"And... why was this desirable?"

"Tree!!"

She points at the giant tree the size of a building, before realizing how silly this is.

"Deku Tree?" She blinks, lowering her hand. "Er, hello."

Her head whips back around to Cam.

"Yes! Now, we don't know for sure, because this is all reading between the lines of what they considered safe to put on paper, but I think—they thought that if they drained the Hyrule region to total magical extinction, they could kill Calamity Ganon once and for all."

The Deku Tree is silent with a solemn look.

"It seems like that might also have other effects and also does not appear to have worked so far."

"It was clearly a disaster, yes! But why? They knew exactly what they were doing, so what went wrong? At the very least they shouldn't have left their experiment running for ten thousand years—though for almost all of that time it was mostly powered down—

"The schism between the royal family and the Sheikah must have something to do with it. I was already thinking, before, it might be that the conflict broke out when everyone first realized what was happening, and you'd get the usual pointing fingers and banishing blamable parties... but if the Sheikah engineers knew all along, they might have been hiding it from the royals. There's so much to unpick there, since—Symin is better at this than me—there's an easy allegation, maybe even true, that the Sheikah were trying to weaken the royals' power, by crippling the hereditary light magic that's their claim to divine ordinance—

"In which case the project must have been cut short, aborted in an incorrect way, to leave them buried and inactivated but still passively draining power. If the King executed all the engineering leadership there might not be anyone left who understood the system enough... I think not many people were fully in the know, because some of the notes we read the writers were clearly in the dark..."

"Draining the magic out of Hyrule was by design. The state the Divine Beasts were left in for ten thousand years was not. Did they fail to end the Calamity because the science was wrong, or because the execution got messed up? Did they intend this magnitude of damage, or was it supposed to be more—transient—and they made a mistake? And—"

She pushes up her glasses and claps her hands.

"Can we improve on that?"

"...I mean, I sure hope so, but I am very much relying on you for direction on how, I have no background in the relevant history, engineering, politics, magical geography, etcetera."

"Rhetorical question! I was pausing for dramatic effect. You say, 'yes, Purah, you're so amazing and brilliant.'

"But here I am, getting distracted. I hear there are other secrets to be spilled."

She turns and looks thoughtfully up.

"You must be the Deku Tree that Link was talking about? I must admit, I imagined you smaller."

"I am, yes. I believe you have struck at much of what I wished to explain, but there is still some you may be missing. However, your Elder Circle bound me to silence. If something like it exists today, they may release me from my word."

"Sounds rough! I've never heard of an 'Elder Circle'... what do they do?"

"It is unclear to me either. The word they called themselves has no name in today's speech. Not leaders, but... advisors, confidants. Secret-keepers, I told Cam here... and that is half right. They were versed in the old ways and came to me with offerings. It pleased me, then. Now I wonder where they learned them from. They revealed no name nor face."

"Cam, can we get the constitution of the 'Elder Circle of the Sheikah', ten thousand years pre-Calamity? Manifesto? Presenter notes of the inaugural meeting?"

"An excellent question." He does tests up in the shuttle; he can drop a three ring binder atop his drone if he gets anything.

Nothing nothing nothing!

Can he get the literal members of this circle?

At the time of their visit to the Deku Tree?

There are five old Hylians, four women and one man, by human standards looking in a range from about their sixties to nineties.

"They did not title anything so conveniently but I've got the oldsters, five people..." Anything jointly authored by any set of three or more of them?

There are what look like technical documents, from the dry formatting and diagrams, but he cannot read them. There are a few very fancy-looking letters, which he also cannot read but which are stamped with an eye-shaped seal he may or may not recognize from the back of the Sheikah Slate. Some other paperwork that he cannot obviously determine the nature of. Not a lot of results, considering how old they look.

"Are any of them—" she lists a dozen names.

He crosschecks.

Three out of five match.

He rattles off those names. "And I'm not finding much they all worked on together, just technical things, paperwork, a handful of letters."

"That's the Village Chief, the head engineer, and the Master of Ancient Arts consulting on the environmental committee... Strange that they didn't write much. Maybe it was all in energetic medium?"

She addresses the Deku Tree.

"We don't have much detail, but it sounds like a committee of the leads of different organizations of the Sheikah? We don't have anything like that at all, really. But I'm the president of the Engineers' Guild and one of two last Masters of Ancient Engineering living, and a closest confidant of Lady Impa, the head of the village. Is that close enough?"

The Deku Tree hems and haws for a moment. Finally, it says, "Very well."