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Blinking awake, Ganondorf’s eyes focused slowly, staring up into a darkness so complete it obscured the ceiling high above his head. He lay on a raised slab of stone that seemed more altar than anything, hands at his chest clasping a strange sword’s hilt.
Sitting up was an effort, every bone in his body aching with the movement as he planted two heavily-booted feet on the sandy floor and stood, doubling over when a searing pain tore through his chest. The sword slipped from his hand, clattering against the floor in a clash of steel on stone as he dropped to his knees. He tore off one gauntlet and put a hand over his heart, expecting it to come away bloody, but in the ghastly blue light of the torches he saw only his own dark skin, clean and unmarred by scars. His armor, too, was unblemished, not even a scratch on the black breastplate.
As quickly as it had appeared, the pain was gone, a phantom ache that dissipated in moments. Staggering back to his feet, Ganon stooped to pick up the sword, frowning at the blade as he finally examined it. So long and heavy a lesser man would need two hands to wield it, the blade straight and double-edged — it was an Easterner’s weapon, akin to the ones the mail-clad knights of Hyrule carried. His armor, too, was strange; black plate and gold filigree, heavy and restricting, not suited for the sand and heat of a desert people… and yet it felt made for him. The sword’s hilt fit his hand as though it had been molded to his grip, weight comforting despite its unfamiliarity.
Almost on instinct Ganondorf raised his ungloved hand to his brow, entirely unsurprised to feel something smooth and polished, too warm for the heat to be from only his skin. That he knew well — his crown, amber laid into silver, stone and metal, dignity and strength. As his fingers brushed the shimmering gem a memory flickered in the back of his mind, distant and barely-there, of gentle fingers too slim to be his own working the clasps from his temples.
The memory, his memory, felt like footprints in soft sand: vague, already halfway gone as soon as one lifted their foot from the ground. The idea that the sword was of Hyrulean make, not Gerudo, the sight of royal knights in silver mail, the crown across his brow: they were all mere impressions with no solid foundation, smoothed around the edges with a dreamlike quality.
In the same way he knew everything else, Ganondorf knew where he was. The walls and floor were in deep disrepair, sand filling the cracks which spiderwebbed across the ancient stone. Those torches, eternally burning, flickered and sputtered in a way they never had before as the magic of the Necromanteion weakened.
He didn’t sheath his sword as he approached the ancient tomb’s only entrance, the rasp of stone on stone echoing as the door shuddered open before him.
Some deeply-buried part of him mourned what had become of this sacred place, once a place of both death and worship for the Gerudo, even as he stalked through the time-worn halls and chambers with single-minded purpose. The Gerudo's First King Ur’baas was buried at the Necromanteion’s heart, deep under the red sands, the only being alive or dead who might know what had happened, what had become of Ganondorf’s people.
He didn’t know how long he walked, turned in endless circles by the shifting walls and passageways, searching in vain for the burial place of the First King, but the only dead he found were not his king.
When a huddled mass on the ground rose up to greet him he raised his sword, eyeing the desiccated body which lumbered towards him, dragging sword tip etching a line in the stone beside it before the thing stopped, opened its maw, and let out a screech so chilling he might have been paralyzed had he not known what, who, this was.
Strands of red hair sprouted from a weathered skull, a Gerudo’s truest mark of heritage, armor rusted beyond use but all too familiar, its scimitar notched with the marks of a thousand blows, a hundred battles. A Gerudo warrior stood before him, once peacefully laid to rest, eternal slumber now disturbed by whatever magic had taken hold of her corpse.
Ganon cut her down, one blow of his mighty sword enough to cleave the spell’s power from her corpse as her ancient body crumbled to dust.
“Rest well, Sister,” he said to her ruined remains, the only respects he could pay her.
She was not the only one; every Gerudo in the Necromanteion must have been raised. He paid them all the same courtesy of true death, letting their long-tormented bodies and souls return to their rest.
—
He never found the First King’s tomb. The magic which protected the Necromanteion’s dead no longer recognized him as one of them, no longer allowed him to see those ancient, sacred souls.
Instead, he turned his gaze to the desert, to the wind-blown red sands and the chattering, brutish creatures which had moved into the old caves and long-abandoned buildings. They called him Black Knight and regarded him with something akin to respect… or perhaps he was simply a curiosity to them, so unusual and unexpected that they tolerated his presence.
Long ago in another time, another life, royals in Hyrule’s court had met Ganondorf’s attempts at diplomacy with vitriol, scorn, one councillor calling him a “King of sand and savages.”
Before now, that had never been truer.
The desert was a formidable obstacle in itself, but the inhospitable mountains surrounding the Gerudo’s homeland were what truly trapped him. For all his power, alone, on foot, the journey would kill him, any old roads or bridges destroyed by the ravages of time. Gone without a trace, just like the Gerudo themselves.
Ganon was trapped in a wasteland with only the echoes of a forgotten life for company, fueled and fed by the hatred that smoldered within him, hotter and hotter with each passing moment until the day a Bulbin hurried up to him, chattering and hopping and pointing with fervor that gave him pause. He followed, grudgingly curious what the creature wanted.
Black Knight, it said, leading him to a pen on the outskirts of their makeshift camp. A bargain.
The Bulbin’s grasp on the common tongue was tenuous at best, garbled words spilling from a mouth too filled with teeth to form coherent words, but bargain was a word Ganon knew well.
There, corralled among the Bulbins’ monstrous boars, was a great warhorse, as tall at the withers as the swine she stood with, coat so dark it seemed to soak up the sun, its eyes gleaming with a light that almost looked red in the setting sun.
Our king taken, the Bulbin said, pointing at the horse. You take beast, find king, go, leave.
So he did.
He took that warhorse, his sword, his armor, and he found the captive king, freeing him to return to his people. Ganon had no people, no home, so he turned his back on that cursed desert.
—
Long ago in another time, another life, Ganondorf hadn’t wanted conquest but trade, prosperity, a guarantee for his people’s future. Now, the Gerudo were gone — dead, migrated, he didn’t care which. The sacred seat of their religion was in decay, their home overtaken by beasts, their history forgotten. Now, Ganondorf had only one, simple need.
To see Hyrule burn.
He recruited the Bulbins, the Bokoblins, every hideous creature expunged from Hyrule’s beautiful fields and forests coming together under his banner. Silver-clad knights fell under his sword, under Phantom’s churning hooves, under the arrows and clubs of his army. Dead, dead, dead, so many of them, not enough of them.
Ganon swept across the kingdom like wildfire until only Castle Town, fortified and heavily guarded, was left. That was when the Sages intervened, faceless, nameless, soulless.
They trapped him with their magic, dragged him to the very place he’d sworn never to return, chained the Dark King in manacles of light and steel. They executed him in his people’s most sacred place, the sword piercing his chest in the very place the green-clad Hero’s once did. A lethal blow but his divine power, that gift from the goddesses, would not see him dead yet.
Ganon pulled that shimmering sword from his chest and killed one sage with half a thought. As the others called upon the mirror in their fear, pulling him away from their realm of light, banishing him, he only laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed because they could send him away, make him a problem for another king, but he’d return.
Ganondorf didn’t want a kingdom, didn’t want the Twilight Throne, didn’t care about that which the usurper Zant coveted, but Zant’s ambition would be a useful tool.
Because Ganondorf had no desire to sit on a throne and he would happily spend his life in exile if only to see Hyrule destroyed first. For everything they’d taken from him, in past lives and this one, Hyrule would burn, never to rise from the ashes of the downfall it had wrought upon itself.