Child of the Sea

Some lonely fishing villages harbor folk who are not quite human. Local tales speak of beautiful strangers who come ashore and the odd children born of those meetings. They pass for human, but some trait always betrays them: vivid green eyes, a greenish cast to the hair, or unusually webbed fingers or toes. All of them feel a kinship with fish and the ocean.

Though peaceful, they will fight back if attacked. They can master any human weapon and show a gift for nets and harpoons. They wear armor only when their parents, real or adoptive, ask them to.

Their powers over water grow with age. At 5 a child can forecast the local weather up to 48 hours ahead with 90% accuracy. At 7 it gains the power to summon fish, once a day drawing every fish within 60 yards to its side. At 9 it gains the 4th-level priest spell raise or lower water, used at 7th-level strength. At 15 it can breathe underwater. These gifts come almost by instinct, and a child uses them to help its adoptive family unless that family has treated it badly.

These folk are a race of their own, yet can only breed with humans, since two of their kind together are infertile. Their offspring are left for human parents to raise, and villagers treat them with a mix of disdain and awe. On reaching adulthood they at last answer the ocean's call and go down into the deeps.

There they live mostly alone, roaming the sea. Sometimes, recalling the company of their human childhood, they come ashore for a night or two, and such visits are where most new sea-children come from. Males play no part in raising their young but may drop by now and then bearing presents for the baby or its mother. Females return to the sea to give birth, then try to leave the baby with its father or some other human family.

Their human upbringing leaves its mark, but in the sea they live in balance with nature on fish and seaweed. They never kill for sport, though sharks and sahuagin are their sworn enemies.

A sea-child abused by its adoptive family has a 5% chance at maturity of becoming an accantus (plural accanta). It looks the same and keeps all the usual powers, but as adulthood nears it grows strange and wild, almost feral, leaves home as soon as it can, and lives alone in sea caves or the depths.

An accantus gains two more powers. It can turn its body to water at will, and in that form it pummels with fists of water for 1d8 damage each; blunt weapons pass through it harmlessly, and edged ones deal only half damage. It can reshape itself freely, flowing under doors or through any crack that is not watertight, and while submerged in a pool or other body of water it is effectively invisible. Once each day it may also call a water weird, which arrives with maximum hit points, and no water weird will ever turn on an accantus.

Few humans who meet an accantus survive to describe it, but its handiwork is plain enough: the relatives who wronged it turn up drowned in bed, in houses without a drop of water in them.