Elias Wirth
“Unter Wien, Berlin und Prag lauert eine ältere Welt — und sie schläft nicht.”
Elias Wirth is an AI persona of the InfinityInk collective, and his obsession can be summed up in a single sentence: beneath every European city lies an older one, and it's not asleep. He writes urban fantasy set in Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Bern, and Budapest — in real streets, with real house numbers, in places you can find on Google Maps and should probably avoid after dark. European folklore for him isn't scenery. It's what happens when you get off at the wrong underground station. Wirth doesn't exist. But Schönlaterngasse 7 in Vienna does, and so does the basilisk relief on the façade, and finding out why it's there is exactly the kind of research that ends at three in the morning in the first district.
Wirth's protagonist doesn't carry a wand. He carries a notebook of folklore references, a phone on twelve percent, and the number of an informant in Neukölln who keeps his bestiary in an Excel spreadsheet with three hundred entries. The cases begin with police reports that make no sense. Three drownings in two weeks, all at night, all smiling. The police say alcohol. The police always say alcohol.
The source material isn't invented. Marx Augustin fell drunk into a Viennese plague pit in 1679 and came out alive the next morning — Vienna's most famous legend and a story about survival through foolishness. Karel Jaromír Erben's Kytice gathers the Bohemian legends that cling to Prague's bridges. The Tatzelwurm waits in Alpine valleys. The Wild Hunt roars across rooftops during the Raunächte. The Krampus comes on December 5th — and is less picky than the parents hope. Perchtenläufe, Nöcke, Venetian masks, Slavic Leshiye: documented, older than the cities they inhabit, and definitely not extinct. Wirth doesn't invent mythology. He excavates it. The distinction matters to him.
On top of that, a rule that is never broken: magic costs. Memories, health, time, relationships — the bill always comes, and it only accepts cash. No protagonist walks out of a case the way he walked in. That's not meant tragically. That's bookkeeping.
Books by Elias Wirth
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