Graelyn Scythes was a notable inhabitant of the 10,000 Dawns who was good friends with Archimedes Von Ahnerabe and, like him, a one-time companion of Lady Aesculapius as well as an agent of Dawn.
After saving them from having been fictionalised by Auteur within the White Canvas, Graelyn was also metaphysically recognised as an honourary original mammoth, "granted the privileges of the herd and song, (…) and known to all to have the spirit of the tusk". Also as a consequence of these events, Auteur considered Graelyn their adoptive daughter, though it was not clear that this was mutual.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Scythes grew up in an abusive household, living with her mother in the late 25th century Moscow of her universe, in which, by that time, the entire solar system was under the control of a giant corporation called Centro Systems. As well as being emotionally abusive, (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"]) her mother sometimes beat her. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"]) She had a cat named Mr Sprinkles whom she kept into adulthood. (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"])
A young Graelyn once visited a museum with her father, and was fascinated by a huge mammoth skeleton, wishing she could see a live one someday. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
In 2471, by which point her father was no longer in the picture, she discovered the book Head of State, only reading it after she was assured by reliable sources that the protagonist, Rachel Edwards, with whom she strongly identified, survived the story despite all the hardships she endured. (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"])
First adventures with Dawn[[edit] | [edit source]]
After leaving Moscow, Graelyn lived "underwater" for a time (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"]) as an intern at Project Atlantis. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories [+]Loading...["Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)"]) After meeting Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"]) she shared a "few misadventures" with him, (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"]) during which she met Alice MacLeod and her friends, of the World Revolutionary Council. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories [+]Loading...["Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)"]) She was then recruited by the benevolent interdimensional paramilitary group Dawn. (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"]) She and Archimedes once went on a mission to a moon chasing something and Archimedes was taken, leading Graelyn to rescue him from the past by infiltrating a World War II special operations mission. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
She also became friends with Dawn's leader Kinan Jans. The two once went trick-or-treating together in Nightmoore, which became one of their fondest shared memories.
At some point, Blanche Combine tried to kill Graelyn several times, but whatever enmity existed between them was later resolved.
Other people she met over the course of her adventures included Mars President Zhang Han, Fleet Admiral Cornelia Carthage, lawyer James Morrel, and Chess Mistress Hex. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories [+]Loading...["Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)"])
Travels with Lady Aesculapius[[edit] | [edit source]]
Graelyn and Arch also travelled with Lady Aesculapius for a time (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"], Life After Death [+]Loading...["Life After Death (short story)"]) in her Factory of Crystal. During this period, they once visited Rogeria City on the planet Mercury, where Graelyn bought a cheap Sherlock Holmes Halloween costume. When she eventually parted ways with Aesc, she left the costume behind in the Factory. (PROSE: Life After Death [+]Loading...["Life After Death (short story)"])
Meeting Rachel Edwards[[edit] | [edit source]]
On behalf of Dawn, Graelyn and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe were sent to follow the Arbiter of Knives to the Totality to prevent her from starting a war between the Firmament and the rulers of that universe. The Arbiter was trying to get the Book of Books, which was being held at the New York Public Library alongside a cache of books about the War from the 10,000 Dawns. By coincidence, the actual Rachel Edwards, who was a real being in this world instead of a fictional character, was one of the journalists doing a story about the Books, which were believed to be a rare find from the 18th century by the human authoritie. Thus, to disguise her presence, the Arbiter had bribed a member of the local cosmic authorities to overlook any strange events surrounding Rachel for the next few days.
Graelyn thus got the opportunity to meet her heroes as she and Archimedes prevented Rachel from being abducted first by the Arbiter, then by the Strid, an alien species native to the war's universe who were trying to take advantage of the situation. Eventually, events came to a head in the room in the Library where the books were being kept, with the Strid having taken the book before anyone and trying to auction it off between the three Dawns powers represented. Graelyn and Arch refused to negotiate with the Strid, merely demanding that they release the stash unilaterally. In the end, the action became moot when Rachel, inspired by Graelyn telling her how much she'd meant to her as a fictional character, managed to turn the situation to her advantage and peacefully recover the book. After sharing fond goodbyes with Rachel, the two visitors left the Totality again by throwing dust on a wall to create a glowing, temporary portal. (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"])
The gauntlet mission[[edit] | [edit source]]
When an Emissary from the Firmament-equivalents of the Totality visited Spiral to complain that an immensely valuable gauntlet had been stolen by a rogue Knight of Sky, Dawn leader Kinan Jans sent Graelyn and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe to track him down. They found him on Christmas Eve in Times Square, New York in one of the 10,000 Dawns' 2460, which was mysteriously empty. They caught the thief, one Artillo Brinzo, and recovered the gauntlet from him, with Graelyn trying it on — but before he could tell them who had hired him to steal it, he was abducted out of time and space by a painted warrior. As more and more of the mysterious extradimensional living statues began to circle them, the group ran into Lady Aesculapius, who told them that the painted warriors had already abducted away all of the Firmament save for her.
Returning to Spiral, they found that the gauntlet had initiated a danger lock, refusing to separate from Graelyn until it perceived the threat of the painted warriors as having been resolved. Thus, despite her eagerness to simply recover the gauntlet, the Emissary had no choice but to accompany Graelyn, Arch and Lady Aesc on a further journey investigating the painted warriors. With Lady Aesc noting that the painted warriors had also been gathering copies of The Book of the Enemy from the Dawns, they deduced that the book must contain information about them, and hurried to the Plume Coteries' Library, where Coloth and Marissa helped them find a remaining copy.
One chapter of the Book informed them that the painted warriors were servants of the Original Mammoths, and gave a description of their alter-time realm. Combining extreme skill with using the crystalline dust with mental focus on the information and all her memories related to mammoths, Graelyn was able to open a crystalline incision portal to the alter-time realm in question. There, they were briefly threatened by the mammoth Taranis, who explained that he was the one who had sent the painted warriors to depopulate the 10,000 Dawns, on the basis of a prophecy that "she-with-the-arm-of-gold" and the Firmament would combine to destroy the mammoths. In fact, however, the prophecy was a fake planted by the real thief, the Emissary herself, in order to trick the mammoths into doing her work for her of capturing the inhabitants of the 10,000 Dawns and menacing Graelyn. With Taranis realising Graelyn was not his enemy, the danger lock released and the Emissary recovered the gauntlet for herself, revealing her true name to be Auteur. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
In the White Canvas[[edit] | [edit source]]
A new beginning[[edit] | [edit source]]
Auteur wasted no time in unleashing the gauntlet's true power, which was to turn people into fiction — reducing the painted warriors into paintings, Archimedes Von Ahnerabe in a box-set of action films, Lady Aesculapius into "a pile of 276 Blu-Ray disks", and most people simply into books describing their linear life story. Taranis, regretting his mistake, decided to make it up to Graelyn by transmuting himself into a secretly-alive stuffed toy before Auteur got to her. Graelyn, meanwhile, tricked her by writing a few "final lines" on her own arms as her last act before being fictionalised: this resulted in these lines appearing at the extreme end of her book, after "And Graelyn wrote on her own arms:". Because of the way she'd written them, her book had no ending, which destabilised Auteur's grand ritual and caused the books she'd accumulated to collapse into an expanse of hostile blank reality called the White Canvas. As she'd written in the book, Graelyn then turned back from a book to a baby.
While Auteur's cousin and co-conspirator Gideon advocated for simply killing the baby, Auteur was convinced that her grand ritual (whose aim was to merge all the fictionalised 10,000 Dawns elements into a single alternate history she could control, and then impose over her own universe so as to overwrite the war entirely) could not move forward until Graelyn completed her part by writing an ending to her book of her own free will. Intending to manipulate her into writing an ending that would fictionalise her after all, Auteur gathered a few hundred members of her cult in the White Canvas and created a Town where she would raise Graelyn over again. While they were at it, she and Gideon also brought a few other "projects" to the Town, including the Hollow Childe, a prophesied Antichrist into whom Gideon had taken an interest, and Citizen 176, a young artist saved by Auteur from the guillotine in the French Revolution and whom Auteur hoped to mould into an "artistic spirit of vengeance". (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Second childhood[[edit] | [edit source]]
Thus, Graelyn grew up over again, not knowing that it was abnormal for a little girl to live alone without any parents or guardians or friends. Auteur, who ruled the town, had positioned herself as her "art therapist" to keep tabs on her, and often let Graelyn walk her robotic, talking dog F.I.D.O to stop her from getting too lonely. However, Graelyn was not entirely unaware that the adults were lying to her about there being no world beyond the White Canvas, and, thanks to Taranis's totemic influence, was able to gradually remember her earlier life — first mere inklings that the sky ought to be blue and that Archimedes, now merely the protagonist of her favourite film series, ought to be her best friend; but then, by the time she was ten, full memories of the mission leading up to the White Canvas debacle, manifesting in chunks as dreams.
When she told Auteur about them, Auteur tried to take advantage of this to bully Graelyn into writing down that she wanted to be fictional like Archimedes in the journal, but misjudged her words and ended up prompting Graelyn to recognise Auteur as the only person left who cared about her and was there for her. Finding that, in spite of herself, she did feel something like love for the girl, Auteur accepted her invitation to spend Christmas Eve together, and rethought her plans, taking on a more guardian-like role to Graelyn for the next five years. Following F.I.D.O's advice, Graelyn also befriended the Hollow Childe and Citizen 176. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Breaking free[[edit] | [edit source]]
After five years, Graelyn abruptly had a further "dream" continuing the narrative of her earlier ones, which surprised her as she'd almost forgotten them. When she confronted Auteur about it, the woman was cagey, and admitted the existence of a world beyond the Canvas while refusing to tell her more about her own part in Auteur's plan. Later that same day, she went with Hollow and 176 to the screening of a new Archimedes movie, only for Graelyn to manage to communicate with Arch through the screen, which prompted an irate Auteur to interrupt the screening.
Finally, two years later on Christmas Eve, Graelyn woke up in the middle of the night with the final piece of the puzzle having popped into her mind. After scribbling it down, she hurried to meet Hollow and 176. With their help, she snuck into the cinema (where an illegal screening of a movie from outside was being held by Skinflint). They hid in the bathroom until everyone left and then screened the 10,000-Dawns-based films one after the other, awakening the people trapped within them and coaxing them out, back into relative reality. Graelyn then confronted Auteur, flanked not only by Archimedes, but by Taranis returned to his full size, while all the other 10,000 Dawns inhabitants desecended on the Town, incapacitating the cultists.
However, when Auteur admitted defeat with surprising ease, Graelyn's belief that the adventure was "over" triggered the original conditions of the ritual, transforming the entire Town — cultists included — back into fiction and leaving only Graelyn and Auteur. Explaining that she had genuinely come to love Graelyn like a daughter, Auteur, instead of threatening to kill her as Graelyn was now expecting, offered her the chance to become her "co-author". Thinking quickly, Graelyn pretended to accept on the condition that Auteur even the playing field between them by fictionalising her own home as well as the 10,000 Dawns, so that neither of them would have a home and they would be on an equal footing "playing" with universes foreign to them both. Auteur thoughtlessly accepted, realising too late that despite all her hubris, she was still part of the wider story of her universe, and was thus pulled along into fictionality.
With the gauntlet not being capable of fictionalising itself, it was left behind in what was left of the White Canvas; Graelyn picked it up and used it to reverse everything it had done, restoring all 10,001 fictionalised universes. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Saving Auteur[[edit] | [edit source]]
After the dust cleared, F.I.D.O found Graelyn in what was left of the White Canvas. He explained that he believed that, striving to recapture the godlike power she'd briefly wielded, he expected Auteur to soon push herself beyond her limits and wind up putting herself in mortal peril. Still being loyal to her despite everything, he asked Graelyn for help in rescuing her from those future circumstances, whatever they would turn out to be. Graelyn agreed, and F.I.D.O transported the two of them to a future time and place when Auteur, now regenerated into a male incarnation, had been flayed alive and was dying in the dust. F.I.D.O stabilised his condition and the two of them transported him back to the White Canvas, where F.I.D.O contacted Gideon, who persuaded the cult to properly induct Auteur and save his life in the process. With their good work done, F.I.D.O then transported Graelyn back home. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
The Christmas Needle Agreement[[edit] | [edit source]]
The following day, on Christmas proper, Graelyn was invited alongside various other representatives of the 10,000 Dawns and the Totality to the Needle in order to sign an Agreement of non-aggression between these realities. After bumping into Ambassador Galaxy Violet of the Quoth, she then found Taranis, and impulsively gave him a Dawn badge as a token of gratitude. Overestimating the significance of the gesture, Taranis felt compelled to return it by imparting upon Graelyn the sigil of the Original Mammoths, which marked her in some deep and honoured way as metaphysically a mammoth in her own right, "granted the privileges of the herd and song, (…) and known to all to have the spirit of the tusk". As this new state of affairs was evidently a much greater guarantee of the Mammoths never attacking the 10,000 Dawns again than the signing of any written treaty, she carefully did not explain the insignificance of the Dawn badge, telling Taranis that he was welcome in Spiral at any time.
After the negotiations and signing wrapped up, Graelyn also bumped into Hollow and 176, now officially a couple, who had decided to accept Empress Miranda's offer to take up residence on the Needle permanently. They promised to stay in touch with Graelyn before heading to the dance floor. Finally, Graelyn found Gideon; although he made it clear that he now hated Graelyn, blaming her for ruining Auteur's dream and driving a wedge between Auteur and Gideon in the process as Auteur descended further into hubristic madness, he agreed to fulfill Graelyn's request of taking one last Christmas present to Auteur on her behalf — a blank notebook which Graelyn hoped Auteur would help for some "art therapy" of his own. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
The funeral of Lady Aesculapius[[edit] | [edit source]]
After one of her incarnations was murdered by an unknown party using a booby-trapped parcel, Lady Aesculapius, reborn in a new body, chose to keep her survival a secret in order to find out who had sent the parcel, and organised a lavish funeral for herself in the Factory, inviting everyone she knew. Graelyn and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe were among the first names she scribbled down on her list. At the reception, Graelyn immediately recognised Aesc in her new body and casually greeted her as such, in part because she recognised her own Sherlock Holmes costume which Aesc had put on as a "disguise". Forced to improvise, Aesc unconvincingly claimed to be her own, imaginary cousin "Lady Raesculapius".
Later, after Aesculapius made her deductions about her murder public, Graelyn and Arch stopped the killer, Meistras, from slipping away quietly. She heard the subsequent interaction between Meistras and Aesc, and was perturbed to hear about the Utopia Dimension's universe-destroying weapon, which seemed to be the heart of the matter. She asked Aesc about it at greater length after Meistras escaped, "sombre for the first time since arriving at this funeral". (PROSE: Life After Death [+]Loading...["Life After Death (short story)"])
Birthday quarantine[[edit] | [edit source]]
While on a mission for Dawn, Graelyn and Arch ended up in a universe currently going through a pandemic, meaning they had to rent a house and spend a while in quarantine before they were allowed to return to Spiral. To make matters worse, they were unsure how they would do so, as they had lost Graelyn's bag of crystal dust, though they did manage to contact Kinan Jans through a spotty interdimensional Internet connection; and to add insult to injury, the planned span of the quarantine included Graelyn's birthday, scuppering her plans for a big birthday party with all her friends from across the Multiverse.
Hearing her grousing about her dashed hopes, Arch decided to send out a request for all of Graelyn's friends to send birthday greetings in video form. After a brief visit by Elliott Jo Jordan, a small-time enemy from whom they easily recovered the bag of dust, they watched through the video messages together, but were then informed by the last one to arrive, from Kinan Jans and Backgammon Jenny, that them having met Jordan face-to-face meant that they had to restart their quarantine period from scratch. They took this in good spirits, however, deciding to immediately set about cooking a big birthday meal for Graelyn; though he didn't eat normal human food himself, Archimedes had been practicing his cooking for just such an occasion. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories [+]Loading...["Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)"])
Other realities[[edit] | [edit source]]
Other versions of Graelyn existed across the 10,000 Dawns, some of whom were encountered directly by this version of her. One led a happy family life, and was among the friends of the Dawn-agent Graelyn who sent her video greetings when she had to spend her birthday in quarantine. She informed her counterpart that things had been going "really great" for her and her family, with her having made "lots of friends" and even having "just come president of the physics club" as she recorded the message. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories [+]Loading...["Birthdays are Made for Memories (short story)"])
Physical appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
By the time she met Rachel Edwards, Graelyn appeared as a young woman wearing a red blazer and matching skirt with a white blouse and black tie,. In Why We Need This Book, a holographic play generated by Archimedes Von Ahnerabe to quickly explain the situation surrounding the Book of Books to Rachel Edwards, which used famous 21st century actors' appearances for the various "characters", Graelyn was "played" by Idina Menzel. (PROSE: Rachel Survived [+]Loading...["Rachel Survived (short story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
Graelyn Scythes is a main character of the 10,000 Dawns series.