Breath of the Wild is easily the game I return to most frequently. The exploration is unparalleled. In my attempt to seek out every corner of this Hyrule, I came across another interesting area: the Ancient Tree Stump.
I found it using Hero’s Path Mode to identify places I’ve not traversed, and when I zoomed in on the map, I saw what I thought was a small island in the middle of a lake, joined by a narrow bridge. When I arrived there, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw: a huge, thick tree trunk, cut off to a stump several stories from the surface of the lake.
Once I’d dispatched the Moblins and Bokoblins around, I was free to explore more. The stump is really very large, and also very far from the high bank that the bridge is connected to. Who built the bridge? And why on earth go to all that effort for an old, dead, tree?
Looking around, I found more clues, though I never found an answer to these questions. There’s a ruined house by the bridge, and two more down on the lakeshore. The houses on the banks are half-buried, suggesting that this area has gone through a great ecological shift since it was inhabited.
Standing on the Ancient Stump as the sun reached its apex, the light hit the water just right and I suddenly saw what I’d been missing: There were buildings, many buildings, submerged below the water. Only parts of the foundations remained in most places, but you can see that there were plenty of people here once. A village no larger than Kakariko perhaps, filled with people long before the lake filled with water.
So the Ancient Stump is no mere isolated spot. It meant something, once. Maybe the land was filled with trees like these. Maybe the Great Deku Tree is simply the very last of their kind.
I spent an in-game day there, listening to the birds, watching the sun on the water and the breeze shift the waterlilies. Wherever I go in this game, I find moments of tranquillity, tinged with melancholy, but tranquillity all the same.
