Chapter Text
For someone with a reputation so extraordinary, this ‘Link’ person's house looked pretty normal to her.
Zelda quickly closed the door behind her to deter any anxious glances from the townsfolk of Suthorn Village and stepped further inside. The house was just one large room with standard amenities tucked into each corner like separate regions on a map. The kitchen, a narrow table stove with a cooking skillet and a small stack of clean dishes, was to her immediate left. To her right, a storage area of sorts—a few ceramic spice pots and a sturdy, double-door wardrobe stood tall against the wall. A rather adorable-looking stuffed owl nestled beside the wardrobe had her second-guessing if she was in the right house for a moment, but she recognized the green hat hanging off a bedpost in the northeastern part of the room and took another step forwardf.
The bedchamber (if she could even call it that) was separated from the main floor by a squat, raised platform. The walls were bare, the scant furnishings dull, save for a large, robust houseplant she only knew to be low maintenance because she possessed one of her own. As far as she could tell, there was nothing exceptional about the house at all. Except, maybe, the size of the cobweb high in the back corner near a gray-stone hearth.
Where were the weapon mounts? The wooden target dummies? Instructive posters detailing combat moves and battle strategy? She knew Suthorn didn't have their own army, but the panicked villagers had made him sound like some kind of soldier.
This didn’t look anything like the barracks back in Hyrule Castle Town. Impa had allowed her to view them as a part of the special tour she received for her sixteenth birthday. She'd begged and begged for months to be shown all the secret passages throughout the castle and surrounding town, which included a hidden tunnel through a well beneath the barracks. The outlandish wish had only been granted, Zelda suspected, in the hopes she might stop seeking them out on her own, as they often led to restricted areas of the town and beyond. And it had pacified her…for a fortnight or so. She had a sneaking suspicion a few corridors had been purposefully left out.
Like the one she'd used to escape the castle dungeons with Tri.
A chill ran down her spine. She pulled the swordsman's cloak tighter around her and climbed the two steps up to the bedroom. Fatigue tugged at her eyes at the sight of a fluffy pillow, but she plopped herself down in the wooden chair beside the bed and sighed. It would be improper for a princess to sleep in a stranger's unmade bed, no matter how inviting it looked.
A curious thing to neglect, she thought, for someone who seemed so organized.
Guards were required to make their beds upon rising every morning. Rhoam, the guard often posted outside her rooms, had told her that when she inquired about his daily schedule. She’d believed him to be kind, as close to a friend as she could have, the way he indulged her curious questions about life outside the confines of regality. But she had witnessed the fickleness of his favor, of all the guard's favor, when they hauled her out of the throne room at the command of that phony king and threw her in the dungeons. Didn’t they know her at all? How could they believe she was the one responsible for the rift in the castle?
"Zelda?" Tri's bell-like voice drew her back from the sink hole rapidly forming in her head. She sighed. She could not give into despair. She didn't have the time.
Zelda turned her attention to the desk next to the bed where she found a small candle, a half-empty cup of water, a stack of books, and a clear bag filled with candy. Candy. Her mouth watered. The kitchen staff had to lock the cupboards at night when she was younger so she didn't gorge herself sick on confections after the rest of the castle went to bed. She still snuck sweets every now and again, but she was better disciplined and only took as much as she could so that the theft remained unnoticed.
They called her wisdom's daughter, after all.
This wasn't her kitchen, though. It wasn't even Link's. That was over her shoulder in the front left corner of the house. She swallowed thickly and forced her eyes to the stack of books, attentively scanning the titles.
"Have you found anything that might be helpful?" Tri said.
"Not yet."
"Do you know what you are looking for?"
She huffed and slumped back into the chair. She was fairly certain there wasn't a text in existence that could realistically give her what she needed. Her castle contained the most extensive library in all of Hyrule and she'd never come across any books on mysterious echo magic, or guides on closing monstrous rifts, or what to do if your father has been replaced with an imposter.
Her eyes flickered up to the tiny star hovering beside her head. She was apparently the only person who could see them, like they were some kind of golden guardian angel. Or a demon. She had yet to decide if it was a good thing or not.
"Could you search the wardrobe over there for me?" she said, pointing across the room.
Tri let out a curious two-tone whistle.
"For a sword or a shield…I don't really know. Anything that looks like something a hero might use."
"Why do you require a weapon?" Tri drifted in front of her face. "I have already given you the Tri Rod."
She curled her fingers around the wand in her right hand and felt it hum with power, as if trying to anticipate her pending command. If she lifted it now, she could summon any of the items or monsters she'd made a copy of with the strange magic.
Echoes, Tri called them.
It was certainly a useful artifact, but she'd heard the stories from the guards. Terrible beasts made of oil and rot occasionally emerged from the greedy blackness of the rifts, as noxious as they were savage. There were bound to be some lurking inside the large rift just outside of the village. It was wise to be prepared…even if she didn’t know what such a state entailed.
Zelda sighed again. She’d never been permitted to fight, never been allowed outside the safety of Castle Town’s walls. She didn’t know the first thing about defending herself. There was a bodyguard at her side almost every hour of the day. Her? Battle monsters? Nevermind the way the world inside the rift twisted a person. How was she supposed to prepare for that? People who managed to return after falling came back wrong. Sick in their minds or their hearts. Would the wand protect her from that? Would it keep her safe? Or was it only as strong as the person who wielded it? She had no idea how it even worked.
Something coiled unpleasantly in her belly. Heat crept up her neck and behind her ears, causing her pulse to beat like a war drum. She'd felt this way inside that crystal cage. Helpless. Forced to do nothing but wait to be rescued for a week while the blue monster deliberated what to do with her. And then the swordsman—Link, she learned his name from the villagers—had come along and still she could do nothing but watch. Watch him fight, her fate in the hands of a person she didn't even know!
At least he'd looked like a hero. Brave and fast and strong…until a rift yawned open under his feet and gobbled him up, too. A goner, for sure.
Tri said no one can escape the rifts on their own.
Since then, she’d escaped one dungeon only to be thrown into another by her own people. She’d been chased by rifts, nearly drowned in a canal, and trekked the entire way to Suthorn Village on foot only to discover the town desperately needed help. A woman had fallen into a nearby rift that was growing larger and larger by the hour, the same rift that blocked the house Impa instructed Zelda to travel to before fleeing the dungeons.
And to complicate matters further, Tri's friends—the mysterious beings apparently responsible for mending rifts all across Hyrule—were also missing. Granted, she hadn't even known Tri and their friends existed before yesterday, but that was neither here nor there because she was the only one who could even see them. Tri had no one else to ask for help, and the task required entering and investigating the aforementioned rift.
"Zelda?"
Magic crackled at the end of the Tri Rod. She was summoning something without meaning to. Zelda shot up from the chair to prevent the echo from forming on the desk, and her elbow caught the cup of water. It tipped over the edge and instantly shattered around her feet, water splattering over the front of her robes as a copy of the miserable bed from the dungeons appeared directly atop Link's beside her.
"Shit!" she hissed, her eyes darting between the beds to the shattered cup to the water soaking through to her shins. She'd broken into his house and now she was breaking things. "Well, this is just great."
Tri had floated up to the top of the stack and appeared to be studying it, their entire body tilting back and forth with an intense curiosity, as if scrutinizing the design.
"Is there something wrong with the echo?" she asked dryly.
Tri looked at her this time and gave another tilt.
"What is 'shit'?"
Zelda's stomach plummeted. The curse sounded positively absurd in Tri's musical voice, but it was a word she'd been scolded for using many, many times before. A byproduct of her temper, which she'd been told was very unbecoming of a princess. A future queen.
"You can't tell anyone I said that."
Tri tilted their entire body to the side, causing the three triangles bobbing behind them to ripple.
"Who am I going to tell? No one else can see me."
It was a good thing, she decided.
"I only said it because I was angry. It's…a problem."
"What is 'angry'?"
"That’s hard to explain." She squatted down and carefully began picking up the larger shards of the broken cup. Gradually, piece by piece, her anger cooled. It was an accident. Just an accident. Nothing to lose herself over.
When she finally looked up, Tri was still waiting. They’d done this a few times already, incapable of reading nonverbal clues, insistent on receiving an answer. Like a mystical, floating toddler.
Impa once described anger like a pot of boiling water, but she wasn't sure the metaphor would make sense for Tri. It hardly made sense to her.
"Sometimes, when you are tired or hurt or…soaking wet," she gestured to the front of her robes and made a face, "those things sort of…build on top of each other."
"Like the echoes?"
"Sure, yeah, like the echoes. I can only stack so many before the magic snaps, right?"
"Right."
"So,"—she waved the Tri Rod to dismiss the dungeon bed in a flash of light—"anger is how people relieve the build up. Sometimes. I usually end up yelling, or saying things I shouldn't say."
Tri considered this for a moment.
"Like 'shit'?"
She sighed.
There was a broom in the kitchen corner. Zelda trotted over to it, catching a glimpse of the dishes on the table as she passed. Everything was in a pair: two plates, two bowls, two spoons…all except the cups. The broken one's twin sat alone and…unblemished.
She didn't even have to think before aiming the Tri Rod.
Magic like a hundred twinkling stars surrounded the cup and produced an exact replica directly beside it. She picked it up by the handle and inspected it in the light. It was perfect. If Link walked through the front door right now, he would be none the wiser his original had been broken.
The copy would disappear eventually, but just the sight of it filled her with an odd, satisfied warmth. The magic was useful. Clever, like her. She could fix what was broken, be a problem-solver, if only for a little while. Until she figured out how to help Tri find their friends and mended the rift to get into the house that was hopefully more helpful than this one.
If she was really clever with the echoes, she wouldn’t have to fight at all.
She glanced across the empty house to Tri still hovering around the bed. They didn't seem capable of much emotion, but the way Tri had asked her to investigate the rift felt urgent. You don't have to understand loneliness to feel it. There was never only one star in the sky whenever she gazed up…they needed to find their friends and she couldn't go home until she found a way to refute the imposters.
She was the only one who could do anything right now.
Zelda made her way back over to the mess with the broom and swept up the rest of the pieces. She set the replica cup on the desk and turned to face Tri.
"Let's head to the rift."
Though their expression was unchanging, eyes and mouth fixed like ink stains on cloth, she could tell by the single descending tone they were confused. Outwardly, it didn't appear as if she'd found anything of value inside Link's house at all.
"Yeah, there is nothing here that can help us. But like you said, I have the Tri Rod and the echoes. I'm—" Ready felt like a stretch. She adjusted the cloak around her shoulders and gave Tri a firm nod. "—capable. Let's do this."