I'm still not sure if I like the last chapter or not. I got mixed reviews from all of you; some of you loved it, some of you weren't so sure. That, in turn, makes me not so sure. It's on my list of things to revisit and reedit, though, so if you have any input, be sure to let me know.
This is the last chapter before the big stuff. From there, maybe three or four chapters until the end. It's happening! Everything I've been waiting for since the beginning! You guys have no idea how excited I am. I'll admit that this chapter could have been better at some parts, but right now it's two in the morning and I want nothing more than to get this out to you guys and go to bed.
In other news, my birthday is today, the 18th! I'm fifteen now! That's two birthdays you guys have spent with me! Going back and rereading my old work, it was astonishing to see how much I really had grown. Thank you so much for supporting me with this story, it really means the world.
I hope you guys enjoy, because I honestly think this is the best chapter so far.
~Alyssa
Flectere nequeo superos.
….
I cannot move Heaven.
ox(O)xo
For months and months on end, the same dream plagued me every night.
No matter what I did, no matter where I was, no matter who I was with, it came back, still has horrific and dreadful as the night before. These were not like the other dreams, where it would keep going on until someone would pull me out of unconsciousness; I was asleep, and I would stay asleep for as long as it took to get to that same point in the dream…and then I woke up, paralyzed with terror and a sheen of sweat covering my forehead, expected to face the next day like nothing had ever happened.
I began to dread going to sleep as I battled through each day, watching her grow bigger and bigger with his child and then watching her die each night. Once I tried forgoing sleep entirely, and managed to make it four days without fail before I collapsed from exhaustion.
I grew further and further apart from the Glaive as the weeks passed. I was so wrapped up with the terrors of my nights that it never occurred to me to go see them, and they never once came to see me. Archer and Wolfe and the rest of the Sheikah made attempts, but after weeks of being snapped at they stopped trying. Only Kassia remained by my side, either oblivious or intentionally ignoring my irritable attitude and the increasingly growing dark circles under my eyes.
After a time, the nightmares began to become bearable. I could sleep now, and I could function like a normal being in the days. There was a peace, almost. During my time off I would go into town with Archer, send Wolfe with a ribbon or a book for Linden. I smiled. I laughed. I might have even been happy.
Until the day that she went into labor and hearing that her child had been stillborn.
I was with Kassia when I heard, walking back to my bedroom in the castle when the guard posted outside her chamber thought to let me know.
"Lady Impa told me to inform you to leave her Highness to her grieving, but to report to normal post as usual." He said, as if I had ever so much as spoken to 'her highness' since becoming her guard. I would have rolled my eyes if my mind weren't a million miles elsewhere, the horrific déjà vu of the situation stealing the breath from my chest.
Just dreams. I told myself, trying and failing to steady my thoughts with a deep breath. Not real. They're just dreams.
Just dreams, though? The other part of my mind argued. The voice was just a dream, too.
That is, until it wasn't.
And then I almost killed a man with the entirety of Castle Town watching.
I will get my revenge, the voice had been telling me from the beginning. He showed me my revenge. He had been showing me my revenge every night since I had won the tournament. The first part of it, her child dying, it had already happened.
Post, the mirror that I had broken all those months ago in the Vera Ostium had read.
Post.
After.
Future.
…Just remember this above all, warrior, take heed
Before thou take this threshold's lead
Whatever you see here is set hard in stone
Fate cannot be manipulated by will of thy own.
Exercise while you can, this will so great
To escape the horrors of thy own fickle fate…
The voice, that creature in the mirror, whatever it was, had somehow shown me what was to come. An inevitable future, locked into place and unchangeable by any means of mine.
I would get my revenge, he had promised. This was my future. My fate.
The only thing to do now would be to meet it.
I stopped walking a few feet before we reached my door, grabbing Kassia's hand and pulling her to a halt.
"Kassia," I started, but the word sounded far too much like 'goodbye' for me to trust my speaking.
She opened her mouth to say something, but I shook my head once, biting down on my lip. "Never mind." I muttered quickly, starting towards my bedroom.
"Hey," She said abruptly, and I hesitated, turning around and raising an eyebrow in question. She closed the few steps that distanced us, taking my hands and raising her head to meet my gaze.
Brown met blue.
Suddenly, we were back in Noamas, on the balcony outside my bedroom with my ocarina in my hands and my heart shattered in my chest. She had made me forget, picking me up and stitching together the broken bits of the boy I once was, piece by piece until I could almost recognize the face that stared back at me in the mirror. She taught me how to smile, how to laugh, how to love all over again, after I swore I never would. It had all started on that balcony, in the depths of those brown eyes where I found something I never knew I needed until it was there.
It was there in her eyes now, that strange indescribable something that almost brought tears to my eyes because all of sudden I knew exactly what it was.
It was trust.
It was dependence.
It was devotion.
It was everything that I had longed for once upon a time, because it was everything Zelda was not. I wanted to be depended on. I wanted to be devoted to. But Zelda was willful. Spirited. Strong. She knew what she wanted and didn't need me to get it for her. If she was able to wield the Master Sword, she probably would have saved Hyrule herself.
And though that was the exact opposite of what I wanted, it was that strength, that fire inside her that made me love her.
Her father had been murdered. Her kingdom was in ruins. Her entire life—everything that she had ever known—had been destroyed, and she wasn't even allowed to use her own name.
But did she complain? Did she cry? Did she fall into my arms and beg me to rescue her, to save her country?
Not once.
She never needed me. Not like Kassia did.
And Goddesses, I loved her for it.
"I love you, you know." Kassia said, going up on her tiptoes to kiss me gently on the lips.
I wound my arms around her waist, pulling her as tightly as I could to my chest and pressing my face into her mess of auburn curls, breathing in the scent of her.
I used you, I wanted to tell her, wanted to confess all the times I had laughed with her and held her and kissed her, picturing another in her place. I lied, all those times I told her I loved her, when I asked her to marry me. You were just a distraction. You were loyal and dependent and devoted, but that wasn't what I wanted.
I wanted her, her strength and her fire, and since I couldn't have her I latched to what was most convenient, can't you see that?
But how could I possibly tell her that? This would likely be the last time I would ever see her; there was no way, once I got my revenge, I would escape the castle with my life. I couldn't watch her face crumple, couldn't see the betrayal in those eyes that had always been full of an unwavering love and loyalty that I would never be able to comprehend.
It was Nox that loved her, but Nox had never been strong enough. It was time for him to die, and there was only one person left that he had to leave behind before it was done.
And I was too much of coward to tell her the truth she deserved.
"I'll see you later," I murmured after a long moment, pulling myself away, my lips pulling up until the fakest smile I had ever produced in my life.
"Later," she agreed, squeezing my hand once and walking away in the opposite direction.
I got to my room, and as soon as I closed the door behind me I sank to the floor, pulling my legs to my chest and resting my head on my knees, trying my damndest not to cry.
She loved me, she said.
Of course I knew.
I just wished it was enough.
ox(O)xo
I waited until it was dark.
It was just past midnight when I slipped back into my armor, with its hard leather body and chaps covered with a royal blue doublet emblazoned with the Hylian Insignia. My knives were stowed at my waist and in my boots, my sword slid into its sheath at my hip.
It was time.
"Egn everru oyte glliw uoy." The voice whispered into my ear, and I nodded once, a small smile forming on my face.
I would have my revenge.
Taking care to blow out the candle on my nightstand, I climbed into my wardrobe, sliding the panel and closing it behind me, letting the dark of the passage swallow me whole.
I felt along the walls to retrace my steps down the passageway, groping through the intersections and the turns until I began to hear voices, drifting through the silence from just around the bend.
"…She wasn't want I needed anyway. I need a son. An heir. And you'll give him to me."
I wasn't too late. Taking off into a run, I turned the corner, using his voice as a guide through the darkness.
"You know what they say, don't you?" He laughed, the malicious, menacing sound of it echoing in my ears. "When first you don't succeed, try, try again."
Night after night I had heard those words, watching him take her over and over and over again. Hearing them in the flesh, though, outside of my nightmares, was something different entirely. I didn't have to just take it anymore. I had had enough, and there was nothing holding me back now.
Sweeping the tapestry aside, I jumped out of the passageway, hand on my sword as I took a menacing step forward. "I don't think so." I said.
He looked up, letting Zelda drop immediately, face paling ghostly white.
She took advantage of his hesitation, pulling the shreds of her bodice up over her chest and backing away as quickly as she could to where the body of her child was, underneath the chair.
A second later, though, Lucien had recovered himself, and I could just see the arrogance clouding back over those malevolent eyes of his.
"Try and stop me." He smirked.
That was all it took.
"I'll have your hea—"
I could have sworn I heard something audibly snap inside me as I lunged at him, knocking the disgusting excuse of man against the wall, head cracking against the unforgiving stone of the wall.
"YOU MONSTER." I roared as my first punch landed square on his cheek, sword forgotten as the iron plating on my knuckles broke something, though I didn't know or care what it was. He struggled in my grip, trying and failing to bring his arms up to protect his face, his feeble kicks bouncing harmlessly against the hard leather of my chaps.
Again and again I hit him, once for manipulating her father, once for all those years ago, back when she was mine and he tried to steal her from me with insults and threats, and once for every night I had to watch him make her cry, watch him kick the corpse of his daughter and rip the bodice off her dress.
"YOU. WILL. NEVER. TOUCH. HER. AGAIN." I screamed at him, accentuating each word with a blow, and I meant it. He would die, as slowly and painfully as I was capable of doing. I would hack him apart limb from limb and savor in his screams until he resembled nothing more than—
"STOP!"
A blinding light burst through the room, and before I could even comprehend what was happening the worst pain I had ever felt in my entire existence was ripping through my torso, a golden beast made of magic attacking my very core, clawing its way out of my chest.
Ripping.
Breaking.
Agony.
A terrible scream registered somewhere in my head, half-crazed and maniacal, and somehow from somewhere buried inside me I mustered the strength to reach for my sword to protect myself from the Re-Deads but there were no Re-Deads because I was in the Vera Ostium with the mirrors and I had no sword but I wasn't in the Vera Ostium because I was in Hyrule Castle with Zelda and she just shot me with a light arrow and those screams were mine.
Because I was in pain.
And I was in pain because whatever monstrous thing that was inside me was being destroyed.
For a single beat of my heart, I could feel the freedom. The clarity. The monster was gone. Dead. I was myself again. I could change my future, my fate. I was Nox, loyal and dutiful and loving Nox, who had a family and a fiancé and a life that was only getting started, should I choose to return to it. We would go back to Kakiriko, Kassia and Archer and Wolfe and Linden and Baxter and Zenith and Garrett and Finley and I. Maybe the Sheikah, Eli and Hank and Leila and Kyn and all the others would come with us. We would rebuild our home. I could spend the rest of my days with my wife, a comfortable and simple living. Maybe we would have children. And when I died, I would be known as the simple and loyal and loving Nox, who had no particular purpose, no drive or passion that he strived for, whose favorite color might have been green or blue, depending on when you asked, who still carried around a tattered piece of green cotton and a weathered yellow piece of parchment with a signature too faded to make out wherever he went. The truth would die with Nox, and that would be that. Maybe I would even be happy.
But in the next second, my purpose returned.
This Nox, this façade I had spent thirteen years living, he was not who I was.
Dammit, I was Link.
In that moment I wanted to cry it at the top of my lungs, scream it to the heavens at any Goddess that cared to listen. I was Link, the Hero of Time, child of the Kokiri and Son of the Deku Tree, friend to Saria and Malon and Epona and Navi and everyone else that I left behind, wielder of the Master Sword and awakener of the Sages, savior of Hyrule and slayer of the King of Thieves, Ganondorf, who dared threaten the land I called home. Link, who had stupid sense of humor and a jealous streak he would rather die than admit, who had a drive so strong and sure not even an army of the undead and monstrous could stand in his way, who loved viciously and lost it all, who was here now to deliver vengeance on the sole being who had taken it all away.
Yes, the voice, the monster inside me was gone. Dead. She destroyed it.
What a shame that she had killed the wrong one.
The voice had only been a distraction. A whistle-blower.
The real monster had been hiding in my heart, growing angrier and wilder since the moment it heard she was promised to another man, who had bided its time and stewed in its hatred until the moment when it could finally unleash its fury. Until it could get its revenge.
The real monster was Link all along.
And I would destroy her.
My eyes opened.
Still in Hyrule Castle, in her bedroom, with a bloodied and unconscious Lucien still in a vice-tight grip in both of my hands.
But as I turned around, something else became painfully clear.
An arrow protruded from my back, stuck deep in the junction where my arm and shoulder met, still faintly glimmering gold in the darkness. A steady stream of blood was trickling down the back of my arm, but I barely noticed the pain.
For standing just ten feet away by her bed was Zelda, eyes wild and screaming something indescribable as she stared me down, another arrow already nocked and aimed straight at my heart.
"One move and I'll shoot," She snarled, but I was so confounded that I had lost the ability to speak. Because for the first time in thirteen years I recognized the person whose eyes were burning into mine.
That fury.
That strength.
That fire that could only belong to one person in the world, someone who I thought dead for so long I had almost forgotten what it looked like.
But now she was here.
And she had only one other thing to say.
"Link.
Put him down."
BOOM. I WENT THERE.
WEREN'T EXPECTING THAT WERE YOU.
NOT SO SOON? ONE MORE CHAPTER TO GO?
HA.
THINK AGAIN.
(Review or maybe I'll just give up on this story now)
(Just throw it into the trash never to be seen again)
(You don't want that, do you?)
(And guess what we have an interlude next)
(cackles manically)
In all seriousness, maybe it was because I wrote the majority of this chapter from midnight to five in the morning, but this is some of the most powerful stuff that I have ever written in my life. I'm so proud of this, it's not even funny. And it only gets better next chapter.
See you then.