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Link flexed the fingers of his Zonai hand and tried to remember the last time he'd obtained a Light of Blessing. If he didn't need the powers that came with it, he would take the whole limb off just to make it stop hurting. Would he still be her knight, then? He had the vague sense that someone had trained him to fight lefthanded before the Calamity, but as usual, he couldn't recall who.
It didn't matter. He could still close his fingers around his broadsword and draw it forth, stepping out into the hollow heart of the Dueling Peaks.
Ganondorf's imposters had all been empty and cold-eyed and alien. The woman waiting inside the metal cage was different. She wasn't trussed up in that white Zonai dress Link knew she would hate. Instead she wore her beloved Champion's colors and dove-grey cloak, her hair clipped back from her face and shining like a golden halo in the morning sun, looking just like the day he'd lost her.
And she was smiling at him. It was the wrong smile, girlish and carefree, not the marvel Link had kept tucked into his heart as far back as he could remember. Of course the enemy could never understand what it meant to survive what she'd survived and emerge glowing on the other side.
"Oh, Link!" she trilled. "You came to save me!"
The voice was wrong too. So was her unguarded posture. Even if Link had never found that pool of tears on the Akkala shoreline—the last gift she left him as she ascended, screaming, to the sky—he would have seen straight through this façade. Yet he found himself rooted to the spot even so.
"Well, aren't you going to get me out of this cage?" the imposter wondered.
Link did not move.
"You're him, all right. Blond and dumb as rocks!" She twirled away in a sunburst of crimson magic and reappeared at his side, still grinning, the choppy golden hair he'd cut himself brushing the hood of her cloak. "Don't you have anything to say, Link?"
Her fingers slid around his Zonai wrist, burning everywhere they touched.
Whatever her intention, she went flying before she could execute it, slamming into the bars of the cage and sliding to the ground in red Yiga leathers. Her two companions burst out of hiding and charged.
Instead of retreating like they wanted, Link barreled forward recklessly, sliding right past one Yiga's guard and falling upon the other. His sword flashed up—hooking through the center of the Demon Carver—then down, raking across the man's arm and wrenching the weapon from his grasp in one movement. Kicking his legs out from under him for good measure, Link whirled to ram through the last Yiga's attack with his shield, sending them both tumbling to the stone, his fist connecting with that masked face again and again.
Only Penn's arrival brought him back to his senses. Link lurched away and let the Yiga scurry off, clutching at his shaking, gloom-cursed hand. That's not me, he thought in horror. I'm not cruel. Zelda, I don't know who I'm becoming without you.
"You all right, partner?" Penn asked, looking Link up and down as he handed over a pouch of Rupees.
Link nodded blankly, but he sat there a long time after the Rito left, wind threading its cold fingers through his loose hair. He thought of a warm bed, a slow morning, a body that didn't hurt all the time, and Zelda sleeping safe and sound beside him.
Finally, he gathered the courage to touch the ring on his second finger.
Mineru appeared in a shower of blue-green light, the limbs of her construct clinking as she faced him. "Yes, Link?"
"Dr—draconification," he said, stumbling over the big word in his small voice. "You called it forbidden. That means…she wasn't the first."
"Or so the stories would imply," Mineru agreed. "The details have been lost to time."
Link had always suspected the dragons were far from mindless beasts—Naydra had even lingered at the Spring of Wisdom as if to thank him for freeing her from Malice. Yet she, Dinraal, and Farosh circled Hyrule endlessly and pointlessly, never resting, never going anywhere. Had they been people once, too? Had they made the same sacrifice as Zelda?
Clutching his legs to his chest, he looked up at Mineru and voiced the question he'd been avoiding for weeks: "Can it be reversed?"
"Oh," she sighed, her metal face emotionless, her voice full of grief. "I'm sorry, Link, but…not to my knowledge."
He hid his face in his knees.
"She was certain of her choice," Mineru told him gently. "She told me that she had more faith in you than in anything else."
A river of agony flowed from Link's right shoulder to the tips of his fingers. He made a sound at the back of his throat, choking on the brutal reminder of those final, gasping moments beneath the castle, when he'd let Zelda fall into a place of no return.
He hadn't even gone to see her, except as an insect on the earth while she soared far above his head. Link had faced his own death; he'd faced the Calamity that caused it; he'd faced the shattered remains of Hyrule and found his place in it, even after losing so much else. But he truly and fundamentally did not think he could face this.
Nonetheless, he would have to. Over a century ago, Zelda had collapsed in the ashes of their burning kingdom and told him she'd sacrificed her childhood for nothing. He could not let the same be true of her humanity.
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The Light Dragon screamed, twisting violently enough to throw him off his feet. Link clung to the sword he'd been born to wield and smothered the echoing protests of his own heart.
"It's me!" he cried out, the deafening wind swallowing his weak voice. "It's me, Zelda, you can let go—"
She silenced him with another roar. By some desperate miracle his boots met the soft earth of her golden mane. Even the perfect shape of the Master Sword's hilt felt like nothing under his nerveless Zonai fingers, but there was another sensation: that of the sword reaching for the lost phantom of his real hand, reaching for the center of him.
And Link was ready. He was still ready, no matter how much it hurt.
Despite his terrible strength, he tried to be gentle—yet still Zelda screamed and writhed, and her pain drove the voice from him. Link poured everything into the blade instead: his apologies, his precious memories, all his broken-hearted love.
She yielded, relinquishing her hold, and it was over. Link raised the Master Sword towards the boundless sky, tears sliding down his face as it passed on Zelda's final message.
By the time he opened his eyes, he wanted to burn the world down. He wanted to take her place. He wanted to tear apart everything that had ever hurt her: with this sword or any other, with his own teeth and nails if necessary. Better yet, he wanted to be back in their bed the morning before it had all gone wrong, when he still had a chance to keep her safe.
But some failures could never be undone. Link had learned that while kneeling in the sunlit waters of the Ash Swamp, remembering his own death.
He balanced between Zelda's glowing horns, sheathing the sword so he could smooth down the moon-white fur that had been parted by its blade for so long. "Thank you," he whispered shakily. "I—it's going to be okay. I promise."
She had fallen quiet, turning in a wide arc towards the Temple of Time. Link watched the green fields roll by beneath them, the tiny shapes of his brave friends at Lookout Landing, the flock of geese flying in perfect formation across the shimmering wetlands.
He loved Hyrule, he really did; for a long time, he'd considered the whole wild expanse of it his home. But that was before he'd entwined his life with Zelda's. Now home was her face lighting up as she made a discovery, her hand cradling his scarred jaw when they kissed, the certainty that he could tell her anything and she would never turn away.
Link wouldn't turn away either. Zelda was still there inside the Light Dragon's wide, frightened eyes. He knew it because he felt safe and stable and calm, everything he hadn't felt in the presence of the enemy's imposters. He sensed her the same way he sensed his phantom arm—too much a part of him to ever be truly lost.
"We're going to be okay," he insisted, wishing the words didn't feel so empty.
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After that, Link went to see her as often as he could. He cleaned her back of loose scales, shot the Aerocudas who tried to approach, and spent hours curled up in her mane, talking to her when he could manage to find words.
The best he could say was that she was aware of his presence. Sometimes her eyes shifted towards him, and sometimes his desperation sought recognition there, but the brutal truth was that Zelda had lost herself. So the sky and the silence were all they had—all they would ever have, until the end of Link's short mortal life left her alone again.
He held that thought at the forefront of his mind as he stood before the Demon King with the Master Sword in hand, amplified by its union with a piece of the Light Dragon's horn.
The enemy had knocked the Sages out like an afterthought, and his strength kept growing, even as Link's waned. Everything hurt, and his legs trembled with exhaustion, and there was nothing left for him at the end of this. Lose hope, lose the fight, someone had told him once, but he had forbidden himself hope that day in the empty place between the Dueling Peaks.
Anger, though—Link had plenty of that.
He had never been so fast or so savage. The Master Sword was afire in his hand, blazing with Zelda's sacred light. The Demon King billowed at the peak of his crimson power, but every one of his counterattacks seemed pitiful, so pitiful that Link saw fear in his enemy's eyes as he swallowed the secret stone.
Link hadn't wanted to die, the first time around. He had clung to the Master Sword, to each breath, to the sight of Zelda's wildflower-green eyes, and he'd fought so hard that he woke up a century later to find her again.
Now—trapped in the Demon Dragon's maw, bleeding along the razor's edge of its fangs—he was still fighting, because he could hear her call, and he could feel her piercing through the corrupted sky. When Link let himself plummet into the golden clouds, she caught him, like he'd failed to do all those months ago.
He pressed his face into her mane as she shot upwards. His sides were wet; his head spun; he tasted gloom with every breath he took. The enemy stormed after them, an undulating nightmare of mindless rage. He was always so big, and they were always so small.
But Zelda had come for Link.
And as he rose to his feet, drawing the sword she'd forged for him, he realized he had been hoping all this time. He would go to his grave hoping, no matter how much it hurt, because he loved her too much to stop.
She caught him again and again, until their nemesis roared in final agony, until his ruination faded into the beautiful dawn, until Link—trailing Rauru and Sonia's blessing like a falling star—finally returned the favor.
At the water's edge, Zelda opened her eyes and found him. Clutching at the miracle of his flesh-and-blood right hand, Link's breath caught around a sudden terror that this was a dream, or another lie, one he didn't think he would survive.
Looking just as confused, Zelda climbed shakily to her feet, making sense of the birdsong and the clear blue sky and the shapes of the Hyrule she knew. And then she tipped her face up to the sun, letting it shine upon the smile that had saved Link from his silence, conquered the Calamity, and carved her path home to him through the millennia.
Only when they were tumbling to the grass in each other's arms, laughing and crying, did he let himself think: It wasn't for nothing.
It never had been.
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