Chapter Text
It’s an old story, just as stories always are; there’s a hero and a princess and three points to a triangle, and the gods bestow power among those they find worthy, and then the gods go mad and the people destroy the golden power out of fear and the world plunges into darkness as it enters its death throes.
It’s an old story. There is no golden power left to save them.
It’s an old story. Just because that power is gone, it doesn’t mean the gods left with it.
Ravio is a practical sort. He was born into a dying world, after all- it’s a matter of survival, less one of choice. If you hear fighting, you run away. If someone threatens you, you run away. If there’s the end of the world on the horizon and you can feel it drawing closer with every tired breath the earth drags out from her shattering core…
Well. Get called ‘bunny boy’ enough, and you kinda wanna reclaim it, yeah? By the time Ravio was seven, he was sewing ears on his hoods, tacking eyes on with inexperienced hands to give him a mask to wander among the other beasts of Lorule. By the time he was eight, nobody had managed to catch him for two years, in all the chases he’d been caught in.
Problem is, you can’t run away from the end of the world. You can’t run away from the princess with all-seeing magical powers when she crawls into your dreams every night.
You can’t run away from the grasping whispers of a goddess, crooning in your ear, an invisible, heavy gaze, haunting you from the first time you picked up a spellbook, curled around your mind like a curse.
See, here’s how it goes:
Ravio picks up a spellbook for the first time when he’s five. Something snaps in his mind, the weight of eyes watching falls on his shoulders as heavy as a condemning hand, laughter begins to tumble in a mad cascade in his mind, and he screams, throws the book away from himself, and bolts back to one of his hidey-holes as fast as he can go.
Hello, little coward, croons a voice as he runs, the sensation of hands as cold and burning as the poisoned river snaking through the land curling around his neck, and Ravio, young, terrified out of his mind, claws at the invisible hands as he runs to no avail. When he gets back home, his neck is raw, torn by the ragged edges of his own nails, his hands buzzing and almost numb where they passed through where the grasping fingers should have been.
His hands tingle for a day before the sensation subsides.
The presence, fading silently to the very back of his mind, stays.
You would think it would be something life-changing. Earthshattering. All the world upended and nothing the same.
It’s not.
Ravio is young; Ravio is a child of Lorule. Ravio has survived five long years of famine and darkness and viciousness from more than only monsters.
In the face of his more pressing problems- what will he eat today, where will he find clean water to drink, where is his shelter for the night- really, having a quiet presence lurking at the back of his mind day after day is entirely easier to let be forgotten than one would imagine it is.
(Perhaps part of it is deliberate. Perhaps there has to be some amount of willful blindness, in this world- when there is a laugh or a sigh or a pleased crooning noise that is not you inside your own head.
Peace of mind is a precious resource. It’s almost as vital as air- in a way, you need it even more than you need food, or magic, or light.
You have to survive how you can.
And sometimes, that means there are certain things you do not think of.)
There’s so much more to worry about, than if you’re cursed, or if you’ve finally gone mad with the rest of the kingdom, or if you’ve tripped old dormant magical defenses, when you are a child in Lorule. As you grow, there are only more worries; the older you get, it seems, the harder it is to survive.
Ravio manages it. Somehow, he survives. Somehow, he grows up. Five to ten to fifteen, swift-footed and, as it apparently goes, entirely too clever for his own good, he manages.
A good bit beyond what he should have, as it so turns out.
What draws Hilda to him, in the first place- what damns him, all and all- is the magework.
Magery’s a dumb thing to waste his time on at first, just a stupid little hobby when he started, even after that scare of the book (and the voice and the watching, or, rather, perhaps, because)- who, in this age, can really dream of being like a mage out of the old tales, from the legends?- but one thing rapidly leads to another and wondering turns to trying turns to experimenting to starting to dabbling with enchanting magical artifacts on his own and then suddenly he’s not just flinging tiny flickers of fire around to light the candles in his house, he’s out in the woods, staring at a hole he just tore in the world with his own hands.
And that- right there- is what doomed him, no matter how quick he closed it afterwards, no matter how fast and far he ran, afterwards, heart racing- Hilda knows everything that happens in her kingdom. It’s one of the last bits of legacy she has left from her bloodline. He doesn’t know this, now- but later. Later, he learns just what kind of a fool he’s been.
Magic like that, dropped in the heart of Hilda’s domain- he may as well have set off a beacon, lit himself up against the shadows, knelt at her feet and offered up his hands for the binding.
She starts showing up in his dreams that very night.
The next morning, he leaves everything behind- his house, his notes, stockpile and all- and runs.
It won’t save him.
She’ll catch him eventually; the snare in the grass, his foot caught in the loops, thrown in the air to where no struggle may free him.
But not today. And not tomorrow.
It’s the beginning of a years-long chase; the ending foretold, inescapable. The trap is there; it is the whole kingdom itself, and the snare is waiting patiently.
Run if you want, bunny boy. She’ll chase you into its grasp soon enough.
And then; everything will end.
(Everything can start.)
Sheerow comes to him a year before the end.
He’s not sure where he summoned Sheerow from, exactly. Oh, Ravio summoned him, yes; no doubt about that, when it was his hands that parted the magic in the air and his voice that spoke the spell, but in the moment, well…
(Who was moving those hands? Who was speaking with his voice?
He doesn’t think about it. He doesn’t think about it.)
Mind-to-mind, maybe even soul-to-soul; Ravio looks at Sheerow, and Sheerow looks back, and there’s the sensation akin to two shards of mirror, pointing right at one another; Ravio sees through Sheerow’s eyes which sees through his, and so back and forth and infinite it goes.
Just what kind of spirit was his body used to summon?
He’s grateful for Sheerow. He is, he really is. The companionship, alone, Ravio would have traded every ill-gotten rupee he’s ever lifted off a poorly-guarded belt for, back when he was five, six, seven and starving for any non-hostile contact, anything that wasn’t a shove or a cuff or had blades at the end of it.
That Sheerow, as it turns out, is more than just a soft whistle in the dark, a gentle brush of feathers against his skin in the cold, an affectionate flutter into his palm...
Well.
When Sheerow cuts a straight line through a crack in the wall of a crumbling temple, dropping a brilliant rod of studded gemstones and so much pure, concentrated, absolutely ancient magic packed within that Ravio just about gets knocked off his feet just from holding the thing, well, now.
Ravio finds it a lot easier to make himself stop wondering about the how of Sheerow, after that.
Don’t think too hard. Don’t think too hard about anything.
It is wiser, not to think.
After that, well. It’s a year of roaming. It’s a year of wandering. It’s a year of Ravio getting his hands on just about every stray magical artifact he can find in all of Lorule, and his own skills at enchanting growing in leaps and bounds with every ancient example he can find to inspect.
He swings by his house again, once, twice, a damning three times, made bold by the power he holds in pockets, upon his back, stuffed inside his new robes. He caches old relics and his own creations side-by-side, their magic mingling with one another easily, hidden from the senses of passerby with the sly tucking of small spells around the beams and baseboards.
It is hard to fear, when you feel you have power. Even if you’re a rabbit; even if all you ever do is run.
Even if you’re the closest thing to a true mage, an enchanter of old, that has been in your long-dying world for hundreds of years.
But still; even with all this power at his fingertips, Ravio doesn’t dare stop running.
Not when every time he falls asleep, closes his eyes for scant moments of stolen rest- she is there.
In every dream, Hilda is there.
(Every night; she calls, and beckons, and her voice rocks him down to the marrow, curling fine-boned fingers around his veins and pulling with the heavy yank of orders laced with magic; magic he forces away, shivers free from, goes leaping through endless fields, runs, runs, runs away, leaving her voice behind him to become nothing more distinguishable as the wind.
Night after night after night. A cycle that never changes. A play that never changes its script. The age-old story of hunter and prey, played out countless times through the vast, aching stretch of history.
It is- for better or worse- such an easy pattern to fall into. Such a breathtakingly natural role to take.
Keep running, little rabbit.
Run forever.
Isn’t that what you were made for?)
And because of that- because of the ghost still haunting his steps- the hunting dog still on his scent- the princess still reaching for him in his dream- he’s not fool enough to slow down. Not even for a moment.
Not when he knows she covets him still.
None of this stops Hilda from catching him, in the end.
“I need you, Ravio,” she says, shrouded in shadow, royal-red eyes aglow in the light of her lantern, the press of a magic-crackling hand a gentle warning against his throat.
“You don’t,” he manages to say, through the press against his neck, above the sudden mad laughter ringing through his mind like a bell falling down a chasm from a voice he barely remembers from childhood nightmares.
“Our world is dying,” Hilda says, drawing in closer. They say the royal family of Lorule has Sheikah blood, that the daughters and sons of their line are raised to the old ways; magic and blades, whispers in the night and the shadow’s embrace. They say the broken specters of the gods whisper their secrets into their ears.
Ravio believes it, now.
“Ravio,” Hilda whispers, this princess divine, her eyes alight with a fever-mad glow akin to that which still laughs in his head; all fresh-spilt blood, all rubies in firelight. “Help me.”
It’s not a plea. It’s a command. There is a hand charged with so much magic at his throat that it is like she’s holding a sun against his skin; harsh and bright and burning, unforgiving light and heat. The rabbit, caught; the snare, looped around his leg.
Ravio licks his lips. He wants to run. Kick out against the trap until his leg breaks with it.
“What do you want from me?”
Hilda wants to bring back the old gods.
Or- perhaps not quite them.
“It’s the Triforce,” Hilda says, with her burning-bright eyes, all shadow-loved and dark-light magic in the middle of the barren room; the place a holy power once glowed out upon the land, now, an aching, empty void, the last dying echoes of its shattering still so strong- to step in the room was to have a shudder rip through your body, almost convulsive in its force. Or maybe that’s just Ravio. Maybe that’s just the metal-on-glass noise that shot through his mind swifter than an arrow’s flight. Maybe it’s the chiding, almost motherly tsk that clicks in the back of his head as soon as the remnant of divine power touches his skin.
(Years of silence, shattered like glass, and now, a constant haunting of sighs and sounds and crooning- why has it changed? Why now?)
Hilda, standing in the middle of that mass of broken divinity, does not shudder. Hilda, the echoes draped around her like a cloak, standing in the epicenter of her broken kingdom.
“The secret,” she says, her voice bouncing off the walls of the small chamber, filling the very room with each word, taking it upon herself to replace the divine, “has to be in the Triforce.”
Hilda knows more than anyone else about the old legends. Hilda thinks that salvation lies in them: Hilda thinks that their only hope lies in trying to revive them again.
Ravio’s not so sure about that.
(You can’t outrun the end of the world.)
“Just the way it has always been,” she coaxes him, hands wrapped around his own, tugging him into the room. “Wisdom, in a princess. Courage, in a hero.”
Sheerow, fluttering at the entrance of the room, lets out a distressed peep, flitting back and forth, back and forth, as Ravio gets pulled in deeper.
There is no dust in the room- it is, in all ways, empty. Empty but for them, two blasphemers, stepping upon the ground that once was holy.
Even so, Ravio swears he can feel grit, like fine sand, rolling under his feet- coating his tongue, when he opens his mouth, when he dares to speak. “Power.”
Hilda smiles.
“Power,” she sighs, a vibration resonating in a deep, inaudible note, striking the soul down to bone and marrow, “To complete us.”
Hilda locks him in a tower every night. More than just a key: it’s magic, along every door, every window. A soft, oily sheen across every one, sparking up at the touch, leaving little warning burns along the backs of his hands.
But not every crack.
Ravio runs his finger along a seam in a back wall, cold air trickling through, as heavy and sleepy as fog. The curtain hung before it lies thick and heavy against his back, warmer than the blankets on his bed. Sheerow flits in and out through the crack with ease, chirping inquisitively, despite the impossibility of his form fitting through such a slim gap.
There’s a bracelet, in one of the bedstands. Heavy gold, set with a single large gem. Left behind by some visitor, never to return- anywhere from decades ago to centuries. Blank and smooth. Hungry for the using; starving for a purpose. The press of his nail, a spark of magic caught in the curve of it, carves an easy curve.
It’s like leaving a lockpick in a thief’s cell; like placing a file within reach of a prisoner; like leaving out a blade for a hero.
It’s his escape; a bracelet, left in the reach of an enchanter.
The one question is- who finishes first?
Ravio, stealing hours of the night to feverish work, pressing careful drips of magic in place, having to go so very slow and hiding himself with the stolen edges of Hilda’s own magic, so as not to alert her to his work?
Or will Hilda, instead, realize first that she truly doesn’t have any use for him- that she wasted so much of her time hunting him for nothing, in the end, after all?
Every night, he bends to his work.
Every day, Hilda speaks to him of ancient legends.
Time goes on; hours to days to months.
Still Ravio works on his slowest, subtlest, most elaborate enchantment right under the nose of his captor.
Still, the voice in his head hums and croons and laughs and watches, eager, pressing up behind his eyes, at the girl who wants to drag the gods back from their retreat to make them love the people of Lorule once more. Every time Hilda speaks- there are two watchers, two listeners to her words. Every time Hilda walks into the room, the voice croons.
(Still, Hilda demands no magic from him.)
“We can bring it back,” Hilda keeps saying, over and over, hunched over book after book after book, scroll after carving after tapestry. “We can bring it back. We have to. We have to.”
It would be so much easier if Ravio could make himself hate her.
He can’t.
She’s so devoted. So frantic. He doesn’t know why- the kingdom spits at her name, ignores her, alone in the castle. They will keep doing so even if she does manage to make a Triforce out of nothing, manages to save this damned kingdom; the world is dying, and everyone is resigned to that. What would they have to do, then, if it turns out that they have a future after all?
The people will never accept her as their ruler. She would never be able to hold her empty throne.
But here she is, and after four months in her company, Ravio can see her so much more than before.
Another night with no sleep, in the angles of her face, the shadows of her eyes. Sprawled on the floor in pants and shirtsleeves, atop a tapestry he knows hung once in the dining hall- they were there last evening, and Hilda did not eat but for a bite or two, kept leaping up to go pace before it, trace the faded threads that once, in another time, might have been a shade of divinity-gold.
The skin around her knuckles is raw, again, one of them back between her teeth as she keeps tracing, tracing, tracing, pressing into the symbol of the Triforce as if all it would take is a hard enough wish, and up it would rise from the weave of the cloth, coming to rest upon her own hand. The world, saved, from just a wish. Wouldn’t that be so lovely?
“We have to,” Hilda says again, in a cadence of near-prayer; the sort of prayer that is less a plea, and more a command. We have to. It will be done.
So desperate. So vicious. He thinks that someone could tell her that they’d save the world for her if only she tore out her own heart, and she’d do it with a smile, holding it out in offering to the gods themselves.
The bracelet is almost done. Two more months.
Just two more months, and he can flee.
And then:
Yuga.
Ravio stumbles out of his room, more than a little light-headed, when the enchantment on his door vanishes and Hilda’s voice beckons him down to the hall, exultant and resounding through what, it feels, must surely be the entire castle.
In the week he’s been sealed- left alone, without even a whisper of her voice to show that she didn’t forget him there to rot- he’s gotten so much more work done on the bracelet. A month’s worth of magic brought together in a week’s time, condensed down, packed into the bracelet with the same single-minded fervor Hilda devotes to her books and tapestries; the both of them, working desperately towards their own salvation.
He’s only had water to drink for two days, doled out sparingly from the basin in his room. Sheerow, flitting out through the crack in the wall, managed to find and drag him back some food, though from where, Ravio doesn’t know- dried jerky, half-withered fruits. It’s uncomfortably close to memories of the old days; four years old, alone, and hungry, not quick enough quite yet to get away from every cuffing hand, every grab for the fleeing thief.
He wraps his scarf up closer with a shiver, ice wracking its way down his spine with every step closer to his summons. The warmth of his robes feels almost shallow, even layered as they are over his two shirts- there’s a strange, swoop of anticipation flipping his stomach, pressing on the back of his mind.
He steps in the room, and the shriek of cackling that erupts inside his skull almost has him slamming hands against his ears on pure reflex.
“Ravio,” Hilda says, smiling wide, face alight with triumph, “meet our Power.”
Yuga’s laughter is perfectly in time with that which rings inside his head.
Everything gets worse.
“We can take theirs,” Hilda says, in a great excitement, pacing back and forth before Ravio’s perch on the edge of his bed. “It’s perfect- I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before- all we have to do is take it.”
Ravio swallows. Shifts in place. Sheerow huddles down close against his neck, all downy fluff and hollow bones, tiny and shivering.
If there is just one thing Ravio is, it is a coward. He flees from every fight.
He stays silent.
(The voice in his head greeted him true, all those long years ago.)
“Perfect. Perfect,” Hilda murmurs, almost to herself- and the worst part of it all, Ravio thinks, is the sheer relief relaxing every stressed line of her face, like he’s never seen her before. The weight of the world, lifted off her shoulders.
He stays silent.
“All we need,” Hilda says, turning, hands falling on his shoulders- with that bright, relieved smile, expectant, trusting- “is you.”
The bracelet is still unfinished.
Ravio is still trapped; a rabbit in the snare. Cord around his ankles. Caged by stone and magic.
One more week. He only needs one more week, and then he can get out of this mess with his hands clean; slipping out from the trap, wiggling free of the snare. Just one more week.
Hilda doesn’t give it to him.
Teach me how to open portals to another world, Hilda says.
Ravio does.
Help me figure out how to connect our world to Hyrule, Hilda says.
Ravio does.
Tell me it will all work out, Ravio? Hilda whispers one late night, curled up in a magic-drained doze, a crack in the worlds spilling color and otherworldly fog out between them.
Ravio does.
The bracelet is ready.
Not soon enough. Not when it should have been. Not before his hands and his magic were made to be part of Hilda’s scheme, and now here they are; twelve bleeding rents between two worlds.
And here Ravio stands; with the clinging buzz of magic humming along the palms of his hands; eyes aching and burning with the late hour; cold metal in his palm, the bracelet washed-out and shining soft in the moonlight.
Too late in part. But not in whole.
It’s still his salvation, even if it arrived just a little too late.
He slips it on, and breathes. One breath. Two. Presses his hand against the wall.
Slips; and through the crack he falls.
Ravio’s not a hero. He never has been. He never will be. Cowardly, not courageous. A mage, not a boy with a blade. Just a little rabbit-boy, running from the hunters, running from monsters, running from the voice inside his head, running from the end of the world.
Run, run, run. That’s all he’s good for. That’s all he does.
Don’t mess with a good thing, yeah? Ravio’s got a good thing going. He sees danger on the horizon, and he turns his back to it and runs as hard as his legs can go, until everything’s behind him and his legs become light itself and nothing, nothing can catch him, nothing at all. He’s been doing it for years. He’s been doing it for all his life.
( Oh? croons the voice that’s haunted him for so, so very long, sourceless fine-boned hands wrapping around his throat, and Ravio does what he’s always done; tightens up the wrap of his scarf around his neck, pretends that the pressure he feels is simply of cloth, keeps his face still; and, as always, pretends he hears nothing.
It’s always worked before. It works now just as well.)
So; it’s in character for him, really, just what you should expect from little Ravio, the bunny boy, the coward, is it not?
Twenty minutes, all told, for him to bolt to his home, to cram every single magical artifact into a sack, tumbling them in all over each other with nervous glances about, just waiting- waiting for Hilda’s voice to tear into his mind all furious betrayal and spitting magic, for Yuga to laugh from behind him, for someone to break down his door and drag him out, hey bunny-boy, whatcha got there-
Twenty minutes: castle to home to packed, and here he stands, in front of his own house, where a crack in the world he helped carve open spills fog like blood from a wound.
And there is someone watching the world from behind his eyes.
Ravio ignores-
Ravio ignores-
Ravio ignores-
He can’t ignore it.
The presence that has lurked in his mind for so very long is pressed up and coiled down, and he can’t ignore that it makes him blink- that the curious anticipation he is feeling is not his- that there is something sentient and watching dwelling in his mind, and it has been there for years and years and years-
Sheerow shrills, all high distress, and Ravio manages to jerk himself a step forwards, wheezing, panting, heart pounding-
The presence does not fade. It does not fall back- it just starts to laugh, an uncontrollable spill of bubbling, mad joy, and Ravio doesn’t want to listen to it anymore, he doesn’t want to-
Ravio- because for some reason, he cannot lie to himself, right now, he cannot hide behind the little falsehoods he always tells himself so that he can, at least inside his own head, feel safe- snaps himself over to the portal, forces himself to drag stumbling foot over stumbling foot to the stupidest godsdamned thing he’s ever done in his entire life-
A breath. One. Two. Hand pressed against the crack in the wall of the world.
Ravio flings himself through the portal, running towards the danger; towards another world, towards Hyrule; towards the kingdom Hilda would damn to save their own.
Ravio’s not a hero. He never has been. He never will be. No matter what Hilda thinks, and says, and begs for- he’s just not. It’s not in his nature.
Some things, you don’t have to be divine-beloved and holy-bladed to object to; and, unfortunately for Ravio’s sanity, and self-told lies, and comfortable, end-of-the-world life, damning another world just to save his own- using magic he helped to put in place- is one of those.
See? That’s the problem with thinking about things. You find out truths, about the world, about yourself, and then, well, you can’t un-know a thing. Not any more than you can un-notice, or un-invent, or turn back time.
Ravio’s going to have to live with that, now; that knowing about himself. That he’s the kind of idiot, apparently, that would rather his home quietly wither away, living through it going through those final, weak throes of its true death, than know that he helped kill another world. All because of a moment of clarity- of being unable to turn a blind eye, a deaf ear, at the moment before the fall.
Stupid. What the hell is he thinking?
Noble, sighs the voice he can no longer make himself ignore; and oh, isn't that the worst of the lot?
Ravio’s spent so many years, carefully not-knowing about the voice that laughs and hums and speaks to him inside his own mind. It takes a special kind of self-delusion, to have learned all that magic, to have gone sifting through every fragment and shard of magic he could find, and still leave himself willingly blind to the truth of things.
Now, he has to admit what he’s been running from for all these years; that same thing that had him, some quiet nights when his eyes burned and his fingers ached, the bracelet cool in his hands, hesitating, because- what if he stayed, after all, what if, instead of listening to Hilda, staying silent, echoing back that what she wanted to hear- what if, he, instead, helped ; that same thing that, he now has to admit to himself, had quietly made him wonder- was it possible, after all?
Now, Ravio has to admit to himself: he thinks he knows, has known, for quite a while now, despite his very best efforts, exactly what it is that’s been riding along in his head, watching the world from behind his eyes, laughing at the world as he sees it.
Ravio thinks; there is a goddess in my head.
And in response, she croons.