You and Pip take over a quay plank and every scrap of charcoal.

Three pictures. A selkie stepping from a coat that is also a door, drawn as honestly as your hands allow. A kelpie that is a bar with a mane of foam, sea around it instead of hooves. A moon and a clock, Sun and Moon pulling on the same team.

Caption, which you argue about and then do not:

Promises are how water remembers us.

You stop arguing for a day. It feels like putting down a heavy basket. Kade looks in, sees no bounty, sees a map of how stories stitch, and does not send extra hands to the kelp. Wren, shown the plank, snorts, then copies the bar-hump into his own book because even skippers like being right in public.

Merrick adds a fourth doodle in the corner: a tin cup of brackish water. “For the pocket.”

The Storm-Horse is still on the bar, unnamed as a trophy, named as a neighbor-weather. The skin is still a problem for another tide—you have not opened every lock with charcoal. You have made it harder for magic to be an excuse.

Charcoal on your fingers. Pip bumping your shoulder like a friend, which is all.

THE END

What you learned: selkies, kelpies, and tide-clocks are a collage—seal-people, drowning-warnings, Moon-and-Sun pull—and people stitched them because wonder is portable. Drawing the pieces apart is not the death of magic. It is how you keep the living mouth in the picture. A drawing, though, is not yet a returned coat.