#botwau

*Chef’s kiss* THEM

You have no idea how long I spent on this fucking comic

back with more of @katiasxiii Dimileth BOTW au

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

@jannike-arts requested Boof in flip-flips and like

Deep in the Lanaryu range far to the east of Kakariko Village, high up amid the crags and peaks so easily visible from Hateno Village on a clear day, there lays a cave.  Deep and dark, it’s entrance easily unnoticed - it slopes down into the earth a long ways away from the light of day.  Yet despite the gloom in those cold, damp catacombs of earth and stone there stands a tree - inexplicably and stubbornly - that has endured since time unknown.  A ruin of a tree that bears neither leaves nor fruit, stood amid lifeless compost that once was the heart of a great flower, steeped in placid water that overwhelmed the cave’s basin to form a shallow lake.  The Sheikah know of it; they were the ones to bind the withered branches and its gnarled, blackened trunk in sanctified ropes and paper wards.  No ax could crack its bark and fire failed to purge it from the earth, so all they could do was bind it.  Seal it.  Lock it away behind arcane barriers developed long before their more familiar technology came about.  Something that ancient, something that powerful, could only be contained by the old ways.

But that was so long ago.  Time marched on and the meaning behind those many seals, those warnings, faded.  Those who tended to the wards passed from the land of the living - without them, the seals began to weaken.  But even quicker to weaken was the resolve to guard against the force that was sealed away there.  The sanctified ropes were eventually seen not as bindings to tether something down, but as a raiment to honor it.  In time, Guardian Frog statues were placed with simple offerings among the tree’s arched roots.  Paper lanterns were hung from its crooked branches.  The reason why the ancient tree had been given such attention faded and what vague recollections twisted into something benign.  Not something to be feared, but something to be respected, as if the tree were a forlorn guardian who needed to be given a kindness by those who still knew to do so.

One can only wonder if the spirit that those ancient Sheikah sealed away within the tree so long ago looks fondly on those who offer such kindnesses.  It has been so long, after all.  Perhaps her demeanor has changed?  Perhaps her wicked ways have relented?  Has she become softer after so many years?  Or has her approach simply grown more insidious?

To the present day there are still those who know of her - or at least, what they believe to be what she is.  There are those who seek her out for themselves.  The stories say she is a shrewd but knowledgeable spirit.  That those with questions no other source can answer may come to her, bring her an offering of rupees and lay down to sleep amid the roots of her tree.  There, in dreams, they meet her.  There, in dreams, they barter with her.  The rupees were merely to get her attention, but if they make a deal that suits the fancy of that cloaked, masked, grinning crone, she would reveal to them the wealth of her long-reaching knowledge.  Knowledge otherwise lost to the ages.  Secrets, vast and forbidden, brought to light once more.  She would wish them well and to return to her again, that she may help them when they are lost and weary and in need of her gentle guidance.  Yet while the receiver would wake with their new information fresh in their mind, they’d realize sooner or later that they’d forgotten something.  What, exactly, would frustratingly evade them.  It’s difficult to recall something that’s been forgotten, after all, even as it sits just on the tip of their tongue yet annoyingly out of reach.  A memory, a thought, a bit of themselves... plucked delicately away, as if to make room for the new knowledge they sought from her.

There are those who seek her out.  The Sheikah.  The Yiga.  The Zora.  Even the Hylians.  With each who visits her, the tale of the benevolent, scholarly spirit grows bit by bit.  More lost knowledge filters back into Hyrule bit by bit.  And one after another, the wards crack and fall away.  One after another, memories are taken from those who seek her wisdom and a single leaf for each begins to bud on those ancient boughs.  There are those who seek her out not knowing what she really is.  There are those who do still recall the old warnings but come to her with pleas and bargains regardless, wagering their need for information against the danger of opening a deal with her.

There are those who look up to the distant mountains and swear they’ve seen her stood at the mouth of the cave, looking out over Hyrule.  Looking out over the ruins of a civilization once so full of wisdom and knowledge, lost to all but herself.  Over the wide span of people desperate for understanding.  People who speak of her as the soul of a long-dead sorceress, as a demon, as a guardian deity, as a Poe, as a Great Fairy in need of patronage.