"It seems I have some work to do as far as earning your trust goes. I suppose that is understandable."

"What do you want?"

The man turns and points his staff in the direction of the castle.

"I assume you caught sight of that atrocity enshrouding the castle. That... is Calamity Ganon. One hundred years ago, that vile entity brought the kingdom of Hyrule to ruin. It appeared suddenly and destroyed everything in its path. So many innocent lives were lost in its wake. For a century, the very symbol of our kingdom, Hyrule Castle, has managed to contain that evil.

"But just barely. There it festers, building its strength for the moment it will unleash its blight upon the land once again. It would appear that moment is fast approaching.

"I must ask you, courageous one... Do you intend to make your way to the castle?"

...Well, eventually, he assumes.

"Why?"

"...Interesting."

The old man's eyes feel like they're trying to pick apart Link where he stands.

"What, precisely, did the voice say to you?"

The voice didn't say it was supposed to be a secret. Link wants to find out what this old man knows.

"She said she's coming to help."

"She's... coming... to help?"

The old man has made affectations of surprise before, but here there is the slightest crack in his facade.

Shrug.

"You know her?"

The man sits down. "I..."

He's going to investigate the shrine while the man has a crisis or whatever.

"Wait—did she say when? Is she coming here, or—how—"

Shrug. Mound-thing?

Mound-thing!

Anyone watching Hyrule Field at just this moment would see some very curious sights.

First, the golden glow at the heart of the castle launches a fragment of itself like a javelin, straight toward the Great Plateau.

Second, the shard of light hits the ground and resolves into a brightly glowing young woman in a simple white dress, who stumbles a little but keeps her footing.

Third, she takes off at a dead sprint, a last flare of light somehow converting her dress and sandals into sturdy boots and hard-wearing travel clothes as she bursts into motion.

This hypothetical observer would then be rapidly left behind, as she bolts toward the plateau at speeds competitive with a racehorse.

Excuse me miss we're going to have to ask you to pull over

wait no don't run away so fast

Long-dormant Guardians are reactivating in the field even as she runs, but they're not quite up to the task of catching such a fast-moving target. Their beams blow trenches into the dirt behind her, but even their luckiest shots only clip her with the blast waves. Her sprint leaves a wake of upheaved soil and grassfire.

Every beat of her heart drums the same message.

Find Link.

He glows in her awareness like a beacon, straight ahead and a long way up.

Find Link.

She pushes her body to a limit that would have been an impossible dream last time she—last time either of her—had a body.

Find Link.

No earthly creature's body is meant to serve like this, peak performance hauled grimly out of it second by second by minute by hour as the inventory of parts that don't hurt yet dwindles into obscurity. But she can do it, with the powers her other self bargained for in the darkness between the pages between the worlds. She can, and she must, so she will. It's not any harder than spending a straight century as the constantly embattled lid on Ganon's jar, and it's going to be over much quicker. Every calculation she can think of suggests that Link will be far more effective with Zelda by his side. The sooner that starts, the sooner they will triumph. So she runs.

She runs past the ceremonial grounds where heroes and champions were once knighted—where she knighted Link. She passes what remains of Windvane, the ruins of the garrisons which once housed their great armies, and the great exchange where all the grain of Hyrule once flowed, now desolate. She eventually finds travelers: on horseback, on foot, walking dirt roads fallen out of repair, who turn to glimpse a second of the princess in her passage.

It is too long until the path runs near its end, and the towering stone walls of the Great Plateau bear down on her. The birthplace of Hyrule, so they say.

The great gates that once permitted foot passage into the sacred grounds are blocked off by a mass of rubble.

She has been thinking about this on her way here.

That self-duplication power is not answering her commands. Apparently the narrative thinks it would be silly if she made a temporary cheerleader pyramid all the way up the side, and, really, she can't disagree.

She also contemplated trying to retroactively become part Rito, but decided that sounds like a last-resort option, and anyway she doesn't know if that power will come at her call either.

But you know what power has answered her readily during every moment of her independent existence so far?

Lightfoot.

And Lightfoot, she expects, will make climbing a whole lot easier.

So when she meets the base of the wall, she just changes direction, from forward to up. Her fingertips find cracks in the stone and her boots find ledges, or sometimes just kick off the sheer stone, and she flies up that wall not all that much slower than she approached it.

It's tempting, when she reaches the top, to stop for a rest. But she's pretty sure she's been leaning on Just A Little Longer to get here, so her first rest on this plateau may be quite long. She'll need a safe place to take it, and she owes Link some answers before then.

(And, she will admit in the privacy of her own thoughts, she just wants to see him.)

So she doesn't pause a moment before she takes off running again.

By this time, Link has found three shrines and collected the runes from them, and extracted the information that there's a fourth one in the mountains from the old man after cornering him in a shack in the woods. 

So right now Link is west of the Temple of Time, experimenting with peppers and a cooking pot commandeered from some Bokoblins, trying to find out how far muscle memory can take him in the culinary arts. The answer is: a lot. He needs to pack these stuffed pork fillets up somehow to bring them with him on the go, however, and his instincts are failing him in this regard.

Well, now there is a strangely familiar figure bolting directly toward him across the grassy slopes, long blonde hair bannering out behind her.