Hi everyone! Glad as always to hear your continued enjoyment!
Birdie, me too! I was expecting a horribly hard dramatic duel and instead he just... wanders off? Very glad the desperation comes through, too!
And Mimi, that's wonderful to hear! 3 Yeah, finally Link is on Ghirahim's radar as himself! That was simply unforgivable. ;-) Glad you liked the patch notes! This scene has always bugged me, as well as Impa and Zelda making minimal sense, in-game I feel like you just turn up so the game has an excuse to show you a cutscene to tell you where Zelda went - you don't really get to do anything, beyond that one leap that Ghirahim dodges. I'm glad you liked the fixes, too! And yes... Zelda is going to come to regret a lot of things, poor thing.
Chapter 52: A Shard of Something Intricate
Zelda gazed up at the Gate of Time, turning slowly and majestically before her. It was awe-inspiring, incredible, and the Skyloft schoolgirl in her wanted to stare, to take it all in, perhaps to try and sketch it, as if paper could possibly contain its wonder.
But she had seen it before, and had studied its design; helped to build a second one; had attuned it and become herself for the first time in doing so. The Gate of Time she had completed slumbered still sealed in her long-ruined temple, where only one thing could provide the key. Only this Gate of Time would allow her to travel safely back to the past, and prepare the way for Link and for their final steps.
She hadn't expected the robots to build a monument in her honour above it… and certainly not one that bore the Triforce. Had someone told them, in the long years between? It was touching, however, and if their mechanical minds couldn't leave the imprint of emotion in the stone the way that humans could, still she could see it in their work. As well, it would provide an excellent landmark to guide Link to the Gate: the terrain she and Impa had crossed was almost completely impassable to someone on foot, and he'd have to find another route.
She sighed, short and sharp, and shook herself. Every second was precious, and she couldn't afford to risk delay.
"Impa, would you release Parasova, please?"
The tall woman blinked, her attention torn from the Gate, and nodded. "Of course." Her voice was so soft, just a breath above a whisper: she'd explained as they journeyed how her people learnt from childhood to never make a betraying sound unless they must. It sounded like a hard and deadly life, and Zelda had wished she could have protected them from it – but their ancestors had been volunteers all, knowing what they would face, and their unshakeable devotion had passed down unbroken through each of their descendants, and she loved them all the more deeply for it.
Lifted from Impa's pack and placed on the ground, Para jerkily unfolded herself into a sitting position.
"What is it, Mistress?"
"Would you mind helping with the attunement, please? As a backup?"
"It will be just like old times, Mistress!"
Zelda smiled despite herself. Para, too, had changed over the long, hard years: more acerbic, if slightly less loudly opinionated, and somehow… older. Yet she was still the same loyal artificial companion Saina had fled the Cycle with, programmed and reprogrammed to aid her in any venture. The screen on the back of Para's head slowly unfolded to its maximum size, and Zelda winced at the number of dead and discoloured pixels as it lit up. Still, she could read it, and that was what mattered most.
She reached for her harp, always her favourite instrument on Skyloft, always Hylia's favourite instrument since long before that. Imbued now with her divine power, it all but sang under her fingers as she lifted it out, the strap she could carry it by hanging loose.
"Temporal analysis routines initialised. Loading previous Gate data." Parasova hummed for a few moments, a slightly static-laced sound. "Data loaded. Begin whenever you're ready!"
Zelda smiled again, almost sadly, and began to play, gently caressing liquid notes from the strings. She felt more than heard the subtle resonances in the Gate of Time before her, aware of each echoed harmonic just before it appeared on Para's battered screen. Without a temporal resonator or any other piece of equipment designed for the purpose, she could only match time's music with her own, and let the tune itself tell her what she needed to know. The Gate of Time was so phenomenally complex that it had once taken her days to attune her own; even with :ll her divine power, all her mortal soul's understanding, she couldn't hope to simply run a quick scan up and down the frequencies the way she would with a piece of Timeshift Stone.
"...Resonance era located!" Parasova reported, almost five minutes later, as Zelda sighed with the same understanding and let her music fade. "The Gate of Time is currently tuned to the beginning of the Cycle. I suppose that makes sense, Mistress, but it doesn't seem very useful."
"I agree," Zelda said, thoughtful. "We'll need to bring it forward. Past the reversion point of the Cycle, ideally… and late enough that we don't risk temporal breakdown."
"Temporal breakdown, Your Radiance?" Impa asked softly, almost diffidently, as if unsure whether she should be asking the question. Zelda merely nodded: Impa was owed every explanation.
"It was only ever studied theoretically, but if you were to go back to the past and set up events that would prevent the present in which you went back to the past from occurring, the results could be catastrophic. We have to ensure we're maintaining a stable causal chain as long as we're behind the latest time we've ever entered – that means that we need to make sure what has happened happens, and things that haven't happened don't happen. If they did…"
Zelda trailed off, closing her mortal eyes, the better to listen to her instincts, her wider-spread awareness. Perceptions far beyond simple sight and hearing were hers, sometimes almost overwhelming to her mortal soul, and her intuition was telling her that if she looked, she might see, see the ever-changing landscape of time surrounding her. Not a stream, not a river, but the sky in a tempest: ever-shifting, ever-changing, eternal and yet…
Bounded?
She knew then that the Goddess of Time was looking on, unfathomable and distant, and there was no greeting from her, nor even subtlest hint of feeling: only observation from afar, where once they had spoken, once the Goddess had warned her.
Do not wish to be other than you are, or you will be a goddess no more.
The price is beyond your sight.
The choice is and must be yours, and I shall neither help nor hinder more than in the giving my gifts will and have.
Save those you choose so dearly, Little Sister, and be it our goodbye.
At last she thought she understood. Her choices made, the Goddess of Time would no longer speak with her, for each thought would be an influence she could not exert. She would only watch, now, as the consequences fell where they would, and time flowed into patterns Zelda's awareness did not have the breadth to see.
"We'll go back to shortly after… everything," she decided aloud, opening her eyes. "The second Gate of Time will be closed, and we can't risk interfering with that event until and unless we're completely ready, but we'll have time to set up everything we need to… and Ghirahim probably won't yet be in any state to interfere. He'll have been very drained after the sealing." Even as she spoke, she felt a fundamental temporal rightness to the idea, like something half-anticipated falling into place. So this causal chain is stable… I hope. "Let's aim for about a week after the event."
"Understood, Mistress," Para chirped. "The calculations will take a while, though. Even when I was brand new it would still have been a massive computational task!"
Zelda smiled fondly. "Don't worry, Para. I think I can bring the Gate forward until we reach the right era. It'll take longer than just setting it directly, but it'll be quicker than calculating the correct setting."
"So your temporal capacities are fully integrated?"
"I think so. The Gate here feels… like something I understand. I don't think I'll have any difficulty manipulating it any more."
"Excellent!" the little assistant declared in her scratchy voice, almost proudly. "Then I'll keep my monitoring routines active!"
"You might want to rest, Impa," Zelda added, turning to her. "This will still take hours."
Impa nodded. "I will stand guard, Your Radiance."
. . .
Time flowed around her, with her, impossibly complex, her divine awareness encompassing it and her temporal soul comprehending it, her whole being sunk into matching its music, guiding the Gate of Time's destination gently forwards through the years. Slowly at first, then faster: a year, a decade, then two, then four…
And then something burst in on her, a voice almost as familiar as her own, a voice twice beloved, and her fingering slowed and stopped as her mind turned from the skeins of time. She twisted to look over her shoulder, seeing her Chosen her friend staring back at her, and relief and joy pulled her back to the present as her heart leapt and wept at once. He was standing at the top of a stairwell that Zelda vaguely remembered led down to the refinery, sandy and scuffed and a desperate urgency overriding the moment of joy and relief in his eyes.
"Zelda," Link repeated, already starting to run again though she could hear the gasps for breath between his words, "Ghirahim is coming, he, Fi thinks he knows you're here!"
Zelda's awareness snapped wide at his words, and she realised in shock just how close Ghirahim was, how close he'd come before she had even become aware of him, so absorbed in her work had she been. He was almost outside, running closer, closer with every breath, all at once outside the temple's fallen entrance, leaping up onto the rubble and lightly down again. Straightening from the crouch he had landed in, he drew his blade, all predatory satisfaction, and a shiver of ice ran down Zelda's mortal spine.
"Hmm. So, here you are at last."
His eyes met Zelda's and looked through her, across a thousand years to all that lay within, and – she could only hope – overlooked or dismissed as insignificant all that was not the goddess he sought. For her part, she knew him with a shudder of revulsion: something wrought to kill that delighted in destruction and in blood. Endings were one thing, sorrowful but ultimately as natural as beginnings, but Ghirahim's every move seemed to her drenched in violence.
His eyes moved on without a pause, for the moment in which they saw one another had been only that.
"And I see you've arrived to stop me once again." It was Fi he spoke to, the spirit of the sword so silent and still, poised as a held breath in the eye of the storm, the subtlest trace of something else that Zelda could not place. And as long as it was only Fi he spoke to, as long as he did not know the truth of what she had wrought, still her half-forged sword was… if not safe, at least concealed. "Normally, I would let you. It is so much more interesting having someone almost worthy to spar with. But, I am not so old that I can't learn my lessons. I simply don't have the time right now… so you will have to wait." He moved as he spoke, first step by deliberate step, then slipping sideways from space to space in the manner he had – so long ago – learnt from those who would become the Sheikah, or perhaps from he who they had served before Hylia and in whose memory they wept. From space to space he stepped, and as he stopped he raised his sword; swung it down with a cry and threw up a shield of demonic power across his path! Zelda flinched to feel it, like a warped and weaker mockery of her own innate powers; flinched again to see Link slam headlong into it and stagger back.
In the moment that she flinched, Ghirahim charged, and before she could even think to raise a shield against him Impa had moved, dashing from her side with lightning speed to throw her mortal strength against Ghirahim, catching his white-clad wrist in both strong hands, bracing herself between him and the ground and holding him fast for a terrifying and precious breath.
"Impa!"
Though she knew she could not stand against him, Impa had thrown herself in his path without a thought, without a pause, only to protect the one to whom she was sworn.
"Really, Impa?" Ghirahim asked, still half-disbelieving as he tried to force his sword arm down through Impa's iron-hard grip and well-braced pose and met her unyielding resistance. "Yes, I know you. I'd recognise the traces of your meddling spirit anywhere. But at last, you're fool enough to come face to face with me!"
Without her training at the Knight Academy, a mere week and a lifetime ago, Zelda wouldn't even have seen what happened as Ghirahim spoke, a blur of motion between the two combatants which ended with Impa staggering back, one arm badly wounded.
"Your Radiance, quickly, to the Gate!" she cried, and Zelda knew she would fight to the last.
"No!"
It was a refusal as utter as any she had ever felt, freed of the bonds of both divinity and time, and she would not allow her allies, her friends, her people to be harmed while she had the power to prevent it! Half by instinct and half by design, she threw a shield between them, a wall of translucent shimmering gold that barred Ghirahim's way utterly. He hacked at it wildly, frustrated at yet again being denied his prey, and as he did Zelda's thoughts raced. Impa was right: she had to get to the Gate and get away. She still wasn't ready, Link still wasn't ready, and while she might be able to hold Ghirahim off, she couldn't get away from him without finding a way to go somewhere that he couldn't follow. His power had grown and changed since a thousand years before, and it worried her even as it gave her hope.
We're none of us what we were any more.
Zelda darted sideways, bringing Link into her direct line of sight, only just recovered from having run into Ghirahim's own barrier. She had already imbued the harp with some of her own power; if she gave it more, then gave it to him, might it be enough? If she couldn't be beside him, then perhaps she could give him the key he would need. Even as she thought it she was moving, every second precious and spilling through her fingers, the dangers of a future unforeseen and unknown pressing around her.
"Link," she shouted across the dry riverbed, "take this! You'll need it if I'm not with you!"
Link looked at her as if about to protest, about to shout to her, but she crushed love and guilt into the back of her mind, holding out the harp and pouring her power into it and through it, reaching out to him across a ravine that was no distance at all. She felt him in her light, as once she as Hylia would have laid a benediction upon her devoted, and in her light she passed the harp to him.
Link's expression of surprise as it coalesced into his hand and her light faded made her want to smile and weep at the same time, but there was no time for either. She felt his eyes shift from her as she turned away, dashing to the majestically turning Gate of Time and touching her hand to it, letting it slide past beneath her fingers, at once smooth and solid and yet an infinite depth beneath her touch, as if what she touched was not an object at all, but only the memory of a door being closed when even now it stood wide open. Still holding her fraying shield with as much power as she could spare, she focused her awareness onto, into, throughout the Gate, desperately trying to encompass it all, not knowing if she even could. Impa ran to her side, snatching up her pack and Para on the way, blood trickling down her arm and her stern face tight with pain, yet her eyes fierce with determination and devotion.
"Your Radiance?" she murmured, almost inaudible above the crashing of Ghirahim's sword against the shield Zelda could not spare the attention to reinforce.
"It's open," Zelda mumbled back, not even enough attention to spare to think about the words she was saying. "I have… the harmony. I…"
There was only one way to escape, only one way to yet again draw Ghirahim away and prevent him from following her… and from killing her best friend, shattering her still unready sword. She couldn't take Link with her, not and keep Ghirahim from following them both, bringing the same deadly danger into the past with her. She couldn't leave him simply to face Ghirahim: the demon blade would fall on him in bloody fury. But she and Ghirahim had looked into one another, and she had seen the streak of sharp calculation, a thousand years of delayed gratification – and so she turned, taking everything in her hands for one more desperate chance, Para balanced awkwardly on Impa's shoulder beside her.
"Mistress?"
Zelda delved into the pack Impa was holding for the keepsake Para had kept safe for a thousand years, not as instinctive to reach for as the harp had been, but uniquely, perfectly tuned to interact with all that the Cycle was and had been. Ghirahim screamed a curse in the language of a long-dead people even as she did, as the wall of evil he had raised against Link tore before the sword Hylia and Saina had made, and she felt him focus every drop of his power into a blow that splintered her own ragged shield apart. Zelda gasped as the shock reverberated through her, but instead of following through Ghirahim leapt back as Link struck him from behind! The two faced one another, Link with his back to Zelda, Ghirahim poised and watching them both.
"Link!" she cried. He didn't look around, but she knew he had heard. "Link, tell the Sheikah what happened! They'll know what to do!" Her voice caught, almost breaking, as yet again she pushed him away, forcing him down a dangerous path alone, his only instructions so vague that Ghirahim would have to follow him to follow them – and thereby let him live. "I promise I'll see you again, Link!"
Saina's now-ancient keepsake in her hand, she raised it to her lips and blew, instinctively modulating the notes to match the Gate still turning behind her. With a nudge of her elbow she motioned Impa backwards, into the Gate, stepping back herself in time with her. The dissonance in her notes grew, reverberating in her bones, in her soul, in time itself, and where once so long ago that same simple instrument had jarred one single soul loose from the perfect clockwork of the Cycle, now it disrupted the very synchrony of the Gate of Time itself.
For an instant all her life was one and none; for an instant she fell without moving, the rippled surface receding at an impossible pace, only her touch on Impa and Para anchoring them to her. She fell, and was not falling; she played, yet no moments passed that she did so in. She felt the force of it, tumbling through rapids over shattering rocks, turbulence and dissonance, and – echoing from the depths of time itself – a pained and silent scream.
And then there was light, all at once: a great flare of it, blinding, and a jolt of sensation sudden and sharp as the step she had never completed found ground after all, and she and Impa and Para were staggering before the Gate in a world of rich-scented air, of pure white stone and a rushing river and subtle birdsong and distant, whirring sound, and the stately, immutable heartbeat of the turning Gate of Time.
Para's head tilted as Zelda gasped, doubled over, something still washing over her as if a tidal wave had swept through her body and left her stranded ashore.
"Mistress, I detect full-spectrum signals!" The scratchy tone of excitement modulated into one of alarm. "The number of distress signals is increasing exponentially!" Another head tilt, a single moment's analysing pause. "All the distress signals are automated, Mistress. There was active communication in the instant we arrived, but I am no longer receiving any. I don't understand what's happening!"
Zelda's legs gave out as she understood, dropping to her knees, every word a blow to her heart.
"No… Oh, no…"
I have been waiting for this! Here we go!
Patch Notes
- Zelda no longer just leaves Link to somehow-not-die.
- Ghirahim given actual reason to depart without a fight.
- Impa no longer carries random glowing explosives designed to destroy incredibly powerful holy artefacts.
- Effects of breaking powerful artefact still significant.