Prologue

Legends tell of a host of heroes hailing from different times across history, all tasked with a similar, enormous goal: to protect the land of Hyrule upon the dawns of the land's most dire hours. Locked in a constant struggle with the fearsome, seemingly immortal Ganondorf, the young men never backed down from their challenges, willing to leave behind their previous lives to stand up to the task. Time and time again, these heroes garbed in green thwarted their eternal nemesis and restored peace to their troubled homes.

It was believed that, although these heroes all existed in different eras, their souls were connected as one, leaving the body of a predecessor and returning to bring life to the next savior when dark energies could be felt looming in the air once again.

Five thousand years have passed without the threat of Ganondorf, who, legends say, was turned to stone when the Hero of Winds plunged the legendary Master Sword into his skull. He has been abandoned at the bottom of the sea for all these millennia.

The tradition of garbing boys in robes of green during their coming-of-age birthday in remembrance of the great heroes had long faded away, for there were rising doubts pertaining to the truths of the tales. Peace had reigned over the new kingdom built from the previously-great sea for so many lifetimes that it was becoming hard to believe such struggles between an alleged young hero and an ever-present evil even existed in the first place.

Ironically, the uneasy discourse between the believers and deniers of the tales began to loom like an ominous cloud over the kingdom that so many claimed the hero fought to save. Social unrest was on the rise. Deniers urged the storytellers to quit spreading the tales and polluting younger generations with unwarranted thoughts of dark times past that may yet come again. They wished to disbelieve that such evil could ever be eternal as the storytellers were wont to include in their myths, or that any such evil could be possible in the first place. The believers of the legends stood firm, however. To them, it was important for their young ones to learn what they believed to be the history of their great kingdom, both the good times and the bad.

In the midst of these debates, the black energies began to rise once again, and in the dead of night, with nary an eye to bear witness, a tall, dark man walked out of the sea.