Velvet Ashes
Velvet Ashes is a romantic-erotic and psycho-fantastical novel by Vegnian author Teresa Bulgaro, first published in 1743 AN. As the third major work in Bulgaro’s literary repertoire, the novel marks a shift toward a more introspective and emotionally intricate narrative, delving into themes of grief, memory, and obsessive longing. Set in a dream-suspended dimension where time loops and meanings unravel, Velvet Ashes follows the unnamed protagonist—a grieving woman—who enters a pact with a dream-walker, allowing her to relive, night after night, the final moments spent with her lost lover. Through a fragmented, lyrical, and deeply symbolic narrative, Velvet Ashes explores desire as a liminal force between absence and presence, and love as a haunting that dwells within the body's emotional memory. Often described as “a sensual elegy carved in sleep,” the novel solidified Bulgaro’s reputation as a literary voice capable of capturing the psychological resonance of passion and loss with uncanny intimacy.
Editions
- First edition (1743 AN) - Panduso Edizioni. Softcover paperback edition.
Plot
Act I – The Pact of Silence
The story opens in a city without name, caught perpetually between dusk and memory. The protagonist—an unnamed woman in her early thirties—wanders its faded streets, wrapped in long coats and longer silences. Her lover, whose name she never speaks aloud, died in unclear circumstances some months before. She has not returned to work. She does not answer letters. Her apartment has become a mausoleum of small rituals: tea brewed but untouched, the sheets on one side of the bed never disturbed, the same melody playing on loop from a dust-covered radio. One evening, guided by the pull of half-formed dreams, she enters an abandoned greenhouse on the edge of the old botanical district. There, amid wilted orchids and fogged glass, she meets a stranger with skin like polished bark and eyes that flicker like candle smoke. He introduces himself only as Aventur, and claims to be a dream-walker—a being able to traverse the dreamscapes of those who no longer distinguish night from loss. He offers her a pact: in exchange for a fragment of her waking name, he will grant her the power to revisit her past nights, one by one, but only within sleep. These nights, once relived, cannot be recalled consciously—only felt, like music heard in another room. She accepts without hesitation. The dreams begin immediately. Each night, she returns to her lover: sometimes in ordinary scenes—a late dinner, a walk by the canals, an unfinished conversation on a stairwell—other times in abstract spaces shaped by longing. Their gestures are familiar, but never identical. He never questions his presence. He never mentions death. And she never tells him he is no longer alive. By day, she becomes increasingly detached. Mirrors blur her reflection. Birds freeze mid-flight in her peripheral vision. Her diary fills with inked phrases she does not remember writing:
«He remembers me only when I forget him», and «Velvet burns more softly than ash.»
A subtle transformation begins: her scent changes. Strangers address her as someone else. Her sense of time fractures. Still, each night, she returns to the greenhouse. And Aventur waits, silent and still as stone, asking nothing, taking nothing—except, perhaps, what she no longer notices is leaving her.
Act II – The Repeating Flame
The dreams deepen. What began as recollection becomes variation. The nights she relives with her lost lover begin to shift—memories bending into dreams that were never real, or perhaps always were. They meet not only in apartments and parks, but in rooms built of velvet and smoke, in trains that never reach a station, on beaches where the sea is made of ash and the stars pulse in rhythm with her breath. Her lover changes too. His face remains, but his eyes flicker with new expressions, as if he is remembering her from other lives. He speaks in riddles, utters words she once whispered in childhood, finishes thoughts she has not yet begun. Their kisses carry static. Their silences stretch into entire chapters of unspoken understanding. In some dreams, they do not touch—but still, her skin wakes warm, as though touched by fire. The boundary between night and day erodes. The protagonist wakes disoriented, her fingertips stained with soot, her pillow damp with saltwater. She finds a feather beneath her bed, fine and dark as ink. Her shadow lags behind her by a second. She begins to see Aventur outside the greenhouse—in shop windows, across the street, sitting silently on park benches. Always watching, always waiting, always unchanged. She attempts to stop the pact. She stays awake for days, but exhaustion overtakes her in moments she does not recall choosing. Even when she dreams of not dreaming, she finds herself in the presence of her lover once again—only now, he seems aware. In one dream, he takes her hand and whispers:
«This is not memory. This is creation. And creation costs.»
She confronts Aventur. He does not deny it. Each night she reclaims costs her part of the day. Her reflection, her name, her linear sense of time—they are the currency.
«You are stitching yourself to a ghost», he says, «but thread must come from somewhere.»
Her body responds with signs: bruises where there was no impact, warmth where she was alone, hunger for things she cannot name. In mirrors, she sometimes sees not herself but her lover, watching her from behind the glass. Despite the warnings, she continues. She no longer cares what is real. The dreams are richer than life. And within them, she and her beloved begin to speak a private language, a code of half-gestures and whispered vowels. They invent a city. A religion. A memory of a child they never had. The act ends with her falling asleep in the greenhouse for the first time. In the dream, she stands beside Aventur, not her lover. He offers her a final vision: a hallway lined with doors, each marked with a date that has never occurred. She chooses one at random. And steps through.
Act III – The Burning Silence
Beyond the door, there is no dream. There is only a room of velvet walls that breathe, lit by candles that drip upward. Time has ceased to cycle. There is no Aventur. No lover. No name. The protagonist walks barefoot on a floor of silent ash. With every step, the echo of another life reverberates—glimpses of conversations never had, skin she never touched, futures that dissolved before forming. She realizes she is no longer in memory, nor in dream, but in the residue of longing—the place left behind when desire is unfulfilled for too long. There, seated in a chair carved from mirrors, she finds him—her lover—but altered. His eyes reflect her face, multiplied endlessly. He does not speak. Instead, he holds out a box wrapped in mothwing silk. Inside: a stone carved in the shape of a heart, warm to the touch, and pulsing faintly. When she places it against her chest, it fits perfectly. She has been missing this—not since his death, but since long before. The moment is unbearable in its softness.
«You loved me as if I were real,» he says, voice fragile as snow. «And so I became real only here.»
She understands. He was never entirely himself. He was the part of her that loved, and longed, and refused to let go. The dream-walker never took from her—he only mirrored what she offered freely. She did not bind herself to a ghost. She created one from the heat of her absence. The dream collapses inward. She wakes in the greenhouse, surrounded by frost, with dawn breaking for the first time in what feels like years. Aventur is gone. The plants are blooming again, but no two leaves share the same shade of green. Her diary is empty, but the last page bears a single line, scrawled in her handwriting:
«Nothing burns softer than velvet, except the name no one remembers saying.»
She leaves the city. No destination. Her memories remain, but faded—as if seen through gauze. At night, she no longer dreams of him. But when the wind turns a certain way, she feels heat under her collarbone. A ghost of warmth. A trace of desire. The novel closes as she walks alone along a pale coastline, the horizon trembling like a closed eye. In her pocket: a feather of no known bird, and a key to a door that no longer exists.
Characters
- The Protagonist: An unnamed woman in her early thirties, grieving the sudden and undefined loss of her lover. She is quiet, introspective, and emotionally suspended—trapped between mourning and memory. Her refusal to let go of the past drives the central pact of the novel. As she revisits her nights through the dream-walker’s magic, her identity slowly dissolves and reconfigures, revealing a deep reservoir of desire, creative longing, and self-fracture. She is never called by name, emphasizing her fluidity and symbolic role as both subject and vessel of mourning.
- The Lover: A mysterious, spectral figure who appears only in dreams. He is at once familiar and unknowable—tender, seductive, and often disarmingly silent. His presence changes throughout the narrative, reflecting the protagonist’s evolving emotional state. At times he is warm and playful, at others solemn or distant. Whether he was ever “real” remains ambiguous. His essence functions as a mirror of the protagonist’s desire, a projection of her unresolved love, and possibly a piece of her own soul. He speaks only rarely, yet his words are always intimate and disarming, as in: «You loved me as if I were real. And so I became real only here.»
- Aventur: A dream-walker—neither male nor female, but presenting as a figure of quiet, unreadable presence. Aventur serves as a guide and a threshold-keeper between the waking world and the dream realm. With skin like bark and eyes like flickering candlelight, they are both eerie and comforting. Aventur offers the protagonist the chance to relive her lost nights, but never pushes or manipulates. Their role is passive, almost sacred—like a ferryman of the subconscious. Their true motivations remain obscure. At times, they seem deeply compassionate. At others, utterly detached.
- The City: Though not a character in the traditional sense, the unnamed city where the novel takes place behaves like a living organism. Its mood shifts with the protagonist’s emotional state. At first cold and grey, it later grows strange, fluid, and impossible to map. Time folds over itself, streets lead nowhere, clocks stop. It is a city where grief lingers in architecture and longing breathes through walls. The city becomes both stage and psyche: a container of memory, desire, and dissolution.
