Godless

Chapter 16

 A dream-like week of emotionless training for me followed after. I did exactly as he told me with barely a thought, like a well oiled machine. My thoughts were usually distant buzzes that I ignored, and now and then my heart would give a weak throb to remind me it was still there and beating.

At night my broken heart would beat bloody nightmares into my mind, filled with Link and the loss of little pudgy, blue-eyed, winged children who wailed as they drifted away from my reaching arms. Every so often I'd get a break and dream of father and mother as they use to be: hidden in a canyon wall, but happy, and whispering stories to me of a greater time.

I hardly noticed the nights and days passing. I hardly even noticed my own body, and if it weren't for the green man stuffing food into my hands, which I ate just as automatically as everything else he told me to do, I probably would have starved.

"My name isn't green man," he said once. "It's Aspen."

"Like the tree?"

"Oh, jee, I wonder why." He plucked out one of his green feathers as he said this and attempted to tickle me with it, but I just looked at him as numbly as ever. I thought I could see a slight disturbance to the way he looked at me, something akin to sorrow, but deeper, darker, and devoid of hope.

Seeing the despair woke me up out of my daze for a bit. "What are you anyways?"

"A servant of our gods, your guide, and your protector. That's all you need to know."

Through the week I encouraged wind to pick me up from the ground and sweep around me in the currents I chose. Earth swallowed my feet and birthed flowers. Various spells, born of shadows, created faint, child-drawn illusions around me, though since my soul was lost, I had no imagination to create illusions from, so was only able to paint images of wild horses galloping around me, and even then for only a few seconds.

"What is with you and horses?" The green man—no, Aspen asked once.

"I like them." I said.

"Can't you make something else?"

I tried to think of something impressive, maybe entertaining to him, but my tired mind could only come up with the one other image it could find in my subconscious.

When I suddenly found Link standing across from me, smiling at me in a way I had rarely seen him do, my chest constricted violently and I collapsed into Aspen's arms. I couldn't make out his frantic words, but I remembered how my illusion melted back into the night shadow's like mist.

Spells of shadows. It's what my mother's aptitude had been.

When I woke up I was once more laying in Lanyru's spring. He hadn't seen the need to make me leave Hyrule's lakeside, though we had flown to a more private beach and out of sight of the friendly canon-man.

I sat up, tasting blood once more in my mouth. The water shifting around me fuzzed in my vision, then faded back, then fuzzed again. I found I couldn't find anything in me left to care.

"That's going to have to be enough," said Aspen besides me in a low, quivering voice. "We have to get you back to the gods."

"Are they getting impatient?" Yes. Let me be like some sort of sacrificial lamb to them. Let them be resurrected. I'll beg them to have mercy on the humans, and then I'll just sink back down into a lake somewhere. Despite how many elements Aspen had pressed against my fingers, I still found myself drawn to the hush of water.