ROMAN KALINOVSKI de KALINOVA
THANATOS Fragments
THANATOS is a neobaroque worldbuilding project that has taken many forms over the decades, from unfinished corrupted videogames to short stories, drawings, and partially-completed novels. The fragmented stories that constitute THANATOS take place on Neith, a world with no natural sense of time. Rather, time is a purely cultural or personal phenomenon, with some tracking it by gazing at dim stars in the darkward sky, others by burning sacred candles, and some refusing to acknowledge its passing at all.
THANATOS embodies the philosophy of the baroque: pictures exist within pictures and stories occur within stories, mise-en-abysme, and characters play characters who play further characters until life is a theatrical play with no clear distinction between the performers and the audience. The protagonist of one story may be the antagonist of the next one as narrative fragments pile up and coalesce into a world where nothing can be trusted: not time, not metaphysics, and certainly not anything claiming to be divine.
The Vaster Conspiracy
A partially finished manuscript of a novel accompanied by a series of charcoal and mixed-media drawings on vellum, The Vaster Conspiracy is a story of art and artifact counterfeiting, conspiracies within conspiracies, and a desperate attempt to uncover a hidden past through natural or unnatural means.
Twisted Passages
In the bombed-out, fortified island city of Efir, Arbelin, a private investigator, is hired to “solve” the murder of a foreign servant girl. While he was meant to pin the blame on an inconvenient group of squatters despised by both the Efirian Imperial Remnant and the New Breslin Development Company, his investigation leads him to pursue a serial killer who seems to move, and kill, faster and more frequently than time and space ought to allow.
Ashes and Dust
The war-torn city-state of Zabool sits at the base of an eternally smoldering crater that regularly covers the region with ash, this ashfall providing one of the few natural sources of timekeeping in Neith.
As they work to support the community and rebuild Zabool’s Shrine of Lucca after the war, a trio of priestesses receives an unexpected delivery: four reliquaries sealed with a series of increasingly elaborate puzzle locks. While opening these reliquaries only reveals more ashes, their unsealing sets off a bizarre chain of events involving the sudden appearance of a mute girl and a Zeelean nobleman calling himself “The Collector” pursuing her through the ashfields.
Confronting the Collector and his apparent supernatural abilities, the three priestesses must choose between protecting the mysterious girl, their community, or their own lives.
Lonesome Voyages
First Vicegrave Venzell Andlauer Katzainer of Leizen, a young Nealennian nobleman attending the Regency Military Academy, accidentally fought a duel against Reinhilde, a student priestess from the Theology Academy in the Regency capital of Bardezant. Taking the blame for the entire bizarre episode, Venzell was sentenced to forty passages of house arrest despite refusing to fight and allowing Reinhilde to stab him.
With a wealth of free time and a mind prone to wandering, Venzell uses his collection of art and books to imagine various scenarios with himself, his friends, and Reinhilde playing various roles in the theater of his mind. But fantasy and reality become confused when Reinhilde, having a crisis of faith, shows up at Venzell’s chambers.
Venzell also becomes acquainted with an entity called Marra, who visits him in his sleep, sitting on his chest and whispering secrets as she slowly suffocates him. Claiming to be from a hidden continent on the dark side of the world called Nena, Marra can remember Venzell’s future with uncanny accuracy, making him question whether any of the decisions he makes matter at all.
Trail of Corpses
Dereza, captain of the Harranian Militia, along with her trusted subordinate Andool and skilled field embalmer Kamma, is tasked with transporting the body of an Orran politician to the funerary city of Harran for proper embalming and entombment.
When their sailtrain is bombed, the trio has to carry the casket along a mountain ridge on the edge of the desert and saltflats, the ancient “trail of corpses” traditionally used to transport bodies to Harran away from direct sunlight. Ambushed on the trail by a mercenary company seeking to steal the body and hold it hostage in an attempt to start a war for profit on the continent, Dereza has to fight not only to preserve her charge’s afterlife but her own life and the lives of her comrades as well.
As if in a Mirror
Eight starcycles following the death of his mother, and four starcycles after his antique business was nearly ruined by a scammer who tried to frame him for counterfeiting artifacts, Riccard Cairngorn receives a mysterious letter addressed either to himself or someone named “Richard,” the handwriting unclear. Summoned by a secret society called The Gathering, Ric is tasked with acquiring a special chalice for an overseas collector by any means necessary.
After losing the auction for the chalice, Ric tries to steal it while it’s in transit on a ship to the buyer’s estate. Caught in the act, Ric is marooned on a remote island with a mute, amnesiac woman who happens to look almost exactly like Ric’s ex-lover, Alexandra, whose name she adopts.