The empire was the crowning achievement of their kind. Against impossible odds and after generations of strife, a brilliant civilization had established itself in a crest of land that had been discovered by ancestors long ago. Where the temperature was moderate, where streams supplied fresh water, where the gigantic beasts rarely went and so also where the wildflowers bloomed around them bountifully. It was short of a paradise, having developed interweaving roads and efficient architecture; rows of magnificent structures and fields of steadily supplied crops; castles, cottages, and keeps. With so few perils afflicting the wide-spanning empire, it was thus celebrating an era of peace that its population of millions wished would never come to an end. They lived ordinary and cherishable lives, comfortable with their everyday customs, content with what they had and the progress at which they expanded.

It was the proudest time of minish history -- that was objective, according to the few scholars that knew the depths of their kind’s history. Jokari was one such individual that had delved into the ancient chronicles, the stories from long ago that spoke of a world so unlike that which they knew. The masses assumed it to be legends, a fantasy tale of their existence, but it was a controversial truth that the minish rulership was keen to write over: that they were a diminutive species, that despite their astounding advancements and intelligence, they stood in the measurements of micrometers compared to far greater beings. The entirety of their existence sprawled around towering wildflowers, surrounded by oceans of grass, fortunate to be near a trickle of springwater. The empire was vast only to the perspective of their kind, and as Jokari had learned more about the pitiful scale of his people, he saw their achievements as appropriately lesser feats.

The philosophical distance between him and his own people was what pushed Jokari to the lengths of science he pursued, and why he had explored an underground cavern by his lonesome. Burdened by the tiny truth of the minish, he sought out clues regarding a legend that even the knowing scholars scoffed at. A prophecy from long ago promised the minish prosperity in the form of a golden-haired goddess that would descend upon their civilization and take them to a world beyond. Supposedly, it was a prophecy that originated deep underground, and so Jokari had followed the dense roots of a silent princess flower that grew within the empire, delving into caves that could possibly be hiding the secrets of that prosperity.

And one day, after a week of toiling through the dirt, Jokari fell into his discovery. Collapsing through a layer of dirt and sliding into an open chamber, the minish scholar surveyed his surroundings until he eventually came upon a most peculiar detail. The floor, hard and perfectly flat under his boots, was glowing where he stood, a faint blue that illuminated a circuit of engravings. Drawn to where these engravings funneled, he followed them to the center, the design too sprawling in the dimness for him to decipher.

But once he had stepped into the center, Jokari had activated something, bringing light to the chamber all at once. Then blinded, he was unable to comprehend the eye-shaped design he stood in the middle of, a shape that stretched wider than an empire courthouse. Just as suddenly, everything began to rumble, an earthquake that extended farther than just the underground cavern, but a pattern of tremors that affected the entire empire to some degree. All citizens felt the surge pass up to their feet, but after only a few seconds of the earthly buzzing, it ceased -- gone just as swiftly as it had happened, too fast to have disturbed society.

On the surface, citizens wrote the ordeal off as an earthquake as stray as any other, but Jokari was rushing back through his tunnels, panicked by what he knew he was responsible for. He had discovered something amazing beneath minish civilization, but he was unaware of the exact magnitude of his actions, yet to realize that he had set the ancient prophecy into motion.

---

After a century of turmoil and a climactic clash between good and evil, the normalcy of peace was gradually enveloping the Kingdom of Hyrule. As towns were being rebuilt and commerce started up again, so too was the princess herself settling back into the living world, no longer a prisoner of her own plot. After being rescued by Link and having vanquished Calamity Ganon, Zelda found herself leading an era of reconstruction, bound by royal duty.

But as more of the land became tamed once more, and less perils required her attention, Zelda managed to make for herself more time to pursue her own interests -- the hobbies she enjoyed before the chaos and tragedy. Once able to be away from the throne any given day, Zelda eagerly answered the call of the wilds, throwing herself into nature so that she could learn more about how the world worked, the mysteries it hid. Like she did in her youth, she joyfully collected samples of flora and documented her findings, conducting little experiments and cross-referencing her research with that of her professors. Even if it amounted to zero breakthroughs, Zelda was content savoring the experience itself, fulfilled to be immersed in the field of scientific study.

Having tapped into the recently rediscovered technology of Sheikah Slates, Zelda’s scientific ventures had been amplified, much to her excitement. The various tools that the Slate provided enabled the princess to investigate deeper into details than ever before. The device could analyze materials with a scan, list out exact information, and simultaneously organize it in an efficient, user-friendly way. Quietly, Zelda had grown obsessed with the tech, keeping it on her person at all times, giddily understanding its most advanced features with each passing day.

Her Sheikah Slate was in-hand being used as a navigation tool while she wandered a forest on horseback, when she was alerted by a unique notification. It was a summer afternoon when Zelda had chosen to travel close to the Lost Woods for topics to study, but her usual plans were interrupted by the pinging on her Slate’s screen. When she tried to dismiss the notification, the map insisted on controlling itself, zooming in first on Zelda’s coordinates before sliding to a nearby point marked with an unknown character -- a short ride away from where she happened to be. She wondered what it could mean, if it was a detection of treasure or danger, but her innate curiosity drew her towards the beacon so that she could learn for herself.

Within the woods was tight terrain covered in tree roots that made it inaccessible for horses. So close to the mark, Zelda continued the rest of the way on foot; she was no stranger to toughing it through the wild like she used to with Link, braving through branches that could not scratch through her blue tunic or the tanned fabric of her pants. Despite her royal upbringing, Zelda could march gracelessly when needed, stomping through thickets until she came upon a grassy clearing of speckled wildflowers -- a glen shielded by arms of the forest, and the location the Sheikah Slate had guided her to.

Though impressed with the tranquil bubble of nature, Zelda was not satisfied with where she had been taken, nor was her Slate. Indeed, the pinging continued to notify her that she had not yet reached the precise coordinate of the beacon. Zelda raised a brow at her Slate as she continued into the glen, ever towards the dot of implied importance. So absorbed into her Slate, it went unnoticed how the ground transitioned from plush grass into hard gravel, her footsteps crunching into tiles of stonework that left distinct prints in her wake.

---

An hour had passed since the empire was shaken by a force only a single minish had a semblance of understanding. Jokari hurried up through the roots of the silent princess, fully anticipating to see the world he knew in ruins. But when he was back to the surface, stepping outside the temple from which his underground exploits began, he saw society continued to flow as usual. There was discussion of the tremor of course, but hardly the panic Jokari expected to see at a minimum.

The light and the engravings -- did anything actually happen? Jokari could only guess, left with so little to decipher what he had uncovered. Knowledgeable as he was, he knew he would need other scholars to join him in solving the mystery. Once the adrenaline had died down inside him, Jokari could let himself be joyful that he had unearthed something especially amazing. Though he knew nothing of what it was, he knew there was no denying the significance of that glowing floor and the quake he caused -- he knew too little of the sheer importance of his involvement.

It was as he hurried to the royal council, weaving through the traffic of midday business, when another quake shivered through the empire. Softer, but followed soon after with a subsequent shake, and another after that. It was a rhythm, its low roar especially haunting without a source to claim it. Civilians clucked about with questions of what was happening to their simple world, but the knights stationed within the narrow lookout towers were beginning to see what was responsible. It baffled them to witness something creeping over the horizon, a sight so unreal they hesitated to hail the sirens or inform the courts. They tried to calculate its scale, but with every step that it drew closer, their guesses proved pathetically low in their estimates.

They could only describe what they saw, impossible as it was, that what approached the empire at breathtaking speed was the shape of a person. But before their warnings could spread to where it mattered, she was upon them, this lone woman garbed in a blue tunic at her imperceivable height. The border, strengthened only relative to their scale, was utterly broken by a single footstep -- the wall, and most of an empire’s district, were completely flattened by the frontward half of a boot. Made unmistakably of leather, a wall of destruction had crashed into the lives of thousands. The swing of the leg was a moment of slowness; so huge and heavy, a single step took nearly a minute to complete, a stretch of time where dread drowned the populace beneath certain demise. It was a massacre for thousands, slain not by raiders or monsters, but by the soles of boots, so worn and aged that their musty leather odor was carried by the winds of their impacts.

Whereas the border districts had only moments to comprehend the appearance of an unstoppable destroyer, those in the core of the empire had marginally greater time to despair beneath the divine arrival. Thousands gathered onto the streets and rooftops to marvel at what had rocked their civilization, suspended in disbelief by the miserable sight of a boot extending far into the sky. It was difficult to imagine that past the highest point of the boot was surely a continuation of a leg, and beyond that, the rest of this being that brought down destruction wherever she went.

Jokari was among those crowds, having glimpsed at something overtaking the sky when he began wrestling to the front of a pack of minish. Squeezed between them, he shared in their absolute awe, his soul escaping his body when he realized the sheer scale of the thing’s footsteps. He and countless crowds gasped at where the boots imposed themselves, failing to accurately understand the depth of destruction -- the amount of territory irreversibly devastated, the number of lives instantly vanished. Panic swelled like a disease, boiling crowds into energetic mobs that poured into the roads, shoving themselves away from where they expected another decisive footfall to crash.

But Jokari was stunned where he stood, gawking upwards until his neck was sore, left behind while the crowds scurried away. Slack-jawed and wide-eyed, he strained himself to grasp what he and millions of others were witnessing. It struck him down his spine, a shiver that belittled him with the reality of the minish, that towering above him and his people was the very prophesied goddess, the golden-haired manifestation of salvation, destined to one day carry the minish to prosperity. She was here, and undoubtedly, he was what summoned her, the cause for her arrival as much as he was the cause for the sudden demolition of several districts.

It was not enough for the one meteoric boot to have made its impact on the empire, for it was joined by the other after a minute of suspense. The second leg roared above dozens of blocks of buildings, enrapturing the crowds that its shadow glazed over with its stunningly huge display. It was a gamble to guess where the leather sole would then crash, striking the world again while the aftermath of the first quake still rattled civilization -- another boom resonated from within a district, an unfortunate square of land that existed then only as dust in the treads of a boot. The surrounding area was bombarded by the tremors of that second footfall, debris blowing through the streets like sandstorms of destruction, whipping through the rioting survivors until they took refuge in one of the many quivering buildings. Though millions across the empire roared into panic, just as many were struck where they happened to be, shaken by the onset of something so grandly more significant than everything they had ever achieved.

Jokari was of those paralyzed by this realization, burdened more by the knowledge than any other minish citizen, for he truly understood the depth of which this matter extended. He knew that this was the goddess of legends, finally brought to their civilization, destined to take them to salvation -- so it was told in ancient writing. How accurate could that still be? Jokari pondered as much, drenched in an eerie calm compared to those that rushed around him. He had been terribly afraid moments before, but when his heart was held still for so long, after watching step after step after step barrage his homeland, his mind was able to steady itself and reflect on the momentous event.

A conclusion washed over Jokari’s soul, a different glean in his eyes as he marveled upon the great mountains of brown that trampled the empire. Destiny, he remarked to himself, his head angling farther back with every explosive step taken by the goddess. I’ve called her upon us -- I’ve moved us towards our destiny…! The sun was eclipsed then, as the gigantic body and its incomprehensible height came to tower above the capital district. All belonged to her shadow, or had fallen victim to her strides; her mountain-like feet, which had seemed oppressively massive from faraway, now made its fullest statement to Jokari, rocking the ground so intensely that he was tripped onto his back. Buildings shuddered and threatened to fall, screams flooded the air, but Jokari was mesmerized by the goddess, her absolute immensity, obsessed even with the musk of that footwear which washed over everything.

Unflinchingly, Jokari rotated onto his knees. He placed his forehead to the dirt, breathed in, and prayed. His fingers dug into the earth to feel the neverending vibrations of her presence, making himself sensitive to that ultimate weight. He submitted to fate, rolling over to what he had caused, his heart given to whatever end would consume him and his people.

---

A notification on her Slate blinked rapidly into her perplexed expression. Zelda had reached the point of interest, as insisted upon by her device, but no aspect of her surroundings was particularly remarkable. The glen that she stood in was surely a charming enclave of sunlight within the dense woods, but there was nothing important of the location -- that she could immediately find. Puzzle-minded as she was, Zelda wondered the possibilities of something being hidden, and thus her eyes sharpened for clues.

“It could be in the trees,” Zelda mumbled to herself, casting her stare into the canopy overhead as she took another blind step forward. Only then had it caught her ear, the crackle and pop of something breaking underfoot; “Or, it could be underground,” she mentioned as well, grinding that last step back through the dirt as she glanced at her feet. When evaluating the difficulty of digging down at the beacon’s coordinates, she noticed the unique colors of the gravel she had trekked into. Less like stone, and more akin to broken seashells and sand; Zelda’s eyes flared with interest, believing she may have stepped right into that clue she was searching for.

Zelda’s boot was lifted behind her as she peered over her shoulder. In this one-legged pose, she meant to only take a quick look at the material embedded into her treads, but her fascination grew the deeper her stare delved into the details. Her brow furrowed with curiosity, and she rotated her foot forward, angled so that she could look more closely. She saw the expected pebbles jammed in the weathered leather, the blades of grass and clumps of dirt wedged in the little spaces -- but there was more, and there was movement. Zelda guffawed with disgust, instinctively assuming it was a horde of insects crawling along the sole of her boot, and surely thriving likewise beneath the other. She would have believed that, had she not been so absorbed in the finer figments of the gravel she studied.

A theory struck her that the unusual shapes and designs crushed into her treads was actually architecture. There was a particular piece wedged within a patch of dirt, a cylinder of stone that was no wider than a shred of a leaf beside it, pointed with a bright, red color -- A roof, she deduced, which must mean that this… is a…?

It made no sense, so Zelda looked closer still. She pinched the stone gently between the very tips of her fingers, careful in how she loosened it free. Brought close to a squinted eye, there was no denying the minuscule scene playing out before her. Her lips trembled while her pupils darted from one microscopic detail to another; in her pinch of a grasp was a castle tower, and within that tower was a scrambling of creatures, lively little things that bounced about like fleas in the structure she had commandeered.

Similar situations could be glimpsed within the treads of Zelda’s boot, countless places where these tiny beings struggled to survive in the upside-down world trapped in the ridges of a sole. The disaster was incomprehensible to those worming through the dirt and debris, pained to make sense of the ruins of their society after having been trampled. While vast amounts perished instantly when the boot thundered upon their district, a fraction endured in whatever parts of their shelters withstood the flattening. Desperate as they were, they unearthed themselves to a windy wasteland, a mountainside of their cobbled civilization, all neatly encased in the unforgiving patterns of leather.

Yet only so few of those survivors would have the chance to look up and awe at Zelda; those that did were drawn to her eye as it hovered overwhelmingly near, her eyelids slowly meeting into a close, then separating just as gradually to reveal a pupil widened with interest -- a single blink that stretched across multiple screams to be saved. It had been wise enough to take refuge in the local noble’s castle, of which parts survived the catastrophe marginally, but those stragglers were then abducted again, stolen away in Zelda’s grip and stumbling into the land of her fingerprint.

But Zelda’s focus, for the time, was that on the masses she now understood to be on top of. More than just her one footstep’s worth of devastation, Zelda gasped at all the colors and tiles of a civilization spread around her in a grid-like design. It made her wary to lower her foot again, though it eventually did take root as her balance began to falter; accidentally, her clutch on the tower tightened, and when she looked at her fingers again, she saw only a wisp of dust, proof of everything’s fragility. The structure was gone, and so was the life within it, as far as her eyes could tell apart.

A wave of imbalance washed through Zelda as she began to understand her perspective. She towered among her discovery, a gridwork of houses, buildings, keeps, castles -- life that thrived, if only in the confines of the isolated glen. “Minish,” Zelda whispered aloud, her lips unfamiliar with the ancient word, that which Hyrule had effectively forgotten. “Such tiny, tiny things… C-Could it really be you? Mmm…” She remembered the minish from bedtime stories and children’s rhymes mostly, otherwise knowing of them through old legends and historical records. A tiny species that was easy to overlook; if Zelda’s theory was correct, she truly had rediscovered an ancient race of Hyrule.

“What an incredible find…!” Zelda giggled, leaning into a loom above the countless streets and structures. “There’s so much to ask and wonder… but, for the meantime…”

---

Pandemonium ravaged the population in the shockwaves of where the goddess came to stand. Every motion she made created a terrible noise, that of the world being reshaped by her movements; in horrified glances pointed high, they witnessed sectors of their civilization be scraped from the ground and carried miles into the sky. Everywhere she stepped, and everything she touched, crumbled like dust -- yet destruction was not her intention. Indeed, something more sinister than merely wiping away the empire underfoot was her plan, as revealed by the super-scaled tools she revealed.

The panic continued as a gigantic blade -- that of the head of a shovel -- plummeted towards the capital district of the empire. The metal impaled the ground, fissuring the city as it dug deep beneath its foundation, far lower than any minish mining operation had ever attempted. The ground trembled uneasily, as though the earth had become loose sand, and thus many crowds stumbled and fell as they sought hopelessly for refuge. The buildings around them shivered and swayed, few structures promising to hold steady as a great happening was upon them. The land itself roared as it was dislodged from the rest of the empire, carried upwards by the unquestionable strength behind the impossibly huge shovel.

All was forced still as that slice of the empire was elevated fast into the air, the gravity amplifying upon everything until, without warning, it was no more. The traveling stopped, and in the aching moments that followed, only so few were able to stand above the wreckage and ruins of their homes to acknowledge where they were. They felt breathing in the atmosphere, that of the goddess hovering over them with an expression too wide to fathom. Her blue eyes were immensely detailed as they darted from one location to the next, skipping across blocks of businesses in a skim-viewing of the chaos.

Jokari was wrestled by the back-and-forth of the riots; at one moment, everyone was fleeing the area towards the district’s borders, only to turn around and horde towards that very center. Shoved about by the madness of so many, Jokari was uncharacteristically passive, always gawking at the goddess’s incomprehensible grace and beauty, drooling in his trance -- a mindset that dwindled his sense of existence, as well as that of his own people. He cared less and less for them, now that he was in the possession of the goddess, as they all were -- they now belonged to someone, this much greater person, an icon destined to do as she was very well doing and taking them to salvation. Jokari had always thought little for his fellow minish, but now knowing there was a life far more significant, far more powerful in every breath she took than the empire could compare, he thought of them as specks, specks such as himself, wasting their efforts on fleeing the inevitable when it could be spent on worship and obedience.

Jokari succumbed to prayers, not unlike the numerous that begged and pleaded to the goddess that would never hear them. The world was moving again, everything held in the shovel carried into the other tool. A glass enclosure consumed the district and its hundreds of thousands of minish, where within they were abandoned. It was a hazardous placement as the goddess, with divine dexterity, leveraged the civilization into the circular bottom of the jar; the land broke apart like an avalanche beneath the feet of the minish, only so much of its shape and structure maintained as it was settled into the clear floor of the container. Whatever had endured to that point had largely toppled into the newly-formed slopes and dips of the terrain, destined to be shaken and stirred as the jar was then swallowed into the darkness of a traveler’s bag.

After the capital was completely claimed, other districts fell victim to the goddess’s curiosity. Seemingly not satisfied with just one sample, the goddess dug into the civilization for more. Humongous craters dotted the once beautiful cityscape of the empire as entire communities disappeared in a pattern of disasters. There was no direction or leadership, nothing more than the ultimate rank and order enforced by the goddess’s limitless power, the fate of her divine decision making…

---

“Might as well dig up one more,” Zelda said quietly to herself, grateful for having had the foresight to bring as many jars as she had. She nonchalantly plunged the shovel into another corner of the empire, twisting on the forward of her feet so she could reach. The area she selected was brought level with her eyes as she scanned the fifth and final sample – noting the dense but diminutive population, all of their homes and accomplishments – and then deposited it into its jar, curious but otherwise callous to how the ground cracked and reshaped to fit the glass container.

Zelda rose, more enthusiastic than before she had crouched, taking her full height above the minish with a glow of accomplishment. Stashing away the last bottle with the others in her bag, she was ready to depart for home, eager to expand her knowledge on such mysterious subjects. Casting her hopeful smile across the tiny civilization, she even offered a small wave of farewell, unaware of its apocalyptic perspective.

The princess then left with haste, oblivious to what the crunch of her footsteps meant, her mind filled with too many exciting thoughts to notice. She was careful with her strides only to the extent of how her motions affected her inventory of nearly a million people; once out of the glen and back on her horse, she accepted whatever shaking occurred to her samples, a small sacrifice for the sake of her discovery. Surely, Zelda assumed, that the minish would be sturdy enough to survive the travel to the castle, and to be in fair-enough health to conduct the various experiments she had planned for them.

Many trembled in their belief that they had been thrust into an age of darkness and isolation. They had been separated from the very ground their civilization was founded upon, stolen from the Empire and imprisoned within an unbreakable, transparent barrier. They were claimed by the heavens, and so ran the deep conspiracy that this was divine punishment for a wrong committed by the minish people.

Without an explanation to align them, panic had broken loose in every crumbled corner of the Empire’s fragments. The unrelenting blackness cast a sudden, unseasonal night on the damaged society, a veil that hid the sparks of chaos, but could not cover up its boisterous, neverending noise. Communities responded to the wide scale of damages; their roads and fields were crossed with fissures, buildings risked toppling over if they had not already, and the death toll was still rapidly climbing. Literally detached from the Empire proper, respect towards authority plummeted in favor of outright survival, and so began a spree of looting and stealing, mobs clashing against mobs in desperate fights over resources.

The safest decision was to seek shelter, hide, and hold onto hope. Jokari had concluded as much early on, predicting all societal order to collapse soon after the abduction; he expected himself to be caught in the worst possible place, that among all the islands of the Empire that the goddess had selected, he happened to be taken alongside the Empire’s once proud capital. It was the densest district, a metropolis of modern minish life, known for being a colorful crossroad of cultures. It was famous for tall buildings, weaving roads, exciting announcements and events – all of it had become a battlefield, a far cry from the history it had been uprooted from. The people raved violently in their uncertainty, turned against one another without explanation; Jokari would have scoffed and looked down at them, for he had knowledge of this divine motion that they did not, but he was also netted into that mayhem. He was as under as much risk of being trampled by an angry mob as much as an imbalanced building could collapse over him.

Jokari fortunately knew of a place he could escape to, assuming the age of darkness was limited to a matter of minish-days. He hurried through the darkness and crowds to reach his lab, a chamber of the Empire college that employed him. It was an unimportant building for looters and the like to consider, though the campus had suffered irreparable damages, partially swallowed into a pit torn open by the goddess’s disturbance. When he arrived at his shaken quarters, he sat a chair up-right and settled into it, meditating on the depth of destruction around him – the consequences caused by that massive deity.

Though he knew more than any other minish, the question still plagued Jokari. The prophecies told of being uplifted to the heavens, but he wondered maddeningly what the heavens were like, and what code of law would be in effect.

---

A heroic melody was hummed through the windy fields of Hyrule, a tune to celebrate an amazing discovery. Zelda sped down dirt roads on horseback, eager to return to the castle so that she could dive into research. She kept the precious inventory close by, hugged onto her lap so that it could be held somewhat steady during the ride; it was a needless consideration, for the magical quality of Hyrule’s famous bottles assured that the contents inside would be contained safely, virtually unshaken in the glass confines. She knew as much, but was still compelled to keep the samples close to her, under her protective smile, that she felt bonded to them already – like a new pet she was bringing to live at the castle.

The princess was recognized instantly on her horse and allowed express entry into the noble stables. Uncharacteristically, Zelda hastily left her steed for the groundskeepers to tend to; no servant would complain when she so regularly offered her royal time generously to such matters. Notably, her glow of excitement caught the charm of many eyes from castle staff, but she paid no heed to the attention, concerned only with the safe delivery of her samples. She wanted to stop and gloat to someone, anyone, but for the time being, the existence of the minish race was her own little secret.

Inside the security of her private bedroom, Zelda locked the door and let loose a squeal of anticipation when no one could hear her. She hurried to make preparations, including lighting lanterns and clearing a space off her work desk – stacks of journals and bottles of ink were all pushed to the corners to make room for where her research would be conducted. She bubbled giddily about what that research would entail, thinking ahead of the experiments she wanted to try, but she was admittedly ahead of herself. Before any of that could begin, Zelda had to first introduce her samples to their new home.

The first of the five bottles was removed from her leather bag, carefully held in both of her gloved hands so that it was on its side – as flat as when she deposited the shoveled land. Zelda fawned over its insides, fogging the outside of the glass with her anxious breaths. “Hehe… Hello, everyone~” she greeted quietly, drawing the bottle near to her curious blue eyes. “Did you enjoy the voyage? I do hope that everyone remained calm…” She studied the design of complex streets and buildings to learn as much about how they handled being traveled, but the details were too tiny for her to make out. Since the general shape of the land appeared largely unchanged, she happily assumed that all was well for the minish people.

“One more step,” Zelda said aloud, though she doubted anyone in the bottles could understand her. She stepped up to her desk, decided on a corner, and then opened the bottle; with a slight tilt and shake, she gradually spilled the landscape over the glass lip. She was intensely careful with the process, her chest laid out on the desk so that she was low to the transition, a keen stare drilled into the little spot that a city district would occupy. “A-Almost,” she shuddered– “eep! Ooh, mmm…” An accident occured when she shook the bottle too much, causing the sample to crack in half – but it barely mattered from Zelda’s perspective, as she saw only a thin divide separating the land in two. The latter half to be placed had been badly dropped as a result, she could admit, but Zelda was otherwise sure that its microbe population would pull together, confident enough to grant them all a shining smile before turning to retrieve the others.

Subsequent transitions were more successful in maintaining the structure of the samples as they were removed from the bottles and spread across the desk. Zelda lurked away once the final sample had been set out, her hands clasping the empty bottle close to her heart as she examined her laid-out project. With the space she had to work with, she had planted a sample near each corner of the desk and with one in the middle – it was the most impressive seeming collection of architecture, but even its tallest buildings would be dwarfed by just the width of a fingertip. The temptation to make that exact comparison popped into Zelda’s mind, to gently poke one of the samples as an introductory form of contact, but she sighed and withdrew the thought.

“They’ve had a long enough day, I’m sure,” Zelda muttered aloud, taking the moment to remove her blue tunic. The summer horseback ride plus the race to her room had left her exhausted, and so the sweat-touched article was slipped off onto the back of her chair. In the plain corset she wore underneath, her arms and collar were exposed to let the warmth leave her. Once cooled into the right mindset for research, Zelda sat down and pulled up to her desk, tickled to make observations. “This is so much fun~ Now, who should I begin with…?”

---

Destiny glared upon them in the form of daybreak. It was a blinding change when the coat of darkness was unwoven from the sky, allowing light to shine over the five stolen cities. It had been nearly a week in minish time since the goddess took them away, and now she had returned overhead, hovering above at an indecipherable height. In that span of minish days, society’s revolt had mostly quieted into an anxious stillness as citizens begrudgingly accepted their belittled fate; it was an uneasy peace that was instantly shattered when the goddess had appeared. Horror swelled as a humongous hand reached unto them, lifting away a glass prison one at a time.

Jokari was awoken from a slumber when the next stage of ascension began, startled off his chair when he heard renewed uproars outside. He scrambled through the mess of his lab-turned-hideout to a window, pulling back the curtain to see that the streets outside were illuminated. The age of darkness was over, so it seemed, and people flushed from their shelters in bewilderment of such change. It was certainly a sign that their lives were about to be rocked again by divine force, and when as much became imminent, the population quickly cowered back into their bunkers. Jokari was the same as any of them, regardless of how much he knew about the minish’s fate.

The capital was the last of the Empire’s bottled fragments to be retrieved, taken into the goddess’s hand and swung through a vastly different atmosphere – a new reality, a sky outside the glass walls that was unlike the blue infinite and its yellow sun that they knew. They were in the chambers of the giant, fully removed from their old world and taken into another, and they were to be initiated with a godly scan of their civilization. Like dawn, the horizon was overlooked by two gigantic pupils, widening and narrowing, rotating sharply as if they were heads of their own. She observed them, deaf to their relentless begging and prayers, unburdened by the weight of all their lives weighing in her hands.

Like the four others, after that glimpse into their city, the goddess moved them to their final destination. The bottle was opened and steeply angled into a vast plane of wood. Its sandy contents rolled to the lip and poured out as one clump of land, successfully landing rightside-up on the new surface and with minimal damages to the borders; the capital had been fortunate to be transferred last, and that the goddess was that much practiced with depositing the Empire’s pieces onto her grand table. The chaos endured by the population was unlike any storm, a sequence of earthquakes that disrupted gravity itself, a passage that claimed more buildings into collapse and left the edges of their city crumbled into a ring of wasteland encircling the survivors. The other samples were devastated more severely, including one that was divided by a large gash during the transition, and another that suffered the opposite, where a fraction of the land fell on top of the other. An uncountable amount of destruction had struck the cities, yet so few could afford to tend to the disasters, spellbound by the impossible image that encompassed the defined ends of their realm: the goddess’s divine torso, a mountain with no compare, hovering distantly away yet stood certainly within reach of everything in front of her.

Jokari staggered from his shaken shelter after the worst was settled and the ground was solid again. He hurried away from the college before it collapsed, another architectural victim in a list that could be heard expanding elsewhere in the city. Crowds of others joined him in the streets, skeptical of what may happen, but compelled to witness the first morning of their different lives – Jokari first marveled at the array of awestruck civilians, all agasp in the same direction, before he joined them in their exact astonishment, gawking at the same stellar scene. The capital’s central road was wide and long, creating a picturesque window of an unblocked view directly to the goddess’s form, or at least, as much of her cosmic size that could be comprehended. The phenomenon was more than just the capital’s people, but true to any within the five samples, millions staring up into the goddess’s baffling shape, just as she stared back at them but with a satisfied, heavenly smile.

As the moment’s amazement unthawed over minutes, the panic from before returned to motion. The mobs did not wait forever for the goddess to act, not being as slow and significant as she was, and so they were quickly swirled again into disorder. They knew it may take days for the goddess to act upon them, seemingly unlikely that she would grant them some mystical mercy. It was made clear that she would indeed be slow to engage with them as she began a slow process of transformation, a performance of godly proportions as she shed the blue garb of her attire, a tunic that, if draped across her table, would inarguably shatter the five pieces of the Empire. It was instead discarded behind her greatness, but with that layer removed, the minish were made that much closer with her radiance – the resonating heat of her own body, a steam she would never recognize, but still altered the atmosphere of her domain.

Jokari turned to stone as he witnessed the great change. It took minutes for the fabric to be pulled overhead, but he watched it all play out, regardless of how the currents of a river-like crowd brushed against him. The goddess’s immaculate presentation had fully absorbed his mind, spinning it into calculations attempting to deduce the exact scale of the goddess, how absolutely overwhelming her measurements had to be.

He could have run that math in his head over and over for entertainment, stiff in that one place, but he was demanded elsewhere. Jokari’s trance only broke when he was grabbed by the arm and pulled aside, forced away from the goddess he would rather be worshiping. He had been identified by an Empire guard as a scholar, ultimately a civil servant whose wisdom had been called upon by the government to respond to the crisis. Fortunately for his wishes, no matter where duty dragged him, he would bask in the goddess’s inescapable glory – itchily anticipating the next decision she might make, preparing for the magnitude of whatever that whim might be.

---

“Ah… They appear even smaller on my desk… If I didn’t know any better, I might think you all had shrunken smaller in my bag, hehe~” Zelda giggled quietly, embarrassed only by the chance she could be heard by someone outside her door, and not at all phased by the millions listening to her. The most they mattered to her was a pop of curiosity; “I wonder if you can understand me? Or is my voice really big to you, too?” She hid her unapologetic smile behind graceful fingers, loosely imagining the low rumble the minish might have been hearing, but failing to grasp the actual league of effects.

“I know that must have been a big journey for you,” she went on, making light of the disastrous voyage she inflicted upon millions, “but there’s so much I want to know now~ I have to take a closer look…” Zelda lurked above her samples, pressed onto the desk’s edge as she leaned forward with interest. She was careful to not shake the table, but that was the extent of her consideration, otherwise oblivious to the perspectives of a sample directly under her. Near the desk’s end was a community she literally overshadowed, lost close to her bosom as she explored the other islands of the Empire, threatened by the canyon-sized cleavage that was paused just short of consuming them. They feared the goddess had cast judgment onto them, left to cook in that paranoia much like the humidity of her body heated their streets.

The thrill of first contact tickled Zelda with the delight of discovery as she brought a finger above the desk, pointed down in selection of a sample. Picking one out, her face then loomed low to the surface, keen to specify the tiny distance between her fingertip and the city’s tallest towers – of those that still stood. She held her breath and made silent observations, simply keeping the pad held steady while testing how close she could get. It went unheard the volume of discord her gesture sprung, the millions of terrified responses as the minish dreaded a catastrophic collision. That skin-colored roof was obscenely detailed as it hung over them, the crevices of its print displayed as a maze of fleshy dunes, threatening to flatten them at any moment but choosing instead to linger and savor.

There was no ill intention when Zelda then brought her finger that much farther down, meaning only to graze the rooftops with a ginger touch, but all the same did she cause destruction, underestimating how fragile the minish structures were. She expected the buildings to be sturdy enough to withhold the littlest weight of her fingertip, but witnessed instead how the round end of her digit carved a place for itself in the patch of civilization – blocks of buildings and all the streets separating them, suddenly disappeared under a pale limb of skin. Zelda withdrew her finger that next instant, but the damages could not be undone, much of the ruins as well as some survivors stolen away by the grip of her fingerprints.

Zelda’s finger curled back into her thumb, grinding the dust-like debris between them as she soured with disappointment. “That was too much,” she learned, examining the radius of rubble that her one tap had made. Her expression was unflinching to the tragedy, stable in its studiousness; she had no remorse for the obvious victims, counting them off as simply too weak to matter. “I must mind myself around all of you, truly… though, I will admit, I’m grateful I know where to find more of you.”

Deeming them replaceable, Zelda settled on another attempt at touching the minish world, albeit with an even gentler approach. Her pupils tightly honed onto the sample, specifying a street, then a block, and finally one building that was half the height of a grain of rice. She guessed at its importance while lining up the very fine edges of her fingernails along the structure’s height; from its base to its roof, she had an entire building in the pinch of her nails, including the loads of minish within its walls. Its foundation was dug under by her thumb nail, deliberately balanced to be claimed in between her fingertips – any tighter and it would be crushed, any looser and it would fall. Zelda’s delicate method was rewarded with a clean removal of the tower and its occupants, but at the cost of immense harm dealt to the neighboring properties, carelessly crunched by her fingers in favor of retrieving her one target.

“A-Ah, th-this is it…” Zelda remarked, restraining her energy lest her prize ended up crushed in an outburst. It felt like holding a tiny sand sculpture, her skin especially aware of how the slightest twitch might cause the whole building to fall apart. The risk increased as she pulled her subject away, far from the community she took it from and level with her eyes. She looked at it closely, amazed by the craftsmanship such diminutive creatures were capable of; it was a tower built like one of Hyrule’s own, an architectural achievement that was cupped in the exposed length of her fingernail. “How cute~” she quietly commented.

Peering even closer, Zelda spotted dots shambling down the building’s walls and gathering around its base at her fingertip. Nearly mistaking it for dust, she realized it must have been minish that were evacuating the tower, fearing its collapse. They were faceless specks as individuals, and as a crowd, still little more than a cluster of activity, easily dismissed with a breath – and thus why Zelda held her own, wary of casting a tornado on her passengers. It was convenient that they were spilling out in such a way, for she had a calculated reason for picking out the building.

“That must be about… ten of them outside,” Zelda murmured, bringing the building even closer to her eye. When she blinked and looked again, her eyelashes had seemingly swept around a group of those that she counted. “Ah, please don’t move so much… This will already be a vague estimate as it is…”

For accuracy’s sake, Zelda angled the tower higher over her eye, allowing better light to help illuminate the inside and expose how ever many minish were still within. A shiver of a shake tossed the occupants across halls and chambers, revealing them just long enough in a glance for the princess to broadly count up the groups. There was more than she anticipated; “If that floor has about thirty… and the building has that many stories… hmmm…”

Zelda grimaced and her squint became a glare, troubled by an itch in her eye. Without a doubt, she knew it was from material dropped off from the building she studied. She assumed it was just debris getting in her eye, but trickling from the building was that as well as free-falling minish, those that were outmatched by the steep angle of her fingertips. Their micro-scale forms plummeted by the dozens; some fell entangled in her eyelashes, but most continued into the eye itself. Their landing was insignificant, muffled by the wet outer-layer of the eye and instantly glued to its surface, no differently than pollen or dust. They were thus responded to appropriately: a single blink brought them and a pool of moisture into the shape of a droplet, which was then expelled from between her eyelids as a tear. Dozens of minish wrestled in the floor that contained them, but no plight was ever heard, the lot miserably dismissed when Zelda’s knuckle wiped them all away.

“Nnh… Well, that should be good enough,” Zelda sniffled, lowering the building from her vision before anything else crumbled. “Perhaps that was three hundred minish, which means… for every centimeter of buildings…” Her math shifted to the city she had taken the building from, which itself became an overlooked subject, withering away and forgotten between cliff-like fingernails. Zelda no longer needed them, engrossed instead with the multitudes more in the one patch of civilization. Her eyes sparkled with numerical fascination, eventually concluding, “Hah~ There must be… at least a million minish, j-just in this one sample…” Zelda’s scan broadened to the rest of the table, her smile spreading as she thought of that sum – accurate or not, she assuredly had a generous amount to experiment with.

It was while thinking of her first proper experiment that the princess found herself in error: an out-of-place strand of hair had drifted into the sample nearest to her, having cascaded from her shoulder while looming above it. Instinctively, Zelda pulled herself back, but quickly predicted the consequence of doing so, how that one blonde wire would rip and level half of the town – indeed having already crashed and cratered a long line of territory. She winced and followed through more cautiously, slowly pinching the hair and lifting it away as sensitively as she could.

“Even just a hair? Ah… how pitiful,” Zelda dismayed, gently carrying the thin thread into view to be inspected. She keenly observed the material that came up with the hair, a grime that was the remnants of a bustling market and the homes of traders and crafters. Dragging the hair between a thumb and forefinger, she separated the debris into a mound, that which writhed with pained survivors. Yet despite their struggles existing between the pads of her fingers, Zelda had no sympathy for them, instead intrigued by a theory regarding what the minish could endure.

She retrieved a tool from a cabinet in her desk. It was a pair of forceps, an item she regrettably thought to use only after plucking a structure with her nails. The metal prongs were lowered into that nearest sample, carefully pinpointing one building among many that she then abducted with a precise pinch. It was a nightmare event for the minish people, to witness a metal claw descend from the heavens and pick out a sacrifice; Zelda was pleased with the procedure, and that her selection was bustling with panicked minish. It was merely the first of her choices, set aside in her free palm and soon to be joined by many more.

Zelda giggled about how effortless it was to strip away bits of the city right off its foundation, culminating into a full laugh when she had an entire neighborhood of minish collected in her hand – confused crowds that climbed over the rubble of toppled buildings, exploring the expansive, flesh-colored landscape of a hand. They existed in that world shortly, soon afterwards transferred to where they would permanently reside. Zelda lifted them higher, past her brow, and then tilted into her hairline; as if combing her blondeness back, she spread the minish across her scalp, gingerly scrubbing the population into the countless strands. All she felt was the grit of minish architecture grinding into dust, a texture that melted with every stroke until it was too finely woven into her hair to feel any longer.

“... They’re in, then? Settling down?” Zelda muttered, straining her vision upwards to where a community of minish had just been seeded. She felt itches along her scalp, but it was very well her own heightened awareness of feeling, thinking so sharply about the little lives now scattered in her hair – a concept that made her want to cringe and laugh simultaneously. “Unconventional,” she admitted bashfully, “b-but… I wonder how they might manage…” She scoffed, believing she might have just doomed them, but still hoped they might thrive for at least a day or two. Her hair, which she kept clean and combed for her regal fashions, was certainly a lush jungle to the minish; a brutal and alien environment, but very well the conditions for life to succeed in. She giggled, “Maybe~”

Zelda’s smile persisted as she selected an empty journal to start her notetaking. A quill was drawn from an inkwell upon the same table as her samples; she sighed and lowered into the first blank page. Her first minish experiment, quirky as it was, had begun.

---

Government officials were in a flurry throughout the castle. Rank and order were strained to their limits as minishkind reckoned with their new reality. Political minds clashed with the religious, elites faced the commoners flooding their walls; the few figures of authority that still upheld their duty were unreasonably overwhelmed by the staggering situations, dizzied by confusion over broken communications. So many turned to the Empress for guidance, as the minish historically had during times of strife, but she was without word, hidden somewhere in the heart of the castle. In her absence, it was only natural that the masses began looking instead to the looming mountain of a woman – the goddess, whose movements were grandiose and heavy, whose breathing itself was the back and forth of wind within the realm they had been taken to. Even if the Empress were to publicly appear, what power did she have to her?

Jokari dwelled deep on that philosophy, simmering in his seat within the castle’s council hall. He was one of some tens of minish listening to a presentation regarding the vast emergencies to be addressed, a rundown of the information the Empire yet had. They acknowledged the wooden plane of a desk, that the goddess, despite being holy gargantuan, yet lived under relatively mundane terms – Jokari was smug about knowing as much already, giddily aware of how abysmally small the minish actually were. It was mentioned as well how the fragments of the Empire were placed on that desk, five regions defined by how the goddess uprooted them. Expeditions would have to be arranged to connect those areas with the capital; to just cross the goddess’s desk, miles would have to be traveled, but it only took the goddess’s hand moments to sweep over that distance.

As much was exemplified at that exact moment. A shadow scanned the city, cast by a massive hand as it flew fast overhead. It was greeted with a horrified uproar of the populace beneath it, the entire capital city responding to that which eclipsed their sky. Her palm could easily engulf them all, and yet it still branched into long tendrils of fingers, of which one gradually erected itself while the rest coiled. The scene overhead had captivated an audience of millions, plus the millions that watched from other regions – all eyes locked onto the hand, awaiting the goddess’s decision.

The council hall meeting ended abruptly as the rumble of movement interrupted any clear thinking. Some figures fled to bunkers, but Jokari was among the crowds that wanted to bear witness of the goddess. He hurried to a castle rooftop alongside others, just as the black shade came to pass over them with a chilling effect. They all clenched their hearts into their hands, mentally preparing for their demise – but the hand, and its designated finger, continued to fly over them. Only once it had fully avoided them was there any noise of celebration, but dread yet lingered; the hand’s business was elsewhere, destined for another fragment of the Empire.

From that rooftop, pressed to the ledge, Jokari stood and stared at the departing hand. Eventually, the other observers trickled back into the castle halls, but Jokari was patient, waiting out the many minutes it took for the goddess to reach what she wanted. He was alone at that height, silently watching, only turning away to follow that trail of her arm up to her glorious body, so awe-strikingly tall. He was enraptured with her beauty, burdened with poetry he could never sing to her – so enthralled by her grace, he narrowly overlooked her moment of murder.

Thoom. It was a muffled and vastly distant sound, only reaching the ears of the capital some time after the thunderous strike took place. The goddess’s finger, and only its tip, had instantly laid waste to a fraction of an Empire fragment. Tens of thousands of lives were crushed in that unfortunate corner, and just as many were likely wounded, caught in the disastrous shockwave of that touch. The fingertip had landed effortlessly, and similarly did it lift away, letting the debris rain off its rounded up before curling back. It was a tragedy that occurred too far and too fast for its impact to be immediately recognized; many were just grateful that it was not them that had been decided on.

Of all the consequences due to the goddess’s destructive touch, one was that Jokari fell to his knees, trembling wildly with conflicting emotions. He felt despair and sympathy for the many that were lost just then, but also did he feel the greatness of the goddess shivering through his veins. He worshiped her decision, praying loudly in thanks for being spared. If she demanded sacrifices, he would happily allow her to take them – no one could deny someone so powerful, whose very presence influenced the atmosphere of their world. Jokari would have applauded her if he had the nerves to stand; all he could do was watch, content to do so as the goddess proceeded to pick out a building to steal and examine.

Before long, however, Jokari was called back to his responsibilities. Though the goddess continued to vibrate the air with her minor motions and whispered words, minish society in the capital strived to adapt to their circumstance. The Empress presented herself in a public announcement, declaring government action from a balcony that overlooked a mob of pained people. She detailed the migration that would begin by the minish’s tomorrow, next when they might be relieved of the goddess’s presence, to try and travel to the other pieces of the Empire and establish cohesive connections once again. Her decree was ever challenged by the goddess's meager noises, met with disdain from the crowds, but after her announcement, the Empress slipped away into her royal quarters, handing the reins of her realm to her noble advisors.

It was from that point that Jokari found himself enlisted as a migration leader, as decided for him by an advisor. Without the spirit to argue, Jokari was promptly tasked with packing up his life in under half a day, to prepare for a voyage across uncertainty. He was granted one freedom in the matter, which was that he could select his destination of the four areas. Downtrodden as he made his way back to his broken lab, that choice seemingly weighed on him more than having to pick and choose what to take with him on the journey.

News rang out from the streets that the goddess was acting again. The rumors were overheard by Jokari, luring him outside where skittish crowds had formed, pointing and gesturing at the goddess’s horizon. Though they could see the event happen from afar, they were deaf to its explosive effect: a comet-like hair was shed from the goddess’s shoulder, plummeting into the Empire fragment closest to her. The audience flinched, sensing the devastation from across that distance, disheartened by their kind’s insignificance that even a stray hair was monumentally destructive. The situation grew more dire as they watched and prayed, the goddess having removed the hair as well as all that had become ensnared in its wiry material – a long strip of community and culture, torn into the air and cleansed off that one golden thread.

Yet that was a mere prelude to the goddess’s subsequent decision. Wielding yet another hypersized tool, the goddess began hunting down buildings from that same fractured city, kidnapping hundreds and thousands at a time with every pinch of her forceps. If minish fled those buildings and took to the streets, they were at the mercy of raining debris and collapsing structures; if they stayed in their shelters, they risked being claimed next, deposited into a gulch-sized palm for some divine purpose. The rest of the Empire, separated as they were, was helpless to interject; the audience outside the college accepted as much and slowly thinned, but Jokari was entranced yet again, his wonder running wild in suspense of what the goddess intended to do.

His wait was later rewarded with a godly development beyond his brashest wishes. Certainly the rest of the capital, and even the other distant cities, were captivated by the goddess’s whim playing out in the horizon before them. Jokari choked with envy; the goddess was carrying those buildings, those tens of thousands of souls, up to the peak of her height. All that was in the grasp of that one hand was then spilled onto her crown, scattered and then spread out through her hair. Their existence was bound to her, the goddess’s own body, the environment in which that population would surely spend the rest of their lives. The reality was dreamed in detail by Jokari, envisioning the surreal fantasy world that Empire citizens were then stranded within. They found themselves lost in a nigh-infinite jungle, utterly surrounded by the blinding blonde color; each thread was thick and immeasurably long, twisting and coiling around each other, the slightest break or split creating a significant branch of mass that changed where the minish could navigate. Plunged without coordination or communication, the minish were cast into lawlessness, tasked with organizing themselves and restructuring their lives around a canopy of hair and a landscape of a scalp. The environmental challenges stacked against them included the goddess’s sweat swamping the base ground, the shifting tangles that were highways of hair, and the rhythm of their world’s motions – every turn of her head, every breath she coursed. Jokari deeply inhaled, his skin tingling to fantasize that humid aroma, that moisture coating everything; how blessed those minish were, given the opportunity to rebuild themselves in that blonde heaven, living off the goddess’s own holiness.

When Jokari had control over himself again, and he gazed upon his ruined lab, sifting for whatever items he would bring on the migration, he thought of the changes his life was going through. He meditated on the choices he could make, the destiny for himself he wanted to manifest. As a lone, meaningless minish, he was at the whims of fate where he might ultimately end up, but as much as he could will, he willed to be there – somewhere, anywhere on the goddess. To walk along her skin and be a part of her radiance, to cherish being on that beautiful world, was all he dreamed of wanting then. He would bring himself close to her, migrate to that city that she seeded into her hair, in hopes he might miraculously achieve that fantasy.

---

Zelda held a hand mirror over her head, angled for her to see the reflection of her hair. She unwove her braids as delicately as she could with one hand, gradually loosening her hair until it was no longer strictly fashioned, allowed to flow and spread down her neck and shoulders. As far as she could tell from the reflection, the minish and their buildings were secured within the locks – secured enough, she hoped, that they would last the night. It was with a yawn that she jotted her final notes into the journal, closing it and shelving it for tomorrow. It was a challenge to not bring the book with herself under the sheets, to review and continue listing out theories and experiments, but she was able to pull away and prepare for bed. She undressed in front of her five samples, occasionally smiling or giggling at them, changing out of her adventuring attire and into her sleepwear, never concerned with the millions that looked up to her.

The last lantern was dimmed as Zelda sat at her bedside, admiring her minish collection until the light was completely gone. “We all deserve some rest after today,” she chimed softly. “Goodnight, everyone~”

Zelda sank into her sheets and relaxed flat on her back. As threads of hair became caught around her neck, she adjusted herself and scratched idly at her scalp – a moment after did she wince and stop, proceeding with more care after remembering the community nestled atop her. The thought made her giggle one more time as she rested her head and closed her eyes, recounting her research until she was sound asleep.