CALAMITY

Evening of Wednesday, June 19, 2019 (comprised of many raw note editings from May 1 through May 10, 2023 that I really hope sound consistent because I left it alone for too long) ~ 3

CALAMITY

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The Demon lay on the floor, its figure still, but its form yet crawling—Malice writhing beneath the surface, across the surface, still obscuring the monster in a pall of unknowableness among its folded, gangling legs bent everywhere—

But it stirred again.

Leg and arm and limb and joint moved, shuffling as the heaving mass hauled and pulled to raise itself—tromp, tromp.... tromp-tromp, tromp.... the varied ends of its nightmare legs squelched against the floor. Dark blood or some perversion thereof came spurting from every surface at the strain, spattering the ground—Shkang!—one Guardian leg clamped against the ground. A literal Guardian’s leg. This dark amalgamation of terrors....

It burbled a sonorous, crocodilian rumbling as it pulled to face me.

The giant flaming sword arm, no longer roaring, heaved up and pounded mightily down as the Demon dragged, shaking the floor.

Its eyes still clutched my throat to strangle the life from me.

The smaller left arm stepped once more and then buckled—the shoulder collapsed—something ruptured and a torrent of black-magenta liquid shot out—from the neck, from the belly, the hindquarter, the other side, again and again, more and more—the Demon screamed, rearing as dark, splattering pools formed viscous and foul over the stones beneath its wilting body—

It didn’t stop—more kept coming.... and more kept coming.... spurting.... SPURTING....

The Demon’s head rolled in a moment of silent, open-mouthed agony, like a dying man’s, and its terrible eyes, like fiery glowing holes, looked on me again.... One of them was fixed wider than the other....

And then the screaming came again, as the monster lurched more viciously than before, pulling the stones beneath it with ungodly strength as its liquid muscles glowed hot and red in its rage. Pounding, pounding, dragging, pulling, screaming, reaching—

The jaws of Hell gaped in its face as it came toward me.

And then came the light.

It was not a goodly light.

It erupted purple-white from within the Demon’s body, spearing out in a piercing shaft—and then another—and then another. At each new beam the Demon’s screams seemed to redouble, layering up upon themselves. A cacophonous teakettle chorus of pain, and rage, and hatred—

Until at last its body could no longer maintain its corporeal form, and all was blasted out, ripped apart from within, by that glowing hot, purple-white sphere like a firebomb....

The dark wind of a boundless evil rolled over me like a gale, rushing out from the center in a wrack of malevolent black flame. I cast up my forearms and lowered my brow, planting my feet against the storm. So much of it.... so much bigger than even that foul, indiscernible thing I had just killed.... I bowed my head lower....

When the rupturing Malice-storm had finally blown itself out, the dark-glistening clouds of it gathered up into the center of the enormous chamber once more.

The beast had no form.... yet it was no less present.... somehow roaring in gurgling fury even now....

The dark cloud swirled menacingly for only a moment more.... and then began to float back up—to ascend back up the central shaft, moving with purpose, another roar guttering in its unmade throat like a dragon....

It was leaving me behind—I had a bad feeling about this.

The Calamity was leaving; everything was leaving—even the Soundtrack had gone. The room stood stock-still and empty. The glik-glik-glik of my boots and the rattle of my gear rang in the hollow space as I jogged a few steps after the departing nightmare.

How do I get out of here?

But even as I stood, gazing upward—that flickering, that glittering—

The Powers of Light and Goodness had not left me bereft. Just as in the times after I had reclaimed a Divine Beast, that delicately twinkling golden light began to gather around my person like living stars, humming like summer crickets and tiny cymbals....

It enveloped me all at once with a high clarion ringing, and bore me up and away as the world whited out....

....

Hyrule Field.

That’s where this was.

Flat, and open, and grassy, and I could see the Castle and those pillars in the distance, blackened to near silhouettes in the golden sun’s glare.

....

No, but was it even called Hyrule Field, here, now?

These Central Plains....

The breezing grass and the lightly scudded sky mirrored fire at one another, as the flickering light descended like a flower petal and deposited me in the field with a flash, soft, and unassuming, ringing like a kiss from the Goddess.

A horse.

A horse was here with me, too. Saddled. Its figure likewise lost in the glow of the molten sky. Brown? It looked liked Brown. But.... Brown was safe in a stable....

The horse from my memories, resurrected?

....

They did look very similar to one another, to be honest. I wondered....

The wind hissed among the grass.

No.... Not the wind....

Streaming tails of Malice coursed through the sky like tadpoles distorted by rippling water. Sickly fireworks, with heads of bright magenta, trailing ribbons of dark fumes behind them.

They slithered over my head, behind me—

Hissing....

“...” Something muffled.

I turned—and saw darkness—

“Ganon...”

The horse turned too—

—It was black, it was swirling, it was a mountain, darkly flaming, writhing and turning as it had done about the castle for a hundred years.... only so much thicker.... Shot with magenta, and fed by a thousand trailing vestiges of Evil as the Demon’s scattered Malice gathered for one final time....

“Ganon...”

It was Zelda’s voice.

“Ganon was born out of a dark past.”

Shapes. Shapes moved in the dimness of the cloud. Solid again. Something big....

What.... rolling mountain of evil-made-flesh was this? I didn’t understand.

“He is a pure embodiment of the ancient evil that is reborn time and time again...”

And another—SHAPE?

!!

THAT one I understood—that was a hoof.

It burst from the cloud and swung ponderously downward. A sound like cracking trees and tearing rocks snapped through the air as the cloven mountain of Malice came to a sudden and violent stop, quaking the earth.

And another hoof.... It tore through the cloud with a shearing, the inverted mountain peaks of its dew claws dragging dark contrails through the air. Every new disturbance to the swirling miasma cast up a blood-red splash as the Demon churned within itself, birthing the new, unholy body.

Oh gosh he’s huge....

“He has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure, enraged form.”

The head at last erupted from the storm.

Fire.

Crests of white fire.

Evil so concentrated it glowed a blinding burning—

The eye. Horns. Tusks. The mouth gaping like I had seen it do so long ago from the plateau when I was tiny and small and naked. Roaring fit to split its jaws apart and fill all the earth with its howling, its raging....

The ground disappeared in a haze before and beneath it, so towered the Demon over the plains below, the vestigial clouds of the evil that had fed its formation still whirling round it in a disc.

Oh my gosh he’s huge....

“If set free upon our world, the destruction will be unlike anything ever seen before.”

The hooves raised unnaturally high—

From where I stood by my horse, I watched—we watched—as the whole, mutated, broad-shouldered mountain of the Beast came slamming down from the final throes of its transformation. The forehooves landing bowshots apart. Casting up house-sized boulders that rocketed into the air—my horse reared and whinnied—

The Malicey clouds at last receded.

The Demon was whole once more.

And its eyes—its glowing, hollow eyes—set amid the animal patterns of the manes of fire cresting its face and flaring up along the proud hump of its back—

Its eyes.... were upon me.

Me. Alone in all the plain.

Me.... and my horse.

Hardly moving from his enormous, tusk-lowering stoop, the Calamity again sighed out the guttering roar of a thousand crocodile dragons—and a quivering, a shaking, racked along his thick, muscly nape, rippling among his shoulders and down through his neck and into the terrible place where his eyes lived—unmoving, unmoved, unwrinkled by any furrow of the brow—only the massive, man-splitting strain of that monumental trembling betraying the awful fury that no mortal could utter and live.

A new title gleamed into terrible focus on the screen:

Hatred and Malice Incarnate

DARK BEAST GANON

Even the title seemed tinged with blood....

The entirety of the Orchestra had risen up through just one earth-shattering sequence of that most ancient organ motif, before coming to hang with the dust in the air on a suspension of high strings that were bending with losing their minds.... watching.... waiting....

That dissonant, ascending organ line.

He was still serenading her.

Still serenading his captive.

But the Dreadful Dialogue pendulated back, as it always did and as it always had, and the Princess’ answering Lullaby came escorted by the Piano alone, standing against the world in a beautiful concerto beneath the rippling sky flowing like a river....

Something was there, like a second sun high above....

She addressed me still—

“I entrust you with the Bow of Light—a powerful weapon in the face of evil.”

And the holy relic descended from the washing pastel of the running clouds, glowing golden, beaming bright, the recurve of its length arcing like a sickle moon decked with gold-wrought tendrils.... sheening.... ringing....

“Link...”

I stood in the grass beside my horse.

“...you may not yet be at a point where you have fully recovered your power or all of your memories...”

Looking down from the easy gaze he had held on the Princess’ final gift, my horse.... looked to me now. Expectantly.

And I looked to him.

And mounted up.

And the Piano reached out with one hand and then the other, drawing in every piece of the Orchestra one by one, stronger and stronger as the Lullaby turned to a new melody.

The oldest new melody in this land....

“But courage need not be remembered...”

The Calamity stomped in the distance beneath the mighty cadence—

“For it is never forgotten.”

Oh my gosh I’m gonna cry.

The Bow finally came down to near ground level, some distance away.... and beyond it, the thunder and terror and roaring of a thousand crumbling mountains echoed from the Calamity’s last raging.

Only the Princess’ Light separated us now.

The cutscene released.

I charged.

Thankfully the pick-up was automatic as soon as we galloped into the Bow Of Light—

And after one FINAL interruption from the You-Get-The-Thing fanfare—oh my, 32 damage times five; that was something—the freeze released us and we hoofed it into the grass.

Oh gosh....

Oh my gosh he’s huge.

He’s HUGE.

Oh gosh.

I took a shot.

But nothing happened.

Oh wrong bow, I was still holding the old one—

I switched out—

A winding, whistling, charging noise and light gathered about the Beast’s head like a collapsing star and then ERUPTED OUT OF ITS MOUTH IN A PIERCING BEAM. Great head bowed low he mowed the blast into the ground, melting the earth and evaporating the grass—and then raised his tremendous neck, arcing the beam along with it, carving a straight line into the ground and off to the horizon and up into the sky and beyond the clouds and high into the heavens—shooting—shooting—SHOOTING!—the earth flaming a raging magenta in the beam’s wake—

Oh my gosh!

“That energy covering Ganon’s body is called Malice. None of your attacks will get through as he now is...”

Good to know!

The Demon charged another blast to spew out upon the earth—was he seeking me out?—My horse and I galloped along his flank, away from his head....

Or was he only blindly blasting his rage wherever he could as it welled up within him?

....

Either way, I didn’t care to invite his attentions!

I spurred my horse onward in the general direction of the Beast’s hindquarters, carving a wide arc and a generous berth....

“I will hold the Malice back as much as I can, but my power is waning.”

Princess!

“Attack any glowing points that you see!”

The Piano bucked like a wild thing among the Orchestra—

“May you be victorious!” the Princess prayed.

I spurred my horse....

Glowing points? His face? His eyes?

But the Princess willed her targets into sight for me—enormous golden rings, overlaid by the sign of the holy Triforce, rang into being across the Demon’s side, glowing hot and shining....!

“Go!” she cried—

OH GANON TURNED—his feet—HIS FEET—!

One deadly fetlock shuffed out and knocked me and my horse to the ground—

He stepped on my horse!

He stepped on my horse!!

I never meant to get this close—

He was MADE—OF—MALICE.

We must not touch him!

I drew back on the Bow of Light—this....Arrow of Light!—and let fly—

The golden targets exploded, and though I could discern no change in the Demon’s ungodly evil hide, I could hear his thunderous roaring in response, and see the impossible writhing of his heaving, mountainous body—it hurt him—

“Ganon’s power is weakening!”

I whistled and my horse was there.

Such a faithful, faithful steed.

Two whipcracks. Came every time I whistled.

Mounting was easier and the horse would run straight away. A mechanic, I suspected, of the fight.... But he was tricky to steer, as the camera wanted to stay focused on Ganon—

“Quickly now!”

More targets—

I’m coming!

The PIANO.

The Piano had accompanied me on horseback before.

It had followed me through the gaiety of sunshine and dappled leaves. It had stalked me lost beneath the moonlight. It had run joyously at my side telling me the Old Stories of Zelda’s Lullaby and the Legend of the Hero—

But now—

Now in the Calamity’s shadow, my horse and I ran to the tune of This Hyrule’s oldest song:

5_ 1_ 8____ 7b_ 5____....

5_ 7b_ 1____ 5_ 2b_ 3b__ 4__

5_ 1_ 3b____ 2_ 5____....

5__ 7b_ 6___ 5____

This melody was ancient on a metaphysical level—already old and well known in teasers before the land had been born. And it strove against the Ascending Organ of the Dark One as the Malice-fires raged and the rain began to pour....

This was the Orchestra’s pronouncement for the Battle at the End of the World.

But the Piano....

Upon this framework....

....the Piano danced!

So vibrant, so vivacious, it leapt and spun and stomped and beat and CARED NOTHING for all of Ganon’s raging! It was there to chant. It moved in syncopated defiance of everything around it, Good, Evil, or otherwise. It wanted a piece of this brawl and it had taken it, and was now tearing it to pieces before the eyes and ears of all.

Always mere raindrops it had been before, whenever it ran alongside my horse—Now it was a hurricane!—a torrential downpour splashing and crashing where it would and NONE could stop its rioting revelry!

My heart could have burst for that PIANO....!

—As it burst for my horse!

Would he stop stepping on my horse!!

I had to shoot the thingies....!

Zelda’s voice telling me what to do.... I could sense it starting to deteriorate into the variations reserved for the retarded gamers because I was taking so long—

“Link, now!”

Hang on I’m still over here by his tail—

!

But then I remembered.... and didn’t want to miss another opportunity....

I took out my pictograph box!

Channeling a stupidly fond old memory from one Adam Hanny and his friend Shad Metcalf.... “Here’s a nice picture for ya!” I sneered with a nasty grin, and took a pictograph of Dark Beast Ganon’s butt.

I was a little preoccupied to do any better just now!

Shoot the thingies....

Some of the targets I had missed while being on one side of him, before passing round to the other side—he was just so big.... his flanks and shoulders heaving and twisting like a mountain....

The Princess’ urgings made me want to hurry.... Sometimes I passed underneath him to get back to where I had been.... oh gosh....

And once as I came out on his right side, A BLOOD MOON WAS RISING AND THE SKY WAS TURNING HELLISH RED.

The clouds, the storm, and now this....

The sky was boiling.

Princess Zelda conjured the final target for me—ON HIS BELLY.

Well, I’d been under a few times already....!

I rode in close again and took it out!

“Link! Look up there!” Zelda’s voice came again.

But I was wheeling around toward the tail again. I didn’t like being anywhere near the Beast’s face. His ripping Malice attacks raking across the landscape—

“That is the very core of Ganon’s being!”

Or some such words....

“Do what you must, Link!”

But I’m looking up and I don’t see anything....

Oh—

I could see now, more light—ohh gosh—from his head now, what?

....

. . . . . . .

. . . .

I gotta get up there.

....

I gotta get up there. Up to the front.

And the fastest way....

I turned my horse and rode straight up his tail, between his back legs, under his gross heaving belly and beneath his.... unexpectedly ripped chest.... toward the front.

“I DON’T LIKE BEING DOWN HERE,” I SAID TO MY MOM.

What the abs?

I guessed he wasn’t totally porcine.

My horse and I tore out from beneath his terrible jaws—the searing firebomb waiting to go off—

We got to the front and I could see now—a light.

A good light!

Golden and sheening, bursting from his head, from above his face, from his nape, out of his manes....

The sight of it hummed and shimmered—the Piano had seized upon a single oboe and was now romancing it about the field in an elegantly charged holding pattern—it wanted me to do something....

“Use his attacks to your advantage!” the Princess sang out.

His attacks....

His attacks....?

....

HIS ATTACKS?

She didn’t mean....?

The Light was so high up.... The Beast was too tall.... There was no reaching it....

Except....

Dark hatred and wickedness once again drew in from the deepest corners of every dark, unseen plane, and gathered within the Beast’s throat. He ejected it in a shuddering roar, gouging the land with yet another ugly scar—

And the earth burned.

Those dark magenta fires.

My Horse.... I must leave you.

I swung as close as I dared and leapt from my steed’s back and down onto the ground—the ground, the terrible ground.

I was small, I was alone, I was naked and vulnerable again, down on the boiling ground—running for all my little mouse-feet could give me—I had no mobility—

—Almost.

The ground smoked and dripped those unholy Malice embers up into the noxified air—the fires....

I just needed to reach those.... poisonous.... stinging.... fires....

Magenta licked my legs as I pounded through the grass and into my deadly target—and leapt—

I deployed my paraglider, and the foul swelling breath of the evil flames swept me up into the air—I rode the draft higher and higher—

“There!” Zelda shouted.

And I saw it.

I had been jumping from horseback to fire my arrows—the slowed time, it steadied my hands—

But now I arrowed in mid-flight, high above the ground and far away from anything—

For just one breath—

It was.... an eyeball.

Hah, and only now as I type it.... do I realize how.... Well, it shouldn’t be surprising I suppose.

It was a cacophony of eyeballs. One greater and more prominent in the midst of the rest. All erupting from beneath the thick, swirling hide, as though the neck had been sliced open lengthwise. Yellow. Bulbous. Bloodshot. Evil.

Even between the Calamity’s great flaming manes cresting high and blazing from its back, the Eyeball and its attendant cluster glowed blindingly bright with their own malevolence. So bright.... For something so evil....

But wait.... I had thought that that golden light I had seen....

....

Was Zelda in there?

“Now, Link!”

—Now—

And my stamina commanded the same—I couldn’t hang on forever—and neither could she—

I let fly.

The Arrow of Light struck true.

And all the world was only a gushing and a rupturing as the Eyeball was pierced, as the Demon howled and the light exploded, filling up the sky—