Chapter One: Lilac and star and bird
The TARDIS wobbled alarmingly as she began to slide her way out the trans-existential bubble of purple phantasmagoria that surrounded her, sending out a brilliant wake of orange chronoplasm in a hue that would have been invisible even to the trained eyes of a Time Lord. To the TARDIS, it was just another worrying reminder of just how close she was to accidentally winking out of existence on that last one. Technically, she had no pilot at her grounding console instant, and thus should not be able to fly much at all, still less navigate, but she had an appointment to meet and damned if she was going to miss this one.
A coven of bladed arc-slicers sensed her impending exit from the time stream and warbled a soundless attack call as they catapulted out of normal space in an attempt to slice through her lateral relativistic chronologisms prior to landing, effectively denying her re-entrance to reality except according to a one dimensional angle along the mirror image of their angle of attack. How many? 40,000? 47,000? It was hard to tell without perceiving them directly, which would cause both all objects to cancel out each others' projected locations and thus erase them both from reality. Luckily, a resourceful machine like the TARDIS didn't need to see things in order to evade them. They were a nuisance. But a deadly nuisance, and the TARDIS let loose a groan that sounded suspiciously like a worried sigh as she deftly sent in an instruction back through the stream to the fourth mind of her Doctor, letting him know to destroy the mine that had created the raw material for the bloody creatures before he left Skaro "this time". The deadly contrivances winked out of plausible existence with a few nanoseconds still left before their explosive contact, but now the TARDIS faced a grim choice; every action had a cost, and she needed to choose what form that cost of sending that message would take: time, or distance?
Distance, the TARDIS chose, knowing that throwing off her time calculations at this point would be more of a threat to her ontological integrity than any manner of physical displacement. It was a burgeoning time lock she was violating at the last minute here, not a space lock. She didn't like it, though. A distance miscalculation would end up costing her more time once she got there, plus who even knew what manner of nasties she might encounter within that distance, before she could reach her Doctor? She was about to find out though, as she headed toward the nearest available micro-passage back into normal space. It was seldom that either of them intentionally spent much time traveling through space in the conventional way, and for good reason: it was dangerous.
She knew, of course, that every possible point of entry into the system would be booby-trapped and mined to high heaven. It was a time war zone, after all, and these opponents knew nothing of limited technology or resources. She thought she dimly remembered making it through, though, so she must survive at least until the Moment and the edge of her available memory. At any rate, she had nothing to lose by springing the trap, did she? Either she made it or she didn't, and there was no time to dither. The TARDIS external sensors blinked off to avoid damage as she plunged into the fray.
Unsurprisingly, the blue box's entry into Gallifreyan orbit was accompanied by the silent detonation of a bewildering array of primed and set thermonuclear devices. They ignited like perfectly concentric fireworks blooming in the not-quite-dark of embattled space that currently served as the besieged planet's night sky. When she was younger, even a very large payload of explosives would barely have put an unplanned spring into her step, but now, the small armageddon of the explosions made the wooden panels of the TARDIS creak and groan as though near to coming apart, and the instrument panels on the deserted bridge burst into sudden flame. The flame became a torrent, a rampaging kirin, consuming the carefully arranged décor in a holocaust of ashen wood flakes and sullenly bubbling bronze. For a few microseconds, even the perpetually malfunctioning chameleon circuit went offline; had anyone been watching just then, they would have glimpsed the shadowy imprint of the TARDIS' true nature, impossibly silhouetted for second or two against the radioactive glow of the dying mines. But she recovered herself, and continued on.
There was no one who might notice or overly care about the addition of one tiny, outdated time machine to the field, however spectacular her entrance might have seemed in any other context than the last great Time War. Military situation notwithstanding, the many times veteraned TT capsule was not worried about the possibility of being directly attacked. Indeed, she was not prone to "worrying" about anything in the usual sense, unless it was the possibility that she would not reach her beloved hijacker in time. Nevertheless, she estimated the possibility of accidental damage as a much higher risk factor than direct fire at this particular instant, not expecting that anyone would be idle enough to even take note of her. Indeed, as the external sensors came back online, a sight that would have been bewildering to a human eye came into view; a space battlefield, still actively contested, laser and neutronic and photon fire glittering across the inky black like furious static.
Against this backdrop of flame loomed the outlines of a billion spacecraft, wheeling and diving, most of them in ruins by this point. Some were little but skeletal husks, buzzing with the movement of countless Daleks, using them for cover or fuel in their dogfights against smaller craft. It was supposedly a war between Time Lord and Dalek, but they were not the only species present; representatives of a thousand worlds and ten thousand armies hung dying in the poisoned skies. Here and there, the victims of causality loops replayed the last few moments of their personal contests, over and over in excruciating echoes. Elsewhere, regions of space too frequently erased and redrawn by the masters of time had grown muddled and distorted, confused shadows of matter and energy flickering in the dark luminescence, preyed upon by nameless things. Directly ahead, an exploding TARDIS had frozen time in an expanding penumbra, Dalek and Sontaran battle cruisers trapped beside her in perpetuity, a gruesome tableau of metal and fire.
The TARDIS carefully avoided the swiftly growing event horizon. She could not afford to grieve the death of her sister just yet. Because of her own sacrifice upon exiting the time stream, she had materialized quite some distance away from where she needed to be. Though she did not know exactly where the Doctor was, she knew where he would be in another few minutes, and it would really be better if she got there before he did. It was a testimony to the chronologically disheveled nature of intertemporal warfare that the TARDIS frankly could not remember whether she would get there in time, or not. She stored her brief approximation of the feeling of doubt in a memory bank for future contemplation, and began to dodge and weave her way down to the burning surface of the planet, to look for the collapsing form of her pilot. She could feel him, the sacred imprimatur carrying his emotions to her even over all the psychic noise in the field below; his exhaustion, his pain. Her Thief! Oh, too soon, far too soon. If only she could get there before the Moment was lost! The TARDIS fairly dove into the flames.