palacebound:
@lionsbow liked for a starter!!
She’s taken a wrong turn, somehow. It’s not as if she’s looking for something in particular, when the amount of information is limitless. There’s much she doesn’t understand about this world. Questions are only answered with more questions. Zelda catalogs as much as she can learn, but… the truth is, learning is interrupted by how much this place reminds her of Hyrule. The ruins of an ancient civilization, technology that seems years and years misplaced.
However…
The room she’s entered… The cryo-preservation chamber. She stares at the bodies of the royal family, stunned into silence. It reminds her of the Shrine of Resurrection. Of Link. Are they alive? Are they… gone? Though she’s watched Link for the last hundred years, even as he slept… To be face to face with a situation so similar? Zelda’s uncertain of what to feel. It’s unsettling. Resurfacing from her thoughts is when she realizes Ashe has joined her.
A hand reaches out to touch the chamber, but stops in mid-air, “It’s rather… melancholic, isn’t it? Truly, to hide them away down here. It’s… beyond disrespectful and cruel.” Her fingers curl into a light fist, then return to her side. “It’s… hard to imagine who would do this, or why.”
In truth, he wishes he hadn’t followed her down here. Not once he sees the preserved bodies in the containers before them, still as corpses. Ashe can only stare at them for a long moment, a faint hint of nausea rising up within him. He’s unfortunately grown accustomed to seeing the dead, though he doesn’t know if the people they’re looking upon are truly dead or not, trapped as they are, but they certainly look the part to him. No, what unsettles him most is the whole of it: The machines holding them like they’re figures on display, hidden away in this run-down building. It’s not right.
The princess’ words reach his ears on a delay, taking some time to cut through the haze of his thoughts for him to understand she’d been speaking to him. He looks away from the chambers, turning his eyes to her for some reprieve from the sight of frozen bodies. It’s some small comfort that she, too, finds it to be a dreadful sight.
“What is all of this...?” he asks, the machinery being wholly unfamiliar to him. Zelda seems to have some understanding of it, given her reaction to it all; hopefully he isn’t pressing where he shouldn’t. “Why are they... down here? What happened to them?”
The last two he knows she doesn’t have answers to any more than he does, but they leave his lips regardless, gaze returning to the frozen family. This whole place has been a riddle wrapped in enigma, and Ashe finds he understands less and less the more he sees of it all. This is, perhaps, the hardest to understand.











