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-Ben

Prologue

It was difficult to remember the time before. Before her power awakened. Before everything had gone disastrously wrong. Before destruction and death fell upon the land. Before she gave the land a temporary stay of execution. Before the Calamity.

Some days, she could remember. She could remember green hills and lush forests. She could remember a black-stone castle with spires reaching for the heavens, and small villages full of hard-working people. She could remember a beautiful, shimmering city resting upon pillars above the source of a great river, and she could remember homes built out of stone surrounded by streams of lava. She remembered a great desert and snow-capped mountains. She remembered dawns and dusks, scorching days, and bitterly cold nights. She remembered anger. Affection. Fear. Hope. Desperation. Hate. Love. She remembered her life as it had been before the Calamity.

Other days—when she could even think in terms of days and nights at all—she remembered very little. Emotionless. Thoughtless. Bodiless. She fought against a force that was both far smaller and far greater than she. She did not live, but she did not die. She existed somewhere in between. Her mind and soul ripped to shreds by the Calamity.

And yet, she fought. Even when all self was seemingly gone; even when hope was but a distant memory, and the darkness was all around, she fought. Every day, month, year, she grew weaker. Deep within her, in the place where she still remembered who she was and what she fought, she knew that she would eventually fail. She would fall. But until then, she would fight the Calamity.

One hundred years. A lifetime for some. A fraction of a lifetime for others. The awareness of time blossomed into her broken mind as the sun slowly rose over the slopes of smoking Death Mountain. The winter had passed, giving way to spring and new life. As the sun rose, she felt more aware of her shattered mind than most days. She pulled the pieces back together, shred by tattered shred. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she saw her land. The land, as it was following the Calamity.

Broken, yet alive. Much like her, she supposed. Deer grazed near the dilapidated skeletons of buildings. Creatures of darkness gathered around cook fires, dancing and singing in their guttural languages. Cuccos crowed with the dawn in distant villages. In a broken coliseum, an angry lynel roared a warning to those that would approach. She saw all of this at once and knew why. She saw it and knew her enemy saw these things as well, so closely tied they were. As her awareness of time and space grew, so too did such things grow in the Calamity.

But she saw something that the Calamity did not.

Far away, on a distant plateau, a man stirred within a chamber deep within a mountain. She saw this, and she remembered. She remembered her life before the Calamity. She remembered who she was. She remembered why she fought. Most of all, she remembered the man named Link.