Tears of the Kingdom – The Eighth Heroine and the Forgotten Sword?

"The Eighth Heroine" and "The Forgotten Sword" are two side quests in Breath of the Wild, which have created a lot of discussions among Zelda fans and theorists in the past six years. They are linked to the statues of the Seven Heroines, statues made by the Gerudo, standing at the foot of Spectacle Rock. They all hold a sword in their hands and they all are attributed to certain virtue or power:

• Skill
• Motion
  
• Knowledge
• Gentleness
• Endurance
• Flight
• Spirit
  

It made sense that they were to represent a group of Seven Sages from the past, where "flight" probably relates to a Rito sage,  "spirit" to a Gerudo sage, and "endurance" to a Goron sage, though each of the statues is depicted as a female. If anything, it was a nice nod to something that has happened in the rich of history of Hyrule, as many things found on the map of Breath of the Wild.

But there is also a secret Eighth Heroine and her lost sword, found at in the Gerudo Highlands, which added a bigger mystery to these statues. We have never heard of there being an eighth Sage and naturally this let theories run wild. I'm personally not the biggest Zelda theorist, where I don't tend to give these things too much thought, because they usually go nowhere. Like, all those theories about the Triforce symbols on the blocks leading to the flipped Stone Tower Temple are super fascinating, but it's not like Nintendo ever bothered to return to Termina and explain any of it, while I'm mostly interested in what Nintendo will do with their next game(s).

And with Breath of the Wild it seemed to me that Nintendo left all these little mysteries on purpose, so that people would keep speculating about the game in the foreseeable future, especially when it comes to its timeline placement. Here I still think that this was never meant to be solved, where all past Zelda games simply exist as distant legends in the world of Breath of the Wild, known as the "Era of Myth", where you never can be sure what of the events have happened and it doesn't really matter for the story of this game.

However... it does look like some of the mysteries were actually left in the game to be picked up by the sequel. Or the sequel is now retroactively giving answers to some of the mysteries, we don't know, where the most prominent example are of course the Zonai. In any case, this has the fans truly hyped, because they are not used to getting answers like this.

And maybe the Tears of the Kingdom will also explain the mystery of the Eighth Heroine... There is a fantastic video by Monster Maze that dives into this topic. It's a bit lengthy, but I suggest to watch it in any case, because it puts Zelda's role in the distant past in a new light. To sum it up: our Zelda from Breath of the Wild is potentially the Eighth Heroine! She ended up in the era of the Seven Sages that are portrayed by the Seven Heroines, in a time where she doesn't belong. And her role in the battle against Ganondorf, as an eighth Sage, was kept a secret.

She is there next to another Zelda from that era, where they both are in possession of the "Tear of Time", as I like to call it. So, from that point onward, this "tear of the kingdom" exists twice and it likely does so for a very long time, up until the point where Zelda presumably finds one in the present and uses it to save herself, as she falls into the dark abyss.

But Zelda's tear might not be the only thing that exists twice in this timeline, which is where the "Forgotten Sword" comes in. This could be the broken Master Sword that Zelda is holding in her hands, which apparently also traveled back in time with her. It looks like she is leaving both the Master Sword and her tear at this temple at the Great Plateau, where I keep speculating that this is the actual Temple of Time, the entrance to the Sacred Realm.

In the present Link finds this temple up in the sky, but with it he will also find the gifts left by Zelda in the distant past: the forgotten Master Sword and her "Tear of Time". This essentially means that there were two Master Swords for thousands of years, one resting at the Lost Woods and one resting at the Temple of Time in the sky. Of course these two swords are one and the same, where the Master Sword from Breath of the Wild went back in time, after it got destroyed by Ganondorf's Malice.

So, at the beginning of Tears of the Kingdom there will be only be one Master Sword again, the one that is completely corroded, but this one also existed during all of the events pictured in Breath of the Wild... long forgotten and completely out of reach.