So this is basically Twilight Princess set in psudo-Reality. Real life logic, evolution, physics, etc, etc, etc all have effect here. There is more magic than in the canon, along with more fantasy races.
The idea for this comes from my initial disgust fot Hylia's manipulations ehen playing Skyward Sword and the question 'What if Link didn't need to turn into a wolf to enter Twilight?'. This story has evolved imensly. I hope that this storyline will stick.
This is the timeline/introduction chapter. This in far from my actual style. This was also written and posted from my phone. Blame all issues aside from content on that.
Sorry for the authors note, I don't like them, you probably don't either. Just get reading.
Hyrule's winters were some of the coldest in all of Eleria. No one could deny it. It was getting colder each winter, some said.
Due to this cold the land attracted a significant amount of attention from non-human creatures. Thousands of years ago, the hearty Elven tribe Hylius Uloth settled in the wilderness.
The elves did more than just survive. They thrived in the colder climate. Magical abilities were abundant in the Elven peoples, they used this to grow crops, create shelter, and even to fold metal into masterwork weaponry without touching a hammer. The most accomplished piece that the ancient elves made was Drath'xarak, a beautiful blade that could capture starlight and turn it into pure energy.
Eventually an elf by the name of Hylia was born. By most's standards she was insane. She babbled on about how three goddesses. This was blasphemy by most's standards.
There were many gods in the Hylius culture. Life, Death, Knowledge, Destruction, and Creation all represented major gods. Although the ancient eleven words are lost, their meaning's of the words was the same as the virtues the gods represented.
But Hylia was powerful. When a great demon rose to power, she managed to gather an army. Large enough to fight the hordes of orcs and beasts that the demon, Demise, gathered.
The war lasted almost five decades. During the war, almost all of the Hylius' holy grounds were desecrated and defiled. The Elven race's culture was all but destroyed.
Hylia took this operitunity to spread her blasphemous words. Her takeover was all but insured, and by the end of the war, the majority of the Elven population were saying prayers to Din, Naryu, and Faori.
The crazed women had magical powers matched only by the most powerful bloodmages of Sedai, the desert nation far to the south. She was not hesitant to use her gift. Hylia created many powerful artifacts and artificial spirits with her gift.
The woman ultimately created one of many means for eternal life. It was a creation that she dubbed 'the Triforce'. It was ultimately the same idea as a lich's phalactraphy, she put her soul into the object, so even without a body, she could live on. It gathered power from anything. It could steal life force from a mortal, the light from the sky, even the heat from a flame. It would take ages to completely charge. But when it was finished, it would imprint itself on three random people. Hylia could then either possess one of the bodies, or just sit back and manipulate their actions.
To keep her vessels alive, she imbued the three segments with unique powers. One was sheer physical power, the unstoppable force. Another was magical prowess, the knowledge of thousands of spells and the mana to cast them. The final vessel was granted with sheer willpower and the strength to overcome any challenge.
Hylia also gave Drath'xarak heavy modifications. She imbued the blade with light energies, along with forcing an artificial spirit into the blade. In a way, she created the first supercomputer, almost 3 thousand years before man did with technology. She renamed the blade 'The Goddesses Sword', after her self proclaimed title.
In the end, Hylia ended up causing a cataclysm. A sweep of blazing white fire across the land, followed instantly followed by temperatures that froze blood in a heartbeat, followed by a massive hurricane. It destroyed the lands, both armies, and almost all civilians in the area now known as Hyrule. A select few, devout followers were saved, being brought into the sky on large patches of earth. Nothing but the most secure of vaults and deepest of caves were spared. Not even Hylia or Demise were spared.
It took a thousand years for Hyrule to return to an inhabitable state. It took another hundred years for the sky dwelling elves to discover the surface world. Hylia's Triforce was almost finished at this point. She attempted to take her first two victims in the same year the surface was rediscovered, a young girl named Zelda and a knight in trining, Link. It failed. It was lost to time was the reasons for her failure.
Eventually the Skyfolk descended back to the land. It was dubbed Hyrule, not after the elves, but the prophet of their religion.
The now dubbed Hylian people started growing. They never stopped.
Over the years, many races came to inhabit Hyrule. From the rocklike gorons that came from below the surface of the earth, to the Zora merfolk tribe.
The ambient magic drew many magical creatures as well. Early forms of vampires and werewolves came to inhabit the northern reaches of Hyrule, the area that the cold from Hylia's icy blast never left. It was heavily forested, evergreens covered in a white dusting.
The wolfbeasts, wolfos as they were called, eventually mutated, creating a single contagious pup. That pup grew to bite a hunter on a misty night, the full moon high in the sky. Although the beast died, the hunter was infected, due to change into a manbeast on the night of a full moon.
The magical curse spread like wildfire, jumping from one to sixteen in a single full moon.
The original vampires, humanoid batlike creatures felt their food source was threatened by the werewolves, leading the two to have a long and horrible war. The werewolves didn't even know they were soldiers until they were fatally wounded and being bled dry.
Not much of the war is known, but a powerful bloodmage managed to stop the conflict. The bloodmage ended the conflict by altering the lycanthropic curse in the alpha wolf, and merging a human with the vampire leader.
This led to the split. The humanized vampire left the fold of what used to be her brethren to live among more civilized nobility, and the altered werewolf, the curse under his control, fled far to the south.
Both the vampires and werewolves apparently dropped in numbers to the point of falling out of history for hundreds of years.
Humans came to the land as well. Most just joined the Hylian culture, but not the Gorudo. The dark skinned Gorudo running as bandits and an independent nation within Hyrule, living on the wastelands in the southwest regions.
Around seven hundred years after the return of the Elves, now Hylians, Hylia struck again. She managed to take hold of the Princess of the land, just a babe at the time.
A wind mage came from a long forgotten Elven culture, the Minish, to take the sheer magical power from Hylia's vessel. Hylia quickly took a second vessel, a smith in training and personal friend of the Princess. The mage managed to turn her to stone, and syphoned the majority of the enhanced mana of the vessel, only to be stopped by the other vessel.
Almost four hundred years later, Hylia decided to play a game of chess, pitching Magic and Willpower against Power.
It was a long war, involving almost all of Hyrule, but Willpower won out against Power.
The avatar of Willpower, Link, eventually learned of Hylia's trickery through an ancient tome, sealed underground from before the cataclysm. Through her own mistake, Hylia gave Link the means to overcome her curse. Always the self sacrificing hero, Link sought a way to keep his body from aging, keeping Hylia's mark from ruining another's life.
In a last ditch effort, being fought the whole way by Zelda, the bearer of Magic, Link came across vampirism. Although Link went through the transformation, it served to enrage Hylia. Quickly, Hylia converted the raw magic used to keep the vessel bound into light magic.
This put Link into endless pain. Overcome with pain, vengeance, and his new thirst for blood, Link originated a rebellion against the Hylian nation.
He found the Pack of the Pure, and subtly exposed Lycanthropy to the masses, making sure they had no idea it was he who gave away the secret. The Hylians started to comb the forests, hunting and killing werewolves left and right. He gained their favor by using their rage at the Hylian's bigotry to fuel their passion for his cause. The Gerudo peoples were allied with anyone that pledged themselves against Hyrule, they joined his cause with little resistance. Link, although young, quickly bested the highest rang Bloodlord of the vampires as the time, taking his seat, he had three vampire clans with him as well. Some humans joined as well, mostly criminals, but some farmers and peasants as well.
The war started in earnest thirty years after Hylia's game. Link lead the charge, backed by man and beast, against a somewhat innocent nation. He tore through Hylia's pawns with her own holy blade, disregarding the pain it brought him to use. The ever constant burning made any flesh wound feel like nothing, his vampiric regeneration healing it as he waded through the blood of his foes.
But the Hylians discovered the vampires weakness to silver and the wolves' weakness to wolfsbane quick enough for them not to tear down the walls of the capital city of Verin.
Some fifty vampire shadowmancers sacrificed their lives in a ritual to open a portal to another dimension within the Gerudo's Spirit Temple. The portal came in the form of a mirror, leading to a world not unlike Eleria. Beyond the portal was a land covered in darkness and partial darkness. It was a complete copy of Eleria, save the ruined and rebuilt Hylian territory, that was the same as it would be had Hylia not created the cataclysm. The dark covered Hylian territory was dubbed Eluryh, named after it's reverse nature compared to Hyrule.
The war took a turn for the worse for the rebels, forcing them to make their base of operations the Gerudo Desert and the New World. Most gave up and settled in the New World. Link would not stop fighting though.
He continued his rampage, and single handedly got as far as Hurule Castle's gates before being brought down by a lucky crossbow bolt, severing his spine and paralyzing Link from the chest down for a good minuet.
A minute is all the army needed to bind the man in silver and haul him before the Queen's feet.
Link was to be publicly exacted for treason. When the time came, Link still held vengeance with his whole being. Hylia's curse kept the man from dying, even when his head was removed by an axe. His willpower was to strong for death to take him.
He escaped while everyone was beyond shock, and rampaged through the crowds, slaughtering man, woman, and child with his bare hands until he found a weapon.
It is said that he had the queen, arm in mid swing when he dissolved into black particles. A lone shadowmancer forced a teleportation spell onto Link, placing him next to the open portal.
Some say the shadowmancer forced Link into the portal, some say Link went willingly.
Almost all of the rebels had left for the New World. Those who hadn't quickly fled to it once they discovered their general was gone.
Soon after the rebellion was 'quelled', the Hylians started building a prison around the Temple of Spirits. Instead of just executing prisoners, the Warden gave the prisoners a choice; die by hanging in one of the cell blocks, in front of your fellow prisoners, or be sent through the mirror to a land filled with beasts beyond the Goddesses' redemption.
Those who did chose to die didn't leave completely. The Temple of Spirits wasn't given it's name for nothing, it was built upon such magic rich land, that it prevented the dead from passing.
Link wasn't done being a 'hero' though. While in Eluryh, Link spent the next three hundred years honing his skills, and learning to use the gift of Willpower to his advantage.
The pain was all but gone, and he could all but manipulate the future. Simply by thinking that he would not be harmed by silver or the sun would make it so, any arrow fired, he could make it hit the mark, if he didn't want to be injured by a blow, it would deflect off his armor or shield. He was all but unstoppable.
But war called, and it was time for the Twilit, as the beings of Eluryh called themselves, to take back the land they lost.
Another war occurred, Link leading the charge along with King Trem Keavith, descendent of the Gerudo.
Link, carved his way into the ranks of Hylian defenders, slaying half of their army on his own without so much as a scratch.
But the King fell. He had been ecstatic to go fight for his people. Leading a charge along with the legendary warrior Link, hero of the Cursed War. But he was reckless, and fell to a stray arrow.
Link flew off in a fury when he was ordered to return to Eluryh. Despite his views of himself being a hero, Link ended up raping and severely wounding a young woman, if she could even be called a woman at fifteen winters. He had left her for dead, bleeding from puncture wounds all over her body. It was close enough to Kakariko that a young healer found her while searching the cliffs for rare moss.
She grew well in time, physically at least, but came to the horrid realization that she was pregnant. In shame, the woman left Kakariko in a caravan headed southwest, into the Faron woods. She had family in Ordon. If nobody else, they would understand.
By the time she got to Ordon, she found that her uncle and aunt both died in the previous winter. She was stranded in a woodland village with no family, and seven months pregnant.
She ended up dying during childbirth, completely alone. It took a week before the village found the child. A blood covered boy with white blond hair and blue eyes. The young woman's body was found with not a single drop of blood left, all gone.
This is where our story begins, the life of Link, the pale blond babe, named after his horrible introduction to the cold world.
So, thoughts on the world I've built? Like? No Like. Do tell. (This is the only time I will be whoring for reviews)
I do accept ideas within reason. The foundations for the pairings are set, so don't bother sugesting those. I'm talking weapons, plot points, new races, general OC design (don't put that much effort into it, no OC will be main characters), etc, etc, etc.
Best Wishes,
Shadowman