Of course he's lost. He went near the sea on a moonless night. Everyone told him not to, but he laughed, called us superstitious, and now he's gone, gone to the Men of the Sea. We'll see him again, unfortunately.

My grandmother told me they came for her village's men, once. She was hidden between cliffs, watching a group of fishermen preparing for a trip. Her husband-to-be was among them; she wanted to wish them good luck. She saw a line of jagged rocks moving across the waves, but then they emerged, and they weren't rocks, they were the warped features of the Hafmaður in procession, bloated piscine creatures the lot of them, with fins and scales and eyes all too human.

They marched in a straight line, with their eyes wide open. She told me they looked very lonely. They surrounded her group--like a snake, I remember her telling me, like a snake spiraling around a nest. They scanned them with sightless eyes, picked one, two, three, ten. They counted ten, no more, and left the rest. They touched them with their fin-like hands, and where they touched, skin hardened into scales, muscles deflated, and bones warped. The unlucky ten fell to the sand, flopping like fish, whipping their tails and choking on the sea breeze. The Men of the Sea put them in harnesses of seaweed and driftwood, placed barnacles on their newly-formed scales, and one by one, watched them become docile.

The Hafmaður returned to the sea, carrying their quarry like lambs over the shoulder, and letting them go in the water, where the mockeries of fish followed them, obediently, to the depths.

My grandmother died a few years ago--she never saw them again, but sometimes, when I came home and found her sea gazing, she would tell me, "The fish came up to see me again. The fish with the eyes like ours." I never understood what she meant until after she was gone.

It's an uneasy state of affairs, this one. But you can't parlay with the Men of the Sea, any more than you can appease the waves themselves. If we take, we must also accept that others will take from us.

And if their children don't come out on sunny days, or when the mist thins, then it's only fair that the fools who go near the sea on moonless nights become children, as well.