Adomania | Jonas Kahnwald

0000. w h a t

a girl, fixated on the past
AND
a boy, desperately trying
to bring her back to the present.

THEY WERE ALWAYS TOGETHER. It was always JonasandMeike, MeikeandJonas. They were inseparable at best, and minutes apart at their worst. At every moment they could be, they were at each other's side, joined at the hip, stuck together like glue. They had secret looks, wordless conversations and silent understandings. They knew everything about each other. They were everything to each other.

And they promised to be.

— ⧖ —

a girl, fallen in love with
a boy who has fallen
for someone else.

THERE WERE TWO THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MEIKE NIELSEN: she loved the past and she loved Jonas.

Meike has always felt a strange pull to the past. To her, it was a story, an epic that unraveled the secrets of humankind in tales of their triumphs, their failures, and their words and deeds. To her, the past was a complex, living, breathing being that was begging to be studied. To her, the past was meant to be remembered.

The only thing that grounded her to the present was Jonas Kahnwald. He held the ribbon that kept her from floating higher and higher, from leaving the present entirely to becoming a part of the past. He was her lifeline, and she was his.

Or, at least, she used to be.

  — ⧖ —  

a boy, in trying to save
others never learned how
to save himself.

JONAS KAHNWALD KNEW TWO THINGS TO BE TRUE. One, he was in love with Martha Nielsen. Two, his father was the greatest man he knew.

Meike Nielsen was his best friend, his confidant, his partner in crime—but she looked back more than she looked at him. Still, he stuck with her, because she was his best friend and that was the way things always were.

One summer, he found that Martha Nielsen only had eyes for him, and she looked at him more than she looked anywhere else. And so, he fell. He fell for the girl that seemed to love him the most, and he was happy.

But everything changed when his father died. Jonas adored his father more than anyone else in the world. His father was his idol, his role model, the beacon of light he turned to when he was lost in the darkness. So when his father killed himself and his world lost its only light, he did the only thing he could think of doing.

Run.

  — ⧖ —  

a girl, uncovering the hidden secrets
of the past, present, and future
AND
a boy, traveling through it.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, Jonas is back in town—she could see him, hear him, be near him—and Meike couldn't ask for more. Though it's clear that he's changed, nobody dares to break the walls he managed to build around himself in a few months' time. Nobody dares to say a word about him being a little quieter, about looking a little faded around the edges, about being a little less alive, because when they buried his father, they didn't bury him alone.

But when mysterious events wreak havoc around town, Winden's quiet streets are buzzing with the desire for answers. Little by little, the town realizes they have to look to the past to understand the present, and Jonas turns to the person who was always so fond of doing so. Together, JonasandMeike and MeikeandJonas dig up the dark past of a town where secrets are buried six feet underground and discover the truth behind the stones they should've left unturned.