[ZGen/Act/Rom] To Go Beyond (T for now)

A/N: Hello, ZU~. Some notes first. Today I have for you the beginnings of a story-- the prologue and first chapter, to be precise-- that I'm a little hesitant to post, because it's a multipart thing with no end in sight, and I'm notoriously bad at continuing these things in a timely manner. In fact, I started this fic at the age of about thirteen or fourteen and then put it down for years before coming back to it. By then, I looked back at my fourteen-year-old writings and cringed hard at the suckitude. So, I'm presently rewriting what I have. What I post here will be the results of that.

I rely very heavily on music when I write, in order to capture the mood of the scene. That said, I'd like, if it please, to direct you to this song for your reading of the prologue. (If this is somehow against the rules, someone just let me know and I'll get rid of it.) Apologies to people who wanted to listen if the download expires/runs out. Music selection is "hepatica (KOS-MOS)" from the Xenosaga III soundtrack. It's incredibly beautiful. Give it a listen, preferably as you read the following. I hope you enjoy, and I hope that I can get myself to stay on top of updating, aheheh.


---


Prologue



The summer grass bows and ripples in the field and Link starts awake in Lon Lon Ranch’s spare room. He sits up, nonplussed under the freak cold of early morning, revived from a smothering dream that he can’t remember anymore.

Malon will be here when day breaks. Malon is his friend.

---

Wind filters into Zora’s Domain from the field. Ruto remembers being chilled to the bone and shivers for other reasons entirely.

---

At the foot of the temple Saria sits and listens to the waking forest, tucked away from the world and its fields. Link has gone. Link has no place anymore. Especially not a temple.

But that can’t be true, she thinks.

Saria, too, is lonely.

---

Rauru oversees the field from his mysterious place and grows ever more concerned. Rauru knows very much but can do very little now in his old age. But he has no successor, so he must remain alive.

---

Darunia no longer cares for the field or the lake or the desert with a son rolling perilously nearer to death each day.

Darunia remembers that everything should be right now, but it isn’t.

---

In the branches above a field of water, a young Sheikah man thinks of a past that wasn’t, but perhaps was.

---

Nabooru lives so far from the field that her former king once tried to take. He vanished one day long ago, gone, only a mirage.

---

Day by day, Impa watches Zelda watch the town and the rolling field beyond. The princess hasn’t been sleeping well lately. She does not and will never know what she sees when she does.

She loves the princess, and she cannot help her.

---

A blue woman stands on the field’s edge.

---

The field is beautiful. Zelda can see it in the distance, beyond the distant bustle of merchants setting up shop, grass tumbling under the freezing morning wind.

It’s incorrigible. This disquiet.



~end prologue

Chapter One: Convention



“—find it a most advisable course of action for the sake of our appearance as the sovereign…”

He paused.

“Forgive me my dullness, Princess, but understand His Highness wishes for you to be prepared to take a more active role very soon.”

Zelda tore her eyes away from the market below and cocked her head at the advisor. It had been days since she’d been outside, touched another living thing.

“I’m sorry, yes, I understand,” she said after a pause. She’d grown tired again today, as though her strength and will had fallen prey to some unseen parasite long ago. She slept lightly, woke sharply, lived like living in a deep fog, dreamt the same. If at all. Unseen beneath the table, one hand contorted into a fist, and Zelda was frightened by the sudden intensity of her temper. The mind could not function without proper sleep, and Zelda felt herself nearing her wit’s end. “May we stop for today? I’ve not felt well; I may retire early.”

The advisor looked concerned. Doing so was his job, after all. “Certainly we may, Princess. Shall I fetch a doctor?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort is necessary,” she said, shaking her head, adding finally: “thank you.”

She clutched the armrest beneath her in order to not rub at her eyes as he bowed to her.

“I will take my leave, then.”

She didn’t watch him go. When he was gone, she leaned forward and buried her face in her arms atop the table.

Vapor filtered into the room and consumed everything. She raised her head and saw that the world had changed into a desiccated and frightening thing, body, her nerves seeking rebellion against the discord that she could neither see nor hear but felt.

I dream, she says.

You do not dream, it answers.

Then prophecy. Dead earth and frost and clouds. From feet away she touches the bare and graying tree and is anxious, feels as though she would die of being anxious. But I find this is a most literal prophecy.

She looks aside and recoils and sees two people hunch over a fallen figure in the distance and tear and devour noisily its wet red flesh and the split wide woman’s grinning face in her face in pulpy rapture: IT IS A MOST DECAYING TIME.

Zelda woke and sat in silence for several minutes.

“Impa.”

“Your Highness,” Impa said, and appeared from some unseen place to stand at her side.

“May I speak with Rauru?”

“I will summon him.”

“And Link.”

“Princess.”

“I, Impa, I just— need to see him.”

“Certainly, Princess. In time.”

“And! Impa…”

Impa turned to face her. “Yes, your Highness.”

“Sheik?”

“Your Highness…”

“I was thinking that,” Zelda started, and stopped when her voice turned brittle. “I thought if…”

Impa did not understand. Impa could only watch and give what little she had to offer. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, Princess. I will return soon. Please rest.”

Zelda was afraid to rest.

---

“Link! Oh! Wait!”

Link brought Epona to a halt and peered back in the direction of Lon Lon Ranch.

“Link!” Malon breathed as she reached him. “You forgot this.”

His ocarina. No, no. Not his. An ocarina, but when neither fairy nor sacred, he couldn’t look at it as his. Though he did: it was his ocarina. He’d forgotten it at Malon’s when he really shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t for her to see. It just belonged to some guy whose name happened to be his own.

He was the Hero of Time.

“Thanks,” he said as he took it, embarrassed. A piddly, useless thing that he never played but kept anyway in spite of himself.

Malon spoke up just as he prepared to say his goodbyes. She wanted him to stay, that much was obvious. “Are you really going now?”

“I should,” Link replied as Malon played with the bracelet hugging her wrist. “It’s hard, staying in the same place for too long.”

He paused. “I’ve always been that way.”

She watched the way the breeze moved his hair but pretended she wasn’t. “Link,” she began, “don’t you ever…”

Link had expected an end to the question, and gave her a look of uncertainty when none came. Sometimes, during those days when he was still welcome in Kokiri Forest, Saria would approach him with a similar line of thought. Her voice would appear slowly and softly in the quiet of the evening, and then when the common memory of his cancelled future rose and stole its life, it fell silent again. Saria’s love had preserved itself through that time and this one, uncomplicated by adulthood. It was a higher responsibility that had taken it from him. She loved him still, he knew this, knew that she had to. But one day in his youth he’d begun to grow taller, stronger than the other Kokiri, voice deepening, ability to belong fading, and at last he had gone away to the field, and Saria to the temple. Even if he hadn’t, she would have gone to the temple.

“Link.”

He hadn’t been listening to her, she knew that. Wasn’t pleased about it, either, but dismissed it. She forgave so easily. And there was that wistful look again.

“I guess it’s nothing. But, Link. I wonder sometimes: don’t you ever want to live in a… simpler way? It’s just you’re always going. And always coming back. And— and I’m happy about that, always, but haven’t you ever thought of making a… home? For yourself.”

Link had not thought about that.

“Like in the forest, maybe, or the city?”

If only the forest.

“Or… maybe here.”

Because a messenger rode up the hillside, horse decorated with royal crests, Link couldn’t refuse her. He came to a gradual stop a respectable distance away from the pair.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but you are Link, correct? Good day, miss, please forgive my intrusion.”

“Of course,” Malon replied, perplexed, and watched Link open the letter he’d received, his expression shifting from curiosity to confusion to deep concern.

The messenger appeared not to know anything of the message, but it wasn’t his purpose to know, anyway. “I am to escort you to the castle as soon as you are prepared, sir. I will wait at the Castle Town gate. Please make haste.”

They stood together on the hill in the wake of his departure, both still, reluctant to react to one another.

“Link,” Malon asked finally.

“Zelda says she had a prophecy a few days ago,” he said, and watched Malon’s face change a little when he referred to the princess by name. Malon understood the situation, though; she knew that Princess Zelda was known for that gift. She knew that the last one had come true, and had experienced it herself under Ingo’s cruel hand. In a previous life. She didn’t completely understand it, but she knew. “Sorry, Malon. I’ll come back when I can.”

“I know,” she answered, smiling, and waved sadly at his retreating back.

---

“Your duty as a Sage trumps everything. If you aren’t prepared to take responsibility, then you don’t belong on that seal.”

“He’s my son.”

“If the world goes to hell one day because you didn’t do your job, then we’ll all be dead and you’ll have a lot more to worry about than him.”

“Nabooru. One’s nature determines one’s presence here as a Sage. It is destiny’s doing, and no action will diminish one’s worthiness to stand within this chamber.”

“Surely you ought to know that, with your past.”

“Ruto.”

“What, is that not true?”

“Ridiculous. What’s gotten into the lot of you? Squabbling like children. We are here to protect the princess and this land. No other reason.”

“Impa is quite right. In Darunia’s child lies the future of the Goron people. He does what he must, and I think it no mere trick of chance that such a grave circumstance should strike him now. Darunia, see to him.”

“Thank you, Brother. I won’t forget this.”

Silence.

“Lord Rauru. I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn.”

“Hoho, Nabooru. I admire such passion in my old age. But remember what we are capable of. What we have been capable of. Though I sense growing discord as the Princess Zelda does, we have overcome the world’s greatest evil once already. Have confidence in one another. Hold together, and do not part.”

“Yes, Lord Rauru.”

“I will watch over you.”

---

Epona took her rest in the castle instead of the riverbank outside the town. When Link returned to the stable, he would find her there. No need to call her with a song. He hadn’t needed to for a while.

Hadn’t needed to see Zelda in a while, either. Five years. He’d lasted two since returning to his own time before leaving the forest to see her, slipping past the guards like a phantom as he’d remembered so vividly how to do. She had remembered him. She’d remembered everything, and it hadn’t changed her at all. Link wished very much that he could have said the same. Maybe because they had been so young, she wasn’t able to quite grasp the weight of their shared experiences— or maybe she understood it so fully that it sparked no reaction in her at all. No exceptional joy, no remorse. Nothing but a placid and tacit understanding. She had that way about her. Link didn’t.

He didn’t want her to know that. After all she’d done for him, it wouldn’t be fair or decent or right of him. Zelda had enough on her plate and it wouldn’t feel right to let her know that every decision she’d ever made burdened him in some way. It’d been his destiny, and in living out that destiny, Hyrule flourished. This life was his, then, now, here, far from the sword sequestered away in the Temple of Time. But Link was the Hero— the Hero— and nobody seemed to know that.

The guards tracked his movement through the castle halls with scrutiny reserved for vagabonds and Link resented the blankness, the pure and hopeless absence of recognition there. They couldn’t believe he was welcome here. But Impa remembered. Saria. Zelda and Malon.

Link reached for his ocarina without thinking, then let his hand fall back to his side.

---

Zelda found a power she hadn’t felt in a long time in her race down the stairs to the reception room, regal bearing vanishing in yet-acceptable ways, arms flying to and around his shoulders, enjoying the laugh jostled from him on contact.

“Link,” she began, taking a step back and a sense of unexpected pride in the man he’d become again, “it’s been too long. You’ve been well, I hope.”

“Yeah, definitely. And you, Princess?” came his smiling reply, but Zelda sensed something contrived in that.

She quieted. “I haven’t been sleeping well. I have nightmares constantly if I do. They’re always the same, nothing like the dream I dreamt of you, back then.”

Link frowned. She was not certain exactly why. “Do you think it still means something?”

“Important people, lords, ladies, fell ill. People my father cannot ignore. Vague as it may be, his memory of that time has made him more cautious. There is word from Death Mountain that the Goron prince is dying.” She pulled at her glove absently. “Lord Rauru believes as I do.”

“That it isn’t bad luck.”

A small, humorless laugh puffed from her chest. “No. I do not believe it is. My father wished to convene with the Sages to discuss their concerns. The castle advisors were in no way prepared for so unexplainable a matter. We will do that, and try to determine a solution from there.”

“What should I do?” Link asked her. She met his gaze through frayed nerves and heavy eyelids and held it.

“Please stay for us.”

“I will,” he replied seriously, and whirled suddenly on the sound of footsteps behind him. She watched him watch the newcomer, saw him squint to recognize the man through ornate blue tunic, his boots, his trousers, scimitar and skin. She watched Link take in that which he remembered most: his hair, his bearing, his eyes.

“I as well,” he said in a different voice. And she knew Link knew.

“Sheik…”



~end chapter one