Chapter Text
You are our light.
Link awakens stiff, but whole.
Thoughts stir at the edges of his mind, but he cannot piece them together, cannot remember the dream he was just having.
He sits up; his joints crack with disuse. He’s momentarily distracted by a faded pattern on his abdomen, a pale starburst-scar that he traces up his throat, across his arms.
He follows the disembodied voice into the sunlight, looks out over the hill, and thinks: how bright. How lovely. How somber, how sad.
He inhales the morning air and, oh, how wonderful it feels just to breathe.
He died.
He's over a hundred years old.
The Calamity returned.
The princess is holding it back, trapped in the castle.
He'd listened to the king's story with grim-faced seriousness; he'd accepted the truth with determination. But oh, when Link feels that wind rushing past him on the first descent from the plateau, all of it fades.
He touches down on the soft grass and smiles, and laughs, and, oh, how his face hurts, unused to the expression.
He stumbles to his feet and breaks out into a run, just to see how long before he’s breathless. He recovers, leans on his knees, and then makes for the nearest tree. He climbs, plucks an apple from its branches. The juice flicks onto his face when he bites. It’s the best thing he’s ever tasted.
How wonderful, he thinks, to eat.
He tames a horse. She bucks him repeatedly, but Link is determined, and he has the best apples in the world. And somehow he knows, already, how to ride, how much better the world looks from horseback. He touches her neck, her mane. Warm. Strong.
He names her. He tells her: “I’m going on a quest to save the princess.”
He died.
Almost a year after setting out, he's standing in the field where it happened, leaning on the corpse of a long-dead guardian.
He died. He knew this already; the king told him. Nothing has changed.
Everything has changed. The visions he's seen are his own real memories, no longer vague once-upon-a-times he pieced together. He died, and it was real now.
He can’t breathe.
He leans on his knees and tries. Inhale, exhale, inhale.
Exhale.
The panic subsides and leaves something else in its wake. He beats his fist against the guardian's hull and shakes with rage. He scrapes his fingers along the metal. Rust and moss collect under his nails.
“I died,” he says, through clenched teeth. His only audience flicks her ear toward him mildly, but the horse does not raise her head from where she grazes. He knows better than to approach the animal while feeling such anger, and that fact makes him angrier. He doesn’t have time. He can’t linger here having emotions about events that happened over a century ago.
He thinks: why couldn’t he parry? Why couldn’t he move faster? Why didn’t her power awaken sooner?
“Stop it,” he tells himself.
He’s sitting, leaning with his back to the guardian (a horrible idea, whispers the trauma). He knocks his head backwards against the hull to dispel the ugly thoughts. There was no reason to blame others for his own failure.
A warm muzzle bumps his shoulder. He mounts up with a familiar lump in his throat that feels like duty.
He died, and he failed, and he will not fail again.