A fourth movement to the trilogy — social-media-intended pieces that extend the world without competing with it. Six character clusters. Some read together as complete novellas. Others stand as singular vignettes.
Released as individual pieces between feature drops. Lead with Sunrises — the Kafka short whose Auschwitz lullaby intercut with a present-day dog walk is the strongest standalone piece in the set. Then alternate Jan Mydlar and Hermes chapters in chronological order. Save the Thebes cluster for closer to feature release. Save Faces Herself and Final Beginnings until the audience has seen at least Cherry.
A village strongman is broken, conscripted, and reforged as Prague's red-hooded executioner — the man who beheads Jessenius — across a life that bookends Aurelia's punishment with his own death by her blade.
Kafka, somehow alive across timelines, shepherds anachronistic historical figures through modern Prague while serving as a quiet witness to a family fractured by a Dad who keeps slipping out at night.
Hermes — a giant, robed, dark-skinned ancient — wakes up in modern Prague after centuries asleep, learns he was the surrogate father to a boy named Nick, and walks willingly toward his own death so Nick can grow into the man who must kill him.
Mathylda — Mydlar's adopted daughter — survives across centuries as Madame Thebes, keeper of three hourglasses of memory, navigating a Nazi-occupied Prague while a wooden marionette and a betrayed self-image hunt her down.
A doctor made from a petri dish, computer-assisted, is visited by Kasparek in her flat. The next morning, she watches the adult Sophia from behind a two-way interrogation glass.
The grown Aurelia — centuries old, the executed witch from Mydlar's platform — confronts adult Sophia, Vivi, and their Mom at a birthday cake table in modern Prague.
A small set of images recurs across the twenty-one shorts: the beetle (Mydlar's resurrection, Kafka's Sunrises, the final morning), the Phoenix tattoo (carried across Mydlar's life and the Rydl uniform), hourglasses (in every Thebes piece), the blue-and-yellow ribbon (Kafka's cluster), the Stopwatch of Lost Time (the Hermit and Madame Thebes), Pod Bastami's bronze owl archway, reflections, monochrome-to-color seams, and the literal screen-direction TICK that bar-lines the second film.
The shorts are tonally consistent where they hold to silence and reflection. They are programmed to alternate with the feature drops as the trilogy moves toward release — designed as the trilogy's fourth movement, not as marketing afterthought. Each is shootable as a single contained piece. Several are designed to function as proof-of-concept exhibits for the visual language of the trilogy proper.
The shorts are the constellation. The features are the spine. Read on into the trilogy and the world that surrounds it.
Cherry Revision. Kasparek. Memento Mori. The architecture of the three-film arc.
Leads, structural roles, supporting figures, spirit animals, magical creatures.
The Conclave of 78, the laws of the hidden world, the Tarot of Prague, why this city.