❛ we can’t remember how to be alive. ❜ ( im laughing ily neri )
poetry sentences | accepting!
There’s a crack of lighting that shakes her bones and when she looks to the sky, it’s RED. It’s a deep, burning red like the open wounds between the bruises on her skin; it’s the same red as the blood that dyes the dirt she walks on. It’s the red of the merciless lasers that aim between their eyes and askew on their chests.
She hates the color now, but it’s all she can see around her.
“Hah…” She heaves a trembling breath, her lungs feeling like the fire she just saw erupt before her eyes. The trees are burning in the distance and smoke is in the air – she feels like she’s choking. Like the brutal, vicious violence and the tragedy of the day history will remember as the CALAMITY itself is suffocating her, strangling her.
The castle she grew up in, the castle with cold stone walls and unforgiving stares is in ruins. The people she had grown accustomed to seeing every day through the years are face down in the rubble now, their empty eyes delivering her a new kind of cruelty.
The paths they follow are littered with blood trails, but she doesn’t have to follow them to know what lies at their ends. She’s seen so many corpses that she thinks she could dream of one each night for the rest of her life and still have faces eager to haunt her when she shuts her eyes. She’ll never stop seeing them.
She’ll never stop seeing the faces of her Champions, her father, her PEOPLE – when things fall silent they whisper in her ear ‘How could you let this happen? You failed us after all.’
But the war continues on. She rallies the survivors of the day by her side and continues fighting a hopeless battle. She is their last remaining hope – their final WEAPON against Ganon. That’s all she’s ever been to most of them, not a princess but a power. A tool to use to beat back the darkness. They never payed much mind to the fact that she was made of flesh, just like they were – that she could bleed and bruise and weep.
And when this was over she would weep. She would weep the tears that she’s hidden away for all her life – the tears she wasn’t allowed to shed because she was supposed to be some twisted form of Atlas. She was destined to carry the weight of the world on her two thin shoulders and never falter under the burden – and that was all to her fate.
She was the deliverer of everyone else’s happy ending.
She’s not taken aback when he tells her such a thing – she can read it in his face and in his eyes. She can see it in his wounds. She can tell that they’re both broken on the inside, just shells of people who have no other choice than to KEEP GOING. They have no other choice than to put one foot in front of the other even when they can’t see the light at the end of their path. But that’s how it’s always been, she remembers.
They were never given a choice in this. They were born to be soldiers, weapons, tools of war and no matter what status they were given at birth, in death they are nothing more than servants to the world that shackled them to a cruel fate.
And how close to death they are.
“You’re right… Link...” It’s hard to speak when your chest feels like its breaking from the inside out. “Everything we sought to protect – all the people we loved… they’re all GONE. Lost to us now. We can no longer reach them... I suppose we lost ourselves, too, then, didn’t we? We really did… we lost the part of us that knew how to live.” That part died by their sides.
“Now this is all we are.”
When the dawn finally comes and the survivors write up all the names of the people whose souls were taken from them on this terrible day, Zelda will find two familiar names missing from the list.
