A/N: Wow, this monster of a chapter is FINISHED! Sorry it took so long! It's a whopping 7,000 words though, so I hope that makes up for it! Thank you so, SO much to the awesome people that reviewed, mwah! You are awesome! And a big thank you to Lortenian, for editing THAT scene for me, and getting me over the hump to get this chapter out!
Also, I started a tumblr where you can keep track of my progress between updates, if anyone is interested: embyrinitalics {dot} tumblr {dot} com
Thanks for reading! Leave a review if you're moved to do so, I would love it!
Lost
Dawn was painting the sky in strokes of pale sea foam and powder blue that stretched south across the rise of the hills, smearing pigment into a morning that was otherwise devoid of color. It was cold and silent beyond what one would naturally expect of the hour, and it seemed, as I trickled back from one realm into another, that the forest's eerie enchantment must have been seeping out into the rest of the world.
The Calamity was standing at the imperceptible line of the magic, so close that his breath was crossing the boundary into it, and the mist, rising out of the earth in great whorls, was licking at him hungrily. He looked like something out of a dream: an endless, forbidding forest sprawling before him; the dull green of his tunic a lone beacon of color in the mist and the overhang that was so thick it blocked out the light; and somewhere beyond the ancient, impassable magic, the key to his own destruction was waiting, enshrined in a pedestal most of the world had forgotten.
"Have you been into these woods before?"
I blinked. His voice, pensive, unexpected, broke the spell I had fallen into somewhere on the journey between dreams and reality.
"Yes. Once. With an escort of knights."
"Don't expect them to be as docile now as they were then."
I hadn't thought them docile at all. The mist had constantly crept in on our path, threatening to steal outliers away and condemn them to wander, lost, forever, beneath the sagging, gnarled boughs of the trees. Legend said they took the faces of the lost, wearing their contorted, mindless expressions as a warning to intruders—or to torment the ones who wouldn't turn back.
But he was an ancient, prolific magic-wielder, and I was the heiress of the sealing power of the gods—there were few things in the world that could possibly get the better of us working together. I got up from the floor of dewy grass and moss and joined him beside the edge of the enchantment, dipping into the barrier with my fingertips and watching the mist lap ravenously where I touched.
"I'm sure we'll manage," I muttered.
The Calamity turned his piercing eyes on me, studying me with an expression that was puzzled and amused at once. Finally, he said, "Do you not know fear?"
"I do," I frowned, defensive. "I fear you."
"Do you?"
My gaze locked with his again, blue and orange mingling with sea green. The question was genuine, hanging between us with uncomfortable weight, his expression stony and unreadable. There was an underlying accusation in his tone that I didn't miss, and it made words lodge in my throat like stones.
"Not nearly enough," he finally decided, his mouth tugging down as he turned his attention back to the mist. He sighed. "The Woods will see to that."
And then he took a purposeful step into the mist and was swallowed whole.
I stood at the boundary for a moment, torn and harboring sudden doubt. I couldn't see him at all through the fog, though I knew he could only be a few feet away at most. The mist had descended between them like the froth of breaking waves. As always, the road behind me, unobstructed, beckoning, invited me to turn and run. But I knew that would get me nowhere. So I exhaled and stepped over the line.
The world glowed subtly on the other side and was unnaturally still, as though suspended in a moment in time and awash in cool moonlight. Even the forest I had left behind, sitting sleepily beyond the boundary, seemed shrouded in a dream from this end. He was waiting for me, standing motionless as stone in the mist between two unlit torches.
My skin prickled. It was too still, too quiet. It felt lifeless. Nothing stirred, nothing slipped under bracken, or rustled leaves, nothing breathed.
Not even the wind.
"We have to go back," I whispered.
"We can't."
Panic started to rise in me like tidewaters. I took a step backward, and then another, reaching blindly behind me for the edge I had only just crossed. But it was gone. He turned, closing his hand firmly over my wrist before I could drift too far away.
"If we get separated, it will take me hours to find you again," he growled. "Get ahold of yourself."
"The only way through these woods is by following the currents in the wind," I breathed, holding on to the last fraying bits of my patience like a lifeline. "We'll never find the path without them."
"Do you think it's coincidence that the winds that have guided your people for thousands of years are suddenly missing?" He dropped my hand, frustration evident in his dark expression. "It's the Deku Tree. He's hidden the path."
"From you?"
"And you with me," he murmured, arching a slender brow. He turned back to the moonlit wood. Mist rippled beneath the boughs, over the moss and bracken, over our skin, obscuring the night and revealing pathways that vanished again just as quickly as they'd appeared. "Stay close. If the enchantment takes hold of you, you won't be able to tell the canopy from the floor."
"I know," I frowned. I could feel the magic responsible for the phantasms and trickery permeating the air, tasting of herbs and citrus. "They're called the Lost Woods for a reason."
"That's not why," he said, moving slowly from our place at the boundary that skirted uselessly out of our reach. "It's because you'll lose yourself here."
I fell in step behind him without thinking, drawn forward as though tethered to him. The trees seemed to shift as we walked, swelling and distorting on the edge of my vision. The rot in the boles left crooked, jagged sheaths and gaping holes: the stolen faces. They watched us as we passed out of hollow eyes, looming, silently, like something alive.
"The Woods will show you truth, or your greatest fear. They're one and the same for most people." He ducked under a low hanging branch, bracing himself against the bulging trunk and tracking forward cautiously. "Confronted with that, with no way out, your mind would rather be lost."
"It must test your courage," I mused absently, thinking of the reward that lay past it, and he peered over his shoulder and met my eyes, searching for something in them beyond the moonglow and the mist.
He admitted, quietly, "Courage helps."
I followed him wordlessly after that, weaving carefully in his tracks. Once or twice, echoing out of the cover of the mist, I heard a child's laughter. But he didn't seem to hear it. Sometimes I thought he was hearing other things that I couldn't, hesitating for no apparent reason, or tilting his head towards some phantom sound that never graced my ears.
The woods grew more shapeless and illusory the farther we went. Sometimes the trees dispersed, leaving us in an empty grove where isolated oaks towered overhead, immense and immeasurable, and the sensation of loneliness breathed down my neck; sometimes they closed in, the branches splaying and knitting above until it felt harder to breathe. The woods whispered my name; they illuminated a gentle, winding path with warm sunlight that I knew would inevitably lead nowhere; they plagued me with the feeling that I had seen all those exact trees a hundred times before.
The Calamity kept his palms spread down at he led the way, scenting a path with his hands. I nearly thought of asking him to teach me the method, just so I would have something else to think of besides the illusions, but I was afraid of distracting him. In the distance, the shadow of a woman's figure glided between the silhouettes of the trees and the spangles floating in the mist.
I took a deep breath, trying to block it out. I told myself to focus on what was real, but it was becoming harder and harder to tell the difference. The woman stalked us from the shadow of an oak, her features obscured in darkness, so close she could've reached out and touched me.
It was nothing like the pilgrimage I had taken to the pedestal. Back then, surrounded by my knights, a guiding wind, and so many torches, the woods had been ominous, but the forces that made them so were always kept at bay, just outside the circle of our firelight. Now I was in the thick of it, subject to all of the temptations and duplicity the mist had to offer. I could only trust that the Calamity knew the way.
Trust. My mind snagged unpleasantly on the thought. How many times had he warned me, in no uncertain terms, that I could never trust him?
Suddenly he was gone, and the woman was standing in his place.
I studied her a moment, forgetting to blink her away. She was beautiful, her long, golden tresses falling in loose curls over her shoulders. She was willowy, and elegant, and her eyes, vibrant and piercing, were a lovely shade of blue, as pure and bright as the summer sky.
"You're killing him," she whispered, her soft, familiar voice tainted with accusation and hurt.
And before I could ask her what she meant she was gone.
And I was alone.
My blood slogged as I scanned the woods for him, for someone, for anything that was genuine. But I couldn't be sure of any of it. The woods, labyrinthine, glowing, sprawled endlessly in all directions, and the mist clawed at my ankles and slithered up the trees. I set my jaw, dithering, trying to decide if it was best to stay where I was and hope he could find me, or if I should keep going forward and hope I found him.
The woods whispered my name again, a chorus of unearthly voices sounding behind me in a deafening, staggered echo, and I couldn't hold still. I moved, knowing I might be doing more harm than good, placing one foot deliberately in front of the other to keep in a straight line.
But the illusions only got worse. The ground shifted constantly, hiding raised roots and slopes until I was stumbling over them, and the whispers followed wherever I went, sometimes sounding from a great distance, trying to pull me from my path, or from just at my back, so loud I nearly jumped out of my skin. The woods seemed to go on forever. It churned by in a repetitious series of trees and knolls that all looked exactly alike, undermining my sense of direction and my confidence at once. I finally stopped when I realized I was accomplishing nothing but exhausting myself. I closed my eyes, willing myself to be calm. Muttering a brief prayer to the goddess to forgive me for my own stupidity.
When I opened my eyes again, the woman was standing with me.
She had her back turned to me, but when she spoke, I knew where I had heard her voice before. It was the voice I used in my dreams, rising out of memories that belonged to someone else. The voice that was mine and not mine.
"Don't make the same mistakes I did," she murmured, turning her face until the glow of the woods splashed against her profile. Her cheek was wet with tears. "Don't let him die."
The forest tilted and my vision swam, and I blinked, trying to regain my equilibrium. The woman was gone. The whispers started again, so close and so unexpected that I spun to face them. There was nothing. But when I turned back the woods had shifted and I froze, scanning for something that looked even slightly familiar. But it was no use; I was thoroughly disoriented.
Barely able to tell the canopy from the floor.
I closed my eyes again, breathing deep to stave off the panic.
"Courage," I reminded myself quietly. "It's not a trap. It's a test."
I opened my eyes. The moonglow had dimmed, turning the mist black and swallowing the trees. There was a presence in the dark, cold, malevolent, like a storm brooding on the edge of my consciousness. The flesh on my skin rose suddenly and I spun, looking for the source. Shrouded in the darkness, illuminated by threads of pale light, the Calamity stood with his back turned.
I stumbled forward, too relieved to question the reality of him. But when I reached out to touch him he vanished, splintering into a thousand particles and dissipating into the mist. Then I felt him, standing so close his breath skimmed the nape of my neck. I whirled, power rising up in my throat like bile, and he caught both my wrists in his hands.
His eyes came up to meet mine, and I flinched at the way they burned: one fluorescent as blue fire, the other molten as smelted ore.
"You're so breakable," he murmured.
The familiar heat of a conjuring seeped out of his hands, traveling up my wrists, over my arms, up my neck. Then he let go, and my hands snapped down at my sides so forcefully I cried out in surprise, paralyzed by his magic. My heart sputtered as he paced a slow circle, eyes trained on mine. I kept fixed on the illusion of him until he moved outside my line of vision and stopped there. His fingers traced my spine where it met my skull, and I shuddered against that familiar touch, too warm and too cool—and so gentle, as though he were stroking something made of glass.
"Such weak defenses. A clean break here would kill you almost instantly," he mused, and then trailed his fingers down my backbone, brushing along the ridges through my tunic until they came to rest on the small of my back. "Or here, if I wanted to cripple you."
My mouth went dry at the threat. I knew he wasn't real. I knew this was all in my mind. I knew as long as I stayed in control he couldn't hurt me.
But I wasn't in control. My blood pounded in my ears and my stomach twisted, and every instinct surging through me shouted at me to scream, or to run. But I couldn't move. Even though his magic couldn't be real and even though I must have been alone I couldn't move. He circled me again, watching with renewed interest, and something bitter coiled in my throat at the fire in his eyes. I felt it, like a cold caress or the kiss of a blade's edge on my neck: he was hunting, and I was prey.
"Slicing the skin here would bleed you out slowly," he went on, running icy fingers across my paralyzed wrist. Then he brought his hand to my throat, stroking the hollow of it. His fingertips lingered, his eyes sliding haltingly from the contact there to my eyes. "Or here, if I wanted to do it more quickly."
He vanished again with a sound like breath, atomizing and suspending for an unreal instant before melting into the dark, and a shiver coursed over my skin like a breath of lightning.
"Shall we try it?"
A blade lodged between the bones in the small of my back, and my gasp cut short before I could manage the scream that wanted to follow. It was cold cold and quick, like plunging into a frozen lake. Like falling into water so frigid every muscle in my body cramped at once. The magic fell away as he wrenched it out, and I collapsed, everything from my waist down horrifyingly numb.
I shouted where I hit the ground, panicked and vision swimming and trembling all over. He knelt beside me, watching me again, but I was beyond feeling shame. My chest heaved as I tried to draw breath, as I tried uselessly to move, as I burst into tears, as small, choked sounds broke in my throat with every gasp. I forgot the woods, the mists, the tests. I forgot about visions and illusions and the intangible gap between them and reality. I was swallowed by the sensation of being broken. By my rattling heartbeat and that instinctual fear I wish I had listened to when I had the chance. By the fire and steel of hunting eyes.
His hand closed slowly around my forearm, startling me into fighting back. I pulled, lurching away with the half of my body that would obey, but it was a futile effort. His grip was like iron. He held my wrist between us, watching my eyes, watching me drown, and dragged the gleaming star-colored blade of his dagger across the soft flesh there with deliberate slowness. I sobbed and gasped and cried, and his eyes gleamed and danced; my arm landed beside my head when he let me go, and I watched the laceration ooze and pulse an even rhythm with the beat of my pounding heart. His voice filled the woods again, filled my ears, filled my mind, thrusting me under a surge of dread as easily as he would've held me underwater.
"And now that you're broken, now that you're helpless, finishing you will hardly be difficult," he mused, letting the dagger gleam near my face, catching sparse light on its edge and drawing my eyes. "But that's the trouble, Princess. I only get to kill you once, and it's been so hard resisting until now. How am I going to make your death last?"
Something cold trailed over my lip, down my throat, down the seam of my body, but I couldn't tell if the touch was his or the touch of his blade. I watched mist and moonglow tumble over my head, felt after the prickling numbness radiating from the lower half of my body, caught up in the fuzzy disconnect where the nothingness met where my limbs should have been. I waited, lingering in the shallow breath I had taken, vision clouding. Fixating on that cool touch. Suspended in the promise of it.
Then the knife bit into me again, sinking through my heart or a lung, and the world spun. My vision went white, my heart surging louder as sight and taste and sound drained away, as I spiraled towards something dark, something that was unnervingly like death. The fear drained, too, lending me clarity that orbited a single, simple truth: that I had made a terrible mistake.
My knees hit the ground and I gasped, forcing air back into my lungs as I teetered unsteadily back to life. The forest had returned to itself, bathed in pale light and shifting mist, and the woman was kneeling with me.
"You have to save him," she insisted, before I had even had a moment to catch my breath. "You're the only one who can."
"Him?" I panted, still drinking adrenaline, still trembling as I came to grips with being alive. "The Calamity? That monster?"
"You know what he is!" She pressed her lips together impatiently, averting her eyes, and whispered, "How do you think he means to draw the Sword? You don't see the truth because you don't want to see it. The truth is in your mind, Zelda. It's your fault he's a monster."
The grass beneath us blanched white, dissolving into ash and spreading, expanding, touching the trees, the vines, the stones, sapping the forest colorless and reducing it to chalky dust. I got to my feet and tried to outrun it, sure it would come for me next. I didn't make it far. The forest stretched ahead of the ash and then snapped back around me, like getting shoved back in time, and the woman stalked out of the trees as I stumbled.
I sucked air, shaken, swallowing panic as color slowly leached back into the world, and met her eyes. I could see some resemblance between us now that I looked. We had a similar brow, and we shared a sweep of jawbone that my mother had, and her mother before her. Her lips were fuller than mine, and her eyes were jewel-tone blue, and her lissome build made her seem untouchable; but beyond those differences, I could see the inherent similarity the Calamity had seen. We were the same in our deepest parts, both of us an expression of the same power, born to inherit the same light and use it to imprison the same evil.
It made what she was asking of me all the more incomprehensible.
"What do you expect me to do?" I finally demanded. "How can I help what he is?"
"The answer was at Thyphlo, and if you kill him now, then he will truly be lost," she said, her voice thinning, vanishing into the air like the memory of a whisper. She was disappearing with it, disintegrating into the mist, and then she followed it completely, her voice lingering like a curse: "And you will be his murderer."
A raindrop, startling, viscous, dropped onto my cheekbone, and I flinched away, brushing it off with the back of my hand.
It smeared red across my knuckles.
I raised my eyes upwards and met his, listless, colorless, staring vacantly where there should have been so much fire. He was strung up, graying and lifeless, in a tangle of vines, swaying inverted in the air above me. One of his arms had come loose, hanging down as though he were reaching for me, and blood was dripping rhythmically off his fingers. The drops fell on my brow, my cheek, my lip.
But I couldn't move, or even look away. And the scream that welled up in me wasn't mine, and it wasn't born of disgust, or fear. It was born of agony.
Sunlight glared blindingly through him from nowhere, melting the illusion and sending the mist spiraling away, and I spun, shielding my eyes. The light carved a passageway through the fog, and standing at the other end of it, his hand outstretched and his eyes lit with a blaze of power, was the Calamity. I ran towards him in that breathless moment of clarity, gasping, forcing myself forward even as the mist tumbled back over the path like crashing waves. The fog fell between us, obscuring him, threatening to pull us apart again. But I kept running for all I was worth.
I barreled headlong into him, reflexively fisting my hands in his tunic in case the forest tried to separate us, and I didn't even care when the sound I made when I tried to swallow was pathetic. I panted as the adrenaline ran its course, staring into his throat, willing him to be real. His hands closed on my shoulders as the mist closed around us, and I finally dared to look into his eyes.
Not glowing and mismatched. Not ashen and lifeless. Just the amalgam of sapphire and amber I was used to, searching mine—probably for signs of sanity. My breath shuddered out in relief, my fingers going lax in the fabric, and I trembled in his hands.
"I don't have as much courage as I thought," I whispered.
He took a shallow breath, leaning closer, but then thought better of his reply. He said instead, softly, his voice taut, "Neither do I."
He took my hand without another word, linking his fingers firmly in mine, and turned again, leading me with new urgency through the web of enchantment.
But despite his intensity, progress was slower this time; he seemed more cautious, or perhaps less certain.
After he brought us to a stop for a third time, I asked, so quietly, "What is it?"
"It's more difficult with one hand," he murmured, but his grip on me didn't slacken, and I wasn't about to suggest that he let go.
"Teach me," I said, hoping he would allow it. Hoping it would make a difference. I was desperate for distraction and would've done anything to get out of that forest.
He passed me a disapproving glance, but then surprised me by complying.
"You can feel the threads of the magic weaved over this place. They're stronger where they're shielding the path. Give me your hand."
I offered it cautiously, and he turned, bringing his own palm to hover beneath mine. Power, invisible, tenuous, pulsed out of it, and I could feel it alight on my skin, delicate as the beat of a butterfly's wing.
"That's what you're looking for," he murmured, turning his attention back to the woods and moving in a new direction. "But this magic is old and well-crafted, and it's everywhere. The differences will be subtle."
I nodded and let my hand fall facedown, mimicking his method. I couldn't increase his acuity as he could have if he had both his hands, but I could offer a second opinion. I let him lead, experimentally feeling for the gradation between the magic cloaking the path we were on and the magic that hung elsewhere, feeling for the butterfly pulse of ancient power on my palm. It was subtle. But when we came to a juncture, the rise of power bending to the left, he looked to me for confirmation, and when I nodded he followed it without hesitating.
The forest contorted, entrapping us as long as it was able. But finally, after a thousand questioning glances and a thousand answering gestures, the Calamity raised his eyes and focused on a break in the mist, and his grip on my hand tightened.
"There," he said, moving towards it without letting me go.
The barren floor of the maze dipped and gave way to the edge of a gully, hidden by the blanket of mist. It clung to us as we stepped onto the fern-laden path, as though trying to pull us back, but thinned and vanished in the heat of the sunlight. Birdsong reached us slowly, carefully, as though trying to pry us out of a dream, and the green underbrush grew more verdant as my eyes adjusted to the light. Once he was certain the danger had passed, he dropped my hand.
The canopy above us was lush, filtering the sunlight in blinding spangles that shifted with the wind. Gradually, like the sands of the desert giving way to a bank of stone, the leaves above us dotted with blossoms until we were under nothing but blossoms. The sunlight poured brighter through the gentle film of the petals, dousing the glen in warm, pink-hued light. A breeze pulled at us, cool and refreshing and tasting of an ancient power, and rising silently, untouchably, out of the earth, a medallion of worn stone eaten by forest, its centered pedestal, and the blade plunged immovably into it rested in the grove like an old, forgotten memory.
It struck me, then: the juxtaposition of the horrors in the woods with all the courage that sword represented. It felt unmistakably divine, and for a moment I felt unworthy to even approach.
But the Calamity had no such qualms. He marched on the pedestal, showing it as much deference as a well-trodden staircase. I swallowed an angry rebuke, moving to follow. Then a resonant, booming voice filled the wood, reverberating through my ribs, and my eyes swept up the sprawl of ancient roots and the gnarled bole rising behind the pedestal as I startled, settling on the ageless, omniscient eyes of the Great Deku Tree.
"So. You survived."
The Calamity scoffed. "Don't sound so surprised."
I glared at him, mortified, but the deity was unfazed by his lack of respect.
"You have come for the Sword," the tree mulled, the smooth knots that were his eyes shifting slowly beneath awnings of dense bark. They settled on the lonely blade, passionless and filtering through the knowledge of forgotten ages. "If you mean to end the cycle, I must caution you that the task before you is an arduous one."
"But it will work?" he pressed.
"If you have the strength," he replied, dryly. Then his massive eyes settled on me. I resisted the urge to shrink behind the Calamity, as though he could possibly hide me from that penetrating gaze, as dark and aged as the heart of a mountain. Finally, he decided, "You have not told her."
"No."
A strain of silence followed, the tree waiting patiently for his disapproval to be acknowledged, and the Calamity too stubborn to budge. Eventually he realized it was foolish to challenge a tree to a game of patience and changed the subject.
"I have the strength. I have the sealing power. I only need the Sword."
"And you are wondering if it will accept you," he surmised. "As you are now, I cannot say whether you are worthy or not. But I do sense you are in a weakened state."
He frowned, but didn't contradict him. I thought of the way he had lifted the fog, of the incredible power that repelling such ancient magic must have taken, and suddenly wondered that he was still on his feet.
"We could both use some rest," I ventured, hoping to circumvent his pride. It wouldn't do for him to jeopardize our efforts on account of his ego.
He gave me an irritated sidelong glance that clearly stated he knew what I was up to. Still, it was a generous if not transparent gesture, and apparently he wasn't above accepting it.
"Fine," he decided curtly, and then turned on heel and stalked off into the grove.
I watched him go, bristling at his irreverence. He hadn't exactly been dismissed. But the sound of bending wood and creaking boughs made me turn, and the tree had shaped his features into a gentle smile.
"There is much you can forage in this forest," he said. "A full stomach will help you regain your strength. Do not concern yourself with the enchantments here. I will ensure your protection."
"Thank you," I said, allowing myself the first genuine smile in recent memory. Not having eaten since the day before, I was more eager to take him up on the offer than I cared to admit aloud. But there were things eating at me worse than hunger. I glanced carefully over my shoulder at where the Calamity had wandered; he was nearly concealed by the staggered trees, retreating further and further into the gully. "What has he not told me?"
"Perhaps you should ask him."
When I turned back, his features had reverted to slabs of bark that resembled a face, perhaps, but that were too motionless to belong to anything alive. I sighed, taking that as an indication that the conversation was over, and moved off the pedestal towards the grove beneath the Deku Tree's canopy.
Unlike the spectral woods surrounding it, the grove was beautiful, and there was life: birds and tree rodents and insects with wings that glittered like translucent jewels. But I sensed that the Calamity's presence had changed things, either driving something away that was as inherent to this place as a heartbeat or moving the Deku Tree to conceal it. I tried to push the unpleasantness of that aside, filling myself with berries and nuts and mushrooms and scattered pieces of low-hanging fruit, nourishing myself with the peace of that forest along with my food.
I explored long after my hunger had been satisfied. The air smelled of fresh growth and the sweet decay of old bracken turning brittle in the sun. But despite the serenity, the visions still loomed in the back of my mind, haunting me. And it seemed the more I tried to forget them the more they refused to be repressed. I traced the fragments of the visions and my dreams, trying to isolate the threads that wove them together. It couldn't have been coincidence that the woman I became in my dreams was the same woman who confronted me in the Lost Woods. But if there was a fuller, deeper meaning, I had yet to find it. There were just too many holes.
Then the Calamity crouched beside me and I started. His lip twitched, amused.
"You're a little jumpy."
I glared. "What do you want?"
"Nothing. But I have a few more things I should teach you."
That was unexpected. I hadn't thought the lessons would continue beyond his uncharacteristic charity the night before, but now that I'd had a taste of my own abilities beyond the throbbing, necessary magic of the goddess's power, I have to admit I was eager to delve deeper. An incarnation of evil wasn't the ideal teacher, of course, but at the moment I didn't have other options—and frankly doubted I would ever come across someone as capable for as long as I lived.
I shifted and reluctantly put my glare away. He noticed, a knowing smirk tugging at the edge of his mouth.
"Telekinesis," he sighed, thrusting his hand to the side and calling a fallen branch to it. It whipped through the air, flying straight to his palm, and then he opened his hand, sending it hurtling away, and it splintered on a tree trunk. He plucked an acorn from the underbrush and handed it to me. "Let's start small."
I pouted in spite of myself. "I think I could handle a stick."
"So do I," he said, quirking a brow. "But if you miscalculate and hit yourself in the face, this will hurt less."
I tilted my head in acquiescence, secretly pleased, and let power pool in my hand. It was already easier than it was not even two days ago.
"Magic is a channel. It connects the elements that make up the universe, and everything around you in susceptible to it. You're already physically aware of that, whether you're conscious of it or not. When you tap into that awareness, manipulating your surroundings is easy. Start by exploring that awareness."
I frowned skeptically, holding the nut out in a cynical gesture. "You want me to become aware of this acorn?"
"Too clever for step one, are we?" he scowled, and then he flicked my forehead, and I scowled back. "I don't mean with your eyes, Zelda, I mean with your perception."
I rolled the acorn in my fingers, swallowing my pride. "I don't know what that means."
"You're relying too much on what your senses tell you," he decided. "Try closing your eyes. Open your palm so you're feeling it in your hand less."
I hesitated, my scowl still in place as I searched him for signs of deceit. None of that sounded helpful. But my desire for the knowledge won out, and I pinched my eyes shut. In the dark behind my eyelids, I instinctively fell back on tactile senses and on the sounds disturbing the silence for information. I tried to move beyond them, tried to ignore what my body was telling me and bury myself in my mind, but it was like trying not to breathe.
"You're holding back," he murmured. "You want a waterfall, but you're only giving it a few drops of water."
Before I could question him his hand was on my shoulder, flooding me with a surge of power as he had the night he taught me fire. The power pulsed and throbbed, almost painful in its heat, but I resisted the urge to shrink back. It grew, feeding off my own powers, drawing from the untapped floodgates buried deep beneath the surface and filling me with white hot light. It was frightening, but it was also heady, and exhilarating, and I didn't know for the life of me why I always held back from doing this on my own.
Soon the input I had been trying to ignore before seemed unnecessary. He dropped his hand, letting me sustain the power on my own, and in the quiet of my mind and the light, I felt the breath of the wild around me. Everything, no matter how small, how brittle, seemed to glow, and in my mind's eye I could see the acorn smoldering in my palm. I touched it with my thoughts, and then felt it rise out of my palm as I guided it upwards.
A breeze moved through the glade, tousling every shuddering blade of grass, every spindly skeleton of leaf and diaphanous damselfly wing, and I tracked them as they tumbled, sensing where they landed and settled amidst the underbrush. My perception went out of me like a heartbeat, pulsating as far as the edge of the forest's enchantment. And I could feel everything in between.
"Zelda."
His voice brought me back to myself and I opened my eyes. All around us the woods were dancing, alight with seedpods and fern fronds, pebbles, forgotten twigs and broken butterfly wings and coils of shriveled leaves, all suspended in the air and catching sunlight like a thousand glittering spangles. And I realized I was holding them all.
I gasped, snuffing the power out, and they rained back to the forest floor.
"I wouldn't have stopped you," he murmured, his eyes glinting with the ghost of a smile, "but you were about to start uprooting the trees."
I stared, a little shaken. "Maybe that's enough magic for one day."
He nodded, lips pursing. Then his eyes slid away from mine, pensive, and he took a quiet, hesitant breath. "There is something else."
The tenor of his voice had changed, and I swallowed reflexively, eyes widening as it registered. I didn't know what in all the world could make him hesitate.
"I don't know what will happen to the power of the gods when I'm destroyed. The pieces might fracture, scattering across Hyrule, or they might find new bearers from this era. But there's a chance they might resonate in you." He harnessed my eyes again. They were startlingly dark. "If that happens, you must never use the wish."
I blinked. "What wish?"
"The wish," he repeated again, incredulous. "Promised by the gods when the Triforce becomes whole and falls to someone worthy, someone with a balanced heart—" he stopped, scanning my eyes for signs of recognition and finding none. He sighed. "Unbelievable," he muttered, and then recovered himself. "It doesn't matter. It might not happen. But if it does, don't use it. There's too much that could go wrong."
I nodded, still largely lost—I had never heard of such a wish, and didn't know what a Triforce was—but the finality in his voice didn't leave much room for argument, and I was slowly learning not to fight him when it came to matters concerning magic. I brought up a quandary of my own instead.
"What did the Deku Tree mean," I prompted carefully, watching him for signs, for clues, for scraps of truth, "when he said there was something you hadn't told me?"
He scoffed. "He can tell you himself once you destroy me."
"You mean after I kill you," I corrected quietly, and his eyes went to mine, indignant. I wasn't sure what had moved me to bring up something that was arguably semantic; only that, just before I had, the vision of him swaying in the forest vines had filled my mind and made my stomach twist.
"Can a curse be killed? Is it even alive in the first place?" he demanded, anger swelling suddenly in him. Then he got up before I could press the issue, turning to leave me alone in the trees, and repeated, "It doesn't matter."
I didn't follow him. I rubbed at my forearms, where it felt like the power wasn't shutting off. They itched like something was crawling under the skin.
When the sun began to go down hours later, I walked back the way I had come, and used my newfound abilities to snatch at fruit that was growing too high. It was probably not the best use of that power, but I was honestly still too frightened of how quickly it had gotten away from me to try anything else.
I found the Calamity near dusk. He spared me an acknowledging glance as I made my way towards him across the moss and fallen blossoms, but didn't engage me beyond that. A chill was starting to flood the forest floor, but he hadn't move from the log he sat on to remedy it.
"No fire?" I prodded.
"Build it yourself," he muttered. "We both know you're not helpless."
I frowned at the bitter edge in his voice but didn't argue, moving to collect suitable kindling. I sparked some fire in one hand, disconcerted with how effortless it had become. Then an idea spun a tiny web in my head and I let myself get snagged in it, using my senses to pull at brambles and twigs and branches without moving from my spot. It worked surprisingly well, coming together and catching as I fed it more warmth and more fuel. I wandered back to where he was, and let the hovering fireball of brushwood I had constructed fall unceremoniously between us.
"Not bad," he remarked dryly. He hadn't even looked at it.
I resisted the urge to scowl, settling silently beside it. We sat for a long time, not saying a word, listening to the tinder snap as the fire devoured it and the staggered chirping of the insects. But it wasn't pleasant. His disgruntled silence ate at me, thickening the air around him like a bad aura, until I could hardly stand to be near him.
"You're impossible to please," I finally growled, and when he didn't respond I carried on, for no reason other than a sudden, blind desire to provoke him. "And you're moody, and bad-tempered, and ungrateful!"
He stared at me then, his expression a strange amalgam of trouble and disbelief. "Why does any of that come as a surprise to you?"
I sighed, falling onto my back and watching the canopy flicker between the firelight and the stars. I listened to the night noise; I recognized the katydids, the crickets, and the tree frogs, but something else warbled occasionally, adding to the symphony with its unfamiliar call. It was annoying, like listening to someone sing a song in a sour key. I was tired of asking questions I didn't have the answer to.
Finally, I said, "I don't know."
He scoffed. "Go to sleep, Princess."
Visions and cold sensations welled in my mind, and then brimmed in my eyes, and I let my eyelids fall shut to keep them in.
"I don't think I can," I whispered.
"Afraid of the nightmares?" he mused, and I turned to glare at him. His eyes were dancing with firelight. "What did you see?"
"Nothing I care to share with you." I sat up again, trying to glare more effectively, but then my expression turned thoughtful in spite of my own stubborn intentions. I asked, quietly, "What did you see?"
It was a long time before he answered. Finally, he murmured, "Only the truth."
Then he left his place on the log, rounding the fire to crouch beside me. I watched the orange coils undulate in the blue circles of his eyes. In their own, untamed way, they were beautiful. I hadn't noticed before, perhaps because I had found them too frightening, or because the undercurrent of his evil was always repulsing me, coloring everything about him displeasing. But I didn't feel it then. I felt the opposite. Drawn in, pulled closer, as by curiosity or invitation, and with his face as near to mine as it was obeying that pull would have brought us tantalizingly close. So close he could've pressed his lips to mine, and tasted my fear in a new way.
"Would you like me to?"
My eyes fluttered back to his, and I realized he was offering to put me to sleep. I flushed a little at my errant train of thought, hoping it was disguised by the fire, and nodded, trying to swallow an unfamiliar warmth in my throat. At least he was asking before putting me under now. That was progress.
Too bad I was going to help him kill himself tomorrow.
I laid back down, getting as comfortable as I could on the uneven ground beside the fire. He hovered over me for a moment, his hesitation long enough that my brow puckered. He took a breath to say something, but then changed his mind, sighing, and ran his fingers over my eyes, and I fell breathlessly into the dark.
Out of that darkness, the battle eased to life again in my mind, as though I was dredging it up from the bottom of an ocean. It was chaos, churning with smoke and fire and malice, but it was what I saw in front of me that was making it so much harder to breathe.
He was screaming. The chaos was swirling, constricting, drawn towards him as my power tethered them together, funneling its incredible, amorphous mass into his mortal form. His face twisted in agony as the evil ripped into him, forced inside by my magic, and then tried to tear its way out, fighting the prison he was becoming for it. A spark ignited on his hand, and his sword flew out of his grasp, clattering as it skidded against the flagstones.
My own screams were trapped in my throat, held too tightly to slip out as I focused my power. I could barely see the merger happening through the hot tears blurring my vision and trailing down my cheeks, but the sound of his pain, echoing endlessly in my ears, more than made up for it. I knew it was working.
The monstrosity pushed back against my light and against its prison, tearing an agonized sound from him that I imagined would've accompany his body being ripped asunder. I forced the last of my strength into the sealing, and felt the transfer coalesce. He held his head in his hands, another scream erupting from him as the burden of containing it fell on him alone.
It was so much smaller, so much lighter, when it was trapped in him. Extinguishing it was no harder than taking a breath and blowing out a candle. And so, with gentle breath, I cast him out of our world.
The light snapped out, an eerie silence taking its place, and I let my head loll back, my power spent and my life quickly slipping away.
My blood was pooling beneath me, rushing out of innumerable wounds. The Guardians that were left powered down all over the battlefield, heralding an end to it all. A weak, breathless sob broke out of my throat.
"Link…"
Dark started crowding my vision, claiming me. Salty tears mixed beneath my temple with blood, and as my heart thudded its last, tremulous effort to keep me alive, I felt only one thing.
Regret.