I spend way too much time reimagining my favorite games. This is a design from The Lament of Zelda, a Hylian tragedy. Inspired by the intro to Wind Waker, it begins with Link awakening to his heroic destiny far too late to stop Ganondorf. It would be a Zelda game that you could never win. The Lost Woods have been clear cut, Zora's Domain is clouded with industrial sludge, Lake Hylia is dry, Death Mountain is being stripmined...

This character is a Goron, a race of living rocks that has been in most or all of the zelda games after A Link to the Past. He, along with a handful of other Goron, was hired to excavate the shrine that holds the Master Sword and drag the entire structure back to Hyrule Castle where it would be kept under guard to ensure that Link could never retrieve it.

I have this image in my head of Ganon's army surrounding Link and Zelda on the edge of a cliff. Has a game ever ended with a lover's suicide before?

Zelda, of course, is the property of Nintendo, and this is just fanart.