Wheeling Gull Isle santeria

NOTE: In Coelacanth’s personal timeline, this takes place directly after this thread and some time before this thread.

The nameless, homeless stray slunk along the shoreline like a wounded, age-bent thing, hunch-spined and heavy-hearted. To an onlooker, her path might have appeared erratic and meandering, but she knew where she was going. Every step, no matter how deep its initial imprint, was erased from existence by the rush of the sea not a minute after its conception. They did not die, eroded by wind and time — they were unmade. They never lived. There was nothing left to tether the sheepdog to the earth. Her lambs had grown razor wire instead of wool and her blind devotion had bled her dry — but she should have felt free. She should have felt happy. She had done what she had been commanded to do: watch the cubs. Keep them safe.

When the atramentous waif reached the northern lip of the pinnipeds’ shoals approximately six hours and twenty-five miles later, she melted without hesitation into the evening tide. She did not swim so much as flow through the water, a literati painting come to life, and the bioluminescent plankton that gathered glowingly in her aphotic fur was mirrored in her limpid Neptune gaze. She grieved, and she gave that grief to the ocean, saline disappearing into saline before she had time to fully register its sting.

Dainty paws brushed the sandbar, frail as a promise, but the inkdark stray couldn’t summon the strength to leave her sanctuary behind. She submerged in the shallows with only her nose, eyes, and ears above water in true crocodilian fashion, momentarily blind to the hard-bitten figure that loomed just in front of her. When finally she blinked the tears from her eyes and noticed him, it was she who loomed — she rose from the water like a pelagic apparition, flecks of twinkling blue dappling her inky pelage. She said nothing — she merely waited to be wounded, her glistening eyes dimly expectant.