“Are you a cultivator?” “No,” she says, steadily. “This one doesn’t possess the core for it.” She pauses and raises her eyes to his, so boldly he finds it a little startling. “I believe that I can be of use to the Jiang sect in spite of that, and I have brought a gift to prove it. May I show you?” Fully intrigued now, Jiang Cheng nods. The girl unslings the bundle from her back, unties a couple of straps, and unrolls it on the floor in a smooth motion. Jiang Cheng is on his feet before he even consciously realizes it’s happened, and the reaction murmurs out through the hall. There, on a blanket that belongs on the back of a horse, are five Wen cultivator swords, offered to him by a girl who looks like the word “bumpkin” was invented specifically for her. What the fuck. “Where did you get those?” he asks, instead of asking “What the fuck?” out loud, because that would be unbecoming of his status as sect leader. The girl meets his eyes again, lifts her chin, and says simply, “I killed the men who carried them.” Or: Fan Dingxiang cultivates the swole path. Jiang Cheng doesn't know how to handle that.

“I haven’t…” she starts, watches his blue eyes narrowed in concern and it’s distracting, everything’s distracting. “I haven’t had a body in a hundred years,” Zelda manages, and shrugs one shoulder, as if to say what can you do? “I was Hylia, mostly, and a little bit me, but I wasn’t a person. I was the sun and the wind and the water and the dirt and I was in a prison and I was the prison. I feel like I’m blindfolded, now, without that sense of the world, but also everything is so bright and loud and close and I hardly know how I’m managing to speak to you when my skin is feeling wind for the first time in a century. It’s…” she trails off, her words failing her, which is infuriating because she’s a scholar, she’s good at words. “It’s a lot,” she finishes awkwardly, for lack of anything better to say. Or: Learning to be a person again, after the end.