Chapter 3: Un Chien Andalou, Beyond the Absurd
Link awoke violently in the deep of night on a bed of stone, retching in great heaves, his entire upper body clenching and spasmodic. Around him, a dark stone sphere had unfurled into two hemispheres, rotating and splitting along an invisible seam. It was the strange mix of ancient magic and futuristic technology set in stone age materials that Link had come to associate with the lost civilization which had created the guardians. The neon blue fluid which nearly filled the spherical device drained through some unseen set of tubules beneath him. He blinked in surprise at the viscous, glowing azure that came up after a few gags, he had been expecting something more navy and saltier. Looking around with heavily lidded eyes, he recognized the carved granite and elaborate blue lighting of the Shrine of Resurrection. His arms were so heavy they felt like foreign objects, made of stone and grafted to his shoulders by some cruel trickster god. He groaned, partly from the pure physical exhaustion, but mostly from the psychic pain that came with the realization of his location.
"Put me back in." He said, and closed his eyes and folded his arms, without further explanation; a stubborn child. It had taken him only moments to deduce the untruths of his lute performance; it was some sort of hallucination brought on during the shrine's healing process. The first century he spent on the granite slab at the center of that mechanical womb had been full of such false experiences, more concrete and memorable than any dream.
He could still recall those dreams; in them he had saddled giant birds and fought Ganondorf atop the rim of the sky, ran with four legs and befriended a shadow-skinned princess, and slipped into the void beyond the edge of the world in some sort of metal craft to challenge a great scaled beast in the space beyond, among many others. At the very least, these experiences were not his, if they were real at all. A great deal of his interest in photography since his reawakening was related to the flood of false experiences. It wasn't just about recovering his memories, it was about differentiating between the real and the fake ones.
Link curled himself around the hollow feeling in his chest like a dead leaf. It had probably been another century since the fall of civilization. The remnants were probably beyond saving. Back to bed it most definitely was.
He remembered sinking down through the ocean, and Zelda's ethereal hands stretched helplessly towards him. It had to be her who had gotten him here. How she had done it was one hell of mystery, but this wasn't the first miracle she had worked for his sake. She just wouldn't let him go.
After a stubborn thirty seconds, and no activity on behalf of the ancient contraption, he let out a fierce string of curses, and neatly dismounted the stone bed of the medical sarcophagus.
"Have it your way" he whispered, teeth bared in an angry expression only vaguely approaching a smile. However Zelda had gotten him in the ancient machine, it had been quite unorthodox, because he had awoken fully armored and equipped, dressed in the same stuff he had nearly drowned in, rather than in the skimpy compression shorts he had found himself in last time around. Fine by him.
Halfway to the shrine's exit, as Link ran a wobbly left hand along the intricately chiseled murals on the walls, he heard a decidedly inhuman gurgle not twenty feet away. Bokoblin? The muted, arhythmic pit-pat of soles on stone that followed, and the shrill yet guttural yelps, confirmed Link's suspicions. That audibly drunken gait and the screech that sounded like it's maker was gargling a mouthful of tiny, screaming goats could only come from a species entire phylogenetic forests away from Link's humble perch on the upper branches of the primates' evolutionary tree. He couldn't see it yet, but a bokoblin was close. Good. Link was pissed.
He reached his hand over his shoulder, intending to get the drop on this particular exhibit of gnashing teeth and savage pseudo-intelligence. His fingers closed on nothing. Mouth in an idiotic 'o', Link hurriedly patted down the rest of his body. Nothing. The hero, swordless.
This wouldn't be the first, or even the five hundredth, time he would come up with a creative means of murdering monsters. But it was one of the first times it wasn't optional. Swiping an arrow crackling with electricity from the quiver at his waist, he snuck forward in a crouch.
In his sword's absence and the surprise it had inspired, Link had lost the sound of the bokoblin, and he approached the doorway ahead cautiously. He passed the empty stand upon which he had recovered his sheikah slate at the start of his second adventure. The wall was a mess of faintly glowing dots and lines like tangerine constellations, and the embossed carvings adorning the doorway were swirling, twisting abstractions, except for where they were weren't. In some places, the hewn stone eerily resembled eyes, ever watching.
Small arcs of electricity bit at Link's fingers, and a tiny tendril of smoke rose from his right ring finger where they had singed a strand of hair. He ignored the pain and gripped the arrow more tightly as he passed through the curved entryway. The room beyond was lit by soft blue lamps, their bulbs approximating static flames. They let off a smoky light, insufficient for any true visibility, but just enough to make out the edges of a few nearby objects: wooden boxes, empty chests, and the glint of a bokoblin's spearhead, coming in hot.
Link bent his neck almost languidly, eyes never leaving the now-screeching form at the base of the spear. The spearhead shaved a few hundred strands of long blonde hair off above his left ear, but no blood was let. He grabbed the wooden shaft to prevent the bokoblin's retreat, took two purposeful steps toward, and jammed the charged arrowhead into the base of the gremlin's jaw. For a few moments, the creature's oversized bony mandible was visible beneath its skin as it conducted the arrow's electricity, and then it was over.
Two more wailing shapes emerged from the darkness, one swinging a jagged sword so short it barely deserved the title, and the other brandishing a studded club. The second bokoblin reached him first, and as it swung its bludgeon where Link's head had been moments before, he was able to make out a sick variety of sharp objects embedded or awkwardly adhered to its surface with a black tar. There were tried-and-true standards: nails and barbed wire, and personal touches: orange-ish patches of fur and what appeared to be the handle of a cast-iron skillet jutting out midway up the club. Then there were some truly barbaric additions. Among these were a number of probably human molars, set roots-up and steeped in black tar, circling the tip of the club. Several were cracked and jagged-edged from repeated impacts, but a few looked brand new.
The crown gem of the club was a single, half-crushed, eyeball at the base of the vicious bat. It bobbled back and forth beneath the overly long, chipped, and yellowing, nails of the squealing goblin. The eyeball was only recognizable as such because of the barely visible portion of white, unsmushed sclera and brown iris, and from the still-wet, striated muscles which normally held the eye firmly inside of its socket and assisted with its rotation, but here served as a crude, bloody string affixing the deformed sphere to its new home near the base of the mad truncheon.
Link eyed all of these strange decorations in a few seconds, and only fully registered what they were upon later, traumatized, recollection. However, as desensitized as he was to the horrors of bokoblin battle culture, and despite the fact that he hadn't fully grasped the true insanity of the cudgel's designer, the hero was taken aback for a moment. Then, survival instincts took over, and he whipped around to let the club screech off the shield on his back in a shower of sparks.
While the club-wielding bokoblin was off balance, Link lept in low and tackled it to the ground. They tumbled over the edge of the small stone platform where he had first entered the room and on to the floor a few feet below, Link landing hard on top of the silver bokoblin with the distinct cracking noise that belongs only to bones breaking. On all fours inches above the beast, he watched it's labored breathing and saw the helpless fear in its eyes, Link realized that something in its spine had broken, and it could not move. Above and behind him came insensate ululations, and he jerked his head sideways to see the remaining bokoblin leaping down from the platform, toothed dirk in both hands. He rolled as it landed, and it's short sword pierced its paralyzed fellow's ribcage instead of Link's back. While it was in shock, and it's nestmate bleeding out and immobile beneath it, Link wound up a steel-toed kick and crunched it into its skull. The bokoblin reeled backwards and landed on its curved back. Link approached the beast and it let out high-pitched groans and clawed blindly at the air either in pain or some last ditch effort to defend itself. He raised a knee, and brought his armored sole down mercilessly on its head several more times than necessary, watching with a dark look on his face as its eyes ruptured like overripe grapes and violet blood and black smoke emerged.
After a few moments of silence, the hero surveyed the rest of the long, dimly lit room to no avail. A giant bowstring let out a bass twang from the other end of the room, and a javelin crackled by Link's torso, impacting the wall behind him with an ugly crunching noise and an explosion of electricity. Only one species of Ganon's minions fired enchanted arrows of that size. How the hell a lynel had snuck its way into the shrine of resurrection was beyond Link, but it was between him and the exit, and it already knew he was here, so the swordslessman had only one option.
Half an hour later Link emerged from the dark cave in which he had been returned to life twice now, with a heavy, curved blade in one hand, and a large haunch of lynel meat in the other. The sun was dipping down below the edge of the earth, and he walked mechanically down towards the memory of a bonfire where an old dead king had once given him a task, looking for a place to cook himself some dinner. That felt like, and may have actually been, lifetimes ago. In his gloom and exhaustion, Link had no eyes for the gradient of twilight colors decorating the horizon, but, upon seeing the place of his memory, he gave a visible start.
In the vanishing light, a blue-tinted eidolon sat next to a pile of sunset embers, under a the rock overhang next to an apple tree. Her figure was insubstantial and shone strangely in the newborn night, gleaming like gossamer in the light of the dying fire. She was beautiful, and she had been waiting for him.
Her lips curled at one end into a quivering smile as she registered his approach, and tears began to leak out of happy emerald eyes as she sought his. She opened her perfect mouth, and spoke:
"Sup dickhead?"
He smiled almost painfully wide, eyes and mouth crinkled to the extreme. No illusion of Goddess or Ganon could mimic that acerbic wit.
"Been a minute-" Link began, and coughed. His voice had cracked, hard. A laughed jerked out between her now-audible sobs, and she stepped quickly and deliberately towards him.
"Been a minute, huh princess?" He tried again. Link's own facial meteorology was also an unabashed mix of sun and rain as he opened his arms for her phantasmal embrace.
She stopped just short of passing through him, and stared deeply into his eyes from not two noses away. Then the touch of her translucent lips on his was the tactile equivalent of white noise. Her tongue tasted like static electricity. He didn't care. It was her. It was really her.
Their love was intangible, his corn-ass, stimuli-flooded, lizard brain told him as he kissed her unearthly lips, so the whole her being a ghost thing was a non-issue. Fuck materiality, he'd go full shrine monk, do a weird yoga pose for a couple decades, transcend the physical plane, and they'd ghost this whole bitch. They kissed for what might've been a long time, or what might've been seconds.
Then she actually bit him.
"Ow! Zelda! What the-" He didn't even understand how she had been able to bite him.
"Bastard." She whispered. Then she said it again, louder. "Bastard." He tasted iron in his mouth as she beat, not lightly, but neither with her full strength, at his chest. Her small spectral fists slid through the skin of his pectorals and left his heart and lungs with an incomprehensible itch.
"You! With the wall- the water- what the fuck! What the fuck! What were you thinking?"
"I-"
"You were going to leave me!" She screamed at him, and she looked up at him, and he looked into her, and then, he hurt.
He hurt in a way he hadn't in a long time. Since he had woken up that first time in the stables, to a world unchanged despite their triumph over evil. Maybe even before then. Perhaps since he had last felt her touch, her real touch, as he faded away from anemia and exhaustion in the cracked shadow of Fort Hateno, among an army of broken guardians.
He began to cry then, a well and proper bawl. For himself, for the emptiness in his heart which had nearly allowed him to sink into nothingness, for the scars on his mind after all these years of violence, but most of all, for what he had put her through. He collapsed gradually to his knees, and she went with him. He held her like a lifeline, a hug almost impossibly tight given her immateriality. It felt wrong, he had meant to comfort her, but she seemed to understand. They held each other, and wept, and kissed.
Hours later, they lay together in the rich loam under darkness' warm blanket as the last of the fire went out, hand in hand, kintsugi-webbed hearts peering out together towards the moon as it dripped up the sky.