Chapter One

Following Fate

Smoke hovered all around her, clinging to the walls and the roof of the burning fortress. Like the heavy smoke, Raneem was locked in the confined space of her bedchamber. The girl had been right, it seemed, for a new type of war had sparked between the Hylians and the Gerudo – a war for the right to live.

They had come when the sky was darkest, well after Raneem had retired for the night. They came from the east, passed the border, killed those who were at their posts and spilled into the desert like an infestation. They brought their flag with them, the Hylian Army marching in formation, their size formidable but their going slow. Behind their lines of infantry came the things they called catapults. They used the great weapons to smash the fortress and break the Gerudos' scattered defences. The Hylians brought death and despair, just as Din had warned and just as Raneem had feared.

The Hylians had caught the Gerudo completely off-guard. By the time the surviving Gerudo scouts had spied the oncoming traffic, it was too late. The catapults the Hylians had brought with their army… they wreaked havoc on the walls of the Gerudo Fortress. It was only a matter of time until the desert children were left out in the open, the quarters they had lived in all their lives a smoking husk beside their feet.

Raneem's own bedchamber had suffered the same fate as so many others. She had been sleeping when she first heard the scouts sound the alarm. Heartbeats later, sorrow's anthem began to play. People were dying all around her and the fortress walls were exploding.

Catapult was a foreign word to Raneem. She had learned of its existence that very morning as she tried to escape her bedchamber. A huge boulder had torn through her walls and smashed her quarters to pieces. Her bed had been pinned against the eastern wall after a supporting beam snapped and came crashing down. Raneem didn't remember how she had gotten out of the way, all she remembered was the screaming.

The smoke made it hard to breathe, hard to see. Raneem bent low, avoiding as much of the ash and soot that surfaced and fell around her. She tried not to fall, for she knew that once she was down she'd never get back up.

Her head throbbed, the noise of the attack resounding against her skull. Screams of pain and disbelief and anger resounded all around her as she struggled to free herself from her chambers. The Hylians, Raneem thought to herself, her fists clenching. They did this. They did this to stop him. Raneem managed to free herself from her bedchamber, squeezing past the pile of stone that had been her wall, her belongings scattered and ruined. She sucked in a deep breath when she saw the fires, the source of all this dark smoke. The Hylians had used the catapults to break through the thick stone walls of the fortress – once they were down all it took was a few skilled bowmen and some fire arrows. The Gerudo Fortress was no stranger to flammable material; the sleeping quarters alone contained enough bedding and cloth to start a wild fire.

Someone bumped into Raneem's shoulder with enough force to spin her around. She caught sight of a young mother as she righted herself. She was cradling an infant in her arms and sprinting down the ruined corridors, stumbling a bit after her collision with Raneem. She didn't look back.

Raneem knew she had to get out of the fortress. It was only a matter of time before what remaining walls fell, and the thick smoke from all the fires would soon choke her if she did not hurry. She willed herself to press onwards, to get out of the crumbling fortress and fight the Hylians face to face on open ground. Her eyes opened, harbouring a new fire that lit up the gold of her irises. She sprinted to the nearest exit, through the east-wing corridor she'd travelled many a time to and from sparring lessons. She knew it like the back of her hand. Before reaching the exit, Raneem grabbed her sheathed glaives from their place on the shelf outside the sparring hall. She did this in one fluent movement, as graceful as a cat as she vaulted out the arched doorway.

The view outside was about as grim as it was inside the falling fortress. It stunk of death out here, and rightly so, as the Gerudo were dropping like flies. It took Raneem a moment to collect herself and draw her glaives. She turned to the first man who raised his sword in her direction. A pale, blonde man, she thought as she parried his blow with her twin blades, and not very good. Raneem's glaives arced high into the air and Hylian blood was spilled on Gerudo sand.

Raneem turned again, this time to her right. A pale man with a Hyrulean crest upon his uniform was hastily nocking an arrow, his hands shaking. Raneem ran toward him, shouting an old Gerudo war cry. By the time the man looked up he was already dead. Raneem glanced past her left shoulder and started to sprint to kill another man, but she recognised him and muscle-memory struck her suddenly. She fell to one knee in the sand before him.

"Get up, girl," King Ganondorf said in an urgent growl. "Don't you see your sisters dying? Get up!"

Raneem launched to her feet obediently, driven by years of practice. She kept her eyes low, out of lawful respect, but she did spy the great sword in Ganondorf's big hand. It was dripping with bright red blood. Raneem glanced up at her king's face.

"You're able to fight? Come with me, now." He looked across his shoulder for a second and then strode past Raneem, grabbing her wrist with his free hand. "Hurry up, girl. Do you want to die? They're slaughtering us!"

Raneem sped up, her head spinning. Ganondorf's strides were as long and strong as a stallion, and it was hard for Raneem to keep up. She looked back and what she saw spurred her feet to move faster in the opposite direction. They were going south, toward Hyrule.

The two Gerudos were panting, sprinting at a half-crouch along the south road, away from the conflict and screams. The sound of her sisters' wails pierced through Raneem's skull. The attack had happened so fast… it was as if one moment she was curled in her sleep, the next she was running for her life. The Hylian Army had struck like snakes in the dark and now they were slaughtering her people. Worst of all, Raneem knew there was nothing she could do.

It was inevitable which would be the last race standing and it was sickly unjust. Raneem was furious. Her heart was racing in her chest and she found herself speaking.

"If they wanted a fight, they should have met our blades in open battle! They're using stone beasts to hurl boulders at our walls and they're burning our home to the ground!"

Ganondorf didn't glance back at her. "They didn't want a fight, you fool, they wanted our extinction."