Cobweb and Ivory (short story)
Cobweb and Ivory was the second story in The Book of the Enemy. Written by Nate Bumber, it notably featured the return and recontextualisation of concepts from the Faction Paradox comics and Lawrence Miles' first Doctor Who novel, Christmas on a Rational Planet.
Summary
Pre-Narrative Briefing
Story
Avus strode forth into an alter-time realm, past six locked palaces in the city of cobweb and ivory, to the seventh which opened to his touch. Within he finds near three gross warriors of stone. At first Avus is unworried, in no prior alter-time realms has he seen living creatures. But the stone warriors move when he turns away. He flees from them, past the human breeding-engine with an unformed history inside. He flees through a park with trees of onyx, stopping at a pool filled with a substance unlike any Avus has seen before in the Spiral Politic. As he glances up from the eddies in the fluid, he notices a stone warrior inches from his face, causing him to fall into the pool.
Hallucinations flashed past Avus, he experiences other identities under the influence of the liquid - each time being chased by the stone warrior. The pet bird of a woman named Abigail, a Pilots' Coterie pilot going through a dense nebula, a primitive human listening to the storytelling of Aguta around a campfire, and a guest at an exhibition on Terra Primagenia. Miraculously recognizing the speaker he'd never seen before, a woman named Linemica, he watched as she unveiled Cernunnos - brought back using illegal time travel. His voice echoes in the minds of those attending - "On my command, your ancestors hunted us to extinction. Now you have resurrected me, I shall return to you the true form of the universe."
Avus is haunted by this occurrence, wishing he could flee - trapped through the visions from the fluid. Cernunnos comes through the pool of liquid and thanks him for showing a path forward. In a desperate attempt Avus lashes out to break the psychic link, finding fragments of another time, pushing himself to that time where Cernunnos is in a cage and impotent, where he cannot follow Avus. Cernunnos sat on his throne in the city of cobweb and ivory, confident that both Avus and himself would deal blows to the Homeworlds.
Characters
Worldbuilding
- The hacker group Anonymous wear Faction Paradox masks.
- Ambassadors of the Plume Coteries come to Terra Primagenia.
- Meerwolves live in the Amazolian system.
- Avus finds a breeding-engine with an unformed human child missing parts of its history.
- Avus uses a transcendent lock pick to enter the seventh palace and lock doors as he moved throughout it.
Notes
- The story's title, "Cobweb and Ivory", comes from the description of a pre-Anchoring city in PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet. The same city appears in this story as the alter-time realm.
- "Avus" is Latin for "Grandfather". Grandfather Paradox and the First Doctor were both members of the Great Houses who were called "Grandfather". Although the text is called the Infancy Gospel of Grandfather Paradox, real-world apocryphal infancy gospels (of Jesus Christ) are named after their purported authors, not their subject.
- Breeding-engines are mentioned to be kept in cradles, subtly reconciling the Doctor's cot first seen in TV: A Good Man Goes to War with the Doctor's Loom-born origins.
- This story's painted warriors resemble Weeping Angels.
Continuity
- Avus travels to an alter-time realm. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Against Nature)
- The alter-time realm resembles a dilapidated version of the part of the time before time shown to Chris Cwej in PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet.
- Faction Paradox masks are commonly worn on 21st century Earth. (PROSE: This Town Will Never Let Us Go)
- Avus briefly becomes a posthuman-era blind pilot in control of a warship. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Newtons Sleep)
- Representatives of the Arcadians come to Cernunnos' unveiling. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
- Avus bumps into a cactus-skinned child on Terra Primagenia. (PROSE: War Crimes)
- Avus briefly envisions a bestiary at the centre of a crowded city where a girl named Lucita tends to a caged mammoth. (COMIC: Political Animals, Bêtes Noires & Dark Horses, PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
- Avus falls out of his House's Loomshed. (PROSE: The Book of the War, The Return of the King)
- Cernunnos is certain that one Homeworld will be "taken down" by Avus' will. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
- The act of Avus, a future renegade, being exposed to praxis in Enemy territory and having a series of nested visions concerning the War in Heaven mirrors the events of the Rivera Manuscript, as described in PROSE: The Book of the War. Similar to Avus's identity being ambiguous, the Rivera Manuscript renegade's identity was left a mystery in the text of The Book of the War.
- The painted warriors and surviving empowered faction of mammoths, as well as their alter-time realm, would go on to play a major part in PROSE: White Canvas. The novel also featured a further appearance by Coloth, and alluded to Cobweb and Ivory itself by mentioning it as the title of a chapter within the in-universe Book of the Enemy which discussed the mammoths and painted warriors.
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