Disclaimer: I don't own the Legend of Zelda.

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078. Cycle

The sword felt heavy in his slightly sweaty palms. The hot summer sun beat down on his bare back, and the beginnings of what he knew would blister into a burn was starting to itch its way down the layers of his skin.

But he couldn't take his eyes away from the sword, the sword that had changed everything in his little country life, and dictated for him a manifest destiny full of blood, sweat and tears. And not just those of his own.

The sheath was gaudy; too gaudy for his tastes. Aquamarine with overlays of gold and shimmer in silver and rubies, emeralds, and other precious gems he was too bumpkinish to know clung to it like limpets. It was so heavy in his hands. The weight of time, the weight of destiny. And the weight of all those bloody gems.

It had just been a custom. A custom for all the men turning sixteen in the villages surrounding castle town to have their own go at pulling the fabled sword as they finally reached the heady-heights of manhood. A fanciful dream that one, tall, handsome and strong, might pull the sword and a heroic age my dawn anew. No one had expected Link, a farmer's nephew so poor he wore his uncle's old clothes, from the farthest town from Castletown, short for his age and awkwardly clumsy, to pull out the sword. But pull it he did. Easy as if he were pulling a ripe apple from the orchard trees. There was a kind of uneasy, unprepared and hasty silence that tippled over the gathered, cheery crowd when he did it. They were all there to see their friends, drink in the town, and celebrate being a man, not watch as the tides of history shifted once again from boredom to action.

So Link was shuffled off with the sword and ugly sheath, and a notice that he'd be summoned should anything be amiss in the land. That he was to go back and stop working and begin training. His uncle had snorted at that, but promised Link could stay up later to train with his new, strange toy in the summer evenings.

And then, two days later, that glowing third of a triangle showed up on his hand as he slept, throbbing hotly beneath the skin.

Everything was about to change.

Because although Link knew very little about anything apart from farming, he did know some things about their land's history. He knew that a hero always appeared when Hyrule needed him most. He knew that Hyrule had suffered periods of treacherous darkness, followed by the most wonderful light - like their current time. And he knew that the princess and her knight always fell in love and married. Now Link was no great scholar, nor was he some great lover, but he did know that their marriages were never held in times of great peace, but those of great agony.

He pulled the top of the sword from its sheath and peered at the glinting metal below. The moment he pulled this sword from its sheath, the moment he learnt to wield it like a true hero, that was the moment that his future would forever change, and the moment he was destined to have a love built from the ashes of a realm.

The sword glinted the colour of the ripening peaches of the trees in the sunset. With a heave and a sigh, Link stood. And let the sheath fall away from the archaic sword.

..

Ashes cushioned every step he took and immediately covered his traces, they fell in his hair, they burned his eyes. The castle was roaring with cries of agony and hopeless barked orders. Link stepped with more confidence than he felt towards the chambers he'd been ordered to salvage. A deft jab and a swift slice to a lizalfos saw him on his way, and outside the door before he knew it.

He didn't even bother to knock.

"Your Highness, my name is Link of Faron Forest, and I have come to save you."

He looked across the bright, fire-lit room at the woman dressed in royal blue travelling clothes and wore a look of despair on her face. Their eyes met.

They really were doomed to a hatefully begun love, every single time. This Link could not break the cycle, but he hoped in that moment, as he was falling in love with the woman before him, that the next might.

An alternate idea for this scenario was Link holding his daughter, seeing the Triforce mark show up, and realise that she would just be the next step in the cycle. But that's *super* depressing so here we are instead!

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