Legend Of Zelda Fan Fiction ❯ The Legend of Link: Lucky Number 13 ❯ Comes to Light Pt. 07: King of the Hill ... Sort of ( Chapter 52 )

Chapter Fifty-two

 

 

They now stood way beyond the edges of anything resembling Fate's charted reality. They were in an area—time, space, and reality—created solely by Link. Neither had said a word to the other since entering the breach back in the child's room, even as they'd traveled for hours to reach their current destination. When the space around them quit moving, Charon presented Link with a list—a list that, besides him, only two other beings had ever seen. It was the list of every person that could, would, and should die.

 

“That's the name of every person that died the day you were born,” Charon had said, breaking the silent stalemate upon giving up his list.

 

Link had watched red lines etch their way through each name on every page, all indicating a life ended. At the bottom of page one, there was Link's name. The red line didn't cross it out, though. There was just a weird symbol beside it. He turned the page, went back to the top and watched the lines draw themselves through another set of names from different realms and dimensions. In the middle of the page, there it was again—the name Link in Hylian script with no line going through it, but a weird squiggle unlike any he'd ever seen. When asked what all of that was supposed to mean, Charon didn't respond. Link could figure out … would figure it out, he believed.

 

And he did, sort of.

 

The turning of pages began to grow faster and more furious after a time, the omission becoming clearer as each page snapped. Link's blue eyes went from the top to the bottom of the list, which was printed in text so small the mortal eye couldn't even perceive the symbols it was composed of, as though he were searching for some buried truth. To look at the list, it was no more than maybe ten sheets of parchment attached to a rectangular slab of polished granite. To look at the list as a god with the power to see what Charon saw, the list was far more than that. Each time that Link reached the “last” page, he'd flip it and find that was merely the beginning of another ten. On and on Link went, though—each page contained his name, each page snapped and flapped with his growing rage, and each page was missing one thing: her name.

 

“Where is it, Charon?” Link demanded in the present upon hitting the absolute last page. “Where the fuck is her name?” He gazed up at the nine-foot-tall giant and glared, naïve mortal irises disappearing into a threatening white light. “If this is everyone's name that died the day that I was born, where is her name?”

 

Charon stood stoic, far more stoic than Link knew him to ever be, and said quite calmly, “It's there, if you want to see it.”

 

Link's face twisted as though in the presence of a foul aroma. “What does that even mean?” he asked with a curb in his outrage, eyes squinting together as though trying to see through a rain storm.

 

“Do you really want to know?” Charon asked with an impassive air, retracting his hood in the same moment and exposing his luminescent skull. “Think carefully about that question, because there is no going back once it's answered,” he added, his skeletal appearance betraying his languid overtone.

 

Link had known or, perhaps it was better to say, known of this god for years, but it was still weird to see a skull emote with the same pliability as a face with flesh. So, it was with great deliberation—and that meant none—that he told Charon his answer.

 

“All of it,” Link said with unwavering … something. Something about him seemed to suggest that he knew more than he let on, but, for the life of him, Charon couldn't figure out what that something was. Neither could Vic, nor Fate, nor Destiny—it was that locked box in Link's head that brought the latter two such pause. There were very few mysteries to people as old as them, but one thing was always paramount: what they didn't know could hurt them—and they always hurt, maimed, or destroyed whatever that was first … barring it could even be destroyed.

 

“So begins the final roll,” Charon said cryptically. “For starters, the first page alone was filled with the names of all those who'd died on the day of your birth. Every subsequent page is every subsequent day thereafter.”

 

The emotionless frown on Link's face didn't move an inch—no sadness, no shock, just neutrality. Charon was quietly surprised, as most people didn't hear something like that and remain completely unaffected. Then again, most people didn't handle the types of trials that Link had and remain as sane as he did, either.

 

“Question: Why am I still alive?” he asked the designer of his supposed deaths.

 

“Answer: You corrupted me,” Charon replied, smirking a bit despite himself. This caused a marginal twitch in Link's left eyebrow. “I'm lethal, Link. Ever since that last battle with them—the Originals, I mean—I've been lethal. I can't even hold flesh on these bones for more than a few days since that battle. I can't even exist on the same plane as the rest, because I'm lethal to god and mortal alike, like a slow poison. Being in my presence is to die bit by bit or so it was.”

 

Again, there was that look in his eyes—Link knew or appeared to know something. He didn't know that, though. “So it was?” Link asked, quietly mirroring Charon's last words.

 

“It's one of those secrets we keep,” Charon said, in reference to himself and Fate. “Coming to my level—my world—usually afflicts a god like a poison would a Hylian within hours. You were there for months on end as a mortal body with godly powers. At the very least, your mortal form should've disintegrated upon entry, but it didn't. It was their plan, you see—everyone would be all happy-go-lucky to `teach' the new guy, all ignorant that their rulers were secretly plotting his death from the outset of his life—”

 

“And why is that?” Link asked, interjecting his voice in between Charon's revelation. “I find it hard to believe that a baby could be this hard to kill.”

 

“Funny,” Charon muttered, knowing full well that Link knew of his grandfather and how he was impossible to destroy, even as a baby. “It's more fun if you can beat your enemy with moves right in front of his face, so I'm told.”

 

“You heard us,” Link chuckled, his frown receding as he turned away from Charon and laughed, closing his eyes and indicating that that perhaps surprised him.

 

Charon did likewise, but added: “There is no `sealing' the world from them, Link, at least not when someone below them is involved. And, even though your father wishes it weren't so, he's no longer even remotely close enough to their power to be able to attempt such an act, let alone succeed. But we digress … sort of.”

 

“There's more?” asked Link, voice filled with surprise, though his face was placid.

 

“Much more,” the god of death replied. “A birth defect is what mortals would term it. In our hierarchy, however, they saw it as a curse. The Originals were gone, but their children—the offspring between them and those lesser gods—were still there, a living reminder of their parental failures. It wasn't until those children began to reproduce that the problem was discovered amongst the females: they bred superiority.”

 

“What?” Link asked, turning back to Charon with genuine confusion this time.

 

“Some of the females of the greater and the lesser possessed a series of gaps in their half of the child making process,” he said with an emotionless finality. “Where all creatures had been designed to reproduce one whole from two halves, these goddesses threw this system into disarray. They fractured the design and reduced it to fraction upon fraction. They took pieces—always the strongest pieces—from each male that they mated with … never a weakness. If they were pregnant and mated, the child merely absorbed the superior trait of that male. Imagine the gods and goddesses that could be produced from such unions—the powers of top tier gods being rolled and multiplied one on top of the other—and you'll understand why they had to be stopped—”

 

“So … what, you killed an entire generation of female goddesses because they might have had this `problem?'” Link bellowed at the elder god, before a new query entered his mind. “Wait, how would you even know they had this issue? The first time, I could imagine stumbling upon it. The second, though, how could you delve that deep without being spotted? The gods are a complacent lot, but they're still self-preserving and strong enough as a whole to not be mind-fucked into submission.”

 

“Exactly,” Charon said, ever aware that Link knew the others could be controlled, despite never being told as much from a valid source. “I was dispatched to infiltrate and dispose of those who were found to possess the trait and any offspring before it became sentient.”

 

Link's mouth hung open, caught completely unawares by that fact. One of the most respectable gods that he'd ever met … had just admitted to killing his own children … without so much as an odd glance. A part of him wanted to break Charon's body into particles right there, but another part wondered … “Why?”

 

“Why? It's an easy question to ask, but I suppose the easiest answer is because that's what I do,” he said nonchalantly, before being lifted by his neck and slammed into the floor. The violence didn't change his demeanor, though. “Wake up, Link,” Charon told him, even as the mystical vertebrae that composed his neck began to crack in Link's hand. “This is what I am. They create the lives, I end them. It's a cycle that's as—”

 

“They were your own children!” Link shouted, chest heaving as though he were panting for air, though none escaped or went into him.

 

“And? What was to stop `my children' from going out into the worlds, the realms, universes, and dimensions and destroying them? Think of the children those children would've destroyed had they been swayed by someone like Fate or your father to fight for their machinations,” the god of death stated with such calm that it was almost disturbing. “Men, women, children, babies, and things that aren't even alive enough to be called those names—I take their souls, end their lives, every single day.”

 

Link gritted his teeth but removed his hand from Charon's neck. “Think of the children those children would've destroyed had they been swayed by someone like Fate …” the words came echoing back to him. There was a bigger picture beyond the murder. His mom was in this picture somewhere, but where exactly? “Where does she tie in?”

 

“Where do you think?” Charon asked in reply, a twinge of familiarity in his voice returning as he sat up on the ground. “Word got out about what we were doing, and she was the first to openly call us monsters for it. Every time a goddess went `missing,' Esmerelda let us hear about it. Loudly. Then, one day, she went silent…” he trailed.

 

“She was pregnant,” Link added as the picture became clearer.

 

“She was,” Charon continued. “Now she was on the list and had to beware the setups and those around her. She dodged us for awhile, and Fate let her, as chasing her was merely something to do. She probably would've gone completely unchecked since she was on the mortal plane most of the time, but she came back. At this time, your father was killing far too many gods and he, too, spoke recklessly about them. His wheels turned and out popped Fate's new game: What if he could make them kill each other?

 

“Fate applies pressure—it's a pressure that they suspect is possible, but aren't aware of enough to resist, but also a pressure that never fails to hurt people in a relationship to the point that they can't think or act straight—that makes your father overreact more than usual and sleep with another, knowing full well Esmerelda would find him. She does, but then Fate leans on her a little bit. Ah, now she's doing more than crying, she's declaring something:

 

“'I'll fuck the next man I see!'

 

“Perfect. This is where I—” Charon grabbed the side of his head and screamed, dropping to his knees, as though kicked in the side of the head. “He will, too, hear it!” he screamed, panting for air as he seemed to shrug off whatever was thrust upon him … whatever attempted to silence him. He stood, brushing Link's hand aside and finished what he was trying to say. Their ability to reach him here did not go unnoticed by Link, who had to question just how far that reach extended. “Fate interjects himself onto the scene. He's in disguise, though, and your mother was nowhere near the rational mindset or power required to see through his ruse. She stormed out of the house with your father on her heels, only to stumble `coincidentally' into Fate. They sleep together. And, as expected, the loudest protestor against our actions turns out to be one of the afflicted.

 

“Your father and mother make up pretty much the next day, as the tampering with the chronosphere had worn off. But instead of killing you and your mother then, Fate wanted me to wait. See, your father kept on talking about how the reign was coming to an end … how Fate and Destiny were soon due to see me. He doesn't show it, but Fate covets his power like a starving rat with a piece of cheese. Any and all insults toward it are blown into proportions that are ludicrous, which is why the next part of the game started—”

 

“The visions,” Link said, shaking his head and silently sighing as he connected the dots. “Go on.”

 

“For months, your father's mind was subjected to these visions. The goal was simple: Fate would lean on him through the chronosphere and have father kill mother and child. I would then eliminate father. Three birds, two killed by one of their own, and the third assassinated by the hidden rock—a solid plan had it been enacted a few millennia earlier,” Charon sighed. He looked forward with his empty eye sockets, focusing on the nothingness and spoke from what some would probably consider the heart. “I don't know what broke me … Esmerelda wasn't stupid. She knew her time was coming, but she came down there and made the request anyway: `Kill me, I don't care. Just let my son live … even if it's just the mortal plane. He's innocent, Charon. What harm could it do?' I didn't care at the time. I had a job. I did that job exceptionally well. So, I told Fate about some of it.

 

“He was tickled blue.

 

“`Imagine her face when the kid's blasted apart and she sees you were playing her the whole time!' he laughed, but something about it upset me. Upset me so much that I didn't tell him the whole story, about her plan to return you to godhood.

 

“She wanted to see the list the day you were to be born, so I showed her that you weren't on it. Your father, however, had written his final song long ago, but,” he paused and sighed, “that wasn't totally true. It was difficult for her to bring him to the mortal plane, knowing I would end him there, but that was the choice I gave her. Of course, if you look at the name closely, you'll notice the last two symbols are comprised of others, so I was lying to an extent.”

 

Link went back to the first page and did as told, focusing on the last two symbols of his name … his father's name … grinding his teeth as the names Esmerelda and Link were folded up, down, backward, and forward into the symbols, written in a print even finer than the main letters. They were all on the list, even himself as a “nameless” baby. This Fate hole was running a lot deeper than Link was prepared for, but he fought to keep his resolve.

 

Charon continued: “I observed the final moments between two of your three parents … and, at the last possible moment, altered the blast so that it hit only her. The Originals breeched a dimension close to ours at the same time, so Fate was occupied. All that meant was that he couldn't intervene, so I let Esmerelda's plan keep going. I let her run, kept her soul inside long enough for her to do what she had to, and then took her into death. Fate didn't alter the fact that your aunts dealt with your father, as the need for gods of war had risen after the Originals slaughtered most of them, so imprisonment was better than death. Fate couldn't deal with me for screwing up the plan, so I was charged with fulfilling the main objective: killing you.

 

“But then … then it was my time to be curious. What if everything went exactly to your mother's liking? What if you, the fallen god, returned? What happened if one of these `abominations' made it to adulthood? I decided to find out. Fate could create all the deathtraps, scenarios, and schemes he wanted to—but if I didn't execute them, no one else could, either. Sure, you could be killed, but if I didn't take your soul, you'd comeback one way or the other. So, failure after failure mounted as day after day ended with you on the side of the living. How hard can life really be on a god before he cracks?

 

“You'd learn that lesson, and, until I met you, I often wondered did I do you more harm than good by letting you live to experience it. That's what I meant about breaking me—as long as I've lived, I've had precisely two friends: you and him. Until we met, I looked at you as merely something to observe, but after … I remembered what it was like to have something more than demons, souls, or schedules. I was supposed to be killing you with my presence, yet I couldn't even do that. You didn't fear me. You didn't avoid me. Anyway, then I got the new plan a few years ago, mortal time—there was no killing this time, just a simple possession. Put Link in a new mortal shell somewhere else, somewhere that he'll never be subjected to Fate ever again.”

 

Link looked at the ancient entity, who sat down on the floor again, legs stretched out before him beneath black robes, and said, “You knew I wouldn't want that if it meant giving up what little I had.”

 

Charon nodded. “But I also felt concern, genuine concern and love in that place. Souls give off such emotions, but it's usually mixed with fear or regret. In that room, the purity of those feelings toward you from that woman Nabooru … her emotions were so unnatural for a mortal, so powerful. They all feared losing you. They all cared for you, but her … I think I might've been afraid to take you from her, as silly as that sounds.” He laughed, as did Link, before standing. “The point is that the end is near. The cracks in the mortal realm are siphoning your strength, not just when you manifest energy, but all day, every day. And, as your mother has already perceived, there are entities waiting for the moment to strike—all of whom were probably put there by Fate.”

 

Link's smile faded seamlessly into that frown, but, again, there was no surprise. Outwardly. Inside, he was wrestling with his emotions. This is what his son must've felt like, to be conceived in anger, was he really anymore than a mistake, like a thrown glass that happened to hit someone standing too close? To make matters worse, his own situation was halved: he was partially conceived in love and partially conceived in anger. More than that, another father wanted his head. But this father was far more twisted than the first one, because every single living thing was a spy for this father and his right hand.

 

The world, as it seemed, really was against him.

 

Still, Link had to keep his wits … watch everything that happened in front of him with a new level of paranoia, always looking for the duality that could hurt him. As much as his soul hurt, he couldn't let the pain feed on him. He couldn't let the questions about whether or not he was mentally capable of taking on the foundation of life itself cripple him before the fight even began. No, no, now more than ever, Link had to be the infallible hero. That was an easy role to play, though, because Link held the one trump card that none of them knew about.

 

He saw the strings … sort of. It had started with the puppet analogy from all those years ago with his aunt. He'd started seeing lines or, at least, he thought that he was. If he focused on a person too intently, it would fade away, as though it realized that it had been exposed and resumed hiding. Link had never told anyone for some reason, and perhaps it was the warrior's instinct or paranoia that drove him to keep his secret. Still, he had no idea what, if anything, this could mean for a battle. But better to have one secret in a fight than none, he believed.

 

It was amazing that this plan had actually gone on this long, to the point something as simple as that analogy could be a move against him that happened in front of him. Still, the game was present, even during his father's speech—Fate was telling him through his father that “even though his words are helping you, they aren't, because this advantageous knowledge exists nowhere but in the confines of your own mind.” Boiled down, every piece of “inside” information that Link got wasn't that inside. It just appeared to be. There was no blacking the world out to them, as they had hooks and strings in all of their pieces that relayed information back to them, no matter how far you attempted to take one of those pieces off the board.

 

Every-fucking-thing was duality in this game. Even Charon's innocence was riddled with sloppy inconsistencies, as Link looked at his friend's ankle and saw the faint golden thread that was attached to it, which trailed off into the darkness. Oh, they can't punish him, yet he just sort of stands around on call to kill when needed. More than friendship drove Charon to act the way that he did. Still, if everything was hidden and exposed at once, there was obviously more to the situation than just that. Fate and Destiny controlled this chronosphere thing, which controlled gods on some level. However, if Charon and Fate were equals at first, like Fate's story told through Link Sr. suggested, how did things become so unbalanced?

 

Link cracked the door to his mind, and Charon bit.

 

“You're wondering why it is I seem to work for them,” the god of death asked, unaware that he'd walked into an amateur ploy. “It's simple really: I never cared. Friendship aside, there was only so long that anyone could listen to him whine and complain about the boredom. So, he took his role and got his entertainment. I took on mine and kept his game running smoothly, while getting my quiet.”

 

“Something more than that happened, though,” Link said with an eerie insight that really wasn't. It was seldom that he bluffed, but when Link did it, he was the best at it. The way his face set and didn't move, the walls that he could throw up around his mind, willing or not, left god and man alike wondering: “What does he really know?”

 

Charon, god of death, couldn't read the situation. The entities eavesdropping were in the same boat. Pushing the issue on his mind, well, that was about as meaningful as a mortal attempting to milk a stone. Charon was left to answer the implied question on his own, “You're referring to my time as a warrior, correct?” Link didn't so much as twitch. “It's true that I fought the Original creations. It's also true that that battle left me in the state that you see before you. This is the price they exact upon those who stand against them, be it loss of flesh, an inactive power made permanently active, or annihilation—their toll is great, even if you appear to be the victor.”

 

Link picked up the subtext and ran with it. That's why Charon quit fighting them, not indifference, but self-preservation. They'd knocked him out of the upper echelon with Fate. This power thing was finite, then. The hero shook his head and bit his lower lip, a begrudging smile crossing his face. Son of a bitch, he thought, with a forced respect for the little fucker's tactical mind, Fate knew it! He sent Charon against those things, and he knew or at least had an idea what the stress of that would do to his “friend.” So, now, Charon is merely another worker serving the throne—and now Fate's barely controlled butchers are aimed at me.

 

“This has been enlightening, Charon,” Link said in earnest, though, fully aware that he was trying to overcome a battle strategy that had begun before he was even born. “I trust that you can follow the golden road back home.”

 

Charon frowned, noting the odd choice of words immediately, but not getting the connotation. He agreed that he could make it back, and Link left. As the giant death god stood up, two familiar “children” stepped out from behind him and came to stand at either side of him. Fate giggled, a dark and foreboding sound, nothing like the childish laughter that he usually displayed. This was the source laughing now, waving his hand and dismissing his controlling thread from his “friend's” foot. Destiny merely smirked, as the two siblings looked at one another and then up at Charon, who shook with a silent contempt, helpless to do anything anymore.

 

“This is perfect, sister,” Fate nearly chortled, placing his hands behind his back and staring into the dark void, as if he were watching Link float back home. “The first failure taking out the last who's taking out the first—it's beautiful, really, like a snake eating itself.”

 

Destiny nodded, adding, “Brother, do you think perhaps they've multiplied to such a degree that even he can't stop them?”

 

The male deity, dressed in his black tunic, with his black hair and black eyes both gleaming, smiled. “Doubtful, but we'll move dimensions to be safe. As for Link, I think he'll manage. After all, his stock is half … death, right, Charon?”

 

Charon wanted very much to hit Fate in the mouth. He couldn't, though. The manipulative little insect had bound him, made him say that Link was Fate's, and knowing full well that wasn't the truth. Charon had been there when Esmerelda made the declaration, just like Fate planned. He was the one who lost part of his being to the entity, the child that was now a man who had left him in that void, growing within that woman's womb. This was Fate's trump card, though. Link may control his face and even his mind, but the fluctuations in reality that he gave off when he was in turmoil were like candles in a dark room—and Link glowed like the hottest of suns in that regard.

 

If this battle went too far in either direction, Fate would sit that in Link's lap to ruin his mind state: “Charon's actually your co-progenitor. And to think, he's lied to you for so many years. For shame,” he could hear his “pal” saying. The worst part for Charon was that he was so close to telling Link, and then the head cramp … the sign that they'd started exercising total control … the bullshit tone that Fate projected through his mouth, all the while listening to that little fuck nearly burst with laughter as he spoke so affectionately.

 

“This is ridiculous,” Charon said through his clenched teeth. “Those things have gone through everyone placed before them, and now they've mutated so far beyond the scope of what they were—do you realize how close you are to losing everything if Link fails?” An appeal to the game, the sport of it all, was Charon's last hope to save his friend … his son, really. It wouldn't work. Charon knew it, and Fate knew what he'd say before he said it, but still—something had to be there to appeal to. “Destiny, talk some sense into him!”

 

“Don't bring her into this,” Fate snapped, frown receding into a cherub-like grin. “This is the fruition of perfection, Charon—no goddesses creating a line of abominations to usurp us, no mutant creations with the intellect of salt, and, best of all, no living abortions running through the system, threatening to throw it all into confusion behind mortal trifles. It's perfection, Charon … perfection. Just like I said in the beginning, the flaws will balance themselves out without us having to extend ourselves.” Fate laughed at him, but grew bitter, a sound of disappointment marring his next words: “But, then again, you were always so proactive— `We can't let them be destroyed!' `What about their souls?' `Waah, waah, waah!' And what do you have to show for it? You're a damn shell of your former self. No one even knows or even cares that you sacrificed yourself to those insignificant little monsters to let the rest of them escape. How fitting is it, then, to watch your child—no matter how fractured that truth is—go down a path that leads to the same worthless conclusion?”

 

The death god's hand popped, but it was an empty threat at this point. Fate still needed him in some regards, so the release of annihilation—body and soul death—was out of the question. Still, Charon used the last weapon at his disposal and said: “It's only a worthless conclusion because you never had the stomach for it. You dance around and play your games, but the truth is you're afraid. You wear that child's skin, because that's who you are—a scared little bo—” Charon gagged, lifting off the floor as amber light burned in the small boy's eyes.

 

“Do not forget who runs this situation,” Fate was quick to growl, voice more primal echo than voice. Destiny watched as an observer to this display, smoothing a few wrinkles on her dress to pass the time.

 

“For now,” Charon replied, a red light streaming from his sockets until his body dropped. It was taxing, but Fate's hold could be broken if the death god was braced for it. “Everyone dies, Fate. Even us.” And like that, Charon vanished from Link's void.

 

“Ugh, he used to be so much fun in the old days,” Fate grumbled, placing his hands on top of his head and staring into the nothingness. “I remember one of our first mortal worlds; he had this brilliant idea to make the mortals' skins come to life as entire new species. It was hilarious! They were all screaming and running and grunting and begging the gods for salvation when their skins started walking off their bodies—and now he's all—” His face hardened, as he abruptly stopped mid-sentence and disappeared.

 

Destiny shook her head and smirked, because, after all, watching them was something to do.

 

Back in the Hylian realm, Link sat in the shadows of his bedroom, avoiding the sunlight of the morning sun almost purposefully. His hands were bridged under his nose as he stared at the floor and formulated plans and outcomes, wondering just how what to do. He extended his left hand after a time, summoning a jar of marbles. Every marble was exactly the same—smooth, round, clear—except for three: a red, a black, and a green. The red marble sat near the top of the pile, while the green and black were situated in the middle, only separated by a few clear ones. The jar was the dimension and each marble a certain realm within the dimension. The red marble was their world, the gods' world—perched neatly atop everyone else, watching, plotting, and shitting downwards on everything else. The black was the old world—the place the gods forfeited to the Originals. Last was the green world, Link's world—Hyrule, home to his family and friends, and everything that he'd ever known.

 

This last marble was also cracked.

 

A tendril of the black marble's being seeped through the transparent realms, and drifted into Link's—touching it, feeling it, corrupting it. With ease, Link could move the realm Hyrule occupied to another location, essentially retreating before the battle. But—and that but was huge—his enemies held him at a disadvantage: if he moved his realm, would the stress cause the shell to break? This doubt was reflected by the green marble's shattering. It reformed, though, as Link continued to ponder. Taking into consideration that the cracks were stealing his strength and that wasn't a lie, was he powerful enough to make such a move? There had to be a reason Fate waited this long, Link realized, and that reason had to extend beyond a game.

 

What if the Originals sought power? What if that was what summoned them to a certain location and, as a collective, they moved their entire realm toward that power to destroy it? If they were as primitive as suggested, they could be like him in the first line, where he couldn't feel safe until everything that resembled his tormentors was dead. If Fate and Destiny had them in bondage and they escaped, wouldn't it make sense to want any trace of that wiped out? Better yet, wouldn't it make sense to kill anything that could put them back in that bondage, even go so far as to seek it out and destroy it? And if that was the case, if he was stronger than Fate and Destiny, wouldn't he be the highest priority for attack? But what if that wasn't it at all? What if Fate had to systematically nudge the two realms closer together over this entire duration to avoid detection? How could he nudge back?

 

“I don't know,” Link whispered, staring at the jar as though it had wronged him somehow. “Questions, if this, what if that, wouldn't that—all this bullshit rhetoric and not one concrete answer to any of it!” Somewhere, Link imagined, Fate was laughing at him. Of course, the joke ran two ways. If Link didn't know for certain anything else, he did have one piece of solid intelligence: Fate wanted his body … not like that, but still—Link had value. To orchestrate his bodysnatching must've meant that there was something of worth in said body that was worth saving. Thus, Link reexamined his situation in more mortal terms. If two kings leading two armies want control of a single hill and one king has a bigger army, what happens to the hill? Link pondered thoughtfully. If one army reaches the summit first and can't hold off the other, be it that this army is too small to properly defend it or be it that the army is too large and thus too immobile once atop it to fight back, the best action would be to … “Destroy it.”

 

Link smiled. Even if he was dealing with the foundation of known life, the tactic was basic: if you have something of value in a war that you can't make use of and your enemy can, destroy it so they can't use it against you. Of course, Link's other enemy was supposed to be mindless, so how would they even formulate a plan like that? Given what he did know, Link had no choice but to focus on the constant: himself. If he did this or that and had to deal with this or that consequence, the one point of importance should always be the knowledge that one enemy thought him valuable enough to capture alive, sort of. So, whatever that asset was, it had to be something that could be a detriment to either side—and that meant that the snake eating its tail wasn't exactly the right way to put it.

 

Link was now the hill.

 

“After all, why is the hill so important?” Link mused aloud, knowing full well that he could be heard if someone so wanted to listen. “Answer: Because if the hill ever became sentient, it could destroy either king's army—” he smiled as the jar was crushed in his hand and the pocket dimension that he'd created for he and Charon ceased to be— “or both.”

 

And with that settled, Link's elation returned to somber reality, as now he had to go and find his son to see just how badly he'd fucked that relationship up.