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“The Power of Evil”The Power of EvilBy: Bongo Bill and DarkGamemasterOne year ago today: it
was a dark and stormy day, and the rain poured a deluge of fantastic
proportions at the near empty and filth-ridden Lake Hylia. Inside
the cursed Water Temple, a battle of epic proportions was taking place.
Swords clashed furiously as Link and his darker half, Dark Link, fought one another and although Dark Link’s strength was not as great as that of Link, the shadow’s complete knowledge of Link’s sword techniques allowed him to keep the original from defeating him. Once Link unleashed the magic of Din’s Fire, however, Dark Link was beaten and Hyrule would never have to worry about the evil phantom ever again. Or so it seemed... Today: it was a clear and sunny day on the shores of Lake Hylia as the sun rose over the now pristine lake, and as usual, the hard-core fishermen had already been on the lake for a while. In spite of the sunrises’ beauty and the impossible clarity of the pristine water, a great evil still rested dormant beneath the lake. Inside the Water Temple the great evil waited and grew stronger, planning its revenge against the one who had defeated it, the one who caused his pain, the one who bears the Triforce of Courage, the one whose very image the strengthening evil bore: Link.... Elsewhere, deep in the bowels of the enchanted Kokiri Forest, life was continuing exactly the way it had for the past year, which was coincidentally the same amount of time since the Deku Tree’s Sprout had begun to grow in the late Deku Tree’s Meadow. All the Kokiri of course, had been up for quite some time watching the thing, except Mido, the would-be bully and “boss” of the Kokiri in name only, and Saria, the Sage of Forest; this was because they had been sent to the Deku Tree’s valley by the Deku Sprout. Link had been training since before sunrise, preparing for the darkness that only he knew was coming. As usual it was a sight to behold: Link, using the dagger that he had found in the Lost Woods to cut each piece of wood in half with just one swing, then moving to his own sword, not just any sword but he legendary Master Sword of Evil’s Bane, moving through a number of motions with near-unequaled grace. Normally he would have used the dagger as a cutting knife for fish, but Link had a feeling about this dagger that it was very important and so he decided to train with this weapon instead of with his sword alone. At that very moment the evil Dark Link was preparing to leave the Water Temple after a year of confinement within the temple; he was too weak to have left sooner because of his defeat at the hands of his light counterpart. Dark Link stood with his mighty blade, the Dark Master Sword, and longed for the moment that he could break free of his prison, to finally take vengeance on Link, and to find the most sacred Triforce and conquer the accursed people of this sickeningly beautiful land of Hyrule. Near midday, Link was preparing to go to Kakariko Village to buy some arrows; the Kokiri, their talent notwithstanding, could not make good arrows and Link was no craftsman himself. Normally Link called Epona to take him but today he decided to walk. As all this was going on, Princess Ruto, Sage of Water, set out to the Water Temple from her own home in Zora’s Domain, reluctantly dragging along an escort her father had insisted she bring. “Milady, if I may ask why are we going to the Water Temple?” the Zora guard asked. Ruto sighed. “Because, I feel that a great evil has taken control of the Temple and as Sage of Water I must do something about it.” This feeling was shared by Princess Zelda as she asked the Prime Minister of Hyrule and the Sage of Light, Rauru, to find Link and the other Sages, for she too felt that something must be done. “It is time, time for me to emerge from my prison! Now, Link, prepare yourself, for you shall face the supreme might of Dark Link, the destroyer of light! I shall have my revenge!” Dark Link called madly aloud to no one in particular as he began to emerge from the Temple. Dark Link knew that the time had come. Not only would he get the satisfaction of his blade rending asunder Link’s already mangled corpse, but he would take from the hero the Triforce of courage, with which he would go on to capture the other two parts and then enslave the world. Nothing could stop him; he was stronger now than ever Link had been, perhaps even stronger than his hated creator, the fool Ganondorf. No use waiting, but he wanted to savor this moment. Too bad. Dark Link swam out of the underwater entrance to the Temple. No sooner had the phantom raised to the surface when he saw two Zoras. The Zora race he hated especially, for they ad made the prison that had contained him for so long. One of the fish people, he noticed, was remarkably beautiful. Perhaps if she had not been a Zora, whom he had resolved to wipe out rather than enslave, he would have kept her as a little... pet. How unfortunate for her. Before either one saw him, he had remorselessly beheaded the guard. The girl let out a shrill scream before he stabbed her through the heart. He knew where Link was and began going towards his adversary, leaving the bloodied water and the corpse of the two Zoras behind him. Back in Hyrule castle, Zelda was acutely aware of a sensation caused by Ruto’s demise, although she did not know that. Link was as well, and all the other sages, one of who was currently being made aware of Zelda’s summons by the owl Kaepora Gaebora. Dark Link continued his long trek towards his mortal enemy. He began to experience a new sensation. Fatigue, he thought it was called. Whatever it was, it was weak and paled beside his hatred for Link. He passed a couple of stereotypical farmers. “Lookit that, Sam,” said one of them. “I reckon it’s one of them poltergeists, Joe.” “Yup. I says we kill it.” “I got my bow,” said Sam as he opened fire. Dark Link rather unexpectedly noticed an arrow whooshing past his face, and somebody found two savagely dismembered farmers later that day. At the Sages’ hall in Hyrule Castle, everyone had arrived except Ruto. “Where is Ruto?” Nobody knew. Each of their innate sagely senses told them that everybody was here. Unfortunately, sagely senses did not know how to count. “Everybody’s here, except...” Then it hit her like a sack of moldy grain deployed from the beak of a passing albatross. “She’s... dead.” There was a shocking kind of silence, which faded in to a morbid kind of silence. “Without all of the sages alive, I fear there is not much we can do,” said Rauru finally. This didn’t seem to help. “But there is a way.” That did. “If it can be killed without our help, then our helplessness will be of no consequence. And we will soon have ourselves another Sage of Water, but it will take time to find this person. “Zelda, you find Link, and the rest of us will search for the person we’re looking for.” The Sages left to be about their business. Zelda appeared rather suddenly above the graveyard in Kakariko Village, where Link was supposed to be. She climbed (a quite difficult process) down, and immediately found Link in the small town. “Link,” she said, “something is wrong. There’s an evil running rampant, and it already killed Ruto. You have to do something.” Link explained that he would, and felt slightly happy that Ruto would no longer pester him, and slightly angry at himself for being slightly happy at her death. He set out of the village at once. He had not gotten to his horse when he saw Dark Link, charging at him with a mad rage in his blood-red eyes, sword drawn high. Link drew his own sword and parried the phantom’s first blow. He barely blocked each of the next ones. Dark Link noted with disgust that, try as he might, he could not keep up with Link now that the so-called hero had mounted his exceptional horse. He would just have to go with one of the other pieces first. Now then. The Wisdom one was closer, just within the village, but its bearer was crafty likely understood very well the adage, “discretion is the better part of valor.” Ganondorf he could kill easily once he was freed; if Link could do it, what could stop Dark Link? He veered off his path after Link towards Hyrule Castle, where the Sages’ Seal kept the King of Evil trapped in another dimension. Most of the castle was sleeping soundly by the time he arrived. He made a note to rest as soon as this was all done with; this fatigue thing was tough. Being almost a shadow in and of himself, Dark Link easily dodged past the incompetent guards to a secluded spot in the courtyard. A normal eye would have perceived nothing out of the ordinary there, but Dark Link saw quite clearly the focus point hanging in the air, just waiting to be opened. He grabbed the point, and it moved where he dragged it. With a sharp flick of the wrist the point enlarged to a full-fledged ovoid portal through which the shadow-like clone fit easily. He closed the gate behind him, but he knew how to open it. Ganondorf was not far, sitting in the huge hall of the palace he had built in the ruins of the Temple of Light. The once mighty King knew why Dark Link had come. “You seek the Triforce? Come and get it!” Ganondorf suddenly was no longer Ganondorf, but a tremendous monster wielding two enormous tridents, one in each disproportionately large, somewhat ursine hand. Dark Link glided towards the monster, his feet making no sound on the dusty gray tiles. A slash—and Dark Link was on the floor some twenty feet away, the wind knocked out of him and in a lot of pain. He estimated that he had broken a rib. But that was no concern now. He realized something he had not: when he was made, he had everything Link had, so he should have a bow or something. He checked his back, and there it was. He drew an arrow and powered it with his own knowledge of magic, and struck his foe’s eye with it. Ganon roared and rose to his full gargantuan height, clutching his face in pain. Now was his chance. Dark Link ran to Ganon’s stomach, and swung—and his sword bounced off with a metallic clang. And then he was another thirty feet down the hallway, with probably another broken rib. Dark Link felt a certain grudging respect for Link at having conquered a foe as strong as this. He shot his adversary again, this time rushing around to the tail. He had caught a glimpse of it earlier, and it seemed tender. He swung—jackpot. Then another blow sent him reeling down the hall, and he slid into a wide marble column. Ganon swung one of his weapons, and the column came crashing down above him. He rolled away just in time to narrowly miss being impaled by the other trident. Then it hit him. Both literally and figuratively. He sailed through the air, but this time got lucky enough to land on his feet. He charged the behemoth, and leapt at the last second, landing just below its neck. He drove his sword straight at the neck, and it went in. Then it was pushed back out, as though he had jabbed it into some sort of indestructible elastic thingy. The trident came crashing down over his head, and he became acutely aware of what pain truly was. How many bones broken? But—he noticed once the black flecks stopped dancing in front of his eyes—Ganondorf was bleeding profusely at the neck. What luck. Pain stabbed up his right leg as he tried to leap up onto the monster again, but he ignored it. He barely made it, pulling himself up with his non-broken arm. He drove his sword into the wound, and opened it up to the back of his head. To go any further than that would be pointless; mighty Ganon had breathed his last. The Triforce entered him. Power like nothing he had ever imagined surged through him. Wow. Unbelievable. He decided to test his power on his shattered skeleton, and it passed with flying colors. He had never felt so alive. The portal was quickly located, and he tore it open with that same flicking motion— —And found a dozen well-trained guards waiting for him. Well, in theory they were well-trained, the best warriors to be found, but in practice they did a downright lousy job keeping the castle safe. When he finished with them, all they were good for was downright lousy fertilizer. He decided to adjourn his quest at once to rest, to sleep. He left the castle inconspicuously, and found a small house, which he relieved of its inhabitant whom he did not study too closely. And he slept the remainder of the day. He awoke that night and walked out into the cold moonlit air. What a beautiful night to continue with his plan. He went to the castle, slaying all the guards he came to, and demanded an audience with the King of Hyrule. Before it was granted, the King’s daughter, Zelda came in. She was using the Triforce of Wisdom. Dark Link could not move. “Go and get Link!” she instructed one of the Sages before turning to face him, and concentrate all of her abilities on immobilizing the phantom. Dark Link pummeled at whatever it was that was keeping him from moving with all of the strength of the Triforce of Power. He thought it gave just a little. Zelda struggled harder. He struck at Zelda herself with an invisible blow. But it didn’t work. The Triforce of Wisdom seemed to be nullifying all he could do. A few more such tries came and went before Link ran in as fast as his pitiful legs could scurry. Then he drew his sword. Rage bubbled in Dark Link until he couldn’t see. Miraculously, the Dark Master sword moved, blocking a vicious blow from the sword upon which it was based. No, not based. Improved. A bluish flash filled the air for less than the blink of an eye. Dark Link could not move very fast or very far, but he was still stronger. He blocked another strike. He realized with a difficultly formed grin that Link was not aware of what he could do with his part of the Triforce, and even if he did, he would still not know how. Then a slice hit home. It burned into Dark Link’s thigh. Dark Link burned with fury. Breaking suddenly free of the Triforce of Wisdom’s enchantment, Dark Link seized the two in the air with his own Triforce, and raised his sword. Then something that he didn’t know what it was happened. A strange golden light encompassed the three. Dark Link felt his wound heal. None of them could move. Everything flooded with white light... They were in a room which Dark Link knew all too well: the oppressive blue stone walls, the water up to one’s ankle, the eerie sounds. This was his home. Link was there, too, looking confused, like Zelda. Perfect. Dark Link drew his sword, rushing at Zelda, since she was closest. She let out a terrified and startled scream. His sword struck. The Triforce of Wisdom entered him, and Zelda’s head fell to the floor and reddened the water. Link’s face was covered with sheer shock. Then utter fury. The Hero of Time, bearer of the Triforce of Courage, and lover of the woman who had just been slain by his own shadow, let out a horrible yell. A yell like all of the terrible things the world has ever known and ever will know, mixed with more anguish than a single mind can contain without snapping, magnified by the injustice that had ever been felt and ever would be. The green-clad man charged at Dark Link like Death itself. It was all Dark Link could do to fend off Link’s savage strikes, lacking in finesse but faster than anything he had ever seen. He tried to draw on his Triforce, but Link had stumbled on how to nullify its powers. The battle raged on, rage in the eyes of one warrior, death in the eyes of the other, and Link winning. Dark Link was pressed against the far wall. A particularly brutal stroke caused him to lower his defenses. Link’s sword hit Dark Link in the right shoulder. The real Link raised his sword high for another blow, a fatal one, when Dark Link struck the other in the abdomen. Link fell backwards, blood spewing from his wound. No one, Dark Link realized, could stop him now. The Triforce of Courage became his, and his left hand indicated that the three sacred triangles were his now. Before he went on to claim his one wish, he had business to take care of. Rauru was lying down for bed when Zelda was slain. He did not know where she was, but he did know he could do nothing. With a heavy heart, he summoned the remaining Sages. Darunia arrived late, being aware of the death of his sworn brother Link and not liking it. The meeting began in silence. No one dared speak. Rauru finally said, “Link and Zelda are dead. The Triforce is whole and in the hands of the evil responsible, and there is nothing we can do with only five. All is lost.” Dark Link heard his speech, and reflected that they were fitting last words. He appeared, and before any of them knew what was happening, he had used the Triforce’s power to kill them all. Dark Link approached the King of Hyrule. “I have an offer,” he said, “Surrender Hyrule willingly and I will make you my lieutenant. Resist and you die.” The noble King of Hyrule died with defiance on his last breath. Dark Link wrought an army of monsters, and sent them out into Hyrule. It was merely a month before he had left Hyrule a burning wasteland, bleak and dead. The Hylians were driven mercilessly by slave driving beasts, making his army greater still. But there was still the matter of the resistance they put up. He would break them before seeking greater conquests. He had not sentenced all to endless toil and just barely enough sustenance to fulfill their duties. He had a number of humans who had sold themselves out and were now driving slaves with his monsters. He had found the smartest and made them leaders of his armies; monsters were too stupid to do that. The prettiest were his pets, the leaders of the resistance his target practice, the ones who resembled Link he struck down with his bare hands; he could never get enough revenge. He never feared betrayal; the Triforce warned him of that. Months passed, years, generations. Dark Link ruled the entire world with an iron fist, and no one could stop him. He was not particularly smart, and was never bored. Every day brought new challenges. He had found the best of the best and set them to advancing the technology that was available to him; they had made the steam engine and were working on harnessing lightning already. Life was good. Longer still passed. Dark Link, the mighty Emperor of the World, could no longer remember how he had come to power. He had always ruled the world. His scientists just unveiled a method they had found and tested that would take their Emperor to other worlds so he could conquer them. He had not felt so much as a twinge of betrayal in centuries. The craft was round, smooth, shiny, and blacker than night. He leapt off of the charred, blackened earth that was the lawn of his palace, a huge building hundreds of stories high and with nothing but that blackened earth to the horizon. The hatch on top closed behind him. There was a lurching sensation, and Dark Link went to the long, unnatural sleep he had expected. The eight scientists stayed behind on the ground and grinned at each other. They were not scientists but robots controlled remotely by the people they resembled. So they didn’t have to leave the lab, they had said. In reality it was because Dark Link, the ill-begotten “Emperor,” could not sense the emotions of inanimate objects, and apparently he had not known that. The scientists who had no names—nobody had had a name since the Emperor had risen—did not tell their master that to get to other worlds would take thousands of years longer than he had already lived. During that time, they could find a way to stop him, or they would die. The fist step they would take was to use a bomb they had made that would kill monsters but not innocent Hylians. They would free the slaves, and get right to work to stop Dark Link, or at least to leave something that would outlive him. The first two steps of their plan went smoothly. There were no more monsters and all the people of the world—only several million of them—gathered in silence to hear the scientists proclaim the people free. The eight, three women and five men, proclaimed all at once, “Freedom!” A huge, deafening cheer rose over the crowd. As the years went on, the eight ruled benevolently, studying magic that could be used against the Emperor. The Triforce, it seemed, was the source of his power. When one of them died, he or she was replaced. One of them found a way to seal the Emperor away, but it wasn’t perfect. And so the years wore on. The world became clean again, and everybody forgot about the Emperor. The eight scientists (not the original ones of course) were expecting the Emperor to return within the next year. One of them used he potent magic to sense him coming; he was angry, and much, much stronger than before. And he carried the Triforce with him, not using its power.\ The eight met, and decided that they would have to make something that would outlive them. The sisters of the scientist who had felt Dark Link coming had been working on making a small terrarium with a complete world in it. It had some primitive primordial ooze in it that we beginning to evolve and adapt to its environment. They would seal away Dark Link, put him in there, and cast the small world into space. The Emperor returned, furious. He had changed. Now no longer a shadow of Link, he was a huge man dressed in evil colors, his hair turned white with the power he possessed. How he had come upon this power, he did not remember. He did know that when he left Hyrule, it had been charred and brow, and now it was lush and green. Thos scientists were to blame. The people cowered before him even as he reduced them to ash. He found the scientists, and drew his mighty sword, two blades wrapped around another. But he was too slow. The Triforce, a small metal medallion, fell from his hand. Before he, shrunk to the size of half a grain of sand. One of the eight, a man, scooped him up and dumped him in the terrarium. Then the scientist, too, shrank. And fell into the terrarium. With a heavy heart, yet knowing what needed to be done, the three scientists who were sisters broke apart the medallion and put each of its parts in with Dark Link and the eighth scientist. Now came the hardest part of the plan. The remaining four scientists had agreed to shrink themselves and command the evolution of the world they had formed, to make sure the Emperor never broke free. It was, they had decided, the only way. They cast magic on themselves, and shrank, and fell in. Only three scientists remained, now, the sisters. They put it in a spacecraft that would fling the small world into space, past the moon, on a trajectory that would sent it straight down the gullet of a black hole after several trillion years adrift. It launched, and the scientists let the democratic rule that had been forming under them take full control of the world. Long into the future, legends would tell of the three remaining scientists
that banished the evil to the stars. Three sisters, whose names were Din, Nayru,
and Farore.
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