To any who still care: here you go. The delay in releasing this has been so huge that it is almost enough to embarrass me into explaining what caused it. Almost. Indeed, the truth is so horribly banal that most probably wouldn’t believe me, and I frankly don’t care enough to make up a believable lie. So, a mystery it shall remain.

After a previous shameful hiatus, I recommended readers go over the past chapter to get their bearings on what all was going on in the story recently. This time… not so much. While I enjoyed the last chapter enormously, self-reflection and the astute observations of several readers have illuminated to me a certain lack of consistency between that chapter and all previous installments. I’m not sorry, because taking off in that new direction was the only way to keep the story interesting enough for me, personally, to ensure this project made it past serialized iteration number twenty, much less twenty-two or more. Also, much as that chapter needed action to hold my interest, this one needed comic relief. Still, its much closer to the original tone, so there should be fewer complaints.

In any case, yet again, I cannot stress enough that I do intend to finish this project. I have such ideas for cool scenes, and I’ve put so much work into it already, that to leave it hanging would bug me to the end of my days. That said, filling in the narrative void between the scenes I ache to produce is a chore of unparalleled tedium. In my rough outline of the remainder of the story, I have about ten chapters still to produce, and even this represents a dizzying narrative pace compared to the earlier part of the story. This in mind, I will make every reasonable effort to get a better update schedule in order. I have absolutely no interest in stretching this project out another half-decade. Hell, by then, Nintendo might actually release a new Zelda franchise benchmark game and render this story obsolete with new cannon material. So yeah, more updates, quicker pace, and a finished story. For sure.

(My chapter numbering system is entirely meaningless, it is so distorted now. I wouldn’t bother with the headings but for habit. Book 2… Book 3… who cares? It’s all posted in the same place)

The Golden Power, Book Two

Chapter 8: Strange Fate

Hyrule Castle Town, The Royal Hylian Arms Hotel, Royal Suite

Zelda came awake suddenly, staggered by the uncomfortable sensation of life returning to her body in a gradual crawl. A wave of sensation spread out from her heart until it reached the tips of her arms and legs, and only then was she able to slump backward into her plush desk chair. She was back in front of her desk, an array of guards and palace advisors gathered around in confused and muttering clumps, their horrified attention universally upon her. For a moment, there was nothing where her memory of recent events should be, but that ended with a sudden and overpowering sense of unease. Directionless fear crept into her chest, bringing with it vague memories of Link and someone she didn’t know, along with a place that she couldn’t picture now that she thought of it. The sensation was infuriating, just like trying to grasp the fading memories of an especially vivid dream.

“What are you all doing in here?” Zelda asked, trying to shake the haze of inexplicable discomfort from her thoughts. At her words, everyone jumped like she’d snarled at them, and this brought the Princess’ attention more fully back to the moment. Something was definitely wrong.

“Is—is that you, Your Majesty?” asked a young serving girl from her hiding place behind two armed guards that were caught trying to decide whether or not to level their weapons in Zelda’s direction. This last particularly disturbed the young monarch, who stood up and slapped both hands down on her desk. The noise made the room jump again.

“Holy Din! Is it me? Really? Honestly, who else would it be?” Everyone in the room retreated a few steps, and Zelda immediately regretted shouting. Something was absolutely, definitely wrong here. Mind still in a fog, Zelda would not have time to discover what was bothering everyone before she was interrupted.

Zelda never saw it coming herself, but anyone who had been watching the space between her and her huge balcony windows, and could also slow down time, would have noticed a fractional-second of motion before her whole body lit up like a bonfire. Something entered her and fused with her body, and now everyone still watching either fled or fell to their knees and prostrated themselves in the face of the hot force pouring out of Zelda.

And then, just as suddenly as it began, the light dissipated, and Zelda toppled back into her chair. Immediately, everyone crowding at the door froze, coming to a standstill and then filing back into Zelda’s chamber in an orderly reshuffling. Those cowering or praying on the floor also gathered themselves, and soon all the bystanders were arranged in neat rows. Their faces were universally slack and their eyes were clouded with a sparkling golden haze.

“Please awaken,” Zelda heard, as the daze cleared abruptly and she found herself perfectly lucid again.

“Who was that?” the princess asked, and then noticed the rows of dazed retainers arranged so eerily before her, “what’s going on here?”

“Do not concern yourself, darling, we are merely rearranging their memories to something more convenient to our interests,” another voice, and yet somehow the same voice, said.

“It is entirely premature for rumors of our power to reach untrustworthy ears,” said the first, now quite familiar-sounding female.

Two sets of hands came in from either side to gently touch Zelda on each shoulder, and she jumped with fright. She quickly glanced to her left, and her body went rigid in shock at what she saw. Almost as an afterthought, she glanced to her right, too, and now her long hair fought to stand up on end. The young woman went white as her skirts as she stumbled back into her chair yet again. It was now obvious to her why the voices were so familiar.

“We must act quickly to cover this incident,” the perfect, identical clone of Zelda that stood on the original’s left reminded them all.

“Don’t forget about Ashei and Auru,” the perfect, identical clone of Zelda that stood on the original’s right chimed in. “They’re probably trying to manage some crowd control after our unexpected and public ‘episode.’”

“I will draw them here. It is better to take care of these things all in one cohesive ‘sweep.’”

“Agreed. Now, about the cover story we should implant to replace the missing hours…”

The two clones spoke over Zelda’s head as a tick crept into her cheek and her long, slender ears twitched uncontrollably. It was not until this instant that she realized that her mind was totally alone inside her skull… the other two ‘cycles,’ were completely absent.

A Grassy Knoll

Link awoke, or rather, ‘became aware’ to find himself in a place he had never seen before. It was not a threatening place by any means—the sky was blue and placid, the green, Hylian grass extended in an endless, verdant meadow unto the horizon, and it was warm. He was wearing his most comfortable work cloths and a huge, wide-brimmed straw hat, poised in perfect repose under the shade of an apple tree, more at peace than at any time in living memory. Still, there was a strangeness to it all, a dream-like quality that refused to stop nagging at him, until at last he had to release his idyllic relaxation and concentrate to figure out what it was. That was when he noticed the gargantuan wolf sitting regally erect only inches to his right.

“I remember you,” Link said, rather stupidly, because he did. “You were there… in that place.” Memories came flooding back to him—a desperate battle, death galore, and agonizing, crushing defeat. Surrounded by perfect serenity, the torment leached slowly from his heart, until he was left calm, empty, and merely miserable.

Eventually, he could no longer cling to his pain, and sat up to look out at the impossible beauty around him, shaking his head at the sight of it. “Goddesses… not another crazy landscape.” Although he was sick and tired of the strangeness in his life, Link could not come to be truly frustrated at his new predicament. He really did like it here—so much that it was actually inexplicable. “Where am I now?” he sighed, resigned to this situation already.

The wolf responded immediately, springing up and trotting down the hill, only to turn and face back up at Link. It was terrifically huge for a wolf, close to as tall at the shoulder as Link himself, and nine feet from nose to tail, at least. It seemed to draw Link’s attention almost magnetically, until at last Link noticed the glowing golden triangles glowing in the dark eternity of its eyes. Much of Link’s calm goodwill evaporated despite his delightful environs, and he deflated into a morose fit almost instantly.

“Just what I need…” Link muttered, “the Goddesses pester me, even in this paradise. Where are we, anyway?” He addressed the great beast, “If I can impose upon the divine to explain itself for FREAKING ONCE IN MY LIFE!”

That outburst caught Link himself off guard, and he clapped his mouth shut. As calm as he now was, a well of bitterness was lurking in the background, already poisoning what it could not overwhelm. As he brooded, the wolf whined to gain his attention, and when he glanced up at the sound, his eyes were once again captivated by the wolf’s emblazoned features. Suddenly, Link was not facing a strange spirit-animal, but a strange spirit-person, shaped like an animal. The effect of the sudden conceptual connection was so strong that Link didn’t even blink when the wolf began to speak. It might have helped that this was far from Link’s first talking wolf-shaped spirit guide.

You ask where you are, and the answer is: you are home, duh. I figured that much, at least, was obvious. The thoughts came to Link, but not as a thought being spoken to his mind the way Arrika managed, but as a feeling that bubbled up from the depths of Link’s emotional core. The wolf was, for lack of a more precise term, speaking to his soul.

“Home?” Link asked, and once again, bitterness wrenched forth from his heart, “I left my only home behind. I left before all of this,” he waved vaguely at the countryside, but he meant something else entirely, “could find me there, as it found me in Ghent, and found me in Romali. This is probably the only good choice I’ve managed to make lately. At least while I’m out here being put through fate’s grinder, everyone back home is safe from the ‘blast radius.’”

The wolf barked sharply, jarring Link back to attention, and once again the words were like feelings floating up from somewhere in his stomach to collide gently with his brain.

Pull yourself together, said the wolf. You’re a disgrace. You were chosen for this duty. Act like it.

‘Chosen,’ it said. That was all, as though that simple word explained it all. It epitomized everything about his mad existence that drove Link to distraction. ‘Fate,’ ‘The Hand of the Goddesses,’ whatever one called it, it swirled around him like a tide he could never hope to tread against. For almost a year, a mad, nightmarish year of horror and heartbreak and agony, he had been a plaything of forces he couldn’t conceive of, much less comprehend.

What was more, he’d enjoyed it. That little voice in his heart sang with joy to feel the thrill of battle, the supreme ecstasy of wading into a crowd of monsters and laying about with a blade. The feeling that came over him when he confronted something huge and terrifying defied description, and was so extreme as to cause him to thirst for it during the long droughts between gargantuan opponents. It was rather absurd really, and it never seemed more clearly outrageous to him than it did as he boggled at the wolf’s upsettingly brief condemnation.

“I was chosen,” Link repeated, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “That’s all anyone will ever tell me.” He thought about that a moment longer, and amended, “Everyone but Arrika, anyway. What is it about you inhuman spiritual entities that makes you think you can rule our lives, dictate our fates? We’re not pieces to be maneuvered against your enemies. Why can’t this battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ stay out of our world? Look at what happened to Romali! In a single night, all human affairs were wiped away, destroyed as though they never existed at all!”

Suck it up, the wolf threw his outrage right back in his face. Evil isn’t going to send an embroidered invitation in advance, asking you where would be most convenient for a brawl. Didn’t your friend with the fancy sword already explain this to you? You prevented an apocalyptic spiral! That damsel you’re suffering over was only one of thousands of casualties you didn’t manage to prevent, which pales compared to the tens of thousands you saved.

“But I didn’t save her!” Link spat, “I screwed up, and that kid paid my bill! I’m a loser and a murderer, and—“

Idiot! The wolf darted forward and bit Link on the wrist, chomping down and sending a bolt of agony up his arm. Link screamed in pain, and a blast of wind shot across the landscape, sending the grasses and tree into a violent dance. Link threw a quick left cross at the wolf’s muzzle, but his hand passed right through it. He tried an overhand blow next, but had even less luck, tumbling down the side of the grassy hill with the beast’s needle-teeth scraping his wrist bones. He landed on a pile of weeds with the wolf on top of him, his whole arm on fire from the pain.

“ARHG! Stop! Let go! What do you want from me?” Link pleaded, although it came out more like a threat, the murderous intent in his eyes clear to see.

I want you to wake up! The wolf growled viciously and ground its teeth as the words sizzled in Link’s chest. So you lost one, so what? Is this pathetic little bitch all that remains of an unmatched warrior after a single defeat?

“I should have done something! I had a duty to protect her, and instead, I killed her!”

Are you still moaning about that? The wolf thrashed its muzzle back and forth, dragging Link’s arm around through an agonizing dance that seemed to draw sympathetic motions from the grass around them as the gale winds blew ever fiercer. If you insist on throwing a fit, can’t you at least lose it over your original, unbelievable, spectacular failure? You know, that one you made all on your own, without any gods or demons to share the blame? Things could have been very different today…

“NO!” Link’s eyes went wide and his body fell limp, pain still blazed through him, but his expression slackened.

Yes. There was no sympathy in the wolf’s tone, but it slackened its bone-crushing grip on his forearm ever so slightly. I knew you couldn’t fail to realize it. You have a talent for lying to yourself, especially for lying to yourself, about yourself. It’s really annoying.

“It’s not—“ Link tried to voice a protest, then realized he could find none. What he had been experiencing so far was little more than a petulant guilt, anger at the outside forces that had destroyed his life, thousands of lives—more, through the ages. “Farore forgive me…” was all he was able to muster, when the true magnitude of his failure finally settled in. He marinated in a bleak pit for several minutes before he finally croaked out his testament.

“I should have controlled the power. I mean, I should have learned to control it.” Without changing his tone, he managed to express an ocean of blame with those words, all focused upon himself. “It’s the Triforce, for crying out loud, it could have saved her from ten demon lords! But… I never even tried—hell, I’ve been trying my level best to pretend it didn’t exist! I couldn’t handle it, and instead, it handled me. Leeta died because I was too weak. Because I didn’t want to be a freak.”

Link said nothing else after that. He seemed to fade into a mild catatonia, despite a vigorous new session of grinding and thrashing from the very annoyed wolf. When it realized its first gambit had been totally counter-productive, the phantom changed its tactics.

So that’s it? The wolf released Link’s arm, and the pain and windstorm died in the same instant. Link the great warrior is done for—and why? Because he got in over his head one time? Because for once, luck and allies couldn’t cover for his weakness? Link came back to his senses just in time to notice the beast glowering at him with a very human expression of utter disgust. You make me sick. I don’t even know you.

“How could you know me?” Link muttered, turning away as the wolf stepped off of him and flounced away in a huff. “How could you even begin to understand what I’m going through?”

How? The wolf turned back, snarling. You mean you haven’t figured it out yet? Goddesses, you are hopeless. Maybe this will help.

In an instant, the phantom wolf was instead a phantom man. Link responded to his challenge by turning back his way, just in time to find the other standing above him. He was startled, but only for a moment.

“You’re not a messenger from the gods, or the lingering soul of a long-dead knight,” Link admitted, banging his head gently on the grass mounds beneath him to punish his own stupidity.

Nope. The man had the decency not to rub it in, not even with a dirty look. He was too busy being viciously disappointed to bother with a snide expression, anyway.

“I guess I always knew you and I would meet like this,” Link sighed, sitting up. When he was on his feet again, standing next to the man who had been a wolf, it was impossible to doubt the truth. Link was standing next to a perfect, phantom copy of himself. “Triforce of Courage.”

What? The phantom’s glower deepened, at which point he hauled of and decked Link with a straight right that flipped him head over heels and back onto his bum again. The stunned farmhand wobbled a time or two and then flopped flat on his back.

“I… uh… got it wrong… huh?” Link groaned.

You got it wrong, the phantom replied.

“But, the triforce, in your eyes… I thought…”

Have you checked your own eyes lately? When Link only groaned and deflated into a deeper slump, the phantom rolled his eyes, triforce symbols and all, and then started to scoff.

Little Link, always so eager to blame the other. You could never accept that I was truly a part of you. A sparkly bit of magic geometry didn’t make me inside you, it just gave me a voice. Of course, you helped out a whole ton by always insisting that I was a foreigner.

“The voice…” Link finally realized, “the little, vicious one…?”

That’s me! The phantom seemed delighted that he was finally recognized, or rather, that’s you. The fact that you consider us separate represents some deep-seated problems on your part. Just think about how you feel in battle, while we’re one and the same, and you will know your true self.

“I… don’t…” Link’s protest died on his lips. For some time, he lay in the grass of ‘home,’ this place that soothed his heartache like nothing else, and considered all he’d done since he’d first identified that voice. Always it exhorted him to travel the world, seek out adventure, and battle for the sheer, untainted joy of it all. The greater the danger, the more powerful the voice, the more urgent his need for the thrill of combat, and the greater his ecstasy. It was what allowed him to kill, to delight in the feral grip of life-and-death struggle, and to accept the cold, grisly efficiency of the ambuscade without hesitation. He didn’t like that it was true, at times he even hated it. Unfortunately, the phantom seemed ready to beat the denial out of him, so, resigned, he tried at last to let it go.

Link offered the phantom his hand from the ground, taking it entirely off guard. After a moment of cautious consideration, Link was hefted to his feet, and the twins stood inches apart once more.

“Maybe… you are a real part of who I am,” Link said, making his first concession. “Triforce or no, maybe I’m a combat junkie, and adventure addict. A… killer. According to everyone who would know, I was born different, predisposed to being the warrior of the century, or something like that. I suppose… I can’t simply ignore you.”

Really? The phantom suddenly seemed even less distinct than before, fading away before Link’s eyes. Does this mean you’re ready to listen?

“Go ahead, what have I got to lose? Maybe you have an insight that I’ve been afraid to face. Let’s just hope that my acknowledging this conversation doesn’t mean that I’ve finally gone off the deep-end.”

Lots of people talk to themselves, the phantom replied, now forget about that. I need to ask you a few simple questions. Hopefully, they’ll show you that its time for you to stop wallowing in your disgrace and face facts. I think the fact that I’m here at all means, somewhere inside, you know it is time.

“Right. So, shoot… I guess.”

What did you learn from that battle? As soon as he asked the question, the phantom drew back its fist and wound its wrist menacingly. Link had opened his mouth to say something self-pitying by reflex, but now snapped it shut. The fist lowered, and Link decided to actually give the question a bit of thought.

“Well, I learned not to trust the gods,” Link eventually answered. Feeling a little less sure of himself, he added, “Also, it’s better to keep the demons from ever being summoned in the first place.”

Anything else?

“Yeah,” Link suddenly found his muddy boots quite interesting, “I’m not the meanest thing that ever walked under the stars.”

Good lessons, right? The phantom slapped Link on the shoulder, getting him to buck up a little. Rusl always said: a man learns more from a single defeat than from a hundred victories. At least, back when he could still whoop us with practice swords, he said it all the time.

“I always thought he was just trying to cheer me up, keep me from quitting. A month later, I could take him in two out of five bouts.”

Anyway, take the lessons to heart. Don’t let what was lost here be in vain. Now you know you can’t trust the gods to save lives. They don’t care about you and me, or any other human, as long as they can keep the world running. I think we’ve been wrong to assume they’re maneuvering us around to protect people. It’s beginning to look like they only care about the big picture.

“If you twist up your thoughts just right, stare at it cock-eyed, you can almost see some justification in it.” Link sighed, and then spat into the tall grass. “Preserve the world first. Otherwise, what’s the point in having people to live there?”

Preserve existence, the phantom agreed, defend life, promote justice. Sounds like something a philosopher would come up with. Treating people like pawns to be disposed of without a second thought. Makes you want to go build a temple to their glory, doesn’t it?

“Oh? Is that the priority list?” Link matched his phantom’s bitter smile. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Who cares if a few lives, or a few hundred lives, are chewed up by their manipulations if it means the sun will rise tomorrow?” Link thought of Leeta, who could have been saved with a word if the gods had cared. Or if he could have been bothered to learn his own powers, instead of hiding from them. Then he thought of Arrika, who had been bound in servitude for an amount of time that defied imagining. Had there really been no other course to reach the same result, or was it a matter of efficiency, where lives were traded for time and energy? There was no way to know the answer, but he knew what he felt was true, and slowly, so slowly that he didn’t even notice, the bitterness in his heart found a new target. “They could at least have had the decency to ask for volunteers.”

The phantom considered Link with a bemused expression. It grinned, and then actually began to laugh in a sudden explosion of noise. Link found himself smiling despite himself, and then he was laughing along with it. The field reverberated with their mirth for a full minute.

The choice, the phantom eventually said, is either servitude, or the end of all we hold dear. Who could fail to volunteer?

“Ha!” Link punctuated his own amusement. “And that’s how the goddesses make a man their slave. ‘Abandon your happiness and march through horror, or you’ll lose it all anyway.’ As if having no choice in the matter is supposed to make me less ticked off…”

Enough, the phantom caught Link’s attention again, there’s one more question. Tell me Link, what do you want to do now?

“Easy,” Link said immediately, because it was. “I want to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. No more failures.”

But do you know how to achieve that?

“I… I need more power. I need to become good enough to make up for the work the gods can’t be bothered with. There shouldn’t have to be victims, just to keep our world running.”

So… what will be your route to power? OUR route to power?

This time Link did pause. How many men had contemplated that question? How many of those had wanted to protect something, or possessed similarly benign intentions? How many of them wound up like Zant, or Gannondorf, or even Duke Orlouge or that Troll Queen? He had never wanted to be in this position, had fought to avoid facing this very question for so long now, it seemed he’d been doing nothing else for months. Guilt stabbed at him anew—if he had faced this sooner, would he have been ready for that demon? Would Leeta be alive right now if he hadn’t been running from this with all his might?

“The Triforce,” Link eventually managed to reply. He looked at his hand, and found it to be unremarkable in this dreamy wonderland. To look at it now, it was just a calloused paw belonging to a muscle-bound farmhand. “I need to learn how to use the Triforce. I mean, really use it.”

The phantom only nodded. It was so indistinct now, it was little more than an outline with an intense grin.

“And…” this time Link sighed extra deeply, “Arrika and her sisters. They need me, and I need them. I was going to help her anyway, now I get to feel like a liar for having a personal motive behind the quest.”

Its not like her motives are as pure as the driven snow, the voice bubbling in Link’s guts was now more of a gentle, tickling sensation. Don’t let them use us without exacting due compensation.

The phantom was almost gone. Link decided there was one last thing to say, and preferred his hand in peace once again. The phantom took it without hesitation this time.

“Maybe you aren’t a total nuisance. I’ll try not to disregard you out of hand, vicious one.”

Maybe you aren’t a total pussy. Just remember not to take shit from anybody, alright?

The phantom was practically no more, hand still clasped to Link’s. The urge to have the final word was overwhelming, and so Link stopped trying to resist it.

“Don’t think this means I’m going to start stabbing every beefy stranger who looks at me cross-eyed.”

Don’t think this means you’ll stop wanting to. And the phantom was gone.

Some time passed, and Link spent it enjoying the perfection of ‘home’ and examining his feelings. He was still hurting, but he had a path now. The bitterness no longer eclipsed his entire future, and the urge to crawl into a gutter and die was gone. Still, the future he now faced filled him with nothing less than dread. When he realized this, he actually felt genuinely better.

Somehow, the fact that he could fear something mundane like the call to power was the most comforting realization he’d had in ages. Whether unfocused psychological aversion was a blind spot in the Triforce of Courage, or some kind of anti-megalomania fail-safe, he’d been afraid of the power all along, so much so that it had controlled his behavior. He’d never wanted it, still didn’t want it, and wasn’t looking forward to searching for it. As far as he was concerned, that was how it should be. The day when he lusted for power over the lives of others, when he considered it not a grotesque responsibility, but his proper due, was the day that he would slit his own throat. If the Goddesses were willing, he’d still feel this way if, or when, that day actually arrived.

For a moment, Link wondered how he was supposed to escape this wonderful place and get back into the stink of reality. Then he noticed a storm brewing on the horizon. He set his course without a second thought.

The Eastern Steppes, Beyond the Gerudo Desert

Aziza came back to life quietly, experiencing much the same discomfort as Zelda. She was alone in the tent she normally shared with her twin sister Nebure and her lover Jamal, and she spent a few moments breathing heavily and scrambling for a grip on her sanity before the power legacy from the demon came to her and interrupted her solitude. When she digested that, at last, she managed to stagger forward to the tent flap and collapse halfway into the brilliant wasteland sunlight. She barely whispered a plaintive cry of distress before Jamal appeared at her side, tears of relief washing his perfectly smooth and sculpted features.

“Aziza! We thought—never mind, we didn’t know what to think! Are you alright? Do you know what happened?”

“Nebure?” Aziza croaked. Her whole body felt pummeled and wrung out, as though she had just spent every drop of magic in her body, and then run a marathon. Or, perhaps, it was like she had just been used as a power source for a major, earth-shifting, demon-banishing manifestation of divine powers.

“She went out to look for medicinal herbs, something about ‘a concoction to call your essence back to its cipher,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Listen, what happened? I was afraid… I… don’t do that again, alright?”

“West,” Aziza mumbled, slipping away from consciousness, “answers are in the West.” Then she was gone again, vanishing into the inky black of dreamless sleep.

Hyrule Castle Town, The Royal Hylian Arms Hotel, Royal Suite

“Hold it!” Zelda jumped out of her comfortable chair and slammed her hands on her desk in almost a perfect repeat of the gesture she’d used earlier on her subordinates. If she’d been a little less freaked out, she might have noticed the deja vou moment. As it was, she spun around and moved a hand to each of her mirror-image duplicates and tried to grab them by the scruffs of their copy official gowns. Her hands passed through them like they were empty air, sending her tumbling off balance, at which point she tripped over her chair, flipped head-over-heels, and planted her face on the thick, soft carpeting with an embarrassing thud.

Above her, for a moment, the two clones actually did stop. They stared down at the heap of her, skirt tangled up around her hips and bestockinged legs flailing hopelessly for balance, and failed to show the smallest shred of concern. A moment later, they went back to planning their effort to ‘reprogram’ the servants, adding in theories about applying the same process for a mass hypnosis of the entire Hylian population.

Zelda fumbled and tumbled for half a minute to recover her modesty and rub the ache from the lump on her forehead, a process that involved completing an ungainly flip after detaching the part of her gown that had caught on her desk chair. Most people, after being shocked, embarrassed, and injured, would experience a flare of temper, possibly even an outburst. Zelda came up ice cold, eyes diamond hard and jaw set to an onerous jutting angle.

“You will cease and desist,” Zelda growled, stepping around her desk to be closer to the familiar pair, unconsciously standing in place to form a perfect triangle among them. “If I am, as I suspect, experiencing some form of psychotic episode, that matter will have to be settled before my powers are used in any way.”

The other two Zeldas said nothing at first, merely staring at the original like she’d sprouted a second head. They glanced at one another, then back at Zelda, until finally the one on her left gave her a patronizing smile.

“Are you honestly going to stand there and try to claim that this is anything less than exactly what you want?” This first copy possessed an arrogant bearing that Zelda recognized immediately as the one she used to intimidate courtiers. Haughty and confident, she was an image to total supremacy, a personification of royalty in its most cliché form.

“This is the most efficient course,” the other copy spoke curtly, without inflection. It stood with perfect posture, too-stiff and with an expression like ice, ready to chill the sensation out of anything her gaze fell upon. “The situation calls for rapid action to diffuse an uncontrollable release of sensitive information. Even now, rumors abound from the mediocre suppression of the ‘May Incident.’ Another such leak to the public could result in irreparable damage to our reputation, initiating a cascading decline in all future—“

“What the stiff is getting at,” the first clone cut in, tossing the second a dirty look, “Is that, well, we know what’s best. We’re the smartest person around. Telling these people what to think is the biggest favor anyone will ever do for them. Besides, we’re their supreme autocratic leader, anyway. This will just be… ‘taking out the middleman,’ so to speak.”

“Oh this is just charming,” Zelda staggered back a step as the sheer absurdity of what she was witnessing hit her all at once. Only now did she begin to feel angry. Honestly, it was embarrassing to imagine that this was somehow a product of her own mind. “As much as it would entertain me to humor this delusional fantasy and the ham-handed attempt to represent whatever inner turmoil I may have faced recently, I honestly haven’t got the patience.”

“Sister, you’re not getting a choice here—“

“Don’t interrupt me!” Zelda snarled, and the haughty copy locked up, so stiff she could have been frozen in time, except her eyes, which bulged with outrage. The other copy’s icy visage cracked long enough to let a flash of fear shine through.

“I’m not entirely certain what just happened to me, or how exactly it relates to what I am experiencing now. What I know with absolute certainty,” Zelda paused for effect, “is that I will not have my powers running wild and endangering the people of Hyrule. There will be no application of any ability I possess that is not fully reviewed by my personal conscious will. I will not tolerate hallucinations—“

“Actually, we feel that we are more akin to imagined visions based on minor fragment split personalities derived from your subconscious desires,” the efficient copy interrupted, her precise nature overpowering her fear with deadly ease. Zelda waved a few fingers in a distracted motion, and now the efficient copy possessed a blank expanse of skin rather than a mouth. She started to panic in a bizarre, reserved manner, and Zelda continued.

“My mind is not a committee. I have the only vote. This nonsense ends now.”

The finality of her statement was astonishing, and both copies lost the luster of personality in their eyes the next instant. A glowing line shot out from Zelda’s forehead the next instant, spit into two, and perfectly pierced corresponding points on the foreheads of the two copies. Over the course of a few seconds, the two dissolved into smoke, which was sucked into the glowing line with vortex force. As they were absorbed, Zelda felt the other two cycles reassert their presence in her mind, growing from minute whispers to their full, spectacular power in mere moments. At last, she was alone in her own mind… all three of them.

With reasorbtion came an unexpected side-effect: reintegration. Zelda became aware of a sheaf of new memories, images of that very encounter from each copy’s point of view, only now it was herself in their positions, up to and including the point where she’d punished each one for insubordination. It was a weird feeling to have three different perspectives on the same minutes of her life, but it assured her at last that the odd, stunted little personalities had truly been erased.

All three cycles of her mind were once again hers to command, but included in her thoughts were all the ideas that the other two ‘Zeldas’ had devised while separate from her. There were quite a few more than she would have been able to make the two subordinate cycles produce otherwise, so much so that it was actually a bit of a shock. However, before she could give any thought to what this might mean, or what use such copies might have in the future, should she master them, the content of those ideas drew her attention back to the hypnotized servants and guards still standing patently in their neat rows in her room. Prioritizing, she set her entire mind to the task of what to do with them.

“Damn!” Zelda eventually huffed, “I AM going to have to rewrite their memories! And… I’m not even sure if I know how to do that…”

Nevertheless, Zelda applied herself to the problem, and eventually succeeded, sending one dazed servant after another back to their duties or to their beds with memories of the night she’d imagined herself. It was far from an ideal coverup, by any stretch of the imagination, and Zelda was left afterwards with a hollow sense of guilt.

The original plan her imaginary clones had devised was to track down and alter everyone who’d witnessed the event, even if that meant zapping the whole city. It would not do for those who had fled the event early and those in the streets below her window to have hugely different recollections than those who stayed behind, and so she was forced to compromise with a cover story. Anyone who asked would be told she’d been dabbling with original spells, a well-known and tolerated eccentricity common to certain types of mage. Tongues would wag, but it was a serviceable lie. Only time would tell how well it held up to the rumor mill.

At length, Zelda was alone again, and she found herself brooding in her chair, staring out at the night sky through her blasted balcony doors. Her memory of what had happened just prior to this most recent escapade with the clones was limited at best. She remembered the demon and Link’s dire circumstances in Careda. Her whispering stone was inert, inactive in a way it had not been since she had divided only a few months before, indicating that its mate had been destroyed or otherwise disabled. Yet, she was certain they had been victorious. She just couldn’t figure out how they’d managed it.

The servants’ memories of the event had been full of her as a statue, black as obsidian, and her own recollection was a mess. She vaguely recalled meeting with Link… as well as someone else… but the rest was a blank. She pushed and prodded at the blank space in her mind, bizarre in its own way as the bulging triple-memory from her short-lived division. In a matter of minutes, she’d given the matter as much concentrated thought as six people might manage in a day, but it was a huge waste of effort, and provided no insight. Eventually, Zelda moved to massage away her migraine, only to discover that she had none.

That was when Ashei and Auru arrived with a quiet knocking at her door. With a sigh, Zelda called for their entry, already processing what to tell them and what to keep secret. There was also the matter of pumping them for more details about what they knew of the night’s events, among other things. As they entered, Ashei looked stricken and Auru inscrutable. For the first time, Zelda wondered what they must have been through while she was lost to the world. She had a sudden urge to ease their weariness with an application of her charm, but caught herself. Instead, she smiled at them.

“Some night, huh?” she said. The sheer absurdity of the understatement seemed to catch them off guard. That and her smile was enough.

Ashei choked and burst into laughter, Auru putting a hand over his mouth to suppress a painfully brilliant smile. The mirth went on for a while, stress pouring out in a wash of relief, until the ministers were seated across from their monarch, and finally calmed.

“Come on,” Zelda grinned at them, “there’s much to discuss. Let’s compare notes.”

A Field Outside what is Left of Romali

“Ohh… did anyone see what hit me?” Arrika said, as she slowly regained consciousness. “Musta been a goodbye present from that amorph demon lord, to put me down like that. Eh, I’m still woozy, I feel like I’m moving through molasses.”

Indeed, Arrika felt incredibly weird as she came to, like her whole body had been weighted down to the earth under her. There was a sensation everywhere that was totally foreign to her, and she could only interpret it as a sort of ‘buzzing,’ but without any actual sound to go with it. The only theory she could come up with, as she crawled up to a sitting position, was that the demons had found a new way to torment her kind during the long ages since their last proper battle. Her torpor could only be explained by a time-delay attack spell, because what else could make her ethereal body feel this way?

“Link? You there? I could really use another boost from that ‘Golden Power’ right about now. I feel like this is the first time I’ve moved in a million years.”

Arrika was ready to spin off more snide remarks bemoaning her aches, but never got them out. Instead, she was occupied by sight of the pony-sized wolf sleeping at her feet. Though it was not an intuitive conceptual leap, Arrika still recognized Link immediately through their spiritual connection.

“Oh… you poor boy… what in the world…?” Arrika mumbled, surveying the transformation with more concern than surprise or confusion. It immediately occurred to her to dive inside of him to check out what might have caused this unreal metamorphosis. After innumerable human lifetimes as a disembodied spirit, the thought process necessary to propel her through the air and merge into a mortal body was automatic, like breathing and walking for a regular person. However, when she tried to accomplish the maneuver this time, she flopped up onto her feet, wobbled forward a bit, then face-planted without breaking her fall in the slightest.

“OWWWW!” Arrika rolled over, gripped a searing pain on her forehead, and hissed in an agonized breath. The lump on her head throbbed three times before her brain caught up with events.

“Wait a minute,” she pulled her hands away from the wound, revealing eyes gone painfully wide. “Ouch?”

Arrika jumped up to her feet and stared down at her hands, noticing the coat of dirt they’d gained from the crater she’d been crawling in, and goggling at them like she just realized they belonged to someone else. With too-quick movements the little girl patted her body down, feeling the smooth cloth of her tight leotard and skirt, and the solid body underneath, and then she freaked out.

“EEEEEEEEKKK,” she screamed like a squeamish girl who’d just found a spider in her hair, hopping up and down and waving her hands in front of her body in flailing, epileptic jerks, as though she could shake the flesh body off by sheer force and spare herself from the horror of what was happening. A minute later, when Arrika was thoroughly tired of shrieking and flailing, she collapsed, heaving for air. Then, she began to talk to herself.

“Okay… okay… get a grip girl… this can’t be as bad as it seems. Powerful illusions can make it like you have a body—you’ve used them yourself for an eternity. Someone else must have cast this illusion! What was the checklist…?” She fretted and fussed as she thought back to her long-distant education on magic.

“Pulse!” she shouted, when the first shreds of information started returning from the mists of her indescribably long memory. She immediately held a finger to her throat, feeling the firm, regular throb just under her perfect skin. As she noticed and was unable to deny it, it sped up even further under her fingers. “DAMN! What else…?”

“Breathing, of course!” she smiled for half a moment, but then smacked a palm into her face, “Idiot! You’ve been breathing this whole time! But… maybe I don’t need to breathe?” Arrika immediately exhaled and held the air out, refusing to react to the resultant pain in her chest and head until she actually collapsed. “Okay,” she croaked, when she had her breath back, “you definitely need to breathe. Blood maybe?”

Without an instant of hesitation, Arrika rolled over, stuck her filthy hand into her mouth, and bit down on the tip of her finger, hard. The pain alone should have been enough to assure her she was alive, but she didn’t let go until her mouth flooded with a coppery flavor. She didn’t even bother to examine the beading crimson when she let her hand fall to her side, but stared up at the pre-dawn sky in utter despondence.

“That’s it. Somehow, I’m alive. And… if I’m alive, then I’m going to die.” She began to cry, more proof of her vitality. “And if I die, then the power of the Mother and Father of the West will die with me, and leave the world forever. The demons will eradicate everything, and all these ages of vigilance will have been for NOTHING!”

As she proceeded to panic in a quiet fit of body-wracking sobs, the great wolf stirred nearby. It seemed unimpressed by its surroundings until it found Arrika in her grieving slump, at which point it let out a single, happy bark. Except, when this unnaturally gargantuan predatory beast expressed its joy, it was a sound not unlike the detonation of a small bomb. The sudden loud noise hit Arrika’s new, organic nerve system like a bucket of ice water, and she sat up with a startled shriek. Then, the shriek died suddenly, as she jumped right out of her skin. Literally.

Arrika was floating four feet in the air before the lingering system shock dissipated, and she flipped around just in time to see the body she’d left melting into a puddle of smooth, viscous black tar. The wolf that had once been Link looked at her, at the puddle, and then back at her, then tilted its head to one side and made a quizzical sound. Arrika loosened up slowly as her new reality sank in, until she was standing on the air looking mildly perturbed, and more than slightly embarrassed with herself.

“Okay,” she finally sighed out her acceptance, purely for show now that she was disembodied again, “so I’m still a phantom. Good. Dodged an arrow on that one.” A single twitch of emotion played slowly across her features, giving the lie to her nonchalant statement. She had truly believed an eternity of servitude had been rendered moot, and not even her wizened heart could shrug off that kind of despair as quickly as she liked to pretend.

“Anyway, what do we have here?” She floated down until she hovered a mere foot above the black goop she’d only just vacated. It was moving of its own accord, mounding up into a slimy pile that quickly smoothed out until it looked like a perfect droplet of black water about the size of a championship-winning pumpkin.

“Wait a second… I know this ooze!” Arrika extended a finger downward until she was the barest of inches from touching it. The slime reached out to try and meet her halfway, but she pulled back before it could. “Amorphia. Changeling’s vitriol. The stuff that dreams are made of—or at least, what nightmares use to take form in the real world. But, I don’t sense any demonic energy from it.” She looked over at the fuzzy giant that she knew to be her partner. “If anything, it feels like you. Which, I suppose, brings us back to what’s going on with you. Except…” she looked back down at the amorphia, “I need to try something…”

With only an instant of hesitation, Arrika reached down to plunge her ghostly hand into the slime. Immediately, it leapt off the ground and engulfed her phantom body in lunge almost too quick to see. Wolf Link skipped back in surprise, then started to growl softly as the muck-ball fell to earth. It began to take on a definite shape almost immediately, and after a few seconds of wet, nauseating, sucking and slurping sounds, Arrika once again knelt before him, alive as can be and wearing the skin-tight grey gown her phantom always sported. The wolf sat back down, puzzled anew, his gaze intent upon his diminutive ally, who was once again weeping.

“Oh my goddess!” Arrika gushed, wiping tears from her cheeks so she could get a better look at them, then digging her hands into the burnt soil, just to feel the roots and grime between her fingers. “This is… its so much more than I ever dared to dream… I can’t…” She looked up to see Link the Wolf giving her another quizzical look, and she immediately rushed over on uncertain legs to throw her arms around his furry neck, a feat she could only accomplish by standing on bare tip-toes. “Link, you wonderful, muscle-brained, hillbilly! If those bitches you worship could suborn amorphia, they should have done it for us eons ago!”

The wolf just sat there relishing the embrace with a passionately wagging tail. After a full minute of luxuriating in the sensation of the wolf’s soft, musky fur enveloping her new skin, Arrika pulled away. Fun was fun, but this transformation thing wasn’t going to figure itself out, and she hobbled back one step without releasing her caressing grip on the wolf’s head. The entity she knew to be Link considered Arrika with brown, animal eyes, devoid of any sort of depth, if not lacking in personality. It was chilling to note that vacancy, and Arrika felt her new pulse start to race with concern.

“Link, if you can understand me, bark twice,” Arrika began, testing their circumstances with the first method that came to mind.

The wolf, evidentially enjoying her affection, barreled her over and started to lick ferociously at her face. Arrika squealed with childish delight and laughter as she was tickled for the first time in her new body. She had experienced the sensation vicariously through contractors, but not even her fully-manifested angelic form could feel anything like this, and she was quickly overwhelmed. When she finally pushed the wolf back, she was forced to lay still and recuperate, stunned by sensory overload, even as dog slobber dried on her skin, chilling her with a new, intense sensation.

“Okay… while that was great… it was also worrisome.” Arrika sat up and considered the wolf again, shaking dirt out of her long, silken hair. “Link would never even consider attacking a pretty girl with his tongue. Who are you, and what have you done with him?”

The wolf, finding playtime to be over with, lifted a leg to scratch at some imagined louse on its pristine coat. Its coloration was a magnificent, almost artistic blending of grey and black on a snow-white background, the pattern mimicking a Hylian art form Arrika recognized from the dawn of time, right down to the ‘third eye’ loop of white on its forehead, representing the trinity theme they were ever fond of. Bored, it gave a canine yawn, exposing its terrifying fangs, and then bent over and started to lick itself.

“Yep,” Arrika flushed, resisting the urge to actively cover her eyes, “definitely not Link.” After waffling for a few seconds, the newly embodied spirit gave in to circumstances. “Okay, I get it. I’m going to have to ditch this glorious ooze and go brain spelunking. Let’s just get it over with already.”
As it turned out, getting on with it was a trickier prospect than Arrika had bargained for. Her every attempt to duplicate what had happened when the wolf startled her earlier was totally ineffective. She tried to concentrate on the sensation of shock, on the feeling of slipping free from her flesh, but found it to be no better than the flailing she’d done in her panic before. Eventually, she even delved into a meditative trance and tried to astral project like any average, mortal person might in an effort to travel in spiritual form. Though she had mastered the skill while alive, now, she might as well have been trying to fly by flapping her soft, skinny arms.

“Okay, this could be a problem,” Arrika stood up from her meditative repose and once again considered the skin she’d wept with joy for only moments ago. “Apparently, this amorphia has absolutely no interest in releasing me, just because I want out. And if shedding it wasn’t something I did… that means…” Arrika turned to the wolf, who had curled up for a bit of a nap. “Oh Gods, I’m not looking forward to being beholden to some fleabag for my liberty of astral travel. But still… a body is a body… and this body is mine…”

A few moments later, Arrika caught herself drifting off as she hugged her arms close to her torso and luxuriated in the sensation of sensation itself. She smacked herself a few times, berating herself for the distraction, and then had to concentrate to avoid becoming hypnotized by the resulting sting. When she once again had herself under control, Arrika approached the wolf again. As she drew near, its ears perked and its tail began to wag. Her biggest consolation, then, was that getting this dog to bark on demand would be about as difficult as falling off a log.

“Hey boy, I don’t know what to call you, since you’re not Link, but we’ll work that out later,” Arrika began, and the huge wolf reacted to the attention with all the restraint of a ten-pound puppy. The wolf stood up and poised on its huge paws, ready to bolt as soon as the new game it sensed began. “In the meantime, could you be a dear and make some noise for me? Somehow, that seems to be a component of deactivating this slime.”

The wolf, it transpired, was at the far right extreme of the bestial intelligence bell-curve. It obviously had no ability to comprehend her words as language, but it read her intent as only a truly brilliant animal could. With a look of doggie bliss on its muzzle, the wolf began to bark with the enthusiasm canines usually reserved for message carriers and small, fuzzy creatures.

Besides its size, now the beast demonstrated another supernatural aspect. In essence, the noise it made in its assumed rage pushed outward like a palpable force that pressed upon the psyche. The thunderous clamor was terrifying in the extreme, but Arrika was braced for the fear, and managed not to quail in the face of it. The slime was not so brave, and started to melt away from the coalesced intimidation assaulting it in bursting waves.

Arrika clung to it for a moment, finding that she could force it to resist the wolf’s voice, even if she could not keep it from becoming limp and discolored under the concentrated aural assault. Then she let it go, and it melted away in a flash, leaving her unencumbered ghostly form standing where her body once had, a black puddle gathering around her ankles.

“Okay, so we know how that works now,” Arrika floated out of the ooze and distanced herself from its tempting embrace before shushing the wolf with a placating gesture. The great creature went from murderous to mellow in the space of a heartbeat, and Arrika couldn’t help but wonder. “You know,” Arrika observed, “ for a guy who looks like the villain from some fairytale, you’ve got the manners of some prince’s prize foxhound.”

The wolf seemed to understand that it was being praised, and beamed in its happiness. Below them, the slime had recovered, and set itself to retrieving what it wanted immediately. It grabbed the wolf by the paw and started to ooze up its leg, causing the wolf to start, then pick up and shake its forepaw to shed the clinging goo. It could not loosen the stuff’s grip, and so it bit at the mass, only to have it sift through its teeth and mount up onto its back. From that high vantage, the amorphia sent out black psudopods to reach for Arrika’s phantom, trying desperately to fulfill its only purpose in existence.

Arrika recoiled, the allure of the amorphia much easier to resist now that she was back in her painfully familiar state of ever-life. The wolf sensed her distress and turned its head toward its back as far as it could to release a bloodthirsty growl. The amorphia shrunk away in remorse, and then sunk into the wolf’s fur, altering itself to blend perfectly with its patterning until it was invisibly integrated. It knew its master, and dared not disobey.

“Ug, pushy little bugger.” Arrika kept her distance for the time being, and finally, finally got back to the task at hand. “Right, so, quick checklist…” she pondered the situation for a moment, and frowned.

“Sword,” she said immediately, and not without a hint of regret. The object in question floated obediently from where it had been forgotten in the dirt, arriving in her hand a moment later. She twirled it idly through a spin around her insubstantial hands, drawing the wolf’s interest, then stopped to gaze at the gorgeous artifact with mixed emotions warring behind her eyes.

“Don’t worry, sword,” she eventually sighed, “It’s not as though I could forget you. We are one, now and forever.” She embraced the blade like it was her most beloved plush toy, rather than a razor-sharp wedge engineered to chop through skin, muscle, bone, and any armor that might dream to shield it all.

“Do take care of this for me while I’m searching for Link, okay?” Arrika tossed the sword at the wolf’s back, and the amorphia caught it with surprising ease. If she needed any further evidence that it had been purged of its demonic origins, the way it encased the blade and camouflaged it into its own wolf-fur disguise was the ultimate proof.

“Right, so, I’m packed. Where’s Link’s junk?” Arrika glanced around, but could find no hint of the new armor and cumbersome weapons harness Link insisted on dragging about. Her gaze eventually returned to the wolf, which seemed to find this whole escapade endlessly enchanting. “I hope that stuff is inside you somewhere, too,” Arrika said, “or Link’ll throw a fit. On the bright side, this means, when I change you back, Link probably won’t be naked! One less thing to worry about, right?”

The wolf could not answer her, could not demonstrate even the remotest hint of real, human intellect, no matter how many chances she gave it, and Arrika was, at last, truly worried. She stopped to collect her thoughts one last time, then floated down to look directly into the wolf’s eyes at close range.

“I’m going to be out of touch for a while, so don’t do anything Link wouldn’t do, alright?” The wolf barked, but it could have meant anything. Arrika shook her head in distress, then steeled herself for whatever she might find. “Shall we see what’s what, now?”

With that, she phased forward, vanishing into the wolf’s body. The gargantuan canine glanced about, sniffed the air, and perked its ears, trying to figure out where its friend had gone. When it could not locate her, it turned its attention to the countryside, where dawn was at last turning light upon the blighted ruins of a nightmare battle. There were familiar scents upon the wind, and it was eager to investigate.

The Edge of a Plain

Link found himself standing in front of a strange building. It was the one and only structure in all the vast grasslands, and it stood on a border between those verdant green oceans and an equally gigantic brown wasteland that stretched to the horizon beyond. The storm clouds were huge, low, and terrifying, brooding above in endless boiling masses, lit intermittently by flashes of lightning barely contained. It was just as he reached the building that the sky erupted, and with a single, deafening peal of thunder, it began to rain with torrential force.

Despite the downpour, Link couldn’t help but take one last look at the building before he rushed to the door. It was a structure unlike any he had seen, heard of, or imagined. In essence, it was as if someone had dropped a pristine, milk-white glass cylinder with a rounded dome roof from the sky and planted it firmly on the grassland. It was three stories tall, or around thirty feet, anyway, and stretched at least forty feet in diameter. At last, the wind picked up, threatening to blow Link right off his feet, and he could spare no more time for what he didn’t recognize, concentrating instead on the ground-floor indentation that clearly held a door of some sort.

Huddling in the almost nonexistent cover of the shallow doorsill, Link was dismayed to find that the door had no knob or latch of any kind. Lightning flashed around him in crawling towers, fencing him in with bone-shaking thunderclaps, and he cursed his luck. In a futile gesture of frustration, he slapped the door with an open palm. In a motion too fast for the eye to follow, the door sucked in three inches and whipped over to one side, pitching an unbalanced Link forward to land with a wet crack on a smooth, tiled floor.

Link quickly surged back to his feet, and the moment he was out of the way, the door swished shut behind him, enveloping him in total darkness. For a moment, there was nothing but the muted sound of the violent storm, which had been reduced to such a whisper that Link could actually hear individual water drops striking the tiled floor as the ran off his body.

“Wish I had a light,” Link mumbled, and took one hesitant step forward. Responding to his words, his desire, or possibly even his movement, a dozen incredibly bright lamps burst into life, flushing Link’s surroundings into brilliant relief.

“Woah,” was all the man could manage, when he finally started breathing again.

Besides the small space of the doorway, which was tiled and lined with racks for coats and shoes, the room was huge and uniform, unbroken by walls other than the curving outer shell of the building. Lamps were regularly placed in the shockingly low ceiling, forming concentric rings, and had no obvious flame to account for the pure light they cast. There was nothing the least bit like a stairway or ladder to a higher floor, raising the question of why the place had looked so big from outside. Other than these things, the interior was practically vacant. The only things actually occupying the vast, circular room was a small collection of furniture around a table near the door, a bed and dresser set in the distance on the left, and a strange circular stage raised in the precise center of the room.

Link shed his soaked tunic and boots onto the tiles, leaving himself damp and half-naked, but noticeably more comfortable and less likely to ruin the deep, soft carpeting. Despite the sheer surrealism of his situation, the young man could think of nothing better to do, just then, than meander over to the nearby furniture for a closer look. He had parted with the reflex to disbelief the first time his body had twisted into a lupine monstrosity, and abandoned it entirely when behemoths of every variety had crawled forth from the twilight eternity to murder him on multiple occasions. An impossible house in an unknown green paradise was fairly easy to take in stride after all that.

After examining the table and chairs and finding them unremarkable, if as oddly designed as the house itself, Link tried one of the seats. It was very low to the ground and very, very heavily cushioned, so that he sank down into it several inches and had to let his feet stretch out over the carpet in front of him. Such short chairs would have made no sense at all, except that the table was only a foot tall, leaving it just below elbow height now that he was fully reclined.

Despite himself, Link was incredibly comfortable, and the urge to catch up with his overdue hours of sleep was almost overwhelming. He glanced around again, eyes heavy, and wondered why all the chairs were arranged facing the nearest section of curving outer wall, which was just as smooth, blank, and white as it had been from outside. As his eyes wandered, they caught on something sitting on the table, just within reach, and Link grabbed it without giving it any thought. It turned out to be a miniature picture frame, and when Link idly glanced at the painting it held, he was instantly jolted from his sleepy reverie.

“Farore, Nayrue, and Din!” Link swore, almost dropping the picture frame in shock. The thing in the frame turned out to be something wholly different than a painting. The only way he could describe it was as a visual memory frozen in time. Looking at it was not unlike looking through a window into another time and place, as though at any moment the figures depicted might spring to life and walk out of the field of view. Link was so amazed by the nature of the image, in fact, that he failed to note its contents for several minutes, until it finally struck him like an angry lizardman.

“Arrika?” Link couldn’t help but mutter in confusion, as he suddenly shifted his focus from the metaphorical forest to the proverbial trees. The portrait actually depicted five young women standing in a huddled group hug, and squeezed down in the middle of the mismatched bunch was a pale, lithe young minx with hip-length blond hair. It was hard to tell at first with the bright green sundress she wore instead of her severe fencing gown, but the more he stared, the more Link knew that the laughing girl in the picture was the capricious ancient who haunted his sword.

It did not take an insurmountable cognitive leap to imagine who the other four girls in the portrait might be, and Link scrambled to drink in the sight of what could only be the five Sword Maidens.

On one side stood of a giant of a girl, six-and-a-half feet tall at least, towering over her sisters by at least a foot in every circumstance. Her hair was somewhere between blue and silver, and it fell to her knees in a perfectly straight, silken mass. She was bulky and muscular where the others were all petite and soft, really setting her apart, and of them all, she was the only one wearing pants rather than a dress or skirt. Her expression was severe, turning her already aquiline features into something positively statuesque. For his life, Link could not have placed her nationality, but she somehow reminded him of Ashei.

Next in line, bent over under the tall girl’s towering presence, was a gorgeous young lady with skin the color of milk-softened chocolate. She was of medium height and build for a teenage girl, and her black hair was short and unruly, tamed only by the dozens of beaded braids she’d worked into cascading curtains to frame her features on one side. Her dress was exotic blue silk, tight around the torso and flared in the skirts, without any sleeves to speak of. She was smiling with an air of smug assuredness, so that her teeth almost glowed white in contrast to her skin. Although Link had never seen a human of such dark complexion, he’d heard tales of their magnificent cities on the coast of Tonga to the south of Hyrule.

In the center was Arrika, and to her left was a girl who sent Link into momentary confusion. Her skin and eyes were like nothing Link had even heard of: she was pale, but with a slightly yellow-orange undertone, and her eyes were almond shaped and very slightly tilted in a slant. Her hair was black as ink, pulled forward over her shoulders and allowed to drape down to her stomach, almost obscuring her odd robe. It was thick silk of some kind, closed in the front and cinched with a huge cloth belt, illustrated with breathtaking patterns of storm clouds around the shoulders and spider webs near the hem. If anything, this girl looked as sad as Arrika looked happy, but there was quiet nobility in that melancholy, and a clear resolve in the way she clung to her sisters on either side.

The last sister had the bronze skin tone of the desert people, but was otherwise nothing at all like the rough and tumble steppe-riders who traded horseflesh and exotic goods by caravan to all the world, including Hyrule. Instead, this young lady was sharp-featured, with a prominent nose and blazing orange hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her clothes were light and exposed her stomach, and her long, unruffled skirt bore a magnificent embroidered design of some sort. In the portrait, she was pulling away from the hug in futile defiance of all that affection, but she had a look of purest joy on her orange-painted lips as she did it.

“Link?” Arrika put a hand on Link’s bare shoulder as he stared at the image, mesmerized. Link gave a jolt in his seat, actually dropping the portrait, turning to face his unexpected visitor with an expression of uncertain shame, as though he didn’t quite know if he’d been caught in the wrong.

Link had been so absorbed, he hadn’t heard her materialize on the raised dais in the center of the room, and had remained oblivious as she walked up behind him, amazement and confusion written across her face. That look remained now, solidifying as something that should have been impossible turned out to be all too true.

“Link!” Arrika had to make an effort to alter her face from a contortion of shock. “What are you doing here? How the hell did you get here, of all places? And… why are you half-naked?”

“Arrika?” Link, for his part, was doing his own double-take.

The sword maiden was still her remarkably slight, lithe, adolescent self, but was perfectly solid-looking to Link. He was so used to being able to see whatever happened to be on the other side of her that it took him a long moment to realize she had somehow changed clothes from her ubiquitous fencing leotard to something else entirely. He stared at her in her loose boxers and stomach-revealing tank-top for a full three seconds before it occurred to him that they were what a girl might wear under her regular clothes. With admirable composure, he shifted his eyes to the disturbingly wizened glare of disbelief and suspicion she’d leveled on him and found his voice.

“How did I get here?” he covered his uncertain sense of guilt with some anger of his own, “I don’t even know underwear I am!”

Arrika considered that statement for a moment, then looked down at herself and huffed in annoyance. She sort of waved one hand, and suddenly she was wearing a loose green dress of the very simplest design.

“For your enlightenment,” Arrika didn’t even hint at a blush, far more concerned with the issue at hand, “I was half-naked because it helps me to relax here in the privacy of my own Home!”

“Your… home?” Link was grateful for the reprieve from his hesitant embarrassment, but that statement threw him for a brand new loop. It was fortunate indeed that he was already sitting. “But… the sword…?”
“ARGH!” Arrika drew the nearest seat away from the low table with an infuriated jerk, flopping down into it and burying her small face into equally small hands. “I’m not a talking sword!” she growled, “Throughout the eons since I lost the ability to manifest a solid body at will, I’ve been making do by conjoining my consciousness to contractors like you. As a result of the process, my Home is joined with yours.”

Link had no answer to that, and Arrika began to glare anew.

“I’m… missing something…” Link admitted, when the glare became unbearable.

“You know… Home?” Arrika said again, as though she couldn’t believe he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she calmed rather suddenly, biting her lip in frustration. “Nevermind. It’s usually impossible to get here without knowing what you’re doing, but I should have learned by now that ‘impossible’ isn’t the same thing when you’re involved, Link.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Link muttered, “I don’t generally do it on purpose.”

“Right,” Arrika sighed, collecting her thoughts and reclining in the chair, which fit her small stature far better than Link’s larger frame. “’Home’ is a part of the Astral Plane specific to an individual person, each one unique as the person who generates it by being a live, thinking creature.”

“Okay, real quick, Astral Plane?” Link replied, earnestly attempting to learn this and understand what was confounding Arrika so thoroughly.

“Nevermind that,” Arrika closed her eyes to complete her stress-releasing posture, having the additional effect of relieving her from the sight of Link’s damp, rippling pectoral and abdominal muscles. “Although horrifyingly inaccurate, it’s far easer just to think of being in this place as standing inside a sort of visual-representation of your own mind.”

“Inside… my mind?” Link blinked a few times. “You mean, when you—“

“Yes.” Arrika shifted slightly to glare at him through silted eyelids. “When I vanish into your body, this is where I come.” She paused. Her expression creased with annoyance yet again, and perhaps the slightest hit of embarrassment. “I expected to have a chance to prepare in my Home for a trip into yours to find out why you didn’t… wake up…” She studiously avoided giving up a vast sheaf of details not related to the immediate confusion. “Not the least of those preparations would have been changing into something a bit more appropriate than what I usually wear to… laze about the place. Anyway, that’s where we are.”

“From here, because of the interface with your Home, I can use your senses to see the material world, hear your thoughts, and access certain types of memories you possess. Frankly, anyone with enough Psion can do much the same, or even more. The Astral Plane is the realm of Psion, just as the Material Plane is the realm of Karnak—your power, Link—and the Fey Plane of is the realm of Mephisto, pure magical energy.”

“Okay…” Link rubbed his temples, and then knocked lightly on the side of his skull, finding it to be thoroughly solid. “If that’s the simple version, I’m glad you skipped the whole story. Now, if you need Psion or sword maiden contract power, or whatever, to get here… how am I in this place?”

“Welcome to five minutes ago, Link.” Arrika slipped her hands behind her head, adjusting her long hair and then propping herself up a bit to give her associate more attention. “I can imagine you finding your way to your own Home by accident—that’s not exactly impossible. People often get Home during their dreams, or while comatose—the very deepest of dream states. What I want to know is how in the world you got into MY Home!”

“Well…” Link glanced about rather sheepishly, noting that he was still ever-so-slightly damp. Only now did he seem to notice his own state of undress, but the thought fled his mind as quickly as it entered. “Frankly, I saw this as the only building on the whole vast, gorgeous landscape and I wanted to get out of the crazy-huge storm.”

“Did you say storm?” Arrika was suddenly all ears, eyes gone wide.

“Yeah, it was ridiculous. I was in it for like, two minutes, and I still got drenched to the bone. That’s why I’m… yeah…. Anyway, you must have heavy-duty insulation in this place, because you can’t hear a thing! I mean, the walls can’t be more than an inch thick!”

Arrika was ignoring him, staring into space instead, until she suddenly turned and waved her hand at the section of curving wall that the table and chairs were arrayed to face. The wall obediently became transparent, transforming into a perfectly clear, truly gigantic window.

“Ah! So that’s why the chairs face the wall!” Link admired the miraculous transformation.

Arrika only had eyes for the scene now revealed—a landscape from a rainy Armageddon. Rather than the endless green expanses she had spent many a quiet afternoon admiring, Link’s Home, at least on this side, was a storm-beaten wasteland of mud and eddying floodwater. Her jaw flopped open, and stayed that way for almost a minute. Link, finding the storm rather entertainingly violent now that he wasn’t caught in it, admired it without breaking the room’s stony silence.

“Link…” Arrika managed to force the words from dry lips, “this is… well…”

“Yeah…” Link sighed, rubbing at bare skin suddenly chilled by drying water. “It’s bad. It doesn’t take a Psion to guess what this is a visual-representation of, right?”

Arrika just stared. For the time being, at least, she had no words.

Next Chapter: To Gauhome

The effort to accelerate this story to completion will have two parts. One is getting over my infatuation with starting new plot threads, which I feel I’ve just about managed. The other is collapsing my many different narratives into three at most, probably aiming for two in the near future. To that end, we’ll be characterizing the Gerudo girls, the other sages, and the thus-far-mysterious main villains as we weave them in to the development of Zelda’s big conflict, the one that will occupy her until almost the story climax. On the other side of the continent, we’ll tie off Link’s last connections to the mundane world and set him loose on a truly fantastic journey to control his own shape, revive the sword maidens, and master the Triforce of Courage. Now, if you’ll excuse me, if I get started on the next chapter right away, I might manage to avoid setting it aside for half a year. Maybe.