Joyful June

There was warmth: the comfort of arms holding him, a heavenly light around him seeping into his body. He couldn't move, but didn't want to. With the strange logic of dreams, it was obvious to him that he was safe.

"Link!"

The voice sounded like Zelda. He knew it wasn't her, but also that it was. It didn't make sense, but it didn't have to. He was dreaming, after all.

He opened his eyes in the dream. There was a holy light, as he'd expected, and it shaped himself into the arms holding him and a face leaning over him. Like the voice, it looked like Zelda and he knew it both was and wasn't her. He gazed into her eyes, suspended as if at the beginning of a plummeting dive.

She shone like the sun, but he didn't have to look away. Couldn't. Didn't want to.

She smiled at him. A tear like a drop of shining sunlight fell on his brow. "I have watched you," she said. "Every step of your journey."

Sky simply gazed at her. She could kill him between her hands, he knew, but he knew she would never harm him. Except in the way her light seared through him, comforting but changing.

For a moment he sank into it, no longer himself though he wasn't sure who he was instead. Something terribly ancient. Something newborn. Boy and man, born to sky and sea and the city and the wilderness and the sun and the shadows.

And then the woman was there again, her face that of Zelda but a thousand other women beside, eyes shimmering in a thousand shades. Perhaps she had a thousand eyes.

Another tear fell on his brow. It was warm, and he was himself again, and she was Zelda, clad in white as she held him suspended in a sunbeam, cradled in the soft feathers of many golden wings.

"I will ensure that your gentle, heroic spirit will live on eternally," she said, her voice sweet as music and echoing through the great halls of an ancient temple. "And I… I shall shed my divinity. The next time we meet, I wish to stand before you as a simple human."

She would always be with him, through years and generations and all of eternity. His Zelda, with Her Link.

He sank into the sunbeam in which he lay.

And he woke up, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky to land in his bedroll.

"Sky, are you well?"

He gasped in a breath as he tracked the voice. First had been on watch and was just kneeling beside him.

As Sky looked up at him, he once again felt like he was floating, consumed in the golden light of that dream, no longer himself and yet more himself than he had ever been.

"A nightmare?" asked First quietly, his cool, stoic expression giving away none of his thoughts. "You were weeping."

Sky raised his hand to his cheeks and found that, indeed, they were wet. The tears felt warm on his fingertips and he smiled despite himself, thinking of that golden vision of Zelda, the warmth and safety of her embrace, the deep joy he couldn't quite express like a shining pool somewhere deep inside him.

"I… I've never been better," he said, looking up. "It was a dream - a strange one - but… a good one."

First looked at him a moment longer, then his expression softened and he dipped his head. "There is a light in your eyes…" he said softly. "I have seen it but once before. But… I think I know what it is you saw."

Sky hesitated for a moment, then pushed himself upright and hugged his knees. "Will you tell me about her?" he asked.

First looked up. After a moment's hesitation, he said, "And those eyes see clearly, it seems."

Sky smiled. "Maybe." After a moment longer, he added, "You don't have to. But… If you saw what I saw…"

But that didn't make him much more comfortable with casting a spell that would change his very physical nature. The old man had assured him it wouldn't hurt, and there was very little reason for him to lie, but a mistake in the casting of the spell could be disastrous.

Still, Link was used to taking risks. He was used to getting hurt, even hurt badly, and he told himself this was no different. He had a doll to hand in case something went badly wrong - his last one, but if he needed it it was always worth it - and it was time to stop dithering and try this spell.

With another deep breath, he folded his hands on his chest, straightened his back, and with a quick mental flick pulled the magic out of his soul and around himself as if unfurling a blanket.

Despite the old man's assurances, he'd expected pain. Instead, the magic filled him with a glittering warmth. He felt the wings flashing out of his back, felt himself shrinking, but it was as if he was a breeze, air forming a new shape rather than a boy of flesh and bone. It was somehow freeing, bringing a lightness and mobility that he wished could go on forever, dangerous though he knew that probably was.

And then it was over. All in a moment, he was a fairy, hovering in the air where he'd been sitting.

He'd got it right first time.

And that triumph and the lingering feeling of freedom and joy and the knowledge that the sky above was suddenly open to him sent such a frisson of excitement through him he couldn't help spiralling upwards with a delighted cry. The air seemed to sing under his wings and he shed tiny, sparkles like droplets of water as he shot upwards between the leaves of the trees overhead and towards the sun. For a moment he hung, hovering, looking down at the little forest in which he'd sheltered for his experiments. He could feel the magic underlying the land, see it when he looked for it. The gleam of hylian life in the village where the old man and old woman and her daughter lived. The little silver-green pinpricks of birds in the trees. The warm, deep green of the trees themselves.

Link breathed deep, though in this form he didn't need to, letting the magic in the air flow through him with a deeper, truer joy than the sparkling excitement of flight. Now he could understand why fairies chimed and sparkled the way they did, if this was their everyday life.

Soon he would have to land again. He couldn't travel far in this form and, more importantly, couldn't risk forgetting how to change back. But for the time being he savoured the magic, looked out at the sun and the jewelled magic of the land below, and let the excitement and triumph and deeper joy flow through every fragment of his body.