I began writing this story somewhere between the 26th of May and 2nd of June 2007. I know that exactly because it was the week between 'Human Nature' and 'The Family of Blood'. I wasn't very well acquainted with the concept of fanfiction, but I really wanted to write a Doctor Who story. I had this great idea of a creature that lived in a mirror! …And the very next episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor – guess what? – trapped an alien in a mirror. But, undeterred, I pressed on. By about chapter five I reached an enormous, several-years-long block.
Only recently did I come back and finish it off. I got past my block by going back and inserting a scene with these insect aliens. Shortly after, 'Planet of the Dead' aired, and – guess what? – there were these insect aliens!
The moral of the story is, write fanfiction quickly, before (as zotlot just said) "the Welsh thieves can get their mitts on them"!
This story is set in Avesbury, a village near Stonehenge with a stone circle round it. Apologies to anyone familiar with the village in question, as my depiction of it here is probably really far from what it's actually like – I visited it once when I was eleven, but can't really recall it in any great detail.
I happen not to own 'Doctor Who' concepts and characters. Saffron Carter and Natasha Simmons, however, are entirely my thirteen-year-old self's.
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Prologue.
Saffron Carter woke up. Shattered fragments of her dream floated around her mind, disappearing fast, until just one thing remained: the last sound she remembered hearing. A noise like an engine, but not a car, or any other recognisable vehicle. A strange, repeating, pulsating sound, like some sort of alien engine, starting faintly, coming louder and louder and louder until… she'd woken up. Saffron wasn't even sure it had anything to do with her dream.
A streetlight shone through the gap in the curtains, leaving a triangle of orange light on the opposite wall. Saffron pulled back the curtain and surveyed the street outside. It was raining hard, but through the rain she could tell that it was the silent hour, just before dawn, when the world gets a little bit darker. People who said midnight was the magical time were wrong. If magic existed at all, it would happen now.
She peered across the road, trying to find something that could have made that noise. There was definitely something there. Something dark and mysterious and box-shaped. She couldn't tell any more through the dark and the rain. But she was sure it hadn't been there when she'd gone to bed.
Saffron glanced at her reflection in the mirror on the wall and stopped dead. Her eyes, which when she had last checked, had been a deep, conker-coloured brown, were now red. Blood red.
She rolled off her bed and walked right up to the mirror. Saffron closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again. They were still as red as ever. Had it been daylight, she would have thought it was simply a trick of the light or something, anything to not believe that her eyes had changed colour. But now, just before dawn, the magical hour, anything was possible. And although she didn't want to, she had to believe it.
