Chapter Text
It is autumn when King Bharos sets out on his hunt for the beast of Lake Hylia.
She tells him not to go.
She tells him what she saw, what she knows.
He pats her head, as if she is still a child, although she is on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, although, by the laws of their land she will inherit his throne when he fails to return.
She tells him that it’s pointless. That swords and spears and holy arrows have never eased the Calamity’s anger and they never will. She tells him, when she is already beginning to give up and understand that nothing will change his mind, about the circling, circling movement of time, the legends and her studies, the arduous, piecemeal work she has done assembling proof of the things that she knows.
He says his prayers to a lifeless, indulgently smiling statue and he leaves, and he cannot hear his goddess screaming.
It is the beginning of winter when they make their way back, a single boat returned for a whole fleet set out. Priests bow their heads, consecrate and bless an empty coffin. They lay it down, in the royal tombs, the gilded bird inlaid on its face. With laurels and beautiful white flowers of all kinds to fill the space left by the body they could not retrieve, the body in so many pieces.
She lays a single Silent Princess on the hateful thing, and leaves the funeral behind. The proceedings go on for a week, and they goes without her.
Deep cold sets in. Snow, over the lake, over Castle Town. As rime climbs the towers, she watches through the windows, walks the halls. She is untroubled, because she is deep in grief, the retainers say- she is unreasonable, she cannot be approached, a fragile thing, ever since she had been born, colicky and screaming from the belly of the dying queen.
But she is untroubled. They leave her be.
The halls are full of people like Bharos. Old rulers, pictures of a storied bloodline. In their portraits they stand tall and valiant, wordless company.
She can name them, in turn.
Rhoam, torn apart by the Calamity Himself.
Hesperine, poisoned on desert campaign in a battle with a demon scorpion.
Her only child, Prince Verace, fled to the wilderness when his mother’s usurpers seized the throne. He resumed power, became king, was killed late in his life while hunting a boar. Not a demon, that one, but it needed not be to rob them of a ruler. The hunting of the Calamity’s likeness was outlawed for a time.
Salsonia, the one who revoked that, depicted in full armor with the spear she used for slaying beasts. She had bled the Calamity, and paid the price when pestilence ravaged her kingdom- the blood plague of a century past. The queen herself had perished, not on a battlefield with glory, but coughing phlegm from her lungs, consulting any stranger or mystic who would promise her salvation.
Her immediate successor was shrewd, and kept a lower profile. Elmia was thus one of only a few who lived to old age, and passed the throne to the younger of her two sons. The older was haunted by demons, fled into the wilderness and only returned to decapitate his brother and seize power for himself.
Sometimes in the portraits she sees herself, rendered a stranger by the artist’s brush. Times she disliked- where the cherubic young girl with rosy cheeks and shining eyes coyly lingering by the skirts of a relative she had truthfully deplored awakens deep unease, where she can remember standing in that dress, staring down the back of the canvas, and wants to believe she looked nothing like that.
Times she tolerated, where painter’s tools, or, recently, pictographer’s lens, were more truthful. Her own visage, stone-faced, back at her through the ages.
Even then, she cannot say she is pleased, coming to a halt before one of them. The centuries may pass, but she does not escape the sacred line.
She can recall that life and its history, both living it and reading it afterwards. The eyes in the picture are the same as hers now. Knowing what would come, what would inevitably repeat.
Even now, she is numb to the halls of her childhood home. She walks them as a ghost does the land of the living, footsteps softened to silence by the knowledge it is not hers any more.
The chancellor has grown a second mouth. She hears them, their tongues twined together, as he bemoans Bharos, how it is such a pity, the king himself not old, having lost his lady, his only daughter so young and tormented by his passing, and she hears the lashing venom of the second mouth- she is weak.
It creeps the veins of the court. A handful at a time, it infects, until they speak with fangs themselves, spread the words- concern that she will not recover from her torment. Over-bright encouragements to ride in the fields, to come out where her public can see her, they are worried about you- and in hissing undertone, it is time for you to smile, become another portrait for the hall, to lie to the people and show them that their sacred line is unbroken.
Unbroken.
Unbroken.
Unbroken.
She gathers what she can to her, and conceals it, buries it in a corner beside the well.
The rest, she destroys. Years of collection, of interest, of curiosity, shattered and torn and burned.
There will be no place for them. They are already gone. What she breaks now is only the empty shells of it, she tells herself, when her vision swims traitorously at the fragments on the floor, when Ania the maid, coming in search of the noise, sees her and screams.
They take her from her room while they clean. Her hands are pried open and the cuts treated with salve until they don’t bleed. The room that they place her in is as white as the snow outside, white sheets, white curtain, white carpets.
Nothing here is hers.
Nothing here is particularly sharp, either, she notices.
She does not know what the whispers are doing now. When she is spoken to, it is so coated with honey that she cannot make sense of it. They mean well, they believe, all of them.
On the third day, Ania brings her favorite heavy comforter, a deep blue thing with golden embroidery. “I couldn’t stand the sight of how dull it is in here,” she says, stubbornly, as if Zelda has answered her anytime in the previous days. “Begging your pardon, my lady, but it doesn’t suit you, this ugly old room. Fetching you up like this. And they won’t even let Lady Impa in the castle- like she’s not your own aunt! The nerve of it all! His Majesty’s turning in his coffin at it all, goddess bless him,”
She can’t. She doesn’t have blessings left to give.
But Ania continues on, straightens the curtains. Thumps a potted daffodil on the windowsill, forcefully (the container is sturdy, does not shatter). Vents her frustration, the chancellor’s audacity, the treasurer’s rudeness- pours words and fills the room with life. Finds the dishes from breakfast, and scoffs at that. “If they treat you like a sickly thing the least they can do is feed you like one! I’ll get the kitchen to make you something proper. You poor thing, you can’t afford to lose weight in this cold.”
“Ania.” Her voice is thin from the days of disuse.
The maid stops, about-faces wide-eyed. For all of how she has played as if nothing is wrong, the silence has been chewing on her.
(It is the face that people make, when they see their goddess. It is not a face of reassurance or comfort. It is a fragile, servile sort of awe.)
(Awe- something only so far from horror.)
“Thank you, Ania.”
It is sincere. Ania has been kind to her. She knows that the daffodil is symbol of camaraderie, but she knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Ania picked it because it is bright and common. She can imagine Ania, huffing in irritation, leaning over the shelves of a shop stocked by a hothouse- something yellow, that’s just what she needs, in that poor dreary room of hers. No one ever disagreed with a nice yellow flower.
Ania has only one mouth, has only ever had one mouth every day of her life, and it is fixed stubbornly on a sharp, strong jaw.
She opens her mouth, and it is an effort to not pour words in desperate, wavering deluge- leave the castle, Ania. Run. In springtime, this monster will wake with the thaw and it will eat you if you stay here. You don’t deserve this, Ania. My father deserved his, and I still tried to beg him to stop.
They won’t make a portrait for you, Ania. No one will sing like you, or remember you, even fond lies of you- go back to the hills you came from, with the daffodils and your dreams and that blushing girl you always wanted to marry, the one who waits for you in the evenings by the gate, run and take her with you now, before the thaw, because it will come early this year, and they’ll get rid of you, they’ll make an excuse and you won’t believe it.
You work hard, Ania, and you’re stubborn and smart and everything they don’t think a serving-girl should be and all they need is an excuse, to pry you away from me, to get me alone, to convince everyone in town that when they lock me up it’s for my own good, and that’s all you are to them, an excuse.
Instead, she says, “I will be cloistering myself for midwinter.”
“Cloister? In your state, milady? That-”
“I believe it is exactly what I need, to clear my head.” She speaks before she lets Ania get a head of steam and indignation. “I… might hear my father’s voice again.” She lets her eyes fall, and the darkness behind them needs no facetious source. “Know how to move forwards.”
Poor Ania believes it wholly. She can watch by the fractional softening of that stubborn jaw, as it creeps through the cracks and wears down stone. “…Well… I suppose, it would be nice to get away from those prattling jays for the holiday.” A bit stronger, “I don’t blame you, milady. They’re right pests.” But she wavers again, looks back to Zelda. “…You’ll send for me if you need something, won’t you, milady?”
All too relieved, she clasps Ania’s hand in both of hers, pallid fingers and gilded brand against soap-scoured bronze. “I will always remember you, Ania.”
Ania goes, to spread the news, and leaves behind a blue comforter, and a single golden daffodil.
Zelda spits the poisoned teeth of her second mouth away from her, and closes her eyes.
If I am to be truly selfish, Ania, I hope someday you forgive me.
The rules of cloistering are very specific. The attendants that attend to Zelda’s needs are blessed, robed and veiled. They have no eyes and no tongues, that they cannot defile the maiden by gaze or speech. She washes in a freezing spring fed from deep beneath the ground, three times, and at the third she is robed in undyed cloth. No jewelry enters the sanctum; before its doors, her attendants press themselves flat to the ground and stay there.
She alone walks forward into the castle’s heart.
Before Hyrule proper had been raised above the clouds, to maintain her purity, leaving behind the green fields and tall mountains worked by the lesser peoples, this place had been made, and now it was the only remaining piece of that ancient castle. It had been painted, once, an ordinary chamber, more adjoined to the room around it, however holy. An ancient battle, however, had scorched it white, destroyed anything else that might have dwelt here until there was not even soot to mark the walls.
The reliefs here are not like the portraits above. It is not people they depict, but gods not honored anywhere else in the castle.
A thousand panels of sunset glass gather into the corded sinews of a young woman, a warrior. Her red hair is twisted in a high, ragged knot behind her. Her powerful arms are sixfold, each banded with gold: the first raised to cradle the sun against the sky; its match holds the moon before the earth. The middle two arms hold a pair of labryses, spread as if to hew her enemies; the final two are cupped in front of her chest. Her breasts are uncovered, and between them, her ribs gape open. From the wellspring of her heart weeps the blood of the burning earth- she kneels to facilitate its flow, but her high, proud face, lifted to regard her first creation of dawn, shows no sign of discomfort.
Still adhering to her tradition, Zelda bows before Din- initiator, destroyer; the many-faced. Dancer and warlord, whose feet shatter the ground. Cycler of sun and moon, ruler of days and seasons.
“I strengthen myself in your image,” she says to the relief, and moves forwards.
Emerald light wafts warm through the second window. A mother, seated on the stump of a great tree. Though it is felled, it is not dead- green runners spring from all corners of its vast rings. A black hand rests on her pregnant belly; with the other, she holds aloft a goat’s horn carved into a flute. The forests around her teem with wolves, their heads thrown back to the sky. She wears a peasant’s dress and the heavy golden jewelry of aristocracy; flowers fill her wild hair and the trees around her are heavy with ripe fruit. Fields of golden wheat stretch in the shadows between the wolves. A grand book lies open on her lap, nearly crowded by her growing child, and nestled among its pages- a single rabbit, so young that it has not yet opened its eyes, but it sleeps safely among the wolves. Her eyes are kind, but gleam like molten gold, a crown of antlers raised from her head, the pelt of a bear draped across her shoulders.
Again, Zelda kneels, presses her branded hand to her heart and brow. Farore- all-mother, giver of life, queen of bounty and treasure. Patron of artists, inspirer of bards, of the overflowing earth and the wild, untamed lands.
“I will surrender myself to your lands, soon,” she says. Her legs are beginning to cramp in the cold. She rises, proceeds regardless.
It is the third she seeks.
The sea in the final relief has been rendered a smooth black mirror, unto which the stars gleam in perfect mirror of the heavens above them. The light that seeps through this is watery and blue, though it rests in the same wall as the other two, though they are enclosed by rock and buildings and no true sunlight has flitted through them in centuries.
Here is a depiction of woman whose history has been etched so deeply into her face that it is not clear if her eyes are anything but deep holes between the wrinkles. She stands forlorn among gravestones, clutching her ragged robes, but a singular gleaming star crowns the apex of her brow. Her harp, she holds before her, and the clutching hand is not empty as it first appears- instead, carved bones- a fortune teller’s tools, a gambler’s instruments, poke from her fingers.
It is before Nayru she lingers the longest. A midwife now long gone told her she was born under Nayru’s stars. The dear old woman does not know how true the statement is. It is Nayru, the fate-carver, master of the ages, the final sovereign that anyone in this world someday faces, who set Zelda on this path long ago.
“Guide me,” Zelda says, and she is not sure when her prayer became a whimper, but there is no one here to witness her breach in etiquette.
She does not wait for an answer, regardless. But she rises, and walks from the Sanctum, walks in the way of creeping fog. The attendants do not hear her. The gate guards do not notice her pass.
Impa sees, waiting at the door to the castle with a white loftwing gripped by the reigns. She watches, with cautious eye, as Sheik mounts the thing, a bit unsteady for being so long confined. “Steady, nephew,” she tells him, a bit sharply.
The outcry will not arise until a week later.
They will be gone by then.
