Prompt No.9
Word count: ~1410
Universe: Ocarina of Time
Pairings: None
Rating: T
Themes: Torture, and torture. Did I mention torture?
Shackled
He was chained at the ankles, at the wrists, at the neck, dragged through dark, blood-stained corridors that smelled of earth and echoed with screams. His pulse slogged through his throat and his ears, stammering every time they shoved him over an abyss onto a platform that was invisible to the naked eye. Sometimes he could hear familiar whispers through the walls.
The Sheikah were feared with good reason, and imprisonment in their Temple was a sentence worse than death.
They reached their apparent destination, fastening his shackles to hooks in the ceiling, in the floor, spreading his arms so his shoulders were ripe for whipping and his head was bent to stare at the ground. When the cell door slammed closed behind him he was left in total darkness.
For a long time there was nothing but the sound of his own panting and his hammering heart. Then, finally, cutting through the shadows,
"Time travel is a fickle art."
Link gritted his teeth, unable to keep from wincing. He knew mockery was the least of his worries; but it still cut deep into a fresh wound.
"But look who I'm telling."
A single torch sparked across the room, splashing trembling light and shadow into the dark without reaching the deepest corners of it. His interrogator's silhouette blotted out most of its glow; his figure was lithe, bound in traditional Sheikah garb. He reminded him of someone else.
"It's the truth," he murmured hoarsely. "Your refusal to believe it doesn't change that."
"Do you know what truth the King of Hyrule believes?" he said, muting the torchlight further with a gentle wave of his hand. "That you're a thief and a trespasser."
"I didn't steal anything. They were given to me. And as for the other…" he sighed, cursing his own foolishness. "I thought I would be welcomed."
"She said she's never seen you before."
He flinched again, remembering the eyes that weren't quite the right shade of blue, the gentle twist of soft, bemused features, painful in their similarness. The absolute lack of recognition. His answer was barely a whisper.
"It was just a misunderstanding."
"The accusations leveled against you are quite serious. Stealing sacred treasures and scaling the castle walls into the Princess's bedchambers are not so easily explained away." He moved away from the torchlight, slipping so easily, as Sheikah often did, into the shadows. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once. "They're saying you're a would-be assassin."
He strained against his chains, blood boiling, but it was a useless effort. He couldn't move.
"I would never," he hissed, powerless and furious. "I have been nothing but loyal to Hyrule!"
"So you've said," he mused, traces of a smile on his voice. "What was it you called yourself? The Hero of Time?"
He loosed a hopeless breath, letting his weight hang on the shackles. "That was another time."
"Explain it to me again."
"I've already told you. My account was true."
"But you haven't told me," he murmured, kneeling near his face so he could look into his eyes, glimmering with a red hue the color of blood, framed with a streak of pale hair. He tipped his head up with a finger beneath his chin, forcing him to strain against the metal biting into his neck. "You haven't told the Sheikah."
Then he was gone again, and Link was left staring powerlessly into the floor, his heart jammed in his throat. Because he knew this place, had seen with his own eyes the remnants of the horrors that they were still using in this time. He knew what they were capable of. He knew that it was a threat.
"I'm from a future where the kingdom was usurped by a Gerudo warlock," he sighed, tired of spouting a tale no one believed. "I drew the Master Sword at the behest of the Princess and was trapped for seven years in the Sacred Realm. I freed the five sages who could not hear the awakening call, and I faced the Evil King in battle and emerged victorious. And then the Princess used the Ocarina of Time to send me back to my own era. But…"
"Yes?"
"I don't know," he whispered. "Something must have gone wrong. She sent me back too far. And this body hasn't changed."
"You sound insane."
"I know."
"Treason," the Sheikah murmured, running a cool finger down his bare spine, "is a serious offense."
"I'm innocent."
"No one is innocent," he scoffed. "You drew a sword that had been holding a seal in place for a thousand years. The damage might have been irreversible if they hadn't replaced it in its pedestal when they did."
"I didn't draw it in this era," he insisted, for the umpteenth time since this whole thing began. "It came with me through time! There can't be two of them at once—it must have been some kind of a paradox. If I could get back to my own time—"
"And how do you plan on getting home, Hero?"
"I don't know," he bit out, voice tremoring. "I thought maybe the Princess…"
He closed his eyes, sighing. He was exhausted, weak from hunger, and creeping closer to hopelessness by the day. And now he was a prisoner in the House of the Dead, a living annal of Hyrule's bloody history of greed and hatred.
"If anyone understands truth, it's you," he whispered, defeated. "Your lenses and masks that cut through illusion and darkness and show what lies beneath… why don't you use one of those?"
"Those devices are useful," he conceded. "And we have others. Do you know the Stone of Agony, as well?"
He did. It was a horrible thing that he could barely stand to touch, that he wrapped in a thick cloth and kept sealed away, and that would rattle eagerly when he was near something concealed. Something it could expose. A secret it could pry out of its hiding place.
He hadn't realized it was a torture device. But it made sense, in hindsight.
The Sheikah didn't wait for him to answer. He plunged it between his shoulder blades, where the involuntary contraction of muscle and bone held it agonizingly in place, and Link threw his head back against the metal band around his neck and screamed. Fear and ice slithered down his spine and unspooled in his stomach, whipping tendrils in all directions, sticking to the inside of his ribs and the back of his throat and the joints of his hips and holding him taut. Teeth and shadows tore him apart from the inside out, peeling flesh and tendons away from where they belonged and lancing organs, rearranging his insides until nothing was where it ought to have been and he felt driven through by a thousand skewers.
After a few minutes he took the stone away and Link was pulled back from the brink of death, gasping, panting, weeping, Farore's name falling unbidden again and again from his mouth as his whole body shook.
The Sheikah sat cross legged on the floor beneath his face, watching him come back to himself, waiting until he was coherent before he spoke again.
"You must have thought yourself very brave, once," he murmured, brushing tears from his chin. "But I think you understand now why the Sheikah are feared. Why we dwell in a place like this."
"Please," Link whispered, pitifully and without shame. "I have nothing to confess. What I told you was true."
"I know," he mused. "If there had been, the Stone would have pulled it from you."
He trembled. "Then why?"
"Maybe I believe you," the Sheikah murmured, leaning very close. "Maybe I knew who you were from the beginning. Maybe the Goddesses have a mission for me, as well."
Link's eyes widened a fraction, hardly able to form the words. "What do you mean?"
"I'll send you home, once my work is complete," he promised, turning the artifact between lithe fingers. "Most people don't know why this place is called the Shadow Temple."
He stood, pacing a slow circle around his panting victim, and frowned.
"They think we worship shadows here, but we don't," he murmured. "We create them."
Then he slid the Stone back into place, watching him scream himself hoarse as it slowly rent his soul in two, and began the long, arduous process of fabricating a Shadow worthy of him, so that he might one day defeat himself.