Chapter 5
"Link, tell them you can't. Tell them you're happier here. You can't just leave, you can't."
Fado's voice trembled as she spoke, and when he looked up, there were tears welling up in her eyes.
"Fado, this could be my last chance." Link placed a hand on her shoulder, and she began sobbing. "No one else even wants to talk to me. I could have a family. Besides, I bet I could visit you sometimes. Maybe on one of the picnics over break."
She launched herself at him then, little fists pummeling his chest in a desperate fury.
"Go then!" she screeched. "Get out. You never belonged here anyway, you loser."
He staggered backward, more from the venom in his voice than the onslaught. He tried to think, tried to see why she was so angry, but his thoughts were a murky sludge.
"Yeah, leave," said the two girls beside Fado. They had names, he was sure of it, but when he tried to focus there was only pain. His head throbbed, pulsing with the beat of his heart.
He ran away, but the farther he ran, the louder the jeers grew. He looked back over his shoulder to see the three girls standing there, just as close as when he had started running. He put on a new burst of speed, but when he looked back in front of himself, Miss Rebecca was standing there, hands on her hips.
"What are you doing here?" she said.
Link tried to focus. He didn't even know where 'here' was. He looked around for some clue, but all he saw was a canvass of black, and a crowd of orphans gathering up behind him.
"You will leave my children alone," she commanded.
"But it's me!" he tried to say, but she had vanished.
A pebble collided with his head, toppling him to the ground. As he tried to stand, another impacted his ribs. He pushed himself to his knees and saw Fado standing above him, a slingshot in her hands.
"We don't want you," she said, and the others chorused their agreement.
Link ran, and this time it worked. He still heard their roar behind him, and pebbles whizzed past his head, but as he added more and more speed he slowly began to outdistance them.
Then, in the distance, a structure began to take form. At first, it appeared as merely a small orb hovering over the ground, but as he approached it expanded until a great temple of stone stood before him. Its shape changed each time he looked at it, but he knew that he would be safe within.
Breaking into a frantic sprint, he bolted up the front steps and through the massive door that marked the entrance. He collapsed to his knees, panting. When he looked back, all the children who had pursued him were gone. There was nothing outside, only a deep blackness that it hurt to look at.
There was no sun outside, nor torches or lights within the temple, yet even so, he could see. He stood amid a circle of seven altars, each emblazoned with a pattern he could not recognize. He looked down and saw that he had a mighty sword, double-edged and fearsome, and dripping with blood.
"Rest, Link. You are safe here as any man can be. For where the Sages stand as one, no evil may penetrate."
Zelda's voice resounded through the chamber, seeming to come from both everywhere and nowhere at once.
"There are no Sages," he heard himself say. "There are but seven coffins of stone, empty for an age, and forgotten."
Then, from a door high above him, the Princess of Hyrule emerged. Her face pale and
solemn as an edifice as marble, she descended the spiral stairs. Where she stepped, light sprang forth, surrounding her in a sparkling aura.
She made not a sound on her descent. Link heard neither the clack of her shoes upon the stone floor, nor the rustling of her white dress, nor even her breath. Silently, she approached him and took his hand.
"Then we will stand ourselves, and woe betide any who threaten this sanctuary," she said.
But even as she spoke, the temple began to rumble. Link raised his sword in front of him, preparing to defend himself, but he knew somehow that this was a foe that would not fall to mere swordplay.
With a crash, all the windows collapsed inward, and gallon upon gallon of sand poured through. In seconds, it had spread to every corner of the room, and it piled steadily higher.
Hand-in-hand, Link and Zelda fled to the entrance, the doorway that opened into the black abyss outside, but their pace was slow. The sand had risen past their ankles, and it moved with a force so great it threatened to knock them from their feet.
"The sword! You have to drop the sword. It's slowing us down," Zelda pleaded, but he could no more let it go than he could let his arm fall from his body.
Still the sand continued to pour in. When it rose past his boots, it burned the exposed skin of his calf. He stumbled, flinging out his hands to catch himself as he collided with the ground. He fought to raise himself up, to keep his head above the engulfing flow.
Zelda tugged at his arm, but the sand had him. His hands were stuck to the ground, frozen in place by the burning particles. As the sand began to cover his shoulders, he raised his head, refusing to be submerged while he could still fight it.
But when he looked up, the walls of the temple were gone. There was instead a mountain, carved into the face of a woman. As he watched, the mountainside cracked, and the stone fell away, and from the ruins emerged the lady whose face it once bore. She stood tall as the mountain itself, stern, with dark eyes that seemed eager to devour. As the sand piled higher and higher, and at last rose to his face, the last thing he saw was her thin smile.
Link's first waking feeling was relief at not actually drowning in sand.
His second was confusion. He lay beneath a thick comforter that smelt of lilac, and below that a layer of sheets that felt as soft on his skin as a wisp of cloud. This was not his bed. This was not his room.
Understanding came in a trickle. The previous night's storm had been quite fierce indeed, and Nabooru had not been keen to drive in it. One phone call later, Kafei had consented to let him stay the night at the castle.
Link sat up and stretched. His heart still raced too fast to allow him to sleep again. Some water, perhaps, might soothe him, but he was not sure he wanted to go wandering through the strange castle's many passageways alone at night.
The door crept open. A sliver of light from the hallway cast itself into the room, a shadow passed through it, and the door closed again.
"Who's there?" Link mumbled, still somewhat groggy.
"It's me," Zelda said. "Turn on your lamp."
He reached over to the nightstand he remembered being beside his bed. His hand grasped a ridged pole and felt its way down to the base.
"There should be a switch on the bottom," Zelda said. Her footsteps pattered closer.
He soon found it. Link winced in anticipation of the harsh light, but when he opened his eyes, there was only a soft glow emanating from the bulb.
Zelda sat down at the edge of his bed and handed him a chilled glass.
"I always enjoy iced tea after a nightmare," she said.
"Was I screaming?" His face warmed. He had thought no one had known. He wondered if he often screamed in his sleep, if his roommates had had to put up with it.
"I've been dreaming, too," Zelda said. "A flood of sand pouring through the windows of an abandoned temple."
"You too?" He sat up straighter. "What else have you dreamed?" It did not make sense. Sharing a dream should not have been possible, but there was no other way for her to have known what he saw.
She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. It felt odd to see her without a smile. When he saw her face, wreathed in the darkness of the room, he thought he could see a hint of the presence, the wisdom that seemed so natural in the great princesses of legend. On her, however, it seemed alien. The Zelda he knew was not so plagued with concern.
"I dreamed of you," she said. "Since June."
A chill ran through him. He looked away, down into his glass of tea. He knew the legends as well as anyone, and he did not like what she implied.
"How-" he began. He was not sure how to finish. How did you know you dreamed of me? How did we come to be friends? How do you know the dreams mean anything? "Just… how?" he said at last.
For a moment, the corner of her mouth turned upward in a weak smile. She reached a hand out toward him, hesitated, then brought it back to her lap.
"Luck," she said. "Or maybe the Goddesses arranged it. I spent all summer looking for you at one orphanage or another, but it was really just an accident that I stumbled into in that coffee shop."
The pieces slammed together all at once. She had seen him in Cuccos and Coffee, and the very next day a family had come in and adopted him, after years of being ignored.
"Kafei didn't really want me, did he?" Of course not. Why would he have been that hopeful? He tried to hide the disappointment, but tears had already started to moisten the corners of his eyes. He knew he was being stupid, that even with the princess's intervention he still had a better life than he had ever known, but it didn't matter. The acceptance he had felt had been a lie. He wondered if even Zelda's friendship was genuine, or if he was just some imagined tool.
Again, Zelda reached out a hand, but stopped when he retreated from it.
"They had already been talking about adoption. And Anju, I believe, thinks that it was Kafei's idea."
He forced himself to sip at his tea. The cool liquid did help a little bit. He had not realized how thirsty he was until he began to drink.
"I hate having to do this," Zelda continued. "People just shouldn't be used like that. But I had to. We have to be ready."
"Ready for what?"
"I don't know. But it's coming, whatever it is."
He set the cup down on the nightstand and slid to his feet, relieved, at least, that he had decided to sleep in his running clothes. He walked back and forth across the room, trying to grasp what Zelda was saying. He was worried about his ability to pass Algebra, and now she wanted him to become the Hero of Hyrule.
"How do you know?" he said. "Even if these nightmares are the sign of some threat, how do you know I'm the hero?"
"I don't. I can't be sure until I see the Triforce of Courage rest on the back of your hand. But when I saw you, it felt right. And if that's not enough for you, you just called a storm last night."
"Coincidences happen," he said. If she had asked him about the storm yesterday, he would have told her that he felt something in the song, that maybe there was something weird going on. But now, that didn't matter. She was wrong. He could not be the hero.
"Look, even if there is something more out there, and I somehow changed the whether with a song a I just learned, that doesn't mean I'm the hero," he continued. "He's supposed to be strong and brave and fearsome. I couldn't even summon the courage to approach any of the visiting parents at the orphanage."
"Then become strong," Zelda said. "Link, I know it's weird, and frightening, but I saw your face in my dreams. It's you, I know it is. The darkness is growing. I have felt it, and I know you feel it too. If Ganon returns with the Triforce of Power, we have to be ready for him."
She strode over to where he stood and dropped to her knees.
"Please. As the Princess of Hyrule, I beg you, for the sake of my people, give us your courage once more."
It felt so wrong to see the girl who would one day run the country on her knees before him, a pitiful orphan. He wanted to run away, out the door, out of the castle, all the way back to his new home where no one wanted anything of him except that he study hard and keep things clean. He would have done so, had his legs not been rooted to the ground. He found that he had forgotten how to move, how to speak, and he could only stare down at the princess.
"If I am wrong, then I will give you anything you want. As the Princess of Hyrule, Heir to the Triforce of Wisdom, I swear it."
"What am I supposed to do?" he said when he finally found his voice.
"I don't know," Zelda said. "I don't even know that it's Ganon we're fighting. But together, we'll figure it out. Until then, prepare. You say you are weak, so become strong." She had not moved from her kneeling position. Her arms hung down by her sides, hands resting open on the ground. Her head was bowed, her golden hair draped loose over her shoulders.
He owed her nothing. She had altered his life for the sole purpose of gaining a tool. It didn't matter that the changes were good ones; she had no right to interfere with that. He ought to tell her to keep her plots to herself. It would certainly be justified.
But as much as he wanted to spurn her, he simply couldn't. What she said made too much sense, for one. The dreams that Zelda knew about without him telling her, the storm, the rightness he felt around her, it all fit so much better if Zelda was right.
And if she was right, and he turned her down, he didn't think he could face the consequences. Several times a year, Mr. Timmons had driven him and the others to memorials, honoring those who had fallen to Ganon's various attacks. The count of those who had died was staggering, some tens of thousands all together. That had been when there had been a Hero to oppose him, and very few people had even been alive to start with. The thought of this ancient menace, loose in the modern world of millions upon millions of people, with no one to stand against his atrocities was unbearable.
"I'll do my best," he promised, though he still hoped that it all turned out to be a mistake. He did not fancy the idea of heroism, and there was always the gift that Zelda promised if she was wrong besides. Perhaps he could get a free college education out of it.
Zelda sprang to her feet and wrapped her arms around him with a force that almost knocked him to the ground.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, I knew I could count on you," she said.
She was much too close. He supposed the proper thing to do would be to hug her back, but he still hadn't quite forgiven her for using him, and he was acutely aware of her body pressed against his, and all she was wearing was a thin tank top with her bare arms stretching around his neck, and why couldn't she just back off one or two steps?
His silent plea was answered when the door swung open, and Zelda instantly detached.
"I heard voices. What-" Nabooru began. She cut herself off with a string of expletives that Link was certain he wasn't meant to hear.
"I shall take the charitable interpretation here, and assume that you have just roped him into your insane little plan," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"He said-"
"No. I am not dealing with this at two o'clock in the damn morning. Go to bed, princess."
Zelda grinned and hugged Nabooru as she walked out the door.
"You sure take your job seriously," Zelda said.
"'It's just one princess,' I said," Nabooru muttered. "How much trouble could she possibly get into?"
Once Zelda was out of the room, Nabooru shut the door and turned on Link.
"Be careful, boy," she said in a fierce whisper. "I do not know how much of what she says is real. I'm not sure I know anything anymore. But if the King of Darkness is rising once more, then Hero or not, you are in over your head. You have not tasted the desperation of the desert, boy, and I pray you never have to. Good night."
It was a long time before he fell asleep again, and when he did, his dreams were filled with the dark mutterings of a thousand dead men.
Note: School resumes on Monday, so updates will slow down for a time. I will be taking four classes in addition to my full-time job, but I will do my best to work on this story when I can.
