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 legitimate-looking works made by his friend, the master art forger Chaudron.

When a drunken encounter with 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. Vaster concocts an ornate conspiracy theory about a secret society that controls the Underground City from behind the scenes in order to generate public interest and sell these fake antiquities.

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?

Prepared to sacrifice his sanity, livelihood, and relationships, Vaster turns to supposedly supernatural means to expose the true nature of the Gathering’s members and finally learn what actually happened to his beloved sister.