Retconned Auteur
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The incarnation of Auteur prior to his seventeenth, the Retconned Auteur, was resurrected by the Retconning Crocodile and lived for many years trapped in an oxbow reality, the Sanctum of the Heretic, before managing to escape via the Cupid Homeworld, and become a traveller between universes. Whilst travelling the multiverse, he assisted Chris Cwej and Lady Aesculapius in rebooting Professor X in the Warsong to rescue Grant Markham and spent twenty years in the Plume Coteries' Library mapping it. He met his end when Roland burnt the whole of Floor 899,167,435,042 to the ground, subsumed in the fiery inferno.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Trapped outside the universe[[edit] | [edit source]]
Resurrection by the Retconning Crocodiles[[edit] | [edit source]]
After several centuries passed, during which Auteur's consciousness became dormant, his salvation came in the form of three Retconning Crocodiles, who came to inspect the oxbow timeline in the hopes of making it into a new base for their organisation. They found Auteur and recognised him. To speak to him, they temporarily regressed his body to an earlier state, that of the bearded old man. The Crocodiles then offered him a more lasting resurrection in exchange for his helping them to attempt to defeat the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids.
Auteur accepted the Crocodiles' deal after making them swear on their own canonicity that they would uphold their end of the deal. The Crocodiles thus retroactively allowed the version of Auteur trapped in the Spire to write a cursed Abecedarium with which to "destabilise the Cupids' story". He then woke up back in the "present," finding that he was in a rejuvenated version of his skeletal body, with his shadow-skin and vitality having been returned to him — alongside his old grimoire and his favourite quill. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author [+]Loading...["Resurrection of the Author (short story)"])
Imprisonment in the Sanctum of the Heretic[[edit] | [edit source]]
Though resurrected, Auteur found that he was still trapped in the oxbow reality, as a mocking message from the Retconning Crocodiles highlighted. Scholars later dubbed this reality "the Sanctum of the Heretic". (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author [+]Loading...["Resurrection of the Author (short story)"])
After two years, Herodotus-724, the custodian of the Cupid Archives, opened the Abecedarium. This link allowed Auteur to step through from his "crumbling little oxbow" into the Cupid Homeworld, where he sought to acquire one of the Crew's Void Ships, the Fog Ships, in order to fly it back to his home universe. He made his way through the Homeworld jumping from shadow to shadow, even shrugging off an attempt by Lord Thymon to stop him, but Sigma-063 was able to stop him from entering the Fog Ship hangar by switching on all the lights in the building at maximum intensity, creating vast stretches across which he could not move in his shadow form. Trying a different approach, he gave life to all the fiction within the Cupid Archives, causing a pandemonium of fiction across the Homeworld as Cupids merged with fictional characters. However, before he could make his escape, Herodotus leveraged his own spell by stamping the Abecedarium as "REJECTED from collection", which, under the current state of reality where everything in the Archives came true, physically expelled Auteur from the Homeworld. Herodotus then chained up the book so that it could not be opened again and locked it in a drawer. (POEM: Auteur and the Homeworld [+]Loading...["Auteur and the Homeworld (poem)"])
Trip to Gongen and capture by the Letharchy[[edit] | [edit source]]
Now wandering the Multiverse, Auteur was "discreetly" "picked up" by Lady Aesculapius from this point in his timeline, which lay in the relative future of Chris Cwej and his Superiors' V-Time, in order to help with a ritual Cwej and Aesc were setting up on Gongen in a "backwater universe" called the Warsong, rebooting the Professor X series in an effort to bring Grant Markham back into existence. Though against the normal rules, this use of a future Auteur by Cwej was sanctioned by his Superiors in the person of Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn. Aesculapius also brought in Graelyn Scythes to help with the filming, and, viewing the skeletal version of her erstwhile parent as mentally ill more than anything else, she slotted into the role of carer for him. She had mixed feeling on the use of Auteur's writing for the project, feeling that they were "enabling" his dangerous obsession. Auteur himself, however, was enthusiastic, though his scripts took many liberties with the truth as Auteur followed his whimsical inspiration.
Eventually, as they were filming the finale, he revealed that his way of implementing their request was not to summon Grant back to life, but rather to summon whatever power had removed him from existence — in point of fact, the Letharchy — leading to them taking Aesc, Cwej and friends to the same place, from which they would hopefully be able to rescue him. Onboard the Letharchy's prison ship the Point of Know Return, Auteur had his memories erased like the other prisoners, and was forced to perform various menial tasks. Eventually, Cwej, Jhe Sang Mi and Aesculapius managed to start a rebellion with the help of Grant Markham himself, eventually bringing down the Letharchy and returning their memories to all the prisoners. Auteur thus recovered the memories he'd lost, though they were not necessarily memories of things which had really happened. (PROSE: And Today, You [+]Loading...["And Today, You (novel)"])
In the Plume Coteries' Library[[edit] | [edit source]]
After their TV-making adventure, Auteur wanted to return to his area of expertise: regular books. At his request, when she returned him to his own era, Lady Aesculapius dropped him off at the Plume Coteries' Library, though at the Void Gate — meant for visitors from outside the universe — rather than the Cosmic Gate through which an Archon would normally enter the Library. Resurrecting his old pretense of being the last of the Mappers, Auteur disguised himself as a non-skeletal version of him using a false beard, thick tinted glasses, and dead flesh and skin stolen from an unknown victim. Announcing his arrival with panache to receptionist Baligant Caulphin, he began claiming that he had in fact been exploring and charting the Multiverse for all these eons, and was unaware of anything which had happened in the universe since before the coup against Urizen.
Declaring that his last task before he allowed himself to return home was to map out the Library, he spent twenty years among the Bookkeepers, teaching their elders advanced papyromancy and creating a number of partial maps of the Library, including the one which later came into Callum's possession. He even took an apprentice, Master Librarian Roland, ten years into his twenty-year stay in the Library. However, Roland began to suspect that the "Mapper" was not who he said he was, and that his explorations of the Library were not random. In fact, Auteur was searching for the Bookwyrm, a "primordial god-serpent" residing within the Library, in the hope of "riding [it]" back into the proper universe as he made a "triumphant return". He ended up attempting to sacrifice Roland's firstborn in a ritual to summon the Bookwyrm. Roland stopped and confronted him, forcing him to reveal his true appearance and identity. Identifying Auteur as an existential threat to the Library itself, Roland took extreme measures and set fire to the whole of Floor 899,167,435,042, burning Auteur down to ash in the blaze. He marked his passage on that Floor on the map, but did not write down any details about what could be found there. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
