#aldridge

“We know, most of all, that the sea-witch is our enemy. / Everything within the water fears her, and she hates us most of all. So long as the sea-witch swims the sea, we will never be truly safe.”

I am once again v interested in the post-TUT dynamics because. the Luidaeg ends up with the majority of her descendant race growing up thinking of her as the enemy who hates them. even if she feels differently towards them now that they’re Roane, she created such a schism with the Selkies, how can she ever have a positive relationship with the Roane?

“All these things are true, and all these things are cold and cruel, and all these things are incomplete.”

it’s a little unclear in DTL if the opening is from her in the future the same way it is in ISST. I’d assume that, but she doesn’t actually say the direct connection between Annie and the sea witch. still all the discussion of the sea-witch makes me think so, which means “All these things are true” hurts. Liz genuinely does end up with a more nuanced view of the sea witch (see: the ISST opening), but there is something so sad about the fact that the Luidaeg had a relationship with her for so long and at the end of it all, it still remained true (to Liz and in general) that the Luidaeg hates them, is their enemy, and is not safe. 😔

“My Annie. The woman who’d pulled me out of my grieving over a life I was never going to live and shown me that there was value in the life I had, value in being Elizabeth Ryan, not quite human, not quite fae, clever in my own way, reasonably kind, reasonably pretty, and somehow lucky enough to convince a dark-haired girl named Annie to fall in love with me. Before I loved Annie, I had never really known how to love myself. She had given me everything. She had been my home in a way the house in Half Moon Bay had never been.”

goddd the hazards of being swept up in this relationship from such a young age and tying her self-worth to Annie so much, and how Annie rejecting her them fucks her up so badly 🥺🥺 “I had never really known how to love myself” I am hurting for her

“Annie inhabited the same liminal space as I had: she was Selkie-kin, a distant cousin of one of the clans, not fully part of Faerie but unable to walk away, because she didn’t know anything else. But unlike the rest of us, she had never wanted a skin. She’d treated the idea like it was something barbaric and wrong, like anyone who wanted to become a Selkie was committing some sort of crime, not chasing a beautiful future full of immortality and magic. Maybe it was because Annie was a changeling in her own right, with at least one Roane parent, but she’d never seemed to understand why the rest of us wanted the skins so badly, why we spent our lives dreaming of the sea.”

okay this bit adds something to ISST — the fact that Annie was always vaguely hostile to the idea of accepting a skin. It does make her reaction not come out of nowhere, but she still crucially didn’t explain herself, leaving Liz with a whole lot of misconceptions.

“And that whole time, she’d been just a little older than sixteen, not quite twenty, while I got older and older beside her, until the people at the farmer’s market and the co-op had started giving me odd looks. Until the first time I’d heard a stranger in the coffee shop sniff behind her hand about how people like me should be locked up for preying on the youth.”

we already talked a bunch about the whole perceived age gap thing re: ISST, but flagging this because of the specificity of that comment, and how much it must have stung. and the unfairness of Liz having to put up with these comments, when she was in fact the very young woman swept up by an ancient immortal.

I wonder if all the clans have the same age cutoff, or if this is specific to the Ryan clan? It seems much more a cultural thing than a “built into the rules of how Selkies work” thing, forty is a pretty arbitrary age cut off.

“So I was happy and I was scared and I was getting older and terrified of getting too old for everything I loved, and Annie was all I’d ever wanted, but I knew deep down that I was going to lose her as soon as I reached a certain age, even if I didn’t know what that age was. Where was the invisible line between happiness and abandonment? I’d been picking myself to pieces trying to figure it out, and then the phone had rung, and my mother had been on the other end, telling me that she was ready to pass her skin, asking me whether I wanted to carry it.”

flagging this re: my point in the other thread about how Annie thinks the aging thing is just an excuse, when it’s actually something that Liz has been genuinely torn up about.

“At the time, I’d thought it was because she was part-Roane, with no Selkie parent to pass a skin to her: she could never be closer to the sea than she already was. But my Annie had never been petty or cruel without reason: she would never have denied me the waves, denied us the chance to be together forever, without a good reason. I thought she’d get over her anger. I thought she’d forgive me.”

also flagging this re: my “Liz made the best decision she could with the information she had” thing. She didn’t understand — the Luidaeg made sure she didn’t understand — what the point of not taking the skin was, when there were clear benefits for her and for the relationship. the only thing that makes sense is that Annie is jealous, and Liz quite reasonably is not gonna let that control her decision. especially when arguably the “one of them is immortal and one is mortal” imbalance is more dramatic than “one of them can transform and one can’t.” From Liz’s pov, Annie is asking her to give up immortality, something that Annie already has, just so they’re on equal “can’t have the sea” footing. With the information she has, it’s a shitty ultimatum, and imo, good on Liz for not caving to it.

“Most of them wouldn’t even speak to me. The ones who did were evenly split between telling me they didn’t know who I was talking about and telling me they didn’t know where she was.”

apartment gone, whole neighborhood turned against you…..yeah that would be horrifying to experience! and the implication that at any time, the Luidaeg could have turned all the mortals around them against Liz, if she wanted to.

also wait. when the Luidaeg hid the apartment, she kept all of Liz’s stuff. what did she do with it?? 👀

what got thrown out or magically destroyed? what has she kept all these years, because she can’t let go?

filing away that thought for later

“Selkie-kin who had not yet received skins of their own were often as diurnal as humans, and with my own internal clock shifting more toward the fae standard of sleeping all day and being awake all night by the moment, I found the fact that I sometimes needed to be awake at noon to serve sandwiches to the youngest cousins absolutely horrific.”

this does contradict OSS by saying Selkies are nocturnal, it’s just Selkie-kin that aren’t…..on the other hand AKF shows the Roane being pretty nocturnal, so it makes sense that the Selkies would be?

I also think it’s more interesting if there’s this diurnal/nocturnal divide, because of how that affects the clan dynamics, how that affects relationships between Selkies and Selkie-kin, etc.

oof the de-aging thing — yeahhh makes sense that Liz is having some kind of feelings about her body changing and having no control over it. even after all her self-consciousness about aging, having your body not feel like yours is. yeah.

“an oddly woody floral blend that smelled like afternoon on the dunes, like hot sun and sweet air and everything I’d ever loved about beachcombing.”

inch resting—it’s a little unclear what the two distinct scents are meant to be? but tbh I do enjoy seeing what magic smells in other povs who can’t pick out all the components in intense detail 😄

“Some of the people in your life…they’re not entirely what they seem.” “You mean Annie.” / “She wasn’t good for you,” she’d said finally. “I’m glad you came home.” I’m glad one of us is,” I’d replied. “I’m going swimming.”

oooh fascinating that Dorothy is really poking at the limits of that geas.

also I feel like this implies Dorothy passed her skin specifically to separate Liz from Annie, and the sacrifice and defiance of that gesture (knowing what happens to Dorothy) is so 🥺🥺

She made a mistake when she gave Tempe’s skin to Colin and not Liz, she didn’t realize about Liz and Annie probably and how she’d drive Liz into Annie’s arms, and now she’s sacrificing herself to try to make up for it. And choosing “Liz is home and away from her and immortal, but miserable about the truth of the skins” over “Liz is with the sea witch maybe forever and mortal, but is spared the truth and burden of the skins.”

“And then I had walked away, and neither of us had mentioned Annie since. It was like my one true love was a minefield stretched between us, and a single wrong step could leave us both broken and bleeding on the sand. It ached. A little more each night, until it felt like I was already bleeding to death, just on the inside where no one else would have to see it. I didn’t know how long I could survive that way.”

oh, Liz’s mental health is. it’s not good. 😔

misc notes:

Liz never takes her seal skin off after getting it, even to shower (but it’s implied that this might not always be the case, but atm she’s too afraid to)

The house is never quiet, someone’s always up.

There’s few enough people living at the house that they could all gather around the bonfire under an illusion (maybe some were still asleep, but it’s implied the house is empty)?

“A Selkie can trip standing still.” / not fast runners

sleekit-stoat: Yeah, I'm curious about just how many people live at the actual house versus people who live elsewhere but turn up for regular events/gatherings, there's so few clans in America that they must each have a lot of people, i imagine

Aunt Margaret is in this scene, interesting. She was the one who passed the skin to Tempe, wasn’t she? So she stayed near the sea and survived somehow?

“I looked wildly around, spotting my cousin Daisy among the crowd. Daisy hadn't been there the night I first met Annie. She didn’t look at me with half-concealed pity the way some of the other cousins did.”

This is a bit weird because wouldn’t Daisy still know that Liz had a long term girlfriend and they broke up?

sleekit-stoat: yeah, that is strange 🤔

“She passed her skin because she was afraid we’d lose you forever if we didn’t, and you’re my heir,” he said, voice low. “For the good of the clan, she chose you.”

and then Liz has the whole “if they had just given me Tempe’s skin” thought process…..🥺🥺 also god the guilt this has to create, knowing your mom died so you could become a Selkie.

“She belonged to the sea for a hundred and twenty years. To have it so suddenly denied…..there was no preparing for that. There was no surviving that. But the clan needed you, she decided, more than it needed her.”

ooh info on Liz’s mom’s age! And we know she visually looked younger than Liz, but also there’s the whole de-aging thing. So she was presumably late teens to forty when she got her skin, plus 120. Meaning we can estimate 80-100 years old ish when she had Liz — so she did choose not to have a kid for a while.

sleekit-stoat: Selkies would have the same low fertility as other fae, wouldn't they? it might have just taken that long to have a pregnancy

That’s an interesting question. Do they have fae typical fertility, given that they’re skinshifters, the skin is what makes them fae, and they becomes human if they set it aside? Also given their higher death rate/frequent need to pass the skins, I’d expect a higher birth rate.

also if you’re a Selkie — one you have a kid, you’re on the clock for passing your skin. If you want to just vibe as an immortal and not have to deal with choosing between your kid’s mortality and your own, best to delay having kids

sleekit-stoat: True, it could be that Selkies have human-ish fertility, which changes when Toby makes them Roane

Liz’s fertility in this story seems very good — yeah the seer powers help determine when they have the best shot of conceiving, but that only improves the odds — and she does get pregnant on the first try

“She stayed long enough to be sure that you would survive, and then she went to the water,” he said.

this has…..implications about the intensity of Liz’s depression

“Because one day all this will be mine?” I asked bitterly. “Because I’m going to be expected to stay here for as long as I live, on the shore, next to the ocean that took my mother, to have children of my own and someday force them to carry this choice? I don’t want my sons or daughters to be beholden to the sea, Dad! I don’t want to have to give up my life to make sure they don’t lose theirs. There has to be another way.”

it is really so interesting that Liz is so “this system is fucked up actually!” — enough to break the rules about it (even if it is Destiny) — but then she does end up in charge of the clan, she does end up spending her life (so far) by the sea that took her mother.

also rotating this in the context of the Convocation. because surely from her pov, becoming Roane would be a good thing, it would mean no more of the betrayer’s bargain, no more children at risk of being drowned.

but when the skins are so limited — it is still the thing of having to save the life of your children first, or of having to choose, and how terrible that is. she remember what it was like to be denied the sea, she knows how being denied it For Sure forever will devastate people.

The secret of our origins was just that: a secret. No one who didn’t have a skin to carry was allowed to know, and even the thought of telling someone stopped my tongue in my mouth. For a geas to carry so cleanly across generations meant that it had been cast by someone of incredible power. The sea-witch qualified.

confirmation that the secret of the Selkies is protected by a geas, and that it doesn’t even need to be recast on each individual person, everything about the original bargain really does bind them immediately — although I wonder if it binds them at birth, or if it’s the “becoming a Selkie” that binds them?

Grief is a beast, and I suppose they understood that sometimes you have to fight your monsters on your own.

okay in this case, I do understand and respect them giving Liz her space. overall though…..looking @ Liz’s huge “self medicating via alcohol” problems later in life — the clan has probably given Liz too much space to fight her monsters on her own. and I wonder how much mental health problems in general are treated as just “something you have to work through” by the clan.

given that suicide of former Selkies who stay by the sea is common, and it’s considered a “can’t be prevented, that’s just what happens” thing, and given that the Selkies live on the outskirts of Faerie (and Faerie’s bad about mental health anyways), but also don’t fit into the human world either, I kinda doubt Selkies have great access to mental health care, or that it’s considered much of an option? meanwhile they have one of the highest death rates in Faerie, they’re taught to be ashamed of what they are, a high suicide rate among their former members…..the Selkies are Not Doing Okay

fascinating lil details about Selkie/Roane in seal form being a sort of mix of harbor seal and fur seal

so crucially: they can use their flippers to walk out of the water

sleekit-stoat: in a sort of related thought, I was just thinking about how the other Firstborn shapeshifters seem way more tied to the animal their descendants turn into than the Luidaeg is (in appearance/never being mentioned being able to transform into anything other than that animal) and I wonder if it's because the Luidaeg is more powerful and way more protean, or if she did have a seal-ish appearance when she was with the Roane, and changed it after she had to remove herself from them

I’m inclined to think the first? because we’ve now seen what is presumed to be her default appearance, and it doesn’t give seal vibes in particular?

but it makes sense that she can shapeshift into so many things, but then her descendants get one (1) animal form

sleekit-stoat: yeah, and most of the other shapeshifters don't seem to have much else other than shapeshifting from what we see, apart from the Cait Sidhe who explicitly inherited talents from three different Firstborn, whereas the Roane get shapeshifting and prophecy and "stormsingers almost as skilled at controlling the waves as the Merrow", it makes sense that it could be because the Luidaeg is particularly powerful

I wonder, would Eira have still set out to kill the Roane if they hadn't inherited prophecy, just to hurt Annie?

hmm the sight was definitely a contributing factor, but it was a combination of factors. and we see her killing other Seer races just because of the sight (only one of the two reasons), so yeah probably “I hate her/I don’t want her & her descendants to be more powerful than me” (the second reason) would have been strong enough

“There’s nothing wrong with killing to eat, especially when you’re a grieving predator who ran away from her life before she could have breakfast. But killing two fish when it would have been possible to get by with one seemed wasteful and wrong.”

Liz: I might be having an emotional breakdown, but I’m still gonna try not to have too much of an impact on the local ecosystem

Seagulls would attack Oberon himself if they thought it would get them a single fry.

y’know this is an excellent mental image

okay when Liz wakes up, the sun is still up, she says she should have been asleep for another few hours, but by the time she’s eating the fish it’s night. so, long swim!

and that’s before she swims to the Duchy

A flag flew above the crow’s nest, three black feathers against a background of blue, tipped in pale, pale gray. That wasn’t Saltmist’s flag. That wasn’t any flag I knew.

Duchy of Ships flag design 👀

(I don’t remember if we heard that elsewhere)

sleekit-stoat: (I believe we see that described in TUT)

welp 😅

okay so fog comes in, ship appears, Liz follows ship into fog, fog gets thicker and is “very clearly a magical barrier,” Liz gets “not supposed to be here/turn away” vibes but keeps going, and then everything goes poof and suddenly Duchy of Ships

so what made the barrier manifest around her in the first place? 👀

sleekit-stoat: I always assumed it was the wards and because she hadn't been there before they were eh about her, but when she pushed, it lets her in because Selkie?

yeah I just wonder how she found the wards/the barrier between the regular sea and the Summerlands in the first place, it seems quite a thing to stumble on it by chance

(maybe the skerry was in on the prophecy 😄)

sleekit-stoat: I do think the prophecy and/or Liz's intent being to run away from the shore for a while has a lot to do with it and that she'd find it almost impossible to find it again afterwards

love Maritza being like “I might end up looking very silly if you’re just a regular seal, but eh gonna do the welcome speech anyways” 😄

sleekit-stoat: Since Aldridge has had her looking out for Selkies for ages, odds are good that's happened once 😂

“My grandmother used to tell me about this place.”

so her grandma was there, her mom was there, she was there

or ooh wait the implication is probably that her grandma told her stories about it

that’s still funny though

Grandma Ryan: people tell stories of this place, but no one knows if it’s real

Dorothy Ryan, who has 100% been there: ~is silent~

she does say that seals shouldn’t just be able to wander in, but it would be super entertaining if that did happen at least once 😂

sleekit-stoat: Pete still gives it 3 days of hospitality 😄

“You look like you could do with being treasured.” 🥺🥺

Maritza is clearly on top of this prophecy — send her to the bakery, give her a nickname and refuse her actual name 😄

plus later on Pete’s like “okay I know these are the rules” and Aldridge has a whole crowd who shows up who’s been waiting for this — it amuses me that there’s a whole cheering squad for this prophecy

although it definitely is a Lot for Liz to walk into that

I’m assuming the sealskins are like actual seal sized — I know they can take other shapes, but yeah I’m imagining it’s big enough for Liz to go for the “wrap around like towel” approach? unless she really did go for “wrap around the shoulders, fully nude in front” move, which yeah is totally valid where she is, but even though she might know Faerie doesn’t have a nudity taboo, she didn’t grow up very in Faerie.

although she is very chill about the “okay cool, we do nudity here” thing 😄

“Hanging out around all-fae households can feel like a Friday night in the Castro, in the best and nakedest ways possible.”

actually yeah Liz really does seem to like the whole lack of nudity taboo thing, it’s not just a “I know the rules say it’s okay” thing

“When I was a kid, I had never found it strange that my family had to hide what we were from the local humans. It had been a delicious secret, something that set us apart from our neighbors and made us special and magical and important. And then I’d grown older, and all the ways that being “special” divided us had started to become more and more apparent. When I made friends at school, they couldn’t come over to see my house or meet my family. My life was centered on hospitality…but not where my human friends were concerned.”

truly this is such an interesting dynamic! especially for the ones who never get a skin, they’re always isolated from both Faerie and the human world. but no matter what happens later, every kid still grows up at a distance from both worlds 🥺

also oof Liz learning young how having secrets you can’t tell anyone isolates you from the people around you

sorry Liz, that part’s only gonna get worse for you 😔

and ahhh I love that this story gets into what it’s like being a queer Selkie specifically — how both Faerie and queer communities are these secret underground worlds, but how Liz is denied access to Faerie for so long, and so she exists in a human world where both “I’m Selkiekin” and “I’m gay” are things she can only discuss openly openly around certain people…..

And how seeing the Duchy really Hits Hard for both fae + queer reasons — that seeing so many people show their fae nature so openly and seeing so many people be queer so openly are both emotional things for her 🥺

She is so delighted by it all and so sad bc she doesn’t belong there 🥺🥺

“Annie’s eyes.”

oh you don’t know how true that is 😔

anyways halfway through and finally hi Aldridge!!!

I have! so many feelings about the bakery scene!

“My apologies,” I said. “I didn’t know—I’ll go.”

it’s so sad that this is the first thing she says to him? that her instinct upon meeting a Roane for the first time is to flinch and apologize for existing in the same space as him?

very much goes back to my thoughts about “how are the new Roane in general going to interact with the old Roane, when those who were Selkies at least, were taught to feel this guilt?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” “Me, too.”

😭😭

“Out of kindness to a cousin?” I flinched, meeting his eyes in shock. The hope and sympathy were still there, and I didn’t see anything to indicate that he might be toying with me.

I am! hurting! she is so ready to be hated for something she didn’t do, she thinks that is the expected and correct response…..and then he just. is kind. 🥺

“It’s a terrible thing that happened, and a terrible burden to set on the shoulders of so many innocents.” / “You do us a great service, by carrying them to keep them awake and aware and living, at least until the day they can be made whole.”

It is so important to me that he said this—a Roane, telling her that it’s okay to be a Selkie, that they’re not wrong for carrying the skins, that they’re keeping the Roane alive, that carrying a skin is something good.

Liz is going to spend such a long time being emotionally punished for taking a skin—and this won’t cancel that out, but at least someone told her, hey, you don’t need to feel guilty for what you are. What you are is important and needed, and you’re doing a good thing by keeping the magic alive.

“Life continues even when life ends, and there’s no point in holding grudges against hands that never held the knife.” oh how I wish this man got to sit down with his great-great grandmother

love Liz trying to do mental math about approximately how many people could live on the Duchy bc yeah I too am curious!

they’re only just sitting on the docks and Aldridge is already like. here have this pretzel roll. my friendship language is feeding people.

oh interesting, he says that not all the Roane can see the future

“until it’s not clear whether you’re seeing the future or having a panic attack” <— oh this is. this is a thought. the intersection of the Sight and anxiety and sometimes struggling to distinguish the two 👀

love Maritza’s bread bubbles 😄

aaand now we’ve reached the point where I have to mention that Come Home With Me from Hadestown, but platonic, is my personal Liz & Aldridge song

“earnest, forthright man says ‘we’re gonna get married’ to woman he’s just met, somehow convinces her to keep listening” 😄

(okay I know Aldridge says the kid thing first, but the vibe is there!)

also the whole “working on something that will help bring the world back into balance” thing has very “our kid’s existence will be an important reminder that will help restore balance” vibes

“What?” really is the most reasonable reaction in this scenario

“I’ve been walking the future with you since before I reached my majority. I met you the first time I met your mother.” / “I’ve been waiting for the last sixty years to sit in a dock with a stranger who doesn’t and won’t ever love me and tell her that she needs to carry my child.”

okay so Aldridge is between 60 and 90 years old, but closer to the 90 end of things presumably, it makes more sense to me if he was in his twenties when he got this vision?

and huh wait I’d been assuming Dorothy was at the Duchy of Ships, but perhaps not! all he said was that he met her, and he was quite young then, and he’s from Canada originally. we don’t actually know when he moved to the Duchy, he could have met her before that.

Liz: hmm maybe that was rude

Liz: wait no, he just Declared that we’re gonna have a kid, this is a perfectly reasonable response!

“He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t right, either. And it seemed like some sort of a crime without a real name to have a baby just to tell Annie how sorry I was, when she might never speak to me again. I didn’t even know how to find her. At the same time, the thought of a child I wouldn’t have to one day drape in death was a tempting one.”

Oh this is something I didn’t process the first time through! Aldridge calls Diva an apology to whoever Liz hurt over a skin. The Luidaeg calls Diva an apology (twice, I believe).

But….that’s not actually the reasoning that tempts her. She doesn’t like the idea of having a kid as an apology. No, what gets her is the fact that the kid will be Roane, will be born to the sea without needing a skin.

And that matches with what Liz herself says later! When she talks about why she had Diva, she only ever talks about not wanting to sacrifice a kid to the waters. Annie is not irrelevant to the decision; it’s presumably her relationship with Annie that makes her feel So Strongly about never making someone else take on the burden of a skin. But “this kid was born as an apology” is not actually a Reason for Liz the way other people think it is.

“But our child is, I think, the key to undoing a great and terrible wrong. She won’t be the one who spins the spell or solves the unsolvable question, but her existence will remind a woman I’ve never known of what she owes to all of us. The Selkies and Roane are born of one wellspring, but we’ve so rarely come together.”

oof, I know Diva crucially doesn’t know that this prophecy is hanging on her, but it’s still quite a big expectation to have on you, that your existence will help change someone’s mind on something so massive.

and I genuinely do think this works with TUT because yes, Toby is the one to convince the Luidaeg to think outside the box, to try to be kinder to the Selkies — but Pete says she’s been trying to do the same convincing for centuries, and it didn’t work. And early on in the book, the Luidaeg is already acknowledging that the situation sucks for the Selkies, but this is the promise she made. She is already on the path to being convinced to find another way, and how did she get into a place where she’d be willing to listen?

okay I am so close to finishing my reread notes on this

“She'll come back to you with my name hanging in her heart, and tell you gladly of how I've fared in our days apart….Verlye will follow her to shore….” / “When she finds me, I’ll follow her and my sister back to shore, and we can divorce.”

implications:

if they’re eligible to divorce when Diva finds him, Diva has to be 30+. so at least ten years in the future from where the series is now

Diva & Liz both survive the next ten years (I mean the future could change but why bother establishing this in a side story if you’re going to just undo it)

“I don't have a fortune to offer you. No great magic, no family name. I can't even promise to love you the way you deserve to be loved. All I can offer you is a bed, and a warm room, and some very excellent bread."

I quite like how blunt and straightforward he is about the situation—Liz has not had enough honesty in her life

but also. asking for a yes/no commitment when she’s in a very raw emotional space is maybe. not the best move.

at least the only binding thing that happens that day is the marriage, and we know marriages are easy to undo if there are no kids. so before she gets pregnant it would be easy for her to back out at any time.

still oof she really is like “maybe having a kid will fix my depression” and oh Liz that is. not a good reason to agree to have a kid. especially when you’re gonna be the parent left with the child raising responsibilities.

(unfortunately I do think Diva probably is what keeps her going through the shit she goes through later on—that and a genuine sense of responsibility to the clans, but I also personally headcanon that the alcoholism did take a while to get this bad and probably would have escalated more quickly without the sense of responsibility to a young kid.)

but she partially agrees because she wants to stay on the Duchy, and I wish that hadn’t felt like a condition for staying? because clearly being on the Duchy and having a friend and having space to breathe is good for her mental health. but that didn’t need to be bound up in agreeing to have a kid.

like. she definitely chooses this. and Aldridge is very transparent with her about what the deal is, he doesn’t sugar coat. but also her mother just died and she was already implied to be dealing with depression before that, and maybe. not the time for big life decisions.

especially when she knows it is very much an impulsive decision

“Why not? I may as well, since it’s not like I’m doing anything else right now.” Liz my darling this is not a great reason to have a kid 🥺

sleekit-stoat: I was just thinking about that- Selkies seem welcome to settle there, I think anyone is welcome to settle there as long as they're chill with having a First for a liege tbh- but no one really explains the Duchy to her and she assumes it works like any other Duchy would and by the time she meets Pete, she's already agreed

I wonder if she ever would have stayed there… she does ask about staying there and raising Diva there, but staying (without having a kid) would mean abandoning her duty to the Clan and her father. I could see her staying there for a bit, telling herself it's just temporarily while she heals from all the grief (and sending word to the Clan that she's yknow, alive and well) and then time getting away from her bc she's immortal now, a few years can't hurt, until she gets word that her dad died and has to return, grieving again and with a ton of guilt for leaving him. Oof and then immediately finding out about the Luidaeg right after (though maybe living around Pete for a few years has desensitised her to FB a bit and she calls her out more)

I wonder if she would have felt weird about staying there after turning down Aldridge’s future, even if she was explicitly told it was okay?

but yeah you’re right that no one explains that she doesn’t need to establish a tie to an existing subject of the Duchy to stay there

she is so new to Faerie in general, she doesn’t know how any of this works

sleekit-stoat: True, she feels guilt towards him just for being a Selkie, I can see her not wanting to be an uncomfortable reminder to him

Yeah and the land courts she grew up around want very little to do with Selkies, she has no reason to think any Duchy would be up for adding random Selkie citizens

but god if she left bc her mom died and missed most of the last years of her dad’s life…..(although presumably she’d visit at some point. still oof about hurtling from a place of emotional safety directly into Everything Hurts)

ah and there’s the whole “don’t say your name until you leave” thing

which implies her stay is always going to be relatively short

it would be so hard to go against that future when everyone is telling you this is how it’s supposed to go?

I do love that even though Pete knows this is foretold she meets Liz and is like. this is a Lot are you sure you’re good?

sleekit-stoat: Yeah, Pete is genuinely making an effort to do due diligence with the whole situation, she's pretty careful within the marriage vows, but she has no idea that Liz is a brand new Selkie and also maybe assumes more of the basics of the Duchy are in the myth that's been passed around

“I'm sure the other Selkies will be thrilled to have news of what's happening on the shore, and no one here will harm you.”

so there is a disconnect between the Selkies/Selkiekin on the Duchy and the rest of the clans (this is what I assumed had to be the case, given that the Duchy is trying to stay isolated, it’s half a myth, but also the Selkies are traditionally messengers so it is possible they had more comings and goings. but it works better for Certain Fics if there is that disconnect so 😅)

“By the time I turned away, the sky had shifted from deep purple to lavender, signaling the passage of time without telling me exactly what the time was meant to be….”

ooh okay so the sky does get dark, it’s not forever twilight

but presumably it’s the thing that happens in the Summerlands sometimes where the sky lightens and darkens but the sun never rises

“She had the kind of hips that would have started a religion in the clubs back in San Francisco, with the ass to kick off a holy war over which deserved the worship more.”

and here we have our winner for “horniest description of Captain Pete” 😄

I appreciate that Liz had basically the same reaction to Pete that I did, except:

“If she hadn't been dressed like a sexy pirate from a very exclusive Halloween store, I would probably have swooned.”

how dare, the pirate aesthetic is the hottest part 😄

“You must be Goldie. I know how strange this must be to you. I was surprised when Aldridge told me you'd agreed."

“Roane prophecy yeah but I still didn’t expect you to actually say yes”

“He's been waiting for you for almost as long as I've known him, and he's always been sure you'd come. I know your name's not 'Goldie.' You're not supposed to tell anyone here what it is until you're leaving. We try not to screw around with the future here, especially when it gets specific.

ah but then here we go back into “when the future is very specific we try to go with it” mode

which doesn’t really make it seem like there are choices

sleekit-stoat: I mean, if Liz said no to the kid thing but still wanted to stay, I don't think Pete would have a problem with that, unless it would cause Aldridge to leave? But Liz never knows that's a thing she could ask

yeah my point is that, because Pete talks about respecting the prophecy, Liz would probably extra assume that if she didn’t agree to the prophecy she’d have to go

sleekit-stoat: Ah yeah, it does come across as a bit you're welcome here (because the future says so) to Liz

oh also “almost as long as I’ve known him”

so she knew Aldridge before the prophecy. which makes it sound like he was in fact living on the Duchy when he met Dorothy?

so maybe she did actually go to the Duchy??

(I’ve gone from “oh she did” to “oh she could have met him elsewhere it never says where” to “okay maybe it was the Duchy”)

sleekit-stoat: Oh that's what I always assumed, cos it sounds like he's lived there most of his adult life?

yeah but he met Dorothy before his majority, and his accent is said to be vaguely Canadian I believe, so he could have met her elsewhere in his youth. (especially because Liz’s mom never mentioned the Duchy being a real place)

sleekit-stoat: Oh yeah, I was surprised the other day bc I'd forgotten the thing about Connor being related to Rene, it is possible they're both originally from the Canadian Clan

I was gonna say that full Roane wouldn’t be living with a Selkie clan, but there is that thing about the Roane who foresee the fall of NYC living with the Selkies, isn’t there? I feel like that was a thing?

so it’s possible, although maybe not that common

sleekit-stoat: I meant Dorothy and Connor, not Aldridge, but yeah he could be too! There aren't enough Roane for them to have their own community, so I guess they all either live w Selkie clans or as Court Seers like Mary

ohhh yeah!

okay so the surviving Roane must be descending through the grandkid survivors

which means “Paden, son of Aulay” was the surviving grandkid

Ulchel is also a son of Aulay we know survived, per SDS

and on the changeling side of the family, Emrys is a descendant of Aulay

I realize this might be a case of “Seanan has established the names of like two kids and keeps reusing them” but clearly Aulay was out there having many kids

sleekit-stoat: Including, presumably, a changeling kid the Luidaeg didn't know about!

I wonder if Mary is Tibbe

Since it's implied Mary isn't her given name

yeah I’ve been assuming she uses a different name specifically to hide that she was one of the original grandkids—she doesn’t want people to know offhand that she’s that old and that she was one of the ones Eira’s army of merlins failed to kill that day

and oof Tibbe was the first to get the vision, it would match with Mary having quite powerful sight

sleekit-stoat: Yeah 🥺

It's a shame Mary didn't feel able to come to the Convocation. Pete must have helped raise her because of her promise, Pete was there, her grandmother was there, it really would have been a reunion

All the blood ran out of my head, and I swayed with sudden dizziness as Aldridge reached over to steady me. The Firstborn are gone. They're legends we tell each other, and fairy tales for the humans, and not real people whose tits we check out way too blatantly, or who perform weddings for bakers and lesbians.

the single funniest bit of dramatic irony in this story 😂 (I mean, intellectually it is painful that she Doesn’t Know, but I’m sorry “oh fuck I had a horny thought about a Firstborn!” is just so funny)

“You weren't afraid of me before you knew. Try to hold onto that now." 🥺🥺

Liz being disappointed that she only got one slice of the cake is so valid of her, as a cake lover I understand this emotion. and Aldridge then baking her a new lil cake each day? absolutely stellar, I too would be won over that way 😄

and ooh this is the point where I link that Tumblr post of mine

wait actually two posts

because I just got to “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It kept not falling.” and 🥺🥺

and now at the part about Liz’s day to day on the Duchy and how she starts feeling better emotionally and physically and:

she loved this place. she felt safe there. she wanted to stay. 🥺

Roane foresight bonus: knowing when exactly to have sex in order to get someone pregnant 😄

(a particularly useful bonus when the parties aren’t enthused about the sex part and it is a means to an end)

“I hadn't been with a man in years, and he hadn't been with anyone at all, as far as I could tell.”

mmm continuing to headcanon Aldridge as ace

bc he’s somewhere between 60-90 years old and he’s a very upfront person (even about incredibly personal, strange things like “I saw in the future we’re going to have a kid”). If he was interested in sex with someone, I can’t imagine he’d have a hard time expressing that interest, given his personality? but given how awkward he gets about sex specifically, it makes the most sense to me that he’s ace and not really interested in sex (but he wants to have a kid and so will do it as a means to that end).

sleekit-stoat: I wonder if that's why he's the Roane who gets Destined for a kid. Being one of a nearly extinct, dying race that was genocided into near extinction and having no interest in the one activity that could carry on that bloodline, it would be easy to feel guilty. The Roane are prophesied to return, but when Aldridge is young that's far from being a done deal, Toby doesn't even exist yet, and they still won't be descendants of the original Roane. So he subconsciously or even consciously wants visions that will help him create a child with minimal sex and/or no relationship if he's also aro, and that's exactly what he gets

yeah. although it’s interesting, it’s definitely said that the Roane barely kept themselves going, seemingly on purpose—so there’s not a strong pressure to reproduce, they’re not trying to increase their numbers much, just keep themselves from extinction.

and it’s unclear/unknown why.

and he is relatively young when he has a kid, which is also interesting. he was born 1400 years ish post-massacre, and his mother was the daughter of a massacre survivor. in 1400 years there were only two new generations in his line, and then a third new generation in less than a hundred years.

I slept that day, and I didn't dream of Annie, and that was the first time I'd felt truly rested since I left her.

😭😭 (bc I know that sense of peace and moving on isn’t going to last…..)

“the years aren’t going to be easy” you’re sure right about that

Sudden fear gripped me. “Do I have to go? Couldn’t I stay here, with you?” He shook his head. “You could, but you don’t,” he said. “You leave with the morning tide, and the last thing you say to me is your name. I’ll see you again when she brings me to you.” “But I like it here.” It was the mewling complaint of a child, and I knew it as soon as it was uttered, but I couldn’t take it back. “One of us has to leave,” he says. “That part never changes.”

Aldridge is too focused on What The Visions Say, I think. We know the future can always be turned aside, but he’s a little too willing to be like “this is what the future says, so this is how it goes.”

The reason she doesn’t is because he says she doesn’t. It’s knowing the outcome that creates the outcome.

He could choose differently. She could choose differently. But he doesn’t and he persuades her not to.

Now, the whole thing about Liz leaving vs. him leaving makes sense, because it’s a choice between two outcomes. And I can see how it’s important that Diva be around Annie, so Annie is willing to bend by the time of the Convocation, so there end up being more Roane in the end.

So them both staying on the Duchy—there are clear reasons not to do that.

But what about Aldridge coming back to shore with her? I can’t see how that would do anything but good, but he doesn’t even consider it because The Future doesn’t say it’s an option.

if Aldridge went back with her:

she’d have a co-parent

Diva would be raised by her dad too and Aldridge would get to raise his kid

I’m pretty sure he’d figure out who Annie is even before Liz’s dad’s death (because he knows Antigone’s name—and yes he said it to Liz but she probably didn’t retain it/think about it), so it would be less of a shock

We know that spouses of clan leaders are permitted to know the truth about Annie, so Liz would have someone to talk to about ~everything~.

also I have been rotating this in my brain for a while. wouldn’t it emphasize the Roane and Selkies being of the same wellspring even more if one Roane and one Selkie were actively coparenting their kid together, if they were a Team. (and also the clan leader & spouse of a clan leader?)

also I feel like Annie would tone down her default rudeness towards Liz if her own great grandson was around and knew exactly who she was.

and when the clan becomes mostly Roane there would be a full Roane already with the clan who could help with the adjustment

it just seems like things could have been better on a lot of levels of Aldridge stayed with Liz to raise Diva with her, but he was so tied to what the visions showed him that it didn’t even occur to him that maybe if he didn’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy, the future could change? the years could be less hard?

sleekit-stoat: Ooh yeah that's a good point! I can see why he would be too worried about messing up the future to be thinking of solutions, but it is a shame he didn't try, especially with the implications that he did see some of Liz's worsening mental health in the future

Yeah, he speaks of her in a deferential, awed way, but after finding out all the context… pretty sure he'd come down on Liz's side (I mean, he would also very much get Annie's trauma and why the relationship could not continue after that, but I think he would judge the whole "playing Faerie bride with a teenager who doesn't know i'm millennia old" thing, and the punitive way she handles the fallout) and he could get away with talking back to her more than anyone else in the Clan

Aldridge is so sympathetic to the Selkies, he doesn’t blame them for wearing the skins, and that’s Liz’s fundamental sin in Annie’s eyes. so there would be someone to push back against the narrative that she was wrong for becoming a Selkie.

sleekit-stoat: Oh yeah, I think he'd understand why their relationship had to end but not see it as a sin Liz should be punished for, more an unfortunate irreconcilable difference. Especially as he knows the Luidaeg is the one who made all the big secrecy rules and the not being able to change your mind without dying rule in the first place

yeah there are many things about Aldridge that are very likable but him being too willing to let the future tell him what to do/create self-fulfilling prophecies is a flaw of his (which makes him a more interesting character for me to poke at tbh)

especially because “Liz’s emotions towards Aldridge over the years” is something I’ve already been thinking about a lot

she understands what the deal is when she makes it, but when she’s sleep deprived with a newborn, or when she’s had her world upended after her father’s death, or so many other times when the secrets she’s bound to keep and/or the stress of parenting are getting to her, she’d easily resent him for talking her into leaving, for not even offering to come with her or explaining why that’s not an option

and the Annie reveal is going to make her question her own judgment so absolutely—if she didn’t know Annie was lying to her, how could she possibly know if Aldridge was, if he just wanted to pass on his genes but didn’t want to deal with raising a kid and so pretended that him being in Diva’s life wasn’t an option? how does she know who’s telling her the truth anymore?

sleekit-stoat: Oof yeah I hadn't thought of that angle

The trust issues like, applying retroactively

“And you’ll always know you could have made things better, and you'll turn that knowledge inward, against yourself, the way you always do with your injuries. You're going to cut yourself to ribbons already over the things you can't undo. Don't add one more to your penance."

Aldridge pinpointing Liz’s guilt issues/self-loathing is. upsetting. we know what she’s already been struggling with but how much of her future has he seen. “you’re going to cut yourself to ribbons already” what has he seen about her shit mental health in the future. how much does he know.

🥺🥺 @ the last cake being a mini version of the wedding cake that started the cake thing in the first place

Most of the Duchy saw us as some great romance, rather than a bargain leading to friendship and cake. She had to see my departure as some sort of betrayal, and not an inevitability.

did Aldridge not explain this part to his friends??

sleekit-stoat: I intrepreted that as they all know the terms of the marriage but they think of it as an arragned marriage with the potential for feelings to happen, and "destined by the future to have a kid together" does sound like the beginning of a fairytale romance kinda deal, and Liz hasn't told anyone that she's a lesbian. Or, less charitably, she has and they don't take her seriously- there is that old lore post of Seanan's that mentions that bisexuality is such the default that people see being strictly attracted to one gender as strange

ohh yeah that would make more sense if they’re like. rooting for them to actually be a thing and stay together. and yeah oof if Liz has actually told people that she’s gay

I didn't love him, but I loved the sound of his laughter, and had for quite some time. I smiled, reaching over to touch his cheek, and he stilled. We touched each other so rarely. “I'm glad to have known you," I said. "I hope you'll be happy, and that knowing our girl is in the world now will help you with that, as much as you've helped me. My name is Elizabeth."

this is so soft I’m 🥺🥺

and the non-reaction to her name, implying he had never heard of Elizabeth Ryan

sleekit-stoat: seriously, it being to prevent Pete from realising that's her sister's ex-lover (that she's very possibly cried on her shoulder about) is the only thing that makes sense!

I was carrying a quilt, and a daughter, and the taste of the sweetest caramel in the sea.

I still want to know how her dad reacts to his lesbian daughter turning up pregnant with the child of a Roane man 😄

The term “Moor” has been used to characterize the reign of Muslims in Spain, Europeans of African descent, and others for centuries.