Ocean's Breath Plateau song of storms

When Tullik was young and her mother still breathed, Tusannituk had sat both girls down and told them a story.

”There will come a day” her gentle voice had spoken ”that a man will come for each of you. He will swoon you with words, will bring to you the pleasure of being loved. Some men will string you together, just to cut the strings. They will not understand you, will seek to mold you into something you are not, and will break you in the process.”

”How will we know which is which?” Her own much younger voice had said, a new fear in her heart. Tusannituk had smiled at their father in the doorway, his teeth wrapped around a fatty marmot, his eyes ever kind.

”You will know.”

Tullik had never learned who hurt her mother enough to pass on such a warning to her daughters. But here, in the warm lodge with her husband, their intermingled breaths, fire stoked warm in her stomach, she found the memory again. She recognized the look in her mother’s eyes. She couldn’t see herself in any mirrors, but she knew she wore it too.

Chakliux brought her to new heights, higher even than her mountain, and it was up among those stars that she learned for the first time that her mother had been right.

She did know.

In the interim, the ocean lapped the shore, the stars tipped the mountains, and they were as one.