It may be narcissistic to write about myself, but...I know myself better than I know anybody. And I'm tired, but have to publish something. I own myself, nothing else.

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This is my story. It's terrible, it's awful, and it's true.

Every story has a beginning, and mine begins far from you. I was created on the distant planet of Gallifrey—created, not born, as it is the way of those people. No—they are my people. I have to accept that now, now I know who I am.

It was a time of burning for that world, when war was first being considered. There was a raiding party of Daleks, creatures without light, or joy, or anything good to justify them but for the fact that they were alive.

The Gallifreyan people, called Time Lords, knew the purpose of this party of Daleks: to steal away the youngest children of Gallifrey from their looms and perform experiments on them. The Daleks seemed to have hope of concocting a biological weapon, one that would exterminate the race of Time Lords before a war even began.

The Time Lords knew that their only hope was to destroy the looms carrying the children, and set about it immediately. By demolishing the looms, however, they had no way of knowing that one child was stolen away before the work was finished. One Dalek carrying one child alive from Gallifrey just as the Time War was declared.

Perhaps my only salvation from the terrible fate of one born in the throes of war was in the very nature of Daleks: shrewd and cunning, yes, but creatures of order. A single contradiction could violate that order, an infinitesimal accident that, by all rights, should not have occurred. A temporal shift stole me ages away from that Gallifrey, and in that shift the Dalek's instructions became muddled. On one hand, it was likely meant to return me to some important, private Dalek lab. However, in this time a message rang out calling it to battle, and to battle it fled.

It came to a class five planet called Earth. A tiny rock, with a relatively large iron core and a people known as humans, who once dreamed of flight and interstellar travel but apparently, in that time at least, settled for backwards robes and shaped rubber wristbands. As the battle ensued, its use for me was forgotten and I was set on a table amongst books in a burning library. Clearly it knew enough to know that I was desired alive, or extermination would've been my fate.

My luck prevailed when a young couple, who had sought refuge in the library, discovered me and kept me with them. Paul and Deidre Winchester, and their children Max and Emily, born a year later, were what would be my family for the next sixteen years. They discovered that I was different through a simple blood test, but through some miracle kept the lid shut on my identity. My only knowledge was that I was adopted; everything else was a mystery, one I had no desire to solve.

It ended in bloodshed and devastation, as all things in my life have. It was the year 2024. I was attending Cedar Residence Academic Preparations School, to which the endearing nickname 'Craps' had been designated by its students. My class was in the ground floor on the east side of the school, which was half-sunk into the ground by the architects; another of the impossible miracles surrounding my life—at least, the miracles in between the many curses. It was the room that he chose to enter.

There was a sudden thud overhead, and the lights flickered out.

"Holy sh—crap," a boy from the back of the room, Kenneth Brandt, exclaimed; the rest of us laughed nervously. Mr. Woodley, our Chemistry teacher, had as short a fuse as a man could have, and he had been in the midst of a lecture that other, interested students might've leaned on the edges of their seats for; it was lost on us, however. He glared at us, his bristly moustache trembling with poorly contained fury.

"I will return," he droned, bustling from the room quickly. We had barely a moment to breathe before there was a blast of light in the hallway and a wild scream to follow it. We shook at our desks, and nearly jumped when the door burst open and a senior darted in.

"It didn't see me," she said; her name was Evanna Pettigrew.

"What?" I asked in horror. Her face was ghostly white.

"A dalek," she whispered. "Like all those years ago."

At this point several of the girls in the room began to scream, and Evanna seemed to find her head again.

"Come on—remember what we're supposed to do during a drill, get up against the wall under the hallway windows so no one can see us," she said. We all nodded, silently following her to the wall and pressing our backs to the bricks that seemed to grow colder from the death just outside.

There was a sudden boom above our heads, and we looked up in fear to see the windows burst in with a fiery explosion, and a wall of smoke enter behind it. We clasped our hands over the mouths of those we knew would scream, revealing us to the monsters outside. Then silence reigned, but for the stamping of feet above our heads, children and teachers running for their lives.

Silence, that is, until one of the windows to the outside shattered open.

And entered the man who would turn my already backwards life on its head.