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.
"You're dying, Hanna."
I didn't even flinch. I hadn't even thought of that.
I couldn't stop staring into the crystalline surface of the water.
Suddenly, a sick sense of irony rose up in my chest and a dry chuckle rose to my lips.
"No wonder we're all dead. Something as simple and pitiful as heartbreak is our downfall, even though I hardly knew him."
"It wasn't as deadly when your kind mated among themselves." he sighed. "Perhaps it was doomed to fail from the beginning."
He got up, told me he was going to go check the sunlight, leaving me to stare up into the twisting green roof of the spring.
I didn't notice when he came back until he spoke right next to me, though I didn't even flinch.
"Do you know why you have all the keys of your people?"
"Because I'm the last?"
"Yes, and no." he pulled in his legs and leaned his chin on his crossed arms morosely. "The gods were putting all their last hopes in you, and in an attempt to give you the chance of surviving an assault by the goddesses, they gave you all the power they could."
"I hear a 'but' in there."
He sighed. "But there must be balance. Since they couldn't give you any more weakness without ruining the point of giving you all the keys in the first place, they gave the extra weakness to your other half, and so that's why your soul mate was born wingless, powerless, and raised among humans."
"He's not powerless." I heard myself saying, even before I thought it. "He's been blessed by the goddesses. He is their prized child."
"And for good reason, for he is your greatest weakness. The gods thought that, by sneaking their prized hero's soul into a child of their own, they would protect him, despite his weakness, and therefore keep you safe."
I sighed and pulled in my legs as well. The sloshing of the water echoed throughout the chamber.
"This is so stupid."
Aspen said nothing to agree or disagree to that, though I got the sense that, just maybe, he was thinking the exact same thing. Because, really, it was all so stupid. All this pain, all this suffering, all this pointless power, just so I can live to do what? Resurrect some pissed off, loser gods? Start up a war between gods again maybe? Because what else would gods who had their bodies and spirits torn apart do after they were reunited? Run away? Hide?
I had already tried doing that myself and now knew how pointless it was. Even hidden up in that canyon above the valley, my parents hadn't been safe. We had never been truly hidden. Only played with.
And now, to learn that Link really was of my kind, but practically born as human...
"How was he born?" I asked. "My parents were the last."
"Your parents were the last. His were killed even as they hid in the forest. I thought you would have noticed by now that he is an orphan."
I had. Ilia had explained it all to me. Link had been found as a toddler in the forest and raised by a young Rusl as though he were his own.
"Then what of his heart? Why did he fall in love with someone else? And why did you still call him a human?"
"Because by all means, he is human. Raised as he was and deprived of all his divine traits, he might as well be one. The only thing left is that he has a bit more physical strength than your average human and might get awfully ill should you die. He wouldn't even know the reason why, either."
"So, with Midna..."
"He thinks he loves her. I believe he doesn't even have the sense to detect what an imprint feels like. Romance is such a silly, complicated thing, for humans. I don't envy them."
I guess I could understand that. I hadn't even realized I had imprinted until my mother told me, and even then I had only figured out the side-effects of it by reversed reasoning. But that's wasn't what pained me the most and made me clench my eyes against the twang in my chest. It was that the dream I had had of him, so many nights ago, where he had been one of my kind. He could have been born like that.
Link and I, the last of our kind on earth...
And he would grow old and die without ever knowing it.
"He feels and thinks like a human. He is as weak as one. That makes him dangerous, as we had just seen. And now, because of him, we're running out of time."
Taking in a deep breath into my gut, I opened my eyes and took in my surroundings for the first time in what felt like eternity. I could feel the soft coolness of the spring water. I could smell moss and wet rock. I could hear the hush of water on stone and the shifting of feathers as Aspen stood up. I could barely remember the past weak, but I finally recognized the hum of the other elements around me. Aspen had told me there had been thirteen elements that I had been capable of, but we had only scratched the surface of four in the past three weeks: air, earth, shadow, and water.
It made me feel horribly incomplete, like I was running into an exam knowing only the names of the topics I was to be tested on. Something was missing, something felt wrong. Two weeks ago I was human. Now I'm struggling to grasp my newfound, magical abilities. At least I had learned to fly without feeling like a complete gimp.
"We should get going."
I unfolded my legs. "Yeah. Who knows how much time I have left."
And with that, I grasped the hand Aspen offered me and let him pull me to my feet.
"Though I can't shake off the feeling this is all happening way too fast," I said.
"That's because it is, idiot fledgeling."
"It's Hanna."
"Idiot Hanna, then."
At the faint flush of angry heat to my face, the first I had felt in a long while, he just smiled, pleased by my little show of emotion.
"Don't let go of that heart just yet," he said softly. "The numbness might be protecting you from the pain, but it's what's killing you. If we're going to make it, you're going to have to try and be a little human for once and face up to it."
"Sounds gory."
"It probably is, in its own way."
Outside of the spring we spread our wings, one set the emerald green of forest leaves and the other black as a raven's, and lifted off into the fading light of twilight.