Goring / Mists of History / 39
About 11776 words
The Mists of history By K. Marston GoringArgent clouds were beginning to pale against a light blue sky as they emptied the last of their burdens in an early morning shower that tumbled from tiled roofs to slicken ancient streets. In a tight alley off a winding market road, an unholy wail pierced the quiet, rising in pitch as if approaching from some distant place. The screech resonated in the alleyway and a door that hadn't been there before appeared in a dingy plaster wall. One hundred and fifty centimeters tall and half as wide, and painted bright red. At the top of the frame a lighted sign throbbed to stillness, marked EXIT in English against the contrast of Greek graffiti scrawled across the walls of the alleyway
With a squeak of unoiled hinge, the door swung in against the solid wall to reveal an interior impossible to explain and a tall figure blocking the way. Dark eyes flicked left toward the street, then right down the alleyway. Certain he was unobserved, caution eased to curiosity and the figure stepped from the doorway, looking back over his shoulder as a second figure bumped into him from behind.
"I don't think this is a good idea," said Ki, looking up at him. Though much smaller in stature, her almond eyes radiated intensity. Inescapable curiosity drew her gaze away to where they'd landed briefly before fixing again on the target of her frustration.
Continuing out and pulling the red door shut behind them, he shrugged. "But we're already here, and we don't want to have come all this way for nothing, do we? Besides. We're just having a quick look. It might be nothing." he said.
Annoyed, Ki followed him toward the street, adjusting the satchel she'd fashioned from the remnants of her once-beautiful jeogori that had long been lost to misadventure. Worry furrowed her brow as she wrung the silk strap in her grip and wondered why they hadn't just waited. They did, after all, have all the time in the world.
#Urgency gave way to patience as they passed through the streets of Athens in the back of a pale yellow taxicab. He watched Ki's expression swing back and forth between elation and disgust. On their way to the taxi stand, she'd spoken at length about the throng of people, the beauty of the architecture, the aromas of cooked food and the petrichoric fragrance of rain on ancient stone. However, she was considerably less pleased now that the sun was blazing in earnest, drying the streets, and they were trapped in the back of a taxi with a Cypriot driver puffing on a cheap cigarillo.
Escape came as they pulled in to the terminal and he fished through a collection of bills before peeling off contemporary Euros to pay the driver. The taxi sped off, leaving them behind staring at a maelstrom of human activity being wrangled by weary tour guides into something resembling orderly queues.
Ki huffed. She could be such a princess sometimes.
He furgled a pocket and pulled out a rather battered silver fob watch. He flipped it over in his hand, running his thumb over the script on the back before righting it and popping it open for a quick check of the time.
It was a meaningless affectation. He always knew what time it was.
Secretly he drew comfort from the presence of the device in his hand, so precious was it to those of his kind. It bonded them to something immutable as they navigated a river of endless possibilities. It anchored them. He ruminated on this while he stroked the device. The reverie ended when his thumb glided over a few dents and deep scratches. Recent damage.
Ki was watching him again. He tried to smile it away. "We're going to be late and I don't want to miss anything," he insisted.
She barred his path in the non-confrontational way she always did. "It's too soon. Much too soon. We can wait in the TARDIS; give you time to recover. They nearly killed you!" she whispered with emphasis, mindful of nearby ears.
"I told you that's not how it works with us. I regenerated. I'm fine now and ready for a new chapter."
"Maybe. But only just. And this… new you… might not really be ready." Worry was clearly evident on her face, but also anger. He didn't blame her. When he'd met her in the lake gardens of the Pavilion of Far-Reaching Fragrance at Gyeongbokgung, he offered her a life of new experiences. Eight months of endless battle against the Teschuin Insurgence wasn't what either of them was expecting. He had been warned against taking companions at the Panopticon. But eternity was a profoundly lonely road and he was easily bored.
Still, Ki had survived, he made sure of that. And so had he – sort of. Ki said he looked different. His skin was still dark, but he hadn't bothered looking in a mirror to find out more.
Before she could voice additional objections, he pressed on.
The receiving attendant looked up as they approach and slapped on a smile for their benefit. "Welcome to Athens!" she greeted in polished English largely devoid of the local accent. "Are you here for Delphi? Good! You're nearly late! Names?"
She looked expectantly at him but Ki answered first.
"And you?" she asked.
"I'm the Agent."
Confused, she checked the screen again. He leaned over and pointed, helping.
"Ahh, a secret shopper Travel Agent. Come to see how good our tours are?"
The Agent smiled, but said nothing. He'd always thought it was useful to let people draw their own conclusions, especially if they were wrong. He'd arranged for the tickets on the way. Who she thought he was didn't matter to him.
Beckoning them, she guided them toward their assigned bus and ushered them up the stairs. "Please hurry and take your seat. We always try to be on time."
As the Agent climbed into the bus after his companion, she scowled at him. "Don't even say it," she warned.
He hid a smile behind her.
#
On the way to their destination, after they'd stopped at the village of Perachori, had a break, eaten and gotten back on the bus, Ki told the Agent she was tired and curled up in the plush seat next to him. He turned his attention to the world passing by the window and she pretended to close her eyes.
She didn't want sleep. Princess Yi Ki-Seung wanted to grab the Agent by his ears and drag him back to his magical door. In the two years he'd been with him, he'd shown her things she could never have imagined. She'd lived such a sheltered life, one of the many 'flowers' of Yeonsan-gun the Tyrant King. As one of his bastard daughters, Ki had some semblance of privilege, but largely a list of duties to entertain and one day be bartered off to some marginally useful lord for loyalty or favor. She did her best to ignore that life, spending her days in the gardens and her nights under the stars. She snuck into the royal libraries and read everything she could find, even sketching on fine rice paper designs for astronomical devices she hoped to one day build. Until she met the dark stranger that promised he would show her those stars. The first thing he'd shown her was what the capital had become in the timeframe to which they had now returned. The twenty-first century city of Seoul was an alien place of light and color compared to what she'd left behind in what he told her what was now called the Fifteenth Century in the new calendar. When her father called for purges, she'd feared the Great Joseon would never survive. But it had, and thrived, though the northern kingdoms were split in this era, which grieved her heart. But the Agent had done as he promised and showed her endless wonders. He let her study in his library, taught her modern ways, gave her technology like nothing she'd ever seen before including the black mirror she could use to call him from any distance.
She wasn't displeased with any of that. He had more than lived up to his promises. But life for them was not always as peaceful as walks in the lake gardens of the Fragrant Pavilion. Truthfully, most of the time was filled with interesting adventures and righting minor wrongs. But, on occasion, he would sense a great imbalance or receive a missive from his homeworld directing him to some great disturbance in the fabric of history. That his people, the Time Lords, could see all of time stretched out before and behind them was truly awesome. Just thinking about it sometimes made her dizzy.
Whatever this was he'd felt even before the TARDIS relayed orders from the Panopticon.
Witnessing his regeneration had rocked Ki more than she was willing to admit even to herself. Her face was still wet with tears when the Agent glowed gold and he looked back at her with a different face. When he lay dying in the wake of battle with the Teschuin Omnicrats, he'd explained what was going to happen, and how he might be different. He'd experienced it before, he told her. How many times, she did not know.
She'd gotten him back to the Tardis before he died and returned. And only a few days had passed since even that. He was weak and not quite himself. As she watched him through half-open eyes, he worried the case of his watch as he favored the passing world outside with distant interest. She could see him fingering the scratches and dents. She'd seen how they got there. How he'd very nearly been truly lost. And now, before taking time to fully recover, he was throwing himself back into the fray.
#
The Agent sat in silence as the countryside passed by. Though she pretended to sleep, he could feel Princess Ki-Seung's eyes boring into his back. The little races often claimed the same ability, elevating proprioceptive static into what they laughably called Extra Sensory Perception. How little they knew.
Alien minds buzzed around him, but he'd long since mastered the ability to block them out. Ki's intense peering did little to trouble him either. He was there and not there, lost in his own thoughts as Greece slipped past the glass. He stared instead at his reflection, seeing a new face for the first time. The disorientation had gone, but the Regeneration still left him tired and weak. And yet, at the same time, energized. Fresh to the world, it was like every nerve ending was raw and exposed. It was a time when a Time Lord was especially sensitive to chronal incongruities. He thought of them as knots. It was easier to explain to littler races as breaks in time, but time could never truly be broken. However, it could wander and be led astray. It could be bent, twisted and knotted and it was a Time Lord's job to straighten it out again.
What he felt now was an unpleasant vibration, like the squirming spasms of touching a live wire. There was a knot in Twenty-First Century Greece that needed to be straightened. These events were extremely uncommon. And usually interesting. Maybe even fun.
Though the bones of what Earth thought of as an ancient civilization passed by in front of him as they climbed the hills, his eyes focused on the stranger's face in the glass. This time the eyes were a deep brown, like wet earth. Last time they were flecked hazel. He watched a stranger's eyes roam a stranger's face as he practiced ignoring the squirming flesh.
He heard a little whistle and turned to notice Ki really had dozed off and smiled to himself. She'd led the most sheltered of lives but still managed to be one of the most aggressively inquisitive humans he had ever encountered. And born into a life of palace intrigue, she was a particularly astute observer of behavior – his, most often.
She was right of course. This was too soon and he knew it. He should have refused the dispatch from the homeworld. They would have understood. It was serious enough that they were certain to send another to handle it if he could not. But he couldn't resist. He'd always had a special fondness for Earth, despite its many faults. The humans thought so little of their world that they used it as the very definition of average and measured the rest of the universe by how much more interesting it all was. But Earth had its charms and despite not really understanding it, he'd been drawn back to it again and again over the centuries.
They certainly had a history of being more trouble than anyone would have guessed.
#
As they approached Delphi, the passengers stirred and the tour guide pointed out items of interest with rehearsed ease. Ki had reawakened and listened keenly as thousands of years of history was chewed and digested into a ten second glance out of a moving bus window.
The Agent declined to listen.
Out his window he could see it.
He'd tried to describe it once to a companion from the late Twentieth Century that he'd traveled with briefly. The companion suggested it was "like one of those lenticular cards from a Cracker Jack box." Confused, the Agent took them on a special trip through the red door to find one and damn his stars if Chad hadn't been right. The technology was simple enough. Tiny alternating strips of differing images were printed and overlaid with a sheet of plastic prisms. As you shifted the perspective of the prisms, you would reveal one image and hide the others. If you didn't hold it steady, the images would constantly shift, blending in to one another in front of your eyes.
Millions of years of Gallifreyan introspection had never been able to adequately describe the vision of a true Time Lord, and Chad from Baraboo, Wisconsin got it in eleven words.
As the Agent stared out the window, lenticular visions of past, present and future shifted back and forth before him. The present was always shifting and fading out while deep history kept breaking through to reassert itself. Meanwhile the future flashed, shifted and went static as probabilities collapsed turning Not Yet into Now. To him, history was a room full of harp strings and life caused them to vibrate as it moved through them. History without life was a dead thing. But here the strings were at near cacophony.
Here the tour guide would point to. And there she would say to look. His fellow passengers saw ruins. He saw the very events being described, ghosts of a long-dead past – alive to him if he chose. He reminded himself constantly of the gravity of who and what he was. Gallifreyans were reviled and ridiculed across the universe for the unmitigated gall of calling themselves Time Lords. Where the little races saw pomposity, he saw responsibility. Where they saw unmatched power, he saw unbearable burden. Where they cursed megalomania, he cursed the condemnation of eternal subservience to the fullness of time. Theirs was the responsibility to maintain the maddening vibrations of life and time so the song could play out. The Hated Daleks sought an end to the music at the barrel of a disintegrator. They offered the peace and order of the grave.
Though he would confess it to no one, in his darkest moments of the Last Great Time War the Agent had thought that perhaps the Time Lords should just let the Daleks win.
But that war was a long time ago – or yesterday.
The squirm was back now, more violent than ever. His skin threatened to crawl off his bones and run away. The bus rocked softly and gravel crunched under its weight as it pulled off the paved road and climbed to the ruins. Air brakes squeaked and hissed bringing the bus and its passengers to a stop.
Princess Ki was fully awake now. She reached over and grasped his hand. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Her natural curiosity had won out against her earlier concerns. There was an adventure waiting for them. She could feel it. His smile wilted some, but he got up when she did and waited patiently as they filed off. Ki was quizzing him on historical trivia from a pamphlet that had been handed out and was greatly amused that he couldn't answer them all. As much as he enjoyed easily impressing his companions, he couldn't know the minute details of all of history, even on a small world like Earth. That was beyond even the most ancient of Time Lords like The Archivist, the Forerunner and Lady Harmonia.
The Agent followed Ki off the bus, checking the pockets of his slate grey coat for his equipment. She dug out the smart phone he'd given her from her silk satchel to take pictures. He reassured himself with his fob watch and then put it away, filing along with the crowd.
Ki was smiling now.
The Agent felt like he was going to die.
He had once found himself in a tragic situation with a very kind human girl he was trying to help. She knew what he was and what he could do, and she was stuck in the worst day of her life. She begged him to set it right and raged when he told her it already was, that he could do nothing to change it. He explained to her that this was a Fixed Point in Time, a moment that could never be changed. With great effort, she eventually believed him. He was lying of course. Fixed Points could be changed, but not without limitless catastrophe.
As they followed the gravel path, Ki remarked at how the air smelled of olive trees and bus fumes.
The Agent felt like he was trying to breathe concrete.
The oppression of the temple's ruins threatened to suffocate him as all of time collapsed on the spot, crushing all probabilities into a single fixed timeline. It was one of the strongest chronal singularities he had ever encountered.
Tourists milled around him, alternatively snapping selfies and complaining that it was 'just a bunch of old rocks' while his head swam. Ki noticed and slipped her arm around his waist, pressing close to steady him. The Agent's eyes were wide now, staring around the periphery of the singularity where the lenticular visions had gone insane. Time had exploded and collapsed at Delphi. What he was seeing shouldn't be happening. It was as if someone had reopened the wound.
#
Tears drying on her cheeks, fear turning to grief and then to anger, Yi Ki-Seung held two handfuls of the Agent's dark wool coat and shook. Having been raised to carry little more than fans and tea cups, her arms tired quickly, but she persisted.
She had barely gotten him to a stone bench at the edge of the temple grounds before the Agent collapsed and nearly took them both down. They were just inside the tree line that pressed against the ruins, covered in shadow and shade and dappled by sunlight through trees Ki didn't recognize.
Milling conspicuously amongst the standing stones nearby was one of the tour guides, looking worried. She'd approached twice already, asking after the collapsed man. Ki had managed to get the guide to leave them be, though whether by fear or cleverness, she had already forgotten. Half-tempted to accept the proffered aid, Ki fought the impulse. They couldn't possibly do anything for him. He looked like a man, but wasn't. He looked young, but wasn't. She touched his face. It was covered in a few day's growth. He hadn't been returned to her long enough for her to take the blade to him.
Her cheeks warmed again with fresh tears. Ki knew he wasn't dead. She'd lain her head against his chest and heard both hearts beating. And yet, he wouldn't wake. She cursed him. She pleaded with him to wake up.
Only briefly overcome, she set her mind once again to doing something. Ki rummaged through his pockets looking for something that might help. He'd taught her about many of his magical devices, but as she searched she found nothing of application. She settled on his watch in one hand, and keys to the TARDIS in the other. The red door was miles and miles away, but it could be summoned, she knew. If he could get him back inside, a solution would present itself.
It would.
But as she stared at the keys, she realized he had never taught her how to summon the red door. Crestfallen, she dropped herself on the bench and lifted his head on to her lap. She rested a hand on his chest where he could feel it rise and fall and leaned over. A fan of raven hair brushed against his face as she kissed him.
Ki had just lost him and had him returned only to lose him again. She raged in her grief at being unable to help. She gripped his fob watch tightly. She knew what it meant to him. Desperately, she considered opening it to see if that would help. As she thought about it, her thumb slid over the release on the stem and began to push.
#
The Agent woke with his hand swallowing the delicate grip of Princess Ki-Seung. Awareness swam back in to focus as he clawed his way out of the dark. Disoriented, he could barely tell that he had been unconscious for nearly twenty minutes. But as his focus returned, so did his awareness. He loosened his grip on Ki's as she released the watch into his hands.
The look she gave him was almost unreadable. Her eyes shined like copper in the sunlight when a smile found them. He saw her visibly shudder with relief
And then she slapped him.
"Why do you do these things?" the princess demanded.
The Agent struggled to sit up. "Do what things?" he asked.
Ki steadied him before favoring him with one of the angriest faces he'd seen yet. Then She got up from the bench and stormed off.
He watched her go, looking around to orient himself. He looked back toward the temple, then up at the sky. The sun hadn't moved. A woman in a tour guide uniform was looking at him with a mix of emotions. He waved and offered a smile. He knew what she must be thinking. To her credit, she seemed to take the assurance, only looking back twice as she returned to the main group.
When he turned his eyes to her again, Ki was pacing – as she was wont to do – and gesturing angrily as she rattled off uncourtly language quietly into the air – as she was wont to do. When Ki got scared, she got angry. He'd learned that shortly into their first adventure.
Thinking back on it, he smiled to himself as he summoned new composure. As a Time Lord accustomed to a multi-threaded reality, it often helped him to do more than one thing at a time. He found it calming.
Simultaneously, The Agent ran through his first adventure with the Imperial Flower, regarded the conundrum of the leaking singularity, recalled the history of the site and returned the equipment Ki had rummaged from his pockets to their accustomed places. When he was done, he got up and followed.
Ki was stabbing at the top of a broken stone column with a twig she'd found on the ground when he approached her. She obviously knew he was there, redoubling her use of uncourtly language and stabbing harder as he came up behind her. Gently, he reached past and stopped her, taking the twig away. "This is a world heritage site," the Agent said. "You'll get in trouble if they catch you doing that." The amused smile at his own joke evaporated when she turned two very angry slits on him.
The tension was thick between them and the Agent was impatient to get on with figuring out what was going on here, but he had enough sense not to ignore Ki's feelings.
Finally, she crossed her arms and asked, "What happened?"
He made a face.
"What?" Ki asked.
"Well," he began, "I experienced an unexpected exposure to asynchronous chronal energies that resulted in an auto-dissociative response to excess stimuli."
Now she made a face.
"You might call it 'fainting'".
"You fainted? Like a servant girl?" Ki gaped. Then she started laughing.
"It was a lot!" he said, defensively. "Now, are you going to stay mad at me or are we going to find out just what's going on here?"
Ki was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes on her sleeves and nodding when he took her by the arm and lead them back toward the temple.
"Why this place? It's just old stones." Ki said as they walked.
She didn't notice the watch in his hand had cracked open just a little bit or that the sun had moved in the sky. Ghostly human shapes zipped around them, finishing the tour and searching for the missing tourists, the dark man and the pretty Asian girl. The bus they had come on was the last to zip away in a flash, probably thinking they had accidentally gotten on one of the other buses.
As this happened, the Agent recounted the story of Mount Parnassus.
#
"Millions of years ago, before these islands were called Greece by the Romans that came after; before that sea even existed," he said, pointing out toward the distant glitter of the Mediterranean, "there was an accident."
"This place was still rather ordinary."
He scooped up a small amount of dark, rich earth and put it in her hands
"Old volcanoes, islands that weren't islands in a sea that didn't yet exist. Ordinary. Until one day the impossible happened.
"Somewhere overhead, the sky split open and Parnassus here was dealt a heck of a blow.
"You see, something happened that I've only ever heard about. A Zwill struck the Earth. They're super rare, Ki. Rarer than Time Lords, rarer than pandas. Just rare. Zwill spend their lifespans tunneling through time and space, occasionally appearing here or there – anywhere or any when." He sounded wistful and knew it. Ki looked up at him with interest.
"They can appear anywhere in an infinite number of universes at any point in time. Only a small handful of Time Lords has ever even seen one. The odds that they would strike a planet – this planet - is beyond calculation. But it happened. A Zwill hit this mountain and died. A few eons later, Hellenic priests built a temple on its grave and started predicting the future."
He looked over at her as they climbed the stairs to the edge of the temple.
"They couldn't have known, of course. For millions of years, this delightful creature had been decomposing under this mountain, the merest traces of its nature breaching the surface amongst the sulfur fumes leaking from the ancient volcano. A few individuals tried to understand what the mists showed them, turned them into prophecies that spread across the ancient world. They even named the site Pythia, after an even older story about the scent of a giant dead serpent. Zwill don't look anything like serpents, so I'm not sure where they got that from." He didn't bother mentioning where else he'd heard that name.
Ki listened intently as he spoke, her ire abated. She loved learning new things most of all. It was one of the things he appreciated in her.
"Finally, after centuries of… let's call it 'mixed' success with their predictions, the waning priesthood at Pythia began to fade and fall out of favor. The new religion of the surrounding Roman Empire was stamping out such 'paganism'.
"Desperate, one of the last high priests of Pythia, particularly attuned to the Zwill mists, sought to secure his place in history and prove the supremacy of his beliefs over the new religion. He steeped himself in the mists, tampering with abilities he couldn't possibly have understood and made a single request."
The watch was closed now. The sun was turning gold as it dipped toward the horizon. The temple grounds were empty. The tour company wouldn't be in a rush to report a couple of missing passengers. Athens police wouldn't come looking for then until tomorrow at the earliest. Standing where they were, they were very nearly brushing up against the event horizon of the chronal singularity. He was covered in gooseflesh. It was like standing next to an electric fence. The air smelled faintly of ozone.
He was studying something. A doorway that couldn't possibly exist.
A hand with beautifully painted nails grabbed his chin and pulled his head around and down. Inquisitive, questioning, frustrated eyes looked up at him.
"Well?"
Feigning confusion, the Agent asked, "Well what?
"What did he ask?"
The Agent smiled inwardly. She could be cute when she was flustered. He relented, stating, "He asked for a prediction of the future."
Fishing in his pockets, the Agent pulled out a sphere of gold and crystal that seemed to spin if you looked away from it even a little bit. At the center of the crystal bubble was a framework of what looked like coral one might find in the shallows of the nearby Mediterranean.
The Ansible, as it was called, served as a direct connection to the heart of his TARDIS, giving him access to many of its abilities. Taking the Ansible, the Agent reached up and placed it in the wall that wasn't there. His fingertips burned from touching it. Ki seemed completely unaware of its presence. The Ansible was spinning madly now, looking or not.
When he pulled his hand away with a hiss, Ki took it. Unable to see what was wrong, she gave it back. Absently, she said, "That doesn't make sense."
It sure doesn't. He was mucking about with the event horizon of a Fixed Point in Time. A dozen TARDISes should be here by now. A contingent of enforcers from the Celestial Intervention Agency. The Imperial Thronecraft. An angry mentor wagging his finger. Anything. Why wasn't the Panopticon responding?
But that wasn't what Ki was asking. "What doesn't make sense?" he replied, multi-threading again.
"Uh?" Her mouth was a little agape as she was looking around. She had that expression humans have when they think they've lost track of time. It happened more than they realized.
"Oh, it doesn't make sense. Did you not say these priests and priestesses could already predict the future?"
"I did."
"Then why…?"
He touched the Ansible. It was singing, getting in tune with his TARDIS. Not long now. He reached inside his coat again and pulled out a silver cylinder scrawled with Gallifreyan script and a deep purple focusing crystal on the end. With a practiced hand, he matched his sonic screwdriver to the resonance of the Ansible, helping to tune it the way he wanted.
The song was rising now, his skin crawled less. The door that shouldn't be there was opening.
"The problem was that he didn't seek another prediction of future events. He wanted to predict the future itself. The entire future history of Humanity. It would be the greatest oracle of all time.
"You see, for most people, the past, present and future are a mixture of truths. The objective truth of what's happening, the subjective truth of our experiences, and the 'creative truths' used to explain it all after the fact. It helps to create what a human author called a Mythopoeia when talking about things like this very place. And like creatures in another story he wrote, this priest 'delved too greedily and too deep.'
"He got his wish. But in doing so, he used up all the chronal energy at once, creating a Fixed Point in Time."
That shouldn't allow me to do this, he thought as he reached out to touch the Ansible once more, hearing the melody now as he half-closed his eyes. In front of them the air shimmered with a grey cast like a reflection of smoke on the surface of a pond. He retrieved the device and reached into the smoke and his hand disappeared, reappearing when he drew it back.
"You'd best wait here," he thought, looking back at her.
When he turned to go, Ki held his wrist and shook her head.
"You are not leaving me behind. Not again."
The hand traveled from his wrist to his waist and around his back, pulling him closer. She pressed her head against his chest. He returned the embrace. Her hair smelled like the flowers from the courtyard gardens where she grew up.
"Eijeonteu, you can't leave me again. I don't know what I would do without you."
He smiled sadly as the embrace tightened. He returned it, holding Ki closer.
The Agent knew it was over now. He would soon have to find a new companion. He had frequently been warned against such relationships by those on Gallifrey and did his best to avoid them. But, like with Ki, sometimes it just happened. He enjoyed the experiences for what they were and genuinely cared deeply for her. But Ki was in love with a dream and he could never give her the life she imagined. He couldn't make her immortal. She would grow old and die and he would live on. As soon as she realized that, she would leave him.
Offering an encouraging smile, he took her hand.
"Let's go, then." he said, stepping into the mists.
#
As the grey mists parted, the Agent struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. His fist was clenched around his fob, the metal cutting into his skin. Ki was squeezing his other hand. He could feel her fingernails digging into his skin.
Unknowingly, they had walked into a charnel house. Broken bodies of young women and old men in linen robes were strewn about the stone temple floor. Towering over the dead and debris, two figures turned to face them. Three meters tall, with skin of milky white jade wrapped in leather and platinum, with four arms on their torsos and four stem legs picking gingerly amongst the bodies, the Teschuin Omnicrats inspired abject awe.
Despite their presence, despite the impossible walking in front of him, the Agent could not tear his eyes away from the third figure. She stood over the body of the high priest at the center of the mists. Robed in midnight black velvet, richly embroidered with bands of High Council scarlet and golden thread, she dominated the room despite the Omnicrats size. Skin that in bright light might look like moist red clay was sapped of color in the heart of the mists. At her feet, a device the Agent had never seen seemed drilled into the stone whence seeped the mists. She held her arms up – just so – weaving, an artform older than Time Lord society itself.
Somewhere in his hyperthreaded mind, he remembered reading Charlie Dodgson's first draft and laughing at his line about imagining six impossible things before breakfast, while the author waited nervously for his critique. He could never have imagined this.
The Dowager was beyond ancient, even by immortal standards. Her age measured in epochs, she had borne witness to Gallifreyan history going back to the Dark Times. One of the first to declare themselves Time Lords, the Dowager had fought to build everything he'd ever known, driven by the child that had been killed in her womb by the witches that had once ruled Gallifreyan society. Her only other child, born before the purge, had died early in the Time War.
She was power personified. And as her glowing, golden gaze lowered, turned away from the weaving, the Agent realized she had noticed he was there.
#
The air in the temple was quite warm but Ki shivered. Her hair was standing on end, every instinct in her body screaming at her to run for her life. She let go of the Agent, backing away. The mists behind her felt like a wall, soft but unyielding. She pressed against it.
She had seen the jade monsters before. Watched as the Agent destroyed them irrevocably. That's what he'd told her, that they could never come back. Yet here they were, gazing down at her with sapphire eyes. One drew a wickedly curved blade from a pocket dimension. The other, a great platinum spear that shined like fire. They didn't immediately attack as they always had before. Something was keeping them where they were. They were waiting. For orders.
Just a short time ago in her time frame, the Omnicrats were on the verge of taking over the universe, now someone else was in charge.
Her. The woman.
Ki knew royalty when she saw it.
When she spoke, her voice sounded beautiful to Ki's ear.
"Child, I give you one chance to leave," she said, her voice soft and round, but with a spine of steel. She looked back the way they had come. Ki felt the mist wall give and nearly stumbled backwards. On the Dowager's wrist and forearm, an ornate cuff of jewels and braided precious metals interlaced with an inlaid timepiece infinitely more complex than the Fob the Agent carried. Its beautiful movement was open, alive with golden chronal fire flowing up to her fingertips to weave golden threads into the mist.
She knew it wouldn't happen, but she prayed to her ancestors to change her consort's mind, to make him take her offer and leave this nightmare temple. But there were some things even they could not do and her heart fell when he took a step forward.
The giants loomed, shifting at his approach but did not attack. Ki developed a dull pain in her ears as the Teschuin communicated with each other, their speech buzzing in the air like a swarm of angry wasps.
The Agent stopped amongst their many legs, a short distance from the woman. His arms reached into the open air, supplicating. "Great Lady," he began, "stop this! I'm begging you. You're tampering with a Fixed Point in Time. You know what can happen!"
"I do." With a twining of her fingers, a thick coil of golden light swirled in to being, turning around and around on itself, spiraling town to the device at her feet. The stone above her head paled and crumbled, a falling rain of dying stone that aged to nothingness before it reached the ground.
"No!" The Agent lunged but a huge white arm swung down, slamming him back and off his feet. He slid, stopping as he struck the body of a girl no more than fifteen whose neck was twisted at an unnatural angle.
The golden eyes fixed on him again. "You're so young; only a child. You can't understand what it's like to look back on an ocean of years to find only emptiness and regret."
Looking at the girl with shock, the Agent struggled to his feet, shaking his head.
On her wrist, the woman's timepiece was pulsing, golden energy gushing as more and more coils formed and wove around and around. It felt to Ki as if the very air was hardening around her.
Heedless, Ki ran to the Agent and helped steady him. He responded by trying to push her away.
"The door is open, Ki. You have to leave!"
"I can't!"
He was digging madly in his pockets. "Ki, go! Run!"
She looked past him, met the eyes of the woman.
Her eyes drooped at first, as if she were remembering something, then her eyes got hard. "Time for them both to go."
The Teschuin Omnicrats lacked any facial features Ki could recognize, but she felt like they were smiling when they advanced. The bladed one slashed in the air, the sword singing.
With a shove, the Agent got Ki out of the way and produced his sonic screwdriver, twisting hard before jamming his thumb on the end. Ki's ears split and her teeth felt like they were on fire. She clapped her hands over her ears and screamed.
Slowed, the Omnicrats' response wasn't quite as strong, but it disoriented them for a moment. Long enough for the Time Lord to produce a little glittering crystal sphere in a dark metal cage. Ki thought at first that he meant to use it on the giants, but he turned and pelted it in her direction instead. She wanted to cry out, get out of the way, but she couldn't. She'd seen it used before on a Hybalian con artist with a mirror that could look into the past that he used to cheat grieving families. When it struck her, she was instantly enveloped in glittering crystal, unable move. The Agent had called it a Cleave. A temporary prison Time Lords sometimes used to remove a person from normal space and time. The prisoner could see and hear for questioning, but couldn't move or otherwise interact with normal spacetime.
She watched helplessly as her Eijeonteu drew the attention away from her, the giants only too happy to oblige. He scrambled for room to maneuver, dodging slashes and stabs. He faced them now, arms at his side, each hand gripping something. Ki's voice was muted as she yelled at him to run. He was backing up slowly, fiddling with his fob in one hand, in the other his keys jingled.
On the far left, one of the Omnicrats feinted, then spun and threw his platinum spear. The Agent neatly sidestepped it as if he knew it was coming – which she realized he probably did. The spear pierced the wall so hard, Ki nearly felt it in her bones. It glowed and vibrated and molten stone began to drip down the wall to the floor.
The Agent laughed. She loved his laugh. Infuriated, the other Omnicrat sliced at him, across, down, across like she'd seen the soldiers in her father's royal guard do when they were luring their opponent into a killing blow. She screamed her muffled screams, trying to warn him. His skin was starting to glow as the fob opened but he must have heard her and looked in her direction.
At the same time, the Omnicrat sliced down, flipped its wrist and came back up again, the Agent sidestepping predictably, but this time instead of slicing back, the giant kept going up and over, turning on its pylon legs to come back down again, point first, instantly impaling the Agent and pinning him to the stone floor. His body didn't move, like it was frozen.
Ki couldn't even hear herself screaming anymore.
They didn't have lips, but they seemed to smile as they turned to each other. The air buzzed madder and madder.
"Fools!" the woman spat with a sneer.
As one, the Omnicrats turned to her in confusion but before she could say anything, a great weight struck one them and bore them to the floor. Laughter came from overhead and everyone looked up. The Red Door was on the ceiling and the Agent was leaning out with a grin. "Watch your head!"
Surprised, the Omnicrat looked back at his kill, only to see an afterimage of the Agent disappearing in fading gold light leaving only the sword behind.
Enraged, the giant yanked the sword out of the stone and stabbed at the ceiling, but the door closed in time and the blade didn't even scratch the paint.
"Can I borrow this?" Surprised, the Omnicrat looked down to see the Agent pulling a Gallifreyan-looking device from a belt on its narrow waist before stepping back into his TARDIS. The door closed, and the Omnicrat looked back up to see the other door there too.
Across the room, a third door opened and out ambled the Agent, leaning against the frame and fiddling with the device. "I see what she did. She built you a Moebius Anchor and pulled you back. Dowager, I can't believe you would give them one of these." He sounded upset and surprised now.
The woman – Dowager he had called her – was making progress, the rope was now a cable of golden light, winding up to the ceiling, slowly coiling into a great circle. Over her head, the stone was mostly gone, with flashes of sunlight and twinkling stars showing through the rotted ceiling.
"Just get him, cretins, before he sends you back to oblivion like the rest of your kind!"
He would do it, Ki knew.
The Princess had watched as the Agent destroyed the Teschuin Omnicrats the first time. The master scientists of the Teschuin Insurgence had built a great tower on the mobile battleworld at the heart of their empire that could bend reality, giving them the power to rival the Time Lords themselves and one day control the whole universe. The nature of the tower's control and the power of the Omnicrats themselves prevented the Agent from simply erasing it from the timeline. With the help of Time Lords like the Truncheon, Solace and Margan the Maimed, they'd fought for months to hold the Insurgency back. In the end, the Agent decided containment would never happen and a causal reversal was impossible.
Solace had called his solution draconian. Ki didn't know that word, but she could guess what it meant.
She joined the Agent in the TARDIS as he jumped back and forth through Teschuin history. He couldn't remove the tower, so with a poke and a prod and a burned page or two, he erased certain knowledge. He convinced the other Time Lords to lure the main fleet away from the empire's battleworld where the Omnicrats remained to direct the war. Then he walked into their chamber and just talked. They tried to kill him, but he was too clever, staying one step ahead of them.
He just talked and talked until they died.
Their capitol orbited a star on the edge of supernova, but he'd erased their knowledge of the phenomenon, convinced their scientists in the past to use it as a power source for the tower and influenced their literature and art to portray the death of a star as an omen of the ultimate providence. Then, he just talked until the sun exploded.
Even with an escape route, he didn't really make it out in time, the intense radiation killing his body. He looked like walking death when he collapsed into Ki's arms in the doorway of the Tardis. Then he regenerated and she got him back.
Only to lose him again, she thought as the remaining Omnicrat slashed again and again.
"Oh, you're going to have to do better than th-" the Agent was saying when he was caught mid-mock. The Omnicrat had one sword but four arms. Keeping track of them was proving difficult. One swing caught the Agent square, sailing him back against the wall.
Ki's heart stopped while he laid still against the stone. Then he groaned, stirred and struggled to sit up. The Omnicrat buzzed and the Agent replied, "No, not dead yet. Perhaps you're not trying hard enough." The smile returned and she could breathe again.
Back pressed against the wall, feet against the floor, the Agent pushed himself up. Still swaying, he noticed the glittering shaft of the spear near and reached for it. He got a good grip and yanked. Nothing. The spear, sunken deep in the wall, molten stone still dripping from where it pierced, did not move. The Agent yanked twice more to no avail before quickly backing up.
Suddenly the buzzing changed pitch, higher now, more cyclical. Laughter, wondered Ki?
Caught in desperate immobility, she watched as the Omnicrat pulled the spear from the stone with little effort and turned on the Agent.
He was backing up now, hands up. Ki had never heard him beg before.
The Omnicrat brandished both weapons, moving the spear from one hand to the other before taking aim. The Agent was pleading, but the Omnicrat was moving slower, more deliberately, taking his time before cocking his upper arm back, rolling his shoulder and twisting at the waist. With a heave, he released the coiled energy and launched the silver spear.
The Agent stepped back and fell.
Missing, the spear flew through where the Agent had been and stuck in the ground, but not before tearing its way through the device at the Dowager's feet.
The red door in the floor the Agent had fallen through was closed now and he stepped nonchalantly through one of the dozen others in the room.
He was having difficulty stifling a laugh. "Did you really not see that coming?"
Enraged, the Omnicrat barreled across the center of the room toward him.
"Mistake Number Two," the Agent said, a tinge of sad mocking in his voice.
#
Despite its size, when the wizened husk of the Teschuin Omnicrat hit the floor it was surprisingly quiet. Many Teschuin ergates lived for centuries; some truly old and powerful ones like their Omnicrats for over a thousand years. Well beyond that of most sentients. They considered themselves immortal. But when that lifespan is expended in a pair of heartbeats. Well, time is relative.
The Dowager loomed over the corpse, eyes narrow and painted lips tight against her clenched teeth. Wisps of chronal energy floated from the slits of furious eyes. The device, whose purpose the Agent had not yet divined, was in ruins scattered across the floor with the bodies of human priesthood and Teschuin zealots. The apertures in the ornate timeband of her gauntlet irised shut.
Overhead, the great intricacy of her weaving curled and looped, a cosmic cat's cradle of unspent potential. Around them, stone dust floated in the air, flaring briefly like sparks as they returned to stardust before dulling once more. Torches in sconces around the temple cast an eerie glow, some blue, some red, Doppler shifting as the chronal distortions grew more and more unstable. They were tearing the ancient temple apart. And the bodies – he had to look up and away, thankful that Ki was safe in the Cleave.
He remembered bumping in to a young woman once, quite by accident. He was investigating a seemingly immortal illusionist and she was stepping off an automated people mover on her way to work. Only he wasn't watching where he was going and she was doubled over in labor pains. The young woman had no one, so he took her to the hospital and stayed with her until the child was born. A little boy as it turned out. She suggested naming it after him in payment for his kindness but he'd demurred. He suggested Adam. He'd always liked that name. But in the waiting room where he sat out the impending arrival, someone had left a dog-eared collection of works by Thoreau. One snippet from the wordsmith came to mind now as he stared transfixed by the intricacy of the Dowager's handiwork.
"The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature," he quoted. "You are truly an artist, Great Lady."
The Dowager offered nothing but a silent, penetrating gaze of flaring golden energy.
The Mara.
Deep in the pre-history of Gallifrey, pioneering minds grasped blindly for understanding of the greater universe, stumbling upon the existence of tangible spacetime. This etherea which they called the Mara connected everything. It terrified and exhilarated them, offered glimpses of profound understanding and deepened the admission of their ignorance. Countless generations rose and fell as the desperate scrabble for understanding continued. Over time, those who studied the Mara developed knowledge and techniques for utilizing it. In their explorations, they found life that had an innate affinity for it, like the great islands of TARDIS-life they harvested and bred and augmented with technology to increase their connection and control of it. Century after century passed and the thaumaturgy grew increasingly attuned to it. Endless generations of exposure deepened that attenuation, but also changed them blood and bone to its own nature. Those with the deepest connections; their children and their children's children, would eventually be born with an ability to sense the Mara itself but were themselves inhabited by it. And now, after so many descendants, the excess chronal energy that built up in their bodies had to be siphoned off. Each Time Lord was anchored to their time pieces or they risked being consumed by the Mara.
Awed by her power and artistry, the Agent almost didn't notice when she reached for him.
Stumbling back, he escaped her grasp.
"You're too late," said the Dowager. A powerful statement from a Time Lord and when she spoke he could feel the vibrations in the room.
"A valiant effort, worthy of the High Calling, but in the end, simple timepass." The glow faded from her eyes, revealing chips of deep green, vivid against her bronzed skin. Finely formed brows enhanced their severity and elaborately coifed jet black hair embellished with jewelry gave her a regal cast. "Child, I have waited too long to let you stop me now."
Reaching up, she altered the weaving and the floor beneath the Agent heaved up violently and then collapsed. He found himself suddenly falling as a few square meters of Mount Parnassus disappeared, returning to the softly rolling hillside it was before it rose from the earth as a volcano.
Tumbling through the air, he clutched at his keys, hoping there was time. Suddenly he passed a red frame and open door before slamming into stone elsewhere in the Temple of Apollo through another.
Coughing, his ribs aching, he struggled to push himself up from the ground. He saw her disappear and reappear in front of him. She hiked her black robes and crouched in front of him. She smelled of scented oils. Dangling from her neck, she wore a necklace of rare metals and bone white stems and stones of coral woven together. She grabbed him by the throat and stood, accessing past lifetimes worth of youth and strength, dragging him up with her. Her hands were surprisingly soft but her grip was like iron.
"What is it, young one?" she asked, noticing him staring at her chest.
He squeaked something unintelligible out and she gave him a confused look, loosening her grip slightly.
"I said," he began before jerking back in the grip, bringing his knee up between them and extending it as he heaved, breaking back out of the vice and falling to the floor, "it's not fair!
He scurried back quickly and got to his feet.
Doubled over, straining to catch his breath, he pointed an unsteady finger at her chest. "You've got one of the bloody Shoals." Defeat and jealousy colored his words.
Predating even Time Lord technology, they were gifts given in mutual affinity for the Mara. Even when they were created they were beyond rare. The Dowager didn't need a TARDIS. With a Shoal necklace, she was a TARDIS. Naked exposure to the Time Vortex had its risks of course, but if he thought she was merely unbeatable before, even that hope was vanishing. He had already exhausted his own surplus essence from his fob. She had her own much greater reservoir and the power of the Fixed Point in Time. He couldn't defeat her.
No doubt coming to his conclusions before he did, the Dowager turned, stepped through time and space and reappeared under the weaving to continue her work.
While she did, the Agent returned to Ki and removed the Cleave.
She fell into his arms and embraced him.
He hugged her back. "I'm sorry."
She looked up at him with light brown eyes that swam with a dozen different emotions. Slowly, she pulled out of the embrace and turned to look at the Dowager.
He turned too, taking a few steps forward.
Ki appeared by his side and grasped his sleeve. "Can you stop her?" she asked.
Looking at her but saying nothing, he turned his attention back to the Dowager before taking another step. "I have to try," he told her.
As he approached meaningfully, the Dowager briefly stopped her weaving and looked at him, finally asking, "How long has it been?"
"How long has what been?" he replied.
"How long since your regeneration, child? Recent. I can tell."
He took another step.
"So it was. Why do you a-a-Ahhhhhhh!"
Screaming, he saw the light around him bend, forming a mirror in front of him. In his reflection, he saw his past life copying every motion. He was feeling what Old-He had felt, connected to the person he was. He could feel the radiation eating his bones, the raw blisters, taste blood in his mouth as he experienced everything he would have felt if he'd never regenerated at all.
The pain drove him to his knees before the Dowager's timepiece irised closed again and it subsided, the antecedent reflection disappearing.
It didn't take him long to figure out what she had done after the pain gave way, but he knew it was well beyond anything he could do. She was simply too powerful.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, his voice pained. Ki fell beside him and kept him from swaying. She was crying scared and comforting things in his ear.
The cat's cradle sped up but began to shrink. When it was small enough, she reached up, wrapped her fingers carefully around it and drew it toward her. It continued to spin madly in her hand. Again, the Agent was impressed despite himself. The power of a Fixed Point in Time held in the palm of her hand. Fantastic!
"Because of every sunset. Because of every wasted day of a long and truly miserable life. Because I have paid and paid and paid for the High Calling and received nothing but pain and tragedy in return."
With Ki's help, he got back to his feet. "But that is the price we all have to pay! This gift-"
"Gift!" she snapped. "This curse you mean. Eternity and Duty. The power to watch the worst things happen and do nothing to stop them. But I remember, child. I remember when we were not so powerful nor so high-minded, but in all the years since we separated ourselves from the rest of the Universe to sit in judgement over it. Imposing the cold comfort of universal verisimilitude when we could offer relief instead. We have the power to make things better, but we choose the mindless tragedy of circumstances and call it our duty. And generation after generation of jawan like you raised to perpetuate it."
"You wish to deny everyone a paradise without mistakes. Without loss. Without pain. Fine. But I will have my own."
"Great Lady, I know you have lost," said the Agent.
She screamed back, "You know nothing of loss!"
Instantaneously, she appeared in front of them. Ki started to say something but a look from the Dowager convinced her otherwise.
Emerald flints turned back in the Agent's direction. Anger, frustration and grief were painted all over her face. She took a step back from him, unsteady now, looking around. She shrugged off her robe and let it drop in a black and crimson pool at her feet. She wore light wrappings of colorful silk underneath and held her hand against her belly.
"They took him from me," she started to say, not even looking at the Agent at first. "The witches. They punished us for defying the old ways. They took away my Vasus."
Tears were streaming down her face now as she held the held the cradle of time. Around them, windows appeared as faded projections of time splashed against the walls. He saw the Dowager with a young boy, playing in the company of a full-grown man whom he resembled. The projections skipped around as the boy grew, showing happiness and sorrow, boredom and adventure. The Agent saw an old version of the ceremony for naming Time Lords. Both men now, both Time Lords, they worked together, performing great deeds in places and times the Agent recognized, events he knew didn't involve them. Now the Dowager was with them, both men. She was embracing them both. Her look was entirely maternal. The boy. He wasn't her first son, the Agent realized. He was her second.
As powerful a Time Lord as she was, she had seen his life before he was even born.
Then the witches killed him in her womb.
"Oh no," he whispered.
When he realized, he met her eyes. They were full of tears. "Now you see."
Spacetime – reality itself – began to buckle around them as she accessed the power at Delphi. She couldn't change her own history on her own. The paradox would destroy her. But if she kept using the cradle the way she was, she might destroy them all.
"Please. Dowager. You have to stop!"
"No!" she cried. "I have suffered enough. I want them back!"
"You know what can happen. It's too much to risk.
She held the cradle in both hands now. The buckling continued. Drifts of solid Mara began to collect on the ground in front of her. "I'll risk it," she said. "For them, I will risk anything."
Desperate, the Agent took a step forward. "I've lost so much in my life. I know the pain never leaves. But life is pain. Existence is pain. It makes every moment precious."
"Is your pain that dear to you, that you would fight to keep it?" the Dowager asked.
Sadly, he replied, "Our scars are the roadmap of our lives."
"A child's notion of profundity, a philosophy untested by endless ages living with that pain." The Dowager cried and laughed as the Mara drifts fluttered on unseen winds, starting to outline figures in front of her one speck at a time.
"I have lived with mine long enough. I have earned a reprieve."
The faded projections were getting richer now, clearer, more detailed as history came in to focus.
"No one can question your suffering, but to misuse the Mara in this way… Great Lady, you know it was not meant for this! You would destroy everything we have built."
"I built, you mean!" she fumed. "You weren't there! I helped build the new Gallifrey. I did, with my will and my hands. And the blood of my sons!"
The silhouettes of golden dust were filling in. He could tell the figure of a man now. On the ground, a baby. One of the temple's pillars snapped and fell with a loud crash. Ki was pulling at his sleeve. She wanted to leave. She didn't know there was nowhere to go.
"I know, but-"
The Dowager was shaking her head. "You don't know. You echo the Council's teachings without understanding them. You adhere to ideals you inherited. A difficult child, sure. Hard to control and a constant irritant. Yes, I know who you are, boy. You call yourself Agent. But agent of what? Surely not of the Council. Of Gallifrey. You strain the yoke too much for that. An agent of those ideals perhaps? You hold on to them because you have nothing else."
"Then you know what I have lost. I understand what you're feeling, Dowager, but the risks are too great, the cost too high."
"We have to leave, Eijeonteu," Ki said, trying to pull him back. "She will not listen."
Resisting, he asked again, "Please stop, Dowager. It won't help!"
"Truly?" the Dowager asked.
Now the projections shifted and the Dowager's parahistory was replaced by his own. He saw there images of everyone and everything he had lost.
Shocked, he whispered, "Please don't do this."
The ghosts of the past that haunted him were alive and within reach.
"There's power enough to bring them all back," the Dowager said.
Ki moved in front of him, taking his face in her hands, pulling it down to look at her. He could only do so for a moment before his eyes drifted back to the projections.
"What's wrong? Who are these people?"
Despite himself, a sob escaped.
Ki turned to look. "Who are these people?" she repeated.
A pair of footprints started to appear in a drift of Mara in front of his own feet.
He sobbed again.
"Please," he pled.
The Dowager rushed forward, angry. Ki cringed. "Why?" she asked, holding up the cradle. "Why should I stop when I'm getting what I want?"
The Agent wasn't even looking at her, instead his eyes jumped from projection to projection. It seemed he wasn't even speaking to her when he replied, "What will they think?"
The Dowager eased back. "They'll know their mother loves them. More than being a Time Lord. More than Gallifrey. More than the Universe itself. They'll know."
He finally met her eyes, brown on green. "They won't thank you."
"I can live with that," the Dowager said.
"Can they?" he asked.
The buckling was getting worse. The Agent could feel it. Even if they survived, the Earth would not. The shining future-history he had played so happily with would cease to exist, replaced with a drift of cooling rubble in the darkness of space.
The Dowager hesitated.
"You're going to kill billions to save two. And all the billions to come. You'll have everything you wanted. You'll have your sons back," he said, grasping her arms and gently pushing her away from him, rejecting the temptation she offered. "And they'll hate you for it."
A heavy silence descended. The stone scraped under her foot as she turned. The silhouette was much clearer now. He could see the man's face and the baby looked like it was sleeping.
"I don't care," she said quietly.
"I don't think that's true," he said, speaking to her back.
The Dowager was shaking with sobs, the profile of her face lit by the cradle as it throbbed with unlimited potential.
The drifts continued to build, becoming more and more solid.
"Why?" she asked finally.
He knew what "why" she was asking. Why should she do what he's asking? Why should she give up her one chance at having her children returned to her?
"I don't have a good answer," he admitted finally.
"You were right about me. I don't really fit in at home. I feel sometimes like I'm not even from there. I'm always saying or doing the wrong thing. I'm always breaking the rules or violating the system. I'm an alien among my own kind. But I was born a Time Lord and people like me can't just run around doing whatever we want. Even a problem child like me needs someone to look up to. I look up to the great figures in our history, who used their power for the right reasons. To people who inspired me to be better than I am. To people like you.
"When I look back on the darkness and pain in my past, some of it was done to me; some of it I caused; some of it just happened. That's life."
The Dowager turned, looking over her shoulder. Tears were drying on her cheeks. "That's life? That's your compelling argument?"
Sounding exhausted and defeated, he said, "That's all I have."
She looked around now, as if seeing the temple for the first time. Pillars were continuing to snap. The roof had long since rotted away to time and alternating canvases of stars and daylight looked unsteady beyond the gloom of the grey mists.
All the red doors were gone now save one, summoned to their side. The Agent opened it and tried to get Ki to go in. At least he could save her. She refused.
"You're not sending me away again," said Ki, stubbornly.
He shook his head. "Please go in, Your Highness. I'm coming, I promise."
"No."
"You have to. This place is going to come apart and if you're not inside the TARDIS, you're going with it!"
He'd almost forgotten the Dowager was there when she spoke.
"No," she said.
The Agent turned to look. She was holding up the cradle and slowly, reluctantly, let it go. It spun out of her hand and up toward the ceiling, growing, getting slacker, quickly losing cohesion as the intricate cat's cradle unraveling into strings.
"The little human child has nothing to fear." The Dowager didn't look at them. She watched her artistry come apart before turning her attention to the silhouettes. They were quickly falling apart. With shaking hands, she touched the face of her eldest son and golden flakes of Mara floated off, flaring like sparks before fading away. Then she collapsed to her knees and sat on her heels, bending over – almost bowing – over the figure of her baby. She was wracked with sobs as she watched each mote of golden dust drift away.
The Agent and Princess Ki watched in silent grief along with her.
#
When the Agent and Ki stepped through the mists, they were back where they started. The sun was still setting over Greece and the insects were beginning their evening songs.
They were both wiped. Exhausted beyond proper description.
The Dowager was gone. She'd taken the bodies of the Omnicrats with her. There was nothing that could be done for the priests. The Oracles at Delphi stopped. Human history didn't have any good explanations as to why.
With the Moebius Anchor he'd taken off the Omnicrat, a few parts from his TARDIS and help from the Dowager herself, the Agent had managed to permanently lock this Fixed Point so that it could never be used this way again.
Together, he and Ki walked across the grass and on to the gravel toward the TARDIS.
Or rather, TARDISes.
More than a dozen was parked in the bus lots with their Time Lords standing near, milling about or in small groups in animated discussion. The Lady Solace was giving him a hard look as he approached.
"What are you going to tell them?" Ki asked, whispering.
"I have no idea," the Agent replied.
End