"How many children on Gallifrey right now?"
The question echoes throughout time and space. For a moment it even overshadows that great question: the first question, hidden in plain sight.
That question has never seemed more unanswerable, for the man it concerns no longer exists.
For sure, his body still lives. His mind, that brilliant mind, burns fiercer than ever before. But his soul is broken and his name is lost. Some of those who knew him in a past life still call him the Doctor, although he rebukes them at every utterance. A few refer to him as the War Doctor, as if this change is only temporary. They fail to see the damage inflicted on his spirit with every second this war continues. Others, delighting in their cleverness, call him the Medic – a military term for his former profession.
Most of us call him the name he has earned, ripped from the genetic subconscious of a species that claims to know only hatred but maintains a rich well of fear reserved for a single man.
We call him the Oncoming Storm.
I ponder the twin questions as I lie slumped on the console of my battle tardis. The injuries inflicted upon me by the Could've Been King burn with the cold fury of the time vortex. Like all time lords I perceive multiple time lines, but now my self-control is shattered and the flood of possibilities overwhelms me. In one timeline I see time lords fighting the daleks with crude energy weapons. Such as a scene is laughable. This war is not fought with convention weaponry. There is no central command. There are no armies. This war is fought in time itself; it is impossible to understand what is happening, least of all for those caught up in it.
An archaic type-40 tardis has the capacity, if the failsafes are disengaged in the correct sequence, to destroy an entire universe. Battle tardises are at the cutting edge of time lord technology and are designed purely for destruction. At the beginning of this conflict we maintained an armada of one million battle tardises. We suffered losses at the rate of one every four seconds, such is the savagery of the enemy's attack. Since then we have delved into the distant past and the far future across infinite realities, searching for more powerful weapons. The daleks have escalated even faster. Such devastation cannot be described.
In an ironic twist, only the insane can clearly see the lunacy of this war and flee from it. We who possessed sanity have quickly abandoned it and fight on, mindless and lost.
As I scour the timelines in search of answers I hear the phrases "no more" and "Gallifrey falls", and I know that he is about to betray us.
He is right to do so.
Time lord society has ever been corrupt, self-interested and hypocritical. This war has abolished any delusions of moral standards we ever possessed. We have wrought havoc upon the multiverse, abducting billions of the greatest warriors ever to have existed and throwing them into the maelstrom of battle to buy us a few more seconds of life.
We have resurrected every time lord who ever lived and we force them to fight. The criminals, the mass murderers and tyrants were the first. We made them our leaders and our captains, for who better to fight a war without mercy than those who had none in peace?
The time lords are not collateral damage in this final act of the time war. We are not the unfortunate side-effect of a strike designed to destroy the daleks.
We are the primary targets of his justice.
As the moment approaches I return to the question that plagues the timelines and answer it with questions of my own. Does anyone believe there are civilians in this war? That innocents would be permitted to exist in peace? That the living are in any way exempt from the conscription we enforce on the dead? That our technologies do not extend to the manipulation of aging so that every individual is at peak of their fighting ability?
"How many children on Gallifrey right now?"
None. Not anymore.