something something mcd!aphmau taking on the role of irene in order to save her friends from the constant cycle of rebirth and destruction but before she leaves, she was given a few more years with her children.
she was supposed to take irene’s role and live up to her true self right after the war with the shadow knights and after shad’s defeat since the original irene is now dead but vylad bought her some time by promising himself to the void. the void needs to be maintained in order to keep it from spreading to the overworld so vylad takes on that role, though no one knows until long after he’s recovered from being a relic and what not.
before aphmau leaves her life behind, she promised vylad one thing: she’ll keep him safe in every lifetime. very much a parallel to irene and hyria’s last conversation. vylad is then entrusted with keeping the relics safe once their holder’s die. he already had the wanderer’s relic, so he just needed to collect the rest.
despite no longer being a shadow knight and being pretty weak after the war, vylad managed to outlive everyone. probably because of his connection to the void and the wanderer.
but anyway his role in mystreet is to simply watch. he’s not able to interfere with anything that happens, not even irene can. but once irene dies, someone needs to step in and maintain order so vylad does.
but the void is becoming unstable and vylad cannot handle the void and keeping the world in tact alone so he reaches out to someone.
he starts getting like vague visions of this weird white space and a strange figure during his travels (which.. in my mind aren’t actually just him traveling to travel but also traveling to learn so he visits various historical sites to learn about them… and the possibility of reincarnation as he starts to notice patterns)
fast forward to when the starlight gang returns to mystreet. vylad can tell that something is off, especially with his family, but he doesn’t pry… not even about why no one remembers garte.
he doesn’t pester anyone on what happened and proceeds to stay with his family now that he’s back from traveling and they’re back from their vacation in hell, minus garte. he still gets these really strange visions and starts to wonder if maybe they’re connected. he brushes it off and continues to exist with his family semi-normally, yknow chatting about how his travels were, them coming up with lies to cover what really happened (I think vylad would already know some of what happened thanks to the news but he’s still kinda clueless)
but things get weirder once vylad starts getting sick. he denies that he doesn’t feel good because he doesn’t want to stress anyone out but it gets harder to hide as his fever gets higher and as he gets less sleep.
one night, it gets so bad to where he stumbles to to the bathroom to try and find medicine to maybe help his fever go down but instead of seeing himself in the mirror, he sees a stranger that looks like him. before he can even question anything the room goes dark.
and then the ominous bells start. he’s standing face to face with the stranger from his visions.
and the stranger is him, in another life.
