The Legend Says I Love You | Zelink

Chapter 17: Despair's Awakening

[I rolled 2 memories into 1 chapter because actually I am Not a fan of suffering even though I tried to write this as emotional as possible lmao]

Four of the Champions, King Rhoam, and everyone inside the castle lose their lives when Ganon takes control of the Divine Beast and the Guardians. Link suffers an unfortunate fate fighting Calamity Ganon alongside Zelda. Regardless, Link continues to fight, protecting Zelda from a pack of pursuing Guardians, but collapses in exhaustion, terribly wounded. As the Guardians close in, Zelda stands against them and finally unleashes her sealing power.

*

They did not stop running for a very long time, and the rain matched their pace. Rain and running was all she could think of; all she had to think of or else flashes of her father, the castle, everything torn apart, would leave her immobilised by fear. The Calamity had begun, and it had not begun slowly. Link had forced her to turn back from the castle, half dragging her behind him as he ran with her wrist caught in one hand, his sword in the other. She glanced behind herself - a mistake - and saw the wreckage left in their wake.

Dead guardians littered the forest, and craters where their lasers had hit punctured the earth, spraying debris around them. Her fault. She had insisted they dig the guardians out of the earth. She had made sure their lasers were at their strongest, only for Hyrule to be left at its weakest. Her fault. The Divine Beasts, too. Link had pretended - how could he have pretended? - not to see their hulking, distant figures implode on the horizon. How their lights turned red and beams turned on villages. How the Champions inside were either dead, or injured, or trapped. Her fault.

Her wrist, covered in mud and rainwater, finally slipped through Link's iron grip and she found herself panting on her hands and knees in the dirt. She couldn't get enough breath to her lungs. She couldn't find the strength in her body. "How...how did it come to this?" she couldn't keep it in anymore. She couldn't keep running in silence. She saw his boots before her, and heard him sheath his sword. "The Divine Beasts... The Guardians... They've all turned against us... It was Calamity Ganon," she tried to reason. To absolve herself from the destruction of her world. "It turned them all against us! And everyone - Mipha, Urbosa, Revali and Daruk..." she raised her face to Link with tears in her eyes. Each name a stab to her heart. "They're all trapped inside those things..." Things she had helped build. Machines she had helped harness power. Not Ganon, not anyone else. If I had just listened to my father--

Whatever thread that had been holding her together finally snapped. The rain and running was not enough to keep her focused. It wasn't enough to hide the truth in front of her. "It's all my fault!" She couldn't hold back her tears anymore, and tried to cover her face with her muddied hands. "Our only hope for defeating Ganon is lost all because I couldn't harness this cursed power!"

Thunder cut through the sky above. The trees shook with her. "Everything - everything I've done up until now... It was all for nothing..." She tore her hands away from her face, bearing her shame to Link who had, in their final moments, resorted back to his protective silence. "I really am just a failure! All my friends, the entire kingdom...my father most of all...I tried and I failed them all...I've left them...all to die." He knelt in the mud before her, dirt and cuts and bruises decorating his face. The rain soaked his hair and clothes, the same way it pinned her prayer dress to her body. We will get sick, she thought distantly. If we are to survive this.

She fell into him, sobbing, and he let her. He didn't tell her to run, even though she knew they had to. He didn't tell her to fight, even though she knew that was what he would do. He would do it until the end; whereas she had given up before they had ever gotten started. All that time, wasted. She had spent more time doubting herself than praying, and now the doubts had finally materialised, and the death of her father and his people were the consequence.