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The world is light and sound, music and colour -- motion, perpetual motion, and she is the still eye at its centre. Time passes in waves and spirals and fathomless turns, and as one, each second slides smoothly over her. She sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, and all turns around her in the never-ending peaceful silence of the temple that has become her home.
As a spirit, a sword, a synthetic thing made at the goddess' hands, she does not dream. There is only nothingness, and something hollow all within her like trees being worn bare by wind. Impressions flutter by at her edges, brief blurs that leave her without anything to analyse, and it is only in this that she knows all of her creator's work has not come undone, and that the world cut out from the sharpness of her blade stands yet. Eternity turns, and she is its axis.
All life breathes. She does not. No heart to beat within her chest, no lungs to draw air, no limbs to stir, and she might as well be dead to it, all of it, in this coma that renders her like purely glittering inorganic stone. The Master Sword is idle and she rests with it like a story at its close. That is all there is for most of it: a slumber without end, like she laid out in clear glass words so very long ago.
But sometimes, sometimes, there is something more.
A hand, fingers that she remembers the bones of more clearly than anything else, a palm curved as if made for her shape, a voice. Always the same voice. Sometimes older, sometimes younger, but the core of it is a note that reverberates all through her like a song.
Master, Master, Master.
She is silence, she is metal, she is cold like the carved-crystal statue she was made to be from her conception, but she is his, and that is forever. She is silent, she is silent, but she'll sing for him yet.
For now she comes alive as if flaring when he draws her forth from her pedestal each time and blazes to the skies that were once and always her home. It is easy to brim over with power and flash forth in blasts of energy when her Master's heart beats strong within his chest and each stroke he delivers is precise and sure, and it is easy to burn away all evil with the holy fires that dwell coiled within her still.
It is easy to find her place between the blades of his shoulders and hang there as if made to fit and say absolutely nothing at all. He no longer needs her, not like once he did; there are other voices to catch his focus and guide his feet, and those are growing surer with every iteration of his legendary self that walks straight into the teeth of evil. There is no need for her probabilities or odds, even if she calculates them still, and holds them rattling inside her head with each forward leap that he makes.
Her Masters, her not-Masters, these boys who wear his hands and heart and face -- they are each as good as ever he was, the brightness of their spirits undimmed by the thousands upon thousands of years that pass before each is born. The curse of Demise sits weighty on their shoulders, circles in relentlessly time after time, but does not make them choke.
They rise in turn, they burn, they lie to rest. She watches with unblinking eyes that do not ever really wake from slumber, and she smiles, to live their every adventure as a break from never-ending empty never-dreaming. There is happiness in this too as there was in the softness of whispered goodbyes, repeating her place in this cycle time and time again. His hand is home as the sky once was, and to meet him again in each and each and each life, even if he does not remember, will never remember, is more precious and beautiful than she had ever once thought that it might be.
This is where she fits: more than purpose, than duty passed down, this is her place. Scabbard, tunic, chainmail, back. Like a probability, she can calculate it to the decimal and rattle it out with perfect precision, these words that spell out belongs.