Sea Lion Shores ours is to smile at your passing, friend

AW - set on sea lion shores at daybreak

when she woke the sea thundered besides her, fresh spume and salt and the sting of cold sharp along the her serpentine muzzle. around her the strand bore the shattered face of a world upturned. wrought wood pale and beach-washed like slender bone, shards of fractured whelk and the bizarre form of beached kelp and stone that had not seen the surface world in countless chiliad. the saxocoline flora of some forgotten marine order assembled madly, rudely jettisoned on the ruined shore.

she was no stranger to the impetus of disaster but the wreckage before her seemed orchestrated by some monstrous beast wading forth from untold chambers, leaving behind it an ambuscade of discord and ruin. the sea waif overturned the broad head of some flattened mollusk, the byzantine glint of its fractured shell the only pretty thing among a world of raptured cataclysm. the specimen was examined for any remnants of meat -- and when none was found its empty husk was quickly forgotten.

as the grey dawn rose before her she studied the ruptured shore. her eyes traced the raw bilge as it frothed along the shale. the way the grey sea rose and fell into peerless murk. like some ghastly apparition she turned back along the tidepools, only the fill of her pawprints suggesting any soul had visited this desolate place.