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Daruk was barely bigger than a pebble when Death Mountain last erupted. Now, it’s been spewing boulders and molten rock for weeks, to a point where even the Gorons are beginning to feel worn down by the extra heat.
Daruk would really rather just keep making his rock roast in peace, but this is getting ridiculous. Now that even the monsters that so typically roam Death Mountain have begun falling to its increasingly extreme temperature, those that remain grow even more desperate for food and materials, and have begun attacking the city outright to compete for them. The Gorons are not a fighting people, but they must face off against this threat should they wish to survive. It’s not like they have much of a choice, after all.
Daruk is pretty much the closest thing Death Mountain’s population has to a leader, although that’s mostly because he’s big and strong and has been around longer than anybody else and makes the best food. It’s not exactly a position with much clout, although that seems to be difficult for the rest of the world to understand. The Hylians especially are really into the idea of always having somebody be in charge, regardless of whether or not there are any pressing issues at hand that need someone with authority to resolve them.
Granted, a prophesied calamity that will be ending the world sometime soon feels like a pretty big deal, when a delegation of Hylians come to request his aid in the fight against it as Goron representative. Apparently there’s a giant weapon machine buried in the mountain somewhere, and they want Daruk’s permission to excavate it and select a warrior to use it.
He doesn’t have any issues with digging up the thing—it sounds like fun, if he’s being honest, and if there’s a giant mechanical beast slumbering deep within the mountain he’s definitely curious enough to see it—but he informs the researchers who arrive to help pinpoint its location that no Goron is a trained warrior. They prefer the simple life, and he is not going to be the one to tell anybody to change that. Besides, they have other concerns to address, like the fact that the latest eruption led to an absolute rockalanche that now fairly effectively blocks off the easiest path down the mountain to where the miners dig up the rock roast.
Daruk decides that he will deal with it, because someone has to, and his Protection keeps him safer from any further falling rocks than anyone else would be. Gorons don’t really die unless they’re killed, after all, so any task that carries any amount of risk with it automatically falls to him, the one who can’t really be threatened by much of anything. There hasn’t been a death among the Gorons in centuries, now, and Daruk fully intends to keep it that way.
Besides, he found two little baby pebbles emerging in a cave a few weeks ago, and helped them detach themselves from the cave’s walls and took them back to the city as the two newest Gorons under his protection. He’s gonna have to show those little guys just how cool their parental figure is.
He hefts his Boulder Breaker over his shoulder, and gets to work carving a canyon. He’s no fighter, but he can certainly do this. Easier access to food will allow the miners to excavate that machine thing the Sheikah scientists are so excited about faster, which means they’ll all be able to move on with their lives afterwards. He’ll even step up to pilot the thing, if he has to. After all, someone’s gotta do it, and since he’s the one who has Protection, it might as well be him.
Daruk is not a warrior. But for his people, he will try.
He meets the other Champions some months later, when a royal summons calls him to the castle for an official ceremony. He doesn’t really get all the fancy stuff the Hylians want to do to make it all official, but he does want to see who else he’s supposed to be fighting alongside, so he shows up. He probably would be in pretty big trouble if he didn’t anyways.
…there are five other Champions. Four of them are kids.
The fifth, a Gerudo woman named Urbosa who he immediately gains immense respect for when she electrocutes an approaching moblin to death from a good two hundred paces away and goes right back to continuing their conversation as though nothing had happened, also seems to have some rather negative thoughts about this. Sure, Princess Zelda is quite literally the only person alive who can fulfill her particular role, but there is absolutely no need to be sending that little Hylian knight into battle. The Zora representative looks to be barely past adolescence, too, and the Rito bowmaster still has the red facial markings that denote him as a child. No matter how good of fighters any of them might be, this is not a responsibility they should be saddled with.
Are they truly the best hope Hyrule has? One adult warrior, a princess who has yet to access her sealing power, three youngsters who should be concerning themselves with their own futures, not that of the entire world, and the only Goron to have volunteered to go up into Vah Rudania, just because he hadn’t wanted anyone else to feel obligated?
Daruk is not a warrior.
…even the Hylian princess, who has explicitly told them all that she cannot control her power and has never hefted a weapon in her life, still carries herself in a way that suggests confidence in a warrior’s skillset. (At least, she does so in front of her father. Traveling together as a group, just the six of them, the regal front she otherwise puts on is all too easily cracked.) It is something that all of them, save for Daruk, have in common: Link wields his sword with a skill that silently screams he is the hero of legend; Revali’s self-confidence can be felt a mile away; Mipha spins her trident as she fights with a flourish and a grin, unconcerned that anything might manage to get a hit in on her; the lightning-shaped scars that snake down Urbosa’s right arm and reach nearly to her chin tell the story of multiple battles that have been ended on her terms.
Daruk has none of their training or experience. His fighting style mostly relies on being bigger and stronger than whatever’s coming at him, or holding enemies off with his Protection until he can find a convenient opening to swing his sword. The one thing he has going for himself is the fact that Rudania has eventually taken to him after all, even though he hears the other three champions all took to their own beasts much more quickly than he did.
None of them ever make him feel lesser for it, though. Sure, Revali has his issues with Link, but they’re children. Of course they’re bound to bicker. Daruk comes to care for the two of them just as much as he loves those two little guys he pulled out of that cave and into his heart. Mipha, who loves her baby brother so much that she fought a Lynel to protect him, quickly falls into that group as well. Zelda, so unsure of herself, is soon to follow.
Daruk knows Urbosa feels the same—they’ve joked more than once that the other Champions are their adopted children, and that even long after all of this is over, they will do everything they can to ensure they have good lives. It even seems that Zelda was practically Urbosa’s daughter already, even before all of this, although neither of them seem willing to speak of that particular circumstance.
All of them have their invisible struggles. It takes a very long time for him to understand them all, but once he does, loving these people is the easiest thing in the world. Daruk is not any less broken than the rest of them, but at least he’s had a little more time to learn to cope with life’s cruelty.
Daruk is not a warrior. But for these people, he will try.
…so, apparently being the Champion of the Gorons doesn’t just have to be about prim and proper ceremonies. Urbosa, as it turns out, is a bit of a daredevil, and it’s all too easy to goad her into attempting things that no one else in their right mind would ever want to try.
In Daruk’s defense, it’s mostly her idea in the first place. She’d asked him whether the Gorons had anything similar to seal surfing, and once he starts going over something like that in his head, it’s bound to get tried out eventually.
They rope Link into showing them how to brew stamina-enhancing elixirs. The hasty kind, too, once Daruk informs him of the plan and Link’s eyes grow wide with the kind of curiosity that suggests he will absolutely want in on this as well. The thought of going even faster is absolutely welcomed. When Urbosa comes up with the idea of setting up several vertical stones at the end of the course to see how many could be knocked down in one final epic crash, it’s a done deal.
The plan is this: they will take the road towards the top of Death Mountain as high as it will go, attach one end of a thin metal cable to Daruk’s wrist and the other to a handle that should be heat-resistant enough for Urbosa to hold onto without melting her hands off, and get ready to have the time of their lives. Daruk will roll down the hill—with the power of gravity and a hasty elixir combined, it’s going to be fast— and Urbosa will surf behind him in a minecart, all the way to the end of the road, artificially enhanced stamina there to help her stay upright.
The plan is absolutely flawless.
“If you both go careening over the edge of the mountain,” Revali says once he somehow finds out, probably attempting to sneer down at them but failing pretty miserably on account of how tiny the little guy is, “I’m not flying you back up.”
Daruk has his Protection. Urbosa has… a makeshift helmet, and a lot of spite. It’s going to be fine.
Link and Urbosa meet him in Goron City at the crack of dawn, leaving Zelda and the other two Champions to continue resting at the stable at the base of Death Mountain. It’s probably for the best that neither princess knows this is happening until after it’s over, anyways. Much easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Link’s going to wait at the bottom of the course, guarding it from any potential monsters or curious wanderers, Sheikah Slate camera pointed at the long boulders they’d set up vertically with the hopes of capturing the coolest action shot ever recorded by technology.
Urbosa is also equipped with Link’s paraglider, just in case. It truly is the perfect plan.
They make it to the very end of the road, almost all the way up to the top of the mountain. Urbosa, even with an extra potent fire-resistant elixir, is looking a little miserable, but not enough that it’s dulling the positively manic glee in her expression. Everything’s ready for them—cable, minecart, some padding that will hopefully not catch fire as they go flying down the steep incline—and they clink their elixir bottles in a mock toast before downing them and making matching disgusted faces at each other when the absolutely rancid aftertaste kicks in. Daruk roars with laughter.
Urbosa gets into the minecart, testing the weight of the handle in her grip, and glances up at Daruk as he firmly attaches the other end into one of his gauntlets. “Ready?” he asks.
Suddenly, she does not look remotely ready. In fact, she looks as though she is currently rethinking every decision she has ever made that has led her to this point.
“Ready!” she calls back, voice shaking only slightly.
Daruk tucks and rolls, and things immediately begin to go wrong.
For one thing, the hasty elixir doesn’t do much for the speed of his actual descent—there’s a point where you can be rolling down a hill so fast that you physically cannot go any faster, he’s pretty sure Zelda had tried to explain once—but it does allow him to be flipping over and over much faster as he does. He feels how uneven the resistance on the cable is almost immediately; constantly jerking against him rather than one smooth pull, which is probably an issue, but he knows even without trying that they’re already going much too fast to actually stop.
Second—and this part’s really not his fault, okay, how was he supposed to know—apparently, having the towing line on his side, rather than coming out from the center of him somehow like seal towing harnesses do, makes it much harder for whoever’s on the other end to balance.
Which is to say: Daruk makes it to the end of the course, smashing into the carefully set up boulders in an absolutely glorious collision, but when the minecart that’s been rolling down the hill after him runs him over seconds later, Urbosa is no longer in it. She slams into him quite a while after that, looking like she just may have been bouncing down the hill after him almost since the beginning, with just enough force to send them both tipping that last inch off the edge and down into the canyon below.
Link shouts in alarm. Little late for that, little guy.
Daruk manages to grab onto her, thankfully, and is able to soften what might otherwise have been a deadly impact with one final use of his Protection, but quite a bit of damage is already done. She did just slide down almost the entirety of Death Mountain with practically nothing guarding her from the jagged stones that dot the road, after all, and Daruk can already tell even before trying to move that this was definitely not one of his nicest landings for him, either. He’s probably going to have to spend quite a bit of time heating up his back in a lava lake in order to fuse the cracks he’s sure have developed back shut again.
Distantly, overhead, is the telltale sound of the Sheikah Slate taking a picture.
“…we’re in trouble, huh,” Daruk says.
Urbosa, still splayed out across his stomach where he’d done his best to break her fall, takes in a deep breath and cackles so loudly the others can probably hear her all the way back at the stable.
They do manage to make it back there. Eventually. Several hours later, well after they’ve sent Link back with a promise to follow soon after that they probably should have tried a little harder to keep, considering how frantically worried Zelda is once they finally do return.
…needless to say, Mipha is not amused.
“I am not amused,” she says, pretty clearly not even slightly amused. (Unlike Link, who announced that he was going to go out in search of hearty radishes, and ducked out of the stable before anyone besides Daruk had the time to see the barely restrained laughter in his shoulders.) “Do you realize you both could have died? The Calamity is growing close enough already; we cannot afford any unnecessary risks—”
“I do apologize, Mipha,” says Urbosa, who does in fact look rather ashamed. Well, that makes one of them. “Truly. I had thought better of my skills.”
Mipha, holding one of Urbosa’s arms in her lap with a look of angered concentration, doesn’t respond.
“When did you last seal surf?” Zelda asks, who still hasn’t quite let go of Urbosa’s other hand since she and Daruk had returned. “Surely with everything going on of late, you have not had the time in quite a while.”
“No,” Urbosa confirms. “Not since—“
She stops herself, rather suddenly. Mipha raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.
“Not since what?” Zelda pushes.
“…I hardly remember, Little Bird,” Urbosa says, and while Zelda seems to accept that answer, Mipha definitely seems to find something suspicious about it. Oh, well. None of Daruk’s business.
Mipha heals him as well, which certainly feels better than melting himself back into shape would have. Her skills are definitely something else. By the time the sun sets, not long after Zelda and Revali step out to see whether Link’s come back and started to make use of the cookpot yet, both he and Urbosa are looking as good as new.
“Do not do that again,” Mipha says, and then leaves the two of them alone to definitely plan how they’re going to do that again. Maybe not until after the Calamity, and definitely with slightly more careful planning this time, but still.
“Wanna head back up the path a little, and look for a maybe smarter starting point?” Daruk asks, and Urbosa laughs softly, subdued. That doesn’t quite seem like her.
“Alright,” she says.
It becomes clear pretty quickly, once they step back outside, that neither of them are looking particularly hard. Urbosa leans against the stable’s fence, gaze distant.
“We’ll do better next time!” he promises her. “I bet we could even find a route that would land us right in one of those healing hot springs. Would feel real nice after bein’ up in the volcano all day!”
“...it would,” Urbosa agrees, distracted.
Daruk frowns at her, and takes a seat on the ground. He’s still taller than her from down here, but only barely. “Everythin’ okay?”
“Do you have children, Daruk?” she blurts.
“Sure do,” he says, not entirely sure why she’s wondering that all of a sudden. “As much as we Gorons have kids, anyway. Rorc and Konvoh! Picked ‘em up in a cave not too long ago. They’re both just little guys, still, but one day they’ll be big and strong like me!” He pauses. She doesn’t seem to be feeling any better, and he’s starting to think he might have an idea why. “...I dunno exactly what they’ll do if somethin’ happens to me up in Rudania, but I do know they’ll be taken care of. I’m… I’m sure the same goes for the tiny princess, too?”
“...I appreciate the reassurance, Daruk,” Urbosa says softly. “The Calamity grows ever closer, and it is difficult not to worry about these things. My little bird is strong, I am sure. But….” Her grip on the fence’s railing tightens. She does not look reassured.
“If…” Daruk begins. He isn’t good at this sort of thing. Gorons don’t really die unless they’re killed, and with so many centuries of peace before this, there hasn’t been a death on Death Mountain in quite a long time. This isn’t the kind of thing he’s ever really thought about before. But Urbosa is one of his people now, and so for her, he will try. “If somethin’ happens to you, I promise that I’ll do my best for her.”
“Thank you,” Urbosa says, and she seems sincerely relieved. “I hope you know that should anything happen to you, I would do the same for Rorc and Konvoh. You’ll have to introduce me, before I take my leave.” She takes a deep breath. “May I tell you something?”
Daruk blinks. “Of course!”
She casts a glance over her shoulder, probably to make sure they’re really alone. “You cannot tell anyone else. Especially Zelda.”
Oh. So this is serious. “I won’t tell a soul,” he swears.
“...I have another daughter,” she practically whispers. “Her name is Makeela Saphi, after two of the most important people in my life. If something were to happen to me, she would become chief, and I—“ she takes a deep breath in, again. “That is not something I wish for her to face alone. The Gerudo people will be good to her, but they only know me as their leader. I would wish for someone to be in her life who remembers her mother as a friend. Not just… a distant legend.”
He wonders if she knows what that’s like from experience. Given the way that she’s looking at him, he suspects that she does.
“...she’ll get to hear all about that time you fell down all of Death Mountain and knocked me off a cliff,” he swears solemnly, and Urbosa laughs, a little desperately. “...and lots of other things, besides.” He reaches over to clap her on the back, as gently as he can manage, though she still almost loses her footing. “But it won’t have to be from me. You’re one of the greatest fighters I know. You’re gonna come home to her.”
“...thank you, Daruk,” she says eventually. “I am sure you are going to return to your family as well.”
The sun has well and truly set by now, and a gentle breeze passes them, bringing with it the smell of meat and mushrooms. They should probably head over towards the cooking pot, especially if Daruk wants to snack on the coals while they’re still hot.
He goes back to the city that night, leaving the rest of the Champions to their rest in the stable. He hugs his little pebbles extra tight before putting them to bed, and wonders if he maybe should leave behind any sort of instructions after all. Urbosa’s worries are lingering with him now, too.
Daruk is not a warrior. But for his people, he will try.
The Calamity comes.
Daruk gives what assurances he can to his fellow Champions, and rushes up Death Mountain towards Rudania in record time, only slowing to help usher the littlest of the Gorons indoors and warning the older ones that there might be an influx of monsters coming their way. Rorc and Konvoh hold on to his legs for a while, but he shakes them off with a solemn apology and something wet forming in his eyes.
Rudania cries out as he enters, that unsettling mechanical wail he’ll never grow used to. Something is wrong, that much he can tell, but he’s never had the smarts that any of his companions do to have a hope of figuring out what. He’ll just have to activate his terminal, and hope for the best. They can always worry about repairs after Calamity Ganon has been sealed away again.
Besides, even in a worst-case scenario, he has his Protection. If Rudania is so broken he cannot fire its laser, he’ll just have to roll back down the mountain and towards Hyrule Field to help out there instead. It’s a good thing he knows a particular route that’s guaranteed to get him going really fast.
He reaches towards his control panel, and a piercing screech rings out in the chamber. A distress signal it sounds like, a theory that is confirmed when Ruta’s icon begins flashing on his map.
…okay, new plan. He’s going to activate his Divine Beast, and he’s going to go rescue Mipha. He and Urbosa had agreed as much, on a shared watch one night—if any of the kids were in distress, they would take precedence. Daruk would look out for Mipha, and Urbosa would look after Revali. Neither Link or Zelda have distress signals, but they do have each other, and so until all four Divine Beasts can come to their aid, that will be enough. Daruk has faith in the little guy with the sword that seals the darkness, and Urbosa thinks the world of the tiny princess. Even if all four Champions fall, he thinks those two are going to make it.
But the Champions aren’t gonna fall. Not while Daruk still draws breath.
“I’m comin’ for ya!” he shouts, and slams his hand onto the console.
Something inside of it moves.
The creature that rises in front of him, formed of dark malice and a piercing blue eye, rises to meet him. As Daruk reaches for his weapon, a spectral shield of flickering orange forms around it.
…well. That’s not good.
Daruk makes the first move, and of course it doesn’t do any good. The thing has Protection, and so his attack harmlessly bounces off, sending Daruk flying backwards to slam into his console. A second distress signal flares, and he knows it’s his own.
Right.
He raises his own shield just in time for the monster to slam a glowing blue blade into it, orange shards shattering across the floor on impact. This is going to be an everlasting standstill, unless one of them runs out of power before the other. Which means Daruk has to keep trying. It cannot be him.
They trade blows for what feels like could be minutes, or could be hours. A third distress signal begins echoing within the enclosed chamber, and Daruk risks a glance at the map. Naboris. Urbosa’s in trouble. He… may have to keep a certain promise after all.
The Boulder Breaker meets the spectral blue blade, again and again and again. Orange shields shatter on impact, again and again and again.
A fourth distress signal sounds. Medoh. For some reason, it sounds even more desperate than the others. Daruk risks a glance at the map again—
Ruta has gone entirely offline. As Daruk watches, Naboris and Medoh are slowly beginning to turn red as well. Mipha is gone, he realizes. As soon as he does, Revali drops as well. Two Divine Beasts, gone.
His Protection, weaker and weaker with each impact, shatters once again the exact moment Naboris loses her pilot as well.
There’s nothing to be done. Even if he survives this, he has no chance of doing any good at Hyrule Castle. He is too weak, too grief-stricken, to move.
The spectral blue blade stills in the air. Watching it, Daruk silently apologizes to Rorc and Konvoh, to Link and Zelda, to tiny little Saphi, who he had promised to love and now will never meet.
It’s no use. Daruk is not a warrior. He’s going to die here.
He thinks of Mipha and Revali, the kids who gave up everything to save a world they barely got to finish growing up in. He wonders if he’ll see them again soon.
He thinks of Link and Zelda, fighting for not only their lives but for those of everyone else in the world. Will it be enough? Or have they fallen already, unnoticed and unmourned?
He thinks of Rorc and Konvoh, of the promise he’d made to them before leaving for Mount Lanayru. They’ll never get to taste the rocks he’s been collecting for them all across the land during his travels. Urbosa had even brought him some sandstone from deep within the Gerudo Desert, which he’d been so excited to try with them. He hopes they’ll be as well taken care of as he’d told himself they would be.
He thinks of Urbosa, of the promises they made each other, of how two people who are so different could have become so important to each other so quickly. If only one of the Champions could have survived the danger in their Divine Beast, he selfishly wishes it could have been her. He knows she would have kept her promise to him.
All of them, in one way or another, have become his people. When he’d agreed to give piloting Rudania a try, he never would have expected that.
The monster facing him, a twisted imitation of his own power surrounding it, draws its blade back for one final swing. Daruk faces it, silent.
Daruk is not a warrior. But for his people, it was worth it to try.