Author's notes: Here I go again. This is in the same set of stories as "Masquerade", "Compass", and "Den of Thieves", so it's my dark take on a post Majora's Mask Link. Originally written for Livejournal's 15_minute_fic for the prompt breakdown. Short and hopefully sweet.

Shattered

Heroes are heroes and monsters are monsters. Good is good, and evil is evil. Light is good, and dark is evil, or at least that's how it's always worked out before: arrows of purest sacred light striking down a man with a heart full of evil and an aura of solid darkness.

That was Hyrule. That was there, and this is here, and Termina turns all the rules he knew on their heads and makes them dance around like puppets. Light pierces the shroud of darkness and burns away evil, but at the same time, there's darkness everywhere. In so many ways, all of this, this whirling cycle, is in motion because of people being people.

One wants friends, another wants simply what was stolen, a third just happens to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He feels like he's trapped in a web of darkness. He can struggle against it and be rewarded with being forgotten or simply give in and watch the world end. Fire and howling winds -- that is how Termina dies, over and over as his fourth day dawns. Break the cycle or be sent back only to start all over; some choice.

It does break, in the end. He breaks it with his own hands, hands long since stained with blood and death, hands that can still somehow summon the holy glow for his arrows. But holy light has no place here, not on this unearthly battleground, not in this place where the dead and the defeated play games with a fool hero for their master's perverse amusement.

It is here, in this mockery of peace, that he turns to the power of darkness and fights the master on its own terms. Twin gods clash in mighty battle, and the world would shudder if it knew what happened.

He tears the master to pieces and would do the same to the mask that carries it if he but has the chance, but fate won't let it end so easily. The mask escapes to another world, another time, but he will find it and shatter it, he knows. Something in him has changed; a shadow curled up around his heart whispers promises of present protection and future duty, of inhuman power and battle after battle.

It's only a matter of time before the effects show, before the boy becomes a man of opposites. To most, he is a true hero, a shining soul traveling the world aiding any who need it, even to his own detriment. He has seen the worst and fights to keep the innocent alive and well. But those who are evil, those who threaten others, they see the other hero, the devouring warrior who kills just to watch something bleed and die, a man who knows better than any that not all monsters look like monsters.

After all, he's one of them now, hero and monster working as one to protect the world, and in this, he is content. The innocent can stay innocent, because he'll kill for them. He is their savior, golden sword and mirrored shield readied as he charges headlong into the darkness, his glowing eyes betraying both power and hunger.

The monsters pay his price with their very lives, feeding him as they fall.