One
I hate this. Even after a decade,I'm still absolutely furious with myself. I had thought if I gave myself time, I would be able to tell this story without the anger,and the self-loathing, but it's all I can think of.
I failed. Again, I failed. And what's worse, I don't even know why! It should have worked! I should have been able to yank the Triforce of Power out of Ganondorf's miserable hand and fixed this mess!
Nayru's tears, what did I do wrong?
….this is not coherent. Okay. Okay.
Stupid spell. I should never have done it this way. But it's too late now; I started this, I don't want to ruin another book by failing to finish. Just... keep going. Keep going Raiha.
Where this mess started... Din's flame, I think my pride started this one. My pride, and a desire to show that a Gerudo could do some good for Hyrule.
It started... with the commission. Before it became common to name the firstborn princess Zelda. Before the Triforce was split.
It would be so easy to blame it on the cataclysm I knew was coming. But no. This is my mistake. My failure.
My greatest.
The war was something I tried to stop. I couldn't change too much because I had a duty to fulfill... and every time I tried changing an event that would alter that, I only made it worse. Or, the power of my mandate would...I suppose the best term is put me to sleep. It would remove my interference from the equation.
Time is complicated. It's not as simple as back and forth, or side to side. Not to a divine being. To mortals, and those who must live in the flow, yes, it's straightforward. Future and past and present are all what they are named, and...
I'm rambling. I need to stop.
So.
The Mirror of Twilight.
Before the earthquake, I could go between borders with ease. Ally with the Goron and the Zora, far stronger than their alliance to a Hylian King who's hold on his throne was shaky at best. The Mirror was meant only to... to look, I suppose. I wanted to see other timelines. I wanted to know how other things went, if I was in any of them. And then, after the quake, I also wanted to see my they safe, or had this undone them further?
Vanity, I suppose. A desire to know if I was ever a truly important placement, or just a lucky accident.
No. This started even before the Mirror. It started with the creation of the Light Spirits.
See, I knew the sundering would happen. I knew the Triforce would break, and while I wasn't certain when, I knew that when it did, the slow death of magic would begin. I was still...I suppose you could call me high? From being reborn, remade by the goddesses, and the knowledge they had filled me with.
I did not want my world to be bereft of magic, so I decided to do something about it. I had... I guess, seen is the correct word. Very well. I had seen memories of how to make the Light Spirits, so I set about figuring out how to do so.
The earthquake that altered the foundations of both Hyrule and the desert... I don't know if that helped or hindered me, really. I'm not even sure if it was natural, or somehow the earth responded to what I needed to do...
This is why this story is so hard to chronicle. There's so much... uncertainty about these memories. They were so long ago. I fear I tell them out of order.
I made the Spirits one by one, but I could not get back to the desert to place one there. Even then, the desert was restless, filled with angry dead; poes, stalkin, reDead... really, you name it, it could live in the desert. And of course, angry Gerudo as well, who thought that the Hylians had somehow caused the quake that so fundamentally changed the shape of the world.
But we were not a people who could go to war. Not to say that we didn't know how to fight; Gerudo are trained extensively in fighting skills. Or... were. But our numbers were few, and thanks to some destructive tendencies, dwindled in a relatively short amount of time.
The Light Spirits, once placed, were connected to me, additional sources of power that would continue to strengthen me, even as the ambient magic around me faded away. In hindsight, not a smart move, but I didn't fully understand then just how bad it would be. Some days, I feel as though I am as much magic as person now...
I digress.
The Mirror wasn't meant to do more than look, not at first. The King commissioned me, actively sought me out as the displaced Gerudo, and promised to find a way to connect me back to the desert. I didn't fully trust him, but I had very little recourse, and... well, I had been playing with the idea of a seeing mirror for years.
The Zora found me the purest of sands, brought up from the bottom of their domain, their grand and glorious throne room. The Gorons helped me to get the other ingredients, and in truth, most of the creation process was thanks to them. They made me the glass that I could cut, the Mirror frame, all the embossing that I directed to help the Mirror hold the magic, and then the holder for the mirror, though at the time I had no idea where it was going.
And while this was happening, a process that took many years of effort, both in the finding and making of items, the King sought a way into the desert. I truly do think he meant to keep his end of the bargain... until his councilors began whispering rumors about my people into his ear; we are not trustworthy. We seduce men, and then leave them. Stupid, harmful bullshit that I've had to deal with for most of my life.
As cruel as it is, sometimes I feel glad that my people are gone. At least no one tosses slurs at me any longer.
In any case, their fear-mongering worked. Instead of a few peaceful traders going in to see if they could help, he sent out a small army. And of course my people retaliated! What else could they do?
They were not all slaughtered, but I don't know how many survived. Enough, at least,to keep the line going until Ganondorf's birth. By then, things were... so much worse.
The Mirror I'd made, as it turned out, did not see the way I had intended for it to. Instead, it parted dimensional walls. Not enough to reach another world, but far enough to find an... empty space. Anyone drawn into that space would become trapped, and would, eventually, die.
I almost broke it then. I should have broken it then. But as much as I feared what I had made, I also... I loved it. It was beautiful, and it was dangerous. It was, in part, as much my child as the four Spirits were, and I couldn't bring myself to do what I should have.
And the king stole it from me.
His war had reached the sacred temple of my people, our last stronghold of magic and history. In my original time, it was called the Spirit Temple, though it was not so much a temple as a palace, a harem home for the women our king would claim as his own. He had the palace... stripped. Down to the base stones, all the treasures, all the statuary... taken, stolen, defaced.
And he repurposed it; what was once a sacred place, a repository of Gerudo history became a prison. Magic that was not mine was laid upon the place, and the cruelest, most evil of Hyrules prisoners were sent there. After all, it was a desert; even if they escaped, they would not survive the heat and the day long walk to a path that might lead to freedom. If the heat didn't get them, the guards and archers surely would.
I did not present my mirror to him. While I was out, talking to those I could trust among the Zora and the Gorons, seeking advice on what I ought to do, soldiers came by and simply took it, unfinished, from the workshop.
It wasn't until they realized that they couldn't activate it that I was called again. By this time I had heard what he had done, and wanted nothing to do with the King, or Hyrule until my temper had settled. But magic was still strong, and even bolstered by my children as I was, I was not all-powerful.
I had blended magic with the glass and the silver backing, and not just the magic that would call the mirror to life. The spell that held everything together was stronger than that; only someone who knew as much about ancient Sheikah magic as I did could unravel the spell on the mirror and shatter it back into the golden sand from which it had been formed.
Perhaps that was where the mirror gained the ability to pierce into the realm of Twilight. I cannot say for certain. Only that I knew, with a certainty, that it was the magic I was meant to be using on the mirror.
Since they could not activate it themselves, they set it up so that I was forced to do so. At the top of the prison they called Arbiter's grounds, they set the mirror and frame next to an obsidian monolith that they had stolen from the Gorons, along with the mirror. It was, indeed, meant to companion it.
And then they set Gerudo women, and Sheikah fighters against me.
Mass melee combat is not in my grand repitoire of skills. I am not small, nor fragile, and I cannot be killed, but I can be gravely injured. At the time, I thought the immortality only covered the not aging; fearful of dying, I woke the mirror, and allowed it to consume everyone.
An observing mage of the court was the only one to escape. Everyone else; Gerudo, Sheikah, Hylian guardsmen and women... all gone. Consumed by the mirror.
I had done it to save myself, but that did not change the fact that I had just sent people into an unknown dimension, with no way of returning. And not just a small handful; the group had been around seventy people of mixed heritage.
Din, I still hate myself for this...
I escaped the prison and hid deep in the desert for many decades. I found a conclave of my people, who did not recognize me or know me, and hid with them for a time. I made a second, smaller mirror; this one did what it was meant to, and showed me what I wanted to see. Needed to see.
Somehow, the people had survived. They had landed in a land full of shadows, and had survived.
This did not make my guilt easier to bear; living in eternal twilight had begun to change them already, and I could feel that there would be no way to get them back once they reached a certain point.
I tried. For years, I tried. I would visit the prison in secret, climbing walls to a height that terrified me, knocking guards unconscious to experiment with the mirror. I learned I could send tings through, not just people, and my first goal was to find a way to give them some light.
I gave them the means to manufacture the Sols, light sources that would mimic the warmth of the sun, and could aid in growing plants for food. I found a way to go in, and return... but I could not bring anyone with me. And they could not bear to be around me for very long; to them, I was blindingly powerful. Over time, I turned into their guardian goddess...
At least,that is what I gleaned from Midna. I am certainly no goddess...
Eventually, my failures pushed me back to Hyrule, seeking entrance to the Temple of Light, through the Temple of Time. I had hoped to speak with Rauru the ancient Sage. But there was no way for me to pass; the Master Sword was in place, and I was not the Hero.
I was forced to wait.
In the end, my waiting mattered little. Events played out as they were meant; the Hero returned as a young boy, we stood with the Princess to condemn the evil king that was Ganondorf. They imprisoned him for many years, and none of his people, our people, were able to break him out.
Things only went from bad to worse when they took him to Arbiter's Grounds.
I don't know what possessed Dalfnesto consider this idea a wise one. I had told him myself that it was not, and at the time, he listened to me.
I did not make it in time to prevent him from being sent through. I almost killed the Sage constructs myself in my fury... And the less said about how I treated the king upon my return, the better.
I have been, I suppose, hermiting rather religiously since that day. The fewer people I interact with, the better. And I had hoped, had prayed, that Ganondorf would never find a way to emerge from the Twilight. A bodiless power was dangerous, but containable. But...
Well, this world would never be what it was if the cycle did not repeat itself time and time again. And there has not yet been a prison that could contain that arrogant bastard, let alone kill him. The void, the realm of the Twili, even the Master Sword... all have tried, all have failed.
And so we approach the beginning of this tale. Two centuries past the original sundering, magic faded bit by bit. Zelda and Link were born twice, each with the dormant piece within, but never at the same time.
Unfortunately, the need for certain events to happen meant that I had to allow the Great Deku Tree to pass. Without their guardian, the Kokiri and their forest passed. I grieved for them, but it also allowed me to move the Temple of Time from its place in the Castle Town Market; I wanted no further foolishness over Hylians hunting the Sacred Realm.
Faron Woods became the entrance to the Lost Woods, near the ancient body of the Deku Tree. Kokiri had continued to live within him for a time, but eventually they too passed; all save a single Skull Child who had sought me out from Termina, claiming friendship with Link, and seeking friendship.
That little imp is all that remains of those eternally young beings. And he is a wonderful guardian against intrusions. As are the trees of the Wood itself. And the Temple of Time rests at the heart of this wood.
Most lifetimes, I do as well, though I return periodically to renew ties with Gorons, Zora, and be the voice of the Eldin Province, as necessary.
I waited so long... And in the end, I was as unprepared as the Hero when the danger finally came.