White Canvas (novel)

White Canvas was a 10,000 Dawns Christmas Special novella which was the second story in the series, after Rachel Survived, to cross over with the Doctor Who universe. It was released as part of A 10,000 Dawns Christmas, and later collected in The Outer Universe Collection alongside shorter, connected stories.

Written by James Wylder with the permissions of Lance Parkin, Simon Bucher-Jones, Nate Bumber, Jayce Black, Niki Haringsma, and Stuart Douglas, the novella featured characters and concepts from Faction Paradox, the Virgin New Adventures, the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and Short Trips, including the first official reappearance of the Eighth Doctor's daughter Miranda Dawkins since 2005's The Gallifrey Chronicles.

It was also notable for introducing the planet Gendar and its eponymous inhabitants, who went on to becoming a recurring element of Doctor Who spin-offs published or otherwise influenced by Arcbeatle Press, notably appearing in Cwej: The Series and P.R.O.B.E..

Summary
Graelyn Scythes, once a grown-up agent of Dawn, has been returned to childhood and lives out seventeen years in a mysterious Town where nobody acknowledges the existence of anything beyond the White Canvas beyond the edges of the settlement. However, in dreams, she keeps getting glimpses of another life, and of a case she was investigating with Archimedes Von Ahnerabe and Lady Aesculapius involving the painted warriors and a powerful artefact stolen from the Firmament's equivalents in another universe. The key to understanding what the Town is, why Graelyn remembers that other life, and why all her friends and foes from the 10,000 Dawns have been turned into fiction within the Town, lies with Graelyn's mysterious art therapist and the Town's founder and de facto mayor, a woman called Auteur whose trademark gauntlet bears a startling resemblance to the one in Graelyn's dreams…

Chapter 1: Art Therapy
Graelyn Scythes, a ten-year-old girl living in a nameless Town under the care of art therapist "Miss Auteur", has been struggling with a feeling that there is more to the world than just the borders of the Town, which everyone in this current version of reality tells her is an absurd idea only fit for fiction. Likewise, she is certain the sky should be blue instead of white like a blank page. When Auteur returns to see that she has painted another picture where she coloured the sky in, she is not as displeased as Graelyn feared, being more interested in the fact that Graelyn painted herself next to the cyborg Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, whom she now knows as the mere fictional protagonist of a movie series.

Graelyn expresses further anxieties at the fact that she simply "doesn't have" a mother or father as far as she can remember, and that she doesn't wear a mask unlike, apparently, all the other inhabitants of the Town. Auteur takes stock of her state of mind, and calmly suggests that she start keeping a dream journal, as she's apparently been dreaming very vividly for the past week, more than she used to. She then brings the session to a close, though telling Graelyn that she can come by later to walk Auteur's robotic dog F.I.D.O if she wants.

She subsequently heads to the Town's convenience store and asks to buy a notebook and a mask; the shopkeeper is confused by the latter request, explaining that he has none in stock, and avoiding Graelyn's question of where everyone else got theirs if that is so. As she walks past a playground, Graelyn ponders where new inhabitants of the Town come from, and whether adults are lying to her about places other than the Town not existing as more than "storybook places". She then walks back to her home, where she leaves alone. After reflecting on her depleted finances (expressed in terms of a currency whose large denominations are abominations and small ones are horrors), she hears Cinnabar calling down from the Diosca Eitilte to warn the inhabitants that he will soon initiate night-time.

Hurrying back to Auteur's home, she meets up with the talking, robotic dog F.I.D.O, with whom she genuinely gets along, although he is rather proud. Their walk takes them to the edge of the Town, and as F.I.D.O drones on about philosophy, Graelyn suddenly decides to bolt into the vast expanse of pure whiteness outside the Town, hoping to cross beyond it and find a whole secret world. Instead, she loses sight of the Town impossibly quickly, then starts to sink into the white herself until she is saved by F.I.D.O, who reveals retractable glider wings and flies her back to solid ground. There, he reaffirms that nothing exists beyond the "empty lands", and tells her that although he will keep her secret about this forbidden expedition, he will not save her a second time if she tries the same thing again. Graelyn bleakly acquiesces, and F.I.D.O casually resumes his lecture about Foucault.

Chapter 2: Dreams
Some time later, Graelyn Scythes presents Auteur with her dream journal. Displeased with the quality of the prose, Auteur insists on spending an hour rewriting it before they start reading it together, squashing Graelyn's objections about whether this defeats the entire point of jointly reading a therapeutic dream journal.

The first entry, at any rate, concerns Graelyn and Archimedes, in their true identities as agents of Dawn, tracking down a rogue Knight of Sky called Artillo Brinzo who had stolen a powerful gauntlet from a species of Firmament-equivalents from another reality. Catching him after a tiring rooftop chase, they manage to get the gauntlet from him, but before he can reveal to them who hired him to do the deed, he is suddenly abducted by a teleporting painted warrior. A different painted warrior then menaces Graelyn and Arch, but they manage to escape using their crystal dust with which they can open portals between universes.

Once they're done reading, Auteur acknowledges the gauntlet's resemblance to her own and tries to psychoanalyse Graelyn's decision to "put it in the story"; they quickly circle back to Graelyn's inability to make friends her age, with her complaining of being bullied by one Tyraniss, who confusingly complains that his mothers wouldn't have to live in the Town if not for her (which Auteur unconvincingly arguing that he was referring to their past employment on the Diosca Eitilte in Cinnabar's place). They part ways without a real breakthrough, though not before Auteur once again reminds her to take F.I.D.O for a walk.

After Graelyn leaves, Auteur is visited by her cousin Gideon, who is apparently privy to whatever is going on. It transpires that Auteur has been running the Town for a number of years, watching Graelyn grow up; she and Gideon apparently killed the town's sole alcohol-distiller when he started to remember some things about what reality should be like, and Auteur is determined not to be so blunt with Graelyn, instead chasing some kind of "breakthrough" which does not sound to be in her own best interest. Gideon, though going along with the scheme, sounds displeased at the thought of Graelyn's relentlessly lonely childhood, with Auteur attempting to reassure him that she is doing what she can to mitigate that, having notably given her some science books for her birthday, and letting her walk F.I.D.O regularly for companionship.

Chapter 3: Popcorn
Graelyn visits the cinema, buying a ticket to see Archimedes: Skymetal from the hulking robotic ticket-booth-attendant attendant Hole. As she sits through the previews, she is gratified to spot one of the other few minors in the Town, Citizen 176, also in the audience. The screening, which sees Archimedes Von Ahnerabe (as played by Brad Pitt) and his companion Celeste Roth (as portrayed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) stopping an agent of the "evil cult" known as the Firmament blowing up an underwater city, is briefly interrupted by the Hollow Childe, but Hole steps in.

After the credits roll, Graelyn is startled to overhear a conversation between an unidentified pair and Auteur. The people are apparently in the know about "why the Town exists", though subservient to Auteur. With "the holidays coming up", they ask for the indulgence of the cinema being allowed to screen an old film from outside that is a guilty favourite of one of the two suitors', Ice Age 2. Auteur refuses tersely, being offended both on an artistic level and because the movie prominently features a mammoth character. Auteur then stomps off to deal with a situation whose ins and outs Graelyn cannot grasp from speech alone.

Later, she has another dream which she records in her journal; a direct continuation of the prior scene, it begins with Graelyn and Archimedes arriving back in Spiral, Dawn's home base, where the organisation's leader Kinan Jans is still talking to the Emissary. The Emissary is initially dismissive of their tale about a painted warrior, being more concerned with taking the gauntlet back "homeward" as soon as possible, but when they try to oblige, the gauntlet proves impossible to get off Graelyn. The Emissary realises that the artefact detected the threat of the painted warriors and has initiated a "danger lock", refusing to come off until the situation is resolved. Thus, she reluctantly agrees to help investigate.

They return to 2460 New York City, where they quickly find the painted warrior again. The Emissary recognises it as a servant of her people's "enemies". Archimedes tries parlaying with it until he is told that these beings are nothing but statues as long as they're observed. When a concerned Kinan wonders why the Firmament haven't shown up to deal with a threat of this magnitude, they're answered by the appearance of Lady Aesculapius, who emerges from under a pile of trash to announce that the Firmament have "fallen", with only her making it out; looking for other survivors, she was only able to track their non-Firmanent group down using her Quantum Whisk. Panting, she explains that the invaders also stole "her ride", and have been systematically scrubbing the 10,000 Dawns of any copies of a certain book called The Book of the Enemy. The Emissary suggests that they could find a copy in her reality, such as in the collections of the Plume Coteries, but the discussion is soon interrupted by more and more painted warriors materialising, surrounding the group on all sides.

After reading this entry, Auteur compliments Graelyn's writing, but highlights that like her previous one, and many of her other dreams, this story is "fanfiction" where Graelyn has written herself as a friend of various cool fictional characters she likes. Turning aggressive, Auteur emphasies Graelyn's lack of friends and failure at life, berating her for it all, and asking her to admit that what she really wants is to join the fictional characters once and for all; to become a fictional character herself. However, before she can persuade Graelyn to write this down, Auteur makes the mistake of asking Graelyn "what else she has left"; mistaking what the supposed therapist is driving at, Graelyn identifies Auteur herself as the only real person who's been there for her all these years, and, in pure, tender earnest, Graelyn asks Auteur if she wants to spend Christmas with her. Completely taken aback at her sincere love, Auteur stammers her agreement, and finds no way to walk it back before Graelyn leaves, her spirits lifted.

Once she's alone, Auteur flies into a rage, knocking her books of her shelves and then curling up on the floor in frustration at how what should have been the climax of her decade-long plan completely got away from her.

Chapter 4: The Plan
On another walk, during which F.I.D.O discusses his lack of interest in Friedrich Nietzsche, the dog suggests to Graelyn Scythes that she has been trying to make friends with the wrong people. Taking this to heart, Graelyn decies to befriend other "weird", misfit children, and begins by bringing Citizen 176 homemade cookies. The oddly emotionless girl is receptive to the offering, immediately suggesting a sleepover with Graelyn and the Hollow Childe. Graelyn thus heads to the latter, extremely frightening girl's home, a huge gothic mansion full of cobwebs where she lives alone. Ignoring the Hollow Childe's attempts to unsettle and frighten her, Graelyn delivers her earnest invitation to the sleeopover and gift of cookies; when she realises that Graelyn is in earnest, the Childe starts sobbing with joy behind her mask, though she then demands Graelyn never tell anyone about it.

They decide to hold the sleepover at Citizen 176's place, which is modeled on the Palace of Versailles. After giving up on a trashy fantasy film sequel (Songbird Knight 2: Dragons Rising), the girls decide to tell stories. They hesitate between telling ghost stories and personal storides; the Hollow Childe decides to lead with her own stories, which is unsurprisingly both at once. This story begins with Gideon meeting the Hollow Childe, who is hovering on top of a mountain of corpses. They are both aware of a prophecy claiming that "the Hollow Childe Will Stand at the End of the Universe, Laughing Amidst the Tears". Though the Childe tries to claim that she is responsible for the mountain of cadavers, Gideon correctly guessts that the corpses are actually cultists who sacrificed themselves in an effort to unlock the Childe's full power; the Childe gives up on the feeble attempt at intimidation, and indeed, adds that she didn't want them to do it, but was powerless to stop them. Unconcerned, Gideon decides to take the child to a place where she will unlock her full potential without resort to such crude methods.

It was thus, the Hollow Childe reveals, that she came to live in the Town. However, he left her with a couple of largely unhelpful books entitled The Apocalypse for Dummies and So, you’re destined to bring on the apocalypse: A Beginners guide with pictures, and has otherwise entirely failed to visit her or make good on his promise to help her prepare for destroying the universe.

For her own story, Graelyn tells them about one of her dre,ams since she has no memories of her life before the Town. Seemingly corresponding to events earlier than the dreams in the journal, this one begins with Graelyn arriving on the windswept desert planet of Gendar alongside Lady Aesculapius and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe to meet Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn at a temple to the Goddess, where ancient prophecies of the rogue oracles, some which seem to have been carved with tusks, have been unearthed. The reason Dawn and Aesc were called is that one of these prophecies is inscribed in a crystalline lattice which is foreign to this universe, instead being Firmament technology. Putting a palm on it, Aesculapius is able to channel the inscription's meaning, speaking several prophecies: first "From the White Canvas, she will never escape." and "Only from flickers will angelic skin return.", then a repeat of the prophecy of the Hollow Childe ("The Hollow Childe Will Stand at the End of the Universe, Laughing Amidst the Tears").

Finally, it's Citizen 176's turn. She relates the short tale of how she came to live in the Town: then known as Louise, she was a young chambermaid during the French Revolution, she was sentenced to the guillotine alongside the Marquis LeFoy for trying to help him to escape. As she waited her turn, she stoically tried to sketch the grisly device and its operator, only for time to freeze around her as an "angel", none other than Auteur, appeared to save her, plucking a copy of her out of time before allowing history to resume with a version of Louise left behind to die while this one was given a new lease of life in the Town as "Citizen 176", hoping that she would grow into "some sort of artistic spirit of vengeance".

While the three girls agree to officially be friends, and ponder what purpose Auteur might have in mind for Graelyn, Auteur herself is holding council with Gideon, who has come to inform her that "the others" back in the Empire are growing increasingly frustrated with the time and resources Auteur has poured into the single ritual that the Town is meant to serve, albeit a ritual intended to allow their side to win the war if it works out. However, Auteur uses the analogy of Cranford (an unfinished book by Jane Austen which is far less famous than finished ones such as Pride and Prejudice, even though it is hardly obscure) to convince Gideon that no matter how much she has achieved already, it would be a waste to try and enact the ritual too early.

Subsequently, at the promised Christmas celebrations with Graelyn, Auteur is genuinely touched to be given a box of paintbrushes from the hair of a creature from Vo'lach Prime — her favourite kind, of which she hasn't owned a set for years. Mulling over her options, she decides to give up on her earlier plan and instead to lean into her "mistake" of having let herself be too kind to Graelyn, and to announce to all the adults that the moratorium on having children within the Town is over, which will apparently lead to "chaos".

Interlude: Auteur
Back home, Auteur takes off her gauntlet and pours herself a glass of grape juice in a stylish-looking wine-glass. She then looks directly at an unseen audience, happy to see that she is starting to perceive them, though they're still "faint". She assures them that although they might not yet fully understand what she's doing, especially as regards her treatment of little Graelyn, it is all ultimately for the greater good.

Chapter 5: A Flicker
Five years later, a teenaged Graelyn (still flanked by F.I.D.O, who's now been telling her about Sandifer) bumps into a significantly drunk Cá Bảy Màu, and helps his friends Axastyakis and Mullion walk him back to his home. On the way, she runs into Citizen 176 and Hollow, reaffirming that she'll go see the new Archimedes film with them later this evening, though she states that she must first attend a session with Auteur.

She finds the strange woman working on a painting of Auteur herself as a child — a rather lonely-looking little girl who, strangely enough, does not look very much like her adult self. As Auteur herself quickly points out, they didn't actually have a therapy session planned; for years now, Auteur has been more of a distant guardian and mentor to Graelyn than a therapist. However, Graelyn insists on showing her the latest entry in her dream journal, which is apparently "surprising".

In a continuation of the narrative of her dreams from five years ago, her Dawn-operative self, Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, Lady Aesculapius and the Emissary arriving via crystalline incision portals in the Plume Coteries' Library. Finding Coloth, an Ulk-Ra who is currently working for the Plume Coteries, who soon calls a girl called Marissa for help, they inquire after The Book of the Enemy. The girl quickly finds a glowing card which will lead them to it, but warns them that it is "a fairly dangerous book", asking Coloth to go with them just in case.

They find it without incident; one chapter of the book, entitled Cobweb and Ivory, indeed discusses the nature of the painted warriors, revealing their masters to be none other than the Original Mammoths of old. Knowing that they would be hopelessly outmatched against such a power — even with Coloth pledging to join them after his shift ends in five minutes — they decide to try parlaying with the ancient beings. Finding a way to reach them seems challenging, but by focusing as hard as she can on what she learned from the Book combined with her childish wonder when she first saw a mammoth skeleton with her father in a museum, Graelyn is able to open a portal to the original Mammoths using her Dawn crystal-dust. After she does so, they all apprehensively step through, leaving Marissa to bemoan Coloth leaving without warning and without tidying up after himself.

Once they reach the end of the dream-journal entry, Graelyn explains to Auteur that she is surprised at this dream fitting seamlessly with the salvo from five years ago even though, on a conscious level, Graelyn had almost forgotten about those dreams by now. Auteur is cagey about what she thinks this signifies, though she grants that it seems to show that they are not "normal dreams", and may connect to "places which don't follow the normal rules of reality". Graelyn connects this to "the White Canvas" which surrounds the Town, with Auteur being surprised at her use of the name. In the end, Auteur advises her to go watch the Archimedes movie with her friends like she planned, and return to Auteur once she's mulled it over some more.

At the cinema, she's happy to meet up with her friends again, reacting with amused aggravation at Hollow and 176 still dancing over the possibility of entering a relationship. However, the opening scene of Archimedes being interrogated by a generic villain about Dawn suddenly awakens a number of memories of her real adventures with him, and other memories of her real life, including her cat Mr Sprinkles and her abusive mother, start coming back to her. She impulsively calls out to Arch through the screen before she realises what she's doing — and is even more surprised when the cyborg somehow hears her and calls back, to the confusion of the other characters on-screen, until the screening is abruptly interrupted.

Auteur quickly arrives, demanding everyone leave except for Graelyn, and demonstrating that she means business by using her gauntlet to somehow make the cinema attendant vanish in the blink of an eye. A raging, tearful Graelyn confronts Auteur, demanding to be told the truth; though she admits that she has a grand plan, and that Graelyn is part of it just like Hollow and 176, she refuses to explain it in full, stating that certain parts "would be hard to tell [her] about". While Auteur is distracted by Mullion's unexpected appearance, the three friends run to Graelyn's house, where they all break down crying, though through their fear and grief, 176 and Hollow finally find it in themselves to admit their love for one another and kiss.

Later that night, Gideon berates Auteur for the day's event — particularly the culmination of the Hollow Childe, the planned Antichrist's, devolution into a loving, heroic figure. Having had high hopes for her and her prophecy, Gideon describes this as Auteur compulsively "break[ing] everyone else's toys just because [she] think[s] [hers] are nicer". He further chides her for having allowed the members of the cult who reside in the Town to become soft and "domesticated", losing sight of their purpose and fanaticism in the comfort of family life. Auteur is unperturbed by these charges, claiming that they are all part of her new and revised plan.

Chapter 6: The Screening
Two more years later, Graelyn Scythes and her friends, now seventeen, still lack any answers, and are wondering what to become of them as they reach college age in a Town without such an institution nor any clear hints of what Auteur expects of them.

Meanwhile, Mullion demands a meeting with Auteur, flanked by Axastyakis, Cá Bảy Màu and Hole. They demand to be allowed to return to the Empire, even going so far as to accuse Auteur of not really being one of them, but rather someone who found out that a future version of her would join, and is prevailing upon that spurious connection to pursue a plan that is entirely her own. Auteur, however, is quick to pierce through Mullion's bluster; after intimidating the others into leaving, she uses her gauntlet to make a fragment of the White Canvas suddenly appear beneath Mullions's feet and swallow her up. Falling through a surrealist nightmare of twisted memories where Auteur has godlike control, Mullion is soon regressed into a meek child who addresses Auteur as her godmother — as a genuine familial term rather than a rank — and apologises. Returned to the "real world", she leaves Auteur's office without another word.

That night, Graelyn wakes sharply from a dream even more detailed than the others. Writing it down instantly, she rereads it three times over and, deciding the time has to come act even if she's still hazy on the details, she gets dressed and hurries to meet Hollow and 176. After reading the dream journal, they agree that its contents are the answer to everything, but are likwise unsure of what to do in practical terms. However, they tell Graelyn that they have a minor secret of their own that they'd been intending to tell her about in the morning: a clandestine movie screening of none other than Ice Age 2, smuggled into the town by Skinflint after years of work. Due to Mullion spilling the beans to Auteur, the screening is crashed by a furious Auteur, but this works out in the girls' favour as they take advantage of the commotion to hide in the bathroom until the theater is closed again. Once everyone is gone, they raid the archives and find an Archimedes reel.

A little later, a strangely calm Graelyn drops in on Auteur and shows her the dream-journal entry. There, after hurtling through time — getting glimpses of such people as her mother, Manuel Salazar and Miranda Dawkins — she finds herself in the alter-time realm where the Original Mammoths endure. She is confronted by a proud mammoth, the true form of her stuffed pet Taranis, who explains that a prophecy foretold that the wielder of the golden gauntlet may bring about the mammoths' own end alongside the Firmament. Thus, when they learned that it had been stolen from their foes who "guard the ticking of the eons", they found rifts between their universe and the 10,000 Dawns, and sent painted warriors through to painlessly extract the Firmament and Graelyn from time before this could come to pass. Before Taranis can similarly freeze Graelyn, however, the Emissary reveals herself to be the true gauntlet-wielder in the prophecy, Auteur herself. With Taranis no longer wishing to harm Graelyn after this revelation, the danger lock releases, allowing Auteur to steal it for herself.

Victorious, she reveals that she herself wrote the "prophecy" the mammoths heard, and created the gaps in the universe they used to send in the painted warriors; Unleashing the gauntlet's power, she uses it to turn everyone who tries to come after her into fiction — first the painted warriors, whom she turns into mere two-dimensional paintings on the walls, then the mammoths, each reduced to a book describing their life story — then Archimedes, turned into a box set of theatrical action films, and Lady Aesc, who clatters to the floor as "a pile of 276 Blu-Ray disks". Graelyn flees to another part of the mammoth stronghold, with Taranis, ashamed of having hurt her, pledging to do anything in his power to make it up to her. When Auteur catches up with Graelyn, she seems to be alone. After turning her into a book, however, Auteur opens it only to find that Graelyn managed to highjack her own story: the book ends with something she very much did not intend, beginning with And Graelyn wrote on her arms, knowing that the text would become lines in the book, and those lines read:….

What Graelyn wrote causes all the books to shake and spasm around Auteur before merging into the White Canvas. When Gideon arrives to see how she's getting on, he is upset to find his cousin holding Graelyn, who, instead of a book, has stabilised in the form of a baby. Auteur insists that they cannot kill her, and need to raise Graelyn again until she is old enough to write a proper ending to her own book, closing the loop of the ritual. She thus resolves to use the Canvas to devise a scenario in which to raise her, which will manipulate her into writing an ending that would be favourabl to Auteur's grand plan.

Having filled in the end of the story herself, back in the present, Auteur is defiant and unrepentant, even in the face of Graelyn being rejoined by Archimedes — still clinging to her plan to turn every part of the 10,000 Dawns into one vast story that she can rewrite to her liking, building it up into an alternate history at her beck and call with which she can overwrite that of her native universe, thereby suppressing the war altogether. However, before she can mount any kind of counterattack, Graelyn wishes Taranis back to his true size and nature, easily subduing her. All over the Town, the 10,000 Dawns natives keep streaming out of the cinema in their dozens, retruend to reality, subdue the cultists.

Getting Auteur to admit defeat, however, turns out to be exactly what Auteur wanted: as soon as Graelyn believes that the story has come to an end, this resolves the glitch in her ritual from seventeen years ago, unmaking the White Canvas and swallowing the whole Town back into fiction — cultists and all — with only Graelyn left behind. Despairing, Graelyn expects Auteur to kill her, and is baffled when Auteur instead reveals, with extreme awkwardness, that she has come to love Graelyn like a child over these seventeen years, and would like her to become a "co-author" at her side, even if she will not accede to any requests to release the people she's fictionalised.

After pretending to consider the offer, Graelyn makes Auteur a counter-offer: she'll join Auteur, and they'll travel the multiverse using their shared godlike authorial powers to mess about with other realities, on the condition that Auteur even out the playing field between them by adding one more universe to the 10,000 fictionalised ones: her own. Auteur accepts without thinking, only for her own life-story to be pulled along into fiction, leaving behind the gauntlet — which Graelyn is able to use to reverse all the fictionalisations, restoring all 10,001 universes to what they were before all this started.

As the dust clears, however, F.I.D.O finds Graelyn in what is left of the White Canvas and shares with her his belief that, having been returned to her normal life-track with all her memories intact, Auteur, as he knows her, will likely "destroy herself" in increasingly desperate attempts to recover the metaficitonal power she briefly wielded over 10,001 entire universes, unable to be satisfied with anything less ever again.

Chapter 7: An Artist Lies Dying
Having gotten killed, then come back as an old man, Auteur is now dying once again — having had his skin ripped away from him, reduced to a bloodied skeleton. He is surprised by the appearance of Graelyn Scythes and F.I.D.O. While the latter does what he can to stabilise his master, they realise that only one power can save him now: that "death cult", which Auteur himself cannot remember whether he has joined yet. They bring him back to the White Canvas, where F.I.D.O calls Gideon, who comes with an escort of other members of the cult, describing Auteur as "the greatest artist there is" and convincing them to save Auteur's life and initiate him into their ranks properly. With their work done, F.I.D.O agrees to teleport Graelyn home.

Chapter 8: The Christmas Needle Agreement
The following day, powers from across both the Totality and the 10,000 Dawns gather at the Needle to sign a pact solidifying diplomatic relations between the two (sets of) realities. As Empress Miranda Dawkins prepares to officially sign the document, Graelyn Scythes chats with a few of the guests — first bumping into Ambassador Galaxy Violet of the Quoth before returning the gauntlet to Littlejohn. She also finds Taranis and gives him a Dawn badge; honoured by the gift beyond what she expected, the mammoth, in return, marks her with a sigil which makes her symbolically one of the Original Mammoths in her own right, "granted the privileges of the herd and song, (…) and known to all to have the spirit of the tusk".

As the documents are officially signed and a banquet is held, Hollow and Citizen 176 announce that they have been granted a new home on the Needle by Empress Miranda, and intend to move in together. As they head off to the dance floor, Graelyn finds Gideon — who acts civil, but makes it clear that he blames Graelyn for starting Auteur down her path of madness by interrupting her great scheme, also ruining their friendship in the process. Nevertheless, he agrees to get one last Christmas present to her on Graelyn's behalf — a blank notebook, to use in "some art therapy of her own".

Characters

 * Aladdin
 * Alice the Songbird
 * Archimedes Von Ahnerabe
 * Auteur
 * Axastyakis
 * Artillo Brinzo
 * Cá Bảy Màu
 * Cinnabar
 * Citizen 176
 * Coloth
 * Empress Miranda Dawkins
 * F.I.D.O
 * Ambassador Galaxy Violet
 * Gideon
 * Graelyn Scythes
 * Graelyn Scythes's father
 * Hole
 * The Hollow Childe
 * Jack
 * Kinan Jans
 * Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn
 * Luigsech
 * Marissa
 * Mullion
 * Celeste Roth
 * Skinflint
 * Taranis

Worldbuilding

 * "Mr Desolation" is the Town's sole sandwich-maker.
 * "Classics" on Auteur's bookshelf include Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Head of State and Dracula.
 * Supernatural behaviours are common in Auteur's Town, with children practicing summoning circles and "blood magic" in school, the "baker's commune" baking memories into bread, and a couple being seen casually performing "a blood sacrifice over a storm drain".
 * F.I.D.O states that "Foucault wrote that madness, in the 18th century, (…) was often used to stigmatize those who were unwanted by society. Poor, sick, and those whose own thoughts fell outside the social norms".
 * Auteur plagiarises the first line of The Dark Tower for her rewritten version of Graelyn's dream journal's first entry. It thus reads "The green-robed man fled across the rooftops, and Archimedes followed".
 * In Graelyn's dream, Archimedes Von Ahnerabe is wearing a blue fez that says "Centro Children's Hospital Fun Gang".
 * Movies slated to be screened at the cinema after Archimedes: Skymetal include Songbird 3: The Fall of Kings, Coloth Adventures 4: The Patron of Doom, Aladdin: Kid Hacker!, and "a few that didn’t really interest [Graelyn] like a drama about how some fictional space admiral uncovered a secret plot to start a war while sitting in a desk job". Seven years later, Graelyn mentions a Songbird IV: Revolution Rising.
 * Auteur claims that she wrote a lot of fanfiction when she was Graelyn's age. Gideon later states that she "wrote short stories about how people you didn’t like had bad things happen to them" which "annoyed everyone back home".
 * The Hollow Childe's home is also inhabited by at least three bats. The Childe is known for claiming that she "has demons in her blood".
 * When meeting the Hollow Childe, Gideon claims to have met "a few potential Antichrists in [his] life".
 * Within Auteur's Town, by the time Graelyn was ten, Lady Aesculapius starred in a TV show, which featured a variety of "monsters". Five years later, she sees a trailer for a Lady Aesculapius movie and is skeptical at the idea, thinking the concept was better suited for television.
 * Neoreaction a Basilisk was a book written by "Sandifer". F.I.D.O is partial to it.
 * Auteur mentions that she "[hasn't] always had the same face, or gender, or a lot of other things", and claims to have been "a mother and a father before, and a parent" in the past.
 * At the Needle, Littlejohn is seen talking to representatives of the Great Assimilation, looked "extremely unimpressed with the Great Assimilation’s bragging about having a multi-universal empire".

Continuity

 * The in-universe version of PROSE: Head of State from to Graelyn Scythes's universe was previously seen in PROSE: Rachel Survived.
 * When pondering where new inhabitants of the Town come from, Graelyn Scythes mulls over the fact that "you [don't] just spin children out of looms, there [are] organic bodily processes for these things", alluding to the fact that Gallifreyan reproduction was revealed to work precisely thus in PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, PROSE: Lungbarrow and PROSE: The Book of the War following the Pythia's Curse and the anchoring of the thread.
 * Walking through the Town, Graelyn reflects "this was her town, and she wondered if it would ever let her go, and if it did, where she could go from here", alluding to the title of PROSE: This Town Will Never Let Us Go.
 * Auteur and Gideon originate from PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine; it is also in apparent allusion to the story that Auteur has Dracula on their bookshelf among other "classics".
 * Hole, Cá Bảy Màu, Axastyakis, and Mullion originate from PROSE: What Keeps Their Lines Alive.
 * The painted warriors, Original Mammoths, and Plume Coteries originate from PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory.
 * The Book of the Enemy originated in PROSE: The Book of the Enemy.
 * Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn originates from PROSE: The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale.
 * Auteur and Gideon refer to "the Empire", evidently the Eleven-Day Empire which served as the Faction Paradox's home base until the events of AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire/The Shadow Play, and was first featured in PROSE: Interference - Book One.
 * Auteur's favourite kind of brush is made from the hair of an animal from Vo'lach Prime, the home planet of the Vo'lach, from PROSE: Ghost Devices.
 * Coloth debuted in PROSE: War Crimes, where he was established to be an Ulk-Ra. His survival within the Plume Coteries was previously seen in PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory, and PROSE: A Farewell to Arms, where he had the appearance of a cactus-person. This is retroactively explained in this story, which makes it clear that Coloth in his resurrected form can adopt various forms at will.
 * The Plume Coteries' Library is described as "one of several places that claim to be the biggest library in the Universe". Other contenders included Catalog, as seen in COMIC: Hunger from the Ends of Time!, and the Library, which debuted in TV: Silence in the Library.
 * When attempting to prevail upon the fact that they are "of the same people", Mullion speaks of the other cult-members as "lesser people" to Auteur, alluding to the phrase "lesser species", used by the Great Houses for species other than themselves according to PROSE: The Book of the War.
 * The sky in Auteur's Town isn't blue, but another, unstated colour which Auteur patterned after her and Mullion's home. From TV: The Sensorites onwards, it was a frequently-restated fact about Gallifrey that its night sky was "a burnt orange".
 * Graelyn glimpses a young Miranda Dawkins by the Berlin Wall, as seen in PROSE: Father Time. Later, Miranda is Empress of the Needle at the "end of the universe", as seen in PROSE: Father Time, PROSE Sometime Never... and COMIC: Miranda. Graelyn is confused at the interest the crowd expresses whenever Mirander mentions "her father", which is much less surprising in the knowledge that as established in those stories, her father was in fact the Doctor.
 * Taranis communicates telepathically, as the mammoths did in PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory.
 * The negotiation of the Christmas Needle Agreement is attended, among others, by representatives of the Quoth from PROSE: The Death of Art and the Vo'lach from PROSE: Ghost Devices.
 * The Gendar Conspiracy was released after White Canvas as a prequel to the story, giving more detail to Littlejohn's investigation of Gendar and the Vo'lachs' actions prior to the Christmas Needle Agreement.