Fic: Selkie

[meridian_rose]

Title: Selkie
Fandom: Original
Rating: PG
Word Count: 314
Prompt: For the writerverse 'beginnings and endings' challenge
Summary: Half-selkie, half-human. The balance is hard to maintain
Warnings: None

I chose the beginning provided by mareel, which is shown in the initial italics.


The sea has never stopped calling to me. Despite all of my denials of that call, I've never silenced it. To do so would be a denial of who I am.

In the stories men steal our skins and force us to be their brides. I don't know what about us is so alluring. Perhaps it is because it is forbidden. Or maybe it is the desire to own and control something no man should. We belong to the sea, the great mother ocean, ruled over by the feminine moon.

My mother left the sea willingly for love of my father. She birthed me in sea water, though, and throughout my childhood she bathed me in the ocean. Even now I can't move far from the coast. If I go more than month without at least paddling my bare feet in the waves I feel drained and lethargic.

I'm a selkie, or at least half-selkie, but I've been raised as a human. I have no desire to live beneath the waves, and give up my electronic communications and warm bed. Yet I cannot turn away from my heritage either. The balance is difficult to maintain. Easier to deny the call at neap tides. Harder at spring tides. Come, the sea calls to me then more than ever. Come, and stay.

The thing is, I'm afraid. Afraid that one day I'll swim out too far, dive too deep, and forget my human side. That the embrace of the ocean will be too strong for me to resist. That I'll never again eat in a restaurant or sit in a park and read a book.

They're foolish fears. My fully selkie mother managed to overcome the pull of the waves to walk onto dry land; surely I can always do the same.

Yet the sea's call quickens my heart. Come, she whispers. Come, and stay.