Wheeling Gull Isle the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking

At first, when the sea’s fingers had closed themselves tight around the tiny Groenendael, she’d struggled like a wounded bird, slim jaws gaping in protest as her spindly legs took on a frenzied windmilling and her emaciated spine whipped wildly to and fro — but the very real danger of drowning compiled with the realization that the water sought to shelter, not constrict, quieted her frantic desire to be free. She surrendered, though not without a few last protesting jerks and twitches of her weakening body, and was dragged beneath the surface by the swift, relentless pull of the current. Though they stung with salt, her Neptune eyes were open as the suck of the tide bore her further and further undersea, and she saw the wolves she loved in fading, water-winged glimpses as she passed them by.

Amoxtli. Doe. Marbas. Kierkegaard. Komodo.

She was limp and still as the crosscurrent carried her frail weight, to all appearances a very dead dog, but she was alive and whole. The madness of the past few months was revealed to her degree by slow degree. The cagey, skeletal creature she had become. The torment she had endured. The filth of the cave. She could not escape these things or refuse to acknowledge them, for they were now as much a part of her as the innocence that still lay deep within the marrow of her bones and the sweetness that she would one day relearn to exude. Coelacanth. Coelacanth, the water seemed to whisper, and she felt her name in three-beat interludes that jump-started her fading heart. They increased in tempo and volume until at last they reached the pinnacle of their crescendo and she was thrust above surface and fairly deposited upon the beach. Any onlookers might have seen a high, cresting wave that swallowed up the shoreline and left in its greedy wake a puddle of cephalopod ink.

The puddle stirred. The scalloped gradient of Seelie’s rib cage rose sharply once and fell. Long moments passed with little to no progress, and then her thin sides began to flutter in hazy, trepidacious stutters before reclaiming a steady rhythm. Her muzzle fell slackly open as she coughed weakly, expelling seawater, and then she moved no more.