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Without further ado...
Selkies' Skins 2
Temple and Skinquest
Installment 53
Chapter 22
Sea Unicorn
The water passed by, and Kirsty found herself falling deeper into a reverence for the passing of time. She saw creatures of bygone eras from time to time but they did not notice her, or at least chose not to interact. Testing a theory she put a hand out beyond the path and saw a school of very large, savage looking, and toothy fish turn toward her as one. She promptly pulled her hand back within the ley line’s boundary. At one point she saw a large shape roving ahead in her path that by its size and shape could only be a megalodon. Kirsty did not repeat her experiment.
Her blood ran cold, but she tucked that fear into herself as far as she could. It was not Mara herself in that ancient form, but an actual shark. It continued on, away from her path, and she thanked Mara not to have to face such a creature in combat. There would be no rebirth after the devouring nor regrowth of limb with an ordinary shark.
The water began to change after passing through where the megalodon had been. Another cliff rose above her, promising that even further above and beyond would be another continent drifting away from the chasm. In this area columns rose above in challenge to the geology, and the bones ceased. Kelp danced in the current, waving colors from brown, to red, and to green. Fluorescence danced along the blades and revealed strange markings and eldritch sentences.
Kirsty sighed deeply and hung her head a moment, hanging in the water at the boundary. She rubbed her nose a moment and pinched the bridge, then shook her head and continued on after checking her pouch, net, and makeshift spear were in order. The kelp forest parted for her along the ley line, guiding her through the columns to an archway. The cliff disappeared, leaving only the archway.
Kirsty backed up. The cliff reappeared. She groaned.
“Ok. I get it, Mara. I get it. You don’t have to follow the rules of geology in a time pocket if you don’t want to. Right?”
She swam through the archway and into the warmer, shallower water beyond. The cliff disappeared as before and revealed a much shallower plain. The kelp forest continued dancing and she observed schools of fish going about their business. The ley line led on and as she followed it the sound of whale song grew louder and louder. Smaller voices joined larger voices. A chill sent her fur on end, and had she been sunning on a beach she would have puffed, but the water held her fur to her body.
“Calves… Birthing ground? Oh no…”
A ghostly white pod came to view much closer to the ley line than she wished to see it in case she were mistaken for a roving shark. Even if she vocalized, if something spooked them, and made clear she was more of the seal variety of creatures that was unlikely to sooth a panicked bunch of mothers. The tusks were half as long as she, but it was clear how they behaved with the calves these forms were still female. She stuck to the ley line, not wishing to risk leaving it.
One of the calves saw her and tried to make toward her, but was headed off by the cow. Her warbles and clicks intensified, and the calf clicked and vooped plaintively, attempting another stride toward Kirsty as Kirsty continued making her way away as unobtrusively as possible. The discussion faded behind her, and she sighed quietly. Sea unicorns were beautiful and majestic, but she didn’t want to outwit one. She certainly did not feel confident about out-swimming one.
Another song began to fill the water, impelling her instead of merely whispering in her blood as it had always done. As the floor sloped more and she grew aware some of the columns became sea stacks it seemed that they became more numerous. She found herself hastening through the water more and the terrain changed again. Sea caves opened before her now, encrusted with the usual sort of crustacean life. Impulsively she shot into the one she felt the song from the loudest and could not stop herself from dancing with the water.
She shot out into a large semi-roofed cavern. Light filtered from above, bathing everything in blue. She turned around slowly, taking it all in. Columns supported the roof here and there, but the skylight reminded her of the cenotes her parents had told her of in their travels. “I know this place…” the thought whispered through blood, bone, claw, and fur. “I’m here.” Kirsty’s eyes fell at last on a box at the far end which she had not noticed when she entered the temple.
The rough stone box sat on a dais of equally rough stone glowing palely in the light of the filtered sun, neither of which she could be sure of exactly what sort. She made her way toward it slowly, keeping her reverence for Mara firmly in mind lest she risk offending her. She paused in front of it and made the sign that she had learned early in her life above where she could feel the seal of the box and she sang the only phrase her mother and the Book of Seals had been allowed to teach her to help in her quest, a song of reclamation of Self, then set her hand lightly on it.
A large creature whooshed by, grazing her side with a horn in the process. Kirsty barely caught the exhaled breath, only managing to keep half of what she’d drawn in before. Her hand left the stone as the salt began to sting the unexpected wound and her blood entered the water. Kirsty saw the tail flippers of the narwhal bull from before speeding away, and then it turned back toward her faster than she expected such a creature to be able to move in such a semi confined space. She dodged as best she could before hearing a voice and the whale song.
“You have finally found your way. Now you must win it as you may.”
They spun through the water together, he seeking to gore and she shying away at the last moment. The more she ducked and dodged the faster the attacks came at her until she flung her net trying to entangle him. The momentum swept him past again and she clung as the net slid over tusk and she found herself hauled along and slammed against him. Her instincts told her to encase her legs around the bull and hold on so that she could perhaps get her spear into him to defend herself. Her current form instead more firmly held her tail and gave her no purchase but the net.
A pillar slammed into her as the whale attempted to use it to jettison her and she felt a rib crack as her breath whooshed from her lungs. The whale song came again but her ears rang too loudly from the blow to decipher what he said. She jabbed her spear after clearing the pillar, more stinging scrapes than whole skin but the angle struck wrong and all she did was make a gash in his side. The giant flicked and both she and her net sailed ahead of him. Her head hit something hard and the rest of her rolled to distribute the remains of the blow, knocking something heavy askew in the process. She felt the shift and groan of stone on stone in the water only briefly before she was rolling to avoid another attack and raising her spear to perhaps strike a blow of her own.
Mara watched from the shadows in an alcove as her favorite bull tested Kirsty’s resolve, a half smile slowly spreading over her normally sternly set face.
The water seemed to have more light to it, but she assumed that was the head blow speaking. The bull had pulled off again but was swinging around for another attempt, flippers passing close enough the current moved her. She tried to remember what she had learned of dealing with large water creatures from the silche’s net and spear hunts under their many varied conditions and techniques but nothing useful sprang from her muscle memory nor from her intellect. Her eye fell on what she’d slammed into.
It was the shining stone box, lid now partially askew. She laid her spear and net atop so that she could thrust the lid open a little further, releasing more of the light. Pelts lay rolled, seemingly more than should have been in such a small space.
“Which is mine?” She shot a look around but the bull seemed to calm as he finished his turn.
The blood hung in the water from the pair of them, the stains slowly fading. The sea unicorn dipped his head and floated in place, watching placidly.
Kirsty looked into the box again, more confident she was not going to have to go on another ride or get gored by a tusk. Grey, brown, black, red, white, mottled and plain skins all shifted around as she watched, trading places. Finally, a small shining white one with a bit of greyish blue markings on the left flipper where a wrist and her deities’ markings might be came to view and she reached for it, forgetting her net and her spear.
Warmth suffused her as she drew it out and unrolled it and her hair streamed out all around her as the currents shifted. Large blue eyes gazed back at her from the head of the skin as if to reproach her for having gotten so lost so easily so many times. Her own voice filled her head with chastisements in Gaelic, followed by the more resigned English she used in school, “But… what is done is done. We go forward together.”
Eyeing the openly lurking whale she slipped the skin on, slipping the head over hers and lining the eyes up with her own. Time began to flow normally and she could feel as her head came together, no longer divided. Net and spear lay forgotten on the box lid as she shifted fully into a proper full seal form. The whale watched as she wove through the water carefully then slid closer to gently prod the box lid. The stones groaned as the lid slid shut. The light returned to its previous low level filtering through the water.
“Do you feel better with your sealskin, Kirsty?” Mara’s voice cut through the elation, bringing a chill despite the youthful gentleness.
The white seal blinked. Where there had only been a whale before there was now both a whale and a far different view of Mara than what Kirsty had ever seen. There was no trace of the usual shark visage. Instead the deity floating and tending the wound of the sea unicorn was clearly a selkie like herself, and somehow more white than her own fur. No blemish colored her anywhere, and she shifted freely between the various permutations of selkie form. One moment she was a full seal, another halfway between with ash grey hair feeling out the water around her and a seafoam skirt swirling about her tail, and yet another she was nearly human save for the same sort of half pelt obscuring things from view she and her mother possessed, explaining at last where her halfpelt fuzz came from and why. Impossibly large eyes turned Kirsty’s way, shifting through all the myriad colors of the sea.
“I suppose… I feel mostly the same as I always did though a little less pulled thin. More in one place than before?”
“Then that is good. Treasure that feeling because there will always be times that even with it you will feel pulled in more than one direction. You’ll have to get better at setting a course.” Mara finished tending the narwhal and patted his side then watched as he went to rejoin his herd.
“I don’t think my path should have been so tangled.”
“No. It shouldn’t have been and I cannot blame that boy you are so set on. I expected better of your wayfinding but I think your path was influenced by more than just your own inner turmoil and the meddling from Finmen. You’ve passed your quest, of course, and you can be fully initiated now and when you return you will find the sealskin you wear now will transform into the white cloak you received so long ago.” Mara frowned a moment and settled on the box beside her. “I’m curious. Can you remember when you began your tests? From the beach?”
Kirsty settled on top of the box where this softer Mara gestured her to do so and tried to remember.
“My memories are conflicted… I can remember entering the water and discarding the cloak, and the dress where you asked them to be. I can remember having to fashion a spear. I… am not sure anymore if this is the net I made earlier in the year or if I had to make it along the way. But there are other memories. Another start. It’s all tangled.” Kirsty looked up at Mara, who now bent over her and curtained her with the tendrils of her hair.
“And what are those memories?” The deity’s face was cool and gentle, a soft smile, but now fangs glinted just at the edge of her lips.
The little seal inhaled deeply and sifted carefully. “The Examining Lintel stone at school. I was offered a choice at the stone by the sorters involving splitting my attention between my present time and my future because I was always thinking ahead to it and worrying.”
Mara nodded thoughtfully and bit her lip. “They have been known to interfere, or more accurately one of them in particular has been known to make some waves not of my control.”
The goddess reached down and stroked the seal’s brow, Kirsty crossing her eyes momentarily to look where she reached. Her eyes slid shut just as quickly while the fingers wove over her brow. Though her eyes were closed she could see as various strings were untangled, neatening the balls and ropes of assorted colors that had become wrapped around her. The process was repeated at her heart and again by her tail flippers.
“Should you have a child, whether with the boy or another, you must tell them NOT to strain forward in time, with or without help, when it comes to such quests. You are not the only one that has done this. It is dangerous and does impact how time flows on the quest. I’m sure you are aware how differently time already works when it comes to movements in realms like mine.” The voice was gentle, but somehow more dangerous than when coming from her shark guise.
Kirsty opened her eyes. “Should I have not?”
“Yes. You should have not. You will grow old too soon if you do it again. The brain of those who are incarnate can only withstand so much. Tell me, are there times in classes where you had headaches, perhaps nosebleeds, the last year in school?”
She blinked, surprised why Mara was asking about things so long ago. “They aren’t, they are now.” Some deeper, extremely tired part of her answered. Kirsty reached a fin up to her nose at a sting. A vice clamped at her head and she leaned into the warm shoulder beside her as an arm slipped around her.
Mara frowned and the fingers rose to Kirsty’s forehead again.
Her blood ran cold, but she tucked that fear into herself as far as she could. It was not Mara herself in that ancient form, but an actual shark. It continued on, away from her path, and she thanked Mara not to have to face such a creature in combat. There would be no rebirth after the devouring nor regrowth of limb with an ordinary shark.
The water began to change after passing through where the megalodon had been. Another cliff rose above her, promising that even further above and beyond would be another continent drifting away from the chasm. In this area columns rose above in challenge to the geology, and the bones ceased. Kelp danced in the current, waving colors from brown, to red, and to green. Fluorescence danced along the blades and revealed strange markings and eldritch sentences.
Kirsty sighed deeply and hung her head a moment, hanging in the water at the boundary. She rubbed her nose a moment and pinched the bridge, then shook her head and continued on after checking her pouch, net, and makeshift spear were in order. The kelp forest parted for her along the ley line, guiding her through the columns to an archway. The cliff disappeared, leaving only the archway.
Kirsty backed up. The cliff reappeared. She groaned.
“Ok. I get it, Mara. I get it. You don’t have to follow the rules of geology in a time pocket if you don’t want to. Right?”
She swam through the archway and into the warmer, shallower water beyond. The cliff disappeared as before and revealed a much shallower plain. The kelp forest continued dancing and she observed schools of fish going about their business. The ley line led on and as she followed it the sound of whale song grew louder and louder. Smaller voices joined larger voices. A chill sent her fur on end, and had she been sunning on a beach she would have puffed, but the water held her fur to her body.
“Calves… Birthing ground? Oh no…”
A ghostly white pod came to view much closer to the ley line than she wished to see it in case she were mistaken for a roving shark. Even if she vocalized, if something spooked them, and made clear she was more of the seal variety of creatures that was unlikely to sooth a panicked bunch of mothers. The tusks were half as long as she, but it was clear how they behaved with the calves these forms were still female. She stuck to the ley line, not wishing to risk leaving it.
One of the calves saw her and tried to make toward her, but was headed off by the cow. Her warbles and clicks intensified, and the calf clicked and vooped plaintively, attempting another stride toward Kirsty as Kirsty continued making her way away as unobtrusively as possible. The discussion faded behind her, and she sighed quietly. Sea unicorns were beautiful and majestic, but she didn’t want to outwit one. She certainly did not feel confident about out-swimming one.
Another song began to fill the water, impelling her instead of merely whispering in her blood as it had always done. As the floor sloped more and she grew aware some of the columns became sea stacks it seemed that they became more numerous. She found herself hastening through the water more and the terrain changed again. Sea caves opened before her now, encrusted with the usual sort of crustacean life. Impulsively she shot into the one she felt the song from the loudest and could not stop herself from dancing with the water.
She shot out into a large semi-roofed cavern. Light filtered from above, bathing everything in blue. She turned around slowly, taking it all in. Columns supported the roof here and there, but the skylight reminded her of the cenotes her parents had told her of in their travels. “I know this place…” the thought whispered through blood, bone, claw, and fur. “I’m here.” Kirsty’s eyes fell at last on a box at the far end which she had not noticed when she entered the temple.
The rough stone box sat on a dais of equally rough stone glowing palely in the light of the filtered sun, neither of which she could be sure of exactly what sort. She made her way toward it slowly, keeping her reverence for Mara firmly in mind lest she risk offending her. She paused in front of it and made the sign that she had learned early in her life above where she could feel the seal of the box and she sang the only phrase her mother and the Book of Seals had been allowed to teach her to help in her quest, a song of reclamation of Self, then set her hand lightly on it.
A large creature whooshed by, grazing her side with a horn in the process. Kirsty barely caught the exhaled breath, only managing to keep half of what she’d drawn in before. Her hand left the stone as the salt began to sting the unexpected wound and her blood entered the water. Kirsty saw the tail flippers of the narwhal bull from before speeding away, and then it turned back toward her faster than she expected such a creature to be able to move in such a semi confined space. She dodged as best she could before hearing a voice and the whale song.
“You have finally found your way. Now you must win it as you may.”
They spun through the water together, he seeking to gore and she shying away at the last moment. The more she ducked and dodged the faster the attacks came at her until she flung her net trying to entangle him. The momentum swept him past again and she clung as the net slid over tusk and she found herself hauled along and slammed against him. Her instincts told her to encase her legs around the bull and hold on so that she could perhaps get her spear into him to defend herself. Her current form instead more firmly held her tail and gave her no purchase but the net.
A pillar slammed into her as the whale attempted to use it to jettison her and she felt a rib crack as her breath whooshed from her lungs. The whale song came again but her ears rang too loudly from the blow to decipher what he said. She jabbed her spear after clearing the pillar, more stinging scrapes than whole skin but the angle struck wrong and all she did was make a gash in his side. The giant flicked and both she and her net sailed ahead of him. Her head hit something hard and the rest of her rolled to distribute the remains of the blow, knocking something heavy askew in the process. She felt the shift and groan of stone on stone in the water only briefly before she was rolling to avoid another attack and raising her spear to perhaps strike a blow of her own.
Mara watched from the shadows in an alcove as her favorite bull tested Kirsty’s resolve, a half smile slowly spreading over her normally sternly set face.
The water seemed to have more light to it, but she assumed that was the head blow speaking. The bull had pulled off again but was swinging around for another attempt, flippers passing close enough the current moved her. She tried to remember what she had learned of dealing with large water creatures from the silche’s net and spear hunts under their many varied conditions and techniques but nothing useful sprang from her muscle memory nor from her intellect. Her eye fell on what she’d slammed into.
It was the shining stone box, lid now partially askew. She laid her spear and net atop so that she could thrust the lid open a little further, releasing more of the light. Pelts lay rolled, seemingly more than should have been in such a small space.
“Which is mine?” She shot a look around but the bull seemed to calm as he finished his turn.
The blood hung in the water from the pair of them, the stains slowly fading. The sea unicorn dipped his head and floated in place, watching placidly.
Kirsty looked into the box again, more confident she was not going to have to go on another ride or get gored by a tusk. Grey, brown, black, red, white, mottled and plain skins all shifted around as she watched, trading places. Finally, a small shining white one with a bit of greyish blue markings on the left flipper where a wrist and her deities’ markings might be came to view and she reached for it, forgetting her net and her spear.
Warmth suffused her as she drew it out and unrolled it and her hair streamed out all around her as the currents shifted. Large blue eyes gazed back at her from the head of the skin as if to reproach her for having gotten so lost so easily so many times. Her own voice filled her head with chastisements in Gaelic, followed by the more resigned English she used in school, “But… what is done is done. We go forward together.”
Eyeing the openly lurking whale she slipped the skin on, slipping the head over hers and lining the eyes up with her own. Time began to flow normally and she could feel as her head came together, no longer divided. Net and spear lay forgotten on the box lid as she shifted fully into a proper full seal form. The whale watched as she wove through the water carefully then slid closer to gently prod the box lid. The stones groaned as the lid slid shut. The light returned to its previous low level filtering through the water.
“Do you feel better with your sealskin, Kirsty?” Mara’s voice cut through the elation, bringing a chill despite the youthful gentleness.
The white seal blinked. Where there had only been a whale before there was now both a whale and a far different view of Mara than what Kirsty had ever seen. There was no trace of the usual shark visage. Instead the deity floating and tending the wound of the sea unicorn was clearly a selkie like herself, and somehow more white than her own fur. No blemish colored her anywhere, and she shifted freely between the various permutations of selkie form. One moment she was a full seal, another halfway between with ash grey hair feeling out the water around her and a seafoam skirt swirling about her tail, and yet another she was nearly human save for the same sort of half pelt obscuring things from view she and her mother possessed, explaining at last where her halfpelt fuzz came from and why. Impossibly large eyes turned Kirsty’s way, shifting through all the myriad colors of the sea.
“I suppose… I feel mostly the same as I always did though a little less pulled thin. More in one place than before?”
“Then that is good. Treasure that feeling because there will always be times that even with it you will feel pulled in more than one direction. You’ll have to get better at setting a course.” Mara finished tending the narwhal and patted his side then watched as he went to rejoin his herd.
“I don’t think my path should have been so tangled.”
“No. It shouldn’t have been and I cannot blame that boy you are so set on. I expected better of your wayfinding but I think your path was influenced by more than just your own inner turmoil and the meddling from Finmen. You’ve passed your quest, of course, and you can be fully initiated now and when you return you will find the sealskin you wear now will transform into the white cloak you received so long ago.” Mara frowned a moment and settled on the box beside her. “I’m curious. Can you remember when you began your tests? From the beach?”
Kirsty settled on top of the box where this softer Mara gestured her to do so and tried to remember.
“My memories are conflicted… I can remember entering the water and discarding the cloak, and the dress where you asked them to be. I can remember having to fashion a spear. I… am not sure anymore if this is the net I made earlier in the year or if I had to make it along the way. But there are other memories. Another start. It’s all tangled.” Kirsty looked up at Mara, who now bent over her and curtained her with the tendrils of her hair.
“And what are those memories?” The deity’s face was cool and gentle, a soft smile, but now fangs glinted just at the edge of her lips.
The little seal inhaled deeply and sifted carefully. “The Examining Lintel stone at school. I was offered a choice at the stone by the sorters involving splitting my attention between my present time and my future because I was always thinking ahead to it and worrying.”
Mara nodded thoughtfully and bit her lip. “They have been known to interfere, or more accurately one of them in particular has been known to make some waves not of my control.”
The goddess reached down and stroked the seal’s brow, Kirsty crossing her eyes momentarily to look where she reached. Her eyes slid shut just as quickly while the fingers wove over her brow. Though her eyes were closed she could see as various strings were untangled, neatening the balls and ropes of assorted colors that had become wrapped around her. The process was repeated at her heart and again by her tail flippers.
“Should you have a child, whether with the boy or another, you must tell them NOT to strain forward in time, with or without help, when it comes to such quests. You are not the only one that has done this. It is dangerous and does impact how time flows on the quest. I’m sure you are aware how differently time already works when it comes to movements in realms like mine.” The voice was gentle, but somehow more dangerous than when coming from her shark guise.
Kirsty opened her eyes. “Should I have not?”
“Yes. You should have not. You will grow old too soon if you do it again. The brain of those who are incarnate can only withstand so much. Tell me, are there times in classes where you had headaches, perhaps nosebleeds, the last year in school?”
She blinked, surprised why Mara was asking about things so long ago. “They aren’t, they are now.” Some deeper, extremely tired part of her answered. Kirsty reached a fin up to her nose at a sting. A vice clamped at her head and she leaned into the warm shoulder beside her as an arm slipped around her.
Mara frowned and the fingers rose to Kirsty’s forehead again.
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Live Journal
Dreamwidth
Copyright 2012-2022 and onward by Teresa Garcia
The ebook's official release for Book One (Castle and Well) was March 16th on Smashwords, and is currently also on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The print edition is available in paperback on Amazon, and hardback on Lulu with Samantha Buckley's stunning cover depicting Kirsty and the storm. An audio edition of the first book in the series narrated by Illya Leonov and now available on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible, with other venues pending. (click to hear what he sounds like in past recordings of other projects)
Got a question? Ask it and maybe the answer will be revealed in the story, or in a comment on the extras page if not part of the story itself. Spy a typo? Website code broken? Would you like the episodes to be longer or shorter? Please let me know!
Installment Uploaded here: April 3, 2022
Uploaded to Dreamwidth: April 3, 2022
Uploaded to Livejournal: April 2, 2022
Patreon: April 2, 2022
Book Two's Landing
(manuscript in progress, be watching for installments)
Live Journal
Dreamwidth
Copyright 2012-2022 and onward by Teresa Garcia
The ebook's official release for Book One (Castle and Well) was March 16th on Smashwords, and is currently also on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The print edition is available in paperback on Amazon, and hardback on Lulu with Samantha Buckley's stunning cover depicting Kirsty and the storm. An audio edition of the first book in the series narrated by Illya Leonov and now available on Amazon, iTunes, and Audible, with other venues pending. (click to hear what he sounds like in past recordings of other projects)
Got a question? Ask it and maybe the answer will be revealed in the story, or in a comment on the extras page if not part of the story itself. Spy a typo? Website code broken? Would you like the episodes to be longer or shorter? Please let me know!
Installment Uploaded here: April 3, 2022
Uploaded to Dreamwidth: April 3, 2022
Uploaded to Livejournal: April 2, 2022
Patreon: April 2, 2022
Book Two's Landing
(manuscript in progress, be watching for installments)
If you'd like to have another episode in the update schedule, feel free to use the Paypal button below or the Patreon button. Alternatively you can buy an ebook, print book, or audiobook from me through Amazon, B&N, or Smashwords. Basic schedule will be biweekly release.
As of this writing I am working on Chapters for Book Two (Selkies' Skins: Temple and Skinquest).
As of this writing I am working on Chapters for Book Two (Selkies' Skins: Temple and Skinquest).
