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She is my two favorites—her lower is starlight on water with sunset spots like the best river swimmers, but her upper is smooth and bald like the woodsmen I catch when the river swimmers are scarce. Her talon-moon teeth are pretty even without a muzzle to keep them, her tail smells good and sour-hot like her home, and her paws are slender and smart and scratch better than any bark that ever was. I forget everything, especially after a dreaming, but her I keep—always.

We met between mine and hers, but how we came to hunt the same prey I no longer recall. He was either a seaman who swam to shore or a woodsman who fled to sea but it does not matter. She and I found him at the same moment out on the night-cave rocks where neither of us should ever go. Hers gave to mine and so I walked between the sea pools to sniff him out, him and the dawn-striped crawlers, the sea-bushes, the wriggling innards, and all the other monsters that live and hide in the water dens. I do not trust the night-cave rocks—slick and sharp and the stalking sea can trap and drown you, like she traps and drowns them. I do not remember how I came to the man beside the pool, I just remember his shiny full-moon skin and his tiny tree-crawler noises when I arrived.

Before I could gorge she appeared from the shadow pool, her sun-river mane fooling me into thinking she had a proper coat upon her back. She grabbed one arm but I bit the other, and we stared at one another over our quarry. She is my two favorites but then and there I thought of her as neither, instead wanting only to take her home and curl up beside her for snow after snow. I do not remember who budged first, mist from my river sneaking through my trees down to our rocks and out to her sea. I do not remember if the tide ran from us or ran towards us, I only remember her.

We shared him, taking turns picking our favorites. She plucked his eyes and I plucked his liver, she picked his brain and I picked his bones. She asked if I were fickle like he and his and I said no, I think, for I was proud, but I may have said yes, for I am honest now as I was honest then. The sea returned, then, and I found I did not wish to leave the night-cave rocks. I wanted to slide down into her pool and have her wrap her tail around me and wrap her arms around me and have our dreaming there, but I was proud then, I think.

I told her I would return, and she asked when, and then the snow fell and the dawn rose in my woods. I told her in the spring and trotted off, but before I did she gave a final scratch and her no-snout brushed my proper snout and I felt her seal-skin soft paw and licked. She tasted of my two favorites but I wanted only to keep her outside my belly. I asked if she would return as well and she promised she would, if I proved myself not fickle. I am proud now as I was then and agreed, and she had me swear I would eat neither of my two favorites until next we met to prove my heart was true.

That snow-time’s dreaming kept her close, and perhaps that is how I remembered. Yet on my coastal rest of roots, my fur scented with pine sap and dyed with mud and berry, the sea comes and goes and I pad the night-cave rocks and still I cannot see her, even as I feel her ghost luring me towards the water. I catch the sea swimmers and let them go again, once they promise to find her for me. The few others of my ilk think me mad and stay away, and I only just sustain myself on the berries and roots and nuts and any small-muzzles or horn-runners I can catch. I have grown old and lean and will not last another dreaming, and I can remember nothing but her and my promise, and when the snow again meets the mist I will take to the sea and not return.

* * *

He is my two favorites—the wild, raw as my dinner, strong as the sharks I battle for no greater end than sport, and proud as my own will, but he is also the not-wild, as placid and soft in secret places as the men I catch and drown. His honesty surprised me, the first to neither shame himself nor me, and while he is woollier than the hoariest walrus I think I like him better than even the fairest bald sailor. I can be fickle, especially after long winters dallying in the deep, but him I would keep—always.

We all have secret songs, ballads without words, and from the feast we shared in that liminal space between worlds I have wondered if the ill-lucked man we caught were unconscious bait I set for him or he for me, or if something more brought together two such disparate lovers as we. I think him crass when he does not come even if I am the one who stays hidden, I compare his greed for a scratched haunch to what the seamen desire and find little difference, yet that song of mine would lilt differently if words it had, that yowling, pressing voice I never knew until we parted, wanting only to again feel his sticky fur between my fingers, to taste his scalding breath upon my blooming cheek, to have his words again fire my thoughts and buoy my heart.

Never before have I thought such strangeness, neglecting old habits and passions and whims, love-sunk sailors a bore, great leviathans no longer fit for jousting. I wish mostly to teach him and have him teach me, as we taught each other that gloaming as winter slipped down around our ears. He taught me that our borders were ours but what lay beyond belonged to us and no other, that the sea is mine and the wood is his and I scoffed at his hubris, chiding his presumptions. I taught him the words men use for themselves and we and the world at large yet he simply yawned and forgot most of what I said, his coming sleep cheating him of what wit he might possess. Something more than this too-brief meeting keeps him ever behind my lids, sleeping or awake, the terror such as my sailors must know when I awake from dreams of solid earth and solid air, dreams I never wish to end so long as he is there.

Others think me lost and I cannot fault them, for I dread the winter and pine until spring amidst the dusky forests that never bud. Bold promises he made in our courting, and the fish he catches always swim free with my name on their thin lips, never the worse save for a torn scale and the fright of a predator’s gentle jaw. I chew them slowly, my delighted tongue and teeth where his have been so freshly, and I rend the unhappy things with frustration that comes from either his piety or my own. Several times between dawn and dusk I resolve to show myself, to lay myself bare so that he might keep his word or lose it in his passion, for my flesh is made of sweeter stuff than the tree-blood he so covets. Yet I never do even as I feel his approach in my bones, and as he advances, pushing the tide into my arms, I retreat, veiled by the slightest of curls, the thinnest of foams, and as I roll my home back towards his, it is I who advance, ever hidden, as he reluctantly scrambles back into his watching place beneath the trees.

I am unlike myself, doubting and shy, and even as he eschews his favorites to show his devotion I wonder if the pull to be with him, a tugging stronger than the moon upon my world, I wonder if it will not bring ruin, and so I secret myself away. I would gift a sleek new skin of seal to replace his shaggy pelt were he to relent first and join me, and such impossible tests I project upon him rather than bundling my beneath up around my waist and marching to his lair as I would were I half so bold as I pretend myself.

It has grown too fierce, the push inside my breast, and I must quit him forever or join him at once, for he is weary and ancient and will not last another of his dreamings. I have ways to keep him always but only if I go now, if I abandon my eternal realm to make him my own before his lungs crack and his breath flounders and that mighty heart I so covet lies still and cold as the rocks where we met. It is no choice at all, and when the mist again meets the snow I will take to the earth and not return.

* * *

They were the two things I feared the most—he the natural yet horrifying embodiment of inescapable mortality, and she the monstrous yet irresistible and self-inflicted doom of the soul—and together they devoured me amidst the tide pools. The sea claimed what little of me they did not lap from the rocks or each other’s wet faces, but then they parted and I parted and the pain can neither be measured by man nor beast nor goddess nor anything else but the spirit itself, once divided. Into the depths of wood and abyss, into darkness and madness, not abandoned with the last of my teeth and toenails in cave or kelp but dragged ever after to haunt the gullets of my killers always.

We lonesome riven dead forget all names but our own, the memories of faith and hope and dream eclipsed by the cramping hunger for wholeness, the scratching thirst for completion, if only for enough time to fade and vanish. Or any end, really, to the agony of separation, of drowning every moment in dark trenches even as frigid air chokes and smothers, of needing all of one or none of the other but gagging on both. Screaming through their bones through the years, formless and increasingly mindless, doppelgangers lacking cohesive thoughts save when the lodestones draw close and semblances of reason return to the two that I have become. Then the cajoling, the whispering, the begging, the demanding. Do not forget anything save your pride; that you may dispense with. Each time we flit just below the jade surface as we pace the ebon rocks above I cry out to myself, close enough to remember how it ought to be for all ages, only to dive deep or lope away and again lose all but my desperate need.

Yet now it is different, and each and all of us feel it. The snow is again drifting down and the mist is again drifting up, the waves above and the waves below, and now the snow flutters against our hair and onto our coat, and I bid myself closer, I make every promise to the hearts as twin in flesh as I have become in soul and then we join the sea and we join the earth and whether I shall be obliterated entirely or persist forever as the shade I have become I can no longer care, for I am again a single, unfisssured thing in the snow and mist upon the sea. Unto myself I am returned.