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Abandoned for what was now a century, Hyrule Castle stood in the heart of Central Hyrule. What was once a proud symbol of the once great kingdom now stood as a foreboding silhouette on the horizon. A looming, ominous stronghold infested with malice and monsters beholden only to Calamity Ganon himself. No Hylian alive dared to step foot in its cursed halls.
Except one.
The Divine Beast Vah Medoh had just been freed from Calamity Ganon's control, but the champion responsible still had work to do. Two of the Divine Beasts still remained under Ganon’s influence. Only with their help could she confront the monster and end this nightmare once and for all.
But she didn’t want to go in blind when the time finally came. She needed to be prepared. And so, while she was on her way to her next adventure, the champion decided to take a detour to Hyrule Castle itself. She had heard rumors of many secret entrances to the castle that would allow her access without drawing too much attention from Ganon’s minions, and she wanted to verify how true they were before, you know, staking her life on them.
Which led her to discovering a passage on the castle’s west side, a cave entrance that led straight to a hidden tunnel system directly under the castle itself. Her memory was fuzzy, but judging by the half-buried guardians she had come across it seemed that this area was used to excavate the ancient machines, an initiative ordered by the king himself.
There just had to be a way into the castle itself. After a few minutes of exploration (and a much needed trip to the castle’s health rejuvenating underground hot springs), the champion finally found access to one of the castle’s lower levels.
She had done it. She had found a viable secret path into the castle. But while her task was technically complete, she decided not to leave quite yet.
Why not explore a little while I'm here? She figured. After all, there’s no telling when she’ll next have the time to scope the place out before the final battle, and any reconnaissance she could gather would definitely come in handy.
And if she found some valuable treasure and cool weapons along the way, who could blame her?
And so Ruby found herself on one of the castle’s exterior walkways, ascending yet another set of stairs on the castle’s west side. As she was nearing the top, she could see what looked to have once been a doorway, now crumbled to the point of essentially being a hole in the wall.
Nearing the opening, she began hearing the wild, pig-like grunts of something large scrounging around inside. Definitely a moblin.
As she poked her head around the corner, Ruby silently drew her bow, her eyes locking onto the creature at the center of the room. Steeling her nerves, she quickly dove out from behind her cover and released her projectile. The arrow was sent flying straight into the moblin’s head, sending the beast flailing onto the ground, prone.
Not one to waste such an opportunity, Ruby pulled out the claymore she had strapped onto her back and charged the creature head on. Before the creature could even pull itself back to its feet, it was met with a powerful slash that sent it crashing into the fireplace behind it.
The creature shook its head in a daze, before finally focusing on its attacker. Its blade slammed downwards with all its might, only for the girl to skillfully dodge to the side. Seeing her opening, time seemed to slow as Ruby rushed forward in a flurry of blows, swiftly dispelling her target.
The moblin fell to the ground, disappearing in a cloud of purple smoke. Grinning at her handiwork, she returned the blade to its resting place upon her back, and took out her bow once again. She really wished she had a weapon that could just... transform from ranged to melee instead of having to switch out every time. That would be really useful.
She loved The Master Scythe dearly. It was a constant companion and she was honored it had chosen her, but boy is it nice to have something with a little more range. Especially against those guardian turrets.
Well, The Master Scythe did have a ranged attack, but the powerful slash of energy only worked when she was at full health, which wasn’t that feasible when she ran into demonic monsters and possessed guardians at every turn. This castle was a nightmare . A far cry from the magnificent structure she remembered. Well… almost remembered.
The process of regaining her memories was slow going. There were still plenty of gaps, but she could definitely recall strolling down these halls before, though rarely alone. She could remember that at least. Remember him.
He was her charge, Prince Oscar of Hyrule, and one of her closest… friends? She’s pretty sure they were friends. She definitely remembered them being friends despite their rocky start. But, she wasn’t quite sure if “friend” was the right word to describe their relationship.
Yes, she definitely remembered how important their friendship was to her. How important he was to her. And yet… there was something else there, something she couldn’t quite reach.
She could remember how his smile, soft and gentle, made her stomach twist up in knots. How his laugh, rare as it was, would echo through her mind for hours on end. And how could she forget the adorable little pout he gave whenever hitting a roadblock in his research?
Yet there was still so much she couldn’t recall, tickling the back of her mind. Key moments that remained elusive to her. Specific events that often required visual cues to…
Wait…
This room. It was… familiar.
She didn’t notice before, too focused on the task at hand, but this room definitely felt important in some way. Even without her apparent past connection to this place she could have come to that conclusion. An ornamental trim lined the walls where they met the ceiling, the windows were far more decorative than those in the rest of the castle, and the various pieces of broken furniture that lay scattered across the room seemed expensive.
There were the remains of a bed, a mirror, an ornate folding screen--This was somebody’s bedroom. Probably where someone of importance stayed, before it fell into such disrepair.
She drifted over to the fireplace where she slew the moblin. This… This sparked something in her.
She felt… she had sat here before, all those years ago…
With… with him…
“…and they’re held aloft by these rotors, see? Just like the skywatchers,” the boy explained, gesturing to the research journal splayed out in front of them.
Leaning over to get a better look, Ruby could see that the machine in question did resemble the guardian skywatchers, at least conceptually. Instead of three propellers though, it had two stacked on top of eachother, and its body was much more simplistic. “So… is it just like, a tiny one? Like the scouts?”
“Er--Not exactly…” he replied. “These sentries are actually pretty big, and while they may share similarities with their more offensive counterparts, unlike pretty much every other guardian we’ve seen it doesn’t seem to be designed for combat.”
“What?!” Ruby exclaimed. “You mean it doesn’t have any weapons!”
“Ruby! Shh!” Oscar said, frantically putting a finger to his lips and glancing at his bedroom door. “You’re not supposed to be here, remember?”
Oh. Right. She was supposed to be in the barracks, not sneaking away to hang out with the Prince in his bedroom. Even his appointed knight wasn’t allowed in his private quarters after dark.
It’s not like they were going to do anything of course! Nothing, save bundling up together in a bunch of blankets to read by the fire.
Goodness. How scandalous.
This little tradition had started at the beginning of the winter months. The barracks had been inexplicably short a few blankets--someone was probably being selfish--and Ruby was not going to spend the whole night shivering.
While she had initially intended to simply borrow a few blankets from Oscar and leave, he had somehow wound up investing her in the story he was reading at the time, and she just couldn’t leave. They soon found themselves reading together by the fireplace, repeating this tradition rather frequently throughout the season.
Oscar would read aloud while she would follow along, reading over his shoulder. A seemingly simple task, made much more difficult by Oscar’s flustered insistence on keeping a respectable distance from her. He seemed to get a bit more comfortable as time went on though, and he eventually let himself sit shoulder to shoulder with his appointed knight, sparking a warm feeling in her chest that had nothing to do with the open flame.
They started off reading some of Oscar’s favorite stories he wanted to share with her, but eventually they somehow moved to reading out of his research journal. Sketches of the various pieces of ancient technology littered the pages, filled with notes and annotations. It was clear how passionate the boy was about these machines.
…even if some of them were apparently boring.
“Sorry,” Ruby apologized, “it’s just, all the other guardians get all this cool ancient weaponry! Why is this one so lame?”
“It’s not lame…” he defended.
“All it has is a couple of propellers!”
“Rotors.”
“Huh?”
“They’re rotors,” he reiterated. “Propellers generate propulsion, this is generating lift, so it's a rotor.”
“Propeller, rotor, who cares? What good is a darkness fighting robot that can’t fight?”
“You didn’t let me finish!” he chuckled. “It may not have any immediate offensive capabilities, but it does have a searchlight just like the skywatchers!”
“So…?”
“So it may not be able to shoot anything, but if it catches monsters in its searchlight it'll alert Rudania who then rains down magma bombs from Death Mountain.”
“…Okay that’s actually pretty cool.”
“Right!” he exclaimed, clearly happy to have swayed her on these new guardians. “We’re still not quite sure why Rudania is the only one who has these sentries. You’d think it would be useful for all the Divine Beasts to have a sort of early warning system like this.”
"Hmm. Probably ‘cause it's so compatible with Rudania in particular,” she noted. ”The others don’t really need it like he does.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Well, Ruta shoots ice blocks, Medoh has canons, and Naboris shoots lightning bolts. All those projectiles focus on specific targets,” she explained. “But Rudania’s magma bombs are more of a bombardment. He can’t control where they go individually, so he needs something to tell him the general area of where to aim his barrage.”
…Oscar blinked for a few seconds, before frantically doing away with his blankets and rushing over to his desk.
“Uh… what are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting a pen. I need to write this down.”
She snickered at his enthusiasm. “Seriously?”
“What?” he murmured, keeping his head down as he returned to the fireside, writing utensil in hand. “It’s a good hypothesis!”
“It wasn’t a hypothesis!” she replied. “It was just a guess based on what I know about weapons.”
“That’s what a hypothesis is!”
“Oh.” She smirked, lightly elbowing him in the ribs. “Hah! You should use my ‘weapons expertise’ more often!”
“Yeah, I should.”
Her eyes widened a fraction. “Oh! I didn’t actually… I was just kinda messing around--”
“I’m not.”
He looked up from his notes to glance at her from beneath his bangs, a small smile on his face. “That was really clever, Ruby. Thanks.”
It was hard to tell from the orange tint of the flame, but she could have sworn he was blushing.
And she had a feeling the warmth in her own cheeks wasn’t just the fire, either.
Ruby wasn’t entirely sure as to how many minutes had passed. How long had she been wrapped up in a time previously forgotten?
She wasn’t sure, and to be quite honest, she didn’t care.
She found herself smiling as recognition slowly flooded her mind. She sat there, allowing herself to bask in her returning memories for a moment. As she opened her eyes though, her heart sank.
Daylight shone through the many gaping holes in the castle’s architecture. It should have made the room brighter than that night, when it was only illuminated by dwindling embers.
But it didn’t.
All the colors seemed far more muted. Everything was dull and faded. It was like all the soul had been drained out of the room itself, leaving a suffocating emptiness behind.
A few minutes ago this was just another room. Just another dusty, decaying relic from a time she was only beginning to remember. But now she knew better. There were memories here. Memories of what was now a very long time ago.
Her gaze swept from the crumbling fireplace, to the discarded furniture, to the deteriorating structure itself. It was then she was reminded of just how long one hundred years really is.
And he’s been stuck here. Holding off Ganon for a century, waiting for her to arrive.
Oscar…
In one corner of the room sat Oscar’s desk, littered with withered tools and chipped glass bottles. Rummaging through the many papers and scrolls, Ruby found a blue and gold bound journal. It’s pages were yellowed with age, and many pages were torn or frayed at the edges, but it was for the most part miraculously intact.
Pacing over to the vast opening in the side of the bedroom, Ruby gazed upon the remains of Hyrule Castle before her, clutching Oscar’s research journal to her chest.
Maybe she wasn’t quite sure how to define their relationship quite yet, but she did know one thing for sure.
I won’t let you down, Oscar. I promise.