I was maybe going to try for a longer update this week, but that was before my weekend exploded into busyness and my life wasn’t nearly as stressful as it is currently, haha. Ha. Oh well. Enjoy this little pause of things!
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Dragons are a different sort of creature than those that dwell below them.
They’re unchanging, ageless, a fixed point in the wide ocean of time. Things move for them, but only sometimes, and when they do, they move very, very slowly.
The same holds true for the Light Dragon, who soars in silence over Hyrule, winding her endless circuit in the skies. Not many can see her, and those that can only rarely make her out, due to the vast height at which she flies. If anyone ever drew close enough to get a proper look at her, they would notice a thicker section of her abdomen, and the way she drifts more carefully than the other dragons, but no one has ever gotten near enough to tell.
Regardless, there are still those that try their best to follow her movements. A boy with blonde hair and the long, delicate ears of the Zonai is the most frequent, often watching her fly off in the distance. A telescope permanently rests at his window, and his eye is often pressed to it, doing his best to study the trail of blue and gold that shimmers off her head.
He spends many hours looking for glimpses of her, and as he grows, points her out to his children, then their children as well, and they do the same for theirs.
The dragon’s identity is passed gently down through generations, though sightings of her grow few and far between as years go by. She’s rarely seen, and if she is, even fewer people are able to see her, and as time continues on and other crises rise and fall, the memory of Zelda starts to fade.
Rumors are passed around hearths and over drinks, of a princess who assumed the form of a dragon to watch over the kingdom. As the story is told and retold, over and over, her name is confused, then lost, and then the circumstances surrounding her sacrifice also fade, obscured by time and countless retellings.
Even the royal family loses the details, and soon any supposed glimpse of the golden dragon is heralded as a mark of good luck, but not much else. Many believe her origins to only be a story. A fairytale for children, a legend of honorable sacrifice, history warped into myth. The truth fades, records are lost, and sightings grow less and less common.
Soon enough the Light Dragon is never spotted at all, and her existence fades to mere myth.
...
Time marches on.
The kingdom waxes and wanes, rules through times of prosperity and famine, through wars and peacetime. The dragons are forgotten by all but a few, and they keep to their domains, remaining unchanged throughout the ages.
...Except for one.
Some length after the Imprisoning war has faded to old history, there’s a terrible roar from the sky, one that makes all surface dwellers look towards the clouds in fear.
More ring out, all that day and the next, and there’s soon panicked rumors that the sky itself is going to fall and consume them. A strange shine appears in the heavens, like an unusually bright star, and other dragons raise their heads from their endless wanderings, taking note of an event strange even to them.
Another bellow shakes the sky, and the blue dragon of ice changes her current course and flies up to support wisdom’s child, frost drifting behind her. A strange cold snap follows, settling over the kingdom, and the continued panic has to be quelled by the current royals. They assure their people that the world is not ending, and promise prayer and an attempt to discover what is actually happening. Surely, they reason, a golden light must mean something good, yes?
Before anything can be done though, there’s one last bellow, the loudest yet. It rings with an unnatural echo, makes the sky shine gold, and shakes the very ground, a silhouette of something long forgotten glinting in the clouds.
And then the sky is silent.
The cold snap ends, the light in the sky fades. Rumors abound of what it all means, but nobody has any good answers. The people are merely joyous that their prayers were heard, that whatever beast is in the sky was seemingly struck down or appeased, and the royal family is relieved nothing further had to be done. The strange events go down in history as nothing but an odd quirk, a disturbance of nature or old magic, and various tales of bellowing sky lights spread across villages and peoples.
Only a few come close to the truth.
On the day the roars cease, far far above on a quiet sky island, the Light Dragon curls around her newly-laid egg, the shell a soft cream scattered with gold. Naydra rumbles beside her as she too looks at it, and there’s a note of fondness in the sound.
The Light Dragon keeps staring, something rising within her. The egg is small, and perfect, and oddly beautiful for something that never should have existed. She doesn’t feel joy, or grief, doesn’t really feel anything except in a distant, unattached way, but the sight of her egg stirs something inside of her. Something unnamed.
Something beyond the simple routine of endless flying, and watching time eternally march on.
For some reason she begins to cry as she looks at it, tears freezing as they fall to the ground, and Naydra nuzzles her head, her cold oddly comforting. Then she heads back to her usual wanderings, the air warming with her departure.
The Light Dragon sets her head against the ground beside her egg, closing her eyes as her tears continue to fall. They dampen her muzzle, catch thick in her mane, are caught in her lashes, but she doesn’t know why she cries. She never will.
There’s a chime that joins the tears, though. One that’s familiar. A pulse, from somewhere above her, or... in her.
She can’t name it or place it, but it’s a great comfort as her tears begin to slow. Finally they stop, and the chiming does too with a gentle hum, peace falling across the island where she’s nested.
And the exhausted dragon rests, and watches her egg, her distant gaze never moving from it.
...
The imprisoning war is little but legend when the egg moves.
The Light Dragon’s circuit is smaller in these times, the egg her central point, her golden trail never straying too far. Nothing ever comes remotely near where she’s laid it without her notice, even through darkness and Calamity, and monsters have long learned to steer clear of her domain or meet a swift demise by way of claws and sharp teeth.
So when her long ears hear the egg shift, her vacant gaze immediately turns to it.
The soft sound happens again, and her dive towards the island is less wandering and more hurried, purpose in the movement that has rarely existed. The Light Dragon lands beside her egg, setting her head next to it, and watches it rock and shift, kept from going too far by a nest of grasses and flowers.
After a long time, a thin crack appears, splitting the gold, and the rocking continues, pauses, then resumes again, over and over. Days pass unnoticed by the dragon, more cracks steadily appearing, until finally in the middle of the night, a piece falls, and a tiny snout pushes through.
An encouraging hum comes from the Light Dragon, and the nose wiggles, still pushing, egg still rocking. A ripple goes through the air, one that zips across the sky, and once again the other dragons raise their heads, and take note of the unusual happenings. All three rise further into the sky than they often tread, and weave around the island where the light dragon lays, keeping far enough back to protect the egg from their magic, but close enough still to watch.
All eyes are fixed on the small egg as it further rocks and twists, the snout still pushing. A claw appears, straining, and more encouraging growls come from the other beasts. Cracks spiderweb across the shell, breaking the pattern of gold, and finally a tiny wyrm of a creature breaks free with a burst of light, and lies exhausted in its shattered shell.
It’s sniffed all over by its mother, a few warm licks soon setting it to rights. All three of the other dragons croon as the tiny one wobbles to its feet, scales in white and gold, hints of greenish-blue spikes on its back, the fur on its face still spiky from egg fluid and its mother’s attentions. It lets out a mewling sound in response to the other dragons’ calls, and the Light Dragon hums back.
The other dragons croon in excitement, and turn and fly in wide arcs through the sky then, rumbles that sound almost like singing accompanying the movements, lights and magic flickering across the clouds. Peoples below talk of the lights for years, claiming they’re a sign of great blessing, and Hyrule enters a newfound age of peace.
The Light Dragon nuzzles against the baby— against her as the others dance, and once again, tears drop from her eyes.
She still doesn’t know why.
...
Calamities rise and fall. Hyrule waxes and wanes.
The Light Dragon and her baby swim peacefully over it all, largely uncaring of what goes on below. The baby grows as time passes, though at a barely noticeable rate due to the nature of dragons. It would take a millennia for her to be as big as her mother.
But still she grows, and learns. She watches atop her mother’s head as any rogue monsters are clawed to pieces, observes the stars above them as they fly. Nibbles on plants, then spits them out when they prove unpleasant to her, and hums in quiet harmony with her mother.
Time rolls on.
And on.
And on.
Largely the same. Largely predictable.
Evil returns once more like it always does, but spikes more sharply than usual, making the baby’s ears flatten. A swordsman falls, and sleeps, and the dragons fly higher as Calamity rages, the baby growling anxiously every time the moon turns red with malice. She curls up atop her mother’s head, and presses her head against the chiming thing, soothed by the noises she makes.
An amount of time that seems like a drop in the bucket for the two dragons passes, and the swordsman wakes. Malice burns harder, but finally a familiar sweep of gold rushes over the land, the moon returning to its normal color with its touch, and the air grows a little less oppressive. A little more free. The dragons remain flying high though, even with the Calamity’s end, and it’s not until the very world shakes that their path changes.
The islands move lower. Much lower. Patterns of grass light up below. Things shift, time ripples, things that should not have happened, happening.
The Light Dragon swoops lower along with the islands, clouds below and above, and the baby dragon watches all of this with an innocent curiosity, sniffing at the strange air that comes from being lower. It’s a new sensation, one that makes her ears prick and tail twitch.
The spirit who drags a half-dead thing up to their islands just makes her screech in alarm, though.
She zips back to her mother, burying herself in her mane, and only peeks her head out, watching from a distance. The spirit watches her a moment and smiles a bit to himself, but quickly returns his attention to the dying thing who wheezes thinly for breath, his arm eaten away, injuries marring his torso.
The baby stays far away from him. The evil coming off his wounds is enough to scare her away, and anyway the strange spirit soon moves him to where she can’t see.
Yet... there’s something about the dying man. Something that makes the Light Dragon circle the big island, and her baby follow along after, not straying from the loop like they sometimes do. A flicker of something, again, that the Light Dragon distantly notes, then moves on from.
But she and her baby still circle, regardless.
...
And when Link awakens with an arm not his own, and steps out of the cave he’s been recovering in, the two dragons watch, and wonder.
Scott: Subs are so fun to play with. All you have to do is hint at what you might do, back them into a corner with a look, or grab their wrist in a certain way and they're a wide-eyed mess.
Cleo: What the fuck kind of Subway are you going to?
Pearl: Substitute teachers deal with so much shit.
