The Library, the largest collection of literature in the universe, it was an entire planet, core to atmosphere, dedicated to being the biggest repository of knowledge in the universe. It was the perfect place to monitor the fall of reality itself. The Doctor was sitting in the history section at a large oak table. He scanned the shelves around him, they'd change and shift on their own, whole shelves and volumes disappearing, then reappearing, the color of the backing changing, the titles shifting moment to moment, different authors different coding. This was not some fancy information technology, some amazing piece of 50th century library science, this was nature now, this was the universe, this was time and history; this was the war playing out on the lower realms of reality.
The Doctor looked around him at the patrons, and they also changed. People would walk by and disappear halfway through the Doctor's field of view, reappear elsewhere but wrong, with changed facial features, different hairstyles. He watched a young girl with her mother in the course of a second the child and mother turned into a son and father, a grandparent and grandchild, a nephew and uncle and a dog and a cat-person. All the while the people (and pet) were unaware of the changes around as history flowed sickly in a splatter pattern of temporal gore and the viscous entrails of time unraveling in chaos.
The Doctor mused on how it must feel to have history shift underneath your feet without having any concept of change. The innocence must be bliss, he surmised silently for a second, and then immediately changed his mind. The ignorance couldn't be bliss; even the temporally insensitive weren't blind. True, initially they would shrug off the changes as faulty memories, as legends and conspiracy theories but eventually paranoia would sink in as causality slowly gave in and events started happening without causes and pterosaurs would appear in the skies of modern cities. Eventually existing would be a nightmare of nonsense, a cacophony of chaos, reality doing what it had to hold itself together, be damned logic and laws of nature.
The universe was always like this on small scales, but now that the Time Lords had abdicated their position of temporal janitors, and started actively tearing reality asunder, big things were starting to happen. Planets would pop into and out of existence, entire star systems, on particularly bad days an entire galaxy would simply fail to have coalesced. The universe can handle the odd person disappearing or dying in the wrong spot, maybe an entire population or city, but a galaxy was too much, and it showed, here in the Library. A whole series of tomes on the Gadrian Commonwealth disappeared, replaced by a quizzical book titled A Hole in Understanding: The Lack of Civilizations in the Bundra Expanse. A whole beautiful, peaceful civilization, representing a hundred billion people across a hundred star systems, replaced with a book with a rather pithy academic title, and then in the next moment it was back, as a military empire bathed in the blood of a hundred stars.
It had to stop. The Doctor reached into his bag, and pulled out a small egg-shaped device. He pressed on the top half of the surface. A twisting, warping ball, that wobbled, shifted and changed shapes flashed into existence above the egg. A closer look at the ball exposed that it was an infinite number of strands, tying around each other, intersecting and merging in a trillion impossibly complex ways. He took out a small stylus and very gingerly started to pull at the sphere, poking at it. Each motion caused the ball to change in fundamental ways, sometimes obvious sometimes slight always a change. This was how it had to be done.
He had to find sometime, somewhere some event or set of events that would give him his perfect result. It had to be small; that was the first mistake most made in these sorts of things. You can't take a sledgehammer to history; firstly because the Daleks or the Time Lords would notice, but secondly, because it would create shrapnel in the time lines, with all the unintended consequences. He had to find a set of small events, giving gentle pushes towards a shape that would stop the war, lead to peace, but every time he thought he was close, the whole thing would collapse and spasm into impossible shapes that resulted in either the war changing into something far worse, or resulted in him not existing or in the Daleks becoming the masters of the universe.
"Hello." A woman's voice breached the Doctor's concentration.
The Doctor looked up. There was a woman standing across the table from him. She had dark hair and eyes, overly a cute face with a genial smile and a sparkle in her eye. She was wearing a dress the top was dark, the skirt was red.
"Hello." The Doctor replied, almost coldly.
"What are you doing?" The girl asked, she took a seat on the other side of the table.
"You wouldn't understand." The Doctor said, brushing off the question as he gently poked the sphere, scrolled through the strands.
"Oh, it's just, it looks like a game, like the ones I've seen, like some kind of electronic pick-up sticks." The girl said with a level of pluck in her voice that achieved a grating tone. "I love games and puzzles. Maybe I could help you."
"No one can help me." The Doctor replied, drawing himself lower to try and put a barrier between him and the woman.
"Are you sure, you look frustrated, maybe a new set of eyes and I can help you to the next level?" The girl shifted her head returning to the Doctor's field of view, she was smiling pleasantly.
"I'm sure you can't help." The Doctor sighed, he looked up sharply trying to send and annoyed message to the girl who was having nothing of it. Her dark eyes twinkled. He narrowed his eyes. "If you could even understand this, you couldn't help me."
"It'd help if I knew what you were doing." The girl chirped happily.
"I'm trying to find a point in history to re-write, that will fix the current state of affairs." The Doctor said almost flippantly. "I'm using a quantum configuration simulator to see what tweaks in the shape of causality will result…and unfortunately I'm not being very successful. Do you think you can help?"
"Oh, that's an interesting machine. Very quaint." The woman said. The Doctor suddenly realized that she was next to him. The Doctor grumbled, looking over at her, in her dark top and red skirt. The dark hair fell over her shoulders. She smiled again and pointed to a strand that was highlighted by the Doctor. "What about that one there."
"Davros getting a balloon as he watches a Thal nuclear detonation over his city; isn't likely to change anything." The Doctor said dismissively.
"Are you sure?" The girl said, her voice was upbeat.
"I really don't think…" The Doctor turned in annoyance to look at the girl full-on. He looked at her, taking everything in. "You've not changed."
"Excuse me?" The girl said, looking in surprise.
"Everything in this library is changing, shifting as the war changes history. The books, the patrons, the paintings, even the lamp fixtures, everything is in flux, except for me and you." The Doctor said, as he quickly snatched up the simulator, shutting it off and pocketing in his green coat. "That can only mean you're what…a Time Lord, a Dalek agent? You're definitely part of the war, you're fixed in a superior temporal state that's for sure."
The young woman giggled lightly. "I'm not a Time Lord."
The Doctor slid the chair he was in, backing away from the girl, apprehensively.
"I'm not a Dalek agent either." The young woman laughed a bit at the reaction.
"Then who are you?" The Doctor growled, uncomfortable, looking around himself.
"I don't think I have a name, at least not one here." The girl said smiling. "Names are such an ephemeral thing anyways."
"I see." The Doctor said, relaxing slightly. "What do you want?"
"To see it for myself, one last time, Doctor." The young woman replied. "There are many who are hoping, but you're tired, and running out of options." The woman reached forward and clasped the Doctor's hand, cupping hers around his. "It must be so hard. The universe is falling apart, eternity is cracking around the seams, and you have to live in it. You are struggling so hard, so valiantly, but you've already come upon the solution haven't you?"
"I've run thousands of simulations, rendered thousands of configurations." The Doctor admitted, looking in the young woman's eyes. He took a deep breath and shook his head looking away from her. "There has to be another way."
"We've strode all of eternity, Doctor, searching for relief." The woman released the Doctor's hand and gently ran her hand through his hair. "There is only despair left. We have watched from afar, the brutality and the cruelty. The screams and nightmares of every ephemeral cry out to us. We can no longer bear this."
"Are you joining the fray then?" The Doctor asked, looking up at the woman. "I know you fought in the old times, you intervened in the blood wars. If the Eternals…"
"No, we won't fight." The woman said quietly. "The Eternals have decided to leave reality."
"Flee? You're going to run away?" The Doctor growled, pulling away from the woman's grasp. "You won't even bother!? I thought I was selfish, but at least I have been trying!"
"And you will end the war, save the universe, but you won't like it." The woman replied, sitting up. "In the end even the good man will go to war, in rage and disgust he will stride into combat and the universe will shake, when a good man goes to war."
"I will never fight." The Doctor retorted. "I won't fight. I help where I can; I'm trying to find another solution."
"Never say never, Doctor," The girl replied, and gave him a demur smile, "especially to an Eternal." The girl looked around her. "History can't take the stress."
"Help me." The Doctor said, he looked at her; his blue eyes pleaded to her. "I can't do this alone, everything I do…it's never enough, never seem to do any good, but if I have your help, with your new perspective."
"It's not my place." The girl replied, shaking her head.
"Then why did you come here!?" The Doctor snapped, standing up knocking his chair over. The woman stared at him nonplussed. He pointed at her. "Did you come to taunt me? Goad me into joining the ranks!?"
"I told you, I'm here to bear witness, to see it for myself." The woman stood up, and looked the Doctor in the eye. "I'm also here to give you the privilege of being the last ephemeral in the whole of the universe to see an Eternal." She reached forward and brushed her hand on the Doctor's cheek. "We're leaving, on this day. This day is the turning point, this day the universe screams in agony, and it doesn't stop, it only gets worse from here on out. Can you deny the wails of pain, Doctor? How long can you ignore it?"
The Doctor blinked and the woman was gone. He looked around himself. The shelves surrounding him were empty. He ran to the shelves, dusty as if they had never had books on them before at all. He ran to the end of the shelves and turned the corner. Row after row, the shelves were denuded, there was a tome here, a few books in a series there, but entire shelves were gone. The Doctor pulled out his simulator, and turned it on. His heart sank, he couldn't believe it. The sphere was now a ball of Swiss cheese, enormous holes ripped out of it with whipping tendrils of dead end time. He turned off the machine and jammed it back into his jacket pocket and ran. He had to get to his TARDIS, there were people dying, and they needed a Doctor.