A/N: So before I address the elephant in the room, I wanted to thank everyone so so much for their reviews and support of this story. I can't tell you guys how much it means to hear that you're enjoying this, and I was blown away by the outpouring for the last chapter. Every notification in my inbox was the most exciting part of my day. So thank you, thank you, thank you!

But yeah. Uhm. Wow. 7 months between updates. I am so, so sorry about that everyone. It know it's probably hard to believe, but I never stopped writing or thinking about solutions for this chapter. I waded through several different versions before I arrived at this one (like, I don't know, 8?), and honestly I still have misgivings, and since it's been so long since I've updated I feel the pressure ten-fold. But I feel like at this point I have to just accept that I'm not going to love everything about this and just get it out there and move on with it.

Thanks so much for your patience. I won't let it happen again!

(Remember, you can keep up with my meltdowns and/or excuses on my tumblr, embyrinitalics. I'll have a more detailed post about this update and all the scrapped versions there!)

I'M SCARED! Let's do this! Bloop!

Mind Games

The stroke brought him to his knees.

For an instant there was silence, fleeting and soft like the ghost of an exhale. And then it passed, and the world broke open.

Power hemorrhaged out of him like a storm. The ground buckled beneath him and trees caught in the tremor split down their middle. The stone flanking the narrow passage into the woods cracked and shifted, and the air thinned, tasting of hot metal and of a mindless, ancient rage. A thunderhead formed out of the malice with a terrible, earsplitting sound that made our blood slog. Somehow, I knew where it would end: the taste on my tongue, the burn of the noxious vapor on my skin, the familiar, primal dread that coiled in the pit of my stomach—it was all just like the battlefield from my dreams.

Link was in the thick of it, writhing, his head in his hands and his fiery eyes wild. I had seen that look on his face before, indelibly preserved in undying, borrowed memory—the look of a man who was losing himself. A glaring streak of blood oozed across his neck, betraying where the wound, now mended, had been. A stifled, grating roar was pulling out of his throat, too loud to be his—too loud to be human—and the amber threads in his eyes were burning so brightly they were consuming them.

It was the monster in him, surging inexorably to life. And a monster in me was rising to meet it.

Light, alien, irresistible, flooded me from someplace untapped, someplace old and forgotten, sweeping me downstream in its current and filling me with a quiet rage so primal and furious that it matched his. It urged me forward and I listened, ignoring the startled cries from the others as I stepped unflinchingly into the storm that threatened to tear the world apart.

His eyes met mine as I moved through squall and malice, drawing closer until I loomed over him, the goddess in me burning like a vengeful star. They were desperate beneath the wrath—begging me to fulfill the promise I had refused to make.

I could see myself in his eyes. I was an ember, luminous, molten and untouchable, glowing so brilliantly my light might have rivaled the gods themselves. But it was hardly pure. It wasn't the holy light I had imagined. It was furious. It was an inversion of his darkness. It was an instrument of war. I stared through my reflection and into him. In my mind's eye I could see the two entities inhabiting the same space before me, pulling desperately at each other: one trying to hold on, and one furiously trying to break loose. I could see the residue of the magic that bound them together, pulsing with its own vibrant radiance. I could see the pounding heart of the man caught in the center of it, trapped between two warring powers that no mortal could hope to contain.

I took his face in my hands—a goddess, condescending to soothe her chosen hero.

And the world became light, engulfing and viscous, flooding the crevices of my consciousness like a flow of honey and swallowing it whole.

What was left was immutable and static, cradling me in warmth as it blotted out memory of anything else. The light blurred and rippled, thrummed with a heartbeat so familiar it ached. Then it parted, color and memory seeping through it and painting a dark, fire-spattered room in my mind from the ruins of a castle that had crumbled to time long ago.

Stonework and shadow shaped around me in a whisper, melting slowly into something tangible until I was surrounded by sensation. Then it closed in, dispelling thought, dispelling doubt, until it was all I knew.

The flickering light of the flames in the hearth.

The warmth of his breath.

The heat of his hands, burning through the soft fabric of my dress as he drew me closer.

He kissed me, desperate and miserable and so careful all at once, and I was dizzy with the feel of him. He whispered my name, brazenly, fervently, and I shivered at the longing in it.

He had never touched me before, not like this. But I had no intentions of telling him to stop. Even if it was indulgent, and impossible, and totally, indefensibly, scandalously inappropriate.

He dropped his forehead against mine, breathing, and took my hands rigidly.

"Forgive me," he said. "That was—"

I covered his mouth with curled fingers, silencing whatever might have followed. Given his station and his duty to me, and the massive impropriety of what he had just done, it couldn't have been anything good. I met his eyes, half-lit by the fire and so beautifully blue. They reminded me of a cold autumn sky, so rich and so unalterably, heartrendingly transient that it hurt to look at it. It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed my mind.

But I had rather gotten used to that dull ache. Even craved it. He held my gaze, letting me burn in it, waiting for judgment. All sense was leaving me, and I couldn't be bothered to care. I only knew, relinquishing to it, to him, that I couldn't fathom how I had lived without it for so long.

I laced my fingers behind his jaw, squeezing my eyes shut as though I could block out the impossibility of what we were doing, and pressed my lips to his again with a sigh. He overcame his surprise in the span of a heartbeat, pulling me flush against him and threading his fingers in my hair. My heart leaped into my throat as I reveled in the resolution of it, of his strong arms drawing me closer and his gentle touch coaxing more out of me, of his sudden boldness, and the way his every thirsty, languid stroke, fueled by desire that had been pent up and stoked for far too long, whispered and breathed things neither of us had ever been at liberty to say.

It was nourishment and the sweetest deprivation at once, filling me with a warmth that could banish any darkness but leaving me wanting so much more. It made every nerve in my body sing.

Then he stopped, pulling away slowly, and my breath went with him. His eyes searched mine, flitting uncertainly between them, and a crease formed in his brow.

He murmured, "This isn't real."

I blinked, falling suddenly, unexpectedly, horrifyingly, into myself.

I couldn't find my voice, or even move, struck dumb and paralyzed in the realization that this memory was different from the others—that it was being shared.

His expression changed as I transformed, as the illusion of our waking dream began to bleed, and his eyes burned.

"What are you doing here?" he seethed.

"I don't—I don't know—"

"Is this some kind of a joke to you?" he demanded, his fingers biting painfully into my arms where he held me. "You think just because you have her memories that they're yours to do with as you please?"

"No!" I blurted, panic rising chokingly into my throat. "I didn't mean to do this—"

"Well undo it!" he shouted, shoving me away and sending me stumbling into the mantle.

"I don't know how!" I yelled back pitifully, mortified tears spilling out of my eyes and streaming down my face. "It was an accident!"

He paced away from me once, trying to calm himself, but he wasn't any less livid for it when he turned around again. I tried, hopelessly, desperately, to free us both, trying to picture anything that was real—the woods, the malice and the storm that had risen out of him, the fury that had overtaken me—but nothing made the illusion unravel.

"This is how you operate when you don't get your way, then?" he sneered. "Prick the Calamity, see if he bleeds?"

I whispered, swallowing another bitter rush of tears, "I told you it was an accident."

"Magic doesn't just materialize out of nothing," he spat, stalking closer again. "What did you want to know? If it would hurt me to relive this? If I could even tell the difference between you?"

I winced away from his accusations, still breathless and my lips still burning from the heat of his kiss. "No!"

"Then what?" he demanded, taking me by the arms again. "Do you want me to admit that you remind me of her? That I'm in agony every time I look at you? Is that it?"

"I don't want anything!" I shouted miserably, struggling uselessly in his grip. "Let me go!"

"Would it please you to know that I am?" he asked more quietly, and I stilled, wide-eyed. He let his hands drop, finally, and said, his lip curling, "Every time."

The breath stole out of my chest as he left me there, crossing to the window; the world outside was a vague, piecemeal reconstruction of the castle grounds from too many eras, part memory and part magic. I held myself where I stood beside the fire, exhausted and trembling.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice quivering, because there was nothing else to say.

"You couldn't have just done as I asked," he growled, staring into the glistening miasma and mismatched spires. "You couldn't have just stabbed me through the heart and spared us both—" he turned, gesturing futilely, "this."

I let him blame me, too drained to put up a fight and knowing he was too angry to win against besides. The lull that followed was humid; I looked numbly down at my dress, the way the dark material hugged my torso and flared elegantly just below my hips. I must have seemed such an impostor in it. He leaned resignedly, bitterly, against the wall and crossed his arms. Firelight reflected off his eyes in the dark like knife edges, piercing and glinting and stone cold.

"Exactly how long are you planning on keeping us trapped here?"

I turned to stare into the flames so I wouldn't have to look at him. "I told you I don't know how to undo it."

"Well," he said, scathingly, "it's very good."

I frowned, fixating on the fire. The warmth, the illusion of it, was so real. I reached towards it slowly, testing the limits of it, letting my fingers drift closer to the heat until they stung, until they burned. I snapped my hand back with a hiss when tears sprung into my eyes, examining my reddened fingertips.

"How did you know?" I whispered hollowly, still at a loss. "This world always seemed so real. I never once thought to question it. But you knew."

"Because these aren't just her memories. They're mine," he murmured, his footsteps drawing closer until he ghosted, blurry, dappled in light and shadow, into my peripheral vision. He took my hand in his gingerly, turning it over, examining it distantly as he set about healing the damage. "And I'm not the same. I didn't have this hatred in me back then. No amount of illusion could disguise that."

I kept my eyes glued to my palm, watching the blisters recede to reveal healthy, milky skin beneath. He stared, too, fixated on my hand, or perhaps on the image of his hand cradling mine.

"But it is good," he said quietly, finally. "I haven't felt this human since…"

He trailed off, dropping his hand and staring into the fire. I looked at him finally, examining his eyes in the firelight. It was barely perceptible, masked in illusion, but they weren't the crystalline, pristine blue I remembered. His pupils were ringed in the faintest halo of amber—a sunset submerged in ice.

"Maybe it was the goddess," I said quietly, and he met my eyes. "Maybe she wanted you to remember."

He frowned. "It's just another prison."

My stomach twisted. How could he see it as anything else? None of it was real. It was just another painful reminder of everything he had lost. Suspended in his gaze, voiceless, pliant, I thought I could see through his calloused exterior to something older, something familiar. Something burdened. My own exhale passed over my lips, feathery and soft, and I unconsciously drifted closer, to touch him, or to whisper in someone else's voice...

Then he raised his hand toward the mantel and summoned a shock of power, tearing stone and mortar apart and putting out the fire with the force of it, and then turned and did the same to the window, blasting the wall apart and pulling in a backdraft of miasma and debris. I threw my arms over my face with a cry, battered by shrapnel and a wind spurred by rupturing magic, and fleetingly tasted blood. I shouted at him from under the crook of my elbow, as furious as I was frightened.

"What are you doing?!"

"Looking for a way out," he growled, raising his voice over the squall of the collapsing illusion.

Then he turned his palm facedown, and before I could stop him he was blasting away the floor at our feet. I screamed, plummeting through illusion and fire and light out of one harrowing reality and into another.

For the briefest moment I was suspended in a void between the two, a nothingness bridging worlds and minds, as our telepathic link severed. It drained out of me like water out of a pot, whisking air and warmth with it until I felt hollow. Alone. And in the quiet, soft as a wind or a breath, I thought I heard him say my name.

And then I snapped back into myself like a crack of thunder.

The Calamity roared, sucked into its host as by a powerful tide, and as soon as it was sealed in him again I clapped the well of my power closed. The woods trembled in the aftermath, and then swallowed the last, resonant echoes of growling power.

I met his eyes in the expanding stillness, panting, afraid of a power too vast to gauge and so furious it had swept me away. My power. But there was nothing but hatred burning in them. I didn't know why I had expected anything else.

He was catching his breath, too, as he glowered. I wanted to shrink out from under the accusation in his molten stare, but I was frozen, suspended in his judgment. Then his eyes slid beyond me, and the hate burned brighter.

"You," he growled, hastening to his feet, and Urbosa, standing amidst the other Champions, still dumbstruck and bewildered, had the wherewithal to raise her sword as they took a collective, haphazard step back. "Do you realize what you could have done?!"

"Link, stop," I ordered, putting a restraining hand over his collarbone and feeling for the reassuring edge of my power. "They didn't know!"

He quaked under my hand, but his rage showed no signs of progressing beyond that, tempered by a tighter grip on his self-control—or perhaps by exhaustion. My own strength was beginning to buckle as the adrenaline coursing through me waned.

"Princess," Revali called testily, flint-sharp gaze still fixed on the Calamity and muscles sprung taut to react. "Would you care to explain what in Hylia's name is going on?"

Mipha angled her spear cautiously, and Link's hand flexed. The situation was teetering dangerously close to a violent precipice, and I didn't know how to resolve it. Not alone. I put myself squarely in his way, imploring him for all I was worth.

I whispered, "Please don't do this. Don't make me fight both of you."

"Zelda," Urbosa urged me. "What did we not know?"

Link clenched his fists and his jaw, making the muscles at his temple bulge. Then he met my eyes grudgingly, and his wrath slowly began to cool. I sighed softly, grateful and relieved, and then turned to face the others.

I said, letting my shoulders sag at the simplicity of it, "Who he is."

And then, the moment my back was turned, Link's hand brushed the base of my skull, and all I managed was a gasp before I was collapsing under the weight of an artificial darkness.

I drifted back towards consciousness later as the seconds began unwinding again, sensation filtering slowly through the fog of his magic. The heat of the sun beating down on me; the caress of a warm wind; and then, like a shocking splash of reality, ice, holding me too close and carrying me over a steady stride.

My heart sputtered and my eyes flew open as I tried to get my bearings. I thrashed ineffectively in his arms, instinctively diving away from the cold, or from the evil, or both; his profile was ringed in harsh sunlight, shielding his eyes in shadow when I tried to find them.

"Put me down!" I shrieked, breathless, and when he complied I stumbled backward, and then to the ground as my legs gave out. I panted as my exhaustion registered, bewildered, trembling, "How many times have we jumped?"

He crouched beside me, his eyes finally catching light. "A few."

I sighed, exasperated and dreading the recovery, and quickly scanned our surroundings. There was nothing but grassy hillside, a smattering of trees, and the sound of water lapping at a sunken shore. I swallowed salt and adrenaline. "Where are we? Where are the others?"

He pointed over the ridge, and I followed the gesture over my shoulder. The mushrooming silhouette of the Thyphlo Ruins loomed ponderously on the horizon, dark and impermeable, like some sort of bad omen. I scowled at it. By the look of things, we were nearing the end of the hills that skirted Lake Mekar and dipped into the Badlands.

"I'm sure your friends are in pursuit by now. But they'll be hard pressed to catch us before we reach it."

I glared at him, soured. "I asked for your help."

"And I'd say I delivered," he frowned, and when I didn't move to thank him his eyes narrowed incredulously. "Don't tell me you actually thought I would let you bring them with us."

"They're sworn to me," I said tersely, but he scoffed before I could present an argument.

"The last thing we need is more variables. This whole endeavor has become complicated enough as it is."

"They would've helped us—"

"They would've been a liability," he snapped, "or was what happened this morning not evidence enough?"

I swallowed again, unwilling to provoke him on that front. It was exactly what he had feared would happen, and I knew how close we had all come to inadvertently unleashing something horrible on the world.

"Am I back to being your prisoner, then?" I said bitterly, and he tilted his head slowly, searching my eyes.

"What makes you think you ever weren't?"

My brow puckered at the unexpected truth of it, and I couldn't help the hurt in the question that bubbled to my lips. "Why are you doing this?"

"You asked me to."

In his usual, twisted, corrupted way, he wasn't wrong. I had asked him to take me to Thyphlo. I had asked him not to make me fight all of them at once. And now here we were—half way to our destination, and alone.

"You know this isn't what I meant. When I realized—I thought—" I cut off, pressing fingers frustratedly to my temple, and tried again. "When I said I wanted you to come with me to Thyphlo—"

"Disappointed?" he interrupted acidly. "Having second thoughts?"

My eyes swept to his, depthless and unwavering. "Yes, I am disappointed."

"You have another option," he said levelly, and his cold indifference made words catch in my throat. As angry as I was, as betrayed as I felt, my resolve to save him hadn't faltered.

"No," I whispered. "I won't do that."

"Well then," he said, opening his hands, and I turned my face away bitterly as he stood.

He moved to the edge of the hill, scouting our route. My hands fisted in the grass. Of course he had tricked me again. It had been naive to think that uncovering the truth he was so careful to hide would have suddenly changed the nature of our relationship, or the nature of who he was. But I had wished it. And the disillusionment stung.

"I could resist you," I challenged. "Buy the others some time."

He regarded me quietly a moment, considering. "Do you really want to fight me?"

"No, not really," I breathed tiredly. "But I'm not about to be cowed into bowing to your every whim."

"Then you should take the Sword now," he said, and cut me off with a sharp look when I made to argue. Dark power was building threateningly in him like a foul wind, full of evil and intent, and his point was made. "I won't give you a choice."

My teeth met with an audible click. As much as I wanted to call his bluff, I wouldn't put it past him to force my hand if I decided to be difficult. His power cooled when I didn't have an immediate response; I was out of ideas, short of throwing a tantrum.

I sighed. "So where does that leave us?"

"With you doing as I say."

I pursed my lips, disgruntled, while I thought. I wasn't overly fond of being manipulated, spellbound, and dragooned into submission whenever he liked. But as he had pointed out, I did have another choice. It had always been his intention to die by the Sword, and it was a concession on his part that we were undertaking this journey at all. Not that that excused his behavior; but I always had the option to end it, if I wished.

He seemed to sense that I had lost the will to argue, something pulling out of his voice, too, making him sound tired.

"Can you walk?"

"I think so," I murmured, accepting his hand gingerly as I hefted myself off the ground. My legs shook, but they were usable. We started slowly across the slope, headed north, and I frowned at the back of his head. "I'll have you know I don't approve of this."

He spared me an irritated glance. "Of what?"

"Of you kidnapping me again; putting a spell on me; carting me unconscious across Hyrule like a piece of luggage," I recited. "Goddesses know what you've done to the others."

He scoffed. "They're fine."

"All I'm saying is, we could do with some boundaries."

"Boundaries?" he demanded, spinning to meet my eyes, and his voice was so caustic I flinched. "After what you did, you want to lecture me about boundaries?"

Heat rose condemningly into my cheeks. "I said I was sorry!"

"Because you were found out?" he glowered, closing the distance between them. "Or because you didn't get the reaction you wanted?"

"I told you it was an accident! What could I possibly have wanted from you?"

"I imagine a girl as insecure and inadequate as you are stands to gain quite a lot by pretending to be someone who's everything she isn't."

I winced, breathless, silenced, reeling in the face of his hate, and all at once much more was pouring out of me than even he could have accrued in our short time together.

"You think I wanted any of this?" I demanded, voice cracking as it vaulted. "To be bound to it? To be destined? I'm sorry if my best isn't good enough, but this is all the gods have given you, so stop comparing me to her!"

"That's going to be difficult if you keep burrowing inside my head and impersonating her!"

"If anyone is to blame for that, it's you!"

He took a dangerous step closer. "Me?"

"Yes, you! You kept me in the dark, leaving me reliant on these visions for the truth. I trust them more than I trust you! None of this would have happened if you had just been honest with me in the first place!"

"None of this would have happened if you had just done as I had asked!"

"I'm trying to save your life!"

He whirled with a roar, splitting the ground open at our feet, and the water below us sloshed and spewed where the fissure zigzagged beneath the lake and up the wall of the island that housed the Lost Woods. When he turned on me again, his eyes were feral, hardly seeing through the wrath, and fear dropped like a shard of ice into my stomach.

"My life was forfeit the moment the Calamity was bound in me," he yelled, and another rupture spilled jaggedly down the hillside, spraying dirt as the ground heaved. "Do you really think I thought I might survive?"

Another geyser erupted beside him as he stalked closer, spewing dirt and stone.

"That I didn't know the moment it happened that this would be the death of me?"

And another.

"That I couldn't feel it?"

The fissure at my feet split again, branching, and I stumbled back breathlessly. "Stop it!"

He grabbed me by the arms, holding me too tightly, and the blistering cold of his touch permeated the fabric of my sleeves. "Farore, Zelda, why won't you just let me die?!"

I trembled, heart and breath seizing, certain he hadn't meant those words for me. His eyes had been wild and unseeing, staring viscerally into a past I had only glimpsed.

He stared, wide-eyed, hands shaking on my arms, as he stepped into that realization with me. His fingers kneaded at my skin as he reeled in the wake of it; then he let me go, swallowing fury, and rasped, "This was a mistake."

"No," I whispered, vacant, helpless, watching him spiral out of my influence into some dark place I couldn't follow.

"Yes. I never should have agreed to it." His expression twisted once, equal parts frustration and regret and hate, too conflicted and too human to be the face of a demon, and my heart lodged in my throat. "You saw what I'm capable of!"

"Your guard was down," I tried to reason, but he silenced me with a condemning look.

"As long as I breathe, Hyrule is just one bad decision away from being thrown into chaos. You know the kind of devastation I would cause. I can't just go running off with you on some fool's errand!"

"You promised," I said, voice wavering, but I knew he wouldn't be held to it.

"End this," he insisted, ribboned eyes boring into mine. "Put the Master Sword through my heart and keep us bound until he dies with me."

I pinched my eyes shut, trying to steel myself against his demands. "Don't ask that of me. Not yet. If we go to Thyphlo Ruins—"

"Zelda, there's nothing there!" he shouted, and I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. "If there was any other way, don't you think I would know about it?"

Suddenly, confronted with his ire and his hopelessness, I knew why he had agreed to come with me; suddenly, I knew what I had to say to keep him with me, to keep him alive; suddenly, I knew how much it would hurt him.

I opened my eyes and whispered, "It's what she wanted."

I watched a new wave of fury course through him and irresolution spill consumingly into its wake. He was rigid, the muscles in his jaw spasming as he gritted his way through a conflict I could only guess at. Something shone in his eyes, something shackled, and for a moment I felt he was as much a prisoner to me as I was to him.

"Then let's be done with this," he growled, and taking me by the wrist he started again towards the foothills of Mount Drena.

The journey was arduous. Despite the fact that he was practically dragging me as we went, I knew we weren't making good time. Between the energy I expended containing him and the toll of the teleporting, I was physically and magically exhausted, and I knew he must have tempered his pace for me. But his kindness ended there. He spoke infrequently and looked at me even less. The one time I asked him to stop of my own accord he let me go so suddenly that I stumbled to my knees in the grass. But I didn't confront him again. His anger was brimming over, and his silence, while charged, was probably better than the alternative.

Intentionally or not, I had crossed a line today, and there was no stepping back behind it.

We finally reached the edge of the Thyphlo Ruins near sunset. Its dark, still mass blotted out the sun behind it, eating whatever light it could find. The mist blooming out of it rendered all but the fringes of the island black and shapeless. Stepping into its shadow, watching the murky water moating its edge bubble putridly, I felt an unexpected loss I had no name for.

I wondered for the first time, staring into its darkened heart and shrinking under its massive bulk, what had happened here that could warrant such darkness.

Then my name carried on the wind, and I spun.

Atop the hill, bathed in the last of the sunset and looking a little worse for wear, were my Champions. My heart swelled at the sight of them—in one piece, and as steadfastly, fiercely loyal as ever.

Then Link closed his hand tight over my wrist and pulled me inside, and we disappeared into the mist.