Seal Skin

Chapter one: the man in the sealskin

It wasn't safe, he knew, to be a lone wicky. The sea was apt to drive sane men to madness, and without company, without conversation to mask the crash of the waves, the incessant drone of the foghorns, it was all the easier for the sea to snake his slick, wet tendrils inside a man's ear.

Lannister always referred to the sea as a "him", not a "her". Not out loud, mind you, that'd make him strange to the other mariners. But in his mind, the ocean seemed much more to him like a drunken father than a fickle wife. A great large thing that could be calm one moment, and squalling the next, beating itself against the walls of wherever one took shelter. A powerful and terrible thing that gave gifts apathetically, washing them to the shore, only to wash them away again, often taking something that belonged to you with it. But Lannister never expressed these thoughts, for he was a mariner and not a poet, though once he might've wished to be.

He'd been tasked with keeping the lighthouse over the winter and into next fall because everyone else in the guild had the money and standing to refuse it. The pay wasn't bad, mind you, nor was the work overly hard, but the cold isolation of spending half a year in a lighthouse with a stranger, or, in Lannister's case, by oneself, was not a pleasant prospect. But it wasn't as if Lannister had any plans, or family to visit regarding Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving. Solitude suited him because it had to, and so Christmas passed as any other day would, and Lannister did not pray, or sing, or even double his rations. He was not a holy man, and he viewed religion as any other superstition of the sea. Something for old fools and young idealists.

December gave way to January, and Lannister performed his tasks as normal, until the sixth day of the month. He'd gone out to his nets, bundled in wool and oilskene to keep the icy spray off his skin, to check to see what fish were to become dinner that night. He found it strangely heavy, and after drawing it up with much effort, found in it the body of a harbor seal, still and unmoving. The corpse seemed fresh dead, and there's a great many useful things a mariner can get from a fresh dead seal: fur, meat, fat to be rendered for the gaslamps; and so Lannister set to drawing the great thing out of the net. He'd come back for the fish later.

Carrying it to the shed was easier said than done. It was a runty thing, but had surprising weight to it, and it's slick fur made it difficult to hold. Once or twice, he could have sworn he felt it shift, something under the skin twitching in his arms. He wondered, briefly, if he'd caught a mother with a belly full of pups. But that couldn't be, as the creature was easily able to be sexed as male, and it seemed too small to be able to hold anything other than itself.

He dropped it on the board that served as a butcher's table in the clapboard shed, straw laid under his feet to keep blood off the floor, and the dim room stank of fish. He rolled the seal onto its back, and, with the cleanest knife he had, began to slice open the soft skin of its belly.

There was no great spurt of blood, which at first, Lannister attributed to his careful cutting. He only wished to deglove the creature, to leave the fat and meat whole and untouched, and the viscera easy to remove. Still, however, he felt the tip of his blade make purchase with something firmer below the skin, something writhing. When the cut was from the gullet to groin, he parted the skin and looked inside.

At first he thought this was the fat cap, or blubber, of the seal. But as it began to squirm, he dropped his knife in horror.
Somehow, curled up in a fetal position inside the seal's empty, bloody skin, was a man. He coughed, brackish black water spilling from his mouth, and turned his head upwards, eyes opening blearily. The mariner gasped as the creature sought purchase to remove himself, shakily, from the seal skin.

He was the queerest man Lannister Davies had ever seen, his hair was long and matted down his back with sweat and blood, he was short and solid, the sort of stoutness that suggests muscle as well as fat, his feet and hands were small yet wide, and his skin was exceptionally pale, sparsely covered in dark brown hair. His face was round and moonish, with thick, coarse brows and a flat wide nose, a small mouth, and huge seal eyes, dark as night with barely any white to them. Long, stiff whiskers stuck from either side of his face, and seemed to twitch. He knelt atop the butcher's table, naked, and Lannister could see he possessed no cock, though what he did possess was uncertain. Despite this, he knew what he was looking at was undoubtedly a man, perhaps not a human man, but a man all the same. He stood frozen as the creature knelt over his dessicated skin, looking back at him often, huge eyes scared and wild. Lannister had never cared much for sea stories, but he had heard enough to know what he was looking at. He'd heard stories of old sea dogs tell of voluptuous young women who swam as seals, discarding their animal skins during the full moon to dance on the beaches and seduce human men. Selkies, they were called. He'd also heard, in these stories, that if a man stole the selkie's skin, or hid it, or worse, destroyed it, that the selkie was then betrothed to him, and was bound by some ancient magic to be his bride. He'd caught a selkie, and destroyed his skin. The realization seemed to hit both creatures at the same time, and they stared at each other for a long moment, before the selk-man gave a hoarse, keening cry so loud it sent a shudder through the wicky, it's face screwed up, black gums and sharp teeth visible. Lannister fled.