She digs the boy a grave in Castle Town. His body has long since stopped being his, of course, so there is none to bury. For want of a corpse, she buries his blue tunic. Considered burying the Master Sword, but that is hers now, yet another thing of his that is hers, that she has wielded better than he ever had.

Zelda had told her of Hyrule’s funeral rites, so she builds a simple gravestone, says a prayer to Hylia, leaves a candle and a flower. She cannot inscribe a name on the headstone. She does not have the tools for it, and that name, too, is something that is still hers. She thinks she’ll keep it, in his memory, though he would certainly not have appreciated it.

Then again, he would not have appreciated anything about her. That’s why he is dead.

She bows before the grave and leaves him to decompose.

Something she notes after the sixth recovered memory: they were not about him. They were about Zelda, all of them, the boy a bystander, a shadow, a piece of scenery to be overlooked. He was the storybook image of a knight, perfectly polished and completely forgettable. Even in memory he hid behind the princess, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.

But nobody can hide forever, and as she persists, she catches glimpses of him. A sparring scene, a man (his father?) squeezing his shoulder in pride and telling him, “You’re growing into a fine man.” A festival and a little girl handing out flower crowns, staring at them before asking a woman (mother?) for a wooden sword, making her smile. At a tailor after his first growth spurt, told to stand up straight and stop hunching.

The last piece clicks in place in the castle, in a dilapidated room not far from Zelda’s, two of its walls gone and the ones still standing barely high enough to hide from the Guardians. Noise becomes muffled and the walls grow tall and proud, hugging the boy and a near-empty room. He stares in the mirror and tentatively unfolds a square of fabric, cut uneven, and wraps it around his waist in mimicry of a skirt. Cautiously, he takes a few steps, watching the mirror almost as much as the door, and she realized, Oh, he was miserable.

He burns his skirt in the hearth and the walls crumble again, until the boy hiding in his room once again became a girl exploring a ruin.

Zelda looks at her not as a ghost but a stranger. After sealing Ganon she’d turned to face her and had visibly startled, eyes darting away from her to see if someone stood behind her, if she had the wrong person. She had, she hadn’t.

She’d taken Zelda to her house in Hateno, lent her some clothes, began to cook her a meal while she bathed and changed.

“Why do you have girls’ clothes?” Zelda had asked.

“I like them,” she’d responded. Zelda had stared at her like she might as well have declared she enjoyed being executed and hadn’t spoken for the rest of the evening.

She catches Zelda staring when she pulls her hair into a tiny braid and weaves a flower in it, when she goes to take embroidery lessons from an old woman whose dog she’d rescued once, when she hums as she cooks, when she talks. One night at dinner Zelda, folding her hands in her lap to hide their shaking, asks her, “Are you a — girl?”

She thinks for a bit, then nods. “Yes,” she answers.

Zelda stares. Link cocks her head.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“I... how do you just... be a girl?”

“It’s really not much work.”

“Were you — were you always a girl?”

“No. I used to be a miserable boy.”

“And you just decided to — to — to stop?”

“I woke up and I didn’t know I was supposed to be a miserable boy, so I didn’t become one.”

Zelda does not ask further questions. Link goes back to eating.

Zelda wants to revive Hyrule. She builds schools and forts and cobbles together a military and calls herself a princess. To Link it seems like mimicry or necromancy, one of the two. Zelda’s smiles are polished and she moves carefully to avoid her puppet strings, but unlike the boy, she has a tendency to trip. She’s not very good at being a princess.

One night, she finds Zelda holding a knife to her throat.

“Do you want to cut your hair?”

She startles, turns quickly and tries to hide the knife behind her back. “Link! I was, uh —”

“Do you want to cut your hair?” she repeats.

Zelda stares at her, chews her lip, squeezes her eyes shut, then nods and hands her the knife.

“Not too short,” she asks, and Link wonders how hard it must be, to kill yourself.

Much, much later, after Link has lost an arm and Zelda lost her mind, she walks in with arms scratched red, blood on her skirt. “Give me the knife,” she says, and Link thinks, Finally.

He stands in the middle of their house, hair chopped short and hands trembling. Stray locks of hair get stuck in the blood on his arms, and Link takes him outside to wash him clean and bandage him.

“I buried him,” she says, “your knight.”

He watches Zelda’s blood swirl in the water and cries. Link rubs his back.

“Maybe you’d like to bury the princess?”

“I’m letting them down,” he says, voice trembling.

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t do it.”

“No.”

“All that work, all those years and I — I couldn’t do it.”

He presses his fists against his mouth and screams. Link waits until he’s done, until he slumps and buries his face into his knees.

“I should’ve stayed a dragon,” he says. “They would’ve liked that.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.”

“Everyone dead.”

He says nothing. Hugs his knees a little closer.

“I don’t know how to be a man.”

“I don’t know how to be a woman.”

That causes him to pause, turn his head, stare.

“But you’re so good at it?”

“I just stopped trying to be a man.”

He looks at the water, at the bandages on his arm. Heaves a deep breath.

“Help me up?” he asks, and she does.

In the ruins of Castle Town there are two graves, a knight and princess, side by side. They tried and tried and failed. Silent Princesses bloom there in spring.

In Hateno a boy studies the properties of winterwing butterflies and a girl returns from travel, brings home a small bouquet of dandelions for on the table. You could never call them corpses.