In the years preceding the Second Great Calamity, many more ancient and forgotten things were than just the Guardians and Divine Beasts. These relics of a bygone age were to be studied by Hyrule's scholars, but little progress was made on them before Calamity Ganon returned to wreak havoc on the world. In the century to come, these objects would pass from one set of hands to another, being traded among the general population as trinkets and baubles of some aesthetic interest; it was only after the great monster's defeat that they could once more be gathered together for the study of them.
One such relic, a stone tablet covered in ancient Hylian script, would find its way into Princess Zelda's hands soon after peace returned to the land. After translating its text, she found it told of an underground city built in the days of the First Great Calamity; a place where people would live in peace until the outside world was safe once more, or even in perpetuity should Ganon have resulted victorious. The tablet also gave directions to the city's entrance, entreating its reader to come with the tablet to let its people know when it was safe to return.
After translating the text, Zelda set out to investigate where the entrance to this underground city was, poring over ancient maps and other old documents to make sense of the directions given. The geography of Hyrule had changed since the age of the First Calamity, as had the names of places, but in time it became clear that the location given was a particular spot near the northeast end of the Great Plateau's base.
Wasting no time, Zelda set out for the location as soon as she had gathered what provisions she would need. Upon her arrival a couple days later, she started searching the area for anything that might be an entrance to an underground city. She had been looking for some time when she noticed that the tablet was glowing inside her carrying bag, and after taking it out saw that its light turned softer or brighter depending on where she stood. Going to where the tablet shone brightest, Zelda soon arrived at what had seemed like a plain rock wall, until a resonance with the ancient tablet induced it to open up into a subterranean passageway.
Until now, Zelda had been keeping her excitement under control, reasoning that with ten thousand years having gone by since the city was built, it might not be accessible any more, if it even existed at all. But this passageway finally give her some concrete evidence that the city had existed at some point, and might have even survived to this day. She eagerly jumped into the entrance, wanting nothing more than to see what ancient wonders she might find inside. Would there still be people living in this city? It seemed far-fetched, but not beyond the realm of possibility. If nothing else she hoped to find some trace of how their ancestors had lived and how they had worked their marvelous technologies.
Walking through the dim hallway, her only lights the soft glow of the tablet and of the intricate patterns on the walls, Zelda soon spotted another doorway, and at her approach it too resonated with the tablet she carried. A symbol in its center lit up and the doors began to open down the middle, each sliding sideways. Yet they had hardly opened up an inch when they stopped again, some inner mechanism clicking repeatedly in a futile attempt to open them. At the same time, a strange blue energy crackled in the gap between the doors. This continued for two minutes before everything stopped as suddenly as it had started, everything going silent again as the ancient mechanism powered down.
The incident left Zelda wary of going any further. As amazing as it was that all this technology still worked in any capacity, it was plainly not in the best condition. Though nothing had come of the doorway's malfunction this time, for all she knew it could easily have blown up in her face, and might do so yet. Still, things seemed to have settled down, and she wouldn't be satisfied if she didn't at least see what was behind these doors before going back.
Since the door wouldn't open of itself, she took matters into her own hand and started forcing them open, lamenting that she hadn't brought Link along to help her out with this. Eventually she managed to open them wide enough to go through, and she stepped into a room which was so brightly lit she might have thought herself back outside.
After spending so long in the dim hallway it took some time for her eyes to adjust to the light, but once they did, she was stunned to discover... absolutely nothing.
The room, a circular thing not even ten feet across, was completely empty, the only things of note in it being the brilliant circle at the peak of the domed ceiling which shone as brightly as the sun, and a round patch of mossy earth some four feet across which filled an indentation in the middle of the room. There were no other objects in there, and the walls were completely bare, devoid even of the patterns which had adorned the hallway.
Puzzled, Zelda walked around with the tablet in hand, holding it up to the walls in hopes it might activate some further mechanism, maybe open up some further passageway or reveal something else to her. Then, after completing a circuit of the room without anything happening, she started meticulously passing the tablet over every square inch of the walls. Still, nothing came of it.
Was this really all there was to see down here? What about the city? Had it never been finished? Had it been destroyed and this was all that remained? Maybe it had been sealed off beyond this point after its inhabitants returned to the outside world. But then, why not seal it off from the very entrance? It made no sense; there had to be something she was missing.
Taking off her shoes to give her feet some rest, Zelda sat at the edge of the patch of earth, stretching out her legs to leave her feet propped up near the center of the room, before setting the tablet down on her lap to read it over and see if it could give her some clue to this mystery.
Little did she know that the answer could be found right beneath her, if only she looked more closely. For what the tablet didn't say was that the city she was looking for was actually a miniature city, populated to this day by the miniaturized descendants of those people who had left the tablet behind and located right in the middle of the unassuming patch of earth.
But how could she have guessed? The city was so small no normal person could have told it apart from a spot of dust, and its people too small for any one individual to be seen by the naked eye. She would have needed a magnifying glass to see the million microscopic souls cowering in the shadow of her feet, and even then they would have seemed mere specks of dust to her.
Since her entrance into this chamber, the microscopic people had been watching her in fear and disbelief, her presence there shattering their worldview just as surely as it risked shattering their world. For, over the ten thousand years they had spent living down there, the miniaturized people had come to believe that Ganon had won the war and destroyed all life in the outside world the earth, leaving them the sole survivors people; why else during all these years had no one come to tell them it was finally safe to leave? And while the miniaturized folks had lamented the end of the world, they also congratulated themselves for their technological gifts which had saved them from the same fate of all those other, lesser peoples.
But now they saw they had it all wrong; and not only were there still people in the outside world, but their great civilization was as dust at the feet of these “lesser peoples”. And though normally this outsider should have been shrunk down to their size upon entering the chamber, their ancestors' technology had failed them after lying dormant so many millennia, allowing her to enter at this monstrous size. Now they were helpless before her; all they could do was wait and hope the encounter wouldn't end poorly for them.
But whatever hopes they had would soon be dashed, as over the span of a minute a drop of sweat grew under one of Zelda's toes, hanging lower and lower until it had gathered enough mass to break loose and fall right onto the miniature city. Everything that drop of sweat touched as it fell was demolished on contact, with the initial impact destroying countless of city blocks while dozens more would then be swept away by the tidal wave of sweat rushing through the city streets. By the time the sweat stopped flowing and was absorbed into the earth, it had wiped out a tenth of the city and extinguished a hundred thousand lives—lives whose existence Zelda had never suspected and whose passing she would never notice, so utterly inconsequential were they to her.
And all that in no more than a second.
By now panic had taken hold over the tiny city, with every last microscopic inhabitant running to flee or to hide. It was pointless, of course—no matter how well they hid nor how far they ran, their lives would still be claimed by the slightest gesture from this outsider the same as if they merely stood in place and prayed for salvation—but it was better to run mindlessly and keep some hope of survival alive than to acknowledge the futility and sink into despair.
So desperately did they run that they failed to notice the outsider's feet come together above them, the sole of one rubbing against the back of the other and sending a shower of dirt raining down on the city. To Zelda they were only annoying specks, but to the people at her feet each grain of sand was a giant meteor that wiped out multiple buildings on impact, and that was to say nothing of the bits of sweat-soaked lint that fell alongside them, the largest of which crushed as much as ten thousand people.
This rain went on for minutes as Zelda wiped off first one foot, then the other, while reading and rereading the tablet. Eventually, though, she put the relic back in her bag, having found no clues in its text. Sighing, she pulled her feet back, tearing up the soil with their heels and eradicating scores of the lesser towns and villages that existed all over the earthy habitat, then stood, feeling a pleasant coolness come over her feet as they sank into the soft earth.
As she did, she noticed a wetness on her pinkie toe and looked down to find what was to her a small puddle, but to the shrunken people an artificial lake maintained by ancient technology so they would have water to drink. She hadn't expected to find a puddle down here, but didn't give it any thought before raising her foot over it.
As her foot entered the lake, it displaced most of the water beyond its borders, half of it going into the imprint of her foot while the other half swept over the great plains around the lake, wiping out town after town as it went.
Zelda then raised her foot up and shook it dry, sprinkling drops of sweat-tainted water all over the landscape before repeating the routine with her other foot and taking a couple steps towards the center to let the earth dry off what moisture remained on her feet.
A powerful earthquake rocked the ravaged capital city as the outsider set her feet down right before it, with lesser tremors coming at the slightest shift of her weight. Standing there, her body eclipsing the artificial sun, she looked up at the light, then pulled out the tablet and held it up towards the ceiling. When nothing happened, she looked instead down at the earth, her eyes coming to rest on the very spot where the city lay even as thousands of unseen eyes returned her gaze, wondering what she was thinking.
When the tiny people saw her dirty sole fill their entire sky, grains of sand once more raining down from it, they felt deep in their souls that this was to be their end; that the last thing they would see would be the outsider's celestial sole coming down to reduce them all to mere stains upon the earth.
They weren't quite right, as instead of stepping on them Zelda's foot swung past their city to drive its toes deep into the earth some miles away, but their doom would come all the same as she dragged her foot back, her toes raking countless tons of earth towards the miniature city, destroying it all as they passed over it.
Blissfully unaware of her accidental genocide, Zelda raked her toes over that spot a couple more times to uncover the smooth stone surface that lay beneath the earth. Grabbing the tablet again, she touched it against that surface, but nothing came of it.
Greatly disappointed, she went to put her shoes back on and gave the little chamber one last look. She still suspected there was something she was missing, but it was getting late and she had no more ideas on where to look. She would come back some other day to search it again, this time with Purah to help her investigate, she decided.
And so she departed, leaving behind a miniature world reshaped by her feet and a few million traumatized specks, never suspecting that she was along a few hundred souls along with her—speck-sized people who had survived the destruction of their city by getting caught in some tiny crevice on the surface of her toes, now finding themselves in a whole new world of constant motion and clinging fearfully to whatever surface they could grab ahold of.
Only a fraction of them would survive this day, but in time those hardy few would become the progenitors of a brand new generation, the first of their kind to exist alongside the much more massive inhabitants of the outside world, living as germs at the feet of people who would be to them as gods.