Chapter 1

The day Finian Relish found the coin, he had been stomping down Old Mucury Road, having just had a spat with his sister Odessa.

The sun was high in the sky and scorching on that particular Sunday afternoon, but our main character was a bit what'd you say overdressed. His dark green overalls and chinos trouser stood out and made one wonder if he wasn't boiling up inside. The reason he had dressed for the wrong weather is still something that eludes me.

Now, you see, Mr Relish, his father, had sent him to Big Mac's instead of Odessa, who already had that fixed role every Sunday afternoon. But lately, Odessa had been preoccupied with a stupid thing with her teenage friends and had faked menstrual pain so their father had to send him.

So, where was I? Oh, yes. He was stomping down the road in his heavy jean combat boots. Perhaps if he hadn't been wearing the frown so intently, or if he hadn't been in a foul mood to start with, he would have been running down the road skipping rocks or kicking debris ball, like children his age normally did to assuage the heat. If he had been doing any of that he wouldn't have seen the dirt-chipped coin teetering on the edge of a large grate.

Or maybe he could have made visual contact with it as he skipped by, but he surely wouldn't have stopped to check it out or pick it up.

When a hard jagged tip of his right sole slipped into a grate hole and almost toppled him over as he picked up the coin, he should have seen it as an omen.

But I doubt our main character even knew what omens were.

He flicked the hard, dry chips of mud off the coin and examined it at all angles. Now that the mud was gone, a streak of light made a bright spot of light wink on an edge. Finian realized the coin was pretty new after all. It was of a shiny, dark silver colour. He wondered how a coin could be black and silver at the same time.

And lying on the side of the road with no residence in sight like that, it didn't look like it belonged to anybody. But it was pretty new, he reasoned, so it had to have been someone's recently.

He turned the coin from left to right for further scrutiny and discovered two different masses of images on both sides. He could make out what looked like a skull on one side, so he assumed it to be the head.

But that he wasn't even too sure of. He wondered who or where it could have belonged to. The head or tail didn't look like anything the boy had ever seen. The image on what he assumed to be head was confusing. It was a mass of locked limb-like stems with round figures of different sizes at the tip. Like an aerial view of a group of people hugging. One of the round figures looked distinguishably like a skull, so he assumed them to all be. The image was twisted and warped like one of those photo-editing filters and was of a darker silver than the body of the coin.

The tail had just a strange looking writing in cursive, a writing which he neither recognised nor understood. And then there was a small dot of dent just below the long cursive. It was so tiny it was barely noticeable.

It looked so incongruous on such a new coin. Finian held the coin closer to his eye to examine the dent, tracing his thumb over it. It suddenly didn't look like a dent anymore.

Let's see. How can I phrase this?

It was a dent, alright, but it didn't look like it had happened when the last user had mistakenly jammed it on a sharp edge or a baby had wanted to test it's edibility. No. It very much looked like the tiny depression had been made there as part of the coin - in the process of minting the coin.

Finian Relish rubbed at the coin again, instantly falling in like with it. He thought it was a smash that there was no one around to claim it. Finders keepers, right? And he sure could use a new thing in his boring old life. He made up his mind to G****e scan it on his laptop as soon as he could. He could even bore a hole in it and wear it as a necklace. Maybe.

He only had to attach some fabricated importance to it at school to make it an ancestral amulet of the English soldiers.

The boy smiled as he slipped the coin in his chinos trousers pocket and continued towards Big Mac's. His very own lucky charm. Would you look at that.

You see, there's no use saying he should have known better than to pick strange things off the side of the road. After all, what has happened has happened and what was meant to be was meant to be.

But, still, Finian Relish should have known better.