I KNOW That It Gets Kind Of Vague At The End - Tumblr Posts
Actually talking about the AU (wow, I know) by rambling about how Anton Shudder ended up on a team with the necroking and a godlike Valkyrie, because he really isn’t on their level of gleefully deranged. I am so biased towards him it’s not even funny.
Anton came back when the rib-bone wand exploded and sent out a burst of magic power, hitting various people differently. Anton, given as to how he’d been dead for so long, was extremely disoriented and saw a lot of chaos going on around him. He instinctively latched on to Valkyrie because he trusted her to not lead him into any stupid situations and she actually still seemed normal at this point.
Valkyrie was really happy to have Anton back and tried loosely explaining the situation to him as they went along fighting people (specifically Winter’s terrorist group). After the fight was over, Valkyrie argued with Ghastly over what should happen to Skulduggery (the compromise being that Skulduggery can be in Ireland for the time being but cannot go in or near Roarhaven) and the three of them decided that staying around Valkyrie’s house for the time being would probably be a good idea, and so they do that so Skulduggery has somewhere to hide and Anton can catch up with what happened since his death.
Now at this point, Valkyrie seemed normal to everyone, including to herself (think of when she turned into a Faceless One god). It took a few days for her to realize anything was wrong with her, and then she had to figure out how to trigger her transformation and what to do afterwards. She and Skulduggery (who’s now using parts of the shadow armour) also started acting more and more violent and unhinged over the next few days, but neither of them really noticed it.
Anton noticed it though, and he had conflicting feelings about it. Because on one hand, he disapproved of the meaningless violence. But on another hand, he loved them both a lot (he and Valkyrie eventually view each other as siblings) and he was also going through an interesting transformation at the time: losing his ability to summon his gist and instead basically being able to turn into a shadowy demon creature for short bursts at a time.
And then the Faceless Ones got out thanks to Malice. And while they were weaker than before, it meant that the mortals now knew about magic and things started going downhill fast. And Valkyrie jumped to the opportunity and went out to go pick fights with the Faceless Ones, while Skulduggery grabbed the other necromancers in order to do the same thing. And since Anton had nowhere else to go, he just…kept on following Valkyrie. Throughout everything. When other people started following her, when they settled down in Dublin, when he killed Mia, the list goes on.
And now it’s been years, and he can’t imagine anywhere he would ever be able to go away from Valkyrie. He’s unhappy, yes, but he doesn’t hate her. Really, he’s learned to shut out a lot of his emotions so that they don’t keep on bothering him. We’ll see how long it takes for him to finally lose it, I suppose.