The name's Oswin. Or Clara. Whichever you prefer, really. I've been called so many names, it really doesn't matter. Others call me Clara. At this point, that is. I probably should have picked a better name. That's the funny thing about Time Lords—they have all these silly titles.

Not that I'm a Time Lord. No, I'm very much human. Here on Gallifrey they think of me as one of them. Not a Time Lord—I didn't look into the untempered schism at brilliant age of eight—but as a Gallifreyan living within the Capitol. That's the beauty of a perception filter. I built it out of an old vortex manipulator. Lets me stay here without everyone wondering how a human got here. Long story, really. Can't exactly say I jumped into a raw time stream.

The Doctor's different now. So much younger. He's still got quite a few centuries on me, but when I had first met him he said he was over a thousand years old. It feels like I've been doing this a thousand years. Blimey, I might have. I don't really know where I am in my journey through his timeline. I've seen so many of his adventures. I don't really know when it'll end. Right now…

I came into the middle of the Time War. I'd read about it in the TARDIS. So much hatred. The Doctor had fought on the front lines, for a while. I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. But I had to go. This wasn't the time for an existential crisis.

When I first got to the front line, it was- I don't know how to put it. There was so much. So much pain and suffering. So much death. And I knew that the Doctor had been a soldier. I knew he was powerful and great. But this man—he was a warrior. And that frightened me. It wasn't as if he was a different person. That's what made it harder. It was still the Doctor. I could see him inside that warrior. To see my friend—the kindest man in all of Time—the cause of so many deaths… It's one of those things you don't let yourself think of, because if you did, you wouldn't know what to think. And yet you fear the outcome anyway, 'cause you know no good would come of it.

I tried to ignore what he was doing, for the most part. At first it was great. After the Dalek Asylum, I was glad to have a chance at revenge on those bastards. The Doctor wouldn't like that. My Doctor wouldn't like it, that is. This Doctor did what had to be done. He was very practical. I suppose I admired him for that, if only to find one cause for it. After a while, the lust for revenge faded away. Vindictive turned to indifferent. Indifferent turned to sorrow. I didn't want the war to continue. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be a soldier. I wasn't even sure why we were at war. But I couldn't leave. I had to stay to help the Doctor.

He was on his eighth incarnation at this point in his timeline. It was hard at first but after so many run-ins with him, it started to get easier to remember his faces in chronological order.

What I knew was that Lord President Rassilon was heading the army of millions. The Doctor also had great command and respect, but he didn't always use it. There was some sort of "ultimate plan" that the High Council had agreed upon. Word around the hydrogen cloud was that the Doctor was against it. Apparently he'd been avoiding Rassilon. Most didn't know what the plan was. But if the Doctor didn't like it, it had to have been bad.

It was hard to earn my way into the war. Not everyone was allowed to fight—the Time Lords, of course, and very few ordinary Gallifreyans who had allied themselves with the High Council. I had to go through difficult trials and tests to see if I was "worthy" of fighting at the side of the Time Lords—and I may have stolen a spaceship. Just a small one from the Chancellory Guard. I needed to help the Doctor.