Auteur's sixteenth regeneration
258 years after his previous body was burnt to ashes by Master Librarian Roland, Auteur managed to enact a regeneration, his "sixteenth" by his own recollection. He emerged from it as the Monochrome Auteur, who looked broadly identical to his predecessor save for wearing a black, ragged cloak materialised from the dirt and ashes of Floor 899,167,435,042 instead of his earlier purple or the yellow robes he'd been wearing when he died.
History[[edit] | [edit source]]
Death of the Retconned Auteur[[edit] | [edit source]]
Stuck outside the Universe, Auteur asked Lady Aesculapius to take him (PROSE: And Today, You [+]Loading...["And Today, You (novel)"]) to the Plume Coteries' Library, arriving 278 years before Coloth met Callum and Maritsa. He was intent on finding the Bookwyrm and using it to break back into reality. He stayed twenty years, posing as the Last of the Mappers and becoming a trusted ally to the Master Librarians; during the latter half of these twenty years, he took on an apprentice, Roland. Eventually, as they were scouting Floor 899,167,435,042 as part of a Stocktaking Party, Roland realised that his mentor was not who he said he was, and confronted him. After Auteur made clear his intent to sacrifice Roland's firstborn child in a ritual to summon the Bookwyrm, Roland set the entire floor on fire to destroy Auteur, burning him to ashes. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Creation of the Monochrome Auteur[[edit] | [edit source]]
258 years later, Roland's grandson Master Librarian Naimon found Roland's old map among a captured Callum's belongings and, seeing the empty floor plan of Floor 899,167,435,042, believed that his ancestor had been unable to complete his stocktaking, not realising the schematic was an accurate representation of the burnt-out floor. After his own hubris led him to falling down an elevator shaft leading down to that floor, the motes of ashy dust that had previously been part of Auteur's body, each of which "remembered itself in the vaguest, most fundamental sense," used Naimon's spilled blood as ink to write his own name in "the alphabet of their people". As the name wrote itself over and over again, in fractal repetitions, a new three-dimensional body began to form out of the blood and dust.
A threefold pulse disturbed the surface of reality, the borrowed blood thrumming to a remembered, triune heartbeat. The letters were interacting, weaving patterns, changing the shape of the world around them. The pulse grew, reaching electrons, atoms, molecules; and as the name took physical shape, so too, it took a mental shape. It began to form a cohesive unity, a whole; the thrumming name remembered itself, its shape, its identity. […] When Maritsa, Callum, and Coloth made their landing, a skeleton was there to greet them.
In his new form, who would later decide to dub himself the Monochrome Auteur, (PROSE: The Two Auteurs [+]Loading...["The Two Auteurs (short story)"]) Auteur was "a cracked, dusty skeleton wrapped in a tattered black robe, a memory of a much more elegant garment which had assembled itself out of shadows and grime". After greeting Coloth and his friends, he immediately tried to use what remained of Naimon's blood to complete his original ritual, only for the Bookwyrm to swallow him whole. He survived within the Bookwyrm (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) and eventually escaped, though he remained stuck outside the Universe. (PROSE: The Two Auteurs [+]Loading...["The Two Auteurs (short story)"])
