The Rise Before the Fall
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Zelda cannot remember the last time Link sheathed the Master Sword.
She watches gore and Malice drip into an earth already saturated with both. It’s all she can see, just like the cold rain sliding down her neck and the blisters splitting her feet are all she can feel. Some of that blood must be Link’s. But he won’t stop. He’s only paused long enough to survey Blatchery Plain.
“We have to circle back,” she says numbly.
His fingers dig into the bark of the massive oak that conceals them from the Guardians. A gust of wind smatters their faces with rain. Someone screams from the battlefield, a thin sound of mortal terror that climbs down Zelda’s throat to seize her heart before it falls abruptly silent.
Link turns his head to look at her.
“North,” she insists. “Then south again to Kakariko…”
He points. Three Guardians crawl out of the dark mouth between the Dueling Peaks. A fourth follows moments later. The Calamity is right behind them.
“There has to be another way. We’ll never make it across that field.”
“We will,” Link decides. The words are rough and quiet, his first in hours, yet filled with that absolute certainty she once mistook for arrogance. “The road’s too open. Go east until the forest ends. Then across the field, there’s more cover on that side. The Guardians will be on me and on the fort. You’ll have a clear path to that hill.” He points north. “And then you’re out of sight. Kakariko Bridge is on the other side.”
Zelda stares at him through the rain. He’s never spoken that many words so quickly or so clearly. But her sluggish mind still rejects them.
“We can’t go back,” Link says.
“We can!” Her voice sounds shrill and childish. “I’m going back, and you’re coming with me!”
His left leg trembles beneath him when he shifts his weight off the tree. He studies his bloody clothes. His darkened blade. Her blistered ankles and useless hands. “I’ll meet you at the bridge,” he says finally. “Please, Zelda.”
“No! I can’t leave you. Don’t ask me to leave you!”
Link steps forward. His face is hard and focused like he’s already on the battlefield. One hand still clutches the sword. The other slides along her jaw. He shutters the violent blue of his eyes and presses his lips to hers.
It’s nothing like Zelda imagined, nothing like their first kiss should be. He’s burning. She’s freezing. When her hands come up around his body there’s no caution or gentleness, just raw desperation. Link shivers breathlessly in a way that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with his broken ribs. They’re drowning in the rain, in the screams coming from Fort Hateno, in each other.
All she can think is that she waited too long. She should have kissed him when he pulled her out of the Spring of Power and enveloped her cold hands in his. When he climbed through her bedroom window with a stolen fruitcake and a wolfish smile. When he sank into stone-faced silence to escape it all. When he ignored their crumbling kingdom to let her pour seventeen years of grief into his muddy tunic.
But she’s too late. They only have this one moment, the rise before the fall, and Zelda ruins even that by sliding her hand too far down his side, where the tunic ends and his burns begin. Link makes a sound in the back of his throat, and he’s back in his ruined body, and she’s back to smelling his charred flesh.
“This is all I can do,” he says raggedly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Zelda.”
She tries to hold onto him. To carry some of his weight. But Link is already pulling away. The last look he gives her is more open and more heartbroken than she could have ever imagined. Then he turns, and she does not understand how someone so damaged can move faster than the wind.
She clutches the tree. He disappears into the rain and the smoke. The world thins around her.
Stumbling away in the opposite direction is the hardest thing Zelda has ever done. Her legs went numb somewhere in Central Hyrule. Her mouth tastes of copper. Time slips by nonsensically. Mount Lanayru looms on the horizon, a cruel reminder of her last chance, her last moment with her friends.
She sees Mipha atop the waterfall, accepting a fate that would tear her away from her baby brother. Revali hiding his weakness at the flight range. Daruk trying to smile right before the end. Urbosa shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother, laughing the way they only ever laughed around each other. Her father’s silhouette on the ramparts, watching her leave for the Spring of Wisdom.
Zelda nears Fort Hateno in time to hear a tattered cheer rise up from its defenders as most of the Guardians move westward. All those men understand is that they’ve been granted a moment’s reprieve. They can’t know that somewhere amid the sparking pile of metal corpses, Link is trading his blood for Hyrule’s hope, just like he’s been doing since he was twelve years old.
Do you keep any hope for yourself? she asked him once. He only turned aside to hide the way his face cracked open, which was an answer all on its own.
He never expected to reach the bridge. He means to purchase Zelda’s life with his own.
She’s on her knees at the edge of the forest. Her path to the hill and the safety beyond it stands clear, as he promised, but the window is closing fast. If she makes it to Kakariko—and that seems a considerable if—what will she do? What use could she possibly be? This kingdom doesn’t need a failure of a princess.
Link does, if only so that he won’t die alone.
Zelda sprints back the way she came, keeping to the trees until her only choice is to strike out towards the maelstrom that separates her from him. Maybe he’ll hate her forever for discarding his wishes. She doesn’t care. Forever is drawing its final breath.
Link has turned the plain into a jumbled maze of dead Guardians, forcing the live ones to approach him over narrow, slippery terrain so he can pick them off and drop back into cover before his next move. Zelda feels a fierce surge of pride, to love and be loved by this boy who has retained his ruthless ingenuity against impossible odds and unimaginable fatigue. It’s almost enough to make her believe they still have a chance.
And then she sees him.
Little guy, Daruk always called him, and right now Link looks so small—a lonely figure soaked in mud and worse, trapped between the mountains of his fallen enemies. Desperate to see his face, Zelda’s mouth forms his name before she realizes he stands between her and a Guardian.
The machine compensates for its missing legs with an awkward shamble that would have invoked pity a few days ago. Now she watches it drag its dead weight around the bend and prays to a deaf Goddess that its roving gaze never falls upon Link.
But he’s waiting for just that. Pieces of him are missing. He clutches the sword between both hands and raises his head, assessing his dwindling options as the red laser fixes on his chest.
Then he moves. He’s still fast, but his legs buckle twice. He can’t possibly have the strength to end the enemy before it ends him. Zelda flounders through the freezing swamp, numb, breathless, blind.
As always, Link surprises her.
He throws himself at the Guardian, his foot finding purchase in the hollow place left behind by one of its missing legs, his fingers seizing hold of some groove that gets him onto its body. And somehow—despite his injuries, despite the slippery surface, despite the laser following his every move—Link hauls himself hand over hand up the metal shell.
Zelda stumbles forward. She can’t reach him in time. She can only watch.
The Master Sword plunges into the Guardian’s eye at the same moment the laser fires.
Link screams.
The world explodes with blinding heat. Through a cloud of steaming rain, Zelda sees him hit the ground rolling. The machine twitches and sparks and slumps over dead, but Link is not dead, he can’t be dead, not him, not the only thing she has left in the world.
Her knees sink into the swamp. She doesn’t feel it; she doesn’t feel anything. Especially not the unbearable heat radiating off him or the blackened shreds of his tunic flaking away as she turns him onto his back. Her hands roam over him helplessly, trying to stave off the blood, to piece him back together.
Link’s fingers twitch around the hilt of the sword.
Zelda gasps his name and his eyes fly open, wide and blue and panicked against his filthy face. He heaves out a horrible, sanguine cough that lasts eternities and breaks every part of Zelda that wasn’t already broken.
“Link, I’m here,” she sobs. “Can you hear me? Can you look at me?”
He tries. His eyes are glassy and unfocused. His lips part over crimson teeth. She cradles the unburned side of his face, hunching over his body to hide him from the miasmic light flickering in her peripheral vision.
“Zelda,” Link whispers faintly.
The first time he spoke her name, it was a new beginning, a light shining through the cracked surface of her. He says it like an end now, choked out between reedy gasps. But all at once, Zelda realizes she did not come here to die with him. She came here to save him, the way he saved her with every smile and every swing of the Master Sword and every stolen piece of time.
“Go,” he begs.
“Not without you,” she vows. “Get up.”
Link looks up at her despairingly. His breaths stutter out of him as if dragged by a hook. Malice cuts through the rain, drawing closer.
Zelda kisses him. This one is so brief and so soft and tastes entirely of blood. Link’s eyes remain closed after she pulls back, tears and rain carving clean tracks down his face. For a terrifying moment, she thinks: He’s gone. I finally killed him.
But his hands slide through the mud, bracing as much weight as he can bear, and together they get him upright. Through sobs of pain, her knight—her dauntless, lionhearted Link—stabs his sword into the marshy earth and levers himself onto one knee while blood and charred cloth and burnt skin slough away from his body.
Despite everything, Zelda feels an infinitesimal spark of hope. “Now run, Link. Save yourself. I’ll distract it—I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me—"
The Guardian crawls closer and closer to their pocket of safety. In one impossible movement, Link surges to his feet, his blade springing free from the muck as he staggers back. Death rattles through his lungs.
The machine’s spindly legs fold up and over the last barrier. Zelda blinks and sees Ganon in its place, all fog and fury, teeth baring for the kill. She has one thought as the red beam slices through the endless rain: It was all for nothing.
Link doesn’t run. He doesn’t lift his blade. He doesn’t look back. Everything he wants to tell her is there in his unbroken stance, in the defiant set to his chin, in the pure ferocity of his eyes. They flash to Zelda in terror when she steps in front of him, but he’s given his answer to the silent question that has loomed over them both since they were born. So she gives hers.
It sears up from a place she didn’t know existed, bright and visceral and real, filling her up and blazing forth to rend the fabric of the world. Zelda erupts into gold. Nothing in her life has ever felt so right.
But even that comes too late.
.
.
.
