ROMAN KALINOVSKI de KALINOVA
THANATOS
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 in 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: 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
Vaster Vrain is the Associate Director of Overdage Galleries, the oldest art gallery in the Breslin Underground City. He is also a counterfeiter, using his connections and the gallery’s reputation to sneak fake sales records and provenances into archives and art institutions so the gallery can sell works made by his friend, the master art forger Chardron.
When a drunken encounter by Vaster at a gallery event nearly ruins everything, a twisted chain of events inspires him to switch gears to forging ancient artifacts instead of art. To generate public interest and sell these fake antiquities, Vaster concocts an ornate conspiracy theory about a secret society that controls the Underground City from behind the scenes.
When Vaster’s show becomes an unexpected hit, it draws the attention of an actual secret society called the Gathering, a group of influential figures from business, politics, medicine, and other fields. But is this group actually threatening to silence Vaster? And are they, as Vaster suspects, connected to the unsolved disappearance of his disabled younger sister forty starcycles ago?
Ready to sacrifice his sanity, livelihood, and relationships, Vaster turns to supposedly supernatural means to expose the true nature of the Gathering and finally learn what actually happened to his beloved sister.
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 than time and space ought to allow.
Ashes and Dust
The war-torn Rodinian 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 time 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: three reliquaries sealed with a series of increasingly elaborate puzzle locks. Opening these reliquaries only reveals more ashes, but sets off a 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
Venzell Katzainer, the son of a Zeelean nobleman attending a 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, Marra can remember the future with uncanny accuracy, making Venzell question whether any of the decisions he makes matter at all.