Every Shard of My Heart Belongs to You: Hanging by a Heart String

There are times in any man's life in which the strings of his heart, the very fibers of his being, are stretched beyond their elasticity. They screech and cry in their strain. Either he will let them break, their recoil twanging and echoing like a cracked copper bell, or they will break him. Will he mold his experience or will the experience mold him? Usually there is no simple answer, since he cannot isolate the effects of one from the other.

Link awoke unto cold sweat and labored breath. He gasped and clutched his chest. He recalled the feeling of blood on his calloused hands and trickling down between his shoulder blades. He was overwhelmed with a sense of thankfulness that his terror was merely a dream, but try as he might, he couldn't remember what caused him such turmoil. Only the feeling of horror remained. It tortured him relentlessly.

He opened his eyes only to be greeted by relative darkness. The closed curtains subdued the morning sun. He carefully set his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his crutch. He limped towards the window and drew the drapery. His squinted against the light, but he didn't turn away.

It was still mid spring but the air smelled of summer. The air was cool and dry like a summer morning in a valley by the sea. The sun shown warmly, reflecting in the dew drops of the dampened grass. Those still sleeping felt as though they were sleeping on clouds, while those who were awake could not help but smile.

Such was the world outside. The world inside, on the contrary, was not so livable.

Link rested his head against the cold stone frame of the windowsill. It had a wide ledge, wide enough for a weary soul such as he to sit. The sunlight seemed to shower him with vitality, but so did it also illuminate the evidence of his near-death experience. He touched the wounds on his chest. They seemed to be healing more rapidly. Scabs and scar tissue were at least a step up from oozing cavities.

A shopkeeper whistled happily in the square in the distance—the lucky, oblivious fool. He was obligated to nothing but paying his taxes. Link envied his ignorance.

He noticed his sword lying next to him and lifted it from the windowsill. He pulled the first few centimeters from its sheath and stared at it thoughtfully. It had been months since it had been used in battle. He wondered if he would ever be the same again.

He heard a light knock on the door behind him. Assuming it was a servant, he authorized their entrance.

"Link?" a quivering voice uttered. Oh goddesses, it was her voice. His muscles tensed as he buttoned his shirt.

"Link? May I speak with you?" Zelda's voice grew louder, more steady. She approached his seat at the window. He nearly jumped when he felt her hand on his shoulder. He had his face turned from her, pretending that the courtyard beyond was more fascinating than her beauty. He closed his eyes in the ecstasy of her closeness as her fingers combed his hair.

"I want to apologize for last night." She turned his face towards her. He opened his eyes again but was shocked when they met hers. He had seen her violet eyes in his dream. "I should not have been so—" He didn't seem to be listening. "Link?"

He recalled the flashes of his dream.

Zelda's eyes—they were the eyes of the lady on the shore in the moonlight. Those lips had kissed another among the rain and ocean mist. The young man asleep on the galleon, shipwrecked on the shore—that was him. He was the one who had been fatally assaulted, asleep on the cargo ship. But why did that woman look so much like Zelda? The man who had attacked him seemed somehow familiar as well: his stature, his dark features, and even his voice—they were Iain's. Upon further consideration, he recognized indeed there was even a semblance between the knight and the princess: their hair was variant in shade but alike in wavy texture, their complexion was equal in fairness, they had a similar nose and jaw line...

"Link?"

He stared with wide eyes, unable to move. Every scene of the nightmare that his conscious mind swore he forgot flooded back instantaneously. The ship called the Isle of Ciel, the wreck, and the man who nearly killed him—All the repressed memories were retrieved flawlessly.

"I—I remember..." he whispered, "...everything."

"What are you talking about?" Zelda asked, puzzled by his words. She watched his eyes glaze over in panic.

"I had a peculiar dream last night," he explained.

"You seem pale. Do you have a fever?" She felt his forehead his the back of her hand.

"I saw the ones who did this to me, Zelda. I saw their faces. I felt it. When I think of it I feel it all over again."

She stopped suddenly. "Who was it?"

"I do not know who, but it is frightening, Zelda, frightening that one of them looked so much like you. She had... your eyes." Link stood up on the window ledge and gesticulated passionately. "Why, Zelda? Why did she so resemble you!" He did not ask her as if she knew, but as one who thinks aloud.

"Link, calm down," Zelda soothed, attempting to take him by the arm away from the threatening window.

"I cannot!"

"Please Link, step away from the window," she pleaded.

He sighed in frustration, preparing to step from the ledge. A clumsy knock upon his chamber door gave him a start, and his foot did not find the friction of the stone floor. Instead he tripped over the unfastened tassel of the window drapes, allowing his balance to fall victim to inertia and the rest of his body to gravity. Link grasped the curtains to save him from the several-meter descent. Zelda shrieked in horror as she watched his forehead collide with the sill's edge. His hold on the rogue curtain remained steady, but the rings were tearing from the dowel rod above the window at an alarming rate, causing Link to awkwardly descend the tower from his second floor room. He heard Iain burst through the door and Zelda's frantic commands above him. He dropped a few inches each time another ring broke.

"Link!" Zelda leaned over the edge of the window and called to him. "Are you all right?"

"I've just fallen out of a window and I'm hanging on to a bloody curtain for Din's sake!" he called back.

"I've sent Iain down, just hold on!"

"Right, what else would I do, " he muttered. The drape was down to its last ring with Link about two meters from the ground. From there he could see into the window of the first floor. Though the window was much smaller than those of the upper floors, his attention was seized by a portrait that hung at the end of the hall. It was the king's hall. The portrait was of a woman with violet eyes and a charming, almost seductive expression. That was her—the woman from his dream! He had to squint in order to read the inscription below the frame, "Sil...vanna... Hylia?"

At last the ring broke.