My Eskara never wakes up with a shout; it unfolds slowly, like the rhythmic breath I have taken for seventy years. At this hour, the village is nothing but a silhouette of jagged roofs and sleeping chimneys, etched against the fading indigo of a tired night.

Before me, the lake lies like a vast sheet of silver glass, swallowing the secrets of the reeds I’ve known since I was a boy. No doors have creaked open yet; no path has felt the weight of a footstep but mine. It is a fleeting, sacred moment where the world belongs only to the mist and the water.

But beneath this deep silence, I feel something stirring in my bones. Even the soil beneath my boots seems to lean toward the horizon, waiting for a beat of wings that hasn't arrived yet, but is already written in my heart.

That morning, she appeared at the edge of the shore like someone the mist had carried in.

 A camera in her hands, a foreign name on her lips: Galatea. She said she had followed the storks across half of Europe, and the trail had brought her here. 

To our village. To Yaren. I did not ask too many questions. 

I have been a fisherman my whole life, and you learn pretty quickly that some things show up in their own time, just like the birds do. 

I grabbed my usual catch and we walked over to the nest without saying much.

When Yaren came down and landed next 
to me, same as always, Galatea went quiet. 

She lowered her camera. 

She just looked.

"How long have you two been friends?" she asked.

"Fifteen years," I said.

She did not write anything down. She did not take a single photo. She just nodded, slowly, like someone who had come a very long way to find something and was only now starting to believe it was real.

"Fifteen years ago , an early morning, one like any other I pushed my small boat gently away from the shore, as I had done a thousand times before. The lake was still, holding the sky like a secret. I pushed the oars for a while without thinking—just another day, just another cast of the net.

The water barely moved.
Everything felt ordinary.

Then I noticed something—white, faint, almost part of the mist.

At first, I thought it was nothing. Just light playing tricks. But then it moved.

I stopped."

At that moment I froze, I didn't know how to react, I felt terrified because I didn't know what could happen. I couldn't call anyone because I was alone in the middle of the sea, but my feeling told me that nothing bad was going to happen.

So I stayed still and let the silence settle around me, the way you do when you don’t want to scare something fragile away. The shape came closer, slow and careful, until I could see it clearly—a stork, struggling against the water, one wing dragging like it no longer remembered how to fly.

            A stork—too still to be just tired—balanced there, one wing hanging lower than the other. Its eyes did not blink. Not once. For a moment, I had the strange feeling it wasn’t looking at me, but through me, as if it already knew who I was long before I noticed it.

                 I don’t know why, but I spoke to it.

“You’re far from where you should be.”      

That was fifteen years ago,” I told Galatea quietly, my eyes still fixed on Yaren beside the nest.

 “The lake you see today was not the same lake back then.”

Galatea lowered her camera slowly. The morning light reflected softly across the clean water around us now, calm and silver beneath the mist. Birds moved through the reeds again. Fish disturbed the surface in small circles. It was difficult to imagine that this same place had once stood so close to death.

But I remembered. I remembered everything.

“That morning,” I continued, “when I first saw her struggling in the water… I thought I was only looking at an injured stork.”

I paused for a moment. “But I was wrong.” Back then, the lake was sick. Not quietly sick like an old man growing tired. No. It was wounded.

The water had turned dark and heavy, coated with oily stains that spread across the surface like poison. Plastic drifted through the reeds. 

Broken fishing nets floated beneath the water like traps waiting for something alive to enter them. The smell was the worst part. Chemicals. Rotting fish. Smoke from the factories beyond the hills. 

Even the nights had changed. 

The frogs had stopped singing. The birds no longer gathered near the shore. Sometimes the silence became so deep it frightened me more than noise ever could.

Galatea listened without interrupting. I could see something changing in her expression now. She was no longer only hearing a story about a bird. She was beginning to understand the lake too.

“When I reached Yaren,” I said softly, “I noticed the line wrapped around her wing.” I looked down at my hands as though I could still feel it there. “She kept trying to fly, but the lake kept pulling her back.”

For a long time, I could not move. Part of me wanted to help her immediately. Another part of me was afraid.

What if I hurt her more?

What if I was already too late?

What if nothing could change what this place had become?

Then Yaren lifted her head. She looked directly at me. Not with fear. Not with anger. With trust. Galatea’s eyes softened at that.

“She trusted you?” she asked quietly. I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered. “And somehow that made everything harder.” Because in that moment, I realized Yaren’s broken wing was not only her wound. It was the lake’s wound too. Everything around us was connected.

 And somewhere inside me was another terrible thought I did not want to admit:

Maybe one fisherman was too small against a problem this large.

I remember standing there in the boat, staring at the poisoned water around her, feeling completely helpless.

“I think,” Galatea said slowly, “that people only notice nature when it begins to disappear.”

Her words settled heavily between us. I looked across the lake again — clean now, alive again after so many years of struggle — and I remembered how hopeless it once felt.

Back then, the reeds had turned yellow. The lilies near the shore were covered in dirt. Even the fish tasted of metal. The lake looked less like water and more like a dying thing trying to breathe.

 “That was my awakening,” I told her.

 “Before Yaren, I saw the pollution… 
but I never truly looked at it. 

I told myself it was someone else’s

responsibility. The factories. 

The government. Other people.”

I smiled bitterly.

 “That’s the easiest lie in the world.”

 Galatea stayed silent.

 I think she understood there was nothing to say.

 “When I stepped into the water to reach her,” I continued, “I was terrified.”

The mud swallowed my boots.

Sharp plastic cut my hands.

The water burned my skin.

But my fear of doing nothing became greater than my fear of the lake itself.

Because I understood something standing there beside her:

Silence is also a choice.

And silence had almost destroyed this place.

I told Galatea how I cut the line from Yaren’s wing piece by piece while she trembled against my arms. How I carried her to the shore. How, for days afterward, I could not stop thinking about what I had seen in the water.

Not just pollution. A warning.

Nature itself was exhausted. Still trying to survive.

Still trying to “fly.” But no longer able to do so alone.

“So what happened after that?” Galatea finally asked.

 I looked around us. At the clean water. At the reeds moving gently in the wind. At Yaren standing peacefully beside the nest she had returned to for fifteen years. 

“We fought for it,” I said.

The villagers cleaned the shore. The illegal dumping stopped. People began protecting the reeds instead of destroying them. It took years… but little by little, the lake learned how to breathe again.

Galatea looked at Yaren for a long moment before lifting her camera once more.

 “But she came back,” she said softly.

 “Yes,” I answered.

She came back every spring.

And somehow, each year she returned, it felt less like a bird visiting a lake— and more like hope finding its way home again.

The first stars were beginning to appear above the lake when Galatea finally turned away from the water, but Yaren remained beside the nest, peaceful and still, as if she belonged not only to this place but to every person who had fought to protect it.

The reeds moved softly in the evening wind, carrying the same quiet sound I remembered from years ago, the night I carried her injured body to the shore and wondered whether anything here could truly survive.

The lake no longer looks the way Adem remembers it. The water, once clear and blue, has turned a dull green, covered with thick layers of algae.

The air smells heavy and sour, like something slowly rotting. Adem wrinkles his nose as he steps closer to the shore.

Even the sounds have changed. He can barely hear any birds, and the water feels strangely quiet.

No fish swim beneath the surface anymore. Pieces of plastic drift slowly across the lake, moving lazily with the weak waves.

Adem stops for a moment. Something about the silence makes his chest feel tight. The smell, the dark water, the absence of life… none of it feels natural anymore.

Adem stood still. He felt his heart beating so hard that he could hardly think. The underwater figure was still there, looking at him.

The storm made a small jump back, as if scared.

Then the water started to move for real. They weren't fish. 

They were long shadows, too big.

Adem swallowed saliva and took another step back.