Chapter Text
Zelda knew her way through the labyrinth by heart. She carried her mother’s tablet on her belt as a precaution when she descended underground, but she could have navigated the great halls and twisting corridors in complete darkness. As the princess of Lomei, it was her duty to lead a hero into the heart of the labyrinth, and she had been preparing for this day her entire life.
The importance of the princess’s duty had been impressed on her for as long as she could remember. A terrible monster called the Calamity was said to dwell within the labyrinth, bound within an ensorcelled slumber. If the Calamity should ever wake, Lomei would be utterly destroyed. The monster’s bindings were strengthened by means of a sacred ritual that only the princess of the kingdom could perform: the sacrifice of a hero.
Zelda’s interest in the labyrinth under Lomei extended beyond her duty, however. Grim though its purpose might be, the sprawling maze under the kingdom was an architectural marvel. Its halls were cavernous spaces illuminated by the gentle light of a night sky woven by generations of magic, and its corridors were lined with tableaus depicting the history of the kingdom.
Zelda was fascinated by the stories told by the carvings and mosaics. She passed most of her time underground in careful note-taking and painstaking sketches of what she observed in the labyrinth.
There was the Hall of Waters, a blue-tiled room whose white marble columns supported walls painted with waves. The silver paint of their foamy crests shimmered under the soft glow of false stars.
There was the Hall of the Sky, whose carvings of soaring birds and swirling cumuli evoked a sea of clouds. The azure tiles of its floor mapped an archipelago of islands floating in the air.
Deeper within the maze was a grand but unpleasant room that Zelda thought of as the Hall of Twilight. Its murals depicted a battle on an unimaginable scale. The combatants were splashed in thick paint on the rough stone walls, and the lurid glow of the phantom torchlight made the chaos of war feel uncomfortably close at hand.
Though winding, the path from one hall to the next was known to every woman tasked with the duty of performing the sacred ritual. Zelda’s late mother taught the young princess the route to the inner sanctum through rhyming songs. Despite the queen’s cheerful attitude, she took care to emphasize that the ordained path through the labyrinth must be respected. Even to the princess chosen to perform the ritual, the corridors were dangerous. After all, the labyrinth was the dwelling place of the Calamity. The monster may be sleeping, but it was a monster nonetheless.
When she first entered the labyrinth with the queen and her attendants, Zelda felt no fear. To her, the Calamity was nothing more than a story, just as the goddesses worshiped in the palace temple were figures of legend who did not touch the lives of mortals. The goddesses existed long in the past, if in fact they had ever existed at all. The labyrinth was vast and awe-inspiring, to be sure, and Zelda could understand the danger of becoming lost in the darkness. If such a prison was necessary, then surely the Calamity must be real, but Zelda never sensed its presence.
Something changed when her mother died. The air became thicker, somehow. Sometimes Zelda caught faint traces of an unpleasant smell, bitter like burning hair. Nothing was amiss along the path through the main halls, but the shadows hanging just past the doors of the branching corridors thrummed and throbbed with unseen movement. These shifts in the shadows were accompanied by wet squelching sounds that would have been imperceptible were it not for the tomblike silence.
In the absence of the queen, her attendants wept and begged not to be forced to enter the darkness. They saw eyes in the gloom, they said, monstrous and inhuman. They told Zelda that the labyrinth was watching; that it was always waiting for an opportunity to open its dark jaws and devour them. It hardly mattered that the appointed time for the ritual was years in the future. Did not the monster of the labyrinth demand sacrifice?
Zelda, child though she was, possessed the wisdom not to force the late queen’s unwilling attendants to follow her into the labyrinth. Nevertheless, she continued her daily prayers for the safety of Lomei. Rumors of her uncanniness began to spread, and she was shunned by the servants of the castle and the nobles of the court. Years passed, and Zelda learned to navigate the labyrinth on her own.
As she grew older, Zelda often found herself rushing through her prayers. She was far more interested in studying the labyrinth and reading the stories carved and painted on its walls. Her fascination with the winds and waves dulled with time, however. Zelda began to venture away from the safety of the known path. She was cautious at first, but gradually she began to seek the source of the noises in the shadows, hoping to catch sight of what her mother’s vestal attendants had fled.
Zelda could hear the noises made by the monster of the labyrinth, yet she never managed to catch sight of what made them. The thought occurred to her that perhaps the creature was hiding. The first time Zelda extinguished the light of her tablet, she experienced a moment of panic. The entire city was above her, its solemn weight precariously suspended above her head. As she forced her breath to remain steady, she gradually felt the comfort of the velvet darkness surrounding her. There was no cause for fear. She was safe in her knowledge of the exact number of steps between each twist and turn, and the map she carried in her mind was reliable.
Zelda heard the monster moving, a faint but deep reverberating sound like the echo of thunder. As her eyes adjusted, Zelda realized that she could see. Faint though it might be, there was light in the labyrinth, and its source was all around her.
Zelda had assumed the Calamity was a discrete entity. She suppressed a scream as she realized her mistake. The monster was the labyrinth itself. Or rather, it coated the walls of the labyrinth in a viscous slime that stretched across the ceiling and coagulated in the corners of the walls. And it did indeed have eyes, so many eyes. Most were closed; but, every so often, one would blink open for a fraction of a second. The protruding globes were orange with blade-sharp pupils, like the eyes of a beast.
This oozing mess of a monster was unsettling, to be sure, but Zelda sensed no malice. Perhaps it was still sleeping, its hunger still at bay. Perhaps it dreamed. Colors that weren’t colors rippled through the ooze of its flesh like beacons. Was it possible that it was guiding her?
Through the days and years, Zelda followed the pulses of the Calamity to other halls deeper within the labyrinth. None of these halls that were in her mother’s songs, nor did they appear in the records left by other princesses – a hall of snow, a hall of mist, a hall of towers in a world turned upside down.
The most intriguing of all was a hall Zelda had no name for. If there were paintings on its walls or carvings on its colossal columns, they were hidden by the pitch-dark flesh of the monster, which bubbled and crept and multiplied like tumorous growths through a blighted wheatfield. In the only untouched space was a tiled mural on the floor depicting a monstrously tusked board rising from the silhouette of a man.
Zelda hesitated to lower her guard in the presence of the ooze, which she still found unnerving despite the time she’d spent in its proximity, yet she still knelt to study the mosaic by the light of her tablet. The hidden mosaic did not answer her questions but only prompted more doubts. What was the true nature of the Calamity? Was it the same monster depicted in the mosaic? Was it the same man?
Zelda never had much interest in the world above the labyrinth, nor was her interest ever encouraged. She was fed and cared for, certainly; but, to the people of the palace, she was a harbinger of ill omen and best avoided. Zelda was content to leave the everyday matters of the kingdom to the people who spent their lives aboveground, but her discovery of the nameless hall inspired her curiosity regarding the history of Lomei. Who was the last sacrifice, for instance? How was he chosen?
Her mother had assured her that she would know when the time came to hold another ritual of sacrifice to the labyrinth. Everyone in Lomei was familiar with the signs of the impending Calamity. There would be earthquakes, small at first, but swiftly increasing in frequency and magnitude. There would be storms of salt. Fields would be ruined by clouds of dust, and wells would be choked with fine-grained sand. The monsters that stalked the periphery of the kingdom’s borders would grow bold, and the moon would shine red and hang overfull like a blister in the night sky.
Zelda was an infant newly born when the Calamity last manifested, so she had no memory of such things. Oddly enough, when she read recent accounts of the kingdom and consulted with her childhood tutors, they made no mention of monsters or earthquakes or tainted wells. Rather, they all seemed concerned with a matter much more mundane. When a cousin of the king was killed in the Gerudo desert, it seemed that war would be declared if the Gerudo did not consent to send a prince of their own to Lomei as tribute. This prince was duly delivered, and he was offered as a sacrifice to the labyrinth.
War was avoided, as was the Calamity, but nowhere could Zelda find the name of the prince.