Down the road a short distance from the Lucky Clover News, there’s a Shrine standing off the road, overlooking the large crater-like geography where Rito Village stands. It is surrounded by thorn bushes, which are no problem for me since I have several means of creating fire at my disposal.
I burn away the brambles, and enter the shrine. The challenge is not terribly difficult.
Exiting the shrine, I see that I’ve ascended a gentle slope and now am standing at a level slightly above the lowest pillars of rock which form the foundations of Rito Village. I’m curious if the obstacle to enter is more than that simple wrecked bridge. I know I must have multiple easy means of crossing — create a new bridge out of building materials and Ultrahand; glide over on my glider, even build a zonai vehicle that can fly. But maybe there’s something more to the situation than meets the eye — high winds, or, say a monster of some kind.
I decide to try gliding to the village and find out. I manage it very easily, and land without incident on the small rock pillar just past the fallen bridge, and walk the rest of the way into the Village proper. Picking up pine cones along the way, I come upon a trio of Rito children, practicing their singing. They are about to do a song about the Stormwind Ark and the god — the same story I first learned of when I talked to the Rito at the cabin outpost.
The children tell me that food is scarse in the village, and that many of the adult Rito have fled the village, leaving the children behind to run things. That seems crazy to me, leaving the children behind to freeze and starve? But maybe they are off doing battle against the Upheaval, or doing something else equally dangerous, and the village is really the safest place for the children.
A bit further in, I finda prayer statue, where I can exchange Light of Blessing for Stamina and Heart Container upgrades. I have 11 so I get one of each, and need just one more Shrine to get another. I now have two full rings on my stamina meter, and 8 heart containers. I proceed up the path further into the village, and find the inn and a food store and an armor shop, much the same as they were in BOTW, but with lower stock. I have almost 500 rupees, and buy some food ingredients that I can use for cooking recipes, and then sell off a bunch of mushrooms that I’ve collected an excess of, enough to afford purchase of the body piece of the Rito armor suit. The pants and the helmet are too much for me for now.
I notice right near the armor shop, there’s a Shrine, right here in the village, so I jump over a fence and enter it. This shrine is a flight challenge. Full of large, open chambers with very high ceilings, and fans blowing massive updrafts from far below. I proceed forward, easily navigating the challenges as I’m pretty used to flight by now, but there are a few parts that are a bit tricky, where I have to manage my altitude and descend through an updraft-filled room by diving and then catching myself. I also have to use the bow to take out some Zonai construct soldiers, and am rewarded when each of them drops a bundle of 5x arrows. A treasure chest contains a bow as strong as the weakest in my possession, so I just leave it, and then go into the next chamber to collect the Light of Blessing. Now I can add another heart container to my life meter. I’m not sure how much more stamina I really need now that I have two full rings, but lately it seems that my stamina has not been a limiting factor in the climbing, running, and gliding that I’ve been doing, so I think it’s time to start adding more hearts so that when I am in combat I can survive a bit more easily.
Outside the Shrine, I notice a slight indent in the side of the massive stone pillar that the entire village is built upon, and thinking it might be the entrance to a cave, I investigate it. It turns out to just be a shallow pocket of a cave, but there’s a small boulder which I pick up, and discover a Korok. I try Ascending, and yes, the shallow pocket cave has enough of an overhang that I can zip upward and back into the village again, a nice shortcut.
The remaining Rito children are working hard at keeping things running at the village, and have amazing spirit, but they are cold, hungry, tired, and too few and too young. By talking to them I find two easy side quests that I solve instantly: one Rito wants some icefruit so they can make a recipe with it, another wants icefruit or white chuchu jelly so they can fuse it to an arrow and make an ice arrow. I have both in my inventory and just give them to each, instantly closing the quest. These were intended to teach me about the potential of fusing materials, but I’m already clued into that from doing other side quests and experimenting and paying attention to things.
I find the last two remaining adult Rito: the new village elder, Teba, and his wife and adolescent child, Tulin. The child is ready to become a full-fledged warrior and wants to fly up to the clouds to investigate the storm seen high above, but his father says it’s too high and too dangerous even for adult Rito. The elder suggests I fly out to the Lodge where I can ask a Rito named Harth if he has seen Princess Zelda around.
I’ve already been there, I came from there, so I’m coming through this area kind of backwards, but it doesn’t much matter. The elder points in the direction of the two marker bonfires, and I jump off a ledge and fly out that way again.
At the Lodge, I talk to Harth, and he tells me he hasn’t seen Zelda and has been too busy to look for her, dealing with the cold emergency and hunting food. He suggests I try asking the child of the elder, who he last saw going out on a hunting expedition, and he points the way deeper into the cold frigid wastes, and uphill.
So I guess my choice at the moment is to continue with this, or go back to the newspaper quest. I think the newspaper quest is what will lead me to becoming able to upgrade my clothing, and make me more capable in combat and better able to finish the rest of the game. So perhaps it’s best if I leave Rito Village behind for now and return to that storyline.
Ah, who am I kidding? I go up the mountain path and look for Tulin.
I climb up some ladders and trudge a short distance, and encounter an adult Rito by a small campfire, and they tell me there are many caves in the area, which are good shelter from the cold. The Rito have been using them, and making large bonfires to mark the way for others.
I continue on and spot a couple of ice keese, which I try to kill with my spear, but I manage to get frozen by one of them. Then a bokoblin comes at me from up the hill. I hit him with an arrow, taking him out in one shot before he can get to me. But then another four bokoblins emerge from the right, along with a White Chu Chu. Fortunately, I kill the Chu Chu with an arrow, freezing all of them with its burst of cold. This makes it easy to kill the three red Bokobs, but the last one is blue and has more health, so when I hit him it’s not enough to take him down. He unfreezes, and then swings at me with a weapon that creates a gust of wind that knocks me back, and I go tumbling down the mountain trail, I get up and try to hit him, and he hits me again, doing damage this time, and I am blown back again, almost all the way back to the Rito woman and her campfire. Fed up, I ready my bow when I’m back on my feet, and nail him in the head at point blank range, just as he’s about to swing at me a third time, and this slays him. He drops a Rito sword called the Feathered Edge, which doesn’t have a lot of damage potential, but the gust of wind ability is probably handy. So I drop the honeycomb boomerang I’ve been carrying since the Hylian Plains, trading a swarm of bees for a gust of wind. Some nutjob Boko I fought a long time ago had a bee hive honey comb stuck to a boomerang, and I discovered that when you hit stuff with it, bees come out and swarm it to do a tiny bit of extra damage. But it’s real value is that the bees also distract the target, making it less of a danger to you, and easier to hit with a follow-up attack. It was a clever way early on for the game to tell me I should think about fusion with materials that would seemingly be impractical or even nonsense in the real world. But I haven’t experimented with it all that much so far, really.
Anyway, a little further up the mountain trail, I find a cave marked with bonfires, a Rito camp. I approach and spot another Rito woman, and talk to her. She tells me that Tulin went further into the cave, and I can find him if I go deeper. This cave is full of those brambly thorns, and for the most part I just move cautiously around them rather than try to burn them away. The cave goes pretty far into this mountainside, and I find a lot of forage and minerals to pick up along the way. At one point, I find a frozen over puddle, which I break through, and discover a deeper underground chamber full of even more mushrooms, cave fish, and minerals. I clear it out and continue further into the cave, and there’s a chamber with a gust of wind blowing upward through a vertical shaft lined with brambles. I fly up it and am fortunately not to collide with them, spot a tunnel branching off the top level of the vertical shaft, and make my way toward it.
Here, I encounter a Horriblin, who I take out with my bow. One shot. My strong Zonai bows do a lot of damage, and I hope I can find more of them when these break, because they are kick ass. I proceed further on into the cave, and find another chamber leading up into a tall vertical shaft lined with brambles, this one has a campfire, extinguished, and no updraft. Well that’s plain as day what I need to do, I put down a flint and a hylian pine cone, and light the campfire, it blazes brightly and I glide up the draft, and find the tunnel at the top, and continue onward. This time, I encounter a male Rito standing guard over some supplies they’ve gathered. He tells me that Tulin went ahead impetuously without waiting for help, to try to chase some monsters back to their “nest”.
I push forward, looking for Tulin. The Rito told me that he would be at the top of a mountain with a lone Cedar tree growing on it. I exit the cave, and there’s a trail leading up the mountain. I spot what looks like a small Bokoblin campfire, and come upon two reds and a blue huddling around a fire. I don’t want to screw around, so I just fire a bomb arrow and headshot the blue, killing him, and the bomb blast takes out the reds, so I take out the entire camp with one arrow. That’s what I’m talking about! Unfortunately the bomb blows away most of the stuff I might have looted from this campsite, but there is one treasure chest, which I open and discover a weaker bow than I have, but it’s a Rito bow that has rapid fire capability which is useful when flying, because bullet time takes so much stamina to get shots off. But I leave it behind, not wanting to give up my other bows. There are a couple of large crates, which I bust open and find an arrow in each. It’s weird how these giant 5 foot by 5 foot crates only have a single arrow or apple in them all the time.
Then I notice down the hill slightly, there’s Addison, holding up a sign. It’s crazy. He’s not dressed for cold, although he says he ate some chili peppers, so that explains it. I try to help him but I just busted up the only boxes around that I could have used to help hold up the sign. Nearby I spot some snowballs, but they just roll off the mountainside when I try to stick them together, and splatter far below. The only other thing I can find is a big boulder. Normally I have to use 2 or 3 things glued together to hold up his sign, but this time I am super lucky, and the one boulder holds the sign up by itself. I don’t know how, I just placed it perfectly I guess.
He rewards me, and then I continue back to my mission to find Tulin. I climb up the mountain some more, and encounter a large Boss Bokoblin and an entourage of small bokos. I duck behind a rock and let them pass, they don’t notice me, and I am relieved. Probably I’ll have to deal with these guys eventually, but in these snow covered trails, I can’t move very fast, and would be quickly surrounded and pounded into jelly by that group if I had to fight them on level ground out in the open.
I climb up the mountain some more, taking a shortcut by climbing directly rather than spiraling around the peak using the path.
Here, I finally find Tulin. I spot the Cedar tree, and just past it, looking out into the abyss surrounding the peak, is Tulin. He’s lost his bow to an Aerocuda, and cursing his luck. His spirits pick up when he sees me, and he asks me for help getting his bow back. He tells me he can give me aid by creating a gust of wind that can propel me forward, so I jump out and glide toward the Aerocuda, and use the gust to boost me but it doesn’t really seem to do much to help. I end up landing on the side of another mountain peak, one with a flatter area, a piece of stone that looks like Sky Island that fell from above. I climb up it, and take aim at the Aerocuda who is flying just above me, but somehow doesn’t seem to have noticed me at all still. My aim is good, and one shot is all it takes. The Aerocuda drops the bow and dies, and before it hits the ground Tulin swoops in and grabs it.
Just then, two adult Rito emerge from the darkness and tell us they saw everything. Tulin is ashamed for having been impulsive and disobeying, and for losing his bow and not being able to handle the monsters by himself. But he says he learned that teamwork is what really wins battles, not taking risks. The adult Rito tell him that now that he has learned this, he has matured enough that he is finally ready to be a Rito warrior.
So now the Rito warriors want me and Tulin to investigate the storm cloud. They know that there is something in there, and want us to check it out and find out what it is. They say it is impossible to get into the storm clouds from the side due to the high winds, and the only way in is from the top, but no one else but Tulin has the flying skill to be able to do it.
This seems a bit weird, because to me Tulin seems like he’s maybe 12-13 years old, and they’re acting like he’s the equivalent of a 17-18 year old who’s just become a man. But it’s cool; this is what we’re supposed to do, complete quests and stuff.
So I guess the next step in this quest is to go into the Hebra sky islands and find out way up to that storm. I have been up there and I kind of think I know where to go, but it’s distorienting to get around up there and I’m not sure if I can find that place where I saw all the long ships again.