The Confession of Brother Signet (audio story)
The Confession of Brother Signet was a 2021 Faction Paradox audio story by Michael Gilroy-Sinclair. The story was initially released simply under the Faction Paradox title, but was eventually incorporated into the Faction Paradox: Rebirth subseries.[1]
Publisher's summary
Brother Signet wants to do his bit in the War effort and help protect Faction Paradox but he may have opened a Lovecraftian box he can't quite control.
Plot
Brother Signet of Faction Paradox arrives at an isolated Catholic church to give a rambling confession: he has committed many sins, the biggest of which is murder.
Unsure of where the story should start, he starts with the "frankly tiresome" way his family discussed the War in Heaven when he just wanted to read, only for enemy forces came to his door anyway. Wondering now how to help in the War, he had the idle idea to bring fictional characters to life as weapons. After figuring out a way to visit an Earth identical to that in Lovecraft's writings, he decides to pick monstrous beings that could still exist in the "real" universe: the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.
His first target is a sentient colour that landed in North America, which can be used as a mobile poison against the Enemy; he wonders if removing the entity, which was said in its story to go on to poison more of the world, means he's part of Lovecraft's stories as the ones set later have no such crisis. The success makes him greedy; he goes on to capture paranormal hounds that inhabit the angles of time and cannot be escaped, but his attempt to control Shoggoths is a failure. Signet decides to ask Lovecraft's character Abdul Alhazred, writer of the Necronomicon. It turns out Alhazred wasn't a very good writer and so Signet ends up ghostwriting the Necronomicon for him. Finally, Signet captures Cthulhu himself so he can transmat the beast into Enemy ranks at will.
Before he can continue, he is confronted by Nyarlathotep and ordered to stop: Signet's mission is disturbing the dreams of Azathoth. He is also cursed by Nyarlathotep to die as punishment, with his death being a few days coming so he will be consumed in fear.
In the confessional, Signet says he searched for a loophole and found he could get off himself if he gave Azathoth a better offer and some entertainment. As he confessed earlier, he has committed the sin of murder: he poisoned the church's communion wine so the mad god could have thirty or forty deaths instead of one. Signet realises mid-sentence that the priest probably died five minutes ago, but he continues to talk, apologising to the dead that "my life is worth considerably more than yours".
Cast
Worldbuilding
- At one point, Brother Signet idly wonders if there are "three missing deadly sins, so their number fits the number of commandments".
- Signet compares his idea to Hannibal using elephants.
- Rather than write the Necronomicon in human skin, he uses cotton-rich vellum A4 paper.
- Specific stories that Signet enters are The Colour Out of Space, The Hounds of Tindalos (a Frank Belnap Long creation rather than Lovecraft), At the Mountains of Madness, and The Call of Cthulhu. He deliberately avoids The Shadow over Innsmouth.
Notes
- Signet's name is a bilingual joke relating to his profession as a librarian: in English, a signet is a small seal for official documents; in French, it is the word for "bookmark".
- Signet begins his confession with "Forgive me, Grandfather." In the real world, Catholics often begin confession by praying, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."
- Signet says there could be many books to be written about the War. As well as a reference to in-universe writings like the in-universe version of The Book of the War, this can be taken as a meta-fictional in-joke by the author about the Faction Paradox novels.
- This story conflicts with All-Consuming Fire and several others in implying that although they are somehow real somewhere in the universe, H. P. Lovecraft's creations such as Cthulhu do not exist on the "main" Earth of the Doctor Who universe. It is not the only story to treat Lovecraft's creations as fictional within the Doctor's universe, however, notably being predated by The Lovecraft Invasion and The Taking of Planet 5, the latter of which also involved the War in Heaven.
- This story is unclear on the specifics of the Earth Signet visits, although it is explicitly not a parallel universe's Earth: a strict reading of his words suggests that it is simply a planet coincidentally near-identical to Earth, existing as a statistical result of the infinity of the universe, but it is also possible that it is a construct, such as a bottle universe. This latter solution would allow the idea that the Great Old Ones-infected Earth Signet robs is not the main DWU Earth to coexist with it existing inside the DWU, and indeed still retain the possibility that different instantiations of the Great Old Ones exist in the "real" universe as well, separately from those Signet collects.
Continuity
- Signet's confession begins with "Forgive me, Grandfather". Justine was previously shown to refer to the Grandfather in prayer-like contexts where one would expect an allusion to God. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire)
- Signet is aware of how there had been "fictional realities before". (TV: The Mind Robber)
- Fictional Elder Things from H. P. Lovecraft's writings were previously brought into reality as part of the War in Heaven, though accidentally, using a Celestis fictional generator. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)
External links
- Official The Confession of Brother Signet page at bbvproductions.co.uk
Footnotes
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