if i die tomorrow - permanent hiatus

tunic

     I found myself standing alone in a battlefield.

     The grass was torn, overturned by blade on blade, splattered with pools of fresh blood. The little bit that was left hardly seemed to have enough strength to lift its wilted face to the dim sun. Dead, as this place was, as the world was.

     Almost instinctively I reached back to my sword, only to find it gone.

     Fear rose like bile in my throat. A battlefield. Defenseless. 

     A wisp of something floated by my face. I stared at it, dumbfound, as the blue scrap of cloth flew through the ashes as though it was a leaf dancing, not quite dead, not quite alive, carried by a nonexistent breeze.

     Then another whisked by, between my arm and my side, slipping through the sliver of space as though determined not to touch me. Then another, at the nape of my neck.

     Soon the air was a deluge of royal blue cloth, bloodstained, the frayed edges singed black as though it had been burnt. My heart hammering, I walked with them, then I was running, running through the storm of what once I had worn with such pride, one hand outstretched to blindly grab at what I knew I would never catch.

     With each shred of myself disappearing over the distance, I ran faster, fear turning to panic, as though I could reach where they were heading for, bring them back. Somehow put it back together, put everything back together.

     Then a pair of amber eyes shone out of the mist of blue and it suddenly cleared, the pieces curling up into blacked ash and falling to my feet like a gentle shower. 

     Mipha was gazing at a point above my head, cradling pieces of a broken Lightscale Trident, her eyes glassy and flat. 

     She was wearing my Champion's Tunic. It hung off her like a loose rag. 

     Before I could do more than just stare, she faded away, to be replaced by Urbosa, holding her Scimitar of the Seven, the blade cracking and falling to pieces on the ravaged dirt. My Champion's Tunic hugged her figure, like chains wrapped around her.

     Then she was gone, too. I wanted to call out, scream, move, anything, but my entire body was frozen, whether in horror or shock or the tide rearing up yet again, after so long of running away, to swallow me, I could not say.

     The Champion's Tunic billowed around Revali. Broken arrowheads littered around his feet, the Great Eagle bow reduced to splintered shreds of wood. 

     It gripped Daruk like a stranglehold. His Boulder Breaker was shattered, deep cracks like slender spiderwebs running along its unbreakable edges. 

     None of them looked at me. None of them acknowledged my presence.

     Then she was there, and I knew, I had been expecting this, but it hurt nonetheless. It hurt more than I had been expecting.

     She wasn't wearing what I had thrown away all those weeks ago. She was holding it in her arms, her green eyes lingering on the careful stitches, tracing the shape that she herself had inked in.

     "The bastard Hero." Her voice was so achingly familiar, and yet so irretrievably alien. "A stained child destined to save a Kingdom of purity."

     Suddenly I saw her then, with eyes unclouded by affection. Suddenly I saw her as just another one of those nobles, just another person to look at me down their noses, call me a bastard, dirty blood running in my veins. Because wasn't that what she was, what she was born to be?

     No. No. I had seen her. I had seen who she was. 

     Yet, I couldn't hold on, no matter how hard I tried. 

     And then she was gone. 

     I was suspended in an ocean of darkness, waveless, currentless, stillness settling on my skin like a fine sheet of frost. In front of me was a face, a face that I recognized, dimly.

     Sadie?

     I had no time to react. She moved lightning fast, a silver blur in her hands as she struck my face, nothing but blankness in her dead eyes, the eyes that had once guided me through my journey, the eyes that had pulled me back from madness.

     I bit my lip hard on a shout, forcing myself slowly raising my hands to touch the gash she had left on me. My fingertips were sticky with blood. It traced down my cheeks, my wrist. 

     Then she looked me in the eyes, the knife, dripping with blood, held between her teeth.

     She wasn't Sadie.

     I saw nothing I knew there.

     The knife. It was vaguely familiar, as though I should have known its slender edge, the delicate curve of the hilt, but didn't. 

     "Remember me." She said, her words clear and cold despite the blade wedged in her mouth. "Remember me when you return."

     Then a wave of darkness closed over my head and I saw no more.

A/N: Keep the knife in mind.