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Warriors hadn’t just been in the War across the Ages. He’d been on an adventure, just like the others.
It started when he was just a boy. Twelve and already a train apprentice! Look how much he’d grown! His housemate, Niko, said he reminded him of the Hero of Winds more every day. To think he shared a name with one of the founders of New Hyrule!
Of course, Link was no hero. He just loved trains. Loved the thrum of the engine, the blasts of steam and smoke, how it sped along the tracks like a wild beast, and how he could drive it. He could see the world! How innocent. Warriors had seen too much of too many worlds now. He should have stayed in Aboda Village. Little Link from Aboda Village: off to the castle to get his royal engineer’s certificate. How exciting.
It was a hard learnt lesson that royal affairs should stay just that. Royal. If Zelda was older than him, Warriors tells himself, if Zelda had people she could trust, if Zelda wasn’t penned in by that damned demon chancellor, Warriors wouldn’t have been like this. He wouldn’t be a hero. This affair would have stayed royal. Instead it was royally fucked up.
Here’s a thing they don’t tell you about New Hyrule: there’s not supposed to be a triforce or a hero’s spirit. Legends say both were lost to the bottom of the Great Sea–the home of their founders. The thing they don’t tell you about the hero’s spirit? It can be demanded. It can be forced. You can be just some guy named Link, and as long as you have just some princess named Zelda, and as long as you have some random evil, voila! You’re blessed with the hero’s spirit, her bloodline is mystical, and the goddess damned triforce is back, stamping its sneer on your hand.
Nevertheless, Princess Zelda was an unsupported child who saw someone who would trust her. Who could blame her? It was tradition.
So yeah. Warriors had an adventure. He’d taken the princess on his train, gotten her killed, taken her spirit on his train with her spirit pipes, and gotten traumatised. Twelve year olds shouldn’t have to watch the princess die. Twelve year olds shouldn’t have to grab a sword and slay fire and ice breathing demons. Twelve year olds shouldn’t be fighting their best friend’s possessed body. Link didn’t tell Zelda he had a crush on her, didn’t tell her how glad he was that she was by his side during his adventure, didn’t tell her how he couldn’t look at her without imagining Malladus’ eyes.
But, hey, he got a cool train out of it. What can he say? He loves trains.
After saving New Hyrule, he became a soldier. He didn’t want to. He wore his engineers’ clothes into battle for pity’s sake! He just didn’t feel like he could go back. He needed to stick by Zelda’s side. For both of their sakes. That’s what heroes do.
He still had a crush on Zelda. “Courtly love” the other soldiers called it. Something forbidden that could never be. That was okay. Link was a soldier and Princess Zelda was exactly that: a princess. A princess who held his hand once. That meant the world to Link. Warriors remembered his little blushes around Zelda. She didn’t grow any less beautiful over the years. And she ended up in armour again, which was definitely a bonus. Armour made it feel like she was by his side again.
Cia killed the innocent kid who “like… liked ” Zelda. He didn’t have time for that. He was the hero again. He was a captain. He had responsibilities and horrors and traitors and dead men on his hands. He was a kid! He liked trains! It didn’t matter. He was strippped of his engineers’ outfit. He wore the clothes of a hero again. He boosted morale for the war effort. He started a war.
Captain Link met other Links. Toon and Mask. They scared him sometimes, late at night. So young. Twelve and eleven respectively. Toon looked like him when he was that age. They didn’t deserve to be in this war.
Soon after one bout of world hopping, he was tossed into another. He left his train in the Spirit Temple. He missed his train.
He was part of a chain now. Warriors. Not the Hero of Spirit. The Hero of Warriors. Who knew the mastersword hated him and his achievements? This is what he gets for wielding the Lokomo’s sword. Jealous girl. He knew about those.
He found Toon again. Toon was his predecessor, the Hero of Winds. Niko would have been thrilled if he were still alive, but Warriors’ first adventure had been a hundred years after Wind’s and Niko had died during the war. He could see what Niko liked in Wind. Wind was a thriving teen, full of pep and vigour. Full of the sadness that expectations, a war, and two adventures had imparted on him. Wind was a painful stab at what he used to be. But he was Warriors now. The captain in the group of Links that hopped worlds.
He missed his train so much.
None of the others knew what a train was. Wild had motorbikes and various Sheikah technology, but trains were apparently off the menu for thousands of years in the future. Wind had barely explored New Hyrule before getting whisked off here. The closest thing anyone else had to technology was the hookshot, which, for logical reasons, was not a train.
He missed Artemis, his Zelda, named after how she stood by him in battle against Malladus and shot the demon’s back with the bow of light, how she stood a wild maiden in battle, ferocious and beautiful. Though, maybe Warriors was biassed. Memories linger sometimes, and one attaches themself to the kindness they know.
He mostly missed his train. His train, that was rusting away, decrepit and unused, in the Tower of Spirits. Foolish Warriors, foolish Captain Link, for leaving it in the tower of spirits. It’s not like the phantoms were going to run engine checks on his train! “Sorry, ancient, resting, all powerful spirits, who look after the land you have gifted us, could you please clean out the firebox of this train every now and again so it doesn’t clog and set me on fire?” yeah, right. He had been an idiot and he missed his train like a child.
Wind sat down next to him. “Whatcha thinking ‘bout?”
The answer was “a lot”. Reminiscing, pointless other stuff, how pretty the fire looked, how Artemis would’ve jostled him by now, punching his arm or scruffing his hair, living up to being Queen Tetra’s predecessor.
But that was too much, so Warriors replied, “Stuff,” eloquently and mulishly.
Wind scooted closer. “Stuff?”
“Yeah. Something like that.” Warriors sat still for a minute, breathing with flares of the flames as Wind blinked owlishly at him. “What was Que- Tetra like? Your Zelda?”
Wind lit up at the opportunity for a story. “Oh, she would’ve beaten you to the ground for calling her ‘Zelda’ that’s for sure!” and off Wind went, regaling him with history no one had written down, character that was only evidenced by laws that read “The crime of thieving? I’m a pirate, let someone else decide” (that law was amended quickly).
“Why’d you wanna know?” Damn. Let it never be said that Wind wasn’t observant.
Warriors was a soldier at face value, and shielded himself in a similar fashion. “Sounds like someone has a crush~” Which was a foolish thing to do, because Wind knew him during the war and Wind wasn’t a drunken idiot. The risk he took was not calculated in the slightest.
“Don’t even try it. Spill. Or I’ll pry it out of you like real pirates do!”
Warriors blurted out his hard earned courage. “What was Niko like?”
“How do you even-?”
Warriors shoved his courage back where the sun doesn’t shine. “Stupid question. Forget it. Get some sleep, Wind. That’s an order.”
Warriors wasn’t ready to think about his adventure. He wasn’t ready to think about anything but the present. He was the Hero of Warriors. If that meant leaving sweet, innocent Link from Aboda Village behind, then so be it. He died in the War Across the Ages.