Chapter Text
At last, she is home again.
It is long past the hour when the final candlelight is blown from the final window of Hateno, long after the sunlight has faded, that Link finally surrenders to his hope. She is little more than an indistinct silhouette in the dark; an outline, a shadow that breathes. She sits unmoving, curled up on the floor, with the Master Sword held slack across her body. When did she get ahold of it? Was it when he laid her down on the grass, heart still beating frantically from the fall? He hugged her so tightly, wanting never to let go, only to pull back and realize—
Her eyes.
Unearthly. Inhuman. Like bright blue pools of light, but only on the surface; beneath them the light is gone. Even now, she fixates blankly across the room, breathing unaware through a mouth held trembling open. Dark or light, it does not matter. The opposite wall is but ten paces away, yet she sees something far in the distance beyond.
She looked right at him, and saw nothing.
Fingers trembling, Link lights a candle, and Princess Zelda is before him once more.
Her eyes. Out of everything, they scare him the most. Their color is unlike anything in nature. Her pupils have been made into kaleidoscopic reflecting chambers, drawn impossibly tight—just tearful circles trembling quietly in the center of panic-stricken sockets. He might see his own image upside-down in their centers and realize at once the frightening power of her reduction, that he’ll never move more than the distance across their diameters. Prismatic blue perpetual terror.
Dragon’s eyes.
Zelda’s eyes.
It’s seared into his mind. All of her memories are. Her dying proclamation, her sacred vow, and her last conscious thought, all rolled together into one. He’ll never forget her words, surely as he’ll never forget the memory of her eyes transforming seconds before the rest of her spirit followed.
Protect them all.
Carefully, Link places his candle atop Zelda’s bedside desk. He kneels down on the hardwood floor, and Zelda, still clinging to the sword, still focusing blankly on something thousands of miles away, makes little reaction as he wraps his arms around her and begins to quietly cry.
***
It is Mineru who, with a clinical detachment that Link can only dream of, begins undressing her. Zelda’s Zonai robes are stripped and folded with mechanical precision, then piled neatly on a chair. Link catches a glimpse of the pile out of the corner of his eye and immediately looks away. It’s not the clothes themselves. It’s what they represent.
“I’m afraid this is my fault,” Mineru says quietly.
Link says nothing. It’s no one’s fault.
“I was the one who put the idea in her head,” Mineru continues. “At the time, we were just theorizing. Just coming up with ideas to get her back to her own time. This was—intended as a last case scenario only. Just the most desperate idea we could come up with, in case none of the other ideas we came up with worked out. If only Ganondorf hadn’t forced her hand...”
Link doesn’t nod. He’s been frozen still for so long that the candle in his hand is starting to drip wax past the guard.
“Draconification is considered a forbidden act for a reason,” Mineru says, her voice hollow. “No one has ever come back from it before. The state that she’s in now...I truly don’t know what to make of this, Link. Truly. This is unprecedented.”
Link draws in a breath.
“Zelda knew,” he says. “She knew exactly what it meant.” His voice cracks, quavers. “And she still chose to do it anyway.”
Mineru says, “In her mind, it was the only way.”
Trying to console him? Or herself?
The only way to do what? To deliver the Master Sword to his hand, on the assumption that Link could succeed where the ancient sages had failed; the infuriatingly arrogant, infuriatingly correct assumption that he could triumph when the best of the Zora and Goron and Rito and Gerudo had fallen. Never could he be a willing party to any plan that involved sacrificing her. And Zelda knew this. So why?
Because what he mistakes for her foresight was really nothing more than pure desperation.
Because it was the only way.
It’s no one’s fault.
“Let’s do the physical now,” Mineru says, and Link can only bite down his tears and nod.
There’s nothing wrong with her. They find no physical injuries, nor maladies, nor wounds. Her body is warped, but she’s not hurt in any way; the joining between woman and dragon has reached equilibrium and will bring her no more anguish. Her face has become the color of bone, sallow and sunken. Her cheeks are drawn so thinly that Link can see capillaries filled with blood running underneath, a branching web of inky blackness spread beneath her pale skin; a dark color, a poisoned color. Her lips display the cyanotic quality of a drowning victim. Atop her head protrudes a diadem of branching blue horns, the hairs nearest to which have become thick and rigid, like porcupine quills, and they move stiffly back into place as soon as Mineru’s hand leaves them. Proceeding down her neckline, Zelda’s leathery skin transitions to scales, a patchwork hide of shale grays running down the length of her body.
Her belly, Mineru points out, is darker than the rest of her. Fish and birds, when painted by nature, tend to have cream-colored bellies and darker backs, to resemble the sky from below and the ground from above. The Light Dragon was perplexingly the opposite.
Link can only stare. Nothing about this is natural.
Toward her extremities, Zelda’s scales darken and harden, tapering off to the bony, birdlike talons that have become of her hands. Her fingertips are capped with sharp points of light blue. Her spine. The spikes along her back—colossal once upon a time, serving as his handholds while she roared across the sky—have been reduced to plates of bone, emerging from her skin in file and glowing with that same unnatural blue tint. They swell near the base of her back, bursting off to a swollen, scabby tail; dragging between her legs, it resembles nothing of any monster, animal, or beast that Link has ever seen. A dragon’s tail in miniature.
Zelda endures all of their probing with an air of terrified confusion. Her draconic eyes dart from Link to Mineru and back again. Like so many wild horses he’s seen thrust suddenly into captivity—he hates himself for making the comparison, but nothing else can so describe the behavior the princess displays. Once her initial wave of blind panic subsides, she can, having survived it, find nothing to do except revert back to her instinctive state. The Master Sword has found its way back to her clutches. It is the center of her volvation, the object of her determination; even now, she holds it in its sheath protectively against her bare body in the manner of a child clutching a blanket. True single-mindedness. To go without it has long since passed memory.
“She knew this would happen,” Link says hoarsely, to no one.
This time, it’s Mineru’s turn not to respond.
Link is sure that Sidon, if he were in position to do so, would immediately deploy a contingent of the domain’s best healers to Hateno, and what a conversation that would be when Link would be forced to turn them away. Because Zelda—there’s nothing wrong with her. A healer can fix her body no more than a bricklayer can.
He remembers Mipha, how her mastery over water was such that she could pull together blood, veins, flesh itself; stitch together anything short of broken bones. All the times she had brought him back from the brink. A once-in-a-generation healing talent. Gone. Because of him.
No. Mipha made a choice. To say anything less of her would besmirch her memory. When she swore her oath as a Champion, she knew exactly what it meant.
Or was that just something he told himself after the fact, to justify leading her to her death? A convenient excuse he could repeat over and over until he himself genuinely believed it? The Royal Court of Zora’s Domain wasted no time in blaming him for their loss, still hated him when he returned from the grave. A grudge never set right. A scar over a century old.
It’s no one’s fault.
The Royal Court of Hyrule is gone. Zelda rules over naught but a kingdom of bones.
So who is left to blame him for her condition?
***
He is a knight. What can he possibly know of sickness? Knights encounter death by blade and by spearpoint. It comes quickly and often, and rarely, if never, on a bed of straw. Link has wrapped his own lacerations. He’s brewed hearty elixirs. Such is the sum total of his medical knowledge. Death does not creep in quietly and consume over weeks via fever and fits of coughing. It’s unthinkable.
He remembers Nanna, bedridden by gloom in Kakariko Village, and how both Claree and Lasli were so devoted to curing her they could think of nothing else. How Lasli toiled at the cooking pot for as long as daylight would allow, how she went around knocking on doors to collect extra bowls from neighbors in exchange for a serving. How was she to know that the curative ingredient came from the sky? His contribution was so minimal, yet they thanked him so profusely as he stood strained in silence with his hands by his sides. Only now does he understand. Only now can he commiserate. If some stranger arrives bearing what is needed to restore Zelda back to her original form, then of course he will thank them, weep at their feet, pay them, and ply them with homecooked meals until they can hardly stand. Any price to deliver him from this crushing powerlessness that has for the past day defined his every move.
Hope for a miracle. Nothing else occupies his mind as he stands before the cookstove, whisking rice in a boiling pot. It’s not thin enough, he decides. He adds more milk.
When he comes up the stairs, holding a steaming bowl of porridge in his hands, Zelda’s head snaps lizardlike toward the movement. Wrapped in her mound of blankets, the hilt of the Master Sword protrudes out alongside her neck. There’s not much more he can do to make her more comfortable. She isn’t sick. But with no other frame of reference for how to take care of her, food and warmth is all he can provide.
Suspicion quietly gnaws at him that Zelda’s chosen spot on the floor, wedged in the corner between the wall and the empty bed, was selected for its angle and for no other factors. From here, it’s easier to gaze up at the sky.
Silently, he crouches down in front of her and offers her the first bite.
She chews her food like she has forgotten how. Every spoonful must first be sniffed before she cautiously closes her lips around it; he needs to tilt the spoon upward as he draws it out. Quietly, and with as much solemn patience as she requires, he feeds her spoonful after spoonful of broth. One bite at a time. It’s not long before his knee starts burning beneath him; he ignores it utterly. Right now, Zelda’s care is the only thing that matters.
Between every bite, he reaches out to massage her throat gently with the pads of his fingers. Zelda’s eyes widen at the contact—they plead with him, terrified. He can’t quite meet her gaze. But still, he endures. There’s nothing that would scare him more right now than the tiny sound of a choke or a cough.
He holds out the spoon again, she swallows again. He massages her throat again, Zelda’s eyes snap to him again. Over and over and over.
What could have happened to have made her this way?
The conscious mind and the unconscious mind are two distinct, separate systems, Zelda once explained to him, months and months ago, while gently broaching the conversation about his memory loss. When Link furrowed his brow in confusion, she patiently turned her notebooks toward him and explained. Any musician will agree that the surest way to ruin a performance is to focus exactly on what the fingers are doing; any hunter will likewise miss their shot, any swordsman will botch his form. If you had to manually think for every single breath you took—such a thing would be infeasible, she pointed out. Your body is capable of taking care of such things on its own. Think about your daily routine in the morning, can you recall its individual steps? Donning an individual tunic, an individual belt? Do something long enough, every day, for enough days in a row, and routine will eventually pass by your memory. A sleepwalker can get dressed, lock up their door, and leave their house without any conscious volition at all. Ergo, it was entirely within the realm of possibility for his memories to have degraded while his unconscious skill remained.
So, Link wonders, is it not possible that the opposite may be true as well? That Zelda’s conscious mind might exist intact, only fettered by a body completely bereft of its unconscious function? Thousands of years of disuse might have left her body with no idea of where its limbs are, or what they should be doing. Constant, conscious input would be required to even sit upright. Such is the manner in which the princess chews her food. Every closing of the jaw seems a hesitant, mechanical, unrhythmic action. Her tongue must run over her teeth between bites to check they are still there. Link’s hand trembles as he holds out the spoon again, carefully giving her another tiny bite.
At least for him, he had instinct. He couldn’t remember his hometown, his birthday, or his parents’ names, but he knew how to field dress a rabbit and that was enough to get him off the plateau.
What hope does Zelda have if she’s even forgotten how to eat?
It takes them well over an hour, but Zelda manages to finish the entire bowl of porridge. Link stands up, feeling his joints crack. He makes sure to wrap the topmost blanket around her again before he goes to put the bowl in the basin downstairs.
He’ll never take his blessings for granted ever again.
When he returns, he finds Zelda staring up out the window again, fascinated endlessly by the starry sky. For his half-minute of absence, he is already forgotten. It takes him several minutes to coax her to come out from her blankets, and another few to turn her away from the bed. Situating himself behind her, he lifts up the back of her shift to her shoulders. The spikes along her naked spine impede him terribly; he’ll get something for her that buttons up in the back. Feebly, Zelda squirms in his arms, but this is the most contented he’s seen her thus far—still, his hold never falters, not until he is satisfied that she is once again enraptured by the stars. The Master Sword stays in her grip the whole time.
In his hand, he clutches a steel-wire carding brush. It’s the same one that Zelda once showed him, bubbling with excitement as she told him about Dondons; how they were discovered, how she was best taking care of them—how only steel bristles were strong enough to scrape their stony hides.
Link draws in a painful breath and begins to brush.
There’s no way of telling how long they sit there. All light disappeared hours ago and as the moon drifts across the sky, Link wills himself to fall into a blind, laborious rhythm, focusing his entire being into his task. Long, deliberate strokes down, then reversing direction back up the same path. Zelda trembles quietly as he works, but she makes no signs of discomfort otherwise. Eventually, her breathing pitches downward, as if she is falling into his trance along with him. When he has finished, he moves to her spikes, using the corners of the brush to scrub at the distended ruptures where bone erupts from her flesh. The floor between them becomes littered with scales and keratin dust. When he gets up to retrieve a comb and a hairbrush, the cascade that showers down from his legs catches him by surprise.
Placing himself behind her once again, he cracks his stiff joints and combs through her hair, pulling it back, gliding the strands through his fingers. In the dark, he can almost imagine that this is normal. He can almost imagine that they are home again—that he’s merely helping untangle her knots after a long day out in the field, instead of for the first time in millennia. This lateness can only be a consequence of losing track of time, together, and the morning will find her laughing once again...
But her skin is as cold as the Hylia River, and the slightest brush of his fingers across her neck is enough to shatter the spell.
Zelda’s rhythmic breathing has slowed; in a different life, he would think her asleep. But still she cranes her neck upward, transfixed by the stars, indifferent to how Link bows his head behind her. Loose scales quietly crunch underneath him, and his heart suddenly breaks. His hands come down and it’s a struggle not to disturb her as tears come splattering down on his thighs, his fists balled over his knees, hoping, wishing, praying, that things had been different, to not be reduced to this desperate imitation of the real thing, that he’d been there by her side, cut through the flow of time itself to shield her so she’d never be forced to do anything so severe.
The hero who couldn’t save her. The knight who couldn’t protect.
Is it any wonder that Zelda used tears as her medium?
By the time the sun rises, he hasn’t moved from his position behind her. All around him are the sounds of the world coming to life and he is utterly powerless to stop them; to slow them down so that this illusion with Zelda might last forever. He hears the cawing of birds waking up, then the pulse of Hateno itself: doors creaking open, cows and goats bleating as they’re let out into the fields. And then, from nearby, the mechanical sound of whirring and clanking. Mineru, coming out of her stasis downstairs. Her limbs move in perfect synchronization as they unfold. Each individual piece of her hovers back and forth along its energy chain, a daily diagnostic check test, equivalent to stretching, he supposes.
When she notices him watching her, she pauses.
“Link?” she asks. “How long have you been awake?”
He glances away.
“I can keep an eye on her, if you’d like to sleep,” Mineru offers.
It’s as if he’s coming out of prayer. Link runs a hand through his greasy bangs, belatedly realizing how dry his mouth is. Licking his lips, he stumbles away from Zelda, who continues to stare out the window absently. The blankets on the floor nearly trip him but he reconstitutes himself, picks them up, shakes them out; rewraps Zelda and the Master Sword back into their pile. Discarded scales lie everywhere. He’ll sweep up later. When he finds the time.
He’s just about to pass Mineru on the stairs when he hears an awful sound, and both of them turn toward Zelda just in time to watch her vomit rice porridge all over the floor.
***
When Purah arrives, it is not with her usual intensity, enthusiasm, and zeal. No entourage, no parades to march down the thoroughfare of Hateno, she simply knocks twice and lets herself in. No aggravating nicknames. This is how Link understands that she grasps the severity of the situation instantly.
“She wanders,” Link says desperately. “Like she’s trying to go back to the sky. If she can’t see the sky, then she panics. She won’t eat. Anything I give her, she throws up.”
“Interesting,” Purah says without inflection. She climbs the stairs to Zelda’s bed, pausing briefly near the top to take in the sight of her. The horns on Zelda’s head and the spikes along her back are currently glowing with a weak blue luminescence that reminds Link of some of the mushrooms he’s seen adorning cave walls. Purah slows her footfalls, bending down in front of her. “Princess Zelda, it’s me. Purah. Remember?”
Zelda gazes up at her, eyes huge. Link doesn’t miss the way she hugs the Master Sword tighter, protecting it from this situation unknown.
“Okay,” Purah murmurs. She steps around Zelda carefully, evaluating only with her eyes. Narrowly, she traces over the changes to her face, then trails down to the metal chain that’s pooled around her ankles. “And this would be...?”
“She wanders,” Link says again, desperate, futile, helpless, pathetic. There’s no conceivable way to explain I chained her to the wall. Chains are for prisoners. Zelda isn’t—she can’t be—
“Where is she trying to go?” Purah asks.
“We’re not sure,” says Mineru, cutting in. Her construct is sized so that she can stand downstairs and still come up to level with them, speaking with them through the banister. “She mostly seems to wander in circles. The only consistency seems to be the sky. She looks directly upwards while walking.”
“Hello, Mineru. Good to see you,” Purah says. “Can I trust that you’ve already done a physical exam?”
“As well as I could, without any equipment.”
“I should have all the necessary materials in my lab. As soon as I get settled in, we’ll take her up there and have a closer look.” She bends and lifts away the top blanket, reaching out and taking hold of Zelda’s bare wrist. Zelda flinches at the contact. “She’s cold as ice. Heart rate?”
“Fifteen,” says Mineru.
“Hmm,” says Purah contemplatively. “That’s a little low. Link, what have you been giving her to eat?”
“Soup. Porridge. Hydromelon...”
“And she threw up all of it?”
“Yes.”
Purah is crouched down, inspecting Zelda’s tail. “What about at the other end?”
“Um...”
“Well, she doesn’t eat, because dragons don’t eat,” she tells him, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Her stomach doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not food that’s keeping her alive—at this point, she’s more magic than she is biology. Most immortal beings are.” Straightening up, Purah dusts off her knees. “Quite the conundrum. I’ll be honest, this isn’t what I was hoping for. This isn’t what a lot of people were hoping for.”
“Do you know how to cure her,” Link says tonelessly.
Both Purah and Mineru glance at him with grave courtesy.
“Short answer is, ‘I don’t know,’” Purah replies. “We need to run some tests first.”
“She’s in there,” he says.
“I would hope so.”
“No—I know she’s in there somewhere,” he suddenly insists, aware of what he must sound like. “She recognized me, when I was fighting the Demon King. She came to my aid. She knew what she was doing. So then...why...?”
“Why can’t she recognize you now?” Purah finishes. She taps her chin thoughtfully. “Well, I have a theory. It needs some refinement, but after seeing her in person, I think I might have an idea.”
“We’d like to hear it,” Mineru says diplomatically. Link bites his tongue, swallows, and nods.
Purah nods back, then turns around and wraps Zelda back under her blankets. Bowing to her, she says, “Rest well now, princess. Your mission is over. The Kingdom of Hyrule owes you once again.”
Then, gesturing for Link to follow, she quietly makes her way down the stairs.
Around Zelda’s dining table, Purah pulls up a chair, then leans forward, reaches into her coat, and brings out a notepad. Flipping through it, she says, “For thousands of years, our princess had only three thoughts on her mind. One: give power to the Master Sword. Two: deliver it to Link when the time came. And three: help you defeat Ganondorf, also when the time came. She had those three thoughts, and nothing else.” Purah lowers her notes and looks at them. “So...what now? The time has come. It came, and it went. So what else is there left for her to do? That’s what worries me. I’m worried there might not be anything else.”
“She’s in there,” Link says stubbornly. “She recognized me.”
“I’m aware of that,” Purah says.
“During the battle—”
“I know,” Purah says. “Like I said, it’s a working theory. We’ll get her up to the lab tomorrow and start figuring out what to do next.” She yawns, propping her face up in her hands. “Have you seen Robbie? Has he seen Princess Zelda yet?”
“No.”
“Has anyone? Besides the two of you.”
“No.” Link swallows nervously. “None of the townspeople know. Clavia—the mayor’s wife—she comes here to clean the house. But I haven’t seen her...”
“She comes here to clean the house,” Purah muses pointedly, putting slow emphasis into every word, mulling the sentence over. “Our princess, you know, she loved being among her people. And her people loved her in return.”
“Even in my own time, she was like that,” Mineru adds. “From the moment I met her. She tended to have that effect on most people she encountered.”
Link says nothing.
“You know,” Purah says, after a few moments of heavy silence, “we thought you were dead?”
That grabs his attention. He stares at her, bewildered.
Purah puffs up at him in exasperation. “Do you have any idea how worried we all were? Do you have any idea what it looked like for us on the ground? And then to top it all off, when it was over, nobody could find you anywhere!”
“What? But—” His mind scrambles. “The sages were there.”
“Yeah, Yunobo came over and told everybody what happened. But—and you have to understand this, Link—that’s not good enough for an outpost full of patriotic Hylians, who are all eagerly awaiting the return of their long-lost princess—” Purah groans. “And then Tulin came over and told us that there was, and I quote, ‘something wrong with her.’ Can you imagine how that made everyone feel? Of course—I mean, seeing her now, I can understand why you had to leave in such a hurry, but still, Link, the past day has been nothing but a massive headache for me...”
“Sorry,” he mumbles.
“Purah, please,” Mineru says. “It was my decision to leave more than anyone else’s. If you need to blame somebody, then blame me.”
“I’m not blaming anyone,” Purah huffs. “I just needed to complain for a second. And now that that’s out of my system, we can focus entirely on fixing Princess Zelda. Sounds good?”
“Of course,” Mineru says.
Link looks up from the table. Something occurred to him while she was talking. “How did you travel here from Lookout Landing so quickly?”
Even before the question leaves his lips, however, he realizes the answer. There’s only one way. Sure enough, there is another Purah Pad hanging off from a belt on her hip. Purah taps it with a finger and grins.
“Same way you did,” she tells him. “I was going to have Robbie take a look at it tomorrow. For now, you’re done. Get some rest.”
The look on his face must give away his apprehension, because Purah sighs at him. “Oh, Linky. Don’t forget, the Kingdom of Hyrule owes you too. You’ve brought our princess back to us.” She gives him the smile of somebody desperately attempting to placate an infant. “The hardest part is over now. Get some rest. Okay?”
Link just stares at her, his head spinning. The grief of the past two days has jaded him to the point of paranoia. He’s lucid enough to recognize it, yet, he still can’t help but fall into the worst line of thinking: something terrible will happen if he lets Zelda out of his sight...
But—he forces himself to think rationally for a second—it’s Purah. Who is more qualified to attend to Zelda’s care? Zelda, if given the choice herself, would come to the exact same conclusion.
Link sucks in a weary breath. All at once, he suddenly realizes how exhausted he is, how ragged he must appear after going for two days with no sleep and even longer without a wash. His clothes stink of gloom, his underarms reek. His skin is flush with rashes, dotted with bug bites the size of peppercorns. Absently, he rubs a hand under his chin. He needs to shave. Since when has he needed to shave?
He’s done all that he can. The best thing he can do now is not get in the way.
Reluctantly, he nods.
Finally, then. A capable adult, ready to take things out of his trembling hands.
For the first time since falling, Link allows himself to breathe.
***
Fortunately, Purah and Mineru take to each other immediately, which saves Link the trouble of needing to speak on either’s behalf. After being housed in the Purah Pad for untold millennia, Mineru is plainly elated to be working alongside its creator, while Purah seems likewise enamored by Mineru’s body. It’s only been a single day of collaboration and they’re already trading remarks and comparing notes like they’ve been working with each other for years, and not just regarding Zelda’s condition, either, but in fields of science and technology so advanced that half of them don’t even have names. The number of people on the continent capable of fully appreciating their conversations—Princess Zelda notwithstanding—can probably be counted on one hand.
To that end, Link is relegated to the role of homemaker, which suits him just fine. To serve such brilliance is, in its own way, a privilege. For him, that’s the way it’s always been. While Purah scribbles notes and Mineru checks vitals, Link spends hours doing whatever needs to be done: cooking, cleaning, dusting, organizing, folding laundry, polishing his boots, mending his cloak, maintaining his armors, counting his rupees, anything; any activity to occupy the mind, anything that will distract him from the subtle scraping noise of Zelda’s tail on the hardwood floor upstairs, which occurs sporadically and instantly threatens to plunge him into despair when it does. He sets his jaw and consciously ignores it.
It’s fine. He needs to be busy. He needs to think about something else. If he sits there and watches Zelda all day with no way of being able to help, then he’ll go mad with grief before long. He knows this.
The dining table needs to be pushed up against the wall, to make room for a travel gate. Link obliges. They need a fresh horse at the house, just in case. Link warps to Dueling Peaks Stable and retrieves Epona, hitching her to a post in the yard. Purah wants shiozake for dinner—at this point, Link suspects that she is giving him tasks specifically to occupy his time, which is fine. Really. While Purah, Mineru, and Zelda warp up to the Ancient Tech Lab, Link sets about deboning the hearty salmon, then spends hours methodically slicing fillets, grinding rock salt, and mixing marinade before skewering it all over the cookstove.
It’s fine. If he loses his head, he’ll be no good to anybody.
When they return, materializing in the center of the house without warning, Zelda takes a lurching step forward, disoriented by instant travel. Link reaches out to catch her and she dispassionately steadies herself with his arm, looking past him as if he is no more than a particularly misshapen handrail, then climbs up the stairs to resume her eternal purpose.
Come dinnertime, his appetite is largely gone. His lips tremble, his stomach burns a hollow pit. He can’t look at anything besides his plate. Purah compliments his cooking, offering him an out, so he takes his cue to clear the table and dump the remainder back in the larder.
There’s no worse feeling in the world than throwing away food. This compares.
The next morning, Purah shakes him awake in his chair. She tells him the steel-wire brush was a good idea. Familiar items might succeed in stirring Zelda’s memory, the same way familiar locations once stirred his. To that end, his task for the day will be to help her take inventory of the entire house. Link sets about doing so with a blandly obedient air, turning out all the drawers in search of the smallest shred of sentimental value. No piece can be called insignificant if Zelda’s memory of it is strong enough to have lasted all this time.
The resulting collection borders on the exhaustive. There’s stacks upon stacks of books ranging extensively in subject and complexity, comprising everything from colorful field guides to astrological tomes to lengthy manuscripts about history. Her closet is emptied and her shifts, stays, petticoats, and bodices are folded into an unbalanced pile, capped off by a Cece-branded bonnet. Her research tools are given their own dedicated corner, for so varied are their uses: tweezers, forcepses, gardening shears, a jeweler’s glass, a lodestone, birdwatching binoculars, empty phials, long-dead cuttings from fruit trees. Soil samples from last year’s harvest are all lined up neatly in ceramic pots, with handwritten labels—carrots, pumpkins, radishes, rice—and behind them sits the nitrate testing kit which she never got a chance to use: halochromic indicators, jars of acetic solution, dishes made of glass. And there’s other things. Several notebooks full of sketches and observations. Pictures drawn by the children at her school. Sheikah runestones. Her riding breeches, her field gloves, her boots. All the ephemera and paraphernalia accumulated over her meagre year of freedom, all laid out bare, all of it, Link realizes, completely redundant and pointless. The only thing they’ve succeeding in doing is dismantling her home. For what in this house does not hold a fond memory of her?
It’s the next step of her treatment, but it’s also the next step in accepting that Zelda’s condition won’t be fixed anytime soon. Accepting that a cure for her won’t be found for months, if ever. What other conclusion can he draw, as they convert her house into an extension of the lab? It’s the fastest way to kill what elements of Zelda still remain. Seeing all the different pieces of her laid out feels wrong, like seeing all the bones of an animal; gutted, dissected, cleaned, taken from their proper place, laid out on the mat after butchery; how is he to reassemble her from this state?
“This is all incredibly precise, top-of-the-line equipment,” comments Purah, oblivious to his distress. “Very fancy. The princess certainly has an eye for quality. Well, it’s good to know that she filled this house with something of value, after she made you get rid of all the weapons.”
“She didn’t make me get rid of them,” Link protests. Purah ignores this. Her eyes light up with excitement as she spies a triple beam balance, with metal counterweights and hand-carved notches. She pokes the pan with a finger, watching it bob back into position. Perfect calibration.
“Where did she get this?” she exclaims.
“Bolson made it.”
Purah whips out a notepad and starts writing something down. Already, the house is starting to fill with loose pages, further signifying its transition into one of Purah’s workspaces. Feeling numb, Link picks up a hair tie from the counter and starts fidgeting with it, stretching it over his fingers as he stares at the pile. Sentimental value—an abstract concept that Purah thinks she can quantify by holding it up to Zelda’s nose and writing down the reaction.
Death by sickness must truly be the worst kind. If he’s ever lost anyone before, if he’s ever felt this kind of despair, then it was robbed from him along with the rest of his memories. There’s a horrible worry dwelling at the base of his skull—has he ever felt this way before? Taken care of a sickly relative, stood by their bedside trapped by the same pitiable feeling of grief delayed, his inability to do something; no monster to defeat, no wound to staunch, only the horrible knowledge that death already claimed them months ago and there’s nothing he can do for it but prop up pillows to soften the blow?
Is this what loss feels like? To remember Zelda as she was: so radiant, so full of life, and then to feel the tiny pull of the hair tie in his hand and suddenly remember—that she’s never going to be that way again?
She’s not going to die.
But Link cannot tell himself with certainty that he thinks she’s ever going to live, either.
He’s lost her twice already, yet this hurts more than both times combined. When she was ripped away from him before, he always had hope—knowing deep down in his heart, he’d one day see her smile again. But now, he can’t be sure. He can’t be sure of anything. Now she’s here, decidedly not missing, there’s no more Calamity to overcome nor Demon King to slay yet Zelda still remains irreparably lost. But how can he justify mourning her while she sits breathing in her bedroom upstairs? Purah and Mineru are his hope now, and that’s what makes his hours torturous; for the mourning process is also the coping process and if it’s stunted by hope, by a lack of finality, by the constant possibility of reversal, then coping is something he will never be able to do.
And that’s what scares him. If they can’t bring Zelda back—if the only living version of her remains alive in his mind—then he, in his mind, is going to have to be the one to kill her himself.
He puts the hair tie back down. No longer will it be used for its intended purpose, but only as a testing element. For the rest of the morning, Link stays outside, brushing Epona’s coat, double checking her tack. He can’t bear to watch.
In the midafternoon, Symin and Robbie come over to the house. Both of them are affable and optimistic. Link plays the role of the good host, serving them fish and rice from yesterday as they catch up with Purah and discuss things with Mineru.
It’s fine. Anything to keep himself busy.
The conversation goes on for hours as they fill the basin with dishes for him to wash and after an unknown duration of monotonous scrubbing, with his mind sufficiently dulled and the low din of conversation filling the background, Link can almost trick himself into thinking that everything is normal again and that nobody in the house is dying.
***
Mineru needs new hands. Her current ones, she explains, have become remarkably battered from weeks of punching down monsters and rock walls, offsetting their calibration by as much as two thousandths of an inch. An unacceptable distance, when dealing in the realm of the microscopic. She’d much prefer to have new ones in the event that Zelda’s treatment becomes surgical in nature. And so she needs new hands. And so Link is duly dispatched back down to the Construct Factory, coughing on gloom, and trying not to imagine the future hanging over him like a downward scalpel.
Navigating the Depths has always been risky at best. Lacking the power of Rauru’s arm, that becomes doubly true. Every sense in his body is strung jumpy and high. Just being down here is enough to make his eyes water. It’s a tomb the size of the continent: even in such a vast, wide-open space, the air doesn’t circulate whatsoever. It's uncanny. At least the area around the Construct Factory is relatively well-lit, holding fewer dark corners from which monsters can attempt to ambush him.
Panting, he climbs the crumbled stairs leading up to the Right-Arm Depot and makes his way inside. It’s only when he reaches the loading bay where the arms are stored that he remembers he has no way of activating the control terminal.
No matter. He’s overcome more complicated obstacles before. Performing a thorough survey of the area, he spies a cracked section of the ceiling and permits himself an inward smile. A carefully aimed bomb arrow is enough to get the job done. It takes a while for the dust to settle and for his ears to stop ringing, so he chews his sundelions as he waits, his provisions on this claustrophobic excursion, still vigilantly keeping an eye out for monsters. When he’s sure that the building won’t come crumbling down on his head he climbs up through the hole he created and finds the final stage of the depot’s production line. A number of construct arms sit sealed in their bulky cases, ready to drop down to the loading bay below.
Focusing on one of them with the Purah Pad, Link holds his breath as he warps away, eager to take reprieve of this dark, musty place. He’ll need to come back for a left arm, but for now, he’s earned himself at least a few grateful minutes of fresh air.
When he materializes back in Zelda’s house, he realizes almost immediately that something is wrong.
The door is ajar.
Link’s heart drops into his stomach.
“Purah,” he says. No response. “Mineru?”
His veins flood with ice. Whirling around, he sees a note lying flat on the dining table, paperweighted by an unlit candle and scrawled for him in messy handwriting.
She ran away
Traveling west on foot
“No,” he whispers to himself. “No no no no...”
Behind him, the construct arm tips over and falls to the floor with a tremendous crash.
His head whips upstairs, scanning the space where Zelda had been sitting by the bed. So long had she been tucked away, her back turned to the rest of the room, that she had become a permanent fixture on his periphery. He was so afraid of even looking at her.
And now she’s not there.
A sleepwalker can get dressed, lock up their door, and leave their house without any conscious volition at all.
Who’s to say that she can’t untangle a simple chain?
Panicking, Link scrambles for the Purah Pad and begins scrolling through it frantically. The Master Sword. The Master Sword. How could he be so stupid that he’d never thought to take a picture of the holy thing? He finally lands on a self-portrait of himself and Tulin, made at the latter’s request; ignores their immortalized smiles, zooms instead on the sheath strapped to his photo-self’s back. He sets the sensor to track the legendary blade, throws open the pantry, snatches a hasty elixir, downs it in one gulp without tasting it and sprints out the door of the house.
After coming straight out of the Depths, the daylight is utterly blinding. Link grits his teeth as he bursts into the yard, his head swiveling in search of Epona. She’s not there either. Purah must have taken her. Without hesitation, he leaps off the cliff over Firly Pond, deploying the paraglider to sail down to the bank below. Stumbling on the landing, he rights himself and continues running west over the grass.
Over the past three years, he has, of necessity, become something of an expert at formulating plans while sprinting at maximum speed. That talent has never been more needed than now. Tearing through the Midla Woods, fighting off the burning of his legs and the cramping of his lungs, listening to the Purah Pad blip in his ears like a dissonantly calm heartbeat, he forces himself to think. His mind races trying to make sense of the note Purah left for him. She ran away. What does that mean? When Zelda wandered before, she could spend hours just drifting around the house, moving aimlessly from wall to wall, staring out of windows or into dark corners of the ceiling. It was always himself or Mineru who would find her and try to bring her down, and she would always comply, in her mute, absent fashion that gave no indication any recognition was there. She ran away. It means that Purah didn’t have time to write any greater detail. It means she had to leave the house in a hurry, to chase Zelda before she escaped from view entirely. But Zelda moves like she’s blind. Her gait never surpasses the speed of a limping walk. How could Mineru not have corralled her before she left Hateno?
What was different this time? What was different in the house to make Zelda run away?
He sees Purah first, cantering on Epona through the trees. A natural horsewoman she is not; she’s riding parallel to a dense wall of brush, trying to find a way through. She must hear him crashing through the branches behind her, for she whirls around and waves at him frantically.
“Link!” she cries. “She’s looking for you!”
A fresh wave of panic descends. Still tearing through the woods at his breakneck speed, Link leaps over a fallen log, running deeper into the green. His heart is pounding hard in his chest. As hard as it did during the fall. Pounding with worry, Zelda right in front of him, just barely out of his reach, he’s reaching out, desperate—
And then suddenly, Zelda is there.
His feet thud heavily as he slows to a stop.
Zelda turns around and sees him emerging from between the trees, panting hard, his back soaked with sweat, eyes shot wide with worry. Mineru is right behind her, standing guard. She too freezes upon seeing him, as if breathless herself, an impossibility.
For a moment they are frozen in the stillness of the forest, as if the forest itself possesses some timeless, transcendent quality; the gap between past and present has been bridged. It is only here they could possibly meet. Link draws in air, suddenly, breathlessly taking in the world around them. Leaves rustle quietly, birds chirp overhead. Dappled sunlight shines down through the canopy, gently swaying in the afternoon breeze.
And then, Zelda takes a step forward.
She takes another. And another. And her face scrunches up with the raw emotion of heartbreak, scarcely willing to allow herself to believe it. And then she takes another step closer and realizes at once he is real, and that is when her tears start falling in earnest. By the time she reaches him, presenting the Master Sword flat in her outstretched arms, she is openly sobbing tears of joy—the relief, the unfathomable relief of her plan having worked, nearly laughing while crying in her semihysteria. It worked. A plan that was borne of such desperate circumstances is going to come to pass after all. He’s here. Her eternal mission is finally over.
Link carefully takes the sword by its hilt and lifts it out of her arms, letting it drop down to his shuddering side, and he realizes, through his sheer relief, that he is sobbing too.
Reaching out, he pulls Zelda into a hug. She wraps her arms around him, overwhelming him in her joy. Nothing can rob him of the memory of what this means.
She recognizes him.