The Lighthouse Keeperâs Selkie
Fantasy/Romance short. A selkie becomes fascinated with a cold man living alone.
4.1k, M/M, rated M. Note warnings for non-graphic violence and butchery, themes of captivity, and cannibalism.
DĂșn has been watching the man in the white tower since he arrived.
The white tower has been there at the end of the peninsula for some decades now â the surfacers call it a âlighthouseâ, because there is a great fire burning at the top of the tower, and at night time, or when it storms and it is very dark, a mirror spins to send out that light in a wide beam, that ships are not dashed upon the nearby reefs and rocks.
He is a bad man, the lighthouse keeper.
DĂșn considers himself no expert in the morality of surfacers, but he knows that they look unkindly upon the killing of their own, and as any species does, look even less kindly upon killing without reason, indiscriminately, which it seems to DĂșn this one does.
Now and then people become lost, and they wander up and down the beaches before they make their way to the lighthouse. They knock on its door on dark and foggy nights, and never does the lighthouse keeper permit them entry, or give them solace within â he gives them directions, and sends them wandering out into the fog, sometimes out onto the reefs themselves.
They fall from outcrops and hurt themselves, or sometimes are simply swept up in the waves â DĂșn has feasted on their corpses, and shared them out amongst his people.
It is the suspicion of the selkies, and of the mermen too, that this man is perhaps imprisoned here for some crime or other beyond those he now kills, because up âtil now, the lighthouse has run on magic, with no keeper to attend it.
He is thin and bony, as many surfacers are â he has a hard jaw and deep sunken eyes, and sunken cheeks, and hair that is black with streaks of rocky grey.
One morning, as the sun is dawning, DĂșn creeps up the rocky embankment to the head of the peninsula, and he pauses on the rock, staring at the keeper. He is sitting on the step of the lighthouse, the door open behind him, and he is holding a metal cup, is drinking from it.
Steam rises from the cup, and DĂșn looks through the steam to the lighthouse keeperâs face.
DĂșn is very close to him. Some fifteen or twenty paces away, he is, perched on one of the larger, more stable stones â in the summer time, this is a very nice place to sit and warm oneself, enjoying the heat absorbed by it, but it is still winter, and the spring thaw has yet to arrive.
The keeper does not reach out for him, or speak to him. He does not compliment DĂșnâs fine hair or his handsome whiskers, nor the beautiful dark shine of his eyes, or the sharpness of his teeth â he does not ask DĂșn to give him his pelt, or even compliment it.
Instead, the keeper simply stares at him warily, saying nothing.
