Title: The Strange Mercy of Listening
Description: 1935, East Prussia.

In a quiet border town where the days move like clockwork and the air hums with the static of the telegraph, a man begins to notice a woman who passes through the same clearing each morning. She hums softly to herself. She reads poetry. She kneels among the wildflowers as though the act itself were a form of prayer.

At first, he only watches, from the trees, from the window of his office, from the edge of his own life. He tells himself it is harmless: a curiosity, a study of movement and light. But the silence between them begins to grow teeth. His journal becomes the only place he can speak her name.

As the summer deepens, fascination becomes ritual. Ritual becomes devotion. And devotion turns to something far more dangerous: the desperate need to be known by the one he has watched too long.

When at last the distance between them breaks, the quiet world they inhabit shifts. What began as observation becomes communion, and the line between love and obsession dissolves beneath the weight of longing.

Set against the fragile calm of pre-war Europe, The Strange Mercy of Listening is a dark romantic novella about solitude, devotion, and the perilous grace of being seen.
Subjects: Fiction, romance, general, Romance, Fiction, romance, historical, Epistolary fiction, Diary fiction, East Prussia, German, Dark romance, Dark romance, fiction, historical dark romance
Places: Tilsit-Ragnit, Germany (East Prussia) (Kreis), East Prussia, Allenstein (Germany)
Time periods: 1908-1935