He was rowing home with his catch, as he always did, when he heard the song drifting over the waves. It was sad and lonely, played with amazing skill on what had to be one of the finest flutes in all of creation, and it beckoned to him. He changed his course, and he found the source of that song: a woman sat upon the rocks, her fair hair tossing unbound in the wind, her gown shimmering like fish scales while she played a flute carved from a narwhal’s horn. Everything about her was wondrous, and yet the sorrow in her song wrenched his heart.

He waited there, his boat bobbing in the waves, until her song was done; and only then did he call out to her, asking why such a lovely woman would be here all alone, playing such a mournful song.

“I am cursed,” she told him, “and any man who shares my life will be taken by the embrace of the sea.”

Some might have scoffed at such things, but he did not. He knew too many legends of such curses, and he knew that even the wildest legend had its essential truth; and yet he was not afraid. “I am a fisherman, and live each day in the sea’s embrace already,” he said. “Come with me, and set your loneliness aside.”

She was hopeful, and came with him, and within three days they clasped each other’s hands and spoke words of loyalty, and each wore necklace of silver. For a time, all was well; but every fortnight, without fail, one morning he would wake to find her gone from their bed, and when he found her again, she would be out on the rocks, playing her sad song. And he asked why she left him so to continue her mourning, and she said, “You have been kind to me, and I love you, but I am cursed, and the sea will claim its due. It will take you, and it will not let you go.”

After one such morning, he spent the next fortnight beseeching the spirits of the creatures of the sea, begging a boon by which his wife might be free of her curse. Shark and Fish and Eel, deep beneath the waves, did not hear his call. Dolphin was at play and Whale was singing Her own song. But Otter heard him, and was curious, and came to hear his plea, on the day before the full moon.

“Such a curse cannot be turned away so easily,” Otter told him.

But he knew that such curses do not always come true in the manner one expects, and he begged that even if the curse could not be lifted, Otter might grant him a boon, by which he might be taken by the sea and yet survive to be with his love.

And Otter was intrigued, and in His whim, He granted the fisherman a boon for the mere asking.

When the man did not return that evening, the woman thought the sea had claimed him at last. As she had done every fortnight, she went to her place in the rocks, and took the skin she had hidden there, and leaped into the waves a seal, to mourn. But even as she swam from shore, an otter came to her through the surf, a silver chain shining around his neck.

And they swam into the ocean’s embrace, together.