Journeys to HYRULE_
Isaac Yuen
The place named HYRULE shifts under its own weight, uproots itself, and is unreliable. Yet whenever a traveler returns, weathered by the years, stirred by latent desires for adventure, they can reprise the role afforded them through the myths of this land, this HYRULE, which moves according to the rhythms of its own time, alongside ours, transmitted in bits and bytes across real and digital borders, even as it changes, reforming, pausing only in instances of recall when a traveler, having pierced the forest’s perimeter, comes across a pedestal housing in august slumber one legendary sword; or, standing by the verge of a wooden bridge bids farewell to a childhood friend one last time; or, tunes into the notes of a lullaby played just out of sight, the flute trills of which will later surface at the threshold between wakefulness and sleep; or—
1.
1993. This first HYRULE sits within a box inside a glass case at a local department store. The asking price: $59.99. Sometimes I would go to look, to dream and plan of possibilities. I think about permission, about allowance, the grand sum of five dollars a week, on whether to spend it on this or another world I now no longer recall.
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Drops of freezing rain fret the bus window, forming tiny lenses that suffuse lights streaming from purple skies and orange streetlamps. Flushed after swim club practice, I push my hot cheek against the cool glass and tilt towards her face, lined from another day’s toil, watching it change as she returns, back to this moment, back to me always. Her eyes sharpen and shine presently, expectant.
“Happy birthday! This is the videogame you wanted, right?”
I press smooth the plastic wrapping to make out the red lettering beneath: “ZELDA”—medallion-gold background, sword and shield iconography that would span three decades on. I note the price tag and perform the conversion in my head out of instinct, an immigrant’s calculus learned early on to gauge worth, except this time instead of currencies I weigh dollars against a single mother’s waking hours spent working to provide—
Something is wrong. The background on this box is purple. The price on the attached RadioShack receipt is too much:, $99.99. And they were not yet divorced. No. This moment comes later, is prelude to another world I would come to treasure, bound to another memory honed to evoke a precise but different ratio of pity and gratitude that remains undiminished across the years. This alternate story exists, is also real. Then why HYRULE, why always—
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Fifth grade. I have visited a mirror version of this initial HYRULE before. It is S who lends it to me after discovering our mutual interest. Yes, this is it, this lone link we share, as I am bookish and flat-footed while he sports freckles and sprints like the wind. I open the paper map creased into nine quadrants to begin exploring this HYRULE, but already S’s journey is nearing the end, his save file having already exhausted all the trials the land has to offer. I return the game cartridge to him the next day, before months later, allowance in hand, I finally set off on my own journey.
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The story goes like this. One stormy night, the royal family summons its loyal liege to arms. The protagonist, the liege’s nephew I shall name LINK—capitals for emphasis—secretly follows behind, only to discover his uncle mortally wounded in the castle sewers. With his dying breath, the liege bestows upon this LINK, a sword, a shield. Thus, the classic hero’s tale to rid the land of evil begins.
No words needed as the world instructs. Blue soldiers take three strikes to vanquish. Green slimes shock swords when struck. The use of bombs to reveal hidden treasure and secret pathways is encouraged. Excessive violence against poultry is punishable by death. This HYRULE is a just playground, designed with jigsaw precision, with each square tile of castle, lake, hill, and forest feeding into the next, waiting to be assembled into a whole. Yet, just when LINK thinks he has mastered the lay of the land, this HYRULE expands, doubles in size, takes on a parallel dimension, intensifies in peril. In this dark world twice removed from reality, an explorer’s true nature is laid bare. A bully morphs into an ogre. His victim becomes a rubber ball. The chief villain transforms into a blue pig, while the hero is turned into a pink rabbit, as starry-eyed and innocent as any eleven-year- old. Undeterred, this LINK overcomes his limitations, trudging through shadow palaces and skeletal forests, thief dens and misery mires. He spends months battling a giant two-headed turtle—because goddamnit that was a nasty piece of business—before triumphing in what seems like this HYRULE’s ultimate test. What happens after this point is unclear. Beyond the completed quest and restored peace there are no records. All that can be recalled is the return, a descent, back to grey December rains, an empty house.
2.
2016. I am at work watching a livestream of Nintendo preparing to unveil the latest HYRULE at the year’s most popular gaming conference. First, the title reveal—“BREATH OF THE WILD”—then a trailer. From the carousel of images, I pick out the following: A hooded rider enters a canyon on horseback. Palms sway along the shores of a desolate beach. Storks take flight from a desert mesa. A hawk wheels past the towers of a ruined temple. A voice speaks for the first time:
Open your eyes.
Details arrive in drip form. The enthusiast press is awed by this HYRULE’s size, bordering on the scale of a real country. They praise the ruleset that governs this virtual world for transcending simple cause and effect, for conveying the complexities of real-life physics. Fires can spread and cause updrafts. Trees can be chopped down for floating bridges. Metal crates can be pushed and pulled by magnetic tools. This world-in-progress is voted best-in-show.
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I watch the trailer more times than I care to count. To me this HYRULE is a haunted realm: No towns, no people, only overgrown ruins upon which the bones of past guardians rest. Nature has reclaimed the environment, but ghosts remain, endure, and the entire land lingers on like an unfinished thought, seemingly in wait for a visitor to reprise the role afforded them once more. For the first time in years I feel the urge to return, not as a cynic used to taking in sights without savor, nor as a child with eyes still fresh to wonder, but as one coming home without ever expecting to return, hoping to find it real and dear, in the old ways and in new ones he never did and perhaps never will again.
3.
2012. I bump into S at the bus stop while heading home after visiting my mother, her spirit and vision clouded now by phantom pains and cataracts. He spots me first, pinning me down with gunmetal eyes, and as I rummage through two decades of faces, I home in on the freckles, free from the old bowl-cut. After pleasantries, S asks if I remembered that time he lent me the game, back when we were the only kids in our grade with Super Nintendos. I laugh and say that I have not thought about that for a long time. We stand awhile, each in our worlds and in the silence that falls between, companionable.
S tells me he is working at the local pizzeria that everyone went to during middle school, high school, and university. When I mention I write, he nods, saying that he should have paid more attention to homework instead of being fastest in class. He says he would like to go to college one day, but with a baby on the way it’s hard to find the time. As the bus arrives for me and not for him, he asks for my number, so we can catch up some day.
He phones me a week later, on two separate occasions, afternoon and evening. I look at the display and let the rings go to voicemail. I think about calling back but do not. I think about replaying the old game but do not.
4.
Once upon a time, there was a boy with no toys, so he carved puppets out of wood and string and made them dance. Once upon a time, this boy of eight (maybe nine) ventured beyond his village’s borders, past the bamboo groves, deep into the forested hills threaded with silver streams. Years later, when the boy became a man, he would recall the thrill of feeling a minnow brush against his leg as he waded through flowing water, of finding a cave and returning the next day with a lantern to plumb its depths. Decades later, when the man became a storyteller, he would try to do justice to these memories and fail. As he found his calling as a toymaker, he would return to these childhood moments in nature, populating his creations with caves and lakes and woods, trying to express what could not be expressed in words, harnessing that first spark, its durable joy.
This is not my story but I know its shape. I am not the boy yet I share that joy. Once transmitted, the initial world encompassing that cave and those woods at the outskirts of a Japanese village named SONOBE with a boy named MIYAMOTO changes form from mind to mind, crossing the gulf between the real and unreal, expanding, imparting, shifting. Even now that place does not hold still, slipping away from the old creator contemplating retirement, is turned over to his successor named AONUMA striving to translate and transmute, to retain and refresh, himself having been shaped by a previous HYRULE already described in this essay, this LINK TO THE PAST. Yet this place exists before and endures beyond names and namers, resists attempts to be reduced to myth, even though we try, must always, can only—
5.
1998. The world restarts. I skip class to line up for the release of this latest revision of HYRULE. Red lettering, gold background, sword and shield—yes, this rings true and cinches the memory—and with it in hand I rush over to M’s house to begin the journey anew. Even though he is at school, not skipping class, his brother lets me into their third-floor flat. Was it third or second? Why always his place and not mine? This was the way ever since ninth grade Math, when M and I first bonded over dreams of shores on another world, another realm where past, present, future cross, intertwine, causing and shifting, always in flux—
No. That is not part of the story, even if the thread of time weaves through both tales. I will file this strand away for when we next catch up, when M flies back from Seoul to visit for a week or two, every year around his birthday. I will ask for clarification that November day long ago. Do you remember the world when—
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A new creation myth has been forged. The legend is retold. Long ago, three goddesses breathed life and law into the land, leaving their mark in the form of three sacred triangular relics that can bestow one with their heart’s desire. This new iteration of hero is once again given the pseudonym LINK, who once again embarks on a quest to vanquish evil. There are differences. In this tale the villain gains the relics and destroys the world. The damsel in distress is a guerilla fighter and secret guardian. In order to undo the damage and devastation, this LINK must travel across time, present and future, to enact change as child and adult. In the end, he succeeds in restoring the realm to its original glory, but at great personal cost. He returns to his childhood with all his memories intact, back to a world that has forgotten his deeds.
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Remember. Another final visit, the sorrow of parting, return to the real. Impressions of this HYRULE remain vague to this day, with the years settling over its surface like thick snow, erasing features until I can no longer tend the terrain. Yet a few details remain distinct, frozen in arc and motion. Jumping the ranch fence on horseback. Hooking a giant loach at the fishing hole. Swimming to an isle in the middle of the lake to shoot an arrow into the rising sun. And once in a while, on the road, in the shower, between act and act, melodies would softly call, stirring up old images, moods, the motifs of things: Minuet of Forest. Serenade of Water. Requiem of Spirit. Signposts pointing to the way back.
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Last week while surfing YouTube and humming the “Bolero of Fire” for the first time in eighteen years, I discovered that if one took the time to stand still and look up in this old HYRULE, the world’s music would slow in tempo, shift down from the usual majesty to a more muted melancholy. The programmers had inserted this secret for those willing to take the time to savor their creation. That past LINK never did. He returns in vain to dredge up what has long past.
6.
1994. In between visiting the two HYRULE’s I traveled to NARNIA, during summer vacation back in Hong Kong while divorce details were being finalized. It was not the wardrobe’s ability to whisk children away to a magical realm that seized my teenage imagination, but rather how C.S. Lewis toys with the shifting nature of time. After years of toil and hard adventure, his full-grown heroes return to London as children, discovering that no time had passed in the real world. Those keen to reclaim their kingdom in a subsequent summer will find upon their return a land centuries removed, their deeds faded into obscure legend. One can go back to NARNIA again, as long as they understand it may be a place they have never been.
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To those who remain bound to place, the tether stretches, grows taut, releases, slingshots across the years. It never breaks. Both chained and free, one can grow, venture forth, meander, question, despair, retrace their steps, wonder. What has been lost over the gaps? What if upon return there remain only ghosts, heaped bones, inessential melancholies?
No. There are stories within the story, myths to be wrought, rebuilt, reshaped, shared anew. Otherwise nothing remains but spent years nothing—
7.
On certain isles, there exists a tradition that when a boy comes of age, he is bestowed a green tunic in memory and honor of past heroes. This is one of the many myths told in a new yet diminished HYRULE, an island-strewn realm set across a vast and sterile sea. Forced to live in this marginal world, the inhabitants of this HYRULE have adapted, evolved, or else gone extinct. Bird people have replaced fish people. Forest spirits have taken to the sky to secure their future fortunes. Mountain folk subsist as a race of dispossessed merchants. So dramatic are the changes that even base archetypes are transformed. The princess is now a pirate. The hero is just a boy in search of his sister. The villain is not driven by all-consuming greed, but by the unjust hand the goddesses have dealt his people. Regret permeates this HYRULE, this drowned land trapped in the shell of its past. The story ends not with a neat resolution, but with a choice made. The old HYRULE is washed away. No safety exists in the present. Hope is entrusted entirely to the future.
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2003. I am in my twenties now, embarking on another quest with another LINK who is ten, maybe eleven. The difference in years between us does not hinder our ability to work as one, and together we sail forth across the uncharted sea, fueled by a love for far-flung lands on the horizon, the glint of treasure at the edge of vision, morning gulls on the waking wind.
Yet as an environmental science major my mind now dwells in the abstract, eager to mine meaning out of this bright, post-apocalyptic tale. Instead of embracing the myth I hold it at arm’s length to extract cold concepts: Climate refugees. Biological impoverishment. Resource inequality. Generational legacy. Deep down I know that to dissect HYRULE in such a way is to miss the point. Part of me yearns to stay, to watch the seeds of this world take root. But there are other lands to visit, other roles to enact. I complete my quest and stow this HYRULE away. I do not return. I do not visit any subsequent chapters of its possible futures.
Interlude
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” A friend posts this quote by Swiss author Peter Bieri on Facebook. I read it even as I am supposed to be working on this essay, not wasting hours chasing a trail of links that leads me to discover Bieri penned the passage under the pseudonym PASCAL MERCIER while writing his novel “Night Train to Lisbon,” which contains this other thought: “A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”
8.
With each retelling of HYRULE, there exists the danger that the stories will repeat, merely shifting positions along the nodes of branching timelines, becoming impossible to distinguish from one another, with its cast of characters enacting the same scripts, tired actors reprising but otherwise echoing identical roles—the hero valiant in deed, the princess sage in foresight, the desert king lusting for power he can never have. Such iterations, should they continue to accrete, stacked upon one another, would grow into a bloated and grotesque history, become untenable, in danger of being crushed under its own weight.
Perhaps realizing this, HYRULE’s storytellers began to weave tales in alternate spaces. From their dreams, lands light as clouds appeared, airy palaces propelled high into the sky, ethereal isles summoned into being by woodwinds and windfishes. Yet despite their new names—SKYLOFT, KOHOLINT, the city of the OOCCOOS—they remain tethered to HYRULE, serving as its mirrors, foundations, pools, all drawing from and reflecting upon that original source. Only one of these tales has gone in the opposite direction, twisting upon itself, fleeing the sky to burrow its roots deep into the psyches of those doomed to repeat their fates an infinite number of times. When time itself returns, one begins to gaze inward to trace the trajectories of life and living. The version of HYRULE where this occurs exists. Its name is Termina. It stays with me still.
9.
The story of Termina is not a legend, but rather a private telling whispered to the attuned ear, concerned with forgotten souls in need of healing. This Hyrule that is not HYRULE takes the familiar features of the original and warps them, so that a poison swamp seeps into the roots of forest groves, a solitary peak usurps the standard mountain range, and a great bay washes away the desert and replaces its dervish host with pirate mercenaries. For this reordering of parts extends even to people. In attempting to tell a different tale with the same constituents, HYRULE’s storytellers had reached into their cache of old faces to refashion new masks, so that the former chicken lady becomes an innkeeper mourning her lost fiancée, the evil ranch hand transforms into a selfless troupe leader, and the carefree marathoner is saddled with the postman’s duty to deliver mail even as the world is about to end. For death permeates this land aptly named Termina, manifesting in the form of a skulled moon overhead, set to obliterate the world in three days’ time.
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2009. I am lying on my uncle’s chesterfield revisiting EARTHSEA, a world like HYRULE where change seems to be the only constant. It has been three months since I started my Master’s, five since leaving my old job, and six since attending my uncle’s funeral back in the homeland. He was forty-nine.
After I return from “The Farthest Shore,” the novel author Ursula K. Le Guin noted is about the thing one does not live through and survive, I travel for the first time to her twin worlds of “The Dispossessed” and the telling of a revolutionary’s journey. Now from text, this passage from one named SHEVEK, my dear Shevek: “One needs distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage of death.”
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What to do when faced with doom from above? Bestowed the Groundhog Day ability to rewind and relive the Termina’s final three days, this LINK helps its inhabitants find peace and salvation. Seventy-two hours to learn a world both foreign and familiar. Seventy-two hours to know each life inside and out, each secret joy and hidden sorrow, each self-lie and naked truth, faces freed from masks. Yet try as LINK might, not everyone can be saved. To aid one person means another will suffer. There is never enough time. Each kind deed and mended relationship is forgotten when the cycle repeats. We remain strangers, in the end.
Yet this LINK and I persist, even if time loops upon itself, resetting the stage for all eternity. So, I return to Termina every few years, whenever I grow weary, to this world that repeats, to a place where there always remains work to do, to learn to act without expectation. There is no reward. There is no end.
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Coda
As I write, my boxed collection of HYRULE’s sits inside my desk shelf and gathers fine dust. I have not gone back to any of them, save the one that holds the dream I have not stopped dreaming. Even if I do decide to heed the call, many versions have been neglected in care and placement, their maps and manuals sold away for small change, are now alive only in these brief moments of inscription. Still. One day I shall like to take one out of its case to study the artwork, which upon examination, may feature heraldic letterings upon a bronze background; or, show a swordsman mounted on his rearing steed; or, depict a boy in green garb tacking into the wind on his dragon boat, sailing home. There are and will continue to be other versions. “BREATH OF THE WILD” comes out tomorrow. This world named HYRULE will shift in the light of each telling, reflected in the gleam of its visitors’ eyes, the dance of torchlight on walls of newly discovered caves, the colors filtered through certain sacred relics, triangular and faceted, turned against an empty sky; or—
Isaac Yuen’s work has appeared in Lammergeier, The Hopper, Tahoma Literary Review, Tin House online, Shenandoah, Orion, and other publications. He is a 2019 Jan Michalski Foundation nature writer-in-residence and currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory.