#midlinkweek2020

The man who had come barging out of the office—the doctor himself, as fate would have it—fumbles and regains his footing much faster than a man of his age would rightfully be expected to, the metaphorical demons at his heel offering him all the motivation he needs to move quickly.  He takes a few hurried lunges forward, hands floundering between his upper and lower body before he seems to make up his mind about something, and he kicks his britches off from about his ankles, pushing his glasses into a more secure position behind his ludicrously long ears.  Now, wide-eyed, tongue-tied, and completely and utterly pantsless, the doctor barrels down a southward street toward places unknown at incredible speeds, hollering incomprehensibly as he parts the small crowd that had gathered there, knocking loose many of their possessions as he does so.  Then, quickly as it had begun, the din dies down; the doctor is gone, and those who had been disrupted by the spectacle gather up their things, and carry on their merry way.

Somewhere in the shadows, a young man clad in green had, too, been witness to the mayhem, laughter stifled behind a gloved hand as the doctor’s erratic movements had so reminded him of the fleeing goats he had spent many an hour wrangling back home. When at last the chaos settles, he pulls himself into the relative solitude of a back alley behind the office, where his companion emerges, looking very, very satisfied.

He laughs now—the kind of laughter he feels badly about, but not so badly that he cares to keep it in. He takes a moment to collect himself, but the smile on his face remains as he addresses his friend. ‘Gods, Midna, what did you do to him?’

“Nothing he didn’t deserve,” she says matter-of-factly, though there’s an air of smugness beneath her words that she doesn’t bother to mask.  “I just wanted to rile him up a little, scare him off so I could look for the dang thing in peace.  It’s not my fault all those drinks he downed building that tab of his made him a bumbling, paranoid idiot.  Speaking of—” She snaps her fingers, and the swirling, black specks of twilight answer to her call, materializing near-instantly to form a small, leather pouch in the air before him.  He raises his hands to catch it just in time, and it lets out a soft but unmistakable chorus of jingles as it settles into his palms.  “—that geezer said he couldn’t pay up, but I found this while I was rummaging around in there.  Looks like plenty enough if you ask me!”

Sure enough, closer inspection of the pouch reveals that it contains more money than Link had ever seen living back in Ordon, and certainly enough to cover the doctor’s tab, astronomical though it may be.  His brow furrows, and he shakes his head, wanting to reprimand his shadowy friend for stooping so low as to become a regular pickpocket, but there are other, more pressing matters to attend to.  He fastens the wallet to his belt for now, freeing his hands to speak.  ‘Any luck with the carving?’

She sighs, folding her hands behind her head as she reclines against the air, the action in and of itself making the answer painfully obvious.  “Nah.  He must have been telling the truth about having it stolen.  But if that coot’s yelling about it being ‘cursed’ is anything to go on, we can say that it definitely exists, so...now we just need to find it, right? Easy-peasy.”

Right.  Knowing only that it’s small, wooden, and lost in a city with more people than there are stalks of hay in my mattress. Easy-peasy, indeed.  ‘I guess we’d better start looking, then.’

“And, hey, it’s not like it was a total loss,” she begins lightly as she trails beside him, the pair slowly making their back toward the main street. “After how nasty he started acting when you brought up Ilia, I’d say it was long overdue someone put that creep in his place. With any luck, he’ll keel over from the fright, and this town will be all the better for it!”

He stops dead in his tracks at that, though his companion continues on, ‘til a change in the air alerts her to something and she turns to see what had perturbed him so.  When he says nothing, she offers her own words instead.

“What?  Oh, c’mon, Link, I was...joking.  Mostly.”

‘You remembered her name,’ he says after a moment, his facial features fixed and indecipherable, though there’s a hint of a smile alight in his eyes.  Confusion settles in, and she opens her mouth as if to speak, but closes it again when realization strikes; then, all at once, the mischievous, cheeky demeanor of the imp seems to vanish entirely, and she raises a hand to rub the back of her neck absentmindedly.

“Geez… We’re going through all of this to restore her memory,” she mutters simply, her gaze fixed at some point on the ground.   “You’d think the least I could do is remember her name.”  

A wave of guilt abruptly washes over him for having brought attention to something so small—Midna had had a hard enough time adjusting to life in Hyrule without his gentle goading—but before he can begin to apologize, she is altogether herself again, and she redirects their attention back to the matter at hand.  “In any case, we should check out his office more thoroughly while he’s gone.  I think he mentioned spilling medicine all over it, or something like that?  Seems as much of a lead as any.”

Link nods, and the imp vanishes into the comfort of his shadow.  I can say sorry later.  We’ve got a stinky statue to find.  Emerging from the alleyway, he suddenly remembers something, and he lifts a hand to pat the considerable heft of rupees at his side. ‘I’m putting this back, you know.’

Is— Is this what you wanted to show me? he says but doesn’t say; he doesn’t need to, as she’s already begun to answer it.  “This isn’t it,” she explains, eyes wide and brimming with something akin to glee, “but we’ll need it where we’re going.  Come on, quickly, we’re going to miss it!”

Miss it?  Miss what? She silences him, unintentionally, before he gets the chance to ask, hurriedly taking him by the hand as she guides him through long and unfamiliar halls, imposing and angular, to where, oh, where he wouldn’t be able to venture a guess.   They move swiftly, too swiftly, the carved obsidian and low blue light of the twilit palace rushing past them in a terrible whirlwind, and Link has to resist the urge to free himself from her grasp, remembering the off-kilter, near-pleading words she had carefully offered him not but an hour ago:

“Hey… Link?  Before we go back to Hyrule...”

The Hylian had resigned himself never to admit it (gods, how could he, after how highly she had spoken of her home?), but from the moment the two of them had stepped foot into the realm beyond the Mirror, he had wanted nothing more desperately than to return to the comfort of the light.  Thrice before he had pierced the veil and taken on the form of a divine beast; he was no stranger to the twilight, oppressive and dour though it may be, but here, in the comfort of his own skin, it is all the more disconcerting, as though the fur coat he had worn as a wolf had been the only thing sheltering him from the thickness of the surrounding air.

The air.  Gods be damned, the air, barren and foul, was it even air at all? It rushes past them as they meander through rooms and corridors that blend together into one identical haze, and it threatens to siphon the life from his body with every painstaking breath. It is neither warm nor cool, neither brisk nor stifling; it is an absence, a sensation he does not have the vocabulary to sufficiently articulate, yet the longer he stays here, he swears, he cannot breathe, gods, he doesn’t remember how to breathe, the black walls around him are closing in and snuffing him out, and he is suffocating, anchored to a ball and chain at the bottom of a deep, dark lake, drowning with no salvation in sight...

Had Midna felt this way, too, when she had arrived in a world that was not her own?  He recalls, briefly, how much it had been her own custom to loudly complain about Hyrule and its inhabitants at her own discretion, before Zant had happened, before Zelda had happened.  And then a more horrid thought strikes him: one of being trapped in this realm with no way out, as Midna, too, had been trapped.  He feels the cold grip of terror begin to grasp him as he imagines something happening to the Mirror on the other side, where he can do naught to reassemble it...

Pull yourself together.  You can stay a little while longer.  For her sake.

Not soon enough, the black and blue blur of the palace walls slowly come to stop.  They stand before a carefully polished but otherwise nondescript stretch of wall in a room Link believes to reside on one of the monolith’s top levels, and Midna again draws their attention to the artifact she had been so determined to retrieve. “This stone,” she begins excitedly (excitedly, of all things, what had gotten into her?), “is...sort of like a spare key, to a portal, here in the palace.  It leads to a place that’s a secret to everybody except members of the royal family.  It can usually be opened with a bit of royal magic, but…” She trails off, perhaps loath to admit that even after they had defeated Zant and retrieved every piece of the Fused Shadow, she was still cursed, the magic that was rightfully hers as the true leader of the Twili lost to her. Shaking her head, she continues on. “But this is how we get in without it.  I, uh, used to use it to sneak up here all the time, when I was a kid,” she admits rather sheepishly, and for a moment, the image of a younger, and somehow rowdier Midna causing trouble within the very walls he now graces is almost enough to distract him from how impossibly heavy his chest feels.  Almost.

He takes a moment to more carefully consider what Midna had said, and he finds himself wondering if the room they had torn apart from corner to corner looking for the so-called “spare key” had once been hers—but before he can think to ask, another thought strikes him: Wait, only members of the royal family know about this place?  ...Is it okay for me to be here? He suddenly feels uneasy, as though he were about to deface hallowed ground, but this goes unnoticed by the Twili, who raises the stone to the wall expectantly.  After a moment, it begins to glow gently, and then all at once a portal, not dissimilar to the ones they had so frequently used to traverse the lengths of Hyrule, appears before them.  She turns her attention on him, eager as ever.  “Are you ready?”

He isn’t, but nods anyway; the portal activates, and he feels the familiar sensation of his body slowly stripping itself away, until he can feel nothing, nothing at all—but they emerge whole, as they always did, as they fully expected to.  There is a moment where he allows himself to adjust; he flexes his fingers, lets his eyes focus in on the relative brightness of his new surroundings...

..and he blinks.

They stand on a platform, of sorts, in a place that at first appears to fly far below the palace and the many other isles of the realm, but closer inspection makes the young man wonder if “below” is a word that even holds meaning in this place.  The palace looked to be far above them, true; but the dark obelisk of the towering structure was pointing towards them, as though it were hanging upside down, a precarious chandelier suspended leagues out of reach, yet clearly visible despite the distance.  And it wasn’t just the palace, no; like a world map plastered onto the inside of an incomprehensibly large dome, it’s as though he can see everything, everything at once, and Link has to steady himself against the sheer magnitude of it all, against the gut feeling that he could fall at any given moment.

“It’s not real,” she starts calmly, when she notices the increasingly dizzying expression on her companion’s face. “Not in a physical sense, that is.  But from here, the rulers of my world have long been able to watch over their kingdom and its people in their entirety, that they might better serve them.  They can connect with them, feel what they’re feeling, their contentment, their suffering…”

The Twili speaks so distantly of royalty Link cannot help but wonder how long she had been a princess before the Usurper King had unceremoniously dethroned her.  And speaking of the “king,” she continues thusly: “Zant caused so much suffering, but now that the Sols have been returned to their pedestals, they’ll be able to give life to the realm and its people again, and anyone still under the effects of his foul magic should be restored.  I wanted you to see this at least once, before we go,” she confesses, though the sentiment is rather lost on the Hylian, who furrows his brow quizzically.  I could always come back and see this later, right?  He cannot say that the thought of returning to the realm of shadows willingly is a pleasant one by any means, but he imagines it will be all the more bearable once the threat of disaster looming over Hyrule Castle has been dealt with, and its princess saved.  

But he is here, now, and there is something so hopelessly endearing about his companion’s enthusiasm, so mind-bogglingly human about the way her small body bobs through the air like a leaf on rippling water, near-bursting at the mere thought of whatever it was was about to happen. But what, what’s going to happen? As if on cue, the princess of twilight frantically begins pointing upwards, urging her companion to lift his gaze to meet it.  “Oh!  Oh, it’s starting!”

He looks up on cue, towards the palace, towards the distant but unmistakable light of the Sols he had not long ago retrieved.  He blinks once…

...and nothing changes.  

He blinks a second time…

...and something, something changes.

The soft glow of the spheres far above them grows in intensity—slowly at first, but it quickly catches on, radiating in pulses and spreading out from the center.  It pours through the very earth, then the sky, till it touches everything he can see, dancing like the intricate ballet of a million shooting stars, before spiralling back in, rhythmically, like the world itself was breathing, was alive—and there is a humming all around them, like the chorus of a thousand people crying out in joy, joy for their princess who had finally returned to them, joy for the freedom they had so long awaited, freedom they now knew without a doubt was theirs.  The swirling light they stand amidst is not true light, he knows that, not like the light of the sun in his world—but despite that, despite everything, he understands why his companion had so dearly wanted him to see this, of all things, and why she had insisted they come here to do so. It was, for lack of a better phrase...quite the sight to behold.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she whispers as she places a hand on his shoulder, eyes fixed on the surrounding kingdom, her kingdom, the one she had fought so valiantly to return to—and when he steals a glance at her, a wide, snaggletoothed grin swelling up and spilling out from the fullness of her heart, he cannot help but think that maybe, just maybe, the twilight isn’t so bad after all.

Because for a moment, Link swears that he can breathe again.