A/N September 20, 2021

This work in its original form was published here on FanFiction nearly 7 years ago in late 2014. The original work was messy, disorganized, and an unfortunate step in my journey to becoming a better writer. Having never finished it, I decided to scrap the source material and rewrite it. The following is the fruit of that labor.

A few things to note about the rewrite:

1. I am determined to finish writing this story, once and for all. I won't be making any empty promises about deadlines, hard or soft, but I will be pushing myself to continue to work on it so that it does get finished.

2. The rewritten story will be SIGNIFICANTLY different, and darker, than its source material. I want to portray a much darker, much grittier, much more politically realistic Hyrule than what, now looking back, I had envisioned when I first published Two Sides. The political situation I am envisioning draws significant inspiration from the French Revolution, Old Testament Israel, and the first Dishonored title.

2. I'll be splitting the story into three overarching "acts."

3. The chapters may not be extremely long. When I was in high school I used to think that remarkably wonderful multi-chapter Fanfics needed to always have chapters that would take several minutes to read through. I still believe that to be true, but I have never completed a full multi-chapter story and want this to be finished more than I want it to be remarkably wonderful. I'd rather the chapters be shorter but satisfying to read than trying to fill in a hypothetical quota for how much I want to cram into a chapter.

For anybody that cares to know, this work IS available to read on Archive of our Own, as well. You can find me there under my name, Minstrel of Madness.

With all of that out of the way, I hope that you enjoy the first look at a project that has literally been in the works for years now. My goal is to put up something I can look back upon one day and think, "I am so proud of myself for finishing this." Feel free to let me know what you think about it.

~ MoM

Nearly seventeen months had passed since the defeat of Ganondorf's insurrection, and somehow Hyrule seemed to be worse now than it ever had been.

The panicked citizens of the kingdom had somehow convinced themselves that when the Twilight Invasion was over, they would be greeted by a Hyrule that was fundamentally identical to the one they knew. They had promised each other that their jobs, their homes, their families would all survive the dreadful time, and that once it was all over, they could all just go back to living they way they had been before.

The Hyrule they were greeted with looked significantly different than the one they had collectively imagined.

The Kingdom's infrastructure was at best feeble, and at worse an absolute nightmare. The trade routes into the neighboring provinces of the kingdom itself had been left vacant for so long that nobody travelled them frequently enough to bring in enough business to regulate the economy. Word of this spread quickly, causing those people lucky enough to have any money in the bank to become paranoid. The speculation caused a bank rush, which in turn caused the stock market to crash. Businesses shut down just as quickly as they opened, since nobody had any money to buy anything. The value of a single Rupee hyper-inflated to the point that it was cheaper to use the gems as decoration than as currency. Roads and buildings fell into disrepair. The number of homeless people in Castle Town had quintupled in less than a year as hundreds of hungry commoners crowded the streets, unable to afford the now lofty costs of owning any property.

Queen Zelda, Hylia bless her, had tried everything within her power to unite the people. She promised at the behest of her advisors to promise peace and order and stability. But between the nationwide panic over the state of the economy and the general distrust of the stability of the government in crises, the people had quickly dismissed her as no more powerful to stop anything than any one of them was. Within months the name of the Royal Family was meaningless, and the young Queen became nothing more than a figurehead. She gradually became hated by her people, who saw her as utterly out of touch with their own situation due to the luxurious living of the Upper Class in the city. Every attempt she made at mending relations between herself and the Hyrulean citizens only resulted in more anger, bitterness, and distrust.

So far, the only thing preventing an outright rebellion was the Hylian military, which at the moment was still loyal to the Crown. The people hated the soldiers diligently walking the streets, but dared not provoke them. Before the Invasion, both the Army and the Royal Guard had been a rag-tag group of cowards with little to no combat experience. Now, thanks to the diligent training of key military leaders and mercenaries, the Army kept an iron grip on the citizens they were assigned to. And though the people raised cry after cry of hatred toward their Monarch, they shuddered to think of what might happen if anybody so much as raised a finger against her and met with the leader of her private Guard.

They called him the Wolf, though nowadays nobody really quite knew why. Some suggested it was because of his ferocity in his duty to the Queen, while others speculated it was due to the large fur cape they insisted was always draped around his neck. Still others believed that he was secretly a Werewolf, and that if anyone were to cross him, he would sneak into their house in the middle of the night and tear their children's throats out. Whatever the case, the rumors surrounding him were all more than clear that anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet him in single combat stood not even a sliver of a chance against him and his blade.

Those who supported him believed he was a good man; after all, they would say, he did single-handedly squash the Twilight Invasion and defeat Ganondorf in single combat. Those who opposed him believed him to be even more dangerous than Ganondorf himself.

Nobody dared speak out against him personally, though, lest their words catch the ears of the Wolfpack, the Royal Guard. Every night these elite soldiers enforced a citywide curfew, put in place after a large group of ruffians decided it wise to attack the castle. Most of the people agreed that the wails of those who participated in the uprising were truly the least terrifying thing they heard that dreadful night. The Wolf and his Pack had been at the front of the Army meeting the resistance, and though the exact amount of time it took to stamp out the thugs was debated for many weeks afterwards, everybody knew that the attack was over before it even started. To even call it an attack was a stretch; massacre would have been a more appropriate word to describe it. The pavement on the North Road was still stained red from the blood.

That was the last time the Wolf had made a public appearance in recent memory. After that night he never left the Queen's side except when she was asleep in her chambers, in which case he personally stood outside her door. And, given that she did her best to avoid the people she governed, he rarely walked outside the Castle Grounds. Children would dare each other to sneak into the Castle Garden late at night to see if they could even manage a single glance at him, usually to no avail.

As rumors of famine, revolution, and disease plagued the land, many Hylians began to lose their hope in the Goddess.

After all, how could a Supernatural being forsake her people at the time where they needed her most?