We ordinary people also need to fall in love.

Long ago, on a land ruled by iron hooves and swords, there was a kingdom called Veridan.

The people here take pride in wielding swords and find joy in the neighing of warhorses, while children's toys are always wooden swords and shields.

The king once said, "A poem cannot buy a grain of wheat, and a rhyme cannot stop an arrow."

But in this martial country, an anomaly emerged.

His name was Nathos, and he was the miller's son.

When he was nine years old, the kingdom experienced an unusually rainy season. A ragged stranger was stranded at the village entrance, and his father, seeing that he was old, gave him a corner of the mill.

The torrential rain didn't stop until the morning of the third day. The stranger left, but left a book as a thank you gift. The father didn't take it seriously and used it to fold the corner of the table.

Young Nathos was curious about everything. While his father was busy, he pulled the book from the corner of the table. Each page contained a poem. Fortunately, his father had sent Nathos to school, which gave him the opportunity to learn some words.

He opened the book and read it page by page, satisfying his young curiosity, skipping over unfamiliar words and phrases...

When he was twelve, the village held the "Young Blade Ceremony"—all boys who turned twelve had to touch the scabbards left behind by the king's guards as they passed by.

The neighborhood boys jostled to the front, pressing their hands hard against the old leather sheath as if they could absorb some of the warrior's glory.

Nassos stood on the outermost edge of the crowd.

He saw sunlight slip through the edge of the sword sheath, casting a long, silent shadow on the ground, and he thought: This shadow is just like an unfinished poem.

He didn't reach out.

His father didn't hit him that night, but remained silent for a long time.

With his back to him, his father suddenly said, "When your mother passed away, she said you would be successful in the future."

Nassos lowered his head and clenched his sleeves.

"But what counts as success?" The father didn't turn around. "Being able to fight, being good at farming, getting married and passing on the mill—that's success. What's the use of writing all day? Will it even feed you?"

Nassos couldn't answer.

But he still wrote his first poem at the age of fifteen, a poem for the wind in the wheat field, asking, "Who should I write this for?"

That night he went to the stream, folded the poem into a small boat, and put it into the stream.

He didn't know where the boat was going, but he felt a little relieved as the paper sank into the water.

Over the next two years, he launched dozens of boats.

None of the dozens of poems received a response—and there was no way they would have received one anyway.

But he still let it go.

It's like someone repeatedly tapping a stone in the wilderness, not to hear a response, but just to confirm that they are still willing to speak.

In the spring of the year Nassos turned seventeen, the stream rose unusually early.

He was squatting on the bank washing a millstone when he suddenly heard unfamiliar footsteps behind him—too heavy, too steady, unlike those of the villagers.

He turned his head.

A woman in armor stood in the sunlight.

She was tall, with tanned skin, and her short hair was tossed about by the wind, but she didn't care. A sword hung at her waist, its hilt worn and old.

The way she looked at him wasn't the usual disdainful gaze of the villagers; it was just a businesslike scrutiny.

"Are you Naxos?"

He instinctively rubbed his wet hands against the seams of his trousers.

"……yes."

"The miller's son?"

"Yes."

"Can you write poetry?"

His fingers stopped at the seam of his trousers.

At that moment, many thoughts flashed through his mind: Did his father send someone to scold him? Or did the villagers finally find him too annoying and want to drive him out?

He suddenly thought absurdly: It was those paper boats that caused the trouble, drifting downstream to a place they shouldn't have, and bumping into some important person.

He opened his mouth, but what came out was something else: "I just wrote it for fun, it's no big deal if I don't."

The knight squinted, then took out a neatly folded piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it in front of him.

Nassos saw his own handwriting.

That was his first poem. He wrote it on a sleepless night, lying on the attic floor. The ink had dried out, and the character "永" (yong) in "永恆" (yongheng) was missing its last stroke—he was so cold that his fingers were frozen.

"...Someone wants to see you."

The knight folded the manuscript again and added, "She read the poem and found it very interesting."

Nathos lowered his head, looking at his patched cuffs and flour-stained collar, and whispered:

"I am the miller's son."

The knight did not respond immediately. She put the poem back into her bosom, then took out a letter and forcefully placed it in his hand.

"I don't know what she wrote in the letter," the knight said, his voice lower than before. "But when she sent me to you, she was holding the paper you wrote and had been looking at it all day."

Nassos, without raising his eyes, simply said, "I'm going. He'll be disappointed."

How did you know?

He remained silent, turned and left, and the knight did not stop him.

The door closed behind him, blocking out the light.

The room was dark, with only a sliver of light filtering through a thin crack in the wall.

He used to think that when the wind came in through the cracks and made a whistling sound, he would think it was the wind talking.

But as I grew older, I learned that the wind cannot speak.

Just as he always thought he shouldn't receive any response, writing poems and letting them flow into the stream was like a job.

The letter slipped from his body and fell to the ground, but Nathos did not move.

The sound of horses' hooves faded into the distance outside the window, so faint as if afraid of waking something.

He clearly picked it up and opened it.

There was no signature, no title. The first line was written in slanted quill pen, the ink darker than his, yet the strokes unexpectedly gentle: "You say the wind can speak. I believe you."

Nassos clutched the letter, remaining silent for a long time.

His finger slowly traced the line of words, like a blind person reading a letter without Braille.

"There were times when I could hear voices, and everyone around me was talking to me, but no one asked me what I wanted to say."

"Your poem makes me feel that there are people on the other side of the river."

There are people on the other side.

Naxos remained silent for a long time, realizing that he had never been an isolated island.

That night he placed the letter beside his pillow, and that night he dreamed of a blurry shadow for the first time.

The shadow stood by the river, through the mist and the water, as the other person reached out their hand to him.

He did not shake hands.

He took a step forward, then stopped—he was afraid that if he got too close, the fog would dissipate.

The second letter arrived five days later.

The third letter arrived three days later.

The fourth letter came a day later.

Nassos began to feel a sense of anticipation as he waited.

At first he refused to admit it. He still went to the stream to fetch water every morning, still poured bags of wheat into the mill, and still avoided the villagers' ambiguous gazes.

But he would stop at the mill entrance and glance one more time down the path.

The knight never explained why he came. She would slap the letter into his hand, sometimes urging him not to write too long a reply, and sometimes saying nothing at all. She would lean against the door frame, drink the water he brought her, wipe her mouth, and leave.

One time she came particularly late, when twilight had fallen. Naxos stood at the mill gate, waiting from sunset to moonrise. When she appeared at the end of the path, he completely forgot to ask about the letter.

He asked, "Have you eaten?"

The knight paused for a moment, then laughed, her armor shimmering silver in the moonlight.

"You've changed," she said.

Nassos looked down at his hands.

He didn't know what change was; he only knew that the days before were like a millstone, grinding wheat and leaving flour, and that there was no difference between waking up and sleeping, or between spring and autumn.

Now, every day when he wakes up, he has something to look forward to.

The other person wrote about reeds, but didn't know what they were, so Nassos drew one for them in his reply. He didn't draw it well; the reed looked like an upside-down broom. But he drew it carefully for a long time, blackening every vein.

The other person wrote that when they were a child, they raised a sparrow. It fell out of its nest and broke its wing. They hid it on the windowsill of their room, made a nest for it with a silk handkerchief, and secretly saved their own breakfast to feed it.

Later, the sparrow died, and I was heartbroken for a long time, but I still had to smile and attend the tea party the next day.

"That was the first time," he wrote, "that I learned to hide a part of myself."

Nathos held the letter and sat there for a long time.

He recalled the words hidden in the wheat stalks, the poems hidden in the paper boats, and the countless times he had written behind the words "It's okay if I don't write anymore."

He picked up his pen.

"I used to think that hiding was to avoid being seen. Now I realize it was so that one day, the right person could see me."

Naxos did not sleep the night the letter was sent.

He pushed open the attic window—the one that never closed properly even in winter. Moonlight seeped in through the crack, drawing a thin white line on the floor.

He suddenly stopped perceiving it as a crevice, as the path the wind had taken when it came to talk to him.

The letter about the promise of a full moon arrived on a rainy evening.

Nathos stood under the eaves of the mill, watching the rain weave the sky and earth into a gray curtain. A knight rode out from behind the curtain, soaked to the bone, but he protected the letter inside his breastplate. When he took it out, not a single drop of rain had gotten on it.

He took it.

A small blue snowflake was drawn on the envelope.

He took it apart.

"On the night of the full moon, under the sycamore tree outside the city, I'll be waiting for you."

Nassos did not immediately put the letter away.

He stared at the words for a long time, the sound of rain falling on the mill roof and on the stream.

This letter has been read many times.

He didn't read it.

It was the other party—they had read it repeatedly before sending it, and after each word, they seemed to pause and think: Will he come?

Naxos folded the letter carefully. He had some insomnia that night, not out of fear.

It was a different kind of emotion he had never experienced before, like a stream on the eve of thawing, with undercurrents surging beneath the ice, yet he didn't know when it would suddenly shatter.

He remembered the letters, the reeds, the sparrows, the wind in the mill, and how she had said she was from the island, but he thought he was the only one on the island.

It turns out that the islands are separated by the sea, yet also connected by the sea.