Blackwater Islands Oh Comely

Hoping for @Akantha, but any and all Nerds welcome!

Sometimes, when the conditions were right and the winds pulled over the water from the north, things would wash up on the shore from the channel that snaked between the islands and the mainland. Many interesting things were spat out from the sea; rejected from her cold, watery embrace. When the sea brought him fish, Whip would eat. But on the days she offered only waste and wayward scraps of styrofoam, Whip went hungry. She was a fickle creature, or at least, Whip saw her as such. Neither benevolent or malicious, there was no denying that the Mothers of the Sea were -- and they were power.

He was thinning, like a twig or a sapling tree, but Whip had survived the worst of the cold. The sea provided when others did not. His spirit, however, had not.

When a young tree is subject to winds, first it bends. The youthful shoots are the most pliable and they don't give way so easily. They bow down in reverance of the winds power, but they rarely break. But older trees and older men alike, those bearing strong trunks and rigid belief, hold steadfast until they split. Splintering. Fracturing. Whip, being a wolf of young adulthood, had his pliability to thank for his adaptation to way of life of Neriedes.

He was a drudge, nothing more. He had even forsaken his own family name.

Today, the sea had given him no bounty. Her shores lay bare. Yet Whip still walked along the beach in silence as his stomach twisted with hunger pains.