A Compendium of Shiekah Customs
Who are the Shiekah?
The Shiekah are a group of nomadic stealth warriors that live around Kakoriko village and Kakoriko Graveyard. Their culture involves a variety of strange customs and rituals, not all of which I totally understand. To give you a brief idea of how the Sheikah started, let me elaborate on their history. The Sheikah were started by a bodyguard to the first Princess Zelda named Shiek. He served the Royal Family faithfully and guarded them with his life. Until he was betrayed. The royal family double crossed Shiek after he killed a member of the Gerudo when he thought that a group of the desert thieves were trying to assassinate the princess. The Royal Family promised the Gerudo that they would hand over Shiek's body in return as a peace offering. When Shiek discovered the plot, he easily defeated the Gerudo guards who had come to take him to the fortress. He retreated to Kakoriko village to avoid pursuit by the guards to take him back and started a group of bodyguard mercenaries and named them the Shadow Ones. They hired themselves out to the Royal Family as mercenaries and took their unique type of armor, which concealed their faces and prevented such a double cross every again. The Shadow Ones did well for many years afterwards, until a Gerudo war party found out who Shiek was. They immediately sent a small raiding band to float down the Zora River until they reached Kakariko Bridge. They hid under, using specialized desert Gerudo climbing claws, until Shiek and a small band of Shadow Ones crossed the bridge for a supposed meeting with the Royal Family. The Gerudo ambushed them and shot Shiek in the leg with a poisoned dart. The Shadow Ones, seeing that they could do nothing, took him back to the village and preformed the Shiekah rites of burial. Afterwards, the Council of Elders was established and the clan's name was changed to the Shiekah in honor of their famed warrior. They also added a single eye with a tear drop to their armor, in remembrance of the Royal Family's betrayal, known as the Eye of Shadows. After a time, they traveled around Hyrule, building Gossip Stones to eavesdrop on criminals, and designing the Lens of Truth after a prophesy that one day a new hero would come to need it. They locked the Lens away in a chest and hid it in the well, controlled by the Shiekah song, the Song of Storms. They placed a vicious Shadow Monster their to guard it, known as a Dead Hand until the hero would come. After the Imprisoning War, the Shiekah slowly died out until Impa and Zelda were the only two left in Hyrule.