Sea Lion Shores the halls of our fathers

Szymon, too, was filled with bad temper. His day had been spent digging dens, checking the pack reserves, and freshening borders. It was tedious work and much of his time had been spent inland, away from the Sea that drew him now to Her welcoming arms. “What am I to do?” he thought desperately, feeling the tension in his muscles relax minutely as coarse granules sank beneath his paws. Tipping his skull slowly from side to side, he sought to relax the cramped kink of his body, for it had curled into its old bad habits — a submissive slink, angular shoulders hunched with distress due to the exaggerated curve of his spine. As his paws sank into the softer sand that tumbled in the lapping waves at the shallows, he shook himself vigorously and resumed a prouder stance, as relaxed and natural as he could make it.

“You are not the same as you were,” he chided himself, allowing the breakers to swallow up his scarred forelegs and the slope of his black-banded ribcage. With a push of his paws, he allowed the Sea to carry him deeper, the current pushing him north toward the pinnipeds’ rocky domain. He fought the current, swimming against it, wary of the riptides that could kill a lesser beast — and only when his wounded right haunch began to tingle with fatigue did he succumb to Her will and drift toward the shore. He was several meters away from the strange female when he washed up on the beach, just in time to see her head break surface as she gazed out over the ocean.

Uttering a low, guttural chuff of greeting pitched to carry despite the cacophony of the barking sea lions, he wondered what secrets the Sea told this stranger — if She spoke to her at all. The tip of his tail twitched as it always did with nervous energy but his posture was guardedly loose — the set of his narrow head remained just a few inches above the relaxed slope of his shoulders. Though he readied himself for an ambush as he always did, Szymon met the stranger without rancor. The pale-furred female was saved from looking like Szymon’s detested sister by a dusting of pale brown on her ears, paws, and tail; she was lean and small, perhaps somewhat of a size with Doe’s warrior friend Lagertha. Mindful of that botched meeting — although he still thought himself blameless for the flighty girl’s abrupt departure — as well as the ever-present stutter that he loathed, the golden-eyed Cairn kept his foray into common speech brief: “Are y-y-you well?”