Whispered in her mind as though the words were too sacred and forbidden for her naive tongue to utter, Chihiro poured over her beloved Nihongi for the thousandth time - just as avidly as she did the first time.

'Of old, Heaven and Earth were not yet separated, and the In and Yo not yet divided. They formed a Chaotic mass like an egg which was of obscurely defined limits and contained germs.
The purer and clearer part was thinly drawn out, and formed Heaven, while the heavier and grosser element settled down and became earth.
The finer elements easily became a united body, but the consolidation of the heavier and grosser element settled down and became earth.
Heaven was therefore formed first, and Earth was established subsequently.
Thereafter divine beings were produced between them.'

The time honoured words spoke so deeply to her soul she was moved as though a great ocean of feeling ran it's currents through her heart. Avidly she read on her beloved text, of the creature that so enraptured her - not just the imagination, but a real sense of actuality within her, that the words so anciently written thrummed with the time hallowed distant power of something larger than life and truth - greater than the bounds of dismissive myth.

Ryujin, the Sea God, the Great Dragon who ruled all the oceans from the beginning, ancestor of Japan's mystical first Emperor Jimmu - who of all Dragon Kami held the power of transforming in to a man.

Chihiro found invariably when she read his name in the ancient tongue that a great tear drop would fall and she knew not why her soul ached at the tale of this divine and fearsome deity.

He seemed mysterious in all his ways, yet curiously kind, even in his treatment of the brother who sought his help in the first book of Nihongi.

Breaking her reverie, the sound of swift footsteps on the stairs and Chihiro's door flew open. Caught, the brown haired girl looked in wide eyed horror at the face of her livid mother.

'What, again? I will burn these cursed books!' Mrs. Ogino made to tear the book from her daughter's hands as her voice spat venom 'do you wish to call down demons on our house to infest it with evil?!'

Chihiro had struggled to hold on to her dear text that spoke to her in a way her parent's Bible never could - but to no avail. Her mother stood there and furiously tore it up in front of Chihiro's aghast countenance.

'Now go and read Romans until you are cleansed of that pagan rubbish!' Her mother stood aside, commanding her daughter to go down stairs to the kitchen to read the Holy Book of the Christians.

Chihiro could not move, so great was her despair and anger. The copy of that text had cost her much, and meant far more.

'Chihiro! Do not disobey me!'

The daughter's face now pale with anger glared up at her mother.

'May Ryujin eat you!' And she ran down stairs past her shocked parent and out in to the street, crying her eyes out.

After wandering the streets for a time, Chihiro's passionate burst of emotion calmed and she took to reflecting on her wistful sadness that they did not live close to the sea, or even a river. Water terrified yet enchanted her, though she never knew why. She guessed the Kami of the Nihongi had seen fit to instill her with such a love of the master and servant that was water. She longed to smell the wind that came off the surface of the sea, or was born from a mountain lake - that refreshing savour sometimes with the salt tang of ocean beginning, flowing in your lungs and settling on your tongue.

Instead, she lived in the close streets of the city neighbourhood so her parents were close to work, and she was nearer school - a place she found some sort of escape in.

Her parents had converted to Christianity a few years ago, a transition that had occured when they had become so terrified of the constant nightmares that plagued them of hellish beings strangling them that they believed they were victims of demonic oppression. Having been cleansed by a priest of the Catholic Church, their mares had ceased, and so the seeds of a blind and deep seated faith had been planted in them for a religion that sucked Chihiro's soul dry.

In secret she replenished herself of the ancient texts of Shintoism, her mind a total foggy blank on why she was so drawn to her native belief. Maybe it was sentimentality for her homeland and culture, but for Chihiro it felt too deep a connection to be merely token.

Some even called her the dreaded word 'otaku' at school for all her obsessive knowledge regarding ancient Japanese folklore and religion, and her magnetic attraction to all things dragon related.

It was a shameful situation for her Christ loving parents - that their daughter was so enraptured with what they referred to as 'the occult'. But when Chihiro had genuinely attempted to know this Christ that her parent's prayed to, she saw far more kindness in the Jesus of the Bible than she did in her parent's treatment of her. Chihiro had not taken long to inwardly brand her parent's as quite hypocritical, and she herself sent token prayers to this Son of God apologising for her parents shameful representation of His love. But her prayers to Him were by no means as passionate and as long as her prayers to Ryujin, the Dragon God.

Looking to the sky in forlorn melancholy and hurt, she whispered to the solitary cloud overhead to transform in to the Sea God himself and send her his comfort; but the swirling white mass of water merely sailed on through the heavens, either dissolving or disappearing in to the cerulean sky.