#this is also part of why damage to the pelt is so damn risky btw

[mantisgodsaus]

More selkieverse worldbuilding time. Fun fact: all selkies are bound to one of the four classical elements (fire, earth, air, water). The specific element varies by individual, but it tends to run in families - due, largely, to the fact that the creature that your pelt belongs to tends to heavily affect how inclined members of a strain may be to being a given element. The best-known, of course, are pinnipeds, who are almost always Water aligned, but marsupial selkies are known for frequently being aligned to Earth, and nearly every single avian strain out there will trend strongly towards Air. Fire tends to be rarest, with no consistent lines, turning up only occasionally in individual selkies.

When aligned to an element, a selkie will naturally be drawn to that thing - Water often produces an impossibly strong draw to water, both the sea and any other bodies of water that may be available to a selkie. Earth might be drawn underground, spelunking or tunneling and going ever deeper until some Earth selkies may wind up not seeing the sun for weeks or months at a time. Air, of course, produces a longing for the air and for flight - and Fire, a draw towards heat and flame which has been well-known to lead to disaster.

Beyond the longing for the elemend one is bound to, one's alignment also tends to offer resistance to one's element - Earth, for example, tends to make a selkie far more resilient against blunt force than other members of its species and offer a strong resistance to the psychological impact of darkness and claustrophobia, and Water selkies are often heavily resistant to both water pressure and any form of drowning.

With most forms of selkie, a strong presence of their aligned element will also tend to make them a bit more difficult to harm - while not offering an offensive advantage, a seal in water tends to simply be harder to hit, a bird in the air will find more ways to dodge you in the air than you knew existed, and trying to chase a weasel into a set of tunnels will have it finding more exits than you ever knew existed.

The final thing that an element affects generally isn't evident until a selkie dies. Upon a selkie's death, the bug body will generally decompose into its associated element within less than a day - though the dead sealskin will remain, the resultant body is rarely stable enough to be formally recognized as a body if you don't know precisely what to look for. Though the exact material varies, it is always tied to their core element - seafoam, lake water, and pond scum have all been recorded from pinnipeds of various forms, cinder and ash is common from Fire, Earth has been known to crumble to sand and leave bug-shaped stone formations in equal part, and Air has the disquieting tendancy to not leave any sign of a body at all.

Though there have been a multitude of rumors and myths suggesting that some selkies may gain the ability to fully control and manipulate their element, when sufficiently attuned to it, there is no concrete evidence to suggest it - historically, all signs have pointed to this being folklore, not fact. Primarily, this seems to stem from a quirk of selkie psychology - something similar to the call of the void. 

Occasionally, particularly when near the ends of their lives (either by old age or should they have the time to feel it after being dealt a mortal wound), selkies are known to seek out any font of their element that they can. Though poorly researched, there are enough anecdotes to construct an idea of the phenomenon. Selkies affected by this will commonly claim that the thing they're seeking out is "calling to them" - an intensification of the pull that element normally has on a given selkie, and an urge to follow it deeper - the bottom of the ocean, the centre of the earth, the very highest part of the sky, the burning heart of a flame.

Should they listen, and follow the call, they rarely come back - losing themselves to the pull of their own essence's wish to join with the greater body of its element. Unlike other methods of death, this does not generally leave a pelt behind, as most selkies will want to bring their skin with them to seek out whatever lies at the other end of this call, and thus the pelt will also be recombined into the core of whatever force of nature they've gone to seek.