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Only heroes belong here, tendrils of dark lapping at her feet like waves. The only thing keeping them from drowning the shore is her own divine power, one of just two that could rival the raw of this ancient palace.
Only heroes belong here, footsteps echoing against the hollow dark. She is dressed to fight, scimitar in one hand, a firefly bloom of magic in the other, but no clothes can turn a princess into a hero.
“Only heroes belong here.”
She stops, breath caught halfway down her windpipe. Did she really hear him, or was it a trick of this calamity?
Calamity, her sisters called it, the word slipping off their tongue like water dripping and sizzling in a hot pan. They all thought their own calamity had started and ended long ago when their own leader betrayed them for land. But this, they try to convince her, is far worse.
Zelda is not quite so sure.
“Only heroes belong here,” and where once this voice was a vague vibration chilling her from all sides, she now hears it from a specific place in front of her.
The shadows, tricksters and demons cackling and giggling like hosts too polite to quickly snuff their guest, suddenly halt frozen. They shift, turn, twist, until a pointed spiral of blood and black peaks into a man.
In another life he might have stood twice her height. But this time around, she is of his kin, and he stands only a head taller than her.
Kin. As if the word meant anything more to him than a vague, meaningless association by blood. Ganondorf showed his loyalty to his kin thousands of years ago when he chose Hyrule over the safety of his people. He has no regard for the red coils sticking out of her hood, nor the dark brown hands gripping her sword tighter.
Nor the headpiece running down her forehead, an heirloom that was said to have once belonged to him.
He says nothing, the shadow where lips should be curving into a smile. He seems delighted to see the essence of wisdom manifested in front of him, whatever form she might take.
A curtain of shadows lurches out at her. Zelda prepared herself with magic and weapons, but not a mind swift enough to detect the reflexes of something that lost its humanity long ago. She turns at the last minute, saving one side of her face, but not the other.
The bright red jewel hanging from her hair chimes as it hits the floor, and she is left alone with the darkness, screaming.
“Wake up, Link.”
Link turns in his bed of bark and evergreen sap. After a hundred years in stasis, it’s easy for him to sleep still on a branch this thin. He stretches awake, careful not to lose his balance and land head-first into the mud pile beneath him.
That voice haunts him. He harkens it at first to the only voice he’s heard in a century, but day after day it starts to oscillate into clarity. It is not a voice he recognizes but something about it is familiar.
He scrunches up his face as his eyes focus in the morning light.
Only after a moment does he realize the mud pile he feared falling into has its own occupant.
Link peeks over the branch, hesitant and curious. A brown mass of something is breathing lightly. After a few moments of staring he notices the wide nostrils and a short set of tusks belonging to a boar.
Well, it was a perfect opportunity for breakfast.
He unhooks his bow from a branch above him, slips an arrow out of its quiver as silently as he can manage, careful not to alert his prey. Just as he pulls back the drawstring does he notice how unusually large this boar is. Before he can scrutinize the features of this beast, someone shouts in the distance.
“Hey!”
The boar startles, sits up, shakes the mud off itself and, in a state of panic, decides the best course of action to run headfirst into the tree Link lounges in.
Link almost wails, losing his balance and just catching himself before he can fall.
“Oh, you poor baby!” the same stranger cries.
Link is about to let out an appreciative noise towards this person until he realizes their cooing is directed at the half-conscious animal and not him.
Someone about his age, covered in layers of dark maroon and intricate designs, rolls up her pant legs and ties the two lapels of her long tunic together at her side. She throws back the length of her turban behind her like it’s a ponytail in the way. She doesn’t seem entirely concerned with the mud catching between her toes or over the coarse hair on her legs, but takes careful consideration to not let a drop of it stain her clothes.
“Poor baby,” she cries again, soothing a hand over the boar’s snout. She snaps her head up to Link, and her eyes turn from honey to cut glass in a fraction of a second. “And you!”
Link stares at her with his own set of pretty blue eyes, blinking as innocently as he can.
“Why did you try to shoot my boar?”
Link turns his shoulders in, trying to convey his ignorance on the boar belonging to her. She just keeps staring at him, though, so he eventually presses his hands together in apology.
After a moment, her face softens. “Can’t speak, huh?” she asks. She turns back to her boar, still petting its nose. “I suppose you couldn’t have known it was mine, anyway.” She continues to sooth her boar for a while longer until a question seems to rise in her mind.
“Wait…” She pauses, scrutinizing his appearance. “A Hylian? A Hylian boy, right? Are you Link?”
For a minute, Link just regards her curiously from atop his tree branch. But eventually, he nods, slowly, considering the consequences of forfeiting his identity.
The girl claps muddy hands together in excitement. “That’s great! Zelda won’t ever shut up about you! You want to meet her, right?”
The name sends the twang of a violin string through his mind. Zelda. Memories of her hands, her face, soft cumulus clouds swirling into foreboding nimbi until dark nightmare and the end of the world flash through him. Her voice echoes again in his thoughts, “Wake up, Link.”
Link brings himself back to the present, shaking himself internally.
He considers the implications of her question. He was under the impression that finding Zelda would require a great deal more effort than waking up above the right person’s pet boar. But still, Link’s journey so far has been as perfectly aimed as a splintered arrow. Any mention of Zelda’s whereabouts are worth following through.
He nods again.
“Okay, then, come down. I’ll take you there. Oh, my name’s Nabooru, by the way.”
Link hesitates. Judging from her appearance—red hair, dark skin, the patterns on her clothes, not to mention the name—he surmises she must be a Gerudo, his only knowledge of which extends to old legends of their hand in Ganondorf’s uprising. As far as he knew, they had disappeared from history after that.
Still, Link doesn’t see any reason not to trust her. If she had some hidden agenda, she probably would not have tried to lodge an arrow in his face a few minutes prior.
Link slips down from his perch, careful not to splash mud on anyone. By this time, Nabooru’s boar is starting to regain consciousness, stirring a little as she pets him.
“We’ll have to wash Waqi before we go,” she says, apparently in reference to the giant boar under her arms. “As much as I’m sure he would prefer to prance around covered in mud.”
Waqi gives his owner an innocent blink.
Link thanks the goddesses that his new companion owns a boar, else he surely would have roasted and starved in this heat. He can’t fathom why an entire group of people would choose to live like this, when he can hardly stand a minute under the unrelenting desert sun.
“You’re sweating,” Nabooru notes, shifting back to check on him. She glances back at him about every five seconds, rightfully so when Link looks as if he could keel over any moment. “Horribly,” she adds, because anyone would be sweating in such intense heat. “You’re turning pink.”
Link, too tired to even make a face, ignores her snort of laughter.
Nabooru bites her lip, embarrassed and adds more seriously, “Do you not have a cowl or a scarf or anything?” as if it was normal to carry extra layers of fabric in this climate. Link glares.
She considers the desperate look on his face—turning a deeper shade of pink the more she stares—and then begins to unravel the turban from around her head. “Nani’s going to kill me for this,” she sighs. Link points to the sash at her waist as an alternative when her hands go to her head.
“That’s keeping my pants up,” she explains. “Can you believe it? A cucco ran off with my cummerbund and now I’m using this thing to keep my pants from falling off.” He tries to stifle a laugh, but fails and is sent an irritated glare his way. Clearly, the loss of her cummerbund is to be greatly mourned.
Link watches with interest as she undoes her head wrap in layers and layers, as if she’s undoing a bandage. Beneath the plain drape, he is surprised to see a scarlet shock of curls that drop just to her mid-back.
“My grandmother told me never to show my hair to outsiders,” she explains, and before he can protest, Nabooru begins twisting the fabric over his head. “Mostly because all of your jaws drop at the sight of it. It’s really annoying.”
Link gives her an apologetic look beneath his newly-tied cowl.
But Link isn’t sure if that was even addressed to him, because she makes no note or care of his apology. She turns back to facing forward and hurriedly ties up her hair into a ponytail.
Link wants to ask if she is truly all right with giving him her scarf like this. But Nabooru seems to be doing a better job in the heat without her turban than Link is currently doing with it. And the rule of not showing her hair to outsiders can’t be that much of a taboo if she’d risk it for a stranger.
They ride on in silence after that. For how long, Link has no idea, only it seems the sun in Gerudo Desert is stuck perpetually at its median, setting ablaze the sands for eternity.
“Stop being so dramatic,” Nabooru says after what seems like an entire day. Link harkens her severe look to the way his tongue is currently lolling out like a dog’s. “We’re here.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected a Gerudo settlement to be like. Tents flapping in a sandstorm, perhaps, or low-lying adobes that show about as much life on the outside as the rest of the desert.
Certainly not something as complex as this.
The streets—for there a great deal of them winding and splitting in long stone paths—are lined with palm trees and towering pillars that provide more than enough shade to keep the earth cool. Most of the houses are adobes, but they are piled on top of one another or between each other in a complex series of blocks, each covered with gardens or clay pots arranged in some artful form. Young children run around laughing and squealing and throwing toys to one another. Some of the older ones that are about Link’s age hang around in the shade or challenge each other to wrestling matches. What surprises Link the most, however, is how ambiguous their genders all are—Gerudo were all supposed to be women, but it doesn’t seem that way here.
“That’s the second time I’ve seen your jaw hanging open.” Nabooru chides him, but he can hear the hint of smugness in her voice. “What? Didn’t think Gerudo could make things look pretty?”
Link shakes his head in embarrassment and she laughs.
Waqi has slowed now to a lumbering pace, apparently relieved by the cool stone under his hooves. The gentle rocking combined with relief after enduring intense heat is enough to make Link’s head swollen with drowsiness.
“Nabooru! Nabooru!” a group of children squeal with excitement, running down the lane and meeting Waqi and his riders before prancing and strolling alongside them.
“Nabooru!” one of them calls, smiling a wide grin. One of her teeth is missing. “Look!” She presents that tooth in her hands, a little red and raw at its base from being newly plucked. “I lost my tooth!”
Nabooru laughs. “That’s nice, Chana. You should make a wish!”
“I thought wishes were for stars?” one of the other children pipes up.
“What’s the difference between stars and teeth?”
Realization dawns on the same child. “They’re both white and they both fall down!”
A girl with a small ponytail atop her head gasps and giggles to Chana, “You can make a wish and it’ll come true!”
They all seem satisfied with this answer and run back from where they came, squealing and screaming all the way.
Nabooru sighs.
“We never get bored here, but sometimes we never get a chance to rest.” She lets out an uncomfortable laugh. “Anyway, Link.”
She gestures forward with her chin. Apparently so distracted by the children and his own fatigue, Link hadn’t noticed that the road ended now in a square. He has to contain a gasp, marveling at the wide and long and brilliant path around the square. At its center is an insignia resembling that of the royal family, a Triforce, but instead of wings and talons at its side, the mark is lined by crescent moons and hoof prints.
At the end of the lane is a huge beige building, steps leading up to its entrance, lined at its sides by minarets. It looks as if it could house its own royal family, judging from the sheer size of it. But that doesn’t seem to be its purpose.
“That’s where everyone in our tribe joins for a meeting,” Nabooru says, confirming Link’s suspicions. “You’ll find Zelda there.” She clicks her tongue for Waqi to kneel.
Link dismounts her boar with a bit of reluctance. Only when he has to stand on his own two legs does he realize how heavy they’ve become and how much he’d rather sit. Still, something like excitement urges him forward. The thought of meeting Zelda…His memories of her are fragmented but the name calls forth the affection for a close companion.
The short set of steps leading up to the entrance are not steep, but Link still finds difficulty in clambering up them. He glances back at Nabooru as if she might be able to alleviate some of his grief, but the only sympathy he’s given is a condescending snort.
He turns back to continue his slow crawl, but jumps in fright and almost trips down the steps he so arduously scaled.
At the top of the steps stands a hooded figure, cloak deep violet and much too thick for this kind of weather. The menacing figure removes its hood to reveal a woman, lips parted in mild surprise.
“Link?” she asks. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
He hadn’t really imagined it like this.
Zelda—or who he assumes to be Zelda—pouring a cup of brimming hot tea, sitting cross-legged on the other side of something akin to a coffee table. The hands that serve him are as dark brown as Nabooru’s, the jaw around her smile as strong, the face that folds with it as long, the coils spiraling down and shifting as she tilts her head as deep and as red as the ornaments that line her walls.
She really is Gerudo.
She ignores his perplexed stare and rolls back her sleeves, adjusting the cushion underneath her. This is not the Zelda who had promised to wake him up.
“You must be terribly confused,” she begins. She takes the cup of tea she poured for herself in her hands, holding it delicately as one might hold a small animal. Link glances down at his and reluctantly takes a sip. He can’t refuse such a polite gesture, suppressing his desire to express the need for something cooler in this heat.
“I know I don’t look like the Zelda you remember.”
He makes no mention of the pattern running under her right eye—a maze of black lines intersecting like streets, glowing faintly—unless that’s just a trick of the light. Like a horrid scar or misshapen eye, Link thinks it more polite not to ask.
“Do I frighten you?”
Sometimes, underneath the amber of her irises, he can see flecks of blue. He sees hints of his Zelda everywhere, in her mannerisms, in the tone of her voice.
In the way she can so easily read his mind.
He could always tell how upset she was by the way she furrowed her brow, like she does now. “I know I look more like Ganondorf than your princess. But I am Zelda.”
Link, unresponsive up to this point, has to sign to her that he believes her. He only hopes his mute language is one she understands.
But she smiles.
“I suppose the best comparison,” she goes on, “is that I am like your Zelda’s daughter. I have things she had. But I am not her. I am my own person.”
Now that they have come to this agreement, now that Link doesn’t feel the need to stare and scrutinize this once stranger’s appearance, Link turns to the decorations strewn behind his host. Colorful fans with tassels sewn onto their edges, plates that spiral in bamboo dyed purple, shawls and scarfs and wide-sleeved tunics embroidered with the most meticulous of designs. He thinks his detects a preference of color when most of them are dyed red. Just like his Zelda.
Zelda notices the boy’s wandering stare and glances back.
Interpreting his questioning look, Zelda explains with a soft note of laughter, “Red is a cheap color to dye clothes with. It gives color to our things. It’s life, it’s strength, and it’s a color for commoners. In the old days, it also matched the color of blood which was convenient for warriors. But thankfully now, we have no enemies left to fight.”
Zelda takes another thoughtful sip of her tea.
“Link.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the pale amber of her drink. Her hand—etched with the mark of the Triforce on its back—twitches minutely, and her eyes betray her for a moment as they shift to the identical symbol on Link’s hand. Her eyes turn then to him, swimming with the same concern and grief he remembers before being laid to rest in a chamber. “Do you even know what’s going on?”
Link shakes his head. He always thought that was just part of being the hero.
Zelda lets out an exasperated sigh, turning her head to the side as if to conceal a sneeze. Her teacup comes chinking down against its saucer.
“We respect Hylian ways,” she finally says. “But we have never particularly looked fondly upon the way their—your—goddesses play games. We never wanted to be involved, and yet we have been dragged into this mess twice over.”
She glances back down at her tea, swirling her cup and contemplating if she should continue downing the substance. “I don’t even understand half of what’s happening. But I’ll explain what I can. Do you know of the first Sage of Spirit Nabooru?”
Link tilts his head in question, wanting to ask what that has to do with anything. But he nods, anyway. In due time, his tutors always told him.
“Well, after everything that happened—Ganondorf’s uprising, all the havoc he caused—there was a great animosity towards the Gerudo. Hyrule has always had its fair share of bouts between races, but never anything like this. Animosity towards the Gerudo was fueled by fear and hatred for Ganondorf’s actions. It seemed as if this one man had condemned all of us by association, despite that a number of us abhorred his actions. Nabooru then thought it would be safer for the Gerudo to migrate out of Hyrule, to leave this place, at least until things had settled down.”
Link wants to ask her how she can feel all this pain when she wasn’t even there, but he would never dare question the wisdom of a soul as ancient as Zelda’s.
“So we did.” Zelda glances back down and swirls her tea again for a minute. It doesn’t seem as if she wants to partake in her drink anymore. “We left our home and crossed the border into the other desert territories. Some of our neighbors were hostile and some were welcoming. Eventually we settled in a little village, and our population grew with theirs.”
Zelda inhales slowly and then continues:
“But we always missed our home, our desert. And a few years before I was born, we migrated back, expecting hostility.”
Her words are the slopping heaviness of a downpour. Link knew the burden on Zelda’s psyche had always been overwhelming in all her incarnations, but to be born into another race with another set of traumas? He can’t blame her for the wounded look in her eyes.
“But instead we found nothing. Our Hylian neighbors were all but gone. We may have been separated from our country and our people for long, but we still retained our customs. And we only understood how bad it had truly become when one of our sages found the mark of the Triforce on my hand.”
“But Ganondorf…” she sighs, throws the name out like a used tissue she’d rather not touch. “His mark is always haunting us, never leaving. I wanted to kill him myself, knowing only rumors and faint inklings of memory of your existence. But I couldn’t wait. I wanted to purge him myself and I tried but…” Her hand grazes over the patterns over her cheek, along the indents of black that pulsate something anti-light.
“Over the last century, my soul has been ripped repeatedly from my body. Your Zelda died at a young age, and I was reincarnated into a Hylian child who died a few years after her birth. And again I was reincarnated, and again murdered or killed by misfortune, and again and again. And finally into this body…I thought my soul would be torn out again when I faced Ganondorf. But somehow I was spared. Perhaps a part of him is still human, and still aches for his kin.”
She utters Ganon’s name like an elegy, as if she mourns the death of her brother.
Finally, her eyes—a deep marble of yellow-orange, as if a flame burned behind glass—flicker up to meet his own.
“Link, I think I know how to defeat Ganondorf, permanently. But as always, I need your help.”
Link steps back outside to suffocating heat and the sound of an old woman’s chiding.
Balding, bent and frighteningly thin, it’s a wonder she even possesses the strength in her lungs to muster up such a long-winded censure. Link is no stranger to an elder’s chiding—that tradition is shared by Hylians and Gerudo—and watches in faint amusement as Nabooru leans over her boar with a pitiful frown plastered over her face, clearly contemplating some way to wriggle her way out of this scolding.
“Do you have any idea how much effort your mother put into weaving that scarf?” the old woman croaks, lifting a threatening finger at her granddaughter. “And you would just carelessly toss it around like it’s some two-rupee cloth!”
Nabooru’s eyes flit momentarily from side-to-side until she notices Link perched at the top of the steps.
“Look, Nani, it’s Link!” she exclaims, in the fashion someone might point to an imaginary bird to distract someone.
Nabooru’s grandmother somehow takes this bait—Link supposes she’s like his own late grandmother and could detect whether her grandchild was lying or not. She swivels around to face him. Her eyes are partially covered by a headscarf but it’s apparent on the rest of her face that she’s in shock.
Out of politeness, Link descends the steps, meeting her at the foot of the building. Her bony, wrinkled hands are shaking out towards him.
“It’s the hero!” the old woman screeches and Link has to control himself from jumping back in fright.
“Nani, don’t scare him,” Nabooru chides.
But Link’s fear evaporates as she takes his head—with that great, jerky force that grandmothers possess—and drowns his faces in short, wet kisses. Link just accepts them with a scrunched face.
When she finally releases him, Link continues to stare. She seems to have forgotten all about Nabooru’s irresponsibility regarding her turban and instead compliments Link on it.
“It look so nice on you, darling,” she coos. “You should keep it.”
Her stream of doting and coddling is interrupted only by Zelda’s presence behind him.
“Oh, goodness!” Zelda cries out behind him in a very characteristically Zelda way. She seems to have noticed the bright shade of red Link is turning in the sun. “I forgot how easily Hylians burn up!”
She unclasps the heavy cloak she had greeted him in, flipping it over in front of her. She pulls it over him, as if his mother wrapping him snug to keep the cold from getting to him.
“This will keep you cool. The trick is not to wear anything underneath.” She winks, as if she would know when the clothing underneath her cloak is still more than enough to keep a grizzly bear warm in the mountains.
Zelda may not be any sort of royalty this time around, but her clothing is still meticulously tailored. She wears a similar ensemble of a long, wide-sleeved tunic with trousers and a sash around her waist, but the entire body of her tunic is heavily embroidered. Swirling patterns of flowers and geometric shapes all weaving down till the end of her shirt. Something about it looks remarkably similar to the Hylian royal family crest.
Before Link can dwell any more on the details of Zelda’s clothing, Nabooru’s grandmother wraps a sharp bony hand around his wrist.
“You’ll need a place to stay tonight, won’t you child?” she says. “You can stay with us.”
Nabooru doesn’t protest behind her but looks mildly annoyed.
Link enters Nabooru’s adobe to the surprise of her mother.
“Oh, Goddess,” is all she says whilst rocking a newborn baby against her breast. “Not another one.”
Link feels like he’s missing some vital context to this conversation when Nabooru answers, “Don’t worry, Ammi, we’re not adopting him.”
“Him?” she repeats, but before she can ask questions, another woman—whom Link assumes to be Nabooru’s other mother—sprints towards the door in a panic.
“Look how pale she is!” she exclaims, grabbing Link by the wrist and dragging him inside before anyone can protest. “The poor thing is anemic! Don’t worry, child, I’m a doctor, I’ll fix you up in no time! How could any of you leave her standing like this!” she concludes in a chide.
“Ma!” Nabooru shouts. “He’s not anemic, he’s Hylian!”
Nabooru’s mother stops and stares at the boy for a minute. Then remarks pathetically, “Oh.”
He finally understands what Nabooru meant when she said she never gets a chance to rest.
“You must be exhausted,” Nabooru notices, so Link is surprised when she takes him to the roof of their house.
At the center stand three wooden frames, all wrapped in crisscrossed wide threads to form a single sheet meant for lounging on. Link has never seen a bed like this, but he is hardly one to judge when his last proper mattress was a breathable pool of water.
Even so, Link stares at it a little apprehensively.
“Well, it’s not like it’s going to rain,” Nabooru says with a laugh.
Zelda, as promised, wakes him in the middle of the night.
Link rolls over on his other side, trying not to disturb Nabooru who’s nestled beside him. He freezes in place when she stirs and waits for her to settle before glancing back up at Zelda.
In this dark, he would have never expected to see such light in her face. For a minute, his heart lurches, mistaking this Zelda for one previous. Only when he sees dark curls shifting around her shoulders does he remember.
He glances back at Nabooru, making sure he hasn’t roused her, and slips silently out of bed.
Zelda presses a hand against his back, helping him to his feet. He feels a tug on his clothes and turns to see Nabooru wide awake, grasping his tunic.
“Do you think I’d just let you run off without me?” she whispers.
The sun has hardly risen above the horizon when they reach the border of Gerudo Desert and Hyrule’s lush fields. In truth, part of the grasslands that run long towards an endless sky are considered part of Gerudo territory, or so Zelda claims, anyway.
“What, you don’t believe me?” she accuses with a hint of amusement when he gives her a tentative look. She laughs. “What do you think Gerudo Valley was made out of? A river ran through it and still does.”
But Zelda’s claims to grassy territory aside, Link couldn’t think of anyone alive who would even protest the matter. It wasn’t like Hylians could take the land as theirs. As far as Link was concerned, all of Hyrule now belonged to the Gerudo.
“It’s funny, though,” she goes on, more contemplative now than teasing. “Ganondorf did all this to take over Hyrule and in the end…all this territory belongs to us. That which doesn’t belong to the Zora or Gorons, anyway.”
“That’s true,” Nabooru adds a bit uselessly. Link imagined she hadn’t thought about territory rights up till this moment. With hardly anyone left to argue over the concept, it probably had never even crossed her mind.
Zelda gives them both an easy smile.
Their conversation divulges into where the best fruit is to pick, what areas to camp in are the best. Nabooru, Link learns, has never set foot farther than the plains on Gerudo Valley’s border. Zelda, however, having made the journey to Ganon’s castle, has experienced almost all of her country’s terrain.
“The mountains are undoubtedly the worst,” she concludes. “It gets so cold my hands and my face start going numb. The first time I walked through there, I thought I was dying.”
Link and Nabooru can’t contain their giggles.
Zelda doesn’t take offense and only smiles. “And then an old man found me, hunched over on a cavern floor awaiting death. I wanted to hit him when he laughed—Oh hush! I really thought I was dying!”
But Zelda’s protest to their amusement only kindles their laughter even further. Link almost falls off his horse from laughing.
“But…” her voice is suddenly strained and grave. A wave of sadness seems to wash over her eyes. “That old man…he was quite nice. And somehow familiar.” Zelda’s gaze, which had been fixed to the ground in front of her and her mount, flits up to meet Link’s. Sadness makes way for realization, and then it dawns on Link, too. Nabooru looks between them in confusion.
But Link and Zelda need not exchange words. The same thought is running through both their minds, and before Link can confirm it with gestures, Zelda tears her gaze away and breaks her mare into a gallop.
A resounding splash and Zelda’s surprised yelp tears Link away from his fire-making. Nabooru exchanges the twigs between her fingers for an arrow. Link doesn’t bother to go for his weapon and instead drops straight down the edge of the riverbank, where he last saw Zelda in this darkness.
Firelight glows, briefly outlining Zelda’s figure, knees tucked to her side. Something sits in her lap, trilling and shivering in her palms.
“I’ve missed you!” it squeaks with joy.
A korok. Link’s shoulders relax. He can hear that familiar chime of nuts dancing in their shell as the korok bounces against her leg. Zelda’s laugh echoes over the water, without a care whether a wolfos or a similarly frightening creature had heard.
“Zelda, hush,” Nabooru chides, in what Link assumes to be an appalling breach in hierarchy.
“Oh, come on.” Zelda, however, honors Nabooru’s request and hushes her voice to the level of a whisper. “I can handle a wolfos.” But Zelda soon realizes her mistake when the small creature in her arms whines and curls up against her breast at the mention of the word.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Persi.” She presses a comforting hand against his back. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Don’t let it eat me!” he cries, still trilling in fright.
“Do you think I would ever let that happen, my dear friend?” Zelda asks, and lets out one last careless laugh over Nabooru’s shushes.
“Kill her,” a part of him says.
But he can only bring himself to tears. It would have been so easy to rip that piece of the Triforce from her, but she looks too much like his sisters when they are sleeping.
Were sleeping, a voice in the back of his head reminds him. His thoughts are hardly even that anymore, emotions and memories floating around jumbled in a space as large as this castle. There is no order. One moment he is a young boy playing cards with his family, and the next a sword is pierced through his skull for the third—or was it the fourth, or the fifth?—time.
His large mass of tendril-like arms reach towards her, picking her up delicately. He cradles her like an infant, swaddles her with long black shadows.
And then he places her far away from him and forgets about her.
Nightmares are no strange occurrence to a hero.
Which is why Link shows no hesitation when he wakes up in the middle of the night to find Zelda’s sleeping mat to be empty. Persi is still curled up where he had fallen asleep between the two women, and Nabooru is buried under layers of sheets, chest rising and falling without a hint of disturbance. He pushes away the pang of envy he feels for them.
Outside, Link finds Zelda not far from their tent, her day clothes thrown over her like a shawl. The white tunic underneath glows dimly in the moonlight.
She does not show any signs of surprise when he kneels down next to her. In fact, this seems to be all too familiar.
“Do you miss Zelda?”
Link shakes his head.
And for a minute, Zelda only stares at him in disbelief, until he reaches towards her and places a hand over hers. Her eyes sparkle in the pale glow of the moon, amused, as if he’s just told some sort of joke. And then she understands.
She’s right here with me.
Ominous and imposing on the horizon, it looks the picture of any child’s nightmares up close.
Calamity Ganon, as he is so aptly named by the Gerudo, looks like nothing more than a particularly imposing cumulonimbus hugging Hyrule Castle closely, as if no one could convince him to let go. Dark clouds swirl in layers over one another. Link expects a smart remark from Nabooru, but she can only lean over her boar in awe.
Zelda dismounts from her mare.
“What are you doing?” Nabooru’s head snaps down to her level.
“We have to open the barrier,” she answers simply, as if it were a matter of collecting firewood. Not bothering to turn her head to face him, she continues, “Link, you’ll have to do it this time.”
“Why?” Nabooru asks, as if she could read the question swirling in Link’s mind.
“Because I did it last time. For what reason would I have to break it again unless Link were accompanying me? If Link opens it, Ganondorf might not suspect my presence.”
Link and Nabooru exchange glances. Zelda’s does not leave the dark veil draped over the castle entrance.
She did have a point.
Link dismounts, and with a hesitant glance at Zelda, presses a flat palm against the barrier. He has to fight not to shrink back when a wave of electricity runs through him, when a gust flies past. Nabooru reflexively cries out behind him, not expecting the sudden change in winds. But she quiets just as quickly when the veil begins to dissolve beneath his fingers. Chips of gossamer black flake off and disintegrate like the desert sands might slip through one’s hand.
“Are you ready?”
When Zelda takes the first step onto marble, the heel of her boot echoes into an endless empty expanse of a palace. The leather shrieks as it drags across the floor.
This place has not aged with cobwebs and dust like all the other abandoned buildings littering Hyrule, but is a portrait stuck in time, a painting hanging over the mantle that one might have just imagined stepping into and gone too far.
And it is just as still. The eye of a storm cloud, so quiet and calm unlike the thundering outside.
And yet there is a foreboding force exuding pressure on them like a heavy fog. It threatens to be just as hazy to their minds when Link can feel his limbs going numb.
Particles of black come together and form a towering shadow of a man. He does not laugh or smile or let out a snarky greeting but instead regards them like a hound might consider prey. Who is the weakest to target first?
Ganondorf picks out Nabooru, sensing no special power from her. He throws a sleeved arm at her, far-reaching and far more powerful with magic behind it. But Nabooru does not hesitate and meets his magic with a confident arrow, cutting through the wall of dark cloth.
“Not even your right-hand trusts you, anymore,” she snaps in a voice strangely deeper than her normal tone.
The comment leaves Ganondorf more wounded than her arrow.
And more vengeful. Something in her words seems to incite an ancient violence when he throws his magic at her once more, this time with vigor. Nabooru, although temporarily possessed by an ancient sage, does not retain the reflexes of one and can only throw her arms up in a vain attempt at defense.
His magic does not meet her face, however, and instead clangs off Zelda’s scimitar like a useless piece of metal.
Link swears he can hear the faintest growl rumbling from Ganondorf’s throat. Or from the air. Wherever it’s coming from.
Ganondorf gaze shifts to the side. He tries to target Link, but Link fortunately for him, has the soul of an ancient hero and—although unused for a century—the skills of a swordsman to give him some strength. He dodges the first strike and blocks the second.
Ganondorf regards his own hand as if it’s a foreign entity, a new puzzle to be assessed.
“It seems…” His voice is a chill, hardly even a voice. More like the shadow of one. “This will not work.”
Suddenly, he lurches towards Link, his whole body gliding across the floor. He lifts a hand to smack the boy, but Nabooru, having sensed his attack, throws her own body in the way of his slap. A sharp whack echoes throughout the palace hall, and Nabooru crumples to the floor unconscious.
Link recoils back.
“Your fight is with me, Ganondorf.”
Link turns to see Zelda in a fighting stance, her scimitars drawn.
“Is it really?” he jeers. “When you failed so miserably to kill me last time?” The gravel is beginning to evaporate from his voice, more coherent than before.
“I will not fail this time.”
Link tries to ignore the fact that Zelda’s mark is spreading lower to her face.
“Amuse me, then.”
For a minute, Link feels a rush of relief when Ganondorf turns his attention away from him. He lunges at her, drawing his own sabers from the darkness that is his hilt and thrusts forward. Zelda catches his blade and spins out of harm’s way.
Link has to commend her for standing up to such a powerful force. But then again, this is not the first time she has faced this man.
His eyes flit between them as they duel, watching, waiting for an opening. Before he can take his chance, however, Zelda finally falters, and Ganondorf knocks her out with the butt of his sword.
Link scrambles to protect himself. He barely has time to draw the Master Sword before Ganondorf’s face is an inch from his.
Only now with a pair of locked swords between them does Link realize the intense heat which Ganon seems to radiate off. Not like that of a campfire or the sun, but something faintly eerie and magical, like the same cool magic with which he was doused in when asleep for a hundred years.
Link shoves his enemy’s sword to the side and rolls out of the way. Hardly a defense when Ganondorf springs back to meet Link’s sword with his own in an instant. The hero relents. Instead of fighting him off, Link lets his sword move on its own, the sound of metal clashing against metal vibrating through Link’s hands as he parries and meets Ganon’s dual swords.
Locked in this endless struggle, Link turns to his unconscious princess. He has no magic to command, no other skills to fall back on. But the sight of her limp on the floor stirs something in him. In that moment, he realizes that he never had anything special to rely on—all he ever had, all he ever relied on was instinct.
“How long do you care to amuse me, boy?”
For the first time in his life, Link wishes Ganon could understand the look in his eyes. Not long.
“Link,” Zelda’s voice is soft, gentle. For a moment, Link mistakes her for his Zelda. He’s still getting used to this situation. “You must not kill Ganondorf with the Master Sword.”
His heart flutters nervously in his ribcage. He gives her a look of confusion. She only meets it with a gentle smile.
“When you kill someone with the Master Sword…it does not destroy them. It only seals them away. That’s how his followers have been resurrecting him over and over again. I need only for you to weaken him. And then I will…I will destroy him.”
Link ducks Ganon’s incoming attack, thrusts the pommel of his sword into Ganon’s solar plexus and pulls the blade across his chest.
Between the seams of black ink, blood red drips to the floor. Ganondorf looks almost as shocked as Link.
But Link’s victory is short-lasting. Ganondorf, no longer amused by Link’s swordplay, takes the pause in their parrying to backhand the boy across the cheek, knocking Link on the floor along with his companions.
He wondered how a short slap could knock out two warriors, but now laying on the cold floor with his cheek searing, he understands just how inhuman Ganondorf’s form really is.
Link tries to feign unconsciousness, only to provide a few moments of relief to his face. But Ganondorf seems to know him better, and digs his heel into Link’s side—far stronger than anything his apparent size could have ever managed.
Link screams.
He writhes beneath his grip, trying to twist enough to get a jab of his sword in. But Ganondorf’s heel proves to be too powerful. Just as Link’s body begins to succumb to the pain, the weight releases over him.
Chains drum against the floor, sinking into the stone and slithering forward like twin serpents winding between one another. Chips of marble and blocks of stone fly around them as if roots of a great tree that can no longer be contained by a man-made structure. They strike out—towards Ganondorf’s wrists—but he dodges just in time, evaporating to the side like mist. Link rolls over to the side, avoiding the pain of a crushed limb. He has half a mind to chide Zelda with a look.
Until he sees her.
Her arms are crossed in front of her, fingers fiddling like a frantic puppeteer dragging her magic chains from one end of the room to the next—wherever Ganondorf appears next. The mark along her face has spread to the whole of her right side, the eerie light underneath glowing just as frantically as she presses her magic forward.
Ganondorf doesn’t spare the chance to tease her. “Are you sure that’s a good idea when you’re beginning to look more like me?”
Link, already frightened by the image of Zelda covered in dark magic, chills horribly at her crooked smile.
Beside him, Nabooru stirs. It’s all Link can do to keep her from becoming a victim of Zelda’s attacks. When she finally does rouse to consciousness, it doesn’t take long for her to realize why Link’s face is twisted in fear.
“Is that…Zelda?” she croaks, disbelieving. Link doesn’t nod. He’s not sure himself.
Apparently tired of Zelda’s long-distance game, Ganondorf rushes in close and thrusts his sword at her abdomen.
“Fool,” Zelda hisses. She squeezes her arms together, and her chains catch Ganon around the wrists, dragging him to the back wall. He only realizes his mistake when he’s on his knees and at this monster’s mercy.
Link and Nabooru start forward to stop her execution.
But just as Ganon’s eyes drop the floor in surrender, so does Zelda. She crouches there for some unmeasured scale of time—surely it couldn’t have been more than a few heartbeats—but how could anyone tell in this space that seems to darken and slow everything it touches?
Zelda’s head cranes back up. The mark has receded back to where it had been when she and Link had first met.
She stands.
“Ganondorf.”
Something deep rasps within her cords, as if the darkness over her face has spun and twisted them out of shape. She spits his name, grips the handle of her sword tighter, to the point where the metal shakes and clacks in its hilt.
None of this is particularly surprising to Link. He knew Zelda hated Ganon, rightfully so when he had caused so much grief to her people—in this life and the previous.
What Link couldn’t understand was how blood was trailing down the blade of her scimitar, when no blood had been drawn.
Before he can continue to dwell on this, Zelda sweeps her sword to his chin, far more gracefully than Link would dare boast of himself. Ganondorf flinches slightly, apparently used to being on his knees sentenced for execution.
“Look at me, Ganondorf.”
A trickle of blood runs down her blade from where it digs into his mandible.
He inclines his head, gritting his teeth when amber meets amber.
“Would you mock me with that disguise?”
Link flinches involuntarily from the weight of his voice. As if centuries of blood have soaked it and made it heavy.
“I could say the same for you, traitor,” Zelda hisses back.
“What would you know of a Gerudo, princess?”
“What does it matter to you which tribe I belong to, when it didn’t matter thousands of years ago? The goddess willed that a Zelda be incarnated into this body, and so I am Gerudo. More Gerudo than you were or will ever be.”
For a minute Link thinks he sees tears forming over her eyes, but as soon as he blinks, they disappear.
Instead all he can see is bloodlust and vengeance swirling in her eyes. Her gaze is unflinching, focused on Ganon. She seems to have forgotten Link and Nabooru are even in the room with her.
“I should kill you, cut you into small pieces,” she continues in a low hiss. “Hylians have been far too merciful with you, Ganondorf, but you should know…exactly how much mercy we Gerudo have to those that belittle our trust. I will make sure that so little of your soul remains that not even a worm could be reincarnated with your disgusting imprint on its being.”
Link would have expected that last word to echo against the temple walls, but instead the void surrounding Ganon funnels it into a nothing-ness. He regards her during the pregnant silence, and then finally breaks into a laugh.
Zelda’s mouth only curls into a more vicious snarl.
“Harsh talk,” he finally says once his laughter subsides. “For someone who’s spent centuries crafting ways to kill me and failing every time.”
“I have your blood this time,” Zelda snaps. “I will not fail to rid this world of you.”
The chains around Ganondorf’s wrists rattle as he attempts to lurch forward, eyes wide, teeth snapping together like flint sparking in a fire.
“Then kill me!”
Without saying another word, Zelda takes up his offer and presses the point of her sword to his chest. It halts before cutting through his robe and hovers there as if impeded by a barrier.
The scimitar tenses over his chest and then shatters. For a moment, Link supposes that it didn’t work, that Zelda’s harsh words had all been talk. Beside him, Nabooru nocks an arrow, fiber whining from the tension.
But then, Ganon’s body begins to disintegrate, flakes chipping off him as black as the void around him. He does not cry out or scream in pain. Instead his eyes are wide, his mouth tensed as if the protest died in his throat before it could make its way out. He dies quietly, his form sinking into darkness, until the darkness involutes on itself into a single, concentrated diamond floating an arm’s length away from Zelda.
She tenses her scimitar towards it, expecting it to be the source of all this madness. But before she can move to destroy it, it begins to glow. A warm yellow swirls and forms a tall, graceful figure, his beard neatly trimmed, his hair long and the same texture as Zelda’s. He moves towards the relic before she can and crushes it in his fist.
He opens his palm, slowly, and then regards the Gerudo before him.
“Zelda,” he greets. His voice has the same ring as Ganon’s, but it is tamer, more human.
She lowers her sword, and for the second time, Link sees a thin film of fluid forming over her eyes.
“I hate you,” is all she says in reply.
“So you should.” The figure’s hand twitches, as if he means to lay it on her shoulder in comfort. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I have caused great harm to our people.”
“Yes, you have,” she agrees in a half-whisper. She doesn’t look at him and stares at the floor instead.
“Zelda,” he says again and finally—boldly—places his hand on her shoulder. “Please look at me.”
Her head moves up too quickly, as if she’s been waiting for him to say that.
“I really hate you.”
“I know.”
“You sold us out for your own gain. Look at what you did to this country. And all for what? Because ruling the desert wasn’t enough for you?”
“Zelda, I only wanted to make things better for us.”
“No one asked you to!” Zelda exclaims so hard that he flinches. “What was wrong with our desert? What was wrong with our home?”
“Zelda—Zelda,” he tries over her half-spun bursts of anger. Finally, he manages, “I know. Zelda, I know. They were excuses, pathetic excuses to justify the monster I had twisted into. There was no chivalry in anything I did, Zelda. It was all just hate and anger and darkness. But there were times when my humanity surfaced and I could only think that there was some good behind what I did to keep from breaking.”
“I wish you had,” Zelda cries through gritted teeth. “I wish you broke, I wish you felt every awful thing you ever did.”
“I do, Zelda,” he sighs, his hands shaking over her shoulders. “I feel it all.”
In the few beats of silence between them, Zelda twists her head to the side, avoiding eye contact.
“But I can finally rest,” he continues. “You have destroyed my body, and my soul can reincarnate anew…Perhaps you two can take care of me…and make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
For the first time, Link’s presence is acknowledged in the room. Ganondorf—or whatever this thing is that looks like him—is staring straight at the boy. But instead of fear, Link feels something strangely warm from his gaze. The yellow in his irises glow oddly like a hearth.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Link. His smile is slight and sad, and Link can’t help but smile back.
And just like that, his form begins to disintegrate again. No longer flakes of black magic, but ebbs of soft light that fade away. He looks to his kin once last time for some hope of release, but all he finds is Zelda’s tight-lipped frown.
Only after another moment does she finally meet his eyes and say, “I forgive you.”
And like a dam gushing free, Zelda’s tears run down her face, taking the marks of dark magic with them. Ganondorf’s body finally relaxes, the ebbs decreasing in frequency until his form has melted with the wall behind him. The last thing he does is smile.
The castle doesn’t crumble over or behind them.
“It’s already as destroyed as it could be,” Nabooru jokes. Her audience is silent, however. Regardless of how apt the jest is, Link and Zelda are more preoccupied with the gravity of the situation.
Ganondorf, finally defeated once and for all.
Instead of crumbling, the darkness around the castle lifts like a cloud parting to make way for the sun. When the three of them step outside and turn back, the towers scraping the sky look like nothing more than another of Hyrule’s old relics.
The eerie silence, the heavy air, has also been eradicated. Link can hear the sounds of nature present throughout all of Hyrule now. Birds and animals seemed to have forgotten all about what once resided here.
“Zelda!” a familiar voice squeaks, and before anyone can even greet Persi, he lands straight into the Gerudo’s arms.
She can’t stop smiling.
Link would have never thought he would be relieved to be back in Gerudo Desert.
It’s comforting, however, a sign that his journey—a journey stretched a hundred years too long—is finally at an end.
Nabooru lets out an exaggerated sigh.
“I can’t wait to go home and sleep!” she exclaims, flopping against her boar. “And eat Ammi’s delicious food. And wake up in the middle of the night because of a screaming baby.”
Zelda laughs softly. The way the sunlight hits her golden eyes now, without a mark running down her face, warms Link to his core. He couldn’t save his Zelda but at least he could save this one.
“Link,” she remarks, her voice light. “You’ll stay with us, won’t you?”
“Yeah!” Nabooru shouts before Link even has a chance to nod. “You can stay with me! Oh…I’m going to have to tell Ammi we really are adopting you.”
They all laugh.
The three of them are met with a warm welcome. Gerudo of all ages stand at the entrance to their village, all elaborately dressed as if preparing for a celebration.
Zelda’s eyes shift uneasily between them. She opens her mouth to ask, no doubt, how did you know? But her questioning look is met with an old woman gesturing her towards one of the tents.
Inside, there is a strong stench of feces and blood. A woman lays resting with a blanket over her, her partner kneeling beside her. At her breast lies a bundle.
Without hesitating, the woman stretches out her newborn to Zelda.
“He was born just a few minutes ago.” Her voice is weary, as one might imagine it to be for someone who just finished labor.
Zelda looks as if she might cry, taking the bundle with shaking hands. She unwraps it and reveals an infant just born, the mark of the Triforce etched into its tiny, dark hand.
The infant giggles and reaches out with chubby arms towards Zelda.
For the first time, Link sees Zelda smile—genuinely smile, and it seems to light up the whole room. She takes him in her arms, pressing a finger into his palm and squeezing gently. She lets out a soft laugh.
“Welcome to our tribe, Ganondorf.”