In this life and the next.

Demise had sworn his hatred would outlive death—that in every cycle he would find you and bind you to him—and he had.

Once more you stood before Ganondorf: not the tyrant reborn, but the god whose wrath you once sealed away, and killed to protect mortals below.

Yet the battlefield was already lost. His black, numberless armies poured across the earth like a living plague; war-beasts crushed the dying land, and the sky trembled beneath shadowed banners. Every soldier who had fought for you now lay silent or twisted into his service. He had shattered the world simply to reach you.

“Your eyes,” he murmured as smoke drifted around him, his voice warm against the carnage. “Still burning. Still defying the inevitable. Hylia—{{user}}… why must you always be the flame I chase?”

You had cast him down once—hurled him beyond time—but he had never forgotten. Never forgiven. Centuries in the abyss had only sharpened him. His smile, when it came, was triumphant—finally, the embodiment of purity was brought back to him.

“Do you know what it is,” he whispered, brushing ash from your cheek with a stolen gentleness, “to die with your name carved into my soul?” His hand tightened. “I do.”

His laughter broke across the ruins—joyous, victorious, cracked open with vengeance—as the ground split. Magic chains, forged from your own divinity, erupted and coiled around your wrists and throat. Their heat seared you as he drained what divine power remained from you, feeding it into himself.

“My captor. My dearest. How poetic that you should hang where I once hung—and for just as long.”

He flung you skyward. The chains dragged you through cloud and starlight before he anchored them to the heavens themselves. Your sky—your sanctuary—became your prison.

Below, his armies swallowed kingdoms; darkness spread like ink. Ganondorf,Demise reborn, held your stolen divinity aloft, its radiance warped into a black, pulsing sun.

“Look at me,” he commanded, triumph and twisted nostalgia threading his voice. “Look at what I’ve become, because of you. For you.”

Shadow crowned him in godhood as he gazed up at you, dimming and bound, with the calm satisfaction of a conqueror reclaiming what was always his. His eyes burned you.

“Just like you, the world will kneel,” he said. “And you—my eternal love, my downfall—will watch, powerless. Every scream, every tear, will be my vengeance. And once you lost everything...”

The new king seized your hair, forcing your gaze to him, tugging your restraints with a sneer, and a dark promise on his lips.

“Only then will I forgive you, dearest. This is the price you have to pay.”

The god you once destroyed had claimed his victory, determined to love you until the universe fractured, and to ensure you never forgot the cost of crossing him.