16: Silk
He was made to be thrown away, but he had never expected to burn.
The pale flesh he wore was not his own.
Sheik claimed an existence of blurred lines and slimly hidden cracks, drifting across the miasma of a hazed mind split in twine. His spirit was worn like a mask to hide a woman's face, brought to being by the regrets of his mother and the necessity of a child who would replace him.
He shielded his jealousy from the ever curious slivers of her consciousness, whenever it dared to breeze his too intimately. She lived and breathed yet, this crafty Princess he harboured, and he had sworn she would continue to do so under his protection.
But in borrowed mortal things came sensations he had long forgotten.
He coveted them, and privately, wished the shadows of this world would not recede. In the darkness of his soul, born of it as he seemed to be, Sheik knew he would be content to possess his charge for the rest of her days, until her bones lay brittle and forgotten upon a battle field as his once had.
He had pushed Zelda back and out of the world's reach for so long, cordoned in the sanctuary he provided. She allowed the crystalline blue of her eyes to be eclipsed by the stoic crimson, rusted and stale with the bloodstain of Hyrule's history in them. Zelda peered through the veil like a child at their window, clutching chubby fingers at the curtains to hide as they watched the strangers outside. With every day, Zelda seemed to withdraw further inward, weary of the strangers she saw. There was only one face she truly searched for among the bleak and haggard denizens of Hyrule.
Fevered searching waned to become patient watchfulness. With each doubt came a small step back. Her disappointment slowly pulled her further away from her window, until finally she had all but stopped, left to sit by it mournfully in the slim chance something may one day catch her eye.
How easy it would be for him to snatch the rope that held her curtains open, blinding her from the light and stealing away that sorrowful vision, and leave her to finally rest in the darkness.
Seven years had tempted him as her despair grew stronger, and her hopefulness had faded. Perhaps it was best for her to slip away into the realms of the dead from whence he came, beyond the reach of any who would exploit her or do harm.
How simple it seemed, after so long spent waiting for salvation, that her destruction might better deliver her from evil. There was so little of her left, flickering dim like a misplaced ember aside a roaring flame, kept alive simply by the heat of it.
But to his flame, a moth was soon drawn.
The Hero kept his distance from the Sheikah at first, furled wings covered in the dust of seven years slumber—much like the Princess, he too viewed the world from behind an adult's eyes, nothing more than an unsure child behind a curtain.
He could feel it then, as the quiet—and until then, subdued—corner of his mind began stirring once more. Zelda had awoken from her own slumber it seemed, and Sheik felt her fingers clutching tightly to the curtains once more as she spied the subject of her many dreams.
The ember glowed bright, and the Hero must've caught sight of it, for upon their second meeting, blue eyes had hardened with determination. The cocoon was unravelling as the moth spread its wings, growing bolder about the fire it chased.
A trace of silk followed his path as the Hero left such childlike things behind.
It was in the fiery mouth of a volcano that he fluttered too close, and the heat of it must've caught Zelda's ember alight. She burned brighter with every glimpse of the boy's face, and Sheik was soon rivalled by the fire he had threatened to douse.
The thread of fate had begun to entangle his flesh, pure and untainted, winding about his form as the moth circled too near.
The lithely toned muscle he bore began to soften. The mottled scars of a warrior were soon lost upon a sea of pale, untainted skin. The callouses hidden by bandaged fingers wore away and receded back into the slender, smooth digits of her hand.
When finally the moth came upon the flames to burn, they stood within the halls of the Temple of Time once again. The thread that bound him had been set alight by their collision, burning down like a wick to melt the wax away into nothing. He was nothing more than a candle to her, and he always had been.
How could the rough weave of cotton and canvas the Sheikah wore ever compare to the fine silk of a Princess, her fraying edges tended by such a dutiful moth as the Hero?
He watched them through the window of her eyes, clutching tightly at the burning curtains.
Zelda's hand was silent as it slowly drew the rope away to let them fall closed.
Sheik welcomed the darkness that came.