The Empty Hour

888

The engines garbled and grunted as the box shook into existence. The stagnant air sloshed around as the blue box forced itself into existence. The clay-like soil crackled as the box settled. The door creaked loudly open, echoing outwards in all directions, bouncing off the very boundaries of the sky itself. The old man took a careful crunching step forward. His heavy, white eyebrows pushed together as he looked out in front of him. The twisting tumult of the sky was tinged red and hissed with the burning of time. His nostrils flared as he dragged deeply upon the air, pulling in the stale, enduring perfume of decadent death.

His graying, blue eyes slid over the scene. A city hewn of bone, of twisting ribs and femurs and vertebrae. Massive twisting spires of blackened cobalt scratched upwards towards the crimson, burning sky like massive claws of some horrific beast reaching for escape. The walls were covered in massive murals painted in a rainbow of blood contributed from a thousand species, many which never existed. He walked slowly forward, unsure what to expect.

In the old days it was said that the Empty Hour was the home of the gravest of monsters. Hordes of travesties against nature would sequester themselves within this conceptual Eden of ill-repute. They would hide within the veil of these hidden hours, these lost days. He had fought so many of them now, killing most of them. Now though this ancient, newborn empire forever and yet bound within the most tenuous of hours and days. It was built on time cut from history. At its pinnacle it was an empire of its own, but now it was nothing more than a smattering of lost hours. It was a shadow of itself, which was itself nothing more than a shadow of waking reality.

A sound caught his attention. He turned, his hand dropping down to a silver blade hanging in a bejeweled scabbard. It was a cat, its black feline form slinking back into the darkness from which it had come.

"It is rare we have visitors, Doctor." a voice called from behind the old man. It was a woman's voice. The man twisted around, unsheathing his blade. His eyes fell upon a slight form. It was clad in crimson-black robes, died in blood. A mask covered the form's face, a made from the skull of an Orsyx, one of the mythological beasts of Gallifrey's past. Over the robes was loose fitting armor, constructed from the bones of bandersnatches, gryphons and manticores. The figure lifted an arm, splaying long, thin fingers. "Even rarer that said visitors be from the Great Houses of the Spiral Politique. No Time Lord has stepped into the Empty Hour, and survived the experience."

"I'm afraid that's untrue, and you know it miss…" The old man replied.

"I am Cousin Suzette-" The woman said bowing. "Why are you here, Doctor?"

"I am not-"

"Doctor, is who you were, and who you will be, who you are." the woman said, shutting down the old man's retort. "You are him, my family knows you better than your own. You have slaughtered so many of my relatives. My aunts and uncles, my cousins and brothers and sisters have died by the edge of your blade. You sanctify their memories with your massacre, you deify their timelines with your unholy touch, you have given them the greatest of blessings-"

"I did what I had to, to protect the rest of reality from your madness!" the old man growled, his fingers tightening around the blade. "You are shrapnel, the festering wounds of the war, if you are not cleaned, cauterized and closed you will unravel the entire Web of Time!"

The woman laughed loudly, maniacally and twirled to some unheard tune of her own concoction. Her robes flowing around her like the drippings of a bleeding laceration. She stopped and glared at him, her sharp obsidian eyes glared from behind the skull's orbits. "Again, Doctor, why are you here?"

"To finish this, to end this finally, once and for all." The old man growled. "Tell me, where is he?"

"He is everywhere, he is nowhere, he is forever, and he is never, he is immortal and forever and has never existed ever before." The woman laughed quietly, taking long, flamingo like steps around the old man. "He is that which should never exist yet persists forever. He is our most esteemed family member, and our most despised, he is the grandfather of us all-"

"Where is the Could've-Been-King?" the old man growled. "I've killed all of his could'ves, would'ves and should'ves, all of his meanwhiles, neverweres and might-have-beens. His entire army, his entire faction of paradoxes and incongruities, I have closed the box upon them. All that's left is what few scurry and cower here in this destitute reality of fabricated mislogic."

"We shall never be defeated." The girl said, lifting her arm. A dagger sliced out of the sleeve of her robes, and she caught the ivory hilt of the twisting, ebony blade. "We are paradoxes, we are an insult to reality, we are forever and immortal, we never were and have always been, how can you kill that which has never existed? How can you defeat a victory that has always been?"

Her long red fingernails clacked as she gripped the blade and lunged forward. The old man parried with his silver blade. The two clashed sparks firing off as he rolled through the strike. The woman giggled manically as she twirled away from the old man. The old man narrowed his eyes as the woman looked at him from behind the mask.

"I have found that stabbing them works fairly well." The old man said, quietly.

Those obsidian eyes narrowed and the woman lunged again. The old man twisted, turning the silver blade cut deep. The woman didn't scream. The blade came out stained in red. The woman staggered and fell. The old man looked down at her. She coughed and her body convulsed and slowly weakly she reached up and pulled her mask from her face. The old man looked away. The dark hair, the dark eyes, an all too familiar face from long ago -

"Grandfather is in the center of the city-" the woman whispered weakly, her lips crimson with her own blood. The old man gave her one last look, took a step forward and knelt down, closing the lids of her cold distant eyes.

The old man stood and turned and walked slowly down the dead street towards the epicenter of town. Occasionally some nightmare would screech, and some dark thing would flit across the sky. Trailing smoke tinged in distant bolts of red lightning, the fleeing presence of some archdemon, would swirl and twist into the sky.

He came finally the center hall of the city. The massive artifice was constructed of bone and fangs and twisted carnage. He sneered at the sight of it, an amalgamation of horror and rage and madness. He pushed through the massive ivory doors that screeched and growled and groaned. Flickering light danced on the walls from torches in fixtures shaped like the mouths of dragons. A tortured carpet led down the middle of the hall, leading to an altar and behind the altar was a chair. It was carved from the horns of a many-headed beast.

The chair was empty. The old man walked towards the altar and stepped up to the chair. He ran his fingers over the smooth surface of the chair. He felt the soft hair-like fibers that were bound so densely into horn. He slowly turned and sat. He weaved his fingers in front of himself as he looked down.

"So you got past, dear Suzette." A man was standing where the old man had just been. The altar sitting between the two men. "How interesting."

"If you think that would stop me, you gravely underestimated what I have been capable of on the outside this little carnival of melodrama you've built here." The old man said, narrowing his eyes.

"It was difficult to acquire her. You know that the fiddling in the time stream of a Time Lord, of fiddling in the time stream of the Doctor, is very tricky." the man said with a smirk.

He was bald, his face scarred but the old man recognized the face all too well, yet. The man's left arm was gone, cut free, some said in a long forgotten battle that never happened and yet it had. The bald man wore a black leather jacket, the skull of some forgotten heraldic beast clipped to his side. A sheath made from blackened jabberwocky leather held a blade, whose hilt was made of steel impressed with a skeletal hand.

"You would know about messing with a Time Lord's, with the Doctor's, time line." the old man growled, narrowing his eyes. "It is what you might call your life's work, is it not?"

"You tell me." the bald man said. The bald man looked at the old man with sapphire eyes. "How does it feel, to look into these eyes? Tell me, does it fill you with some kind of angst, déjà vu maybe? Do you feel that old, contact, that you've had with the others?"

"Why should I?" the old man grunted as he pushed himself up onto his feet.

"We are cut from the same cloth, you and I." the man said as his right hand reached down and grasped the hilt, the old man noted that the skeletal hand of the hilt made a mirror of the right hand's physiognomy. The old man's teeth clenched as the bald man's sword was drawn, it was made of bone, three bones pressed into a sword. It was a sword as long as a person's left arm.

"No, we aren't." The old man said, unsheathing his silver blade. "I am real, and you are an existential abortion. You're nothing more than apocrypha, decanonized gospel that is all but forgotten except for on the fevered whispers of the confused."

"And yet, we are here." the bald man said, smirking. "I exist. I am paradox! I am the impossible! I am a gaping sore in the side of causality, the penny in the cog of reality. I am forever, and I am-"

"Yes, I heard your liturgy from your lesser adherents." The old man said as he and the bald man circled the altar.

"You are not any different than me, you are nothing more than a last minute retcon, a woeful rewriting of the story, with all the impossible and illogical consequence that comes with it." growled the bald man. "You are a story so abhorrent you can't be bothered to be told!"

"And yet, when this is over, I will stand and be, and you never will." the old man said as he and the bald man charged each other.

The swords clashed and as they did the very fabric of the Empty Hour shuddered. The many nightmares and demons that were still hiding in its depths screamed in terror. Those meanwhiles and neverweres that dared to survive fled. The sky twisted from crimson fire to abyssal black as the two fought. Fearsome strikes and slices cut and shook the Empty Hour. For eleven days the battle raged, endless, continual, never resting. Those that witnessed it quaked in terror, many died from the sight of it alone. The powers revealed, the forces unleashed were amazing, astounding, they were the things of stories and epics, impossible to detail in the lower dimensions, even less capable to be depicted on a wooden stage with so very few actors. It is said that entirely new species were born from the sounds of the battle, and their only reason for existence were to sing its chorus and then die when the battle ceased, and cease it did.

On the evening of the eleventh day, from the rubble of the great hall stood the victor. Exhausted and weak he staggered forward. He slid down the piles of shattered bone and dropped to the dusty road. Drops of blood dripped from his hand. He looked up at the sky, dark and forlorn, it seemed even more empty than before. The silence was deeper. No wind, not a breath of air. He wheezed and coughed as he walked away from the hall back towards the box, dragging behind him in one hand his silver blade, covered in blackened blood.

He approached his blue box and leaned weakly against its frame. He pressed his head against its wooden surface.

"I'm getting too old for this…" He hissed quietly.

He dropped the silver blade on the ground, and slowly fished in his jacket pocket for a key. He opened the door and slowly trudged inside. The box grunted and wheezed and struggled as it shook and wobbled and faded out of existence, and as it did, the last remnants of that eleven day empire, shook and crumbled and the final seconds of the Empty Hour expired.

888

AN: This was fun…and yes the Empty Hour is the hour of 2AM Spring ahead of, during Daylight Savings (just like the Eternal Hour is that time period between 1AM and 2AM when we fall back, if you follow those instructions puritanically it will never be 2:01AM on that day ever…).