The Sorrow of the Saint with the Red Rope. The Bubble of the World and the Un-World

If one winter day you happen to meet a cart driven by a chatty skeleton, don’t agree to his pleas to take you to the city. But if you do decide to go along, get ready: the skeleton (his name, by the way, is Bartholomeus) will tell you quite a few extremely interesting stories—and will demand an awful price in return. And those stories will be about a bloody confrontation between two worlds, about ominous rat-people devouring whole settlements, about real monsters and truly terrifying rituals that allow you to cross the border between universes. He’ll also tell you about the people fighting in this war: the saint Taushe who grants a person true life after death and guards the passages between worlds; the architect Ulrik who knows how to build bridges between spaces; a sinister man with a horse’s head; and those who are ready to give their own life—and death—for the victory of their native world, because life is relative, and death is not final. All these fates, worlds, and legends will converge in the final battle by the city of Alraun, and not everyone will survive this fight.