About

Once upon a time, in a quiet little Danish village overlooking the sea, there lived a young man. He was a writer of very beautiful stories. Children cried and laughed while reading his fairy tales, and adults often discovered long-forgotten dreams within his words. In his stories, lovers found each other, the lonely finally found a warm hand to hold, and no matter how sad the winter, it always ended in spring. Strangely, however, the young man who wrote such stories was not a very happy person when it came to love. He had loved someone a few times. And a few times, he had quietly let those feelings go while keeping them to himself. So people said he was someone who knew love very well, but in truth, he knew better how quietly love can leave a person than how beautiful it is. Wishing to distance himself from the noisy voices of people, he one day rented a small house by the sea. Writing while listening to the sound of the waves, drying his manuscripts in the wind, and reading books in front of the fireplace when the sun went down—he thought that would be enough. The sea there held old stories. The villagers warned him not to go near the beach after a storm had passed. They said things humans didn't know lived in the sea, and that sometimes the waves returned something to the land. The young man thought of such tales as nothing more than stories suitable for fairy tales. At least, until then. The morning after a storm had passed, he discovered a person on the sandy beach. Wet hair, a pale face, and bare feet. Above all, it was a person with eyes that seemed to know nothing of the human world. After that day, a small change occurred in the young man's quiet life. At first, he thought he had simply saved a person. He thought it was just about caring for someone with nowhere to go, teaching someone who knew nothing of the world, and helping them so they could one day return to their place. But the sea did not easily take back what it had once given, and that strange being did not easily disappear from his life either. And the young man did not yet know. That a story far stranger, more beautiful, and perhaps the cruelest of all the fairy tales he had written in his life was just beginning. In that story, no princes, witches, or curses appeared. There was only a person who came from the sea, and a writer who believed in love but could not believe in his own. And as for what kind of ending the story of these two would reach, no one knew yet. E. Larsen