Author's Note: Shocker, I'm not dead. Been a good a while and a half, eh? Pls don't maim me
Heaven on earth
"But…I don't understand."
Link saw but did not believe.
His hope-deprived abject confusion didn't even have the remote courtesy of leaving him slack-jawed. He trembled mutely, mouth moving but useless. Eyes wide yet unseeing.
"What's not to get?" Aryll – Link scrabbled at his head, tearing his gaze away, refusing refusing refusing – giggled.
Every word was bladed torture. Every curve of her lips hot wax seething on his spine, every sharp hitch of laughter black soot in his lungs.
Midna, as ever, was his ground.
"She isn't herself," her whisper grazed the shell of his ear. Her hand warm and steady against his elbow, whereas every other part of him stilled, cold and lifeless.
"But what's wrong?" Aryll's voice came to him like birdsong; liquid, melodic, something saccharine to swallow. "I'm your darling sister."
"You're not," he croaked. "You're something else."
"That is so terrible of you to say," she affected a whimper. "My heart's in pieces."
Midna stood protectively in front.
"Quit the charade. We've been sick of you dangling strings on us since day one. It's time this ended."
Aryll glanced helplessly towards her companion, eyes watering.
Fat tears trailed her chin, resembled blood as they ensconced themselves in her curtain of red.
"Oh, it really is, isn't it?" she cried, musically frantic.
Anju rose a finger and tenderly wiped away the moisture gathering at her corners.
"One way or another," Anju gently crooned. "We'll save them, sister. We will."
Marin snapped her fingers and blue brimmed the canyon.
Every remaining solder collapsed to the gravel, unmoving. Their hearts, quiet. Their chests, a myriad of hollowed synapses.
Against the mountain wall, their leaders could only stare.
"They're not…" Zelda's whisper drummed against the expanse, deafening where before all had been muted.
"Well, yes. Of course they're dead," Marin explained, gesturing as if it were a lecture.
"Why was there need?" Ganondorf rasped as best he could above the pain.
"To impress upon you beyond your misconceptions that there is no fight," Marin inclined her head almost kindly. "I am the law, you see. I always have been. In the wake of my absence came the two of you: an admirable attempt at substitute. You tried to bring order where there was none; semblance where there was discord. Authority to displace the vast blackness of the human heart – its frailties, its lapses – that had molested the world."
Her smile was rimmed by blue. Her eyes were bright. In them, Zelda saw knowledge. Saw the azure banks of insurmountable wisdom and boundless serenity. Saw the devil.
"You tried to wage what you thought was a war. Please, you must understand. There's never been a war."
"Then what would you call it?" Ganondorf gritted through bloody teeth, his anguish seething across the mounds of the fallen in front of him, behind Marin.
She blinked. Placed a finger cautiously to her cheek, as if apprehensive about being caught relaying the obvious.
"Um…" her finger tapped; her eyes scrunched quizzically. It painfully reminded Zelda of the real Marin, puzzled by something she's just read, a pluck of confusion washing over a slip of a girl surrounded by the castle's vast library.
"Clearing the attic?" she finished almost timidly.
Her implication was not what triggered their horror, their sudden hoarse breaths of desperation as they grasped it, as their minds seized it with a macabre understanding.
It was her nonchalance. She truly felt nothing as she insisted, yet again –
"I am the law," she repeated cheerfully. "There is no fight."
Zelda stepped to the fore. Brandished her blade and her beating heart.
"We're only alive because there is."
Marin bit her lip, again darting her eyes to either side, checking if it was safe to answer, if it was some trick that prompted the easily evident response.
"Oh, no," her tongue drawled the words, traced them sweetly in her mouth before releasing them. "You're alive because we haven't quite gotten the dust in the corners. Dreadful of us, really.
Zelda ignored her. Tried looking once more into her eyes, into those immeasurable depths. Blue, blue, blue.
"I'll bring you back, Marin," she whispered, clenching her sword's hilt. Feeling the blister of steel travel through her bone, along her spine.
"I swear it."
Pockets of molten mineral nearly singed a hole in his chest as his half-hearted strokes caught nothing but the wind. Across from him landed a girl sheathed in red, pouting from the lack of challenge.
"Link," came Midna from his shoulder. "I know how you must feel, but that isn't Aryll. If we're to survive…"
"Yeah," he breathed. "I know. I do. But I can't…expect myself to – "
The road to his right was abruptly cleaved from its center. Jagged columns of heat spurted from the line, the earth's blood at his sister's beck and call. A circle of fire traced itself languidly around him and Midna.
"There seems to be a misunderstanding, dear darling brother," Aryll tittered.
Beneath his feet, veins of liquid rock.
"Hurting me is the least of your worries."
Author's Note: Uh, so it's been a year. At the risk of my impending (deserved) murder, I am going to finish this fic. It's actually nearly there, y'know. I promise promise promise that the next chapter will be out tomorrow. It's pretty much been written already, though it's short. Trust me though, it's quite a doozy.
Review? (and not just to tell me how much you want my head on a stake)