-Royal Palace, Kanyou-

Ganondorf knocked a Qin's shield out of the way and beat down on the man with his swords. The sword dented his armor and crushed bone, but could not cut through. The man grunted in pain, but zealously kept fighting. Straining with effort, Ganondorf shoved a fist into the man's armored chest and released a burst of flame. The small explosion sent the man flying back, and he did not stand back up.

Ganondorf huffed. Sweat poured down his body. His vision grew blurry for brief moments. All around him he saw his fellow Majora were also sweating like rain. They were growing smaller in number quickly now, exhausted as they were in their unrestrained mindset, and even the Fae were not enough. The Fae took the brunt of the battle, true, but the Qin was adaptable. They grouped up on the Fae, used spears and shield to hold them back, and gave ample targets for their archers. The archers coated their arrows in oil, and lit them aflame.

Coated in flaming oil, the Fae had to flee their wooden forms. Fire was not an element, and while they could shape oil as easily as water, touching it would expose their frail bodies to lethal flame.

Simply the Qin had figured out how to fight Fae much quicker than they had hoped. To make matters worse, their tactics were something foreign to Ganon. Every minute or so Ganon heard a high pitched whistle. As soon as the whistle rung out, another Qin would rush forward at him while his target would flee. At first Ganon thought this meant they were winning as the Qin fled.

How wrong he was. The Qin commander had trained his formation well. Every whistle meant for half of his men to rush forward into the fray while the other half stepped back to take a breather. So while the Majora grew exhausted, the Qin did not. Ganon had picked up on it too late.

Ganon smiled gleefully. If he lived this day, he wanted to share a drink with the Qin commander. He had completely underestimated the man. It was a worthy battle.

Ganon saw another shape charge forward, and expected another warrior to charge him, but something felt off. No whistle blew. And as the shape stepped into the clear he realized it was but a young boy... a child. Ganon lowered his blades, however the boy was not watching where he was going, as his attention was behind him, and ran face first into Ganon. The boy fell on his butt, and was about to give Ganon a tongue lashing, but gasped in fear. Ganon breathed heavily, his red eyes poured down through the horrific mask, his flaming hair flowed tangled down his back, his skin was black, and his large swords were jagged. To the child, Ganon was the visual depiction of a demon.

"Prince Kyou!?" Ganon heard the Qin commander yell. The commander tried to rally his nearby men to go after the boy. Ganon could only raise an eyebrow. This was the prince? This youngling that was about to wet himself?

Ganon grabbed the boy by the shoulder. The boy found his strength and resisted, but he was weak.

"Stay back..." The boy whispered. "Stay away! You mongrels, barbarians! You dare to touch a king!?"

Ganon grabbed the boy's jaw tightly while holding him to himself. It was at this point the boy got the message and stopped screaming. The Qin commander stopped moving at the silent threat to his prince, and all around the battle slowly ended. The Qin did not move, lest the Majora leader kill their king. In turn the Majora took a moment to breath. They were on the verge of collapse.

"Release him." Zelda forced herself through the crowd into the open. "He is my problem."

"Princess?!" The Qin commander stammered in shock. His eyes drifted in the distance toward Midna's barely conceivable corpse, but it was still there.

Ganon kept his tongue, and simply nodded. This was her domain, her home. He would respect his role as guest and be at least somewhat compliant. It grated at him, but she had respected his home. He would do the same. He released Kyou.

Kyou tried to make a run for it, but Zelda was quicker than him this time. She punched him solidly in the face.

"Kyou." Zelda said. "You are nothing more than a fool. A fool who believes that the fortune one is born with equates to their total value. A fool like you, who can't even see the people beneath his feet, is unworthy of king."

Kyou stumbled and tried to fight back, but it was immediately apparent how different they were. Kyou was a nine-year old boy who had been spoon fed his whole life to believe he was special, that he was better than the humans beneath his feet. He had maids, butlers, guards, servants at his every command and come a few years he would have concubines and wives and the kingdom might have been his without him ever once having to lift a finger. Zelda was a twelve-year old girl who had been hostage in a hostile land, beaten to within an inch of her life on a regular basis, starved, betrayed by the people who should have loved her most, and survived through strength of will and cunning while fighting dogs for scraps and stealing. Even with her mind almost gone and no hope in her life, some shred held on until finally hope found her, and she refused to let go of that hope. She hadn't then, and she wouldn't now.

"What kind of warped education did you receive, Kyou?! The people are not as simple as you think! Nor are we, as royals, so much loved as we would like." Zelda briefly glanced to Link. "While you were staring at your throne and the heavens you believed you sat on, you lost sight of the people. You know only how to trample them! You know nothing of it! You know nothing of the people!"

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Desperate, Kyou grabbed a sword lying on the ground. He swung at Zelda. She leaned back enough to avoid being hurt, but his wild slash still cut her stomach. It was a shallow cut, she barely felt it. Instead of flinching she reached in and stabbed him clean through his arm.

Kyou screamed bloody murder and fell clutching his bleeding arm. "M-my arm! I'm bleeding!"

"... so what? Its red. So many people have died spilling the same blood, all because of you. The very fact that you cannot see that is why you are alone. I have an army at my back. The royal guards defended you, but now are merely watching. Your very chancellor has left you behind. But do you see now? Can you comprehend pain?"

"YOU BITCH! YOU WILL NEVER GET AWAY WITH THIS, YOU HALF-BREED, BORN FROM A WHORE WOMA-" Zelda hit him in the face so hard his jaw dislocated.

Before, she had restrained herself to see if he could give some proper answer, to see if he was remotely repentant. But to hear him refer to her mother...

Zelda said ominously, raising a fist above his head as she lifted him up by his hair, "Kyou, allow me to teach you the people's pain..." She pummeled into his face.

None could say how long it lasted. How many times she beat her fists into his face. Ganon watched stoically. At most he felt the girl was a bit unhinged as when the boy mentioned her mother the look in her eye was... not right. Link felt physically ill as the blows rained down and blood splattered from the boy's lips. The Majora did not move, the Fae hardly cared, and the Royal Guard, though wanting to defend their prince, would not attack their princess to do so.

"Can you feel it?" Zelda demanded angrily. "Can you feel pain? Can you begin to understand what you have done? You murdered an innocent girl thinking she was me. You slaughtered entire villages you should have sworn to protect to chase after my image. You burned crops that would have fed the hungry. You turned our own army into traitors. You nearly made brother to fight brother in a civil war! You murdered our servants in the palace, and put our royal guard in a position to have to choose between us! You have nearly given Ketsu the throne, because whether you realize it or not you are nothing but a puppet to him! If not Ketsu, then Ryo would have taken the throne from both of you, easily! In the instability you have caused, Qin would have been torn apart by the surrounding kingdoms, the vengeance of the Majora would have been meted out on innocent people-" Ganon nodded grimly. "And at the end of it all the only thing you can think about is a chair and one girl!"

Zelda would have continued to beat him angrily in the face, but a hand grabbed hold of her wrist in mid-swing. She snarled at whoever it was, and saw it was Link. She stopped. Something about him made her stop.

He was afraid... He was afraid of her.

"Look at your hands." Link whispered. "If you keep going you may kill him."

Zelda glanced at her fist in his grip. Her knuckles were bloody and the skin was torn open. Odd, she didn't feel a thing. She didn't feel the cut on her stomach; she didn't feel how bruised and bloodied her hands were.

"So what?" She whispered back harshly. "What do you care? You're just here for revenge."

"You're right. I did. But I've found revenge... isn't all it's cracked up to be. I think enough blood has been spilled by all of this, don't you think?" Link replied. "Look at him. You've won."

Zelda looked at Kyou. Kyou's face was swollen beyond recognition. His eyes were sealed shut by the inflammation, but tears of pain still poured from his eyes. He shook violently and whimpered apologies to whatever would listen with a dislocated jaw. His arm was still bleeding. He hadn't bled out because the sword still lodged in it was keeping the blood from flowing freely, but it would need to be tended to immediately.

He was right. If she hit him perhaps even one more time, she might crack his skull and kill him.

Zelda recognized the feeling inside her, this numbness. It kept her from feeling pain herself. It was something she had shoved away, so she should be able to feel some pain, but she didn't. She also knew the cause. It happened when her mother was brought to mind or mentioned.

"Despite how sick I feel from having to say this: I agree with the boy." Ganon said. ("Hey!" Link barked.) "Whatever your brother did, he is still royal blood. That has value. If you want to execute him, if you want to spare him, it's up to you. But the middle of a road is not the place for it in a fit of anger when you have already won. It demeans both of you. A proper show of power is also power over yourself."

Zelda closed her eyes. They were right. Dindamn them, they were right. She knew it. Having to admit it was hard, but she would anyway. The madness had taken hold briefly, and she knew if she was in her right mind she wouldn't have gone this far to begin with.

Zelda stood. She looked to the Qin commander. "Will you contest my return to the throne now that the prince is defeated?"

The man shook his head.

"Good. Then stand down. I want this rebellion to end with the fewest deaths possible, so I will spare your lives."

"You will?" The royal guard wondered. They whispered amongst themselves and wanted to cry in relief. They had feared their lives were forfeit.

"I will want to speak with you later, as you bear responsibility for them." Zelda told the commander of the royal guard. The man gulped, but bowed and saluted himself.

The Royal guard as a whole dropped their weapons. In turn Ganon sheathed his own, and the Majora followed his example. Link sighed in relief. "It's over."

"Not quite... Someone take Kyou to the doctors, and place him under armed guard. He is under house arrest." Zelda replied. She cast her eyes toward the distance. "Elder, how fast can you run?"

"Fast. Why?"

"Then let's go! Quick as you can! We have not a moment to lose!" Zelda ran down the road away from the palace. Confused, Elder followed, picked her up, and ran as her steed temporarily.

This left Ganon, Link, and everyone else standing there wondering what to do with themselves. The Qin commander gulped nervously at the barbarian and the walking tree-horse-man-things.

"So..." The Qin commander muttered. "Um... Who are you?"

"Best we attend to the wounded." Ganon cut him off. Ganon barked orders to his people in their language, and they set to work doing what they could. They inspected the living and dead to set to account who they could save. Ganon asked, "Do you have enough doctors? How do they treat outsiders?"

"Right. Um... normally they wouldn't want to associate with enemies, but I think technically you're allies now... since Zelda has taken the throne."

Ganon stared at him.

The man took a step back nervously. "Why don't I go fetch them?"

"Yes... Why don't you do that?" He acknowledged.

The man raced away. The other Royal guard tended to the wounded as best they could. However there was still a great deal of tension in the air. Both sides were relieved it was over, but it was still... odd... being next to people who had just been trying to kill you just minutes ago.

"Awkward..." Link whispered.

"Mmhmmm." Ganon grunted. "Why don't you make yourself useful and let everyone know they can stop stabbing each other?"

"Oh! Shit!" Link raced off to the palace.