"Responding to your mask, this strange stone statue talks to you... I overheard this..."

Epilogue: The Things In Between

The Three Features, House of Dead, Right Hand Man

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The following story is not a pleasant one. You who have found the Mask of Truth... may I tell you? Will you listen to the story of the man consumed by madness? Will you see the tale of our downfall unfold before you?

~{ 0 }~

It's been said that a man used to live in Kakariko Village. This man created the Three Features in terrible experiments... or so I had been told once long ago. His house stands where the old well is in the village, and his experiments still roam the underground passages beneath the well.

This man sought to obtain the power of the Goddesses, like so many of our tribe once did. Somehow, I think that may have been his way of giving hope to all the mortal beings of the land. But somewhere along the line he strayed from the path. Deceived by evil.

His terrible experiments used not only the villagers of Kakariko but many others as well. Tortured, mutilated, and reconstituted into monsters to join the battle against the darkness.

But still it was not enough for the man.

He had obtained the bones of the hero... the first hero... the first Link. No one knows how he had gotten them, but he wasnt the only one to use the sacred flesh fo the hero...

He used the first hero's bones to make a mask. A face... that even we could speak no lies to. It is the very mask you wear now to hear our words. The mask of truth.

The stone of agony. Made from more bones. But this time bones of the damned. The bones of his own people. The bones of fallen Sheikah. For no one knows Hyrule's secrets better than the shadows that protect it.

And from his own head he plucked his own eye. An eye that could see no evil. The Lens of Truth. I suppose if the man could have seen evil he woudln't have wandered so carelessly into it.

On completing these three artifacts of great power the man name them the Three Features, claiming them to be man's own Triforce.

This was during a dark time for the Sheikah. We wanted to learn more about the darkness and how to suppress it. And we learned much. Too much. It consumed us.

During this time more and Sheikah were growing too bold, too daring... too close to the darkness. This was before the Civil War, before the banishment of the interlopers... the civil war... the interlopers... they were our people. They were Sheikah. The Sheikah who had grown too bold.

The man fell farther into the darkness and soon turned into a beast. A mad one eyed beast. You may know him now as Bongo Bongo. The Shadow Sage, Impa, took pity on the man and his new monstrous form. She sealed him in the well, where even more of his terrible experiments had been conducted.

This coincided with the suppression of the Interlopers. The bold Sheikah who sparked a Civil War. The fallen Sheikah who ran across Hyrule to seek refuge with our sister tribe the Gerudo. But the soldiers of the Royal Family chased them down and there was no mercy. The Interlopers were banished to the Twilight Realm. A realm of gray and nothingness.

The Gerudo, who had helped their sister tribe, were also punished. Condemned to exile. But before the orders could even reach them, the Gerudo's leader -the Exalted One- closed the gates to their city. She ended things on her own terms.

The rebellion had been quashed, the monster Bongo Bongo had been sealed, and the interlopers had been banished to another dimension. All of this, because we... we grew too greedy. We wanted the power for ourselves. We wanted the power to protect the light... and instead we became the very thing that we wanted to protect it from.

And when you would think we could fall no further from grace... we did.

The man who created the Three Features had two disciples. These two were his right and left hand. They knew everything about his research. Even after their master's imprisonment they remained every loyal. Both were locked away and tortured... treated horribly. They weren't men any more, this much was true; but nothing should ever have to face what they did.

We could not deny the power and strength of the monsters the man had created. We used his research to create monsters of our own. Undead creatures. Floor Masters, Wall Masters... even Redeads... we used them to guard artifacts and treasures and secrets. But there was one monster that even they had not managed to create, the Dead Hand.

But we did.

And... and... we... we turned them... we revealed the monsters these two were by becoming monsters ourselves. We turned the first into a Dead Hand. It happend fairly quickly, almost laughably so. The experiment was a success. It was disgusting.

And yet we did it again.

The second man. He was so... overjoyed at the news... he was ever so... pleased when we told him that he would become a Dead Hand. He didnt care that he would become one of the monsters. "We are expendable," he had once said. "We are not shadows! We are the void! We are nothing to them! Nothing!"

The man who had been turned into the first Dead Hand... he was far too gone. The madness had taken him. He was obsessed with the Rule of Three. He was convinced that his master, himself, and the other disciple were tied by this Rule of Three. And in the end I suppose they were.

After the Hero of Time had laid the two Dead Hands to rest, their souls were not satisfied. They flew to rejoin their master in the Shadow Temple. They returned as Bongo Bongo's left and right hands.

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"A long time ago... There was a man in this very village who had an eye they said could see the truth! Now usually, you have to train your mind's eye most strenuously to actually see the truth... But this fella, no, they say he had a different way of doing things... His house stood where the well is now..."

"Here is gathered Hyrule's bloody history of greed and hatred..."

"Look at it with the eye of truth."

"The mystical stone responds to the mask and speaks to you. ...But its words are heard in secret..."

For more information on my thought process please read the next chapter.