Ray is low on time, luck, and hope; his only chance is an artifact that may not even exist. But upon meeting Landon, Ray is beginning to believe he might find all four.
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Cambion...
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Seawater pooled in the pattern of Landon's feet as he walked along the shore.
It was a miserably warm day, the late afternoon sun baking the salt of the ocean into his skin. It was only saved from being unbearable by the wind which made the waves and tousled the curls of Landon's hair.
His legs, knees, and hands were coated in a fine layer of sand. The small grains burrowed beneath his nails but he didn't have the time to wash them. Every moment he spent doing something pointless like that was a moment wasted. There was only so much time before the tide came back in and, before it did, Landon intended the beach to be picked clean of its treasures.
Landon's clever eyes darted from clumps of seaweed to swells of seafoam, never lingering on anything for very long. He was like a bird of prey, a hunter high above.
When he finally found something, Landon raced towards it, grabbing it as quickly as he could before shoving it in his half-filled wooden bucket. He glanced suspiciously at the other children on the beach. They were like him, all dressed in the same scraps of ill-fitting clothing given to them by the cathedral. They all had that tell-tale thinness of those who never got enough to eat.
The others seemed distracted—some chasing crabs, others shooting stones at gulls with slingshots, and the rest digging in the sand to find any creature abandoned there by the tide—but they might get bored or lazy and decide to take Landon's treasures. The priests said not to but they said a bunch of things and the bigger kids didn't always listen.
Landon ran from treasure to treasure, collecting them in his bucket as he went. His back ached from how frequently he bent to inspect an object that had caught his eye and his arms strained to carry the ever-increasing weight in his bucket.
As the sun sunk lower and lower and the tide rose higher and higher, the others abandoned their conquests, returning to the cathedral for dinner and gifting the things they'd found that day to the gods. The priests said it was a way for Sea Children to pay the gods back since they had no money, no parents, and no chance for survival if the cathedral hadn't taken them in.
There was an official name for the orphaned children cared for by the cathedral, but as far as Landon knew, all the people of Jihn—from the littlest baby to the oldest priest—had forgotten what it was. Instead, they were called Sea Children.
The priests told a pretty story about it. Jihn was a kingdom of the sea. The people of Jihn were only allowed to live such happy and prosperous lives due to its waves. In a way, everyone was a Sea Child. Like a mother, the sea nurtured them, feeding them with fish and seaweed and crabs. Like a father, the sea protected them, keeping them far away from the territory-starved empires of the north. Without the sea, none of them would be alive.
So, when a child had no mortal mother or father to raise them, the only parent left was the sea. Thus, they were Sea Children.
The people in the village had a different story, one that was much less pretty. They said that they were called Sea Children because they were the children that the cathedral made work by the sea all day, collecting things for the priests to either sell or use. They were Sea Children because they weren't School Children. They would never learn to read.
