Eulogy for the Storm-King

Fiction

We stand upon the shale, where the salt has etched lines into our skin, to return what was never truly ours. Look at him. Look at the translucence of his skin; the way his hands tremble like sea-foam. For one hundred years, we knew him as the Old Man of the Shoals. He mended nets. He taught our children the geometry of the currents. He slept in a bed of driftwood and wool, shivering in the winter frosts that should have been beneath his notice. Yet, we must remember the weight of the silence he kept. We remember the year the Northern Gale sought to erase our harbor, and how he simply stepped into the surf. He did not speak. He did not shout. He merely expanded. For one hour, the horizon vanished. He became a wall of black water three hundred feet high, a crushing weight that could have ground our stone cottages into sand. He did not destroy us. Instead, he caught the gale in his own chest, folding the storm back upon itself, absorbing the violence so that we might wake to a calm morning. He was the balance. When the tides grew greedy and threatened to swallow the lower pastures, he whispered to the deep. When the merchant ships were blinded by the fog, he cast a singular, bioluminescent pulse from the cliffside to lead them home. He lived as a man, but he breathed as an ocean. Now, the human shell fails. The salt is reclaiming the marrow. We do not weep for a loss of life, for he is eternal. We weep for the loss of the kindness that chose a fragile shape. As we commit this form to the Seventh Tide, we guide the consciousness back. Return to the crushing depths. Return to the cold, unthinking pressure of the abyss. Leave the wool and the driftwood behind. Go now, Storm-King, and let the deep be still.