The planet burned. Not just the rock of the planet, though that was burning too, bursting into impossible sickly green flames even as it also melted into lava, but everything. The buildings, the people, the sky, the ships and satellites in orbit, the very space around the planet, the very time that flowed through it. Reality itself burned. The very idea of Arcadia burned, burned from mind, burned from history and space and time and reality.
And it was not a clean burning. This was no simple erasure or efficient, classically-Dalek extermination. The Cruciform would have allowed for such a thing, of course, much more easily than this summoning of hell, but the Cruciform's new masters, for once, wanted more than extermination. The Daleks were making a showcase of Arcadia, a preview of their planned, and, it now seem, inevitably-destined destruction of Gallifrey. It was not done vindictively; the Daleks had little to no concept of vindication. This was meant to inspire fear, horror, and hopelessness, to shock and awe the Time Lord enemy. The Daleks had come to understand their enemies' weaknesses very well, and even now, with victory all-but assured and the greatest weapons of Time Lord science under their control, they did not stop exploiting them. They had become so very good at this.
The Cruciform shone so brightly in the sky that it drowned out the twin suns as completely as they drowned out the stars. It pulsed with crimson light so strong that the light alone could almost have destroyed the planet; and perhaps in one reality it was doing so. The great weapon of time was blasting through reality, bringing forth into being every possible destruction of every possible Arcadia; one of those must have included a death by light. Meteors rained down upon the planet from realities and times where it passed through the great outland swarm, phasing in and out of existence as the Cruciform ensured that none impacted the Dalek ships which blanketed the planet, raining fire upon it with more traditional weapons. It did not bother to protect itself in the same fashion; the meteors which struck it simply dissolved permanently as they entered the crimson glow.
The continents cracked and shattered along every possible faultline, burying cities and nations under tons of rock, crushing millions – who were then brought back to life as the cracks were repaired, so that they could face death in some other way. Cities and people from different realities and times were spliced on top of one another, mutilated horribly as they were forced to occupy the same space and time; every Arcadia was here, every Arcadia was now, and every Arcadia was dying.
Every possible disease swept the planet, every possible war from every possible time. Ancient brigands swarmed through the cities, ransacking them; primitive artillery shelled the advancing armies of rebellions against every possible authority. Sontaran cruisers joined the Dalek saucers in bombardment, and huge Racnoss stars, and the ships of countless other civilizations, known and unknown. Somewhere, in some world and possible time, these ships had attacked Arcadia, and now those possibilities were being made here and now, as reality bled helplessly under the Cruciform's blazing assault.
The Reapers descended upon the planet like flies, devouring the chaos, folding it back into time, and in the end only adding to the destruction. They swarmed over the Cruciform frantically, personifications of time's pain, trying desperately to end the paradox, this joke being made of time, but the Cruciform merely devoured them just as they did their victims, using the time energy that made them up as fuel for its attack on time. The more of them came, the more power the Cruciform had to cancel out their sterilization. But the Dalek brains directing the machine refrained from completely blocking them from accessing the planet; after all, they were wonderful agents of destruction and fear themselves.
Even the Time Lord fleet, which had fought so valiantly and foolishly against the Dalek fleet those few short hours ago, not realizing until too late that the Cruciform lay at the heart of the enemy formation, and which had come to Arcadia to seek refuge in the temporal safeguard after the Daleks' dazzling victory, was not immune to the madness. The screams of millions of Gallifrayan warriors echoed through the sky on every psychic wavelength as they were caught in the fire as well; a TARDIS's shields were no match for the Cruciform. It destroyed them from inside out, or forced them into one of the infinite destructions of the planet below, or simply set them ablaze. Their occupants were helpless. No Time Lord science could stand against the very pinnacle of Time Lord science, the very might of reality itself. Every ship in the fleet burned, and screamed.
All but one.
To be continued...
Author's Note: Ooooh look at me, actually updating a multi-chapter story, aren't I shiny? Yes, one is the sufficient number I spoke of. But more reviews would of course be very nice. As might be obvious, this was originally just the intro for a somewhat longer chapter, but I realized that this part made sense on its own, had a nice cliffhangery ending, that standards for chapter length on this site are not incredibly high, and that saving the rest gave me more time to write the chapter I'm working on now, which is proving difficult to make not suck. Also, I don't know why I misspelled Galifrey in the first chapter. I am ashamed. Just write it off to my being American and stupid. I've probably left out a U somewhere too. Sigh.
