Archive of Our Own ^beta

A deviation.

 

Link gasps an awful, choked breath as the tip of a blade sinks between his ribs with a practiced ease and precision. Breathtaking, paralyzing pain arcs through him. The tang of blood and burning flesh taints the air. He stares down at the tip of a silvery-blue sword jutting from his chest.

He knows this blade.

Even beneath the flaking layer of barely-drying gore that coats it all the way down to the hilt, he would be able to recognize it anywhere. Even covered in his own blood.

It is the same shade of blue as the sword that clatters from his hand to the ground, the sword that he alone is destined to wield: the Master Sword.

How?

But his vision is already growing dark and the pain is beginning to feel far away as the nothingness beckons him with open arms. Agony spikes through him once more when the blade is pulled free but even that feels softened at the edges in this fog. Blood spurts from the wound in perfect sync with his pulse.

Link doesn’t want to die. Not when there are people to live for and adventures to take with them. Not when he has Zelda and Skyloft and even Groose, he supposes, to introduce this new world.

Not when he is so close, so painfully close to the end. Not standing here in front of a dark portal that waits to bring him to the culminating battle of this beautiful, horrible, amazing, terrifying journey. He is so close to being able to go home again with Zelda by his side.

“Who?” he whispers with a shallow, dying breath. “Why?” Who are you? Why here? Why now? Why me?

“I’m sorry.”

He never quite manages to see the mysterious figure’s face but something about them tickles at the back of his mind. It occurs to him just how much dying feels like being weightless. Eyes wide open but unseeing, he stares up at the sky for which he will one day be named. Or at least that is how the story always goes.

In every other version of this story, the Hero defeats the Demon King. A cycle that haunts the kingdom of Hyrule for as long as it has ever been and ever will be begins right here in this moment.

Yet this time around, Link of Skyloft dies at the center of the Sealed Grounds. His blood runs into the ancient stones, a stain that will be washed away long before this place is ever forgotten. Just as he is never meant to be.

This time around, the timeline shrieks in protest as what has yet to happen never comes to pass. As the never-ending legend of good and evil is cut short in its prologue. It breaks. It fractures. It cracks apart at the seams and lets the oblivion of chaos seep into the contradictions.

In nine repeats of a cycle that could have (should have) been, a Hero falls through the cracks.

 

A loss.

 

There is a moment where everything falls silent.

The cadence of eight heartbeats has long become seven, then six, then five, then four. Wind had screamed when four became three. Then two. All it took after that was one mistake, one missed step and one slash that moved faster than a shield could be raised. Sky stumbled when Wind toppled into him, suddenly limp and still in a way that felt so unbearably wrong.

Sky remembers being fourteen. And Wind will never know what it is like to look back on those years to realize just how young he’d been. Or maybe he wouldn’t have either way. Maybe the sailor really had already been all grown up in every way that mattered. Sky isn’t sure which is worse.

But he knows a fatal wound when he sees one, knows that Wind is gone before his body even hits the floor. There is nothing left to save.

The Chosen Hero has never been a healer – no, he is a wave of destruction and a force designed to tear apart armies and a killer of the unkillable. And with the battlefield clear of allies for the first time in months, Sky lets the rage sink in.

 

A beginning.

 

The Hero of Sky leaps from the back of his loftwing with a carefree laugh, letting gravity take over and pull him back down towards the clouds. Wind pulls at his hair as he falls and he can hear his sailcloth snapping in its grasp behind him.

He lets his eyes close, basking in the comforting heat of the sun that shines down on him in the only way he had known before his… adventure. It feels different on the surface and he’s missed feeling as though he could simply reach up and touch the sky itself.

Then there’s a sharp tug of fear that flashes through his soul bond.

He opens his eyes to see a chasm of inconceivably dark nothingness beneath him, wreathed by an odd purple light that closes in as he falls through. The connection with his loftwing snaps in a way even distance has never been able to before. What remains of his side recoils back into his mind, untethered and incomplete.

Just as he is about to panic in this subliminal space where he is nothing but an intangible consciousness floating through the ether, he is spat back out into the light. On solid ground.

Except this isn’t the surface and this world is neither his newly established Hyrule nor Skyloft. He is also just one of nine Hylians standing around each other in a loose circle as nine identical portals zip closed behind them.

“Hi! My name’s Link,” a boy (who must barely be a teenager by Link’s estimate) says brightly.

The chaos that unfolded at that greeting was nothing short of extraordinary.

 

An end.

 

There is only one portal.

It’s ironic, really, that this adventure of nine heroes is completed with one. The first. The guiltiest. The one who really doesn’t deserve to go home after what he’s done. Or failed to do.

Sky – Link, he supposes, if there’s nobody left to share his name anymore – stares at it in something he thinks feels like defeat. One path back home lies in front of him where he’d always imagined there being nine. There’s a quiet thought that maybe he should be grateful. Hylia is kind enough not to send him to return their bodies and recite condolences.

Eight heroes lay broken on the ground behind him as he steps through.

 

A sacrifice.

 

The Master Sword burns in his hand as Sky – Link – stalks silently up behind the Chosen Hero. He grimaces as the heat becomes overwhelming, searing into his skin. It feels no different from thrusting his sword through a monster except this one doesn’t turn to dust.

“Who… why?”

“I’m sorry,” Link says, letting the lie roll smoothly off of his tongue. It turns out death is still and empty and permanent in a way that feels infinitely heavier than the killing.

I hate you, he thinks into the silence that follows. I hate what you would have become if I let you live. I hate that you would have lived to let them die. I hate that you grew up to be me.

He steps into another portal to finish what he began on his first adventure. The God Killer is back on the hunt.

Fissures spread through time itself and it wavers just one breath away from obliteration.

 

A defeat.

 

The Shadow doesn’t dissipate into smoke or a plume of ashy dust. Instead, the darkness melts away, falling to the floor and dripping into the darkest corners of the room in a way that feels unnatural and wrong.

Sky tilts his head back, pretending for a moment that there is warmth and light shining down on him. That the eight brothers he’s lost are still here with him or if not alongside him then at least alive in some distant future. There is enough blood soaked into the green of his tunic for it to look brown.

He alone stands unscathed in a room that once held nine heroes and a Shadow. Not a single drop of his blood has stained this place but he walks away from it coated in crimson.

 

A reunion.

 

The portal at the center of the Sealed Grounds spits him out before the Demon King. Except Demise is the same as he has always been. And Link is three years wiser. He has nine times the skill. He is eight times more furious. The stakes are higher than they have ever been.

The lightning burns just as much as it had the first time and he can feel where new scars will one day appear besides the old ones. But Demise flags sooner than he had the first time around. Link is faster, more vicious, and far less afraid than he had been back then.

His breath aches in his chest as he pushes himself through what had once been the hardest fight of his life until this morning or at least the last time he’d seen the sun rise. The last time his brothers in spirit had felt the sun’s warmth across their faces and seen the sky stretched out above.

Lightning that hums with something powerful and divine beams from his sword and Link relishes in the way he can see the manifestation of his wrath. He can see the fear slowly dawn as Demise grows desperate. Lightning strikes him again and again and again and it hurts even more than the hollow ache of loss in his chest.

There is no courage without fear but Link doesn’t think there’s any room to be afraid alongside the empty hatred of his despair.

 

A memory.

 

Link pants with adrenaline-ridden panic as he strikes with a barely-controlled frenzy. Though the Master Sword is powerful, simply slashing at Demise feels like dragging a dull knife through metal. Calling and beaming divine lightning seems effective but the pain is blinding and his entire right side is tingling with lingering numbness and agony.

He grits his teeth as he raises his sword, a flash of indescribable power coursing through his body as he lets it pass through him. His momentum has him stumbling forward when Demise falters and falls.

The rush of victory and relief has him feeling as though he is floating when he leaps into the air and drives his sword downward into Demise’s stomach. The god lets out a pained, rageful wail.

It’s over.

 

A revelation.

 

“How foolish of him to curse the three of us into this cycle forever.” Time’s gaze is faraway but Sky can see the hints of old bitterness and grief written in the way his voice wavers.

Everything falls into place. It's heavy. It's crushing. How had he not realized this before?

He hears Legend say something in that lofty storytelling tone that he usually saves for the campfire or bouts of irony but the words wash through and over him.

“Forever,” he whispers and he is drowned out by laughter in response to the punchline of Legend’s sarcastic comment.

Forever is a long time to be trapped by fate. Nobody notices the weight of guilt as it begins to crush the Hero of the Sky into the ground.

 

The end of all things known.

 

The dark mirror of the Master Sword in Link’s hand is driven into the ground with an eerie screech and a splash before it dissipates. Demise wheezes dying breaths that sound just as wrong as the flickering aura of quickly fading divinity around him. He opens his mouth and Link doesn’t let a single word slip out.

With a jagged scream of vengeance and blindingly rageful justice, the Master Sword cleaves a clean line through the Demon King’s neck. Fear shines bright in his eyes as he meets Link’s eyes for the last time but it is no longer the fear of oblivion. With a flash of divine, white light, Demise is gone. For good this time.

Satisfaction burns dark in Link’s core as something breaks deep within him. If it’s the Hero’s spirit then at least no one will ever need it again after he’s gone. He’s brought to his knees by a choking, laughing sob as everything comes crashing down.

The timeline crumbles to dust.

The cycle of growth and destruction is broken before it can begin, the prophecy destroyed before it can ever be uttered. Link stares up at the blue overhead as he flickers once, twice, and fades away.

The Hero’s spirit dies with a boy in green who lies dead at the center of the Sacred Grounds and will never live again. Hylia’s power and bloodline slips from memory with the ever-constant flow of time.

The story of them fades into the backdrop of oblivion until they become nameless cautionary tales and then nothing at all.

Far away in a world that will never grow to become the kingdom that no one remains to remember, Link of Skyloft is the first Hylian in millenia to be buried on the surface. There is nobody to remember the eight others he would have one day traveled with. Their lives may never even come to pass at all.