Art by A D'Amico

So while the game was still coming out in chapters, we didn’t originally know how the apprentice lost their memory. A theory I came up with was that they tried to do some kind of forbidden ritual to end the plague; it failed and it caused them to lose their memory. Later I was thinking that could still be a fun AU (because au’s are my crack), and envisioned a world where Vee (my fan apprentice) completed a pact with some forgotten being older than the arcana themselves. It ate up all that delicious magical energy causing the plague (and Vlastomil, as the source of it,) and then took up residence in Vee’s body as a link to the world it’s been severed from for eons, waiting for them to direct it at something else to devour. We split off into more AUs from here because what’s more fun than putting this cast through The Horrors?

Option one is that Lucio makes Vee become his replacement for Vlastomil in court while trying to get them to make all his other ill-conceived pacts disappear in the same way, lots of court intrigue and general misery ensues.

Option two has Vee sentenced to death for what they did (a whole bunch of people who had the plague and didn’t know it yet died in the wake of their pact), but the Entity won’t allow them to die. This is of course very intriguing to Valdemar who is allowed to take them to the secret dungeon lab where they can re-enact as many scenes from the Saw franchise as their cold shriveled heart desires. The Devil has also become intrigued by the existence of this Entity that Vee is harboring, and uses Valdemar’s experiments as a bargaining chip to try and make a deal with Vee. His plan to perform the dinner party ritual has been interrupted by Vlasty’s disappearance, but if he can gain control of whatever was able to wipe the worm man off the face of the earth, he could probably do some neat and not at all sinister stuff!

The Entity is actually in favor of this too, because goat looks like a fun thing to try eating. Vee holds out for as long as they can though, because this just overall seems like a bad combination of eldritch beings. But eventually they’re no longer able to keep their hold on The Entity and it escapes their body. The Devil and The Entity end up wrestling for dominance so hard that they tumble back into the arcane realm to keep going at it in private like some kind of toxic yaoi. I don’t know why I phrased it like that. Anyway, they’re going to be busy for a while figuring out who gets to eat whom. (For how long? A week, a decade, a millennia? Who knows?) The rest of the courtiers disappear with him, maybe to try to help the Devil out or to slink off and hide.

From there is a couple MORE splits, which is

A- AU 1000, which is mostly domestic fluff of Lucio learning to be a decent person.

B- The situation in the previous post’s comics, (which once again could go several different ways based on which character I feel like being dramatic about lmao) where Vee stumbles out of the dungeons with very few memories aside from the inexplicable need to run. They end up in the forests around Vesuvia, and eventually find the ruins of an old cottage that once belonged to a witch who left the area decades ago. They have the feeling that they can’t return to Vesuvia and are generally fearful of other people, though they don’t know why. In fact trying to remember much of anything is physically painful, so they simply try not to, instead simply focusing on surviving in the wilderness.

The witch’s cottage gives them interesting clues about the person who used to live there; someone who despite preferring solitude clearly had a habit of helping those who crossed their path. Vee sort of accidentally takes up the same custom, on the rare occasion someone stumbles into their part of the woods. They can’t do much aside from provide minor herbal remedies or point them in the right direction, but rumors start to quietly spread about their presence anyway. They also befriend a colony of forest cats because hell yeah why not.

Eventually someone from their past finds them out. Muriel catches sight of them on day during his usual forest business (forest business? Lmao idk) At first he doesn’t believe his eyes, then he thinks he’s seeing a ghost. But the longer he keeps tabs on them from a distance the more sure he is that something suspicious is going on.

Before he has a chance to decide how to proceed our beloved gangly Doctor gets lost in the woods on his way back from a trip to a neighboring city and is instantly concerned about this malnourished little Frankenstein’s creature wannabe. It’s not until after he’s safely back in Vesuvia that their familiarity starts to nag at him. He finds their wanted poster from the final days of the plague stashed in with some old notes and doesn’t know what to make of it. Like Muriel he isn’t sure if he’s seen a ghost or if some other sort of trickery is afoot.

From there the rest is just kind of me daydreaming about various scenarios, from Muriel telling Asra about his discovery and the two confronting Vee to dramatic effect, to Julian making friendly return visits in an attempt to find a medical explanation as to why they’re alive. Maybe even Lucio leading a hunting expedition into the forest to see if he can get answers about why all his ill advised magic pacts have suddenly fallen apart. ( •̀ω •́ )

Aaand yeah! Idk. Anyway here’s the full comic and some extras. ( ੭ ˘ ³˘)੭‎°｡⋆♡