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He lands gently.
He had not expected to land at all.
He lays, stunned, assaulted on all sides by brilliant sunlight and singing birds and fresh air, the faint taste of creek water and loam on his tongue.
His arm is dead weight at his side, heavy and scorched past bone and marrow. There is pain, but nothing so blinding and overwhelming as the attack that had – eaten it. Even now, he hears its hiss, as his flesh shrivels and collapses.
The shattered hilt of the Master Sword still rests in his still-living hand. He lifts his good arm slowly, testing. Evaluates the blade critically, what surviving length of it there is.
Enough, he decides. He brings it down.
There is a shout, the cold sensation of magic rushing towards him – too late.
X
The medicine they give him is more magical than medicinal. He eyes the concoction critically, but allows the woman – Mineru – to slather it onto the ache of his shoulder.
He’s unnerved them all. Good, he should, but –
The remnants of the gloom are hissing into nothing beneath the King’s glowing hands. The lot of them had stopped protesting and panicking over Link carving his own arm off when they’d realized the poison had not stayed in his arm. Link’s actions had slowed the spread, kept it from his heart long enough for them to realize and to do their mystic bullshit.
He should be thankful. Mostly, he’s tired.
“What did this to you?” Mineru asks. The King does not look up from his task, but the Queen at his side does.
There is very little of Zelda in her face. The same wide eyes, perhaps, but this – this is what the late Queen would have appeared as, he thinks. This is a woman trained and battle-tested in a way Zelda was never afforded.
He’s still bitter for her, as bitter as he is for himself and for everyone and everything they lost to her father’s inability to function as a halfway competent ruler.
There is no such thing as a coincidence; Zelda had spoken of her ancestors and here is a Hyrule he does not recognize. Link was never one for the books and research Zelda so adored, but he would not have survived his childhood, let alone what came after, if he were not intelligent.
He reaches for the broken Master Sword and taps his nails along the remnant of her blade. The sound chimes, still. The soft cadence of song sweeter than battle has any right to be.
She’s pleased, he thinks, and frowns, because she does not say anything further. Not like she does to Zelda.
There is something in this time for her, he deduces. Something to help her.
The rest are staring at her; High Priestess, King and Queen. At him.
And the second King, frowning in the shadows of the infirmary.
Link nods to him. He is the only one to understand that that is Link’s answer to Mineru’s question; the others are distracted by the blade and poison.
The Gerudo frowns.
Link smiles.
X
The thing of it is – he and Zelda did not have secrets from one another.
A century she’d spend, bound tightly enough to the Calamity to nearly cease existing. She’d felt it, remembered it, lived it. She’d known it in a way no other being ever has.
It is only fitting that Link get that same opportunity. Necessary, Link thinks, because Zelda had not mourned the Calamity but she had mourned the man it had once been, and so had he.
A friend, a stranger – someone who did what Link had not been capable of, and sheltered Zelda during a century of death and loss. Link knew Urbosa’s fury at the mere suggestion the Calamity had worn Gerudo skin – and he knew Zelda’s grief, that the myth was true.
Ganondorf Dragmire had been the greatest of his people, blessed by the gods and desert herself. There had been no better trophy for the Calamity to take.
Millenia consumed by a force of pure hatred and destruction – and still the man had fought, retained himself. Supported the princess destined to slay him as she bound herself to an invisible fight in the ruins of her home, waiting for her appointed knight to breath once more.
They’d gone to bury his body, only to find the Calamity not so gone as they’d hoped.
X
It won’t survive them again.
X
The Gerudo are not part of this ancient Hyrule. Not yet, not now. Their King has come to negotiate some form of agreement with Zelda’s ancestors; the Zonai had not been kind to the daughters of the desert, historically, and the Gerudo’s necessary plundering has never won them peaceful ties with the rest of the country.
Ganondorf Dragmire is a wary, prideful man setting aside his ego for the betterment of his people.
He is the first to approach Link, not for the mystery of his arrival, but for his knowledge of the future.
“Will they hold true to their word?” Ganondorf asks without preamble. He has waited until Link has separated himself from Zelda’s kin, isolated himself on the lakeshore of a body of water he does not recognize. He still has no true idea where he is, not yet – this Hyrule is too other.
He tilts his head back, stares up at the man looming over him, and pats the earth beside him. Ganondorf takes the invitation without hesitation, which is – nice.
He signs slowly. His language of choice has always been Zoran, all the better now that he has only one hand to use, but Zelda’s deep ties to the Gerudo had ensured he’d learned the silent speech of the desert too. The language he knows, however, has evolved for thousands of years past whatever sort Ganondorf may know – if he knows one at all.
The man’s eyes are intent as they track Link’s movements.
In my time, Link signs, Hyrule has fallen.
“War, then.” Ganondorf rumbles, after Link has repeated his signs thrice. Link shakes his head.
We are at peace. The Gerudo flourish. The Zora still rule the waters, the Rito the skies, the Gorons the mountains.
Ganondorf’s eyes lift from Link’s hands, settle on his face. The King does not speak for a very, very long time.
“And before your peace?”
I will tell you the story as a desert-daughter once told me.
Long ago, there was a King.
X
Ganondorf is a selfish man. He ignores Link a week before approaching him.
“If there was a way to prevent it, would you take it? At the risk of your whole future.”
He is a selfish man, yes, but a kind one too, to make certain Link understands what it is he is asking.
Link is too. He does not hesitate to nod.
X
Queen Sonia is horrified at the prospect of meddling with time at such a grand scale. Her husband is equally discomforted, and Link watches the two of them argue until they are breathless with some curiosity. Ganondorf does not back down; nor do the women at his back, the greatest warriors and mages the Gerudo have to offer.
Nor do the Zoran mages and Prince standing behind Link; he may not have gills or fins but they had been his people since he was a child. For Mipha’s sake alone he would have approached them, if he were not kin to them beyond her memory.
To hear of her – to hear of their Domain subject to such tragedy, their people losses so great, had brought the Zora to tears with rage. There is no greater revenge to be had, than to erase their enemy from existence.
The Gorons, who do not age as the rest of Hyrule’s peoples do, do not fully understand the problem. The Rito elders, however, stand behind Queen Sonia.
“And would your Queen, in your time, agree to such thing?! To tear the natural order apart and bring ruin to the whole of the world?!”
Finally, attention turns back to him. He does not hide his amusement at the question.
Zelda, he signs, rose my corpse from my grave and put a blade in my hand.
Zelda, he signs, single-handedly imprisoned our enemy in the ashes of her father’s throne room for a century before deigning to kill it.
Zelda, he signs, slew one god for the evils it wrought and damned another for her inaction.
Wiping our enemy from existence would be too kind of her to agree to.
But I am here; and I am kinder than she.
The Master Sword sings her agreement at his hip.
X
Long ago, there was a god.
X
Mineru and Rauru and Sonia forbid it anyway.
Link leaves, Ganondorf and Prince Ralis at his side regardless, for the Lost Woods.
X
The Master Sword that waits for them in the tangles of the Great Deku Tree’s roots is awake.
Her touch is gossamer, when she cradles his face in her hands.
“Master.” She whispers, and her face is carved, cannot smile, but Link smiles for the both of them. Presses his lips to her palm. His own blade hums, joyful and wanting.
Hylia was not a benevolent goddess, she tells them. Not as the people of Hyrule remember her as. She was a warrior-goddess, warrior-queen. His Zelda is hers in blood and in spirit.
“You must reforge us.” She tells them.
Three of three, she tells them, for Hylia honored her mothers in all ways. Three Springs, to wash the taint of corruption from the blade. Three scales, to build the blade anew. And –
“They must bleed.” She says.
“That will not be a problem.” Prince Ralis murmurs, and Ganondorf nods is agreement at Link’s other shoulder.
Can I wake you? He signs, after they have received their instructions. Her form is fainter now, drifting in particles of light and shimmer to the sword that houses her.
“To return, you must. Three Temples of Time exist in your time, Master. You will have to fight your way through them – see your way through them. But I will be waiting on the other side.”
“And so will she.”
X
“You will return to your time, then?” Prince Ralis is as young as Mipha was when she first became Champion; his species sleeker, more streamlined than her own. His mother rules the Domain, his father long dead, and he speaks for his people in her absence.
He calls Mipha daughter, for the Zora do not hold to Hylian notions of relation. Mipha, and the great Queens Ruto and Oren, the Sage Laruto and the hero Sidon has become in the wake of his sister’s death. Children, loved before they are even born.
Link had wept, at the honor Prince Ralis bestowed upon his descendants in blood and station.
He nods. He will not remain parted from Zelda any longer than he must.
“You would have a home here, Sir Knight. Among our people – and the Gerudo too, I suspect.”
Link smiles, takes the Prince’s offered hand and squeezes it gently in thanks.
X
“Fuck you.” Ganondorf says flatly, staring up at Mount Lanayru’s frozen heights. Prince Ralis only laughs; his species more attuned to the cold than most.
X
Prince Ralis must provide the map. Ganondorf eyes it skeptically, but Link more or less points out the approximate locations of the Springs, and off they go.
The holes and jagged edges to her blade soothe in the spring’s waters, into something less frightful. Red-black ichor bleeds from the metal, only to boil away to nothing in the golden waters. She feels lighter each time. Some of her glow returns to her; her shine.
“What is she made of?” Ganondorf asks one evening. Link shrugs.
She feels like bone, sometimes. Too alive to be anything but flesh, others.
If Zelda is the blood of Hylia – there had been a body.
He does not voice these thoughts.
X
The dragons prove to be harder – but not by much. They begin with Naydra, having saved her spring for last, and go second to Farosh and third to Eldin, for fear the Gorons may try to stop them. Prince Ralis waits for them at the foot of Death Mountain, then – the heat too much for him to approach.
After, scales in hand, they search for the Gorons. Neither of them are happy about it, but they need a smith – and the finest in Hyrule are and have always been the Gorons.
They are taken to a circle of Elders; more than exist in Link’s own time. It is an arena they stand in, the eldest of the Goron brothers seated in a ring around them. Ganondorf meets them with all the dignity of his crown; Link merely stares, head tilted to the side, and his gaze drifts up – and up – and up – and up –
“The Mountain agrees with you, goro.”
The Goron who speaks is the largest Link has ever seen, all but vanished into the dark depths of the cave’s ceiling, but for his eyes – larger than he is, black like pools of night. His voice is the low rumble of rockfall and the drag of magma currents. His brothers call him Biggoron, and Link cannot think of a more appropriate name.
He is the eldest, and the greatest smith the Gorons have ever known. He takes the Master Sword and the scales, and returns to them a blade unlike anything Link has ever seen before.
She looks right, now, he realizes.
“We will not speak of this.” Biggoron warns, and Ganondorf swears it so.
X
“We could kill them.” Ganondorf says, eyes tracking Dinraal’s ever-serene form. Link pulls a face.
“You do not strike me as the type of man to balk at sacrilege.” Prince Ralis says dryly, considering him, and Link laughs, silent and great.
They are wonderful to fly with, he signs. I am fond of them.
“You fly, in your time?” Prince Ralis asks, startled, and Link grins and picks up a stick, and begins to sketch out his glider for his companions in the dirt at their feet; they’ll need one, to reach the beasts.
He’ll have to modify his design, anyway – what with only one arm.
X
“I hate you.”
“We could have thought that through better.” Ganondorf admits, wholly blackened with soot and ash, and Link hovers over Ralis’ still-wounded arm. A fairy had taken care of the worst of the burns – the peeling, shriveling scales and the embers of flesh – but it would scar, and scar badly.
Dinraal’s blood had been hot as magma, with none of the weight – after Link had managed to cut the dragon deep enough to bleed it had whipped its head about, and nearly splashed the whole lot of them, if not for Ganondorf’s quick thinking and magical prowess.
“I should be able to wield my spear still; this isn’t quite so deep as the original wound. But I still hate you.”
“At least the other two aren’t fire dragons.”
“Hate.”
X
Ganondorf loses a finger to Naydra, and is both amused and furious over it. Link takes a bolt of lightning from Farosh to the chest; he feels Zelda grip his heart in her hands and squeeze rhythm back into it, and she leaves him with scars fractaling up his torso in punishment.
“She is powerful.” Ganondorf says quietly, eyes dark.
“She’s mad.” Prince Ralis says flatly, far less reverently, but even more relieved. Link had taken the blow for him.
Isn’t she? He signs, loopy and warm and adoring.
X
She’s longer, shape changed. Greater in some way he cannot put name to. They have not sung power into her or prayed blessings into her; this is power obtained through violence and warfare and bloodshed and determination.
Link cannot help but wonder if a knight has ever sought to heal her before, if it has only ever been a princess to do so.
He leaves his mark on her, as she has on him – and thinks to all those who have come before him, who may never come before him now, and thinks, you are not forgotten.
X
The King and Queen and High Priestess have formally forbade their actions, but not been able to track them – not until they began fighting the dragons; each visible across nearly half of Hyrule. They are drifting their way through Hyrule Field, arguing over what to do next, when the royal soldiers find them.
X
There is something inside the temple.
It sets Link’s teeth on edge; familiar and his and alien, not his, never his, but – perhaps belonging to those who came before him.
They cannot take the Master Sword from him; she sets fire to the blood of the first man who tries and bleeds the second dry. She has become more vicious in her reforging, he realizes fondly.
He does not kneel. Neither does the royalty he travels with. Rauru is not the type of man to care about his station and neither is his wife, but the Hylians who call him King and she Queen are, and they are furious at the insult.
Someone moves to disarm the Gerudo King; Ganondorf merely lifts his chin and the very shadows at their feet writhe up into beings all their own. They’ve red eyes; Link’s boils and writhes until a tendril bursts from the stump of its shoulder and forms a second arm. Link’s shadow spares him a challenging look.
“Sorcery like this is unnatural.”
Don’t be rude, Link signs without thinking; sees something like a snarl form on Prince Ralis’ shadow.
They cannot be contained. Ganondorf is a sorcerer second to warrior and he is still greater than even the Sages in power and skill; Prince Ralis is as great with trident as Mipha once was – will be – and stronger than any Hylian could ever hope to me; and Link – Link bears the Master Sword.
Zelda’s kin are aware of this.
They will still try.
Zelda’s kin has found something they believe can. Rauru’s eyes linger on the Master Sword as he speaks. Link swallows the urge to strike the man’s head from his shoulders at the insult. Zelda would hate him, he decides. Would scorn them.
“The Zonai built this temple ages past – to contain a power capable of enforcing the will of Hyrule’s people.”
There is something inside the temple – the temple built below the throne room, buried in rock and earth like a grave. There is something behind the doors wrought with holy symbols and warnings the Queen and King stand before; something with siren-song and want, and Queen Sonia’s golden power sweeps the debris of ages from those doors, sets them back in their mechanisms.
Mineru and Rauru come forward to open them as one.
“This is it.” Prince Ralis says suddenly, certainly. His voice rings through the room, to Link’s ears, but must be buried beneath the grinding of stone and metal.
“We slay it – and you go. They will not let us down here a second time.” Ganondorf murmurs.
“You believe this to be the Temple the sword-spirit spoke of?”
“That is the Hylian word for time, stamped on those doors.” Ganondorf says dryly, just as soft. Link, who has been irate over his illiteracy in this time from the start, kicks his companion’s foot petulantly.
Prince Ralis tilts his head, squints, and lets out a skeptical sound of his own.
Within the hidden chamber is something gold, something radiating such intense power that it nearly brings Link to his knees; he stands, as do his companions, but the King and Queen and High Priestess, so much closer to it, cannot.
It is on hands and knees that Rauru creeps forward, hand upraised, and presses his palm to the corner of one of the lower triangles.
X
And a god awakens.
X
Long ago, there was a god, and he cursed the people of Hyrule in his rage, that they might never know peace, that they would always suffer the edge of his vengeance, that he would haunt them until their dying breaths.
And to seal this evil, he stole a King.
X
This King is ready for him.
X
This King has a knight and a Prince of his own.
X
Rauru is torn to pieces beneath the rush of red-black rage that pours from the trinket; a lovely trap bait and set long before any alive could fathom. The artifact itself splinters and shatters; one piece slams into Queen Sonia with a sound like the gong of a bell, sending her crashing to the floor and leaving her motionless.
One hurtles itself into Link with the howl of a beast – he feels nothing but a warmth in his blood, hears the Master Sword’s growing cry of fury far more sharply than he had moments before.
And one, drenched and dripping in miasma, throws itself towards Ganondorf.
Three shadows, a scimitar, a trident, and the Master Sword are there to greet it.
X
This is no Calamity, no beast. It may be just as mindless and just as malicious, but it is hungering and needing a vessel; and given its single-minded determination to claim the Gerudo King, Link suspects this vessel has been chosen by whatever the artifact originally was – the Calamity has no say in it, cannot change it.
If it cannot have Ganondorf, it cannot have anyone.
And it will not have him.
Prince Ralis’ trident breaks first; as powerfully crafted as the weapon is, its magic is not enough to stand up to the Calamity. It does not need to; the Hylians around them have recovered from their shock and have split; some to gather their High Priestess and Queen and the rest to stop them, as if they are at fault for this madness.
Prince Ralis turns to them, barehanded, and bares his teeth. The markings on the underside of his fins flare, tracing warpaint down his face and throat and chest beneath his armor; a Zoran threat display. The Hylians are not wise enough to heed it.
The Master Sword is screaming, joy and fury and bloodlust to match Link’s own – they are enough, this is enough, they will win.
The Calamity pulls itself back, and Link lungs with it; sheers through one of the artifacts corners, and a hunk of miasma drops, boiling and dissolving into nothing now that it is severed from the whole. From it emerges that same golden light – particles that flee for Ganondorf untainted by the Calamity.
Link’s gaze meets his doppelgängers’; its grin matches his own, the shadowy replica of the Master Sword in its hands glowing darker as his glows brighter.
The more they chip away at it, the greater the pull towards Ganondorf seems to get – the Calamity grows less coordinated in its attacks, draws back less and less. Ganondorf commands the shadows as only a general can – he is a warrior-king as much as Zelda is a warrior-princess. By the time only the rotten heart of the Calamity remains, Link is pressed back against the Gerudo King’s chest, his blade and its shadowy twin all that is left between the Calamity and its prey – and that, all but a breath away from his own flesh.
His hand burns; the Master Sword’s hilt surges, slides, angles itself – and catches on the Calamity’s edge.
One great hand clad in gold and ruby, sparking still with black magic, folds over his, and the strength of the Gerudo King bears down atop his own.
X
In his time, the Calamity died with a scream fit to tear the heavens to pieces.
In this, it gasps a death rattle, and breathes no more.
X
“GO!”
Prince Ralis’ voice is a guttural thing, shocking them out of their stupor before a full breath can even pass Link’s lips.
The last bit of golden light, free from the Calamity, slips past Link slowly, leisurely, and he has barely an instant to register that before Ganondorf’s hand is falling from where it holds his, hooking around his chest, and hauling ass into the room that had as of minutes ago been filled with the Calamity and its glow-in-the-dark trinket.
The moment they step past the threshold – the world warps.
Shifts.
X
Zelda is calling them.
X
Home.
X
One step takes them into the ruins of a temple long overgrown with gloom and the twisting, writhing husks of trees. A young man – younger than Link was even when the Calamity first struck, even when he first claimed the Master Sword – stands in a circle of stones, in front of a crumbling pedestal stamped with the same three triangles they’d just fought.
He holds the Master Sword – a whole other form of it, sleeker and thinner and more gold than silver – in his hand. He has Link’s eyes.
Another step. The winds of time pull and tear at them, and Ganondorf presses on heedless.
The temple has been rebuilt – no, this is a new temple, without the echoes of ruin and age. A cathedral, like those that had once been the pride and joy of Castle Town. Stained glass rises up on all sides, paints the room in a rainbow of colors.
A young Sheikah stands there, staring at them with wide red eyes and Zelda’s hair a tangled braid down his back; Link smiles to see him, knows him thanks to Zelda’s stories of her ancestors, even as brilliant light consumes the pedestal behind the boy and Ganondorf moves past him.
A third step; water cascades down on all sides of them, another pedestal, and this time a child in green holds a broken blade in his hands and a silver wand at his hip. He knows Ganondorf has spotted the water when he hears a fuck no and Ganondorf’s pace speeds up.
Another – and the scream of time and space rises to a crescendo, bearing down on them as intruder and wrong and alien, closing in around them like a prism spelling only death.
The Master Sword blazes with song and light, and a hand reaches out, spearing a fractal of freedom into their prison.
Link does not have a free hand to grab for it, but Ganondorf does.
X
“Don’t you ever fucking do that again!” She orders, the weight of a goddess’ blood and a crown’s authority in her voice, and then she collapses into them.
The Master Sword falls from his hand with a chime, and she spirals free of her blade in a delicate swirl of light.
And, finally, Link allows himself to weep.
X
“Welcome home.”