The Story Begins

A quick resend — the first email went out with some rather unfortunate text colors. Here it is as it was actually meant to look.

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Hello,

In my first newsletter, I told you why I'm writing this saga.

Quite a bit has changed since then.

One of the quieter milestones was finally giving each of the four books its name. I also went back to their descriptions and rewrote them to better reflect what each part of the journey is actually about—without giving away where that journey leads.

The four books are now:

Book I — Garden Between Walls
Book II — The Weight of Memory
Book III — Transmutation
Book IV — Stargazing

Seeing all four names together made the saga feel a little more real to me. Until now, much of it has existed as characters, scenes, structures, questions, and an increasingly large collection of notes. Giving each part its own identity felt like another small step from something I'm designing toward something that will eventually sit on a shelf.

I've also updated the website with the new descriptions, so if you're curious about the shape of the journey without wanting to know too much, you can find all four there.

But there has been another, more important step since my last letter.

I've started writing.

So rather than spend this newsletter only telling you about the story, I thought I should finally let you read some of it.

What follows is an early draft of the opening of Book I, Garden Between Walls. It is still very much a work in progress. Sentences will change. Details will move. Entire pieces may look different by the time the book is finished.

But this is where the story begins.

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Early draft — September 2026

Some places carry their summers gently. Others turn the season into something to endure, pressing heat into stone and skin alike, as if the city wished to test those who moved through it.

On this early summer evening, Dresden did no such thing.

The sun was setting far in the west, and from the Albertbrücke and the Brühlsche Terrasse, the sky opened in layers of deep orange, yellow, and red, slowly dissolving into gold above the Elbe.

But the sunset was not the end of it.

Warm air rose from the city into the cooler heights above, carrying moisture lifted from the river, the stones, and the leaves. There, over Dresden, it gathered until it became heavy enough to return.

There was no storm. No dark ceiling of cloud. No warning roll of thunder over the rooftops.

The rain began almost without announcement, as summer rain sometimes does: light, cool, and unexpected against the warmth of the evening.

The first drops touched the city gently. Some vanished against the warm stone before leaving more than a trace. Leaves shifted rather than trembled. Across the Elbe, scattered rings disturbed the gold of the setting sun.

High above the city, a raindrop formed.

Far below her, a bridge stretched across the Elbe, its pale stone arches rising from the water in a long, gentle procession.

On the bridge, a Dresden-yellow tram made its way toward the old city alongside cyclists and people crossing on foot, some almost strolling. A couple of bicycles rested against the stone parapet, their riders lingering beside them to enjoy the last rays of the setting sun and the cool summer rain against their faces and bare arms.

Perhaps they had crossed it a hundred times before. Perhaps some barely noticed where they were anymore. But on evenings like this, when the river carried the colors of the sky and the old city gathered beyond it in towers, domes, and stone, the bridge seemed to ask even those who knew it well to look again.

A bridge had carried people across the Elbe at this very place since the thirteenth century. It had changed with Dresden, rebuilt and reshaped as the centuries passed, while the river continued beneath it.

Today, Dresden knew it as the Augustusbrücke.

From high above it, the raindrop could see why people stopped.

The Elbe moved wide and calm beneath its bridges, carrying the last light of the day in broken pieces. Along the promenade, people slowed without quite deciding to. Some walked with the unhurried rhythm of an evening that asked nothing of them. Others sat or lay in the grass near the river, letting warm air and cool rain share the same moment.

The first drops drew the scent of fresh grass into the air.

There were reasons Dresden had once been called Florence on the Elbe. Some stood in stone. Some lived in the curve of the river. Some appeared only for a few minutes at a time, when light, water, history, and human attention found one another by accident.

The raindrop began her descent.

She might have fallen straight into the Elbe.

Many drops did.

But the air above a city is rarely still.

Warmth rose from the stone. Cooler air moved along the river, and where the two met, an evening current caught her and drew her away from the Elbe.

She turned away from the water and drifted deeper into Dresden.

The river remained close behind her.

Along the Brühlsche Terrasse, beneath the broad canopy of the trees, a young couple strolled hand-in-hand. The leaves caught much of the fine rain above them, gathering it into heavier drops that fell only now and then onto the path or their shoulders. Neither seemed inclined to avoid them.

At the stone balustrade they slowed. Across the Elbe lay Neustadt, and somewhere beyond the riverfront the streets that had once filled every June with the Bunte Republik Neustadt. They lingered there for a moment, looking toward it with quiet nostalgia, remembering music from every direction, crowded streets, makeshift stages and open courtyards — the wonderful disorder of a neighborhood that, for one weekend, seemed to belong to everyone who was there.

The raindrop drifted on.

Near the top of the Frauenkirche, a visitor stood at the railing and looked out over Dresden.

The city sprawled around them in every direction, each corner competing for their attention. A dome here, a tower there, the river curling between them, roofs and streets disappearing into the distance — beautiful on their own, yet somehow made more compelling by the suspicion that almost everything they were looking at had a story they did not yet know.

Their gaze wandered from one to the next, never quite settling before something else caught it.

The raindrop drifted lower.

At the foot of the church, Dresden looked very different.

Across the Neumarkt, a man drew apart two long sticks, and between the ropes hanging from them a thin sheet of soap caught the air. It stretched, shimmered, and broke into hundreds of bubbles — a number not even the gentle summer drizzle seemed able to diminish.

A child ran among them.

Her parents watched from nearby as she reached for one after another, missing most and laughing when one finally burst against her hands. Around her, other children joined the chase almost without invitation. Tiny bubbles vanished against the warm stone; larger ones climbed higher, carrying warped little reflections of the Frauenkirche, the bright façades, and the warm colors of the setting sun.

Some rose high enough to meet the falling rain.

For a moment, bubbles and raindrops shared the air above the square.

Then the evening current carried her beyond them.

The same wandering current carried her between the buildings and away from the open square. The Frauenkirche disappeared behind the facades. For a few moments there was only stone around her: windows glowing with evening light, cornices darkening beneath the rain, glimpses of rooms beyond the glass.

Then the air weakened.

She fell.

Hidden behind one of those facades was a quieter place, unseen by most of the people passing only a short distance away: a small courtyard enclosed by the surrounding walls.

Here the city arrived softened. The rain touched leaves and stone. Voices mingled beneath the faint patter of water, close enough to belong to the same place without becoming words. Warm light spilled through the windows of a cafe and reached into the gathering dusk.

The drop descended toward the garden.

A last breath of air caught her and pushed her sideways.

Toward the light.

Toward the window.

She struck the glass without a sound.

For a moment, the drop held against the glass.

Through her curved body, the little garden bent inward. The tall walls leaned. Trees blurred into green shadows. The warm light of the café stretched and folded, and behind it all, seated at a round table in the window niche, a man appeared to be looking straight at her.

The drop trembled.

Then she slipped.

In a single thin line, she ran down the pane, carrying the man's distorted face with her until the glass, the garden, and the last light of the evening broke apart behind her.

Through the glass, the raindrop could see more than the man alone. The round table. The book beside him. The ashtray near its edge. But some details belonged to a world beyond simple sight.

The book had been opened often enough for its cover to soften and its corners to crease. The ashtray was unused. His clothes were casual but deliberate: a simple shirt, good shoes, nothing excessive, nothing neglected.

He was mature, but not old. Young enough that life still had years to demand from him; old enough that it had already taken some things without asking.

The impression that he had been looking at her was only an accident of glass and angle.

His gaze rested somewhere beyond the rain-speckled window, beyond the little garden and the walls around it.

He was sitting in the café, but his thoughts were somewhere else.

The man blinked once.

Absentmindedly, he lowered one hand onto the table. His fingers found the edge of the book and pressed another small crease into one of its already worn corners.

He did not notice.

His expression was that of a man remembering.

Not one thing.

Many.

Perhaps all at once, if the faint tightening of his left eyebrow could be trusted.

Only when his name was spoken a second time, gently and after a short pause, did he return.

A drink had been placed on the table.

Beside it stood the waiter, watching him with a warm smile touched by the smallest trace of concern.

“Nemanja. Is everything alright?”

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In my first newsletter, I wrote that I wanted people who know Dresden to recognize it in these books.

I've been thinking much more about what that actually means.

I don't want Dresden to exist simply as a collection of landmarks behind the characters. I want it to feel lived in.

If you live here, I hope there will be moments when you recognize not only a bridge or a street, but the experience of being there: the warm stone after a summer day, the yellow trams, the Elbe at sunset, a light rain that nobody really wants to escape from, or the strange familiarity of passing something beautiful often enough that you sometimes forget to look at it.

If you know Dresden but have never visited, I hope the familiar names and images gradually become something more tangible.

And if you have never known the city at all, I hope that after spending enough time here with these characters, some of its streets will begin to feel strangely familiar anyway.

There is another part of this that has become important to me.

These books take place in real places at a particular moment in time. Cities change. Streets change. Businesses disappear. Buildings are altered. Traditions come and go. The little things people take completely for granted today may feel very different twenty years from now.

I don't want to turn the novels into historical catalogues. The story always comes first.

But where the lives of the characters naturally touch the world around them, I want that world to be specific and truthful enough that it quietly preserves something of the place as it was.

A bridge people have crossed for centuries. A festival that once filled a neighborhood and now survives partly in memory. Children chasing bubbles beneath the Frauenkirche. A yellow tram passing through a warm summer drizzle.

Those details are ordinary now.

That may be exactly why they are worth keeping.

The same principle will follow the story wherever it goes.

There is an interesting difference at the moment between how much of the story exists and how much of the manuscript exists.

The manuscript itself is still at an early stage.

The story is much further ahead.

Over the past months, I've been working across the architecture of all four books: the major character journeys, the emotional progression of the family, the speculative rules underneath the story, and the consequences that connect one book to the next.

That sometimes means working on something that will not appear until much later in the saga, only to discover that it changes something that needs to be established much earlier.

So a lot of the work right now is about making sure the foundation holds.

I'm identifying the questions that are still unanswered, resolving the ones that affect multiple books, and gradually moving from the architecture of the saga toward the scenes that will actually become Garden Between Walls.

The opening above is part of that transition.

For quite a long time, much of this story existed as plans, scenes in my head, notes, conversations, and connections between events.

It is slowly becoming a book.

Since this is the first piece of the actual story I've shared here, I'd genuinely like to know how it felt to read.

Did Dresden come alive for you?

Did the opening make you curious about the man at the café?

And if you know Dresden yourself, did anything in it feel familiar in that particular way real places sometimes do?

You can simply reply to this email. I read every response.

Thank you, as always, for being here this early.

Until next time,
Nemanja