Chapter 5
As a very young child, Link’s grandmother had often told her that she was the hero reborn, and she’d believed it with all her heart. Once upon a time she’d bragged about it to the other children as they tended to the Cuccos. In response, they’d pinched her arm and laughed in her face about it. How ridiculous, they told her in voices full of mocking glee. The Hero of Legend had always been, and always will be, a boy.
Link’s only a tiny bit older now, and she’s grown much more silent. Ten years old in this life, but she feels ancient.
Staring into the mirror as Link so often does these days, she watches the reflection as her child-self reaches out to touch the surface with palm facing up. Her mother believes it’s a young girl going through a vanity phase, and perhaps that’s for the best. After all, she’s a pretty round-faced child with auburn hair and baby-blue eyes, so why wouldn’t she? Except she’s not into pretty dresses or dolls, a fact her mother seems to ignore.
No.
She looks because there’s an incongruity with how Link sees herself in comparison to what is presented before her in the mirror. Almost always clad in green tunic, soft brown trousers and scuffed boots, she deduces it’s the only way those she’s destined to help will recognise her. And behind those bright blue orbs is something ancient and telling, if one is perceptive enough to look past the cute face.
Most aren’t.
In reality, Link is a man in a child’s body. No, wait, she’s a woman in a child’s body. Pronouns are important, her mother tells her. In any case, Link has been both. Several times. She’s had a multitude of forms. So many she’s lost count.
In one life, she remembers a young boy sailing across a vast, endless ocean with nary a soul in sight except him and his dragon-boat.
In another life, he was forced relive the same three days over and over again. Forced to change forms so many times a young boy had gone all but mad.
In yet another, Link remembers fighting his own shadow, the culmination of all that he was. In the end he’d become that shadow.
Link lets her arm fall back to her side. So. She is the hero reborn, and it’s something Link had wanted for as long as she could speak. If she’d wanted some sort of confirmation, this is it. But Link remembers her reincarnations now, and she’s not quite so sure she wants the responsibility.
So many, many lives. Fragmented and fleeting and full of loss. With destruction, grief and death.
Link wonders if the other two remember. For both their sakes, she fervently hopes not. It’s not something she’d wish even on her greatest enemy.
Link finds an answer soon enough. Just below her window a dark-skinned, yellow-eyed boy inexplicably appears in the chicken coop one stormy night. In little more than rags, red hair matted, he burries himself in the hey where no one can see him.