Goddesshood was a perplexing thing. The concept of time and space as infinite yet finite, unknowable yet comprehensible, your life everlasting yet, in Hylia's case, ephemeral.
In the struggle against Demise, Her sacrifice would be one that would seal Her powers within Her descendants; the light of Her immortal soul beckoned for the Spirit of the Hero in perpetuity and ensured the protection of Wisdom and Light that had blessed this world and adjacent ones since time immemorial.
It meant that Hylia's life as she knew it would end, Her goddesshood sacrificed upon an altar of mortality as a safeguard against the relentless Darkness that she had sealed after waging holy war. After laying the foundations for Her plans to be set into motion, farewells to Her generals, Her priests, Her warriors, Her children, Hylia was to be put to rest.
And yet, in the split seconds before Her voluntary passing from this world and Her relinquishment of divinity, those split seconds lasted for an infinity.
Far more perplexing than goddesshood was Hylia's quality of omniscience.
It's what made Her actions and plans innately unknowable. Innately divine and incomprehensible to beings with no concept or perception of time itself as a flat circle, of causality, of lifetimes forming but an infinitesimal facet of the great Mystery.
With this omniscience Hylia could rest assured that Her battle would be won.
Demise would live up to his promise, his curse. He would return and bring blight and death and suffering to Her children and their children's children, but Light would always return to triumph against the Dark, and sometimes, even the Dark would refuse to yield in the face of pure Evil.
But in the end, in some distant and unknowable future, Hylia's children would prosper. Their hope, which would sustain them even through absolute oblivion, would be validated.
Before reaching that conclusion, Hylia savored Her omniscience. Hylia lived hundreds, thousands, millions of lives. Felt every breath, every laugh, every kiss, every grievous wound. Every age and era coursed through Her within the span of a breath. She would answer the prayers of Heroes who wouldn't come into existence for yet anotHer millenia, watch as kingdoms rose and fell ad infinitum, experienced all the prosperity and desolation that would await Her resilient children.
She would see all possible futures, think all possible thoughts, feel all possible emotions, live all possible lives.
And time and time again, in whatever timeline or realm that would be birthed from the cyclic struggle of Light and Dark, there were constants, spawned from the nature of the Triforce itself: Heroes borne from the spirit of Courage, divine royalty borne from the spirit of Wisdom, and great evil borne to pursue the spirit of Power.
Hylia also saw other constants.
Maybe it was a species or a certain color or a type of companion or a Hero's certain affinity to a specific fashion of hat.
But, very curious, was the presence of…
…a man…no, something more than that, consistent across the different planes and varying pathways of fate.
His presence in Her realms was bemusing; like the Hero, the Princess, and the Tyrant, he would recur on multiple branching pathways of history…but why?
She didn't know if he embodied any spirits of the Triforce; in him, she sensed great power, but also courage and wisdom. She sensed darkness but no evil, sensed light but no virtue. His appearance would always change, but even in Her omniscience Hylia struggled to pin a specific face, or even a name.
To Hylia, he was but a Stranger who kept persisting throughout all Her realms and history, unabated by discrepancies of time and space.
He always took on the form of a merchant. His success and profits were consistent; never excessive enough to cause any major imbalance of power, never too indigent to hold him back from peddling his wares and services to anywhere he wished. Through mercantile means, this stranger was the very spirit of independence, wandering through town after town without a clear purpose other than to indulge in the wellspring of life and…his preferred vices.
He was never tied down, and he never had any desire to shift major events towards his favor.
But most bemusing of all was the fact that this stranger's fate always crossed with her descendants borne from the spirit of Wisdom.
In every reality she envisioned and experienced, this stranger would become…intimately involved with these women, all of them possessing the spirit of Wisdom, and bearing the name of Zelda.
It was true that her bloodline had a somewhat elevated inclination to satiate carnal needs. After all, the power of the Royal Family relied on holy blood coursing through Zelda. If they were to keep the fight throughout the centuries, ensuring that Wisdom and Light prevail, then their drive to mate would be higher than the average young woman.
But that didn't answer why this particular soul was getting involved.
In Her eternity, Hylia wondered and tried to find a motive, tried to see if he was part of Demise's plans or any servant of darkness.
And yet with all Her prescience, Hylia failed to find any explanation or any endgoal for this stranger. All she found in Her experiences and memories and multitude of lives was one constant that roiled in this faceless Stranger: the spirit of Desire.
Hylia cycled through the lives of every Zelda one more time, seeing how this stranger affected their fate. Many times a Zelda would even sire his kin, and yet in none of the legends and memories would he remain after the fact.
There had to be something She somehow missed…something that would explain why Her descendants would constantly fall to this stranger's charms, why this stranger burned so strongly with a Desire that transcended ages, eras, worlds, and realities.
She tried to focus on him to see if she remembered. His face, his name…
Hylia's mind delved deeper into prescient thought, calling upon the memories of Zelda and Zelda's to come. She searched for the stranger, and in her eternity, she watched.
The legend unfolds…