(A Zelda Story)
Link hopped from the stirrups, landing on the rocky path at the pools edge. He stroked Epona’s face, and she snorted an impatient breath, no doubt smelling the water and dismissing it outright. He kicked off his boots by her side, and dropped his gloves beside them, murmuring a reassuring word before he left her.
The image of the night sky split. Stars stretched away from each other as ripples moved across the surface of the pool, distorting the reflection. Link paced out, disregarding the cool water soaking into his clothes as he waded to the center. At its deepest the pool came to his hips, his fingertips dipped into the water when he held his arms relaxed at his side. He dragged them in random patterns, disrupting the serene cosmos below.
His body ached. The hurts of hard travel, of years of fighting, of neglect in favor of action. He looked up into the cloudless night, sinking into a crouch that brought the water up to his shoulders. The chill arrested his breath for a moment, but it also stole some of the pain, and he breathed easier once he adjusted.
The pool sat in a rocky bowl. The sheer walls rose from the shallows to tower over the hidden spring. Early in the night as it was, the full moon had not yet crested the walls, but as Link lay back to stare up into the heavens, it peeked over the ridge to the east. He lay there, the sound of his breathing magnified in his head by the water filling his ears.
Slowly, over long minutes or hours, the moon climbed higher. It approached its zenith over him and he noticed it before it was truly over head, but paid it little mind. The western wall of the bowl was beginning to glow and that occupied most of his attention. It seemed the rock was made of some form of crystal, dull and uninteresting in the rock face, until it caught the light of the full moon and threw it back into the the night. Spots of light danced across the water, flickering off natural facets in the stone as the moon inched by.
He grew tired of watching the dancing lights and closed his eyes. Floating in the spring water, dense with whatever mineral deposits it picked up on its journey to the surface, he was more buoyant than he should be. He lay back and floated atop it, and the longer he lay the less he felt the water. He could almost forget the last year like that, drifting weightlessly in serene quiet. Almost forgot that it was a year, to the day, since she left. Almost.
He pulled in a deep breath through his nose, deep and full, expanding his chest and stretching tight scars across his torso. He shouldn't have those scars, no ranch hand from a backwater forgotten corner of the kingdom should; but he was glad he did.
Glad he'd been able to help. Glad he'd been enough. Hyrule was safe, and he was glad.
He rolled over, disturbing the calm pool as he shifted to his stomach, face down.
The princess had offered him lordship and land, he'd told her he had a home. She'd offered him money, and he asked what for? The people of the kingdom needed it more than he. She'd offered him whatever he wished, while he stayed in the castle with her, and he'd only stared at her blankly. He did not know what to request of her, he did not know what he wanted. Finally, as he prepared to leave a few weeks later, she'd offered him a place by her side. . [9:08 AM] He could not be king, he knew that and so did she, but he suspected she knew that once he walked out of the palace they would never meet again. He guessed some vestige of her time with her sister princess remained enough to want her to prevent that.
It was certainly what kept him at the palace that long.
It was time to go though. Time to return to the roads and dusty trails of the once great kingdom they both loved. Time to find some new purpose, time to assist in the rebuilding, time to forget.
That was what he was doing here. Forgetting.
Laying face down in this moonlit pool, he let a bubble break free of a nostril, it drifted up his face tickling his cheek on its way to freedom.
He could not forget.
The scars were there, and they paid homage to his journey, his hero’s quest. A constant reminder every time he caught his reflection, every time he stretched and bent, every time he breathed. They were there, reminding him that he was not enough.
He furrowed his brow and sighed, trying to push off the invasive thoughts before they could swarm. It was a lost cause of course. Not a day went by that he was free of them, and they always led to the same place. The perpetual terminus of his hero’s tale. He could see it still in perfect detail, every crack and chip, the light glass dust rising off the shattered portal to his only true home.
He could still see her, the true her, that he’d only just been able to meet. Still hear her voice, muttering a thousand hurtful words and a single loving goodbye. Still feel her hand, smooth and warm cupping his face, small and shaking as it held fast to his fur.
Link could not forget, and he did not want to, because the memories were the only thing worth having now that they were all that was left.
He never even went back home, he couldn’t, because he knew what would happen if he did. He would fall back into life in Ordon with relative ease. The people would accept him, the days would pass by, and every last bit of who he’d become once he got out of his sleepy village would fade away.
He would become Link the ranch hand again, and the only thing left of her would be these scars kept hidden under cloak and tunic. He could not abide that. He could not allow it. He had found something in himself with her aide, found a connection to something larger, older, and infitinately more imptortant than Link the ranch hand.
So he left. Left the palace and left Hyrule. He wandered for a while, with Epona to keep him company, and ‘a while’ carried on as it has a tendency to do. Outside the technical borders of his home things were not so different, it was still hills and valleys, plains and mountains, lakes and rivers, and towns and villages. Sure they didn’t have big grand cities with paved streets and towering castles, but Hyrule had just the one anyway, and the people out there didnt seem to be missing it much.
It was in a village, not so different from Kakariko, that he’d learned of this pool.
Nestled at the base of a mountain that was not Death Mountain, but had some such similar ominous name to the people there. He was just passing through, when he decided to stop for the night, and a kindly innkeeper had offered to stable Epona so he could visit their bathhouse. In the steam and soothing waters he’d found a wizened old shaman, the village elder, that seemed more wrinkle than skin these days.
He’d told Link to come here, said he was troubled, and they had a solution for troubles in this village. Link could not deny the elder’s claim, and he didnt have much in the way of direction otherwise, so he’d taken the old man’s advice.
He sighed again, relieved he’d at least managed to curtail his thoughts before they started conjuring images of her. He rolled his shoulders, rewarded with snaps and pops from his neck and took a deep breath.
Then he remembered that he was supposed to be face down in a pool of water and his eyes flew open.
The sky was a wash of violet and orange, and the full moon overhead was absent. He flailed wildly, splashing the pool in his haste to get his feet under him as his heart jumped into overdrive.
Epona was not on the side of the pool where he’d left her, but apart from that the little bowl the spring sat in was identical. Well, apart from the fucking sky at least.
He put that out of his mind for the time being, because he recognized that sky, and it was best to deal with things one at a time. Epona was gone, he had to get down the mountain and back to that village, there would be answers there surely.
He’d made it to the edge of the pool before he caught sight of his hand and it brought him to a halt in the shallows. Smooth, unblemished, gray skin stretched across his palms and disappeared up the sodden sleeve of his tunic. The scar on the middle knuckle, from a Moblin’s scimitar jumping off his blade and splitting it, shown white.
He could only blink at his new hands, and then look back up at the sky above him again, and he rocked back on his heels as it felt as if his chest was caving in in the best possible way. As he looked down the mountain to the strange landscape below he allowed himself, for the first time in a year, to draw unlabored breath and whisper:
”Midna…”