The darkness has shackled her more effectively than any tangible bindings could. The ocean is a tumult of chaos and creature now, full of beasts that even the largest predators steer clear of. She thinks it is because the ocean is less limiting - it is vast open space and little gravity, and things can grow to impossible sizes with impossible appetites without ever finding themselves wanting for more. She has tried several times to fetch her selkie skin, but it remains where she had hidden it away, tucked inside the narrow crevice of a rock formation in a cove now too far to swim to.

She is made for the water, but she is not made for the dark, and beneath the water there is no light whatsoever.
She is predator made prey, and it scalds her.

So she keeps to the land where the monsters are more clumsy, where it is harder for them to hunt and sneak like the predators of the sea she knows so well. But it comes at a cost and she can feel that a darkness has carved its way inside her chest, that it has built a home there beside a heart so weary and homesick.

She misses the muted ocean sounds, the way everything seems far away and the only sound is that of her heart beating in her ears.
She misses the way the water moves her hair and how it feels when the longer strands touch her cheeks like strands of heavy silk.
She misses the weightlessness and the solitude, misses the privacy of having something that had been only her own.

There is nothing on land that compares, and she is no match for the creatures below without her selkie skin. But there is no way to retrieve it, and no one she would trust enough to ask for help even if it were possible. So she wastes away like a star without a constellation, a constellation without a sky. She lets that darkness grow inside her chest, a fury at feeling so helpless, and eventually she cannot even bring herself to visit Hyaline any more to see a family that has never been hers.

She feels an outsider in every way, an imposter in this skin that no longer smells of the sea. Not even the strands of her white mane remember how to hold those salt-soaked curls. It is like the ocean is leaving her, has already left her, and there is no part of it she is allowed to keep for herself. She is adrift with nothing to hold onto, and as she stares out into an ocean too black to discern from the sky sprawled above it, she imagines what it would be like to fall away into the dark.