The Confession of Brother Signet (audio story)
The Confession of Brother Signet was a 2021 Faction Paradox audio story by Michael Gilroy-Sinclair.
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 but the biggest 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, but then 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 enter a fictional world, 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 bothering the dreams of Azathoth. He is also cursed by Nyarlathotep to die as punishment and his death will be a few days coming so he will be consumed in fear.
In the confessional, Signet says he researched for a loophole and found he could get off himself if he gave Azathoth a better offer and some entertainment. As he confessed, 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 continues to talk, apologising to the dead that "my life is worth considerably more than yours".
Cast
References
- Signet wonders if there's three missing Deadly Sins, so their number fits the number of commandments.
- Signet first says "forgive me, Grandfather", as in the Faction's leader Faction Paradox.
- Signet compares his idea to "broadly" be the same as Hannibal using elephants.
- Signet says there could be many books to be written about the War, an in-joke by Gilroy-Sinclair about the Faction Paradox series.
- 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 is a name given to him as a joke: as he's a librarian, they call him the French for "bookmark".
- Rather than write the Necronomicon in human skin, he uses cotton-rich vellum A4 paper.
Continuity
- Signet is aware of how there had been "fictional realities before". (TV: The Mind Robber)
- The Cthulhu Mythos has often been treated as real in Doctor Who canon since PROSE: All-Consuming Fire but was also treated as fictional in AUDIO: The Lovecraft Invasion, which came out the year before The Confession of Brother Signet.
External links
- Official The Confession of Brother Signet page at bbvproductions.co.uk
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