“I believe Annabel and the Acolyte to be lovers living in a dystopian future, made so by the sketches of The Artist many years prior. In Confessions, Annabel and the Acolyte design and engineer a way to travel through time and space in order to go back and time and find a way to change the past and fix the world they live in.
In Comedy of Errors the time machine is being worked on furiously by Annabel and the Acolyte until they finally get it to work and Annabel decides to travel, going slightly mad with power from her accomplishment (the breakdown of Comedy of Errors, “I’m insane”).
In The Goddess, Annabel ends up in a different universe. This universe looks to be beautiful and serene but I think it is actually the exact opposite. I believe it to be here that a demonic being, Rusalka, comes into contact with Annabel and begins to possess her body thus creating Fatima Rusalka. This theory is made clear in the next song with the line “when did my heartbeat start to echo” which implies that Annabel is two rather than one.
In Oh, How The Mighty Have Fallen Annabel finds herself trapped between worlds in a purgatory like place struggling to escape from both the labyrinth and Rusalka’s possession.
In The Puppeteer Annabel accidentally travels in time to a point chronologically after the events of Catharsis. This song foreshadows the ending and Annabel realizes that she’s mad a terrible mistake. I think that this song describes reality as it is after what happens in Catharsis (I’ll get to that part later) and it isn’t the reality that Annabel and The Acolyte hoped for.
In Fatal Optimist Annabel struggles to complete her task and this song outlines her second guessing herself and facing the difficulties of her task. This is slightly unrelated and I may be looking into it a bit too much but I really like how the line “I fear the emptiness will swallow me whole” references the album The Emptiness. This line, the way I see it, means that Annabel thinks the upcoming challenges will be too much for her. And these upcoming challenges are the events of The Emptiness thus creating a nice play on words.
In The Martyr, Annabel finds herself in Slough, 1891 (7 years before the events of The Emptiness when The Artist met Annabel) where she meets The Artist and seduces him. This song outlines Annabel and The Artist having sex while The Acolyte is helpless to Annabel having sex with another man - a man that he and probably many others in his time have come to hate.
In Paradox we find Annabel and The Artist together. The Artist has fallen in love with Annabel. This song takes place chronologically just before And Now For the Final Illusion and Curse of the Virgin Canvas. Rusalka completely takes over Annabel and she kills herself. But Annabel is the vessel. Perhaps Rusalka believed she wouldn’t need a vessel in this universe. One line alludes to “Joan of Arc yet unlicked by flame”, leading me to assume that Joan was one of Rusalka’s past vessels. Perhaps this wasn’t Fatima Rusalka’s first attempt to die.
In Through the Eyes of Uriel I have ideas of what may be happening but I honestly just don’t know. Maybe a unique chapter that ties up loose ends from Uriel’s perspective. I believe Uriel to be a parallel universe version of the Artist. I think he and Fatima Rusalka were lovers, eternal and forever, but years previous, Uriel was placed in a sort of mirror prison, leaving Fatima alone for eternity, leading her to try and figure out ways to commit suicide. I believe that Uriel, mad with seeming to lose his loved one (Fatima), he goes on a rampage, destroying the Utopia. The fact that Uriel is a parallel/mirrored version of the Artist would explain why the people of the Utopia hate the Artist so much.
Catharsis. The end. There are a few ways that I think this could go. I’m still very confused by exactly how it ends but I think that someone (possibly The Acolyte who time traveled to Slough, 1898 himself) destroys The Artist’s canvas, thus destroying his sketches. Now, since the future world that Annabel and The Artist lived in was one built on the influential works of The Artist… that reality ceases to exist because now that his work is destroyed they can’t influence the future. This is a paradox though, because since the sketches were destroyed and that reality is destroyed then there would never have been anyone to go back in time and destroy the sketches.”
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