Legend Of Zelda Fan Fiction ❯ Who By Fire ❯ Courage ( Chapter 2 )

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." - Mark Twain

She had tried to escape, once.

Three days after her capture, she waited until he was gone. She was weak and dizzy, but everything in
her said move, run, escape, anywhere. This thought possessed every movement Zelda made. This was wrong, all of it, and it didn't matter why, it only mattered that she escape.

She soon discovered the impossibility of it.

The hallways would go on forever. The doors would open only to other rooms, endless
rooms, so many she lost count. There were no stairwells. The windows would not break. No matter how far she ran, or how many doors she opened, she was only met with failure.

Now, Zelda looks out the window of her bedroom, the only place where she can escape anything in this castle without entry or exit. Her hands are shoved beneath her armpits, fingertips grazing the sharp edges of her shoulder blades.

She wishes she had wings, but doubts even flight will aid her.

"You're certainly not what I anticipated."

Zelda sits and trembles, despite the ungodly heat she's surrounded in.

She doesn't know what to call him, this man-hybrid kneeling before her, with skin like storm clouds and a smile full of fangs.

And, blankly, she wonders how he can stand this heat, swathed in a heavy crimson mantle.

He stares at her, as if expecting a rebuttal to his thinly-veiled insult.

Zelda has found her voice has fled.

He tips his head at a strange angle to better observe her. She wants to call what curls his sallow lips a grin, yet it isn't, not one she's ever seen. This man – this thing, she can't call him a man – kneels gracefully, balancing on his toes without effort, like a child studying an insect.

Her heart thunder-claps beneath her breastbone, so hard it clangs all through her body. She wants to fight, but knows the uselessness of it.

He moves toward her, and she twists away, wincing as the chain around her ankle chafes against her skin.

His grin wavers. There is nothing in his eyes when he speaks. "Oh, my, it seems they injured you in bringing you here. How clumsy of them. I sometimes forget how easy you humans bleed, you must forgive me."

He's reaching toward her, and every pale inch of her shudders in repulsion, as he swipes one gloved fingertip along her bloodied ankle. He smears it between his fingers, as if testing the texture of some fine drink against his tongue. What fills his long, colorless face has only been seen in her nightmares.

Zelda's eyes follow him as he stands, lifting one hand towards her, glowing with some unnameable
power. She curls into herself and hopes whatever death he has planned will be quick.

The chains around her are shattered. She's free.

And in the same moment, a prisoner once more.

She wants to vomit as he grips her arm, pulling her up with him, legs barely able to carry her own
weight. He leans his head close to her own, and Zelda realizes, with horror, that his breath is like hoarfrost, with less warmth than winter.

"This is how it's going to be," he declares, "you will come with me, and you'll be a very good human for me, understand? No kicking or screaming. No begging, though I imagine you'd be so very pretty if you did. No resistance. No trouble. Am I clear?"

Her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth. She nods.

He doesn't smile, only lifts one hand to snap his fingers.

Then, she's standing in a blank white room, and he is gone.

Link winces as his blade cleaves through the skull of a Bokoblin, a wide arc of blood spraying everywhere.

The pig-creature reels back, collapsing, before disappearing into a miasma of violet smoke. This strange act of dying (could it be called death, he wonders?) no longer surprises him as it did at the beginning, after the first one he'd killed did the same.

It doesn't surprise him that they all vanish into whatever plane they do after he kills them, because he's killed dozens of them by now.

It doesn't surprise him, because this place called The Surface is unlike anything he could have ever dreamed up, not even in a nightmare.

He wipes the blade on a cloth retrieved from the pouch at his waist, before sheathing his sword once more. He can feel Fi's aura beat reassuringly against the graze of his fingers as he lets go of the hilt.

He's too weary even to smile, lips peeled of their moisture, red and aching.

This place – what does Fi call it – this desert, this place full of sand and dry, brittle heat that sucks the air from his lungs is bigger than anything he's seen. Not as big as the sky, but very close. It seems for every two steps he takes, there are five more ahead of him.

There is sand in places of his body Link doesn't want to think about.

The sunlight is getting thinner, night will swoop down upon him soon, and what Link would give to be in his own bed, in his own home, with the comfort of knowing all is right in the world. What he would give to go back to the Link stuck in Skyloft, spending his days in laziness and reverie.

He knows he can't go back, wouldn't go back even if he could, because Zelda is in danger, and he would give anything, and even more, to keep her from it.

Her memory is the only thing that comforts him now, when he can't sleep because his dreams are full of slathering monsters or crazy, half-mad Demon Lords after his head.

Link squints into the distance, one hand pushed beneath his bangs to shade his eyes, gazing at the massive sculpture of some ancient relic from ages past. He knows that symbol, knows it like it's part of his being. It draws him in, with the copper-gold sunlight shining behind it, as if imbuing it with some ancient godly power.

The sun will be gone soon, Link knows, so he finds a secluded crag in a rocky wall to hide in, to hope that, tonight, he'll dream of her.

How amusing this boy is.

Ghirahim watches from a high cliff overlooking the desert valley, too far for human eyes to see. He watches this boy, this child, even, brave the desert thousands of other humans had perished in long before the boy's time.

Ghirahim folds his arms across his chest, pushing his weight to one leg, unflinching as a gust of wind bellows against his back, sweeping his cloak with it. He takes his eyes away from the boy to glance at the temple across the desert, impatience and longing burning up within him. There's no point in going to the temple now, as The Gate of Time there isn't activated, not yet. As powerful as Ghirahim is, he knows only those blessed by the Goddess can activate the Gate.

His eyes turn back to Link, a tiny, infinitesimal spot on the ground, no bigger than a bug beneath his foot. The boy vanquishes another one of his monsters, blade flashing (that beautiful, beautiful blade, one he doesn't deserve to wield) as he rives it through the creature's head.

Ghirahim smiles.

"You're getting used to killing now, aren't you, Skychild?"

Closing his eyes, he brushes a few fingers against his pointed chin, contemplative, other arm tucked against his chest. He speaks to the boy, though he can't hear it down below.

"How amusing, to think that you are, unwittingly, aiding me in my own quest. How amusing indeed. If only you knew, boy, that I have what you're looking for. That would light a fire in you, I'm certain. Keep killing. That softness doesn't suit you."

He stays a moment longer, then disappears.

The smell is terrible.

Impa scrubs her fingernails into her arms, kneeling on the floor of the Sealed Grounds, having passed through the Gate of Time and into ages past.

The smell of darkness lingers on her like some mephitic smoke, burning behind her eyeballs and stinging her throat. She's never known darkness this thick, this tangible, not in all her years of guarding the Sealed Grounds, waiting for the Goddess' return.

That boy, and more importantly, herself, had been too slow to rescue Zelda after her capture in the Earth Temple.

Impa cracks her knuckles against the stones beneath her, ignoring the pain, even as she feels the fine bones in her hands splinter with the impact.

"Perhaps Her Grace was wrong in appointing me this task," she says, seething with shame. Her long, lean body trembles with it, a self-loathing she's never felt, loathing she knows is deserved. Guiding the Goddess Reborn was her only task, and she has failed.

A Sheikah is not used to failure.

They – Her Grace, and the Demon Lord – had vanished only seconds before Impa's arrival, but those few seconds were time enough. She knew it was him from the smell, the inky miasma of darkness he was so heavily lathed in, which clung to the air after his departure.

There was no using staying in the present, so she fled, so much like a coward, back to the Temple of Time and through the Gate, knowing the risks of activating it when he still had Her Grace. Even a mighty Sheikah knows when to retreat.

Impa lifts her golden head to the sunlight glistening in, warming her face and the bareness of her shoulders. Her thin, sculpted lips part to take in a long, shivery breath of that sunlight, the citrus-bubble of holy power.

"Oh, Goddess," she pleads, "what will I tell the boy?"