Happy Birthday to me, happy birthday to me~ I turned fourteen on the eighteenth. The big one-four and all that jazz. –throws confetti- wooo…
(Sorry for the long wait. Something about this chapter just refused to work with me and there were some kinks in the storyline I had to work out. Once a week schedule should resume after this)
~Alyssa
Heu damna emergere ex incidere in peius.
….
Alas, I emerge from one undoing to fall into a worse.
Now
For several years, I lived remarkably happy with my family.
Life was simple, but I preferred it that way. There were no people to save, no kingdoms to rescue, no danger around each corner, living day by day. Just the wonderful simplicity of being a small town boy; going to the marketplace to swipe our dinner, playing ball in the postage-stamp yard with Archer, teaching Linden how to read and write. There was something comforting in knowing what to expect, day after simple and happy day.
The wounds of my past slowly scabbed over, fading away to scars that I barely noticed anymore.
Yes, sometimes they still ached, like when Archer came home with yet another girl on his arm (I believe at this age it was Fallon) and asked me why I hadn't even tried to find one myself, or when the owners of Lon Lon Ranch came to town and the redheaded farmgirl hadn't even spared me a glance. But these instances were few and far between.
For ten years I had found respite, and for some reason it didn't occur to me that it would be taken away from me. Of course it couldn't be that easy. Of course I couldn't be happy for this long. Over the course of a day my life went from a peaceful paradise to a living Hell.
This was the true start of my second adventure. The beginning of the end.
I can remember like it was yesterday.
ox(O)xo
Then
"Ow!"
I pulled the brush through Linden's tangled brown locks again, trying to be gentle as her hair snarled around the bristles, effectively trapping it on her head.
"Well," I said, giving the brush a sharp yank. "Maybe if you hadn't decided to roll around in the mud even though Zenith told you not to, it wouldn't have gotten all dried up and hard like this and your hair wouldn't be a nightmare."
Linden crossed her arms, her lower lip pushing out as she glared at me adorably. "I was pretending to be a pig."
I closed my eyes, trying to quench my laughter as to not condone the ridiculous, albeit endearing, behavior. "Why?"
"Because," And though her face was away from me, I could just see the rolling of her eyes, her tone superior as if this was an obvious fact and I was too slow for not understanding. "I wanted to play princess but Archer said he wouldn't pretend to be the knight in shining armor and there can't be a princess without a hero to save her and get married to and live happily ever after."
I paused in my brushing, paralyzed with shock at her words.
There can't be a princess without a hero, she said.
But there can. Outside of fairytales princesses don't marry their knights in shining armor like they promised. They send them back in time without so much as an explanatory word, spitting on all their hard work and pain, wrenching life as they know it away. In the real world there are no happily ever afters for the heroes. Just pain and suffering and devastation and heartbreak. "Silly Linden," I wanted to say, patting her head just like when she would make a particularly ridiculous statement so far from the truth it was comical. "But everyone knows that's only in stories."
"One day I'm going to be beautiful, just like Princess Zelda," she chirped, swinging her legs back and forth. "And a prince is going to come and take me to his castle, and you and Archer and Baxter and Zenith and Garrett can all come, and I'll be in charge and I'll never have to eat my peas even though Baxter says they're good for me."
I bit down on my lip at the mention of Zelda, the pain preventing me from thinking about doing something stupid like crying. I forced myself to keep my amused smile on my face, pulling the brush through another strand of hair as she continued to jabber, my small episode unnoticed.
"And the wedding is going to be so magical because there'll be flowers and I'll have a pretty white dress and everyone in the kingdom will be there and do you know what it's like to be in love, Nox?"
My jaw immediately clenched, my bottom lip crying out in protest as it was caught in between. Blood filled my mouth, and I almost gagged on it, choking on the surprise of an honest, innocent question asked by a curious child.
"Nox?" she asked, turning around, confused by the pause in the brush strokes.
I planted another smile on my face, smoothing a wayward strand of hair back in place. "Yes?" I asked, ignoring the disgusting taste of the blood as it welled in my mouth.
"Do you know what it's like to be in love?" She repeated, and there it was again, that look, with the big green puppy dog eyes and the batting of the eyelashes.
I didn't want to lie to her. But I had kept my other life a secret for ten years now. How could I give it all up to a little girl who couldn't even fully understand?
"I… I think it's bedtime." I said, setting down the brush on the dresser.
"Nox, I wanna know! Tell me! Pleeeeeeease…" Her jutted-out lower lip began to quiver, and it took all of my will not to spill it all right then. She was adorable, and she knew it. Adorable and manipulative and relentless.
I held out for a few more seconds, but the misery in her glistening eyes was the worst torment I've ever felt. Well, maybe the second worst.
"Fine," I snapped, letting out a big, dramatic sigh, but then paused. "…It's a bit hard to explain, Lin."
"Try," she insisted, climbing up to sit on my knee.
How to explain without scarring her? How to explain without spilling my past? How could I make such a complex, terrible thing make sense to a child?
My eyes fell upon the vase of flowers on the dresser, and I had an idea. I plucked a rose from the top, carefully placing it in front of her curious face.
"Love is like a rose." I began, almost a joke, the irony of the cliché not getting past me. "It's beautiful. Feel." I instructed her, and she lifted her fingers to stroke the satin petals. "It's soft and it's sweet like the smell, and there's many different layers: family love, friends love, a lover's love. But sometimes people get so distracted that they don't see what's underneath."
Pushing her hand gently away, I lifted up the flower so the petals were out of sight, the stem only in her vision. "Thorns," I said, tapping my fingertip to a particularly sinister looking barb.
"Many people want to find love like they want to smell a rose," I lifted the blossom to her nose, letting her smell the sweet fragrance. "But when they're not careful, they end up getting pricked."
I pressed my finger down on the sharp prickle, hard enough that a small drop of blood bloomed around it.
She held up my bloodied finger, a strange look of awe on her face. "Did you get pricked, Nox?" she asked, her voice quiet and solemn.
So she was capable of understanding. Hopefully, then, she would learn from me and protect herself.
"Yes," I said, trying to keep the sadness and pain out of my voice. This wasn't a joke, not anymore. "And I haven't touched the roses since."
"And neither should you." I muttered. I lifted her off my lap and led her to the door, tossing the flower back onto the dresser. "It's better that way."
ox(O)xo
BANG.
I bolted upright from the bed, the force of the action sending my forehead slamming onto the beam of the bed above me.
"Farore!" I cried, clutching at my head. "What the Hell?"
A stream of profanities were muttered as the shock wore off, leaving me grumpy, in pain, and very much awake.
"Linden sleeps right across the hall, you know." Archer said, his voice heavy with sleep. "If she has a mouth it'll be your fault."
I closed my eyes, pressing against my temples and trying to fight off the growing throbbing in my head. "You didn't hear that?"
"All I heard was you swearing to high Heaven." He said, swinging over the side of his bed and glaring down at me disapprovingly. "And like I said, I-"
BANG.
He toppled from the bunk, hitting the unforgiving floor with a loud thump. "Argh!" He moaned, seizing his leg in a similar fashion. "What the Hell?"
"Linden sleeps right across the hall, you know." I mimicked, trying and failing to keep the smug grin off my face. "If she has a mouth it'll be your fault."
"Shut up. What was that?"
Just then, the bedroom door opened just a sliver, and Baxter slipped his head inside. In the light of the one candle, his face flickered solemn. He stared at us intently, enough so that Archer became fidgety. When he spoke, he spoke in a hurried whisper.
"I suggest that you two get yourselves geared up, and quick. Grab whatever you think's important and clear out. Only take what you can carry."
"Baxter, what's goi-" Another loud crash sounded from outside, followed by several shrieks of people. He shook his head quickly.
"That, my boys, was the sound of disaster." And with that, he was gone.
Archer and I exchanged worried glances, but shook it off immediately. I had come to recognize that Baxter was the steady voice of reason. When nobody else knew what to do, you could always count on him and his level head to think of a solution. Even when simply pulling something out of thin air, he'd make it sound brilliant – or mad. Either way, nobody dared to refuse him.
Besides, we'd been here before. Every once and a while, it wouldn't be safe to stay in Kakiriko and we'd leave somewhere else for a while. There were plenty of towns in Hyrule to house us when we needed it. We'd lay low for a time, and come back.
This made us rather efficient at clearing out.
With one quick sweep of his arm, Archer knocked the piled up belongings from on top of the chest, pulling it open and tossing me my things. He roughly shoved the chest out of the way, prying up one of the floorboards it had previously concealed.
I stepped out of my sleep clothes, securing the heavy chainmail around my chest before throwing the brown tunic over top of it, my heart starting to race with fear.
Disaster, though? Never in all my years here had he ever used that word. Threats were usually a joke to Baxter. He laughed away the police, taunted the guard and the courts. They were never something to fear.
What made this different?
I laced my boots and gauntlets with stiff actions, watching as he slipped into his leather plate. From the hole in the floor he took his weapons, sliding knives into the multiple hidden compartments that he had shown me once—the breastplate, the hips, the ankles, and the like. Once done, he threw me my sword. I slung the sheath over my back.
"What do you think's going on?" I asked as he climbed up to his bed, ripping the pictographs from the wall and stowing them in his uniform.
"Hell if I know. I haven't seen Baxter that serious in my life." he said, jumping down and going to the door, taking a brief glance around the room. "Is that everything?"
"Yeah. Go check on Linden, see if she's alright," I half shoved him out the door. "I'll catch up."
He raised an eyebrow, but the desperation in my voice must have convinced him not to question me.
As soon as he was gone I was on the ground, flat on my chest as I looked underneath my bed, blindly trying to catch my fingers on my objective—a box.
After a few moments of struggling I found it, wrenching it out from underneath the bed and righting myself, sitting cross-legged with it in my lap. I lifted the lid, methodically running my fingers over the contents, as I had a thousand times before.
The soft cotton cloth of my tattered hat. The rough, crudely-made string of my slingshot. The pearly smooth surface of Saria's ocarina.
I opened the pouch on my belt, stowing them gently inside. These somewhat trivial objects from my childhood were all I had left from my other life, a painful reminder of what I had lost. Whatever the pain, though, the idea of leaving them behind was unthinkable.
Standing up from the floor, I dusted my tunic off, bounding out the door and down the steps to catch up with Archer.
The Glaive was in a flurry of action, darting around the large room, packing up things into large sacks, a very frantic air about the three adults. Another thing about them I had learned a long time ago that was thoroughly disturbing now: they never panicked. Not when Baxter had nearly been apprehended by the authorities two years ago. Not when we thought we had lost Linden in the marketplace, when in reality she had wandered less than ten feet away to look at the ribbons from the fabric man's cart. Not even when Archer didn't make it home from a mission, having bumped into a girl he fancied after it was through. What was different now? I needed to know.
Linden sat in the corner by the door, clothed in a dress with mail I had never seen before, clutching a bag to her chest. As I approached she looked up, and surprisingly for a girl just over a decade old, she wasn't crying.
"What's going on?" She asked, standing up and running to me, wrapping her arms around my waist.
"I don't know," I told her honestly. "I think we're going to have to leave here for a while, though."
"Where are we going?" She sounded excited. This was like a game to her. It was the ultimate fun, like a big game of hide and seek.
"I don't know that either. Maybe you should ask Baxter."
As if on cue, Baxter stopped his packing, slinging a mostly full sack over his back with one hand and sheathing a monstrous sword with the other. "Kakiriko's being attacked by monsters. It's not safe here. Nox, take Linden. Archer, grab one of those bags. We've gotta clear out, now."
Monsters. Ganondorf's forces. After everything I did, after everything I suffered through, it didn't matter. His people were here, in Kakiriko, making my life Hell all over again. No. This couldn't be. I told Zelda. I told her. How could she not take my word?
She lost her memories. whispered a voice in the back of my mind, always defending her. And you did seem a bit off the edge…
But whose mistake was that? Who sent me back in time? She was the only one at fault. If she had even given me a second's notice as to what she planned on doing, I could have told her the dangers, the uncertainties. She should have realized there were repercussions, but she didn't, and now I'm paying the price.
She took my life once, and now she was taking again. I had just settled down, and she was tearing me up. Why, for the love of the Goddesses, why could I never life in peace?
I didn't realize I had frozen in place, nails digging painfully into my palms, until Linden tugged on my sleeve. "Come on, Nox." she said.
Shaking my head once, I did as I was told, picking her up and shifting her around to cling on my back, leaving my hands free. She rested her head on my shoulder, pressing her doll in between us.
"Hurry on, now!" Baxter rumbled, heading out the door. "Let's move!"
The rest of the Glaive paraded behind him until Linden and I were the only ones left. I looked back to her, plastering a reassuring smile on my face. "You ready?" I asked.
She nodded into the crook of my neck, unconsciously strengthening her grip.
I blew out the remaining candle on the well-worn table and hurried out the door, turning my back on my home.
Leaving it behind in the dark.
ox(O)xo
Grabbing his sister roughly by the arm, the boy tore out of the burning dining hall, tripping over the too-long hem of his new pajamas.
"Hadlea! Move!" he yelled, fighting the urge to break down into a ball on the ruined marble floor, screaming bloody murder at the things he had just seen.
The Moblins. So many of them. All at once.
They were just having a routine supper—well, admittedly, not so routine. His father had come home late again from wherever it was he went all day, so late that him and his sister were already in bed, a fact that he cursed as he watched his sister stumble over her bare feet again as she dodged a falling piece of Din-knew-what from the ceiling.
He hadn't even apologized, a fact that had severely irritated him up until a few minutes ago.
Because it didn't matter anymore.
Because he was dead.
The Moblins had broken through the grand windows of the hall with their great spears and disgusting pig-creatures and torches, their attention immediately focused on his father.
He hadn't even had a chance to scream.
Bringing his vacant fist to his mouth and biting on it to prevent from crying out, he threw open the great doors of his manor home, urging her through before throwing them shut behind him, flying down the steps four at a time and off the grounds of his home.
His home, Kakiriko, was in a similar state. Fire was everywhere. Men, women, children were scrambled, screaming for loved ones and tripping over one another. Several men were trying to break down the front gates to escape, only succeeding in letting more of the terrible monsters in.
All those people. All his people. They were as good as dead, just like his father.
Gone. Dead. Murdered.
Hadlea took his hand, pulling him in the opposite direction of the carnage, sprinting down a back street with her silver silk nightgown flying out behind her, giving her the appearance of a fleeing spirit.
He followed close at her heels as she ducked down an alleyway, nearly knocking her over after she stopped very abruptly, her face immediately draining of what little color it had left from the run.
"Wolfos!" she gasped.