I kind of pulled lore from all across the games for this, though I can't say exactly what without spoiling things, and added a bunch of my own stuff. It was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The Return, by Rose Zemlya.
Zelda wondered if she would ever finish mourning. Three years. Three years since she had tried to send Link to the past, since he had vanished before she could cast the spell. She had spent every minute since then searching for him, dispatching messengers to every glen and mountain top in the land for any scrap of information. Every visit to another kingdom, she would personally ask anyone she could find, but it had all been fruitless. Link seemed to be well and truly gone.
She pressed her back against the carriage seat, sitting stiffly as a statue, hands clasped so tightly together in her lap that she had all but lost feeling in them. Her eyes burned, but she was well past the point of being able to cry. All she could do was feel that tangle of emotions twist and tighten in the hollow pit where her soul had been. It had faded bit by bit since his disappearance, and she was afraid she would soon lose it altogether.
Her head snapped up when the carriage came to a hard stop, the horses neighing frantically. She threw the door open and jumped to the road, seeing the somewhat distant silhouette of Castletown against the colors of the sunset. Her gaze snapped to the tan cobblestones when a low sound hit her ears, her chest constricting when she saw what must have made it.
A long bundle lay across the road, shuddering quickly. She hurried to it and dropped to her knees, ignoring the warning calls of her driver and footmen as she grabbed a flap of cloth. The fabric was incredibly coarse, as though the thread had been spun from gravel, so stained with mud and she dared not think what else that there was no telling what color it had started as. She folded back the bit in her hand, that tangle of emotions piercing every inch of her flesh as she stared down at what she had uncovered.
A pale, worryingly lean face, neck and shoulder scattered with scars, some more faded than others, overlapped with fresh wounds still oozing blood. A swath of tangled dark hair that was filled with leaves, sticks and debris. Long, sharp ears with small gaps where piercings had been ripped out. Their skin was clammy, icy cold, their forehead burning hot. She searched frantically for their hand, gripping it tightly before throwing their arm across her shoulders.
"Help me get them in the carriage," she ordered. As hard as she tried, the unconscious stranger was much too heavy to lift on her own. Her footmen obeyed, laying the stranger on the seat opposite hers, the driver urging the horses into a gallop. Zelda reached into the folds of her gown for the powerful healing potion her father insisted she keep with her, doing her best to hold the stranger's head steady as she poured the liquid down their throat. The stranger barely swallowed, but it was enough for the potion to work its magic.
Their face darkened to a rich tan, their freshest wounds began to close, and their breath began to quiet and steady. To her shock, the potion stayed active, and she watched as their hair, brown like the richest soil, faded from root to tip into a gold that rivaled the sun. Their eyes snapped open sightlessly, the irises shifting from pure forest green to the bluest of blue. It was only then that the potion's charm faded, and she was left staring at what the stranger had become.
Or rather, who.