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Link’s boots were beginning to drag through the desert sand.
Zelda kept watch out of the corner of her eye and wondered if they should have come at all. He might have repaid Ganondorf a thousandfold for every wound, but his body still needed time to sew itself back together. At least the Light Spirits had repaired Midna far more cleanly. Zelda, though, had never been hurt at all. She’d only stood at the bottom of that hill, watching the two of them tackle each other in a hug, wishing she could draw closer.
Midna caught him the next time he stumbled, then stepped into his path, blocking the sun with her height. “Let’s turn back.”
“I agree,” Zelda said, handing over her waterskin.
Link’s rough fingers brushed hers. For a brief moment of freefall, she was in Hyrule Field with the ghost horde thundering towards them; she was in that place of light where he’d offered her his hand; she was letting him pull her up onto Epona’s back, his face resolute.
He peered at her intently, then took a drink and said, “Not necessary.”
Midna rolled her eyes. “You’re going to pass out.”
“Carry me, then,” Link said primly. “It’s only fair.”
She squinted at him. He stared right back, a mischievous smile spreading across his face. It turned Zelda to stone, seeing him look so young, and it made Midna’s expression wobble like the waves of heat on the desert horizon.
All Zelda could think about was what would happen once they reached Arbiter’s Grounds. She wanted to tell Midna that the hope outweighed the risk. She wanted to tell Link that she owed him everything, including happiness. The three of them could make a circle strong enough to keep every beast away, except for the ones worth loving.
She knew next to nothing about what drove Link, but if it was strong enough to sustain him through that agonizing fight with Ganondorf, he wouldn’t turn back now. And Zelda understood Midna with a depth she had never expected and felt wholly unprepared to lose. The Twilight Princess would do as she deemed necessary to reclaim what the enemy had stolen: her body, her people’s future, whoever Link had been before that bright-eyed wolf came to be imprisoned in Hyrule Castle.
As always, Zelda’s words would make no difference. As always, she would try anyway.
Link remained oblivious to Midna’s plans. He was grinning, actually, as she hefted him onto her back. “Now I pity Epona,” she muttered, and he dropped his face into her cloak and laughed.
Midna flashed a helpless glance at Zelda, who fell into step beside her, warding their path against Moldorms and Leevers. The sun beat down mercilessly, but both women turned their faces up to its heat: Zelda because she hadn’t felt it in so long, and Midna because she would never feel it again.
“What’s your advice?” Midna asked suddenly. “For earning back their trust.”
Zelda nearly laughed. “You’re asking me?”
There were no secrets between them after the heart they’d shared. Yet Midna still turned those ruby eyes on her and said firmly, “Yes, Zelda. I’m asking you.”
“Well…expect to be tested. Rise to the challenges; never lower yourself to the insults, even if it means wasting an opportunity. If you don’t draw your lines now, people will push past them forever. Teach them who you are. Give them constancy after all this upheaval.”
“You can do it,” Link added with complete conviction.
Midna almost looked embarrassed. “And you, wolf boy? Back to herding goats?”
He lifted his gaze to Arbiter’s Grounds, smile fading, and offered no response. Midna’s steps faltered ever so slightly. And Zelda was left to process this new revelation about her kingdom’s savior—not a warrior by occupation. Not someone who came from power at all.
Far too soon, Midna was setting Link down at the base of the colossal prison. He eyed the shadows crowding its tall doorway, the sunset reaching through its high and hollow places.
Zelda felt like a century had passed since the last time she’d trained with the ancient Sages here. Zant must be the reason half of the outer staircase lay in ruins now. “How did you reach the Mirror before?” she wondered.
“Through the prison, at first,” Midna answered grimly. “We used the portal after that.”
“Why not use it today?”
“This kid’s in no shape to transform.” She flicked Link’s forehead. He stuck his tongue out at her. “Also, I have no idea how the portal would affect you, and…”
“We didn’t want to leave you behind,” Link finished.
Zelda swallowed hard, remembering how the wolf had lingered in her doorway, gazing back with those blue eyes that said everything his voice could not. Only Midna tugging at his scruff had finally persuaded him to move. And Zelda had stood unmoving by the window, telling herself that if her only contribution was distracting Zant from the restored light and the ancient power gathering in Midna’s hands—then so be it. Waiting was a family tradition. She knew how to be a prisoner in her own home, a mirror for powerful men to gloat before.
Link had been a stranger then, and he remained a stranger now, despite everything binding them together. But even so, he’d been unwilling to turn his back on her. Zelda had to make that mean something.
She and Midna twined light and shadow across the ruined staircase. Link tested the glowing walkway dubiously and found it solid beneath his weight. “Wow,” he said with a rueful laugh. “I really do wish you’d been with us the whole time, Princess.”
“Imagine that,” Midna agreed wistfully. “Both of us free and at full power? We would have sent Zant and Ganondorf running to their mothers.”
Zelda shared that wish with more fervor than she would ever articulate, but to hear them both say it meant she still had a chance. There were other gaps they could bridge together. Up there in the coliseum, Zelda would try to make Midna see that one last time.
For now, she followed them both up the shimmering stairs, watching Midna grip Link’s hand with desperate strength as each step brought them closer to the twilit sky.
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After all was said and done, Link found himself kneeling on the sun-soaked platform, watching a shining speck of glass float down to rest in the sand. His fingers inched forward. The light went out.
Months ago in the prison that lurked beneath him now, Stallord’s brutal charge had sent him falling thirty feet to the hard stone. Lying there in the dark, the thready sound of his gasps proving that something had broken inside him, Link would have joined the restless dead of Arbiter’s Grounds if not for Midna. Her words were long lost in the haze of that awful memory. He only knew they’d brought him back to his feet.
He felt the same way now—choking on disbelief, the world thrown into disarray—and she wasn’t here to remind him of his courage.
Wind howled through the empty frame of the Mirror they’d worked so hard to repair. Link understood what had just happened with merciless clarity. What bewildered him was how she could go through with it. She was part of him. At the very least, they weren’t supposed to hurt each other.
Link squeezed his eyes shut. Each second crawled by like an age. The pain that had seemed so manageable until now wormed through his half-healed wounds. She’d lain in his arms last night and asked him to make her promises. She’d let him hug her at the stairs to the Mirror, let him ramble on about his plans to visit. She’d told him, See you later.
But she had never said goodbye.
“Hero?”
When he opened his eyes, the Princess of Hyrule knelt before him, caught by the last golden vestiges of twilight before they slipped below the horizon. Not a single crack in her composure, yet her gaze burrowed through his desperate effort to maintain his own.
“She never wanted to hurt you,” Zelda murmured.
Wanting was a luxury denied to all three of them. But those days were supposed to be over. What had Link been killing for, if not a world where the people he loved could make their own choices? He’d never expected Midna to use that freedom in this terrible way, at the end of everything.
“We ought to go. The night grows cold.”
Zelda extended a silk-gloved hand, pressing her mouth into a hard line when Link just stared at it vacantly.
“Link,” she said after a moment, and there was something soft and uncertain and familiar in her voice. He remembered it from the day she’d saved Midna, and the day she’d saved him with that brief and precious moment of safety before they rode against Ganondorf together. “You had a life before this. You’ll have one after it.”
The future seemed unimaginable, the recent past unbearable—but Link could think of Ordon. Uli humming by the riverbank. Rusl mussing his hair. Gathering the kids into a hug, all sharp elbows and knobby knees. Cantering Epona across a field of swaying grass with Ilia’s arms around his waist, the wind swallowing their laughter.
He had promised to come back home. That carried enough weight for him to take the Princess’s hand.
She pulled them both to their feet, her grip as strong and sure as it had been before Ganondorf himself. Link remembered little of the journey that followed. Zelda got them across the dark desert, back to the horses, and through the town gates—but he felt present for none of it until she opened the door of a castle bedroom and ordered him to rest.
He pulled off his layers and the hat Midna had always made fun of, lying down to stare up at the painted ceiling. If the plush rug was this soft, he couldn’t imagine the bed. The goatherd from Ordon might have been awed by his accommodations. Whoever Link was now only saw the shadows and the emptiness seething inside them.
Neither tears nor sleep arrived, and without those escapes, he had to make his own. Over his body’s exhausted protests, he pulled on a plain shirt and retrieved his weapons. That was when he noticed something in his trouser pocket: even wrapped in several layers of leather and attached to a cord, he recognized the shadow crystal’s whispering magic instantly.
Why would Midna leave this with him? He never wanted to be a wolf again. Not to mention that he’d be relying on the Master Sword to turn him human again. That was just like her: no warning, no explanation, just the expectation that he’d read her mind somehow.
Link shoved the crystal into a drawer and stalked out into the sleeping castle. All but two areas were clear of monsters now. Why should the Princess or the bumbling idiots who comprised her guard risk their lives in the dungeons? That was Link’s responsibility. He squeezed past the first barricade he encountered, lit his lantern, and descended into the damp gloom.
He was almost glad when the first Skulltula unspooled itself from the ceiling, for this was the kind of fight he understood, the kind for which he’d been born. Link caught the venomous fangs on his shield, severed one long leg to halt the spider’s lunge, and darted sideways to hack at its vulnerable back until it died. And that was how he spent the next several hours, combing through every corridor and every enemy, until he stumbled across something familiar.
A short chamber divided into two cells—not much to look at, just the place where a chained wolf had first met a grinning imp. Link leaned against the stone entryway, searching himself for grief or fury or forgiveness. He still couldn’t find anything past blinding, violent shock.
Home, he reminded himself. You promised.
By the time the dungeons were clear, habit and exhaustion made him toss a bomb at the boarded-up exit—an incredibly reckless move he regretted instantly when the smoke cleared to reveal two guards huddled against the opposite side of the hall in terror. They seemed unharmed, at least. The morning sunlight stung Link’s tired eyes.
“Who in Din’s name are you?!” one of the guards sputtered. “We have orders to keep the dungeons barricaded!”
“Hold on,” the other said. “This kid was with the Princess yesterday. And he’s injured.”
Link looked down at his shirt and shook his head.
“You mean that’s not your blood?”
Link swallowed hard, dragging his voice out somehow: “It’s safe now.”
The guard’s mouth opened and closed. His fellow looked unsure where to point his spear. Something Telma had said on that horrible journey to Kakariko flashed through Link’s mind: We need a beast right now, to keep the true ones at bay.
His mind scrabbled for purchase and found it: there was still one more thing he could do for Hyrule. He left the guards in the sunlit hallway and started to climb. The castle’s first two floors remained largely intact; the Clawshots got him the rest of the way. Very few monsters had survived the higher levels, and none posed a challenge.
Up in the half-collapsed throne room, the sun was warm and the wind cool. Link didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that there was nothing left to fight. He stood there for a long time amid the rubble Ganondorf and Midna had created, staring out across Hyrule, at the endless desert and the dark scar of Arbiter’s Grounds.
The Master Sword seemed to be growing heavier by the minute as he lost hold of whatever madness had carried him through the dungeons and all the way up here. Maybe he could catch a glimpse of Ordon to the south. Link was backtracking through the destroyed chamber when a metallic gleam caught his eye: a thin longsword, half-buried but unbroken, with a golden hilt and a purple crossguard.
He’d last seen it in the Princess’s hand—not as herself, but as a ghoul with yellow eyes and sallow skin lined with corruption. Ganondorf’s voice had crept forth from her lips. And when she aimed the point of this blade at Link’s skull, he barely dodged in time to let it graze across his cheek instead.
He pressed his fingers to the bandaged cut and tried not to think of the rest. The only mercy was that Zelda remembered nothing. Midna had made him promise to keep it that way, and Link kept his promises, even now.
Perhaps he should have flung the beautiful blade back into the rubble for good measure, but he hated the idea of losing his own sword that way, and he suspected Zelda had been unsafe much longer than him. The least he could do was give her back this one thing and hope she never learned what Ganondorf had done, what Link himself had done.
He stuck the sword through his belt and was about to continue when he heard the footsteps. A monster. The thought made him suddenly, immensely sick. He’d been killing all morning and for six months besides, but it took several tries to nock an arrow and take aim at the only narrow path available to his enemy.
Something was wrong. The bow trembled in his grip. He was trapped between amber walls, blood dripping down his chin, magic crackling through the air. He would let it strike him over and over rather than hear her scream, but there was no choice, his death didn’t belong to him—
And then he jolted back to the present, because Zelda was rounding the corner, and she was herself this time. Blue dress dusty from the rubble. Dark hair shining in the sun. She looked from the arrow to his face.
Just like on the night they'd met, Link was struck by the enormous sensation that he was rooted to the earth beneath his feet, grown up out of Hyrule itself, all of that feeling held in her proud blue eyes and the unflinching way they met his. The past fell back into its rightful place. He was anchored in this moment again—despite the wreckage around and inside him—and there was a stubborn thread of hope working its way back into his heart.
He wasn't sure he wanted hope. He was tired and heartbroken and unworthy of anything Zelda might offer him. But she had climbed up here alone, for him, through the ruins of the kingdom Zant and Ganondorf had stolen from her. Link had to make that mean something.
There would come a day when it meant everything. At the time, he could only feel the knife of her presence, the memory of Ganondorf turning them against each other, the dread of splintering apart into someone unrecognizable. But when Link recalled this moment months and years down the road, he would see so much more than the indomitable figure Zelda showed the rest of the world.
Just like him, she was young and frightened and lonely; just like him, she had gone up to the throne room believing the best parts of her life were already over. But she kept walking anyway, kept hoping, kept proving that the two of them—along with the kingdom they’d saved—could always be put back together, no matter their missing pieces.
In that light, the memory became precious. If there were shadows in it too, they were the sort Link loved, the sort he would keep in his heart forever. And though they still called each other Princess and Hero that day, their true names waited on the other side of the ruins.
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