only one here I don't know." Link coughed again, but only a small drop of new blood jumped onto his raised fist. Aspen shook his head distastefully.

"He'll live," he reached out a hand to Link's forehead and drew it back before the other could weakly whack it away. "He has a slight fever, but I think that may be more from the strain of the cold and such that was just aggravated by the imprint." He tittered. "So human..."

"Stop using 'human' as a synonym for weak, Aspen. If you haven't noticed, there's still millions of them and only two of us."

Aspen bowed his head, expression apologetic. "Forgive me, princess."

"Are you a princess?" asked Link, who had once more been swallowed up in the warmth of my wings and arms. I had my stick of rabbit meat held away and above.

"I just think he likes calling me that." I tore off a piece of meat and offered it to him. At first, Link wrinkled his nose at being fed like a baby, but on Aspen's insistence that his body needed all the nourishment it needed (and another screech from whatever monster had found us this time from outside), Link weakly propped himself up high enough to lean between the crook of my shoulder and wing to nibble the meat.

I tore off another piece for him, but he just looked at it, his expression glazed.

"What did I do wrong?" he looked to me, then to Aspen. "The goddesses. They want to kill me too, now. They said I was...I was deformed. That my soul came out wrong. Is that why they don't want me?"

It should have sounded ridiculous, the way he said that last sentence as though he were but a child, but it only broke my heart and made me want to pull him back into my embrace. Aspen, too, looked sympathetic.

"Ah, little fledgeling, you really have done nothing wrong. You were simply born to the wrong parents, in the goddesses' opinion."

"What do my parents have to do with this?"

"They were like my parents," I said gently. "Same species."

He blinked hard at me. Then, as though it would somehow help things make more sense, he finally brought the rabbit meat back up to his mouth, chewing carefully. Aspen and I munched away at our own portions until Link finally swallowed and spoke up.

"I don't have wings. Was I suppose to?"

"Yes." said Aspen, simply.

Link frowned. "Is that why I'm...deformed?"

"Yes and no. The goddesses probably think you are deformed because the soul that was meant to be reincarnated as the Hero of legends was stolen by our gods to be born as one of the winged rather than as a Hylian. Souls have existed long before the gods and always will. Your soul is as pure as always, otherwise you would not have been bestowed with the power of the Triforce," Aspen pointed to one of Link's gauntleted hands. "Due to that, the goddesses had to make due with what they were given, even if their precious, hoarded up soul had been born a wingless, weakened child of their enemies. Now that the Hero's purpose has been served, they had hoped you would live your life out as a human, never meeting any of your kind, for fear that you may take the power of the Triforce to the gods they had fought so hard to destroy. You are both their greatest strength, and their greatest weakness."

Link's brow furrowed so deep, his eyebrows met across the gape of his nose.

"I don't understand," he said slowly, taking another slip of meat from me without looking, this time able to bring up a hand to hold it for himself. "How does any of that make it so I don't have wings too? Was I just born wrong?"

"No," said Aspen. "It was for the sake of balance."

"Balance..."

"Well, if you haven't noticed by now, Hanna here is quite talented in her abilities to manipulate water, as well as other elements, as I have here fore taught her. Part of the reason your kind are so vulnerable to heartbreak and have the imprinting instinct is to balance out these powers. For great strength there must be equal weakness. And since Hanna's powers are out of the ordinary, and even more powerful than any before her had been, weakness had to be put somewhere to balance her."

He still didn't seem to understand, and coughed a bit into his closed fist. I had finished off as much of the rabbit I could eat and handed the rest to Link, who took the stick to his mouth without thinking. Then, half way through a chew, it seemed to hit him and he forced a painful swallow.

"Wait, she imprinted on me, and if I'm the same kind of being as she is, then that must mean—aw Din, you weren't lying back there, were you? When you called her my mate."

Aspen looked exasperated at this. "Forgive me, but you're an idiot."

But Link was on a roll. "That's why I got so sick, because Hanna was dying, which meant the imprint was pulling me after her, which means..." he stopped. Then frowned. "Why are we both still alive?"

Aspen shrugged, gave me a covert glance, then went back to picking the bones of his rabbit clean.

Link slumped back. "So...I'm the weakness. That's why I don't have cool powers or wings or awesome claws and fangs, huh?"

"Practically human," muttered Aspen.

"Human..." Link echoed, rabbit remains forgotten for a moment. "So I'm not...human."

"Might as well be, though with the imprint weakness, you're even weaker. A human's strength and blessing is there ability to heal and move on from heartbreak as though it had never happen. Since you don't have that..."

"Aspen, shut up." I could see the empty look coming to Link's eyes.

"You do seem to have a little more physical strength than most, though, given you still have the bone structure of the winged. And there's always that Triforce attached to your soul."

"What about 'shut up,' do you not understand?" I hissed.

He bowed his green head, acorn eyes half-lidded. "Pardon me."

And then an ugly, leathery winged bird of prey dropped in front of the mouth of our little cave, wicked long beak ducked down to screech. We all winced and covered our ears with shouts of alarm. But even as the bird attacked, it stopped as though hitting an invisible wall. The force of it's rebounded attack threw it back several feet and into the dirt. There, it flopped about, screaming.

"Well, looks like we get to deal with that soon, eh?" said Aspen.

Despite his casual tone, I still had to focus to keep my claws and fangs retracted. A new, pounding energy coursed through my chest, soothing the pain and banishing whatever weakness had remained in my bones. I curled in tighter about Link's form, fire rising up from my gut.

For Link, I could kill that thing. For Link I'd kill a lot of those things, and more.

For Link, I would live.