Chapter Text
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After the baby finally fell asleep, Zelda curled up in an armchair and watched the year’s first snow drift down over Hyrule. The sun was setting somewhere beyond the grey clouds, and her bed was too far away; she was half-asleep when the door opened.
“Look,” Owen exclaimed in a hushed whisper. “I made her a hat.”
Zelda suppressed a laugh at the sight of the lumpy, misshapen thing in his hand. “Since when do you crochet?”
“Since stress relief became necessary to my sanity. Not everyone finds it relaxing to hit people with sticks.”
She stretched, still sore from her first sparring session in months; she’d practically run to find Impa as soon as the doctor gave her permission. Owen bent over the crib and slid the hat over little Zelda’s blond curls. Ribboned boxes and congratulatory letters were still piling up outside the royal chambers, but the best gift was the Council keeping the kingdom running without any sign of subterfuge. Maybe Zelda was still a symbol, as her daughter would be, but Hyrule loved her enough to give the gift of time.
“Come see,” Owen gushed. “She’s so cute.”
She unfolded herself from the armchair and came to stand at his side. The hat was as blue as the baby’s eyes, which were peacefully closed right now—she really was devastatingly cute, and Zelda loved her with a ferocity she’d never expected, as though she’d grown a second heart. She rested her head on Owen’s shoulder.
At times like this, she wondered if she could love him too.
But she never had the chance to try.
It happened a week later, halfway through a meeting with some droning noble who was testing her short supply of sleep and patience. When a tearful maid burst into the study, Zelda’s first panicked thought was of her daughter, then of Impa; she wasn’t expecting to hear her husband’s name. He wasn’t a fighter. He was supposed to be safe.
An abject numbness seized her body and steered it all the way to the infirmary bed where Owen lay, surrounded by weeping doctors and nurses—he was as beloved as Zelda herself, after all he’d done to engineer the peace they now enjoyed. But they didn’t know him the way she did; they didn’t know how his fingers were always stained with ink, how he’d cried with joy the first time he’d held their daughter, how he mumbled about legislation in his sleep. Zelda willed him to be sleeping now as her fingers brushed his dark curls and trailed down to the place where his pulse should be.
Someone said in the shaking voice of a little girl, “He’s gone.”
“Yes, Lady Queen,” the doctor said gently. “He collapsed in the hallway. His heart, I believe. You’ll remember his father died the same way—King Owen must have inherited the same weakness.”
“He wasn’t weak,” Zelda whispered. Where were her tears? Frozen like the rest of her? Was this her fate, to be left behind over and over again, to never have anything last? She understood Link perfectly in that moment—because if she had the option, she would flee the same way he had; better to be free than to wait for tragedy to tie you down.
Owen deserved to be buried amongst the vast southern orchards where he’d grown up, but he was a royal now. On a dreary grey morning, Zelda followed the funeral procession through the Kakariko graveyard and watched the priestesses slide his coffin into a dark slot at the back of her family’s tomb. Sniffles came from the crowd they’d collected along the way.
The baby was quiet for now. Zelda clung to her like a lifeline, shivering in the cold breeze that blew through the tomb’s doorway, staring blankly at a spot on the wall, unable to focus on the funeral rites. Past all those layers of stone waited the Shadow Temple, and she could think only of the dead surrounding her, Hylian and Sheikah and the terrible secrets they had shared.
She only realized the ceremony was over when Impa guided her outside. Halfway between the tomb and the crowd of mourners, Zelda faltered, feeling an unearthly chill ripple through the air. The wind, she thought, or the grief—but Impa’s arm had gone rigid around her shoulders.
The baby burst into sudden tears. And Zelda could feel something reaching towards her across the mossy gravestones, something dark and wrathful and hungry. The deeper parts of the temple were still sealed off; she’d checked them herself after Ganondorf’s escape.
But perhaps some secrets couldn’t stay buried forever.
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“You can’t be serious,” Impa said later that night, when she walked into the royal suite and found Zelda pulling on the dark boots that completed her Sheikah suit.
“You sensed it, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. But you have enough to worry about. I’ll gather some scouts.”
Zelda slung a quiver of arrows over her shoulder. “No scouts. This is my responsibility. After what happened in the Shadow Temple at my family’s behest—”
“And by my clan’s hands,” Impa interrupted in a low voice. “By my own hands, Zelda. You’re better off without seeing what remains.”
“I rule even the darkest corners of this kingdom, Impa. Besides, I won’t let you face it alone.”
She held out the Ocarina of Time. Impa frowned down at it, her eyes violently red above the white Sheikah tattoos. “Is this what you need?”
Zelda glanced back at her empty bed, at the desk piled with Owen’s beloved paperwork, and said quietly, “Yes.”
Impa crossed the room to take her hands without hesitation. The Nocturne of Shadow swept away the world and deposited them in the quiet graveyard.
Impa barely batted an eye at the disorienting travel, but she stared into the Shadow Temple’s gloom with dread, not moving until Zelda did. The area where they’d imprisoned Ganondorf was eerie enough—old bones, skittering rats, more darkness than a spell-light could drive away. Past that were the wards Impa’s people had cast years ago to contain the temple’s dangers, still intact but badly frayed; no wonder that presence had been able to reach out to them in the graveyard.
“It’ll get worse from here on out,” Impa said grimly. “Best to cast now.”
The teardrop symbol glowed briefly on her forehead as she opened her Mind’s Eye. When Zelda followed suit, the illusory wall at the rear of the room became an open doorway. Impa led them onward through the twisting hallways, pale and silent, pausing only to warn of Keese or ReDeads.
The temple did get worse, and not solely due to traps and illusions and monsters. Zelda knew what people whispered about her family; she knew the cause of Impa’s nightmares. But it made her very blood feel vile to actually see the cells, the rusted torture devices, and the bones of those who had been denied even the dignity of burial. The chill she’d sensed after Owen’s funeral became an oppressive weight here in the darkness. Worst of all, she couldn’t escape the sense that something worse waited around each corner; with every step forward, her instincts screamed at her to retreat.
Impa brought them to a boat that floated in a narrow canal—unanchored and untethered, just waiting there for them, its horned figurehead pointing into the darkness ahead. The canal wasn’t full of water, it was full of…fog? Emptiness? Zelda’s eyes strayed away every time she tried to focus on the abyss.
“I never went further than this,” Impa said faintly.
But Link did. Zelda carried his wrinkled letter in her pocket, for no reason but to feel him with her; she ached to imagine him experiencing this terror as a child in a teenager’s body. Though she didn’t know the details of his passage through the temple, she could guess it was the reason he’d always flatly refused to visit Kakariko with her.
“Did…did the other Sheikah use this ferry?” Zelda asked nervously.
“Yes. With the prisoners. They always came back…different. Or not at all. I was young enough to be spared the worst of it.”
“But not all of it.”
“Not all of it,” Impa agreed. There was something small and thin about her voice that made Zelda step forward to wrap her arms around the woman who’d raised her, who—in some ways—remained a mystery. Link was like that too. It didn’t stop Zelda from loving either of them.
Impa hugged her close, then let go and hopped the small gap to the ferry. “Play your lullaby,” she said as she helped Zelda across, pointing at the Triforce inscribed on the deck.
“Why…would I do that?”
“I don’t know.” Impa was staring off into the gloom, her face white as a sheet. “But it was the one good thing about this place.”
Not much of an answer, but Zelda wouldn’t pry. She raised the Ocarina to her lips and started to play. The familiar melody didn’t erase the fear, but it certainly came as a comfort—and under her feet, the ferry jolted forward.
Two Stalfos dropped down out of nowhere, the deck rocking under their weight. They were no challenge for Zelda’s magic and years of training, but again she was wondering how much Link could have possibly learned in that little Kokiri practice yard.
The ferry lurched to a halt—then, horrifyingly, began to sink. Zelda stumbled after Impa and leapt through the shadows, landing on the stone dock just in time for the ferry to disappear into the void below. She brushed a hand over her pocket, where the Ocarina rested beside Link’s letter, and thanked all three Goddesses that she and Impa had an escape route.
There was a door to the right, another abyss ahead. Zelda studied both and found a cluster of bomb flowers growing beneath a pillar across the way. She was sorry to destroy the first sign of natural life she’d seen, but not sorry enough to delve through more of the temple than necessary. One well-aimed arrow ignited the flowers and sent the pillar plummeting down to span the abyss.
Impa was first to cross. Zelda followed, trying to watch her feet across the narrow walkway. She kept catching movement in her peripheral vision—shapes writhing beneath the pale fog that filled the abyss—but everything was quiet and still and dead whenever she turned to look.
That was when the voices assaulted her, rising from everywhere and nowhere: whispering, wailing, begging for mercy in a cacophony that made her stop cold in the center of the column. Zelda. Zelda. She clapped her hands over her ears. There were snatches of familiarity—her father, her husband—but that was impossible. They’re gone, I saw them buried, no one can hurt them anymore. Shuddering, she managed another step.
Zelda.
Her knees locked. Only a decade of Sheikah training kept her from tumbling into the abyss at the sound of that voice, so lost and lonely.
Zelda, Link repeated, barely whispering. You can’t fix death. I’ve tried. Don’t make me try again. Just come down here and rest. Don’t you want to rest?
She remembered floating beside him in the Zora River, watching the clouds drift by, talking of everything and nothing. The fog seethed below her feet. The world seemed brutally cold, but the future could be warm; she could find him at long last, and they could both be safe again.
“Keep walking,” commanded another voice, clear and unmistakably real.
Her eyes flashed to Impa, waiting at the end of the pillar, the same way Zelda’s daughter and the entire kingdom were waiting. But Link—what if that was really him? What if he’d been trapped here all these years, desperate for help?
No, Zelda realized sadly. He wouldn’t drag me down with him. That’s why he left in the first place. And we weren’t meant to rest. We were meant to heal the wounds of this world.
Besides, Link would never allow himself to be caged. That was one of the first things she’d loved about him.
By the time she reached the other side and fell into Impa’s arms, Zelda was finally crying—for Link, for Owen, for every person who had suffered in this place. “What was that?” she gasped.
Impa squeezed her shoulders. “Just another illusion, little bird.”
“I heard Link. That was…how are you so calm? What did you hear?”
“Only the dead. There’s no one alive they can torment me with, apart from you.”
Zelda pulled back, wanting to protest—Impa had friends, she had her troops—but it was a conversation for sunshine and warm tea, not for this place. Magic got them through one locked door, then a second, until they stood in a small, circular chamber with a hole at its center. Utter darkness waited below.
Impa wiped sweat from her forehead, despite how cold it was so deep beneath the earth. “What lies down there…it can only be the shadow spirit. Let’s rest a moment.”
They sat against the wall, sipping from their waterskins and triple-checking the Mind’s Eye spell. Zelda drummed restless fingers on her bow, trying not to contemplate how far underground they were, how many levels of bloody history they’d descended through.
“My people’s best guess is that the spirit was always here in some form,” Impa said after a while. “But that it…fed on the suffering we caused. As it grew stronger, so did its hold on this place. That’s what causes the illusions and keeps the dead awake. Things grew so volatile that we abandoned the temple before the war even ended.”
“I should never have put Ganondorf here,” Zelda muttered. “That beast inside him being so close to the shadow spirit…”
“A dozen Sheikah placed that seal using magic we’ve safeguarded and developed for all our history. I never imagined it would weaken. But I suppose my people aren’t anything to be proud of.”
“I feel the same way about mine right now. But you’ve done so much, Impa. You’ve kept going after all you’ve lost.” Zelda thought of the silence where Owen’s pulse should have been, of the empty chambers she’d be returning to, of their daughter growing up fatherless. Her voice sounded small when she added, “How?”
Impa stood, her eyes red as truth under the spell-light. “Save what you can. Set the rest of it free. This temple, my clan, your family—it’s a tangled mess far older than we can possibly understand. You were right that it’s your responsibility, but it’s not your fault.”
Zelda recalled looking into Ganondorf’s eyes and sensing the net that bound her and him and Link together. But perhaps it was wider than that. Perhaps it had killed countless people in the war and withered the survivors with grief and fear. Perhaps it had planted Ganondorf’s craving for revenge and forced Link through hell to stop him.
All she knew for certain was that she stood at the net’s center. More trapped than anyone—and in the best position to cut through.
She got to her feet and peered into the dark abyss, reaching for Impa, who took her hand without another word. They stepped off the platform and into suffocating darkness.
The Mind’s Eye gave her a glimpse of sharp vertebrae jutting out from under grey flesh, and a scream caught in Zelda’s throat as they plummeted past the shadow spirit’s warped body, nearly as long as the chamber was tall. Be like Link, she reminded herself, preparing to break their fall with magic.
The ground heaved up to meet them, nonsensically; Zelda and Impa both stumbled, but kept their feet. An enormous hand with gnarled knuckles and dark scars in place of fingernails slammed down in front of them. When the platform jolted again, Zelda realized they stood atop the massive drum that had given Bongo Bongo his name—and then the only thing in the world was a bloodred eye, sprouting from the spirit’s severed neck and fixing on Zelda with so much hate that she reached for an arrow instinctively, unable to bear his gaze.
His right hand swatted the arrow aside and hurtled towards Impa, who dodged and used the bounce of the drum to jump, landing on the hand and sinking her twin blades into its mottled flesh. Bongo Bongo gave an awful, warbling moan, shaking her off like she was no more than an insect. Zelda darted to Impa’s side as the spirit barreled towards them, bracing her feet to unleash a wave of golden magic.
Bongo Bongo collapsed, his ruined fingers scrabbling at the surface of the drum in his attempt to rise. Zelda nocked another arrow—it would take more than that to kill him, but she wasn’t afraid anymore. Link had won this fight with only a fairy and a short supply of magic no one had trained him to use. She and Impa could do the same.
But something stayed her hand. Sparks of her magic still drifted through the air, glittering on the drum’s surface and in the putrid water surrounding it. The spirit moaned again, piteous and empty, and his gaze was no longer fixed on Zelda—he was watching the magic, watching the closest thing to sunlight he’d seen in decades, perhaps in his lifetime.
Her eyes stung. Though she had to end this scourge for Hyrule’s sake, she felt none of the righteous fury that had fueled her fight against Ganondorf. She cast her power wider and tried to understand the being before her.
It didn’t feel like he’d feasted on suffering to grow stronger. It felt like he’d absorbed all that pain with no choice in the matter, the way earth absorbs rain. Perhaps the Shadow Temple had begun as a place of true worship; perhaps Bongo Bongo had been its guardian. Perhaps it didn’t matter what he’d once been—just that he was twisted and tainted by the atrocities Zelda’s family had committed.
She took a cautious step forward.
“What are you doing?” Impa whispered.
“It’s all right,” Zelda said, both to her and to the spirit, who watched her approach with his wide crimson eye. Magic glowed under her skin and rippled through the air around them. She could sense everything in the way only wisdom could—the heavy horror of the temple above their heads, the hammering beat of Impa’s fear, the hollow place where the spirit’s heart had once been. If he hated her, it was because he’d forgotten how to do anything else.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for all of it. I should have come sooner.”
Bongo Bongo stared back at her, unblinking, unforgiving. But he was done fighting. She could see it in his gaze: an exhaustion older than time.
“I can’t heal you. I can only give you peace.”
He shuddered, and she knew that peace was all he wanted, more than he’d ever hoped to receive. Tears spilled down her cheeks. Impa stepped to her side, steady and silent. Save what you can. Set the rest of it free.
The spirit closed his eye. She lifted her hands and guided him away in a calm river of light, bright as a spring morning, gentle as rocking her daughter to sleep. He slid quietly into his welcome end.
Zelda felt it the moment his remains began to wisp away: a shift in the air, an unraveling of the curse he and the temple had languished under. Far above her head, the illusions were fading; the undead were finally permitted to sleep; the trapped souls were rising towards freedom. She tried to let her losses go with them. Her father, her unknown mother, all the people who had died to build the kingdom she now ruled—and Owen, the unexpected light that fate had snuffed out far too early.
Impa’s daggers thudded to the surface of the drum as she buried her face in her hands and sobbed with relief. Zelda gathered her into an embrace, returning the gift Impa had given her so many times—and all around them, the Shadow Temple fell silent for the first time since Hyrule had raised its banners for war.
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