#tere shadow

He was lying in the relative shelter of a ruin. It was strange— he had seen this place of his turn from a steady and lovingly made home into something people avoided, something people glanced away from, if they came by at all. No Hylian willingly addressed the wrecked onetime-villages except one, and he was off to the Northwest now.

They saw each other in passing, he and the new Link. The new Link was never startled at red eyes peering from the darkness, although he should have been. The Shadow put that up to confidence, and it was a well earned confidence if it allowed the Link to ignore a demon. But the Shadow had seen them— battlefields, covered over with new growth and skeletons, iron ingrained into the air and storied strength graven into the veterans’ minds. The Link was a warrior.

It took him back. Oh, it took him back! Back to the troublemakers he’d aligned himself with in his younger years. Younger years, hah, he looked barely a day over twelve— resurrection magic was strange like that— but it was true that he had been younger, back then. Young enough to learn new tricks. Like compassion, like friendship.

“What’s on your mind?”

The Shadow started. He hadn’t heard a voice like that for years— a voice made of icy water that had never seen light, made of Blood Moon nights and thunderstorm days.

The owner of the voice looked like the Shadow.

Or rather, as he had looked. Back when he had been a boy, chained under the rule of an insane mage, fighting against his brothers… But the newcomer was not that memory, and he was not someone who the Shadow could afford to judge so easily.

The new dark raised his voice, repeating the question. The Shadow felt indignation rise through him— he wasn’t dull! He gestured vaguely, then clarified (his voice was rather underused, wasn’t it?).

“Whatever enters it. Who’s asking?” The breeze tickled past his chin, rustled through the grass, made Shadow’s patch of shade ripple along the edges. The same seemed to happen to the edges of the new dark’s mouth.

“A great admirer of your work.”

That could mean only two things: One, this new dark had seen the crude charcoal drawings Shadow made in his free time, or two, this new dark had heard tales of Shadow’s conquest from before he had been changed. The second option was far more likely, not to mention far more terrifying.

“Shadow Link? Are you still in there?”

He pulled back his teeth, eyes flashing, adding a red tint to the shadowy hand that the new dark had waved in front of his face.

“...You look a bit like someone I met once. A long time ago.” Shadow turned his head away slightly, remembering— gold and iron, a scarred-over eye, its bright blue twin conveying urgency as gauntleted hands shooed away. The Shadow wasn’t a bug, but he had felt that way, facing down— “The Hero of Time.”

“Exactly!” The other doppelganger snapped his fingers in delight. “Not even the bitch himself has made that connection.” He leaned forward, and Shadow’s senses spiked in discomfort. “It just speaks to how profitable an alliance between us would be.”

Alliance. No. Shadow had been under someone else’s rule before. He only reclaimed his freedom through the curse on this land, set down by evil, and that freedom was something he paid dearly for in the loss of his tether to humanity.

“Just to be clear,” the dark smiled, almost an afterthought— “You don’t have a choice in this matter.”

No.

But flames and smoke and the rotten, fungus-coated hovel started to burn. Shadow rocketed up, hissing as his hair brushed the sunlight. Pain. The light was pain—

“I’m not one to come quietly, demon~” he lunged. Spun a small blade, Eightfold it was called, out of his sleeve. The lizalfos-horn tip went through— something— with a squish.