The Demon Queen on AO3
Rating: E for sex and angst
Seven years after the fall of the Demon Dragon and return of the Princess, Link and Zelda have disappeared from the throne and the world’s stage, choosing quiet love in their hillside Hateno home over the burden of rule in a kingdom that seems content in its peace.
But in Hyrule, harmony is never permanent, and power refuses to be left unattended.
Ganondorf returns, not with fire and war, but with strategy, influence, and a bloodless coup. In his wake, the Hero vanishes without a trace. The Princess is claimed not as a prisoner, but as his Queen. Draped in silks, paraded like a jewel, Zelda finds herself back in her castle with her crown restored, and her body playing host to a storm she’s denied for lifetimes.
As whispers rise from the Depths and ancient secrets claw to the surface, Zelda must confront a new Hyrule, the choices she once buried, and the man whose darkness is no longer her enemy but her shadow, her partner, her match, and above all, the one desire she'd been sure she could hide from the eyes of eternity.
Today's Update: Chapter 27
The dust settles after the ball. The Dragmires reflect on what has come before and what world they wish their family to exist within going forward. Fate, however, is rarely cooperative.
(p.s. I'm sorry, if it makes it any better, I cried so many times writing this and am just generally in misery.)
Ganondorf did not dream. At least he hadn’t, not for thousands of years. It was another aspect of his humanity that he had cleaved from the bones, a sacrifice laid bare on the pyre in his bleak attempt to stay sane. The crush of gravity from endless, unchanging time, like the water pressing at the bottom of the sea, was punishing enough without the respite of deep, unknowing sleep. His single escape in the prison of his own body, the ruined citadel pinned like a moth beneath Hyrule Castle while the soft feet of a hundred generations of servants and subjects and ignorant Kings and fair-hearted Princesses spent their brief lives a mile above his waking grave. Each existence a fuse burning bright, only to end snuffed in the same sputter of smoke.
Within this prison, he had waited.
Counting decades in his mind’s abacus, the shreds of his reason cast around one dogma: if he remained here, alive in his death, then she was still coming.
The child born to fall.
Drawn down into the forbidden crypt that waited for her as inheritance, the hatch into the life they were condemned to live.
That moment, the winking salvation of torchlight—his first assurance since Rauru’s final plunge between his ribs that he hadn’t imagined, that fate had not forgotten…
Petal. Unwritten, wide-eyed, bewildered by her mantle in his mouth.
How do you…know our names?
Oh how he’d wanted to consume her, that supple, wide-eyed wholeness; and he, whittled down to nothing, dust where muscle had once corded, a void emptied of blood. To drench her in the Gloom that was his husk’s oxygen, to drag her into the cavity where once had beat heart she’d yet to keep. All of the ragged need not only for her to pay, but to know what those slight hands would wring from him.
This he kept to himself.
Read it here
