[22 October '06] [Inuit mythology] "Storm's Centre", Sedna

[demoerin.livejournal.com]

Title: Storm's Centre
Day/Theme: October 22 - a dark and stormy night
Source: Inuit mythology
Characters: Sedna, her father, the birdman
Rating: R (violence)
Word count: 1 687
Notes: Because I never did get the connection between attempted murder = intro to godhood when I read this myth.

 

 

The power of a storm should spiral out from the calm eye. But now, the clouds piling into an ever-higher drift were a core of lightning, with no calmness to offer.

Sedna thought the real eye of the storm was looking at her; it was the birdman's gaze from high above, in the calm that lay beyond fury.

The bird-man's wings flapped once, and the wind from it whirled torrents of rain loose from the clouds. Sedna threw herself to the bottom kayak, pressing down and clinging as she felt the storm grow. Sedna dared to turn her face away from the kayak bottom and screamed: "No! I'm free! I won't return to you!"

"Quiet!" her father shouted. "Don't make him angrier!"

The birdman still circled above them, implacable. "Go away! Stupid creature!"

"Sedna, no!" Her father gripped her shoulder, and fell back as the kayak slipped helplessly upslope and down on swelling waves.

Sedna's eyes darted from the white shape of the birdman to waves that looked as if they touched the lowering clouds. "May they catch you!" Sedna shrieked upwards, gargling the words through stinging salt water that the wind threw at her.

Then the birdman soared away, cutting a straight, quiet path through the storm.

Sedna looked down to choke out water. Her throat burned red-raw with shouts and the pressure of tears. The tiny discomfort suddenly seemed too much, and she looked to her father as desperately as any fearful child.

He was looking around wildly, back pressed hard to the bottom and gripping the side of the kayak with one hand and the paddle with the other, as if looking for a way to fight the storm. "Stupid!" Sedna roared, enraged at the futility, and he caught her eye. Now he wore a look that spoke of the terrified hope for comfort.

Her anger became a wisp of smoke. She was afraid, and the only comfort to be had here was that there was someone to swim to death beside her.

Her father looked even more afraid as he reached out a hand to her. She raised her own to take it, though it meant giving up her grip on the boat - and his other arm brought the paddle cracking into her skull.

The force slammed her into the side of the kayak and tipped her dizzily overboard. Sedna fell, and waves surged to take her.

She screamed as she hit the water and rose choking and still screaming, heaving herself at the kayak. She caught the side and slung an arm and leg over-

The paddle struck her knee.

"Bastard! Devil! Father, please!" Sedna held on with one arm, felt the sucking pull of the sea, and launched her whole body back to the kayak. He was kneeling, raised high enough to grab - if she got hold of him, he'd have to pull her in fall with her. The paddle came down...

"Father!" Through wave-mist and darkness she saw her father's face: intent and almost blank. He judged her position in the calculating way of a man hunting for a meal he couldn't dare miss.

Her father raised the paddle and Sedna wrenched her whole body. The kayak jerked against the swell of a wave, and she almost tore herself from it, and her father lost his balance.

The paddle arced from his hand into the ocean, and her father thudded into the boat. "Pull me in!" Sedna cried. Her hands were the only part of her on the kayak, and her body was a lump ice pulled by the sea. "Father!"

She was dragged down too low to see into the kayak, and she could not hear her father over the storm - could he hear her?

She sobbed hugely when she felt a touch. "Father," she whispered. "Pull me--"

Something thin rested on the smallest finger on her left hand. Sedna's words vanished, and she remembered the hunter's look on her father's face.

Her head was beaten into the kayak's side by the waves, and water filled her mouth as she gasped. She hiccoughed it out, bringing with it phlegm and bile. Heat and life was passing out of her and to the ocean.

Then she realised what had touched her finger; her father had taken out his knife. Now he had begun to cut.

She could not scream, because her mouth was too full with salt that might be blood or sea. Sedna watched the fingers of her father's free hand curl over the kayak's side, giving him a hold as he cut with the other hand. She couldn't let go until he did: She wouldn't die without him. He could not get through this unharmed, he would not live.

She had to hold. Hold. Hold, hold!

Salt ran from her eyes in tears and from her torn throat in blood, and the sea took it all, launching into her and washing her empty from inside out.

Take it! She could not speak anymore, but that was what she told the sea. If the sea could clean her wounds, it could take her pain. It would be easy to take the pain from the parts of her body being cast to the ocean, one by one by one by - Take it!

The twitch of her father's fingers caught her attention. They shifted and gripped harder at the side of the kayak. Sedna folded one palm and two fingers over the side of the kayak, and gripped harder with her other hand.

"Father, Father!" She shouted in a way that sounded like pleading. Her father's fingers did not move.

She would not die before him. She would never die, just because he was killing her. She would not let him.

Sedna kicked her legs, though they were as ice. She could shake the kayak again to make her father fall; she could - she could swim them out of the storm if she kicked hard enough... she could ... turn the sea into a whirlpool with her legs, churning it into a spiral to suck the old man down.

His fingers gripped tight as he worked. She couldn't really grip, anymore, but she did.

Waves beat her head into the side of the kayak in a series of thudding blows, and she pushed the pain from her, screaming with no words.

Then every ache was numb, and Sedna could feel only the ebbing of sensation as her pain washed away with her blood. She gaped in relief, astonishment, and swallowed more water. With the taste of salt came distant awareness, and now she saw that her old pain had pooled blackly in those fingertips, swelling and bulging there, too immense for the tiny space.

Would the fingers burst? Would the pain come for her again?

She gripped harder on the kayak, before the shock of pain could return. Her father was working slowly now, and his hand shook violently. Could she hear him crying?

Waves washed over the boat, and Sedna watched another of her fingers going down. She gasped for joy - taking the sea water in as a benediction - when she realised that her fingers were holding the pain. Yes! She would hold. The pain swelled, and her fingers turned darker - longer - sleeker; they became as beautiful as they had been on her much-complimented hands. There were strange colours in them now, oceanic blues and blacks and greys.

The waves retreated, leaving her to the harshness of the open air. Sedna realised that her father was crying. He must be in pain too; such an old man, beaten by the waves, the wind, and fear. The knife wobbled as he cut, shaky in his grip.

Sedna looked up into the raging clouds. The bird-man had left to let the storm kill them, but it had reached a height that went beyond his control, and now the sea and the storm had saved her.

She turned her head, scraping her cheek along the side of the kayak, and caught a glimpse of her father's fingers. They looked as if their grip might slip at any moment. The storm would tip the kayak, and her father would fall into the sea...

She could not let it happen.

Sedna uncurled her left palm from the side of kayak. She would never let him have the peace. He would take every moment of pain that his days would give him.

She tried to move her other hand, but the remaining finger kept it locked into its grip, solidly frozen. She screamed, frustration tearing gales from her throat—

The knife cut through, and her father threw her last finger overboard.

Sedna sank.

She slipped swiftly downwards, watching pain pour from her hand in a billowing cloud of red. It wrapped into the last piece that had been removed from her, and in the deepness untouched by the storm, it changed. It became Black-blue-purple, wise and warm.

Sedna and the sea stroked the smooth flanks of the thing that had been made from them. The whale crooned for them, and its newborn brethren swam to it.

The seals, whales and sea lions were few. They were too beautiful to be so few...

Sedna smiled, planning how she and the sea would make them multiply. There only had to be more pain.

She let the storm calm, and sent a current to push her father home. He believed he had appeased the sea, and would return to take food from it soon.

Sedna would let him do so until she knew how to wrap pain into the very last moments of a drowning man's awareness. Her father would not be allowed to have the sea soothe his pain; he would be wrapped in it until his being was destroyed.

The trick would not be hard to master. The currents spun around her, carrying knowledge from afar; Sedna learned of the location of two kayaks drifting close to each other.

She travelled in the peace of the depths, and called the threads of a sea storm with her.