Overview
The Leave-Carry Selkie is the quick, certain hand of the Selkie Shore, a seal-bodied, skin-keeping watcher of the cold coast who carries the shore's leaves and keeps the low shore, the shore's quick, clannish, and most certain hand. It stands just over two meters in its seal-body, watchful and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept carries rather than years. Where the Skin-Keep selkie keep the skin, the Leave-Carry selkie of the shore carry the leave, and they have been carrying the first leave on the first rock for a very long time.
Habitat
The Leave-Carry Selkie keeps to the low shore of the Selkie Shore, a range of black stone where the shore is a promise and the leave is a treaty. Its dwellings are hollows of black rock and kept air, their floors dissolving and re-forming with the tide, their faces catching the grey shimmer of the coast on the inside and the shelter of the rock on the outside. It favors the lower shore where the rock runs widest and the carrying is widest, the places where a leave can be carried without the shore's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Leave-Carry Selkie is about 2.06 m in its seal-body, long and watchful, with grey-brown seal hide that reads as cold in the grey shore-light. Its flank carries the pale-silver band, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the carrying, and its nose is black rock, the color of the coast's own stone at low tide. Its eyes are pale grey, bright and certain beneath the brow, and they hold still in a way that no other eye on the shore does. It wears nothing, for the skin is its garment, and it carries a single grey stone at its throat, set with a single carry-loop at the brow, the loop of a carrier.
Behaviour
The Leave-Carry Selkie is quick, clannish, and profoundly exact, a creature of long carries and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It waits before it carries, often for hours, waiting on a rock or a person or a leave until it understands the shape of the skin, and only then does it carry, and then with an exactness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Leave-Carry selkie is a debt the shore will keep long after the carrier has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Leave-Carry selkie is no open-water fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the carry and the rock itself, not force. Its primary defense is the rock, for it knows every hollow of the low shore and can lead a pursuer along the Selkie Shore until the pursuit loses its nerve and its footing on the black stone. Should it be forced to act, a Leave-Carry selkie is quick and precise, 9 m/s in the grey water and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a fin, dimming a light, or carrying a hollow until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Leave-Carry selkie is attuned to the long word of the leave, for the leave is the carrying and the carrying is the whole of its power, and a selkie that has a shore and a hide and a carry does not need a spell that is not its own. It is not attuned to any art that is not the leave, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the nod that is the leave, which is not a magic but is a thing that the selkie of the shore have given for a very long time, and the nod is the carry, and the carry is the whole of its power.
Society
The Leave-Carry Selkie live on the Selkie Shore in clannish, quick shore-clans of twenty to a hundred, bound by the carries they keep together rather than by blood or by place, and the eldest keeper among them is honored as the Skin-Keeper. There is no elder and no ruler beyond the Skin-Keeper, for a selkie that has carried the most and left the truest is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a carry and the carry is the whole of their society.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Leave-Carry Selkie is a culture of the kept carry, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is quick and clannish is the only honest word on the shore. They keep no records, for a selkie that has kept a carry does not need a record, the carrying is the record, and the carrying is quick and clannish and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told on the rock at the low tide, and they are stories of carries kept and leaves carried and the quick, clannish difference between them, told in a voice that is exact and means every carrying.
Home
The Selkie Shore is the Leave-Carry selkie's home and its carrying, a range of black rock where the shore is a promise and the leave is a treaty, where the selkie carry their leaves and their quick, clannish words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Leave-Carry selkie has learned to live on that rock rather than against it. The grey shimmer of the coast that runs across the low shore is the shore's own, a cold light that the selkie have come to read as the color of a kept carry.
Relations
The Leave-Carry Selkie keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of the Selkie Shore, a truce of kept carries that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing on the black rock. To the grey shimmer of the low shore the Leave-Carry selkie is a quick, clannish, and absolutely exact presence, a grey-eyed carrier that is at home in the hollows and on the leave, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the carries pass, for a selkie that has carried you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the shore, the Leave-Carry Selkie is the quick, clannish edge of the tale, the place where the carries are kept and a leave is given and a carrying is read. It is the figure that carries a new leave at the low tide and holds the shore very quick and very exact, and the figure that, when the truce with the skin-keeping selkie grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old carry quick and clannish and absolutely exact.