The object was a dark grey leather bound notebook. Red seaweed was plastered to the cover, and the pages had yellowed by months, perhaps years, perhaps decades at sea. But this is not what made this notebook so odd; it was jammed inside a cracked glass bottle with a faded red cork.
Owen held it up the to the sun, perplexed. Why would someone want to ruin a notebook like that? They must've curled it up really tight in order to fit it through the small bottle opening. This was, without a doubt, the strangest thing he'd found on Summernear, and a lot of odd things tended to wash up there.
Slicing down the side of the bottle, a large but very thin crack explained the small amount of water and seaweed inside it. Owen noticed a tiny drop of crimson leaving a trail on the bottle before hitting the sand and disappearing beneath a wave. Blood?
He must have nicked his hand on the sharp crack in the bottle's side as he was bleeding from a small cut on his left palm. Ignoring it, he went back to inspecting his find.
The skin on Owen Redwood's hand began to ripple as if it were the ocean itself , then stretch itself to patch up the cut on his hand - it was as if new skin was rising from nowhere and his hand had healed before you could say, "inhuman". It left only a smudge of blood on his palm.
For barely a moment, Owen's gaze flicked to his hand, noticed the healing, and turned back to the bottle, utterly uninterested by what some would call a miracle. This wasn't new to him, and it hadn't been for three years.
Younger Owen had been scared of himself the first time his body healed itself so fast, so much that he'd gasped and screamed and thought, 'Maybe... I'm not human'. However, older Owen knew that to be ridiculous, or thought that he did. How could somebody be a boy one day, and... something different the next? He probably just had some crazy medical condition, he told himself, but he didn't believe this enough to seek help, or tell anyone what was happening to him. As younger him knelt in the centre of a gravel road, watching his grazed knee fade away, he realised that something had happened to him that day - the day his father was lost to the sea.
A small scar on his left knuckles was the only thing that hadn't healed, a crescent moon shaped mark that he'd acquired that same day, which is why he figured it hadn't healed.
But this was a long time ago, and as Owen's sister liked to say, there's no point dwelling on the past.
The glass shattered upon contact with the cave wall, and cracked pieces sprayed everywhere before quickly falling to the sand like glittering treasure. From his vantage point hanging off the side of the cave, he carefully sifted through with one hand and pulled out the notebook.
Jumping down carefully, he strode out of the shadowy cave and into the light. It hadn't taken him long to decide what to with the notebook in the bottle, just as it hadn't taken him long to smash the bottle and retrieve the mysterious book inside.
It was bent from being trapped in the round bottle, and was loosely tied shut with a thin ribbon so worn that the colour had been drained out of it, leaving it beige yet with a vague hint of the blue it once was.
Owen decided to read it in the tree's branches; it didn't feel right to read it on the beach. After heading to the cliff, he carefully climbed the rock and then looped his arm around the lowest branch. Pulling himself up, he sat to read.
The splotchy grey notebook looked as if it were once completely black, but the ink used to dye the ancient cover had faded away. Owen turned it around in his hands.
He reeled back as he saw a picture pressed into the back of the notebook like an emblem; a circle with a smaller one inside it . Scrambling down the tree, he held the notebook up to his dad's carving in the trunk and to his shock found them completely identical.
It was probably a coincidence, surely it was, he thought. Then he noticed the tiny, scribbled signature pressed into the leather beneath it - his dad's signature.
ns 172.70.179.91da2