Davros was.

He had no body, no senses, no reality. There was nothing to see or to hear or to feel. But he was, he had thought, thought and memory and emotions and power, he was here, he was now, he was still alive, IT HAD WORKED!

"I AM!" he shouted, in ultimate triumph, and he was. Was words and breath again, lips to speak, eyes to see – light.

He was surrounded by endless whiteness, rolling and billowing. It shifted, seeming to ebb and flow as his eyes moved over it. It was aether both more and less than mist: solid and thick, yet so diffuse that his eyes could not see any particles.

His eyes?

He raised his hands and looked at them: fingers and palms and wrists just the same as he remembered, down to the little nick in his thumbnail from clipping it too short yesterday – yesterday? Had it been so little time ago? Was there time, anymore?

His hands were real – or as real as they were going to ever be. He touched his face, ran his hands down his body and found everything familiar, and yet infinitely new. And bare. He frowned: he was here, his body, but not his clothes. Disturbing, that. It suggested that perhaps the Daleks would not be able to enter Eternity with their casings, which would leave them as nothing but little gelatinous blobs that would be of little use to him.

Daleks. He looked around, and saw nothing. Then he – not-looked, reached out with other senses, new senses that had just come into existence within him.

He could perceive a place – under him. Not down so much as below, removed, remote: and what he perceived was reality. The world where he had been born and raised, the reaches of space where he had flown and fought: his native dimension.

And above him, far above, there was a hint of something else...

But his attention was drawn back to his hands. He stared at them, and with a little thrill found that he could see through them: sense through his skin, see the flex of tendons as he bent his fingers, follow the firings of his nerve impulses. He could watch a single impulse as it travelled up his arm, and then into his brain – his vision no longer seemed to originate from his eyes, but could move and point in any direction. He could see his own brain: a cavern of flickering sun-bright energies boiling inside his skull: could actually follow as his attention moved from one part of his cortex to another. But he felt that there was another way he could see his mind.

He concentrated, hard, and suddenly everything changed.

The cavern full of fires darkened, and became a vast and empty blackness, with little piles of memories here and there, connected by cold lines of cognition. Emotions were pale white flames that seemed to dance around them, and he, himself, was a dark and drooling beast that stalked those caverns, clawing at itself, burning itself again and again with the searing flames of hatred and anger and fear, and huddling over his memories.

He wanted to deny what he was seeing, but it was true. This was what he was: a beast in the darkness, eternally alone. But – he did not have to be this way. There, that knowledge of the basic properties of neurochemicals – why were they washed over with hate, hate that rose from those memories bright and awful? There was no reason why that knowledge and that emotion should be so linked as to be fused into one glittering mass, as cruel and frozen as barbed wire heavy with frost.

He remembered sitting in a class and hating the teacher who had humiliated him in front of everyone. And ever since, those memories and that hate had been festering together in his mind.

But that was so illogical! He reached out – not with his hands, but with his will, and experimented with blotting the flames out. They rose again, but then he brushed them aside. He touched his mind, saw the rough corrosion of his negative emotions layered over his entire life, and wondered: what would it be like, what would he be like, once he had cleansed his mind and put everything in order (he could see already great blocks and towers of information that should logically interconnect, but were separated by extraneous feelings and memories).

He felt a new sensation. Without realising how he did it, his attention divided: part of him remained inside his own mind, carefully parting his memories from his emotions, polishing them, ordering them: and another part of him looked at the endless whiteness that surrounded his body. There was something there. Someone, even.

"Nyder?"

"Here, sir," and Davros gasped in sheer delight as his subordinate appeared out of the cloudy white aether. Nyder had transcended! He was not alone!

Nyder was as bare as he was, his nudity striped with scars. He looked exactly the same as he had alive: dark hair neatly combed, his face looking even more naked than his body without his glasses. His eyes were full to overflowing with emotion: passion and excitement, and more. And Davros wanted to know what else was behind those eyes. After all, Nyder was able to touch Davros' emotions with his quills: now Davros could return the favour.

He reached into the other man's mind - and recoiled, finding with cold and certain immediacy that Nyder had painful depths that he had never suspected. Any suspicion he might have had that this was just a figment of his imagination, something that he had conjured up out of nothing, was crushed by the brutal reality of Nyder's mind. In that mind, underneath the rapture of being here, of seeing Davros alive, were terrible things.

The memories of Nyder's training were horrific; the battlefield memories were worse. The endless, grinding nausea of fighting and working and sleeping under the constant threat of sudden death…Davros had never known anything like that, not to this degree. He had feared assassins, political machinations, mistakes by his subordinates: he had never feared everyone that was not him, wanted to see the whole world dead so that he would be safe…well, perhaps he had felt that way sometimes. But not in years, not for many long years...finding that feeling in the other man's mind was more than disconcerting. He had thought that only he felt that way.

But there were other things co-existing with the horror: strength of will, coldly analytic judgment, and discipline: discipline like a field of swords, like a million compass needles eternally pointing true. Discipline and loyalty, eternally entwined in Nyder's mind. It was enthralling, to see that amazing loyalty and know that it was under his complete control.

But these parts of Nyder's mind were too frightening. Too alien – or perhaps not alien enough. He pulled away, and then returned, searching for a subject that was certain to be more pleasant. Sex.

That was - strange. An initial linking of sex with abuse and power and pain; a long string of brief mechanical encounters with various men; and then - it was like watching a dead branch suddenly burst into blossoms heavy with dew and ripe with perfume, with colours so bright they seemed to bleed. After Nyder met Esselle, after he started bedding her, every encounter was unique and sharp, and each better than the last one.

There were some interesting diversions - they had been doing what to each other under the table at the staff meetings? No wonder Nyder was the only one who never appeared bored.

But while there were plenty of memories of Nyder making love to Esselle, or to Esselle and Ravon both, there were no images of him with any other women. Odd; he was Davros' second in command, who would dare refuse him? Davros had certainly taken the first opportunity to have every Daughter in the post-war Bunker, and any other woman who attracted him.

But for Nyder, there was - no, there it was, he had slept with another woman. A small room, the air sharp with the smell of medical disinfectant, an examination table, his bare skin, her hands on him, her red-brown hair spread out as he mounted her, staring in her face and-

"You coupled with Shan!" Davros' mouth was wide. He focused his eyes back on Nyder, and saw him rapt and burning with some indescribable knowledge.

Davros suddenly wondered if Nyder had been reading his mind. And - what had he found there?

"Ten hundreds. I impressed you," he said.

"What?" Davros asked. His newly sharpened mind flashed down the tracks of his memories, remembering the one time he had heard those words, even as Nyder went on speaking.

"In the Bunker, when I was a Security Trainee. When I told you that the teachers had never taught me any numbers above the hundreds, and how I made up my own numbers. You realised that I had known about mathematics, known about it without being properly taught, and I," he raised his scarred hands and pressed them to Davros' face, "impressed," he leaned close, "you." And Nyder kissed him, hard.

The aether burned, and thunder rolled around their ears. They did not notice; there was only each other. The crackling energies that rippled over their new-born bodies and washed hot and alive around them were as nothing to them. They were each other; there was themselves together; and that was all and everything.

After a too-long time that was not nearly long enough, they pulled back far enough to see each other's ecstatic faces. "You made it," Nyder finally whispered.

"We made it," Davros replied, running his fingers through Nyder's hair. Then he frowned minutely. "This all seems to be natural now."

"So it does," Nyder agreed, touching his hair as well. "I thought that only living tissue might transcend-?"

"No, no, hair is dead tissue. Most of yours was artificial."

"I seem to have re-created myself in my own image...Yours has gone all white, you know."

"Has it?" Davros squinted, concentrating, and with jerky unease moved his point of view around, and looked. "Well, so it has. I always rather liked my white hairs." He smiled, and saw himself smile.

Nyder stepped back a pace, and ran his eyes over his raised arms. Then he froze, staring at his hands, still slathered with scars but bare of gloves - or rings.

"Ravon. Ravon!" he suddenly shouted, and his voice vanished without echoes. "Esselle! Answer me!"

Davros quirked one eyebrow, and Nyder noticed.

"No, they must be here, they must have transcended with us. I felt them, we felt them! They were right here..." Nyder spun around and saw nothing but endless whiteness. "Where are you? Ravon! Esselle!"

"Fuses, Nyder," Davros said softly, and then flinched back as Nyder impaled him with a gaze as sharp as steel.

"Explain," he said a little too slowly, and his lips writhed back from his teeth as Davros answered.

"Their role in the Rite was to absorb excess energy. Their neural arrays were wired directly to the ascension engine buffers, and mine was not. It was always a part of the calculations that their channelling of the appropriate energies could be fatal. And they knew what they were doing, and so did you!" This a bit sharper, matching his steel to Nyder's. "You knew that you might not survive, and still you attended on me!"

"I-" but whatever retort Nyder had ready was interrupted by an answer to his calls.

"We are here."

The voice was not a Kaled voice. Four Daleks glided forward out of the aether, casings shining like gleaming grey gems, eyestalks and weapons in perfect alignment. Davros smiled impossibly wide at the sight of them. They were the first sign that his experiment had been successful in forcing non-living matter to transcend.

"Excellent," he said. "Now we can begin. We will need to plan a preliminary sensor sweep-"

"We must locate and exterminate all sentient life on this plane of existence," the Dalek blatted, interrupting Davros. "We must control this dimension! All other life forms are to be exterminated!"

Davros was so startled that he didn't even attempt probing the Dalek's mind; instead he stared, in shock at this unexpected rebellion.

The Dalek moved forward, its weapon now frankly menacing Davros. "You are unarmed. There are no Reflectionists to protect you; no Daughters of Skaro to divert us. You will obey. Obey! Obey!" The Dalek dropped its weapon to point at Davros' legs, and fired.

It had meant to fire a paralytic ray, most likely, but what emerged from the gun barrel was a hundred times more potent. A river of impossibly deadly fire that shrieked through the aether – and passed straight through Davros' flesh, leaving no mark.

There was a long silence after this futile attack.

"Now that's interesting," Davros said. He raised one hand and pointed a single slim finger at the Dalek, concentrating. The aether around his fingertip glowed, and then a similarly deadly ray lanced from it, slicing through the Dalek's casing and out the other side – with no apparent affect. There was no molten metal, no scream of dismay from the Dalek. It just sat there, staring, as did its three fellow Daleks.

"Stalemate," Davros said appreciatively.

"We are the superior life forms. We outnumber you." The Daleks slid forward, as though to catch Davros between their casings, and then froze.

Davros froze as well, feeling a cold black tickling shadow at his back. A familiar sensation: Nyder's quilling, using his enhanced nervous system to touch another living being's. But the sensation was shatteringly distinct now, not a vague brushing against the nerves. Apparently, Nyder's quilling had been enhanced, just as the Dalek's weapon had. And even in normal space, Nyder could easily reach through a Dalek's casing and touch the flesh inside...

There was a muffled sound from the distance, almost the sound of a smothered laugh grown huge. Davros and Nyder looked around themselves, and then up: the Daleks craned their eyestalks upwards as well.

Skaro was a world with two moons, and that is what they thought of now. Two great white shapes hovered over them, too vast to be comprehended, and only by focussing and re-focussing their gazes could they see that the white objects were familiar. In fact, they were faces.

Ravon. Esselle. Faces the sizes of planets stared down at Davros and Nyder, and the four Daleks behind them. They loomed in the mists of Eternity like icebergs. Nyder could see their great naked bodies streaming away from them, as vast as waterfalls to forever but flesh, nonetheless.

"Sorry," boomed Esselle's voice. "We seem to have materialised on a different scale."

A giant hand reached out, fingers curled, and then the finger flick-flick-flick-flicked the Daleks tumbling into space, like a child knocking beetles from the leaves of a favourite plant.

Esselle leaped, neck and breasts and belly flashing overhead, hovering like marble clouds and then shrinking as she fell, contracting, until she was no taller than Nyder, or perhaps a little shorter. Her bare feet softly padded as she walked to Nyder's side and smiled up at him, radiant with joy. Ravon was at his other side, looking the same as before or perhaps a little younger, and his face bright with tears.

Davros pulled back a little, watched the three of them embrace. Ignoring the possible threat of the returning Daleks, he started probing the new arrivals' minds with ruthless thoroughness.

Esselle: a mind of equal power to his own almost, but so different! Where his mind was darkness and chaos, hers was brightly tumbling spires of crystal, full of light and colour, and all perfectly organised and controlled. A precisely aligned mind, with all its information overlaid and overlapping, like a billion interlocking stained glass windows in every colour of the spectrum and more. Every thought, every emotion, was balanced and interlinked, moving together like an impossibly complex machine.

And Ravon! Davros could look into his mind and see a long chain of thought neatly decompiling itself, breaking away and taking great black sheaves of repressions and distortions with it. And the chain was something newly added to Ravon's mind, he could tell.

The study of the Final Rite of Rassilon, the Reflectionist knowledge of the Harvest that had apparently driven Ravon out of his mind – he was shaking the memories and their effects away like water.

I am seeing a madman deliberately become sane, Davros thought to himself. And behind Ravon's madness was a mind not quite as full as Esselle's – she was a Reflectionist after all, her knowledge extended beyond this life and time – but in Ravon's mind were depths of emotion, of feeling, of compassion and empathy, that he could not even begin to measure. Ravon could feel in ways that were completely beyond Davros.

Davros looked at them and felt a deep, unrelenting terror grip at him. Terror, and a seemingly bottomless hatred. And he had no idea why. Everything in him cried out to strike out at them, use his new talents to rend and tear and burn: but instead he reached into his own mind, followed the thread of memory that told him that he had felt like this once before, long ago, very long ago. He was distantly aware that the others were watching along with him as he went back into his memories, back and back and back...

He was an infant. He was weak, weak and soft and uncoordinated. His eyes could only make out blurs; all his senses were confused. Vague 'things' came and gave him warm liquid to drink, or wrapped things around him, or made strange noises that hurt him, or moved him back and forth – once they even frighteningly raised him up, away from the white surface that was all he had ever known.

His infant mind had just started to coordinate itself, and had managed to group the 'things' into entities other than himself: into things that could move when he could not, that could bring warm food or not bring it, that could cover or uncover him.

How he feared and hated them! Hated those Things that could do what he could not. He could barely raise his own head up, and his arms and legs were limp flailing things only occasionally under his control, but his tiny infant's face convulsed with infinite hatred whenever one of the Things came near him. A part of him would never stop hating.

I hated them because they were Other: because they could do what I could not, Davros thought. Now I am here, in Eternity, with Nyder who is stronger of spirit, Esselle with her marvellous mind and Ravon with the depth of his heart. All of them are greater than me, in some way. All of them can do things that I cannot do.

But I do not need to hate them. They don't hate me. They love me.

And I love them.

With that thought, Davros felt the death-grip of his infant hatred fade away. He gave up that weight he had borne all his life, and felt it slip from him like chains that had bound him, smoke that had stifled his senses, walls that had hemmed him in, and him all unawares. His hatred had been the eclipse, darkening his entire life: now the light was free, burning like the core of a sun.

With that thought, Davros grew up.

He reached out for them, for his beloveds, with hands and heart and mind and all his soul, and they reached for him in turn. Their eight hands met and they formed what all of Davros' machines had barely been able to achieve: an energy wave that could raise a man, or a thousand men, or an army and all its ships, from one dimension to another. An engine for Eternity.

They were together: Davros' intellect, Nyder's discipline, Esselle's precision and Ravon's compassion, all of them working together as one, and so they wrought: