SPLASH!

Her entry could use some work.

This was the Zora princess’s utmost thought as she dove into the water, merging with it in such a graceful manner scarcely a few ripples preceded her. Ruto dove deeper, hybrid gills affording her a functionally limitless time in the water. This was not the only adaptation she had for aquatic travel; her skin was supple and smooth, allowing her to glide through the waves with the utmost ease. Her hands and feet were equipped with webs that bolstered her force and power with which she could swim. And her head was adorned with a natural crest-like appendage, granting her a near 360 degree field of ultrasonic perception. A useful tool for navigating the ocean’s darkest depths.

And navigate them she did. Deeper and deeper, the light of the surface became more and more distant until she had reached the most isolated underwater caverns of Lake Hylia. Here, save for a spare few crawfish, she was as alone as perhaps any creature in Hyrule could possibly be.

And yet, she hadn’t escaped that which she sought to run from. That burgeoning fear of leadership. For even as Ruto had developed into a mature, intelligent, and strong woman, the mere thought of taking to the throne was enough to steal the air from her gills.

Settling in place, Ruto grabbed onto a jutting rock in her current cavern, taking a break from her dive, and sighed.

The bubbles -- air that had entered through her gills -- escaped her open mouth and floated upwards before being violently sucked through a crevice.

“Hm?”

Ruto looked upwards, though this did nothing. She had just as much information in these hadal depths as she had before. Above her was a slight crack in the stone, and water was rushing through. Ruto was quite familiar with these caverns, but even she could not claim to know them in their entirety, especially as the depths were always changing. As for this aperture, it was small, but for the slender princess… it could be traversed. With some difficulty.

So, in a fit of curiosity, she did. Ruto drifted upwards, reaching her hands through, and feeling the rush of water that was pulling at her.

What could be back there? she thought, pulling herself further through, until --

SWISH!!!

It was like suddenly being pulled in by the winds of a hurricane, or a sailboat at once locating its tradewind. It was only by the grace of Hylia (and her preternatural swimming abilities) that Ruto was able to survive the length of her journey through the fast-moving tunnel without being sliced uncomfortably on the jagged rocks.

And then it was over, and she was emptied out into a vast blue expanse. Filtered light was not far ahead.

“Is this… the lake?” It didn’t feel like it; too foggy. And the land rose in a more gradual fashion compared to the vertical walls of Lake Hylia.

Princess Ruto was intrigued by what this new locale may have been, and she swam quickly upward, head breaking through the water, oblivious to the speck-like objects that seemed to skirt the surface.

***

The passengers of the Majesty’s Wake cruiseliner were already on edge as the waters became choppy, turbulent, and angry. It was only as a result of the staff's efforts to calm them down that tension seemed to avoid its inevitable tipping point.

Travelers leaned over the railings, holding the bars with ironclad grips as the boat listed and listed until…

It was as though a mountain was rising out of the ocean. The sea inclined, gradually, slowly, dreadfully, and very very close. A cascade of blue grew in size, rising and displacing gallons, then tons, then entire bounties worth of water.

The first scream on the decks of the Majesty’s Wake foretold the next, as the ship was hit by the tsunamic avalanche with an immeasurably powerful force, flinging those unrestrained off and into the sea.

Those who had managed to grab something bolted down were instead forced to live through the horror as the thing that was rising from the water made itself known. Something big. Too big. Impossibly big. Something with a face, an insultingly curious, feminine one. Something that looked down at the boat and likely didn’t even recognize it for what it was, a mere drop of sand in the harbor.

Ruto’s vast flaps of her arms and legs as she breached the surface were the last nail in the keg for the ship, its lists sending it capsizing into the merciless depths of the blue waves, gracefully ending the lives of the already-ejected passengers that were caught beneath its massive frame. Those left would find that Ruto’s errant wags of her hands and feet, battering against them like islands, would do more than sufficient of a job at finishing these tourists off.

Ruto was at home in the water. She always had been. And yet, as she approached the shore, she couldn’t help but feel… off. The way the water caressed her felt different. The way it cascaded off the crest of her head and her smooth piscine body was less like droplets and sheets, and more like… dust.

And as she neared the coast, her confusion only increased, seeing little that went on for as far as she could see, save some hills. A thin strip of tan sand was the only border between the gentle lapping tide and the vast green expanse deeper inland. An expanse that Ruto seemed to tower over more and more, feet finally caught onto the bottom of the ocean coast, and able at last to stand at full height in all her regal glory.

STEP!

A quake near water always brought on fears of a tidal wave. But those that inhabited the city of Tory could not have been less concerned… the entity that now beheld them was without a doubt no less than a walking natural disaster on its own. Rising from the depths of the sea like a long-forgotten eldritch god, she had -- for it was likely a “her” -- a relaxed, unbothered demeanor. Her head alone could’ve been the peak of a small island, and the rest of her followed seamlessly, glistening as torrential levels of water fell off the planes of her body by the metric tonne, some enough to invade and ultimately level the flimsy stilt houses that lined the shore. Beachgoers covered their mouths in horror, the churning of the waves the first portent of a calamity now made manifest as Princess Ruto surfaced, now standing to height, a towering monument of the joining together of land and sea. Her periwinkle foot, leaving the water with a seemingly glacial and measured precision, indecipherable ripples that still jutted out like shockwaves, their wakes crashing inland and sweeping too-slow beachgoers out to sea.

And then, she stepped forward.

In an instant, the sky was gone, now replaced by a dark mass dripping with water. But these were not the healing natural waters of a wayward cumulonimbus cloud; rather, this water was the salty residue of the ocean, the final warning to a society that was already destined for oblivion.

BRUBOOOOOOOOOOOM…

“Hm? What is this substance I’m stepping in?”

Princess Ruto’s voice sounded more like a low growl of thunder to any that remained. However, in the footprint made by her step, there was little life that remained at all. The sand compressed into sedimentary rock, concrete buildings were mere mites, reduced to dust. Houses became mulch. And people… the one silver lining of the massacre was that any life’s eradication was so complete it left no sign of the violent ends they must’ve surely endured. There was truly no hope for recourse; any cracks or crevices between any of Ruto’s three toes was filled in with the webbed flippers, oh so useful for swimming, but a death sentence for the microbes that found themselves under her deific soles.

Princess Ruto did not expect the seemingly barren landscape to answer her, so she crouched down, wiping away two more boroughs with both hands and grinding the seaport to dust with her knee, creating a massive reservoir through which water flowed in, cleansing the location of remains.

Ruto’s superior eyesight was, at this level, able to attain some semblance of understanding of what she was looking at. The thin gray strips zigzaging betwixt tiny crystalline box structures were roads and paths of some sort, and said structures must’ve been businesses, homesteads, buildings. Their complexity precluded all else.

Ruto gasped.

“You all… you’re alive?!”

The mermaid maiden was taken aback.

“You’re all so… insignificant.”

Ruto’s breath was a haze, pure and refined, that invaded the cowering survivors of the abstract municipality.

“I wonder… if…”

Ruto drew a finger, pointing it down at the town, preparing to smite all who were beneath.

The tiniest trace of a smirk broaching her lips, the piscine princess’s right index finger made contact with the ground, breaking it, and disintegrating the facsimile of structure that remained. She dragged it across, digging it deeper and deeper into the earth, her immense size effortlessly undoing the concrete as the digit larger than the largest buildings to ever exist traced a path of unfathomable destruction in its wake, uprooting and bulldozing billions of dollars and thousands of lives per second.

“Wow…”

Ruto felt something cold on her forehead.

“Hmm?” She reached a finger to her brow, but felt nothing there, until she glanced at the several white tufts floating around her at eye level.

“These are… clouds… so then, I’m…”

Finally, she understood.

Ruto very nearly lost her balance and plummeted forward, a sure death sentence for the tiny city.

“Well, I’ve no idea where I am, but it is not Hyrule... Though I am still a princess…” Ruto rose to her feet, a laborious, impossible-to-comprehend task for her new subjects that was as natural as, well, standing up or breathing to the enlarged amphibian. “So, it’s time to give my first decree to this newly-found civilization of…”

At this, Ruto uttered a damning chuckle.

“It simply doesn’t feel right to call you ‘people’ at this scale. So, germs…”

Ruto tilted her chin up and her gaze down, stately and regal, body fully exposed and visible, jutting violently out of the horizon for any onlookers on this hemisphere.

“Die for me.”

And Ruto elevated her foot, allowing it to hang from above like a sword of Damocles. It still was dripping with water, now mingled with the copious tons of debris that stuck to the underside of her webbed sole like a smeared muck. And she stamped down.

The area directly beneath the stomp once again was compressed completely and utterly, laying waste to all that was within its path. Ruto felt it crumble with such ease, and she felt a chill completely unrelated to the cold as enough people to fill a small town were suddenly disassembled beneath her royal foot. It was an indescribable feeling, and one she wanted to feel again.

Luckily for her, she’d scarcely taken two steps across the grayish strip by the sea. Meaning there was still quite a lot of land left for her to stroll through.

And so Princess Ruto’s walk along the side of the beach began.

Her footsteps came quickly and without remorse. Ruto closed her eyes, allowing her ultrasensitive skin to be the only method of sense for the moment. It was through this that she was able to really feel the crumble, the crinkle, the crunch, the crush, the crash of every single footfall. If she really tried, she could’ve sworn she could feel the individual bodies pop, each one barely enough to cause the most minuscule splotch on a single ridge of her foot. Whatever the case may be, being able to so intimately cause the deaths and destruction of these lesser beings didn’t exactly feel becoming of royalty, but it did feel… right. To the princess at least. It was one of the first steps she had taken toward understanding what power is and whether she had the right to wield it.

And as Ruto launched her foot to the ground once again, this one creating a splash of dirt and rubble with the force of the near-kick, Ruto could confidently say, for once, that she knew she had the right to wield it. And she was demonstrating that right with every step she took.

“Feeling the likes of you all simply… collapse under my feet is an unmatched sensation… I must have more…”

Then… a rumbling occurred.

“Hm?” intoned the fishy princess, the stretchy, rubbery sensation of ascendance. Time slowed as all of creation witnessed Ruto’s expansion. Defeated countrymen fell to their knees as the walls of all three of Princess Ruto’s webbed toes expanded to become the sky, their turquoise blue seamlessly melding with that of the heavens as their end became impossible to verify. Of course, they did end, they simply ended at scales incomprehensible for mortals to identify.

Truly, her immortality felt assured as Princess Ruto stretched out her arms luxuriously, dozens of miles long on their own. Her toes furiously squelched, their simplest movements creating tectonic levels of destruction, all the more appropriate as they now just barely skirted the heights of the highest mountains in existence. The sky felt… darker. Ruto was not yet able to truly detect the edge of space, but the deep, rich, velvety blue that now adorned her like a halo was nothing like that which she experienced at her normal size in Hyrule. She stood unopposed, planting her arms on her hips as an opportunity to touch a phantasmal, phenomenal being such as herself, before a somewhat funny if vulgar idea came to her.

“My vassals,” Princess Ruto’s voice now held as much import as the weather. She was like a hurricane, a bolt of lightning capable of wiping existence itself from reality. And when she beseeched the attention of humanity, they all listened.

Then, Ruto smiled. And she said, “Take this!”

Collecting the glob of saliva in her mouth, Princess Ruto puffed her cheeks and spat, the fat spitball crashing cannon-wise like a meteor, spreading over many kilometers worth of city. The cascading saliva destroyed much on impact, before digging into every crevice and hiding hole the humans attempted to create, drowning them in the viscous encompassing lake that her spit developed into. Neighborhoods were destroyed and boroughs were bulldozed by the glacial encroachment of her spit, and Princess Ruto chuckled. Royal blood she may be, but at heart, the Princess remained a pernicious tomboy, and she loved to wreak havoc simply because it caused a change. And at this deific scale, she could effect change on a level unheard of in the history of this paltry planet, starting with the creation of a new inland body of water.

“This has been fun, truly,” Princess Ruto said, taking another short walk along the promenade of the beachside, now merely a tiny pin-width strip of whitish-yellow next to the puddle of ocean. “However, the time has come for me to end this. I do hope this event has been memorable. I will certainly remember it for at least a good few weeks,” Princess Ruto said in utter honesty, turning to face the water.

She stood there for a moment. In the silence of her stance, those who had survived all she had thrown at her, seeing her beauteous and exposed body staring at that oceanic volume from whence she came, they might’ve expected her departure. An end to the living nightmare, the arrival of this physical goddess capable of rendering all life asunder. The return of hope.

But then, Ruto allowed her knees to buckle.

This was no accident. And it didn’t take long for those who watched to realize… Ruto was falling.

Spreading her arms far apart on either side, the Princess descended backwards, a smile on her face. The air compressed, unable to get out of the way fast enough, creating vortexes of superheated oxygen that baked everything (mainly planes, birds, and hang gliders) that found themselves in the way of the small of Ruto’s back. Her globular backside split into two was just as firm and supple as any human woman -- or any Hylian woman for that matter -- but to the tormented onlookers it simply spelled double the death. Ruto’s heart fluttered, the same feeling of adrenaline all creatures got when they simply fell, allowing gravity to reclaim them. And for Ruto, there was much, much to reclaim.

She landed.

Her landing split the Earth; the sting on Ruto’s back made her tickle, the sensitive skin especially vulnerable to the fiery spurts of magma layered deep in the planet’s crust. Ruto had breached it, though her size made it as dangerous to her as a termite sting.

The muddy remnants of the city’s vaporization was absolute, instantaneous, and obliviating. The very idea of a city that once was, had been wiped off the map. And Ruto’s self-satisfied rest came easy knowing that an entire race would never forget about her arrival, or what she left behind in her wake.

And speaking of wake…

Ruto mused an incantation to herself, and already, water began to tough the heels of her feet. Even at this size, in this realm, her magic continued to work; in fact, its effect seemed only to strengthen. Good, thought Ruto. So this will work just as intended.

Water was rushing inland. The tsunami of all tsunamis, it was the final song of absolution to these tiniest of creatures, collecting the blended debris in a rushing wave, traveling at breakneck speeds further and further past the shoreline, up hills and down valleys, collecting in pools -- not least of which those created by Princess Ruto’s footfalls, and completely drowning the pale remnants of the settlement that once dared to gloat to have mastery over all domains of this Earth.

The magic-enhanced water came and came, rising hundreds of feet before ascending even miles and miles, coating Ruto in a cool, refreshing blanket of her own element, until at last Ruto opened her eyes and realized she was submerged once again, comfortable and content.

Ruto slid forward, sliding and grinding the thousands of corpses caught beneath her legs and bottom into the tiniest of paste, more than enough for the local bottom feeders to finish off. Then, she leapt into the ocean, her size allowing her to easily descend past the continental plate and into the deep pacific. As though greeting her, a blue shimmer of light seemed to emanate from one such nearby crevice. It was a phenomenal size to her at her normal height, but just barely able to fit one such as her in this new vessel. Still though, she squirmed and squirmed and squirmed until…

Whoosh!

Darkness. Everlasting darkness.

Not that the Ruto monarch minded very much. But more importantly… she was back home.

She'd popped out of the same underwater cave orifice as before, but now no fluid seemed to be sucking through.

Ruto was sad, just a bit. She had quite a bit of fun, but the feeling that she wouldn’t be able to go back anytime soon -- nor did she know how to return -- was a bit demoralizing for her.

But one thing the trip did do was remind her of what she was:

Hylian royalty. A distinction true here, or anywhere in all of creation.

Smiling cheekily, Ruto kicked her feet and prepared to navigate out of the cave. Besides, who said the fun had to stop? Legends told of a diminutive race known as the Minish. Perhaps the royal Zora scribes had records that explained such accounts in greater detail… and where to find them.