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ginneke · 1 year

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already too late (if we arrive at all) - #2

we've got some exposition & lore coming up this time, whoo! but only a little bit. got to leave some for later.

should have mentioned last time -- the title of this fic/collection is from a Poets of the Fall song, "War". I rate this band so highly. their lyrics truly are poetry.

anyway. on to the fic.

Pairing: Revalink

Rating: T

(A soulmate AU, sort of.)

-- Prompt #2: you can do better than this --

The thing is this: these days, soulmarks are something of an oddity in Hyrule. The earliest recorded story claims they were a gift from the Goddess, to help fated lovers find each other – and to help them use the time they had together wisely. Whatever the truth of it, this much is known: they are most commonly found among the Hylians and Sheikah; seldom encountered among Gerudo and Zora; a mere peculiarity among the Gorons.

And never spoken of in the Rito histories.

Their only source of information regarding the marks stems from their Hylian neighbours, whose own knowledge of the myth is limited: nobody in Tabantha Village had been the subject of a soulmark in quite some time.

It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened anymore, they said.

So, Revali would argue – if indeed he was ever compelled to defend his purely scientific curiosity, which frankly needed no defending at all and would merely indicate unspeakable rudeness on the part of his hypothetical interrogator – so, it was only natural that he might hold some curiosity about the marks, and what they were supposed to mean. An idle interest, that was all, in—

“—just the most ridiculous, vacuous notion imaginable; I’m sure one could divine more accurate fortunes from a river-snail’s slime.”

Well. That.

“…Evocative,” Urbosa says, a glint of emotion Revali can’t decipher in her eyes. “Do go on.”

Her words have the weight of a trap behind them and, almost too late, Revali recalls the whispers. It’s enough to make him realise the comparative wisdom - for once - of silence.

“No?” Urbosa probes, and when Revali stays stubbornly silent she just smiles, and the quirk of her blue-painted mouth is a shimmer of mirage on the horizon, the curling danger of desert heat. “Should I take a guess, hmm?”

Mipha, who’d been looking down the path in hopes of seeing any of their fellow Champions approaching—not that it was likely; the three of them were all far too early to arrive at the proposed meeting-place, and would no doubt have endured in silence if not for Revali’s refusal to let the opportunity for answers pass him by—well, anyway, Mipha chooses that moment to look back at them with the same sharp huff of disapproval that Revali heard from her, and had endeavoured to ignore, at that dismal attempt at ceremony earlier. Of course she must have steel, to be chosen as a Champion, but still it takes him aback to be confronted by it so.

“Of all people,” says Mipha in that mild, reproachful voice of hers, “I would have thought you might speak of the marks with more respect, Lady Urbosa.”

Urbosa tips her head on one side — a remarkably Rito gesture, which makes Revali wonder if she’d once had friends among his tribe. She eyes Mipha, considering. “My apologies,” she says, in a voice just this side of sincere; “I forget how seriously the Zora regard these things.”

Revali glances between them. The Zora are strange, he reflects. In years, it’s possible that the Zora Princess is even Urbosa’s elder; yet in terms of lifespan, she’s far closer to his own peer. (In maturity, she surpasses them all: he’d think it the weight of a crown, yet their appointed leader is far from Mipha’s equal in that regard.)

And though Urbosa could overpower her with but a click of her fingers, Mipha stands firm and unyielding: allies, but not yet friends.

The same goes for all of them — except perhaps for Daruk, who seems to regard strangers as a friend he hasn’t met yet. But Daruk isn’t here, and after earlier, Revali is inclined to think of that as a good thing.

Instead, while Urbosa’s attention is drawn away by Mipha’s intercession, Revali cannot help but let his gaze dart down to the twist of flowers that ring a washed-out grey band around the Gerudo chieftain’s lower leg.

Brazenly brave of her to walk into Hyrule Castle with a proclamation inked upon her skin for all to see: that she, Urbosa — not King Rhoam — had been the soul-marked intended of the late, beloved Queen. He hadn’t heard of it until a day ago. It was something which had dominated whispers in certain quarters — whispers far more interesting than those he’d heard about other parties — and a question he’d quite forgotten to ask.

It had made him wonder…

“Do you… know somebody with a soulmark?” asks Mipha, giving up on playing lookout and walking across to where Revali is rooted to the spot, determined not to move lest he somehow betray his secret.

Something like that. He tells her so, as curtly as he can muster. Mipha looks at him like she can see straight through him regardless.

“Still,” she says, softly, “it is peculiar… The marks are so rare, these days, and yet…”

She shares a meaningful look with Urbosa, and doesn’t seem at all willing to give up her advantage just yet.

…He wonders. Even he knows that the marks are rare, and yet they’re the only thing she might be talking about. So. Something about the marks. Something about the Champions. Urbosa, obviously. As for the other…s, it definitely isn’t Mipha: none of her adornments are designed to conceal a soulmark, her red and cream scales unmarred by fate’s brand. It’s unlikely to be Daruk on probability alone, since the marks are supposedly so rare among Gorons. Which leaves the most predictable of possible soulbonds in all of the kingdom, trite and underwhelming.

The princess and her knight, of course. He starts to say it out loud, but trails off mid-sentence; Mipha is shaking her head with a look of utmost alarm on her face, her hands twisting in a plea for silence. Revali frowns.

“Not her, no,” Urbosa says in a low voice, “and you’d do well not to poke that courser hive. Particularly not here.”

Dinraal’s accursed flames, but Revali detests the doublespeak of Hyrule’s court and the knots it makes of people’s tongues.

(Much later on, he’ll realise — they didn’t deny that Link has a mark. The thought leaves him irritated. Fate really does favour that dull-witted knight.)

“Shouldn’t they be here by now?” Mipha says abruptly. She’s taken the opportunity to turn back to the path, and a faint crease of concern twists the corner of her mouth. “…I wonder if something has happened.”

If Revali were to hazard a guess, Hyrule’s princess is licking her wounds, her knight’s presence is salting them, and Daruk… Daruk is probably just lost.

“I’m sure everything is just fine,” Urbosa says, and there’s no spark of danger in her smile now. Only a languid warmth like she’s decided that Mipha and Revali are people she approves of.

Mipha shakes her head and turns back to him. “…How long?”

What.

She looks at him with mild reproach, waiting for an answer, and Revali rustles his feathers in annoyance, snaps out a defensive, “What?”

She explains, in more detail than he’s entirely ready to take in. He does his best to keep up anyway. Marks that unravel from gold to grey, threads that join souls together regardless of whether they’ve met before.

Threads that guarantee at least an encounter, it’s said, though it’s up to you to recognise them and Mipha can’t say how that works.

Threads that measure out the span of years allotted to your fated person.

Revali hadn’t known that. His wing twitches towards the wrapping that hides his soulmark from the world. How would one measure such a thing?

She hesitates. “…I can try,” she says, sounding unsure, uncertain, the steely confidence with which she’d faced down Urbosa draining away. “Or - a sage could say with more certainty, or — well, it’s said came from the Goddess Hylia originally, so maybe Princess Zelda…”

Revali thinks of what Urbosa said — best not poke that courser hive — and comes to a conclusion. Of the remaining options, Mipha’s the only person on that list who has earned his trust.

Mipha makes a soft noise of confusion as Revali gingerly pulls the covering away, exposing his soulmark to another’s eyes for the first time since he was young and childish and didn’t know better.

“…Oh.”

She doesn’t say anything else for a long time. It leaves Revali twitchy with agitation. “Well?” he snaps, eventually, and Mipha shakes herself out of her stupor.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the words are a shock of cold against his auricles, creeping inside his head and draining slowly down into the hollows of his bones. Sorry — sorry for what? “I — I’m really not sure if I’m reading this well, but… I think it’s a century and a half? Maybe closer to two… The twists are so close together, I’m afraid I can’t really see them clearly, but…”

“Are you sure?”

She hesitates for a long while before saying, “…Yes.”

It narrows some things down. It leaves some things far more unsatisfactorily done, and casts a shadow over his mood through the rest of the day.

In almost five years, the only thing Revali has ever had from his supposed soulmate is silence.

—

You see, there’s been no suggestion in the long history of the Rito that any of them have ever been possessed of a soulmark: not the Cuho, nor the Torpa, nor any one of the wandering clans have ever mentioned such a thing; and the rarer the event, the more likely it would be to be commemorated in song and passed down with fine-tuned precision, sung to chicks in their eggs when their hatching was still far from certain.

Indeed, not even the ancient sage and her trickster prince were marked by destiny’s strings, the way Hylians so often were, and they are at the heart of several songs, passed on through generations.

So when an orphan fledgling — on a date far too close to the archery contest in which he’d hoped, at long last, to prove himself the victor — finds the indignity of his adult tailfeathers finally growing in marked, similarly, by the presence of a golden band forming against the grey of his scutes, it’s… beyond strange.

Nobody knows what to make of it.

Least of all Revali.

Early curiosity doesn’t last for long. Soon the mark is nothing but a silent brand, and he can only wonder if some day there might be an answer. Until then he hides it from sight, and waits.

And waits.

And soon he grows tired of waiting.