#ascheherz

Its name is ‘Ascheherz’ (heart of ash) by Nina Blazon. It might seem a bit like these classical tales with their beautiful girls, but it isn’t. 

And yes, it is a story about a girl that loves, somehow, but what I love about this book is the way it paints pictures in your mind.

There are stories within this story, a theater where the actors wear mantles woven from branches, masks made of glittering sundust and copper, and a city in a summer night, filled with music and forgetting.

There is a strange land, where the winter lasts a whole year, where blue flowers bloom on wintertrees even in the coldest nights, where children swim with shark-sisters.

There is a castle, empty for centuries, where now the Death and her children live, where beds are made of stone and marmor, where one dreams with everybody else, and where nobody sees each others faces.

There is a ruin, hidden in the forest, where nobody goes anymore, where butterflies woke in winter, and where one danced until the morning.

There are people fighting a war with guns and swords, other people living in the mountains, and their reflection in the water shows not their face.

This is a story about magic, and death, and love too, love in a way that is senseless, useless, unnecessary, but endless and ever-there.

This is a story interwoven with poems:

“Liebte dich

unbewusst,

heimlich,

leise,

auf meine

mir damals

noch fremde

Weise,

liebte dich

körperlos,

dein Lachen,

dein Haar,

liebe dich grundlos

und

immerdar.”

(Translation:

Loved you, unconsciously, secretly, quietly,

back then in a for me still strange way.

loved you, disembodied, your laugh, your hair,