Mergelburg: The Heart of Van Helten [English Verison]

Prologue“Above all else, guard your heart,for everything you do flows from it.”Proverbs, 4:23“The more we try to control everything,the more reality slips through our fingers.”Sigmund Freud.It is human nature to want to control everything around us—even that which cannot be controlled. We make plans, draw routes, arrange the future on neat shelves, as if life were a mechanism with understandable gears, where one only needs to twist a single part for everything to go as intended. But life is not a mechanism. It is a river—fast, murky, unpredictable—and any attempt to hold it in our palms always ends the same way: the water seeps through our fingers, leaving behind only a cold dampness and the bitter taste of helplessness.This was precisely what Howard was thinking as he stood by the window on that raw autumn day. Beyond the glass, Mergelburg seemed like a town forgotten by time and weath…