***Note: This is the Link of my own head canon - a virile young man who wakes up after a hundred-year sleep feeling like a million bucks, only to find that there are heavy responsibilities hanging over his head. He has to live up to the expectations of people he doesn't even remember. While he has a strong sense of right, wrong, and duty, he also has a tendency to be a little selfish from time to time, and he has a right to. You could probably easily skip this chapter, but I wrote it mostly to get into Link's headspace and develop his essential personality.
Chapter One – the Great Plateau
The first thing I remember is the voice. That gentle, patient, dulcet voice coaxing me out of a deep and satisfying sleep. It was a voice I could not – WOULD not – disobey, hauntingly familiar, yet I couldn't picture a face to go with it. She directed me to the Sheikah slate that rested in the guidance stone across the warm, humid, unfamiliar room. She told me that I was needed, and some inner working of my soul, you could say my moral compass, felt compelled to respond to the call. I did feel pretty damned good; I don't know how long I had been asleep, but it had been the most restful sleep I could… not remember. The voice had called me Link, and that felt right. It MUST be my name. But whose voice was I hearing? She sounded like an angel. I imagined that she was very beautiful.
Once the voice had guided me to the Sheikah slate that opened the door and got me out of the chamber, I found some old clothes in chests on the landing outside, but they didn't fit well, so I just wadded them up and stuffed them into the seemingly bottomless little pack that had come with the Sheikah slate and the belt on which I now wore it. I was totally okay with just wearing the underwear I woke up in.
I figured out how to open the next door, with the soothing voice prompting me, and made my way outside. It was strange to me that I recognized chests, clothing, the sunlight, trees, animals, everything around me, could even read the words that appeared on the slate, but I had no memory of where this place was, who I was, or what had happened to me before I went to sleep. But I felt so good, it didn't really bother me much. Yet.
It didn't take me long to meet the old man. He seemed to be the only other human here with me. He was kind enough, but he was also rather secretive – for example, he said he had seen my Slate long ago, and knew how it functioned, but wouldn't say how he knew. He told me we were in a place called the Great Plateau. The strangest thing about him was how he seemed to be in two places at once. When I finished speaking to him at his campfire under the rock outcropping near the entrance to the place I had awakened, I noticed smoke from a campfire coming from the trees below us, and when I got to that campfire, the old man was already down there, hunting boar! He taught me how to hunt, how to forage, and how to cook the food I hunted and gathered.
I was bad at hunting at first, but it quickly became second nature, as if I had done it before in my previous life. Weapons felt natural in my hands, and I wondered if I had been some sort of soldier before. Everything I did triggered a feeling of déjà vu. I even found that I already knew how to swim.
Even the monsters that also inhabited this plateau seemed not so strange to me. The temple with the goddess statue seemed vaguely familiar, but the tower that my slate led me to activate was nothing I had ever seen before.
And the shrines… their outsides seemed vaguely familiar, but the things I learned inside of them were completely new to me. With this magical little Sheikah contraption, I could lift heavy metal objects. I could stop moving objects or freeze stationary ones momentarily so I could hit them in the direction I wanted to move them, and they would fly off through the air. I also had the power to produce infinite bombs to blow up rocks and monsters. I felt like a god.
I ran around for a few days, accessing the shrines, of course, but also just collecting things and exploring. I hunted boars, caught fish, killed monsters, and met up with the old man in unexpected places. I slept more or less sporadically; with bugs, animals, and monsters all over the place and no truly safe place to shelter, I quickly became attuned to even small changes in my environment, and a slight noise during the night would put me on the alert. It never really occurred to me that I probably could have slept inside a shrine.
The old man had told me I would probably kill myself if I tried to jump or climb down from here in my current state, and I believed him. I could hardly fight bokoblins without stuffing my face the whole time. I spent an inordinate amount of time traveling the perimeter of the plateau, looking through the scope on the Sheikah slate, trying to get the lay of the land, find roads, landmarks, et cetera – anything that would help me make my way around once I got down from here. I pinned towers and shrines. I found a group of wild horses just below the north side of the plateau, and being the horse lover that I am, I coveted one. From the northwest side of the plateau, I was able to see a circular tent with a huge structure on top that resembled a horse's head. It wasn't too far away, and I was intensely curious about it. On the northeast and east, I could see roads and ruins. To the southeast, I could see a huge lake spanned by a long, wide bridge, ornate but damaged. In the early morning and late at night, I could see an awe-inspiring yellow and green dragon circling there. To the west, I could see a series of tall spires of land connected by wooden suspension bridges over the lake into which the icy River of the Dead thundered down from the plateau. Later, when I ventured into the snowy mountains to access the final shrine, I would see on the southwest strange fat trees with branches only at the tops; the branches seemed tiny compared to the trunks of the trees.
Further away from the plateau, far enough that I couldn't see them clearly, I could see something massive in the sky to the northwest, and an ominous giant creature crawling over the volcano in the northeast.
Eventually, I came across the old man on the south side of the plateau, chopping wood near his rickety little cabin. I checked out his cabin, coveting his bed, and snooped through his journal on the table. He had written about a recipe he'd figured out but promptly forgotten. I pieced it together and cooked his "signature" meal for him. As payment, he gave me something warm to wear that actually fit me properly – the last shrine I had to visit was in the coldest part of the plateau.
When I had finally completed the trials inside all four shrines on the plateau, the old man finally revealed his true identity, and things got dark fast. This friendly but kind of shady old guy was actually the ghost of King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule, who had once ruled everything I could see from up here on the plateau, a decimated kingdom called Hyrule, and the voice I had been hearing was his daughter, the princess called Zelda. Something horrific had happened a hundred years ago, something I had been involved in, and I had unfinished business with this horror called Calamity Ganon that was causing the sinister, swirling auras of magenta around the remains of the castle in the distance. I had a bad feeling that I was going to find out what those giant things in the distance were before too long. If those were Divine Beasts, as I suspected, there were two more somewhere I couldn't see from here. I hoped I wouldn't stumble upon them unexpectedly.
The ball of tension in my belly as I finally descended from the plateau with the old man's paraglider felt like an old friend of sorts, the kind of friend who told you what you needed to hear, not what you wanted to hear, whether you liked it or not.