"The truth is, hell is what we make of it."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

We have something of yours to return to you.

Link glanced to the wolf. It sat on its haunches, watching the soft pillar of mist where Garona had disappeared, mouth open in an almost-smile.

We have taken back what we have lent you. But we have not yet returned what you have lent us.

Link tried to think of what he was missing, what was different. The spirits had taken back their ears, perhaps still ringing with the distant echo of Kasheik's unheard prayers. And they had taken back his life, brief but joyful, a life that could've ended in many violent, unpredictable ways, and hadn't. Link could not think of anything else the spirits had exchanged with him.

Your dreams.

The wolf padded forward, and a tiny sphere of blue light gathered at its nose. For a moment Link thought of the fairy that he'd seen accompany his fallen predecessor—the light floated toward him, pulsating in the mist, surreal, almost alive. But it was not a fairy, it was a window, a tiny pinpoint of light through which he could see the content of his own mind, the faces of dogs and horses, the smiles of his family, the joys and pleasures of the world.

The goddesses have shaped them into beautiful things, the spirit said. They are a life for you, a life you will not know. They are yours to keep.

When Link touched the sphere, he saw Impa's smiling face, he saw Kakariko, down below him, obscured in the steam of the hot springs. He saw Epona and the hounds, Irma's garden, Talporom's stern hands healing his own. He saw the Elder at her fire, he saw Ralis and Ravio and Saria, he saw the vast wildness of the desert under red moonlight, shining through Nabru's hair. He saw Impa's fingers strike the harp, her old harp, he saw her foot tap, the joy in her face as she played a song, a real song, empty of the power of destruction but full of a different magic. He did not know if it was real, but for the first time, he heard her music.

Thank you, he thought.

Take your time with it. The wolf lay down on the caldera's edge, scratching under its chin with the long nails of a back paw. Time is our domain. We weave time and walk across the flows of its rivers with ease. The goddesses have imbued this place with as much or as little as is to be desired.

Link closed his eyes, nodding. He held the light in his hands, letting the images flow through him. Palo, grinning; Zelda learning music from Impa's quick hands, dancing along the golden strings of a concert harp, bigger than both of them; Talm laughing over a banquet; Impa beneath him, face contorted in ecstasy; his own arms, cradling his tiny daughter, red-eyed and curly-haired like her aunt. He spent years with them—in small glimpses, muffled with the bizarreness and wonder of dreams, he watched his daughter grow up beside Zelda, loving one another as only sisters could, fighting one another as only sisters could. In the span of a second he became a father, a guardian, an advisor, then a memory; he watched Hyrule change, he watched the sun rise and set in an endless, precious cycle, at once fast and slow, terribly confusing and endlessly illuminating.

When he opened his eyes, he was weeping anew.

You should keep those with you, child, the wolf told him. They will guide you through the darkest recesses of death, and keep you mindful of the light.

Link thought for a moment, his dreams in his hands. He squeezed the light, heart wringing. I would like to give them to the next one to hold the gods' power, he thought, carefully. The same way Garona passed her memories onto me, I want to do that for the next one in my place. To guide them to the people who can teach them how to use the triforce. To give them hope.

The wolf lifted its head. A kind decision. You have only just reclaimed your dreams, and yet you wish to impart them. It is for that selflessness that you were chosen.

Link hesitated a moment, by whom lingering on the tip of his thoughts. The wolf had clearly understood, but it did not answer him. It only rose, shaking dust-light from its haunches, and stepped closer to the caldera.

Come, it said. We must move forward.

Link followed, holding his dreams tightly to his chest. He glanced down into the mouth of the mountain, bright with life and time and eternity. Deep inside, he saw movement—circles, cycles, round and long and unending, like a worm eating her own tail.

For the first time since he had been in hell, Palo heard the god's voice. It sent a shiver through him, it seemed to suck the warmth from his skin as it hissed along the curve of his ear, sending his hair standing on end.

He'd done it. He'd done what thousands of magicians over thousands of years had failed to, and what those who'd succeeded regretted. Palo had enticed the death-god into manifesting itself.

He could feel it around him. It crawled, almost visible, through the dust, sucking away what little pale light crawled through the tomb's cracks. Slowly, it slithered from behind the otherworldly veil, lowering the shield of its impenetrable eye. Its hunger, freezing and desperate, seemed to shrink the air.

"My servant has made a master out of you." The wind was cold on his skin, not quite a breath, not quite a hiss. "I know what you ask of me, but even you cannot accomplish such a thing as this."

Palo could only imagine the shape of that hideous mouth lingering behind him, liquid lips spitting air out from its putrid lungs, tickling the hair at the nape of his neck. There was something horrendous, something visceral, physical about the monster he knew slithered through the shadows. He dared not turn.

"Of course I can," he said. His voice was hoarse, fearful, though he tried his best to hide it. "I'm the greatest necromancer to walk this world."

The breath came again, icy. "Even so." The shadow slipped around him, lingering outside the limits of Palo's circle of blood. He knew he would have to choose his next words, and actions, very carefully. Yet, so would the ancient one. Link's was a life blessed by the goddesses themselves. The power to twist and break a thing like that would not come easy, and it would not come cheap.

"I've done this before," Palo said. "You witnessed it, and you exacted the price."

"Mindless," the god hissed. Its shape still rippled at the edge of his vision, and as it circled him, its voice left a trail of ice on his skin. "Soulless, voiceless, hateful, desperate little things. Nothing but twitching, rotting flesh. To conjure extant parts is easy, but to seam them together is another art entirely."

Palo thought he could hear a strange enthusiasm, almost an amusement, in the terrible voice. He dared to think he had sparked its interest. This was an affront to the triumvirate, to Hylia, to every god that the old, dark one held in contempt.

"What would it cost?" Palo asked.

The shadows fell still for a moment. In his mind, Palo saw a great, glowing eye blink in thought. The last of the thin light seeping into the tomb vanished. "You have already dripped so much blood down my throat," came the answer, eventually. "You have already engorged me with the dead, what more could I desire?"

Palo smiled. "The living."

A thin rattle made its way through the slinking darkness. "You? Again? I have had my fill of you, deadseer."

"So you already know how good I taste."

Movement. A drip, the thick sound of a mouth opening. It was slavering, it always was, this hungry god. The shadows took on a vague, hunched shape reminiscent of a starving hound as they circled him.

Memories of a thousand teeth, a barbed, violating tongue sparked in his head—his heart began to race. The odor of his fear, his sweat, his shallow breath, seemed to excite the god. Palo could not stand to look directly at it, but he heard the clicking of clawed feet echoing along the floor, pacing, eager.

"You are living now," the god said. "But you will not be by the time I am finished with you."

Palo gulped. "I don't care."

Something of a shudder overtook the room—laughter, perhaps—that forced Palo's hackles to rise. The shadow around him flattened, the starving animal congealing into a denser shape, elongated, almost human. When Palo averted his gaze, the shape followed—two round yellow eyes, too familiar, too wide. Set in a heart-shaped face, mouthless, adorned with long spikes and appendages formed of splintered limbs, a patchwork of shadows torn from the undersides of a thousand different hells.

"This is no ordinary task," it said. "This will invite chaos, it will feed demise. It will throw the balance of the goddesses into ruin. It will break the cycles, the world you love, irrevocably."

"I know," Palo said. In truth, he could not know. He was a mortal deadseer, he could not know what even the dark, ancient one could not. But he would gladly spit in the face of gods who gave and took life as they saw fit, who bestowed their terrible power onto their chosen subjects, who used them as playthings to satisfy a strange, cosmic caprice.

"Very well." A long, black, tongue-like thing slithered from under the face of the monster-god. It extended toward Palo, splitting, looping, probing him like an insect. As it crawled toward his face, his breath left him, but he stilled, frozen in a grimace. The thin appendage brushed him painlessly, leaving a thin trail of liquid in its wake. It slithered across his cheek, down his neck, his arms, then back up to his forehead, resting at the knot between his eyebrows.

"Seventy-two." The whisper came from every inch of the god's terrible limbs, as if a thousand tiny mouths had spoken at once. "Hundreds."

"Minutes?" Palo asked, a careful hope rising in his heart.

"Days."

He added the years in his head.

"And everything you ever were, everything you have ever been. Everything you have ever loved. Every part of you."

I refuse. The words danced on the tip of Palo's tongue, begging to be said. But he forced himself to think of Impa, mad with grief, of her crouching over a pool of Link's blood, he forced himself to think of the cruel way he had died, the insult of his broken sword. The flesh being ripped from between Sheim's ribs in a flash of golden light, the same god-light tearing through Palo as gleefully as the dark god had once done—but giving nothing in return. Only an evil god could bestow such destructive power on such a man as Ganondorf Dragmire. Only a god with truly malicious intent would release such hideous light onto the world. A god worse than the creature slithering before Palo now.

"I accept," he said.

The thing shifted behind him. It slipped an appendage around his neck and froze the blood in his veins. It tightened, gradually, firmly, squeezing the air from him. Another long appendage, perhaps a claw, perhaps a tail, slid down his waist, around his leg, and dragged him slowly backward, away from the circle, away from the world. Something wet, sharp, touched his face. For a half second, the memories flooded back to him, of hell, of the burning, the cutting, the broken bones and devoured flesh, the images of his life upturned and distorted.

Suddenly, deeply, Palo regretted his decision. He wished fervently that he could take back the last few minutes, the last few hours, days, years. But he could do nothing but slide backward, legs numb, a streak of his blood painting the tomb's marble floor.

Are you coming with me? Link did not mean to ask the question, it merely slipped through his mind before he could stop it.

The wolf stared down into the caldera, tongue lolling. I will lead you there. We are journeying down the same road, to the same place, child. My time in this world has ended just as truly as yours. It crouched at the edge the rock. My home is ash, my people are massacred. My devotees and any offerings they might've given me are burned to nothing. Ikanokana is no more. Kasuto is no more. Kakariko is no more.

Kasheik— Link dared to think.

You are kind to think of him. He is my last follower. He will return to Eldin, but for one reason alone. He will return to that wasteland to die, to lay himself down at the grave of his wife and child, to fall into the earth that nourished his ancestors. He, and I, were not meant to survive such a disaster.

Link sensed a profound sadness in the wolf's words. Perhaps it was not quite ready to move on, perhaps it, like him, regretted its untimely end.

Our world is in ruin, it continued. Our land is injured, and badly. The world is not safe simply because of the death of one man, the defeat of one army. Now is a time of hardship, of strife, when many spirits will die, and many people with them.

Link hung his head.

But it is also a time of rebirth. Of learning, of overcoming. Though I will not be there, I hope the wolf cubs of the east mountains will survive, I hope one day I may be seen in their eyes. As you will be seen in the eyes of another, of one who will take on your burden when time dictates.

Link breathed deeply. His dreams warmed his fingers.

Are you ready? the spirit asked him. Are you ready to pass on what you have made, to bequeath your gifts and efforts to another?

Yes. Link realized, that despite his regrets, despite his grief, he meant it. He was ready.

Then follow me. Let us go home.

The wolf stepped forward, disappearing into the light, disappearing into oblivion. Carefully, Link followed, staring into eternity, the faces that lingered there, the songs and dreams and rebirths that waited for him. An anxious joy overtook him, and suddenly, nervously, he found himself smiling.

He stepped out into the empty air, and let himself fall.

At midday, when the sun was high and hot, Impa's fever broke. She bolted upright, still burning, wheezing, panicked. She glanced around—she was not in the infirmary, though she vaguely remembered having been brought there. Instead, it appeared she was in one of the palace's many empty bedchambers. The damp sheets clung to her, and the curtains were drawn tight over bright windows. A tincture sat on the bedside table.

Impa searched her memory for the events of the previous days, and could find very little—both her waking and sleeping hours and been a blur, a haze of grief and agony and sickness. But her head was clear now.

Her head was clear, her heart was racing, and though she did not remember her recent past, she thought she might've caught a glimpse of the future. She could still feel her broken heart ache inside her, and she had the terrible sensation of being outside herself, of being something other than herself, of being an apparition, perhaps, in someone else's dream. An ominous cloud curled over her mind, a warning—but of what, she did not know.

She pushed herself up from the mattress. When she moved her hand to throw the sweaty sheets from her legs, its dorsal surface lit the room with a golden glow.

She froze.

"Impossible," she muttered.

Link had been dying—she remembered his face, his bloodied lips forming desperate words, to take something, to take his triforce, or his life, or his sword. She had not known; she had been in too deep a stupor to realize what he'd said, she'd been lost, gripped by some strange sort of madness. But this—

This could not be real—she could not be sitting here, with the triforce in hand. She could not have taken it from Link, certainly. She knew the hidden legends, she knew that particular fragment of the gods' power was flighty, choosing its wielder based not on blood, but on heart and deed. She had felt Link's power travel through her many times, when they kissed, when they touched—it had a sharp, green taste, it raised her hairs like a shock of electricity, like a refreshing sting of a cold wind.

This was different. The light inside her was a low rumble, deep, a trembling undertone. It was an energy that hummed like a current beneath the surface of calm water, the roaring magma under a sleeping mountain. It was not Link's, and it was not Zee's. But that could only mean—

She slid from bed. She felt heavy, but sturdy somehow—with her mind returned to her, with her injuries tended and the worst of her sickness passed, she was able to struggle to her feet and tremble to the door, supporting herself with one shaking arm against the stone wall. A ripple flowed through her with every step, deep and red, like the stretch of a powerful animal. She did not know what was happening inside her—all she knew was that Link was dead, the King was dead, she was alive, and that something terrible was about to happen.

She threw open her chamber door with such force it screamed from its hinges, clattering to the opposite wall of the corridor in a spray of golden light. Her hand burned, her heartbeat drummed across her ears with a deafening intensity. When she limped down the hall, her bare feet were uneven, but swift. Her bandaged leg throbbed, but it did not stop her. The pain was simply a haze in the distance, unimportant, nothing more than a suggestion.

The palace halls were mercifully empty. She twisted through the servants' corridors, past the kitchens, following her mindless feet, uncertain of where she was going, but certain she had to hurry. Her momentum carried her through the palace doors and into the gardens, where she tumbled past benches and little bridges and orchards, trees bending and shifting to talk to one another as she hurried past. Instinct drove her down a marble path, one she had vaguely remembered traveling a few days, or a few years, before, following the pale face of her lover, the man who had saved her, saved Hyrule.

Her heart was somewhere in her stomach when she arrived at his tomb, pristine white marble marred by a single crack. Reluctantly, she reached for it. Her triforce pulsed, commanding her to power through the stone, to burst into the resting place of the Verdant Knight, to save him from whatever dark shadow lingered over him.

The stench of magic reached her nose. It was familiar, sickening, a mockery of a scent she had always held dear to her. Of Kakariko, of dark, earthy skin, of firegrass smoke. It smelled of Palo.

She cried out for him, raising her fist.

Before her power gathered in her hand, before she even touched the marred stone, a violent tremor shook her from her feet. Dust and pebbles flew from collapsing marble, and the sky darkened, clouds descending swift and heavy as boulders. Her heart trembled in her throat, and she gasped, raising a golden hand to protect herself. A light flashed, and she went blind.

Something gripped his ankle. Something cold, something painful, sharp as the bite of an asp and just as venomous. The ice spread up his leg, to his waist, pulling him away from the bright mist, away from the light, away from eternity.

He struggled, clutching his dreams to his chest. His mouth opened, his lungs heaved, and he released a cry he could not hear.

The caldera again took shape before him, condensing into a ring of rock. He shook, he struggled, but the soft release of eternity slipped away from him, and he from it. He screamed, he begged, he wriggled against the evil presence that held him. It only extended more arms, long and black and dripping with some sort of foul black blood. In his mind, he could feel the vibrations of an agonized howl, calling for him.

Darkness tore across his vision. The caldera disappeared, and the thing that gripped him tightened its hold, spinning him around. He closed his eyes—he did not know what terrible curse had caught up to him, if a nightmare had stowed hidden in his little sphere of dreams, if he had displeased the gods in some way, or if this was only eternity, if this was the fear and suffering that death truly entailed.

A puff of freezing air chilled his face. Whatever held him, it breathed, it moved, it undulated almost like a living creature. It was not a spirit, it could not be. Whatever it was, he didn't want to look at it, he didn't want to put a shape to the vile aura that sent a silent cry up his throat.

But he did. He opened his eyes, and saw a familiar face. Tattoos dripping black, eyes dark and stained with regret and hatred, Palo grabbed hold of him with painful, claw-like hands, and did not let him go.

He was cloaked in shadow and cold as ice. His hair was gone, replaced by thin tendrils of writhing black, and when he opened his mouth, a dark liquid emerged, drops of inhuman blood, or something worse.

"Palo," Link gasped, though he could not know if his voice would reach the deadseer. "What are you—"

Palo tightened his grip, wringing a cry from him. Link did not know why his friend had followed him, or why he had taken on this form, with a monstrous second body fused to his flesh. But he knew enough to guess why the deadseer was here, straddling the strange place between life and death. It was territory a magician like him would know well, but had no business interfering in.

"Let me go," Link said. "Please, Palo. Don't do this. Just let me go. I have to go."

Palo's lips moved, and Link thought he could make out the shape of his words through the dark bloodstains. "You're not going anywhere, kid."

The look in Palo's dark eyes was as sharp and hard as obsidian.

So Link struggled. He kicked, he threw out his hands, he nearly dropped his dreams trying to fight off the deadseer—but he was only pulled closer, into the stench of evil, into the freezing grasp of a monster. The dark limbs, inhuman, long-clawed and multi-jointed like an insect's, wrapped around him. He did not know if they belonged to Palo, or something else—but when he tried to pull away, they only pinned his arms to his sides, twisting his form, ripping his dreams from his grasp.

"I'm sorry." Palo's lips moved. Link could not hear him, but his words were clear enough. "I've done something incredibly stupid."

Pain, visceral, bodily pain, a pain he should never have rightly felt in death, overcame him. He screamed, he writhed, but he was utterly paralyzed, the sting of life spreading through his veins like poison. Palo held him still with one set of monstrous arms, with the other he reached up and gripped Link's face. His hands—his real, familiar hands, wet with black blood, pushed at his cheeks.

Palo's lips stung Link's skin as they brushed his forehead. The kiss lingered, throbbing, even when Palo lowered his face again, something of a sad smile playing on his lips.

"I love you," the deadseer said, soundlessly, slowly. "I love you all so much."

Wait, Palo—Link thought, and his mouth almost repeated it—but in a flash of darkness, Palo pushed him away, twisting his body, forcing him across the painful rifts of death, through which he burst like blood from a severed vessel.

The moment of the Verdant Knight's awakening, a moment that would sear itself into the minds of Hyruleans for decades to come, the sky darkened to black. A pall passed over the sun, over the stars, and momentarily, the entirety of the nation was assaulted with an unseen, unassailable terror. In the farthest reaches of the Haunted Waste, worms bust from the sand, writhing and dying; in the forests of Faron and Ordona, waterfalls turned to ice and trees petrified as if struck by lightning; and in the little chapel of Hylia in the Capital's palace, the crown fell from the new queen's head. It clinked and rolled past the feet of horrified spectators, glinting as the stained glass windows shattered. Nearby, in the garden, the monarch's adviser and protector, still burning with fever and aglow with golden light, let loose a scream of anguish so powerful it destroyed the tomb before her.

The earth shook, the trees trembled, the water in the fountains and ponds foamed and overflowed—the dread impact could be felt from the northern slopes of Hebra to the shores of the ash-choked Deadwood River. Fields went fallow, bridges crumbled, and in a doctor's clinic in Riverton, a Lanayrun woman, an unmarried scribe who had been abandoned by her lover but who had decided to adore her baby strongly enough for two parents, who had planned for the birth for months, counting down the days and running through names, who despite the trying times would've raised a child worthy to one day be called a hero, found out, after hours of arduous labor, that her son, her baby boy, her chance at happiness, had been born without a pulse.

Years later, most who witnessed these events would say it was Hylia's rage. It was Hylia and Din and Farore and Nayru, each slandered in her own way, each meting out punishment to those who had tried to bury the goddess' chosen hero alive. Scientists and naturalists would attribute the strange phenomena to the eruption of Death Mountain, whose ash and smoke clouded the sky and cooled the earth, whose destruction of the rivers and valleys in the lowlands disrupted ecosystems for hundreds of miles. The Gerudo would say it is because of Ganond's curse, released upon the annihilation of his bloodline, a curse that forced Molgera deep underground and wiped out Her daughters.

No one was quite sure what happened on the day that the Verdant Knight rose from his grave (or, according to the more scientifically-minded, managed to escape having been mistakenly put to rest alive). The only one who saw him emerge from the tomb was Impa, already on her knees, already beleaguered by shock and dismay. She had been rendered mad with pain, and she only became madder when she saw the face of her love, sunken and gray, painted with tattoos, stumble toward her through the dust.

He shook on weak legs, still dressed in his burial clothes. He was deaf, he was delirious, wailing the same word over and over, hoarse, breathy voice emerging from cracked, blue lips. When he collapsed in Impa's arms, he was cold as ice.

He writhed in her embrace, calling a name, a spell, a pair of syllables that he himself could not hear, repeated so forcefully they soon became meaningless.

"Palo," he moaned. His eyes were wide, glazed, too dry for tears. "Palo, Palo…"

Impa squeezed him, taking him into her shocked, shaking embrace. She held him to her, stroking cold, damp hair back from his cold, damp forehead. She looked to the sky, to the clearing clouds, to the sun slowly reappearing in the distance, and chose not to wonder. She chose not to wonder if she was insane or not, if this moment was truly occurring, if the man she had been so sure had died was now lying in her arms, breathing weakly, wheezing over and over: "Palo."

She did not ask how Link was alive, she did not ask what had happened. She did not ask what ineffable machinations of the gods moved behind her back, she did not ask why they saw fit to give him back to her, she did not even ask if Link was all right.

Instead, she spoke the other question that was bizarrely at the forefront of her mind, her numb, overwhelmed mind.

"Who's Palo?"