Chapter Text
There's one man, he's like
The wishful thinking in my life, I see so
And he's like the wine on the weekend
And though he is like the sea and it's right he be so
If I hold tight he'll wash over me
1.
The first thing the boy learns, the first thing he remembers, is how to want . He is five and hasn’t been fed in days; hunger gnaws at his belly, dizziness coming and going in waves. The woman raising him stands before the wolf pen, towering, a sticky scrap of meat pinched between her fingers. “You want this, don’t you?”
He nods. Satisfied, she flings the meat over the fence. “Go get it, then.”
The pen is empty; the wolves have been let out to hunt. The boy scrambles over the wooden slats and snatches the priceless sliver off the cracked mud. Immediately he pushes it into his mouth, dirt and all, grit and dust mixing with blood as he bites down. The taste of copper and animal musk fills him as he swallows and he sinks to his knees.
“Good,” says the woman, watching.
The scrap, naturally, doesn’t last. By the time the sun dips below the rust-red mountains the boy is starving again. He goes to the woman. “I’m hungry,” he says. “I want more.”
The wolves have returned from their frenzy with full bellies. When the woman tosses the hunk of cured flank into their pen, they look up, ears pricked, curious. The youngest one gets up to investigate, and the boy jumps the fence to grab his prize before they do. The wolves stare at him as he squats on the other side of the barrier, ripping up precious, flavorful shreds with his teeth. He stares back, eyes equally yellow and glittering.
Neither wolf nor boy eats for the next five days. The woman goes to the lowlands and returns with a deer slung over her shoulders. The boy’s body trembles with longing at the thought of stew thick with spices.
The woman carves a hind leg off the deer and holds it up. “This is yours,” she says. “Your portion of it.” Blood rolls off the jagged edge and thickens the mud at their feet. The boy licks his lips.
She turns and hurls the deer leg into the wolf pen. The wolves rise in a cloud, snarling and ravenous, hunger dissolving the bonds of their pack. The woman tosses her carving knife to the floor. In one long motion the boy seizes it and leaps over the fence, jumping into the whirling thicket of fur and sharp teeth. He is fast. He knows fire. Above all, he burns with indescribable want, his desire stronger than pain, overriding the weakness of his flesh. Teeth sink into his shoulder as he cuts through his rivals. He flings them aside. By the time the pack retreats, frightened, one wolf lies dead, and the others are singed and bloody. The boy is bloody too, but he is victorious. The meal is his.
The woman ruffles his hair. “Well done,” she says. He rarely sees her so pleased. “You are wilder than I’d hoped, my little red-tusked boar. It will serve you well.”
To want is the most important thing, she says. The boy will learn to hate, but that is second. It follows. Malice grows from great desire. The boy learns the key lesson, that the fire within him must be stoked by wanting. It is the source of his power. It burns in his veins, reddish-purple. The braziers must be kept lit.
***
The woman’s name is Youma. She was born into a clan of skilled warriors, secret, cave-dwelling, working to restore the power that a hundred years ago had almost claimed the land. Years ago, she left them to strike out on her own, settling upon this bluff halfway up a mountain on the other side of the range. The boy asks her why.
“My father was Yiga,” she says, cleaning a fish, “but my mother was Gerudo. And we do not tolerate foolishness when we see it.”
Her sharp fingers flake bright scales into the water. The boy watches as she slides a knife along the rim of the soft white belly to pull out the guts, her nails red and wet. “My idiot half-brother was given the reins of the clan. I disagreed, and they did not care for my disagreement. I said that he would ruin the clan, and he has. Look at them, crawling on their bellies in the dirt while the world around them is ripe for the picking. The Hylians are soft and scattered, and the peoples of the four nations do not talk. We could break them apart like a bundle of twigs, and what do they do?” She snorts, derisive. “I, working alone, will achieve more than they could ever dream of.”
She tosses the gutted fish into a metal basin, then turns and catches the boy’s curious look. She laughs. “Of course I’m not alone. There’s you, isn’t there? Precious boy. You’re the key to my plans.”
On a clear day Youma takes him to the summit of the highlands, where the air bites and he must be wrapped in furs. She points across the vast horizon, the faraway greens, the flat tops of trees. “Do you see that?”
Yes, he says. What is it?
“That’s Hyrule Castle. The gravitational centre of our land, towards which all power rolls.”
Why does it look like that?
“Because it is a battlefield. And it has been, for the past hundred years. Perhaps much longer, just not so visibly. Even though no armies march across the land, we are at war.”
A war? Who’s winning?
She likes the question. Her teeth gleam in the light, and he imagines that the purplish-pink of the distant fire is reflected in them. “We will. You will, my little boar. When the time comes, you will strike the crucial blow.”
She teaches him the history of the land, drawing lines in the clay. A series of triangles, precariously stacked. She points to each of them. “Always there are three. A princess, her defender, a challenger. Chosen by the gods, born and reborn again.” A circle around them, a snake eating its tail. “Wisdom, courage, power. A long time ago, the three lived in harmony. The way it should have been. All beautiful, all at peace. But then—“ she taps the ground— “these two, the guardian of wisdom and the fount of courage, grew jealous of the other. They feared the bearer of power. Why should he have all of it, and none for them? They ganged up on him. Just because they couldn’t understand.” She wipes out the top triangle with a rough hand. “That’s unfair, don’t you think? Two against one?”
The boy nods, rapt, hands on his knees.
With a nail she inscribes a swirl over the destruction. “But he persisted. Even without an incarnate form, he was determined to take his revenge. Across thousands of years, he gathered his strength. Hatched a plan. A hundred years ago, he nearly succeeded.” She dashes a finger across one of the remaining triangles. “He took over the castle. He defeated the princess’ defender. Victory was almost his, and yet…”
“And yet?”
“Somehow, the princess held him back. And continues to hold him back, while her defender, who fell, gradually regains his strength, so that he might retake the castle.” She re-traces the second triangle with a slow drag of the nail.
“That’s cheating.”
“Isn’t it?” She chucks him under the chin, fondly. “The time will come soon, though, when you become useful.”
“What must I do?”
Youma puts her finger in the middle of the triangle she has just re-drawn. “Soon, the princess’ defender will wake from his long slumber.” She swipes; a single, brutal motion. “When that time comes, you will kill him.”
***
The boy learns magic. He learns to wield a knife, then a sword. Youma teaches him the ways of his birthright, the power that burns within him, under the arches of his ribs. He learns to see in the dark, to disguise himself, to change his form. He loops through the land around their home, leaving his mother to tend to the wolves, wandering longer and further as he grows. He hunts, he shoots birds from the sky. Long past are the days where he relied on his mother for sustenance. Roving bands of monsters live on the dry cliffs of the highlands, but he knows to repel them, and eventually they run shrieking from his approach. He fears nothing, except maybe the wide river that rushes between his home and the rest of Hyrule. Water confounds him, how swift and cold it is, how it slips between his fingers and yet could kill him if he weren’t careful. Experimentally he paddles in the small quiescent lake at the foot of the mountains, where his mother has put up cages to raise fish in. He fills many hours here in this sudden burst of green, roiling with golden light as he whirls barefoot within the feathery grass, gathering herbs and mushrooms and leaping, still wet, upon the back of deer to break their necks.
In their cave home Youma has a small circle of black glass hung from a wall, a lock of tawny hair tasselled from it, the color of orange rust. It draws his attention constantly, its presence hooking him by the throat, the navel. He tilts it in his palm, marveling at its abyssal surface, the way it sucks in all light. One day Youma catches him teasing a finger through the soft, thick hair and laughs. “You like it, don’t you? A souvenir from Hyrule Castle. The princess kept a lock of his hair hidden in her diary. How romantic.” She takes the glass from him and puts it back on its hook, tapping the dark surface. “This is my scrying mirror. It lies dormant now, but one day soon it will wake. You will know when it does.”
Now the boy turns twelve. He is tall, almost as tall as his mother, broad-shouldered and growing blockier by the day. His hair spills wild over his shoulders. He has learned to refine the rumbling avalanche of his hunger into a sharp point, a tool with which he can cut through every obstacle, sculpt anything he wishes.
Youma decides to name him. “I have worked all my life to create a perfect vessel. I had no wish to waste a name on something flawed. But you have shown yourself to have promise. You could be worthy of the name.”
The boy kneels as she daubs his forehead with red clay. “Ganondorf Dragmire,” she says, the words of ancient legend. “It was good enough for him, it is good enough for you.”
He rises, the new name sitting on his shoulders like a cloak. “Now,” she says, “don’t disappoint me.”
Ganondorf. Being named is a novel experience for the boy. Ganondorf, Ganondorf. He mouths the syllables as he sits in the grass by the rippling lake, willing them to mean something, to become his. The name wraps stiffly around him, like a new pair of leather mitts. In time, he thinks, he might get used to it. Names have power; to be named is to give up part of himself, to have part of him placed in the minds of others. Before, he was just a boy stretched out across the bones of the land. Now, he is someone.
Ganondorf’s magic grows in strength and scope. He learns to float on a cushion of air, to warp himself across great distances, to puppet others. He explores the soft, carpeted vastness of Hyrule, beginning from the mountain nearest his home, the one which glows a sharp green at night on occasion. Trees burst with fruit; carrots and mushrooms thrust from the velvety ground. He catches pigeons with plumage in every color and lets them go, feeling generous. The land beckons to him and he answers the call, wondering why he kept himself away from it for so long. He wanders further afield, across desert and mountain and rocky land that burns the feet. He discovers fantastical creatures, glowing springs, strange labyrinths marked with blocky designs. He stops returning home. He hunts, he gathers, he cooks. He attacks travelers while disguised, knocking them out and stealing their valuables, putting on their jewelry. And on nights the moon rises red and the strange power howls from the castle with so much force it seems like it would suck him in, he clings to the land, lying on his back with his fists balled in the grass while his blood boils in his veins as if it doesn’t belong to him.
Hyrule Castle continues to tug at him, and he resists its gravity as long as he can. He can see it wherever he goes, at any time of the day, glowing like a baleful eye. In the end he is nothing if not curious, and that edifice, shrouded in purple fire and black mist, is the greatest mystery the land has to offer. The fields surrounding the castle crawl with the ancient machines he has become familiar with, restless and watchful, kaleidoscopic blue eyes turning in his direction when he approaches. He silences them with a look. “I am not your master,” he says, “but you will not harm me.”
In the castle he finds sucking black sludge oozing across walls and corridors; contact with it feels like plunging his head underwater. Monsters camp in every corner, studying him warily without engaging. The lynels challenge him, seeing him as an equal, a notion he quickly disabuses them of. He keeps their weapons; he likes their heft and shine.
Above it all is a cold, high light, a brilliant presence that turns in his direction the moment he sets foot on the grounds. As he roams the castle he feels its attention upon him, watching him keenly. It forms a barrier between him and the great black ocean that calls his blood, dulling the pull of that tide. And yet it does nothing, merely observing him as he moves through the ruined corridors. He blinks sleepily at its curious regard. “Zelda, is it? I wonder what you make of me?” But there’s no answer.
He plunders the castle, finding its riches, its gewgaws, its little secrets. He creeps around the inner sanctum, where he feels he must not go. He finds the princess’ room. He reads her diary. Then he stumbles upon the keep’s greatest treasure: its library. Row upon row of books, more than he’s ever seen in his life. He pulls them from the shelves, one after another, inhaling them. He discovers histories. He studies new spells. He learns the names of places he knows largely by taste and smell. Satori Mountain, sweet with the land’s bounty. Lake Illumeni, the cradle of his childhood. The frozen wastes of Tabantha. Ganondorf leaves the castle, yet returns over and over to that library, fingers questing over worn spines, seeking more tender pieces to feed his mind with.
But, as promised, his years of freedom must come to an end. One morning, as he roasts fish over a fire, as the sun clambers into a greening sky, he feels the pull of his mother’s summons, the loop of her will drawing him back to the bluff above the lake. Ganondorf has not returned home for years. As a grown man stepping into that witchlight-struck cave, he wonders how he spent so much of his life in a space so small.
The mirror on Youma’s wall is alive. It dances with motion and light. In it, a Hylian youth his age races across a green field, half-clad, his delicate features curiously vacant but coldly determined. Ganondorf recognizes the shade of his hair. This mad, barefoot Hylian climbs trees. He fights with sticks. He steals weapons from his enemies and uses it against them. He lopes from place to place, wild and savage, like a wolf. A wolf-boy.
“He is awake,” Youma says. “Your time has come.”