Hi, this is my first story. I hope you enjoy it. It's not finished yet but I'll be adding to it through the month. Please review it as you see fit.Thanks, spekenzi

There is a reason that children dislike going to bed.

There is also a reason for children having a phobia of the dark.

They are not the same reason nor are they the only possible reasons.

One of those reasons is me.

I'm the Doctor. And this is how nightmares came to be.

It first happened in an ancient worlds and stars had begun to taken shape.

Amid the chaos of a growing universe and voice called through the darkness.

This was called The Word.

Until then no sound had been made but there had been no one there to notice.

This one lonely voice kept going for what seemed like forever waiting to be heard.

Through dreams the voice began to call to people who did not yet exist. It possessed the minds of creatures and men millennia into the future.

Until finally it reached someone who would answer it.

A traveller from the other side of time heard the call. The whispers sounded in their head day and night, until at last they could take no more.

The traveller went to it.

Giving up everything they had known and loved, they stole a means of escape. With a small silver key purloined from the alter of his people he took a machine that could take them to the Beginning.

A time machine.

This was no ordinary vessel, however. The traveller did not know how to make it obey his commands and so resigned himself to jumping through space and time sporadically and with now prior warning. Finally, the elders of the traveller's race, a mighty people called the Time Lords, found him. They had hunted him relentlessly; desperate to reclaim the machine, lest the traveller should unknowingly damage reality and cause the fabric of time to unravel through accidental or foolish alterations to the past.

The time machine had brought the unwitting traveller to Yggdrasil, a planet of legendary beauty, and remembering the stories about it from his childhood; he wished to explore it for himself. But the Time Lords were waiting. They organised an ambush at the food of the mythical Ivory Mountain, and erected elaborate traps to catch the traveller. However, the traveller did not follow the path as expected and approached the mountain from the other side. Despite this, he still have been captured but for the whim of fate for just as the traveller reached the ambush point the dawn broke the horizon illuminating the forest where his aggressors lay hidden and causing their polished helmets to gleam light jewels.

The traveller realised with a start that he was in danger and ran like a startled hare. Fearing his pursuers he sprinted back to his machine in the hope of escape.

But the machine would not move.

It had a mysterious intelligence to it, and some said that it was sentient itself. It saw its chance to rid itself of this hijacker and allow him to be taken by his assailants. The traveller huddled in the machine and watched in terror as the Time Lords came for him. He began to plead with the machine, frantically begging it to take him somewhere else, in the hope that somehow it would respond to his words. The machine started to consider his pleas. On Gallifrey, its home planet it had been revered. But it was now an ancient craft, much older than those that the Time Lords used at present. It, she, as she started to think of herself had become a museum piece, locked in dusty rooms with no hope of being used again. Though blessed with intelligence and the ability to move through time, there was one floor in the machines mechanics, she could only ever travel of her own accord when harbouring a passenger. She looked again at the sagging man leant against her control board; maybe this hijacker was not such much a kidnapper as a key to her freedom.

The traveller then spoke, quietly, almost inaudibly. In a calm and charming voice that seemed to read her mind, he said: "Please… bring away from here, carry me to the creation of the universe and I will go with you wherever you wish for the rest of my life.

The Time Lords at last reached the machine; it was disguised as a glistening sapphire tree, identical to those around it but for a narrow door in the trunk. But to their dismay the doorway closed with their smiling quarry still inside. To the sound off gusting wind and rustling a few leaves, the machine disappeared.

And the traveller gave her a name: Time and Relative Dimension In Space. He called her TARDIS.