Wheeling Gull Isle wanderer, what are you searching for?

there was a storm. lightning. thunder. torrential rains that chilled you to the bone. winds that swept you off your paws. there was no escaping the storm, if you had no home to speak of. the packs of the cliffs were tucked away in their caves, safe and dry.

but aditya was alone. he had always been alone.

his pelt of browns and tans, already soaked from the downpour, was pulled beneath the waves. his golden eyes stung from the salt sea. his legs, burly and strong, were ineffectual now. they churned and kicked, desperate to free the rest of his body from the ocean. to no avail. he felt himself sinking. down. . .down. . .into a darkness he had only heard described in--

"hhhhhhg!"

aditya gasped desperately for air as his head finally hit the surface of the water, crashing through like a whale breaching. he blinked rapidly, trying to get the water from his eyes. his legs felt like limp seaweed, yet he somehow felt the strength to weakly paddle. the water was calm.

how long had he been under?!

"haye bhagwaan," he intoned, his voice raspy and reedy. just before the darkness had overcome him, he felt as if. . .something. . .had pushed him to the surface. yet when he had gone under before, the skies were the color of slate, the wind drowning out all other sounds save waves crashing. above him was a sky as blue as it could be, cloudless, and he could hear seabirds calling. had he slept? had he dreamt? was he dead?

before he could ruminate further on the endless existential possibilities, aditya felt the tips of his paws skim seafloor. he was washing ashore! breathlessly, he tugged himself through the shallows onto the beach, then flopped over, chest rising and falling with the barest of motion.

and fell promptly asleep, eyelids tugging downwards, feeling like a stone in the sand.

Coelacanth returned to the water’s edge on a fairly regular basis, so perhaps it was not surprising that she was the first to come across the salt-etched, sepia-painted wolf who lay like a wolf-shaped twist of driftwood in the damp sand.  Heedless of her own safety, she surged forward to meet him, afraid at first that the sea had stolen away his breath utterly — but closer inspection revealed the fluttering rise and fall of his sodden flanks.  She knew she ought to proceed with caution.  She’d been savaged for doing exactly what she set about doing now, but she couldn’t stop herself.  Centimeter by slow centimeter, she approached the wolf with nose aquiver and limbs atremble, her Neptune eyes limpid with mingled distress and curiosity.

Without speaking, she touched the tip of her nose to one leathery paw pad, wondering if he would wake — but he was so cold.  Instinct bade her to tuck her tiny body along his side, but innate shyness and a fear born of cruel treatment stayed her.  She whined softly, an airy sussurus so frail any self-respecting siren would laugh at the attempt, and nudged at his wrist with the bridge of her muzzle.  Please wake up!

beach crabs. they were tickling his feet. he giggled like a child, trying to shake them off. he was surprised they weren't biting. . .but perhaps they were friendly crabs.

"hmmmm. . ." aditya breathed sleepily, paws twitching. he was trapped on the edge of dreams. he felt balanced on a precarious ledge between life and death.

"mere bachpan." his mother's voice, sweet as nectar, drizzled in and out of his ears. she was so long gone. . .he must be dead. . .

with some effort, the wolf opened his eyes a sliver, only to find a pair of blues staring right back. he would have jumped up and back in shock, had he not been so exhausted. as it were, he managed a surprised grunt, his throat red and raw from saltwater intake.

his eyelids were so puffy that he couldn't open them more than a crack, and his eyes were blurry with sleep. besides her--for it must be a "her;" the scent suggested it--eyes, he could make out no more than a sleek black form, standing close, nose pointed curiously.

she made a small sound, a tiny whine, and aditya struggled to respond. "kaun hain?" he asked in a ragged whisper, trying--and failing--to lift his head off the sand. she does not have your tongue, in all likelihood, the practical part of his brain admonished him. he struggled further, then, for a more neutral language.

"who. . .wh. . ."  he gave up nearly immediately, hoping that blinking quizzically at her would help answer his question. aditya was fluent in many languages, but his fight against the sea had clouded his brain, rendering him nearly speechless.

Like wind-whipped butterflies, Coelacanth’s tufted ears fluttered, and at the first sign of life from the strange wolf she hopped nimbly awry — as though his first frail overtures of speech were a cutting snarl.  Twin petals skimmed uneasily against her skull before springing forward again.

“Kaun hain?” she mimicked uncertainly in a breathless whisper, edging nearer to minister to him.  Wary of the fangs and sharp words that could wound and flay, she tenderly angled her finely-sculpted head and, if he allowed it, made to gently bathe the salt from his face.

“Seelie,” she whispered timorously.  “Friend?”

he felt something warm and gentle against his cheek, and found that the dark female was laving the ocean grime from his face, like a mother bathing her pups after their journey out of the birth canal. seelie, she whispered. and then a word he did know--friend.

"see-lie," he tested the word on his tongue, daintily. friend. friend.

flailing legs punched the sea's rolling surface, a muzzle gasping desperately for air. he was too far away to reach, and every time he tried to swim closer. . .  "nando! swim to me! nando, mere dost--" the sodden black mass kept floating farther away from him, the salt-choked cries growing fainter. he had to save nando--

"nahin!" he gasped aloud, wrenching his head away from the she-wolf and rising to his feet, swaying like a drunkard. he looked at her, eyes still half-closed, licking his lips as he summoned enough saliva to speak properly. "nando kahaan hai? mere dost nando?"

it was now that aditya was remembering that his friend--his best friend--had been swept away by the storm as well. he was not here, now. and aditya had to find him. . .dead or alive.

“See-lie.”

It was halting and uncertain, but Coelacanth rejoiced in it regardless, her sumi-e brush tail wriggling and whipping behind her as she bathed the strange male’s face — feverishly now, in time with the quickening thrum of her cunicular heart. It seemed to her that he began to drift off again, but in the next moment he gasped aloud, waterlogged lungs greedily sucking air and expelling it on a string of words she did not understand: “Nahin! Nando kahaan hai? Mere dost Nando?”

Tufted ears folded sharply against the sheepdog’s gently sloping skull as she half-recoiled, huddling in the sand with her eyes squinted and most of her frail weight settled upon her tightly coiled hindquarters. The salt in the air caused her feathery fur to bristle into a halo of inky quills, and she looked for all the world like a bewildered kitten who’d just been sprayed with a water bottle to discourage counter surfing. Nervously she licked her lips, looking up at the towering wolf with a significant amount of trepidation. Even when it became clear to her that he wasn’t going to eat her face off, she treated him with a certain wariness — but she did not run from him.

“Nando?” she parroted in a hesitant whisper, wanting desperately to appease him. There’d been a peculiar amount of emphasis on that word, but she didn’t think it was his name. She imagined that he was saying something along the lines of, “Where am I? Tell me where!” but she couldn’t be sure. An anxious whine stirred in her throat, airy and uncertain.

If he could walk, she thought it was best for him to move inland, away from the shoreline. As much as she loved it, the sea could be unforgiving, and he would need clean water and fresh food to settle his stomach from the brine. Too, there were warm dens for the stranded that Komodo and Stockholm had helped to excavate and furnish. “Friend,” she entreated in a timorous susurrus. Daringly, she made to touch the tip of her nose to one tawny shoulder, the lupine equivalent of timidly tugging at his sleeve. Then she moved a pace or two away, angling her slim muzzle suggestively, before circling back to his side in case he needed to lean on her. She was tiny — a poor walking stick for such a burly wolf — but her Neptune eyes were gamely determined.

his breath left him in a sob, as she echoed his friend's name. "nando," he repeated, looking down and squeezing his eyes shut. the tawny male's face appeared in front of him, slightly blurry, as if seen underwater. not drowned, though, but happy. . . smiling. "my. . .friend."

the woman rose to her feet, and aditya blinked at her, suddenly unsure. where was she taking him? was it safe? did she have nando?

"please. . ." adi croaked, not exactly sure what he was pleading for. "where. . .where is here?" despite his poor physical conditions, the synapses in his brain were beginning to fire once more, and he started to make sense of it all. he had washed ashore, here. last time he had been fully conscious, he had clung to a slippery cliff, the wind buffeting him from all sides.

"seelie," he said. he looked around. "this. . .is seelie?" his golden eyes returned to her own blue pair. "or are you. . .seelie?"

Comprehension glimmered in the sheepdog’s seabright eyes, but sorrow surged to meet it. Wordlessly she lifted her head, tracking the empty shoreline with a characteristically intense gaze, and returned her attention to the golden-eyed wolf with somber eloquence.

Whoever this Nando was, he had yet to find his way to Undersea’s shores.

Speaking at length was both physically and emotionally taxing for the feather-furred empath, who drew in a trembling breath at the weight of weariness she borrowed from the stranger. Still, because he had asked her, she tried her best to deliver: “Here is Unnersea,” she breathed, brow furrowing as she quickly corrected her faulty pronunciation. “Undersea.” It was…an okay name. Stockholm and Komodo had let her choose it, but the names she really liked were far longer. For all she was a mute, Seelie came from a family of wordsmiths, and though she lacked the basic faculty to breathe life into them herself, her mind was a bustling whirlpool of psalms and stories.

The Jewel Between Scylla and Charybdis!

The Land Under Reign of Sea and Sky!

The Shores Blessed by a Hundred Seas!

The Stormborn Wolves of a Thousand Tides!

In his laconic, plain-speaking way, Komodo had gently suggested that these names — and the myriad others Seelie managed to eke out over the weeks that followed — were a mouthful for any wolf. [He made sure to sugar this suggestion with double handfuls of praise for her creativity.] Even Stockholm, who was generally content to let his sheepdog sprite do whatever she wished, seemed to agree. In the end, Undersea worked for a variety of reasons: the path to reach the island was beneath the surface; it was easier to say than Hundred Seas; and it reminded the whimsical Groenendael of one of her favorite story settings: a lost kingdom at the bottom of the sea.

Though her Neptune eyes were sad, she smiled shyly at the bourbon-and-cream wayfarer. “N-Name?” she asked him, a little tongue-tied at her boldness. “Come with me,” she begged, pulling off the difficult consonant blend with the tip of her tongue pressed deliberately betwixt her incisors. “I — Seelie — make you better.” Her pert pink tongue darted out to lap at the salt that crusted the fur at his elbow. Even this small amount of speech had exhausted her, so she resorted to body language to convey what she wanted: she danced away on nimble paws, then circled back, one tufted petal tipped toward the wolf and its mate turned inland where she so longed to bring him.

undersea. he shuddered at the name. it wasn't so long ago that he had been literally undersea, and to have been swept onto a place called that. . .well, hari wasn't often cruel, but this highlighted a bad side of him, for sure.

then the sleek, black-pelted woman was asking for his name. it took him a couple seconds for it to all come together, before he responded hastily, "adi. aditya." his tongue felt thick and heavy in his mouth, a salt-soaked mass of flesh. it was hard to speak clearly.

she began to groom him; her touch was warm and comforting, but almost as soon as it had began, she pulled away, leading him inland. at first, he resisted--how could he know what sort of bed of snakes this woman--this seelie--was leading him into?

but, after a long moment of thinking, he figured he had nothing left to lose. his home was long gone, his friend lost to the sea. he was here, with seelie, on undersea. . .and if she could help him, then he'd have to take the risk.

“Adi. Aditya.”

She shaped the syllables with a tender mouth before breathing life into them — “Aditya,” — and when she did, her tapered muzzle dipped sharply, bent beneath a tidal wave of shyness. “Adi.” Tufted ears fluttered like nervous wings as she awaited the rebuke she was conditioned to expect — but when it did not come, she raised her finely-sculpted head and gave him an timorous smile.

Abandoning the precariousness of the spoken word, Coelacanth woofed softly and began to herd guide the burly male, gently but insistently, away from the sea. The mountain to the north — diminutive in comparison to the great, towering peaks she had seen on the mainland — afforded the seawolves a wealth of sweet, clean water in the form of waterfalls and rivers; and it was to one such rill that she led him. Feathered paws paused at the water’s edge, and with her Neptune eyes fixed intently upon his face, she lowered her head to lap at the glimmering surface — a few swallows only, and mostly out of politeness [and to prove the water was safe].

Crystalline droplets clung to her chin and whiskers when she stepped back, making a sweeping gesture with her nose akin to the magnanimous wave of a kind hostess’ graceful hand. What is mine is yours, bespoke her mien, sumi-e brush tail ticking like a slow-set metronome against her hocks.

he felt much calmer as she spoke his name, her sweet voice breathing new life to the syllables. he nodded, the barest of smiles coming to his face--though it hurt to hold that expression for long. the sleek black wolf turned, then, and guided him to a river on the small, sloping mountain, drinking from it.

at her gesture, adi dipped his muzzle into the water, almost collapsing in ecstacy at the pure, crisp taste of it, washing the salt from his mouth and sliding down his sore throat. he was careful not to drink so much that his stomach ached, instead taking small, cautious swallows.

when he had finished, he sank to the ground, muscles shaking from exhaustion. the small trek up the ocean crag had depleted whatever strength he had, and he wanted desperately to sleep for a long time in a warm bed.

his golden eyes, the lashes still crusted with salt, lifted to her face. "seelie," he whispered. "dhanyavaad. bahut. . .thank you."

maybe he wasn't dead.

Once Aditya’s thirst was quenched, Coelacanth planned to lead him to the caches — but as he drew back, she espied the trembling of his body and knew they would go no further. With an airy, toneless whine of dismay, she tucked her tiny frame against his far broader one, doing her best to make him feel warm and safe. Their conspicuous difference in size rendered her meager attempt a laughable enterprise at best, but a soft, satisfied purr burbled in her throat anyway as she began to gently bathe his face, clearing the granules of sand and salt from his sleeping lashes. Already she loved him — and oh, how she wished to lay claim to him! It was easy to keep herself awake as the golden wolf slept, her wild imagination conjuring dream after rosy dream of his continued stay upon her island. Perhaps he would fall in love with beautiful, blue-eyed Faeryn, or even with Ixchel, the spirited calico tiamat! Coelacanth decided that the second option was the best one, for Ixchel was a Corten and her marriage to Aditya would make him one, too. Happily now, she rested her chin upon the wolf’s flank, savoring the slow rise and fall of his breath. It was blissfully free of the bubbling, gurgling sound that signified a particularly bad case of drowned lung. He would get better.