HAVEN || SATORU GOJO

XIV

RIEKA TRIED TO FORGET HER LONG AGO CHILDHOOD, but it seemed to have a chokehold on her, following like a haunting ghost that had been bound for all of eternity. She had everything from a young age. That was when the daunting reality. That she had everything .. and it could be taken away in the blink of an eye.

There was a tale she had been told growing up. A human fisherman had saved the daughter of the sea emperor, the Dragon God, so he had been invited to the deity's palace where he met the lovely Princess Otohime.

They spent time together and fell in love and the princess had conceived a child.

One day, the fisherman requested to return back to the surface to visit his mother .. and as he left, the princess was sorrowful and apologetic, handing him a box called the Tamatebako which would protect him from harms way with the condition that he would not open it.

When he had returned to the surface .. everything had changed. The village he knew was now anew and the people were much different, none of them recognized him at all.

And then he had realized that three hundred years had passed since the short time he'd spent at the Dragon God's palace.

As a response to his grief, the fisherman, Taro Urashima, had opened the box the Princess had given him, just to be transformed into an old man .. and the final thing that came out of the box was the voice of the Princess, "I told you not to open that box .. in it was your old age .."

So the Princess with the help of her father, the deity of the sea, the patron god of the Urashima family who had blessed the child in its father's absence, he had become the great fraternal grandfather of the first emperor of Japan.

Otohime had converted the Tamatebako box into a sea conch with the help of her sisters and used it to continue their legacy as their lineage had begun to stray from the sea, their human urges wanting to return to the surface.

To assure that the past did not repeat itself, Ryujin, the sea god asked for a favor from his fellow gods to put a momento of them in the sea conch to protect his future generations from humans and their fragile lives.

He was already regretful that because of his intervention, inviting the kind hearted fisherman to his palace and leaving his mother to die on the surface without ever seeing her child again .. and leaving him to also die .. Ryujin made sure that he would watch over his future generations to carry on the man's legacy as well as his own.

It was his intervention that would choose which child of what generation would receive the gifted necklace that held the weight of their ancestors and predecessors. It would be the child of the most pristine soul, the clearest that most resembled the fisherman's integrity that had led their fates to be intertwined in the beginning.

Ryujin wanted his descendants that would carry on his blood to be strong willed like the ocean, brave like the tides and fought like the stormy skies.

Rieka was the first child in three generations to receive the necklace when she was born, after the previous user had passed away at the age of a hundred and thirty two.

A short life.

There had only been four people whom the necklace had been passed down to, due to each of the wearers typically living a long life ..

Rieka remembered when she was a young girl and her continuous life, like a scripted play to be enacted out over and over again had broken out of its trance.