Hey friends! Thanks for reading what just might be the closest thing to a crackfic I've ever written (maybe a dark crackfic? I seriously have no idea where in my brain to file it, or where its premise came from). It's a bit of practice starting off in medias res, namely the final battle of Twilight Princess, so let's hit the ground running. (Oh, yeah, this shouldn't interfere with Legacies and Bloodlines—that one is still going strong—it's just a shorter, fun project I started in between chapters.) I've taken more than a few liberties grossly misinterpreting canon; if you can roll with it, that's cool, if not... that's cool too I guess. Whatever floats your boat. This is just meant to be a really weird, nonsensical but kinda fucked-up romp through the horrifying supernatural world of the Sacred Realm. Thanks again for reading!

Ganondorf, like any proper Gerudo, could find beauty in nearly anything. It was a talent that ran in his blood; it was his mothers' voices, whispering literature into his ear; it was the rich tradition of poetry his people passed down to him before Hylian swords slit their throats and sent them voiceless into the dust. And this was poetry he saw before him now—wordless, filled with beauty and brimmed with imagery (if not a little too pedestrian for his taste).

That the princess should die by the sword of her own hero was nothing short of art. The boy had pined for her for so long, in so many ways and behind so many different faces, it only seemed natural—hilariously so—for their centuries-long liaison to end with so romantically penetrative an act.

But Ganondorf could not laugh, he could not voice his appreciation for the spectacle (his lungs, ultimately, had been the ones to feel the sting of the wound), but he got to see the boy's face up close as the realization of his own horrible mistake came over him. His pupils shrank so narrowly, his tears welled so sudden and so bright, his eyes seemed to be two pools of indistinguishable blue. His lip curled in an incipient cry, black shadows of anguish spread like fissures across the skin on his forehead, and as he pulled his sword from her chest—that burning, blasted instrument, thin as a penknife—a torrent of blood followed. The boy's hands shook as he withdrew his weapon, slowly, his whole body crushed in bewilderment at his own treachery. It must've been difficult, for a kid like that, who had no doubt been reassured his whole life of his own goodness, to suddenly find himself a regicide. Ultimately, he should've known better than to raise his sword against his princess, even if he had convinced himself it was for his own protection, or even her own good—but the gods had certainly not chosen him for his wisdom.

You can never save a woman from herself; only she can. Even now, the judicious words of Ganondorf's many mothers echoed in his head. If only this horrified, shaking little waif had been raised by better women, perhaps he would not be paralyzed now, trembling at his own atrocity.

But it was this paralysis, this inadvertent treason that Ganondorf had anticipated. He would not have otherwise thrown himself into the mind of the Hyrulean princess—he would not have otherwise waded through all the mundanity, all the tragic meaninglessness of the entire library of her memories, endured her opposition and trapped her muscles within his own control. It was old magic, painful magic, a spell contrived and perfected by those ancestors of the Twili (who, perhaps due to an incurable culture-wide self-loathing, seemed to weave only the kind of incantation that discomforted or damaged its own wielder). Ganondorf would not have thought to possess the woman if he had not been so sure of the outcome.

As usual, his surety solidified into reality. Here he was, smiling from behind the princess' yellow eyes, drinking her agony and regret like invigorating wine. He couldn't have been more than two paces from the stupefied hero, well within arm's reach. The boy, now nothing more than a quivering green leaf, stepped back in mystified hesitation. It granted Ganondorf enough time to gather himself, to cast the princess' fading presence from his own mind permanently, and thrust an arm forward.

Though he could not see through the little hero's eyes, Ganondorf had no doubt it must have been a comical spectacle, despite the circumstances—a large, dark hand emerging from the possessed princess' wound, untouched by its blood, black-tipped fingers curling with strength. On the back of the hand, where its ligaments and veins flexed with effort, glowed the proof of its owner's potency, the guiding light that drew him from the princess' dying body and back into real air.

The white-gold triangle, burning with proximity to its missing parts, seared his skin and sent jolts of exhilarating agony up his arm, all the way to his rolling shoulder. It pulled him forward, steering his hand to the boy's thin, exposed throat. As his fingers wrapped around soft skin, the burning light of his own power seared his heart, filling his veins with pyretic strength. It had the intensity of loathing but the pleasure of affection, it was inexplicable, it was horrifying, it was wonderful—and it always guided his hand with stunning accuracy. A bitter incantation on his lips, Ganondorf dug his fingers into the boy's neck, explosive buds of black magic blooming on the tip of each nail. Before the kid could raise his little toothpick of a sword, before he could even cry out in surprise, he flew across the throne room, limbs flailing, a flutter of helpless green. From his hand a streak of silver fell—his sword clamored to a halt just as he hit the wide body of a stone pillar. He slipped down the marble, painting a streak of blood across its white surface, and crumpled to the floor in silence.

Ganondorf stepped toward him, fully extricating himself from the swiftly cooling body of the princess. As he emerged from the last throes of her bitter pain, he heard the thump of her corpse fall behind him. Now fully in his own body, he could feel the gold in his blood burning every inch of him; it lit his face, his eyes, and the sardonic smile he could not help but let pass over his face.

"That was clever, was it not?" he said to the boy before him. He was not sure if the curled green leaf could hear him, quivering and twitching though it was. "And plucky, I will admit. Perhaps too much so. Gods above, it appears I have more wisdom and courage than the both of you." He laughed as he kicked the boy's cursed sword out of his way. He didn't deign to touch the blasted thing; it was, and always had been, a sword so attuned to its own conceited sense of justice it would burn any hand it did not choose for itself (a tool only one man can use is a poorly-made tool, said his mothers' voices in his head).

As expected—Ganondorf knew more than he'd like about the bothersome tenacity of heroes—the boy was not quite dead. He lay on his back, wide blue eyes locked on something far beyond the arched ceiling of the throne room, chest quivering and heaving with effort. His hat had fallen from his head and now soaked up the pool of blood that dripped from his tangle of blond hair. His lips quivered uselessly, as if dancing blindly around words he no longer had the strength to form.

Ganondorf reached down to grip the boy's bloody hair, twisting the slick locks through his fingers. He pulled him from the ground, ignoring the instinctive twist of resistance from him; despite his dire state of semi-consciousness, it appeared he had enough awareness of this turn of events to muster some opposition to it. If the kid felt even a fraction of the powerful, electric ache that jolted through Ganondorf's bones at the prospect of reuniting those ruthless triangles, he could not blame him for struggling. After all, the gods' gift to him was nothing more than a parasite in his soul, seeking to keep itself alive and active through him—and it knew its extraction was close. They all did.

To see the triumvirate of power in its full glory was indeed a rare privilege. It always did resist showing itself in its naked and vulnerable gold, preferring instead to hide within the flesh and spirit of others hardier than itself. Ganondorf knew the sacred shapes had a will of their own, but after everything he'd done, everything he'd worked for, after every impossible struggle he'd overcome, he knew it was a will he could subdue. He tightened his grip on the boy's hair and dragged him toward the princess' body, hand aching, lungs burning with light.

"You prattling, gutless, vulture-nosed little bastard."

It appeared Ganondorf was in the presence of another poet. One apparently not quite as skilled as himself, but with a pleasing spirit and a tuneful delivery. He turned to see the imp—oh, yes, he'd completely forgotten about her, that clever, dogged little witch—standing between the pillars that arced to the palace's sky terrace. She recovered her footing and swayed her injured head, legs shaking. She was a tiny shadow on an infinite grey sky, all evil-eyed glare and cat-toothed grimace, barely up to his knees, even with her headdress. It charmed him to no end to have been called little by such a creature.

Delighted, he let the hero's bloodied hair slide through his fingers. The boy dropped to his feet with a tortured groan, limbs ignobly splayed about his shaking body. He stepped toward the imp, over the wheezing, shuddering little leaf of a man, and graced her with his handsomest smile. She bore her teeth, lifting herself from the ground, tiny feet hovering over the pock-marked floor. She spread her lithe arms, etched with the glowing blue of her people's long-repressed magic.

The imp's smile lit the air around her, shining against the spines and curves of the shadow that spun about her head. "You'll beg for death before I'm done with you," she hissed. Her voice echoed watery-clear, rippling through the potent aura of her people's oldest and most powerful treasure. Ganondorf had never seen the Fused Shadow in action, and he doubted it would impress him. But he was an open-minded man.

"I look forward to it." He drew his sword with a streak of white light. He would see if the collective power of the Twili people could withstand the Hyrulean sages' supreme instrument of execution.

"Cheeky, aren't you?" the creature growled, widening her evil smile. She reclined in the assurance of her own power, safe and natant in its billowing waves. They buoyed her body into the air, sparks of darkness ripping and deforming the space around her. Despite her diminutive size, despite her round face and large, shining eyes, she may have struck a lesser man as formidable.

It was not entirely due to caprice that Ganondorf decided to spare her. Waste not, little one, his mothers had said. "And I will waste not this little one," he replied aloud, raising his sword.

The imp's eyes widened at his cryptic words, her invincible smile cracked at its edges before the plates of stone shadow clicked into place over her tiny form.

For a second, the world stood eerily still. Then in a flash of incoherent shadow, massive, undulating pillars of darkness burst from her stone mask, rippling through the air, spreading tendrils like fingers. Ancient, defunct runes glowed in their jointless lengths, pulsating as the limbs stretched and curled. The monster that had burst from the Fused Shadow bulged with effort as an amorphous, molasses-like hand gripped a cracked pillar and pulled it through the archway into the palace's throne room.

Its power swept past Ganondorf like an invigorating wind, swelling under his cape, rushing through the hairs of his beard, and he could not suppress a smile. His throaty laugh echoed past his teeth to the creature's formless body—here was the fight he wanted, what he had expected when he'd stepped from his prison and back onto familiar ground. It was what the princess and her hero had failed to give him, and he rushed headlong into the tangle of formless appendages with a peculiar levity he had not felt in ages.

When he cut off the first billowing limb that came at him, he was not surprised to see two more replace it. Each time he hacked at one of those uncanny appendages, avoiding the bubbling flow of what was not quite blood, the remaining flesh (if it could be called flesh) retreated into the main body of the creature, only to burst out again twofold. The spiderish beast grew with each second, bulging outward like some disgusting, distended organ, spreading its black magic to every inch of the throne room. He would not give it long until it consumed the entire castle—which is why he supposed he ought to kill it before then. It was, after all, his castle now.

"Take care to not step on your friends," he told it. He did not know if the imp inside the monster heard him, but he could guess, considering the way the titan's skinless form rippled with anger, the way the runes along its limbs pulsated and burned. Its large hands planted themselves far from the dead princess and her dying hero, fingers digging into the stone, grinding it to dust under her enormous weight.

She was certainly a beautiful thing. Ganondorf could not help but admire the fury with which she crushed solid rock beneath her, how her incomprehensible limbs seemed to swallow sound in a black, desperate bellow as they flailed through the air. Perhaps, even after all these years, the magic of the Interlopers still flowed through this ugly little devil. It certainly did not flow through her compatriots with the same intensity, but perhaps it was merely because they lacked the endurance to truly channel that ancient magic. Ganondorf could not imagine the kind of agony the tiny woman must feel, locked inside that malformed stone helmet. Though the magic of his own land was far from bloodless, it did not adhere to such damaging edicts as the Twili's. In his gut swelled a genuine admiration for the imp.

Ganondorf swiped away another surging, malformed arm. The light of his blade burned against the monster's flesh, illuminating the hissing outpour of black blood and steam from its wounds. His weapon's light blistered the pulpy skin, drove back its glowing runes to the main body of the beast—Ganondorf did not know what would happen if he let the thing touch him, but he knew he would rather not. So he kept the rippling tendrils at bay, paving a way forward toward that tiny stone temple atop the beast's head, where the little hands of the imp were no doubt quite busy, imbuing movement and violence into the monster's massive arms.

It did not take Ganondorf long to tire of the exchange (it did not take him long to tire of anything, which was particularly unfortunate because he seemed to spend the majority of his life locked away, twiddling his thumbs and plotting). He removed himself from the telegraphed trajectory of a swollen finger, and sliced it off. He lowered his body, leaning forward on one knee, twisting the ball of his back foot against the palace's lush, soiled carpet. He felt that familiar golden fire course through his blood, and he launched himself upward to the tiny mask of shadow and stone that housed the monster's will and heart. Sword-tip first, he aimed himself at the flat, rune-embossed forehead of the Fused Shadow. He turned the grip in his palms, narrowed one eye, cast out all other objects, all other targets but the glinting silver of the decorative serpent that wound around its forehead—

Light met stone and the Shadow gave way. His sword pierced through the shallow length of helmet, and out its top, between its decorative set of what could only be described as horns. In a series of gladdening cracks, the mask split open at the forehead, falling to either side of his still-progressing blade. It tumbled away in a blur of grey, and the light and shadow of its magic snuffed out almost instantly (amid Ganondorf's satisfaction rose a pang of shame—it appeared he had permanently disfigured what would've otherwise been a decent trophy).

The imp inside let out a scream, though he knew better than to assume it was one of agony. It was relief, it was the ecstasy at having such terrible magic removed from her, of having the burden of such a spell lifted from her tiny, sloping shoulders. As her mask fell away and the shadows around her dissipated into the thick, stormy air, her big eyes closed, her scream declined into a sigh, and her diminutive form curled back, landing softly on the the ground before him. The remnants of her helmet fell in pieces around her, still smoking from the force of Ganondorf's blow.

He regained his footing, inhaling the foul air the broken Shadow spat from the pocks in its rapidly decaying stone. The little imp lay unconscious before him, tiny shoulders rising and falling with exhaustion, forehead bleeding black from the nick of his blade. He sheathed his sword and stepped over her, taking care to not give in to the morbid but fascinating temptation to see if such a round head would pop like a grape.

Back to the hero he strode, back to the business of crushing the world under his feet. The boy lay exactly where Ganondorf had left him, still struggling to breathe, still staring at nothing. Around him lay craters of stone where the monster had balanced on those ineffable hand-feet of hers, but he had remained untouched by anything but harmless showers of dust. He did not seem to have noticed the conflict around him—or perhaps he was simply used to sights like a Gerudo god-king and a spindly shadow monster having a go at one another.

Ganondorf did not have the patience to sit around and wonder. He just bent down and again took the boy's hair in his hand. He dragged him back to the cold body of the princess and dropped him beside her, maybe a little too unceremoniously for such a grand occasion. He took a moment to look over the pitiable duo, at the two bloodstained bodies, one only slightly more aware than the other. The princess lay twisted on her back, mouth and empty eyes open slightly, skin grey and still stained with the marks of Ganondorf's shadow magic. The boy was hardly better, his own stare as vacant as hers—if not for the shaking, shallow rise of his chest, and the struggle of his hands to open and close mindlessly at his side (perhaps he had hit his head harder than Ganondorf had initially thought), he would've mistaken him for dead.

Dead or not, it didn't matter to him. When he knelt down to them, gripping the boy's left hand in his before reaching for the girl's right, the familiar gold agony rushed through his veins. The princess' wrist was cold and pulseless, but he could sense the dim, fading glow of the power still within her—the boy's light was already shuddering at the surface of his skin, waiting, almost eager to leave his body (Farore's curse had always been the most volatile of the three, flitting between well-meaning young men like a busy coquette).

The power inside Ganondorf told him what to do. He lifted the hands, one lifeless and pliant, the other still struggling weakly, and drew the light from them like one would draw a breath. From his palms to his shoulders he burned, and his own hands shook from the effort, but his heart was calm, his mind pure and clear. He tilted back his head and took in the godly breeze, reveling in the painful heat that radiated from the meeting point of their hands.

The affair was mercifully quick. A rising wind, an excruciating, lively scorching of his skin, then stillness. Two pale hands fell back to the ground when Ganondorf let go, flexing his own wrist and asking himself thoroughly if he felt any different. Besides the quietude in his blood, the significant and conspicuous lack of stinging fire in his veins, there seemed to be no change. He was still himself, so far.

He relaxed his hand, a little surprised he found himself in his right mind—if it had been right to begin with. He lifted his eyes toward the room's gaudy dais, raising his large, empty hand to block the light. There it rose, smaller than one would expect, and brighter than one would think reasonable. The power of the gods, mundane and stripped of its mysticism, waiting for him.

It made a sound as he approached—a high, almost impossible wail. He did not know if that was in innate property of its material, or if it was a noise of protest. Whether or not it was an unjust opposition to him (for he had earned this as well as any other might), he didn't listen to it. He just approached with unwavering steps toward its blinding glow. When he reached out a hand, a familiar burning sensation flickered across his skin—yes, this was his. This was his by all rights. He lay a finger on the topmost shape, the closest to his heart.

Images of nothing, of everything, flew past him, through him. Before his eyes flickered the vague, evasive sight of the gods themselves, a cavalcade of nonsense and brilliance. It was the creation of the world, and its end, all morphed into incomprehensible swirls of color. It was the history of the land written in grass and stone, it was every sadness and triumph of his people, it was the wrinkled eyes of his mothers, filled with wisdom, it was a princess on the eve of womanhood, it was a record of the Hyrulean Civil War, it was a great flood, it was the dream of a jeweled and starry whale, it was a moon falling—it was all things, all manner of impossibilities, and frankly (Ganondorf thought as he slowly regained his own sense of being), rather ludicrous.

"I see," was all he could muster.

Before him, the golden light faded into nothing, stretching itself against the air and disappearing into whatever pocket of existence in which it preferred to slumber. But it could not wander far from him, even if it desired to. He had a firm grasp of it now—he had a firm grasp of nearly everything.

Cupping his chin, he seated himself again on the throne of Hyrule. Far beyond the palace's battlements, beyond the barrier of twilight he had erected seemingly decades ago, the clouds of the storm retreated to the east. The shadows passed lightly, uncaring, over the faces of the two bodies before him, one pale and twitching in soporific agony (finally, only after being relieved of his godly burden, the boy managed to faint), the other grey and sunken. Ganondorf supposed he ought to get rid of the princess—despite her loveliness, her untouchable dignity and her divine power, she was a corpse like any other and would certainly start to stink up the place soon enough. He ought to get rid of the boy, too, if he knew what was good for him, but something held him back.

That something took the form of a tiny imp, twisted over her own stunted spine, red hair splayed about her like motionless fire. Ganondorf frowned, crossing an ankle over his knee and pulling thoughtfully at his beard.

She would not be pleased when she woke up.