Chapter Six : The Silent Devastation
"This world is but a canvas to our imaginations" - Henry David Thoreau
Time Lords.
What a bunch of emotional over the top wrecks.
Rassilon's staff smote the bridge before him and a dazzling flare bloomed from its tip, blinding all those around him. The bridge trembled and moaned as if it were in pain. It sways and creaks but then for a while, a tense short while, it seems as though nothing had happened. It is still and it is quiet.
Wade looked around and drew a deep breath of relief.
"Phew!" he exclaimed.
Crack.
"Oops," echoed all the voices in his head.
"This is so embarrassing."
Then, without warning, with a great rending boom, the steel bridge shattered like thin glass under their very feet. His ears drowned in a roar and a great confusion of noise. Sudden calm turned to chaotic tumult. He heard the gut churning snap of the suspension cables, the cracking of concrete and the moaning whimper of the bridge's supports and his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him.
Suddenly, as though commanded by Rassilon, whose strange gauntlet was shimmering, the water of the river leaped up, lashing and livid and consumed them as the bridge fell, slid, crumbling and crashing down into the gulf below.
The group toppled and fell backwards as the ground they stood on simply fell away from them.
Instinctively, as he fell, he quickly grabbed onto his swords and fedora. I mean, it's a fedora. He liked his fedora. Fedoras were cool. And his swords? They meant more to him than even his own life. Which was immortal, by the way, so he wasn't actually that scared to be brutally honest.
He didn't fear death. He only feared pain.
And he always felt the pain. Every single inch of flesh that cut him and every single shattered bone. The agonizing and mind searing pain. But then he heals and he lives. With all the pain. That was the price he paid to keep his life. An eternal life of eternal pain.
As he fell, he watched the others and wondered if they were going to live. He wondered how painful it would be for the others. Wade watched everything as if it were in slow motion.
Jorge tumbled backwards awkwardly like some clumsy giant upturned turtle, roaring and cursing as he scrambled to grab onto the broken wreckage, which broke into smaller pieces in his mighty grasp.
"For want of a better word, that is going to be…ow."
Seth on the other hand was surprisingly fast and poised, moving to jump as the bridge collapsed and was now diving rather than falling into the river.
"Man, preacher boy is way too cool," mused a voice in his head.
"Yeah, but he doesn't have a fedora," added another.
"True that," agreed Wade.
Buck and John too were actually handling the falling thing pretty well. Both of them were smiling.
Death smiled upon Buck and he smiled back, welcomingly.
"Okay, creepy smiling face."
John was just smiling because he was suddenly teleporting in a great purple glow.
"Wait what?"
Wade blinked and in an instant John had simply disappeared from where he was -falling in mid-air. He looked around quickly. Someone else had disappeared too. Someone hot and yummy and totally sexy.
"Wait, where'd Lady Christina -"
Then in another bright flash, which Wade was getting bored of because there'd been a lot of those going around today, plus it wasn't very epileptic friendly, Lady Christina suddenly materialised above him. She floated above, hair dancing in the rush of wind and reached out for him.
"I knew she couldn't resist us."
"Hey, no copping a cheap feel there- oh, I'm sorry, that was me doing the copping... "
In another flash and the sound of a firm slap, they disappeared as the Millennium Bridge came crashing into the River Thames without Delta Force.
The day grew old and the ash-filled sky turned darker but the thundering explosions were not lost in the coming night. As the battle continued on Earth, high above the city a greater fury began to brew…
"Define …"disappeared"," hissed the Rani, her lethal gaze befalling the grim-faced Gallifreyan Chancellery guards.
"The T-TARDIS can…no longer be l-located milady and-"
In a flash, the Rani's sinewy scarred hand shot out from the depths of her robes, clutching a thin silver blade that cut well and through into the soldier's heart. Immediately, he sputtered blood on the cold metal floor and slumped onto it with eyes wide and blank.
"Congratulations on your new promotion Commander Annos," drawled the Rani, wiping her blood soaked hand across his shirt as she took a step back and wrapped herself around the shadows like a blanket. "I hope that unlike your predecessor here, you will be more successful in your search?"
The men and monsters fell back before them, the giant wings of the dragon whipping a gale beneath as they rapidly descended to the Earth. The Master's eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize.
There he was. He recognised the stench that tainted the wind from a mile away.
The enemy did not run screaming nor did they rally into a war cry, though they gazed in wonder at the Time Lord that the dragon bore on its neck. Bob the dragon spat out a warning burst of flame in their direction yet they did not flinch. They simply let the flame lick the air.
This group of enemies did not know of fear. Not from anyone but their lord that stood tall and dark like a living monolith amongst them.
Rassilon smiled at the sight of his newest challengers come to die. His carven face with its proud bones and skin like ivory hardened and his ancient deep eyes lit up.
A beastly hunger had awoken.
The Doctor's hearts thumped once, painfully, against his ribs. He wasn't too late. Not this time.
The TARDIS shivered, her metal insides groaning as the Doctor pushed her through the tempest that was the Vortex. Friction turned the air to fire and the TARDIS raced through the swirling fields of time energy and the TARDIS shook and pitched wildly.
"Dad?" shrieked Jenny as she lost her ground and was sent flying across the console room, blonde hair whipping her features as she fell with a resounding clang on the hard and cold metal floor.
He was gripping the stabilizing shaft too tightly, he realized, and relaxed.
"Oh, sorry," said the Doctor distractedly as the shaking immediately diminished and the TARDIS slowly materialised into the Universe, against starscaped space, in deep wheezing breaths as though it had just held its breath for too long under current.
He levelled the TARDIS off, straightened and ran a quick scanning sweep of the surroundings. The sensors picked up nothing.
He gave an audible sigh of relief and his mind immediately returned to Earth. To the massive invasion force that had arrived and blanketed its atmosphere.
He saw them follow the TARDIS. He saw them gave chase. But how many? How many now were still on Earth, destroying the planet? Surely, he got their attention. Surely? Hopefully.
"Did we lose them?" interrupted Ivy, business-like and maturing too fast. The Doctor caught her eye and she swept her hair to her face and stared determinedly at the screen. "Where are we?"
"The Unknown Regions," said the Doctor. "The furthest tip of space."
"We've lost them," confirmed Jenny as the TARDIS signalled a safe landing zone with a chirp. "We're deep in the dark now."
The Master got in way over his head. And so did he, mused Bob. A troop of Rassilon's men were rushing the Master and Bob was separately staring down Lord Rassilon.
It wasn't the way he expected the day to be ending when it started.
Sharp cracking sounds were lightning, coming and going in staccato waves. It was a hint of danger. No time to waste. Bob struck fast. The gushing waves of his flame engulfed Rassilon as he rose high into the air with a grin.
The victory was short lived. A gauntleted hand moved.
Bob looked down at the Time Lord below him, barely visible behind the fiery blaze yet somehow he still seemed to loom like a sinister shadow, a black hole in the shape of a robed man.
The fire whined, subsided into a great snake-like fiery mass and bent its will to Rassilon, who then sent it flying through the air straight back towards the dragon.
Bob was caught by surprise. He bared his teeth. His heart beat with an excitement of mortality. He had never truly known he was capable of feeling such fear. He was a fucking dragon. What did he ever have to be scared of before?
Now however…
He reached out into the depths of his lungs, searched for that spark of flame, now swelling and rising in him like an invisible muscle and finally let rip a thundering blast of fire.
The explosion of two fire blasts rocked the air. Lightning split the sky into a thousand pieces. Thunder boomed. Far below and all around, the sea and rivers raged. Rain began to pour.
Through the smoke, Bob saw a stalking dark figure and a great burst of lightning arced from his staff. Bob dived right and narrowly missed it. He almost smiled. Rassilon's rage was not so easily escaped. The dragon snarled and dived headfirst towards him.
Fire swelled in his chest as he rocketed to the earth. Then, lightning met flame and the two collided and connected. His determination met Lord Rassilon's rage, and for an instant he was unsure which would win…
And then alarmingly, with gentle ease, Rassilon straightened and swiped the air with both staff and gauntlet. Fire and lightning ceased and before Bob could do anything more than yell a roaring spit of flame, Rassilon spoke words in the ancient Gallifreyan tongue.
"Die."
There was a terrible scream as the dragon's abdomen ruptured and split in the middle and he fell to the ground, bathed in his own blood than was raining down on him.
"Last of the great dragons," muttered Rassilon coldly, his ancient faraway-eyes narrowing. "I regret how the mighty have fallen."
He turned; there was no remorse nor sadness in him. Rassilon stalked away as Bob rasped and gurgled indecipherable words, his large amber eyes widened and fixed on the Time Lord's back.
"You dragged us as you fell, boy."
"I'm not getting anything," said Jenny as she fed the scanners with any number of search commands. "There's nothing. No Empire, no naval fleet, not even a skirmish."
"A silent devastation he called it," recounted Ivy as she watched on, a burgeoning self-pity growing in the pit of her stomach as she felt adequately useless just watching.
"No, no, no, they must have left a trace," the Doctor said stubbornly shaking his head and gesturing wildly with his hands as though to assure himself. Frustration and determination filled his voice as Jenny futilely worked harder on the controls. "The scans are wrong. Our enemy, whoever they are… are clever. Way cleverer than anyone we've met before...so we must be looking at it the wrong way..."
"Boosting the scan," announced Jenny hopefully, and they waited quietly. No one seemed to know what to say. She struggled to keep their collective emotional turmoil at bay. Like her, they were bouncing randomly among grief, rage, and disappointment. Even the Doctor was struggling to stay centred.
It was a long and silent wait aside from the hum of the TARDIS engines that grumbled from far beneath their feet. But the stillness did not bring comfort to any of them. The quiet drone was unnerving.
Then, a chirp of instrumentation made them jump, and they looked up at the monitors eagerly. Jenny was first to react, staring at the screen as the scanning information streamed in from billions of light years away.
She blew out a breath, stood and tried to find her calm.
"Nothing again," she said disappointedly. "Just a big blank."
"Now that's …scary," mused the Doctor suddenly his eyes, narrowed and still fixed on the monitors. He pursed his lips and frowned. Something felt off.
Ivy stared at him, wearing her confusion. Worry lines creased her forehead. He caught her eye once again and he answered her unspoken query.
"Whole universe and not even one little dogfight between pirates?" he questioned, absent-mindedly nibbling slightly on fingernails. "Not one Atraxi misunderstanding? Whole galaxy and everybody's at peace?""
Suspicion and curiosity grew.
"Maybe they're invisible?" Matt said shrugging as he sat down, cupping his chin. He slouched when he spoke, weighed down by events. "Cloaking or something. Perception filters. I dunno."
The Doctor suddenly turned and looked at him thunderstruck.
"Or not?" he added nervously, taken aback. "It's lame I guess. Yeah. They probably don't do something like that. I dunno…"
"That's it!" roared the Doctor loudly. The penny was in the air. His bright eyes were wide, piercing and ablaze. A stirring revelation was rising from within him with every breath he took.
Then, the penny dropped.
The Doctor, frantically began babbling, his fingers pointing, snapping, waving and smacking against his forehead furiously like a strange chorus. "How could I be so stupid? No, no, no, no. Too simple. Oh but...yes. No! Yes! No. Oh but that's very clever. It's right in front of us. Staring us in the face all this time. Jenny, scan again but this time, don't scan for what's there. Scan for what's not there."
Jenny complied diligently, her loose hair hanging long across her face.
They waited.
It was a short wait. The instrumentation beeped a signal almost immediately.
"Woah," said Jenny as more beeps chimed receipt of answers. "We've got something."
The monitor screens began to load with numbers and symbols. Bells seemed to chime in eager response. The TARDIS seemed to urge itself in that moment.
"There we go," whispered the Doctor, a hint of awe in his voice as he stroked his hand across the image of star-filled space on the screen. Large swathes of it were glowing white. "Radar filters, all over the universe, hiding them in plain sight."
"But we still don't know exactly what we're up against," informed Matt.
"That's easy," said Jenny dismissively. "All we have to do is compare and contrast the two scans. What's there, what's not there and we'll get what's been hiding in between."
"Put it up on hologram," urged the Doctor.
The TARDIS did as he asked and the lights began to dim as the hologram of the Universe filled the room. Planets, moons and entire star systems floated around them and Ivy, looking down on the Milky Way that wafted past the tip of her nose, felt foolishly like a giant amongst the constellations. She stretched out a hand to Earth, but her fingers simply went straight through unsympathetically.
"Ok now let's see," Jenny said as she tapped away at the controls hurriedly. "The bad guys will light up in red-Oh..."
Slowly, the holograms of the planets began to turn a threatening hue of red one by one.
"That's not too bad," shrugged Matt as he made his way through the holographic stars systems. "I mean-"
"Zoom out," said the Doctor gravely, his eyes furrowed and his teeth gritting. "Show me everything."
Ivy chewed the corner of her lip. She felt fear creep on her again. The Doctor's voice was cold. Then she blinked hard. The glare of the red lights was making her stomach turn.
"Oh," Matt whispered. "That's bad."
"Why don't we ever see anything good on these holograms?" asked Ivy, trying not to feel nauseated at the sight and scale of their problem, but her voice turned stiff. Frustration was growing within her but she tried her hardest to not let it show.
"Head us a course to one of these places," the Doctor said, grinding his teeth. He pointed to a planet at random. "Griffoth. We'll start there."
Jenny nodded, engaging the controls where she felt the TARDIS pelting through the vortex tunnel and headed a course to the planet of Griffoth. Then, all at once the TARDIS shook violently, nearly knocking them all off their feet.
"What was that?" asked Ivy, bracing herself and struggling to keep balance.
"Well I'm not sure what that was," said the Doctor. "Think we might have hit some sort of gravitational speed bump."
"A gravitational speed bump? They have speed bumps in space? How fast were we going?"
In the centre of the console, the glowing crystalline columns groaned and wheezed as if wrestling some unimaginable force. The lights began to dim, the interior of the ship descending into gloom.
"Well, not a speed bump as such," said the Doctor, completely unfazed by the dimming of the lights and the monstrous cacophony being made by the TARDIS.
"More like...a road block."
Then, suddenly the TARDIS quaked violently again and again. This time successfully knocking them all off their feet.
"Alright," continued the Doctor, as he got up, shaking his head happily, "several road blocks."
"Feels like someone doesn't want us here," cried Jenny as she shook her head in pain.
"Precisely," agreed the Doctor, grabbing the controls tightly with both hands with a flash of his gleeful grin as the TARDIS lurched forwards, as though falling from the edge.
Shaun Temple bore her body in his arms, blinking like an owl in daylight as his stream of tears blinded him. He stumbled slightly, arms shaking as he struggled to carry her, the burden of grief bearing down upon him as well.
"Help me!" the cry rang into the shuddering smoke-filled air.
But no matter how loud he was even in the clamour of battle, there was no help nor hope to lift him.
He struggled on, his body thus far had only known to move forwards and to not look back. Shaun then finally looked around: he had forgotten the war, and all the world beside. All of his mind had been on Donna, who lay unmoving in his arms still.
Then he saw it.
The hospital.
It was ruined and aflame but there were people there. Nurses and doctors. A light in his heart grew as he hastened.
"Help!" he screamed in hope. "Help!"
His voice was heard. A man turned, his eyes bright upon him as he met his gaze. Shaun smiled as he wept, staggering forwards as quickly as his weary legs could carry him and his wife.
"Help me!" as his heart cried within him, and his knees buckled sending him kneeling hard to the ground.
"Please, help me," Shaun said to the man who was now sprinting towards him, coat flapping at speed. "My wife…she needs a Doctor. P-please…help her. She needs a-"
"It's ok, it's ok," hushed the man, trying to calm Shaun as he smiled a wide smile and laughed at the sight of Donna and stroked a gentle hand across her cheek. "Trust me. I'm the Doctor."
It seemed impossible to survive this ride.
But for the Doctor completely impossible had an uncanny way of being merely difficult as he reigned in the TARDIS with every limb he had on him. Ivy reflected that she should be used to it by now. The Doctor was now fighting ferociously upon the controls, like trying to tame an angry beast as the TARDIS pitched and angled more wildly.
Then, there was a sudden terrific clanging sound, like that of a monstrous hammer slamming down onto an impossibly large anvil and the TARDIS abruptly stopped moving.
Though the engines of the TARDIS had stopped wheezing and the outside world was quiet, the inside was still filled with a sonorous ringing. The Cloister bell had rung.
The TARDIS had broken through a thick pink blanket of clouds and the brown, blue and white of the planet Griffoth's northern hemisphere filled out the TARDIS' monitors. The company in the console room watched mesmerised by the bucolic beauty that had appeared.
Snow and ice peppered the blue box, frozen shrapnel, beating a steady rhythm against it. The slow setting suns suffused a large swath of the world with orange and red. The northern sea roiled below them, choppy and dark, the irregular white circles of breaking waves denoting the thousands of tiny uncharted islands that poked through the surface of the sea. To the far west, far in the distance, snow-capped, cloud-topped mountains ran along the spine of the world.
It was to there, where the cavern cities of Griffoth were hidden in the mountains, that the Doctor steered the TARDIS.
He eyed the location on the navigational computer, pressed several buttons and flipped a few levers and returned the controls to the TARDIS, and she banked him towards the ridge line where the shadows stretched long and high.
The calm tranquillity of the planet did not ease the Doctor's anxiety. Still heart, still mind, these things eluded him, floated before him like snowflakes in the sun, visible for a moment, then melted and gone the next.
There was something in this world. He could feel it in his hearts. In silent darkness a doom has already swept the land.
And there they stood, in the midst of the dead and slain, in one another's arms. Suresh and Gita Chandra embraced their child tightly, sandwiching her in between, kissing and crying all at once. Their hysterical mutterings of prayer and relief were not comprehensible by ear but their daughter understood them all the same.
Sarah Jane could not speak but cried anew as she held Luke and Clyde closely.
"What happened?" gasped Clyde as he tried to mask his tears. "I thought we were goners."
"Containment vortex failing," chimed K9.
"Force field," said Luke without hesitation, pointing to the glowing shield of energy that surrounded them. "Mr Smith must have learnt how to shift his containment field to protect us."
"That computer never fails to amaze me," muttered Sarah Jane happily.
"Wait though," interrupted Rani, her expression confused. "If this is his containment field—"
Her thoughts churned. All of them seemed to be on the edge of saying something, yet no one said anything. K9 finally gave voice to what she imagined all of them must be thinking.
"The Xylok is dying," stated K9. "Mr Smith is-"
Ominously, the glowing bubble of energy died as they came close to their realization. The suffocating feeling extinguished the need to hear the end of the sentence. Ripples of cold undulated over Sarah Jane's skin as she rushed first to her broken home.
"MR SMITH!"
The TARDIS doors opened and snow and cold blew in, the tang of ocean salt. Ivy stepped out into the wind. The light of the setting twin suns made her squint. She'd been too used to the artificial light of the TARDIS. Her boots crunched on the snow-dusted black rock and her exhalations steamed away in the wind.
"Blimey, it's freezing," she cringed as the cold wind bit against her cheeks.
"It's times like this I wish I still had my scarf," said the Doctor as the others joined her, bracing themselves against the cold. Ivy was suddenly glad her jacket was so thick though she now wished it had a hood. "I loved that scarf."
"Come on, keep moving. We'll all die from this cold if we stay here, and I have no plans on you meeting the next me," he said as he led the way down the icy slope fringed with jagged black glittering rocks.
Ivy trailed behind the others as she eyed the world around her with concern. Nothing marked their passage and they walked untroubled. She felt unease at the silence. An unease that filled her chest.
She felt as if she were submerged deep underwater, the pressure of it pushing against her. She kept waiting for her ears to pop, to grant her release in a flash of pain. But it did not come.
Then finally, they paused as they stopped and stood at the mouth of a cave. There was ruin here. The cave was like the TARDIS. At first glance it seemed ordinary and small. But it was bigger on the inside.
Ivy gasped as she saw the city. Buildings, towers, bridges, lifts and plazas covered the entire inside of the cavern, to a height of kilometres, all of it the trappings of what looked like a wealthy, mighty civilization. Or once was.
"The cave cities of Griffoth," whispered the Doctor, sorrowful and soft, as a rocky column like a skyrise, came crumbling down. "I'm so sorry."
They entered the cave, its ancient stone was cold and grey even against fire.
The shell of some war machine, like a tank, smoked and burned in places near the entrance. The company walked slowly into the cavernous city, the smell of smoke and death filling their lungs. Bits of blackened metal and weaponry dotted the fire lit cave. Walls and columns had been reduced to piles of jagged rubble. Graskes and Groskes lay dead everywhere.
"Oh no," Matt whispered seeing the bodies and making a movement towards a group of bodies.
"Do nothing," Jenny pleaded to the others over her shoulder. "Let fallen warriors rest."
Matt let his hands fall slack to his sides and fell in behind the others.
"Why would anyone do this?" Ivy asked.
The last word hung in the air, frozen in time as the group went deeper into the darkness. The setting sunlight on their backs barely reached the city but extended their shadows before them, like dark heralds marking the path ahead.
"Can you smell that?" the Doctor asked as they stopped to a halt before a ruinous temple of sorts. "It's in the air; Time's running dry here."
The Doctor stretched out a hand to stroke the stone. Cracks veined the walls and ceiling. Jenny joined her father and stood in the temple's shattered entrance. She held his hand, and the fire glinted on her long hair. Her eyes moved across the destruction, but the soft line of her mouth showing no emotion.
"I don't think they left anyone alive," she said. Her fists balled with anger and grief, and she felt an empty shout creeping up her throat. Breathing deeply, regularly, she sought to quell her slow loss of control.
"They didn't," the Doctor said.
"Probably the same story for all the other planets and systems that they hid from us," added Ivy bitterly. A thought struck her, and the thought transformed into need. An idea rooted in her mind, in her gut, and she could not unseat it. She suddenly, wanted the dead to be avenged…
"I feel sick," Matt said as he sat down, throwing his back against a column spire.
"Well, we wanted to see what they could do," said Ivy resentfully, "Now we've seen it, what do we do?"
All eyes fell upon the Doctor as he stared at the bodies and the ruin, unblinking.
There was a soundless pause as he considered his words carefully.
"We fight," he said, anger bleeding into his tone and a steel in his eyes.
Author's Note :
This has been a very long wait. But I had other emergencies to deal with and last month was a bad month for me with regards to writing.
But fret not, I wrote 2 chapters and will be posting the next one in a short while. I'm being calculative with my stuff now so I can handle my chapters better as well as reward the keen eyed Whovians with more interesting stuff.
Anyways, the two chapters really ought to be one but there's also natural act breaks everywhere that I needed to exploit. I'm controlling the pacing of my story with intent and purpose so the overall flow will feel be more organic and emotional tones that need to hit harder than others do so.
So hopefully this isn't a mad crazy fast paced chapter it was in the drafts. Or not unintentionally mad and crazy where it's not supposed to be.
Also, I just put the Master on a dragon, fighting Rassilon. How cool is that?