Archive of Our Own

The Princess wakes up and says, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering on the wind; now I am awake, and I can’t remember: am I a princess who dreamt she was a butterfly or a butterfly who dreamt she was a princess?

Being a dragon is like dreaming, in that it makes sense when you’re doing it. When you’re doing it, it makes sense as anything ever has, seems that you’ve always been this and will always be this. Seems that you’ve always been winding in the air, miles above the ground, twisting and glorious, gleam and light and shimmer and ozone, fit to pluck the moon out of the sky. Ten thousand years all coil into one rapturous breath. Yeah, you're a pretty big deal, you’re the biggest deal in the night sky. Who’d argue with you? People down below, small as gnats running hither and thither under logs, creatures who haven’t been alive ten thousand years and a hundred years before then, yeah, you’re a big fucking deal.

But then the dream ends, and it doesn’t make any sense at all in the light of day. Ten thousand years resolve into nothing at all. The dream unseams the way all dreams do, into warm morning and touching hands. Sand in the corners of your eyes, tear tracks drying into salt in the lines of your face. You can tell it to someone, but you don’t have the resolve to sell it. You can tell it to the butcher, to the cheesemonger, say, I dreamt I was a dragon high over the land, twisting in the wind like a kite, and they’ll listen, but not listen, because we never really listen when people tell us about their dreams, only politely nod and wait for them to finish and then say, I dreamt I was a bird once, or, Last night I dreamt I was a marmot in my den, but then the rain came and washed me out and all my eggs broke up on the rocks— oh, I should say, in the dream I was a kind of marmot that laid eggs—

She dreams, and she is a dragon, twisting in the wind like a kite, rolling and leading with her head, blinding light in her mane and blinding fury in her claws. She is no-one at all, she’s the biggest deal in the night sky, forget the moon and the stars, forget the sun, she’s no-one and nothing at all and she remembers nothing but ten thousand years of flying and the occasional tremor of fear. There is no fear now. What does a dragon have to fear? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

But then she thinks, oh, but this is over. The sword is repaired. I’m home now. And the dream, which has no defenses against self-awareness, evapores like water off a hot pan. She is a woman miles above the sky, plummeting, plummeting.

. . .

They make it to their home in Hateno, but only just, falling apart as soon as they cross the threshold and collapsing into pieces in bed. They fall into a pile together, heedless of where their limbs end up, sleeping like two dogs in a heap, boots thrown under the too-small mattress.

Link’s the right size to fit under her chin when they’re pressed together from neck to ankle, and she likes him that way, likes his shape— small in height and none too broad, but dense as hardtack and twice as coarse. She can put her arms around him and join her hands together at the small of his back with room to spare, and he presses her down into the mattress, as heavy as a stone. It makes her feel big and present and safe in a small, small bed.

In the middle of the night, he wakes up and cries for five minutes, and then falls asleep with his face wet, his breath evening out mid-hiccup. This boy could fall asleep in the middle of anything. She touches the small of his back, pats it like she’s soothing a horse. In the morning, he’ll be starving.

Zelda isn’t hungry. Or maybe she’s the hungriest she’s ever been, it’s hard to tell on an empty stomach. 

She’s exhausted. She hasn’t slept in eons, although it feels like she just woke up. The center of her chest feels as drained as a flat waterskin, it ought to be concave, but it isn’t. It’s just a chest. She ought to be tired, but she isn’t at all, only drained. She closes her eyes and sees the blue of the sky against her eyelids, the imprint of the sun burning holes into her retinas. When a child wakes up from a nightmare and is afraid to go back to sleep for fear of dropping right back into the jaws of it, that’s how she feels.

But she’s very drained, after all. An hour before dawn, sleep finds her coiled around her knight like a length of rope around a neck.

—She wakes up, and air is rushing past her ears. She can’t tell if it was the falling that roused her or the rousing that made her drop out of the sky. One day, she will be through with falling, but today is not that day. The sun is meekly climbing out of the horizon line, and she is rushing down to meet it on its way. 

“Link!”

She’s saved by virtue of Link being insane, and being insane, he fell into bed wearing pants with pockets, and in those pockets were a lot of things. Additionally, he’d thrown his equipment over the side of the bed when they climbed up the stairs, shrugging and signing that he’d arrange them in the morning. This all being the case, as he would tell her later, when he woke up, he managed to grab his glider and hang on to her tail, following close behind and catching her when she dropped out of the sky.

The reason he’d woken up being, naturally, that she tore the roof off their house.

. . .

They sit at Purah’s lab, eating porridge without saying anything as Purah looks her over, and then not saying anything as Impa looks her over, and then only exchanging confused glances as Robbie looks her over (why? ), all without coming to any particular hard and fast conclusions

“I’m thinking about it,” Purah says, “and it might be that you still have the stone in your stomach. Like a bezoar.”

“A bezoar is formed internally,” Zelda says. “You’re thinking of a gizzard stone.”

Purah waves her off. “I’m not a horse doctor.”

“That would be a choke, actually. Different, still.”

“So it could still be in your stomach, because it’s a stone and you aren’t a Goron. It’s just been— partially deactivated somehow. Maybe something in your sleep made it reactivate, and as soon as you woke up, it reset. Like a fiddly switch.”

“Like a fiddly switch,” Zelda repeats, feeling numb.

“What was it like,” Impa asks, ponderously, “when you were a dragon?”

What was it like when Zelda was a dragon? That’s the question, isn’t it. She wishes she had a diary on her, so she could parse it out slowly, step by step, like she might with a dream she’s remembering in bits and pieces, but that is exactly what it’s like. Like a dream from the night before, vivid and tangible, but already melting away in the light of day. It’s like trying to describe a scent— was it good? Sometimes. Was it bad? Frequently. Does she remember it? She remembers that it happened, but the rest is vague. She’d been fulfilled by a powerful and singular purpose, to bathe the Master Sword in power and thus heal it over millennia, but to try and look past that one overwhelming drive is like trying to peer through a window that’s fogged over with condensation.

“That’s alright, we weren’t expecting an answer or anything,” Purah says. Impa scoffs at her.

Link bumps his knuckles against hers, his left hand to her right. He’s always been ambidextrous, but favored his right hand over his left until now. He still seems somewhat unfamiliar with his restored arm, holding his shoulder a little tensely. It’s been less than twelve hours since, however, so no-one could fault him for that. 

“Thank you, Link,” she says, putting her hand over his and patting once, then letting her go so he could freely sign as needed. “It’s— it was like dreaming, I suppose. I was aware of my actions and time passing, but it all felt rather hazy and unreal. And now that it’s over, I can only recall outstanding details, but not the overarching structure.”

“And those details were…?”

“I was very high up,” Zelda says. “There were clouds, and light. And it was vitally important that I held on to the sword.”

It was good she did. There she sits, on Link’s back, sheathed and at rest, but still thrumming with power. It’s strange to say it now, but she feels a camaraderie with her now, one she’d never felt when they were teenagers, and she’d held such contempt for the wonder boy who could do everything so naturally when she was left in the lurch. But looking at the sword now, Zelda finds herself happy to have had someone with her in some way, all those thousands of years, if only to bear silent witness to at all. Maybe they ought to be asking the sword what’s going on, she’d probably have a better sense of it.

“Well,” Purah says. “I guess the only thing we can do now is wait and see if it happens again. Good luck with your roof!”

Zelda forgot about the roof.

. . .

Hudson Construction is nothing if not fast, but overnight roofing is a lot even for them, and she hadn’t left very much on their poor little house anyway. It’s lucky she didn’t take the walls off in her exit, simply neatly removed the roof like a child prying open the top of a toy house to peer inside. It’s not livable, however much she’d like to get inside where the fabrics smell like Link’s soap (it’s horse lather, he’s frugal) and her books. Instead, they both squeeze onto Boots’s saddle and ride out while there’s still daylight to burn towards the Akkala Region.

When she lets go of the conundrum long enough to consider their surroundings, she asks, “Where’s Eyesore? He wasn’t at the house.”

“Wait,” Link says. It’s hard for him to sign with his hands on the bridle.

They stop once on the way there to bathe separately at a river. The water is cold and refreshing, almost painfully so, and Link’s horse lather is so harsh it makes her skin prickle after, but it smells like him and it’s comforting.

After she’s finished bathing, she comes out of the water and dries herself, enjoying the sun on her skin for a moment before dressing in fresh clothing. Link finds her a moment later, a concerned look on his face, and she scans the horizon for attackers that aren’t there. He takes her by the shoulders and squeezes like he’s checking to see if she’s still there in the flesh.

His breath comes through his nose, short and fast, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around like a spooked horse. She’d been gone for ten thousand years, and for him, the better part of a year. She pulls him into a hug, his back bowing so he can tuck his head under her chin.

“I’m here, Link. I’m here now.”

He’s horseflesh all over wherever her hands land, and they land over a lot, because he never wears a proper fucking shirt. His skin shivers like he’s casting off flies.

Afterwards, he apologizes with his hands and his frowning eyes for freaking out. There aren’t very many signs in original Hylian Sign Language, it’s a woefully blunt language coined only very recently (well, recently for them, which was a hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a year), and originally it had been invented among guards and soldiers for delivering silent messages, and so it was a language with little creativity and even fewer room for expression. Especially compared towards Rito Sign and Gerudo. But he’s always been inventive with it.

It wasn’t the first time he’d created an expression, only the first time he’d done so when she didn’t resent him too much to appreciate his creativity, but she remembers when he’d first signed the word wiseass, making the sign for eyeglasses and finishing it by, rather than tucking his fingers behind his ears to depict the legs of the eyeglasses, drawing his hands up to imply donkey ears. It took her a minute to understand, but she laughed when she did, because it was just like him to make a pun like that for no good reason at all. In a more just world, she’d have sent him all over the place to collect all the colloquial innovations that Deaf Hyllians across Hyrule poured over that had never been committed to page, and include his own ideas among them to expand the formal language. But her father had been, for obvious reasons, against the idea of sending her guard out to shake random villages in hopes spare words and tenses fall out, and so it never came to fruition, and now all those words are gone.

They reach Tarrey Town at dusk, and find Link’s odd module home, like a series of cubes stacked together by a baby, which is immediately identifiable by the gleam of Eyesore standing at his stable, pumping his knees up and down excitedly. The shiny idiot sticks his upper lip out and whinnies, and a more sentimental person might think he’s happy to see his rider after having been left abandoned for nearly a year, but Zelda knows that, in his heart, Eyesore is a dumb stallion like all dumb stallions, and he’s only excited because Link brought his mare within sight.

Still. When Link untacks Boots and Eyesore is busy stretching his neck over the fence in a vain bid at flirtation, she buries her face in his mane and feeds him half an apple. He’s such a stupid, gaudy animal, and she’s glad Link caught up to him, he wouldn’t last a day in the wilderness.

The house is nice, if very geometric, but they don’t sleep inside.

“I don’t want to knock off your roof again if it repeats tonight,” she says.

“ Our roof,” Link says, putting emphasis on the sign for our, moving his hand in a circle that was much wider than it needed to be.

Roof ownership aside, they still sleep outside, their bedrolls laid side-by-side. The stars above don’t look any different with one dragon fewer in the sky, and the moon rises white and safe, no threat of curdling red above their heads. It isn’t like when they first met again, after one hundred years. They don’t furtively glance at each other from the corners of their eyes, or struggle to learn how to speak to one another. He slings his arms around her and they look at the stars and wait for sleep to find them.

“Did you fight in the Imprisoning War?”

“Some,” she says. “Not a lot. I’m not very good at fighting, I’m afraid. After Sonia— towards the end, it didn’t matter anymore who was skilled and who wasn’t. Still, it was not very much, you see more conflict in a day’s work.”

He nudges her shoulder with his. She notes it’s with his left shoulder. They tuck into their bedrolls at the same time, but when she turns over on her side to look at him, his eyes are still open and looking at the moon.

. . .

She lashes the air with her claws, and the sky cuts itself to ribbons around her. She doesn’t usually fly this close to the ground, but the air is sweet and clean ever since the beast left. Perhaps she will fly low for a thousand years, see all the little people skitter, coming out of their dens to point up and gape. Perhaps she will turn up into the wind like a flag and wrap herself around a wind current, allow it to carry her up into the stars, and never come down again. Ten thousand years, and she hadn’t ever let her claws touch the ground; why should she? In the bevy of lights, she will be the brightest among them.

A hot gale blows up from beneath her and she coils herself around it like a noose, shoulders into it and lets it carry her up, up into the bevy of lights, up into the cradle of heaven, up into the place where the sun hides its face, where the air is thin and cold.

A flutter of fabric beside her catches her eye, and she blinks at it, turning one ear to listen. It says, “Hoh, hoh,” like one soothes a horse, and she identifies it easily as her little person. She can’t remember the name, she’s cried that knowledge away, but he’s identifiable to her now as much as he was when he came for his sword. He still carries her, safe in her sheath on his back, even as he tries to keep pace with her on a kite of his own, the contraption shuddering and struggling to keep up with the upward gust of her movement. If he can keep himself from crashing to the ground, he may follow.

And if he cannot, she will catch him.

He keeps up for the moment, gliding in her wake, dipping and catching himself and coasting again. She turns her attention back down to the homesteads below, all boxes and angles like mineral salt. She has seen towns such as this grow and fall and grow again, though these are perhaps the strangest yet. Strange people in strange times. She coils upwards in the air like a kite twisting in the wind. The homesteads become smaller and smaller, and she forgets what it was she was looking for, so small and temporary.

Her little person must have lost his grip on his wings, because he alights himself on her tail, holding onto one of the spines on her back. He is so small, her little person. He will have to hold fast. The wind coming off Death Mountain is hot and will carry her easily. Where will she go? Somewhere cold, perhaps.

She lashes the air with six sets of claws, and eats the space between where she is and where she will be. Eats the time between now and then.

. . .

She wakes up in a tree.

If she didn’t know better, she’d say that they were in a tree in the Hebra Mountains, which is a long way away from where they went to sleep near Lake Akkala. 

But she doesn’t know better because she’d been a dragon all night, and dragons are hardly constrained to staying in one place. Despite the fact that she’d been flying all night, and woke up balanced on a thick tree limb, she feels bright and well-rested. She rubs sand out of the corners of her eyes and looks down in search of Link. He’s not on the branch below hers, so she looks upwards, and, sure enough, he’s lying on his back in a narrower tree branch, sound asleep. It seems awful to wake him up, she must have kept him awake all night flying.

Finding her way down isn’t easy, but she does it without barking either of her elbows, so she considers that a small victory to start the day. When she looks up, Link is still asleep and dreaming, his head nested in his arms like a cucco sleeping on its own wings. She rounds the hill and a few wild ponies, grooming one another and pushing snow with their hooves to scrounge for breakfast, raise their heads at her and huff. They’re distant enough that they don’t startle away, just eye at her nervously and resume their morning activities. She goes in search of breakfast and comes back with a few edible mushrooms and a fish. She should probably wait until Link wakes up for him to cook, she can’t really remember what types of food become a breakfast.

Fortunately, she doesn’t have to wake him up, he’s already awake and halfway through shimmying down the tree. She’s happy he didn’t throw himself down and twinge his ankles.

“Breakfast,” she says, presenting her handful of mushrooms and fish.

He looks down at it and smiles at her in an honest, somewhat disheartened way. She throws a mushroom at it.

Despite her meager findings, he manages to scrounge up a decent breakfast for them, using his supplies— this time he’d been prepared and taken his pack with him before she transformed, so he must not have slept at all before then. He makes two mushroom skewers and roasts the fish wrapped in a wide leaf, and they eat it with their hands, peeling away tender flesh and bringing it to their mouths like animals. After she’s finished, he rummages in his pack and retrieves some fried wild greens and charred peppers (how long has he had those in his bag) and wolfs them down in three big bites apiece. She finds a wildberry bush and they share the tangy red fruit between them until she feels more alive than before, fresh and strange and exhilarated.

“We’re in Hebra,” she says. These are the first words exchanged between the two of them since she woke up in the tree. “Near the Tabantha Frontier, correct?”

Link nods enthusiastically and sucks a red spot of juice from his thumb.

“We should head there, then, for cold weather gear and horses.” She touches her own chin, thinking. “Maybe we ought to warn Teba that this is happening when we arrive. I would like to avoid destroying any more houses, especially those not our own. I suppose it’s good for us that the Rito are already fans of open-air living, right?”

He smiles at her and drums his fingers— still damp— on her knee. When she looks at his face, again, he signs, “It was fun to fly with you again.”

“Oh, I wish I remembered it,” she gushes. It comes out earnestly, she wishes she could remember it, every time that it happened. Not just now, but when he took the sword back, she wishes she could remember all of it, even when it was bad. She hates having left him alone with this.

“Couldn’t have fun before,” he says, aloud, “I was worried.”

His smile falters, but he reinforces it with steel. He’s always been good at smiling through his nerves, but she can tell that he’s lying. He’s still worried.

He catches them a slow but strong pony, judging it from afar and stalking down a snow-covered back to leap onto its back, and they ride with only a blanket as their saddle all the way to Rito Village. The horse is full white with black spots all over, and she suggests they name her Goshawk, and Link suggests they name her Spotty. They settle on Snowshoe.

. . .

“That’s where we last saw the Light Dragon,” Teba finishes, gesturing to the horizon with the tip of his wing. “It landed there. We were going to launch a search party— nobody’s ever seen a dragon land before. What if it’s been hurt?”

“Already checked,” Link says with his hands. “She’s fine.”

She elbows him in the ribs. It’s like elbowing a beefsteak.

“Sorry, sorry, that was me.”

“The— you brought down the dragon?”

Zelda grimaces. “In a sense? I— we’re still trying to understand what’s happening here. I am the dragon, at least for the moment.”

“I can hardly see how you can be a dragon for the moment, your highness. Do you plan to divide yourself down the middle like a worm so one half can fly and the other walk?”

“Oh, do you think that might really work?” she says, at the same time Link says, “Absolutely not.”

Teba nods, stroking his beak. “No, I thought not. But at least now I can call off the search party, so that’s a relief. Can I ask, princess, were you always a dragon sometimes, or is this a new development?”

“That’s a very difficult question to answer, I’m afraid. For simplicity’s sake, let us say it is a new development.”

“I see. Kaneli is asleep now, and won’t be awake for a long while yet, and I’m not as wise as he is when it comes to these matters, but I would be happy to help however way I can. What caused you to start turning into the Light Dragon?”

“She ate a rock,” Link says.

Teba hums. “Like a gizzard stone, I see.”

“In a sense.”

“Well,” Teba says. “Have you tried regurgitating it?”

Despite his very kind offer to have the most able-bodied of the Rito hold her upside down and shake her until the secret stone falls out of her mouth, Zelda declines regurgitating it. It feels like she’d have an easier time spitting out her own heart than the stone at this point, it’s been a part of her for so long. However, when Teba suggests that they stay until nightfall, so that they can offer, instead, the tutelage of experienced flyers who will be able to mind her, she eagerly takes him up on the suggestion. She’s under no delusion that her problem is lack of practice— she’s had more hours in the air than the whole village combined— but it would allow Link a night to himself for the first time since the battle with Ganondorf, and she’s sure he’s exhausted. Uninterrupted sleep must sound like a dream.

One of her experienced minders, as it turns out, is the young holder of the Rito’s secret stone, Tulin. Looking at him now is a strange act in double vision— she knew him before, though not nearly as well as Link had, and she met Medli only after that, but the lack of linearity, and the equivocal length of time since seeing either means that when she looks at him, she sees the Rito Sage, and when she thinks about the Rito Sage, she sees Tulin.

She hopes she’s able to rest her eyes properly soon. It’s been eons since she’s truly slept and it feels sometimes like her brain is retaining water.

“Link says you’re a dragon now!” Tulin says, in lieu of greeting.

It’s not entirely accurate, but it also sounds exactly like something Link would say, so she smiles as warmly as she’s able and says, “Yes! Isn’t it exciting?”

“Yeah, kind of!”

He flits around her, moving to examine her from all angles as though looking for scales and horns. Tulin is a bit strange to her— he’s older than the children at the school in Hateno, and so she feels like she can’t easily entertain him by showing him what kinds of insects and lizards he can catch if he’s careful, but he’s still young and bright-eyed and curious. She notices, however, that he seems more attentive than when she saw him last, a little under a year ago in his time. He seems more mellow, somehow, his energy tempered by responsibility. He does not wobble under the strain, it seems. If anything, he seems to fly higher with it.

She’s glad so many people have Link in their lives. He’s a good influence that way, even if he puts ideas in people’s minds about inadequate food storage.

After a few minutes of quiet mutual inspection, Tulin sits back and settles his wings, standing in front of her with his chest puffed out. “You aren’t a dragon right now,” he concludes, “but I can sense the secret stone in you. Why’d you eat it? Did it taste good?”

She’s taken aback. “You can sense it?”

He shrugs. “I just can. It’s like how you can find the way home when you’re flying at night, you know? Anyway, you didn’t answer me.”

“I swallowed my secret stone because I needed immense power at great personal cost, Tulin. If I tell you what it tasted like, do you promise never to try it yourself?”

“Well, yeah, I’m not a stupid hatchling who doesn’t know rocks from food.”

She says, “It tasted floral. Grassy and a touch sweet. But also a little like the wind. I do hope that makes sense, but you’ll have to take my word for it.”

A look of conflicted curiosity crosses his face, and he strokes his beak, a gesture so clearly borrowed from his father that it’s like seeing a reenactment. The look passes, and is replaced by boyish determination. “I promise not to eat my stone, princess.”

“Thank you, brave Sage. It’s a relief to me to hear.”

“It sounds a little gross anyway.”

He has her do an hour of fledgling wing exercises despite her insistence that she doesn’t fly the way he does when she’s a dragon, rolling her arms up and down and touching her toes until something between her shoulderblades pops satisfyingly. It doesn't have any immediate benefit, but makes her muscles burn in a soothing way, reminding her where her arms and calves are, and that it is good to have a body that breathes and does things for her. She’s concerned that she’ll destroy any house they’ll put her in, so she beds down on the landing in a hammock, overlooking the Hebra Mountains, the view beautiful. Link asks to sit next to her, but she insists that he take a bed and sleep properly for once, and after three rounds and asking, he finally agrees.

It is strange, to lie alone on the landing, listening to the whistle of the wind. The air is refreshingly cool and she is surrounded by the comforting noises of the village settling to sleep, the wind carrying the noises of late night conversation and music. Still, she has a difficult time relaxing. She wants for the too-small bed in Hateno, to be pressed shoulder-to-shoulder to Link, with one of his legs thrown over her when he rolls over during the night. The way they’d been just after he’d defeated Ganon originally, furtive and curious and reluctant to leave each other’s side for even a moment.

They’d made a happy little life together in Hateno, hadn’t they? The two of them, together in all the ways it counted and allowing anyone to make any assumption of their relationship that they wanted. Going about their daily tasks apart or together, falling into one bed any night they both were in town, sharing meals and ideas and time. It’d been so long ago it feels like that must have been the dream, a sweet delusion she came up with to please herself, and the time she’d been a dragon was the only time she’d ever truly been awake. 

It doesn’t have to be Hateno. It could be here, if he wanted, or in the desert, or Death Mountain, or the surface of the moon if he wanted it. But she hoped that there would be, in the future, a bed to share again, and a table set out for two with their favorite cups.

. . .

She wakes up, and her little person is nowhere to be seen. She is on the ground, which is nowhere for a dragon to be, her legs as useless on the flat earth as a hummingbird’s, scrabbling and insufficient. She ought to be up in the limitless air, straining against the cold wind and swallowing the sky. And her little Hylian, who flew with her so brazenly the night before, is gone, which is not suitable. She raises her head to the air and licks at the wind, tasting the smell of birds and bird-people, snow and ice and clean, cold water.

And her little person, asleep in one of the bird-person nests. She’ll just get him herself.

She roars, and all the little bird-people fly hither and thither, scattering into the air like gnats, rising from their nests fluttering and casting off feathers, and out comes her little person as well, pulling on papery layers of cloth to cover his legs. She’ll have to be careful not to harm him, people are so small and delicate. She slithers on her stomach to close the distance, until she can take hold of the papery fabric on his legs with her teeth and pull him up when she leaps up into the air. 

His fingers scrabble over the scales of her snout, nearly too small to sense, and he pulls himself up, nearly losing his leg-fabric in the process, and clambers up onto her head, the wind that rises to meet him there plastering him flat. He’ll have to hold fast if he’d like to stay on, and get warm if he’d like not to freeze. She is climbing up the bower of the sky, and she savors the chill and biting air. Perhaps she’ll stay above the clouds for another thousand years, perhaps she’ll stay here until the stars die out one by one.

Her person’s foot slips as he climbs onto her muzzle, and he falls on four limbs, crawling on his stomach until he finds the bridge of her brow and sinks his nails into the scales there, hanging on with one arm as he leans over the side to get within sight of one eye. He lowers a hand and makes shapes with it, nearly too small to see distinctly if it weren’t for how close he is, and his gestures clarify into spelled letters. He writes, in a hand-word language she knows without understanding, “DOWN”, and, “COLD”.

Hasn’t anyone told this guy? She’s the biggest deal in the night sky.

One of the smaller bird-people bursts up through the clouds and flutters around her head. “Link!” the bird-person calls out. “Keep her from coming down on top of the village!”

Her person momentarily let go of her scales with both hands to gesture at the bird person with both his arms, palms out to his sides, in exasperation. She dips her snout down to gain speed, and he plants his hands back on her brow, followed by his chest when the wind buffets him flat. The naked skin of his chest is not at all like her scales, soft and very warm.

The settlement below comes into view through the night fog, houses and bridges, nests and perches, suspension and ropes, an eagle’s aerie at the top of a cliff, unfolding into view the way civilizations rise from the ground, the way they’ve always risen from the ground, and inevitably fell, razed like wheat shorn at the harvest, cut down at the knees, and just as inevitably, rising back from the roots, growing up from the foundation, building themselves up with sticks and branches, suspension and ropes.

Her little Hylian, who has found his way to her mane, grabs two handfuls of her long fur and pulls as hard as he’s able, yanking up strands by the roots like the reins of a horse. Ah, so her little person thinks she is a beast of burden that can be led by the nose. He is not the first to think so, but she is fonder of him than any who tried it before. He’s brazen.

She leads with her head, sharpening her dive, and then loops around in a circle, the turn so steep that she could bite at her own tail, and loops again the other way, creating a figure eight in the sky. The movement kills her momentum dead, but she is content to slow her ascent on the way up, to check if she’s shaken her little person off. By some force of divinity, she has not, and he is still hanging on to her neck, still yanking up on her mane, the fur looped twice around his wrists to anchor himself. He must be freezing and boiling over with fear.

He makes a noise, first what sounds like a bark of pain, then half an utterance, and finally, a howling laugh.

She flies south for winter.

By the time she finds her way to the great, yellow plain of the desert, he has buried himself up to the shoulders in her mane, lying on his stomach with fur knotted around his legs and hands to keep from slipping off, and he must find some protection from the cold there, because his breaths have evened out, and his grip relaxed. He must have fainted from the altitude, or perhaps fallen asleep. No matter. She finds a place in the desert with water, which people need, and tall trees as protection from the sun when it will rise, and she makes to land.

. . .

Once upon a time, there was a Wind Fish that dreamed of a world, and in the world there were many people who lived strange and full lives, who loved and lived and didn’t want the dream to end; but the dream must end. One day, despite all their pleading and begging, the Wind Fish woke up, and she rubbed her eyes and said, “You won’t believe the dream that I had— you were there, and you were there, and you, and you—”

Being a dragon is a lot like dreaming, in that you wake up sometimes in a wet tangle of sweat and clothes, reeking like an animal, ashamed of the you that slept and dreamed and left you to clean up the mess they left behind. 

Zelda opens her eyes and finds herself with her cheek pressed to hot sand, having thrown off a blanket that had been pulled over her shoulders when she slept. The sun, in the late stages of rising, makes itself comfortable in the cathedral of the sky, as bright as a migraine and twice as punishing. She pushes herself up, her mouth tasting like sand and stale water, and hauls herself to her feet. She looks around until she finds Link. He’s on all fours next to a small oasis, drinking from it like a dog. He’s wearing a long tunic as a dress.

“That looks very fetching on you,” she says, the words coming out strange the way the first words spoken in a day always are, “where’d you get that?”

When he finishes drinking, he gets up, beams, and signs, “Side pouch! How are you?”

She feels exhausted, every time she blinks, her eyelids drag as though they can’t be bothered to open again, and there is grit in the corners of her eyes. She doesn’t need to check to know it’s sand. In lieu of answering, she says, “It wasn’t like this before, was it? Before, it was like sleeping and having a few dreams, now it feels like… it feels like I’ve spent all night in the castle hall, dancing until my shoes are worn through. I wasn’t like this as a dragon, before.”

His hands come up and he searches for words, making half-signs and giving up on them before he can finish the thought. His mouth twists into a thoughtful frown. Finally, he says aloud, “No. This is better.”

“This is better? Link, we’re completing the map of Hyrule with fewer and fewer supplies every time. Should we aim for Death Mountain next?”

“No,” he says. Then, “Yes. No, not Death Mountain. Yes, it is better.” He struggles to explain himself visibly, his words catching in his throat. He switches back to his signs. “When you were a dragon, you weren’t you. This time, it is you. That’s better.”

She reaches up and pulls at the ends of her hair, wishing it was longer so that she could worry at it more, or shorter so that it wouldn't stick to the sweat beading on the back of her neck. “I worry,” she admits, “that it’s only a matter of time before I am like this more than I am not. Perhaps this is the secret stone reasserting itself, and soon I’ll be a dragon more than just when I sleep. What then, Link? If I’m more destructive now, if I hurt you— we can’t ignore that possibility.”

“We’ll be together,” he said, signing the word together with finality. “Whatever happens. We’ll solve it.”

“It’s not that simple! Link,” she sits down on the sand, kicking up a cloud of dust. “Link I don’t want to go back. Please, I don’t want to lose myself again, I’d rather—”

He gathers both of her hands in his and brings them up to his mouth, kissing the back of one hand and then the other. He presses her hands together. It feels like when she would stand in the cold water, praying to Hylia for salvation, pleading for anyone to hear her, not even grant her power, only answer her so that she knew she wasn’t so alone.

His hands are occupied, so he speaks with his mouth, saying, “Ganondorf had a puppet of you that he’d dance around, recite spooky poetry, tell lies. I knew it was him, but I still went when it called. Because I thought— there was a chance. I needed to see to be sure. I went to see, and it was your face but not you. I thought it would be comfort, but it only hurt.”

There’s a wet gleam in his eyes, and it’s probably just sand that’s gotten into them, but it’s not and she knows it. He hums, hems and haws, his fingers moving against her palm, working through his thoughts. “You will not be lost again,” he says. “Whatever shape you are, if it’s you— then it’s you. And I’ll find you.”

He kisses the back of her hand one more time, seemingly to steel himself, and then returns it to her. His mouth curves up into a small, brave smile.

“Link,” she says. Then, “Link, why are you soaking wet?”

He signs, “Sweaty.”

Even though they’ll be filthy again by the end of the day, they take the time to bathe in the oasis. The rocks around it are rimmed with young safflina sprouts, too young to identify by color or bloom, and she shows him how you can identify which are electric and which are warm based on the shape of their true leaves, and the amount grown on each individual leaf node. She explains to him that this is important, because testing has shown that eclectic safflina needs to reach full size before being harvested, but the sprouts of the warm variety have an increased effect when compared to the adult specimens. She speculates that this is an adaptation to protect the vulnerable sprouts at night, since they are particularly prone to frost. At this point, Link momentarily stops her to dip his head below the water and wash the horse lather out of his scalp, then pops back out and shakes his head from side to side, casting water everywhere.

They also wash their clothes, and leave them on the sun-warmed rocks to dry while they wait in their underclothes on the shaded rocks, Link sharpening the Master Sword (silly boy. The blade doesn’t go dull. He’s just being sweet to her to suck up) and she flattens herself on her stomach and catches birds for breakfast. Three birds in, she hears him humming a melody while working the whetstone, and she momentarily stops to listen in.

“You know that song?” she asks.

He shrugs.

“It’s a waltz. Do you remember how to waltz?”

He shakes his head no, then rises up to his feet, hands extended. He doesn’t need to sign for her to know he’s requesting a demonstration. She takes both his hands, guiding his left hand to her right deltoid, having it rest there, and trailing her own right hand down from his arm to wrap around his waist, pulling him closer until they were standing chest-to-chest. He had yet to put on his dress again— it was still drying on the rocks— so there was an alarming amount of skin contact caused by this action. She’s beginning to remember why many dignitaries would not dance the waltz and considered it indecent compared to the more traditional country dances.

Leading with her left hand, she demonstrates the basic steps, counting aloud, “Two, three, one, two, three— it’s a box step, forward left, sideways right, then close, and reverse. It’s very simple, in theory, though I don’t think it was engineered to be danced on sand.”

He learns the steps well, doing everything she does in reverse, which of course he does, he’s always been a quick study when it comes to the physical arts, and he’s only really relearning something he’s forgotten but his feet remember. When they switch, and he attempts to lead, he spends the entire time looking down at his bare feet in the sand to make sure they don’t step on rocks, and when she reminds him he’s supposed to look up at his dance partner, he looks up at her with such wide, improbably blue eyes that he does, in fact, step on a rock. She goes back to leading after that, but the mood has dispersed, and now he’s decided that he’d actually like to dance in a faster pace than triple, knocking his knees with hers, pulling her in rather than mirroring alone, improvising into a sloppier frame, pulling her hand until she agrees, laughing, to spin him.

It’s definitely not a waltz anymore, but she’d have to be a very different person to resist him.

“Sa'oten!” someone says, making both of them jump, “A mirage! A vai and a voe dancing around an oasis in their underwear, the heat must have melted my mind.”

They part sheepishly. Zelda creeps around to grab their mostly-dy clothes from the rocks and slip into her own clothes, tossing his dress over her arm to bring it over to him. Not that he seems at all embarrassed to speak to the Gerudo warrior in only his shorts as she waters her sand seal and explains that, “I only wanted to stop for a drink of water before we kept going. Chief Riju said she saw the Light Dragon come down in this direction. Can you imagine that? A dragon landing on the ground! What if it was being attacked?”

The Gerudo shakes her head, as if she can’t keep the thought in it any longer.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Zelda tells her, passing the dress back to Link, who throws it over his head and wriggles into it without breaking eye contact. “We saw it take off from here, it didn’t look injured in the slightest.”

Adjusting his collar so it lay properly, Link makes a so-so gesture with his free hand. She nudges his foot with hers and he pretends he was just shaking his sore hand out.

“That’s good news!” the Gerudo says. “The name’s Jamila. It’s a beautiful oasis, don’t get me wrong, but the two of you— if you’re as real as you seem to be— are very far from Gerudo Town. Surus here,” she pats the sand seal on its rump, “isn’t spry enough to carry all three of us there, but it would be an honor to provide directions to two lost travelers, even if only one of you will be permitted entry.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Link says, “they’ll make an exception.”

“That’s very optimistic of you, little voe, but they will not.”

. . .

“Say again,” Riju says, speaking very slowly, as though talking to someone quite stupid. “You’re a dragon, but only when you sleep? Because you ate a rock.”

“A secret stone, like yours.”

“Well, I can tell you right away what your problem is,” Riju tips her chin onto her fist, the image of teenage disaffection. “You shouldn’t have eaten that rock.”

“Lady Riju.”

“We could have you—”

“We’re not shaking the rock out.”

Riju sighs, slumping in her seat. “We’re never allowed to do anything fun.” She lingers in her sullen mood for seconds before perking suddenly, planting her feet on the ground with a thud. “I have it! You said that you only transform when you dream, yes?”

“Yes, Chief Riju, that is the case.”

“Then,” she says, a broad grin spreading across her face, “we simply have to keep you awake. Buliaria!”

Buliara stands at attention, leveling Riju with a raised eyebrow and a suspicious expression.

“Bring the coffee.”

Coffee, they learn while sitting in the throne room at the first floor of the palace, amidst a collection of earthenware cups, heated pots of sand, and one very shiny copper kettle, is a type of drink, similar to tea. It comes from red berries, from which the pips are harvested, then roasted, and finally ground into a very delicate brown powder, like Sheikah matcha, and boiled in the kettle to produce a deeply fragrant, spectacularly powerful drink that, when imbibed for both medicinal properties and for its flavor, elicits in the drinker increased energy and alertness.

“Our warriors drink it before night missions, both for the heat and for to keep them awake,” Buliara explains. She places the copper kettle on top of the heated sand and drags it carefully across, like a painter drawing long brushstrokes. “And, of course, because it is delicious.”

When she is happy with the state of the coffee, boiling in the copper kettle, she removes it from the hot sand and stirs it vigorously with a wooden stirrer, then pour the contents— a shockingly small amount of liquid after all that work— into three miniscule red clay cups. The drinks steam invitingly. Buliara reserves one cup for herself, and gives Link and Zelda the other two. Without a minute’s hesitation, Zelda brings the cup up to her nose and savors the bitter air coming off of it. It smells earthy and vivacious, like the first rain.

Riju, glaring at the number of cups, says, “Buliara!”

“It’ll stunt your growth, Lady Riju.”

“I’m not a child anymore!”

Buliara looks unconvinced, but she pours a little more water into the kettle and heats it again to make a much lighter concoction in color, pouring that into a fourth cup and sweetening it with honey. “Would you like cream in it, as well?”

“Buliara.”

Zelda drinks her cup without any honey at first, simply tasting it and burning the tip of her tongue so badly she can hardly taste how bitter coffee is. She licks her bottom lip clean, then sweetens the drink with a spoonful of honey and tasting it again. “It’s delicious.”

Buliara, drinking hers as black as night and without as much as a glance at the honeypot, sits back and sips hers, looking appeased.

When she turns to look at Link, he’s watching her, his eyes on her mouth as if he’s trying to read her lips. She lifts her cup at him and quirks her eyebrow, and he shrugs, looking at his own cup and bringing it up. He tips the drink into his mouth in its entirety, then throws his head back like a pelican and swallows it all at once.

For a moment, he doesn't register any expression on his face, and then he opens his mouth and cringes horribly. He turns back to her, wearing the aghast face of those suffering a deadly betrayal.

She shrugs at him helplessly. “Well, I liked it!”

After ten minutes, she’s finished her own cup and asked, politely, for another, which Buliara refuses her, saying she can have another in an hour if there’s no effect. After twenty minutes, Link starts to jiggle his knee. After twenty-five, he taps his feet. After an hour, he shoots out of the palace and finds the tallest structure to climb, purchases three new outfits, and solves at least two people’s personal problems, one which required capturing a wild sand seal. By the time he comes back, two hours post-cup, still wild-eyed, Zelda has finished her second cup, split a lovely savory pastry with Riju, and feels ready to take a nap.

“That was delightful, I haven’t been so relaxed in eons,” she says. “But, to be blunt, Lady Riju, it was an utter failure. I could go to sleep right now.”

“Coffee affects everyone differently,” Riju admits. “We’ll have to find a different method to keep you awake all night, and it isn’t even sundown yet.”

“I do have an idea, Lady Riju,” Buliara says. “But it can wait until after dinner.”

“Why is that?”

She says, “It’s uncouth to daydrink in polite company.”

. . .

“—And he didn’t even let me do it once!” she says, directly into Link’s ear, her hand braced on his shoulder so she could lean in without losing her balance. “He said I’d break it! Me! Break it!”

“Robbie’s stupid anyway,” Link says, his hands moving in a flurry. He says something else, but he combines signs together in such a fluid, relentless pace that she doesn’t follow at all.

“Say again, please, I didn't catch any of that.”

He repeats the gestures, speaking at an exaggeratedly slow pace. “YOUR-HAIR-SMELLS-NICE.”

“Thank you, it’s not horse lather.”

He growls and catches the point of one of her ears, tugging on it in mock punishment. Three drinks in, his face has a sweet red flush, like after a long ride through a cold field, and his eyes are as wide and blue as the sky. Outside, the moon is high in the sky, and Zelda isn’t a dragon.

“If you’re going to flirt all night, do it somewhere else,” Furosa says. “At least don’t do it in front of Deltan anymore, she just got her groove back and you’re making her discouraged.”

Deltan flaps a hand. “Let them! Maybe some of their good fortune will rub off on me.”

The canteen is fuller than she’d ever seen it, though it could be that she’d hardly ever gone during its peak hours, which, based on how packed it is now, seem to be in the dead of night. She also had never had a Noble Pursuit before, though it reminds her of a type of drink Urbosa had once goaded her into sipping when she was sixteen, a dark red wine that tasted like blood orange and had cubes of hydromelon floating in it. She doesn’t believe Noble Pursuit existed in its current form when Urbosa was alive, but she imagines she’d like it if it had. She orders another glass, because the dead cannot drink libations and throw their arms around the living, so she will have to do it for them.

When she places another drink in front of him, Link rambles with his hands, something about how he has this idea to braise a wild boar in sweet wine for many hours and then he plucks up his drink and sips while continuing the thought, fingerspelling with his free hand. She only picks up on about half his words this way, he’s so chatty today, and the red of the Noble Pursuit stains his mouth like gloss, like someone’s bitten him on the lips. The ice of the drink is so cold on her mouth but the drink itself is so hot in her throat, no wonder the Gerudo invented it. Hot in the day, cold at night. She thinks it would be good to kiss him right about now, to taste the drink while it was still on his lips, cold on the mouth and hot in the throat. He looked so good, wearing his tunic as a dress.

Someone— Buliara, touches the back of her neck, her hand shockingly cold to the touch. Was she just outside? Yes, she was, she’d been sulking because she saw her ex getting a drink, even though she must see her ex all the time in the palace anyway.

“Are you having fun, Princess?”

“Yes! I am, Urb— Buliara. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” she says, “but maybe this will be your last drink for the night. You should drink some water, or you’ll be a bear when you wake.”

Zelda says, “No, I’ll be a dragon.” And then a sudden laugh pushes out of her, as loud as a bark. Link tips his head onto her shoulder, and his hair tickles her philtrum.

Buliara grabs a stool and drags it over to sit next to theirs, putting her back to the rest of the canteen. This way, it was like the three of them were in a private booth of sorts, in a conversation apart from the rest of the room. The question rises in Zelda’s mind and bubbles out just as quickly, “Where’s Lady Riju?”

“Sulking,” Buliara says, smiling. “She’s the Chief, but it embarasses her that she can only have a light drink here. She could demand that Furosa serve her as she would an older Gerudo, but she’s uncomfortable commanding people to bend their morals without good reason. She’s growing up. If only her mother were here to see it.”

Zelda hums. She sips her drink, attempting to commit the taste to memory, it may be a while yet before she’s able to have it again, and ten thousand years of being a dragon did not have much room to savor sweetness. She says, “I remember being her age and wishing the same thing. I was fortunate to have Urbosa’s guidance then.”

Buliara nods. “I’m not a scholar, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Gerudo warrior who has not studied Chief Urbosa’s policy. In writing, she spoke about you like a daughter.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, and, looking down at Link, his hair pooled on her shoulder and his eyes downcast in silent reflection, he doesn’t offer any answer either. Breathlessly, she says, “Ha. Yes. That is— yes.” She brushes under her eyes and is relieved that they are still dry. “I was very young when my mother passed, it… in many ways did not seem real. Not unreal that she died, but unreal that she was a true person and not only a story. Urbosa’s death— still does not feel real, at times, but… I was very fortunate to have her in my life, for more than just her guidance.”

Buliara sighs. She doesn’t flush, but she seems too vulnerable with her expressions to be entirely sober. “I hope that I can provide much the same for Lady Riju,” she says. “She has much on her shoulders, but I hope that she can still be a child, for as long as she’s able to. She’ll never say it, you know, but she’s proud that you came here for her guidance.”

For no reason in particular, Zelda thinks about Sonia and Rauru, then, and feels a stabbing throb behind her ribs. She drinks again, polishing off the last dregs of her Noble Pursuit.

“You are a princess, and a princess of the Hyrule.”

Zelda snorts into her empty glass. “Whatever that means anymore.”

“But,” Buliara says, and with careful gravity, she says, “you will always have a place here among the Gerudo, should you want it. Not at the head, of course, that is Lady Riju’s rightful place and hers alone. But, you are as much a daughter to us as anyone.”

“I am so much older than you, Buliara, you wouldn’t believe,” she catches the laugh in her throat before it can strangle her, and swallows it down hard. “Thank you. I know that’s not an offer extended lightly.”

“Oh, but it is. It is very easy to love someone, wouldn’t you say?”

“Easy? No, not at all. It’s the hardest thing to do, I think.”

It doesn’t look like Buliara believes her in the slightest, but she relents. She sits back in her stool and looks out the door as Lady Riju steps back inside, her face chapped from the cold air, and she watches her approach. The pride in Buliara’s eyes watching her stride in is almost too much to look at directly, like looking the sun in the eyes without flinching.

“It’s a warm night,” Lady Riju declares, which, in Gerudo Desert terms, means that it is not quite cold enough to strip the bark off a tree. “A few of the warriors are on standby, watching in case the dragon returns. Would you like to join them?”

No, Zelda would not like to join them outside on lookout for herself, freezing the skin off her nose and the tips of her ears waiting for herself to make an appearance, but it’s late at night, maybe early morning by now, and she has yet to become a dragon, though her eyelids feel that they are beginning to droop. Maybe the cold will wake her up a little. Maybe she just doesn’t want to scalp any more homes. She pokes Link’s cheek and he snorts, coming back to life a little. She asks, “Do you want to go sit outside by the fire?”

He beams. “I always like to sit outside by the fire.”

They go sit outside by the fire. Lady Riju has undersold how many warriors are out waiting for the dragon, their tall, armored forms beautifully lit by a roaring fire, and their backs cast in shadow. Someone is playing music to pass the time. She must be very inebriated now, because she doesn’t know the song at all, but she feels like she knows it, knows the way the music vibrates through the air and in the miniscule hairs lining her inner ear.

They sit close enough to the fire to avoid freezing to death, but far enough that they don’t draw any immediate attention. Several people give them odd looks, but it’s very late at night, very early in the morning, and this isn’t entirely a watch. It’s odd, actually. She’s so used to seeing the Gerudo only in utter military airs or off the clock, savoring their free time as only the Gerudo could, but this strange twilight is neither here nor there in its entirety. Music and drink flow, a few Gerudo break off to dance and sway around the fire, but as many relax, an equal amount stay at attention, watching the sky and the deep blue horizon. It’s an uncanny effect.

Link slips off his seat and folds his legs on the ground, scooting himself over so that he’s leaning his back against her legs and tipping his head back into her lap. She pushes his hair back from his face and starts to plait it on a whim. “You’re such a cat,” she accuses.

“No,” he says. “I’m a mean dog.”

She thought the cold would sober her up, but she only feels the alcohol in her veins more now, everything cold outside and hot in her hands, in her stomach, in her mouth. She feels as though she’s swallowed a hot star and it’s burning its way out of her. “You’re not a mean dog. A mean dog wouldn’t let me braid his hair.”

He hums and closes his eyes. He’s falling asleep on her, she can tell, or he wouldn’t be this pliable. How many years have they shared a bed without ever stepping beyond whatever this is? It all seemed so natural then, but now, it’s a mystery. What a difference ten thousand years make. She ties off the plait with his hairband. He sighs, contented.

Zelda lets herself look at the sky for a moment. What can she remember about being a dragon? Sometimes, she can recall flashes of it, like a half-forgotten dream. It brought her so near the stars. It made her feel untouchable. It was the worst thing to have happened to her, but it wasn’t— it wasn’t one hundred years in the castle that had never been home and could never be home the moment it became her battlefield. Her stomach coiled, and she was suddenly aware of the sickly sweet aftertaste in her mouth. She would rather be closer to the stars for an eternity than think about a century with the beast for even a moment.

“Zelda,” Link says. His eyes are open again, and he scoots himself away from her, turning around so that he’s facing her. His hand lands on her knee. “Do you need to be sick?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she says. Forces a smile that feels more like a snarl. “Don’t be concerned.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he keeps his hand on her knee. On the horizon, a thin yellow light turns the corner of the desert violet. The sun is climbing up out of the sand. It is slow to rise, but soon it will come up like a ship loose from its mooring, like an island rising from the sea, like the Goddess Hylia’s inevitable return. What does the Goddess know about dragons? Zelda doesn’t care. Since when do dragons care about gods?

But it’s not the Goddess Hylia rising at the lip of the sky, not really. It’s something greater. Brighter. More nourishing. It’s the sunrise.

“The sun,” she says. It’s a revelation.

“What was that?”

“The sun,” she repeats. “I’m going to eat it.” She snaps her jaws at the air, her teeth clicking together.

“Oh,” Link says. His hand on her knee clenches, like he’s trying to hold her back, but there is no holding her back. She’s going to swallow the sun.

. . .

She slides on her stomach. It’s not right for her, she isn’t a snake, it isn’t natural for a dragon to lie on the ground. Ten thousand years, she flew in the sky. Twisted in the air like a kite. Now, her stomach churns and her head spins. Has she been poisoned? Corrupted? She shakes her head. Lashes her claws. Roars, roars. Where is the wind? Where is the moon? Where is her open sky, her ladder to the heavens? She is writhing like a snake with its head cut off.

“Give her space!”

“Why is she moving like that, is she hurt?”

“She’s confused, give her room to breathe!”

Familiar voices, unfamiliar words. She opens her eyes and throws her head, taking account of her prison. There are taller gnats here, but still so small, and so young. Her little person is there, wobbling on his feet, throwing his hands out to the side. Once, she was here, when she was not a dragon, before-after-before she was a dragon. There was a little person here, a taller-little-person, who touched her head and called her little bird. Where has she gone? Won’t she fly with her now? Why has she left her?

She rises to her feet, her claws scrabbling. Her head lolls down, and it follows when it should lead. Why is her head so heavy? Where is the wind? Where are her skies?

“Is she— is she drunk?”

There is a moment of silence when the little gnats do not howl and wail at each other as they do.

“I got an immortal dragon drunk?!”

“You got Zelda drunk—”

“Heads up, she’s taking off!”

She lifts, but she cannot twist in the air like a kite on the wind. There’s no wind, for one. The air is too thick and balmy down below. She slips on the rungs up her ladder and lands, headfirst, through a sand dune, the rest of her long body piling in behind her. Below, a chorus of gnats hiss and moan, “Oooooh.”

Slithering on her stomach, sand in her eyes, she roars and climbs up to her feet, her vision swimming. Where is her sky? Her stomach turns. Who will hold her hair back now? Once, she was a person, and she had three mothers, in the wrong order. Which one of them hadn’t she lost yet? No, she’s lost them all. Where is her little person? Where is the sun? Has she lost them too?

She gets up, unwinds, and finds her legs beneath her. They’re so small on the ground, she shouldn't be on the ground at all. One leg goes forward, but it’s the wrong leg— there might be a right leg, but she’s never heard of such a thing— and she wobbles forward and falls on her stomach again, slithers in the sand like a snake. Her head is so heavy. 

“Don’t grunt at Patricia, she’s not a horse!”

“We need to move faster!”

“This is as fast as she goes carrying two people! You want her to go faster, get off!”

She had a father once. She had the beast, her adversary. The two blend together when she remembers them. She doesn’t like to think about them, and seldom did, for ten thousand years. What does an immortal dragon have to fear? Death? Failure? A dragon is unfailing and undying. Dragons don’t have fathers who yell.

She lifts her head. Yes, there is her little person, flying on his feathery-fabric kite, and there is the sun behind him. She rises to meet them. She’ll catch them in her teeth.

. . .

Zelda wakes up in the late morning, looking at a Mother Goddess Statue, her head pounding. She licks her teeth, and senses how fuzzy and unclean they must be. “Oh no,” she says, “you again.”

She gets up onto her knees. The trickle of water from nearby should be soothing, but with the splitting headache assailing her right now, it’s salt on an open wound. That must be the Spring of Courage. Good. She’ll have something to throw up into.

The Mother Goddess Statue looks on at her, implacable, her face drawn into an expression of serenity. She’s spent hours of her (long, long, far too long) life looking at that face, up to her knees in cold water, calling for help that would not come. She looks at the face again now, and knows, still, that help isn’t coming for her.

The spring isn’t what she remembers it being. She hadn’t accompanied Link here after he woke— or rather, she hadn’t ever accompanied him here, only ever had him accompany her— she can’t make perfect sense of why she decided to land here. It’s so different she wonders if she even recognized it from above, all greenery and moss. If it looked like this before the Calamity, maybe she would have enjoyed her time more. She turns her back to the Mother Goddess Statue, looks at herself and her ill-suited, oasis-washed outfit, and sloshes into the spring.

“Ah!” she yelps. “Ah, ah! Oh! Fuck, that’s cold!”

A nearby water lily says, “Sshh!” in Link’s voice.

“Link,” she tells the water lily. “What are you doing?”

“Catching frogs.”

“Why are you catching frogs?”

“For roasting.” The water lily rises up from the reeds, showing itself to be cleverly attached to a round, flat shield, carried as camouflage by one noble swordsman, who lurched with the water up to his chest, arms outstretched to either side as if preparing to catch a hot-footed frog in each hand.

“Link,” Zelda says, “we don’t need frogs to eat.”

With one hand, he signs, “I’m hungry!” and then returns to his previous, alert stance, hunting for frogs with both hands out.

“You’re always hungry. You look like a crane.”

He doesn’t reply.

“Link. Come here for a moment. Please?”

Maybe he isn’t as hungry as he lets on, or maybe she sounds desperate enough, but he sloshes in the water, wading his way over until he’s with her on the shallower end, though the water still reaches higher on him than it does her. She reaches out for him, pulling him into a sodden hug, the duckweed stuck to the front of his chest squishing unseemingly between them. His hands come up around her in a sudden rush, like he isn’t thinking about it at all, one on her louder back, fingers splayed, and the other on the back of her head, getting her hair wet.

She pulls back quickly, startled with herself. Was this what she called him for? She hadn’t thought it was, but here she is. Her hands land, by their own volition, to frame his face on either side, thumbs on his cheekbones and rubbing away pond scum. She asks, “Link, aren’t you tired?”

Breathless, he says, “Slept last night.”

“That was two nights ago, not last night. Link. Don’t you want to go home?”

He stays quiet for a moment. She watches him lick his lips, and makes note of a tiny split right at the center of his bottom lip, where the arid desert air cracked it. He says, “Do you?”

She laughs. “Desperately. I want to go home to Hatento and I want to give Eyesore oats in the morning. I want to eat a whole bowl of mushroom risotto. I want to see the school and the students, I want to grade their assignments. Really! I want to grade! I want to go to sleep in our bed and stay there the whole night. I want to wash our clothes and not be sure which are yours and which are mine. I want to lie down forever. I want to fly again. I want to have tea and fruit cake. I don’t want to be anyone at all.”

A wrinkle is forming between his eyebrows, and she has become a master at deciphering Link Microexpressions. This one says, I am trying so hard to understand, and I don’t at all, but give me time. Give me time and I’m sure I’ll understand. He says, “We can do all those things.”

She hopes the waters rise and take her with them. She hopes they rise over her head and the frogs and the fish can have her bones. She hopes there won’t ever be a thing called princesses ever again. She hopes some archeologist ten thousand years from now finds her fish-gnawed bones and ponders what strange extinct creature she must have been. “Link, I’m starting to think that I am very bad at wanting things.”

“I don’t think you can be that,” he says, this time with his hands. “But—” he starts a sign, then stops, and starts again. “Okay. Maybe we start with something small. What’s one thing you want right now?”

She wants to kiss him. “I want to not be looking at the Mother Goddess Statue anymore.”

They don’t have things to pack up, so they just get up out of the water and go, Link picks a direction that ostensibly must be in the direction of a village or a shrine or a stable, and they’ll just walk there. Link says he’ll catch another horse, otherwise they’ll move slowly and carefully. Before they leave, Link goes to do something with the statue while she looks away. She doesn’t care what it is. No love is lost between her and the Goddess. For a century, she was a rag held in the teeth of two fighting dogs, Hylia and Malice. Her love is better spent on Hyrule, the dirt under her feet and the sun in the sky.

They aren’t lucky to have the sun in the sky with them. It’s late autumn, winter coming on, and the sky clouds over before her hangover is gone. There aren’t any horses to catch, all of them probably gone to find cover ahead of the rain, and the rain is coming. At least they’ll be clean by the time they reach a stable. It can’t be too far from here, it’s never too far to reach a stable. The mountaintops roll and rumble.

“How far is the stable now?”

Link squints at the horizon. For him, his expression says, not that far at all. For her? On foot and in wet clothing? Too far. He says, “Across the Big Twin Bridge,” which is a very diplomatic answer, and it tells her all she needs to know. They won’t beat the rain there, and probably won’t beat nightfall there at the pace they’re going.

She says, “We shouldn’t be on the Dueling Peaks when the clouds break, high grounds won’t be safe.” She’s almost certain this was a class she taught the students before: when thunder roars, go indoors. Where’s indoors? Not forest cover, if they want to avoid being struck by lightning or fallen branches. “Are there any caves in the Popla Foothills?”

He shakes his head no, but the wrinkle on his brow eases somewhat. He makes the sign for tower, then another for follow. She imagines he must be too tired and distracted to bother assembling a full sentence out of that, and doesn’t bother herself asking him to. He got his point across, anyway.

They reach the base of the foothills before the first raindrops begin falling, but not much before. Link had overestimated their proximity to the tower, and had overestimated how fast he could move with her trailing behind, and getting to the foothills had necessitated backtracking somewhat in the direction of the springs, wasting time. If they had started going towards the tower first instead of going towards the stables and then doubling back or perhaps if they’d gone down, towards the farther stables closer to the coast and away from the storm and not towards it, maybe they would have gotten to shelter before the rain did, or at least before it came down hard. But this was not this world, nor this time, and they found themselves scrabbling in the hills, fat raindrops landing on their heads, still damp and shivering, having never dried from their dip in the spring.

Link is signing something about his paraglider— a terrible idea if she’s ever heard one, with lightning crackling overhead and winds gusting, the fabric will soak and he’ll sink like a stone and get fried like a fritter by lightning— when the sky splits open. Lightning strikes across the hill from them, hitting the trunk of a tree and leaving the branches black and blazing. The thunderclap is near enough that Zelda can feel it in her teeth. She knows what she needs to do.

It feels like swallowing a stone, or like being on Hyrule Field, making eye contact with a guardian. How many times will this happen? At least one more. Maybe another after that. Maybe not to them, but to another them, to newer, less tired versions of themselves.

Link catches her wrist before she can walk away from him, reeling her back. He isn’t often expressive when things are dire, locking his face up like the outer wall of a fort, his mouth pressed in a firm, bloodless line. She’s never appreciated just how tired he’s looked all this time, bruises purpling under his eyes, water running into the rivulets. Not just tired now, but a year’s worth of running, all cast into sharp relief.

She says, “I’ll get us home.”

“Us,” he signs. “Both of us. Stop—” he struggles for the words, his hand leaving hers so he could sign with both hands, fingers grasping at meaning. “You said protect them all. Why is it never you? I know you need to save everyone, but why can’t you be part of everyone? When do I stop leaving you in the castle?”

She leans in until she can rest her forehead on his shoulder. He smells like water, like how a swamp sometimes smells strangely clean. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to come home, but I think— Link, I think I’m still in the castle.”

He must be signing something, but she can’t see, and doesn’t know if she wants to see it. She’s afraid that one day, he’ll get so tired, so impossibly tired, that he won’t be able to keep running to the castle to get her out. She’s more afraid that won’t ever happen, that he’ll always run into the castle after her until the day his legs give out and his arms give in and the sword falls out of his hands. She can’t see his hands signing, but she can feel him put his arms around her, one hand pulling her wet hair off her face so he can press his wet lips the bridge of her nose, to her mouth, so he can lean his forehead against hers.

“Both of us,” she says. “I promise. I’ll get both of us home.”

His face relents, the gates opening a little. He looks so tired. “Alright. But you have to promise.”

“I promise,” she says. “Both of us. I’ll save myself too.”

She steps away from him, and it’s agonizing to turn her back on him, so she delays as long as she can, walking backwards while looking at him standing in the rain with his long hair plastered to his face and back, his hands empty and dropped to his side. Lightning strikes again, farther away, but not very, and light catches in his eyes, the way fabric catches just before it tears, the way a dream catches just before it ends. She turns her back on him, and walks towards the tree.

It’s a lie that lightning doesn’t strike twice, though it is uncommon that it does. She doesn’t expect it to this time, but the tree is higher on the hill, and is as good a place to walk as any, so she climbs up towards it, fisting her hands in the wet fabric of her clothes. Something’s caught in her throat, something’s choking her. Where is the sun? She left it behind her, at the bottom of the hill.

Lightning climbs down the ladder of the sky, each branching coil as detailed to her eye as the fine webbing on tree leaves. She catches it in her teeth before it can touch the ground.

In many ways, being nothing and no-one is liberating. Dragons don’t beg. Dragons don’t fall on their knees praying. Dragons don’t do anything but be, and they never fail at being. They’re immortal, after all. The only thing they fail to do is die. Twist through the air like a kite on the wind. Roar. Cry. Be the brightest thing in the sky, swallow the sun whole and lick the plate clean. Yeah, she’s a pretty big deal. Pray to who? Beg salvation from what? Nothing and nobody. Is the dragon moving or the wind moving the dragon? Certainly the mind isn’t moving. Twist, twist.

The Princess has slipped her leash and her handlers. The Princess has slipped her dress and her crown. The Princess has slipped between the bars of fate like a snake sliding out of grasping hands. The Princess has destroyed her cage. Yes. Yes! The Princess is out.

But she made a promise. She turns her head back to the ground and unwinds, the storm hissing and popping as it parts around her. Lightning strikes her horns, and she glows with it— she’s the brightest star in the sky. She lowers herself, aligns her belly with the ground and twists, as quick as a burst of fire from the heavens, flies so low and so fast that if she were to lower one of six legs to the ground, it ground strike against the wet grass like a matchstick and she’d shatter to a thousand pieces. A dragon is a very brittle thing, like a dream, it doesn’t hold up to even the slightest of prodding. She flies low and fast and noiselessly.

Her little person— Link, as quick on the draw as ever, reaches for her horn as shoots past him, and his hand finds her ear instead. A gentle tug, and then he’s up on the saddle, one knee planted in her mane and the other loose in the wind like a flag. He leverages himself up and lies on her neck on all fours, hands fisted in her mane, knees straddling like a racehorse jockey, he’s never been kicked off of a wild horse in his life, he must have been born in the saddle. The wind catches him full in the face, air that knocks him breathless, as she pulls up and leaps headlong into the storm, rain sluicing off her spines as she pierces the screaming wind with her teeth bared.

They rise up, through the lightning; up, through the weather front; up, through the cloud cover, until the wind goes quiet, and it is the soft, golden space she’d flown through for ten thousand years. Yes, she’s been here before, many times, the warm, peaceful place between dreaming and being awake, she drank this skyline before.

On her mane, Link sits astride, his knees pushed apart wide and one hand holding on to her horn. Up here, the wind is milder, and she stabilizes, flies free and even so that he can loosen his grip. He lets go of the horn but not her mane, running his hands into it as deep as they’ll go. “This is you, right?” he asks. “You’re awake?”

She doesn’t need to answer it, if he asks, he already knows the answer. Just to be safe, however, she rolls her head from side to side— not hard enough to knock him loose, but enough to make him grab for her horn again, shaking with laughter.

“Understood,” he says. Then he bends double and plants himself face-down into her mane, barely holding himself there. “It doesn’t seem fair at all.” He doesn’t elaborate for a long time, and then, without preamble, he says, “You can be a dragon forever if you want to. I’ll make us a house on a sky island and I’ll wear a glide suit every day. But you have to want it.” His hand combs through her mane. It sounds as though he’s been thinking about these words for a long time. “I want to kiss you every day. I want you to dance again. I want to bring meals down to your well. I want you to live your life without always standing in the doorway, holding the wolf back so that everyone else can sit down to eat and sleep in soft beds. I want it to be your turn to come in from the cold and eat hot stew. I want so much that I don’t know how to say it. Is it the same for you?”

Roar, roar. Twist like a kite in the wind. Who wants things? Not a dragon, and not a princess, but maybe a person does. Maybe she can want things if she’s just a person.

What does a person want? She wants to go home. She tilts her head opposite the wind and catches all the scents of the continent, unfolding before her like a map, inviting her to swallow all the joys of living at once and come back to refill her cup. On whose behalf has she been depriving herself of this? For what reason?

She doesn’t know how to answer his question, even if she could in this shape, but she finds that there is no need. Lying on his chest on her mane, Link’s pulse slows, and his breath evens out. He’s fallen asleep, as easily as anything, as though they weren’t far above the clouds.

Finding the sweet wind that flows from home, she turns gently, leading with her head, towards East Necludo.

. . .

Open your eyes… open your eyes… open your eyes. Wake up, Zelda.

She wakes up to the sound of frogs chirping. It’s late evening, and her mouth tastes stale, her throat parched. Had they really gone all day without food? Link is going to be inconsolable.

As it would happen, she doesn’t need to look for him at all, he’s lying in front of her, curled on his side with one knee between her legs. They’re facing each other, his hands palming the front of her tunic, his cheek resting on her trapped arm. In the low light of the moon and the stars streaking in from the opening of the well above their heads, he’s as streaked in dried water and moss as a stone that’s been left in a field for a thousand years. He looks like a statue of a boy with the inscription long since eroded to nothing, written in a language no longer spoken. He looks like he’s probably cold. She throws a leg over his hip and pushes a little bit closer, so they can lie together like two dogs, asleep in a warm heap. Moving makes her stomach turn with hunger.

She’s thirsty, starving, and her neck hurts from sleeping on the rocks at the bottom of a well. For the first time since she’s woken up after a thousand years of dreaming, she feels well-rested. The frogs are chirping. In the fields of Hateno, the crickets sing the loudest song of the year, the last push to procreate before winter comes. Soon, snow will fall, the frogs will sleep and the crickets will die. But for now, they are alive, and they are singing as loud as they’ll ever sing.

It feels cruel to wake Link up, but he grumbles awake regardless as soon as she makes to sit up, sensing her arm shifting under his head. She wonders if his cheek will leave a Link-shaped bruise on her forearm.

“Link,” she says. “It’s late. We overslept. Don’t you want something to eat?”

“Mm.” Eyes still closed, he raises a hand and spells with his fingers, “What do you want to eat?”

“Eggs and rice. Hearty salmon. Wildberry pie.”

Later, he will cook eggs and rice, and hearty salmon, and wildberry pie for dessert, and they’ll ravage it like a pair of starving animals, eating with their hands on cutlery that had been lying, a little dusty, on the table where they left it a year and ten thousand years ago. Later, Link will go to the stables and fetch, miraculously, Snowshoe and Boots and Eyesore, and they’ll feed all three hot oats and slices of crisp autumn apples. Later, people will come to their house and ask about the dragon that landed in Hateno, ask about what happened during the Upheaval and what all those strange reports of Zelda’s appearances throughout the land were, and she’ll stumble through a halfhearted explanation and promise to answer any questions they have at the school tomorrow morning, and Link will wave them off and usher her back inside their half-repaired home. Later, they’ll fall into dusty sheets and talk about the things they want at great length, and then not talk about the things they want at great length. Later, she will not destroy the roof of their home unless she wants to, and she hardly ever wants to. Later, there will be a later, there will be hot soup and spicy curry, there will be flying and the wind in their hair. There will be crying and planning and a world to eat, seeds and all.

But for now, Link pushes up on his elbows and looks up at her invitingly. Now, she pushes his hair back out of his face, and he touches her chin with his non-dominant hand. Now, the moon is rising over the hills, and the crickets and frogs are singing their hearts out, and Zelda leans down and kisses the sun out of his mouth.