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.