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The sea is rough tonight, out where the breakers are rolling in over the low-tide line. Usually this is his favorite time for beachcombing, when everything is quiet and far away and he can be out here by himself, just a dwarf and his Light cantrip and whatever the sea has left for him to find.
Tonight, though . . . Merle sighs and rakes his fingers through his beard, dislodging a strand of bentgrass that catches the wind and flutters off into the dunes at his back. Tonight the sound of the sea and the tug of the salt breeze doesn’t do anything to help. It doesn’t ease away the ache in his jaw where he carries all his stress, or the leaden exhaustion in his guts when he thinks about tomorrow and the next day and the rest of his life.
Merle bends down, lavender light shimmering from the strap of the bag slung over his shoulder, and picks up the bleached-white shell of a scallop. It’s broken along one edge, sharp as a dagger, and he lets it drop back into the sand.
It’s not accurate to say he and Hekuba had a fight. That’d imply the existence of an alternate state, something involving the two of them not fighting, and that . . . shit, Merle can’t remember for sure when that state last existed. Sometime around Mookie’s second birthday, probably, and the little fireball’s nearly five now.
He sighs and pushes himself back to his feet, knees creaking as he does. The first moon is just cresting the horizon, a razor-thin line of silver that casts a handful of shimmery sparks across the breakers. It’s beautiful, in a spare kind of way. He picks his way along the wrack line, eyes on the sand, looking for lost things washed up by the waves.
He loved it here when he first arrived, those early days when he was still a little unmoored and uncertain. The old human woman who dropped him off told the village elders she’d found him on the road, dazed from some kind of spell or head injury, and had brought him to the nearest dwarves she knew of. That they just so happened to be distant kin of his was good fortune, or Pan’s intervention, and Merle had been grateful. Still is, he supposes, even if it’s all gone sour now.
They didn't ask too many questions, which suited him because he's never had as many answers as he should. He thinks probably whatever injury he took before he met that good stranger made something just a little off inside his head, left funny gaps and memories that skitter off like crabs when he reaches for them.
He went out into the world looking for something when he was young. That’s a memory he remembers clear as day, that certainty that beyond the enclaves of Pannite dwarves there was something else that would make him feel whole. The rest of his memories are a jumble, wanderings and wrong turns, disconnected journeys in search of something nameless. Sometimes he has a faint impression that he found it, whatever it was, but that's ridiculous.
If he had found it, why the hell would he ever have come back here?
Well. Maybe that's not entirely fair. They're good folks, here. They did him a favor, taking him in despite the distance of their relation. It was only fair, honestly, for him to try and make up a little bit of that debt. Pick up a little bit of that slack. Hekuba had the baby to care for, a pearl farm to run, a dead husband to mourn. She'd needed something, and the clan had thought it was Merle.
In retrospect Merle thinks maybe what she needed was a clan that would've helped her take the burden without expecting her to marry for the privilege. Maybe some time and space to mourn while someone else took care of things. Maybe just a new spouse that wasn't him.
Whatever she needed, she didn't get it. Neither one of them did. They just got each other, and Pan knows they tried to make that be enough. But it's been . . . Fantasy Christ, it's been seven years, and it's not enough, and it never will be, and Merle is so, so tired.
It’s not Hekuba’s fault, and it’s not the kids’ fault, and it’s not Merle’s fault, either. It would be so much easier if only there were someone to blame, but there isn’t. There's just Merle and Hekuba and their mutual sharp edges, biting into each other and growing progressively more miserable as time goes by.
Merle crouches and picks up a stick of driftwood, grey and tumbled smooth. The salt sea has taken all the weight of it, left it strangely light and hardly recognizable as something that used to belong to the land.
Sometimes his life and his memories feel like a puzzle box. Merle has the faint memory of someone putting one of those boxes into his hands, once, walking him through the steps of moving lovingly carved pieces until they slotted into place, until the lid lifted and there was something wonderful inside. Something he doesn’t remember anymore.
The problem with Merle is that his pieces slide and catch against each other but they never quite go where they’re supposed to, never open up onto something more precious within. They just rattle and jam and leave him feeling lost, like he’s perpetually walked into a new room and forgotten what he came in there for.
Merle slips the driftwood into his bag. Maybe he'll make something out of it. More likely it'll sit on the cottage windowsill until Hekuba throws it out or Mookie snatches it to poke at dead birds and washed-up sea jellies.
Merle used to tell people he loved the sea because it was always changing. Lately, though, he's realized he was wrong.
The sea is never still, but it also never gets anywhere. It moves, but it doesn't change. He loves it but it isn't what he needs. He loves it and he hates it and those are just two more sliding pieces that won't -- can't -- fit. Merle can feel the weight of that wrongness in his muscle and sinew, in his bones and his teeth. It makes him want to scream out into the waves until the sound shakes something loose. It makes him sharp in all the wrong places, turns him into a broken thing that cuts everyone around it.
Hekuba sees the worst of him; Merle suspects it's because they're just too busted up in too many too-similar ways. Lately, though, he's found himself getting worse with everyone else. Worse with the kids, which scares the shit out of him. He loves the two of them, he does, he loves them so much it aches. Nothing scares him worse than hurting them, by action or by apathy, and either one of those feels more likely the longer he stays in this too-calm, too-loud, not-enough place.
He bends down, picks up a whelk shell and holds it cupped in one hand. It fits like it was carved to settle into the curve of his palm. So little now feels like it was meant to fit him. So little ever has.
He should talk to somebody, maybe. Let someone in the village listen to his troubles, see if they have any advice to offer him, anything to ease the ache. Or maybe he should spend more time with Pan, get himself a copy of the Good Book and get serious about the faith of his youth. He calls himself a cleric, he uses the cantrips and spells, but the truth is that the last time he actually spoke to Pan was . . . hell, he doesn’t even know.
Merle could do either of those things. If he really wanted things to change, he could even try talking to Hekuba -- really talking, not sniping or grumbling or shouting. He could reign in his sharp edges long enough to show her where he’s hurt, offer to let her do the same, maybe find some way out of this broken, jumbled place they’re in together.
He’s not going to do any of those things, though. He slips the shell into his bag and stands up again, breathing in salt and the scent of kelp. Doing any of those things would require him to be a different dwarf than he is.
He went looking for something once, when he was younger. Either he never found it, or he found it and lost it, and he doesn't know which one upsets him more. But the one thing he knows for sure is that it isn’t here. It never was.
It’s still out there somewhere, maybe, if it exists at all.
Merle looks up at the cold black sky above him and the stars in all their bright, nameless brilliance. Mavis once asked him to teach her the names and the shapes and all he could do was smile sadly and tell her she’d have to ask somebody else, because he’s never been able to keep them straight, can’t use them for guidance like some people he might once have been able to name. Pan is in everything, maybe, but he’s never been in the stars. Not for Merle, anyway.
He turns his face back to earth. The tide is rolling in now, off to his left, making its inevitable crawl up the long bare plane of unbroken sand. Lights shine from the cottage windows behind him like the golden eyes of a crouching owlbear. Far back of that the village lights glow like the beast brought reinforcements.
Merle breathes deep, lets the tang of the nighttime air fill his lungs until they feel like they will burst. The first moon is up now and the second is following, and the beach is pale and silent, and the wrack line rolls out ahead of him like a black, jaggedy ribbon, like a road laid out by a madman or a monster.
The waves break. The moon rises. Merle starts walking.