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The first time Link sees him, he comes to Clock Town to barter and repair his tent, and Link stands at the edge of the market and stares at him, sword half-drawn until Kafei passes and catches Link’s eye.

“Are you all right?” He asks, voice pitched soft and low, as he steps behind the wall where Link is crouched. Link does not move. Kafei follows his gaze, sees who he is staring at. “Why are you staring at Dragmire?”

On the other side of the wall, Dragmire laughs.

The adrenaline goes out of his body as quickly as it had entered. He lets out a slow breath. This man is not Ganondorf. His laugh is that of a man who is pleased with life and his stock in it. As all of Termina is, this is just the man Ganondorf could have been—perhaps would have been—in a better life. Nothing more, nothing less.

Just a man.

Link has lived in Termina for three years before he is properly introduced to Dragmire. They meet one day at the fishing hole down in the swamp, and Link has to crane his neck all the way back to see up to the man’s face. “I’m surprised you two haven’t met,” says the shopkeep, dividing their tackle out between them. “My two most frequent customers.”

Dragmire sizes Link up. Link, who, at something like fifteen, is still slender and small for his age. He has stopped wearing only green, today in a brown hat and a patchwork-color knitted poncho that Romani made for him. His sword is sheathed low across his back now, and he stares back at Dragmire, unafraid.

Dragmire is not what Link expected, either. He is younger than the Ganondorf that Link remembers, even from their fleeting meetings when he was first a child. The lines around his eyes and mouth are not as deep, not as tight, and he stands with a comfortable ease rather than the pugnacious jut of his jaw. His hair, too, is longer, not cut short and carefully tamed flat: it lays across his head in thick twists, bound up along the back of his scalp and into an elaborate knot of braids at the base of his neck. He doesn’t wear black and red; he wears brown and blue, worn but well-loved leather boots, his hands in fisherman’s gloves and not the gauntlets of battle.

When Link holds out his hand to shake, he uses his right. When Dragmire takes it, Link looks at the back of his hand.

There is nothing at all there. When they shake hands, he feels no frisson of power, no tremble of the firmament or rattle of his bones. Just the texture of leather and the warmth of skin.

Link says, “Want to join me?”

At first they meet only occasionally, one afternoon here and there amongst weeks and months, crossing paths at their favorite fishing holes, trading tips and tackle and line as they go. Once, when Dragmire finds his tent blown away in a storm, Link helps him collect his missing things, rappelling down a dry well while Dragmire stands up above, holding his rope and calling down repeatedly to check if he is all right.

There is only one moment, when Link is about twenty feet down with forty more to go, that he has a sudden, paralyzing fear that Dragmire will loose the rope and he will fall to his death. He doesn’t have his hookshot on hand, nothing but his wits and his sword, and he is about to prepare for the drop when he realizes the rope is steady.

“Don’t worry!” Dragmire calls, “I’ve got you!”

They begin to meet more often after that, forging an unexpected friendship that builds across fish soup and bad jokes, over stories beside campfires and the long silences as they sit and wait for their lines to bob.

They are down in a corner of the Swamp one golden afternoon, silence turned hazy and soft, when Dragmire says, apropos of nothing, “You’re very good at this, for being so young. I was never so quiet or patient at your age.”

Link laughs. “I’m a lot older than I look.”

“Oh?” Dragmire looks at him, and in the man’s face, Link can see the shadow of the Ganondorf he knew, the derision, the disbelief, the frustration and anger. There is the edge of a man scorned and hated there—or perhaps there is the promise of it, if he was broken by a thousand small hurts to become a stranger who longs for the wind. Dragmire just raises his eyebrows, doesn’t question or ask. Simply waits, as he has learned to do, because he is a man of nearly as few words as Link himself is, their silences rarely broken by speech in their understanding of the world around them.

Link thinks, as he waits for his line. How old is he, truly? He can’t easily put a number to it. He knows, when he first wandered out of Kokiri Forest, he was of an age with Zelda and Malon—ten, perhaps eleven. How long did he live amongst the Kokiri, though? Was it a decade, or three, or ten? Was it forty years, two hundred?

Instinctively, he knows—with a bone-deep assuredness that he could not explain even if he tried—it is somewhere in the middle. There are no words, no reasons, but for the certainty that he lived lifetimes amongst the trees, where time and space are not the same, waiting until the Deku Tree knew the time was right. For a time he was also seventeen, but he isn’t sure that really counts, either. Trapped in the Sacred Realm, he was not even awake, and hardly alive. He has no memory of that time passing, although he does remember time passing in Kokiri Forest. But he does not feel a hundred, and neither does he feel quite so young as seventeen, certainly not as fifteen.

And what, then, of Termina and Clock Town? How many days did Link relive? And those, he knows, somehow are days that count. Close to a year, he is certain, of trying and failing and trying and failing and trying, of watching the world crumble and fall.

This is not the same, of course, as living time facing forward and never walking back. The way everyone else lives it, the way Link never has. It seems so little—in the constellation of other times and years he has lived—but when he was saving Termina was also the first time he ever had time to grow and change and learn: stolen, golden days of sitting and playing his ocarina atop the Clock Town Walls and chasing chickens just for the joy of it, knowing he could always try again. So, if he is now perhaps closer to fifteen than he was once to eleven, and yet, also closer to twenty, he is still not younger than a hundred.

“Between seventeen and ninety,” Link says at last, when his line twitches. “Or ten and a hundred. Time has a way of moving strangely for me.”

It is the first he has told anyone in Termina of the years he has lost, the life he once had outside their forest borders in a Hyrule he has chosen not to return to. In a Hyrule that perhaps no longer exists, just as perhaps in another world this Termina no longer exists; another kingdom gone, disappeared into nothingness without the Fierce Deity’s Mask to ground it.

“Makes sense,” Dragmire replies. “Sometimes, I feel much older than twenty-three. Like I’ve had more than one share of chances.” He shifts his grip on his fishing rod, looks up to the sky, and Link peers at him carefully.

Was Ganondorf really so young?

Did he only feel old, because Link was even younger?

A fish bites, and Link goes to reel it in, moving with the muscle memory he gained while hiding away off of the Zora River, pretending the world wasn’t falling down around his head, sheathing the Master Sword and running away to the past, wishing terribly that he could stop time. The fish slips away just before reaching the shore, and he sighs, not really as sad as he feels like he should be.

There is something poetic and beautiful in a fish going free. There is peace in a broken line, courage in the chance to live again.

Dragmire laughs at Link’s empty hook, and Link laughs too, because he is glad that his sword hand is going empty in favor of simply being himself.

In the winter, Dragmire packs up and heads east to his homeland, out past Ikana Canyon, walking beside his horse, pulling a cart full of salted, stored fish. He promises to see Link when he returns for the Clock Town Carnival come late spring. This is how his years pass: he comes in and out of the desert, weeks-long journeys stretching alone in silence, carrying fish and foodstuffs and the creations of civilization and returning with the bounty of the desert, art and textiles and hand-printed books of magic and weather and science.

Link spends the winter that year mostly down in Great Bay as a temporary guest of The Indigo-Go’s. He finds peace in the strumming of his guitar, the heady beats of bossa nova filling his dreams, each of them shaped like the dancing light of a fairy. He practices spearfishing and finds that it comes easily to him now he is growing taller and stronger, knifing through the water, chasing Lulu’s growing children, more sure and secure in their fins than he is. He tries, by some instinct he can’t name, to mend bridges with the Gerudo Pirates, and finds a friend in Aveil he never expected, trading treasures found on the ocean floor for stories, nostalgic ones reminiscent of her past.

When Link returns to Clock Town, he finds Anju with a newborn baby, Kafei busily overseeing the preparations for the Carnival, and two strangers.

They are both taller than Link, but that is not uncommon—he knows, even fully grown, he will never be tall. They wear Sheikah garb, and he could hardly not know their faces, even though all that is visible is their eyes. Sheik and Impa haven’t changed a bit from how he remembers them, even here in Termina.

They are staying at the Stock Pot Inn, crammed in with all the other Carnival tourists, and can be found in a different part of town every day, taking pictographs and talking quickly in Sheikah. The first time Link sees them, Sheik freezes and stares at him—eyes wide, unmoving, as if they’ve seen a ghost—until Impa calls to them with a question and they tear their eyes away, stumble on, glancing back every two seconds while Link stares in return, hand resting uneasily on his bow.

The following day, Dragmire comes back into town, hanging heavy handmade rugs from the sides of his market stall, and Link goes to greet him, finds himself pulled into a tight hug. He’s grown again, the top of his head nearly at Dragmire’s chest, and he returns the unexpected hug, two two of them catching up as he helps Dragmire air out rugs, string up beads, the bounty of his mothers and sisters for sale and barter. They talk of nothing and everything, of what they did to pass the seasons, of weather, of the Carnival, of some ideas Link has to try ice fishing, of this and that.

Half of it is not said aloud, communicated by their motion, their bodies, the way that they interact with one another.

As they talk, Link can feel Sheik’s eyes on him. He can feel judgment, something unnamed and primal, and it leaves the hair on the back of his neck on-end. They stop him when he heads out of town to go down and run an errand for Koume and Kotake, a hand on his shoulder.

“You must,” Sheik says, in a thick accent that Link can’t place, “Stay away from that man.”

Link looks into their face, searching for a Zelda that he knows he will not find. This is not the Sheik he knew any more than that is the Ganondorf he knew. He gently shrugs their hand off, smiles.

“He’s not who you think he is. Neither am I.”

He waves goodbye, and ignores the way that Sheik watches him all the way out across Termina Field until he disappears from sight, swallowed up by the trees.

Link is manning the Romani Ranch stall when Sheik and Impa come up the following morning. Impa finds a way to look busy, inspecting the milk, squinting as she tries to make out the writing, while Sheik shifts back and forth and refuses to look at his face or meet his eyes. “You know me.” they say at last, a statement of fact, but their voice rises, as if asking a question, caught halfway between one and the other. Link doesn’t answer, just shrugs, lets the silence hang. “You said you are not who I think you are. Who do I think you are?”

Link shrugs again, because Sheik will come to their own answer in time. Most people do. They pick up a bottle of milk, fingers brushing over the top of an open crate of eggs. “Who is he,” they whisper, and the agony that laces the question makes Link hesitate.

“A friend.” At this angle, just shorter than them, both of Sheik’s red eyes are visible, and they are frightened. Link nods, as if sealing a promise. He has lived in Termina four years and seen all kinds of things he never expected, even homemade cakes from his self-appointed Grannies on his birthday, rather than fire and ice and burns and bruises that last weeks. Things are seldom what they seem, and this Sheik is not his Zelda, left behind in Hyrule. This Sheik, he knows by instinct, is their own person, an existence entirely Terminan.

Memory is just that—memory. Nothing more or less.

“I know him,” Sheik says, and Link is captured by their eyes. He cannot look away. “I know you. But I don’t—I don’t know your name. I know this place shouldn’t exist. Clock Town is rubble and dust, full of the dead and the dying. Termina is burning. You are gone. But…everyone is alive. The clock still counts. The Carnival is three days too old.”

Link tastes the bitter tang of adrenaline and holds tight to his sword the rest of the day, jumping at any whistle or sparkle of a fairy, every rattle, anything that could be the click of a mask or of joints.

That night he doesn’t sleep. He goes to the Observatory and stares through the telescope up into the sky, watching the moon all night. The sun rises, uninterrupted.

The back of his right hand is still empty. Time moves forward, not back.

The moon is just a moon.

The mask is just just a mask.

He runs into Sheik by the Great Bay. “He died here,” they tell him, looking over the grave marker. “I don’t know who, but he died here. You should have been able to save him.” Link doesn’t have the heart to tell them that it’s not that simple, it’s never that easy. Time doesn’t really obey anyone’s commands—all you can do is ask of it, provide all you have, and it will give you whatever chances it can.

He tried so many times to save Mikau. Tried with all his might.

Trying is not enough.

He finds Sheik and Impa arguing down in the Swamp, Impa in the water almost to her waist. “It’s not poison,” she says, and, judging by her tone, it has to be the tenth time. “Look. I’m in it and I’m fine.”

“It’s poisoned,” Zelda repeats, and they sound almost frantic. Link has to stop himself, has to duck behind a tree, and remember this is not Zelda. This is Sheik. Sheik repeats, sounds almost frantic, and he can hear in their voice an edge of panic that he thinks of as the scent of a castle garden. It has the same tone as Zelda screaming when he was hurt, gored by Ganon’s tusks.

“It’s not,” Impa says again, and then, something in frustrated, rapid Sheikah that he can neither follow nor understand. Their conversation moves on in the language, wheedling and snapping and fear, and he waits as long as he can before walking by to head deeper into the swamp to run ingredients over to the Grannies.

Both of them look at him. He lifts a hand in greeting. Sheik opens their mouth and he cuts them off.

“It’s not poisoned.”

He hops into the water and goes swimming away, lazily kicking his feet, and tries not to remember how it burned him when he fell in the first time, how he yanked back and stumbled out, crying, his skin weeping, as he limped over to the clean spring by the Grannies’ house, rinsed himself in the water and sobbed, even after he’d had two potions, even after the cycle had reset and all he had was the memory.

When the Carnival comes to an end, the Sheikah disappear from the Stock Pot Inn between one day and the next, their room empty. Link, who stays in guest beds in half-a-dozen houses when he’s in town, feels an itch in his palms, a desire, a gravitational pull that drags him to go search after them, to find out where they went. To catch them, stop them. To go with them.

He knows that they will be back. Drawn to Clock Town by more than passing interest and the desire to travel and move, drawn to Link. Like iron filings to a lodestone. He doesn’t need to go looking for that which will return.

Link draws three triangles in the sand by the Great Bay and kicks them out until half the beach is his footprints. He burns them on slips of paper, bombs them as rocks, petulantly smashes them as snowballs. He sits on top of very tall trees and plays all kinds of different songs on his ocarina—Saria’s most often, and sometimes Zelda’s lullaby, or the Bolero of Fire. He plays Epona’s Song and rides her until they’re both exhausted; he plays the Song of Storms when he’s under thick foliage and listens to the rain above him, bouncing off of the leaves, and can almost imagine he’s home.

Link wonders why there are no Kokiri in Termina.

Link wonders what would happen if he went back to Hyrule, if he just left the way he came. If he opened the door at the base of the Clock Tower, stepped inside and walked downward.

He dreams, sometimes, of the ocean, and in his dreams it is endless fathoms on forever, waves and wind and salt air and a little girl calling his name. He dreams of snow and a thick fish soup that he loves to make whenever he has the ingredients. He dreams of the moon falling, of the moon blood-red, of the moon silhouetting a howling wolf, of the moon seen from high above the clouds. He dreams of drowning, and of songs that end the world.

He dreams of dragons, and plays different songs when he wakes.

When Dragmire starts to saddle Arbiter and load his cart to head back to the desert, Link, who has been busy cleaning up the Ikana lichyard, rides up on Epona. He watches for a few minutes, idly feeding her bits of apple from his pocket as she turns halfway around to lip at his wrist.

Dragmire stops at some point and sits down on the edge of the cart, out of breath, soaked with sweat in the humidity that’s rolling off the Bay. He’s stripped down to his waist, and he wipes the sweat off of his forehead with a towel. His hair has gotten longer in the last year, his dreadlocks currently pulled back by some twine that looks like it’s one jump from coming loose. He looks at Link and drinks his water.

There are still more goods off of the cart than on them.

“Are you going to sit there and watch,” Dragmire says, “Or are you going to help?”

Link slides down off of Epona and, relieved of her load, she goes back to her favored pastime of bullying Arbiter: she stalks over to his patch of grass, shoves his head out of it, and immediately starts eating it. He doesn’t even try to stop her. Link sets his shield and sword on the ground, adds his pack to the pile, and comes over to help.

He’s still not quite full-grown, but he knows he’s close. His sword and shield feel almost right in his hands again, Mama Aroma hasn’t needed to let out the hems of his clothes in months. There are still some things he can’t pick up or move, not without resorting to masks, so instead they split up the work. Dragmire lifts everything up onto the cart, and Link moves it around, organizing it with the same kind of single-minded efficiency he brings to bear on solving puzzles, organizing his pack, beating playground games, and generally solving problems on purpose. It goes twice as fast, even if it does exhaust Link.

He’s glad, suddenly, that he no longer wears chainmail every day.

“You could take your shirt off,” Dragmire points out when Link stops to rest, out of breath, sitting on top of a barrel of salted fish with his feet propped up on a box of powdered milk.

Link points at the sun. Dragmire puts his hand over his eyes and squints upwards. He doesn’t seem to get it. “I’ll burn,” Link says, and Dragmire’s mouth makes a little o of surprise. He looks down at himself, his black skin highlighted green by the sunlight and beads of sweat, and laughs, head thrown back. Link half-smiles, shakes his head, and goes back to catching his breath while Dragmire takes stock of what’s left, tallying a list he’s got pinned to his cloak.

“I want to go with you,” Link says, still looking off into the distance. Arbiter has shifted as far as his bridle on the cart will allow because Epona keeps bullying him.

Dragmire looks up. He’s tucked his pencil behind one ear, and it’s half-hidden in his hair. “You’ll burn,” he says, as if that’s answer enough.

Link shrugs.

He has before.

They leave past Ikana that evening, Dragmire guiding Arbiter and the cart while Link rides alongside on Epona. When they stop for the night, their bedrolls are sat next to one another, to share heat, and Link falls asleep to the sound of Dragmire’s even breathing, staring up at the utterly unfamiliar constellations amongst the stars and finding that joyful rather than terrifying.

Link hunts a deer on the road and they prepare it together, taking a long afternoon at a riverbank salting meat and hide both, cooking fresh rations for the road and bottling up the remains of their stew when they’re done, Dragmire sealing them with an enchantment to keep it fresh a few days longer. Dragmire tells him stories about growing up in the desert; his deep, sonorous voice carrying in the clear, dry air.

Termina is not so far from Hyrule that they do not share at least some history, holdovers from the world it could have been. Link has met the Gerudo pirates, and knows that some things are true for both—the Gerudo have been ill-treated by history, discriminated, pushed to the margins of society, and they have learned to make their way in the world in whatever manner they can, unkind or no. There is honor in being a good thief.

Link knows now that his lack of knowledge is another sort of unkindness. Both in Termina and Hyrule the Gerudo were pushed to the desert, and Link doesn’t really know why. In Termina, it was war with the Ikana, old hatred that festered over generations into a cycle of violence that ended with Ikana victory and Gerudo retreat, but to hear Dragmire say it, this was so long ago that it’s passed beyond living memory. The Gerudo are at home in the desert now, at peace with their memories of loss, and generations have become as true to the desert sands as the sands are to them.

In Hyrule, Link never bothered to learn—now, he wishes he had. When he was first thrown into this conflict he was too young, so young that he did not yet know how to ask. He followed the cues of his teachers, trusting them to lead him true.

The Deku Tree did, and with kindness. But Link wonders about the honesty of men like Rauru, of the wisdom in their choices. Certainly, he saved more than simply Hyrule itself by his actions, but Link is now a man twice-grown, his spirit older still. He knows that there are different kinds of power-madness in the world, can tell apart the lust of greed and the agony of hunger. Men like Ganondorf are not born naturally, they do not come fully-formed into this world and think to themselves that the point of a forest is to burn. They grow up watching again and again as the forests are burned by men who call themselves their betters while their hearths lie cold and think to themselves that a single cord of wood is not too much to ask.

Want breaks people. The Gerudo were broken long before Ganondorf was born, and it is hardly his fault that they were wanting. Evil does not appear because of need, desire does not birth violence.

They are cousins, and Link has held hands with both.

What old vein of sour rot hides at the heart of Hyrule that poisoned the wells that made Ganondorf? Magic and old curses, hatred and derision, can only do so much. A man is not an island, and Dragmire is what Ganondorf could have been, but Ganondorf, too, is what Dragmire could have been.

Link thinks to himself, I want to do better next time, because he knows there will be a next time. He might not get two shots at it then, might not learn from the first time. He might not grow up so soft-hearted, might think in days instead of years.

Dragmire is precious to him in ways he cannot explain. Freed of whatever dark shadow runs down his line, whatever venom ties him inextricably to failing and falling, he is a precious gift of a man that Link could-have-known. He is thankful for every moment they have together, for every long conversation, a friendship wherein they are both freed of all their expectations. Two men, riding along a dark scrubby road on the edge of a vast desert, and the Triforce is only in his dreams.

When they reach the Gerudo homelands, nomadic tents pulled round a clear oasis for the winter floods, Link offers to the elder mothers and sisters gifts he has carried on Epona’s back all the way from Termina. Strong, Kokiri-style cloth he made himself from the soft pulpy inner bark of green branches, fibrous leaves woven into a silk-light, dense green canvas that is waterproof and very rarely leaks—it is perfect to protect a tent from the occasional heavy rains and can carry water a long way from its source without spilling. He has two bolts of it, along with the ever-present needs of the desert sands: fine rock salt and steel from the Gorons, Deku water filters that can be used for years on end. They are good gifts, brought a long way, and Link is proud that he chose well, that he has honored these women in ways he never was able to before.

He spends a winter among them, re-learning Gerudo horseback archery and gaining a tan, helping move tents and foal horses, and when the spring comes and Dragmire packs up once more to return to Clock Town and Termina for another long, swampy summer, Link packs up too, and they ride the distance back together, a warmth between them that feels like the distant boughs of home.

They arrive in Clock Town the final night before the Carnival is set to begin, carpenters running about yelling to one another over the sounds of saws and hammers, setting up stalls and dance poles. Sheik finds them only minutes after they ride through the gate, their face beneath their mask pale as a sheet, their entire body shaking, blood all over their clothes, and they say—

“Help.”

In his back pocket, Link’s ocarina burns kiln-hot.

Sheik manages to give directions before they succumb to exhaustion, getting onto Epona’s back only with Link’s help, leaning against her neck while Link lets her have her reins. Dragmire rides alongside, neither invited nor rejected, as evening clouds roll in. In the nearly three hours it takes to ride out to where Sheik tells them they left Impa, a light drizzle begins, and Link and Dragmire both take out their cloaks, Link tying his awkwardly to keep Sheik dry.

He tries not to think about the fact that Sheik came all this distance back to town on their own. Of what may be waiting for them when they arrive.

By the time they get there it is fully dark, and because of the rain Link has to try a half-dozen times to get the oilcloth on his torch to light, giving up only when Dragmire conjures fire and it licks across the skin of his hand raised in lieu of a torch, the flame steaming and hissing beneath the rain. Sheik does not speak, limping heavily as they lead Link and Dragmire down the wall of a canyon to the northwest of Snowhead, the switchback path slick and dangerous in the rain.

More than once, Sheik stumbles and Link catches them, always barely in time.

The temple is at the base of the cliff, and it has grown late indeed when they step inside, Sheik shivering with cold and exhaustion, leaning on the wall with every step.

When they grow too weak, they collapse to the ground, crying, sobbing, pulling down their mask and hiding their face from Link and Dragmire. Link looks to Dragmire, lights his torch from the other man’s hand, leaves his cloak, and moves on ahead into the darkness while the other man stays with Sheik.

He knows without looking that this is an old place, a Wrong place, and it feels the same as Majora’s Mask did when he took it in his hands, like every time his hand touches the wall the bare skin is plied with a thousand splinters from inside old wooden joints. His footfalls echo louder than they should, his breath gets cold too quickly, and he finds himself longing for the comforting ring of fairy bells.

His loneliness is, in that single moment, suffocating. Without meaning to, Link begins to cry.

The ruin goes downward and Link goes with it, deep into the mountain past poorly-cleared traps and missed doors, footprints in the dust and blood and broken remains of Stalfos. Instinct leads him on, a bone-deep knowledge of which way to go, which door to open, which trap to kick aside.

He finds Impa, still-warm and still-dead, trapped in a pit filled with spikes. There is blood all up and down the walls from her trying to get out. It is cold and silent and dark.

Link returns the way he came, exhaustion dogging his steps all the way back out. When he reaches Sheik and Dragmire, the air smells like a fight, and Sheik sits where he left them, wrapped up inside Dragmire’s cloak, no longer shuddering with the cold. They both look at him, waiting. Dragmire’s hand still burns. Link silently shakes his head.

Sheik’s face behind their veil goes pale and drawn, and they turn their head away. Link doesn’t ask what happened, just crosses his arms, waits.

“We came...looking.” Sheik’s voice is low, shaky. “I remember this place. There’s something hidden here. I thought it might not be hidden any longer. But I didn’t—there were so many traps.” As they speak, the shakiness clears their voice, the words become strong and sturdy, fear propping them up. “There was a room full of Stalfos and I was injured, Impa went on ahead and told me she’d come back—once she found the way through—and then she—“

She didn’t.

She died, screaming. Link already knows the shape of it. Impa was trapped down below, the pit swallowing her up. There was only so long you could stay above the spikes, only so much strength in a body. Sheik sat and listened to her die, too far away to reach.

Dragmire watches, his eyes dark and bitter. Sheik covers their face, and Link thinks of how hubris can pretend to be wisdom if you don’t know that foolishness is the inverse face of the coin. Wisdom without courage cannot act. Wisdom without courage knows the smartest thing to do is stay put, and that saving a life can lead to losing yours.

“You’re a fool,” Dragmire says, no heat in his voice. The fire he holds goes out, plunges them into darkness broken only by Link’s flickering torch. “What were you thinking? What did you think would happen?” Derision bites in his words. “You’re lucky you didn’t both get killed.” He looks to Link, a sneer, cold and ugly, on his face. “Why did you follow them here?”

Link takes a slow breath. He lets it out.

There is something Wrong at the heart of the temple, a scent he cannot name, like decay, rotting hidden in the understory amongst leaves and lichen. Like when you go to snap a fresh branch from a tree and find the branch dead inside, dead all the way to the heart. Food gone bad, a nail through a hand, a thorn in a paw.

Link has lived through the end of the world enough times to know what a problem is when he sees one. He cannot get through this temple alone, not with the few masks and tools he has left, not with what little magic he can conjure. He’s too short, too stocky, not-quite-right. He’s supposed to be done, now. He’s saved the world twice. That’s more than enough.

He tries not to think about what would have happened if Zelda had never told him to open the Sacred Realm. About a childhood that stretched on past nightfall. About lightning in the dark and Death Mountain, endlessly aflame.

The opposite of courage is not fear. You cannot save everyone. The punishment for hubris is failure. Sheik and Impa did not know what they were looking for when they opened the doors and stepped inside, did not question whether or not they ought to invite themselves in—or the inside out.

There is Courage in having the strength to walk away. To say that you cannot do it.

Oh, how badly Link wants to have the courage to—just this once—say no.

But he looks to Dragmire, sees the slant of his nose rendered into a cruel shadow in the flickering torchlight, the hard jut of his brow, and wonders what he might have done if he had known the way to save this man in his last life. What traps would he have endured if there had been any other way to end it? What death would he have suffered if it had meant Ganondorf might have been able to rise a better man?

Link pushes his torch into Dragmire’s hand and reaches into his tunic to pull free the Ocarina. It’s warm in his hands, fresh-fired, and it tingles as he touches it, a warmth he has felt a hundred—a thousand—times before. He knows what magic it possesses. What he doesn’t know is why the Goddess of Time has chosen this, has chosen Impa, has chosen them and this place.

There is no way to learn but to do.

Link lets out a slow breath. “I can take us back,” he says, choosing his words with care. “Three days.” They are both very quiet, watching him. Link turns the Ocarina between his hands, stares at it, at the fingerprints forever marked into the clay. He has always wondered who fired the Ocarina of Time. Was it Zelda—his, or some far off ancestor? Was it the Goddesses themselves—setting it in place as a weapon and a shield just in case? Was it simply some nameless palace artisan, who created a toy for a child, one that was imbued with magic because of the hands which held it?

He will never know.

Link looks up at them, at Dragmire, his face tight and unreadable, highlighted by flame and shadow, echos of a face he has seen before. At Sheik, eyes red and raw, broken, as vulnerable as a child without their guardian, clinging desperately to the mane of a horse and wanting to escape.

“There are rules,” Link finds himself saying. “There are things you cannot change. You never know what they are until you try.” Mikau, dying in his arms. Darmani’s ghost, dead before the moon was ever even called. “I can’t tell you what they are. If I play the song again, everything you change is lost. You can do it however many times it takes.” The moon crashes into Clock Town and Link huddles with Cremia and Romani and for once in his too-long life, he cries at the fear of it. “But we will remember it.”

Link swallows. He shuts his eyes.

“All of it.”

Dragmire doesn’t sound surprised when he says, “Time has a way of moving strangely for you.”

Sheik stands, shaking still with cold, adrenaline, or both. They reach out, falter. “What should we do?” They ask, and their voice is low, hoarse. “Do we just...stand here?”

Link doesn’t have a good answer for that. He doesn’t know—he’s always, only, ever, fought alone. He can only follow his gut and guess, so he steps closer, into the circle of torchlight, between the twin warmths of his friends. “Put your hands on my shoulders,” he tells them. Dragmire’s hand is huge, eclipsing his entire shoulder and then some, fingers burning with residual flame heat on the back of his neck, and it anchors him. It is a reminder: you are still here. Sheik’s is long-fingered and narrow, light against his skin, hesitant, afraid that if they try to hold on too hard he will slip through their fingers like mist, cool through the layers of their gloves.

It is enough. It feels right.

Link brings the Ocarina to his lips. He plays the Song of Time, each note as dear and known to him as the fingerprints on his fingers, and opens his eyes as the Temple rushes away from them, watches time spin backwards, the flow disrupted, opening to let them start over again.

It does not work.

Sheik tries to convince Impa they can’t leave, Link tries to clear the Temple out before their arrival, Dragmire stands stoic, silent watch over their efforts, and in the end Impa goes into the temple and dies, overcome by a cloud of keese that Link can’t cut through no matter how hard he tries.

The next time, when Sheik cannot turn Impa from danger by words alone, they lock her in her room at the Inn. Impa escapes and dies, jinxed in Termina Field, before they ever even know she’s left. Dragmire smashes through the Temple walls, falls to crumbling rock, crushed and spitting blood a full day before Sheik and Impa ever even arrive, and Link’s fingers shake as he plays the Song of Time. Sheik tries to tackle the temple alone while Link and Dragmire distract Impa, and in the end only the Song of Time saves their life.

Days become weeks. Time clicks by. They sleep in shifts, solve puzzles like sleepwalkers, eat the same food purchased again and again from Carnival stalls.

Impa dies.

There’s nothing they can do.

In the end, Dragmire refuses to go another step. “This isn’t working. We need a better plan.”

Link, without any other ideas, exhausted and sore to the bone, forgoes conversation and simply walks away. There is hesitation—a heavy, questioning silence that he leaves behind—before they follow him, Dragmire’s footsteps one to each of his and Sheik’s two, as they exit Termina Field and go north to Snowhead. Link’s feet carry him over the bridges and then he hops down, swinging into the Grotto, and doesn’t even look to see if they follow him.

They do, Sheik slipping down first and then reaching up to help Dragmire inside. Link has already started disrobing, piling weapons and supplies and equipment into a corner, the Ocarina and the Mask both sitting atop the stack. He feels their eyes on him, watching. “I’m tired,” he says, without turning around. The steam from the water, sulfuric and eye-watering, is starting to get his hair damp with sweat.

He pulls his underclothes off, tosses them into the pile, and sits down in the hot spring water. Sheik yelps, turning around and covering their face.

“Link!” Their voice cracks. “You’re a man!”

No, Link immediately wants to reply, I am a Kokiri, but Sheik wouldn’t know what that means. He just sits there for a moment, stunned and looking helplessly between Dragmire and Sheik, unsure of what to do. Dragmire sighs, takes his cloak off, and gestures to Link to help him string it up between two of the boulders. Once they have it tied on, it drops to form a divider, and Sheik’s quiet thanks are heartfelt.

In the end, all three of them get into the hot springs. They need it. Link was right to bring them here, to take the edge off of their ticking clock. Time can still spin backwards, and what’s another failure at this point?

Impa can hardly be more dead than she has been.

“Thank you.” Sheik’s voice is muffled by the water, the steam, the cloak that hangs between them. “I...needed this.” Link makes a noise of assent. Dragmire sighs and shifts back toward the edge of the pool, lays down until his head is pillowed on his trousers, up almost to his nose in the water. “And for the cloak, too, although I am sure it is…not what you would have preferred. I did not realize that mixed baths were...common, outside of Sheikah.”

“All Gerudo are women,” Dragmire says, not opening his eyes. “I made the same mistake as you when I first came to Clock Town.”

“He got thrown out of the Stock Pot Inn,” Link explains. Dragmire splashes him. Sheik makes a noise as if they are unsure if they’re meant to giggle or not. “Kokiri don’t have them either, but I’ve never travelled with anyone before.” Link is not used to the hot indoor baths that Clock Town prefers. He’s used them on occasion, but always private ones. At heart, he is still of the forest, and he always trusts running water more. A dip in a river may be cold, but it is a reminder of his body, of the earth and nature all around him. It is communing. Coming home.

“Are you...” Sheik trails off, not sure what to say. “Are you both...women?” They sound—consternated, for lack of a better word, perplexed by the conundrum before them. Link can’t say he blames them. Sometimes, he’s just as confused as they are.

“Yes,” Dragmire says, folding his hands behind his head, “And no. To be Gerudo means to be Gerudo.” The way his voice changes on the second word is slight, just the barest shift in pronunciation. “Gerudo means woman, it’s got nothing to do with what’s in your pants. I’m Gerudo, and a man, and that’s got nothing to do with what’s in my pants either. Terminans can call me whatever they want, but I know what I am. I was born Gerudo, and chose to be a man both at home and abroad.” He yawns, crosses his legs, disturbing the water. “You’re not a woman or a man. I wouldn’t expect you to want to share either set of baths with me.”

“Kokiri are Kokiri,” Link says it with finality. “We’re of the trees.” He came out of the Forest and Hylians called him a boy, then called him a man, and Link shrugged and said sure because at the end of the day he didn’t care. He was himself, and he liked it that way.

“Oh.” Sheik’s understanding is soft and sure. Link wonders if they’ve been alone all their life: neither man nor woman, just Sheik. He wonders if Zelda felt the same way, if she feels the same way even now. If becoming Sheik let her become more herself; if that future, lost when the Master Sword returned to the Temple, will leave her unhappy all her life.

It’s quiet for a long time, after that. Not with censure—it’s comfortable, warm and damp, safe under the tall rock walls and the far-off roof.

It’s not until the light aboveground turns red and gold with sunset that they finally get out of the water. Link and Sheik make dinner together, Link in only his shorts and Sheik in a long robe that reminds him of a blanket, wrapped loosely over their head to let their hair dry, held shut with one hand while they help cook with the other. Dragmire takes care of their things, sorting their packs and cleaning their weapons, until they sit together on the mossy stone, eating fresh curry and tahdig, all of them caught up in their own heads.

Around his mouthful of tahdig, Link says: “We need to find out what’s in the Temple.” They turn to look at him. “All three of us.” He taps his foot on the ground as he thinks, struggles to put it into words, gesturing with his bowl as he speaks. “We need to know our enemy.”

Link thinks of Skull Kid and his flute in the woods. Link thinks of Ganondorf atop his tower, screaming his futile frustration to the stars.

They sleep the night there, and then they pack up, and Link plays the Song of Time, and they go back once more, to the beginning. This time, they don’t stop in Clock Town or the Stock Pot Inn—they don’t bother to convince Impa, who will follow them, in her own time, in another day.

They leave Arbiter and Epona at the top of the hill and climb down the narrow switchback, relatively safe for it will not rain for another two days. Outside of the temple, they stop and take stock, fixing their packs, equipping themselves. Sheik has grappling hooks and lock-picks, a climbing kit, Deku nuts, tripwire grenades, poison needles, throwing daggers, and four long-handled knives sheathed on their thighs. As Link hooks his longshot onto his belt they crouch, strapping metal bracers onto their forearms and shins, binding their hands with boxers tape.

Link starts sorting his bomb and bombchus out, separating them to distribute them evenly, as Dragmire goes off behind a pile of rocks. He’s finished divvying up his Deku sticks and nuts, setting out filled bottles of of blue potion and a fairy for each of them, when Dragmire returns. His box braids have been bound up tight and laced into a careful headdress, pinned into a tail at the nape of his neck, and he’s put on blue and gold half-plate over leather armor, chainmail around his waist. There’s a wicked-looking trident slung over his back, a kukri unsheathed at his waist.

Link is always ready.

Link takes his tunic off, pulls on a chain shirt, puts his tunic back over it and belts it down. He sheathes the Gilded Sword slung sideways across the small of his back, his quiver at his right hip and his bow in his left hand, thumb ring a reassuring weight on his finger.

The last thing that Link does before they enter is stop Dragmire. He takes a bundle from within his pack and carefully unwraps it, the porcelain cool in his hands.

He stares at it for a long time.

He hands it to Dragmire, who takes it, trembling. Link closes his fingers around it. “If,” Link’s voice is far firmer than he feels, “If you must.” He does not know what will happen to Dragmire if he uses it. Not truly. There is a small part of Link that is terrified that he will become Ganon, blood run hot and black with the curse of Hyrule. There is a smaller part that is scared it will be worse, somehow—a part of him that longs for flight, that shies from the heavy burn of ozone the moments before lightning strikes. A thing that he does not even know the words for, a thing unnamed.

Dragmire nods just slightly, and slides it into his tunic beneath his armor. Link slings his bow over his shoulder, Sheik lifts the lit torch, and they walk forward, down into the open maw of the earth.

They have all made cursory forays into the temple, so it takes them relatively little time to clear out the first few rooms, splitting up and working separately. Rather than risk picking door locks, Link insists they find keys, and in this way they dodge a few more waiting traps. He does not need to resort to his masks (and explanations that he is unsure he wants to give) because Dragmire can lift Sheik and they can climb fine even without his help.

When they find the main room, Link pauses, taking out paper and charcoal, to sketch out a map of the interior based on where they’ve been and the loose grasp that Sheik has of further in. They eat jerky, then split up, never going out of earshot, as they map through the temple.

The first thing Link realizes is how large the interior is. It’s nearly double the size of the Stone Tower Temple, rooms connected by tiny, claustrophobic vents that he has to become a Deku scrub to get through, the hollow sound of wood echoing off of the stones as he scrambles through them. A false floor falls out from under him, and he’s forced to levitate back up, wedge himself, clinging to the stone until splinters peel from his fingers as Sheik and Dragmire get in below and fight down the largest Stalfos he’s ever seen, one huge eye glowing in the darkness.

The first night they spend in a low-ceilinged room with torches set in the wall, the light and heat reassuring in the damp, stygian darkness. They sleep in shifts: Link first, sitting up with Sheik at his side and Dragmire at his back; then Dragmire, who finds that in their sleep Sheik and Link roll into one-another’s bedrolls, Link’s arm thrown over Sheik’s chest and their legs both tucked between his knees; Sheik takes the last watch, and they curl up with Link and Dragmire wrapped around them and feel something not unlike safety.

The second day, they find the key to the final room behind a puzzle that takes all three of them to solve, Dragmire tossing Sheik up to a high platform so that they can reel Link up around a switchback-wall, and then he takes aim and fires a light arrow, striking the mirror and illuminating the room. They clear out three more Stalnox, each larger than the last, and then a writhing scorpion not unlike Gohma but worse, Dragmire cracking its carapace open so that Sheik can stun it with poison and Link can sink his blade through the eye.

He does not want to question this temple and its mercurial puzzles, traps that no two of them alone could safely disarm. It’s as if the place has been waiting for the concept of them, but no matter how many times Link checks there is never a golden glow upon any of their hands.

The Triforce is not the only power at work in the world; it is neither the sole blessing nor the sole curse of his days.

It leaves him unsettled down to his bones.

When they come to the final door, they stop—to rest, to eat, to catch their breath, to clean their weapons. Link goes to stare at the door, still locked, and runs his hands up and over the stone, worn and pockmarked and crumbling with age.

Link had thought that he had missed this. The experience of finding hidden passageways and solving puzzles older than the lifeblood of the world. The chance to test his skills, all of them, upon a knife’s-edge of perfection. He had thought that he had missed the whistle of arrows and the grate of metal and the twump of the bowstring and the clang of blades. But now, taller than he ever has been in his life and still dwarfed by the door, Link feels…

Fear is an old companion.

Grief is a new one.

Their world has been broken. Again and again and again. Hyrule, Termina (Lorule his mind supplies, Holodrum and Labrynna, Skyloft, The Dark World, The Great Sea, and then softer, like something remembered from a dream, Koholint) torn apart time after time in pursuit of power. In pursuit of something else, something better, a chance at greatness, a chance to make any wish, any one wish come true. How many times has he borne aloft his sword and stood unswerving against the darkness?

Footsteps. Sheik stands beside him, equally silent, and Link reaches out to take their hand.

In his pocket, the Ocarina burns, kiln-hot. Link takes it out and gently presses it into their free hand. They jerk backwards for a moment, barely catch it. In this moment Link finds he can read their red eyes like an open book, wide with fear and understanding as they look down at him, at their shaking hands holding the Ocarina. They breathe out like a bellows.

“Link,” they begin. Link curls their fingers around the Ocarina, does not look away from their eyes.

“You know the song,” he tells them. They do, even if they don’t know they do. “You will know when.” Sheik’s eyes cut away, Link squeezes their hand in his. “Trust yourself,” he tells them. “I do.”

And he does. He finds he does. He trusts Sheik, not because they could-be-Zelda, but because they are Sheik. Because they laugh with their eyes and a half-snort; because they cry in their sleep and because they are unafraid to be afraid. Because they don’t know. Because they are happy, just as themself.

The world is never straightforward. If Courage is not the absence of fear but the understanding of it, Wisdom is not the presence of knowledge but the recognition of it.

“What if I don’t,” Sheik admits, voice so low Link can barely hear them.

He smiles, for that’s all right too.

Dragmire opens the door and leads the way in. There is nothing inside: no traps, no obvious waiting monster, no boiling magma nor drowning water, no fire, no ice, no billowing wind. Nothing.

The final room of the temple is an empty stone chamber, perhaps forty paces to a side. It is covered floor, walls, ceiling with flagstones, each laid perfectly square. Nothing inside here has decayed even a day. There is not a mote of dust in sight. The silence once the door swings shut is so dense it could be cut with a knife, the smell of it stale and oppressive in the air.

The sound of Sheik drawing two blades is loud, the snick-t of metal on leather. Link carefully loads his bow, but doesn’t pull the string, just holds the arrow nocked.

The room is empty. Utterly empty but for what they brought with them. They split up by unspoken agreement, Sheik and Dragmire along the walls while Link cuts through the center, checking each step before he takes it, knowing a pressure plate could be hiding beneath each and every stone.

Nothing pops up.

They search the room again, a second, then a third time, trading areas, checking walls. But there is nothing: devoid of life, devoid of danger.

When they at last turn back to the door they are greeted by the low grating moan of stone upon stone. The floor between them and the door opens, a platform rising up to meet them. It is empty—then three pairs of glass-white eyes open and three ghosts flicker to life, dark as the shadow of the falling moon.

Link has been here before, half-drowned in ankle-deep water.

His ghost faces him and draws his sword. This is a Link he barely recognizes: himself-and-not, a single glowing eye, the other a hollow socket. Archaic armor covers his body, a roundel shield and blade appear in his hands. He steps forth first, sword raised, shield boss at the level of his eyes. In the shadow of that helmet Link searches for the outlines of his face, but all he can see is a man who looks as old as he feels, a grinning skull decaying even as he watches.

Link raises his bow, arrow already set to the string.

The ghost that steps forward to face Dragmire is taller even than he is, sleeves hanging down almost to the ground, robe of shadow whispering around his feet, a blade longer than Link’s arm in either hand. This shadow has his hair cropped short, and there is age in his face, sorrow and grief that strikes Link raw and bleeding.

Dragmire lifts his trident, flames licking across the metal.

Link could recognize Sheik’s ghost anywhere. It is his Sheik, the Sheik-that-was-Zelda, and the homesickness he feels at seeing her here and now is almost crippling. He wants to lay down his blade and run into her arms, to grab his Zelda, to show her this life he has made here, in Termina, this beautiful world she could never have known. But then he cuts his eyes to Sheik, and finds in their steady gaze something that is more powerful by far than any forgotten, lost home. This is who his Zelda wanted to be, and could he give that up for anything? Even one more chance to say goodbye.

Sheik flips their blades, stillness in motion.

They strike.

Three arrows take Link’s shade in the eye before he is forced to draw his own blade. This ghost is slower than the last one he fought, each step painful with age, but his bladework is better than Link’s. It is a constant struggle to keep up with him, especially since his blade is the shorter, but he makes it work.

Is that not just the truth of Link’s entire life?

He makes it work.

Link cannot spare any attention for his friends, has to trust in them, cannot look away from his opponent. The shade pulls no punches, and Link’s shield-arm rings every time he blocks. In the end, he has no choice but to backflip away, using his greater mobility, coming back with a powerful overhead strike, bringing the Gilded Sword down with both hands and stabbing it straight into the shadow beneath the shade’s helmet where its face should be.

The armor falls, lifeless, to the floor, the helm empty.

Link looks up, gasping, trying to find his friends. Dragmire is holding his shade by the wrists, his jaw tight and his teeth grit as they wrestle, both of their weapons discarded. As Link watches, Dragmire plants his feet, sweat glistening on his broad forehead, and snaps out one leg, catches the shade behind the knee and twists. The thing collapses as he throws it to the ground, defeated by sheer brute force. Dragmire, breathless, sits down hard, staring past Link towards where Sheik is hissing between their teeth, kneeling atop their own ghost, their blades buried in its chest.

They have a single heartbeat of peace, and Link prays that this is enough, even though he knows it isn’t.

It’s never just once.

The shadows coalesce, growing out of the ground, until once more three ghosts stand facing them, armed and armored, ready and waiting.

Instead of facing another version of himself, Link faces a man taller than a house, his body covered in interlocking scales, his hair flickering about his head like a halo of dark flame, billowing in some invisible wind. At the center of his forehead there is a cross-shaped scar, and it glows so brightly that for a moment Link misses his eyes. In his right hand there is a sword nearly as long as Link himself is tall, the blade framed by massive spiked points, wider across than two of Link’s hands put together.

He knows, by instinct, that this is another Dragmire, an older Dragmire, and his presence unsettles Link down to his bones.

It has been a long time since Link was scared.

Sheik, still crouched, has Link’s ghost this time, and this version of himself is still as short as he was as a child with an oddly round and boyish face, wearing a green tunic and cap. In one hand he holds the Blade That Seals The Darkness, in the other, a mirror shield. He smells of the ocean, of salt and the waves, and when the shade of this Link-who-will-someday-be smiles at Sheik, his smile is not unkind.

The Zelda that Dragmire faces is a tall, imperious woman, all hard edges and sharp, unforgiving lines. She drops her arm through the air and a sword of silver and light appears in her outstretched hand, the point deadly-sharp and the blade whip-thin. She glows with the magic of the Goddesses, cocooned in Nayru’ Love.

The ghosts move as one. They step forward. They raise their swords.

They strike.

Demise, for that is his name, cuts at Link as if each strike could cleave him in twain. He has been here before: the motions and the movements ingrained in some deep-seated memory, like his soul yearns to strike.

But he does not have the Master Sword and there is no lightning coiling in the sky. Link has only the few tools he brought with him, and none of them feel like a proportional response to this thing, this ancient evil, this curse, bleeding onto the edges of their reality. There is a high whining frisson of fear in the back of Link’s mind that screams if he does not kill this shade it will somehow steal Dragmire again, turn him into something else, something worse. Demise will poison Termina irreparably.

All he can do is dart in, keeping low to the ground, and try to strike at the shade, even though his sword inevitably bounces off of the armored scales. Link is too short to be able to strike the weak point on its forehead, and even if he could find a way to get up there, he has a sinking feeling that the Gilded Sword would be useless against it. The Master Sword lays still where he left it, buried in the stone of the Temple of Time.

When he first misjudges the thing’s reach, Link blocks the strike with his shield and gasps as the blade—a weapon meant for force and strength, not for cutting—punches into the mirrored steel of his shield. The barbs on the diamond-points puncture straight into the metal with a grinding noise, and he rolls, trying to absorb the shock, thrown almost far enough across the room to step into Dragmire’s space. Not a good thing, not when Dragmire is conjuring flame and trying to break through Nayru’s Love.

The Mirror Shield, when Link glances at it, has two punctures that go almost all the way through. His right arm is completely numb, and Link knows that if he tries to parry that sword again, Demise will—at best—disarm him and dislocate his shoulder. It could be even worse.

This will not work.

He stays out of Demise’s reach, skirting his companions in their own battles, trying to find a strategy. Occasionally he will dart forward, check how close they need to be before Demise deems him a worthy victim. It is only when he is certain that Link sheathes the Gilded Sword, hooks his shield over his back once more.

Demise grins as if the shade is laughing at him.

Link pulls out his bow, nocks an arrow, and feels his hands glow with light.

When Demise next comes toward him, he holds his ground, feet planted, eyes narrowed, waiting. Waiting. He will have only one shot at this, one opportunity to take advantage of his speed, one moment in which he knows his arrow will be able to strike home. When Demise at last swings, a savage right-to-left swipe that is meant not so much to take his head from his shoulders as it is to cut Link in half, he leaps, the blade whistling through the air. His toes narrowly clear it, and at the height of his jump Link pulls the bowstring back to his ear, aims, even with his right arm trembling, barely able to keep ahold of the grip.

The cross-mark gleams in the low light of the room. His arrow strikes true. It buries up almost to the fletching in that wound, and the shade drops like a stone, disappearing once more into shadow before it even hits the floor.

Link lands, stumbles, and falls, collapsing onto his good arm. He pulls out his blue potion, uncorking it with his teeth, drinks the bottle empty, and finally feels his right arm stop trembling. It’s still numb, but he can move it again. Nothing, thankfully, is broken, and he cradles it to his chest as he looks at his friends.

Dragmire is leaning against the far wall, his armor singed, bleeding from half a dozen puncture wounds, copying Link and drinking his potion. He looks dazed, and it takes him a moment to catch Link’s eye. When he does, he smiles: a grim, sure little thing. He’s all right.

Sheik is crouched on the ground between them, their head between their knees, panting. Nearly hyperventilating. Link pushes to his feet, goes to them, sets his hand on their shoulder, and when they finally look up at him Link can see the whites of their eyes. They aren’t injured, but there’s something else wrong: battle does not only hurt the body.

Link gives them a hand up, and then holds them, one arm around their waist, as Sheik leans against him. Dragmire comes over, favoring one leg, and sets his big hand on Sheik’s shoulder.

“You all right?” Dragmire’s expression stony and hard as he says it—he doesn’t look at them, but looks at the room, ready. Ready for whatever is coming next. Sheik makes a pained noise that is less than an answer, but still sets their hand atop Dragmire’s, squeezes it. Straightens slightly out of where they have buried their face in Link’s shoulder, narrows their eyes as Link draws the Gilded Sword once more.

He knows what is coming.

Dragmire’s appears first: here’s Link, a little shorter, a little stockier, a little older, holding a shortsword and a shield with a cross on it, his tunic loose over a long-sleeved brown shirt, no armor in sight. He has no other weapons—no bow, no magic, nothing but that single simple sword.

Sheik is second: they face Dragmire’s mirror, the person who they thought he was. Ganondorf is exactly how Link remembers him—tall and haughty, his smile never reaching his eyes, his cape wrapped around his forearm like a shield. He holds no weapons but his fists, and that is all he needs. The Great King of Evil ever made his way with his own two hands.

Link’s is third, and he feels his heart fall through the floor when he sees who it is, a sorrow, a longing that nearly brings him to his knees. This Zelda is a slender young woman no taller than Link himself is, her hair loose around her shoulders, a white dress clinging to her body. Her face is clear and her jaw stony, and when she lifts her hand it drips golden fire that falls in boiling embers to strike sparks from the floor. Her eyes are hard, unrelenting, a force of nature born of fear. Link knows he cannot fight her. He knows it in the way he knows the shape of the Ocarina in his hands.

He is crying. Link knows he is crying, just as he does not know why.

Sheik holds tight to Dragmire’s hand, and Link reaches for him instinctively, catches at his back. All three of them look at Ganondorf, at this memory of what could have been, and Link bares his teeth.

“You cannot have him,” Sheik hisses, their voice low with anger. They step forward just enough to put themself between the ghosts and Dragmire. They do not look away from Ganondorf, from the corpse that wears Dragmire’s face as a promise and a threat. “You cannot have him.”

Not this time. Link hangs on tight to Dragmire, his hand pressed against the other man’s warm back, and thinks not this fucking time.

Fighting yourself is easy—Link has done it before, after all, more than once, be it with blade or within the realm of his own mind. It is the winning that is hard, because there is nothing harsher, no greater hate than for yourself.

Fighting Ganondorf, any Ganondorf, is not easy—but Link has done nothing else, not really, not in any life. He has lived and died and lived again all for the sole purpose of defeating Demise, and he knows the step to that dance in his bones. He knows for what he was born.

Fighting Zelda—

He cannot fight Zelda.

There are lives where Link lost, of course. There have to be. Dragmire fights behind him, exhaustion slowing him so every move he makes has purpose. Without his strength to rely on, he uses his mind, and Link is many things—but he has never, not really, been all that smart. Oh, he has horse-sense and a good head for survival, an eye for patterns and the practice of lifetimes, but he is not smart, not in the way that either of his companions is. Link has never begrudged that Wisdom is the least of his gifts; there are some things that make his life easier, and not having the wisdom to see the full shape of the world is a boon as much as it is a bane—Nayru’s Love can shield in more ways than one.

It is to Wisdom that Dragmire’s shade falls.

Once upon a time—when he was younger and had not yet been to Termina and seen the shape of the world, the way it curved back upon itself endlessly, endlessly spinning—Link thought that Zelda and Sheik were one and the same. Two sides to the same coin. Sheik is what Zelda became when she wished it; Zelda is what Sheik became when they chose it.

Link knows better now. They are-and-aren’t; Sheik is a part of Zelda, just as Zelda is a part of Sheik, but neither is wholly the other. It is Zelda that Ganondorf has conquered again and again, Zelda and the ghost of a goddess that lives on inside her as a memory. Zelda has Courage and Wisdom in spades, but it is Power that ever eludes her, slipping between her fingers in each new life.

Of all amongst their number, only Ganondorf has won alone. Only Ganondorf—only Dragmire—can hold all three virtues.

Sheik is not Zelda. Sheik has power, strength earned and won in battles against themself and the world, and they do not fear The Great King of Evil, no more than they do any other enemy. Why should they? It was not Sheik who clung to Impa’s back, fleeing across a drawbridge at the edge of night. It was not Sheik who fell into roiling cloud clutched by the hate of soemething older than the idea of evil.

It is to Power that Sheik’s shade falls.

Link is alone.

When he tries to strike at his shade—this Zelda, brilliant and brave and powerless but for her own two hands—the Gilded Sword is like lead in his hands and he cannot raise it. When he tries to shoot at his shade—this Zelda, who cries golden tears and yearns for something better, sick with a loneliness that nearly drives him to his knees—the arrow falls from his bow again and again until his quiver sits empty and quarrels lay scattered around his feet. When he tries to turn his shade aside with his shield—this Zelda, who remembers Link, longs for him with a strength so great and so old that it makes his bones sing beneath his flesh—he cannot push her away. Again and again her golden magic burns at his flesh; he weakens, slows, stops.

Link falls to his knees and cries as this Zelda-who-is-not-his flays his skin from his bones and begs her to stop until his voice goes hoarse.

(He does not notice when Dragmire fumbles free his gift, places the Fierce Deity’s Mask upon his face, and screams in agony and triumph as a mane sprouts down his shoulders and back, as muscle bunches and curls and forces him onto all fours, and he charges Link’s shade, striking that Zelda with all his force, grasping her in his arms and throwing her aside, roaring “Do not touch him!”)

Link curls up against himself, staring at his hands, through their unbroken flesh that looks to him like the clearest water, his bones visible, stark white and cracking with every breath. Link wails as he remembers falling through the clouds and a voice like bells and the bloody bite of harp strings into his fingers and the smell of salt air and the thunderhead over Hyrule Castle and the feel of the Triforce whole and still beneath his touch as Zelda and Gan sing and he thinks of happiness and the grey motionless stillness of Fallen Hyrule beneath the waves and a man with his face and hair black as night and a great bird that blots out the sun soaring alongside a great boar that turns the moon red and footsteps stretch ever onward in the sand and a mirror shatters and cracks and Midna smiles and three strangers meet around a picnic table and laugh in the sound of music notes and the Moon falls and

(He does not notice when Sheik pulls out the Ocarina and stands frozen, motionless between where Link lays on the floor clawing his own arms open as he screams, indecision warring between Wisdom and Power as their Courage fails and Dragmire bleeds golden from his forehead, from his arms and legs, from his stomach, and Zelda stares at them, untouched and glowing and beautiful. She raises her hand.)

Link lives twin lives in dreams and the Wind Fish lives and dies and lives again and an old monk laughs and he takes an afternoon nap that lasts seven years and then a hundred and he drowns in the dark the endless darkness of Regeneration and Restoration and Resurrection and

Zelda raises her hand. It glows gold. Light limns her fingers.

A beam shoots through Link. Through his tunic and chainmail, through the skin and muscle and bone of his chest and ribs, through his heart.

Sheik finds their Courage, raises the Ocarina of Time, and plays.

Inside the South Clock Town square, Link lays on the ground and screams. He screams until Sheik sits him up and Dragmire pours something into his mouth while someone runs for the Swamp, shouting for Koume and Kotake. Even drugged his eyes roll wildly beneath their lids, he sweats and begs and babbles in voices not his own for people from other worlds than this.

At last, he sleeps.

He wakes a the first chime of midnight on the final day. The Ocarina rests between his motionless hands, and he lifts it to his mouth, his breathing so shallow that as he presses his fingers down as if to play the Song of Time, no noise comes out.

It is enough.

They sit, the three of them, in the South Clock Town square. Their horses stamp and huff in confusion. Link is crouched on the ground, holding the Ocarina of Time. It feels fragile between his fingers in a way it never has before, as if a single breath will shatter it into dust. Sheik reaches for him but Dragmire stops them, a hand on their shoulder. They wait until the silence has grown long, as Link cries and grieves for lives he will never know.

“Link?” Sheik’s voice is quiet.

“What do we do?” Dragmire’s is just as soft.

Link looks up at them and wonders in what interim he fell in love. Did it happen in this life, or did it happen in all their lives? Love and hate are two sides of the same coin: both can kill as sure as a blade through the heart.

He loves them both, of course.

He always has.

He always will.

“I know,” Link says, when he can finally speak. “I know what we have to do.” He cannot say it, not in words. He knows it, surety as deep as the foundations of the world. He lifts the Ocarina in his hands, and both Dragmire and Sheik reach for it, set their hands atop his.

There is no threefold glow, no Triforce burns the backs of their hands. Link knows, now, that they are free of that. Here, in Termina, there is no next life for them: this is their second chance all on its own. There is no Demise spitting curses, no Hylia bleeding blessings, no boy in a green tunic with a Sword That Seals The Darkness.

There is just them.

There is just Dragmire, who smiles when he feels the wind upon his face, who brings home goods and stories and laughter to his distant mothers and sisters and sings against the twilight, whose footprints cross sand and stone and soil and sea, leading nowhere and everywhere all at once. There is just Sheik, who is still unsure of who or what they are, filled with memories of different lives but living only in the present, who at last has overcome their fear. There is just Link, who grieves the ghosts that haunt him, who has watched a dozen dozen worlds end, and for whom time finally moves forward, not back.

Dragmire and Sheik take back their hands, lift Link to his feet, and there in front of the whole world they hold him between them, cradle him in their arms, and Know.

They mount up and ride northwest in a comfortable, knowing silence, united as one. They dismount together and walk down into the darkness of that cave below the earth: this time, there are no traps to stop them. The monsters lower their swords. The doors are unlocked and open.

When they reach that final door, they take the handle as one, three hands joined, three souls bound.

They step inside.

The ghosts are waiting for them. This time, their opponents are themselves: Dragmire, Sheik, and Link, arrayed in a line. These ghosts wear no armor, hold no weapons.

“I’m sorry,” Link tells them, tears spilling over his cheeks. The ghosts of Termina look at him, eyes empty and all-seeing. “We were wrong. I was wrong. Courage isn’t about fighting. It’s about moving forward and knowing when to stop.” He knows, now, what this temple is, even if he has no words by which to call its name. It is another relic, another memory, just like the inside of the Moon was.

Majora’s Mask is gone, but other relics of that long-lost people remain.

Link takes the Fierce Deity’s Mask from Dragmire and holds it out to the ghosts. Termina, he knows, should not exist. It should have glowed and faded like embers from a banked fire, but his presence has allowed it to remain.

Link will not live forever. This life is his last—oh, there will be other Links in other lives in other worlds, but he will not come back. He is cut loose. He will die here, in Termina, and find his rest. That is a precious thing, and dying—truly dying—is its own adventure, one that will take all the courage he can muster.

The shade that looks like Link reaches out, takes the mask from his hands, and smiles as it puts the mask on. It does not change, does not transform, but it does thicken for a moment before it disappears, fading away into nothingness, the mask going with it. When it is gone, the air is lighter, the colors of the world more vibrant. It is Termina that has transformed, that has become fierce and godlike and alive all on its own.

Link takes out the Ocarina of Time, and for a moment, it feels so fragile. He feels so fragile.

Sheik takes one of his hands, Dragmire the other, and they lift him up as he holds it out to Dragmire’s shade. Link sobs, great heaving gasps wracking his body; he cannot see clearly past his tears. It is a goodbye, one long overdue, and when the shade reaches out to touch the Ocarina it cracks down the middle with a hollow, dissonant ring like a shattering bell.

“Wisdom isn’t understanding,” Link says, to the shade, as the Ocarina starts to dissolve, turning first to crumbled clay and then sand and then dust and then nothing in his hands.

It is Sheik who says: “Wisdom is knowing when to let go.”

The shade sings the Ballad of the Wind Fish, and this time, the world does not end. Termina wakes, yes, but it does not forget its dream—instead, it shakes free the sleep of the dead, and in its place, new life starts to bloom. Real life. True life. The shade disappears, takes with it the Ocarina of Time. Termina’s time clicks once more into the motion of the wheel, spirits tracking ever forward. Between Hyrule and Lorule there now lays Termina, as solid as stone, turning its face up toward the Moon and smiling.

The final shade waits, silent, patient. Link bows his head, because he has nothing else to give, but it does not look at him: it looks to Dragmire and Sheik. Whatever it searches for it finds in their faces as they hold onto Link, as Link holds onto them.

The shade turns to Sheik first, and their breath shakes as they hold tight to Dragmire and Link’s hands. Sheik swallows. “I will learn. I will grow. There is only one me. I’ll learn to be them.” This seems to be enough for the shade, who looks now to Dragmire.

“All I want is to stay,” Dragmire says, and Link knows that he means it. “Here. With them. With both of them. Together. That’s where we’re meant to be, isn’t it? Together.” Through his tears, Link can see the shade nod. Dragmire straightens against him. “Then that’s where I’ll stay. Power is not ambition. Power is knowing how to protect.”

When this shade goes, Termina stills. The whole world breathes, from the soil and the seafloor to the heights of the sky. Their Oath to Order made, the world binds itself closed, sealing promises with the gifts of their magic. Termina is made whole and real, at last, at last, at last.

In that empty stone room, Link, Dragmire, and Sheik hold onto one another as their world is reborn.

When winter returns, the first snows close the passes up to Snowhead and the Zora move to warmer waters further south, nearer the Swamp than the Great Bay. In Ikana the wadis begin to flood as the rainy season comes to the desert. Outside of Clock Town, three soulmates load two carts worth of goods, saddle their horses, wave goodbye to Impa (whole and hale and well at last, as safe as Termina) as she heads back home to Sheikah, before they begin to ride east.

Dragmire drives his cart, the hood of his Kokiri-green cloak pulled up over his head to protect his hair—particularly sensitive right now, as he has begun to let it form locs—from the rain. Sheik sits next to him, leaning into his shoulder. They do not need a cloak: they are still hooded and masked as any Sheikah, although their companions know their face well after months worth of nights sharing one bed.

Link rides alongside, comfortable upon Epona’s bare back, his bow strung in his lap just in case he needs it. He turns his face up into the clouds, grinning.

He sings a new song, one he’s never heard before, with no magic but the joy of singing.