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For a time, the eternity you tread within is silent… cold… just as strangely pacifying as one might imagine the stiff embrace of demise lying beyond the throes of a gruesome battlefield.
For a time, you are content to float.
Your body, broken.
Your mind, fraying at the edges as deep gashes and shattered bone are stitched back together through an ancient magic no modern soul could dare comprehend.
Oblivious.
For a time… a very long time… this eternity is all that exists. It’s a womb never abandoned, an old cobbled road enshrouded in mist. Before long it’s all you’ve ever known— nightmare fading into memories, memories fading into myths, myths fading into legend. But then…
(Open your eyes.)
With much labor, you emerge from that all-engulfing dark, stolen away from blissful oblivion into the arms of an unnervingly familiar dream.
Drawn to follow the instinctual pull of that woman’s gentle call as if some strange destiny you can’t begin to comprehend commands it, you sit up from the water with bleary eyes and lead-laden limbs, and realize with a perplex brew of hollowness and bewilderment that— before she addressed you, before you were pulled from the silent oceans of that cold eternity— you didn’t even recognize the taste of your own name.
Wake up, Link… the gossamer-lilted voice beckons once more, insistent. Your heart throbs within your chest, as if responding to lost emotional stimuli you can’t even begin to label or recognize.
You’re honestly not sure what insanity possesses you, but you choose to follow that spark of light that day.
You stand to your feet, wriggling your bare toes against aged stone.
You take the Sheikah Slate as instructed, its significance still a divine mystery.
You retrieve every scrap of clothing and material that’s available within the half-rotted crates and chests awaiting outside the first chamber.
You exit that once-eternal tomb.
And then you run— small waves of strength returning with each and every footfall— to the very edge of the grassy precipice beyond, breathing in the invigorating scents of an untamed wild.
In the thousands of paces that pass, fleeting glimmers of familiarity bloom amidst your surroundings like the delicate bells of nightshade under the moon’s careful guard.
The weight of a sword feels all too ordinary within your calloused hands, a revelation that’s as much of a relief as it is a troubling burden. (Who were you, that you find yourself so skilled in the art of killing monsters?) In a similar manner, an old truffle foraging location tickles at the corners of your mind as soon as you approach the edge of a shaded forest, its colloquial name unknown, but the path you tread between its moss-covered trees and jagged stumps a manner of rote instinct. Thankfully, the common language spoken amongst Hylians and Sheikah at nearby stables and villages beyond the Great Plateau is immediately recognizable, as well as their hand signs. However, you do not speak aloud if you can help it, and the unpracticed roughness of your sentences tells you with undue certainty that this disuse is far from a new habit. What an enigma your lost childhood is, where the presence of a deadly weapon upon your back is a comfort, but the weight of a handful of words feels altogether unnatural upon your tongue.
Hours turn to days, which roll into weeks. Each new sunrise is ripe with discovery as you test the limits of your body and mind. Echoes of simple stew recipes return easily enough, as well as the skill required of catching and mounting a horse. In fact, you find you’re quite athletic even before you start to regain your stamina, capable of dodging near-hits and climbing up sheer rocky edifices. You’re clever and scrappy, surviving fights with mechanical horrors the likes of which you’ve never seen before.
You’re Link, a silent wanderer with no anchor to anything upon this earth except the desolate wilds of a ruined Hyrule you’re slowly becoming a master of.
The slate resting upon your hip claims otherwise, of course. Ancient technology with ancient ties, its very image sparking whispers of long-passed champions who met a calamitous end in every secluded population you visit. Curious, it is. Curious, and downright nerve-wracking. One hundred years later, the end of days is merely a haunted verse in the ballads of this land, and yet… you can’t shake the terrible, creeping feeling that your prolonged inaction will only invite greater ruin, a suffering all but unimaginable. For the Calamity Ganon’s malice grows ever thicker in the air with each passing blood moon, and the quiet, wavering whispers of the lone princess holding it all at bay are now few and far between.
That princess…
Zelda, recent memory provides. Only daughter of the late King Rhoam, the spirit you met on that distant plateau soon after awaking. Last in the royal line of Hyrule, wellspring of the Goddess. Mere facts, recited with the unattached candor of a naïve young child stepping through the pages of history for the very first time. Recollection of these facts promise you no vivid details. Nothing of your time supposedly spent as her escort.
Nothing personal.
So what is your piece in all of this? How does your forgotten story slot into these legends?
Who are you beyond the threads of this unshakable destiny, the young man obfuscated behind amnesia’s mask?
The haunting answer is that you have no idea where to start searching for your truth. And out of all your skirmishes to date— beyond extended tangos with territorial Lynels and the mightiest of Hinoxes— that’s perhaps the most damning battle of them of all.
Exalted Champion.
Hero of Hyrule.
Chosen One.
Knight of the Goddess.
The Calamity’s Bane.
The denizens of these lands carry many names for you (or— the elusive ‘you’ who existed a century prior, who they assume is long dead), each one more ill-fitting than the last.
With that in mind, it almost comes as a relief when you run across the rare few who spit these titles with a thick undercurrent of resentment, rightfully cursing the young man who failed in his intended destiny, forever dooming Hyrule to this ruinous state. As far as you’ve gathered from the stories the survivors passed on to their descendants, the mighty champion Link died defending the gates of the former fort standing to the east of Blatchery Plain, overwhelmed by the endless flood of Guardians and slaughtered where he stood. These secondhand anecdotes claim that even the knight’s divine sword had finally exerted all of its luster, becoming brittle and dull. Sympathetic travelers sometimes leave claymores at the site in remembrance, as if wishing a silent prayer for that hero of the past to pick them up and keep fighting for their futures.
You learn that it was only thanks to what locals deem the ‘Miracle of Fort Hateno’ that Ganon’s mechanical army marched no further that terrible night.
(Exactly what that miracle was, no one can say. Only a century has slipped by, but the history is already growing hazy.)
Despite everything, however, when you close your eyes in that swath of muddy grass, surrounded by massive, ancient corpses and the rusted armor of the fallen alike— the place of your rightful demise— you swear you can feel the searing agony of the white-hot Guardian beam that probably killed you, matching up with a broad, mottled burn scar splayed across the left side of your torso.
Ultimately, this place brings you nothing. No true memory revival, and no resources worth looting beyond the occasional spring or screw. Reverently, you leave one of your own swords upon the battlefield, plunging it into the moistened soil to stand guard over the souls of the lost. Whatever kind of man the Link of your past was, you believe he truly did die that day.
Amidst the seasons that follow, you strive to make peace with this sobering fact.
Only Hylia herself knows if you’ll ever fully succeed.
Apart from its other astounding capabilities, you soon discover that the Sheikah Slate is capable of logging away detailed slices of life as still, flat images… as if every detail were captured perfectly in some sort of hyper-realistic oil painting. You quickly grow to adore this feature, taking candid ‘snaps’ of forest creatures, good foraging spots, and sweeping scenic vistas.
Your snapshots aren’t the first to grace this device’s memory, however.
The Sheikah researcher Purah— an eccentric, that one is— recently managed to unlock a number of images taken a century earlier. Images of a world before the Calamity.
(Your throat grows insufferably tight whenever you gaze upon this one snapshot of Hyrule Castle in its prime, with the vibrant ramparts and steepled rooftops of the former Castle Town sprawling like Hylians prostrated in reverence around its base, and it makes you wonder… for just a solitary moment… if perhaps you had family that lived there. Could they have escaped the smoldering obliteration left behind? Is there any chance their descendants now peacefully roam the wilds like you do?)
Both Purah and her sister in Kakariko, Lady Impa, wholeheartedly recommend that you seek out the many locations depicted in these images. They suspect that these places may hold some sort of personal significance, and could assist in restoring some of your memories. It sounds like a long-shot in your opinion— the desperate theorization of old friends still hoping a completely different man might soon knock upon their doors— but the last thing you wish is to disappoint them after all their generous assistance.
It takes weeks amidst the rest of your travels, but you eventually find every location.
Sure enough, all of them hold some degree of familiarity.
Recalling vague fragments of your past doesn’t magically transform you into the Link you once were, of course. No, no… instead, your recollections are more akin to reading a stale third person account in a book. Detached, and lacking in emotional resonance. From what you can gather, the legendary hero was strong. Silent. Bold. Endlessly courageous. Loyal to both the crown and Hylia’s wishes until his last breath. You glean nothing of your former personality from those rare flashes of memory beyond these static traits.
But you yourself, in this present?
You’re kind, never failing to share food with a soul in need or assist a roadside stranger being assailed by monsters— even though it sometimes gets you into more trouble than it’s worth, where the Yiga are involved.
You’re good with kids, the children of Hateno excitedly flocking around you whenever you return from a long journey, begging to hear the latest stories of your daring, swashbuckling quest. You always show them the snapshots you’ve taken on your slate, and unsheathe rare, battle-worn weapons to satisfy their curiosity about the world beyond.
You’re witty and sarcastic, deploying puns and the occasional bout of gallows humor to lift your own spirits on these long, treacherous roads.
You’re somewhat of a glutton, capable of scarfing down half a dozen spicy mushroom skewers in one meal if the mood so much as strikes you. Over the past months, you’ve come to realize that life is simply too fickle and too precious not to enjoy a good meal to the fullest.
Most of all, however… you’re scared. You’re really, really scared.
(You wonder if your past self ever admitted to that.)
You fight shattered, twisted versions of your foes in the hazy fog of your nightmares, and you rarely win in that malice-infested arena. When you wake up, it’s often with a barely-stifled scream, disturbing those resting beside you in stables and inns. You don’t spend the nights in communal beds that often for a reason, instead whittling the hours away in the insulating solace of the wild, warming yourself around your homemade campfires.
As such, it comes as a great relief when you finally save up enough rupees to purchase that abandoned house at the edge of Hateno Village, securing yourself a permanent home base for sleep and storing your gear. Behind this door, you almost feel safe enough to let your hair down, to slumber without your favorite broadsword resting within arm’s length, to take off your belts, your baldric, your muddy, muddy boots. You almost feel remote enough from the rest of town to not stress about waking them with your frequent night terrors. After all, they’ve grown to trust you… they believe in your protection, believe in your courage. They don’t need their hopeful image of you dashed by cold reality.
They don’t need to see the terrified child dwelling inside.
No matter the weapons carried on your back or the elixirs stashed in your pouch, you weren’t prepared to face the unimaginable horrors awaiting you in those Divine Beasts.
Re-activating them was simple enough, far easier than the harrowing trials you faced in simply stepping inside each mechanical wonder. But the pure evil lying in wait for you there… tightly braided into the very core of these ancient machines… the terror lingers with you for weeks afterwards like the nauseating stench of singed flesh clinging to your tunic.
It’s true that Ganon’s Blights are formidable foes even after a century of decay, but it’s not this that haunts the deepest cords of your soul and threatens to draw a strangled scream from the fathomless abyss of your lungs.
It’s… the bodies left behind.
Their bodies, broken.
Revali. Urbosa. Mipha. Daruk.
The dark influence of the Calamity’s malice is strong here, and in all four Divine Beasts, it’s chosen to trap the champions in a permanent state of half-decay. The gelatinous mass of concentrated darkness wraps around their corpses like a constraining sleeve, pouring in through the wounds scattered across their rotting forms and the empty void of their eye sockets. They lay precisely where they fell, their souls eternally tethered to these cruel prisons and crying out for help.
Boiling with a century of yet-untapped anger and hatred for what irreparable damage Ganon has brought upon your kingdom, upon your memory— upon the people who history says used to be your dearest friends— you obliterate each of his twisted creations handily, mind and body running on blinded autopilot until you’re panting heavily and the malice clinging to the air like a virulent disease recedes, sweat-slicked palms clutching a sword stained in the unnatural blood of the apocalypse.
Each champion’s spirit thanks you for your service, (even the resentful Revali, in his own way), granting you a sum of their power as aid during the final chapters of your journey. Seeing their souls free and vital once more is a salve, but not one strong enough to entirely erase the horrors of what you’ve witnessed in these machines.
You recover their scattered weapons from the cold stone floors of the Divine Beasts, and return them to each kingdom’s leaders.
Each leader, however, insists that you keep these priceless relics.
“Urbosa would accept no lesser wielder. Take them.”
“This great bow belongs in the hands of a hero like yourself…”
“I believe… Daruk would’ve wanted you to have this.”
“Keep her trident, and keep her memory alive, Link.”
Reverently, you hang each weapon on the walls of your humble home as you collect them over the months, stepping back every time to admire each friend’s most cherished tool with a hollow pang of delayed grief suspended like a thunderstorm in your chest. After taming the final Divine Beast, you promise yourself then to document as much information about the champions as you can amidst the rest of your days, so that their legend may live on eternal just like the princesses and heroes and sages of old.
It’s your first true self-assigned destiny.
As you fall asleep that night, you can’t help but wonder what it feels like… living for your own purpose instead of constantly being tugged by the Goddess’s strings.
With only one piece of history left to retrieve before striding towards your journey’s end, you suppose— whether in life or death— you’ll understand soon enough.
People whisper stories of a powerful sword, hidden deep within the bowels of The Great Hyrule Forest.
They say it lies in wait for a single master, the Hero of Legend forever reincarnated across the eternal whims of time, allowing no other to pull it from its place of rest. When its most recent master passed in the first wave of the Calamity, it returned to its stone hewn pedestal and fell dormant, biding its time until the triumphant dawn of the next hero.
When you first set eyes upon this ethereal sword, the weapon forged by the Goddess’s very hand to seal the darkness, you’re assailed by an almost nauseating wave of déjà vu. You’ve known for a while that— for better or for worse— your courageous song stretches far beyond a single lifespan, but the nebulous flickers of impossible memory that tickle across your consciousness then only confirm the truth you dread…
…that you’ve been a pawn in Hylia’s desperate war for a very, very, very long time.
You’re a twelve year old boy in a royal page’s attire, timidly striding towards the sword to take your turn under the watchful eyes of the rest of your peers.
You’re a steel grey wolf, a denizen of another realm riding upon your back as you guide your nose closer to curiously sniff at the weapon’s pommel.
You’re ten, firmly wrapping your fingers around the leather-wrapped grip of this ancient blade, wholly unaware of the childhood that’s about to be irrecoverably stolen from you.
You’re seventeen, dressed in the flowing silks of the skies as you stand silent and humble before the pedestal, acknowledging with an ache in your soul what must be done to save the world you call home.
You’re the very first, an inhabitant of a city beyond the clouds blindly following the instructions given to you, slowly pulling the Goddess Sword from its resting place and lifting it skyward.
(You didn’t set out to be a warrior. You only ever wanted to save your best friend.)
And yet despite these legends that bind your lives as one, despite the duties and endless titles you never asked for, the familiar weight of this sword in your hands makes you feel like a long missing fragment of your soul has been returned to you. You swear you hear a faint melodic vocalization flicker across the very edge of your awareness, like the remnants of an echo riding upon the winds.
Hello again, Master, this wordless melody happily sings to you.
You hold it aloft, admiring the way the dappled sunlight reflects off its perfectly sharpened blade before taking a few practice swings, sliding it into its scabbard, and musing about what kinds of elixirs you should prepare for your journey to Hyrule Castle. Because... with the recovery of the sword that seals the darkness, the pieces of your final strike are now aligned.
Calamity Ganon holds no physical power over you now.
Every hall and corridor of the great castle you tread within is haunted with the patchwork footsteps of another man’s life.
This place was once the king’s favorite dining hall, you think, recalling how on occasion you’d been summoned to dine alongside the princess as her personal knight. And that passage to the right… that’s where members of the royal guard kept quarters during their weeks on duty. One of those rooms was likely yours, a century ago. You wonder— should you happen to wander past it— if you’d recognize your own door.
The monsters who live here hold no candle to your fighting prowess now. You clear out their camps without breaking a sweat, plundering their weapons and pushing forward through the castle’s labyrinthine interior. With each footstep, you find rotted evidence of the everyday hustle and bustle that used to fill these sacred halls with life. A library in ruins, filled to the brim with maps, scrolls, and moth-ridden books. The galley, rusted pots and pans still laying in the sinks and patiently waiting for a wash they’ll never receive. A broken canopy bed in what you can only assume is the princess’s bedroom, with a nearby desk covered in ripped, nearly illegible notes and illustrations. The gear of the former royal guard, scattered, many weapons unclaimed… and more still wielded by Moblins and clever Lizalfos. You try not to think too hard about the crack of bones you sometimes feel underfoot, or the scraps of blood stained armor and cloth that are buried within the rubble.
But alas, the truth is that you’re not as brave as the legends claim you should be. Is this a fault of your lost memories? Has the rift they form in your mind ultimately left you broken, unable to perform your duty to that cursed goddess’s standards? Was the old you a more faithful representation of the Triforce of Courage? Did its influence pass straight through your fingers, when you died?
Has any other hero ever felt such dreadful notes of fear stirring deep within their chest?
(Or are you alone in your shameful cowardice, just as you’re forever cast away, forsaken, in the vast seas of what you suspect is largely unrecoverable memory?)
Your fingers tremble against the string of the ancient bow you hold in your grasp as you aim your arrow at an eye of malice that’s blocking your path. Hastily, you try to blink away the budding tears. Try to show no weakness. You clench your jaw so tight your molars grind painfully against one another. What unimaginable tragedy you tread through… a whole kingdom mercilessly shredded to pieces, the dark presence you currently seek only restrained from consuming the rest of Hyrule by the wisest, most powerful, most courageous of souls, by Zelda, by that gentle spark of light who woke you up now nearly a year ago.
In certain aspects, you believe you’ve grown to understand more about that princess through your travels than you have about yourself. For every quiet nod or affirmative hum your past self offered, Zelda wove a veritable tapestry of observations and comments. She’s incredibly intelligent, a scholar first and a princess second. She’s quite stubborn— not necessarily because she wants to be, but because the pressures of her role in destiny’s game demands it of her. She resented you for so long due to the sword you carry on your back… wrongfully feeling like your existence somehow negated her own efforts to unlock her sealing powers. You believe that if she hadn’t been caught up in this mess, she might’ve grown up to become a botanist.
And then there’s you.
You, oh damned hero, the boy who fell into an ageless sleep upon the battlefield. The boy who failed in his duty, cursing the princess you swore upon your life to protect to face this timeless horror alone.
Well, no longer. You’re not that boy anymore. You're a new man, a soul all your own. And this time around, you refuse to fail.
When this is all over, your only hope... is that she'd smile again.
With a burst of angelic light, the weakened Calamity Ganon is sealed away by the goddess’s hand once more, cast into a restless slumber for another ten thousand years.
Gasping for breath, you collapse to your knees, dropping Zelda’s bow of light beside you. You clutch at the dampened grass as if greeting an old friend, limbs trembling with delayed exhaustion at everything that’s just transpired.
It’s over. It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
The clouds part. The sparrows of the field begin to sing again. That dazzling light soon settles upon the hill before you, the princess wobbling slightly as her feet make contact with the ground for what’s likely the first time in a century.
The newfound serenity before you seems altogether unreal, as if you never woke up from the Shrine of Resurrection at all. Your limbs almost feel numb as you coax yourself upright, as you stride towards her— a light jog at first, before blossoming into a hurried sprint. She’s saying something to you, the hint of joyous tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, but all you hear is static.
Shock, your months of battle instinct provides. You’re still in shock.
And then…
“Do you remember me?” she asks, her form almost glowing with the hope of this new dawn.
The abruptness of this impossible query jolts you out of your fatigued stupor, your heart leaping into your throat. A part of you feared this conversation was inevitable. But how in Hylia’s name is one still partially cloaked in the shadows of amnesia supposed to respond to such a question? The quandary feels hopeless. You remember attributes, yes. You remember some of the cruel words she threw at you before you proved your dedication by saving her life. You remember thin slices of how you spend your time together. But you don’t remember knowing her beyond mere facts. It’s as if she’s merely a character in a storybook, a bedtime story you heard as a child. You don’t wish to hurt her, but you also don’t wish to lie. You part your lips to try and cobble a clumsy response, but your tongue is dead weight within your mouth. Try as you may, you cannot speak these words aloud.
Excruciatingly, the seconds tick on, the princess’s enthusiasm dimming with every heartbeat of delay.
“No… not really,” you eventually force yourself to sign in response, your fingers racked with an almost unbearable tension as they shape the honest (yet piercing) truth of your complicated plight. For what is a relationship but a tapestry of memories, and what is a man beyond the sum of his past?
Her expression crumples, snapping like a delicate wildflower underfoot.
“Yes, of course you wouldn’t…” she murmurs as she turns away, burying her face in her dirtied hands. “The goddesses would never be so generous to me…”
“But Princess…” you hastily follow up, exhaling a low note to attain her attention once more.
She slants her gaze towards you, those melancholy emerald eyes— wise beyond their years— locking solidly with yours.
You offer her a reassuring smile, repaying her that sacred spark of light she revived you with so very long ago.
“If you’d have me, I’d like the chance to know you again.”