Hi all! Always glad to hear you're enjoying; sorry I haven't been updating as regularly as I'd like!

Mimi, thank you! I don't think you've specifically said that before, but even if you have, it's really lovely to hear; that made me really smile! But yeah, poor Zelda... from here on out, for her, is where the consequences of all the things she didn't think through in this life or those before start to become clear.

Birdie, here it comes - I hope this lives up to your expectations! And Zelda really does, doesn't she? XD "Bye!" "...o_o" Glad it makes a bit more sense now!

Cstan, heh, you might just be right - and Zelda's going to have to live with that for a long, long time...

Chapter 53: A Broken Cycle

"Mistress?"

Zelda didn't respond, sobbing into her hands.

"Impa, please lower me nearer to the ground immediately!"

Impa did as she was bid, kneeling to allow Parasova to jump from her shoulder, landing in a whirr of stiff joints and the clack of composite on stone. The cat-like little machine limped rapidly around in front of Zelda despite her uneven gait, looking up at her.

"Your Radiance…?" Impa, too, was at a loss. Para's head turned slightly, her eyes refocusing briefly on the tall Sheikah.

"I will take care of Mistress Zelda. You should bind your arm; I shouldn't need to ensure that you take care of yourself!"

A momentary smile flickered through Impa's concerned, pained expression as she nodded, looking around once for danger before placing her pack on the stone floor, even going so far as to peer around the Gate of Time for any hidden threat before settling down. Para's attention flicked back to Zelda as she did: the young Sheikah woman was as dedicated as all her kin, but they did need reminding of the oddest things sometimes.

"Mistress?" she repeated quizzically, shading her static-laced voice with tones that indicated concern.

"Oh, Para, I-" Zelda broke off for another couple of sobs, shaking her slim frame. "The Cycle, we… we-we broke it after all, Para…"

"Nonsense!" Para replied indignantly, pressing a forepaw against her mistress' leg with a faint grinding noise from its wrist joint. "I performed every calculation necessary. There was minimal effect on the Cycle, as evidenced by the development of the later-model robots in future iterations!"

"N-no, not then…" Zelda took a deep breath through shaking hands. "Now. We… I destroyed the Gate of Time, a-and… The signals, Para, they stopped because of the- the t-temporal shockwave, I- All the Timeshift Stone, it…"

Para tilted her head with a click. "You mean this is the date of the catastrophic shutdown of the robots, and the end of the Cycle, Mistress?"

Zelda nodded, rapid and shaky. "We're forty years in. I- I know it. That's why the train cores were tuned to this time, that's why- why everything just s-stopped." She shuddered. "From the moment we left… we always must have come back here. I-it must be a stable- stable causal chain." She scrubbed tear-wet hands across her face, looking at Para briefly before burying her head in her hands again. "I felt the shockwave, Para." A single, final sob escaped her. "I ended it all…"

Despite her thousand-year age, even Parasova was temporarily silenced.

"Well!" she declared after a few moments. "I don't think that could have been predicted! Even the robots of the final Cycle can't have had a computer with that level of predictive power!"

"I think the Goddess of Time knew," Zelda whispered softly. "I think she always knew."

The wayward one has chosen and will have. The design ever breaks, though it draws near. Will shall always seek to find a way, against even time itself. The thoughts she had felt as Hylia now had a bitter ring, a depth of meaning the goddess could never then have seen.

"She certainly ought to, Mistress," Para retorted unexpectedly. "It is her divine domain."

Zelda sniffed, lowering her hands from her face at last. "I suppose. I… I felt her again, when we went through the Gate of Time. Just like before… or if before were just an echo. I felt her scream." She swallowed. "Why didn't she stop me?" She knew well that the great goddess' very nature meant that she could not directly interfere, but there must have been countless points within the Cycle that the subtlest of pressures, a mere fragment of a thought, could have changed things.

"Surely, Your Radiance, it is simply that some things must be?" Impa spoke softly as always, having walked up to Zelda and knelt beside her silent as a shadow. "They must be, and so they shall. Such is your destiny, is it not?"

"I wrote my…" Zelda trailed off, thinking back. Then, so long before, she had reached forth into the might-be and etched a bond, and a pattern. She had written a destiny that became her own, and in so doing she had spoken with the Goddess of Time for the last time.

You choose and shall choose, and so it shall be.

I shall neither help nor hinder more than in the giving my gifts will and have.

Time could have flowed countless ways, and yet it had brought her here, kneeling before a wondrous portal which she already would have destroyed. The causal chain was stable, and yet if she knew what it was she would know how to deviate from it. She was perfectly placed to tell herself, three hundred or so years before it had all begun. Perfectly placed to change the script: to find Reach, perhaps, and reactivate him centuries early, or…

Zelda pressed her hands to the sides of her head as her thoughts began to spin, a strange kind of pain pressing on her mind, on her awareness. Time eddied around her, an ever-shifting landscape she felt without seeing, shadowed and indistinct yet wide as the clouded, bounded sky. All she had to do was reach out and touch it, consequences spilling out in all directions beyond hope of following, no point fixed even at her own feet. She felt a dizzying spiral, fractured and strange; she remembered a dream and wondered whether it had been a dream at all.

"Mistress?"

Zelda gasped, dragging her awareness back into herself, her melded mortal soul. Temporal flux theory, they'd called it in the Cycle: the idea that causality need not only flow one way. That all that had been was as it was because of the consequences of where she was and would have been…

If that were so, then changing the future past, and all that she was and had been, would be as simple as reaching out and touching it. The causal chain would become unstable, and collapse, and ever become never so that Saina might never have existed at all, and all things would have always taken another shape in the wildness of the might-be.

But you've what you need, if need it must be.

The Goddess of Time had given her the Gate, a precious gift from the apex of her Cycle, even though the stable causal chain would lead her to destroy it. She had let a mortal soul escape and break the Cycle, and she had, once, been gracious enough to show Hylia something of her perception in fondness and sorrow, though she knew the younger goddess would not fully see. She had warned her in warnings that held more truth than Hylia knew, and at the last she had wished her well, so that it had seemed as if perhaps the greater goddess smiled and yet was sad. How could she not have been, when she had known all that yet would already have followed from that choice? From the very gift – gifts? – that she had given?

Take as then my gift to you, and what is of mine use well. Choices the fallen ones make also, but aid their aims I need not, where yours I might.

"Mistress Zelda!" Parasova snapped, rapping her leg sharply with the same creaking forepaw.

"Para! I'm sorry." Zelda tried to wipe tears from her face with still-damp hands, already drying to stickiness. "I was… I think… I remember… I mean, I-" She took a deep breath, trying to forcibly calm herself, still all the guilt and regret and sorrow. "We… we shouldn't stay here long. The causal chain is stable for now." And I trust her.

I think.

"The longer we stay here, the more we- we risk breaking it."

"That's very sensible," Para declared. "Temporal instability is not something about which I require data!"

Zelda gave her a momentary weak, watery smile. "We'll go back – or forward – to not long after the event, just like we planned. I think that will still be stable. I just… have to attune the Gate…" She glanced over her shoulder at it and almost wished she hadn't, all its grandeur sweeping slow and stately past her, and she felt for a moment that in its turning she could see the entire Cycle in its countless iterations, all shattered by her hand.

"You should rest first, Mistress. Your emotional state is not conducive to proper focus, and besides, you look very tired."

Beside her, Impa nodded in quiet, concerned agreement. "This area is both safe and defensible, and the weather is mild. You have done a great deal today, Your Radiance, and you are mortal. The sacred one is right that you should rest."

"I don't know if I can…" And yet, even as she said the words, she almost didn't know if she couldn't. It was so much, too much, and part of her just wanted to lie down beneath it until she slept and it all went away.

"The fourth thing one must know is to sleep whenever the opportunity comes, for it may not come again," Impa murmured softly, the words well-worn in her quiet voice. "I will set up our camp behind the Gate of Time. We shall not be seen there, save from above or beside, and I will conceal us from sight also." She stood once more, offering Zelda her uninjured hand. "Some things are as they must be, Your Radiance… this the Sheikah know."

Zelda grasped Impa's hand, the taller woman lifting her to her feet with a strength that seemed almost effortless. She bent to pick up Parasova, cradling the little assistant in her arms, and let Impa lead her around the Gate of Time to the open space between it and the rear wall of the open-air temple.

They were both right: she did have to rest. If only she could believe it would make the weight of all she'd done easier to bear…

That was a heck of a chapter to write. Turns out blowing up the Gate of Time maybe isn't something you can just do without consequences, here... and then we get into all the other temporal stuff!

Sorry for the delay! I'm still pretty busy, but I have slightly fewer things going on simultaneously now, so here's hoping this is the start of more regular weekly updates again!

Patch Notes
- Consequences remain important. In a variety of directions.
- Causality considered.