The Badlands

Waking of Saturday, July 8, 2017 ~ 2

The Badlands

From Gut Check Rock, I began a counterclockwise circumnavigation of Death Mountain. Dinraal looked like he got to some pretty low altitudes.... and if Farosh dropped things when you shot him with arrows.... then surely Dinraal would, too.

I paraglided, I jogged, I climbed—sometimes I would see the DIVINE BEAST crawling in a parallel course higher up the mountain. My gosh it was so big . . . . its feet were on fire . . . . and it had four eyes oh my gosh....

Madly inhaling Rock Octoroks.... Eldin Ostriches.... a few Red Lizalfos.... Ice Arrows took care of them.

And I saw....

Hhhhh.

There was land, over there. North of the volcano, across a huge gulf. Beyond the northern edge of my map.

I’d seen the distant mountaintops. Maybe from all the way back on the Plateau. There were some far, far peaks whereupon if you centered your scope.... the central reticle would remain empty, instead of lighting up red.

You couldn’t place markers there.

I’d always imagined they’d be just part of the grand scenery beyond as soon as I came up against the impassable mountain borders, which surely would be there....

Well.... I suppose the gigantic gulf was border enough. Though it still made it somehow more tantalizing.... Agh there was grass over there; there were hills and slopes and plains and mountains and . . . . hhhhhhh . . . .

It was comforting, and a little heartbreaking, to know and see that there was land over there.

Hahhhh. </3

I tracked Dinraal’s course through the most barren landscape of any I had yet visited. Naked stone and crusted spills of ash. No Koroks.

None.

Only monsters. And ostriches.

And a queer little breed of pigeon I took a pictograph of—apparently it’s no good to shoot it for game; it burns away when killed.

Okay so perhaps the land was not so barren. But the utter lack of Koroks was disconcerting.

The Deplian Badlands.

That’s what this place was called.

I stayed high, working from jutting crag to jutting crag, until I saw something . . . . unexpected, unbelievable, impossible: far away, in the lowest reaches, the farthest skirt of the volcano, right up against the dropoff into the impassable chasm, in a place with grass . . . . a long, broad, crestlike slab of bleachy grey: a skull.

And behind it, vertebra after vertebra, and great bowed ribs spidering into the earth. It was too big. It couldn’t be that big.

I thought of the StalHinox of Satori Mountain.

It couldn’t be that big. It was too big to be allowed!

And on his very occasional slow twining westward passes, Dinraal would snake low through the air above it, a crocodile, and he only the python.

How could it be that big . . . .

A Dodongo, I thought, it had to be a Dodongo, long-dead from some forgotten age, some terrible forgotten age.... And memories of Volvagia, and what would have happened had he not been killed.... And those giant bones I had seen in the dusty desert.... And visions of the volcano erupting endlessly, and lava covering the land, and dread colossal Dodongos reigning in blood and fire . . . .

What a terrible, terrible world.

It turned out the skeleton really was that big—I hiked for what felt like ages, and it seemed barely to come any further into my view. So slowly it crawled by at my passing....

But after a very, very long time, I did manage to get somewhat above it.

I thought again of the StalHinox, and was afraid to go down there. But.... at David’s encouragement....

I paraglided in.

Crag by crag, anyway. And then I was close enough to know: this was called the Eldin Great Skeleton.

IT WAS NOT A STAL-CREATURE. OuO;;

Well that was a relief.

I floated down onto the great mountain-shelf of its head.

There were baddies camped out beneath its spine! Bokoblins, Moblins, Lizalfos.

Well. The high ground was already mine. All I had left to do was appeal to Ja Baij.... I picked a nice angle and chucked my bombs one after another through the gap between two of the skeleton’s ribs. The monsters ran around in an irate fret, trying to find the source of the commotion, but they never failed to either come back toward the center, or run in to try and kick the bombs away.

Either way.... they blowed up real good.

And they left me a few presents! I snagged another Great Fireblade, a few bundles of arrows, and plenty of monster bits.... until these latter treasures began rolling away toward the skeleton’s tail with a sudden gust of wind.

David directed my attention upward: Dinraal was making another pass! I ran but could not catch his head. And so I fired an arrow at the only place I could—his underbelly.

I still had Ice Arrows equipped—sorry, Dinraal!

And a scale streaked glowing toward the earth like a falling star.

“What?” said David, but I didn’t answer him; I just collected the scale.

Cool. X-)

I had quite a time exploring the entire giant skeleton, let me tell you. I climbed back up the tail and jumped from vertebra to vertebra—each singular bone took a few jogging strides to cross! And I crept up the neck beneath the huge armored skull—almost fell all the way through to the front but climbed back up and went backward again.

How could it be this big.

But after a time I moved on, and continued my counterclockwise traversal of the mountain.

And I saw something else. Something that seized my gut and just about made my heart stop—a White-Maned Lynel.

That’s what my compendium called it. I snapped its pictograph just as it threw a startled question-mark glance in my direction—and then I ducked back down behind the rock I was on.

Oh my gosh.... 8C

Its body was black and white. Striped. Like a zebra!?

So that was what was up with that thumbnail I kept decidedly ignoring in my DeviantArt messages.... there really were zebra-Lynels....

Yeah it was time to get high again. Oh that came out so wrong. It was time to get to high ground! I climbed up the backside of a large jutting rock, away from the Lynel’s view, until I was back amid the ashy crags of the mountain’s side.

And I continued round the mountain.

From my high road I saw Dinraal make another low pass over the farthest skirts of the mountain—this time over the barren piece of earth the White Lynel haunted. Anywhere else I might have sailed in to try for another scale or shard, but here?

Hah, NOPE! C8