The story starts in Vienna in 2012, in a world that is essentially ours, except that history has a few additional layers and some old stories are considerably less metaphorical than we assume. The supernatural does not live in a separate realm; it exists inside ordinary cities, family histories and traditions that most people simply never encounter.
Vienna, underneath Vienna
Vienna is an ideal setting for this kind of story. Roman walls lie beneath medieval streets, Baroque palaces stand on older foundations, and vanished empires still leave their traces in buildings, institutions and family names. The Vienna of Anrun is recognisably the real city, but beneath the familiar surface are older alliances, forgotten places and histories that were never meant for public consumption.
Different traditions, different rules
Anrun does not treat mythology as one large box of interchangeable monsters. Its characters come from different cultural backgrounds, and the supernatural traditions surrounding them have their own histories, assumptions and rules. European occult traditions meet East and Southeast Asian folklore, religious ideas, family stories and things that do not fit comfortably into any category.
The disagreements between those traditions are often more interesting than the similarities.
People first
Despite all the secret history and supernatural trouble, Anrun is primarily about people: family obligations, inherited conflicts, friendship, belonging and the difficulty of understanding somebody whose idea of the world is very different from your own.
The main cast can be found in the Characters section. Those pages introduce them without explaining where the story eventually takes them.
Beyond the novel
The first novel takes place mainly in 2012, but the history behind it reaches much further in both directions. Over time the project accumulated earlier events, later events, character histories, places, documents and side stories that would make the novel unbearable if I tried to squeeze everything into it.
This section of Avanova is where some of that material can live: revised short stories, background lore, fragments and occasional things that are harder to classify.
There may eventually also be documents that should not exist, links appearing where they should not and pages that behave as though nobody explained to them what websites are for.
Most of Anrun will remain perfectly easy to navigate.
Only selected parts need to be a little less cooperative.
After all, a labyrinth is rather disappointing if every corridor is signposted.