I am up in the top of an immense tree atop a small hill, which looked like it might have something special in it, and would have in BOTW, but there’s nothing here in TOTK. It’s a small distance away from the Purah Pad geoglyph, and since there’s nothing here, I’m looking around for something to do, somewhere to go. It’s late at night. I check the map, and see that I’m fairly close to a region on the map I haven’t visited to previously, and haven’t unlocked the map for yet. I’m thinking about going there to open the SkyView Tower, when I see a shooting star fall from the sky.
I mark its landing with the Purah scope, and check the location on the map. It happened to land very near the SkyView Tower, which seals my decision. I make all haste in that direction, and run all night. I encounter a yellow Wizzorobe, who I have to fight quickly, and fortunately am able to defeat it without losing any health, but it slows me down too much. Unfortunately, the terrain is very difficult, with many rocky cliffs to climb, but with little to no opportunity to glide for great distances and cover ground quickly. A bit further on I encounter another Yellow Wizzorobe, and as I’m fighting it I end up being ambushed by chuchus, and this combat ends up taking a bit longer than I wanted it to. I end up running and climbing all night, but don’t make it to the site of the falling star by morning, and it fades from view just as I’m closing in on it.
I am near the SkyView Tower, anyway, so it’s not like this was all in vain. I walk a bit further to where the base of the tower comes into view, and I’m noticing a strange muck covering the ground here and there. It’s a dull brown color, and doesn’t look like gloom, but does look similar. Near the Tower, I encounter a Zora soldier who is embedded in a pile of the stuff, helpless and in trouble. He begs for assistance, asking for water. I happen to have some things that might help here, and in my inventory I pull out a Splash Fruit and throw it at him. This does the trick, the muck dissolves, and he is rejuvenated.
In thanks, he offers me his spear, but since my weapons inventory is currently full, I cannot accept it.
I walk over to the SkyView Tower, and the entrance is covered by muck, but another Splash Fruit takes care of that. I walk in, activate the tower, and shoot up into the sky to update the map data.
It seems that this region of the sky is especially dense with floating islands, some of which are especially nearby. One of the closest is a perfect sphere, which seems to be rotating. I deploy my glider and head towards it, and as I do so an opening rotates into view, and I dive down to land inside of it. The entire thing is hollow, and inside are a number of Zonai devices: a wing, a sled, a fan, and a dispenser. There’s also a shrine in here, so I enter it.
This shrine is fairly difficult. It’s a vast open chamber with a very high ceiling and no floor. But there are several platforms, and on these platforms a variety of Zonai devices spawn, roll off down a ramp, and then fall into the abyss until they despawn and reappear at their starting point and roll down again. Far off in the distance at the other end of the room there is the goal, but it is such a long way off it seems like it would be impossible to glide there on the wings that spawn here. Over to the right, there’s a platform where I find a chest containing a Large Zonaite. Then I try various things and mostly fail, for the better part of a half hour, until I finally get a lucky glide. The way I solve this, I launch from the right platform, carrying a wing with a fan attached to it as close to the edge as I can get, then lift it as high into the air as I can using Ultrahand, drop it, get on, and turn the fan on, then activate Recall to use the time-reversal to lift the wing into the air, and when it gets to the top, I cancel Recall, and it flies free. It has enough forward momentum with the fan up to speed, and I stand right at the rear of it, which balances the weight such that it doesn’t fly nose-heavy and dive, and by so doing, I’m able to retain enough altitude that I make it all the way across the chasm to the goal.
I claim the Light of Blessing and exit. I’m still left wondering about the purpose of this spinning orb in the sky. What is it for? What can I do here?
First, the entire orb seems to be spun by the mechanical action of a wheel with a Zonai fan attached to it. I can arrest the wheel using Ultrahand, and even grab the fan and tear it off, and then deactivate it.
With the orb no longer spinning, I can exercise fine control over the spinner, and when I do so the opening in the outer shell of the sphere aligns with a sky island slightly below and a short enough distance away that it would seem possible to glide to it.
I have wings handy and the fan, so it seems like just the thing to do.
I make several attempts, but the physics of it are difficult. I can’t seem to get a stable flight, like I was able to in the shrine I just cleared. It seems like that shrine was there to tell me how to do this, but I can’t get it to work reliably. I just fast-travel back to the shrine and try again and again when I fail.
I notice on one of these attempts that there seems to be an underside to the orb as well as the floor that I have been launching from. There’s a pair of holes in the floor, covered with a grate, which I can see through into the space below, and it not only appears to be hollow, but there are lights, so it seems to be an intentional space rather than an accidental void.
I try climbing down from the edge of the opening of the orb, and sure enough it’s easy to climb within and make it inside the lower half. Here, I find a treasure chest, and in the chest there’s a Sage’s Will. This is just the second one that I’ve found so far in the game, so one of the rarest items I’ve yet to discover in the game. The description says that when I have four of them, I can increase my power with one of the Sage abilities. So far the only one I have is Tulin’s gust of wind.
I resume trying to rig a glider so that it will reach the sky island in the distance. I eventually figure it out, what I was supposed to figure out in the shrine: that by attaching a sled to the bottom of the wing, I’m able to roll over the ground with the propulsion of a fan, enabling me to get some speed up which helps me fly more stable and lose less altitude by avoiding stalls.
This way, I’m easily able to reach the sky island in the distance. Here I find another treasure chest, this one has another Old Map in it, which shows the location of another item that I imagine is some part of an outfit. I’m going to have to start prioritizing finding these soon.
Beyond this island, there’s another floating off a short distance away, I’m able to use the glider to reach it easily, and here I find a korok seed. There’s a tree stump that if you stand on it, a firework shoots out, and falls toward the earth below. You can jump off too, diving after it, and if you can catch up to it and Look at it using the A button, the Korok is revealed.
This fall takes me directly into the heat of the Zora kingdom. I don’t want to go here yet, though, and fast-travel from mid-air back to the shrine, because there are at least two more places that I wanted to investigate in the sky nearby.
The first is another of the small sky islands that looks like a five-petaled flower. It is on the other side of the Orb, and by rotating the shell around so that the entrance is behind the Zonai dispenser, I can see it. It is not far, and I can glide to it easily by jumping out the hole at this point. I glide lightly to it, and when I land on the center, the entire thing drops out and falls to the ground below. I follow it, gliding to safety as the ground gets near. The center section of the island has another engraving on it, which I take a photo of.
After that, I decide that I’ve gotten enough of these that I should head to Kakariko village, where Wortsworth told me he was heading to after a very similar stone pillar with an engraving fell to earth at Lookout Landing.
I fast-travel there, and find him. He has been teaching Purah to read the Zonai language too, and she is still a beginner, struggling but determined. I talk to Wortsworth and he is excited by the photos I’ve found. He tells me that there are a total of 12 of these tablets, and if I find any and bring back some sort of visual evidence that he can translate, he will reward me. I’ve already found three of them. He translates them for me, and rewards me 100 rupees each.
I’m still stuck trying to figure out what will allow me to get into the floating ring ruin above Kakariko, which Zelda herself had declared off-limits.