I take some time in the Forgotten Temple’s secret back room, and snap pictures of the Geoglyphs and the world map, for later reference. I also explore the general area around the room.
I had almost forgotten, but in the room before the Map Room, there was a mysterious room with a circular feature in the center which looked like it had some purpose, but I couldn’t tell what it was. It looked like a fountain or a machine of some kind. I wouldn’t want to forget that, in case it is important for some reason.
I decide rather than backtrack through the Temple, I will try to use the Ascend power to go straight up and out. I’m curious to see where this room is located, in relation to the surface, and I’m also curious whether there is any limit to how far I can tunnel through the ground with this ability. I must be very deep below the ground, and this is as good a test as I’m likely to find. I suppose I’m also testing the game design’s ability to bring me back on track if I take a random, weird wrong turn.
I trigger the Ascend power, and go up, up, up, emerging out into daylight on a rocky hilltop at the base of a mountain range. I decide to follow the ridge of the mountain up as high as I can go.
I climb and climb, mostly walking, up the ridge. Down below I can see what looks like an interesting rock formation, what appears to be a chunk of the sky level that fell and embedded into the mountain side. There’s a yellow plant growing on the top of it, and I want to check it out; it’s just fireseed fruit, nothing special. I continue back up the mountain ridge, until I get to just about the very top of it, when I spot a half buried treasure chest. I pull it out of the ground using Ultrahand, and it flies up higher into the air than expected, as though it were on a spring. I lose grip of it with the Ultrahand power, and it lands on the ground with a thud, then starts sliding down the hill. I try to run after it, hoping to catch it, but it tumbles and then falls off a cliff, and I instinctively try to glide after it. It’s falling faster than I am, but I can dive and catch up. Despite my best efforts, I lose track of it, or it despawns more likely, and I’m way down the mountain, annoyed at what just happened.
Now what? I decide to return back to the top of the ridge. I was close to a shrine, and I wanted to activate it and create a new fast-travel node.
This shrine is very dark. There’s a light in the very beginning, a bright Zonaite lantern, aiming at a locked gate. I pick up the lantern and walk around until I find a corridor branching off the back of the room, and decide to follow it. I turn a few corners, getting disoriented as I do so, and hear the sound of grinding stone. Around me I see some spiked walls, and it seems that some of them are moving. Eventually I find a treasure chest, which I get a piece of mineral out of; continuing my exploration, I find another dead end, but I notice the floor looks interesting, and I scan the area with Ultrahand and discover that the floor stone is movable. I lift it up and reveal another chest hidden underneath. This chest contains a small key, needed to unlock the gate at the starting area of the Shrine. I backtrack, and open the key. It’s a relatively easy shrine. I note that I could have used Ultrahand to pick up the lantern, which would be more useful in a number of ways, depending on the situation.
Exiting this shrine, I’m back at the top of this mountain ridge. Looking outward, I can see another map tower in the distance, one that I haven’t been to yet. It looks like it’s a long way away, but I think I should be able to glide a good bit of that distance, and make it there without too much trouble.
I do glide very far, and come to a landing in a dark, forested area overgrowing some stone ruins. The ruins look like rows and rows of columns, badly eroded and worn down by time. The mapping tower is still ahead of me. It is raining, and as I get closer to the tower, I slow down, carefully scouting the area and trying to avoid being seen by any monsters that might be nearby.
When I get close enough, I can see a light from a fire. This tower does have someone here. I spot a lean-to near the fire, and a Hylian man taking shelter there. I feel relieved, it looks like this one is already in our control. I talk to the man, but I forget what he tells me. I’m more excited to go activate the tower, and head right over there. There’s a Rito named Billson, who is trying to get the tower working, but something is wrong. He says the machinery is in working order and he doesn’t understand the problem, but it might be something to do with the tower itself?
I decide to go out and have a look at it. I notice some strange floating rocks in the vicinity of the tower, and one of them is low enough that perhaps I can use Ascend to get on top of it. Maybe from there I can get a better view and see what’s going on.
On top of the block, I awaken a soldier Zonai, who seems to be programmed to defend this little bit of ground it has. I have no choice but to do battle, but it’s quick and it goes down easily. I note that there two rocket-looking items on the ground here, and I find that I can pick them up using Ultrahand. I attach them to the sides of the platform, and hit them with my weapon. The rockets fire, and the entire block I’m standing on rushes upward for a short bit, but then the rockets are depleted and I’m left at a higher elevation looking down at the top of the tower. There are several more of these platforms below me. Perhaps I just need to get all of them to rocket up, out of the way, like this one…
I drop down and land on each one in succession, defeating a soldier Zonai and repeat the process of attaching the rockets to the platform and activating them. Soon I’ve done this to all four platforms… and then I finally notice that the tower has one of these sky platforms resting on its tip. It’s hard to notice, and it’s not like I’ve seen a lot of these towers to know the difference, but I now know what I need to do; I fly down to the tower, landing on the top of it, climb down to a level below the skyworld block that’s obstructing the tower’s operation. Using Ultrahand, I grab the block. There’s no rockets here, so nothing else I can do, and move the block up and horizontal until the tower is cleared.
That does it.
Now, why Billson the Rito couldn’t have flown up and seen the problem easily, so he could tell me what needed to be done, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. I figured it out, and now the tower is active. I zip up into the sky, and download more map data.
From up here, I see some nearby skylands, and I glide toward them, easily. Off in the distance, but too far out of reach for my glider range, I spot a massive cube hovering over what looks like a labyrinth. I’m curious about this, but I don’t have any more pins to use right now on the map. From the position where I’m standing, I can see that there is one of the Geoglyphs from the Map Room in the Forgotten Temple — the one that looks like a sword. It’s nearby enough that I can get to it easily by gliding over.
I do so, and dive once I’m overhead, descending rapidly without using up my stamina, and then I manage to land on the hilt of the sword. I figure it’s a good place to start. I have to climb upward — I didn’t realize how vertical this geoglyph really was, from above, but it’s mostly vertical on a mountain slope. I climb up, up, up, and get to the tip of the sword, where I find another memory point.
I examine it, and trigger another cutscene. This time Princess Zelda is somewhere in the past, it seems. Her necklace looks like one of the geoglyphs, the one that looks like a comma. Or is it a claw? It’s hard to know. She is deeply concerned and lost in thought. Then the Master Sword appears in her hands, and it is deteriorated, looking like how I last saw it, when it was destroyed in my grasp when we awakened the Demon King.
Zelda says something about becoming a great Dragon Spirit, or something, and says that she knows what she must do now, and that she will be forever changed. Then she says that I must find her.
So I guess this is a particularly important bit of story-clue, and has to do with how I’ll recover the Master Sword.
I’m not sure exactly what it means, or how I’ll be able to return to the past to find Zelda. I guess I’ll know more eventually. Maybe it’s time to return to talk to Impa or Purah.
Below, a short distance away, a Shrine. I glide down to it, and enter. It’s a Recall puzzle, and an easy one. I use recall to get gears to turn backward; first there’s a spinning gear, which dumps a falling ball the wrong way. Reversing the gear, the ball falls to the correct side, landing in a bowl, which triggers a gate to open. In the next room, there’s another set of gears, this one not moving, but attached to a crank. I crank the crank using Ultra hand for a few rotations, then aim at the the big gear with Recall and it starts turning the opposite way that I was moving it with the crank. I ride up the cog teeth like it’s an elevator, and reach a platform where I collect my Light of Blessing.
Stepping out of this Shrine, I’m not sure where I should go next. I decide to look at the map, and head toward the nearest pinned location. This turns out to be another shrine, downhill and further to the West. I get there, and am in a lightly wooded areas with coniferous trees, and some wolves nearby. One of the wolves attacks me, and my weapons are too slow to hit it effectively. It almost kills me before I can land a hit on it, but fortunately the hit takes it out.
I enter the shrine, and it’s called Fire and Ice. There’s large blocks of ice dropping from chutes in the ceiling. Over to the side, there’s a blast furnace shooting flames. I see a switch, and try to position the ice block onto it, but it’s too big. So I move the ice near the flame, and it melts enough so that it will fit in the space where the switch is, and I activate the switch, opening a door.
There’s a treasure chest, containing a Zonai spear, which isn’t as good as any of my current weapons. Beyond that, there’s a spiked ramp leading up over a bottomless gap to another blast furnace, and a group of fans fixed the the floor, blowing upward at an angle. I can glide up the wind from the fans to the other side of the gap, and when I’m there, I see there’s ice blocks being fed into the furnace directly from the chute. These blocks melt in mere seconds.
I puzzle over what to do, and it takes me a while to figure out that there’s a grabbable platform next to the blast furnace. It looks just like a wall to me at first, but once I realize what it is, I pull it aside, and pull an ice block out from the furnace before it melts, which is tricky. But once I grab one, I glue it to the platform, and use the ice to lubricate it so it will slide down the spiked ramp. The ice is slippery enough, but the platform is not. Once the platform is down to the main level, where I came from, I glide back down there myself, to figure out what to do next.
This is also tricky, the first blast furnace is shooting flame down onto a big floor switch. It’s difficult to notice that this is even here, because the flames are so bright and hard to look at, that it conceals this switch. I try putting the platform down on the switch, but it isn’t heavy enough. So I determine the solution is to weigh the platform down more by gluing large ice blocks to it with Ultrahand. Once it weighs enough, it depresses the button, unlocking the Shrine, and I earn my Light of Blessing.