As a reminder, you can find MORE of this on my SubStar (dot adult slash KajaWilder), it's posted up past chapter 75 there... And if you guys haven't seen an update in at least a week, please let me know! I have a busy life, and I get distracted and forget things. This story (and PTaL) are supposed to be updated WEEKLY from now until they're both caught up with each other (like I was doing with FwB until this weekend).

And if you're just interested in discussing things with other readers, of course, you can go to my DISCORD here: h- t_ t_ p-s -: -/ -/ -discord . g-g / N9yDA8t6Cw (taking out hyphens, underscores, and spaces of course).

Finally, you can also read my ORIGINAL FICTION on Kindle. If you've got Kindle Unlimited, they're all free. Here's my author page, h-t_t_p-s -:- /-/ tinyurl _._ com /- 4ffb7wph with links to everything published. (Remove all Hyphens, Spaces, and Underscores, of course... 'cause Ffnet.)

Merry Christmas again! Bonus ZPoW chapter! This one's a lot lighter than the previous (which dropped yesterday if you haven't read it yet), and deals with a lot of the emotional aftermath of that chapter. There's still a bit of action. ;)


Chap. 42: Reflection on Ocean Waters

After the series of life-changing events that had occurred in the last... however many hours it had been since Zelda started her assault on the sheep rustlers at Hateno Beach, Zelda decided that it was a good time for a review of... well, everything. Her goals, her inventory, her priorities...

It started with a bath taken in the warm ocean water to wash the filth of Bokoblin paws off of her, and the rest of their semen out of her. As the monster parts had previously, while she was in the midst of things they were delicious and worthwhile, but afterward seemed... less than appealing, and she was glad to be clean of it.

Once her bath was done, Zelda let herself dry in the warm sun that approached midmorning, before dressing in her traveler's light leather armor and clothing. The Sheikah armor she generally preferred was simply too worn and damaged to be useful, torn and ripped by the black Bokoblin's hungry, grasping paws as they prepared to use her body.

After that, she started gathering up the detritus from the battle and its aftermath.

The finer control granted by the tier-two Magnesis: Swarm had deposited a six-pound pile of iron nails, arrowheads, a half-formed, jagged spear-tip she guessed was of Lizalfos make, and the shattered shards of one of swords. The last bits of the pile were the broken-off, serrated knife-like tips of the twin-pronged spear the blue Moblin had been using. Most of it, everything except two of the Lizal spears, were useless to Zelda, for she had neither the time nor skill to fashion even the larger bits into more useful tools.

But there were two useful melee weapons in the bunch, and those Zelda was, if not happy, at least satisfied to use as cheap replacements for her own broken and damaged weapons. The more intact Lizal spear with the jagged tip and single bone-taloned hook was well-balanced if not particularly sharp. The other was better in every way that mattered. The hafts of both were six feet long or so, a little taller than Zelda herself, but the bottom of the second spear was capped in a spiked bone joint, and the upper end had a similar piece of sharpened bone helping to attack the jagged, saw- or fishbone-shaped teeth of a broad leaf-tip head to the spear. It was a little to front-weighted for her comfort, but she could not deny that the razor-sharp edges of the spear-head, combined with the rear-pointing tines, would do a great deal of damage.

There were two Bokoblin-made bows in the pile of weapons too, but those Zelda disregarded with a sniff. The bow she had used to snipe was still intact, and even if the draw was not great- barely more than a child's toy bow- it was still equal to the Bokoblin's craftsmanship and sturdier to boot. The rest of her bows were far stronger, more flexible, or both.

One of her five shields, and one of three Sheikah-crafted ones, was a little dinged up and scratched but the least functional part was a single screw starting to come loose on the upper arm-loop. Nothing to worry about there.

The Bokoblins hadn't accessed the food stores in her satchel, thankfully, so Zelda still had plenty of ingredients, both raw and prepared, with which to have a late brunch. In their own supplies, amid the more rotten fruits and rancid fish, she found a gigantic green and yellow-striped melon her Slate called a Hydromelon which had delicious, sweet and moist red pulp inside along with a slew of hard black seeds she spat out, three apples, and one of the large green palm fruits. There were a half-dozen arrows in the makeshift quivers the two Bokoblin archers had carried that were of decent quality, but for monetary worth the single chest they had guarded, hidden beneath the water at the base of the tree, held a single ruby amid the ocean sand that had made its way inside the lock-box.

She did not consider the equipment and weapons much of an upgrade or downgrade, really. She had gained some sheer attack power, but lost durability, which she prized just as much. The elixir and other things she had used to keep herself in the battle before being knocked out were probably paid for, in effect, by the ruby but it was hard to make a real call there.

The pain, the trauma of what had happened...

Had that been mitigated or made up for by the things the princess had learned about her past? Her soul? Her ancestor-selves? Her... what, destiny, whatever that meant?

She didn't know.

"But I know it's no use dwelling on it," she reminded herself quietly, then started reaching for her equipment to add it to her outfit over the leathers. "I have to keep moving forward. Like Zelda- the other Zelda- said... I can't give up. Even if this was terrible... it happens every day, all over Hyrule, I'm sure. If I want it to stop, I... have to keep going."

She swallowed, then tried to empty her mind of all such troublesome thoughts as she finished her preparations, her wounds mostly healed, but the mental scars still bleeding.

Further south by a quarter mile, near the tip of the spit of land the sheep rustlers had occupied around the horse-shoe bay, a trio of trees that held a decent helping of the same green palm fruits, a whole three of which had survived the fall when Zelda used her Bombs to bring the trees down (at least she'd gotten some firewood out of the equation, too), there was another treasure.

At least, of sorts.

A spectacular view as a disappearing and reappearing flower led her to a Korok hiding atop a large boulder just beyond the sandy beach that looped back north. She had stripped down to her underthings to make the swim rather than salt her leather armor with the ocean water, but that only added to the experience as she felt the warm ocean breeze and soft mist of the waves breaking on the rock against her skin.

With the high butte of the promontory on the right, the glowing orange shrine on its tiny island at the center of the gulf, and the towering mountain of the large island further southeast at the edge of the horizon, Zelda was presented with a spectacular sight well worth remembering.

Without the sense of urgency she had once had, Zelda let herself sit on the moist rock for an hour as she watched gulls fly overhead. Somehow, she let herself simply exist, her mind silent rather than running in endless circles about the Calamity, her recent traumas, the knowledge that her father had such dire unfinished business to live as a ghost for a century just waiting for her to wake up, that she was the descendent of an actual goddess, doomed to reincarnate again and again...

It was all just too much. But somehow, for once, very little of it mattered.

It was a brief moment of peace before the sun became nearly unbearably hot and Zelda decided to return to the mainland. As she pushed herself to her bare feet atop the storm- and wave-smoothed rock, Zelda noticed something peculiar in the water some fifteen feet below her.

Shining metal, surrounded by broken wood beneath the waves, half-covered by coral and barnacles.

A chest. The Slate was as waterproof as it had ever been, so Zelda was easily able to use Magnesis in its default setting to bring the box up. Water drained from several cracks for a few minutes before she worked the rusted, half-encrusted lock open, but the ten blue rupees inside it seemed well worth the work to her.

A lot more at peace, and a fair bit wealthier, the princess took one last look at the horizon before she swam back to shore, let herself air-dry once more, and re-dressed and then continued on.

A mile north, slightly northeast of where the rustlers had camped, a small, disused pier held a raft that Zelda mostly passed by. A single footlocker, no doubt a sailor's travel belongings in ages long past, lay mouldering and rotting amid a pile of broken crockery. Within, Zelda's greedy fingers found a pair of opals, both finely cut as if they might have been intended for earrings, which were eagerly added to her stash of gems.

She made camp that evening in a small sea-cave half-filled with water that had just a few feet of dry land remaining at high tide as shone by the salt deposits on the bare rock. It was a decent place for it, she thought, for not only was it secluded from view except from the ocean itself and a thin beach that stretched toward the distant pier, two guardian-statues watched over it.

An offering plate on one had held another tasty palm fruit, but Zelda had seen that trick before and gladly gave up one of her own to get another golden seed from the local Korok.

Mid-way through the night, she woke feeling a renewed need for pleasure from her body, but the watchful eye of the forest spirit was enough to let her put it from her mind for the moment. She would have time for that later, and the call was not so desperate just yet.

In the morning, refreshed but shivering from the cool breeze that had replaced the warm one during the day, Zelda moved further east, either climbing along the bluffs from outcrop to ledge and back, or using her new varied Cryonis abilities to cut directly across the crashing waves that broke against the high cliffs on the southern edge of Walnot Mountain. By the time she had crossed Deepback Bay, Zelda had gathered up a few Armored Porgy and one Mighty Porgy from a school of fish, a pair of tasty bird wings from a gull she had shot out of the sky, and fished up a chunk of amber wedged between two of the stones just beneath the surface of the water a few feet from shore she had been lucky to see.

By that point, it was just after midmorning, and as the princess used Bombs, Magnesis, and even Stasis to scan for useful scavenge and salvage amid the heavy jetsam along the beaches of Mapla Point, she was almost feeling normal about things again. It was surreal, in so many ways and on many levels, to remember a conversation she had with an ancestor who shared her soul, both descended from a literal goddess.

Perhaps she was going mad, and the entire thing was the workings of a mind driven insane by the pain it was going through. Maybe it was a coping mechanism, some hallucination to bring about comfort rather than focus on the worst event of her life.

Either way, the adventurer-princess decided it didn't truly matter. If she was crazy, then she was crazy and she would accept the dreams, or whatever they were, as the comfort they seemed at the moment. And if they were real... if the fantastic things the former Zelda had told her were true (and she had to admit that what her father's ghost and the now-ancient Impa had told her corroborated it all), then she truly was a descendant of a goddess, and she essentially had to take what the first Zelda had told her at face value.

While picking up a dozen pieces of ore, flint, amber, and more, from the jagged rocks of Mapla Point, Zelda let her mind drift back to previous times. The Octorok tentacle had squirmed so deliciously... even the first one she had encountered, as it slithered into her mouth, had set a tingle into her body while she fought it off.

Bokoblins... Bubmin. She'd given him a blow-job, and loved it... at the very least, afterward, she had not hated it. Even now, looking back, she was not filled with disgust at herself. Neutral, at worst. It had even been... kind of fun, rewarding him for his help, for saving her.

Knowing he found her attractive enough to stroke himself to.

Even now, when she knew a 'Boko-Matron' was still a woman they had captured and raped until she provided children, the idea wasn't abhorrent as she felt like it should have been. At least, not if it was her. Better her, she supposed, than someone else.

She had a goddess watching out for her, apparently, making it better than it otherwise would be. Letting her enjoy it, at least a little. And if not, she was, or at least believed herself to be, emotionally resilient enough to handle it.

Or, once again, completely mad so it made no difference.

A large stone circle hinted at the hiding place of another Korok in the jaws of the wide C-shaped cove formed by the foothills of Walnot Mountain as they met the sea, and it was the work of a half-hour and a few more minutes to find the three stones missing from it and earn another seed.

The cove itself was beautiful, if a bit smelly. Three waterfalls, glacier-fed she was sure, made their way down from either inside the cliffs on the northern end, or down a small stream from the upper reaches of the large mountain, to feed a wide pool perhaps a mile and change across. The south end was filled with sea-water, where a narrow channel seeped through the shell-strewn sandy beach between the ocean proper and the cove's pool, and the brackish water where the two mixed provided a nice, healthy scent of rotting fish. Shimmering veins of ore and gems lined the northern half of the cove too, where sheer cliffs rose to meet the mountain as it climbed higher.

Seaweed, pretty shells, even small pebbles of amber lined the shore as she left the cove for a while to continue exploring along the outer edge of the stone fingers that framed the pool. She found a small cluster of crabs feasting on a couple of fish that had died trapped in the rocks near the beach's end, and kept a wary eye on two swimming Lizalfos a short way off-shore as she used a bomb to stun a couple each of Razorclaw and Ironshell crabs to add to her stores.

Then, rather than pass by the Lizalfos again and risk a fight, Zelda climbed the cliffs up onto the higher rocks, which were covered in scrub-grass and sparse wildflowers that had a sweet scent far different from the rancid fish in the cove.

One of those was drastically, eye-catchingly large compared to the rest of the storm-stunted flora, the daisy's petals as long as her fingers.

"Another Korok," she whispered with a smile, and started following that flower-trail, too.

Up the rising hills, stones, and grass, four, five times until the daisy switched to a daffodil with white petals just as large as the first, and another seed fell into her hand as she patted this kind Korok on its little green head.

By then, she was eighty or ninety feet above sea-level, and the sun was starting to sink toward the horizon once more. That was actually how she spotted the distant speck of a third Korok's pinwheel, sprouting from a short spire of rock that commanded the north end of the cove at Mapla. Even as the sky grew darker, Zelda had no problems seeing where she was going thanks to a bright, full moon and the guiding lights of several veins of Luminous Ore that ran through the same set of boulders.

It was too steep to count on being able to gather ore if she used Bombs to break some free, so Zelda had to resort to using her crude but sharp Lizal spears to break out five large chunks of the glowing stone. Unfortunately, her weaker spear, the first she had used, had not survived at all, the shaft and head had completely separated. Worse, the heavier, saw-toothed one was now dull at the point and it was starting to crack half-way down the shaft, because Zelda had been forced to hang her whole body from it to lever the last piece of ore out. It might stand up to one or two, maybe three more blows, but it would be a risk.

It was, at least, one she could mitigate by expanding and pulling out her Sheikah-made Serpentine Spear and hanging it crossways across her back too. It was awkward climbing with the two shafts forming an X over her back, but not too bad, and she was able to reach the Koroks' pinwheel just as night started to set in.

Thankfully, her eyes were keen enough that even in the gathering darkness, Zelda was able to pick off the hardest to find balloon with a single lost arrow, and the others were near enough that a carefully-thrown Minibomb blasted the other two to smithereens. The Korok was an unusual, fall-accented red color, but he didn't stick around to talk after rewarding the princess with her third seed.

Lured by the quiet of the day after the previous two, Zelda decided it was probably worth heading down into the secluded cove, climbing down in the moonlight to gather up the ore she could get on the way to the bottom.

She even had a good plan: Drop a few bombs down the edges as she circled it over the next two hours and the moon rose higher, trying to time their explosions to knock off many decent hunks of ore and hardened crystals.

It even worked, and Zelda saved herself a bit of work after by para-gliding to the water below, after finding a shallower spot on the north side to land in.

Of course, that's when things went wrong, and in a decidedly less-peaceful fashion.

She had just picked up her fourth Korok seed by diving into a suspicious ring of lily-pads and started dressing again when the rock she was using to drip-dry in the cold night air moved.

Violently.

The first lurch sent the princess tumbling sideways down into the water. She lost her reflexive grip on the enhanced Lizal spear as she slipped further, twisting and bouncing from one craggy outcropping to the next. Cold water enveloped her in darkness. She could not tell which way was up, stunned and disoriented by the rolling toss and then impact with the dark, brackish water.

Her nose hit gravel and sand first, scraping it bloody, before a heavy weight smashed into the smallest two toes on her left foot.

She screamed, letting out the last gasps of air as bubbles that tickled her face as they moved upward.

Instinct alone clamped Zelda's mouth shut hard enough to tingle her lips, and her broken toes burned with pain as she got her legs beneath her. Then she pushed, fighting to control another scream of agony as half her body weight pushed against the injury, while her hands scrabbled and slid through the loose pebbles, broken shells, and silica of the tidal pool beneath her.

At least, with the ground beneath her, she knew which way was up.

Her head broke the surface of the shallow pool a moment later, and the silence told Zelda to move, move, again.

She threw herself purposefully to the left this time, hoping to catch herself on the uninjured leg. A stone arm wider than she was tall smashed into the water where she had just been, sending a torrent-like wave toward the princess. The weight of it threw her off-balance and she fell again, but this time just to her knees, her head above the rolling surface of the pool.

With another grunt of pain, the broken foot hit dirt, and she pushed off again, trundling through the water as quickly as she could. It was just below her waist, hard to move through...

She ducked as another arm, a little smaller than the last one, hurled a boulder through the space where her head was a moment before. It smashed against the rocks two dozen feet ahead, sending sharp shards and painfully bludgeoning rocks back toward her. One struck far too close to her already-scarred left eye, and the salt water running down her face stung as it hit the bleeding wound. Another hit her in the chest, drawing blood too.

But Zelda pounded on, running, running...

Her chest hammered, her foot had gone numb hundreds of steps ago, when she heard more than saw the lumbering Stone Talus, its central elemental core glowing with the same luminous blue-green glow of the stones she had collected during the twilight hour, turn and lumber slowly back toward its resting spot.

"Fuck that place," Zelda panted as she leaned, gasping and definitely favoring the right leg, with a single arm against a lone palm tree near Deepback Bay once more. "I hate those things so much..."

She had not been forced to run quite so far and fast since the strange force had possessed her mind and body calling her toward the celestial fragments that filled pride of place in her satchel. Before that, it had been the Stone Talus on the Great Plateau, deep in the Forest of Spirits.

And before that...?

She did not know, but Zelda could not remember any other time she had run away as quickly or desperately. Not even from the decayed Guardians on the Plateau.

But she was safe now...

At least, safe enough to find a hollow in the rocks on the east side of the bay, sheltered from the brisk wind that spoke of an incoming squall, and hunker down to eat a cold meal and drink one of her healing elixirs. And, if there was still enough light afterward, probably to put a heavy poultice over her swollen toes.

"I should probably take off my boot before it's stuck on there, though... fuck... fuck, owwie... shit..."

If Zelda had considered being a princess at that moment, she would still have probably cursed and cussed rather than maintain the decorum of her station as she pulled the boot free.

At least the rest went relatively smoothly... but it still hurt.


"Oh, you poor babies," Zelda cried out, hustling forward despite the pronounced limp as she made her way back toward the long, no doubt painful, climb to Hateno Village the next day. Without exploring she had made better time, but it had still taken hours after dawn to make her way back to Hateno Beach.

And been reminded of the stolen sheep she had somehow forgotten days earlier.
They bleated angrily, weakly, tired and hungry and thirsty from lack of care, still trapped in the crude but strong pen the Bokoblins and Moblin had crafted for them.

Trying to ignore the lingering pain in her broken foot that she'd been walking on for hours already- and swimming across the bay on, before that- Zelda hurried to pull out a dozen apples, a Palm fruit each, and some hopefully healthy herbs from her stash to feed to the poor sheep as they crowded around her.

She almost lost a few fingers feeding the poor things, but by the time she had fed the lot to them, all seven sheep had grown less impatient and hungry, less desperate for food. They still bleated and called angrily as Zelda stood up once more, but with another apple each, the animals grew more calm. She tried talking to them then, keeping her voice as calm and soothing as possible. "Alright, little sheep. I'm going to take you home now, back to Koyin. Are you ready? Who's ready to go home? Bleat once for yes... or twice for yes. Okay, sounds good. Let's go, let me just untie this gate here..."

She really should have expected the mad rush once the barricade was open, but at least Zelda didn't fall over, she was able to catch herself with one arm on the short fence. The sheep did not run far, though. Instead, they huddled around the princess, bleating quietly but incessantly, their lips searching her hands, or her satchel, or her pockets, for more food.

"Alright, alright," she chuckled, and reached down to pull out more. She didn't let them have it, though. Instead, Zelda broke open the Palm fruit on one of the fence posts, then portioned it out bit by bit as she started leading them, still limping, up the shore toward the trail-head.

She had never considered herself a sheep wrangler. Not in her new life, and, she was sure, certainly not when she was a princess in more than just name.

But Zelda found herself rather good at it, and smiled at the simple affection the creatures showed her (or maybe it was just her sweet-tasting food) as they trotted along, increasingly calm as they hiked higher and higher up the old, twisting trail.