Ocean's Breath Plateau uguuruk ⤄

for @Tullik & @Marina! can be RO or one reply, just needed to get this written! backdated to march 6

when the wives of chakliux had settled and seemed well enough to receive moonmother, she brought with her plucked clams, oysters, urchins, and scaled fish, all work that now the seal hunter women did not need to do.

"your husband, though he is a seal hunter, he does not know the way of his women because he is a man. but though i am a sunshine woman, i was almost a seal hunter wife, and so these secrets were told to me. now i give them to you," kukutux said, bemused despite the importance of the knowledge she would speak; seal hunter ways taught by a sunshine mother.

"you have seen the scars on your husband, and know they will be put upon raiyuk. when the time comes for new sons to have this done, it will be one of you who makes the marks. but seal hunter women have their own marks, and they will come to your daughters in dreams."

"you know that boys hunt their first seal when they have almost twelve months. they are encouraged then to go away, to travel, and not yet to build a lodge for a wife. seal hunter girls have another year. let them be young. they do not need to think of husbands, and should be taught all you know, and be encouraged to seek their own ways as well. they will not become a woman until they are first militsik."

"the winter before the spring where sedna will move in the body of a girl and make her a woman who seeks a man, this winter has great power of spirit. when the long dark comes, from first snow to first melt, your daughter is not girl nor woman, not child nor adult. the spirits move in her, and through her, and around her. she will build her own small lodge beside the sea, and be alone. she will speak with the spirits and seek her vision. before this, there are two ceremonies: one, to cleanse her in the ocean with sea-lavender and scour her with sand. the second, to help her build this shelter, and the third is to spend that first night with her beside the sea, and eat the sun-root together, to dance and to laugh and to cry until she finds the glow of the sea inside her."

there was much to say. here she paused. "tell them the stories of your family's women, of oil father, of sedna. it is a time of mothers passing down to daughters the things they must know as women of their own strength."

"a militsik is very powerful and therefore she is very desired. she must not lie with men during this winter. she must seek no husband nor any pleasure. it is a time to learn her own control as well. when the sun returns to warm the snow into water, she is a woman and no longer militsik, and must have her First Rite." kukutux glanced to the seal hunters. there was a great division here between sunshine and these people, but she would overcome it. "between you, and other women of the village, and other villages if it is needed, choose a man who will be gentle and soft. they must not be allowed to marry after, and indeed kept far from one another. but once this First Rite has passed, she is a woman through and through. in fact, among your husband's people, a woman who conceives during her First Rite is considered very blessed. help them to celebrate their bodies and how they were formed by the great beings. i know you are not seal hunters from birth. but i think you will find these ways less shocking than others i have known."

and here kukutux was silent, save for, "the sun-root grows between boulders beside the sea. it is white with long green leaves. this is only for you to know." not chakliux, and not any seal hunter son.