Shades of Blue

Numb

Hope is a brittle and broken thing

It denies and begs, wails and lies

Despair is a raw and clawing sting

It rips and drowns, burns and cries

No pain, no fear, no ear-splitting scream

To wake you from this nightmare dream

From the moment the familiar fire of golden light had enveloped him, he felt nothing beyond its burning. All the pain, the terrible, stabbing pain that cut its way through him only moments before was gone. Replaced by this impossibly intense light. Washed out by the sensation of being dragged—physically and metaphorically—away from the horror he had just faced.

Perhaps because he couldn't bear it anymore. Couldn't even begin to comprehend it, not seriously. The moment he did, he would slip off into that growing void which had carved its place out in his chest.

It was too much. It couldn't be true. It couldn't.

Revali couldn't be dead. He couldn't be.

All this pain, all this scratching and dragging his way back into the world, gaining his strength back and taking back the Sword, all to free Revali. He had been clawing his way through the dirt, fighting and fighting and fighting, fleeing his way all across Hyrule trying to regain even a few measly scraps of his strength so he could take up the Sword—forced himself through countless terrible fights, nightmares, endless memories he still hardly understood—took up the Sword again and crossed Hyrule again to reach Rito Village as quickly as Epona could carry him—fought his way up and through Vah Medoh, fought his way to the main terminal, fought just to earn the right to a battle—

All to find out at the last moment, after a battle that scarred him more than he was ready to admit, that Revali was dead. He was dead. Gone. Gone long before Link could ever hope to have reached him.

He had failed incomprehensibly long before this fight even started, failed somewhere in that foggy before, failed before he had failed the final time and sentenced the world to a century of death and destruction.

Had he known what happened? Before his final failure? Did he know in that indeterminate time before the sharpest of pains, what had happened to Revali? Or had he fallen into that river of blue-tinted nothingness without the slightest clue that Revali too had been lost to it?

He didn't know which was worse—to have died without knowing what horrible fate Revali had met, or to have died knowing that he too was gone, and then have that knowledge scrubbed out of him the same as the rest of him had been wiped away.

The light was too blinding for these thoughts. It burned him as much as it blinded him—there was nothing gentle about it, despite the grief in the voice that controlled it.

She was still talking, still saying something—reaching, begging, all but weeping—but her words were lost to him. They bounced around his head and made his ears ring painfully. There was some franticness to her tone, a rapid pace to her words as they came, never ending, and dug into him in their attempt to be heard. To be understood.

But he hardly heard them. The moment she had whisked him away, his mind went utterly blank. Despite having no ability to see himself as she pulled him off—and where was she taking him anyway?—he felt as if he were quite distant from himself, as if he were watching his body from a few feet above it, looking down and watching himself come apart at the seams. Like all of him was being slowly boxed away, tucked into the empty corners of his mind, where nothing mattered or even existed, leaving these weak little wisps of "himself" to simply stare, wide eyed and numb.