Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

At the floe edge, where the frozen sea ends and the black water begins, Inuit children for countless generations have been told to listen. Beneath the ice, the elders say, something is humming. She is the Qalupalik (in other communities qallupilluk, plural qallupilluit): a woman-like being of the sea with green or grey skin, long streaming hair, and long fingernails, who lives under the sea ice and hunts one prey only — children who wander too near the water's edge alone. She wears, of all things, an amautiq : the Inuit mother's parka with the deep pouch on the back in which babies are carried against the warmth of the body. But the pouch of the Qalupalik is not for her own young. She snatches the straying child, tucks it into her amautiq, and dives — down into the cold and the dark, where, in the tellings of some communities, she keeps the stolen children asleep, feeding on their vitality to stay young, and they are not seen again. Her hum comes up through the ice when she is...