#ifora

With a slick twist, Sardon swung one laden arm outward. Kinov let out a squealing giggle as he flew into the air, sailing a good three to four seconds before crashing into the seafoam. The kids laughed in delight, and Sardon winked, crouching down to offer the Gerudo kids his hands.

“Ready to go, Utoko? Urali?”

They pounced on him instead.

“HEY!”

“The molduga’s escaped!” yelled Utoko, changing the game’s rules in an instant. “Get him back in the sand so he can’t get anyone!”

“Yeah! Up to his face!” called out her sister, completely forgetting her turn on Sardon’s shoulders in favor of this new game. She shoved hard against his hips - and while Sardon was easily three times her height, he played along, falling into the sand with a wet thud.

“No! Noooo! RAWWWR!” he yelled, batting feebly at them with arms and legs he’d decided were tentacles for the purposes of this game as they, Zuta, and Kinov (who was not to be excluded from this game) raced to bury his body under the sand. “I’mma eat you up! I’mma eat’choo up–”

“Utoko! Urali!”

The two of them paused, clearly not wanting to stop their game. At the second call of their names, though, Utoko glanced around and sighed, pouting.

“Yes, Iforaaaaa!”

Sardon twisted around, trying to get a glimpse of who was calling them. He caught her at the edge of his vision: an older Gerudo, her vibrant red hair done up in a thick braid over her shoulders and a jagged, chipped tooth on a chain necklace draped across her Lurelin-clad chest. She waved at her sisters while she walked across the beach, skirting the trench Sardon had created in his running while still homing in on the Hylian dogpile.

“Mom says it’s time to go back,” the girl said as she stopped just short of Sardon, lest she get sucked into the sandy struggles. “It’s lunchtime, and you know how she is about sand in the stew–”

“We’re having stew tonight?!” asked Urali, her games with Sardon forgotten in a split second.

“Yep! And the rest of you are invited if you clean up,” she said with a wink.

“Heck yeah!”

It was as if Sardon had never existed. Completely abandoning their task, they scrambled for the village - in Zuta’s case, scrambling over Sardon’s chest in his excitement to beat them all there. Sardon, for his part, blinked; the play-to-eat turn had moved so fast he had to wonder if the kids were part zorca themselves.

“Need a hand?” the Gerudo woman asked.

“Uh…I might?”

She grabbed Sardon by the hand and pulled back, surprising the newly-made Hylian as she easily lifted his heft with one arm. Sardon clapped at his chest and thighs, brushing the grit off his new clothes as best he could, before raking his hair with his hands in a futile attempt to remove it from his ponytail.

“Thanks, Miss…?

“Ifora,” she said, offering a hand. “You know, you’re really good with kids.”

“Ah, yeah,” he said, shaking it (and accidentally transferring some of the grit to her). “Comes with living in a pod–er, uh, family.”

Ifora waved off the correction. “Don’t worry about it. The zorca are our neighbors. We get a dozen of them who swim by every year - about this time, in fact. Would you three be a part of that pod?”

“Er…no?” he said, a little surprised. “I mean, we do come by here, but we’re usually in the fall/winter migration. You’re taking this surprisingly easily, by the way.”

“What, the three of you showing up?”

“Uh, no. The whole–” he gestured at his body, clearing his throat uncomfortably.

“Ah. The…transformation.” She smiled, then started ticking off events on her fingers. “Well, before you showed up, we were attacked by pirate moblins. Not to mention having our village rebuilt by a feral Hylian who’s supposedly a century older than he looks. And the exploding demon dragon a little while after. After a while? You just learn to go with the flow.”

She winked.

“...Well, I guess when you put it like that…”

Ifora’s smile faded. “I’m sorry. I’m making light of your condition. Are you all right?”

“I…”

Sardon’s voice faded as he massaged his still-unfamiliar wrists, working his lips against strange blocky teeth that had none of the flesh-stripping serration he was used to. His hair had plastered itself across his back, matting and dragging across his skin in ways his headpiece had never done. As much as he was trying to play it off with all the nonchalance he could muster, it all just felt so…strange.

“I wish I could be so easygoing about this,” he finally said, trying to move his head in a way that would pull his hair off his back. “I just keep going back to, well…what if this is permanent? We still don’t know what even happened, and we’re making plans and journeys based on some basic suggestion our friend made.”

He gestured out towards Danmalaak, whom the two of them could vaguely see haggling aggressively with a passing trader.

“Two of us aren’t even supposed to be here,” he continued. “Dad and I are supposed to be at the Turning of the Wheel right now. That’s the, uh, thing most of the other zorca this time are supposed to be going to, by the way? - but my brother’s been going through a lot lately and we didn’t want to leave him where he was.”

“Girl troubles?”

“Exile.”

Ifora winced. “Ooof.”

“Yeah. We don’t even know what for. I don’t think even he knows. One minute, the moms are just fine with him. The next, he’s out on his butt, told to keep swimming and never stop.”

“That’s a lot…and, might I say, a poor way to make an example of him.” Ifora frowned. “I mean, how do you know what to avoid if you can’t even know the crime?”

“Right?! Well, Dad and I couldn’t just leave him at that. I’m not leaving my brother like that, not…you know, all alone. Angry. Confused.” He shuddered at the thought. “So, we get this idea that we’ll pass on the Turning this year, keep him company over the summer, and then…well…”

Again, the gesture at his face and chest.

“As bad as this is? I can’t have Cir thinking it’s his fault we’re stuck like he is. He’s already bitter at everything that’s happened, I don’t need him taking even more responsibility for us just having some lousy luck.”

Ifora nodded. “We older siblings have to look after the rest, am I right?”

“Yeah…we do.”

Ifora licked her lower lip as she considered Sardon’s dour mood, a deep plunge given how gleeful he’d been only minutes before. This was a boy who felt things, and felt them hard. Sure, that came in handy when someone needed that surge of adrenaline in a fight (and judging from that scar on his pectorals, he’d been in at least a few), but the insecurity writ ‘cross his face simply would not do.

“For what it’s worth…I can’t believe this would be permanent,” she ventured, picking a piece of grit off her hand with a fingernail. “For one, I imagine it would take some considerable magic to affect that kind of change with any degree of permanence. Something on, say, the Demon King’s level…and I don’t think that would have been wielded on three isolated zorca on some beachside jaunt.”

Sardon’s response was a noncommittal grunt. “Cir would just say he’s got that kind of luck.”

“Well, that’s the other thing,” Ifora continued. “You three don’t strike me as the type to just lay down and accept it.”

That earned a crack of a smile from Sardon. “You got me there,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “Pretty sure Cir could call down the goddesses on that guitar on his. And Dad would wrestle them into submission given half the chance.”

“And you?”

His hesitation made Ifora’s decision for her.

“Do you mind if I give you a gift?” she asked, reaching behind her neck to undo the clasp of her necklace. “This is something my grandmother gave me for my first Gerudo Town pilgrimage. I was a child at the time, already so much taller and stronger than the local children, but I was terrified at the idea of leaving. You can probably guess all the usual reasons why - the monsters on the journey, of traveling through that vast, scorching desert…but, really, most of all, I was terrified of leaving my family, living in a city of nothing but strangers.”

“...Strangers?” Sardon asked. “What, didn’t you have a family to go back to there?”

“Of a sort,” Ifora replied, winding the necklace chain around her palm. “Gerudo are required to live part of our lives in the Gerudo homeland. It is a way for us to recognize one another, to ingrain our culture and engender community in a people whose very biology requires that we live amongst others. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that our own families are there. Just about everyone in mine lives in that house, in fact.”

She rocked her head towards one of the villages’ signature palm-based huts. Indeed, Sardon could see Utoku and Urali there, virtually bouncing in anticipation for an apparently mythical beachside stew.

“When it was my turn to go, my grandmother was the only relative waiting for me. No mother, no sisters, aunts, or cousins, just one elderly woman caring for a girl just barely into her teens.”

Sardon made a face. “If you told me a pod had only one grandmother for its children, I’d tell you that pod’s’ days were numbered.”

Ifora laughed. “I thought the same thing! Surrounded by family here, and nothing there but a decrepit old lady I’d never met before. But, you know, she knew exactly what it was like, and she had a gift ready for me when I arrived.”

She pressed the wound-up necklace into Sardon’s palm, flicking up the jagged tooth fragment with her thumb.

“Molduga tooth, that,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Only the very tip, of course. They were still harvesting the carcass when I came into town, so I got to find out how big they got - and I think even you’d have trouble wearing a tooth the size of your head on your neck. Of course, Grandmother wasted no time telling you who landed the final blow.”

Sardon glanced between the necklace and the woman offering it, his eyes wide.

“I–Miss Ifora, I can’t possibly–”

“It’s just Ifora, and you can, too,” she sad, a tad forcefully. “Think of it as a gift of courage, from one crotchety old grandma to her stubborn granddaughter - and from one big sibling to another. You three make sure to get back to your big oafish selves, all right?”

“Oafish?!” 

Sardon’s surprised indignance fell quickly away to a feral grin as he used Ifora’s grip to pull her in for a big zorca-style bearhug.

“You got it,” he breathed in her ear. 

The two of them shuddered, grinning. As they parted, though, Sardon unwound the chain, pinching the ends between massive fingers in preparation to put it on himself as he nodded to Ifora.

“I’ll be sure to bring it back,” he promised.

“You better,” she said. “I’m going to need that courage to keep my sisters in check!”

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The sun hung low in the sky as three Hylians and one goron grouped up in front of Lurelin’s modest archway. Cironus and Danmalaak were both wearing a pair of bulky hiking packs, each filled with a number of provisions that would hopefully keep them sated on the way to their next stop.

“You packed the extra spices, right?” asked Cironus. “Eating salted fish is going to be such a downgrade after that paella.”

“I told you, that’s in case we can’t catch anything!” said Danmalaak. “And you’d better - those spices were expensive. We could have bought three times as much fish if you hadn’t–”

“Relax, kid,” cut in Fat Fin. “We’ll find something. I can taste it.”

“You can trust Dad to hunt anything,” said Sardon. “Anyway, did you ever figure out which way we were going?”

“Uh, well…weeee thought we’d put it to a vote,” muttered Cironus. 

“Couldn’t choose, could ya.”

“Mind your BUSINESS, Fin!”

“All right, then, let’s vote,” said Danmalaak. “Route A, with the cliffsides and hinoxes–”

Fin’s eyes lit up.

“The WHAT–”