Chapter Text
Light from Darkness, Darkness from Light. At the beginning of all things, when thingness parted from nothingness, Blessed Nayru placed her hand upon all that was and was not and might ever be and created Herself, and as She loved herself fruitful with Light and Time and Order and Harmony and Love, Her shadow birthed Darkness, and Eternity, and Chaos, and Nullity, and Hate.
In the beginning of all things, in the very same act of primal generative love and pleasure, suffering and sorrow were inextricably woven into Being.
Each chaining the other, pulling them back from fully realizing all the potential inherent in their conception, their ever-tightening spiral an endless wellspring of power flowing through all things and NoThings.
And so also with him.
Ganondorf surrendered.
The winds of chaos and order wrapped around him, stirring his spirit with deathless sorrow and lifeless hope as he sank down through the endless spinning tempest of All.
His first death bound him in Light.
Searing, burning, limitless and featureless sterility scouring him down to hunger and madness and vengeance.
His second death bound him under every hatefully visceral element all at once as the Triforce broke the world at the command of the craven and corrupt Hylian king. The earth split under his feet and engulfed him in fire that could not be quenched, drowned him in water that could not be siphoned, crushed him under stone that could not be shattered, buffetted by air that could not be stilled, snared by winding roots that could not be splintered.
And still, he rose, because the indomitable Spirit of the Hero and the spark of Hylia’s Light lived on in the shattered world. Ganon was birthed from a dying god for the sole purpose of haunting them eternally for their audacity to slay Chaos Himself. Ganondorf was His instrument. And so, and so. The distant gods let him rise to cast a shadow over the cursed once more.
His third death lay sweet and iron-rich on the tongue.
The old gods worked in threes.
This one would last.
Darkness enfolded him in a nothingness so deep that shadow was no longer a strong enough word for the absence of Light.
Ganondorf surrendered.
Shadows had ever been his companion, even before he awakened to his destiny as the vessel of Ganon. He was more than ready to embrace the formlessness and nothingness of true death and let his self drift on the gentle spiritwinds, unchained at last from his namesake, and his mortal limitations, and the sorrow of memory and the ache of all that might have been if only absolutely everything had been different.
The sword of Evil’s Bane strove to seal the darkness away from all Light, winding its enchanted chains around and through in knot upon tangle upon knot. The spirit in the sword knew him, and knew Him, and in the bodiless formless senseless darkness there kindled in his spirit a sense that she nodded to him as to a — not a friend, but a respected opponent. As if the Sword That Seals The Darkness had in their ages together in the plane of Light come to know him seperate from Him, at least enough to recognize that he himself would not fight her work this time.
He neither wished nor needed to.
Being Light itself, by definition it was fated to fail or become corrupt, whichever it amused the gods to weave first.
Ganondorf prayed with what little was left to him of himself that this time he would erode before the magic did. The one power that could grant the desire of his heart had been shattered beyond all possibility of repair. Let whatever fate befall the knifeared Hylian zealots in the rotten crumbs of the world they broke. He no longer cared. All he desired — all he had ever desired, in his heart of hearts at the germ of the root within the seed of his ambition — was that gentle wind.
Over and over the gods gave him magic instead, the most tangible manifestation of the power itself, and they housed his self in a powerful mortal body, born with right of blood to secure secular power over human and demon societies alike.
His enemies and allies alike said he loved only power, and in all his lives he generally would have agreed, keeping to himself — and sometimes, from himself — the germ of why and what for.
The children might understand one day, when they too stood in the ruins of all their shattered hopes, powerless to change their stars.
Power was not and never could be an end in itself, but was instead the sole constant means to every end that could ever be desired.
Except for one.
Peace alone was blessed to be woven with another path, open to the powerful and powerless alike, and at last he too understood and craved that final means.
Ganondorf surrendered.
And yet.
He felt Light and Shadow tremble.
He knew sorrow and longing more intimately than his own petrified bones.
He tasted the heaviness of everything bearing him down, and down, into the lightless crushing depths as the sea floor yawned wide to swallow the ruins of Hyrule into the cauldron of Din beneath.
And still. Even as chains of light bound his darkness tighter than the space between tears, Death did not lift from him the wretched consciousness of self and Beingness and all that lay in ruin around him.
Ganondorf surrendered.
Death refused.