Work Text:
Daeron:
'What wilt thou weave? What wilt thou spin?'
Lúthien:
'A marvellous thread, and wind therein
a potent magic, and a spell
I will weave within my web that hell
nor all the powers of Dread shall break.'
(Lay of Leithian, Canto V)
The White Goddess Hylia was a weaver from the beginning, though this is very rarely remembered. Most of the tales and songs told about gods recalled greater, grander, more divine things:
Din's power,
Nayru's wisdom,
Farore's courage.
Stuff of raw, weighty matter that ran thick as blood and lay heavy as the foundations of the world, dark and deep and mysterious. But what use is raw matter if there is no gentler hand there, to warp and weft it into patterns? Into networks and connections that ran across time?
The golden goddess brought the formless world into being, laying it down in messy clumps of Magic. Young Hylia, or, well, as young as a goddess could be, is the one who works the mess like wool around her spindle, creating the threads of tension and energy with her Power, that she then embroidered into definite shapes and symbols and motifs upon the world.
She:
:creates
Day and Night:
:Ocean and Sky
Land and Sea:
*Push.
Tug.*
*Knot.
&Snip.*&
Begin again, another thread.
She creates the concept of colors as she goes along, dyes to go along with the textiles of the world she has woven, sewn and knitted together. She breathes them in, and they escape through her fingers.
...
Yellow is the bright joy, the unbelievable awe of seeing the sun for the first time, ripple of corn or wheat, the finding of treasure.
The finest shade, once she can never match with any dye, is the color of his hair, messy as un-spun wool when, near the end of her era, he stands tall and strong and kind, swearing his life at her side.
...
Blue is the freedom, the calmness, the vastness of the sky. Safety. Sanctuary. Honor.
Nothing is more safe than looking into his eyes, the promise woven there that the vow of the demon king has made to ravish this land, to ravish her as his /abducted/ consort, will never come to pass.
...
Green is the strength of the forest, the resilient of the grass, the virility of life.
It is the color of the tunic he wears, it is the one he pulls off in the dead of night, when he holds her close, holds her tight, and makes her understand with the pinprick of pain that comes from the first time that Hylia has fallen in love with more than just her weaving. More than just this world. She is in love with him. So much so that she would give herself as his own, if she could.
...
Red is the passion of her creation, the trill of seeing it come together. Red is the crimson thread, loose and liquid, soon given the uglier name of blood, that connects parents to their children, kin to their clan, in repeated tugs across generations. Its a lovely color, but these seams are so important that they are best left inside the bodies of the Hylians she knits together in their mother's wombs.
She will never love /and loath/ the color more, then she see how much he is will to shed on her behalf. Unto his death, his mortal seams broken and unraveling in her arms. Yet she will trust in the thread he binds her with on their first-their only- night, as she relinquished her divine form. To stop Demise, yes...
Yes...
But.... also
to
find him
again.
...
Thousands of years later, the thread continues...
Brought up high among the Skyloft people of the floating islands, Zelda learned to spin and weave and sew early on, as most young girls in their community do. Its an important skill after all. The temperatures above the clouds is unpredictable at best. They plunge without warning and the man who doesn't have a thrifty, industrious wife to make hardy clothes made to last will be losing a hand or a leg to frostbite in the winter, as he hunts and labors for his family in the skies above.
So Zelda learns at her mother's knee, tongue sticking out, brow furrowed, utterly focused.
Her mother and the ladies of her sewing circle get a chuckle out of her compete attention.
"Love," said mother, one hand stroking her daughter's sun-colored hair. "Its only a sock you're mending, not time and space."
Little Zelda, only five years old, looks up completely serious. "It's Link's sock."
"Oh, honey," mother laughs. "That boy will have another hole it it by this time tomorrow."
And he would, it was a cycle. Link loved to explore the layout of their home, to climb the tallest trees and scamper underfoot. And Zelda would often be trailing along after him, fretful, her sewing knit on hand to stitch him back together.
"But I have to fix it," and for a moment, Zelda's mother felt her smile falter, for in that moment, she doesn't recognizes who is looking out her daughter's bright blue eyes. "I have to fix it."
...
With an attitude like that, its no wonder Zelda quickly became the most accomplished seamstress among the girls her age. She's making her own clothes by the time she's thirteen, as deft with a needle as an painter is with oils. She tugs and pulls and weaves and dyes the fabric at hand, the dress for the goddess ceremony, where she had been chosen to play the role of Hylia.
She wants the dress to be a dark dusty pink. The color of the ashes of roses.
Of a beating heart, a love that has never died.
Cherries and fir are used to help make the dye. Rose and lavender too. Sumac is what finally get it right.
There is method to it. By candlelight Zelda embroiders the sailcloth. Every stitch matters, and each one has meaning to the gods' language, each speaking the story she's created.
She hopes Link will like it. She hopes he'll like the knight's tunic the winner will wear this year. She made it green...its his favorite color, and oddly, while she was tugged its seams into place, making sure they were strong and tight and would not come undone,
would not loosen wouldnotfailhimwouldprotecthim...
the
hand
that held.
Her needle.
Shook.
...
Nothing goes as planned. Zelda is stolen away, down to the surface of the tapestry of creation that part of her barely remembers. At first she creeps, cowers, hides. Then Impa finds her. Then what she is is told to her.
She remembers.
She sets to work. She needs to purify herself for the task to come. But first she must weave a garment signifying her submission, her acceptation of this fate and its consequences.
Only the softest white from the clouds of the sky, the foam of the rivers, and the tears of her eyes will do to make the necessary threads, and under Impa's watchful gaze, Zelda creates a dress white enough to be used at her wedding...(to the hero? to the demonking ?) that might serve as her shroud.
For so long in her former life, Zelda knows Hylia has been a weaver, creating the tapestry of life and social fabric of peoples lives. But with the way she -and she- pulls and tugs and manipulates the threads to drag Link, who crosses sky and land to rescue her, into this fate...
It doesn't matter that she-she-loved (loves) him. Its unforgivable.
Never mind that (the hero) her best friend, forgives her. Zelda does not.
So she weaves herself into the tale, tugging shut the binding that will keep Demise at bay, until her sleephead wakes her up.
...
Its over. The demon lord who would sacrifice her is gone, the demon king who would defile her is vanquished. Link has saved their world, saved her life. Again.
This time the red seams that flow through his heart did not break, he is here, on earth, his thread willing given over to her hands to spin with her own, unbroken into the future. They have years and years to look forward too. To seeing the settlement they begin on the surface grow, to see themselves grow into adults. To see the tentative thread between them strength into something so much more, all over again. Once, a Hero had tugged a Goddess close, and bound her to him with his devotion.
Now Zelda tugs her hero close on their wedding night, his hands that slay demons so unbelievable gentle as they follow the patterns they discover across their bodies, across their hearts, stitched into their souls.
Together, they continue a very different type of weaving, the only weaving left that can create new life, a addition to a tapestry the Golden Goddess begun. That will continue on and on, its pattern unbroken, yet forever new.