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Under a bruised and angry sky, two white-haired Sheikah scholars hurried up the slopes of the Great Plateau, bearing a laden stretcher between them. The military escort that traveled with them from the battlegrounds of Ash Swamp and Blatchery Plain had split off below the mountain's rise, heading back across the fields to aid civilian refugees who sought shelter on the Plateau, and Doctors Robbie and Purah were left to make the final leg of their journey alone, save for their burden.
As they reached the crest of the cliff before the Shrine of Resurrection, they could hear the rumbling of distant, mechanical bombardment, and see the fires that burned across Hyrule - and above it all, the dark storm of Calamity that hung over the castle. They paused there a moment to catch their breath, hardly daring to stop, trying desperately not to let the day's horrors sink in as they turned and saw each others' faces.
The shorter of the two, Purah, spun away from the grim vista and rubbed the fog from her glasses with a huff. She picked up one end of the stretcher again, and the two continued their trek towards a cave entrance set into the mountainside nearby, stumbling inside and down a flight of long-decayed stairs to land at the Shrine's door. Dust sifted from the root-laced ceiling above, jarred by their passage and the faraway tremors that shook Hyrule's core.
While her taller companion busied himself checking that the occupant of their stretcher still had a pulse, Purah grabbed the Sheikah Slate from her hip and stepped up to the door at the end of the tunnel, fumbling with the glowing device. The door responded to the Slate’s presence after a breathless moment, and slid groaning apart in long blocks of stone. The pallbearers hastened inside, through an antechamber and a second slowly opening door, and set down their burden just inside, where the corridor widened into a cavernous room with a lone basin in the center.
Still clutching the Slate that a grave and bloodstained Princess Zelda had pressed into her hands hours before, Purah set it in its pedestal, and started up the interface for the Shrine's ancient furnaces and cisterns. Robbie stepped in to take a look as she waved at him pointedly, and she turned her attention to their patient.
Link's pulse was so faint that she wasn't certain it existed at all, but Robbie had given her a thumbs up as he moved over, so they still had a little time. She quickly worked to remove tunic, sarashi, trousers and boots, before Robbie returned to help her lift the body and lay it in the empty basin, trying to jostle it as little as possible. The charred remnants of the Champion's finely embroidered outer tunic, soaked through with half-dried blood and grime, had to be cut away - but she folded and stowed its pieces in her bag nonetheless. Her sister would want to see it, she figured, a talisman to keep hope alive if nothing else-
She was pulled from her thoughts by a pained hiss from Robbie. He was kneeling over the basin, with one side of his sensitive headset to the Champion's chest, and as he stood up and glanced at her, his face - and the room's utter silence - said all she needed to know. After coming so far, they were closer to losing their patient than ever.
As Purah stepped back over to the pedestal and began to eloquently curse the Slate’s user interface, Robbie pulled down a set of alien-looking medical instruments from a compartment in the hood that hung above the basin, rifling through them. The research team had determined their function some weeks earlier, thanks to a breakthrough in translation by Zelda. Most important right now were a mask of ancient rubber, shaped to fit over the patient's lower jaw and nose to facilitate breathing, and two handheld, engraved plates - devices that could start a body's heart again once stopped, or so the notes Zelda had left with them suggested.
After lowering the mask that hung on a flexible pipe from the basin's hood, fitting it to Link's face, and hearing the faint push and pull of air begin as Purah activated its systems, Robbie gave the plates an experimental tap together, and jumped at the bright current of energy that sparked between them. He cautiously lowered them to the lifeless body in the basin, pressing them carefully to its chest, then harder, switching on the current and counting under his breath before pulling away as the scrawled translation notes suggested. After a few more tries, he stepped back, frowning. Purah hurried over from where she’d been calibrating the Slate and knelt down to see.
“Heart isn’t starting.”
Purah’s face was drawn with worry as she looked up half a minute later, after attempting to resume compressions on the corpse's gory chest, as she’d been doing on and off throughout their journey to the Shrine. It was a lost cause, the soldiers had told her - even the singular fairy they’d managed to find along the route had said as much, when their magic failed against the malice that tainted the hero's wounds - but she wouldn’t give in.
Twice already Link's heartbeat had paused along their journey, and twice the Sheikah had brought it back through sheer persistence, manually stirring the Champion's blood and breath into temporary motion again. They weren't about to lose now.
“Hit it again.”
Robbie focused his goggles and obliged. Again and again they tried, alternating pace with the ancient technology and the pressure of hands, working in taut wordlessness as the minutes dragged on, beyond all reasonable hope of revival. Until, finally, the sparks of cerulean energy that leapt from the plates jolted - and caught, holding fast to the artificial pulse they'd induced as the Champion's heart stirred awake once more.
The air in the room sang just beyond hearing, and the hairs on their arms stood on end. Alchemical reaction or divine intervention, it was the kind of defiance of Death they'd only encountered in legend, and both scientists froze in a moment of awe.
A shallow pulse stuttered and quickened in the silence, then settled into a slow, deliberate rhythm. A horrible, choking gasp followed, before resolving into equally shallow, rasping breaths that echoed through the mask. The two cheered quietly and almost high-fived, but caught themselves before shocking each other. Purah cleared her throat and stepped away to fiddle with the Slate, and they watched anxiously as warm, glowing blue waters poured into the basin from somewhere deep below.
The waters moved eerily with the heartbeat in the reanimated body, up and down, as though they flowed with the blood in its veins. The malice-poisoned blood that had swirled into the basin drained away as healing liquid cycled through it and the Champion’s surface wounds began to close, leaving the waters clear and bright.
The body had been still for too long, and remained barely breathing, eyes closed, as Purah pushed clumps of blood-soaked hair away from Link’s cold, inert face. But life had returned, or so the Sheikah dared hope. Now that their efforts were less likely to be in vain, they rolled up their sleeves and turned to the grueling task of debridement - cutting away the tissue that had been damaged beyond repair, salvaging what they could to stitch back together.
A squadron of corrupted Guardians had targeted the Champion's heart, and though most of the blasts had been narrowly dodged, leaving serious but shallow burns stretching across Link’s torso from shoulder to hip, the worst and last - the one that had doomed the hero - had nearly found its mark. It had been a white-hot explosion that ripped and burned deep into the flesh, far closer to striking true than the others, as its target slowed and staggered from exhaustion and too many near misses.
That final strike angled from the Champion’s right collarbone, down across the chest to the lower left abdomen, as the hero had narrowly turned aside to avoid being pierced through the heart. The energy blast had broken multiple ribs, ripped deep wounds across the stomach, and left the breasts in tatters, layers of tissue torn away almost completely from the chest wall. Remnants of the softer tissues, that hadn’t been burned through or tainted with malice, were already turning necrotic after the long journey from Ash Swamp. And the compressions they'd performed over and over, in a desperate bid to keep the fragile circulatory system going, had only further crushed flesh and fractured ribs until they were sickeningly concave.
Purah found herself wondering as she worked, only slightly light-headed from stress and exhaustion, if Link would someday wake up hollow-chested and wracked with pain, and hate them for it. For the taut and painful scarring that would close over those raw, jagged patches of exposed and charred flesh that had been torn across chest, stomach, back, and arms alike, and even crawled up the side of the jaw. For the ridges where broken ribs had been pieced back together, and the slashes that had been sewn up where guts were spilling out...
For the way the Guardians and Divine Beasts of Hyrule, the mechanical pride of the Sheikah, had been twisted to destroy everything they were supposed to protect.
It was the Sheikah’s fault this had come to pass, and for all their cleverness they couldn’t make it right, but she steadied her hand on the scalpel and swore to Hylia above that she would salvage as much as she could.
There was nothing they could do, though, to save the shape of the Champion’s old body, no time or resources for reconstruction or skin grafts. They did all that was possible to preserve what remained, and hoped it would be enough for survival. The heartbeat that pulsed in time with the glowing waters faded the longer they spent on surgery. According to the ancient texts, they needed to stabilize and submerge the patient as quickly as possible for the Shrine's revitalizing power to take effect.
And so they washed away the blood and put the swordsman under, and finally allowed themselves to breathe. Robbie gagged as the clinical detachment faded and the nausea hit him - despite his ever-steady hands, he’d never been good at coping with the grim realities of doctoring - and Purah held him tight and let her own mind go far away, while they breathed, in and out, to the rhythmically pulsing lights of the now enclosed cradle that held their friend, and the humming that resonated in the cave around them. A sepulchre, or a womb - only time would tell which it truly was.
They called upon their ancestors and gods with prayers of old, for all the science in the world might not mend a sundered soul; the technology they’d already called upon was doing all it could. They sealed the Shrine’s great doors in silence, but not before leaving grave goods - a set of clean but well-worn clothing from Link’s supply bags, with the blue earrings and hair tie the Champion had favored, tucked into chests with talismans of protection and messages scrawled on scavenged paper. The Shrine would be a tomb for a long time yet, but one day the hero who slept within it would rise again.
They would live to see that day, Purah and Robbie swore to the sky outside, as they held onto each other with bloodstained hands. They had to believe it would come to pass.
Until then, the Sheikah would move on, persist against the odds as they always did. They would never let the memories fade, and never forget what lay hidden under the mountain - their shattered hero, embalmed and laid to rest, the last hope of Hyrule.