Kelpie
A short story about fate, surrender and the sea
There are few coastlines more steeped in old magic than those of the northern isles. It leaches out of the weathered rocks into streams and rivers, flowing out into the Atlantic. And the sea returns it, washing the islands’ desolate shores with half-forgotten stories, tales with tails, and tales with teeth.
The land isn’t barren up there; a living can be coaxed out of the rich black earth, if your crops and your animals can stand up to the unforgiving climate, if you can tolerate the isolation and endless toil. Most outsiders break after a few years, overcome with failure and fatigue, back-breaking work and soul-shrivelling loneliness. But there are those, crofters native to this desolate place, who are made of the same stuff as the islands, and can endure.
Ùna came from a family of such people. She was born and bred on the west coast of the westernmost isle. Its low hills and rivers, its jagged cliffs and shorelines were etched into her soul. She was as tough as the ancient gneiss under her feet. That's why she never complained of the cold and damp, or of hunger in the lean months of the year. She didn’t even complain when her father arranged for her to marry Eachann Lawrie.
The other crofters shook their heads and said, in hushed voices, that it was a shame. Eachann was far older than Ùna, pinched by decades of struggle and near-starvation, unsociable and mean. Whereas Ùna was so young and pretty, with a head of auburn curls and a fire in her eyes to match them. All the crofters led difficult lives, balancing on the edge of a knife, staving off poverty one season at a time. What kept them going through the drizzle and gusting wind was the thought of warm arms to go home to. Everyone knew Ùna's home with Eachann would be cold. Not the cold of the isles - the kind that numbs your fingers and makes your face ache - but a cold that would shrink her, and douse her fiery soul until it was nothing but a pile of grey ash.
Ùna understood this too, but she also understood that, for a crofter's daughter, there were only two paths, and her father wouldn't keep her any longer - he had other, younger mouths to feed. Still, something inside her cried out at the unfairness of it, the wrongness of shackling something so alive to a husk of a man who could offer her nothing but a life of emptiness and hard work.
In the weeks before her wedding, Ùna shirked her work and couldn't be found for hours at a time. No one knew that, down on the shore, she had met her salvation: a creature with flowing ebony hair and eyes the colour of clubmoss on the moor. He listened to her, and talked to her in a soft voice, like waves lapping the shingle. He touched her with fingers as gentle as the caress of the water on her bare feet as they stood together on the shoreline.
She knew him for what he was, of course, though she pretended to herself that she didn't. She was infinitely sad, and it seemed a fair price to have someone to hold her, to kiss all the broken pieces of her, and not ask her to change. She didn’t care that he was a monster; she only cared only about his saltwater kisses, his hands that opened oceans inside her, that forced shuddering breaths from between her lips, like the soughing sea breeze that heralds the storm.
Ùna couldn’t bring herself to care about the grey life that awaited her, pointless and hollow. It wasn't just the certainty of death at the end from an infected cut, an incurable disease, or washed away in the blood-red tide of childbed. It was all the little deaths her soul would die when they wedded her to a cold, cruel man and bound her to a life of drudgery; the same chores day in, day out - a death sentence for the hope she had always tried to keep in her heart.
Faced with that, wasn't it preferable to drown now in the murky depths of the slate-grey sea? Wasn't it better to meet death at the hands of the only being who made her feel alive?
The day before she was supposed to speak her vows to Eachann, Ùna went down to the shore in the afternoon. The sky was overcast, and the sea roiled beneath it, threatening, beckoning.
The creature was waiting for her, as she knew he would be. Ùna believed in fate. You cannot live on the islands for any length of time and not believe in it. It is in the stones, in the water - the whisper of a story much bigger than yours. Like the island itself, there is no point in trying to fight it. You must surrender and let it carry you, because it will take you anyway, in the end.
Ùna could hear the whisper of her own story in the air that afternoon as she stood in his arms in the shallows. She wasn’t afraid when he drew her down beside him, into the freezing surf, and then out into deeper waters. Down, down into darkness he carried her, and her eyes never left his face, even when they became glassy and there was only salt water in her lungs. No one could wed her now; the kelpie had her heart, but her body and soul belonged to Manannán mac Lir.
Sadly, the kelpie released Ùna’s lifeless body and watched it sink down into the dark, her hair a halo of fire in the deep. He sighed. It was the same decision generations of men and women had made before her. All they had to do was ask, and he would let them go. But no one ever chose to live.
Oh, the selkie at the end! 🥺 But of course, why would she ask?
Thank you. Loved, as always!