Auteur's Town

Auteur's Town was an artificial town built within the White Canvas by Auteur and Gideon in order to have a place to raise the deaged Graelyn Scythes as well as the Hollow Childe and Citizen 176.

History
After Auteur used a gauntlet stolen from her people to turn the inhabitants of the 10,000 Dawns into fiction, the final stage of the ritual she was enacting was destabilised when Graelyn Scythes arranged for the book she'd been turned into to have no ending, and need her alive and well to write her own ending before the ritual could continue. The mass of fiction Auteur had gathered then destabilised into the White Canvas while Graelyn was reverted into a baby. Despite Gideon's objections, Auteur decided to raise Graelyn over again until she was old enough to write this ending, hoping to manipulate Graelyn's reeducation so that she would willingly fictionalise herself.

To this end, Auteur built a nameless Town in the heart of the White Canvas, secluded from all other realities. It had a sky that wasn't blue but rather the same colour as her old home's, and instead of a sun and moon, its day-night cycle was assured by the Diosca Eitilte. Auteur populated the Town with a few hundred members of "the cult", who kept their masks but were advised against acknowledging the existence of the outside world to Graelyn, and forbidden from having children, the purpose of all this being that Graelyn would grow up fundamentally lonely and alienated. The only exceptions to the no-children rule were two little girls brought to the Town by Auteur and Gideon respectively as side-projects: "Citizen 176", a sketch-artist from Revolutionary France whom Auteur hoped to mould into an "artistic spirit of vengeance" and the Hollow Childe, a prophesied Antichrist whom Gideon hoped to help achieve her true potential.

After ten years, by which point both the cultists acting as Townsfolk and their brethren in the Empire were growing frustraded with the slowness of Auteur's plan, Graelyn began to have dreams about her original life. When she told Auteur about them, Auteur tried to manipulate this to urge Graelyn to complete her book and retreat into fictionality to be reunited with Archimedes Von Ahnerabe and the rest, but instead, she realised that she had been "too" kind with Graelyn, who earnestly declared Auteur the one person who'd ever been there for her and loved her. Instead of betraying that trust, Auteur decided to alter her plans, taking on a more guardian-like role for Graelyn over the next seven years and declaring that the ban over having children was over. This development, and the maturation of the Hollow Childe into a benevolent, normal girl who became friends with 176 and Graelyn, greatly displeased Gideon.

Eventually, Graelyn fully remembered the Town's origins, and freed the 10,000 Dawns inhabitants from their fiction state, confronting Auteur and the cultists with them. When Auteur admitted defeat, however, this triggered the condition of Graelyn thinking her story was over, which meant the original ritual resumed, turning everything within the Town into fiction, cultists and buildings and all, leaving only Auteur and Graelyn. Graelyn subsequently managed to win the gauntlet back from Auteur and reversed everything she'd done with it, unmaking the Town once and for all as its component parts were returned to their native universes. (PROSE: White Canvas)