The Goddess of Gendar
The Two Auteurs [+]Loading...["The Two Auteurs (short story)"]
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The Goddess of Gendar was the twelfth incarnation of the renegade Archon who would later be known as Auteur. In this body, she tricked the "death-cultists" into thinking she was already one of their own, and used this influence, as well as an artefact stolen from her people, to orchestrate an ambitious plan to end the war by siphoning off the "narrative power" of the 10,000 Dawns. This plan, which informed her posing as "the Emissary" in Spiral and "the Goddess" on the planet Gendar, was eventually foiled by Graelyn Scythes, whom Auteur nevertheless retained affection for, viewing her as an adopted daughter.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
As the Goddess of Gendar[[edit] | [edit source]]
Wanting a comfortable "day job" from which she could plan out her next moves, the renegade Homeworlder eventually teamed up with Gideon as well as Virtuoso (an exiled member of the Firmament, their species' equivalent in another reality) to build up a civilisation on the barren planet Gendar which should not rightfully have existed. While Virtuoso posed as a native and became the perpetual leader of the government, Auteur and Gideon became "the Goddess" and "the God", worshipped and pampered all day long. While the history they'd engineered spanned a billion impossible years, the Goddess and God spent around a hundred subjective years on Gendar, during which they supervised the construction of a skycraper-sized statue of the Goddess in the foundations of which Auteur hid a number of secret workspaces and stashes. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy)
Impersonating the future[[edit] | [edit source]]
In this incarnation, the renegade Homeworlder discovered that at some point in her subjective future, she would join a group of "death-cultists" with a deep knowledge of rituals and blood magic. With the help of Gideon, who was already a member, she tricked them into believing that she was a version who had already pledged her loyalty to them, beginning to operate under her future chosen name of "Auteur". (PROSE: White Canvas)
The 10,000 Dawns gambit[[edit] | [edit source]]
Auteur hatched a plan to turn the entire 10,000 Dawns into fiction and then fuse their contents, now malleable to her whim, into a fully consistent "alternate history" which she could superimpose over her own universe] to overwrite the war with a peaceful version of reality where she would be dominant. Having diverted resources from the cultists, (PROSE: White Canvas) she plotted from her Gendar hideaway to steal a powerful gauntlet which could turn things into fiction from the weapons-store of her homeworld. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy, White Canvas) She wrote a fake prophecy according to which the 10,000 Dawns would be the undoing of the Original Mammoths and arranged for them to find out, manipulating them into sending out the painted warriors to the 10,000 Dawns and taking their entire population out of time to avert this fate, starting with the Firmament. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
As part of this conspiracy, she teamed up with several other individuals, including a rogue Firmament and two Knight of Sky. One of them was Artillo Brinzo. After they retrieved an urn from Vo'lach Prime which allowed Auteur to regain access to her stash of notes on Gendar after Virtuoso had sent it to Vo'lach Prime to prevent the cache from being opened, Auteur and Brinzo decided to dispense with the excess of members, and tried to kill the three other conspirators. The other Knight was thus left dead in a pit on Vo'lach, alongside another one of the conspirators. The rogue Firmament, however, managed to survive by leeching the life-force of others.
However, he was unable to get to Gendar before Auteur, who successfully recovered her notes preparing for a great heist (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy [+]Loading...["The Gendar Conspiracy (short story)"]) and sent Brinzo to steal the gauntlet. Then, posing as "the Emissary", an orthodox agent of the Houses, she travelled to Spiral and asked Kinan Jans to put their best people on the case of "recovering" the gauntlet. Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe caught up with the Knight and got the gauntlet from him, but he was abducted by a painted warrior before he could reveal the truth about who had hired him. Returning to Spiral, they found that the gauntlet had danger locked itself to Graelyn, preventing her from immediately giving it to the Emissary, who was thus forced to tag along as she, Archimedes and Lady Aesculapius investigated the painted warriors. With Coloth's help, they eventually found their way to the alter-time realm of the mammoths. With the mammoth leader Taranis realising Graelyn was not his enemy, the danger lock released and the Emissary recovered the gauntlet for herself, revealing her true identity.
Auteur wasted no time in unleashing the gaunlet's true power — reducing the painted warriors into mere works of art, Archimedes into 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. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Creating the Town[[edit] | [edit source]]
While Auteur's cousin and co-conspirator Gideon advocated for simply killing the baby, Auteur was convinced that her grand ritual 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. She nursed and cared for Graelyn until she was old enough to walk, at which point she left Graelyn to live on her own and transitioned to acting as Graelyn's "art therapist" to keep tabs on her. Thus, Graelyn grew up over again in a Town with barely any other children, not knowing that it was abnormal for a little girl to live alone without any parents or guardians or friends — in a reflection of Auteur's own childhood. To prevent her from getting too lonely, Auteur often allowed her to walk her robotic dog F.I.D.O.
While they were at it, in later years, Auteur 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)"])
Graelyn's dreams[[edit] | [edit source]]
As she grew, 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 Von Ahnerabe, far from a mere fictional character, 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's creation, 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 her better judgment, 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)"])
The unmaking of the Town[[edit] | [edit source]]
After five years, Graelyn Scythes 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 and sending Auteur back to her correct point in the timelines. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Later fate[[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.
This grim prediction was fulfilled, with the female Auteur soon getting killed, and using her final remaining life to return as a man. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"])
Appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
This incarnation was a tall woman with red hair styled in a "lulu cut" and striking green eyes. (PROSE: White Canvas [+]Loading...["White Canvas (novel)"]) She generally liked this form, but was not very happy with the nose. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy [+]Loading...["The Gendar Conspiracy (short story)"])
Personality[[edit] | [edit source]]
to be added
