About me
Hi! I'm an adult guy from Czechia who has always loved to make up fiction which brought him here, to this site. I go by many names which include Ajax, Alex/Alexandr and Sever, preferably with the Czech pronunciation – [ˈajaks ˈalɛksandr ˈsɛvɛr] for the IPA nerds, AH-yahks AH-lek-sahn-dr SE-ver for the less fortunate souls. I'm queer and (undiagnosed) autistic, which both heavily influence my work.
If you for some reason want to know more, then you are welcome to head to my Tumblr account where I post art and sometimes talk about other stuff or visit this funky carrd site featuring my interests. If you have any questions or want to contact me for any other reason, feel free to message me on Tumblr or Twitter!
More about Kélas, the novels and conlangs
For easier orientation in my rant, quick introduction to the two novels: Shadows of the Past is the main story, written from the perspective of the very main protagonist Nyr. Your typical high fantasy with some magic and fighting against the evil, but it's very queer and dark (or fucked up as I like to call it). The second story Seven Circles of Death is a prequel written from the perspective of the second protagonist of The Shadows, Yrsk, and explores his past – it ends just a few days/weeks before the beginning of Shadows of the Past.
As for the history of all this, I started the project on the 27th of September 2017 with writing the prologue to the story and releasing it on Wattpad. At the time, I was just a kid, had no idea what I was doing and what beast of a project laid before me. I actually finished the story in the late spring of 2020 but by 2021 I knew that I wanted to rework it. It has been significantly postponed by an insane writer's block and other stuff in my life, which resulted in the Version 2 still being unfinished as of now and stuck at the very beginning. (Quick fun fact, the first prologue doesn't even exist anymore.) Somewhere in the meantime, I started with Seven Circles of Death and finished it sometime in 2021. It probably is no surprise that this, too, is in the process of being rewritten.
The conlanging came to me sometime in 2018 and I properly delved into it in 2019, since I've always liked languages. The constructed ones in the fantasy books I've been reading fascinated me and, of course, I wanted to give it a try. And here I am several years later, with more conlangs than I can handle, all of which actually have its own place and culture on the world of Kélas. It has definitely been an experience and I've learned A LOT. The work is going slow these days but it's still a hobby very dear to me. :)
About Shadows of the Past
What happens when you throw an anxious eighteen year old into the world beyond his home of the deep arctic north? What if you force him to face death and the horrifying reality of everything? What if he discovers things about himself that shake his entire being down to its very core and nearly destroy him? Loads of interesting things, I suppose.
I have to admit that I've never known how to write an annotation that would fit this story. Whenever anyone asked me what I was actually writing about, I couldn't give them a satisfactory answer because the book doesn't have one definite goal towards which everything is moving. Sure, the goal of the plot is to defeat evil in the form of greedy imperialism, but this whole story has always meant something more to me (as cliché as that sounds). A story about growth and regression, about corruption and redemption, about strong and weak people, about people who have been crushed by the wheel of fate and who were nevertheless once given the opportunity to choose which path in life to take. I like to dissect my characters and their relationships, so watching them from the mental perspective is just as important to me as the role they play in the plot, therefore it's probably not surprising to see a chapter dealing with heavy topics here and there.
I'd like to wrap this section in some meaningful way, but given that the story itself doesn't have a fixed ending at the current stage, it's probably more than appropriate
About Seven Circles of Death
A story about the endless circles of revenge. About loss, finds and losses, but above all about death.
How did Yrsk get to the beginning of Shadows of the Past? What did it cost him? Why seven circles exactly? All of this is answered by the prequel, in which I would like to capture as raw as possible the feelings of a boy who got caught up in a trap called revenge (so far I don't think I managed to mould it to this expectation of mine). Love and hate, gratitude and contempt, a slow decline into the darkness of one's own mind and the lure of death, all of this intertwines and together forms a book with a little bit too many timeskips.
