Pain, her talons shred the flesh from bone and her teeth shine with stolen blood. And the Lords of Time bound her in the last Great Tower. Kept her until they needed her, for she was their greatest weapon of all.
- The Book of Rassilon

Sarah waited by the fountain.

Spare parts, Romana had said, and no, she didn't need their help. Content yourselves and I'll be back in an hour, she'd said. Do try not to get lost had been added more as an afterthought.

The mention of the fact that this world looked like anything but a spare parts repository for a highly advanced time machine had been met by a roll of the eyes and a mutter: "Humans."

Rose had wanted to stay in the TARDIS, and Sarah imagined that whatever Rose felt, it was a lot sharper than her own reaction. She, at least, had a few decades distance from her travels with the Doctor, and it gave her a little more objectivity, she supposed.

So she had stretched her legs, wandered the sandy little streets full of dark shops and scuttling aliens and now she sat, enjoying the spray of cold water in the hot afternoon sun. The wonder of a new world never wore off. She smiled at the purple sky, not caring what any of the passers-by thought.

But she couldn't ignore the quiet sensation murmuring at the back of her mind. Because this wasn't anything like it was before. The Doctor was out there, somewhere, hunting for them. But when she thought of him, she couldn't believe that he could possibly mean them any harm. Still she believed Romana's warning, and she did not want the Doctor to find her, or the others.

She glanced into the pool of the fountain, caught by the strangeness of her reflection. The water rippled, yet the reflection remained steady.

But it wasn't her anymore. It was the Doctor. The face she had known longest. Curly hair and bright blue eyes, watching her from the water.

"Doctor?" she whispered, not daring to move.

His image seemed to smile as it faded away. Sarah blinked. It was gone and her own distorted reflection appeared. She stood up, cold despite the sun, and wanted nothing more than to get back to Romana's TARDIS as quickly as possible.

She began to walk, quick steps, pulled her leather jacket close. It was getting dark, much too quickly, and she realised that her coldness was not just to do with her fear.

There was a shriek from the sky: a long screech of a noise, a warning, a war-cry, perhaps. But it was something that cut straight through her. A noise that she did not want to hear again.

She looked up, saw dark shapes careening between the clouds. Huge - frighteningly huge - their wings blocking out the sun. And they were getting closer.

Sarah began to run. And the city ran around her, the shrieks coming from the ground now.

Romana found her before she was halfway to the TARDIS. "What are they?" managed Sarah, her breathing sharp, painful in her chest. She definitely didn't have the stamina she used to.

"You don't recognise them?" Romana's voice was perfectly even, her running steady. Sarah guessed she could go a lot faster, had she wanted. A backpack was slung over her shoulder. Hopefully she'd found whatever it was she had been looking for here.

"Wouldn't ask if I did," said Sarah, meaning to be sharp, but not quite managing. Romana smiled, caught her eye.

"They're the Krillitane," she said. "They've evolved."

"Big, aren't they?"

"Mmm. Nothing we can do about that. Come on." Romana grabbed Sarah's hand. So like, so unlike, the Doctor's: her skin was smoother, the fingers smaller as they wrapped around hers, but she could feel her own heart beating with just the same excitement as before.

She glanced back as the screams rose to panic pitch.

Keep running.


There was a sadness to the Doctor as he climbed the tower. He knew that he didn't have to walk, count those steps, take this time to move from one place to another.

He did so as the only apology he could offer. The one in the tower could never be free again.

Her flesh was bloody, dripped off her bones. Fingernails, sharp and long, clawing at her face, revealing white bone. Her hair was warm, red, knotted back at the nape of the neck. Her dress torn to shreds, but her eyes were real. Oh, her eyes were real and they stared at the Doctor, stared through him.

She shrieked and spat in his face. Clawing with one hand. Bu she never reached him, could never reach him now. Never reach anyone ever again.

"My sisters will have your soul," she said. The voice was knife-sharp, and it sank through his skin, a thousand pins piercing him. "This is a violation, Time Lord."

"I'll lock this door and I'll walk away," said the Doctor. "I'll destroy the key. I can do that now. You know I can."

"You have no right!"

"There'll be no mistake made this time. There won't be anyone to let you go, or even know that you existed."

"You bind me, but you will not rend me from yourself. I take you, Time Lord, and I tell you that you will always remember pain."

The Doctor nodded. "I'll find a way. I'm still learning, after all. But you'll never hurt anyone ever again." He turned on his heel.

"I never did!" shrieked Pain as the door slammed shut. The Doctor locked it, put the key in his pocket.

On the way down, the steps seemed to go on forever.


They found Rose in the cloister room, pacing. The TARDIS had let her find the room earlier in the morning, after she had told Romana she needed some time alone. Time to think. The pacing helped, a little.

Sarah looked flustered, hair astray and skin flushed. She'd been running, "What happened?" asked Rose.

"The Krillitane," Romana told her, striding into the long room, taking a seat on one of the little stone benches. She waved at the seat opposite, inviting Rose and Sarah to sit too. "Remember that they gained the same power as the Doctor."

"Those people," said Sarah. "They swallowed them whole. Couldn't we have done something?"

Romana shook her head. "Against so many? You saw them. Even without the powers the equation has given them, those weren't creatures we could fight without a great deal of preparation."

"But they were feeding?" asked Rose.

"Oh yes. I imagine that even as gods they wouldn't want to give up all their sensory pleasures. But don't judge them too harshly. In their way they've done a lot of good. And given us the chance we need to make things right."

Rose leaned back against a pillar. Grey stone, intricate carvings and ivy winding up and into the darkness of a starless sky. "Why's that then?"

"There's a lot more of them than there are of the Doctor," Romana told her.

"Yeah, but the Doctor's a Time Lord. Doesn't that count for something?"

Romana nodded. "It began at an impasse, but the Doctor's a quick learner and a brilliant improviser. The Krillitane were willing to listen to him, at the beginning, but their first concern was for their species. The Doctor's was…something else. He kept to himself the parts of him that they wanted and so now they fight. And the Krillitane are slowing him down, but they are losing that war." She looked away, her eyes cast in shadow, in memory. "The Krillitane are a plague on the cosmos, sweeping from world to world, feeding and taking all they want from each population they consume. They lack imagination, and rely on the invention and evolution of other species to improve themselves. The Doctor does not."

"One omnipotent being trying to kill another," said Sarah. "Is that even possible?"

Romana shrugged. "I'm not sure. I'd think so, somehow. The important thing is that there are other beings out there with power comparable to the Doctor's. This isn't the first time the Skasis Paradigm has been solved."

"Couldn't we do that?" asked Rose. "Solve the Paradigm, I mean."

"No," was Romana's short reply. "No," she repeated. "I wouldn't know how to begin, and even if we could it would be far too dangerous."

"But you do have a plan, right? We can save the Doctor?"

Romana stared at her, and in those moments there was no doubt left in Rose's mind that she was a Time Lord. All that intensity that she had come to associate with the Doctor was there, in those eyes that were watching her now, but the familiar exhilaration was fermented into fear.

She shook it off. She wasn't afraid, not of the Doctor and not of Romana. "Well?" she insisted.

"I do. But I can't tell you. It wouldn't be safe."

Rose folded her arms. "Right. So we're supposed to trust you, and you won't trust us."

Sarah was more diplomatic. "Wouldn't it be easier for us to help if we knew what was going on?"

"I don't know…I…you're bleeding." Romana was staring at Sarah's ankle, remembering she had tripped on the way back to the TARDIS, but had thought nothing more of it. Neither had Sarah. But there was an open wound on her leg, a nastier stumble than she had thought. "Doesn't it hurt?"

"I'll go clean it up," said Sarah, using her fingers to apply pressure. She didn't wince, frowned. "It doesn't hurt at all. Isn't that strange?"

Romana was on her feet and running. Raced to the console room, followed by Rose and Sarah. Her eyes scanned the readouts, comparing the numbers to the ones she held in her head. The universe, held together by mathematics and now there was another part that refused to add up. As her hands moved across the console making delicate adjustments, she glanced up at Sarah. "How are you feeling now?"

Sarah's eyes widened in surprise. "It stings." She shifted her weight to her other foot. "What did you do?"

"I think we're running out of time," Romana told her. "The Doctor's started to interfere with the universal constants. He's started to make changes on a grand scale. I've managed to seal off the TARDIS, but those effects will be dripping through the time-lines now." She bit her lip. "But pain's a warning as much as anything else, and without that…we'd better leave this galaxy altogether. He'll be after the Krillitanes on that planet now, that's something anyway." She was talking to herself, Sarah and Rose none the wiser as to what she was planning, but neither had forgotten.

Rose stepped forward. "Answers. Now."

"Library," said Romana, still working at the console. "You'll want the Gallifreyan texts. The TARDIS will translate them, don't worry about that. Look for the Book of Rassilon."


While Sarah went to bandage her ankle, Rose searched for the library. A very quick search now that Romana had told her she could find it. And she found the book that Romana had suggested very near the door, sitting next to a plush sofa and a little table.

As it turned out, the Book of Rassilon wasn't a book at all. It was a lot of books. A lot of very thick, very heavy books with very thin pages. Rose took the first one, sat down with it on her lap and opened it to the first page. She began to read: In the beginning, there was understanding.

She frowned as she continued to read. These really weren't the sort of answers she was looking for.


Sarah found the first aid box under her bed and decided that Romana's TARDIS was a great deal better organised than the Doctor's. She cleaned her wound, disinfected and bandaged it. It still hurt.

She intended to go and find Rose, but the sight of her bed was so very tempting. She really wasn't cut out for this sort of life anymore, she thought, perfectly sure that she never used to feel this tired after so little time racing about an alien world.

Her shoes kicked off, she stretched out on the bed, closed her eyes.

Something behind her eyes flickered.

It wasn't a dream at all, but a memory.

The fear was real, and the corridor was gun-metal grey. She knew what was around the corners. Knew how close to death she had come here, how she had seen so many die. How everyone would die before they had finished and any lingering hope she had held as she and Harry and the Doctor had disappeared was gone now as the memory sharpened.

It was Skaro. In the Kaled bunker, and she was only a few metres from the room where the Dalek life form had been created.

Sarah was a phantom, watching her younger self. So young, so very young. She would not mourn her lost youth, she would not. The woman crouched by the Doctor was still a part of her.

"You must complete your mission for the Time Lords," she held herself say, her voice so desperate, so certain.

And she wondered then whether that was why it had been so difficult for him, because it was them that had sent him here, told him what to do. Given him three options, and he had been allowed no other choice. So in the end, he had made the choice they had not given him. And the Daleks had lived.

"Do I have that right?" He had heard her, she knew that, but he could only see those two wires, one in each hand. An inch or two separating them. So little distance, such a small thing. Just touch them together. All he had to do was touch them together.

She watched, entranced, though she knew that nothing would change. The Doctor would run from his responsibilities, and she would run right along with him.

A voice that shouldn't be here: "Oh Sarah Jane, why didn't I listen to you?"

She looked over her shoulder to find another phantom, another Doctor. He seemed not to see her, had eyes only for his previous self. He stepped forward, stepped through her and snatched the wires from the other Doctor.

Sarah woke up shivering.


"How much of this is true?"

Rose had been reading for almost an hour before Romana made an appearance. She seemed almost tired, collapsing into the stuffed chair opposite Rose and lying back as though she wished to sleep.

"All of it." She paused, reconsidered. "Well, most of it. In a manner of speaking. Sort of."

"Thanks, that's really helpful."

Romana sat up, rested her head in her hands. "It's real to me then. To Time Lords. We've a lot more senses than most humanoids, so the way we see the universe is a little different. Mostly helpful, but sometimes your limitations protect you." She glanced down at the book. "Time, for instance, would hurt me a lot more than she could hurt you."

"But this book makes the Time Lords sound like gods," said Rose.

"And they thought they were," Romana told her. "A very long time ago. They built the foundations upon which we rest reality, so Rassilon tells us. But he's probably just taking credit for someone else's work. What he did do though, what the Time Lords did then, as we emerged from the Dark Times, was use our powers to create the Time Vortex."

"So the Time Lords were like gods?"

"I wouldn't say so. They were a cruel and vicious people. Power is not divinity, Rose. Have you read about the Three Sisters yet?" Rose nodded. "Those were the gods the Time Lords created, and they survived our fall. Our invisible legacy. Now the Doctor's trying to destroy them."

"They're important?"

"Oh yes. I suppose you'll see eventually, when I've worked out where we have to go."

Rose, silent a moment, then asked suddenly, incase she changed her mind. "What's happened to Earth?"

"Not a lot. Not compared to what could happen." Rose wasn't satisfied; Romana relented. "Little things at first." She smiled, said, "You know what the first thing he did was? Let the Greens win. Everywhere. Environmentalists had taken over the world in a bloodless revolution."

"That doesn't sound so bad," said Rose carefully.

"Except a lot of people didn't want the environmentalists in power. A lot of people didn't want them in power very, very badly. So he had to take away their weapons. Big ones at first, then smaller and smaller, till all that was left were fists. And, well, he wasn't quite ready to start rearranging the body parts of humanity."

"Couldn't they make more? Weapons, I mean?"

"They didn't know how anymore. But then that knowledge is connected to an awful lot of other things. Logic, he decided, was a terribly over-rated concept. But living in an illogical universe didn't help the humans stay sane for very long. They were still mostly themselves, after all, and they were still fighting, only now it was the biggest and the strongest who would win in little meaningless fights everywhere, all the time. Civilisation fell into barbarity." She looked at Rose, her gaze intense. "Though you must remember all of this happened so very quickly, not even a moment passed between the changes. But the TARDIS recorded it all. Each problem was immediately met in his mind with a solution that merely required the exercise of his will to become reality. But reality was too complicated, so he's left Earth much as it was, for now. Those who are changed are people that knew him once." She sighed. "The final answer will seem inevitable to him eventually, but for now he's still trying to find another way."

Rose considered what she'd said. "So by destroying what the Time Lords created…he's taking away the limits that the Time Lords imposed on the universe, on reality." She glanced at the book, the elegant text. "But what's the final answer?"

"He makes the universe a simpler place."

"No pain, no death." Rose understood, looked at Romana "No free will."

Romana nodded. "Just his will. So much simpler, isn't it?"