Darkness. Darkness was the first thing she was aware of.

Emilia sucked in a breath, her first one since she woke. The air was stuffy.

That was good. Not satisfying, but good. She could feel, she could move. Somehow she knew she hadn't been able to for a long time.

What she didn't know was how she had ended up here, wherever here was.

Her attempt to sit up was slow and strenuous from the weak state she was in. She didn't get very far, though, before her head banged into something. Her upper body fell back down, and she raised a shaky hand to rub at her forehead. When some bug crawled over her leg, she used her other hand to flick it off. As she moved, she felt skin brush against skin, making her realize that she was wearing nothing at all for some reason. Another bug crawling up her shoulder reinvigorated her need to figure out where she was so she could get away.

Trying to feel for something she couldn't see, she reached her hands up. Whatever was above her head seemed to be above her entire body. A metal ceiling that close to the floor? She moved her arms out to her sides and found she couldn't extend them very far outward either.

A box. She was lying down naked in a box. An oppressive, unventilated, dark box...

It's nighttime outside—her back is against the earth and a blurry face is above her and she's frantically struggling to get away—she reaches for the knife but she can't get it out of his grip—he's pressing it to her throat—and then—

And then when she was left reeling in the darkness, her heart feeling like it was about to explode, she regretted wishing to remember.

Knowing that she had only been reliving a memory didn't make it feel any better. It made it worse. Because now she realized what she was in.

She remembered the moment when she'd known, with what she had thought was absolute certainty, that she was going to die.

But she was moving. Breathing. Feeling. Thinking. She wasn't dead. She was alive.

And she was in a casket.

"Get me out!"

Emilia started to scream, pushing and banging against her confines with all the might she could muster. Tears slipped from her eyes. She gasped for air between screams, but no matter how much she took in, it wasn't enough. She couldn't breathe.

What if nobody got her out? It hardly felt like a 'what if.' It felt inevitable. If she had already been buried, then nobody would think twice about her being dead or not. Nobody would realize she was alive in here—and so she would die in here. It would be the most painful kind of irony, to have miraculously survived attempted murder, only to die after being buried alive.

She thumped and scratched on her casket until her hands went numb, and screamed until her throat burned and her voice fizzled out. Then, she thought, maybe it was better to be quiet anyway.

She could wait until she heard someone pass by above ground, and then she could put all of her energy into trying to be as loud as possible to garner attention. She just had to hope that the six feet of dirt between them wouldn't prevent them from hearing each other.

If she could hear no one, if no one could hear her... She didn't want to think about it anymore. She didn't want to think about how long she would be stuck in her head, alone in the dark. Hours? Days?

She'd go insane. She was already going insane, and she'd been awake in her casket for minutes.

Had it been minutes? She wasn't sure. She couldn't keep track of time.

Against her will, Emilia's brain decided to fill in the nothingness with more memories of her last agonizing moments outside of her underground prison. With nothing to hear or see to help bring her out of it, it was hard to tell herself that they were only memories, that it wasn't happening anymore.

So she started to sing softly to distract herself. Her voice sounded terrible through her tears, but it was better than the silence that allowed unwelcome memories to run free in her mind.

Wake up. Kill bugs. Cry. Sing. Sleep. Wake up again. Kill bugs again. Cry again. Sing again. Sleep again.

That's how she thought everything was going, but there were times when she wasn't sure if she was awake or not. There were times when she wasn't sure if she was alive or not.

Maybe this was simply what death was like. Maybe her casket and her body were nothing more than imagination, representations of her consciousness.

But how would she be conscious if she was dead? She couldn't be dead. She was alive. But was she really alive? How could this nothingness be considered life?

Her thoughts went in circles, like everything else. With time, the facets of the circles gradually became more intense, harder to bear, like the air that became even harder to breathe. Flashbacks became impossible to distinguish from the present. Quiet moments became voices whispering incoherently in her ears. Darkness became swirls of incomprehensible shapes. Pleasant dreams became nightmares. That final change—losing her dreams—was even worse than the worst flashbacks and hallucinations.

At least when she had good dreams, she wasn't conscious that she was here, even if it hurt to wake up and realize that she still was—but when they turned into nightmares, she had no escape at all. Being asleep was hell, and being awake was hell, too.

She wondered frequently if that was what this was. Hell.

That theory came, in part, from her realization that none of her other theories as to how she'd gotten here made any sense when she thought through them.

Her first theory, that she'd been buried by the very man who'd tried to kill her, was supported only by the fact that she wasn't wearing clothes and the fact that her casket felt like nothing more than a metal box, with no plush satin lining or a pillow for her head like there would've been with a standard casket. Nothing else about that theory held up. For her to be alive, he would've had to have attended to all the wounds he'd inflicted upon her—but why would he have tried to save her after trying to kill her? And if he'd saved her from dying by blood loss, why would he have then put her in a casket where she could've died from suffocation or dehydration? Moreover, why would he have even bothered burying her in something when he could've just thrown her right in the ground?

Her second theory, that she'd been found after she was attacked, didn't hold up to scrutiny either. It was far too warm for her to be in a morgue, so she would've had to have been properly buried, except there was nothing proper about being buried alive. Someone should've realized she wasn't dead. She should've been autopsied and probably should've been embalmed before her burial. So, if she really had been found, then she'd been handled by the most incompetent coroner and mortician in the world—but her own mother was a forensic anthropologist, so how could any of their oversights have slipped by her? And even if she had been handled so dismally with her mom somehow not noticing, why would her family have buried her naked in a plain metal casket?

With both of those theories having immense gaps, she got stuck in a circle of going back and forth with which one she believed in. The circle always came back around to her only other theory—the only one with no gaps, the one she desperately hoped not to be true: that she had died, and this was her hell.

Eventually, Emilia ran out of tears. Her bouts of crying became nothing but episodes of staggered breathing. Not long after that, the circle of her life broke. It was no longer wake up, kill bugs, cry nothing, sing, sleep.

It was wake up, kill bugs, and scream and thrash around, because she couldn't drown out the screams clawing at her throat with songs anymore. Scream, scream, scream, and cry no tears as she screamed. She tried to make herself stop screaming multiple times when the sound brought back memories of screaming for her life the night she should've died, but she could never make herself stop for long. It was too much. She couldn't handle it anymore.

It repeated in her mind like a broken record, a new circle: I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore.

I.

Can't.

Handle.

This.

It felt like it would never end. She thought she would be stuck in a circle of teetering on the edge of her sanity for eternity.

But she was wrong. The circles broke again, and she could hardly believe that it wasn't a new hallucination. She saw something real, something she hadn't seen in what felt like years.

Light.

It was so bright that she saw nothing but white even when she closed her burning eyes, but after all that time in the dark, she was terrified at the thought of losing the light. She wondered if this was it, if her end had finally, finally arrived, or if she was finally being saved from her casket, though she was leaning more toward the former. Surely, she thought, she couldn't still be alive after all that time with no water or fresh air.

Regardless of whether humans or angels would greet her, knowing that her time in this hell was over left her euphoric.

Crisp air washed over her. She heard shuffling and felt arms wiggle their way under her neck and the backs of her knees. Her eyes blinked open, and they began to adjust to the light as she was lifted up out of her casket. A tannish blob was leaning over her, and the blue sky was behind it. The features of the blob slowly started to become more distinct in color and shape, forming the person who had freed her from her casket.

Emilia's eyes focused first on a face—a pretty face, pretty enough to belong on an angel, even with features marred by concern. Her rescuer was somewhere around her own age, with hooded bright blue eyes, long and shaggy strawberry blond hair, and light skin littered with scars. That last feature was what finally made her realize that the face belonged to a boy, and beyond that, made her uncomfortable—not because of the scars, no, especially not now that she had to have her fair share—because of the mere fact that she could see enough of his skin to even know that he was a boy with so many scars. He was shirtless, only a belt over his shoulder covering up a small fraction of his skin. She didn't like the idea of some half-naked guy digging her from her grave, whether he was an angel or not. She didn't like that he was still holding her, either.

Her cheeks heated as she remembered that she was naked herself. Mortified, she pulled her hair in front of her chest and tried to cover her lower half up with her hands, though she knew he'd already seen everything.

Then, as her focus spread farther outward, something even more peculiar than his partial nudity suddenly caught her attention—sticking out on either side of his head were pointed ears. They definitely looked real, but either they were real because they were in heaven and he was some angelic creature, or they were good fakes because they were on earth and this boy was a nutjob who liked to walk around in graveyards while pretending to be an elf.

"This... This isn't heaven, is it?" Emilia croaked out.

His voice was soft and his face was caught somewhere between pity and confusion as he answered her. "No..."

So he was just a nutjob. A gravedigging, shirtless nutjob with elf ears that reminded her of Link from the Legend of Zelda.

In any case, his answer brought her solace. Not that she had anything against the idea of eternal paradise, but she was happy that her life hadn't been stolen after all.

Her eyes still burned from being so unaccustomed to light. Positive that she wouldn't be losing the light anytime soon now, she let them close. She sighed as the burning subsided.

"Will you put me down?" she asked.

He maneuvered her to the ground at her request. The sensation of soft grass tickling so much of her skin was weird, but words could not describe how satisfying it was to finally feel something other than a hard casket beneath her, to feel the sun seep into her pores, to feel her lungs fill with pure air. The only thing keeping her on edge now was that she wasn't wearing any clothes in front of a boy. Oddly safe as she felt with him, it was still disconcerting.

"...You look very ill," he said. "How are you feeling?"

"Considering...? Relieved. Grateful I'm not just ... straight-up dead." Her voice started to crackle out, so she had to stop to clear her throat. "...Did you already call 911?"

"Call nine-one-one?" he repeated, emphasizing each syllable.

"Um, yeah...? I'm ... pretty sure I should go to the hospital... So can you call them, please? Or ... do you wanna call my parents instead?" Just saying the last sentence excited her. She'd be seeing her parents soon, and her little brothers, and then the rest of her family and her friends...

...She wondered if they would be mad at her for letting this happen. She had to have caused them so much pain.

Several seconds passed before the boy's voice broke her out of her thoughts. "...Come again?"

Emilia furrowed her brows. She didn't know what part of what she'd said hadn't made sense to him. His accent sounded native in the few short sentences she'd heard from him, but maybe he wasn't entirely fluent in English...? Her current hoarseness probably wasn't helping, either. "Do you have a phone?" she asked, trying to speak as clearly as she could.

"I'm sorry—but I really don't know about what you're asking me for... I have severe memory loss right now. I wouldn't even know my own name if someone hadn't told me it."

"Oh..."

She guessed that explained his behavior.

Maybe his memory loss made him forget that shirts existed, too.

Emilia sighed again. "Can you please take me to someone else, then? Or bring them back to me... The nearest person you can find. I'd walk, but ... I don't think I can."

"I'll carry you," he said.

His arms tucked back underneath her, and she wished that she hadn't suggested he take her with him to find someone. Her body went rigid in his grasp. She tried to occupy her mind with thoughts of being reunited with her family instead of focusing on how she was completely naked and some random half-naked boy was holding her. All she could do was hope that the relief of seeing her again would be enough to outweigh the pain she'd caused them.

"It may be a while until we come across someone," the boy said. "It can be dangerous out here."

For as many times as she had relived the last waking minutes of her life before she'd found herself in the casket, she had never managed to recall much of what had led up to them. The clear words that suddenly rung through her mind—"Let me drive you home. It can be dangerous out here."—were accompanied by a fuzzy image of being in her car at night while what could only have been the man who would go on to almost kill her was outside speaking to her.

Nice. She hadn't just let this happen—she'd practically invited it to. She'd been lured to what might as well have been her death like a goddamned idiot. What had been wrong with her that night? She knew better than to trust a stranger, but for some reason she had, and that failure of judgment had nearly killed her.

...So why was she still being an idiot and trusting this stranger after the price she paid for thinking she was safe with one last time?

She kicked her stiff legs out of his arms and fell to the ground. The movement left her lightheaded, and her vision went black as she fought to get to her feet. Maybe it wasn't the best idea—it certainly wasn't the easiest—but it had to be better than leaving her safety in his hands alone. She had to try to go by herself. If she'd been found, her family probably would've buried her in their town's main cemetery; she would only have to make it to the mortuary there herself to hopefully find people she could actually trust to help her, people without severe amnesia who knew what phones were.

Her plan to go to the funeral home collapsed when her vision returned and she realized that she wasn't in the cemetery. She wasn't in Marana, period. She doubted she was even in Arizona.

Ahead of her were two mountains, unimaginably steep and colossal, that looked like they were one that'd been split down the middle. Not once before had she seen those mountains in person, but they were still familiar.

She told herself that she only found them familiar because the boy's appearance had planted familiar thoughts in her mind. After so long being deprived of stimuli, her brain was trying to connect dots where there were none. It was only a coincidence that the mountains happened to look like that. Just because the boy looked like Link didn't mean that the mountains were Dueling Peaks. That was ridiculous. Beyond ridiculous. She mentally reprimanded herself for even indulging in that impossible fantasy for a second, but the words she told herself did nothing to calm her heart or her nerves.

The boy walked in front of her and opened his mouth to say something, but he didn't get a single word out, because Emilia screamed.

He wasn't just shirtless—aside from his belts, he was everythingless. And those belts covered nothing.

"Dude, what the hell?! Why are you naked?!"

His hands moved to cover himself up, but she'd already looked away. "Sorry..." he said. Quietly, he tacked on, "But so are you, y'know."

Though she'd only inadvertently glanced down there for one horrifying second, she knew she'd seen something on his hip that looked an awful lot like the Sheikah Slate. But something else, something she couldn't attribute to his eccentricity, something even less deniable, was jutting out of the river that passed through the mountains to her left. She had to do a double-take when she first saw it, not believing her eyes. She turned fully to her left, her jaw slack as she soaked it in.

So many emotions swarmed over her at the sight, fear being at the forefront. She couldn't find it in herself to scream again, but the urge was bubbling up.

In the river beside the mountains was a tall tower that glowed a radiant blue in its center. The scene before her very eyes looked like it'd been ripped straight out of Breath of the Wild.

"Where are we?" she asked in a whisper.

"Just west of the Dueling Peaks," he answered.

His answer was exactly where she thought they were, and it was exactly what she didn't expect to hear anyhow.

It wasn't enough. She needed to hear him say one more word.

Her voice dropped so low that she could hardly hear herself when she finally managed to ask, "In what kingdom?"

"Hyrule."

Maybe it was spurred on by his answer, or maybe it would have happened regardless—but that was when vertigo hit Emilia full force, and she felt herself begin to fall before everything went black.

AN:

HOO BOY. Thanks for checking out the first chapter, and hope you enjoyed! I wrote the original version of this chapter June 19, 2016... Just days after ~Zelda U~ was officially revealed as Breath of the Wild, and three years ago as of today. I've always loved OC/SI stories, but something I never really liked about a lot of them is the often boring methods of inserting the OCs. One of my ideas that I'd had for quite some time was having an OC be buried and wake up in a fictional world. So, with Zelda being my main fanfic jam, Breath of the Wild seemed like the perfect game to finally put that idea to use with.

Of course, we still didn't know all that much about the game back then, so I couldn't write much further than the point where Emilia was saved. When the game did finally come out and I played it ... I couldn't picture myself actually writing a full OC/SI story set in it. It just seemed like a lot to handle at the time, so I moved on. But, I started playing through BotW again earlier this year, and it made me want to come back to this. I tidied up what I'd already written, finished what came after where I'd left off, and decided to post it on third anniversary of this chapter...

And then the BotW 2 trailer dropped last week. Was not expecting that at all. I'm admittedly kinda nervous to post this now on the chance that something in the sequel ends up not jiving with my plans for this story. Part of me thinks it might be better to just wait. Buuut I've been waiting for three years to get this chapter out there already, so I'm posting this anyway. If I need to go back and make revisions after BotW 2 comes out, so be it. With my track record and the fact that the game looks to be reusing a lot of assets, I might not even be that far into this story before the game comes out.

Anyway! Rambling over. I'm almost done with chapter two, so that should be out fairly soon. In the meantime, feel free to drop a review!

UPDATE: Ignore pretty much everything I said two paragraphs up. I have decided to just wait until I've played BotW2 before writing more, so this fic is on hiatus.

UPDATE UPDATE: "BotW2"/TotK is out and I've played it, but this is still on hiatus for a bit longer!

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Now it's not!