recalled to life, or, drifting soul
the eye of a dragon is larger than a human's. slower to blink. slower to tear. slower to nod, is the dragon.
and how many blinks of a dragon's eye, in ten thousand years? number them as clouds and as stars. each weighty thing. the eyelid of a dragon could lift a waterfall back to its start, chase a storm through its every tormented beginning.
the spikes of a dragon could divert lightning without so much as a passing thought.
and thoughts...the light dragon has many and few. a neverending stream fearpainsorrow alongside beautynaturetime and birdstreesgrass.
to admire each tiniest hop of a robin's foot. to feel the tremor of a bear's standing roar.
the dragon's body is so large, even the most massive event upon hyrule's surface is as the dropping of a pin in the most desolate reach of the depths. and, too, the hylians do not know of the silhouette that trawls above them, crawling through the clouds with a silent, mournful roar.
no weather. no effects. no domain.
the dragon's light, paler than the sun. the dragon's wind, tamer than tornadoes.
all pass over rauru's sealing shrines in the sky, tracing the shape of that precious amulet.
just like the master sword, the secret stone is so much safer up here, hidden in the gullet of a scaly snake with cragging claws and gilded mane. as the stone, the sky. watched. guarded. the world itself, collected and observed by the immortal dragon. the dragon is naught but the world.
the world, which travels on only to be affected by those that live within it. the world, a playground of memory.
(history, living, dying, changing, and persisting through it all.)
unspooled, time raveling, zelda was beneath the castle just as she was far, far above it. above the island of the sky. she must have been; she had to have known it. had to have seen the terror winding its way into eternal rot, down there.
(as above, so below - is the dragon rotting?)
and, dear zelda, how did you get there? how did you come about to fly so unflagging through our fair hyrule's skies?
the sword knows, perhaps. undoubtedly, the sword remembers.
but the sword, so much smaller than the dragon, cannot change anything.
for zelda had once thought that, merely by harnessing sonia's power over time, she could return herself to whence she had come. but it's not so simple as that, now, is it? for zelda does not know how she arrived in the past. not feasibly, organically. she cannot, without a path to trace, place herself so directly back into the future.
rauru's stone, light's magic, is not beholden to time. of course, light moves so much faster.
but now, the dragon, with its eyes, can see. as light paints. as wind shifts. as lightning strikes. as fire burns. as water soothes.
(enormous, sobbing eyes. eyes dry and unblinking. eyes staring on.)
each year of those ten thousand, a point along contour. each loop about the map, over towers and towns, mountains and valleys, lakes and rivers, telling zelda i am here and i belong and there is, surely, a reason.
a reason time, and not light, awakened to prepare the princess. a reason this failure must be left to fester, until someday, so soon and so far away, so near and so long ago, it will all become clear.
just as link slept, so that one hundred years hence, he could finally quell the calamity.
does it ever occur to zelda that she might try to change - truly change - the past, as it affects her future?
(of course she had wanted to defeat ganondorf. but then, failing this...to the future, as written?)
why recall a dropped teacup? why not simply never drop it to begin with?
because we are not gods. because we are only listening, between faith and humans.
(because hylians are not perfectly pure of heart. a trial, of course. a trial from the gods.)
like second nature. and a dragon, immortal and eternal, covered in thousands of eyes, seeing more and more and more, knows, implicitly, about time.
a dragon's movements, slow and measured. a dragon's flight, repetitive and sagacious.
a dragon's soul, constant as the rising of the sun; an arrow with natural precendent on perpetual course to its necessary destination.