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For as long as he'd known, Roalc island had always been Rui’s home. The arid greenery of the small lands surrounded by the sea were all he’d ever seen. Every inch of the village was etched into his memories, but, as much as it was his home, he felt there must be something more.
He loathed the loneliness of Roalc island.
He wanted nothing more than to explore beyond the endless waves of the sea, but the people of the island thought him a fool for such ideas. To them, there was nothing beyond the island. They deemed him a naive youth and shunned him from society for his dangerous dreaming.
Rui found his safe place in the shoreline to the south of the island. It was far away from all of the heckling of the village boys who called him strange, or the village elders who called him too much. It was safe haven away from home. The soft waves soothed his constant woes.
During one of these many escapes to the shoreline, Rui made a life changing discovery. In an angry rant to himself, he threw a large piece of wood into the sea at the shoreline. Though he had expected it to sink the moment he’d thrown it in, he was astonished to see the large flat board of wood float in the sea.
When Rui rushed back to the village, no one believed his claims of discovery. Wood would always sink. That was an indisputable fact of life. No one believed him when he said he’d found a possible way to travel beyond the endless expanse of the sea.
Disappointed as the complete rejection made Rui, this did not stop him from continuing to chase his dreams. Over the next few months, he tested and tested away at all of the different ways the specific kind of wood could drift along the water. He even went so far as to try to stand on the carved wooden craft himself, though he was very wet afterwards.
Then, on one day where he tried to test the make-shift raft he had created, the wood held strong on the water. All he could do was burst into tears of joy as he felt the gentle up-and-down bob of the raft he’d created from scraps floating against the water below his feet. Controlling the raft against the waves, on the other hand, was a mystery to still be solved, as was returning to the shore.
After struggling to bring the heavy wooden construct back to land, Rui brought his months of hard work before the village elders. The wood, when bound together, was able to float and hold a passenger. They could use the raft to have people travel beyond the great blue wall surrounding them all.
The village elders were not swayed. Far from it in fact, Rui left the village hall, with salty tears like the sea in his eyes and a broken raft in tow. Back to the comfort of his shoreline he went, harsh words of his elders weighing heavy on his mind. Their focus had been entirely on the risks of the raging waters the entire time. They’d paid no mind to the possibilities beyond the deep blue.
And they were right. Rui had not yet thought of how the raft would brave even the slightest wave. His dream of the unseen held strong, only further tempered by his tears.
He would have to chase this dream on his own.
As time floated along, Rui spent more and more of it crafting and testing rafts by the shoreline. His time in the village grew shorter and shorter each day as his life’s work completely overtook him. Eventually, he found a way to steer his raft within the water using a long stick, widened at the edge. He called the new implement an oar, because it was his ticket back to shore.
With Rui’s invention granting him newfound mobility, he set sail deeper into the water. Roalc island became but a speck in his vision with every laborious stroke of his oar. He was one with the grand vastness of the sea, finally free.
Until he began to feel empty. The speck of an island, the home that was all he ever knew, turned to nothingness as it was consumed by the vast emptiness of the endless blue. The dangers of the unknown darkness he was warned about slowly began to set in.
Fear did not have time to grip Rui, however, for the moment he felt it, a harsh, jagged force shook his body to it’s core. The raft came crashing to an abrupt stop, nearly sending Rui overboard. He looked down to see a red web beneath the surface of the water scraping against the bottom of the only barrier between him and the endless waters below.
The water gushed upwards around him from beneath his legs rapidly as if it had a mind of it’s own. The rugged red had broken a hole through the hull leaving a path through his only safety. His raft was sinking, and he was coming along with it.
Salty water curled around Rui from with a cold embrace. The sweet sound of his own splashing against the rising sea called him to his true home. The deep sang to him a tune of a freedom he’d never known hidden beyond the waves below. His vision became clouded by speckled seawater, but he clung to life on the same red reef his raft hung onto.
His breath and his grip held tight for dear life, but the sea was ruthless. The currents cared not and chose to crescendo in this moment. They crashed into the coral, setting the raft free beneath the sea, and with it, Rui.
Breath could not be held much longer as he sunk deeper and deeper into the ocean. His hazy mind, addled by the lack of oxygen, fixated on the beauty of the brilliant red reef in front of him. He smiled as his consciousness waned, welcoming his sweet freedom in front of such a marvel unseen by any man before him.
Just before Rui’s muddled mind began to welcome eternal rest, his trance was broken by a beautiful maiden with loose locks like faded seaweed. The distress on her face was the last thing he saw before the world around him turned to a deep black, and silence became everything.
Rui’s silence was broken by the familiar crashing of waves tumbling against a shoreline. He jutted up, immediately coughing out a mixture water and salt. Any hydration he thought might have been in his body was now but a dry husk of a desert. The first thing on his mind was where he might get water, rather than where he was.
As he haphazardly swiveled his head around, he noticed he was on the familiar ground of Roalc island once more, somehow sitting along the very same shoreline he had left behind. The only missing piece of the image in his mind was the lofty raft he’d spent a year on. Every tool he had still sat on the trusty workbench. He thought he’d left all of this behind for good.
He also thought he’d lost his life.
Before Rui could think too much, he heard a splashing in the sea at the shoreline. When he turned to sea who it might be, he saw the very same woman he’d seen last before he woke at the shore. She was tucked behind one of the many jagged rocks that speckled the shoreline, splashing with what looked to be a fishes tail. Her seaweed colored hair glistened against the morning light as it hung forward as the only part of her body not hidden.
Rui called to the mysterious woman, his voice still hoarse from the stress his throat had endured under the waters. When no response came, he began to hobble towards the water once more. As his body was still tired, he tripped, face first, into the wet sand beneath. Gentle foam rushed into the shoreline to remind him of what almost was.
A chuckle from the mysterious woman in the water brought Rui back up to his knees. He looked up at her fully now, her rock covering left behind as she swam effortlessly within the deeper end of the shoreline. This was not a woman he knew from Roalc.
Before Rui could speak, the woman called to him, chastising him gently for his poor decision to play games with his life. He was lucky she’d been keeping an eye on him as he foolishly tread the waters humanity should not.
Though Rui tried to defend himself, he had no response to the stranger’s superior knowledge on the subject. He was stunned to hear there were other islands nearby, even if she phrased the claim as his folly to attempt reaching them beyond the great red reef.
The news of new islands, beyond Roalc, stoked the flames of passion which had been dampened within Rui. With new resolve, he pushed back against the mysterious woman of the seas. No matter what, he did not want to give up on finding out what lied beyond the endless expanse of the sea.
A gentle smile was not the response he expected to get from the worried one in front of him, let alone actual words of support. Instead of further demanding he stay safe on his home island, the sea person offered to help him on his journey. She claimed to know the sea well, and pointed towards the nearest island she knew. Before the woman could dip away into the sea, Rui called to her, asking for her name.
The woman responded first with a title he did not understand, and then with her name: Nene Kusanagi. The name played against Rui’s tongue as he voiced it to himself while she dove down into the sea to a land below he could not see.
Though he did not know who she was, he knew she had saved his life. He did not know her reason for so selflessly coming to his aid, nor did he care. He finally had someone who he could share his journey with. He no longer needed to travel into the vastness of the sea alone.