[FredWolfLeonardo]

There is a story from my childhood that I learned as a part of my class during my early school years. It is a story that holds a very special place in my heart, but one that I never able to track down on the Interent, even to this day.

A rough summary of the story goes as follows:

There once lived a fisherman on a coastal village, poor but content with his life.

Life was as usual for him, until one day he spotted a beautiful woman walking out from the sea.

He was intrigued and smitten by her in an instant.

Despite many warnings from the villagers not to approach humanoids from the sea, the man defied the local traditions, by approaching the woman to talk to her about how beautiful she was.

She made him on offer, that she could take him to a place where countless other beautiful women like her lived. He would get to stay there for three days, and there, he would live like a king.

He took up the offer, and followed her into the sea, where she used her magical powers to give him the ability to breathe underwater. When he arrived in the mysterious city, it was exactly how she had described it to him.

The next three days were pure bliss for the man, for he would gorge on the most royal of feasts, sleep on the finest of beds, and meet the most beautiful looking women he had ever seen during his stay at the palace.

When it was time for him to go, the woman who brought him in the first place, also bought him to shore safely, taking away his ability to breathe underwater, and giving him a parting gift.

The man asked what was inside the box, to which the woman replied that it was a box that he must never open at any cost, returning back to the sea afterwards.

The man then returned to his village. To his surprise however, no one recognized him. When he told his name to a village elder, she proclaimed that she only remembered his name from legends told to her by her great grandmother. These were the legends of a man who walked into the sea 300 years ago after following a forbidden woman, never to return.

Realizing the situation he was in, the man walked away from the village, feeling depressed as to how he had lost his entire life in the village just for those three days of pleasure which started and finished in the blink of an eye. Having nothing else to do, the man looked at the box which was given to him by the forbidden woman in curiosity.

He opened it at last, releasing a magical spell that transformed him into an old man, who had aged by three hundred years, matching the new time period that he was now living in.

The End.

I've tried searching for the story online using key words and concepts from the story, but to no luck. That may be a blessing however, as it makes the story all the more fantastical, and nostalgic in my eyes.

This is the music I listen to when I think about the story and have come to associate with it, just to capture the magical atmosphere: