Auteur

Godfather Auteur was a skeletal Homeworlder. After joining Faction Paradox, he declared himself the Homeworld's "Observer Effect" wrought flesh and took the title "Author of the Spiral Politic", believing that everything they wrote really happened and that anything he hadn't written about which did happen was "not valid". (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine, Going Once, Going Twice)

Origins
Auteur once claimed to Graelyn Scythes that her original incarnation was a little girl, who grew up quite lonely because at this point in her Homeworld's history, even looming her as a child at all had been "something of an experiment". (PROSE: )

According to rumours, Auteur was in fact a Mapper of early Great Houses history, one of the first product of the looms, who was driven insane following being forced to watch the outside Spiral Politic from an office on the Homeworld and map it via the observer effect. Before even sprouting a second heart, Auteur realised that he could abuse the Observer Effect to make anything real if he looked in the right place. Similar to the naming conventions used by other renegade Mappers, Auteur then took a name which was a variation on the word "astrolabe". (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) Notably, the Sixth Doctor repeatedly faced a Renegade Time Lord known as Astrolabus, who resided in a tall tower-like TARDIS, claimed to have mapped out the stars, (COMIC: Voyager) and had his skin ripped from him during his last face-off with the Doctor. (COMIC: Once Upon a Time-Lord)

However, Intrepid believed that this rumour had been started by Auteur himself and his "drinking buddies" in order to give his Observer Effect-based abilities "some more gravitas", and that he had later started believing it himself out of habit, whereupon it became valid history for him due to the Observer Effect. The official word from the Eleven-Day Empire had simply been that Auteur had been one of the Homeworlders drawn away from the Great Houses by Grandfather Paradox in the early days of the Faction. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)

After twenty years studying under him at the Plume Coteries' Library, Roland got Auteur to admit that he wasn't really "him". Auteur admitted that the lie had been getting old by that point. However, he insisted that he was really an Archon; he briefly entertained the thought that he might have been l'Autre before correcting the notion to simply being "a bit of him". (PROSE: ) Gideon seemed to remember growing up with Auteur on their shared homeworld. When Auteur recalled how she used to write prophecies, he corrected that she "wrote short stories about how people [she] didn’t like had bad things happen to them", which "annoyed everyone back home". On another occasion Auteur mentioned having written "a lot of fanfiction" when she was the same age as a then-preteened Graelyn Scythes. (PROSE: White Canvas)

Early adventures
When Auteur was banished from the Homeworld for his beliefs, he left with his House cousin Gideon. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine) However, the two grew apart; Gideon eventually left Auteur to join Faction Paradox. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) Over the years, Auteur had various faces, genders, and "a lot of other things". She later claimed that she "didn’t even like" most of her past identities, but felt that to such an incredibly long-lived being as herself, "different can be enough". By the time of her twelfth incarnation, Auteur had "been a mother and a father before, and a parent". (PROSE: White Canvas)

Twelfth incarnation
In her twelfth incarnation, Auteur 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 (PROSE: White Canvas) and "the Goddess" on the planet Gendar, (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy) was eventually foiled by Graelyn Scythes, (PROSE: White Canvas) whom Auteur nevertheless retained affection for, viewing her as an adopted daughter. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories)

Thirteenth incarnation
Auteur's final regeneration in their original allotted life cycle was a man, (PROSE: White Canvas) presumably the "wizened old man with a greasy beard and two clumps of white hair on either side of his bald head" (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) matching the appearance of Astrolabus as encountered by the Sixth Doctor (COMIC: Voyager, etc.) who was documented in another account as a having propensity for saying phrases in French and once scribbled into a grimoire by candlelight, notwithstanding Intrepid's suspicions that this entire aspect of Auteur's past was a fabrication which had only later become real due to the Observer Effect. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)

Having had his skin taken by Life, (PROSE: ) he was taken in by Faction Paradox at the recommendation of Gideon, an old friend. (PROSE:, ) However, he was too mad even for them, and was imprisoned in the Shadow Spire, where he whiled away his days. (PROSE: ) After the War in Heaven was over, he became the leader of the remains of the Faction, but was eventually killed by Apep after he sought dominion over all of time and space. (PROSE: )

Return in the post-War universe
During V-Time, Chris Cwej and his Superiors knew of Auteur. Although they knew him to be currently dead, they also knew that he would eventually be resurrected, and that at some point in this future life, he would find himself wandering beyond the Totality. (PROSE:

Indeed, Auteur resurfaced in weakened form. Without his shadow-skin, he had been reduced to a "tangle of blackened biodata" inhabiting his own battered, badly-repaired skeleton. Auteur put together a new plan and used a "Noble-woman" to alter the structure of history, creating a twisted parallel world. However, the woman rebelled, restoring the proper course of history despite Auteur's attempt to stop her by "vandalising a sad and ancient thing".

Because he'd physically followed the woman into the altered timeline, rather than simply projecting his mind backwards like she had, Auteur remained trapped in the parallel world even as it faded away, collapsing into an empty oxbow timeline. Although he was lost and dying, Auteur rejected this ending for his "story". He cried tears of ink and used them to write down a message on the pavement which would ensure his eventual survival: "This is only the beginning". (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)

Resurrection by the Retconning Crocodiles
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)

Imprisonment in the Sanctum of the Heretic
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)

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 couldn't be opened again and locked it in a drawer. (POEM: Auteur and the Homeworld)

Sixteenth incarnation
The incarnation of Auteur prior to his seventeenth (PROSE: ) was a traveller between universes who assisted Chris Cwej and Lady Aesculapius to reboot Professor X in the Warsong to rescue Grant Markham (PROSE: ) 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. (PROSE: )

Seventeenth incarnation
His next incarnation was born when Naimon's blood was scattered over the burnt ashes of his previous incarnation, allowing him to regenerate. He was eventually eaten by the Bookwyrm when the latter got bored of him. (PROSE: )

Legacy
One of the landmarks on the planet Gendar, whose religion worshipped the Sun Builder as gods, was Auteur's Babbling Bibliothèque. During her time working as a tour guide on Gendar, Maxie Masters recalled giving guided tours of the Bibliothèque to various alien tourists, such as electromagnetic barnacles. (PROSE: Out of the Box)

Auteur appeared as a character in a BBC TV series whose title was made up of two words, beginning with F and P respectively. His skeletal "thirteenth reincarnation" was portrayed continuously from 2067 and 7898 by a single performer, (PROSE: Auteur's Abecedarium, Resurrection of the Author) except for the 200th Anniversary Special of 6267, where he was portrayed by the actor David Bradley wearing a rubber mask. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)

Undated events
At an unclear point in their personal timeline, Auteur received an invitation to Lady Aesculapius's funeral, but did not attend, instead sending a "lovely message" apologising for not being able to make it. This slightly wounded Aesculapius, who was in fact alive in a new body, and had organised the funeral herself as part of a plot to figure out who had been behind the "murder" of her previous incarnation. Reading the eulogy while posing as Aesc's imaginary cousin "Lady Raesculapius", she mentioned Auteur and his message, muttering under her breath "I mean, I was able to be with us here today and it's my funeral but whatever". (PROSE: Life After Death)

Behind the scenes
Auteur is as heavily implied to have once been Astrolabus, a recurring antagonist of Doctor Who Magazine's Sixth Doctor comics, as can be achieved without impeaching on the character's copyright. However, this was never explicit due to Observe Books not having the license for the character of Astrolabus, which lies with Steve Parkhouse, writer of COMIC: Voyager.

Information from invalid sources
The character of Auteur, licensed from his creator Jayce Black, made a further appearances in Aristide Twain's A Better World, a short story released on the Doctor Who: Lockdown! website as part of the Lockdown Fan Gallery. While not mentioning any BBC concepts by name, it placed a post-Time War version of Auteur in the background of the events of Turn Left. Upon spotting the way the timelines seemed to be converging on a "Noble-woman", Auteur sensed an opportunity to create a world without "the Renegade", and was the one to advise the fortune teller to feed the woman to her beetle. His plan was successful, and a new timeline is created, with Auteur following the woman into it. However, the "Wolf-girl" stops Auteur from reaching out to the implied-Donna and convincing her to let this new history take its course.

This story formed the first part of a trilogy completed by Auteur's Abecedarium and Resurrection of the Author, the two crossover guest appearances of Auteur in The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, with the latter also being written by Twain. However, unlike those two stories, it has not, to date, been released in a professional context, with the Lockdown Fan Gallery being an explicitly non-commercial medium of release. As a result, A Better World is not covered on this Wiki, unlike its two sequels.

Dee Dodebier's depiction of Auteur was largely based on the from the film  and also on an abstract self-portrait by.