Hello readers! This is my first attempt at writing fanfiction. The idea for this story came to me mostly all at once, and nagged at me enough that I've decided to put it out there. This story was written in anticipation of the game.
The story is already complete on AO3 (under the proper version of my author name :glares: and with vastly superior formatting) so I suggest you find it and read it there. It can be found at ao3/works/46689181 (or probably even more easily by searching Google). I'll post a chapter per week here though! Please leave a review! I love to hear from readers…
Some notes about the content: Most chapters will be short and snappy. There will be no spoilers for ToTK except for what can be easily seen in the first trailers (and I had personally seen nothing about the game aside from the trailers until after this story was completed and published). There will be both sexual and violent content, though I think it should remain within the scope of the "T" rating. The impatient can rest assured that the title character's POV will appear from Chapter 5 onward.
Disclaimed: I do not own The Legend of Zelda or any of its associated IP, and this work makes no profit from their inclusion. You get the idea.
The Gerudo are a race of women. Historical ethnography went so far as to declare them an entirely different species, but the reality of Gerudo social, matrimonial, and reproductive patterns all suggest deeper kinship with the people of Hyrule than such loaded terminology had allowed. Still: the unique matriarchy of the desert is its signature, and strange magic protects its secrets from the eyes of men.
Teebo Oliffson, A Modern Anthropology of Hyrule
The woman was pregnant. She was huge with it. The few who saw her knew her time was nigh, and so, though the woman herself protested that she required no assistance, a midwife was found to assess her condition. What the chosen midwife found in the hovel beyond the Icehouse confirmed the suspicions of those who had sent her. Though the woman refused to answer any questions, the development of her body left little doubt about her situation. The midwife, of course, made certain thorough investigation of the woman's progress and—having long experience with recalcitrance and with poverty—cast a spell of alarum before taking her leave.
It was not long after this visit that the spell sounded in the ear of the midwife. It was that time the Hylians called the witching hour. The Town was silent, the revelry of the night reduced to muffled snores; and the wind whistled across the desert beyond the walls. The midwife roused herself and channeled her magic into the diagnostic. The woman's labor had come suddenly (how often it does!) and her need was urgent. Quickly gathering the few instruments required for the worst case, the midwife stepped quietly out of her comfortable lodgings and hurried across the town square. The guard allowed her passage through the gates without a second glance, and then, with an agility few would expect from one her age, the midwife leapt into the air, dropped an old shield under her feet, and lassoed a dozing sand seal. The seal startled instantly, dove into the sand, and with a familiar tug at the rope brought the midwife out into the desert at speed. A few jerks of the improvised reins set their course for the Icehouse.
After a brief sprint through the quiet desert, the midwife pulled her seal to a stop and dismounted her shield with a flourish. The animal allowed itself a momentary glance at its new surroundings, felt its new mistress' fading interest, and departed for the company of its fellows. The midwife herself bent to part the flap of tent that was the woman's only protection from the chill desert night. She found what she had expected: the woman feverish, sweating, screaming, hands fisted in the cloth of her bedding, and the ancestral magic of their people thickly massing in the air. It was time.
Gerudo magic is known for the devastating violence of its furious lightning. The warriors of the people are justly famed. Yet the Gerudo themselves will tell you that the greatest masters of these arts instead practice such work as anesthesia, repair, and the subtler varieties of mental suggestion. This midwife was not quite a master, not yet, but her reputation had grown rapidly upon her retirement from frontline combat. She had apprenticed at the foot of her people's most renowned magician, a sage on call to the royal family, her mastery great enough to catch the attention even of those ignorant Hylians. So it was with some confidence that the midwife invoked the traditional magics that guide and protect Gerudo, mother and child, and with satisfaction that she noted the strength of its response. The spells of diagnosis and monitoring told her that the babe was ready and in good health, that the mother was ready and in good health, and that the time of delivery of auspicious. With the lightest spark of electricity, the midwife eased the frantic woman's raving voice and stayed her cringing body. As the extremities relaxed, the midwife knew, the woman could better focus her attention on the birth of her child.
No matter what magic is deployed in its service, all Gerudo will tell you that childbirth is fundamentally a practice of the physical. It is never easy or painless—indeed, some speculate that Gerudo healing magic has intentionally avoided research that would make it so—and many of these warriors will happily describe their throes in terms that shame any exploit of battle. In truth, a good midwife can do much to relieve the burden of new motherhood. And in this meager tent, a midwife of great talent found her magic redoubling effortlessly with that of mother and child. They were strong. It should be a simple thing, with such magic—such power—at hand, to deliver the mother her child. The midwife felt dazed by it, but her work was instinctual, and she laid the charms of relaxation and contraction, of mental clarity and physical compulsion, without a second's thought. The woman's response was equally instinctual, whether her gasping cries, or the sympathy of her magic, all partaking in the shared strength flowing between the three parties of this ritual.
It is the intended design of this magic that the midwife take on the caster's burden. Its practitioners realized from the beginning that both mother and child would need their strength, and that a midwife could recover her exertions at her leisure. So it was that this midwife took upon herself the largest share of responsibility for the strange thick magic that had empowered the rituals of delivery and recovery, and so it was that she could never be absolutely certain she trusted what her eyes and magic told her: that the child she had delivered was a boy.
For, indeed, she did not have long to think on it. The midwife when she stumbled out of the tent managed to walk not more than half the distance to the Icehouse before she was set upon by those shrieking imitators of Gerudo combat, the Lizalfos.