Hi Mimi! Great to see you back, and I hope you feel better soon! Your review read fine, if you were still worrying. :-) Thank you so much - really glad you like all the work I've put into the lore! =D

Glad you're all still enjoying!

Chapter 64: A Pattern Turning

Who are you?

I'm… a servant of the goddess Hylia. My name is Zelda. She sent me to help you however I can.

After stepping through Gate of Time, Zelda had tuned it back to the beginning of the Cycle, leaving it as she had found it in the future. Then, with Hylia's divine power at her fingertips, temporarily freed from the restrictions of hiding from Ghirahim as she would have to in the future, she had searched the ruins of the city, lifting the robots who could still be restored from their sheltered resting places, Para's sensors, Hylia's senses, and Saina's understanding of what each readout, each feeling meant combining into a sure and certain knowledge. One by one she had found them, all the ones she could easily revive, until there were no more to recover and she scoured the city again for power cores.

She'd killed them all. She had to bring them back.

One by one they'd woken, booting up with twitches and beeps, shock, questions. None of them remembered anything more detailed than Reach and Rails and the others Saina had woken so long before, and for that, Zelda was glad. She hadn't explained it to them, couldn't bring herself to. Only that the goddess had sent her to help them, because she loved and cared for them, and she owed their kin a great debt. When she'd explained she'd come through the Gate of Time, when their own finely-calibrated sensors had confirmed her temporal displacement, when she'd spoken of time with the fluency and understanding of a temporal engineer who had all but seen its heart, they had accepted her words. To avoid the risk of temporal instability, they had even agreed, unprompted, not to question her too deeply.

She'd told them that, by the time a thousand years had passed, they had left the desert; that they would need to, one way or another. That she didn't know why. She'd told them of the islands that Hylia had raised above the clouds; warned them of the shield that would prevent any spirit passing through… but not, perhaps, them. She'd told them that she would find and revive others in other cities as she could, on her way through the desert, and send them to meet those she had already awoken.

She had warned them what danger would lie to the east for a thousand years, for Hylia had guarded the Triforce and the demons would not leave until it was found, and hoped that they might travel west across the desert and be free of it all, somewhere far away, but she had left the choice to them.

And afterwards, as she and Impa made camp in a room the robots had declared safe and gratefully offered to her, she had felt pasts and futures spin around her again, balanced on the fulcrum of her choices, and held her head, dizzy with it.

She had lent her powers to the robots' aid again the next day, helping them salvage whatever they asked her to: some things she didn't recognise, others she knew they would need to travel across the desert, not asking them why. They avoided asking her questions either, Cycle-born just as she was, knowing the danger of alteration of the great tapestry of time. The gratitude they showed her, asked her to convey to her goddess, promised that they would honour her goddess in demonstration of, touched her heart even as it weighed it down with guilt.

This is all my fault. I killed you all.

I broke the Cycle…

But the words remained unspoken, and when, two days later, she had done all she could readily do and told them she would have to move on, every last one of them came to see her off in her patched-up levitrain, a crate of power cores her only cargo. Perhaps the trains were all identical, all designed for the same purpose, but she felt that she recognised it: that it was the same levitrain she had taken from Cronellon in the distant future.

Disembarking at Cronellon, realising almost without surprise that she had arrived on the same platform she had departed from in the distant future, Zelda had hesitated. Link would need to pass through here, and he would need the power cores she had brought with her readily accessible – but not so accessible that it would be immediately obvious that they went together with the levitrains, just in case someone else, or Ghirahim, passed through in the thousand years that had to pass before Link collected the cores she knew he'd need. She'd have to put them somewhere close by, somewhere he could find them, if he knew what to look for…

She remembered being in this same station, a very literal lifetime ago. Saina had searched it once, looking for transport and for robots to reactivate. She'd found both: levitrains that could be repaired enough to work; and a robot who nicknamed herself Rails, caught emptying bins in one of the offices when the temporal shockwave had hit. Thinking of the upbeat maintenance robot and her grand dreams of one day running the entire levirail network, Zelda smiled, at once fond and sad.

With Impa's help and a slight boost from her own divine power, she carried the crate up into the stationmaster's office, lying the office bin on its side beside it in a private memorial only she and Para would ever understand. Perhaps – probably – Rails was still alive in this time, playing out her role on the islands above and far to the east, but in Zelda's own she was long dead. Past and future spun in her mind again as she remembered searching for cores nearby, knowing from the traces of her own power that she'd encountered before that, somehow, Hylia – or Zelda herself – had prepared for this, had been here before her. She'd found them in the crate in the office, the bin still on its side a thousand years later, a silent memento that had made her smile in bittersweet regret for all the many people who had helped her, who she had loved, and who she would never see again. In the endless ever-changing landscape of the when, cause and consequence eddied about her. Had she done that? She had in this past, in its future; she always had, and yet she sensed that there were paths where she had not, other temporal stabilities where Zelda would-had will-yet reached the Gate of Time earlier, or later, or another way – but they were not, where she was, and this causal chain was stable, and she knew at her core, where Hylia had barely felt and Saina had consciously known only theoretically, that she could never see far enough to encompass the ripples she had caused from the points where they began.

Take as then my gift to you.

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

A weight of disapproval, a weight of inevitability. A weight of consequence… Not of refusal.

The consequences that follow I shall not shield you from.

Zelda leant against the wall, feeling a tremor run through her. Had all her choices, all anyone's choices, always been like this? Was the only reason people didn't feel the weight of them the fact that they could only see the past, and that imperfectly; that no part of most mortals could span even the slightest breadth of time?

"Your Radiance, do you need to rest?" The words were so soft they were barely above a whisper, yet she could hear the concern in them. Zelda pushed herself upright, dragged her mind back into the present enough to smile at Impa, to feel her gratitude at the Sheikah woman's devotion and inhabit it so that the present was her only world once again.

"No, I'm all right. We should keep moving – we need to go back to the reservoir, the one where I felt traces of my power. I have to make sure it will still hold water when we needed it."

Impa nodded, though Zelda could see confusion flicker in her eyes for a moment before being replaced with acceptance.

"Do you think Guard and Sentry are still here in this iteration, Mistress?" Parasova asked. Zelda scooped her up from the top of the crate as she considered, walking back out of the office and heading for the exit.

"I don't know. I – Saina – didn't really keep track of what was happening in Cronellon while we were studying the Gate of Time and preparing to return. I know a lot of the robots from Cronellon joined us… if any didn't, I suppose we'll run into them. I should probably tell them to go north and meet the others." She sighed. "I want to revive as many as I can while we're here, as well. I owe them at least that much."

"Understood, Mistress. But remember that you can't afford to take too long!"

"I know." With every day that passed, another day opened in the temporal gap between the moment the second Gate of Time, her Gate, was opened and the moment when Demise had been sealed away. Ghirahim had survived the divine clash and escaped his master's imprisonment to wait a thousand years for Hylia's return, for Zelda's birth, and though she knew he couldn't have escaped unscathed, that his aura had been dim enough or far enough away that she had not felt it as she lay dying, she didn't know how long it had taken him to recover – how long she would have before he began hunting her just as he had in the future. Quite apart from that, the earlier she had the Gate open, the longer the timespan she would have to work with if she needed it… and the sooner, perhaps, hopefully, Link could rejoin her.

But what would he see if he did? Who would he see when he did? She'd fled from him to save her sense of self, her fragile memories of a past no mortal should know, and now she was – what? A goddess, a monster, a girl from Skyloft whose brief, happy memories felt all but drowned in all she had been and all she needed to do? She had loved him, and she had loved him, and she felt an echo of Saina's half-scandalised, half-delighted amusement from all that time ago, that bright goddess Hylia was sweet on a mortal man.

Was any part of her herself any more?

When this is over, ran the thoughts that might have been Hylia's, might have been Saina's, might simply have been Zelda's, I will be a girl from Skyloft again. She would lay aside the cares and the memories as best she could and try to go back to that simple life of promise, of wide horizons and curiosity enough to dare any barrier, of a future spent exploring with…

Had any part of her ever been herself?

Zelda kept her face turned away from Impa, now carrying Para, as she angrily scrubbed tears from her eyes, forcing herself to focus on the next step, and nothing more. She had to reinforce the reservoir with a power that would last a millennium, and after that, she had to find and revive as many robots as she could before she pressed on to Hylia's war-ravaged lands, and to the Gate of Time.

If she focused on that, then she didn't have to think about anything else.

Lookit me, a whole three chapters in three weeks! Keep 'em coming! (Well, maybe… Wish me luck!)

Patch Notes
- Reason provided for the existence of a monument in honour of a Triforce-bearing bird goddess who doesn't live here.
- Temporal shenanigans now more subtly evident.
- Zelda now useful.
- Taping over someone's memories and sense of self remains horrible.

Would it have killed them to make Zelda do something, anything on camera at any point in the game? The only time she has any agency, personality, or action is the intro-tutorial section! We could pretty much have had the whole rest of the game without her for all the impact she actually has on anything – it's not like Link wouldn't have fought a big world-eating monster anyway!