Trying To Write About Skulduggery And Valkyrie In An AU. It Is Turning Out Very Long, So In The Meantime

Trying to write about Skulduggery and Valkyrie in an AU. It is turning out very long, so in the meantime I’m gonna talk about what the Sanctuary is up to.

This au pulls the very stereotypical “most of civilization has collapsed”, so Roarhaven is incredibly crowded full of people mortal and sorcerer alike, and the city is shielded at certain times of the day to protect from threats (most notably Mevolent/Serafina or the Faceless Ones).

Like, when I say packed, I mean packed. Pretty much the whole city is stacked on top of each other and some people are seeing if they can connect the buildings together to form one massive structure, and even that isn’t enough to hold all the people now penned up in this city. Splashes of magic are becoming even more widespread, especially among mortals, to the point that some of the police have started to crack down on it. There are also people who can’t afford places to stay who all sleep together under one big tarp to conserve body heat, it is a mess.

China got aged down to about her forties in this au because of the magic blast, which really led to her being annoyed that magical explosions kept tampering with her age. She’s no longer the principal of Corrival and now she lives on the edge of town running a business as a Signum Linguist (since Signum Linguists are in very high demand in Roarhaven). She doesn’t create Splashes, but she does make weapons and/or enhancements for soldiers, particularly mortal ones (which I will get into later).

Corrival Academy is technically no longer functional but many of the teachers do still teach, and they find places and times to do it so that students can show up in groups and learn. Teachers like Fletcher and Militsa are partially helping the Sanctuary keep organized and on-task and partially trying to organize and actual school for kids since the last one fell apart. Also Militsa broke up with Valkyrie again on account of Val being an evil god (AGAIN), and now she and Fletcher are disaster besties who’re trying to keep it together. The two of them somehow managed to keep Xena alive until her death at an old doggy age.

Ghastly is still running things over at the Sanctuary, and he is having a VERY rough go of it. On top of mortals finding out about magic and chaos ensuing, he also has to deal with the fact that he now knows that Skulduggery is Lord Vile (because of what Cadaver told him) and that Valkyrie defended him for years (and has now turned into a slightly deranged god). He, Tanith, and Temper have been working together to create different military units with different purposes now that they have more demographics of people to keep track of, protect, and make use of. In short, Ghastly is even more burnt out than he was before the apocalypse.

The mortals have also been making themselves useful, usually working as soldiers for the Sanctuary. I talked about technomages a bit earlier, and I am talking about them now. Lots of the mortals now living in Roarhaven have been going out of their way to equip magical tools (usually weapons) to help them keep up with the sorcerers. This has led to them basically forming into military units working for the Sanctuary and has greatly increased their firepower, making them slightly less appealing to attack.

On top of Temper, Tanith, and Ghastly at the top of the Sanctuary, Dexter Vex also has a little group of his own who technically don’t work for the Sanctuary, but stay in Roarhaven and are more than willing to do tasks alongside them. Aside from Dexter, this team consists of Saracen (who was revived in the same way as Anton), Kierre, Aurora, Frightening, Donegan, and Gracious. Kierre showed back up when the Sanctuary (aided by China’s sigils) figured out a way to fix her boyfriend, and Aurora and Frightening found each other in America shortly after the general apocalypse (North America did not take it well) and then hopped over to Ireland to find Dexter. The Monsters Hunters did something similar to this except that they were in England at the time, and Saracen basically respawned in Ireland.

One of the people who is not present at the Sanctuary (or in Roarhaven at all) is Anton Shudder. He’s off working for Valkyrie for reasons that I plan on explaining in a later post, but he (and Valkyrie) are missed dearly by their friends.

Unlike most of the other groups in this au, Roarhaven isn’t actually aggressive and doesn’t go out of their way to pick fights with other gangs, instead working to act as a safe space for refugees from the war. They’re also completely stationary, which is why they have the part-time shield to protect them from attacks. Valkyrie is willing to spend resources to protect them, but they don’t entirely trust her and so she tends to give them space. They do get visits from her occasionally though, and she’s described as feeling like a harbinger of doom.

Much words, sorry to spam you all with au stuff

Ok. So. I was initially going to make this in one post, but then I realized it was going to be too long and so have split it into two parts. This is gonna be me rambling about an AU. This is part one and is going to be about Skulduggery, Valkyrie, and how they’re doing in the war. This is still probably gonna be a long post that makes exactly zero sense, so buckle up.

Firstly, I’m gonna talk about what the two of them turned into after the big magic explosion.

At first Valkyrie seems relatively normal, albeit a bit injured. It takes a few days for her to realize that anything changed, similarly to what happened at the end of DoA. But she eventually begins to suspect that something is off about her and after a week or two manages to trigger a transformation that gives her several sets of wings and a set of retractable tentacles with which she is able to absorb other people’s souls and move power from person to person.

Shortly after this, she also starts acting a lot weirder. Similarly to Darquesse and her obsession with magic energy, actually, except that Valkyrie gains an obsession with absorbing everyone she cares about so that she cannot ever lose them. Luckily for everyone else, she’s only willing to do this if they’re close to death (at least in her current state). But basically, she starts talking a lot more like a god would, which is weirdly, vaguely, and objectifying of everyone around them. Skulduggery and Anton are both in something similar to isolation with her at some point, and so they are the first two to notice. Anton is vaguely creeped out but trusts Valkyrie in spite of it, even if he does continue to be slightly morally off-put by some of her decisions. Skulduggery doesn’t really mind it, and even welcomes the additional power since he’s now having to try and stay normal and not turn back into Lord Vile. In the years since she and Skulduggery split off from the main group, her form with wings has also grown in size, although she’s still normal on the rare occasions she decides to look normal.

Now, Skulduggery didn’t really have any big magic transformation. However, bad circumstances and peer pressure basically forced him to put large chunks of the armour back on so he could fight, and he ended up never really taking them off out of paranoia that he was about to be jumped by Sanctuary officers, even when he was at Valkyrie’s house. So it wasn’t the magic that eventually made him go insane, it was the magic armour, the violent tendencies that come with it, and his best friend randomly turning into a god.

While they’re technically classified as leading different groups, they work together constantly and are still pretty much inseparable. The two groups have also decided to just…merge together. It’s famously codependent duo that’s leading them, they might as well become besties at this point.

Another thing about how they work is that their dynamic drifts around a bit, but through areas that are pretty predictable. The two of them both sort of have the average SP god’s appreciation of life, that being “it’s all irrelevant in the face of the universe”, and as a result they don’t really think about the potential consequences of their violent actions. When they’re like this, they both tend to talk in such a way too (as stated earlier). However, they’ll also default to bantering as normal sometimes. But more importantly, the two of them (although most prominently Valkyrie) sort of…float in and out of lucidity.

To explain, they’re both insane and their brains work like gods, they don’t really think about the consequences of their actions. However, there are times when things such as their humanity, old morality and general personalities float back to them that sometimes cause them to have small breakdowns (although again, this tends to happen more with Valkyrie). And those usually last for a few days, and then their brains begin to slide more back towards the cold inhumanity of godhood. So their followers really just have to wake up and figure out how their bosses are doing mentally on that particular day.

That’s all I can think of for them right now tbh, but maybe I’ll add more in the future. Next post is gonna take a lot more organizing than this one.

Reblogging because yes yes yes you’re SO correct

And what’s more is that he’s also worried that Valkyrie will eventually learn to hate him by learning about what he did, so not only was he having to remember what he did to his friends, he also feels like doing so is risking his relationship with Val.

the moment in LSODM where the dead men are telling and story and are like "Haha Skulduggery doesn't like this one because he isn't in it!" then immediately start the story and it's like "so we're fighting Lord Vile right-" is so funny to me idk

@salticid​ you’re amazing and I love ur cryptic spambot convo I hope u like this!!

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Want to edit a video. Have nothing to edit. Tragedy.