Nuckelavee – The Breath of the Sea Devil

In the northern reaches of Orkney, where the gray Atlantic smashes against the sea-stacks of Sanday, the old islanders keep a single iron law: never burn kelp when the summer tide is out.

For two centuries, islanders earned meager coin burning sea-tangle into alkali soda for the mainland glass factories. But the heavy, pungent smoke offended the ancient master of the deep sea—the Nuckelavee, an entity born of primordial ocean darkness, imprisoned beneath the salt waves by the Mither of the Sea until human carelessness stirred his wrath.

Tammas of Fea had stayed out too late cutting peat on the coastal moor.

The twilight in northern summer—the "simmer dim"—clung to the horizon in a bruised band of purple and sickly yellow. As Tammas hoisted his peat spade over his shoulder, the wind abruptly shifted from south to north. The air turned foul, thick with the stench of decomposing seals and stagnant tidal brine.

Out in the breaking surf, the whitecaps began to boil with oily froth.

Tammas froze. Rising from the cold sea was a shape so grotesque that his mind struggled to reject the reality of his eyes.

It appeared as a horse and rider fused into a single monstrous body. The equine torso stood higher than the roof of a croft, its legs ending in broad, cloven flippers instead of hooves. Sprouting directly from the center of the horse’s back was the upper body of a man—not riding in a saddle, but growing from the equine spine like a cancerous branch.

Its arms were disproportionately long, hanging down to scrape the gravel, ending in webbed, hooked claws. The human torso possessed no neck; its immense, bulbous head lolled heavily against its chest, lolling from shoulder to shoulder. Its single, burning red eye sat in the center of its forehead, glowing like a smoldering peat coal.

Worst of all, the beast possessed no skin.

Yellow sinews, pulsing black arteries, and raw, glistening red muscle were exposed to the salt wind. With every lurching stride, the dark, stagnant fluid in its veins could be seen pumping through translucent membranes.

From the wide, gaping mouth of the equine head puffed clouds of gray, boiling vapor—the Mortasheen, a breath so toxic that heather withered in its wake and dairy cattle dropped dead in their pastures.

The red eye fixed upon Tammas.

The Nuckelavee let out a hollow, gargling neigh that sounded like drowning men screaming beneath a capsized hull. It surged up the shale beach with sickening speed, its flipper-hooves tearing up moss and earth.

"Run, Tammas, run!" the crofter cried to himself, dropping his spade and bolting inland across the heath.

His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The thunderous, rhythmic thudding of the beast’s strides shook the boggy ground behind him. He could smell the rancid breath of the monster, hot and suffocating, searing the back of his neck.

Ahead lay the burn of Loch of Scapa—a small, rushing freshwater stream flowing from the inland peat bogs down to the salt bay.

Tammas remembered the lore passed down by his grandfather around the winter fire: The Sea Devil rules every wave of salt water, but pure running freshwater is an agony to his raw flesh.

Ten yards. The beast’s webbed claw whistled through the air, catching the corner of Tammas's thick wool coat, tearing the heavy tweed away like wet parchment.

Tammas threw himself forward with the last breath in his lungs, leaping through the twilight air.

He splashed belly-first into the cold, peat-brown water of the freshwater burn.

A shriek of primordial fury tore through the night sky. The Nuckelavee reared back upon its hind flippers on the salt-side bank, thrashing its long arms in blind rage. A few droplets of the fresh stream water had splashed upon its raw equine muzzle, sizzling and boiling like drops of acid upon raw meat.

The monster stamped the earth, gouging trenches into the peat, but it could not set a single hoof across the flowing freshwater.

For an hour, Tammas lay shivering in the icy current, watching the single red eye burn through the mist, waiting for the morning tide.

When the pale northern dawn finally broke over the North Sea, the beach was empty. Only deep, scorched furrows in the sand and the lingering scent of sulfur remained to prove that the Sea Devil had walked the earth once more.

Tammas crawled from the stream, fell to his knees in the wet grass, and swore never to walk the shores of Sanday without listening for the breathing of the deep.