PHASE ONE: Existence
"I wandered lonely as a cloud..."
It was a simile that could have conjured profundity in any of the trio of realms that comprised the Grand Universe. But the realm from which it originated was the most logical hub for its coining. It was borne of the land beneath the clouds, the land in which its natives raise their heads to contemplate those very clouds and their shapes, patterns, paths, and any other manner of wonder they formulated in the minds of the most grounded of peoples: inhabitants of the land referred to as The Earth, which in itself houses the closest equivalent of shared existence between the realms.
It is the most picturesque of Earthen countries, with velvet fields of beige and green, offering up a sense-feeding potpourri of vegetations, architectures, and scores of species that do not graduate from the class of Legend beyond its borders, not even to the other land-based civilizations of the vast, waterlogged Earth. It is the country of Hyrule, and though it was and remains unbeknownst to its residents, it is a land whose history is not tied down by the gravity that keeps its people from discovering the evidence that would give incontrovertible credence to its lore.
Earthens in all regions, but the Hylians in particular, have formulated a veritable compendium of lore, including stories that slid beneath recorded history's back door upon an oral sprint through the foggy forest of natural - inevitable - ignorance. The Hylians have produced The Earth's most vibrantly-detailed and tightly-plotted mythologies; in time, they will long to trade in the revealed realism of that vibrancy for a one-age-fits-all refitting of the ignorance in which they were clothed for so long.
Above the Earthen clouds, and above the atmospheric ceiling painting their sky with seeming blue infinity, can be found an approximation of the parallel universe believed in, dismissed, contemplated, and debated by the Earthens for as long as they have coveted intelligence. The residents of this approximately parallel universe called their home Skyloft, the middle tier of the Grand Universe. To the remaining few who remember how spirited and spiritual Skyloft was before The Change, it is known now simply as the City In The Sky.
Clouds were to Skylofters what oceans are to Earthens. Loneliness is not limited to The Earth, nor is self-reflection, apparent symptoms of a lengthened stare-off with an apparently infinite scene. From the meshy white vantage point moving weather occasionally brought, no Skylofter with any semblance of an educated guess could discern from the City's inscrutable height the murky spin-top of bleeding colours and its purpose so far beneath the geography of their own perceived monopoly of existence.
Skyloft was allotted the unfortunate fate of having an evolutionary leg up on The Earth by virtue of being the first realm to be visited by the top tier, a place and a people lonelier than any cloud, lonelier than the sky itself. Their sky offers no reflection of a mysterious-older-sibling fascination, or at least an upstairs neighbour to gossip about. What it does offer is infinity; the universe's only true awareness of it, and not in the blue that alternates between light and dark hues in tune with the carousel flights of Skyloft and The Earth around the sun, the yellowy white orb of heat and light from which both realms derived their most necessary resources. This realm lay perched far beyond the blue dome that was home to the cycles of life defining the existences of Skyloft and The Earth, and far beyond even a hint of the light emitted from their sun. It is not so much a sky as a void that envelops this high realm in abstract black, and not so much a patchwork of clouds as a powdery haze of burgundy and burnt gold that hovers below its continental edges like a cosmic mattress. This haze is to them what The Earth was to Skyloft. This outpost of a realm is known to its creators as the Land Of Twilight.