Merrick’s chest is cedar and stubbornness.

The rule goes in with a card in Pip’s best letters:

NOT SALVAGE (seal-skin / selkie door). A coat is a way home. The bar is the kelpie. Legends travel farther than boats. Ask how.

People come all evening. They come for a miracle pelt and leave with a clock in their heads. Wonder moves without a trophy. A girl decides to keep tide-marks. A boy decides to be Merrick. Kade does not become a villain or a saint. He becomes slower than Brine would like.

Mixed, because mornings matter: the coat sleeps one night under cedar, then goes to Grey Stack on the first decent ebb, with you and Pip as awkward honor-guard. Brine accepts it without pretending the delay was perfect.

You touch the card once more. Dry, plain, from a village that almost made a ledger into a shrine.

Merrick says, “Holy fences work better with visiting hours.”

THE END

What you learned: naming a taken thing kindly still leaves work—the thing has to go home. Museums and story-chests can teach if they don’t become a second theft. Selkie lore and seal biology can share a card without one eating the other.