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Merely a formality
24 hours till this goes live on FF.net. Get your critiques in now or never. ;P
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The context of this chapter may be a little confusing. For that I apologize; it is intentional.
Disclaimer: This chapter is rated T for intense situations and off-screen violence.
---
"I have it."
Zelda jumped guiltily at her nursemaid's voice and fumbled the book back into the gap on the shelves. The wall-sized collection of tomes and volumes had become her sole source of preoccupation of late, but that was a book she should probably not have been reading.
"Come take these to the table, would you?" Impa's face emerged over the lip of the cellar not a moment too soon, looking distinctly dustier than when she had descended some tens of minutes ago. Zelda hurried forward to receive the armload of aged scrolls and parchments, hoping her eagerness would be enough to conceal the heat in her cheeks. The older woman hefted herself over the edge of the floorboards in one fluid movement, then proceeded to stalk around the room casting a spell of shadow over each of the shuttered windows.
This seemed strange and just a little ominous. Zelda opened her mouth, about to ask the reason for the unfamiliar routine. Secrecy, the word rang in her mind unbidden, and she bit her lip, wondering why she had need to wonder.
Darkness melted across the final window like dripped ink, casting the entire room in mute shadow. Opening her eyes as wide as she could, Zelda could just make out the silhouette of Impa approaching and leaning over the scrolls on the table. "Should I light a candle, Impa?" she offered.
"I do not need light to read the shadow letters," spoke Impa in a low, distant voice that still carried remnants of spellsong. "And I would not risk an unneeded flame near these ancient documents." She unfurled the thickest of the scrolls, and skimmed deliberate fingers over the dense lines of script, touching and prodding seemingly at random.
It was a few loaded moments before Impa began to read aloud, but what issued from her mouth were not sounds a Hylian-trained tongue could reproduce. Zelda did not understand a word of it, wasn't even sure if she could isolate the tongue-twisting sounds into words, but there was a undeniable haunting rhythm to the low stream of syllables like song, like enchantment. She took a seat slightly away from the table, and did not interrupt.
"These are prophesies of Sheikah lore," said Impa in the same low hypnotic voice, and it was a moment before Zelda recognized her nursemaid was speaking in Hylian again, for her words were colored with an accent that had never been so prominent in her diction as now. "They hold guidance for those who protect the Holy Land of Hyrule."
"What does it say?" Zelda asked in a meek voice that carried perhaps only as far as her own ears. Whether the Sheikah woman had heard her or not, though, she smoothed a hand over the edges of the parchment and began to translate, haltingly, but no less artfully.
"O, Great Land blessed by the Goddesses' favor!
Thy blessing lends also to thee trials of covetous evil.
Would that time of Cataclysm looms heavy upon the land,
Heed ye these words, that ye may find faith and guidance.
"Upon thy direst hour, a Hero shall descend unto the land,
Marked by the Blade of Evil's Bane, chosen by Farore's hand.
Though obstacles insurmountable challenge his path,
The Hero's Domain shall bear him to righteous victory.
"If Power seeks to corrupt through absolute force, the Hero shall be borne by the Patience of Time.
If Shadow holds the world to stagnate in fear, the Hero shall be borne by the Crossroad of Umbra and Light.
If Oceans swallow all passage to echoes of Legend, the Hero shall be borne by the Winds over the Waters.
"There is more," sighed Impa, sitting back on her heels, "plenty more. But the list's descriptions grow more and more far-removed from my understanding, and I am no scholar of scripture. Our salvation, if it exists, must be within these early entries."
"Is... Is a Hero supposed to come and save us?" The words were strange to Zelda even as she voiced them, because there was nothing to save--they needed no salvation--they were already saved--weren't they?
"It's as much as we can hope, since I cannot imagine what other cause could be great enough to merit one of these prophesies, if not our current dilemma." Impa's voice carried the hint of a wry smile despite her solemn words. "As I have found no records nor tales of Heroes wielding the Master Sword itself in Hyrule's written history, I will take the audacity to presume we have the honor of being first in line. Here is the passage on the Hero of Time." She bent over the foreign texts again.
"The Hero of Time," Zelda silently tested the words over her tongue, finding their taste unwieldy. The image from her dreams flashed upon her mind in an unsolicited response, lone, green, bright. Sudden tears warmed her eyes for reasons she couldn't sort out. Everything was wrong. The Hero was supposed to have stopped the darkness. Is it not too late already for him to salvage their world?
Impa made a soft huffing sound, the kind she made usually when exasperated by Zelda's antics. "These are only hints here on how the Hero is to achieve his victory. It's no help when we've yet to even confirm or locate the Hero." She rubbed her thumb over her brow as if trying to force brilliance from her scalp. "I wish these prophesies would have hinted a bit more to these heroes' identities."
Zelda fiddled with the folds of her dress, unease building with a sense of something, somewhere, having gone quite wrong. "What if a Hero never comes?"
"Then perhaps Hyrule will be sundered." Impa shook her head lightly and pushed the scrolls away. "But one thing is clear, regardless - the Master Sword marks the Hero, and we know, without a doubt, that one person has managed this now." Her eyes flashed pointedly to Zelda.
"Then... Link... has become the Hero of Time?" It was an absurd, foreign thing to imagine of her childhood friend (Acquaintance? Errand boy? Were they familiar enough to be considered friends?), yet the phrase rang true with all the certainty of a dream-prophecy. A shiver ran through her at the ponderous fate she has dropped on his thin shoulders.
"He would have to be. No one in centuries has ever been able to budge the Master Sword, and not for lack of trying. For a child so slight to take it up with no resistance..."
"I know it," Zelda murmured, eyes downcast. "My dreams told me as such." Stone. Green. Fairy. The premonitions had seemed fanciful and romantic at the time, but now they felt only dreadful and condemning. Goddesses, he was only her age - if that.
Impa nodded knowingly. "I am not surprised. It would be too much of a coincidence if all these puzzle pieces did not match up. All our hopes rest upon the boy now."
"But then where is he? It's been months and we've seen no sign of any Hero." Because he is gone, a strange thought said in her mind, he left to find... what? She thought she should know, but it sounded absurd, and the thought dissolved like a wayward sigh.
"He is very young. Perhaps too young to bear such a burden." Impa was silent for a moment, musing. "Yet the sword has not rejected him. I think the Sacred Realm has not released him yet. Perhaps in time, when it has deemed him prepared..."
How can anyone prepare for all this? Zelda bit her lip, hating the implications. Was Link facing trials within the Sacred Realm, was he imprisoned there until he has paid some price? "How long will it take?" she whispered. "How long will we have to wait? How long can we wait?"
"I do not know this." Impa sighed again. "There was no mention in these texts of any trial or criteria required of the Hero apart from the Master Sword. It seems the prophets of lore were not much concerned with details and minutia."
"Then what can we do?"
"Keep hidden." The older woman's voice was flat and resigned. "Keep safe the royal bloodline, and the Triforce of Wisdom, until the Hero emerges."
"But that could be ages."
"What would you have me do, dear one?" Impa crouched down to her level, eyes glinting ember-red in the darkness. "I am Sheikah and I have many resources at my disposal, but a lone Sheikah can only do so much from the shadows. You and I do not have the capability to storm up to Ganondorf and put an end to his reign, else it would have been done much sooner. Our role is to Watch, and study, and wait." A firm hand ruffled her hair. "Hyrule will need a Queen to lead her, once all this is over."
"If there is a Queen to be had," Zelda muttered bitterly. "If she is not ancient and withered away in a dark room after centuries of waiting. Maybe Ganondorf will have withered away too."
"Keep patience and faith in your heart, Princess. The Sheikah prophesies may be vague, but they have never yet proven wrong."
"I hope so," Zelda mumbled, but her thoughts fluttered back to Link--barely her height, barely of fledgling age, barely qualified to be a Hero--and she was suddenly unsure what she hoped of him. He was brave and bold enough to be a hero for her childish whims, to be sure. But THE Legendary Hero? It seemed a title too oppressively heavy to lay on anyone unasked, much less one as bright and smiling as he. And if one day he emerged from the Sacred Realm resenting fate, resenting her--
A clamor broke out beyond the cottage walls. Zelda gasped, and Impa leapt for the door, bolting it and chanting a shimmer of wards across it in one movement. Shouts of warning and cries of distress swept past their windows like gust-tossed leaves, followed by a flurry of voices thick with undeniable desert accents and weighted down by metallic jingles of bangles and blades alike. Gerudos, Zelda realized, panic rising in her throat as Impa snatched up her arm with an iron grip and pulled her away from the entrance.
"Village of Kakariko!" the shrill voice of a Gerudo woman rang out clear across the village square. "Our troop comes on behalf of the Great King Ganondorf to collect your tribute to Him. Bring out your goods of value now, and spare us the time!"
"You were here only a month ago!" a gruff male voice shouted back. "Doesn't your King know it takes time for crops to grow?"
"Why should we know?" the Gerudo voice snarled in outrage, and the dissenting man suddenly gurgled with pain--"No crop grows in the desert you filthy Hyrulians exiled us to! Perhaps you would like a taste of desert hospitality? Should I bury you in the sand and leave you to the Vultures and Moldorms? Or should I save my time and just cut your tongue right now?"
"Please--" the man choked, "I have family--"
"Everyone says that," scoffed the Gerudo speaker. "It is not a reason so special that I care. You want to bargain with family? You can exchange your life for the ex-Royal Family." Her voice lifted to address a wider crowd. "Any of you care to save this worthless coward man? Just lead us to enemies of the Great Ganondorf. The Princess, the servants - any drop of blood from the House of Hyrule is worth a bucket of yours - if you have any worth to trade."
"Stop it, please!" A woman's ragged voice tore through the din like a dull, desperate knife. "I... I know where there's someone from the Hyrule Court! Please let my husband go!"
Impa's hand tightened around Zelda's arm, and she began chanting spidery things under her breath. What sounded like a brief scuffle flared and faded as quickly as it began, leaving only the clear-cut voice of the lead Gerudo. "Speak cleanly, woman."
"It's... it's my friend, Mika," the village woman's voice, now thin and untethered, was on the verge of hysterics. "She's been putting up a Hylian soldier in her house. Oh Bright Din please don't punish her! She just has a soft heart for the wounded!"
"I care not about your Din," spat the Gerudo. "Flush the Leever-grubs out."
More yelling ensued, Gerudo and Hylian and other unidentifiable utterances in a great cacophony of confused rage. Harsh crashes and curses marked the soldier's discovery and extraction, pierced by the keen wail of an older female voice: "How could you, Melia? He's just a boy!"
"Well, not too bad on the eyes, for a pasty male," the Gerudo speaker drawled deliberately above the protests. "For a traitor. I will give you one chance, Hyrulian scum. Tell us where is the girl, Zelda."
"I wouldn't tell you even if I knew," replied the young soldier, valiant despite the pain in his voice. "My allegiance is to the Crown of Hyrule to my death!"
"Pfeh. So be it." A winded grunt from the soldier, as if struck in the stomach, before the Gerudo raised her voice again. "I don't like killing men, myself. Waste of breeding stock." Her words were accompanied by snickers and hoots from other Gerudos. "Fortunately, my companion here has no such caring. Lizalfos!" A grating, inhuman screech met her summon. "Do to him as you like."
"They'll kill him!" Zelda squealed in a frantic whisper. "Do something, Impa!"
"I cannot," Impa replied tersely. "It will give us away."
"I'll stay hidden in here!" A scream rent the world with terror and helpless torment, a sound more agonizing and horrible than soldiers falling, her home burning, her father's blood flowing over his throne--"Impa, please!" Zelda pleaded, tears tumbling down her cheeks. But the Sheikah's steel grip upon her arm remained, and the man's yells died away into a nauseating gurgle, soon drowned out by reptilian sounds of satisfaction and--Nayru forbid--glee. This can't happen, this can't happen, I am the Princess of Hyrule and this mustn't happen in my domain, please make it stop please save him please Din Nayru Farore...
"Tch, so this is the renowned Hylian blood? Looks as filthy as any other." The Gerudo woman's voice rang out again to a chorus of cackles and jeers. "I could've told you that, Nadil!" a younger, sharper-sounding Gerudo yelled out.
"Tell me earlier, Rasha, so I don't dirty myself in it next time." Another round of mocking laughter. "And as for you, treasoning wench--" Two voices screamed out at once, and one cut off abruptly with a horrible mixture of sounds, and the other kept screaming, and screaming...
Tears dripping furiously down her chin, Zelda clutched her ears trying to shut out the sound, and her mind's eye fled to the safety of the Temple of Time, to the bas-reliefed doors of granite, to the enigmatic steel of the Master Sword beyond them. Link, Link, where are you? If you are the Hero, please come save us, we don't have any more time...
"You are spared, coward. Beg thanks from your woman for keeping your blood inside your skin," the painfully familiar Gerudo voice cut mercilessly through the muffled roar between her ears and palms. "Let that be a lesson to any of you who think to harbor enemies of the Great Lord Ganondorf. And remember this, you have always the choice to pay your tribute to your King in goods... or in Hylian blood."
A piercing whistle followed a sharp Gerudo command, and the hostile voices dispersed into the distance, leaving only wails and laments in their wake. "They're gone," Zelda breathed in relief, dashing away from her nursemaid to unbolt the door. "We have to help--"
"No!" Impa hissed, and in a flash she was there, sweeping Zelda away with a wrenching jerk. They had barely fallen back against a dusty corner before an accented voice piped just outside the wall, so close she could've been within arm's reach, "We're heading out, Nabooru!"
"I have orders to search every house," a woman's cold voice responded, and then their door crashed open.
The sudden sunlight blinded Zelda from making out much detail, but the figure who strode through the door was unmistakably and fiercely Gerudo, with cropped round ears and a dagger-sharp nose, clothes soft with silk and eyes hard like bronze. Impa's left hand gripped Zelda's mouth as tightly as the curved knife readied in her other hand, smothering the whimpers Zelda would never have dared to emit. Maddeningly, vulnerably, her eyes flicked to the scrolls still spread across the table, and felt an irrational wave of fear for them more than herself.
"Tch. Sand-blasted run-down shack." The woman's mirror-hard eyes slid over the room--over the scrolls--across Zelda's face--with the same uncaring disdain she would spare the sight of a diseased beggar, and she was gone like a hot breeze.
It was minutes or hours or centuries before Impa shifted from her side, and Zelda did not move even then. She watched Impa cautiously slide the door shut without attracting attention, and set the bolt into place, and whisper the shadow magic loose from one window to peek outside, and throughout it all she did not move at all, for if she held perfectly still, it might make up for her foolish impulse earlier, for the blood on the grass outside. She hardly even realized that her teeth and fists and throat hurt from clenching until Impa was crouched in front of her and shaking her slightly by the shoulders. "Zelda. Princess. It is safe."
Safe. Will she ever be safe again? "How did she not see us?" Zelda whispered, not trusting her watery voice or their safety to more.
"Glamour and shadow; tricks for the weak-minded," replied Impa, her voice still as tight as her grip on the Sheikah dagger. "If I had left your side, you would be dead."
Dead, like the poor villagers outside those walls. Zelda fought back a wave of sickness. "Thank you Impa," she managed in a very small voice, and tried her very best to sniffle without making a sound. "I'm sorry I asked you to stop them."
"Never think that." Impa's hand caught her chin and raised her gaze to meet smoldering crimson eyes. "This was my village, Zelda. These are my people, and each drop of blood shed here is tenfold upon my soul. But my life's sworn duty is to protect the Royal Family above all else. I have already failed the King, and that is enough mark me soul-dead and exiled, were there still a Sheikah tribe to be exiled from. It would be upon all that remains of my life before I allow further danger to you, Princess."
"Impa," was all Zelda could say before burying herself in her nursemaid's arms, unable to stop the tears from overtaking her, just as surely she would be powerless to stop them the next time. Two more people dead for her sake. For her mistake.
The Princess Zelda awoke in a luxurious bed that is but should not have been hers, and wept.
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Gawd, 3200 words. I hope this has been enough to get all the writing out of my system for a while because I really need to work on... other things. Like work. >_> Then again it might just mean I have to write out the next chapter sooner so that it can explain this one. ::die::
-----
The context of this chapter may be a little confusing. For that I apologize; it is intentional.
Disclaimer: This chapter is rated T for intense situations and off-screen violence.
---
"I have it."
Zelda jumped guiltily at her nursemaid's voice and fumbled the book back into the gap on the shelves. The wall-sized collection of tomes and volumes had become her sole source of preoccupation of late, but that was a book she should probably not have been reading.
"Come take these to the table, would you?" Impa's face emerged over the lip of the cellar not a moment too soon, looking distinctly dustier than when she had descended some tens of minutes ago. Zelda hurried forward to receive the armload of aged scrolls and parchments, hoping her eagerness would be enough to conceal the heat in her cheeks. The older woman hefted herself over the edge of the floorboards in one fluid movement, then proceeded to stalk around the room casting a spell of shadow over each of the shuttered windows.
This seemed strange and just a little ominous. Zelda opened her mouth, about to ask the reason for the unfamiliar routine. Secrecy, the word rang in her mind unbidden, and she bit her lip, wondering why she had need to wonder.
Darkness melted across the final window like dripped ink, casting the entire room in mute shadow. Opening her eyes as wide as she could, Zelda could just make out the silhouette of Impa approaching and leaning over the scrolls on the table. "Should I light a candle, Impa?" she offered.
"I do not need light to read the shadow letters," spoke Impa in a low, distant voice that still carried remnants of spellsong. "And I would not risk an unneeded flame near these ancient documents." She unfurled the thickest of the scrolls, and skimmed deliberate fingers over the dense lines of script, touching and prodding seemingly at random.
It was a few loaded moments before Impa began to read aloud, but what issued from her mouth were not sounds a Hylian-trained tongue could reproduce. Zelda did not understand a word of it, wasn't even sure if she could isolate the tongue-twisting sounds into words, but there was a undeniable haunting rhythm to the low stream of syllables like song, like enchantment. She took a seat slightly away from the table, and did not interrupt.
"These are prophesies of Sheikah lore," said Impa in the same low hypnotic voice, and it was a moment before Zelda recognized her nursemaid was speaking in Hylian again, for her words were colored with an accent that had never been so prominent in her diction as now. "They hold guidance for those who protect the Holy Land of Hyrule."
"What does it say?" Zelda asked in a meek voice that carried perhaps only as far as her own ears. Whether the Sheikah woman had heard her or not, though, she smoothed a hand over the edges of the parchment and began to translate, haltingly, but no less artfully.
"O, Great Land blessed by the Goddesses' favor!
Thy blessing lends also to thee trials of covetous evil.
Would that time of Cataclysm looms heavy upon the land,
Heed ye these words, that ye may find faith and guidance.
"Upon thy direst hour, a Hero shall descend unto the land,
Marked by the Blade of Evil's Bane, chosen by Farore's hand.
Though obstacles insurmountable challenge his path,
The Hero's Domain shall bear him to righteous victory.
"If Power seeks to corrupt through absolute force, the Hero shall be borne by the Patience of Time.
If Shadow holds the world to stagnate in fear, the Hero shall be borne by the Crossroad of Umbra and Light.
If Oceans swallow all passage to echoes of Legend, the Hero shall be borne by the Winds over the Waters.
"There is more," sighed Impa, sitting back on her heels, "plenty more. But the list's descriptions grow more and more far-removed from my understanding, and I am no scholar of scripture. Our salvation, if it exists, must be within these early entries."
"Is... Is a Hero supposed to come and save us?" The words were strange to Zelda even as she voiced them, because there was nothing to save--they needed no salvation--they were already saved--weren't they?
"It's as much as we can hope, since I cannot imagine what other cause could be great enough to merit one of these prophesies, if not our current dilemma." Impa's voice carried the hint of a wry smile despite her solemn words. "As I have found no records nor tales of Heroes wielding the Master Sword itself in Hyrule's written history, I will take the audacity to presume we have the honor of being first in line. Here is the passage on the Hero of Time." She bent over the foreign texts again.
"The Hero of Time," Zelda silently tested the words over her tongue, finding their taste unwieldy. The image from her dreams flashed upon her mind in an unsolicited response, lone, green, bright. Sudden tears warmed her eyes for reasons she couldn't sort out. Everything was wrong. The Hero was supposed to have stopped the darkness. Is it not too late already for him to salvage their world?
Impa made a soft huffing sound, the kind she made usually when exasperated by Zelda's antics. "These are only hints here on how the Hero is to achieve his victory. It's no help when we've yet to even confirm or locate the Hero." She rubbed her thumb over her brow as if trying to force brilliance from her scalp. "I wish these prophesies would have hinted a bit more to these heroes' identities."
Zelda fiddled with the folds of her dress, unease building with a sense of something, somewhere, having gone quite wrong. "What if a Hero never comes?"
"Then perhaps Hyrule will be sundered." Impa shook her head lightly and pushed the scrolls away. "But one thing is clear, regardless - the Master Sword marks the Hero, and we know, without a doubt, that one person has managed this now." Her eyes flashed pointedly to Zelda.
"Then... Link... has become the Hero of Time?" It was an absurd, foreign thing to imagine of her childhood friend (Acquaintance? Errand boy? Were they familiar enough to be considered friends?), yet the phrase rang true with all the certainty of a dream-prophecy. A shiver ran through her at the ponderous fate she has dropped on his thin shoulders.
"He would have to be. No one in centuries has ever been able to budge the Master Sword, and not for lack of trying. For a child so slight to take it up with no resistance..."
"I know it," Zelda murmured, eyes downcast. "My dreams told me as such." Stone. Green. Fairy. The premonitions had seemed fanciful and romantic at the time, but now they felt only dreadful and condemning. Goddesses, he was only her age - if that.
Impa nodded knowingly. "I am not surprised. It would be too much of a coincidence if all these puzzle pieces did not match up. All our hopes rest upon the boy now."
"But then where is he? It's been months and we've seen no sign of any Hero." Because he is gone, a strange thought said in her mind, he left to find... what? She thought she should know, but it sounded absurd, and the thought dissolved like a wayward sigh.
"He is very young. Perhaps too young to bear such a burden." Impa was silent for a moment, musing. "Yet the sword has not rejected him. I think the Sacred Realm has not released him yet. Perhaps in time, when it has deemed him prepared..."
How can anyone prepare for all this? Zelda bit her lip, hating the implications. Was Link facing trials within the Sacred Realm, was he imprisoned there until he has paid some price? "How long will it take?" she whispered. "How long will we have to wait? How long can we wait?"
"I do not know this." Impa sighed again. "There was no mention in these texts of any trial or criteria required of the Hero apart from the Master Sword. It seems the prophets of lore were not much concerned with details and minutia."
"Then what can we do?"
"Keep hidden." The older woman's voice was flat and resigned. "Keep safe the royal bloodline, and the Triforce of Wisdom, until the Hero emerges."
"But that could be ages."
"What would you have me do, dear one?" Impa crouched down to her level, eyes glinting ember-red in the darkness. "I am Sheikah and I have many resources at my disposal, but a lone Sheikah can only do so much from the shadows. You and I do not have the capability to storm up to Ganondorf and put an end to his reign, else it would have been done much sooner. Our role is to Watch, and study, and wait." A firm hand ruffled her hair. "Hyrule will need a Queen to lead her, once all this is over."
"If there is a Queen to be had," Zelda muttered bitterly. "If she is not ancient and withered away in a dark room after centuries of waiting. Maybe Ganondorf will have withered away too."
"Keep patience and faith in your heart, Princess. The Sheikah prophesies may be vague, but they have never yet proven wrong."
"I hope so," Zelda mumbled, but her thoughts fluttered back to Link--barely her height, barely of fledgling age, barely qualified to be a Hero--and she was suddenly unsure what she hoped of him. He was brave and bold enough to be a hero for her childish whims, to be sure. But THE Legendary Hero? It seemed a title too oppressively heavy to lay on anyone unasked, much less one as bright and smiling as he. And if one day he emerged from the Sacred Realm resenting fate, resenting her--
A clamor broke out beyond the cottage walls. Zelda gasped, and Impa leapt for the door, bolting it and chanting a shimmer of wards across it in one movement. Shouts of warning and cries of distress swept past their windows like gust-tossed leaves, followed by a flurry of voices thick with undeniable desert accents and weighted down by metallic jingles of bangles and blades alike. Gerudos, Zelda realized, panic rising in her throat as Impa snatched up her arm with an iron grip and pulled her away from the entrance.
"Village of Kakariko!" the shrill voice of a Gerudo woman rang out clear across the village square. "Our troop comes on behalf of the Great King Ganondorf to collect your tribute to Him. Bring out your goods of value now, and spare us the time!"
"You were here only a month ago!" a gruff male voice shouted back. "Doesn't your King know it takes time for crops to grow?"
"Why should we know?" the Gerudo voice snarled in outrage, and the dissenting man suddenly gurgled with pain--"No crop grows in the desert you filthy Hyrulians exiled us to! Perhaps you would like a taste of desert hospitality? Should I bury you in the sand and leave you to the Vultures and Moldorms? Or should I save my time and just cut your tongue right now?"
"Please--" the man choked, "I have family--"
"Everyone says that," scoffed the Gerudo speaker. "It is not a reason so special that I care. You want to bargain with family? You can exchange your life for the ex-Royal Family." Her voice lifted to address a wider crowd. "Any of you care to save this worthless coward man? Just lead us to enemies of the Great Ganondorf. The Princess, the servants - any drop of blood from the House of Hyrule is worth a bucket of yours - if you have any worth to trade."
"Stop it, please!" A woman's ragged voice tore through the din like a dull, desperate knife. "I... I know where there's someone from the Hyrule Court! Please let my husband go!"
Impa's hand tightened around Zelda's arm, and she began chanting spidery things under her breath. What sounded like a brief scuffle flared and faded as quickly as it began, leaving only the clear-cut voice of the lead Gerudo. "Speak cleanly, woman."
"It's... it's my friend, Mika," the village woman's voice, now thin and untethered, was on the verge of hysterics. "She's been putting up a Hylian soldier in her house. Oh Bright Din please don't punish her! She just has a soft heart for the wounded!"
"I care not about your Din," spat the Gerudo. "Flush the Leever-grubs out."
More yelling ensued, Gerudo and Hylian and other unidentifiable utterances in a great cacophony of confused rage. Harsh crashes and curses marked the soldier's discovery and extraction, pierced by the keen wail of an older female voice: "How could you, Melia? He's just a boy!"
"Well, not too bad on the eyes, for a pasty male," the Gerudo speaker drawled deliberately above the protests. "For a traitor. I will give you one chance, Hyrulian scum. Tell us where is the girl, Zelda."
"I wouldn't tell you even if I knew," replied the young soldier, valiant despite the pain in his voice. "My allegiance is to the Crown of Hyrule to my death!"
"Pfeh. So be it." A winded grunt from the soldier, as if struck in the stomach, before the Gerudo raised her voice again. "I don't like killing men, myself. Waste of breeding stock." Her words were accompanied by snickers and hoots from other Gerudos. "Fortunately, my companion here has no such caring. Lizalfos!" A grating, inhuman screech met her summon. "Do to him as you like."
"They'll kill him!" Zelda squealed in a frantic whisper. "Do something, Impa!"
"I cannot," Impa replied tersely. "It will give us away."
"I'll stay hidden in here!" A scream rent the world with terror and helpless torment, a sound more agonizing and horrible than soldiers falling, her home burning, her father's blood flowing over his throne--"Impa, please!" Zelda pleaded, tears tumbling down her cheeks. But the Sheikah's steel grip upon her arm remained, and the man's yells died away into a nauseating gurgle, soon drowned out by reptilian sounds of satisfaction and--Nayru forbid--glee. This can't happen, this can't happen, I am the Princess of Hyrule and this mustn't happen in my domain, please make it stop please save him please Din Nayru Farore...
"Tch, so this is the renowned Hylian blood? Looks as filthy as any other." The Gerudo woman's voice rang out again to a chorus of cackles and jeers. "I could've told you that, Nadil!" a younger, sharper-sounding Gerudo yelled out.
"Tell me earlier, Rasha, so I don't dirty myself in it next time." Another round of mocking laughter. "And as for you, treasoning wench--" Two voices screamed out at once, and one cut off abruptly with a horrible mixture of sounds, and the other kept screaming, and screaming...
Tears dripping furiously down her chin, Zelda clutched her ears trying to shut out the sound, and her mind's eye fled to the safety of the Temple of Time, to the bas-reliefed doors of granite, to the enigmatic steel of the Master Sword beyond them. Link, Link, where are you? If you are the Hero, please come save us, we don't have any more time...
"You are spared, coward. Beg thanks from your woman for keeping your blood inside your skin," the painfully familiar Gerudo voice cut mercilessly through the muffled roar between her ears and palms. "Let that be a lesson to any of you who think to harbor enemies of the Great Lord Ganondorf. And remember this, you have always the choice to pay your tribute to your King in goods... or in Hylian blood."
A piercing whistle followed a sharp Gerudo command, and the hostile voices dispersed into the distance, leaving only wails and laments in their wake. "They're gone," Zelda breathed in relief, dashing away from her nursemaid to unbolt the door. "We have to help--"
"No!" Impa hissed, and in a flash she was there, sweeping Zelda away with a wrenching jerk. They had barely fallen back against a dusty corner before an accented voice piped just outside the wall, so close she could've been within arm's reach, "We're heading out, Nabooru!"
"I have orders to search every house," a woman's cold voice responded, and then their door crashed open.
The sudden sunlight blinded Zelda from making out much detail, but the figure who strode through the door was unmistakably and fiercely Gerudo, with cropped round ears and a dagger-sharp nose, clothes soft with silk and eyes hard like bronze. Impa's left hand gripped Zelda's mouth as tightly as the curved knife readied in her other hand, smothering the whimpers Zelda would never have dared to emit. Maddeningly, vulnerably, her eyes flicked to the scrolls still spread across the table, and felt an irrational wave of fear for them more than herself.
"Tch. Sand-blasted run-down shack." The woman's mirror-hard eyes slid over the room--over the scrolls--across Zelda's face--with the same uncaring disdain she would spare the sight of a diseased beggar, and she was gone like a hot breeze.
It was minutes or hours or centuries before Impa shifted from her side, and Zelda did not move even then. She watched Impa cautiously slide the door shut without attracting attention, and set the bolt into place, and whisper the shadow magic loose from one window to peek outside, and throughout it all she did not move at all, for if she held perfectly still, it might make up for her foolish impulse earlier, for the blood on the grass outside. She hardly even realized that her teeth and fists and throat hurt from clenching until Impa was crouched in front of her and shaking her slightly by the shoulders. "Zelda. Princess. It is safe."
Safe. Will she ever be safe again? "How did she not see us?" Zelda whispered, not trusting her watery voice or their safety to more.
"Glamour and shadow; tricks for the weak-minded," replied Impa, her voice still as tight as her grip on the Sheikah dagger. "If I had left your side, you would be dead."
Dead, like the poor villagers outside those walls. Zelda fought back a wave of sickness. "Thank you Impa," she managed in a very small voice, and tried her very best to sniffle without making a sound. "I'm sorry I asked you to stop them."
"Never think that." Impa's hand caught her chin and raised her gaze to meet smoldering crimson eyes. "This was my village, Zelda. These are my people, and each drop of blood shed here is tenfold upon my soul. But my life's sworn duty is to protect the Royal Family above all else. I have already failed the King, and that is enough mark me soul-dead and exiled, were there still a Sheikah tribe to be exiled from. It would be upon all that remains of my life before I allow further danger to you, Princess."
"Impa," was all Zelda could say before burying herself in her nursemaid's arms, unable to stop the tears from overtaking her, just as surely she would be powerless to stop them the next time. Two more people dead for her sake. For her mistake.
-
The Princess Zelda awoke in a luxurious bed that is but should not have been hers, and wept.
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Gawd, 3200 words. I hope this has been enough to get all the writing out of my system for a while because I really need to work on... other things. Like work. >_> Then again it might just mean I have to write out the next chapter sooner so that it can explain this one. ::die::