Chapter Text
Destiny blankets the land of Hyrule in a shroud that has rested upon the kingdom since its birth, a cycle of struggle between the forces of Light and Dark that has been in motion for eons, and eons, and eons. There is always a form of Malice, ruthless and hungry for power. There is always a princess, blessed and wise beyond her limited years. And there is always a hero, virtuous and courageous despite his many, many hardships. And when the time has come, they have always risen, stepped forward, and played their part. But for all of its wide reach over Hyrule, Destiny is not omnipotent.
Equal in strength with Destiny is the force of Free Will.
Though destined to face the Malice, the heroes choose to extend their hands to help others outside of this cycle. Though destined to face the Malice, the princesses choose to battle against greed and power in their own governments, to protect their people from the shadow of inequity. Though destined to face the Malice, the heroes are not guaranteed to prevail . . . or to survive.
Destiny and Free Will strike a balance in the order of the world to maintain stability. But, like the Golden Triangles that were left behind in the making of the world, there is a third weight in that balance. In the space where predestination and agency meet is the realm of coincidence, of unknowable consequence. It is the realm of unforeseen and indifferent misfortune—of illness, nature’s wrath, and the ripples cast by the acts of kings, and gods, and lowly thieves alike.
Equal in strength with Destiny and Free Will is the force of Chaos.
And it is Chaos that brings a gateway to the land of Hyrule, of all the places it could’ve opened.
And it is this gateway—opened by beings worlds away who know not what misfortune they have unleashed—that brings a new being into this land. It is a great and powerful beast that finds itself deep beneath an ocean it does not know. But it feels something familiar. Something that this beast cannot abide.
The sky was still dark over the waves washing ashore in Lurelin Village. In less than an hour, the sun would peek over the horizon and illuminate its beautiful sands and clear waters. Mubs, the tall, slender woman who owned the village’s general store on the pier, had until that light made its grand appearance to finish setting up the stands bearing her wares. She took a moment to examine what she’d accomplished so far: Of the six large trays on display, half were filled. With the non-edible items like arrows, shock arrows, and octo-balloons arranged in a manner that satisfied her needs for presentation, she could now worry about the foodstuffs.
She stepped onto her boat and made her way over to the baskets containing her freshest catches. An open carrying tray sat on its side beside the basket to her left. Taking it in hand, she pressed it into her hip and lifted the basket’s lid to expose its contents: freshly caught armored porgies. As she placed one into the carrying tray, she couldn’t help but grimace at the thought of the fish’s texture. As far as she was concerned, fish should be soft. It should fall apart in her mouth. Armored porgy was not soft and it did not fall apart in her mouth. It was tough and crunchy .
Fish should not be crunchy.
When Mubs finished loading the tray with three of the offensive crunch-fish, she replaced the basket lid and carefully stepped back onto the pier. She placed the porgies on their display tray—in as visually pleasing an arrangement as dead fish could be in—and made her way back towards her boat. She had just stepped onboard when the deck suddenly moved beneath her feet.
With a yelp, she dropped the carrying tray and flung herself forward to latch onto one of her baskets. She felt the boat spin and tilt below her before she and her supplies were sent sliding down the deck. They spilled over the edge, and then Mubs was falling with her heart in her throat. She dropped for only a second before she landed in the water, her fall cushioned by one of her baskets.
For a terrifying moment, she had no way of knowing which way was up or down. She thrashed about until her arm hit a rock of some kind, sending shocks of pain to her fingertips and her neck. When her body landed on the seabed, she found her footing and pushed herself upwards—and broke through the water’s surface much sooner than she expected. Thrown off balance, she fell again before finding her footing again and standing upright. She burst through the surface and expelled seawater from her throat, coughing and sputtering. When she could breathe again, she looked around to make sense of what had happened, and what she saw made her blood freeze.
She was standing on the floor of the natural harbor that Lurelin Village curved around. The water level had receded so drastically that it now only came up to her hips. The pier she had been standing on moments earlier now loomed over her, her boat hanging by the stern from the short, thick line of heavy rope that tied it to the dock. The bow was low enough for her to reach in and touch the deck.
Such a sudden and severe evacuation of water from the bay could only mean one thing.
Mubs turned and waded as fast as she could toward Armes's house. The sound of snapping rope made her look back in time to see her boat fall into the shallows below, landing nose-first in a spray of bay water. She turned away and resumed her course before it finished keeling over onto its side with another mighty splash. Her feet carried her to Armes's doorway, where she stopped short of colliding into him. He was barely able to eke out a syllable before Mubs cut him off.
"Tidal wave! There's a wave coming, ring your bell, hurry!" She didn't even wait for a response before she turned and ran down the village's main path, yelling as she went. "TIDAL WAVE!!! There's a wave coming, WAVE!!!"
Some villagers had cautiously made their way outside after Mubs’s boat fell to its grave. When she started screaming and Armes ran from his home hammering a large bell, they sprang into a frenzy of action. Some ran inside to grab family members or precious valuables. Others immediately took off toward the road out of town. A few ran to neighbors and friends' homes to help where they could.
Mubs fled through the village at the head of a growing pack. Her feet raced against her heart, as if each feared being left behind by the other. Her ears roared with the staccato throbbing of her pulse, the clamorous din of the villagers’ yelling, the rumble of their stampede, and the sharp clanging of the warning bell. Some part of her mind wanted to look back, to look for the wave, to see how much time they had left to escape, but she knew better than to do so. She kept her eyes forward and focused on the path before her, pushing herself along the main road as it began to incline towards higher ground.
Yet even despite her focus, Mubs’s fear betrayed her. She pushed herself with such desperation that she stumbled and fell onto her face. Feet hammered her and bodies fell on her as the front of the stampede collapsed. The rest of the herd split in twain, flowing around the pile of fallen like water around a rock. Mubs hurried to untangle herself from the knot of limbs she found herself in until someone hauled her to her feet, a hand on her elbow pulling her along. She had barely registered that it was Numar, the son of the village’s elder, who had helped her when the sound finally reached her ears.
The distant sound of roaring water growing louder, and louder, and louder.
A swell of ice grew from the pit of Mubs’s stomach, climbing through her chest and into her throat. She neither felt nor heard herself begin to whine as she pushed, pushed, pushed herself up the inclining road. Ahead, she saw the pathway that would lead to safety: the empty plain that overlooked the village, where a monster camp had once stood before the Calamity had been destroyed. She saw the pathway ahead, but she could hear the wall of destruction behind her growing louder. She could feel the wall of destruction growing closer in the rumbling of the earth. The sounds of wooden structures being violently smashed and demolished reached her ears, and Mubs tried, she tried so hard to fly, to fly up the road as if her feet were fit with the wings of a pegasus.
The roar of the wall was no longer distant, it was behind them, it was rushing up the canyon behind them and bearing towards them all. The pathway out of the canyon grew closer before Mubs, and the wall grew louder and larger and closer behind her, and the path grew closer, and the wall grew louder, and the path grew closer and the wall grew louder and she was so close SHE WAS SO SO CLOSE—
The next thing she knew, Mubs was running up the pathway, then she was in the plain and she was safe , she was on high ground and she was safe. But she didn’t stop. She kept running, her legs carrying her on as if she planned to run northeast to Keya Pond, or the Dunsel Plateau, and beyond. She heard the roar of the water in the canyon behind her blasting by, rushing towards the Atun Valley. It was only when she passed the abandoned, wooden tower by several yards that she finally stopped, collapsed to her knees, and tried to catch her breath. She felt tears in her eyes, and she let out an animalistic moan as she tried to expel the ice, the pressure, the fear from her chest. She heard the crashing of waves and the sounds of voices, and crying, and moaning.
Then Mubs felt the earth shake.
It was a single, sudden tremor; a brief beat. She felt it again and it was just a little stronger. It was when she felt the third tremor, stronger than the second, that she heard the screams behind her rise up in alarm. She whipped her head around and saw a gathering of villagers looking south, towards the sea that used to be their home. This group was backing away from whatever it saw. It was when she felt the fourth tremor, stronger still, that Mubs looked out to the water herself—and her entire body froze at the sight.
It was as if a mountain had risen from the ocean, a gargantuan spire that could only be seen in silhouette against the faintest, palest hint of dawn. The fifth tremor, even stronger, coincided with the more dreadful realization that this mountain was no mountain. It had the shape of a torso, stout and burly; of arms, curled at its sides with clawed hands; of a neck and a head that towered far above any living being or physical structure Mubs had ever seen in her entire life. Most terrifying of all, it moved; it swayed as it walked, as it approached closer and closer toward the submerged remains of the village.
It was when she felt the sixth tremor, the strongest yet, that Mubs realized that the tremors were footsteps.
She heard the other villagers screaming and running. She wanted to scream and run as well. She knew she needed to run, because the thing in the water was not just marching towards land, its immense legs pushing the sea itself in billowing breakers. It was marching directly toward the plain that the villagers had fled to for safety, the plain that was now a stretch of shoreline.
But try as she might, Mubs could not move from where she kneeled, her insides constricted in a frosted grip. She could not stand, she could not move. She could not tear her eyes away from the being, the titan, the god that walked upon the world. She craned her neck up, and up, and up as it came closer and closer. It was when one of the titan’s gigantic feet emerged from the sea, moved over the plain, and began to plummet towards her that Mubs finally regained control of herself.
She screamed, threw her arms over her head, and flung herself to the ground.
She simultaneously felt and heard thunder detonate within the earth. She felt the concussive shock in her bones and her innards, and she heard the cracking fireworks of shattering wood. She heard the torrents of waves cascading from the sky, and then a second blast of thunder struck the earth again. She felt and heard another explosion in the earth. She felt the air displace around her. Then another explosion, then another, then another, each fainter than the last. An eternity seemed to pass before Mubs realized that, not only could she hear and feel the tremors fade into the distance, but she was still alive.
Mubs opened her eyes, her breath stuck somewhere in her throat, and lifted her head. She slowly pushed herself off of the ground with trembling arms until she was standing upright, her legs feeling as if they could give out at any moment. What she saw before her, where the monster tower once stood, was an impression in the earth, a mark left by the stride of the great beast. Her breath hitched in her throat four times when she finally recognized that the beast had missed crushing her by a mere three feet.
As the sun peeked further over the horizon and the earth shook with the reverberations of distant steps, Mubs could only stare at the pit that was almost her grave and try to regain control of her breathing. She stared and tried to breathe, and stared and tried to breathe. Then with a final, terrifying squeeze, she collapsed to her knees as all of her fear spilled out from her chest in sobs and wails.