Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
Ten Thousand Years Before the Upheaval
“Stupid, stupid girl.”
The thick consonants felt good punching off her tongue, the curse blotting out the glen’s chorus of cicadas and hidden songbirds. She pressed her temples between her palms, her nails raking against her scalp as the afternoon replayed itself on loop in her head. This wasn’t the first time this particular boulder had served as her throne, a sole surviving witness to her private curses and muttered thoughts. Beyond Rauru and Sonia’s Palace gardens and gazebo, this tucked-off nook was just far enough away from the monarchs and guard shifts and constructs manufactured to fret. It was the perfect place where she could scream and curse and cry outside of their purview, without being away so long that they began to notice and wonder and want to know, oh sweet Zelda, what’s the matter? Don’t you know that we’re always here to listen? You shouldn’t worry, all will be just fine?
She could still feel the strain in her cheeks from tugging her lips up into a smile, her bobble-head nodding at Rauru and Sonia’s reassurances because that’s what they expected her to do. In the two years since plummeting into their world she had come to suspect her place in their esteem. Hinted with the reassurances that were always a little too fast to pass their lips; small deferrals promising to pick up a question at a later time that never came. The answer to this problem lies in study…for this reason, and others, I want him close…
She’d sensed her role; this afternoon only confirmed it.
There was nothing to worry about. She had swallowed Rauru’s assurance like bitter medicine, not because she believed it, but because she knew that they wanted her to.
They didn’t want to hear that Lord Ganondorf’s intentions were insincere because they had already decided his depths for themselves, independent of her council. If they believed that she was right, that he was capable of much more than petty antagonizing in their burgeoning kingdom, it would mean they might lack the capability to stop him. Which was, in the glaring blur of their light, impossible. They had the Stones, the strength, the very alignment of goodness on their side.
She could not make them see. They could not comprehend the mindless infection of a thousand Guardian heads swiveling in blind obedience to malice’s will, destroying a world on behalf of which no divinity saw fit to intercede. Of course Rauru could keep an eye on his latest pledge, trusting his power and influence to keep such an outlandish, outlying threat at heel. Everything had to be okay because they had never known the alternative.
And it didn’t matter that she had felt that same ripple of hatred slamming its knee to the Palace stone thrum against her heart for a hundred years. Or how many others outside of herself had risen and fought and schemed and given all they were to halting a threat they’d chosen to heed, only to be ground to dust by hatred's arc of might. The Sheikah, the Champions, these alternate entities must have been flawed, just as she was. They did not have the talent and foresight of the Zonai. They would be blessed because they always had been.
Why should they think otherwise? Even she, even she herself, did nothing but nod and smile to their assurances, because being disagreeable felt abominable in the wake of their confidence. What was another hundred years, another thousand, another ten thousand if it meant her hosts would be spared the uncomfortable glare of offense?
Unable to reach home and impotent in correcting the past. She could practically hear Hylia’s laughter as she beheld her least favorite daughter once more, cursing her with the blessing of foresight. “You’re as worthless as everyone else,” she muttered, digging her sandals into the fertile, unscarred earth, the Zonai stone bracelets rattling like chains.
“No wonder you’re so sweet-natured to the rest of the world. You save your wrath for yourself,” a voice snaked into her tiniest corner of the world, sending her crying out in surprise as her spine shot her up like a cannon. A self-satisfied chuckle punctuated the Gerudo King’s carefully chosen entrance, and she didn’t need to turn to see the smirk shaded with a narrow-eyed stare, fixing down his impeccably sharp nose with the force of an archer tracking a skittish doe in his sights.
The eyes that had wandered everywhere in the Throne room save on Rauru as he droned on about honor and fealty, first lingered on Sonia, glazing over with tedium bordering on contempt before locking on her. She’d met them a moment, the sharp, fearless glint of gold nearly making her start in its naked boldness. Sending her own focus slanting sideways just to avoid being caught noticing.
“This is all the evidence I’d need to implicate you in a threat,” she spoke, keeping her voice even as her fingers curled around her rock.
“Does an oath of fealty not grant me the right to move about the Plateau of my own volition?” Ganondorf challenged, still behind her, making no move to cross her sights. “Or is your mere vicinity sacred territory, my Lady? You’ll have to grant me a measure of grace, if your infinite wisdom would allow it. Your people’s customs are strange and overwhelming to this bumbling outsider.”
“There is a difference between crossing paths and sneaking in unannounced,” she pointed out, refusing to turn, to give any validity to his presence. “I can’t imagine our cultures are so different that you’d be unaware of the two.”
“I made myself known as soon as I got a moment in edgewise,” he claimed. “You’ve been so intent on berating yourself, it’s difficult to find an opportunity’s peace.”
“You’ve been watching me.” she said, the words sounding foolish as soon as she’d spoken them. Not so much an accusation as a realization, slipping out loud.
“Only because it seemed rude to interrupt.” A weariness sanded the edges of his tone, fatigue she recognized almost as well as the contempt. The faintest hint of a sigh as his presence shifted, quieted, taking on a trace of regret. “I did not see another way we’d have an opportunity to talk. Not freely, at least.”
Maybe he does feel misplaced , that small, sweet voice inside her tugged. Maybe you’re wrong, and that’s not hatred vibrating off of him like current, only your biased suspicion implicating a man who’s been nothing but cooperative to your side.
That doubt…that simpering weakness she couldn’t shake, even now, after everything she’d learned and endured. If she was so right all the time…why didn’t anyone believe her? Wouldn’t she have authority if she deserved it?
The uncertainty wafted beneath Ganondorf’s nose, freeing his hands from their snug fold against his mighty chest, squeezing her bare shoulders. “You spoke to Rauru against me,” he whispered into her ear as fact. There wasn’t a whiff of question, nothing muffling the statement he did not present for argument, only explanation. Nor of anger, only acknowledgment. A strange tendril of guilt teased her stomach like an enchanted vine, its spores clouding away the iron-clad certainty that had shored up in her solitude.
“Your vow seemed insincere,” she said, practically an apology.
“Insincere?” He tsked, his thumbs gliding over her knotted shoulder blades as he spoke. “I could say the same thing about you, my Lady. You feign tolerance in my presence and spew venom in my absence. My fealty was predicated on conditions,” he went on, his breath tickling the short hair grazing her neck. “Conditions I’m starting to wonder whether Rauru is willing to uphold. Especially considering such…hostile counsel.”
“Rauru doesn’t take my counsel,” she said, an absolute that shrank her even further.
“And why is that, Lady Zelda?” He asked with a self-assured squeeze.
Tell him to take his hands off of you.
He’s only being polite.
Why are you so adversarial?
“I’m only Queen Sonia’s niece,” she said, the lie flowing naturally after two years of living within it. “I don’t have the experience to advise a King on his Kingdom.”
“Is that what he tells you?” Ganondorf’s voice dropped somehow lower, scarcely a tone and more of a rumble. “You see, I think,” he went on without urging, “that a chorus of opinions and experience that do not echo my own enriches any decision I might make. A throne has many blind spots,” he went on, dragging his fingers along the back hem of her dress as he stood, his katana rattling as his grip naturally settled back against it. “He might do well to wonder why a Hylian’s niece sees nothing but a monster.”
“I don’t see a monster,” she said reflexively, leaping back to her feet, her hands shaking with the need to smooth whatever rift she accidentally opened. Her fear was like a stain blotting onto Rauru’s robes. What could she say for certain about the shadows glimpsed before the fall? How could she leap from a corpse mummified to dust to a man willing to bend his own royal knee to quell the discord?
Because you’ve known evil beyond carnage, beyond death. Because it seeped into your cells, probed into your heart—because darkness possessed you just as surely as your light held it back.
If he had wished to hurt her, he could have done so by now. Malice did not stand on formality, arguing her to death. It did not negotiate assimilation of independent territory. It did not kneel as its adversary smiled in victory. Evil was not patient.
Ganondorf shifted his weight to his left, leaning into his weapon as he examined her, relaxing into the sharp pillar he could trust. His gold, muted in the dim filtered light of the palace throne room, blazed to life in the high afternoon sun. An intricate series of chains and jewels made only for his singular form, bespoke finery that made Rauru and Sonia look like paupers with their simple jade and stone tabards, the muted fringes and tassels. Carved Hylia, with her bowed head and folded hands, would seem rapt in worship within his presence.
“Tell me then, dear Lady,” he said, taking in her whole form at once, like one tiny morsel he could swallow whole. “What do you see?”
A Secret Stone skittering across the floor, catching the torch-light. Infernal curiosity compelling her hips to bend, her fingers to snatch the treasure that was not hers to claim. The desecration of a tomb crystallized in eternal agony. Eyes ablaze at her presumption, her nerve . Power surging, protecting itself from her onslaught, tipped to action by her unholy intrusion. A sin even the Master Sword could not excuse, absorbing her punishment, decaying in her place.
She saw her failure.
She saw her fault.
He cocked his head, his stare tunneling, burrowing into the space her silence left open. “Something too awful to state, then?”
“No, I—“ she fumbled, her mind refusing an explanation as the moment yawned open. “I’m sorry, I see…this has become an awful misunderstanding, and you should think ill of me, but not of Rauru. And not of Sonia.”
That same stare held, unshaken as her ire shrank, scurrying like a squirrel back into the bushes. “This friction digs at you, doesn’t it, Lady Zelda?” he murmured, the tease wrung out from his voice. “You always trip on your own feet on the way to peace, don’t you?” He stepped closer, undetectably slow and fluid, as if the ground itself were knitting them back together. His thumb hesitated before journeying beneath her chin, tipping her face up to meet him with the slightest curl of his filed nail. He tilted his head like a bird, omitting no detail from his memory. “You spend your breath protecting those muzzling your truth rather than speaking it. What is so starved inside of you that demands the approval of those who aren’t even worthy of your respect?”
It was as if her mind went blank at the question, nesting dolls of shock splitting open as each revealed a secret deeper than the last. How did he…
He relaxed into an easy smile. “I don’t think our aspirations are so opposed, my Lady,” he said, his nail stroking her skin so gently she didn’t register the motion as separate from her breathing. “And I can see how mightily the discord weighs on you, even tempered by your nagging suspicions. If only you could let go of this vendetta,” he said with a tsk , flashing the threat of his disappointment. “Be truthful, Zelda. Does this anger and distrust make you happy?”
“No,” she breathed, reflexively.
It was what he wanted to hear. What he wished her to be.
His smile returned; she’d passed the test.
“I shouldn’t think so. Such a good girl, willing to admit it.” She sat on the edge of his talon, lost in the approval softening his topaz eyes, easing his brow as he beheld her agreement like a rare reward.
With a quick turn he broke the spell, crunching last season’s leaves beneath his feet as his broad steps multiplied their distance before she could think to stop him. Her fingertips rose to caress the place his nail had just been, to feel the intent the sharpness coaxed into the soft underbelly of her chin, an indent she now only felt within his absence.