The Legend of Zelda: Dreamer of Dragons Chapter 1

Chapter 1

    He could feel himself falling…

    The sky was a whirling, yawning vortex of cobalt, the clouds a hundred rows of dagger teeth, and the shark that was the four winds threatened to consume him in one greedy bite. He could feel the icy sting of the air, rushing all around him, chapping his lips and tearing his clothes to ribbons. The tears streaming from his eyes trailed off into nothing, lost forever in that endless overhead ocean of air.

    Link awoke with the scene still burning in his mind, his heart thundering against the confines of his ribcage, and sweat pouring out of every pore. He threw the sheets off, and gave a hoarse scream to the stifling, humid summer night.

    A pale, gibbous moon gleamed at him through the window, and he could see the tops of trees glowing in the faerie light as the little orbs danced back and forth, no doubt still planting the morning dew, a duty legend had assigned to faery folk. Calm settled over him as he realized he was still in bed, still in the lush forest of Hyrule, with solid ground only a few feet beneath him, and not plummeting through the open sky. He sighed.

    There was nothing but nightmares anymore, the boy reflected as he rose from his straw and feather bed and snatched a towel from a clothesline nearby. He regarded his dark and silent treehouse with somber melancholy as he dabbed the beads of sweat away from his brow and his neck. It had been nearly a month since he had slept well. He had taken to rising before the sun and not getting back to bed until well into the night in a vain attempt to minimize his exposure to the scene of terror that filled his dreams- a scene which did not diminish in its horror, despite its consistently growing familiarity. Always he was falling, through an endless sky, no ground in sight, and whether he had slept for one or eight hours in the waking world, the fall through that desolate and empty void of mocking blue felt eternal.

    A creeping significance existed somewhere in this repeated vision, something that was beyond the boy's comprehension, but he felt that it was very real. Even as he sat upon the window sill, gazing out at the nighttime forest he made his lonely home, he couldn't shake the image of that endless sky from his mind. It felt like someone, somewhere was trying to tell him something… but what?

    He went back into his treehouse, a round, single room of ramshackle carpentry constructed of scraps of wood and metal he had pilfered from the outskirts of nearby Castle Town, and rummaged through his single cupboard for something to put in his stomach. A mouse-gnawed, stale ear of bread was all he found therein, and his stomach warbled at him in desperate protest. He gnashed at the hard crust with a grimace on his face, and it made him look much older than thirteen.

    The mystery of the nightmares was confounding and though he tried his best to garner some shred of coherent meaning from his fleeting memories of the rushing wind and sky, it amounted to very little, and soon his mind wandered on to other things. It would be morning soon, as the cuccoo crows, and he had a busy day ahead of him if he wanted to eat again before another night of nameless terror would overtake him.

    Again he plucked something off the clothesline: a forest green tunic he had sewn himself from stolen cloth –and pulled it on, his tuft of messy blond hair springing out the top like a wave of golden grain crowning his dirt-smudged face. Then, it was gone again, as he pulled a matching cap like a great green sock over it. Stepping out into the moonlit night, he scurried down the ladder and disappeared into the twilight of the forest.

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    Castle Town had been the largest city in Hyrule as long as anyone could remember. Over the hundreds of years it had stood at the Northern Border of the kingdom it had grown and grown until it had become fat and decadent. Its white walls and high parapets were stained with the sickly yellow of industry, and dwarfed by the tall smokestacks that belched their evil soot into the darkening sky. The walls of the city, to an unaccustomed eye, looked like a rising tidal wave of tarnished brass, dingy iron, and whistling steam. A thousand pipes of varying color and size ran up and down and back and forth along the twenty-foot high barrier, and the river that dragged along lazy and thick at its foot was pregnant with the potent stink of pollution. Its waters drifted, noxious and syrupy, under the great stone drawbridge, which had not been raised in immemorial centuries. Along this drawbridge, the poor and the vagrant had made little cities of canvas and animal skins, discarded wood and sheet metal, from which they, by day, accosted any travelers that they might trick, either through pity or the offering of some bauble or trinket, for a rupee or two to pay in tribute to the demon hunger.

    Since Hylians had learned to harness the powers of coal and steam, and tame the curious energies of electricity, the temples of the old gods had gradually given way to factories, taller and more demanding of tribute than any deity. Here, thousands of people toiled with dirty hands and dirty faces, grinding out textiles, metalwork, and various sundries, working themselves to the very brink of death, and indeed sometimes beyond.

    Link was orphaned in such a factory long ago, a nameless boy born to a frail and beautiful mother. She was unable to survive birthing him, and the boy was with no belongings and no inheritance. He became the charge of the city, and was thrust unceremoniously into one of the many overcrowded orphanages which grew up like weeds in the cracks between the factories and warehouses, of which orphans were a natural bi-product. At that time in Hyrule it was a custom to name the orphans after common tools or objects of the trade to which they were to belong once society had reared them up to the honest, working age of ten. So it followed that Link- who took his name from the great iron chains the factory near his orphanage produced –was meant to be a metal worker, as far as the city was concerned.

    However, Link had proven more than a little resistant to the life of a typical Hylian orphan. So light was his step and so deft were his hands that often things went missing around him, and he was regularly disciplined by lashing with deku rods when hands could be lain upon him, though his nimbleness sometimes kept him well out of reach. When he had turned ten, when he should have entered into the life of a factory worker proper, he was thrown into the streets as a vagrant, and labeled as a thief with the branding of a triangle into the back of his left hand.

    Link was a clever boy, though, and knew how to survive. He was quick at taking food and water from the places it could be found, and strong enough to fend off the other beggars. Besides, a natural affinity for animals and plants and places where nature still ruled was in him, and it did not take him long to trade the bleak city for the nearby cover of the faery woods.

    Yet, as much as the endless green of the forest canopy beckoned him deeper, he was still bound to the city in some regard. He was not a hunter. Deft though he was at feats of stealth and skilled as he was with a sling or bow, it was not in the boy's nature to hunt and kill the same creatures which now comprised his only friends and companions. Fruit was too scarce in the forest, since long ago the Hylians had taken the best and most nourishing of it into the rotten city. What came in by cart and wagon came from foreign places, too distant and unknown to Link for him to seek them out. Link knew little of the world outside Hyrule, and though the forest beckoned to him with its promise of wonder and mystery, he dared not stray too far from the putrid city, wherein was his only guarantee of sustenance. At least, that is what he told himself, but a wiser and older part of him occasionally suggested he was afraid of what he might find if he strayed too far, and so chose the familiar evils of his rotten city over the unnamed evils of the world at large.

    The sun was coming up over the Eastern mountains just as Link was clearing the tree line, and he saw the first golden rays play across the wheat fields and strike the bronze gates of Castle Town, making it erupt into a dazzling glare of fiery light. Already, the road was thickly trafficked with a mile long progression of travelers, coming and going in throngs innumerable with business of every kind. He would steal across the plain and slip in among them, letting some unaware coach or pack animal be his ride in through the gate, since the guards were acquainted with him and would not like to see him strutting out in the street. From there to the market he would be carried, for it went without saying that the market was almost every immigrant's destination in Castle Town, and then he could snag some bread and cheese and perhaps even a jug of milk if he was lucky. His stomach groaned pitifully at the thought.

    He did these things with the efficiency and routine of clockwork, having done them many times before over the course of three years. Before the sun had completely crowned the tops of the trees he was clinging to the underside of an oxen-drawn wagon, clutching his hat to his head and trying not to let his skull knock on the hard, uneven gravel of the highway.

    The procession of travelers was a diverse cacophony, rife with the whinny of horses, the bleating of oxen, the clucking of cuccoos, and the murmurs of a thousand voices in as many languages trading gossip and news from the world outside. As Link clung to the wagon, he could catch some spots of conversation of the passersby, and it was impossible not to notice that one piece of news was upon nearly every pair of lips,

"Did you hear-"  

"Princess Zelda! A traitor to the crown!"

"-heard she tried to kill the king!"

"-only a girl, but they say she has the eyes of a witch-"

"-never would have believed it myself, but they say they caught her in the act-"

"-execution at dawn! Unbelievable. What is this Kingdom coming to where we have to behead our own princess?"

"-Royalty are all the same. Let 'em swing, I say."

    Link had seen the princess once, at her father's side on the day of some speech the old king once made. He had been too small then to remember what the speech was about, but he did remember the girl, and he recalled that she looked, to him, like an angel. She was not much older than he, perhaps a year or two. Her skin was pale as alabaster, and seemed to glow with light and warmth. Her golden hair framed her face in tiny ringlets, and her eyes were as blue as five-piece-rupees. She was the very image of innocence.

    It didn't follow with him that such a girl could be capable of attempting to kill the king, her own father, whose arm she clung to so dearly in that distant memory. The thought of the castle guards holding her on the chopping block, and the axe coming down on that porcelain neck was incomprehensible to him. It seemed that no one in Hyrule was safe from the growing threat of public execution. Not a day went by when Link didn't feel that terror breathing down his neck, the ever-present anxiety that one day someone might spot the triangle on the back of his hand, or catch him off guard as he pilfered a meal and then –CHOP! In one swing, he'd be erased from the world, without as much as a mother to mourn him.

    Of course, that thought led him to wonder what sort of father would send his daughter to the chopping block in the first place. Link knew little of what it was actually like to have a parent, but he had been reasonably certain that parents were supposed to love their children. If it were true what they said, and Zelda had tried to take the life of her father, then he wondered what the reason might be. It seemed beyond reason that someone who appeared so innocent could be the perpetrator of a crime so heinous.

    Link was thinking himself in circles, and so enthralled was he with the subject of young Zelda's treachery that he didn't notice the cart passing over the drawbridge and through the city gate. It was the smell of fresh bread baking and cuccoo roasting over glowing coals that first alerted him. His stomach growled urgently at him.
 
    Moments later, the cart came to a stop somewhere in the market square, and Link let himself drop on the cobbles with a dull thud. No one noticed over the din of the market, and the boy rolled out from under the cart and disappeared into the crowded square, his nostrils full of the smell of cooking food, and his ears with the pleasant fanfare of flutes and lyres being played somewhere nearby.

    Ribbons of color crisscrossed the open street, stretching from the corners of tents pitched right on the cobbles, their canopies reaching out over wooden troughs filled with fruit, nuts, vegetables, smoked fish, fresh bread, and glazed pastries. Merchants were calling out to passersby to sample whatever they were selling. Here and there, peasant children darted after dogs and cuccoos. Link watched these sneak-thieves, playing at playing, their nimble hands finding the pockets of the unaware and the purses of the oblivious. Shining trinkets, watches, rupees and snuff boxes disappeared as frequently as the odd piece of bread or fruit from the Castle Market. A wise man kept his hands in his pockets when treading the cobbled streets, and he never kept more rupees in his wallet than he absolutely needed.

    Link didn't concern himself with money or wealth. He could not work to earn his pay, for the triangle upon his hand labeled him unemployable, and he did not have aspirations to be rich or powerful. Therefore, the boy kept his stealing mostly to food and drink and sometimes clothes, because without these things he could not live. His one weakness in this regard was his love of the clockwork toys a certain clockmaker in the town crafted so lovingly by hand. On occasion he had nabbed one of these, unable to resist their temptation, and so he had a little collection at home of windup cuccoos, deku scrubs, and even a white wolfos, which would stop every few steps in its ticking procession and throw back its head to imitate a howling motion.

    Today was not a day for taking toys though. Link turned the other way from the clockmaker's shop, and headed down the row of bright tents where the bakers and dairymen kept their stalls. It had been a long time since his food situation had grown so desperate. The guards in the market had grown savvier and increased their numbers along the aisles that had once been best to shoplift. Even as this thought crossed Link's mind, he became aware of the dark eyes of a guardsman surveying the crowd for undesirables, and he hid himself behind a passing donkey just in time to duck the villainous gaze.

    Link gave a sigh, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. He would need to be especially quick about it today. He would grab what he could and get out, not waste a second. He crossed the aisle to the side farthest from the guardsman and began toward a baker's stand he often made his mark, for they did good business and he felt that taking from them did the least harm.

    When he reached the stall he checked to make sure no one was watching him and slipped between the canvas tents, wriggling his way under the wooden trough where the bakers stacked their bread. Hidden well in the shadows below the stall, he could see the shins and ankles of people walking on the street and some customers who had stopped to buy some loaves. With expert quickness, Link plucked a roll from the back of the counter, and sat down to munch on it right under the noses of the shop keeper and his patrons. He needed to be fast, but his stomach could not carry him on without something to fill it. While he sat, eating quietly among the forest of passing legs, he listened warily for the sound of approaching guards over the din of the market.

    "Three rupees for a loaf! That is highway robbery, sir," the thick accent of a Gerudo woman rose clear above the hubbub of the streets, incredulity dripping off every syllable.

    "If you do not like my price go buy your bread elsewhere," replied the shop keeper, unimpressed, "but you won't find it much different. Times are tough and food is scarce, and I must make enough to keep my shop open or there wouldn't be bread for you to barter over."

    "Two rupees is a generous sum for hard bread!" cried the Gerudo.

    "It'll be three, or you can keep as generous a sum as you like and take your business to another baker," said the shop keeper, "The price is what it is, take it or leave it."

    "It's no wonder that even the princess is a criminal in a land where the bakers will rob you at their stalls!" spat the Gerudo, her words dipped in desert venom.

    "I don't expect that savages from a kingless land should understand how city economics work," said the shop keeper, growing agitated, "I dare it to be four rupees, one for your insolent tone, and you can get out of my sight!"

    There was a shout, and the shrill screech of a Gerudo battle cry. A sword was unsheathed somewhere out of Link's sight, and a great number of the legs on the street went scrambling in every direction.

    "Guards!" cried the shop keeper, and Link's heart skipped. He crammed the rest of the bread into his mouth and began to gather himself to run, but all at once and with a terrible crash the trough he was under flipped over on its top. There crouched Link, exposed to the world.

    "Hey! Thief!" cried the shop keeper, jabbing an accusing finger out at Link, but to no avail. The Gerudo woman, a tall, dark-skinned warrior clad in the silken kaftan of her people, and wielding a long, curved sword, came rushing at him.

    Link somersaulted out of the way just in time, and the woman and the shop keeper went down in a tangled mess. The boy got to his feet and turned around, surveying the situation with desperate confusion. There was a small, semi-circle crowd gathered round the baker's stall, keeping just out of sword's reach but near enough to see the tussle between the Gerudo and the shop keeper.

    Link's back was to the wall. His eyes darted around the scene, seeking an escape route, but there was none. The clatter of metal boots on cobbles announced the approach of a troupe of guardsmen, and Link felt the air leave his chest as realization that he couldn't get away sunk in like a knife to the heart. The Gerudo warrior was dusting herself off, standing triumphantly over the shop keeper, who lay unconscious at her feet.

    "All hail the Goddess of The Desert!" she cried as she returned her sword to its sheath. She spat on the shop keeper, and her audience gasped in appalled shock.

    "What is all this, now?"

    A short, round man with a great caterpillar moustache and clanking silver armor came waddling on the scene, followed by a line of similarly dressed individuals of dissimilar girth and stature. It was plain that this was the captain of the Market Guard, and Link knew right away that his number was up.

    "You there!" said the Captain, pointing his rapier at the Gerudo woman, "You are hereby under arrest for disturbing the peace and assaulting a citizen of Hyrule Castle Town. Lay down your arms and come quietly!"

    "Miserable pig," said the Gerudo woman, turning to face the captain, "You will have some respect when you address an Amirah of the Gerudo."

    "Amirah? What sort of nonsense is this?" barked the Captain, "Men, arrest her."

    Two of the guards stepped forward at once; swords rose, and bore down on the Gerudo warrior. All at once, the bronze-skinned desert Valkyrie became a whirl of steel, her sword coming out of its sheath faster than Link could track with his eyes. It was a violent motion, yet something about it was fluid, almost like she was dancing, and with the rhythmic pinging of metal on metal she sent the rapiers of her attackers into the dirt. The guards barely had a chance to realize they had been disarmed before the clasps on their armor split at the seams and it came clattering to the cobblestone, leaving them in nothing but their long johns.

    "Deplorable. The tiniest Gerudo babe could best a thousand like these the first day she clutched a scimitar!"

    "That will be quite enough, Lady Nabooru," the new voice seemed to appear on the wind, creaking and whispery yet somehow coming from all around. A black stallion came striding up, the crowd parting around it, and a murmur and hush of awe followed in its wake.

    "The High Wizard!" gasped someone in the crowd.

    Astride the black stallion was a man in billowy, purple robes, hemmed with black designs of three triangles connected at their edges to form a larger one. His neck was adorned with innumerable silver and gold chains, set with every sort of gemstone one could find, but one in particular stood out. It was a pendant in the shape of the claw of some great bird, and clutching a translucent orb which glowed inside with arcs of eldritch blue lightning. He wore a black mitre upon his head, a purple feather at its crown, and his eyes were jet black and sunk into the wrinkled sockets of his weathered, pale face. It was the face of an old man, but there was nothing of this about his countenance. No, the old wizard, if old he were, was built like a powerful stack of brick, his shoulders broad and his chest sturdy. He held his head aloft as he rode towards them, glaring down his pointed nose like an emperor regarding the most insignificant of peasantry with scathing hatred.

    "Lord High Wizard," said the Gerudo woman, her sword again in its sheath, "I am glad you are here. The peasantry was becoming unruly, and I was growing weary of playing with them."

    "Sir!" barked the Captain, saluting to the wizard, "We caught this woman attacking civilian merchants in the street! Are you going to forgive her of such behavior?"

    "My dear Captain, I shall forgive you, for your mind is of a lower class and cannot be expected to comprehend fully the situation. This is Lady Nabooru, an emissary of the Gerudo people, and our King's guest. Please, I implore you, let your peasant laws be applied to peasants, and know that where the Amirah walks in our kingdom she shall have the full extent of the King's hospitality and full diplomatic immunity."

    "But…"

    "Ah, ah, ah, Captain," chided the wizard, waggling his finger condescendingly, "It is unwise to argue with your superiors. Now run along. I shall escort the Lady to the castle myself. She is here to observe the execution of the traitor Zelda, and cannot be detained."

    "Well, what about the lad then?"

    Suddenly, all eyes were on Link, and the boy remembered himself. Why had he not taken the chance to run away? Something about the scene had mesmerized him, rooted him to the very spot, and now he had missed his opportunity and it was too late to get it back.

    "Lad?" said the Wizard, glancing around. His eyes met Link's, and those two black orbs seemed to see straight into the center of the boy's soul, giving him a feeling like ice dripping down his spine. "Nothing but a common thief. He's for the gallows, the edge of the axe is too good for his ilk. Take him away."

    Link desperately tried to scream, to kick, to run away, but it was no use. The guards were upon him, all around him, and they were too many and too strong. One seized him around the waist and he bit down hard on the man's arm, making him yelp. Then something heavy came down on the boy's head with a bang and he went out like a light.