This is London, 60 AD. The Iceni have risen up against Roman occupation, marching across the country, burning and slaughtering as they vent their fury against Rome and all its influences – merchants, peasants, lords and ladies, clergy men, all put to the sword for their foreign ways. Distracted by trouble on the other side of the country, the Roman legions don't know about their rampage until it's too late. And in that time, the Celtic warriors of Boudica had burnt down Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium, which will someday be known as Colchester, London and St. Albans.

And through it all stands the man in the blue box.

There are no legends that tell of the lonely god with his blue box, bigger on the inside than it is outside. The few tribesmen who investigate find nothing but an eerie note carried by the breeze, as of some celestial grindstone. No books record his coming and going; of how he watched as London burned, how he watched as the legions returned and gave battle and routed their enemy; of how he watched as Boudica took her own life rather than submit to humiliation by Roman imprisonment; or how he watched, with a small smile on his face, as the British rebuilt in the wake of the slaughter, bigger and better than before, restoring the towns, the forts, the villas.

Someday Roman Britain will come to an end, swept away by the Anglo-Saxons. And in their heyday, the Anglo-Saxons too shall be torn down by the Normans. But these people, these ordinary people triumphing in the face of adversity, will go on and on, up and out into the stars. Today, their future is bright and shining.

It is cold. So cold, after the time of heat, infinite blazing heat, the same moment repeating in an infinite loop. The feel of an eternal fire consuming everything, only to consume it again, and again and again and again…

This world is cold, but it has warmth.

There are creatures on this planet. Ridiculous creatures. Giant animals that use their noses to hold things. Small things that use tails like hands. Things that live beneath the waters of the world, never seeing daylight, never witnessed, but possessing a kind of beauty in themselves. So many wonders and marvels and miracles happening every day.

And perhaps the greatest of them is boredom.

Imagination. Creation. Inspiration. All traits, useful traits, and all will be made full use of in time. But It looks with almost a sense of wonder upon this world and its marvels, and the greatest marvel of them all is that the beings that scurry across its surface never stop, never really look around then, never appreciate the beauty that surrounds them every day. The way the light reflects off the water. The way a branch curves, splitting into twigs tipped by leaves. The way a body can lie at an angle that in life would be called unnatural, its skin turning pale as the blood stopped circulating, the muscles tensing as rigour set in, making it stiff.

It shall enjoy burning all of these wonders, as it was burned. It shall delight in them.

Such marvellous new toys! Never played with, never broken. And, as all parents know, a child will always break their toys.

This is Minorca. Not the island, the planet. This is the middle of the twenty sixth century. This is the heyday of the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.

This is the day that the planet falls.

The empire doesn't call itself that. Not yet. Only in hindsight, after its fall five hundred years later, and the later rise of the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, does it earn its name. In the time most are familiar with, the time that should have happened, the Empire was at war with a race known as the Draconians. Minorca should have fallen to them, become a rallying cry for thousands to renew the war effort, before an unexpected peace. But much has changed. Time is in flux. The Draconians have yet to met humanity. The Human Empire, besides not being called that, is a less harsh place.

But while most of time is in flux, there are still some fixed moments.

Minorca is meant to fall. But not, this time, to the Draconians.

Another enemy, another war, another act of senseless violence that sparks war across hundreds of worlds. And this enemy is voracious, it is powerful, and it is utterly, sincerely convinced that humanity deserves to die. And to that end, it brings its powerful machines of destruction to bear on Minorca, one of the last frontline fortress worlds of humanity. Next stop, Earth.

And then the blue box arrives.

This is not first century Britain. There are legends now, of a warrior who travels in a box that defies the laws of the universe itself. Of a man who has sent empires running, again and again, and who ended the war that threatened to devour the universe by sacrificing his own race. The Lonely God, the Oncoming Storm. There are legends, and this new enemy know them. They fear them.

They run, howling back into the darkness of space. They flee.

Minorca survives.

The Human Empire survives too, and goes on for another five centuries in an age of peace. Peace for itself. For those who stand in its way, there is only conquest and subjugation. Humanity changes. Now it is humanity on the offensive against its old enemies, humanity cracking worlds open in retribution, slaughtering millions who had no hand in the previous destruction. It is humanity who has become the stuff of nightmares, coming from the darkness of space to rain ruin upon those who did them wrong so long ago.

It is time. The blue box appears again.

The First Human Empire falls in fire and ruin. Minorca shatters. Humanity scatters across a million stars, forced to rebuild again, bigger, better, and less fanatical.

The box vanishes.

The halls of Whitehall Palace were large, and quite extravagant. They should be, Will mused. Being owned by Queen Elizabeth of England, if there were too many that were finer, the owner found themselves risking separation of their head from their body, or worse still, being shunned by high society. Will found that to be an odd thought about the aristocracy, but not an correct one – he made a mental note of the idea, wondering if he could fashion a story out of it, or maybe work it into one he already had planned.

Will made a lot of mental notes. They came in handy. He rarely forgot them – they were far too interesting to forget, after all – and thoughts he had from observation were often the best ideas.

Right now, the loudest thought in his head was "who is this officious twerp?" The word twerp will not come into use until after 1874, two hundred and seventy five years later, but the thought nevertheless persists – not helped by the trim and tidy beard, or the ruff worn even outside of fashionable hours.

The man sitting in the comfortable – but not, he noticed, too comfortable, lest a guest overstay his welcome – chair was, by the standards of the day, handsome. A neat beard, trimmed but not too manicured, just rugged enough to be masculine. Hair thinning at the temples. Someday he will be painted with a bulbous forehead, a renaissance symbol representing great intellect. Historians will debate whether he really was balding or not. This man doesn't know any of that. His clothes are well tailored, but practical, and a cloak hangs over his shoulders to keep the wind off him.

This may be the most important man in England.

Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, coughed as he enters the room, drawing his attention grudgingly. He merely raises a curious eyebrow as he takes a seat opposite him, reading through some notes in his hand, giving him a momentary and uninterested glance. "Her majesty sends you tidings of good health, master…"

"Shakespeare. William Shakespeare." This really annoyed him – it was hardly the first time they had met, or even in the first dozen – and yet he always insisted on pretending that they did not know each other, had never met, and were unlikely to ever know each other at all.

"Ah yes, Master Shakespeare. I apologise, but her majesty is unable to attend to your appointment. Affairs of state occupy her at present."

Will smiled. "I heard. Does Essex make much sport in Ireland?"

The situation in Ireland was no dramatic secret, but Cecil's eyes darted to the doors and windows as though spies leaned with ears pressed against the woodwork. The Irish were rebelling, and the English had sent a massive army, the biggest ever sent to the troublesome provinces, to put it down. By all rights, they had enough men to have succeeded, or to have brought the rebel leaders to negotiate – and instead, Robert Devereaux, second Earl of Essex, had squandered his army in skirmishes in irrelevant places and, worse, made a truce, humiliating the English. Rumours held that he was returning to London, to deliver their terms personally to the Queen – such a thought was shocking, appalling, and knowing the reputation of the Earl of Essex, probably entirely true.

Cecil frowned disapprovingly. "The Earl of Essex serves his queen, sir, of whom we are all subjects. The Irish occasionally need to be reminded of this."

Will kept smiling. "So she hasn't just sent him to Ireland to get him out from under foot?"

Cecil stood, face reddening. "You forget your place!"

Will chuckled to himself. "Oh, come off it, Cecil. Must we always keep up the pretence? The queen knows full well what I think of you, and she cares as little as I do. She has my eternal loyalty and fealty – I retain the right to judge the men foolish enough to think to woo her."

Cecil waved a quavering finger at him "To speak ill of her majesty is to utter treason!"

Will shrugged, changing the subject. "How did she like her commission?"

"We found it most amusing, master Shakespeare!"

Cecil was already standing, but if it was possible he stood straighter still, staring with horrified surprise as a woman passed gracefully into the room.

Nobody would call her old, even if they could. Objectively, Will knew that the Queen must be sixty six year old, and in some ways she looked it. Her eyes – they were not the eyes of the young, smooth and unwrinkled. Six decades had taken their toll. But at the same time, her skin was painted pale as of youth, and unwrinkled (a kindness – mostly unwrinkled), and even her figure remained as waspish as ever. She seemed to Will both old and young – as though holding back the wear of time. Elizabeth the First was called the Virgin Queen for a reason.

William stood, bowing deeply. The Queen returned the motion with a subtle, uninterested nod.

Cecil pointed an accusatory finger as Will. "My lady! He-"

She waved a hand dismissively. "You are dismissed, Cecil. We have private business with the young man."

Cecil gaped, evidently thinking about imploring her majesty to reconsider – and realised the futility of such a request. He backed out of the room, bowing low as he said, "As you wish, my Queen."

A wry smile tugged the corner of her lips. "We are your Queen, Cecil. Do not forget this."

She turned to Will, who tried to say, "My lady-"

She placed a finger to her lips, still looking at the thick oak doors. "Hush. Walls have ears, and jealous ones. Come, you shall walk with us in the gardens. It is a fine day today. Admire the topiary."

A strange request. A well-known London-based Warwickshire-born playwright, invited by her majesty the Queen of England to take a casual stroll with her within the palace gardens at Whitehall Palace, the centre of England's power. Such an occurrence would normally cause outrageous scandal – since it was the Queen, however, the majority would probably accept it as a simple conversation with a playwright over a play to be commissioned. The usual cover. Admittedly, her dealings were rarely so direct as this, and usually carried out through intermediaries, but with luck nobody would suspect.

Luck. Hah. Lady Luck was a trickster, always had been and always would be.

He waited until the two of them were safely in the garden, her soldiers taking up positions out of earshot to prevent trespassers. To his surprise, he found himself rushing to keep up with her – age may have worn itself into her, but it was hid well, and she seemed to glide across the carefully trimmed grass. The garden itself was still being worked on, the landscape being shifted painstakingly by workers, skilled gardeners planting and tending trees that would reach up to the sky in a few years time, if all went well. But Shakespeare's craft was words, not plants – besides their pleasing colours and forms, they were just a background.

"My lady, the topiary is irrelevant. Your message was clear, and urgent. I thought-"

The Queen raised an eyebrow. "You thought that I had further need of you, Master Shakespeare?" He nodded. "Your thoughts are prudent, if presumptuous. We have need of your services once again."

He winced at recent memory. "After the Japan debacle, I thought-"

A thin smile passed across the Queens lips. "The Shogun's emissaries have written to us, demanding an apology. I have in turn sent a carrack fleet to bombard his ports until he withdraw his demand. The fact that we wish to improve our trade rights in the region is a minor concern."

"In fairness to myself, lady, the ninja did attack me first."

"Only after you set fire to their temple, if reports are to be believed. And stole their sacred jade totem."

He shrugged, embarrassed. "Well, it…looked like a gift your majesty would much amusement in."

This actually drew a short laugh. "You were correct, master Shakespeare, insofar as the tale behind it is worth more than the trinket itself." The laugh seemed to die on her lips, however, giving way to a look of grim resolution. "You were also correct in that we require your services once again."

"My lady, I stand ready to serve at your pleasure."

"What we command you gives us no pleasure at all. But it is a command that must be given nonetheless. We were present yesterday at your theatre. The man who ran with his Moorish companion. Do you know who he is?"

How could he forget?

He had first met the Queen after the performance of his most popular play to date, Love's Labour's Won, which had dazzled the audiences of London. Unfortunately, this hadn't been his doing at all – some otherworldly creatures that looked like wizened hags and used the power of words had manipulated him into writing the play, hoping to use it to release the rest of their kind on an unsuspecting world. It had been William Shakespeare who had stood up on the stage to face them down, hurling words at them with the strength of hammer blows, sending them back from whence they came.

And it had been the Doctor who had helped him to do that.

The Doctor had just burst in on a "brainstorming" session, but soon his presence had felt as natural as his own. He had some odd kind of effect on people like that – you trusted the Doctor almost immediately, albeit sometimes grudgingly, and he gave you good reason to trust him. The Doctor had shown him impossible things, such impossible things…witches whose power lay in words, madmen who clung desperately to sanity, a glimpse of other worlds, strange worlds, wonderful worlds…

And inspiration had struck.

"I…well, I have some…ideas."

The Queen glowered suspiciously. "Then these ideas are insufficient. We require more of you."

"You wish me to find out more of him?"

The Queen finally halted on the garden lawn, Shakespeare stopping behind her as she turned to face him. "We wish you to find him, and to bring him to me in all haste. We have business that remains unfinished to discuss and he has inflicted wounds upon our self that have yet to heal. For this he must be punished."

He frowned. "But your majesty must know that this man is…elusive."

She raised an eyebrow. "We know this quite well. Take heart. You go with the blessings of your queen. God will smile upon your charge, and speed you to your target."

Well, this was a dismissal as final as any court in the land. "I…thank you, my queen." And still, he couldn't resist the impulse that gripped him – if he could, then he wouldn't be Will Shakespeare anymore. "Incidentally…how did your majesty find your commission?"

She smiled again. "You wish us to be frank? We found it to be most amusing, as we said. The play itself was bawdy and tawdry, and the characters shallow, but it served its purpose well. Especially the use of dear Falstaff."

He shifted nervously, regretting prolonging the conversation longer. "Using a character I had killed two hundred years earlier was an…odd request, my lady."

"You think such a thing impossible, Master Shakespeare?" she asked enigmatically. "Then you have many things yet to see."

He shrugged. "It's just that I had many questions about it. People thought it an odd choice, amusingly so, but it nevertheless attracted attention."

She smiled, more mysteriously this time. "Then it has had the effect we intended."

An odd comment. Their meeting had been a secret one, using mutual cover stories – she had interrupted a meeting with her privy council on the raid of Cadiz, under the guise of exhaustion – she had been awake for many sleepless days, worried. And yet she had still found time to pull a wandering minstrel offering his services to the court aside, and briefing him that she required the creation of a play, requesting the use of Falstaff.

He had used the character in an earlier play – Henry IV. He had been popular, and he had certainly enjoyed writing for the part, but he had died in the sequel, Henry V. The request for his resurrection had been passed off before as indulgence – she had insisted he had been her favourite character, and he had seen her laugh much during the presentation of both parts of Henry IV that she had attended. Now, however, Will wondered if there were ulterior motives at play.

He sighed. "I must confess, I was working in a rush. If I had more time-"

"Time has ever been our foe, Master Shakespeare," The Queen said, now stern. "Life is a constant battle with it, one we must inevitably lose – but victory or defeat is irrelevant in this battle. It is the fighting of it that matters."

Will hesitated before he asked his next question. This was the Queen of England after all. "If I may be so bold, your majesty, what sins has this man…the Doctor…committed to your person that must be redressed?"

"Wounds that cannot be seen. God keep you in good health until next we meet."

A dismissal. Like so many before now. He bowed low as he backed away, leaving the Queen in her garden, surrounded by her guards. He was well away from the palace when she uttered her next words, low, aloud only for her own benefit.

"God may forgive him, but I never can."

This is a year that has no name. None live yet to give it one. Someday, it will be given the hypothetical name "65 million BC," but there are no creatures to call it such yet.

This is the man with the blue box, standing on a hill in what will someday be called North America, watching patiently as he waits.

If there were someone there to see the man, they might wonder why his face is filled with a sadness that seems infinite. The day is beautiful. The lush forests stretch out in all directions, populated by large animals that graze on ferns and low-lying branches, preyed on by predators that will someday fill nightmares. But these creatures are far off, and they are not his concern.

He stares upward, at the sky.

Somewhere, up there, is an object. History textbooks will record it as an asteroid, a very large one. The man knows that it is not – it is a spaceship, and right now an old friend is struggling against all odds, against time itself, to stop it from impacting. But this too is a fixed point in time. The ship is destined to crash, slamming down into the peninsula before the blue box and its owner, smashing coasts with tidal waves, sending a wave of fire out and up into the air, a plume of dust and ash that will block out the sun, dooming countless species to extinction.

It is not the end of life. Some will struggle on. The mammals, for so long forced to live in the shadow of the dinosaurs, will have their chance, and will someday give rise to a species of ape that figures out that hands can hold more than just roots and fruit. The dinosaurs, magnificent as they are, are doomed. But that is not why a single tear slides down the man's face.

There's a deafening boom, as the ship hits the upper atmosphere. A fireball streaks across the sky, leaving a trail of smoke and fire in its wake. There is a flash a thousand times brighter than the sun as it hits the future Yucatan peninsula. The man doesn't blink.

"Goodbye Adric."

The man enters his blue box, closing the door behind him with a note of solemnity. An observer might ask how he plans to escape the wave of fire rapidly advancing upon him. But there is no-one there, no one besides the man in the box, and soon there isn't a box either as it fades away, accompanied by a sound like celestial gears grinding together.

The blue box vanished. And history continues.

The chamber rattles and shakes, the central pillar glows as energy passes through it and an otherworldly sound fills the room, and the man dances around it like he has for centuries.

An observer would think it random at first – a hand slams down on a button here, pulls back on a lever there, twists knobs and pushes sliders as he circles the control panel. But a pattern would emerge – if they had decades to watch it, years to study it, and months to analyse it.

It was never the same pattern, either. Any machine navigating through the timestream would take years to calculate a single trip, even a relatively short one – would need to detect and isolate a single temporal thread in the infinite timestream, follow it forwards or backwards, ignoring where it branches off or crosses other threads, the people it meets, the places it goes, the things that happen to it. And an observer would notice, with no small amount of alarm, that the man seemed to do this off the top of his head, referring only to a few scattered post-it notes hastily scribbled in an eccentric but elegant circular language and slapped haphazardly on control panels or monitors. Occasionally, he teetered as the room wobbled or pitched, and he hurriedly made adjustments and corrections.

"Alright," he said aloud to himself, "now we just follow the thread back to its last branching, isolate it from the interconnections, and…"

The sound was replaced with a harsher one, a kind of ethereal grinding like a celestial cog had slipped, and the rattling stopped.

"Hah! Here we are!"

The man steps back from the console as his ship, his TARDIS, settles into its landing zone. He's tall, thinner than he had a right to be, and sported sideburns and spiky hair. Over his long and lanky frame he wore a blue pinstripe suit, and over that went a long brown trenchcoat. Occasionally, he wore the glasses folded up in its pocket. In another pocket, one closer to the reach of his hand, a sonic screwdriver was nestled in the expansive fabric.

This man is called the Doctor. And he is about to get a very nasty shock.

He claps his hands together, rubbing them excitedly. "I've always wanted to come here. Sand, surf, sun, football, and the metre bar. Wonderful man, Pierre Mechain. Bit of a dreamer. I think he fancied me. It couldn't last."

The machine seems to hum, either in response to him or simply out of contentment. An observer might wonder if he was talking aloud to himself, not always the sign of madness people think it is, or whether he talks to the machine that surrounds him and that he dances around. And then they might not wonder if the machine is answering back in subtle, sometimes imperceptible ways. The machine is vast, and undeniably mechanical, but it is also more than a computer – it is alive, sentient (mostly), and imperceptibly fond of its occupant.

The Doctor swung the door open, a huge smile plastered upon his face. "Here we are, then. Barcelona-"

Mud splashed up from a cart as it passed him, splattering against the side of the TARDIS, and nearly soaking the Doctor head-to-foot, stopped only as he swiftly shut the doors. He opened them again.

"What?"

The sight that met him was not the one he had expected. Well, it wasn't as if it didn't keep happening to him – he just wished it wouldn't happen so often.

The street outside was…well, occupied was the only real word for it. Filled with rubbish, filled with carts drawn by horses and oxen, filled with people shuffling past one another and weaving between the carts, and filled with filth, which they carefully avoided with an acceptance that seemed well-rehearsed. Live with something long enough, and anything can seem normal.

He stepped out, locking the TARDIS door behind him. It wasn't exactly Barcelona, but…medieval architecture, Tudor style, possibly Elizabethan…definitely England, judging from the accents and fashion…London? Hardly an exotic city in renaissance Spain

"Ah well. Only a few hundred miles off. No harm done. Just a hop, skip and a jump across the Channel and-"

And that was when the screaming started.