The page was a chaotic canvas of scattered phonetic fragments—words I had desperately scribbled down in the dark whenever I woke from those nightmares.
"Gülden Locken..."
"Datt güldene Haar!"
"Sot'gen verflicht'en Farbes deines Haars ist gar dem Selben g'lich!"
"Alles deinetwegen!"
"Du hast alles vernichtet!"
"Wärst du bloß nie geboren!"
As my fingertips traced the stark ink strokes on the paper. The ink-drawn words seemed to vibrate off the page, carrying that same cold, malice-drenched voice from my nightmares which ends with her.
Hoping it could be a key to find her, I turned to online translation tools. But when I typed the longest phrase into the search bar, the screen glowed with similar useless answers—"No result found", "Language not directed", etc.
It wasn't until tonight, after hearing Dr. Sterling mention Germany, that it finally clicked. Modern algorithms failed because these weren't standard, conversational words. They were archaic and regional—a traditional, old-world syntax preserved like a fossil.
In short, they were fancy or more like traditional version of German.
To understand them, I didn't need a search engine. I needed to isolate the German root words myself.
With that in mind, I pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward me. Mapping out the roots, I started writing each word one by one as if solving a puzzle. It took my whole knowledge of the language online etymological archives.
The shattered pieces started to assemble piece by piece, giving a meaningful direction to those words.
"Those golden locks..."
"This golden hair!"
"This cursed color of your hair is precisely the same as him!"
"It's all because of you!"
"You ruined everything!"
"You should never have been born!"
My pen stopped mid-air.
According to me, the speaker seems to be someone closely related to the listener. She seems to be suffering from despair so deep no-one could pull her out. Yet her words dripped with an unnatural amount of hatred, anything but befitting of someone close.
Maybe both of them were close and then separated because of something? And the third person might be connected from the reason they separated?
But to comment on someone's birth... The three of them must be family, I guess?
"Argh! It's complicated." I sighed in frustration and shut the leather bound book, placed it on my side-table. Finally acting like someone would at this late hour, I laid down on the soft bed.
Staring hard at the ceiling, I thought to myself "So... how does any of this link back to Aurelia?"
I had always believed it could be a key to find her. Every nightmare ends with her. She would call out to me using a name that felt undeniably mine, even though it wasn't the name I grew up with.
Her voice was always so warm, so infinitely gentle—like a soft melody sung to pull me out of a storm.
Or was she trying to keep me from hearing the rest?