"Chaos and anarchy loosed upon us all." - Romana (Neverland)
"They're DALEKS!" For one brief moment, Missy's usual mask of smug indifference slipped. "Davros or Rassilon, Kaleds or Gallifreyans, it doesn't matter. They're DALEKS."
The Doctor rushed forward to catch Truthless as she fell. He didn't even know if Gallifreyans could regenerate in this version of reality. And even if they did, he didn't know if she had any remaining regenerations. If Missy had killed her...
"She was shielding the Daleks," said Missy. She stepped past the Doctor to investigate the cabinets on the far wall. "Look at this. A reality lock and chronomorphic stabilisers." Missy twisted a dial and flicked a switch. "Popcorn time!"
The force that had been clamped around the timeline suddenly dissipated. Missy's alterations to the Eye of Harmony finally took effect. The Doctor felt the floor shiver beneath him. The sound of distant explosions boomed through the walls. He closed his eyes, knowing that Missy must have triggered the weapon of last resort - effectively a self-destruct - on all the Daleks in the city. He could see it as clearly as if he had done it himself.
Not just the city, came Missy's thought. Everywhere. The Eye had hyperspace links extending all over the universe.
"No..." moaned Truthless, stirring in the Doctor's arms. Her form softened, as if all the structure had been drained from it. Anti-time welled up from inside her bones. Possibility twisted around her. Her words came out distorted, phrases overlapping as if reality was still undecided. "What have you done?" "They're all dead!" "My children!" "You monsters..."
Missy opened more cabinets. "A transmat." She touched the controls. "We don't need any interruptions today."
"That's the least of our worries," muttered the Doctor. He could feel time fraying around him, revealing the bleak emptiness that lay beneath the reality Truthless had been gluing together. "Truthless. You can't have been holding it all by yourself. Not even you have the strength to..."
Truthless opened her eyes. Her form had solidified at last, her face subtly altered from the one she had worn before, but the memory eluded the Doctor. Before he could think why, she had shoved herself away from him and jumped to her feet. "Murderers!" Her face was ashen, her voice filled with despair and horror. "Monsters. Better you had been strangled in the Loom!"
"Shall I shut her up for you, Doctor?" Missy glanced up from her examination of the cabinets.
"No!" The Doctor took a deep breath, running a hand through his hair, frowning as his fingers slipped past the metal circlet. "Listen. We're not who you think we are. We're not even from this reality."
"This is the only reality left," said Truthless. "Gallifrey stands on a breath and a prayer. It's one thing for you to refuse conversion. But to deny survival to everyone else... that is the most vile selfishness!"
"Tell me." The Doctor held her gaze. "When did I refuse 'conversion'?"
All the anger seemed to drain out of her face. In a tone devoid of hope, she said, "It makes no difference now. I may as well tell you the things you have forgotten."
The Capitol was the last bastion of pure time left on Gallifrey. The outer lands were inhabited by mutants, savage tribes that fed off of each other in a desperate struggle to survive. Hidden in the catacombs beneath the Capitol, the Weeping Sisterhood maintained the Last Loom. Once there had been more, but now all children were woven from a single genetic loom, loosed to scurry like pig-rats in the darkness under the catacombs. At twelve years of age, when they were young enough to be uncorrupted by anti-time but old enough to cast readable shadows of their futures, they were taken for selection.
A few were given to the Sisterhood to be trained in the manipulation of time and anti-time, while the rest were sent to the conversion facility. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the conversion was successful and the anti-time was cleansed from the subject. But once in awhile...
"Sometimes conversion fails when a mutation slips through the Loom," said Truthless, not looking at the Doctor. He remembered the "deformity" that had earned him his childhood nicknames, but said nothing. "And sometimes the child refuses to accept conversion."
"And then what?" asked the Doctor.
"They return the body to the Sisterhood." Truthless picked up a child's skull and offered it to the Doctor. Her voice had been calm as she led the Doctor and Missy through the winding paths of the catacombs and gave her explanations. Her story wove itself through the ether, reinforcing reality with her words. Now, touching the ancient bones, remembered grief tightened her throat. "This was... yours."
The Doctor accepted it wordlessly, held it delicately between his fingers and stared into the empty eye sockets. What had it seen, before its death, he wondered. Was it refusal, or merely a chance mutation, that killed it?
"Shortly after that, right before her initiation, Koschei disappeared. We thought... suicide. Because you - they - had run together as children, you see. But no one ever found a corpse."
"Koschei was destined for the Sisterhood?" The Doctor glanced back at Missy, raising an eyebrow. She shrugged back. "How many of you are there? Enough for a football team? More? A whole league? Come on, let's have a look at them."
Truthless took the skull back from the Doctor and replaced it in its nook. "Follow me."
The Doctor fell into step behind her, a familiar pattern from a distant childhood. A wisp of memory strayed into his mind.
She was only three years older than he was, but wiser and infinitely more level-headed. She had taken the two of them under her wing, protecting them from the darkness until the year she was chosen for the Sisterhood. After that, he had rarely seen her again, and when he had, she had been silent under the weight of new responsibilities.
It wasn't you! Missy's reminder was a slap across his thoughts. And this isn't your cousin. She's obviously leading us into a trap.
Ah, thought the Doctor. Of course. She's buying time for someone else to prepare our reception. He shook his head, clearing the corrupted memories from his mind. He glanced back to find Missy lagging farther and farther behind.
She raised a finger to her lips in warning.
I thought you had a plan, he thought.
This Gallifrey isn't quite what I expected, she admitted. My original plan may need a few modifications.
Things got away from you, and you need my help, interpreted the Doctor. As usual.
You refused to take us to the right version of reality, you stubborn old pig. So if you find it unpleasant, you have only yourself to blame.
That was hardly fair, thought the Doctor. He hadn't consciously chosen to bring them here. Had he? Or was there a part of himself that cursed the Time Lords for being no better than the Daleks, and this was the ironic culmination of that line of thought? He didn't know...
You never do. Never mind. You go and spring the trap. It'll be great fun, I'm sure.
The Doctor turned again, but Missy was nowhere to be seen. What was she up to now?
A bit of poking around. I'll see what I can do with the equipment in your not-cousin's cabinets... Her thoughts faded as her mental shields tightened.
The Doctor forced his attention back to his surroundings. Once they were out of the catacombs, the passages took on a more rational conformation, free of the uncertainty cast by anti-time. Underneath that, the foundations of reality felt steadier than they had since Missy had shot Truthless. The rest of the Sisterhood must be taking up the slack in maintaining the fabric of time, surmised the Doctor.
Truthless continued on silently, not looking back.
A trapezoid of pure darkness descended on them from behind. The Doctor only had time to hear the telltale whine of the time scoop before it enveloped them both.
"I should have known," said the Doctor. They had been deposited in the Dark Tower, the one in the Death Zone. In the original timeline, Rassilon had been dead for millenia, and the monument was known as his tomb.
In this reality, the founder of Time Lord civilization was very much alive and physically present, his timeline unscarred by death. His psychic aura was unmistakeable, even though this was not an incarnation the Doctor had encountered before. He was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a silvery coronet over thinning gray hair. His robes were heavy and lined with zybanium and zero matter, long enough to sweep the floor with. His voice was as arrogant as ever. "Welcome to my tower. Thank you for escorting our guest, Sister Truthless."
Truthless glanced between the Doctor and Rassilon. Her face ashen, she said to Rassilon, "My lord, they've killed... killed all the Time Lords. I couldn't stop them. I'm sorry." She took a step forward, then knelt, bowing her head. "The failure is mine. Punish me as you will, but spare my sisters, I beg of you."
Rassilon laughed, gracious in the manner of someone with secret triumph bubbling in his hearts. He raised Truthless to her feet. "No matter, Sister. It was foreseen that my success would draw my enemies into the open at last." He turned his gaze to the Doctor. "That's you, is it? Pitiful abomination, you shall not hinder my plans."
"I'm not the abomination here," said the Doctor. "These plans of yours... Let me guess: Gallifrey under your boot, the rest of the universe to follow. No dissent, no alternatives, no divergence."
"Order, peace, and prosperity for my children, forever. Gallifrey is the oldest civilization. There is no need for any other. And this, at last, I have achieved," boasted Rassilon.
"But they're dead, murdered," said Truthless. Tears glinted in her eyes. "So many deaths."
"We will loom more, as many as we need. All the time in the universe belongs to us, now," said Rassilon. "And the new generation will be even stronger than before."
"That hardly helps the ones who are already dead," murmured the Doctor dryly. He had never expected to see anyone weep for the Daleks, but he could see that Truthless was sincere in her grief. For the first time, he felt a glimmering of guilt. Even so - he raised his voice and stared at Rassilon. "No. This ends. You will not convert any more children of Gallifrey into Daleks!"
Rassilon's eyes widened, showing surprise for the first time. "How do you know that name?"
"How do you?" snapped the Doctor in return.
"I was touched by the hand of an Unbending Witness," said Rassilon. "It showed me many things, but I am Rassilon, and I remain the master of my own mind."
"Really? I have to question the sanity of anyone who voluntarily turns their own people into - "
"- the pinnacle of Gallifreyan evolution," interrupted Rassilon. "They are powerful, obedient - "
"- blobs of curdled hate in mini-tanks!" finished the Doctor. They glared at each other for a moment. The Doctor wondered then about the influence of the Cruciform, if it reached even here, transmitted from the war zone through the minds of the Unbending Witnesses. Was it the weave of destiny that twisted Rassilon's thinking to the point where no rational argument could sway him? If Daleks did not exist, were the Time Lords compelled to re-create them?
"I think it's you who are consumed by hatred," said Rassilon, smiling. He raised a fist, sparks crackling on the skin of his metal gauntlet he wore.
"Both of them are," said Truthless. "There was someone else with him. It was Koschei, my lord."
Rassilon lowered his gauntlet and stared at Truthless. "What did you say? No, you must be mistaken."
Truthless shook her head. "I am not. It was her. All those years I thought she was dead, but..."
"This is some trickery wrought by the abomination," growled Rassilon. He turned back to the Doctor. "Speak! What do you think to accomplish with this base deception?"
"It's not a matter of what I think to accomplish, but what she's been up to all this time I've been talking to you," said the Doctor.
"Nothing. Nothing whatsoever!" Rassilon stared right through the Doctor, the coronet on his head shedding jagged flashes of silver light.
Time slipped loose from its track. Voices howled in the ether. The foundations of the world quavered...
"My lord!" Truthless gasped, sweat glistening on her face. The Doctor sensed her effort to keep reality from disintegrating. "You... what are you doing? The fabric of time will not hold."
"It will hold. The Sisters aren't the only ones capable of manipulating timelines, not anymore," said Rassilon. He hesitated, then continued, "Let me introduce you to my most valued servant."
Time steadied again, but there was an additional presence in the tower...
...a hunched, distorted figure, thick with anti-time. It appeared in the corner, holding a sack over one shoulder. It turned lidless, staring eyes towards Rassilon and croaked in a dry, rasping voice, "My lord Rassilon."
"It can't be." The Doctor's appalled disbelief warred with instinctive recognition of that gaunt, skeletal face and the indomitable will that underscored every pained breath.
If anything, Truthless was even more horrified by the hooded monstrosity. "Another abomination!"
"One tamed to my will, Sister Truthless. Look closer."
Seemingly mesmerized by the unblinking glare, Truthless stepped closer. "Koschei?"
"I saved her from the embrace of an Emissary of Harmony. Now she serves only me," said Rassilon. "Slave, have you captured the imposter as I instructed?"
"My lord," replied the anti-time creature. Without transition, it was standing in front of Rassilon, the sack dumped at his feet. With the blade now in its hand, it sliced the top of the sack open. It fell apart in strips of discordant spaces. The sack had been bigger on the inside. Now Missy tumbled out, a limp heap on the tower floor, the blond wig knocked awry and covering half her face.
Heavy stun, thought the Doctor. He tested their mental link, but couldn't sense anything from her mind. As for the creature, it was all too familiar, as was the blade it held.
"This is wrong." Truthless's voice grew stronger as she turned to face Rassilon. "You call her your slave, but that doesn't change anything. A creature of anti-time will inevitably corrupt everything we have built, my lord."
"Nonsense," scoffed Rassilon. "She is my assassin, hunting down the Emissaries one by one, securing the universe for my children."
"Truthless, listen to me," said the Doctor, heartened by her hint of rebellion. If Rassilon was too far gone, perhaps Truthless could still be persuaded. "This whole reality is wrong, but if we work together, we can salvage Gallifrey. There can still be a future - "
"'Work together'?" Truthless looked sickened by the thought. "Haven't you done enough damage already?"
"Enough, yes, and that's why you have to let me make amends," said the Doctor. "You must see that Rassilon's so-called 'travel machines' are not the answer, unless the question is 'what's the last thing Gallifrey needs?'"
Truthless shook her head, not looking at him. "Lord Rassilon, I beg you to reconsider. Release these two abominations into the Void. The Sisterhood will do everything in its power for our people, but this..." She sighed. "I must return to my duties."
"Truthless, wait." The Doctor started after her.
A bolt of energy shot past him and blasted into Truthless. Her image seemed to hang in the air before disintegrating into a fall of ashes. This time, she was dead beyond any possibility of regeneration.
"No!" The Doctor whirled, shouted at Rassilon, "What did you do that for? She already refused to help me. She was no threat to you!"
Rassilon pointed his gauntlet at the Doctor. "Maybe not today, but someday she would have betrayed me." The gauntlet glowed a bright blue. Even as it discharged another deadly bolt, the Doctor dodged sideways into the desolation of the ghost world. This was Gallifrey as it would have been without the Weeping Sisterhood's intervention, he thought. Without Truthless, did they still have enough power to hold it back?
He didn't have time to think about it. A blade slashed a line in the air and the hooded, decrepit anti-time creature appeared through the crack: Rassilon had sent his assassin to kill the Doctor.
The Doctor backed away, hands raised in a pacifying gesture. "Let's talk about this, hmm? You don't have to do this, you know."
"I am the Slave and I... obey Lord Rassilon," croaked the assassin, shuffling forward.
The Doctor winced. As much as he had hated his old friend's choice of sobriquet and vicious ambition, this broken monster was not anything he had ever wished to see. "You can't trust him. He may have saved you once, but only in order to use you."
"Kill!" The creature's dry exhalation was suddenly too close. The Doctor frantically wrestled for control of the knife. The withered limbs held surprising strength. Time and reality warped around them, as they each struggled to bend chance in their own favor.
"Listen! You are no one's slave." The Doctor's thoughts battered at a mind locked in layers of chains. As soon as he pried a crack between a pair of links, another pair snapped shut, blocking him, and he cursed the weakness of his telepathic powers. "I know what it's like. In another lifetime, in another reality, I was the one who became his pet monster."
"You?" The bulging eyes reddened in jealous rage. "Never. I am the only. Only one. You do not. Belong. Here."
The blade pressed closer and closer to the Doctor. Reality slipped again, and the Doctor was sprawled on his back, the weight of the anti-time creature grown unnaturally heavy. The tip of the knife touched his throat. His hand locked around the other's wrist, holding it in place. Space opened behind him, the time winds threatening to sweep him away.
The uncanny blade became the only fixed point in the chaos. The Doctor strained to see past it to its wielder. Listen to me, he thought. You need to remember.
"Remember. What?"
Remember that we are the Master. Whatever Rassilon's done to you, it's time to show him who really holds the leash! The thought was sent through the Doctor's mind in a lightning-stroke of psychic power, with a precision beyond his own skills. Missy. She must be awake at last. Another thought lanced through the Doctor, but so compressed that he couldn't catch any meaning from it.
The blade trembled, then lifted from the Doctor's throat.
Of course, thought the Doctor. Missy had always been better than him at getting along with herself. Six billion copies of the Doctor would have resulted in four billion rows breaking out simultaneously, but the Master had somehow managed perfect coordination.
Reality jolted back into place. The assassin loosed the Doctor and turned to face Rassilon, rasping, "You! You did this to me!"
The past laid itself over the present, forcing the old pattern to play itself out anew. Through blurred double-vision, the Doctor saw the anti-time creature charge Rassilon (both Rassilons) at the same time as the bleached-blond Master poured out his life energy in lethal blasts. Time stretched and broke. Then Missy was dragging the Doctor clear of the vortex, even as her anti-time echo rammed Rassilon and pushed him in.
"Saved by the power of nostalgia. How sentimental!" The Doctor seized the ragged edges of the temporal fabric and knotted them back together, sealing the rift. He kept his attention on the scar, in case Rassilon tried to claw his way back through, but it seemed the anti-time assassin had been thorough in cutting its former puppet-master out of reality.
"It's not sentiment. It was merely a convenient memory," said Missy, releasing the Doctor. "Echoes in time."
"I didn't know that was possible," admitted the Doctor. She had sent the pattern through him, using anti-time to reshape her alternate self. Reshaped and consigned her to oblivion. So much for 'sentimental'. The Doctor shook his head and looked around. He was startled to see light streaming in through the walls and ceiling of the tower.
A moment later, there was no tower. He and Missy stood alone on a barren outcropping of solid rock. A chilly wind whistled past his ears. There was no sign of sentient life in any direction. They were in the ghost town version of Gallifrey. The Doctor frowned at the sight. He tried to shift them back, but it was as if the inhabited version of Gallifrey had never existed.
The Sisterhood, thought the Doctor. Where were the Sisterhood? He could no longer sense their psychic influence on the timelines.
They were weak. They no longer have any anchor in our reality, Zagreus gloated, showing the Doctor a replay of their battle with the Slave. This time, he saw the moment when reality was re-written without the Weeping Sisterhood. He couldn't even tell whose side had made the change. At the time, he had only cared about securing every possible advantage.
He could get them back. He only had to look for them...
"Stop it." Missy yanked him back from the brink of dissolving the universe again.
"Agh," he groaned. He sat down heavily, covering his face with his hands. "But that means there's no one left."
"Just us." Missy came up behind him and massaged his shoulders. "Now don't be such a grumpy-pants. Things aren't that bad."
"Not that bad!?" the Doctor spluttered, not finding the massage the least bit relaxing under the circumstances. "Gallifrey is dead, and so is the rest of the universe, if we can believe Rassilon - and however much of a megalomaniac he was, I don't think he was lying about that."
"I know. Just think. The whole universe. Ours at last! We can do whatever we want, and there's no one left to stop us."
"Finally checked that off your to-do list after all these millenia?" The Doctor let his hands drop. He sighed when he found the outlook as dismal as ever.
Missy sat down next to him and followed his gaze. "Of course, it needs doing up, this universe of ours."
They tried. They really did. Missy had a plan, involving painstaking manipulation of the timelines, weaving them back together strand by strand to restore intelligent life to Gallifrey. Once they had a Gallifrey free of anti-time corruption, a Gallifrey with Time Lords and time technology, they would be able to acquire a TARDIS and start on the rest of the universe.
By the second day, he thought he would implode from boredom. Every time Missy used him to construct another delicate, perfectly balanced piece of the puzzle, the Doctor struggled with an urge to kick everything over. It was like watching someone else assemble a complicated line of dominoes. That temptation to just push over the first piece became overwhelming. The Doctor was reminded of their Academy days, when he used to ruin her (enviably perfect) time experiments.
Once he let an Emissary of Harmony slip through, but it was too easy to dispatch and the resulting disruption of the timelines set them back a week.
After that, he forced himself to restrain such counter-productive impulses, while Missy kept a tight rein on Zagreus, who saw no problem with a universe soaked with anti-time. To distract himself, he peered gently outwards, careful not to tear the fabric of time with his looking. What had happened in the rest of the universe? He gathered his data glimpse by glimpse, building up a slow apocalyptic vision.
The Emissaries of Harmony spread exponentially through space and time, because where there was life, there was conflict. Each Emissary ripped through reality, leaving a gaping hole for anti-time to flow in. In the end, there were no minds left capable of hatred, or anything else. Gallifrey had been the last bastion of intelligence left...
"And look what they did with it," said the Doctor. "They made themselves into ghouls and Daleks."
"Good thing we stepped in, then," said Missy. They had progressed as far as introducing primitive hunter-gatherers back onto Gallifrey. The tricky part was to keep the tribes from fighting each other (from ever having fought). Agriculture would add another layer of difficulty to her calculations, but that was a problem for next week.
"No. No, it's wrong," said the Doctor suddenly. "I don't believe it."
"Don't believe what?"
"That we're the only ones left. Haven't you sensed it? A blind spot, resisting our influence?" The Doctor felt it as a nagging bit of leftover time in the back of his mind. He forced himself to focus on it. "There's someone else. Someone we forgot to account for."
"All the Time Lords are dead," said Missy tiredly. "Or... do you mean Omega?"
The Doctor shook his head. "We would have noticed him. No. I don't mean a Time Lord."
"Then who?"
"Immindiyan," said the Doctor. "The Yssgaroth in the Stone Garden."