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Zelda sighed, cheek in her hand, and watched the candle slowly burn down in the center of the table.
It was an unusually warm autumn, and so far the harvest was expected to be just as unusually large. Purah called it nature bouncing back from the Calamity, which had caused short summers and bitter winters for the entirety of its one hundred year imprisonment. This year should have an unusually short, mild winter, and over the next five or so slowly even out to pre-calamity weather patterns. Nature was bouncing back, and Zelda had been so, so excited to see the signs of Hyrule’s recovery, the good omens of what was to come. Now, however, she couldn’t even bring herself to stand up and fix dinner, much less find any excitement. Not with Link missing.
It would be one thing if he’d just wandered off into the wilderness and gotten sidetracked or forgotten to leave a note, both irksome new habits he’d picked up since awakening from the shrine. Zelda could have forgiven that, could have taken a deep breath, tracked him down, and let him off with a scolding as life went back to normal. It was another thing entirely to have seen him be taken before her very eyes.
He'd been missing for a month or two, now. Zelda might have thought it was some kind of nightmare if Riju hadn’t seen it happen too.
It had been a perfectly normal afternoon in Kara Kara. The three of them had been walking together after a sand seal race, throwing ideas for more effective elixirs back and forth. They’d started serious, but the longer the conversation went on the sillier the suggestions had become. Riju had literally sat down on the ground laughing at Link’s suggestion of just chopping the raw ingredients up fine and serving them over rice, like the world’s worst poke bowl, and Zelda hadn’t been far behind her. Link had been walking backwards to see their reactions and he looked so smug. Everything had been normal.
Then, the next moment, the smell of Malice in the air so thick Zelda choked on it, a hole had opened in the ground beneath Link’s feet, and he was gone. Just like that. Literal seconds before they’d been laughing, and Link had been taken.
Obviously, the Yiga were the first suspects. The peoples of Hyrule had carried out raids on every known Yiga stronghold, weeded out infiltrators with brutal efficiency, but none of the Yiga captured for interrogation had known anything about it. Zelda herself had sat in on an interview with a captured Yiga scout whose reaction to hearing the hero had been kidnapped by some kind of portal was “Hey, that’s a good idea!”
Useless.
Eventually they’d had to accept that the Yiga hadn’t taken Link, but there were no further suspects, no more leads. The Yiga were the only known people to both be able to teleport and to have a grudge against the hero. The search was back at square one.
It felt awful to admit it, but Zelda was starting to lose hope. The Yiga investigation turned up empty handed. The search parties sent into the wilderness came back without even a burned out campfire to show for it. No one at any of the stables had seen him, not in the Zora’s domain or at Rito Village or Death mountain, not a single person who had heard from him since he was taken. There was no trace, not even the smallest sign. It was starting to feel like… they weren’t going to find him.
No. Zelda lightly slapped her cheeks. She couldn’t think like that. She’d waited a hundred years for Link once. She couldn’t give up on him after just a month or two. There was no point in getting maudlin.
Maybe the Rito search parties would have some news soon. They covered much more ground than any of the other search parties, after all, and there was a lot of ground to search. Zelda would send a message in the morning. In the meantime, food. She would be no good to Link if she fainted from hunger.
The small kitchen she shared with Link was… bare. Embarrassingly so, in comparison to how Link usually kept it stocked. But Zelda had fruit and eggs and while she wasn’t the cook that Link was she could at least prepare simple things.
The last, fading light of the setting sun vanished and left the house with only the golden light of the candle as Zelda chopped fruit and fried eggs. The sound and smell of the cooking food was soothing, making her shoulders relax just slightly. It reminded her of Link.
Grabbing another piece of fruit, Zelda went to chop it, but paused, and frowned. The sun had set. Surely it shouldn’t be getting brighter in the house?
Zelda glanced over her shoulder, and dropped the knife with a gasp.
What she had taken for the golden light of the candle was in fact a blinding shape in midair above the dining table, too bright to look at directly and lighting up the room like the noonday sun. Little sparks swirled through the air, following dizzying circling patterns that made no sense, and a strange music made her very bones vibrate. Zelda groped behind herself for a weapon.
The light grew and grew, at first only as large as a hydromelon but expanding steadily until it was as tall as Zelda herself, brighter with every moment. Zelda could see it with her eyes closed, with her face turned away, with her hand over her face. The hum of magic was thick on her tongue, strangely familiar.
For a moment, it seemed like it was just going to keep growing, until it had consumed Zelda, the house, the town, maybe all of Hyrule. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it stopped. It hung in midair for a moment, unchanging, before suddenly all the light rushed inward to a single point. There was a pulse, one last burst of light, and a soft thump.
Zelda blinked the spots out of her eyes, nearly blind now in the dim room where before it had been bright as the sun on snow. Looking at the place where the light had just been, her mouth sagged open.
The light was gone. Instead, there was a woman standing on her dining table, wobbling like she was dizzy. She looked… disconcertingly normal. Long blonde hair, blue eyes, Hylian, perhaps a few years older than Zelda herself. The oddest thing about her, besides her entrance, was her clothing. Sturdy and practical, but it was also perhaps the most old fashioned thing Zelda had ever seen, and she was an archeologist. She was pretty sure she’d seen clothing like that in the very few surviving artistic depictions of the founding of Hyrule. And yet, on this woman it was obviously new.
The woman blinked a few times, then seemed to realize she was standing on the table and hurriedly climbed down. “My apologies for arriving unannounced,” she said, bowing her head, “And this late at night.”
Despite the strangeness of the circumstances, Zelda could still feel the diplomat and hostess at the back of her mind come online with a click. “It’s no trouble,” she said, grabbing the plate of fruit she’d been preparing and setting it on the table, “Please, sit. Would you like something to eat? What brings you here in such a strange manner?” As she spoke, realized her eggs were burning and dove for the stove.
“Thank you,” the woman smiled, sitting down in the wobbly chair that was usually Link’s, “My name is Zelda of Skyloft. I need your help.”
Zelda dropped the frying pan on the floor with a clatter.
Her… her royal predecessor was remarkably patient as Zelda cleaned up the mess she’d made with the eggs. Actually, she’d tried to help before Zelda had forced her back to her chair on grounds of being a guest. Uninvited, but a guest nonetheless. Zelda got the slightly uncomfortable feeling that she’d mostly gone in order to let Zelda try to regain her composure. She was watching now, with a concerned and bemused air, as Zelda chopped more fruit for a second plate and did her deep breathing exercises.
The first queen of Hyrule, founder of the nation, Hylia herself in mortal flesh, was sitting in Zelda and Link’s modest home in Hateno, on the wobbly chair, drinking Zelda’s cheap tea for the days she had a headache because she’d run out of the fancy stuff, eating plain chopped fruit. Zelda was barefoot, her hair was a mess from running around looking for Link for days, there were eggs on her hems, and, she could not stress this enough, she had the reincarnation of Hylia in her kitchen.
Still, Zelda was royalty. She’d maintained her dignity in worse straits than this. Taking one last deep breath, Zelda brought the second plate and mug to the table and took a sip of her tea.
“So,” she said, “For the sake of clarity, let me just be sure I understand properly. You are…” she paused for a moment, looking for the best way to put it, “My ancestor. The first Queen Zelda.”
The other Zelda laughed lightly, “I’m no queen, just a headmaster’s daughter. But yes. I’m your grandmother. With a whole bunch of greats.” The warm smile she turned towards Zelda was unsettlingly maternal, “As odd as that sounds coming from someone my age. Sorry if I’m staring, it’s just… you look just like my mother.”
Zelda… had no earthly idea what to say to that, so she elected to just continue, “And you have somehow come forward literal millenia in time to meet me because… you need my help for something.”
The other Zelda startled slightly, the disturbingly gentle smile vanishing as she seemed to remember she was here for a reason, “Oh! Yes, yes I do, very badly.”
“Well, I struggle to think of something that I could do for you that the Goddess Hylia couldn’t do for herself,” Zelda startled herself with the bitterness that had just come out of her mouth and hurriedly took a sip of tea, “That is to say, I’d like to help, of course, but there’s so much work I have to do, especially with Link missing…”
“But that’s why I’m here!” the other Zelda hurriedly set down her cup, “He’s not the only one that’s gone missing, and I need your help to find them.”
Zelda paused, and her fingers itched for a pen. “Start from the beginning.”
The story the other Zelda spun was unsettlingly like what Zelda herself had experienced the day Link went missing. She and her fiancee, also named Link, had been running their usual errands when a dark power had overtaken them, and other Link had fallen through the world. Or, more specifically, through time.
“One of Hylia’s lesser known domains is Time,” the other Zelda explained, “I can’t access her full powers as a mortal, but I could sense enough to realize that something was messing with time, and that it was what had taken Link. I could also tell that he wasn’t the only one. Whatever took them is tearing holes in time, turning the… fabric… into…” she gestured expansively as she tried and failed to spit it out, “Look, if mortal tongues have words for these concepts they haven’t been invented yet for me. But if there get to be too many, very bad things happen.”
“Alright,” Zelda frowned deeply, steepling her fingers, “But if you’re the goddess of time, surely you could just go directly to where or when the problem is and deal with it?”
“It’s not that simple,” The other Zelda shook her head, “I left most of my power behind to incarnate alongside my hero. I’ve only got enough umph to either aim the travels or initiate them, not both.”
Irreverently, Zelda wondered if umph was a technical term. “If that’s the case, how are you here?”
“I managed to make it here for the same reason that I need your help,” the other Zelda turned a blinding smile back towards regular Zelda, “Of all my daughters, you are the one with the strongest connection to time. You glow with it. I could pull myself to you by that connection, and it’s what will let you help me. Working together, we could follow the thing kidnapping our heroes and close the holes, especially if we pick up some of my other daughters whose heroes have been taken.”
“Others?” Zelda frowned, “How many have been taken?”
“At least seven,” The other Zelda said, “Maybe more? It’s harder to sense these things as a mortal, it gives me a headache to try.”
Zelda sat back in her chair, mind racing. Could she afford to believe this? Could she afford not to? (Rather inanely, the goddess Hylia gets headaches?)
But her eyes landed on the picture of the champions on the wall, specifically on Link, and she knew that she had to try.
With a heavy sigh, Zelda stood. “Give me a moment to pack.”
The other Zelda cheered, but Zelda ignored her, heading upstairs to gather her things.
Travel rations, comb, extra socks, pens and a blank journal (travelling through time! Imagine the research opportunities!) money, extra hairpins, bedroll, maybe another journal or two just to be safe…
“So what are we going to call each other?” Zelda called down the stairs as she pulled on her travel boots and wrestled her hair into submission, “If we’re picking up at least five more people we can’t just be ‘Zelda’ and ‘Other Zelda.’”
“I thought we’d just be ‘Senior’ and ‘Junior,’” the other Zelda called back, “It’s not like Zelda is that common a name!”
Zelda stopped dead halfway through doing her hair. Zelda actually came several steps back down the stairs, hands still full of hair, to stare at her ancestor. Zelda was boggled. Could she possibly not know this?
The other Zelda smiled nervously. “What?”
“Zelda is the traditional name of the royal line,” Zelda said slowly, “Your line. The only time there has ever been a queen of Hyrule that did not bear the name, it’s because the throne passed to a sibling rather than a child.”
The other Zelda paused. “Ah.” She pressed her hands to her cheeks, but that didn’t do anything to conceal the blush. “All of them?”
Zelda nodded slowly, starting work on her hair again.
“And everyone thought Dad was being pretentious giving me a middle name,” Zelda muttered, “They all said that Zelda was such an unusual name I’d never need anything to distinguish me, so I didn’t need one.” Suddenly, she straightened, snapping her fingers, “That’s it! Middle names. Those aren’t all the same, right?”
“No, they’re not,” Zelda sighed as she finished pinning her hair in place and hiked her bag up. It was a good thing she had more than one middle name because only over her dead body would she allow herself to be called Regina. “I suppose in that case you can call me Calanthe.”
The other Zelda beamed, “And you can call me Alice!”
Alice. It was a strangely plain name for the goddess reborn.
Zelda, or Calanthe now she supposed, quickly wrote a letter for Purah explaining the situation and tacked it to the front door. Someone would see it and take it to her in the morning.
Turning to her ancestor, Zelda Calanthe straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. No going back. “What do I need to do?”
The maternal smile was back, but for whatever reason it wasn’t as unsettling now. “Take my hands,” The other Zelda, Alice, said, “Close your eyes. And trust me.”
Even through her eyelids Zelda could see the light begin to grow, feel their joined hands grow hot, but it wasn’t uncomfortable like when Alice had made her entrance. Instead, it felt almost right. Comforting.
There was a gentle pull, like someone tugging her sleeve, and a sense of asking permission. Bracing herself, Zelda reluctantly gave it.
Power came flooding out of her. Although she couldn’t see it, the house glowed like the morning sun as the light grew and swirled around them.
Her ancestor laughed, and the light vanished, taking the two of them with it and leaving the house empty.
The rush of time in her ears was unlike anything Zelda had ever experienced. Her eyes flew open, and she watched eras fly by like shooting stars in the darkness of the space between realities. Somehow she could tell that she was providing most of the momentum as her ancestor set the destination, hurtling towards the twinned sensations of a dark, sickening rip in reality and the warm golden light some part of Zelda knew was family.
Hold on, Link. I’m coming.