Zelda thought it was all over. It had to be. The sun was setting, and the Evil King was beaten. He straightened, reaching for dignity, and uttered his final words. Only Link heard them, but Zelda had a guess.

Link the Hero ground the Master Sword deep into the sacred wound, silvered steel piercing through the man's core. At first, the blood was white as the telltale holy mark upon him, but then there was a gasp and a spurt and out spilled deep, dark crimson: glowing in the dusklight. Ganondorf Lord of Darkness dropped his branding blade and it shivered apart, spent and dead. Power flared once, twice, and was still. His eyes grew wide and he stood fast as stone. Then, he crumpled dead to the ground, bleeding into the dirt.

Link and Zelda stood there for a short time. Of them, Zelda did not know what sadness came over her. Perhaps it was the twilight, the final hiccup of madness in his eyes as the madman saw something nobody else could see. And in the horrific moment he finally died there was a startling burst of clarity in him, as if at his instant of passing he had seen beyond his own hate. Even if for a second.

Zelda felt... sad. As horrid and hateful he had been, it was Zant in her mind that had taken Hyrule. This man was just an insane donor of power that had never gotten to act. He had been too crazed to act. He had used Zant, but had gained nothing from it. Mastermind, master of nothing.

Even as the Spirits of Light appeared over the hill, even as Midna came back seemingly from destruction, the Princess Zelda stood unmoving. Midna's return was Link's triumph.

This was barely her story, Zelda realized. She could not stand between Link and Midna. She had no place to. There was nothing for her here, but to pick up the slivers of her cracked kingdom and leave Link to his well-earned peace.

Probably, she thought, this is why I feel so empty.

She turned from the happy scene over the hill. It was not for her. Instead, there was the huge, prone form of their greatest enemy. His body had fallen upon the Master Sword, had been pierced all the way through and had been forgotten. The iron of his blood seeped into the ground, scent rising in the evening chill. It glistened, slick where it had ran under her boots.

Someone had to be realistic. With extreme difficulty and some magic, Zelda managed to flip the cooling body over, avoiding the empty horrified eyes that once had been so full of fire. Now she couldn't bear to imagine the stony reflections in that death stare. It felt wrong to her, undignified.

The Master Sword was covered in blood. Her gloves were ruined as she yanked it out of him, feeling the edges slip smoothly out of the flesh. As she removed it, the luminous holy wound faded until all that was left was an ordinary kill, cooling in the night. The curse to Ganondorf, King of Evil, was gone. He had been condemned to death a lifetime ago. Finally, death had found him.

She felt the weight of the Master Sword, streaked in the dark man's blood. She thrust it into the ground and stooped by the one it had slain.

What now? He would not be mourned. So what funeral rite did the Lord of Darkness get? Did he even deserve one? Surely, she thought, although darkness was foul he had been formidable. She was not one to spit on a fallen adversary, even though she had fantasized about doing so in the past. But as the reality sank in, she found she simply couldn't bear to disgrace this foe. There was no menace here. It was just a dead man. He lay before her, lifeless.

She should have hated him, she knew. But all she felt was a cold sadness and disgust. It was the end. And as bearer of Wisdom she knew that there was too much that had gone unsaid before this villain's final bow.

"I know your people," she whispered, confident that he could not hear. "I've read of them, seen their fall in visions. It was both our faults. You don't have to apologize; you've paid now. I do."

She should not have felt this way, she knew. He was the abhorrent evil, the one she had seen in every vision about darkness and despair Wisdom had given her. But as the Hero ran off to be with his princess, Zelda bowed her head to the dead man, and pleaded forgiveness. Wisdom was a double-edged sword. She knew of this man's atrocities. But she also knew that he had been overlooked in this iteration of the eternal cycle. As had she. They had killed him, so she had no fear of what he said. He was dead and they both had been left behind in some way.

He had been mighty and proud in life. And in her mind, there was an echo of recognition. True, he had possessed her empty body for spare minutes as a crazed mockery to the Hero. But the taste he left to her was one of sadness, of despair and sorrow. He hadn't thought at all of what he was doing, or any implications of using her physical self as a weapon. All there was to say could be found in the agony and grief his muddled consciousness exuded. There was no subtext, there was only victory.

Not hate or spite. It troubled her. Made her pity. And regret that she never had known him, understood him more. As it was, it disturbed her how little satisfaction she felt in the kill. He had never been her curse in this lifetime. He had orchestrated a coup that left him nothing. He had returned to a world that housed none of the things he hoped to seek revenge upon in the first place. And a hundred years or more before he had been imprisoned for merely what he was going to do in some possible future, in a destiny.

Zelda knew he had seen and experienced that destiny during his imprisonment, forced to stare out the eyes of another him, in some other time.

Damned from the start, damned in the past, and damned until his death. No wonder his insanity had grown so deep. It was a marvel he could even formulate words, was coherent enough to be understood at all in the end. His own shock should have destroyed him. He had held an inner strength of heart, even if just to be the nightmare he had been for them in the past weeks.

"I'm sorry. I am so sorry for all that we have done. No matter your character, we had no right to try and change the future as we did. The blame falls upon me and my house. Please accept my apology, and find rest. Curse us no longer. It's finally over."

Her bloodstained gloves cracked as she reached over his frozen face. In death the lines and the jaw had relaxed, erasing most of his frenzy. No more than a man. He almost was peaceful.

"Sleep well, stranger," she whispered. Delicately, she closed his glassy eyes. "You were our mortal enemy, but we deserved every blow."

Link and Midna had vanished over the hill, gone until they would seek her out again. And no sooner had the Princess removed her fingertips from the fallen king's brow did a violent shudder spike through his body. The suddenness of it caused Zelda to startle and fall backward. As if lightning had struck him, his muscles convulsed powerfully, a bright scarlet flare shining from his right hand. The shockwave traveled from his core up and down his spine, into his legs and into his chest, flaring heat in his flesh where it had fled. Zelda could nearly hear a heartbeat restart, followed by more refined twitches as the gaping strike in his belly drew together, seamlessly closed. Color began to return to his face, and not a festering disease: warm blood was forcing back through him. A second burst of electricity forced open his mouth and he gave a deep gasp, chest expanding and pulling in fresh breath to force out the stale death in his lungs.

Eyes no longer vacant, but sharp and frightened snapped open where she had laid them shut to rest. But only for a moment: he gave a strangled, tired sound in the back of his throat and laid limp again, breathing ragged and shallow. However exhausted, wounded, or broken he was, Zelda could not avoid the staring truth that Ganondorf was very much alive.

Zelda felt a black fear creeping over her. How? How could this be? A moment ago the holy blade had pierced his body clear through! His blood had drained out of him, was staining the grass! He should not have been squirming and gasping in broken sleep! It was... it couldn't be...

But it could, she noticed. His spirit had not left the body, had not been cleaved away by the Master Sword. Somehow, he had held on. And Power had revived him.

She cowered. The sheer magnitude of magic the holy relic fed the man to heal him, to nourish him, was frightening. It coursed through his veins, restoring lost blood, settling in muscles and promoting his return to strength.

He would not remain helpless for long. At this rate, she had only a few hours before he was likely to try and strike again. Zelda stood and grasped the Master Sword, shaking. Link was long gone. Zelda twisted her fingers around the hilt, training the tip over his again-beating heart. Slowly, she inched it closer. The holy magics in the blade made him shudder, made his piece of the Triforce glow brighter.

She wondered at his vulnerability to holy magics when an even greater source of sacred power ran through him constantly. The proximity to the Master Sword only made Power ooze magic more violently, curling defensively over his heart, feeding it strength to speed his pulse. He unconsciously writhed away from the sword tip.

In his blind haze, he stared up at her, weakly raising an arm a fraction. A suggestion of reaching. And the most frightening face she had ever seen from him: pleading.

And weakly, he spoke one broken, desperate word.

"Please."

And collapsed, too spent to do anything more. Zelda paused, hesitated. And as his eyes closed, she seized up and dropped the sword.

Once was enough. Link was able to kill this man. But in her heart, she knew her own dire weakness. Why she seeked others to place her justice. Why Midna mocked her. Why she had surrendered so easily at the start of everything.

She was weak. And he was proof.

Zelda gathered her magic and removed his recovering body to a remote cell deep in the dungeons. Invoking the strongest anti-magic barriers she could muster, she called upon Light itself and forged walls that could keep him in. He was sealed in a magical cell, one that would kill him again upon any type of escape attempt. No physical barrier could stop him. But his vessel was a mortal one, and she could restrain him with that.

She was back before Link returned. And she said nothing of what had happened to the body. To the Kingdom of Hyrule, The Lord of Darkness was dead and gone.

But she was careful never to mention Ganondorf's name. And the guards were not permitted in the deepest level of the dungeons any longer.