Solution to Once Upon a Time in the Quest

This glyph calls back to the 13 x 13 Yajilin puzzles in The Neverending Story. Each column, separated by heavy lines, represents the exact layout of clues from 13 unique columns spead out over the eight original puzzles. Filling the blocks from the solved versions of those columns into the glyph creates the image shown below, the familiar emblem of SUPERMAN.

This glyph calls back to the Marching Bands grid in The Hobbit. Rotating the individual bands of the solved grid per the arrows shown in the glyph creates the new grid shown below, wherein GUINEA-BISSAU can be read along the NW-SE diagonal (as indicated by the hyphen in the glyph).

This glyph calls back to the cryptic crossword in Peter Pan, in which the names of grown animals are replaced with the names of their smaller versions (e.g. CAT --> KITTEN). This glyph encourages solvers to ignore the smaller versions and consider the original larger versions. This list of animals can be fit into the given grid as shown below, with the answer word BEAST reading across the dashed lines.

This glyph calls back to the grid shapes in Dinotopia; the silohuetted T-Rex might also suggest this. The darkened pieces overlaid on the grid shapes form ominoes that can be rotated and repositioned to form the T-Rex shape. Dots within the T-Rex shape indicate the locations of footprint symbols in the shape when the ominoes are correctly positioned.

Rotating the ominoes will necessarily rotate the footprint symbols. In their new orientations, the symbols can be read in the strings withn the T-Rex as the clue AS IAN SAID, IT, UH, FINDS A WAY, a reference to Jurassic Park's Ian Malcolm's characterization of LIFE.

This glyph calls back to the Rows Garden grid in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It suggests swapping the positions of the medium and light blooms. Those blooms pair uniquely, and, if all pairs swap, the new top and bottom rows spell the clue SMOTHERED MATE GIVER, and shown in the grid below.

In chess, the piece that delivers a "smothered mate" is the KNIGHT.

This glyph calls back to the "winter" Hashi / Bridges grid in The Wizard of Earthsea. It suggests eliminating the double bridges from that grid, and, if this is done, the remaining single bridges make letterforms spelling the answer CHAPEL, as shown below.

This glyph calls back to the snaky grids in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The grids may be overlapped in the configuration shown (the curved ends disambiguate which is which). In the highlighted spaces, take the letter in either the shaded or unshaded space from the crossing tracks, as indicated by the glyph (in some cases, the spot in both tracks will be either shaded or unshaded, but in those cases the letter is identical). Reading by rows gives the answer TENNESSEE. (see diagram below).

This glyph calls back to the tesseract map from A Wrinkle in Time, located here. The darkened paths below are identified by letters at each end on the map shown, and entering those bigrams in both directions generates the clue DYING OF LIGHT POEM, a reference to Dylan Thomas's DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.