@dragmiire asked / in the time after ganondorf's rule, and in the discovery of her sagehood, what kind of responsibilities did nabooru find herself saddled up with ? did becoming a sage feel like a moment of enlightenment, like she had discovered a purpose to her life that she had always needed, or was there doubt lingering in the back of her mind, dogging every decision ?
there are very few topics nabooru will not speak about, in regards to her own life. for the most part, she sees her own history as an open book, & she’s happy to speak about it with those who ask, & to share her own form of wisdom, be it with the younger gerudo girls, or when she’s called to hyrule castle as a ( somewhat seasonal ) member of queen zelda’s court. truth be told, there are only two things, really, she either point blank refuses to speak about, or is incredibly cagey if she does. the first is, of course, who fathered her daughters. the second is anything at all regarding her sagehood.
part of the reason is that nabooru woke as a sage during an extremely traumatic part of her life. i’m going to touch on this in another headcanon pretty soon, so i’ll gloss over it here, but nabooru heard the call from the sacred realm for a lot of her life without realizing exactly what it was, & it terrified her. it was part of what motivated her to make her pilgrimage at eighteen, to see if it would help block it out, but of course, it didn’t. the call was a persistent, terrifying thing & she told absolutely no-one about it. she only really stopped hearing it when she was subjugated by twinrova - whatever magic they used to manipulate her, & lock her away in the back of her own mind, was strong enough to silence it, but considering everything which came with that, nabooru would have preferred to just let it haunt her.
considering she was the last sage to be awakened before link fought with ganondorf, everything which followed happened extraordinarily fast for her. one minute mind-controlled, the next not; temporarily imprisoned, again, in the void between worlds until link could vanquish the witches who kidnapped her, & then in a heartbeat, in the real world once more, with the call from the sacred realm deafening in her ears. she didn’t have a choice in ascending, essentially being pulled into the sacred realm against her will. she, more than anyone, knew ganondorf had to be stopped, so she made no complaint when asked to lend her powers ( powers that, up until that day, had lain dormant within her ! powers that, post-sealing, she had intense trouble trying to access outside of the sacred realm ! ) hell, even the act of seeing ganondorf - her king - sealed away barely seemed to affect her ( on the surface ) whilst she was riding the adrenaline high of her life taking an unexpected turn, with her barely able to comprehend how much had rapidly changed for her. she worked with the other sages, she sealed ganondorf away, she returned to hyrule with her faculties intact for the first time in seven years, with the call of the sacred realm a dull whisper in the back of her mind. she returned as an agent of the golden goddesses, as chief of the gerudo, as a mother to lost children, as a stranger even to herself.
she didn’t even worship the goddesses of the triforce, or hylia, or anything to do with them. she had always been an acolyte of the goddess of the sands & it was to her altar she took her prayers. to find out that she was a puppet of fate & the goddesses which controlled it when before she had barely acknowledged their existence ? a terrifying thing. gods were real, but they weren’t hers. the crisis of faith nabooru experienced - in part because she had been held a prisoner in her own goddesses’ temple, & she had never once intervened to save her - was intense.
& then, finally, she got to go home, only to be the one charged with telling the other gerudo what had happened to their king, why he had neglected them so long, that he had been the one to make the world monstrous, that he was dead & gone & they were leaderless & lost once again. hyrule was in shambles, monsters still roaming, kept alive by lingering remnants of ganondorf’s power, in desperate need of rebuilding from the ground up. she returned to a home where few recognized her at first, where she was a stranger to her own daughters, a home filled with women who had been utterly betrayed by the man they had sworn their lives to. was she supposed to tell them, then, that if their goddess existed, then all their prayers & pleas must have fallen on deaf ears ? that the goddesses who did exist had chosen her to lock their lord away, & ignored the rest of them as they suffered under the rule of her chosen one’s family ?
becoming a sage completely destroyed nabooru’s view of the world. it took her a long time to be able to look to the future & see something bright, instead of the long strings future generations would dance on at the whims of the goddesses. looking at her own daughters put unspeakable fear in her heart, because what if they were to be the next tools, used & discarded by those who created the world ? would they even know ? would they, like her, hear the siren song of another world, & never speak of it from fear ? would she lose them, as she had been lost, & never know the reason why ?
to become chief of the gerudo was something familiar to her, at least. those were responsibilities she was used to, having dealt with them as second-in-command to ganondorf, & stepping up to fill his shoes was hardly much different from that. it was almost a comfort to assume the role, to know that finally, someone was leading them who would actually champion their people’s cause, rather than disappear in the pursuit of greater power, & leave them to rot. she accepted zelda’s invitation to sit on her court, when necessary, though she was more reluctant to agree to meet with her & the other sages in the sacred realm as necessary. the seal on ganondorf would have to be monitored, that she accepted, but as said above, nabooru’s concept of her powers was vague at best, nevermind her ability to control them - she supposed, being the sage of spirit, it was these dormant powers which gave her the drive to excel as well as she had in her life before ascending, but other than that, she found them hard to define in any meaningful way. gifts from the goddesses, some called them, but to her, they were an inconvenient curse, & a reminder of all the hardship she had endured, all for the purpose of her eventual awakening.
thankfully, for her, the responsibilities of a sage were few, & she wasn’t often called to act upon them. much of her responsibilities following ganondorf’s rule & her awakening were much more … mundane, in nature. her one regret is that her role as a sage eventually became publicly known, as the full story of ganondorf’s defeat was eventually told to the public. more than anything, she despised people who attempted to revere her as a sage, the way they would any other hylian figure of worship - eventually, they came to learn that speaking of her sagehood was a good way to earn her eternal ire. it wasn’t their fault, of course, that it had happened, but the last thing nabooru ever wanted was to be reminded of her so-called divine blessing. she was chief of the gerudo before she was ever anything else - that, she maintained until her dying day.
she still visited the spirit temple, to ensure it was never defiled again. she still spoke to the goddess of the sand, as she always had, but no longer wished for a reply. she knew, by then, that the divine were strange, indifferent beasts to those who worshipped them. old habits were just hard to break.
