KESTRELMOOR: The Hollow Tide

The story

On the storm-scoured coast of Kestrelmoor, twelve-year-old Wrenna Tolm keeps the lamp with her grandfather while her little brother Bram collects tide-junk on the rocks. One night the sea simply leaves — retreating over the horizon in a single silent breath, stranding ships upright in mud and revealing a drowned world of wrecks, whalebone arches and staircases going down into the seabed. In a cracked salt basin the children find a vast slow-beating orb of light, the Tidal Heart, chained inside the ribs of a rusted dredger by a crew of scavengers led by Marrow Kilbey, who means to sell the sea's pulse piece by piece. Wrenna and Bram cut it loose with a fishing gaff and the Heart, freed and panicking, begins to drag the ocean back toward it — a wall of returning water building far out at the horizon. Chased across the exposed seabed by Kilbey's clattering sand-sledges, the children befriend Old Pell, a mud-caked lighthouse mechanic who has been stranded out there since the last hollow tide forty years ago, and his salvaged walking crane. Together they race the returning water along a road of sunken church spires, losing the crane, losing Pell's lamp, and finally losing each other when Bram falls into a flooding wreck and Wrenna dives to pull him out. In the drowned bell-tower of the old town they learn the Heart must be returned to the deepest trench socket or the sea will come home all at once and take Kestrelmoor with it. Kilbey catches them at the trench and tears the Heart away — but Bram's pocket full of worthless tide-junk turns out to include the socket's missing keystone, and Wrenna trades the one thing Kilbey truly wants, the lighthouse lamp itself, to buy three seconds. She drops the Heart into the trench. The ocean folds back gently instead of violently, lifting the stranded ships upright and carrying the children home on a rising swell. Kestrelmoor wakes to a sea that breathes again, a new lamp lit by Pell, and two kids on the rocks who now know exactly how deep the world goes.

Cast

• Wrenna Tolm wants to prove she can keep the light — and get her brother home alive
• Bram Tolm wants to keep every treasure he finds, and to matter
• Old Pell wants to walk on dry land again before the sea takes him
• Marrow Kilbey wants to sell the sea's heart piece by piece and never be poor again
• Grandfather Tolm wants to keep the lamp burning until the children come back