Mara und der Feuerbringer (2015)

Fourteen-year-old Mara Lorbeer lives in Munich’s Au district and really wants just one thing: to be “normal.” Instead, ever since she was twelve, she has been plagued daily by dark visions, is considered an outsider at school because of her daydreaming, and has an esoterically minded mother who drags her along to tree-speaking seminars run by the Wiccas of the Au. After one of these seminars, Mara meets a talking branch that is supposed to deliver a message from an unknown client. From it, she learns that she is a Spákona, a Norse-Germanic seer, and that her task is to prevent the Twilight of the Gods (Ragnarök). In a vision, she sees Thor and his brother, the demigod Loki, who was bound to a rock by the gods for all eternity as punishment for his deeds and has been tormented there for more than 2,000 years by poison dripping from a snake. Now Loki threatens to break free of his bonds, which could bring about the end of the world. Reluctantly, Mara accepts the task assigned to her and seeks out university professor Reinhold Weissinger, an expert in Norse-Germanic mythology. Weissinger doubts her account, and Mara leaves his office at the University of Munich disappointed. Only when he discovers a drawing by Mara depicting the Midgard Serpent as she saw it in her visions does Professor Weissinger become curious and get back in touch with her. When Mara takes him into one of her visions and he encounters Thor and Loki there, he realizes she is telling the truth and decides—excited by the possibility of experiencing Norse-Germanic mythology firsthand in this way—to help the girl. Mara continues to be troubled by visions and by people with menacing black eyes who urge her to help. It turns out that Loki is speaking to her this way. She seeks him out in the cave where he lies bound to a rock and learns that his wife, Sigyn, who protected him from the snake’s burning venom with her magical wooden bowl, has been abducted by a fire being. Loki asks her to bring Sigyn back to him; otherwise, he will tear himself free. With the help of Loki’s divine power, Mara transports herself to the fire-bringer’s volcano and finds Sigyn chained there, along with the enormous fire-bringer, made up of many small flames, who calls himself Loge and claims to be a god. Mara returns to Loki without Sigyn but with the magical bowl, and assures him that she will do everything she can to free Sigyn. At school, Mara and a male classmate are bullied once again by the malicious Larissa and her clique. Furious—and strengthened by Loki’s divine power, which finally enables her to fight back—Mara makes Larissa see a vision of the enormous, terrifying Midgard Serpent. Larissa collapses in fear and is taken to the hospital. Horrified by her new power and by the satisfaction she felt in using it against another person, Mara is appalled at herself and wants nothing more to do with any of it. Only after visiting Larissa in the hospital and talking things through with her does Mara reconcile with her gift. She decides to seek help and, with Professor Weissinger’s support, go after the dragon-slayer Siegfried from the Nibelung legend. She and Weissinger go to the Munich Residenz, a place that has repeatedly appeared to her in her visions, and from there transport themselves to Gnita Heath, where, according to the legend, Siegfried killed the Lindworm. But before Siegfried can kill the Lindworm, the two are discovered and attacked by it. In a panic, Mara transports herself and the professor back to the Munich Residenz and only then realizes that she has accidentally brought Siegfried and the Lindworm into her own time as well. In the Residenz’s Brunnenhof courtyard, the Lindworm wrecks a medieval market taking place there, and Mara only just manages to transport herself, Weissinger, Siegfried, and the Lindworm away—to the fire-bringer’s volcanic world. After first the Lindworm and then Siegfried fail to destroy Loge, Mara realizes how she can defeat the fire-bringer. Once he has vanished, Sigyn can be freed, and without the fire-bringer’s magic, everything can return to where it belongs. Siegfried returns to his own time, Sigyn to Loki in the cave, and Mara and the professor to the Brunnenhof, where Mara casts a spell of forgetfulness over all the visitors. Mara and the professor realize what a good team they make and that their adventure is far from over. And Mara understands that she was never truly alone: she had always had her mother, just as her mother had always had her.