Fan Fiction Friday: Within the Darkness – Chapter One
Posted on June 24 2022 by Kat Vadam
Chapter One: Into the Crypt
There are ghosts down here. Dark spirits and monsters. Forgotten battles of the dead and the damned. Silence that echoes through barren halls and stilled hearts. Down here, we are buried. Down here, we are lost.
Down here, we cannot speak.
Souls of history that the kings of annals would rather forget, condemned to fight as demons and malice only written in tales you tell to your children, dark tales of history. We fought you. We died by your hands. We had names. But your history will never remember them.
Our killers still serve you, people of the White Goddess, tasked to Her protection from birth. You do not fear the darkness, for in it, Her shadows lie. A certain sense of relief lies for you within the blood of Her soldiers, for they are bound to those She favored, and those She bore to carry on Her legacy. They take an oath to protect you, by the very lives they live.
Down here, we long for the light, but She is eternal, and from our last breaths, we were consumed.
Here we lie, sent to die.
I remember the first time I stepped foot in these dark halls. Winter of my eighth year had only just begun to dust the roads of Castle Town in white, and we had traveled to your homestead to ensure your people were prepared. Royal scientists had predicted brutally cold days ahead, and the homes of Kakariko did not protect well.
You were busy aiding your people, and I was bored of sitting inside. I wanted to get out and explore, to see your history for myself. You had always been so secretive about the history of your people, those eternally bound to my family. I knew you fought in wars, sent by the hands of my father, and I knew those memories brought you great pain when you thought no one was looking. And I knew that there were books in the castle’s library that you said I was not to touch until I was much older, and my father’s crown was to become my own.
But I was young, naïve, and curious. You could only shelter me for so long, I reasoned. Whatever you wanted to hide, I’d eventually have to know. So why not save you whatever fear or shame or hurt you felt and just…find my own answers?
Back then, though, these halls were barren. The traps had faded to age, and the only sound was the whispers of drafts blowing through cracks in stone. I hadn’t meant to find the temple back then, on my quest for answers. I didn’t even know it existed until I tripped over a vine in the graveyard and landed hard against a headstone. When the headstone slid across the grass, revealing a path beneath the ground, though, I did what any headstrong, fearless, stupid princess would do as she was defying the wishes of her guardian: I scurried inside without thought to what waited below.
These memories guide me on my path now as I search for you. You’ve vanished, and I do not know where. Your people need you, and you are nowhere to be found. I need you. With every step I take to dodge swinging blades and ancient, searing beams from unseeing eyes, my heart pounds as I realize, for the first time in my life, I am truly alone.
You brought me from my burning castle after the Gerudo King’s coup into the safety of the shadows. You hid me there. I have trained for these past years to move within the darkness and follow the footsteps of you and your people. But I never thought I would be alone.
A princess should never be alone.
I am no princess anymore.
Please, be down here. I have looked everywhere else. Creatures of evil have once again risen to take this land, and they grow ever stronger as the Goddess’s chosen hero slumbers in the Sacred Realm. I know destiny will call me once he awakens, but until then, I must fight to keep these creatures at bay, and I don’t know how much longer I can do that without you at my side. You alone listened when I said that something was coming, something that would tear my kingdom asunder, and now…
I’m so scared. My hands are steady as you have trained them to be, but my mind clings to memories of that day I first came here to keep me focused as I move. The traps are alive once more. Wicked spirits condemned by my ancestors cry as they sense my presence. Their bones built these horrid walls. They feel betrayed.
Some of them, they say, were your people. Some were my own. Their treachery had been their downfall, but their blood is now on my still hands. Their deaths have been passed down to me.
I know now why you kept your silence back then. Some secrets are best left unspoken.
Featured image by さだぢ.
Kat Vadam is a mother of one, proud cat mom, and wife to someone far nerdier than she could ever hope to be. She also works by day as an analyst, writer, and editor. Here at Zelda Dungeon, she is the Head of Social Media and a copy editor, though she still enjoys occasionally writing things. Someday, she plans on giving up all her worldly possessions to move to the forest and become best friends with a korok. Were it so easy.
