Et Sequitur Magazine

Et Sequitur Magazine, Issue 18

Issue 18 (Summer 2026)

Kinfolk

By Sarah Connell

(cover art by Hans Gude, From Nordmarka - 1849)

The new body lay before her. Its muddy parts steamed in the morning sun having come from the deepest parts of the bog. Celeste hummed as she worked.

She had a good feeling about this one.

Her gentle fingers reached into the earthen body; through the hollow Cattail ribs, and past moss ball lungs to seek the place where the heart should be. After dredging the swamp, Celeste had found the final piece for her new kinfolk.

The stone was no bigger than a quail egg, and red. She settled the slick stone heart into its cavity of pondscum and watched ribs knit together.

The spruce above her began to talk with the wind and she shut her eyes to the noise of the conversation.

“I'm almost done,” she said. “You can have your bits back when I’m good and ready to return them.”

A grumble rose up from a rockslide on the cliffs above her. Summer had faded into fall and two bighorn sheep fought for their chance up there amidst the dying light. She envied them the company of their own kind.

Celeste sat with the new body until the moon was well on its way across the gloaming sky.

Mudkin didn’t stir.

She clapped the dirt from her fingers and trekked back to her hut. There had been other attempts, all with their own failures and half-lives.

Her own people had cast her out long ago for dark deeds rife with black feathers. When she’d escaped to the valley, her first attempt at companionship had been made of bone. She’d gathered the remains of a mule deer skeleton that wolves had cracked open for marrow. Bonekin had come together willingly enough, had taken to life even before she finished. But the cry Bonekin had loosed, as it ran from her, had been too keen. Celeste tore it apart with her bare hands, swiftly so that the tears dripping from her chin would not mingle with its borrowed flesh. 

Later, she’d found a perfect chunk of deadwood with three holes already carved into it. Celeste braided a body for it with fronds of sweetgrass that grew thickest around her hut. But Woodkin had turned out too heavy of head and weak of leg. It sat there still, leaning against the woven willow saplings of her hut wall, unmoving.

She hobbled up and asked it, “What do you reckon?” Celeste looked over her shoulder to Mudkin. “Is earth too cold to make alive? Is that what I did wrong?”

The heavy-headed Woodkin creaked and crumpled a bit deeper onto its grass neck, small legs twitching. She thought she could hear something like a whistle coming from its hole of a mouth.

Celeste sighed and pushed through into the darkness of the hut. The door thudded shut behind her. She felt for the heat of a banked fire circle and began to poke it to life.

“Perhaps tomorrow,” she said to the coals, “I’ll try for a Firekin.”

A sound like the murmur of water over stones roused her.

She tilted her head.

There it was again, and close. The murmur of a brook splashed about outside.

“No.” A voice, gruff and scratchy, whispered somewhere nearby.

She knelt to peer through a slit in the woven wall.

A shadow hulked just outside, dark and human shaped against the twilit treeline.

“Mudkin,” she said, catching her breath. She opened the door and it fell within.

The thick-walled mud body did nothing to right itself and instead, eased its bulk on top of her. She slowly went down under the weight. Knees hit the hard-packed earth with a jolt and she grunted, trying to push her arms up for space to breathe. But her hands sunk into the cool body, swift and sucking.

They landed close to the coals of the fire so that Celeste could see the two dents she’d carved for eyes looking at her.

Mudkin sucked its face apart to reveal a wet mouth. “I’m here,” it burbled.

The weight was too much. Her ribs expanded less and less, and try as she might, she couldn’t throw the kinfolk off. Mud caked everywhere it touched.

“Mudkin,” she tried to say, but only ended up filling her mouth with it, gritty and cold against her teeth, copper and cutting along her tongue. She gagged but ended up swallowing.

“No,” she heard a scratchy voice say through her terror.

And then the pressure slid away and she rolled over, scraping black mud from her eyes and mouth.

In the flickering light of the coals, she watched sweetgrass arms pull and tear at the earthen body, sinking roots deep into soft swamp innards. Mud ran everywhere to pool sputtering against the fire circle. But Woodkin’s head was too heavy and Woodkin sank down into the morass of its fellow, pulling itself apart as it tried to break free.

Celeste crouched in the silence that followed, gasping.

“Woodkin,” she hummed to the lifeless knots mounded around the hut.

A shudder stole through the central hillock of the refuse and she caught a glimpse of red there. Quick as a snake, she darted out a hand and clutched up the heart rock. The tied wall panels of her hut split with the weight of what was soon becoming a swamp as Mudkin dissolved. Celeste rose on shaking legs and stumbled away.

She fell to her knees beside the river, washing the mud from her tongue in the moonlight.

The trees shook their boughs above her.

“No need to laugh,” she said, spitting grit. “You were right, yet again. It was never mine to take, but always yours.”

The stone heart of Mudkin felt warm in her fist.

Her eyes found their way back to the fire ring and its coals smoking amidst the swampy ruin of her hut. A raven landed on a twiggy outcropping, cawing at her. It pecked at the grass refuse, eyes glinting with mischief.

And Celeste nodded.

Afterall, this world was full of dead things, waiting to be made anew.

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