The fog-lane is a page. The seals of Grey Stack have written on it in belly-slides.

Not hoofprints. Not paws. Long dark scribbles on wet rock and mud, where a heavy body chose the easy way down. You crouch the way Brine showed you last summer: small, quiet, a person pretending to be a post.

Pip whispers, “Kelpies are horses.”

“Kelpies are stories,” you whisper back, and then you feel a little mean, because the white shape on the bar was real enough to shake the air.

Grey Stack stands north of the bar, a knuckle of stone with a haul-out on its seaward shoulder. Seals already occupy it: harbor seals like fat commas, a few greys longer and roman-nosed. Eyes like wet stones. Whiskers that you know, because Pell told you, feel fish in the dark better than your fingers feel a knot.

A strip of shed fur hangs on a barnacle, torn. Dusk could have turned that coat into a person-shaped rumor. You file the thought in the notebook of your skull.

The lane follows cover: pickleweed, a stranded spar, a tunnel of fog that is almost a hallway. To the south, past the bar, kelp beds lie like dark pastures under the chop.

You can go carefully along the animals’ own hallway.

You can offer a selkie greeting from last summer—low, to the rock, no shouting—and see whether Brine is already watching.

A gull scolds once.