Hello readers!
Long time no see. I'm excited to begin a new story here about a project several years in the making. This is a concept based on an idea by sparklyfaerie that we developed together but abandoned years ago. This first chapter has been in a vault since like 2016, but the nudging of my younger sister told me to finish it and release it to you all. Here's a synopsis of the premise:
Zelda is a theater major in modern day Hyrule who is a huge fan of a Hylian playwright who chronicled a series of major events in medieval Hylian history. She is accidentally sent back in time, where she realizes that she is witnessing those series of events unfold before her eyes. After meeting the Hero of her plays in the flesh, she realizes that she can play a critical part of the war effort in the Conquest that is raging Hyrule. There's just one problem…in the play, the Hero dies in the end. When she begins to fall for him, will she decide to tell him about his untimely demise…or will she do whatever it takes to stop it?
I hope you enjoy this first chapter. It's certainly a proof-of-concept; if you like it, please let me know if I should continue!
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There was a power about standing center stage that went beyond words.
Alone besides the mic at her ear and the spotlight tied to her person, Zelda was able to transform into something beyond herself. With her costume and her makeup and the set around her, the theater gave her the ability to be someone braver, stronger, more majestic than she could ever be alone. Only there could she command the attention of hundreds. Only there could she be wholly in charge.
If her father were here, he would have compared it to politics. He would have asked her to reconsider her major and follow in his footsteps. It had been decades since there was last a female leader of Hyrule, but with his influence and her natural charm, he had always insisted she'd be unstoppable. He had always promised her that the Prime Ministry would be hers when she graduated so long as she listened to him. If he were here, he'd remind her again. All she had to do was transfer away from Faron University, the little liberal arts school she had enrolled in under her mother's name, and come back to Castleton to be at his side.
But he wasn't here, and he would never be again.
It had been six long months since she received that call.
Though it had been a sudden thing to her, by all accounts of the doctors, it was a long time coming. Arteries didn't shrink overnight, and peaceful men didn't keel over from stress before they turned sixty. Regardless, Prime Minister Daphnes Nohansen's death had shaken the country, and in the political turmoil that was left behind, no one spared so much of a thought as to what it had done to her.
While oftentimes absent, he was all she had left.
Her father's will had brought her some comfort, at least. In addition to granting her the deed to their city house, all his liquid income reverted to her as well. All that, and another gift-a substantial donation to Faron University, made out to whatever she wished.
She was overcome by the affirmation that he supported her choices after all the fuss he'd kicked up about it. Instead of giving it to the theater department, which was ridiculously well-endowed when one considered its size, she'd invested it in something everyone could enjoy.
Her father wasn't much impressed by any aspect of life outside the city, but he had loved the rose gardens tucked away in the back of campus. The idea that the place-a little aspect of her father's happiness-would be well kept for years to come brought her some comfort, too.
Though these thoughts haunted her most of her waking hours, they were pushed away when she was on the stage. There, she had to be completely transformed. There was no room for Zelda Harkinian's worries when the Princess of Hyrule had to articulate her innermost thoughts to a captivated audience of hundreds.
And so she'd thrown herself into her work. For the last six months, it had worked. That had much to do with the play her director had chosen for this semester's spring show. The Hero and the Princess was the most famous work of Hyrule's most esteemed playwright, Lord Archambaud Albion. His scripts were works of history as much as they were works of drama; he chronicled one of Hyrule's bloodiest wars and one of its most tragic love stories as it unfolded before his eyes. Because of him, Hyrule had a gripping, contemporaneous account of Hyrule's conquest over the Gerudo Kingdom and the tale of the first Princess Zelda losing her betrothed, the brilliant General, in its last battle.
Everyone in the country knew Lord Albion's plays. To Zelda, putting one on was a thrill on its own. Being cast as the star role (and her namesake, the Princess Zelda) made it even better. Working to make her performance the best it could possibly be was enough to distract her for a time.
Tonight, though, not even the theater could be her escape. Her father's ghost followed her. She could hear it from the wings.
"Did you hear about what the Nohansen Endowment is paying for, after all?" The voice was barely louder than a whisper, but sound carried in the hall, and Zelda was on stage alone.
"I guess it's not to fix the waffle machine in the dining hall?" another voice responded. Zelda kept to her flow, reciting her lines to the empty seats before her, all but invisible in the ordinarily calm dark of the theater.
"No. Rose gardens."
Laughter, now; muffled, but biting. The darkness pressed in like a vice.
"'Would that I, as Princess, could control the flow of time and r-r-'" Zelda faltered, then, stumbling over her words.
"That much for the rose gardens?" The first voice said, callous. "If he was this bad at managing money when he was alive, he's better off dead."
Her mouth had gone completely dry. "Would that I...I would…I…"
"Cut, cut!" the director's voice cut through the darkness, and the house lights came up as Zelda tried to maintain composure. A wave of her hand cut off the instrumental track that had played beneath her. The silence that followed echoed uncomfortably. "Zelda, what's going on?"
"Nothing," she croaked, biting her lip as her voice betrayed her. Her pathetic tone echoed across the theater, amplified a hundredfold by her microphone.
"Nothing?!" squawked her director. "You've gone pale as a ghost and your voice just went to hell! Don't tell me you're getting sick. We open in TWO DAYS! We can't replace you!"
"I'm fine," she said, though her voice, uncomfortably loud without the underscore, proved that she was most decidedly not fine.
Her director stood from her seat, running a tired hand down her face as she walked up the aisle. "Goddesses above. When they called this play taboo, they weren't kidding! We're ending tonight. You're on vocal rest, starting immediately." She turned to the company then, waving her arms. "Get out of here, all of you. Get some rest. We start first thing in the morning, and you'd better be spotless!"
A muffled commotion in the wings brought Zelda back to her senses.
She nodded mutely, swallowing in an attempt to get rid of the lump that had formed in her throat. Really, though, it was no use.
Tired. She was just...tired.
Mechanically, she exited stage right and navigated the chaos of the darkened wings to reach the dressing room.
Once there, she stripped herself of her costume and tucked it away in her bag before changing into her street clothes. She would wash them before rehearsal the next morning; one of her castmates had spilled some paint on the skirt while working on a set piece, and the stain would set if it wasn't tended to. Just another thing she would have to deal with this week.
Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she left the performing arts building without so much as a farewell to any of her peers. She needed to clear her head. There was only one place she could think of to do it.
And so she wound through the green of the University quad, wandering towards the outskirts of the campus where the fence met the woods. She walked for some time, following a worn path of dirt through the trees towards her special place.
She knew that a great temple had once stood where she was headed; if she was better at history, she might have even recalled the name. Now, though, it was nothing but a mass of upturned rubble and jagged stone, unable to stand the test of time. Faron University had sued a thousand times to get the zoning clearance to remove the ruins and expand the school, but her father had never allowed it. It was a testament to how far the country had come, he had said, and besides, there was something magic about the place that demanded it be kept.
There is something special about the place, she admitted as she strolled up the path towards the ruins, her script in hand. If she'd believed in magic, she would have wholeheartedly agreed with her father. There was a certain timelessness about the place that she loved. The ruins were green and cool and quiet, and since most people around viewed the place with superstition, she was almost always alone. There was no one around to hear her, and she could work her lines as loud as she wished without fear of interruption or intrusion. She felt at home among the battered columns coated with lichen and the rubble overtaken by decades of moss. She felt safe, like all the people over the centuries of history that had walked where she walked were protecting her.
Carefully, she turned to the scene that they stopped on at the dress rehearsal, breathing in the scent of old parchment. Her script was a first edition, a gift from her father, but one that she had never quite been able to bring herself to open. Now, though, she needed the words more than ever.
"'Would that I, as Princess, could control the flow of time and rectify that which our ancestors had left undone.'" she read off the page as she walked, the words flowing from her lips so much more smoothly than they had before. She knew the whole play by heart, of course, but there was something almost meditative about reading the lines as she spoke them. The words on the page calmed her almost as much as the place around her did. "'Your bravery, though it has been the salvation of the people of Hyrule, has taken so much from you. Would that I could relieve you of your burdens-"
She passed a pair of large statues and began up the steps, looking forward to sitting down on the small, raised platform beyond.
"My burdens are my own," she read, speaking now for the Hero, "and I would dare release them unto another. I gladly accept the reality of my trials if it secures the future of our people, for it is the future that we may mold, and thus the future is where our gazes should lie. Your Majesty is not responsible for the mistakes of your forebears.'
'And yet,'" she said of the Princess, "'I find myself burdened with shame for their failures...and those of my own. Would that I could open a portal to the past and cast the Evil King into the abyss myself.'"
She sighed, sinking down on the marble slab in the center of the small grove. Letting her grip on the script relax a bit, she closed her eyes and breathed in the heady scent of the plant life around her. Though her father never had a love of the theater like she did, this was the part of the play that he had always liked best. When he had given her this script for graduation-expensive by normal standards and priceless by hers-he had written the last part of the next line on her card.
"'I should like to return you," she recited without reading, "to the past which was stolen from you, with the hope that you may make your mark on a new history.'"
Her chest ached. Her father was hardly ever around when he was alive, but sometimes she missed him so dearly that it stole her breath away. Though he was quick to slip his disappointments at her choice of career into every conversation, at least he was there to tell her that he loved her. At least he would answer when she called. There was no one left to rant her frustrations to and to speak the sense back into her, and she had never felt his loss so keenly as she did now.
She was utterly alone, and in that moment, she wished for a better time than the one she was in.
Blinking back tears as she turned the page, she began to read anew. However, her brow furrowed as she realized that the words weren't the ones she remembered.
No, the scene didn't end with her father's line. The Hero had to propose to the Princess first. Licking her finger, she pinched the page between her thumb and forefinger. As she suspected, the page was stuck to the last. She carefully pried the two pages apart, pressing them flat.
There was something scrawled in the margins, though.
It was a short music staff, crooked and cramped, with three notes repeated twice. Leaning down to better read it, she hummed the notes under her breath, confirming that it was a tune.
Suddenly, though, she was forced to shield her eyes as a bright blue light exploded from underneath her. A gust of wind whipped around her, pulling the script from her hands and forcing her hair in her face. She shrieked, jumping to her feet, but as she tried to run her foot caught in the strap of her bookbag, sending her tumbling over the slab that had been her seat. Her hands flew out to catch her, bracing for grass.
However, when she hit the ground, her hands encountered something cool and smooth.
It was as she opened her eyes that she realized that something was very, very wrong.
Gone were the crumbling, vine-laden pillars of stone and the soft sounds of the forest around her. Gone was the familiar brick pathway back to her campus.
Instead, she was lying on marble.
The breath left her as she scrambled to her feet, head whipping around as she took in her surroundings. She wasn't in the grove anymore, that was for certain - instead, she was in a church. A grand, beautiful church, with soaring ceilings and stained-glass windows. The floor was a glistening white marble, and gigantic Doric columns stretched proudly to the ceiling every so many meters. The smell of incense was thick in the air, and as her eyes adjusted, she realized that the haze in the world around her came from fire smoke.
A heavy feeling settled in her stomach.
"Hello?" she called out, turning to see if anyone would answer. The echoing of her own voice through the vaulted ceiling was the only response, mocking her with every repetition.
Hello? Hellooo? Hellooooooo?
She muttered a swear underneath her breath, kicking at the ground in frustration. It was then that she noticed that her bag was slung just by her feet. She went to retrieve it, glancing around for her script, but that was nowhere to be found.
This immediately agitated her, but she forced herself to prioritize.
Figure out where she was, first. Find her priceless first edition script, second.
There was no one in her immediate vicinity. Determined to find a soul to explain where she had possibly ended up, she headed towards the only set of doors at the end of the long, cavernous room. They were heavy, wooden doors - stretching at least a story tall - but cracked open. Beyond, she could see a ray of sunlight and hear some signs of life. She slid through the open door, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the light of day.
Nothing in her life could have prepared her for what she saw.
The street was vibrant, a bustling microcosm of the city that surely stretched around them. Beyond the square of the building she had just exited, she could see rows of brightly-colored townhomes with well-tended fronts, vibrant overhangs protecting the wide windows of storefronts from the sun. It reminded her of the street that she had grown up on in Castleton, with its historic cobblestone roads and quaint atmosphere.
It wasn't so much the setting that shocked her into speechlessness. No...that was the inhabitants. For it wasn't normal of any city she knew for guards with chainmail to be patrolling the streets with swords on their belts, for women to parade about in long skirts and aprons. No ordinary city would boast horseback as their primary mode of transportation, nor would they allow chickens to scurry about.
On this street, there were carts and stalls and barrels and barkers. There were no cars or printed signs or telephone wire.
She had dressed enough sets, had costumed enough shows, to know what she was looking at. This street was positively medieval.
The sinking feeling in her stomach began to bubble into panic as she hurried down the steps of the building towards the street.
A desperate thought came to her mind.
I'm not in Hyrule anymore.
But just as she considered the notion, something caught her eye. There, above the smoke-laden chimneys of the buildings on the street, she saw a horrifyingly familiar sight peeking up on the hill. She passed that building on her way to school every morning for most of her life. Not often used in her experience but for important governmental holidays, but an iconic sight nonetheless. After all, it was the building for which Castleton was named.
Hyrule Castle, clear as day.
...or am I?