A/N: Ok, so first of all, I have some MAJOR issues with the opening to this chapter, which is essentially the introduction for the Champions. Basically, it sucks. But I'm tired of sitting on these NINE THOUSAND PLUS WORDS, and of trying to throw together half-baked solutions, so I'm just going to put this chapter up here so you guys can read it, such as it is, and I can move on with my life. Someday I'll come back and do a total rewrite of the first third of this and some other parts that I think have horrible pacing, but as those problems don't really impact the story at all other than being very weak sections, I think I can live with that.
Thank you guys SO MUCH for your reviews and for your patience, you are, as always, the absolute best! So, without further ado...
*Throws chapter at screen, sending pages flying everywhere*
*Runs away, arms flailing*
Hunger
I sat, bathed in sunlight, at Thyphlo's edge. The waterways had already begun to heal in the absence of the curse, the long-dormant moat and putrid mudpots feeding off their old aquifers until, once in a great while, clear water in amongst the clouds of silt would catch light and reflect it back in brilliant diamond shapes.
It was really quite amazing how much had changed overnight.
Mipha and Revali had gone to fish at the nearby rim of Lake Mekar, where 10,000 years of decay hadn't made the waters uninhabitable, and Daruk and Urbosa had stayed behind—ostensibly to protect me, though I suspected it had more to do with keeping me company than anything.
I resisted the urge to look back at the ruins looming over my shoulder, where the Calamity had stalked off hours ago and had yet to return.
Link hadn't let me explain until I had been fed and given something to drink, but once I was allowed convincing the others of his true identity hadn't been as difficult as I had feared—due in no small part to the sacred sword slung across his back, though all told it hadn't done much to ease tensions between them. They didn't trust him, and he wasn't particularly inclined to keep them alive. Which he mentioned. Several times.
My shoulders sagged. I wanted to be angry with him for being difficult. But he was what he was, and expecting him to be anything else didn't make me an optimist. It just made me stupid.
Urbosa left the cooking fire she was tending and sauntered closer, summoned, it seemed, by my negative energy. She had a knack for being exactly where I needed her to be precisely when I needed her to be there. A Gerudo's legendary intuition, she would've called it. Sometimes I suspected it was just written all over my face, and it was merely a matter of being observant and invested.
She planted a hand on her hip and looked over the hills. Then she glanced at me, eyes warm and pensive and a thoughtful smile curving her cobalt lips. "You've changed, Princess."
I grimaced. That was a massive understatement. I could hardly tell the two sets of memories swimming through my head apart anymore. But I wondered what aspect of that she had seen. "Have I?"
"You're stronger."
"I know," I murmured, mouth twisting. "Sometimes when I use that power I don't feel like myself anymore. Like a stranger in my own body."
"Well," she amended, squinting into the light as she joined me on the ground, "that wasn't exactly what I meant."
A gust of wind blew stiffly from the west down the hills, stifling conversation as it pulled at hair and cloth and carried into the ruins, rattling leaves and churning dust as it went, coaxing them back to life with ardent breath as though they were a half-dead ember. Somewhere in those ruins, the wind was raking over the Calamity, pulling at him with as much success as it did the carved stones he walked among. I dug my fingers into the moss and didn't turn around.
Urbosa clarified, when I forgot to answer, "I meant you're more resilient."
I sighed without meaning to, and Daruk, his massive brow furrowed, cleared his throat and ambled perceptively away from the cooking fire and out of earshot, mumbling something about quarrying a decent lunch.
"I don't feel like it," I whispered, once we were alone. "It feels like I'm coming apart at the seams."
Urbosa was quiet a moment, cushioning her counsel, watching me with eyes that were fierce and gentle at once. "Have you considered that he might be right?"
My mouth twisted again. "I can't explain it to you, Urbosa. I know who he is and I've seen what he's done, and if I don't—" I stopped short, puffing a sigh into the air. "If I didn't at least try to save him, I could never live with myself."
Try, I had to amend, because there was no guarantee this would work. But the truth was I didn't know what I would do with myself if it didn't.
The memories surfacing in my brain were coming more vibrantly since the curse had lifted, triggered, it seemed, by tapping deeper into my powers, or perhaps by the influx of memories Link had exposed me to while we were connected. There were still plenty of holes, ultimately leaving me with more questions than answers; but the emotional investment in those memories was stronger than it had ever been.
Urbosa smiled again at me, reaching over to tame a matted, unruly wave of hair that didn't want to sit behind my ear, but it was a sad smile. "There's a fine line between passion and stubbornness, Little Bird," she said, "and you're walking it."
"What choice do I have?" I murmured, but Urbosa was decidedly unmoved.
"He was the Hero once, and he made his decision long before any of us were even born," she reminded me, looking for evasive eyes. "He's ready to give his life for Hyrule."
"I know he is. But I'm not."
Urbosa pressed her lips into a thin line, but she didn't force the issue. Something warm, something maternal, had seeped through her diamond-tough exterior, moving her against her better judgment. Finally, she decided, "You need to eat."
I nodded, rising to move closer to the fire and grateful for the change of subject. I'd already been wrestling with Link over his own demise for days—and though it came as no surprise that the Champions sided with him on the issue, it was draining to have to hold my ground against all of them at once.
They didn't understand. How could they? They hadn't felt his soul fracture beneath lithe fingertips, splintered into a thousand tortured pieces that I could weave with threads of hate and malice, hadn't felt him strung on my needle and pulled taut to snap as I cross stitched what was left of him back together into some mutilated, unconscionable mockery of what he had been in the name of divine providence. A goddess, playing with her embroidery.
I trembled as the memory drained. They feared him, what he was capable of, when the one they should have been fearing was me.
The unmistakable silhouette of a Rito streaked overhead, wings spread wide as it circled the ruins, and Mipha marched up the ridge not far behind. She joined us at the cooking fire without preamble, immediately setting about skewering their catch, her fair features drawn with concentration. She was naturally soft spoken, but her silence was distinctly artificial. The result of the revelatory deluge the night before, probably. I wanted to say something—thank her for the food, or reassure her somehow—but I couldn't find the words.
Revali touched down a few moments later, beak tugged down into a frown. The feathers at his neck puffed aggravatedly, betraying what might otherwise have appeared to be a cool exterior. He was least happy of all with… well, everything.
Urbosa reached to turn the spit without turning to acknowledge him. "Well?"
"Still skulking," he murmured, and then tilted his head towards me, eyes glittering with impatience. "Quite the paladin, your hero."
Urbosa arched an unamused brow at him, but I ignored the jab, fixating instead of the promise of a hot meal. Hunger was so simple, so easily remedied, compared to other torments. We waited in stilted silence, listening to scales sizzle and staring through plumes of smoke.
"We should decide on a route," Urbosa said, finally, pulling a skewer off the fire when it was done and handing it to me. "The Great Plateau isn't exactly isolated."
I picked at the trout, distracted. There was no question in their minds that they would take the journey with me. I had fallen into a restless sleep the night before trying to convince myself that it was for the best that they be left behind. But the truth was I wanted them with me. They couldn't compete with Link's magic, or even my own, but their companionship meant warmth and compassion and support, and I was beyond starved for all three.
I frowned privately, weighing the consequences. Link would hate it.
"We could take the road through Rowan Plain," Mipha suggested, and Revali cocked his head in reluctant acknowledgement.
"It would keep us away from civilization," he murmured, frowning at his fish. "Keep the collateral damage to a minimum."
I nodded, stifling a sigh; my Rito Champion certainly had a knack for phrasing the truth in the ugliest way possible.
"What about him?" Urbosa murmured, glancing back through the marsh as she pulled another skewer off the fire.
"He doesn't eat," I murmured, refusing to follow her gaze, and Revali made a pleased noise as he swallowed down a mouthful.
"Finally," he intoned, just as Daruk rejoined them, the crook of his arm full of foraged rocks, "a redeeming quality."
"There's nuthin' redeeming about not eating," he murmured, munching pensively on a boulder the size of his fist.
He settled cross-legged beside us, his massive brow furrowed with wrinkles deep as the ridges lining the Eldin Foothills. Even disturbed, Daruk radiated a positive energy that never failed to lift the spirits of those around him. I tried to muster smile, but it felt tight across my mouth.
Sitting around that little fire, surrounded by the Champions, by their warmth, I suddenly realized how very, very cold I had been the last few days. I had been in close proximity to evil for so long I hardly noticed it anymore. I stared down at my half-eaten fish, trying to steel myself to confront Link with my plan, and within the span of a heartbeat my appetite was gone. I never wanted to be that cold again.
"We should leave soon," I murmured, setting the unfinished skewer down and excusing myself—quickly, before their sudden, rigid alarm and exchanged glances could produce an objection.
This was definitely a conversation the two of us were better off having in private.
I moved headlong back into the ruins, feeling after his presence. He wasn't terribly far, his shadow pulsing warmly as the vibrations of my perception pinged off his form. I snaked between massive, etched pillars and beneath the bared teeth of dragon heads, looming like great protectors along Thyphlo's rim and at its crossroads, and moved silently through the blind gaze of its bird-torches. They watched me pass out of hollow, lidless eyes, sitting stone-still amidst trees and altars like sentinels stationed eons ago and never relieved.
Sometimes I could see it all as it was before—still old, still foreign—surrounded by a lush grove and constantly doted on by the Sheikah monks who had taken up residence there long after the great ancestors had moved on in search of new conquests, their marks left on a world that they would eventually forget, but that could never forget them. And the monks, swaddling themselves in the ancient energy and the peace of the natural world seeping from that place like a blanket, would listen for Hylia's whispers in the old stone and in the wind, letting her inspire them in new and wondrous ways and birthing in those ethereal, connected moments, images of monumental beasts, aglow with azure fire and light, zealous to do the goddess's bidding.
Naturally, the Princess with the Blood of the Goddess was always welcome there.
I shivered, confronted again with the barrenness that had overtaken that place as the visions receded from beneath my irises. There had been so much promise there, so much hope. So much ambition.
And it had all come to nothing.
I shuffled to a standstill, my mind suddenly drawing too many parallels between those ruins and myself. I scanned sprawling peat moss and ruins and replayed fervent arguments from the night before, a knot of fear tangling behind my ribs. Doubt whispered that my fate was as twisted as theirs had been, bound inescapably to the goddesses and their will but ultimately doomed to fail; whispered that my ambition, my hope, would come to nothing, leaving me as rotted and haunted as this place.
Link's voice echoed out of memory, tinged with a hint of a smile.
Since when does the Princess of Hyrule give way to doubt?
But that had been a different princess, and I was reasonably certain, if I asked him now, that he wouldn't have such words of encouragement for me. He would accuse me of endangering the entire kingdom for the sake of one man, remind me that our journey was an exercise in futility, and then hand me a broadsword and tell me, with eyes like ice and smelting copper, to drive it through his heart.
I brushed the image aside and forced myself to move on. Several winding turns later I found him sitting on the remains of a column half-buried beneath a tree that, preserved somehow inside that curse for 10,000 years and against all odds, had begun sprouting new leaves already. His back was turned, but I knew he must have felt me coming long before I ever laid eyes on him. His voice, part wind and part stone, seemed to belong to the ruins themselves.
"Have you gotten rid of them?"
"No," I sighed, hugging my arms as I drew closer, "I haven't gotten rid of them."
The sweet smell of sunkissed earth and moss wafted up from beneath my feet as I moved, whispering gently that autumn was stirring awake, ready to renew that forgotten place with a proper rot. There was an inviting stillness in that heat, tempting me to join him in it rather than disturb it. And the temptation was strong. I was tired, and unmotivated, and he still hadn't acknowledged me even though I only stood a few feet away.
I chanced, quietly, "What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
I lowered myself onto the lip of the makeshift bench, my posture slightly collapsed, and ran a hand across my scalp. I could guess what about. He had come face to face with the last, lingering remnants of the woman he loved yesterday, and then destroyed them for me.
He asked, suddenly, softly, "Did you dream?"
I blinked at him, addled, and nodded.
"I've forgotten what it's like," he murmured, staring into the ruins, or perhaps through them, into another time. "But I think being trapped in your vision must have been close."
I tried to swallow, but my throat had closed. Had that only been yesterday? Only now, having experienced the turbulence of the memories he led me through the night before, could I begin to fathom what kind of torture waking up in that illusion, charged with so much remembered emotion, must have been.
"Dreams feel so real in the moment," he mused quietly, "and it isn't until later on, looking back, that you realize how ridiculous it all was."
I stared at my feet, voiceless, trying not to remember how tightly he had held me, how carefully, how desperately, his mouth had moved with mine; trying not to remember the conflict scrawled across his face when he realized what I had done.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, swallowed again by the image of the untouchable, dispassionate goddess, playing with her needlepoint. "When I conjured that memory I didn't—" I faltered, my eyes slipping closed. "I never meant to make you relive that."
He didn't answer for a long time. Then he murmured, "Yes, you did."
I looked up at him, surprised, miserable, but his gaze wasn't harsh.
"I was losing control, and the part of you that knew me best knew what it would take to stop me."
His eyes locked easily with mine. The coils in them turned, undulating rings of fire, always pulling me in, holding me still, whispering things I couldn't make out that struck fear and curiosity in me at once. They pulsed in mesmerizing tandem with my heartbeat. I shook my head, breaking free of their spell long enough to respond. "I won't do that to you again. You have my word."
"Don't make promises you can't keep," he sighed, mouth turning down. "You have a harder time controlling your power than I do."
I frowned, wishing I could argue. But the truth was I hardly understood what I had done. Cornered by his logic, embittered by the empty sound of my own apologies, I lapsed into another silence. The heat rose from the stone, from the earth, surrounding us with the woody scent of dried sphagnum. But he spoke before that alluring stillness could form again.
"You didn't come looking for me just to tell me that," he breathed. "What do you want?"
I reluctantly met his eyes. The pulse in them still mirrored the pulse in my chest. "I want to bring the Champions with us."
He tilted his head slowly, studying me, pulling at the unspoken threads encircling us both like a web until he seemed to know everything, see everything, that I hadn't wanted him to see. It made me feel naked. "You're here to invoke my oath, then?"
I bit down on nothing, holding his gaze. Only he could turn so quiet a question into such a brutal accusation. "I'd rather not have to."
"I see."
His eyes never left mine, boring so deep into them and for so long that I could feel the glowing filament burn into my brain and alight it from within, turning everything inside my skull to ash. I whispered, "I wish you wouldn't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you expected this of me."
"How should I look at you?" he asked, and suddenly, feeling bare under his scrutiny, watching a quiet, insatiable hunger lurking in his eyes, I felt my face heat. "You can't expect me to not see what's right in front of me."
I mirrored his scornful gaze, stung, and rose sluggishly to my feet, turning with nowhere to go. The ruins stared back at me out of empty, sun-bleached eyes, and he rose behind me like a cold shadow at my back.
"I don't know what else to do with you," I finally admitted, whirling despairingly. "I can't control you. I can't reason with you. Does invoking an oath you gave me of your own volition really make me some kind of a monster?"
"The oath is yours to do with as you please," he conceded. "I am yours. But you're a harsh mistress, Your Highness."
I swallowed thickly. When I found my voice, it wobbled. "Then I'll release you from it. Once this is over."
"And using that oath like a leash until then—is that something you learned on your own, or something remembered?" he asked levelly. "You've twice coerced me into obedience against my express wishes already, and it hasn't even been a day."
"I know that," I bit loudly, cornered, too many emotions stirring in my chest at once—the frustration, the guilt, the restless, ancient need for his constancy that I still didn't understand. "But I need them, Link, can you understand that? I can't—I can't do this alone."
I trembled in the beat of silence that followed, chilled, suddenly, as though he had reached out and touched me. But he was remarkably still.
"Maybe you are a monster," he murmured, irises pulsing a hypnotic rhythm and drifting close enough that his proximity was beginning to make my head spin. "Maybe you're more like me than you want to admit."
My brow scrunched. I tried, meagerly, "That's not—"
"The similarities are uncanny, really," he droned. "You manipulate others to get your way. Hurt them, if you have to. You put Hyrule in grave danger on a daily basis. And your power is completely out of control."
"You know I'm doing the best I can," I whispered, hurt. "That I'm trying to save you, before there's nothing left to save!"
"Yes, Zelda, I know exactly what you're trying to do," he sneered, eyes narrowing. "And let me give you a piece of advice, from one monster to another. The best intentions can come back to haunt you in the most debilitating ways."
And then he tore himself from me without a second glance, moving west through the heat of the marsh, and I shuddered where he left me, feeling hollow and torn to shreds. I turned, staring after him, seeing the Calamity, seeing a protector, seeing a man from a memory and his contradiction at once.
And I just couldn't leave well enough alone.
"Link, wait," I panted, pained, as I caught up to him. "What are you saying?"
"Exactly what it sounds like," he growled, sparing me a bitter glance, and I sighed at him, frustrated.
"I don't understand."
"No," he rumbled, moving so quickly through bog and ruin that I was stumbling to keep up, "you never do."
"Stop," I demanded, snatching him by the elbow, and he did, fixing me in a glare that nearly made the words lodge in my throat. "I know none of this has happened the way you wanted it to. I know you're afraid the Champions will set you off, that you're afraid of losing control. But you don't have to be. I can prevent that—"
"Can you?" he cut me off, his volume so unexpected that I couldn't bring myself to finish. "Do you really think if I wasn't fighting with every fiber of my being to restrain that part of myself that I couldn't crush you?"
I swallowed, watching the monster stir restlessly in his eyes. He snatched his elbow away, leaving my hand grasping at nothing in the air between us and my mind grasping at a response. But there was nothing I could say to that.
"Believe it or not, I understand that you need them," he growled, holding his hand out in a taut gesture between us. "I do. You were never meant to do this alone. You were supposed to have a Hero by your side."
My brow puckered, something buried in my soul renting in two. "Link—"
"Let me finish," he insisted. "Those Champions are no substitute. And they may well endanger this whole, absolutely insane endeavor in ways you could never imagine. But I will do everything in my power to prevent that—for you, because I'm sworn to you. Do you understand that, at least?"
I stared at him for too long, heart trapped in my throat. For just an instant, like a burst of lightning casting a shadow, I saw the man separated from the beast, disfigured by hate and bound in armor but still very much alive, and understood who it was that I unwittingly harbored such loyalty towards. I nodded, curiously dispassionate. As far as epiphanies went, it left a rather bland aftertaste, as though some part of me had been aware of it all along, as I was of my own breathing, or my own heartbeat.
I whispered, "Yes."
"Good."
He turned back to the path out of the marsh, and I didn't try to draw him out again. There was still so much hanging stale and unspoken in the air between us, but I was learning to live with it. Learning to accept that some things were better left unsaid.
Sometimes, suffering his stony silence and his unyielding pace, I thought he was running away from something.
When we emerged from the ruins, we found the camp dismantled and the supplies packed, and the Champions waiting for us in a variety of postures suggesting indignation. Even Mipha, usually so genteel, sitting with her trident planted tip down in the dirt, looked like a force to be reckoned with.
"Well, well," Revali sighed, exchanging a meaningful glance with the others as we crossed Thyphlo's edge into the remnants of the camp, "won't this just be terribly fun?"
"That's not the word I'd use, no," I breathed, giving my hair an absent, weary tousle. "Are we ready to leave?"
"Ready, little princess," Daruk answered, perhaps a little too tenaciously, and earned himself a glare from Revali. He screwed his leathery lips sideways at him and shrugged.
"Good," I said, ignoring the exchange; I was much more concerned with Link's oscillating mood than theirs, watching him stare them down out of my peripheral vision. "I'd like to reach the Breach by nightfall, and we're getting a late start as it is."
There was a beat where no one moved, I waiting for my orders to be enacted, and my Champions hesitant to turn their backs on the entity that had nearly destroyed them all not a week prior. Link finally broke the stand off, passing me an agitated glance as he moved between us all to take point and set the pace.
And, moving as unwaveringly as if it were an instinct, I followed him.
The others trailed into place behind me in a tight-lipped procession, strung together by the undercurrent of disgruntled silence emanating from the front of the line, and I stared at his back, processing. I would follow him to the ends of the earth, I realized, if he gave me a reason. It was like he was a magnet or an anchor, pulling me along wherever he liked. Was that influence residue from a memory, tethered to that deep-seated loyalty I had glimpsed in the ruins? Or was it something ingenuine, the result of some kind of manipulation on his part? I hated not knowing. I hated realizing the answer would make little difference.
An hour into our journey, as we descended Mount Drena into the Aldor Foothills, conversation was still stifled; but Urbosa had nudged herself close enough to ask after me, and not for the first time since we had set off.
"Are you sure you're all right?" she murmured. Apparently my earlier attempts at nonchalance had been less than convincing, and when I opened my mouth to try again, Urbosa interrupted pertly, "Because you haven't stopped staring daggers at the back of his head since we left."
"It isn't his fault," I muttered, and Urbosa's lips twisted.
"You're quick to defend him."
"Well I have to be, don't I? You'd all take his head off if I turned my back."
"You don't give me enough credit. I'd ask your permission first."
"It would be one thing if you believed in this mission," I scoffed, ignoring her quip. "But as it is you're all only here because you serve me."
She arched a fiery brow at me, eyes drifting to the Calamity. "I think he's riding the same sand seal."
I raked my hair back with both hands, holding it taut at the nape of my neck, and sighed. "It's complicated."
"Well you know what I think," Revali horned in, wings crossed, and Urbosa rolled her eyes.
"Yes, we all know what you think."
"I think he's a ticking time bomb and this whole expedition is insane," he carried on anyway, and I dropped my hair.
"Well, that makes at least two of you."
"I don't trust that Calamity as far as I can throw him," Daruk chimed in, "but we have faith in you, Princess."
But I wasn't naive. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Mipha turning away, obscuring her reaction. Of course they must have questioned my judgment. But did it run deeper than that? Had they begun to regret swearing themselves to follow me in the first place? Did they think I was leading them all into disaster?
"That's kind of you, Daruk," I murmured, swallowing my fears. "Thank you."
"Do you?" Revali snorted, and I blinked at him, addled.
"Do I what?"
"Do you trust him?"
My tongue went numb in my mouth, tingling with the answer I wanted to give. Against all reason, against every warning he had ever given me, against every instinct in my body, yes, I trusted him. Not in the way I could trust them, of course, expecting their implicit honesty, sacrifice, and obedience. But insofar as his deepest motivations were concerned, I trusted that his loyalties lay entirely with me. But could I convey that to them?
Did I even dare admit it aloud, when he might overhear?
"Are you finished?"
Link had appeared at my side before I could formulate an answer, frowning. I frowned, too. I wanted to snap at him, push back for once, but the truth was our pace had slowed considerably. We were falling behind.
"We were talking."
"Yes," he growled, snatching up my hand in his before I could argue, "and I have full confidence in your ability to do that and keep moving at the same time."
I bit back the retort that bubbled to my lips, letting him drag me away as the others bristled. Picking a fight with him in front of them wasn't worth the potential fallout, even if he was making it tempting. Playing diplomat was tiresome enough as it was. Still, I was in no mood for his tyranny, and a glance backward at my friends, all of them staring daggers at the exchange, told me I had to do something.
"Would you stop?" I hissed under my breath. "I'm perfectly capable of traveling under the power of my own two feet."
"I wouldn't resort to dragging you along if you would use them."
"Can't you be reasonable? We weren't even talking for two minutes!"
"I think you've spent more than enough time clinging to your friends," he spat, and I blinked.
"Are you saying—" I began, and then backtracked, trying to appear less subversive. He would never admit to something as petty as jealousy. I licked dry lips, thinking. "Am I not giving you enough attention?"
"What I'm saying," he growled, giving me a firm tug, "is that if you can't keep up I'll put you under and carry you the rest of the way."
I frowned, miffed. "And have to deal with the Champions yourself? I doubt it."
He glared. "Try it."
He clearly intended for that to be the end of the conversation. But I wasn't about to let him get away with it. I summoned a spark of sealing power in my palm, pitting it quietly against his grip, and he dropped my hand like it was a hot coal, stifling a hiss, and shot me another glare. I raised my chin, daring him to complain, and he sighed.
"You've picked quite a time to be difficult, Princess."
I arched a slender brow at him. "I could say the same."
"I am always difficult. Don't pretend you didn't know that."
His voice was gravel, but his words brought a small, sympathetic smile to my face. The truth was the others weren't making it easy on him. And regardless of the complications that existed between us, I was the closest thing he had to a friend. I admitted, offering him the softer expression, "I did know that."
He examined my smile for a half-second and scowled.
We marched until sunset, around Salari Hill and beneath the bulky, staggered shelves of Lindor's Brow, over the swathe of North Hyrule Plain that overlooked the castle, looming in the distance as a quiet reminder of everything we stood to lose. We followed the road down into the Breach, where nothing grew, and where the cliffs jutted out like fat, grasping fingers overhead and the gaps suggested two misaligned rows of teeth that couldn't quite knit shut. The cover made it an ideal place to spend the night, but Link wasn't having it. He kept us moving until the road rejoined the fields.
He seemed to breathe easier under the open sky.
We pulled off the road and put the Scablands at our backs and set up camp in the plains sprawling in the shadow of Satori Mountain. I started an effortless fire, lost in my own thoughts, and it wasn't until I looked up and noticed the others staring that I remembered they still didn't expect that sort of ability from me. The only person who did had wandered off, preferring a bit of isolation to the antagonism of the group.
The Champions quickly saw to my needs, fixing a simple meal of fish from the river and scavenged herbs, and making sure I rehydrated, and finally relaxing enough to engage in some casual conversation. They managed to make me laugh, even if quietly. Urbosa helped me untangle the week's worth of knots in my hair.
When she was finished and I could turn around again, I realized Mipha was missing. I scanned the darkness and spotted her well outside the ring of the fire, her silhouette muted by the night and crouched beside the Calamity's. They must have been speaking—I couldn't imagine Link would tolerate her presence for long if she didn't have something to say—but the distance, the rhythmic gurgle of the nearby river, and the crackling fire made it impossible to eavesdrop.
"What do you suppose that's all about?" Revali murmured, the disdain in his voice tempered by something else, something trapped between uncertainty and scorn, and I couldn't find the words to answer.
Mipha's shadow moved, both hands moving to cup his face, and a gentle glow emanated from them, splashing them both in pale blue light. His eyes were closed, and I turned my back on the scene, trying to beat down a hollowness rising beneath my ribs that I couldn't name.
I whispered, "It's probably nothing."
With the fire still roaring, I rolled onto my shoulder and tried to sleep. I was afraid of dreaming, of being plagued by nightmares where we couldn't reach the shrine in time and he transformed into some ravenous beast, or of being trapped in memories too intimate and painful to bear. I was just as afraid of staying awake, where the sudden discontent in my chest was churning my thoughts into a tumult.
When I finally slipped under, I was tormented by nightmares and memories in equal measure.
I stirred awake in the middle of the night, swept by a chill that belied the warm embers glowing beside me, and realized Link's unmistakable presence was missing.
I pushed myself up on my arms. Mipha was asleep—or rather put to sleep, a coppery, milky taste lifting from her supple form like a hazy aura. I closed my eyes and sent a pulse in all directions, feeling. He wasn't far, ricocheting back as a thrum of bright shadow among the dull light of a smattering of oaks near where the prairie gave way to the Breach, where the earth tipped up in shelves as though something had burst out of it. I pursed my lips, torn, and then pulled myself away from the fire.
I moved towards the silhouette in my mind, through prairie grass and boulders and cold night wind, until I came upon the trees dappling the plains like sentinels. Link's figure was little more than a blotch of deeper shadow standing among them, the hilt of his sword and the small, silver-blue hoops in his ears catching the scant moonlight. But he didn't turn to acknowledge me as I closed the distance between us, or give any indication that he sensed my approach at all, and that glaring lapse made my stomach twist.
Soon I was close enough to make him out. He was bent, one hand braced against a mottled tree trunk and the other holding his ribs as though he were holding a wound. For a moment he was so still he seemed to have shed his body and left it there to become part of the wilds—unmoving, ever watching, eaten by ivy and wildflowers and bleached by moonlight. I waited, listening for whispers or breath. Then his face turned down, a haggard sound shuddering noisily out of him, lips falling apart as he panted, and I took a hesitant step forward.
His eyes sprang open, coils flaming as they found me, and he sneered, his gravel voice lacking its usual bite, "What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you," I admitted, narrowing my eyes in a feeble attempt to make him out better as I approached. His silhouette didn't get any brighter for lack of distance. If anything, he seemed to grow darker, less clear, fading further into shadow. His eyes disappeared again, their glow vanishing with a turn of his head, and suddenly he seemed even farther away than before.
His hand dug deeper into his side for a long, breathless moment, and then he gulped air and growled, "Go away."
I did the opposite—which shouldn't have surprised either of us, really—drawn in by that harsh snap of anger that should have sent me running. A quick assessment revealed what I had already begun to suspect: the sheen of sweat on his forehead, his shallow breaths, the muscles seizing in his neck and face as he tried to school his expression—all telltale signs of a pain he couldn't quite mask.
"Link," I insisted—or pleaded, or demanded, or begged, hardly aware of my own voice, of its gentle warble on his name—"tell me what's wrong."
"It's nothing I can't deal with alone," he snarled, turning to face me squarely as his patience waned, the simple gesture making him seem that much more dangerous. "Now sleep."
Magic dragged itself across my mind like a curtain, a worn, familiar conjuring he had used so many times before, and my legs buckled. But I pushed back with the last precious flutterings of consciousness, catching myself woozily on an oak between us as I breached the frothy surface of the spell, and he frowned, quickly summoning it over me again like the crash of a wave.
"Stop it," I gasped, breathlessly breaking through the tumult a second time. "And yes, I'm invoking your oath!"
He turned, resigned, his face suddenly wan and lined with exhaustion, and backed against the tree again, puffing a humorless laugh as he slid towards its base. "Well. At least you're admitting it."
I breathed deep, willing the numb tingle of the magic away as he settled where he had landed, eyes closed and arm braced again across his middle. I left the security of my support unsteadily, kneeling beside him with all the surety of a baby fawn.
"Now, are you going to tell me what's wrong of your own volition," I panted, my vision finally beginning to clear, "or do I have to order it out of you?"
He opened one eye halfway to glare at me, and then sighed, shifting gingerly. "I'd forgotten this."
"What?"
"That swearing yourself to a woman is hell."
My mouth twisted, nearly put off. But I was nothing if not persistent. "Is it an injury? My healing abilities are nothing next to Mipha's, but I can at least—"
"Just—" he broke off suddenly, spine arching and teeth clenching as he rode another swell of pain to its breathless end. "Gods. Just leave it alone, Zelda."
I stared at him helplessly, loathe to use his oath against him again and balking at the absurdity of simply leaving him there to suffer. I slid off my ankles, slouching as I resigned myself to battling his stubbornness all night. I tried miserably, hopelessly, my voice little more than a whisper, "Please?"
And then, against all odds, he sighed, eyes moving grudgingly to stare through the silky carpet of wildflowers in as plain a show of acquiescence as I had ever seen. He took a single, hesitant breath, wrestling with the final vestiges of his own obstinance, before he murmured, so quietly,
"You asked me once if I needed to eat."
I stared, my body alight with pins and needles as the implication wormed its way into my heart and sat there like a stone. His eyes met mine, full of the same tired, dogged determination they always were. The ever-present hunger glinted there, waiting, gnawing, confirming the truth I felt a fool for not having recognized before.
"Why didn't you…?" I trailed off, realizing it was pointless to ask him why. That it was pointless to expect that, for once, he would do the reasonable thing and try not to bear the burden alone. "You've been starving yourself? This entire time?"
"Don't start that again," he groaned, pulling himself upright with some effort, and I blinked incredulously at him.
"What?"
He gestured vaguely. "With the eyes."
I flickered them down, brow puckering, not entirely sure what that was supposed to mean and unaccountably flustered. Blue and white wildflowers stared back at me.
"It was manageable at first," he murmured, drawing my eyes back with his voice before I could think better of it. "But it just keeps getting worse."
"And you didn't think to mention this until now?" I demanded, grasping after the anger searing a palpable trail in my chest in a desperate move to stave off grief.
"I didn't expect to be alive this long," he reminded me tiredly, and just like that my rage was doused by his utter lack of reprisal.
I frowned, my thoughts realigning, fueling a curiosity that I knew was dangerous.
I asked him slowly, "What do you eat?"
"Life," he murmured, dropping the word like a stone, and a beat of silence grew up around it like a knot of weeds. His lips twitched. "Or perhaps death. I'm not really sure where the nourishment comes from, to be honest. I just know how to get it."
"By destroying it," I whispered, all too aware of the truth, of how that hunger had driven him so many times before, through so many ages, to cause so much ruin.
"Draining that spark of life out of something, watching it turn listless…" his eyes slid to mine, dancing with relish at his imaginary meal. "The temptation is always there. When I see Hyrule, so green and teeming with life… When I see you, just coming into your power, so vibrant it almost hurts to look at you…"
His hand drifted unconsciously as he spoke, reaching for me, his touch so dark I could feel the cold of it drawing the warmth from my chest even though it was still inches away. He faltered, his hand flexing rigidly as he remembered himself, and drew back, and I haltingly remembered to breathe, squelching the thrill of fear I felt like a fiery ember under my boot. No doubt he tasted it. No doubt, by the way his eyes glinted in the dark, it was making his mouth water.
"I experimented with less… unsavoury methods," he continued, shifting again, trying to stay ahead of the discomfort. "Those ancient trees in the grasslands were so old, I thought… Well. They were no substitute."
I scoffed, remembering. "The apple."
"It tasted like hot metal."
Another silence, dense, heavy, thickened the air between us to the consistency of sludge. A swamp of our own creation, sprawling as far as the eye could see in every direction and even less hospitable than Thyphlo had been. My hands fisted on my leggings.
"This is my fault," I decided, swallowing salt, and he tilted his head in a noncommittal gesture.
"If you're referring to the fact that I'm still alive, then yes," he grunted, "I blame you."
He braced his hands on the ground and the tree, shifting his feet beneath himself so he could stand and moving away from the Breach, away from the towering shadows of the Scablands. Moving towards the irreconcilable peace of the prairie grass and wildflowers. The twinkling lights of Hyrule Castle glimmered waxily in the distance, like a spattering of tiny stars cast to the earth and embedded where they struck in the hillside. I sighed, picking myself up to join him languidly; he had his face pressed into the ribbed bark of another lonely oak, enduring another pang of hunger.
He sent me a leaden glance as it passed, panting, and said wryly, "I suppose petitioning you for a mercy killing is out of the question."
I puffed a breathless, humorless laugh, throwing my gaze hopelessly toward the sky. Midnight always seemed bluer on the plains. A swathe of stars hanging over the night mirrored the earthed stars, glistening like lanterns over still water and their reflections.
"Will you make it to the Plateau?"
"I can make it."
I nodded, dreading looking him in the eye when what I was asking of him was so horrible. But I owed him that much. His gaze was soft when I met it, and the guilt in my stomach burned brighter.
"Everything I do is awful," I warbled, smiling suddenly in a paltry effort to mask the tears building in my throat. "Whenever I try to make things right I always end up making them worse."
He smiled too, privately, like it was a secret thing. "It has always been the princess's burden to make difficult choices, and then learn to live with them."
"Has it?" I folded my arms, blotting out a cool wind raking down the mountainside, and pressed my lips into a line. "I honestly don't know if I have it in me."
He watched me a furtive half-second before he turned his attention back to the plains. "You do."
And there it was again, that constancy, that indelible confidence that spread through my chest like the heat of too much wine. It was turning my ears pink and my eyes glassy. It was empowering me when I felt so near the precipice of giving up hope.
I crossed to him in two paces and put my arms around his neck, shivering as that unbearable cold passed right through our clothes and into my bones. But I held him close all the same, pressing my mouth into his shoulder as I blinked back grateful tears. He wasn't reciprocating, which neither surprised nor deterred me much; but where I had expected a scoff of disdain or a dramatic roll of the eyes, he had instead gone so incredibly still I was beginning to worry he had turned to stone.
I pulled back slowly, afraid I had crossed a line. His eyes were hard, searching mine with an amalgam of incredulity and no little disapproval.
"Sorry," I whispered, though I wasn't entirely sure why.
He finally murmured, still holding my shoulders gently as though to keep me at bay, "That had better have been motivated by guilt."
I blinked. "What? No. It was—I don't know. I was grateful."
"Grateful?" he demanded, and the sudden anger in his voice put me on edge. "What in all the realms could you possibly be grateful to me for?"
He spat the words like an accusation, and it made my cheeks heat.
"Are you really going to start an argument? Now? Over this, of all things?"
"If you had any sense at all—!" He stumbled back, bracing himself on the oak and clutching his ribs, and roared in frustration out of clenched teeth as the hunger seared through him again. He fixed me in his fiery gaze as it passed, righting himself crookedly, and panted, "I've plunged Hyrule into darkness too many times to count, eaten her subjects alive, gorged myself on light and blood until there was nothing left, and I'm dangerously close to giving into doing it again. And you're grateful?"
"And haven't you saved Hyrule," I argued, frustration blowing caution to the wayside, "just as many times? Haven't you always been my strength, no matter how black the darkness?"
He stared, eyes wide and full of fire.
"And do you consider me your strength now?"
For a moment I was afraid to answer, all too aware of the fury thrashing in his eyes, waiting for an excuse to snap loose. But I was also afraid of letting him drag himself along behind me on account of his oath like some kind of leashed animal, tortured and starving and slowly losing himself, without supporting him in turn; without assuring him that I believed he was worth saving.
"Yes," I said, nearly trembling with how simple it was, "I do."
He was motionless for a breathlessly long time, his body suspended in strange disconnect from his eyes as the wrath tore loose. It was like watching a war unfold, measured in battles waged and won and lost with every beat of his heart. He couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. And then the tension strung between us snapped, and he closed the space to me like lightning, fisting one hand in my hair and whirling. I yelped in surprise and at the sting of pain, but when he pressed against me, trapping me between him and rough bark, the sound died in my throat.
"How many times do I have to teach you this lesson?" he hissed. "How many times do I have to remind you what I am?" He pressed his palm against the side of my face, channeling scalding cold straight into my soul, letting it frost the deepest places there until I thought my breath might mist, and I couldn't stop the strangled cry that fell from my mouth. It struck me then, in the oddest way: how many times before he had touched me like this, trying to burn the sense that he was pure evil into my brain, trying to create a distance he hoped I would be wise enough not to cross. He leaned closer, his cool breath feathering my cheekbone and his fist tightening in my hair. "Stop pitying me."
He was trying to intimidate me, trying to hurt me, and it wasn't that he was failing. It was that, for the first time, I could see beyond it—see the desperation and the fear pulsing beneath the hate, feeding it, engorging it, pushing it until it spiraled out of control.
"I do pity you," I managed, defiant, breathless, and the fury burned brighter.
"And that pity is going to get you killed and your kingdom torn apart," he growled. "You look at me and you want to see something mythical, something forgotten. You want to believe your story has a Hero. But it doesn't."
I gulped a breath, tremoring, and bit out, "The Sword chose you."
"Because it had to. The Hero's Spirit can't be reborn if it's trapped inside this body. Don't you understand that?"
He turned, loosing me so suddenly I had to catch myself against the tree, and ran a hand tensely through his hair. I waited for my pulse to calm and the tingling sensation on my scalp to fade, absently touching my cheek; it had gone completely numb, as though every nerve there had died from the cold and would never feel again.
My thoughts drifted to our connection the night before, when I had let him scour my mind for answers. That experience had been intimate, in a way. I had let him see parts of my mind no one else had ever seen, and that I never would again. I took a hesitant step forward, eyes flitting away uncertainly as I summoned my courage and held out my hand.
"You could show me," I said, the words coming out so quietly I wasn't sure he had heard.
His head ducked, his shoulders going unnaturally still, before he turned to face me again, staring incredulously at my outstretched hand.
"Do you know what you're asking? What that would do to you?"
I swallowed, holding very still. "You want me to understand what you are."
"Not like this," he frowned, and I scowled.
"Because I'm not strong enough?"
"Because you're too pure."
I flushed at my own petulance and at his sudden, earnest counterargument. Of course he would try to protect me. Didn't he always? Even when he was purposefully unkind, even when I had thought he was just being selfish—it always came back to me. But I didn't need his protection anymore. He needed mine.
I steeled myself to follow through with a breath, and nodded. He sighed at me.
And then the second he turned his back again, I closed the space between us, dizzy with intent, threading my fingers across his scalp, and plunged headlong into his mind.
The transition wasn't the warm, honeyed suspension of my own mind. It was dark, a jarring snap of nothingness that snuffed out the world. Finally, the tether went solid, binding us together. At first the impressions were amorphous, translating clumsily into my unpracticed mind: light so hot it burned, dark so cold it ached. Then all at once it sharpened, coming agonizingly into focus, and it was like regaining consciousness on a funeral pyre.
I burned with hatred that couldn't possibly be human, devouring every drop of goodness in my soul like kindling and ravenous for more. The rest was white noise: darkness so blinding I despaired, fury so loud it made my ears bleed, guilt so thick I couldn't breathe, the foul taste of malice reaching so deep in my throat I gagged. The ever-present agony of being ripped in two right down the seam of my spine.
A split second later his hands were closed over my wrists, pulling me out of it, and I heard myself screaming. The contact could barely have lasted the span of a heartbeat. But it had been too intense. Too overwhelming. I couldn't focus on the reality right in front of me. He lowered me to the ground, kneeling with me as I gulped air through panicked tears, and through the fog I heard him calling my name. Finally the sensations started to fade, leaving me trembling noisily and half-blind in his grip.
"There," he growled, when my pupils began to constrict again. "Now you know."
He still sounded breathless himself, his fingers flexing rigidly on my wrists. I searched numbly for his eyes. They were a tumult, furious and depthless as the sea.
He gritted out, voice tremoring, fingers biting down to the bone, "Now stay out of my head."
He stood in a sudden flurry of shadow, raking a hand across his scalp as he paced away. I wanted to apologize, wanted to throw myself at his feet and beg for his forgiveness for being so stupid, but I couldn't stop gasping for air long enough to tell him. I tried to close my eyes, but dark and fury and stench still vortexed behind my eyelids.
"What in Din's name were you thinking?" he hissed, turning back slowly, shoulders quaking. His composure was hanging by a thread. "Are you insane?"
I sobbed quietly, no more able to answer him than I was able to pull back time and rewrite my own foolishness. My pulse throbbed painfully. I was still reliving the fear, the anger, the pain. It was like a nightmare that wouldn't drain away. And he was in no state to help me through it.
I met his eyes, and in that moment, still drowning in the memory of his mind, I finally believed him.
He was a monster, and I was a fool.
He paced forward, too suddenly, too close, and I panicked.
"Stop!"
I reached out, the goddess breathing to life, shunting power to my fingertips and filling my eyes with light, and touched his mind.
The connection was blinding. My pulse rippled through the weight of an ocean. And then darkness bled into light. The moon turned to rain. Fury turned to breath. The chill in my heart burned off and clung to my skin, turning cool, turning moist, saturating the air until I could taste it. I descended out of the light and into a rainstorm, and a distant rumble of thunder nudged me back into myself as he searched my eyes, soaked bangs dripping rainwater. They were so blue that for a moment I was fooled; but just beneath the surface, submerged in ice, they were ringed in warm haloes the color of honey.
I waited, breath taut, realizing what I had done. Praying he wouldn't. Praying he was fooled. Wondering whose eyes he was seeing. He drifted closer, drawn by warmth, or by memory. So close I could feel the heat passing between us, a gentle fire that couldn't be put out by the storm.
Another crackle of thunder sounded on the horizon. And then, barely audible over the constant patter of the rain, he murmured, "So much for your word."
My expression fell as he exposed me, as he exposed the lie—as ephemeral and tenuous as our misting breath. Conflict raged in his eyes, another war—of disappointment, and regret, and something else, a desire I couldn't quite place that was slowly crowding out the rest. He reached to cup my face, his touch full of all the warmth and tenderness an ancient part of me remembered.
And then the desire won out, and he crushed his lips against mine.