"If you were living at the bottom of the sea, I'd cut off my two legs and become a fish. If I could be closer to you as I sink into the depths, it's all right even if I become a shade, wandering the endless darkness."

- Tsukiko Amano

"*laughing psychotically while wearing a bloody kimono*"

- Ayako Kawasumi

"What's wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost."

"Maybe I did."

- Jason Carter and Lisa McCullough, Viper

A hundred years ago, she had tried to stop him from escaping the abyss. She had been a pure and kind-hearted healer who never wanted to be drawn into conflict, but still devoted herself to performing a sacred ritual in her shrine to help in the sealing of the evil Ganon. She had accepted the duty entrusted on her despite the dangerous odds, all because she simply wanted to save her people, and protect the one she cherished.

Her ritual had ended in utter disaster. The priestess Mipha had not only lost her life trying to hold back the Great Calamity. She had been warped into one of its agents of destruction.

The shrine she was responsible for tending was corrupted into a nest for evil. Her life was ripped out and served as a mocking sacrifice by Ganon's forces. Everything she held sacred was twisted around and used as a weapon to obliterate her own kingdom. Her shattered spirit was forever bound to her desecrated shrine, the cursed moving temple known as Vah Ruta.

A hundred years ago, and the pangs of despair still stabbed like it had all only happened yesterday.

Zelda gazed up at the darkened ceremonial structure with nothing but regret in her eyes. A single glance was all it took to make her remember everything. Ruta had been thought lost for close to a century, only to emerge from beneath the waves and loom in the shallows of Zora's Domain just recently. It was as if a dark hand had raised her for the hundred year anniversary of the catastrophe. Once she returned, terrible rainstorms covered the sky every day in the Domain, and the waters of the lake surrounding her turned black with corruption every night. Things were slowly going back to the way they had appeared on the day of the Great Calamity, as if the tragedy was on the verge of repeating itself in a ghostly loop.

Rumors began circulating through the Lanayru region. It was said if you stood at the edge of the palace dam on nights when the rain stopped and the waters moved so slowly they made no sound, you could hear the voice of the priestess still trapped in her defiled shrine, awash in tears. Some thought it could mean her pure spirit was still pleading to be freed from her decades-long rotting prison. Others suspected it was the trick of a sunken river siren luring hapless adventurers to their watery doom.

Only a fortnight ago, just around the same time as when the forsaken temple began to rumble through the tide, Link had awakened from his long restorative slumber. He had been drawn like a man possessed to the shrine to complete the very same ceremony Mipha had left unfinished all those painful years ago. He had loved her so much in life. He wanted nothing more than to make up for his own failings and help her soul find some small measure of peace in death.

He never returned. Vah Ruta still loomed in the fog of Lake Lanayru like a dark omen, waiting for the next unlucky passerby to sate her bottomless hunger for souls. Only now she had gone completely silent.

Zelda was the only one left who could right all the things that had gone so horribly wrong a century ago. She found the Sheikah Slate washed up on the shore of the lake like a plank of wood from a shipwreck. It was the only piece of proof Link had ever existed, and only one of its functions was still working: The rune-powered camera lens.

Armed with nothing but the ancient artifact and her own unsteady resolve, Zelda walked through the ominous entrance of Vah Ruta.

Author's note: I feel like Donatello in the second Ninja Turtles movie where he sees that clown doll and he just keeps saying "Yeah? Yeah? Yeeeah."