With that, Angus started towards the roaring ocean, his grandmother's dead body still paddling and rowing gracefully right beneath the surface of the waves. Ronald and Anstice summoned him back, but he only heard , glorious bagpipes had infused his mind and he knew she was content.
The ice cold grip of the sea took his legs, then his waist, but still he bore forward.
He would swim with his grandmother.
No joy could trump swimming with his grandmother one last time.
Angus was no stranger to the water. A sailor. A captain.
He took to the paralysing temperature with ease and swam to where the corpse was diving and sliding below, and above. Ronald and Anstice stood looking on, unable to join, unable to leave. They watched. They watched.
The heaving waves began to mask Angus' head more frequently and eventually his elated cries went mute and his head was lifted above no more.
He was gone.
The ocean engulfed him entirely and claimed him for his love and compassion. If at all, that was a legitimate reason as any to die for.
From the tide spewed the sea lady Mayem's corpse.
She swam in the shallows until the shallows became beach and as the tide pulled away from her, so did her animation and eventually she lay on the shore, bare and contorted once again in the rain that now failed to move her as it had before.
The two people from the morgue collected the cadaver on the beach as they would on a normal day. But this was not a normal day.
Not for them.
Not for anyone who bore witness to the anomaly they now knew and could not prove.
That day the ocean claimed a sacrifice for the granting of one last wish.
A wish so strong in its yearning that it ventured across the natural and the god-will, to appease the heart that had asked it.
Some wishes transcend comprehension and sometimes, when the weather in the soul is just right, and the yearning in the heart is true, the supernatural will afford it.