Storms Without Rain
Riju polished her scimitars by the light of the moon. She enjoyed the ritual of the act, the repetition of running the curved blade against oiled waterstone. Though fragile, requiring maintenance, Gerudo scimitars sliced more finely than any other.
By the window, her intruder munched on a hydromelon.
He had paraglided in through the window. Thinking him an assassin, she had nearly skewered him. The Champion of Hyrule seemed to delight in extraordinary entrances – she still remembered him entering the shelter from the floor, head half-peeking out of the sandbrick, the rest of him swimming up like a Molduga. The younger Gerudo children were beginning to believe all voe could do that.
"Did you steal that from the kitchen again?" Riju said. "They'll give it to you if you just ask, you know."
Link spat out the hydromelon seeds on the floor of her bedchamber. He grinned, pink melon flesh staining his teeth.
Riju flourished her scimitar, sheathing it. Earlier in the day the blade had speared open the belly of a Gibdo.
She plopped down next to him, resting her head against the cool stone. It was desert summer, which meant even the nights were hot. The evanescent moon hung from a sky the color of a bruise. Link wore traditional Gerudo voe armor: hair in a top knot, puffy sirwal trousers, a jewel-studded bracer on his left arm that bared his chest and abdomen. The low lamplight sent shadows dancing across the striations of his muscles. If her people knew she kept the company of a half-naked voe this late at night, they would hold a festival.
Buliara's implications that she find a husband had become less subtle of late.
"I'm tired," Riju confessed. "I don't know how much more of today we can take."
A fine stitch ran across Link's bicep. The Gibdo attack had surprised them all – after Ganondorf's defeat? The strange skeletal monsters boiled out of the sand, overrunning a Gerudo Town that had finally begun to enjoy a well-deserved peace. The first fear that seized Riju a year ago had seized her again – the failure, the panic, the retreat, the dead weight of the realization she had failed her people.
In the end, discipline prevailed. The civilians once more fell back to the shelter as her warriors fought with weapons of fire and lightning. Swords to the east, spears to the west. Cannons boomed from the palace walls. Riju's arm had gone numb from calling down lightning, glassing the bloodied sand.
And Link…she remembered him in whirling death, Master Sword in one hand and a lightning spear in the other, exultant, alive, the same Champion a hundred years ago as today –
The barks of a sand seal cut the night silence. Riju realized she had been staring.
Link tossed his hydromelon rind out the window – horrendous manners, really, Riju kept forgetting he was a commoner, son of an unlanded knight, not even low nobility. He spoke in a voice rusty from disuse, soft and a bit scratchy with a hint of melody.
We'll beat them.
Riju sprung up, dusting dust from her sari. She uncinched the circlets holding her braids. Her hair unspooled to her shoulders, always a relief after a difficult day.
"I'm going to bed," she said, pointing an accusatory finger. "And you better get out of here before my guards discover you. We've long days ahead."
Link rolled his eyes. He braced one foot against her window, hesitated, looked back – feral blue eyes met unflinching green, and Riju felt the impossible irrational urge to ask him to stay, why did you even come? – and then he was gone, the ribbons of his paraglider fluttering in the waning moon.
After the Upheaval, after the Gibdo Queen, after Master Kohga – Gerudo Town blossomed like a cactus flower, shyly peering out of its bud at a spring too bright to be real. Almost overnight, her people's greatest enemies had vanished. New trade routes flourished in wake of the old. Children overran the streets decorated with orange thistle. Street stalls sold little voe dolls with its hair in a topknot.
Riju announced the Day of Triumph, a holiday commemorating the lives lost when a madman decided the world should be his.
The Gerudo never forgot who saved them – the same sword wielded by the same hero who saved them years ago from the storms of Vah Naboris, who perhaps had saved them all, infinitely through time, reincarnations of reincarnations, if certain legends were to be believed.
Riju believed in things she could see. Stone tablets dating back thousands of years heralded Gerudo history from their first king. The most recent entry – one hundred years ago, carved by a dull edge, the characters jagged and unformed – read, Our doom was of our own making.
But the past was behind them. Even the most pessimistic Gerudo crone couldn't imagine dooms worse than the ones that had so nearly destroyed them.
Riju enjoyed waking with the sunrise, to morning heat like an old friend. She had spent long enough underground to miss the comfort of her silk bed, of hugging her plushies like a lover (tell anyone that and she will impale you).
The war party set out in dampened mood. Trauma-hardened citizens watched from the safety of the shelter, enclosed once more in stone. Riju tried to shake off the feeling she was leaving her citizens entombed.
She set out with Link and almost the entirety of her warriors. Atop the royal sled, pulled by four sand seals, she surveyed remnants of yesterday's battle: the white bones of dead Gibdo, scattered weapons already rotting in the unforgiving heat, the scent of ash. Even as they passed, dormant Gibdos stirred beneath deep sand. She ignored them. Killing bees meant nothing without torching the hive.
The Gibdos had attacked from the west, and from there the source had been easy to track – a chasm not far from the Champion's Gate. Most chasms had closed following Ganondorf's defeat, but this one still spewed Gloom. Her scouts spied enormous shadows moving across the sands and swore they heard the beat of wings.
Sharing her sled, Link spent the morning alternatingly snoozing and munching on wildberries. He could be the most damnably lazy Hylian in existence. Of course, Link had always hated sand seals. Riju remembered his first attempts, careening into cacti, driving into sinkholes. He preferred horses, those oafish animals. Can a horse memorize a twenty-league trail to home? Can a horse hide beneath the sands and resurface when the danger's past? Can a horse smell out a truffle buried underground inside a cave?
Link laughed, mimicking a galloping motion. Next time you visit Hyrule, ride with me.
"Some of them never forgave us," Riju said as they flew across the sand. "When Ganondorf first declared war on Hyrule, we followed him. I don't know how many followed him because they believed in his vision and how many simply did so because he was our king. The Imprisoning War nearly destroyed us. We lost thousands in battle against the Hylians, Zora, Goron, Sheikah…even afterwards, when Ganondorf was finally imprisoned, they still hunted down the remnants of our tribe. In the end, we saved ourselves by hiding in the edges of the desert, out of the reach of vengeance."
Link's gaze turned skyward, and Riju knew he was thinking of Zelda, the Light Dragon, and her ten-thousand year fugue.
Toward sunset, they sheltered in the east ruins, buffering against the razor winds by hiding behind the backs of the enormous statues at Korsh O'hu. According to Link, he had once dueled Urbosa here.
Link cooked her a meal of steamed fruit, salted crab, and a wildberry crepe made from fresh milk and cane sugar. Years later, during drought seasons, Riju would dream of that night and salivate in her sleep.
He spoke of the before-times. He missed most the cities, Castle Town and Mercay Island and a dozen other names lost to time. More people walked the streets of Central Hyrule than existed now. You could eat a Goronian meat-stuffed pumpkin and finish with porgy meuniere freshly caught that morning from Zora domain, wash it all down with a cocktail mixed by a Gerudo bartender ("Of course you would most miss the food," Riju groaned). The world was smaller then, fuller.
All wiped out in a single act of monumental evil.
Sometimes Link sounded old and sad. Riju wanted to peel open his armor and deshell him like a palm fruit. He knew more tragedy than anyone living. Let us protect you, she thought and didn't say. Haven't you done enough for us?
"You two seem close," Buliara said later that night when the two of were alone. Riju shifted on her sleeping mat, trying to work out a kernel of sand from her back. Buliara sat facing the entrance of their shared tent, blocking it entirely with her massive frame, her equally massive blade resting open to the night air.
"He's saved us twice, and now he's risking his life to help us a third time," Riju said defensively.
"The Gerudo need an heir, but not desperately enough to risk breaking off an alliance with Hyrule."
Riju flushed like a sunburn. "Who I choose to marry is my decision alone."
"I only meant that there are more…available voe."
It took Riju several seconds to grasp Buliara's meaning.
"You're talking about Zelda."
"If certain rumors are to be believed," Buliara said delicately, "she's quite close with the Champion. Zelda might look upon your friendship with him the wrong way."
"I have more faith in her than that."
"We live in a tenuous peace." Buliara's shoulders tensed at some subtle change in wind, relaxed again. "The alliance between the races are brittle. With Ganondorf's defeat, little else holds us together. Remember, before the Calamity, our races didn't need Ganondorf to go the war."
It was a humbling thought, though not in the way Buliara intended. Princess Zelda – Queen now, soon to be coronated, a queen without a king (and, some skeptics claimed, without a kingdom). To Link, Zelda was more than any one individual. She eclipsed the entirety of her being. Zelda was Hyrule, she was a world, she was their future and their past. To imagine her demise would be to imagine his own suicide. Link could no more go against Zelda's wishes than tides could go against the moon.
It was love and yet it wasn't, not the type Riju wished for.
"Trust in wisdom," Riju said, closing her eyes.
"Your Highness! We're under attack!"
Riju leapt out of bed, already grabbing the scimitars sharing her sheets. The secret stone in her ear lobe warmed like a baking stone. At first she wondered how Gibdos could bypass her scouts, then she heard the telltale high-pitched laughter of the Yiga.
She dove out of her tent into a battlefield. The campground was alight, burning oil and animal hide. Between flares of roaring flame, she saw her warriors fighting the Yiga, the Yiga's dark costumes blending with smoke. Everywhere she turned she heard laughter. Buliara fought three at once, spinning her greatsword like a child's top. Overhead, some great flying machine whirred, search light illuminating the carnage, Yiga riders raining down arrows.
Where had they come from? Master Kohga was gone. The Yiga were supposed to be gone.
Link, Riju thought. Where was Link –
A flutter of ash above her was her only warning. She rolled sideways as the assassin bore down, eightfold blade nicking her arm. She lashed out with both scimitars, but the assassin had already retreated. The upside-down Sheikah eye seemed to be laughing. She lunged after him, diving through a cloud of paper talismans, lightning arcing between the tips of her blades. She grit her lips against the smell of burning tannin. They were supposed to be gone –
The ground erupted. The desert bucked her off. She landed on her back, gasping, wind knocked out of her where the Earthwake had slammed into her belly. Something sharp pierced her shoulder. Instinctively, her other scimitar sliced upward, met a satisfying stop into flesh. Laughter turned into screams. Riju jumped to her feet, snapping off the arrow shaft piercing her bicep. Better to leave the head buried than to risk exsanguination by pulling it out.
The Yiga she slashed spasmed on the sand, muscles locked from her lightning. She had no time to finish him. More assassins bled out of the darkness, sickle-blades catching the glare of a dim moon. She parried with one arm, trying to find her brethren. When had she delved so far from the circle of blazing tents?
The first hot heaves of panic welled up her chest. She fried some poor hapless footsoldier, for a fraction of a second illuminating the battlefield Stalfos-white. Even before the brilliance faded, a pair of Yiga came at her from opposite directions. She managed to dodge one blow while the other's sickle-blade carved a chunk out of her thigh. Grunting, she dropped to one knee.
The hulking form of a Blademaster approached, windcleaver held in an execution stroke…
The Blademaster turned around and began to flee.
"Duck!"
Riju heard only a crescendo whirring. The sky exploded. She was thrown off her feet, crashing against hard stone, head ringing as if she had inhaled dazzlefruit. She tried to stand, stumbled as her thigh gave beneath her, finally managed to prop herself up on a scimitar. Heat seared her skin in red, violent lacerations. Smoked clogged the battlefield.
At the heart of Korsh O'hu, surrounded by dead Yiga, burned a massive wreck of Zonai metal, and, racing toward her with his cloak still on fire – Link.
"You beautiful idiot," Riju muttered.
Grasping her hand, he pulled her up. He was grinning, Goddess Hylia, face smeared with charcoal, hair singed free of its top knot, pieces of metal embedded in his chest like needles on a cactus.
He was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
The Yiga swarmed forward, throwing themselves against the remainder of the Gerudo with renewed desperation. You'd think the destruction of their airship would slow them down, but the ancient Sheikah enemy fought with a suicidal ferocity mirrored in Riju's own soul. She battled through her wounds – somehow she felt lighter than at the start of the fight, the world sharpening into diamond clarity. Together, they had bested calamities, divine beasts. What were the ragtag remains of a dying tribe?
Link was art in motion. He wielded Daybreaker and the Scimitar of the Seven as if he rode out of Gerudo legend. Parrying attacks as if they were an afterthought, each counterstrike a killing blow, he bore the brunt of the Yiga's vengeance, vanquisher both of their master and their dark god. The bow in his hands sung arrow after arrow.
Let none forget that this is the Champion of Hyrule, chosen not based on birth or influence or any such intangible quality but on his ability to kill things.
Afterwards, as her warriors put down the last of the Yiga, Riju splayed out, bleeding onto the sand and too tired to do anything about it. Buliara rushed to her; Riju took offered potions and bandages and told her to address more serious wounds. Babi had suffered the worst. Unconscious, pale and diaphoretic, she lay without moving on a sheet of tent canvas.
Death to them all, Riju swore. On my pride as chieftain, on my family name Makeela, I declare war upon the Yiga until the last of their blasted tribe feeds the desert.
But in the silence and fatigue, it was difficult to hold onto hatred. She climbed a flat rock and watched the dunes. Why did the Yiga attack now? Were they connected to the Gibdos? Questions spun like the cycle of seasons.
The Gerudo had a saying – vas il vas. Sand upon sand. Mysteries upon mysteries.
Link joined her, nursing a bowl of stew. Stifling laughter, she declined his spoonful, the glutton. When did he even cook that? The soup smelled fragrant – tomatoes and mushrooms with something sharp, probably voltfruit. How can you eat at a time like this, she asked, and he explained that it was how he recovered after battle, as if somehow the act of eating rejuvenated him. Maybe it was a voe thing.
On a whim, before she could be afraid, she rested her head against his shoulder. His skin radiated warmth. If she pressed her lips against that curve of flesh she would taste the burning sun.
Together, not quite asleep, not quite awake, they watched the moon set on the dunes.
"We're moving forward," Riju said.
"With all due respect, Your Highness," Buliara said, "we're spent. We must regroup and come back another time."
"I agree," said Teake.
Riju's head throbbed with a fatigue headache. Her retinue had napped in fits, paranoid about another Yiga ambush or inopportune monster maraud. Fortunately, they survived to morning without further attacks.
Daylight laid fresh the wounds of her war party: half of her warriors were completely incapacitated, the other half bearing outstanding injuries. Babi had died during the night. They ringed her body with safflina flowers and settled a shroud on top for protection. The body wouldn't last in the desert. Lizalfos were notoriously drawn to the smell of corpses.
"We're more than halfway to the chasm," Riju said, sketching on the sand, "and we've learned nothing about our primary purpose – why the Gibdo attacked us. If we return now, what's to prevent the next Gibdo attack? Or a Yiga raid? Right now, our citizens are huddling in the shelter, counting on us for deliverance. I won't disappoint them."
"You can barely hold a sword," Buliara growled, gesturing to Riju's wrapped shoulder. Overnight Buliara had teased out the arrowhead, tourniqueting the wound with a strip of silk. Riju's leg had fared better after a stambulb poultice. She ignored the stinging pain and pus seeping through the bandages.
"I'm not fighting," Riju said, "merely scouting. I just want to find out the source of the Gibdos, if there's another hive."
"You. You?" Buliara gaped. "You mean to go alone?"
"The rest of you are too wounded. You said so yourself. You need to go back."
"Insanity! Your Highness, you're the one we can least afford to lose. You're not thinking this through clearly."
They didn't understand; their sorry state was precisely why they couldn't afford to return empty-handed. A second attack now on Gerudo Town, with all its warriors incapacitated, would mean the end of their race. Too many unknowns, too many questions, too many ways for a catastrophic end. They couldn't afford the luxury to wait.
The tips of Buliara's hair rose in the sudden static.
"Last I checked, I wore the Crown of Seven Swords," Riju said coldly. "Jakuva svorz? Va'saiba kaluum Makeela?"
Buliara bowed her head. "My apologies, Your Highness. I forget my place."
"At least let me come with you," Teake said.
"You're in charge of the retreat," Riju said. Buliara had fractured her leg in the attack; she moved only laboriously, using a spear-shaft as a splint. "I count on you to get my warriors to safety, Captain Teake. Besides, I won't be alone. The Champion of Hyrule will go by my side."
Link, hearing his name, perked up from his position in the shade of a cactus, where he had been playing with a Keese eyeball. Out of everyone, despite being the instigator of an explosion centered around him, he escaped the Yiga ambushed most unscathed. The wounds he suffered had somehow stitched themselves back up within hours. He tossed the eyeball from hand to hand, spun it in his palm, threw it up in the air and caught it behind his back. Riju got the impression even if she ordered a full retreat, he would've continued alone.
"I know you're worried," Riju said, gentling her tone. "I'll return at the first sign of danger."
Her warriors slung together the remains of their sleds and tents into makeshift stretchers. Those who could ride handled the reins of the sandseals; the wounded laid down, holding onto the sides to avoid being thrown off. Riju watched the dust cloud of their passing with relief. She dwelled on the joy of seeing them again safe within the walls of Gerudo Town, instead of the possibility it might never occur.
"Let's go," Riju said, but to her surprise, Link had already mounted his shield, holding Patricia's reigns. He glanced pointedly at her leg.
Riju got behind him, hugging him tight. He smelled like the earth, like the rich loamy scents of Lookout Landing when Riju visited all those months ago, when they thought the end of Ganondorf would be the end of all troubles. It was the first time in her life she had experienced rain.
The desert stretched like a tarp of gold. Noon was the desert's most merciless heat, when the air shimmered as if underwater and tempted you with mirages of lakes.
Link rambled. Alone, his natural reticence fell away into something resembling normal conversation. He even spoke about the rarest of topics: himself. Brief snatches of childhood in Hateno, the Knight Academy, the first Calamity war. Strange to believe that it all occurred a hundred years ago, that the man she held in her arms had lived through – fought – events the Gerudo elders only remembered as children.
Of course, he wasn't a hundred years old, mentally or physically. Some time ago, stargazing on the palace rooftop on a night without clouds, Link had confessed to her of his resurrection. Pieced back from ancient Sheikah technology, he wondered if any part of him remained the same. If the entirety of him was replaced, was he still Link?
It occurred to Riju that she never knew Link and probably never will. His journey had not been her journey, his struggle not her struggle; their paths had intersected and diverged, would intersect and diverge again like the minute and hour hands of a clock, forever intertwined and apart.
Nobody would ever truly know Link save the Goddess Hylia. He encompassed too much for one lifetime. Link certainly didn't know himself.
("It doesn't matter to me who you were," Riju had told him that night. "Don't we all change as we grow old? We only love who you are now.")
She smelled the chasm before she saw it, a mixture of oil and rotten meat and overly-sweet honey, a combination of every nauseating odor you could remember. This close, Gloom condensed into visible form, tendrils grasping out of the hole like fingers trying to escape.
They paused some distance away, surveying the scene. The chasm was quiet. Nothing crawled out, no towering mushrooms pillaring out of the sand.
It was early evening – had they really ridden for so long? The sun burned low and bloody on the horizon.
"Over there," Riju said, pointing.
She had missed it at first because it was ashen yellow, the same color as the sand, built so deep into the dunes it was almost buried. The shack was a ramshackle thing of wood and twine, clearly constructed in haste; in a strong sandstorm the whole thing would topple.
Painted across the door was an upside-down Sheikah eye.
Riju drew her blades. Link stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
"Of course I'm going," Riju snapped, recognizing the déjà vu in this argument. But Link was merely handing her an elixir.
She uncorked it. The mixture was pink and almost glowed. It smelled like peaches.
"Bottled fairy," Riju murmured. Farsai'viga. The breath of life. One drink would innervate a corpse, and afterwards leave it in an even worse state. Gerudo law banned its consumption. "Where'd you get this?"
But Link had left her behind, sword in hand. Riju downed the elixir. Warmth blossomed. She laughed, stopped herself. Her head felt as light as if she had drunk all night at the canteen. Once, as a child, she had snuck a taste of her parents' fleet-lotus strain; the inhaled smoke had given her a similar intoxication. Already her shoulder numbed. She flexed her leg, pleased there was no pain.
Link broke down the door. The brittle wood vaporized from his shield smash. He crashed through with a violence that nearly toppled the whole shack.
Riju followed, lightning aimed.
Dead meat greeted them.
Riju heaved, almost vomiting up the precious bottled fairy. Corpses piled into the narrow space of the shack – Yiga and Bokoblin, Gerudo and Lizalfos, Horriblins and Moblins, even the four-legged carcass of a beheaded Lynel. Someone had arranged the corpses in neat stacks the way a bibliophile might arrange books. The smell of those bodies crammed into that airless room…
Riju stumbled out of the shack. The world careened. She found herself on all fours, eyes squeezed shut, sand clinging to her sweaty palms. Some of the corpses must've been there for weeks, putrefying in the desert heat, maggots gnawing even on the bones –
Link sat down next to her. His face was as smooth and unreadable as the first day a strange-dressed voe intruded in her throneroom.
"This is evil," Riju whispered. "Ganon was evil, but at least he had purpose. This? This is madness."
Link nodded slowly, contemplatively. His face screwed into the same expression of concentration as when faced with a temple puzzle. He laid the Master Sword into the sand, point-forward, the bright blade almost humming.
Riju frowned. Her scimitars also vibrated.
At first, she thought it was a Molduga. The ground trembled, imperceptibly at first, then she felt it in her bones before the vibration crescendoed into a full-body roar. Link, too, jerked wildly, searching for the source. Staggering to her feet, she tried to keep her balance in the shifting sandscape. Below them rumbled a flapping noise like immense butterfly wings.
The chasm roiled. Gloom poured out like champagne overflowing a glass. From the darkness shot forth an enormous silhouette, buzzing like a thousand insects. Riju glimpsed six pairs of translucent wings, a segmented body, twin purple feelers. Orange pupils peered out of black sockets.
The Gibdo Queen hovered above the chasm, even the air around it vibrating as if struck with a tuning fork.
It dove towards them.
Riju rolled sideways as the Gibdo Queen screamed past. Only a moment later, when she felt wetness sliding down her sari, did she realize the thing's claws had glanced her. A deep gash cut through her abdomen, the sensation dulled by the bottled fairy.
"How is it back?" Riju shouted at Link, not expecting an answer. "Are there three of them?"
One they had killed together at the highest floor of the Lightning Temple. A second she had slain in the depths below Hyrule Castle, the Sages against their nemeses, as Link battled Ganon at the world's heart. This one was…slightly smaller, its carapace a lighter shade. The same inscrutable expression masked its face. Every part of it clicked: its mandibles, its claws, the joints of its segmented body.
Link's bow flew into his hands. He unleashed three arrows at a time, each one burying into the Gibdo Queen's carapace. By instinct, Riju raised her arm. Lightning crashed down, that old party-trick, but a beat too late. The Queen flew high, circling around them. Its jaw shot out a blast of pressurized air. Link entrenched behind his shield. The impact was like a log striking a gong. He flew backwards, coughing up sand.
The Queen thrashed its wings. The air stilled, a sudden quiet that Riju recognized as one of the most dangerous signs in the desert. She raced to Link, helping him up just as tornados opened from the sky. Sand swallowed them, wind shearing their skin. Only by clinging together and digging their weapons into the ground did they avoid being launched into the sky. When the sand cleared, they found the Gibdo Queen's hulking form charging them.
Only by twisting her body at the last minute did Riju avoid a fatal blow. The Queen's mandibles merely sheared her torso, half an inch below her heart, raw muscle glistening behind the ragged edges of the wound. Searing pain cut through the pleasant haze of the bottled fairy. The force of the Queen's charge almost knocked Riju into the chasm. She crawled up out of the edge, Gloom coiling around her. Every part of her throbbed. She raised her arm once more, but the Queen had again flown out of reach of her lightning. Link's arrows similarly fell short.
"We need to retreat!" she called to Link. Even as she said it she realized it would be futile – they would never escape this thing in open desert. Nowhere either to hide in the broad expanse of dunes. The shack had long since been destroyed, carcasses strewn across the sand. Soon monsters would follow the scent.
Their only option was to kill it.
Link had also come to the same conclusion.
"I have a plan."
He kneeled down, taking something out of his pack. She trusted him like she trusted the commandments of Hylia. Standing over him, she faced the Gibdo Queen, twin scimitars held like a prayer.
Evening approached, but in desert summer the sun stayed past midnight. She thought about Buliara and Teake, safe in the shelter, and she thought about Babi, who by now would've been interred in the catacombs, a lit candle placed on her gravestone.
Link muttered, Easier with that damn arm…
The Queen divebombed like a thrown spear. Riju watched its descent, counting down the moments to her life's end. The bottled fairy was leaving her – each second denervated her, limbs growing heavier, pain returning in pulses.
When the Queen reached its nadir, Riju struck out. Lightning crashed down, but Riju had mistimed; the bolt only clipped its wings. It shrieked, veering off course, quickly righting itself.
A second bolt of lightning struck. Brilliant flame flashed across the Queen's carapace, transmuting it bone-white.
Riju fell to her knees. Blood trickled down her nose. Two bolts back-to-back – her body numbed, vision darkening. Twin scimitars dropped from nerveless fingers. Still two bolts hadn't been enough to ground the thing – the Queen screeched, wings pumping as it climbed skyward again, tornados whirling in its wake.
And there was Link, flying after it, Zonai-green flame torrenting from the rocket he had somehow glued to his shield. He burst past cloud-cover like a droplet caught in the sun. When he reached the apex of his flight, he launched a trio of arrows into the vulnerable mask of the Queen. It flailed, growing slack, tumbling down to earth like a many-legged comet. Link fell with it – and Riju's heart in her throat. That radiant light in his hands could've only been the Master Sword. The Queen impacted the sand in a cloud of dust half a league wide, sand rising like tsunamis.
When the dust cleared, the Queen lay split in two, thorax cleaved from its head. Link unsheathed the Master Sword from the thing's neck.
Always gotta be the hero, Riju laughed, but no words came out of her dry throat. Laying on her back, she stared at a darkening sky as she lost consciousness.
Fighting off encroaching Lizalfos, Link lashed Riju's body to the sled. He traveled through the night to reach Gerudo town, where the guards found him in even worse shape than Riju. Sometime during the ride he had fallen unconscious, wrapping Patricia's reigns around his wrists like prisoner's shackles, counting on the sand seal to find its way home alone.
All this Riju found out two days later when she awoke. Buliara openly wept. You said you would be safe, she reproached Riju, who felt something like a shame. Riju replied, When are we ever safe?
For days Riju stomached only thin gruel, and it took her a week before she could physically walk around the palace with Buliara's support. By this point, the Gibdo attacks had ceased. Her people welcomed her from the open plazas of Gerudo Town. Captain Teake lead a parade through the streets, Riju carried on an open platform, each step jolting pain down her thighs. But the joy on the faces of her people healed her quicker than any medicine.
Link, of course, had recovered infuriatingly quick. As Riju lay in her sickbed, bored out of her mind, he climbed in through the window. He carried a half-eaten hydromelon.
"I should report you to Captain Teake," Riju said, biting into the melon flesh. "The thief's at our stores again."
Link responded by spreading out a banquet of egg pudding, honeyed fruit, tarts. At least these he must've cooked himself. Far off in the distance, the lights of Kara Kara Bazaar's night market winked like sunset fireflies – Riju remembered the fireflies from her last trip to Necluda, watching in wonder as night fell and stars descended to earth.
"Thank you," Riju said. "This is a bit late, but accept this as formal thanks from the whole of the Gerudo. You've saved us for the third time."
Link held up four fingers.
"Fine, four, depending on what you count as saving. Really, you're counting Kohga twice?" She took a breath. "I mean it, Link. Without you, our tribe would've been eradicated several times over."
In the purge of the Yiga camps, her warriors had found a journal detailing the final plot of the Yiga. For years, under pressure from a reunified Hyrule, the Yiga's influence had waned. Kohga's loss, followed by Ganondorf's defeat, had spelled the end of the tribe.
Down in the Depths where scraps of Gloom still survived, a Yiga footsoldier had discovered a young Gibdo Queen. Using corpses, they trained it to crave surface meat – using even their own dead so the Queen would develop a taste for flesh. But the Queen learned too well. It grew out of their control, eating its captors, using the chasm as a spawning ground. The Gibdo ran the Yiga out of their base and cut even more into their dwindling numbers. Survivors resorted to leaving bait around the chasm mouth.
The last page of the journal read:
They exiled us because they feared us. For what? For ten thousand years we lived in secrecy, victimized for a way of life they didn't understand. Never again will I hide who I am. The Gerudo have discovered the chasm and are already on their way. Tonight, we head out to ambush them with the last of our tribe. Should we fail, the true legacy of the Sheikah will be lost forever.
Riju didn't think it possible to sympathize with her ancient enemy. Her own tribe had similarly approached this close to annihilation.
She licked the cream from her fingers. From her drawers she picked out a bracelet, a simple band of gold set with a small emerald, forged months ago by her own hand. She finally offered it to its intended recipient.
Link accepted it with a grateful but puzzled look.
"There's a tradition among the Gerudo." Riju cleared her throat. Sweat beaded on her neck. "In Hyrule, I'm told males start the courting process. It's the opposite for Gerudo. This is a svor'sa – a gift of favor. We give them to voe we, ah, I mean…fancy."
She avoided looking at him, willing the redness away from her face. The desert sun had settled across her shoulders; that was the only explanation for why she felt so hot. She tried to remember Ashai's stupid Voe and You class. Should she sing a song now? Hurry him out the door? Duel to the death?
Link turned the bracelet over in his hands – shoddy craftsmanship, really, she had snuck into the forge during after-hours so Buliara wouldn't grow suspicious, she should've spent more time shaping the metal, that emerald looked positively cheap – and deliberately, Link put it on.
Riju laughed. Without thinking, she hugged Link, who picked her up and spun her around. Footsteps rattled up the stairs. The commotion had attracted the guards. Riju no longer cared, if she ever cared at all.
In another year or ten thousand, evil would rise again, forever and forever, so long as darkness lurked behind people's hearts. But for this one ephemeral night between calamities, Riju was content where she was.