- Interlude One: Killing-
Depending on whom you asked, Alfalfa-Matraxis was in the middle of a golden age that would last one billion years. However, Rigelax thought to himself, in the private confines of his primary mind, people who answered differently usually wound up gone.
Rigelax shuttered to himself as he scaled the palace wall, the one which looked out upon the cliff-face which itself overlooked the red ocean. The one that was unscalable through traditional means. But the church had long arms, even in these dark times. He had been told that the climbing gauntlets which had been remolded to fit his smaller hands, were very old, Centauran, and absolutely irreplaceable.
Unlike him.
If Rigelax was discovered, it would be his holy duty to throw himself down onto the jagged rocks below, where another cleric would retrieve the gauntlets from his corpse. His secondary head grimaced at the thought, a minor heresy.
Surprisingly, becoming a holy assassin, a martyr to the cause if need be, had slackened some of Rigelax's piety. Oh, he still abided the twelve guiding principles of Solosian theology. He didn't spit or steal or urinate in public places. He was nice to his mother, when he saw her, and even his brother Teliax, who still lived at home. But, curse it, if, in a moment of distress, an emotional response slipped onto the face of his secondary head… Well, he wasn't going to beat himself up about it - literally - anymore. Minor indiscretions were negligible in the face of the service he was about to render unto Solos, unto all of Alfalfa-Matraxis.
He was going to kill the Half-King.
Rigelax had been born into the reign of the Half-King, who had arrived on this world in fire five cycles previously. No one talked much about the before-times. Even the elders of the church had been vague when expounding the glories of Alfalfa-Matraxi before the Half-King's rise. But Rigelax had faith. It had to be better than this, than the fear he had always felt, always accepted as a mere fact of life.
He wanted something better for his mother. She was such a sad, lonely woman. Lonely in a way that her two sons had never been able to fix. Some people were just broken on all-sides like that, the neighbors said, clicking their tongues when they thought Rigelax couldn't hear.
Once, after crying all night out of her secondary face, an act which had scandalized Rigelax enough to send Teliax, only four at the time, to a neighbor's house for the night, his mother had let slip that Rigelax's father had spoken out against the Half-King. Had disappeared. First, underground, communicating through letters to his wife and to children he had barely even seen. Then, abosolutely. His letters stopped and everyone pretended to forget about the dark haired man who had once befriended their families and watched their children when they had had to put extra shifts in out on the fields.
The entire story had come out of Rigelax's mother's secondary head. The memory burned into Rigelax's mind. Even now, every detail of his mother's heresy, the worst any Soloist could commit, was etched into the back of his minds, both primary and, as much as it pained him to admit, secondary.
It also meant that the story was true. Every word. Even the smallest child knew that to lie through the secondary mouth was impossible.
Somewhere amongst the pain of memory and the cold night air, Rigelax found strength. He would end this. He believed.
Climbing into the window - the Half-King had apparently insisted on an ocean view as one of his first royal decrees - Rigelax hummed counter vibrations to cancel out even the smallest sounds of his stealthy arrival. It was late, but there was still a candle lit off in one corner of the opulent bedchamber. The blue flame shone a faint, flickering light that revealed jade stone walls.
Stepping with perfect, hummed silence, a feat which it had taken him three years to master, Rigelax crept to the edge of the four poster bed where the Half-King slept. An entirely new set of verses were required to cancel out the feint swishing of the curtains as Rigelax pulled them aside and laid his eyes on the sleeping form of the Half-King.
A ripple of shock went through Rigelax that made the eyes on his secondary head go wide and almost caused him to stop humming with his primary mouth. No one in his level society had ever actually seen the Half-King. But his name was true. The sleeping form which lay, muttering and turning restlessly, below Rigelax, had but one head. One face. But was it primary or secondary? Rigelax would never find out.
Rigelax didn't hesitate. Finding a steely calm within he had not known before, Rigelax took his dagger in his left, gauntleted hand and plunged it deep into the heart of the sleeping Half-King.
The Half-King died instantly, blood welling from the wound, but not spurting. His heart beat no more.
A moment passed and Rigelax still stood before the corpse of his monarch. Taking in the numbing weight of regicide, Rigelax marveled that he had actually completed his task. He had! He would be a hero to his people, first amongst a new line of saints, his moth-
The Half-King erupted at his extremities in a golden light which blinded both of Rigelax's faces and sent him flying into the far jade wall.
Rigelax tried to cry out, but the wind had been knocked from his lung and he merely sat, stunned, gasping for air.
"Shit!" A voice cried from the Half-King's bed. "Shit! What just happened?"
Rigelax started to cough. Slowly, the Half-King rose from the bed where he had been murdered. As he walked towards Rigelax, something small and cylindrical in his hand, glowing golden, Rigelax realized that he could not raise his hands from where they lay sprawled beside him.
"Don't bother," The Half-King said, a croak at first. Then a cough, "I've magnetized the floor. Never execute a hostile overthrow of an alien world without keeping iron floors in your bedchamber. That's rule number … well, it's rule seventy-nine, to be honest, but it's a good one nonetheless." He coughed again. "What is in my lung?"
Rigelax gestured with the eyes of his secondary head to the large knife protruding from the chest of the Half-King. He was too scared, dismayed, and bewildered to keep his secondary head from reflexively revealing the truth. His years of training had evaporated from him.
"Ah," croaked the Half-King and matter-of-factly pulled the dagger out of his chest. It fell faster than it should have and hit the floor with a loud clang. The Half-King's glow began to fade and no new blood streamed down his previously bloodied pajama shirt.
"Much better," he said, his voice so clear it cut through the room like a blade. "Now let's have a look at you," the Half-King started again, his eyes cold and bright.
Had his hair always been black? a small piece of Rigelax's terrified mind, primary or secondary he didn't care, wondered. Rigelax could have sworn it had been blond when he had killed the monarch.
The Half-King looked deeply into the eyes of Rigelax's secondary face and all thoughts vanished.
"Rigelax-Matraxis," The Half-King said to no one, certainly not Rigelax. "And you're," he ran a scalding hot finger across Rigelax's forehead and placed it in his mouth, "Seventeen? Really?" It registered to Rigelax that The Half-King was annoyed by his age, but he was too stunned to attach that thought to anything.
The Half-King walked away from Rigelax and began pacing in circles on the cold, iron floor.
"They're sending children against me now?" The Half-King shouted to no one in particular, "Children with," he looked over more closely, "knock-off, Centuran garbage? Can't pull off an industrial revolution without plunging into revolt after five tries but they can get gravity gauntlets to scale my palace walls? Ugh, fine." The Half-King looked over at Rigelax with a hard gaze completely opposed to the fury that had until now taken him.
"Just don't talk," The Half-King said, staring at Rigelax, "I'm concentrating."
Rigelax began to feel strange. Suddenly, the room wasn't walled in by jade, but by grey marble. Rigelax started, forgetting his terror and the order of the Half-King.
"What did you do?" Rigelax asked, breathless. The Half-King looked around.
"Oh, the walls. Well, nothing. Not directly. Temporal shift. That happens when I play with the timeline." he looked around again. "Mind you, a whole room? It's getting worse. That'll happen."
"You've done what?" Rigelax asked again.
"Well, nothing yet. It's what I've resolved to do," The Half-King smiled, almost sweetly, "Tomorrow morning, I'm going to wake up early, or sleep in maybe, have a nice breakfast, a good, strong cup of tea, and then I'm going to kill your mother before you were born."
The Half-King let that hang in the air for a moment before continuing.
"Now, normally I would just kill you, seeing as you're the one who tried to murder me. Seems only fair. But the Soloists had to send someone who wasn't around to murder twenty-two years ago and, seeing as all I have to play around with on this miserable, backwards planet is Dalek Time Corridor technology, my hands are tied. Your mother was around twenty two years ago, you weren't." He shrugged. "I hope you don't have any siblings. Well, honestly, I don't care." The Half-King grinned.
"But you haven't done it yet," Rigelax was panicking. His mother. Teliax. Oh Solos, he could feel himself… fading.
"Yes, you're right. By all logic, that shouldn't work. Doesn't make sense," The Half-King stroked Rigelax's secondary head soothingly, "In a sane, rational time-space continuum, you can't just go resolving to kill someone's mother later and they vanish before your eyes - you're beginning to fade by the by - it just doesn't make sense," The Half-King seemed very sympathetic. Then something hardened in him and he drew his had away.
"But we're not living in a sane, rational time-space continuum anymore," the anger on the Half-King's face - was it primary or secondary, Rigelax's thoughts echoed - boiled over into his speech, "Someone had to go kill the Time Lords. All of them. Well, not just that, destroy Gallifrey itself. All in one go. And with that, the rules have changed and oh yes I can kill you by resolving to do so. I could do a lot of things if I had the means to move about unencumbered."
"Honestly, I could just kiss the bastard," The Half-King looked up, "well, after I kill him, perhaps."
"But that's -" without warning, Rigelax's lung vanished into oblivion. He gagged.
"Barbaric," The Half-King sighed, wistful, "But what can one do? Gallifrey falls." He turned and walked away.
One last breathless gasp and Rigelax-Matraxis wasn't there anymore. He had never been there. He had never been born.
For a long time, the bedchamber was silent.
"One billion years of prosperity?" The Master mused to himself, alone once more, his wine had moved to another room in the temporal shift. Bother. "That was an overstatement. At the current rate, I'll burn through this world in five."
There was a supreme arrogance in that statement, but at the edges, a creeping fear of its verity.
"My dear Doctor," He said to himself, softer this time, "You'd best hurry up and find me."