Curios

888

"Bring the next one forward!" the cardinal shouted as the young girl, eight years old, cried and was led away by one of the lesser deans of the academy.

The cardinal was ancient, even for his species, in fact no one could think of a time when he wasn't cardinal. The rumors were he was one of the trinity who brought an end to the ancient Pythians. Who had fought and led the rebellion across the Deserts of Sangridor and had released the prisoners of the Death Zone. Another rumor was that the Cardinal was the one to end the war between the Carrionites and the Eternals. A third rumor was he was the one that the ancient lost Minyans worshipped as god, that it was he who had brought the nuclear wrath to them and that his penance was to officiate the viewing for the rest of eternity never being allowed the sanctity of death.

Everything on the cardinal was ancient even his ceremonial robes who had inscriptions and sigils that were only known to a few who could not only read but comprehend ancient High Gallifreyan with the dialects of the ancient monarchal mystics who had ruled in the times of blood and fire. Even his high-necked frill was so ancient and eroded that only a webbing of the original was still visible.

The young boy stared up at the surrounding Lords of Time. Ancient, august, their stony faces looked down to him with stoic judgment. His class was well known as being the most unruly that his college had had in millennia. Many believed them to be a disgrace to the name, to the idea of Time Lord. He gulped quietly as he was pushed, gently at first and then forcefully, forward. His feet scraped through the freezing desert sands. He looked up at the sky to the moon glowing in the pitch. The rays of the reflected light of two stars splintering through the transduction barriers and bouncing off the icy mountain tops of Solace and Solitude creating magical flints of silver-tinted spectral bows against the mists of the mountains. He looked back and in the crook of the two mountains he could barely see the mighty citadel encased in an impenetrable dome. It had stood like that for millions of years, and before that the city was protected for billions of years by the ancient charms and unpronounceable chants of the Pythian witches and clerics who wound their magics in the blood of sacrifice and in the smoke of herbal fires who sailed across the vortex using their inherit powers to create an ancient empire across the stars. He turned his head back forward to the coming ceremony, a cold night breeze swept through the procession. He closed his eyes as he was pushed and thought of his times up on the slopes of the mountains, of the smell of red grasses wafting up from the valleys below, of the sound of rustling silver-leafed trees swaying with the breeze as two suns glistened in the morning creating golden-red skies. He opened his eyes.

He walked slowly between the lines of his teachers, of his older peers dressed in their finest regalia. Fire-tipped torches lined the path as they walked closure to their destination. He could make out the opening in the crowd that would encircle the place where the ritual would take place. The boy gulped and looked up at the two who led him down the path. His closest teachers. On his right was an old man, with a white, craggy face, the other was an elderly tan woman with long, sparse, silken hair cast in the shades of white that reminded the young child of an ancient glacier with gray veins of soil cutting along its length.

They both gave the lad a smile. Both smiles were encouraging, both were smiles that beneath their surfaces were more insistent than warm. The boy looked ahead to see the rows of attendants widen, opening into wide circle of sand and fire. The ceremony was a remnant of those ancient days when mad women half-intoxicated by the burning of ancient herbs and the imbibing of alkaloid drinks would scry as they stared into the depths of reality and the depths of reality would glare into them.

The two Time Lords behind the boy stopped walking as the boy proceeded forward into the middle of the ring. The two of them turned and bowed in reverence of the ancient cardinal who stood next to a pair of torches that burned bigger and brighter than the others leading up to it. These torches were the final barrier to the dais behind and the giant portcullis that stood upon it.

The child gulped as he looked up to the ancient cardinal. The cardinal looked down at him. The two locked eyes and as the boy looked into the cardinal's eyes he could feel the weight of it, the sheer unmitigated mass of history that had passed through the old man's pupils. The connection broke as the old man lifted his head to the dark skies above. His face was ancient, so ancient that even if you had said that it was wizen that would only barely touched the edges of it. It's dark skin and craggy features clung to the cliff-face that was his skull. His eyes were huge, owl-like, with cold, steel irises. His nose was something predatory, sharp, dangerous. His hair, what was visible from under his frayed, formally crimson skull-cap, was thin, and purest white. He was tall, and towered over the boy, his crimson robes seemed to flow independent of whatever body was entrenched inside.

The cardinal lifted his long arms, his long, aged fingers curled around a staff that was carved into some creature unfamiliar to the boy, or to any other living thing in reality. He chanted something; something that had been chanted so many times and for so many years that the chant itself had become its own living thing that wafted into the darkness to live and die in the wilds of the cool of the night. The words of the chant were so long lost to history that even chanter who had seen so much of history only knew the words themselves and not their meaning, or their context. The cardinal then lowered his arms and looked down once more to the boy. His gaze crushed down upon the boy with the force of thousands of galaxies. The boy winced slightly as he felt the weight the ancient cardinal's gaze, the gazes of the surrounding Time Lords and their judgment of him were trifling in comparison to this one man's sheer force of experience.

The ancient man then turned looking out to the attendants. The cardinal called outward. The boy turned and looked as he heard his name spoke to the attending quorum of Time Lords. Somewhere out there was his family. His cousins, his sisters and brothers, his parents. They wouldn't have missed this. Not after all the struggles they'd gone through to see him get into the academy. The boy strained to see out but the light from the fire turned the attendants into nothing but shadows, nondescript forms flitting in the dancing flames. For now, the only two people in the universe were himself and the ancient cardinal.

The cardinal turned to the boy. He gulped slightly as the cardinal swept one arm forward, inviting the child to take the next step onto the dais, to stand before the portcullis to look into the halls of eternity. The boy was hesitant, worried; he had heard the stories. The older boys and girls had whispered the secrets of the ceremony the terrors that they were to behold. The scolding from teachers for those who are failed to appreciate what was seen. The boy was afraid, he was never the best student, what if he failed to understand the point of it, what if he didn't see anything, or worse yet what if he did see something. His tiny body shuddered within his drab black robes, his muscles shivered anxious to act either to fight something or run away.

"Step forward, young one." the cardinal said, his voice was crackly, like the clicking and clacking of old branches that sprouted from the timeless trees of his family's estate. "Survey that, which one day you will be lord over…"

The boy looked surreptitiously to the old cardinal and then forward. He stepped upwards onto the dais and continued on the crimson carpet that lead to the giant portcullis that was set up in the middle of the desert. The frame of the portcullis was embossed in gold with ancient High Gallifreyan twisting and swirling around its surface spelling out some long lost message to those who could read it. His sight orbited the outer fringe of the portcullis for a few minutes before he took the final step forward and looked into it. He gasped slightly as he watched the twisting spinning forces of the universe spread out in front of him. His eyes flashed back and forth as he saw the vast expanses of time and space laid bare in front of him, his gaze flitting from world to world, from galaxy to galaxy, from one universe to another. With a few seconds time he found he could control the view, and he focused in on worlds across the vast expanse. He could see alien birds twisting above the alien sands next to an alien sea. He could watch the motion of the universe the beautiful explosions of ancient stars, the emergence of microscopic life, the whole of it. Beautiful animals, plants, fungi were displayed in front of him, an endless menagerie of diversity and beauty and weirdness. Ancient libraries and museums detailing every instance of a world's history, the displays of the greatest artists in all of reality creating in every medium imaginable from simplistic charcoal-tipped sticks and rock canvasses to hyperspatial filaments and stellar constellations. He saw cities of song and people of smoke, he saw the dreams of a billion worlds.

A smile spread across his face as he saw it all, and desired it all. He wanted to go to everywhere and see everything. He wanted…

The view changed, it spiraled out of his control. The images twisted the idyllic pictures curled and flames erupted around them. Flames that roared upwards and outwards and he tried to take a step back but the images transfixed him as he watched ships exploding, and tanks rolling across the ground. He could hear people screaming for help in billions of dialects. He could hear explosions and the sound of laser fire. He could see even his own people, the ancient cardinal running in fear. There was an encroaching darkness and then he could hear the metallic screams.

"EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"

The boy twisted away from the portcullis, throwing himself onto the ground. He had to get away. He scrambled to his feet. He could feel the weight of his teachers' hands grasping at him. He wasn't going to go back to it, he wasn't going to look. He kicked and somehow escaped their grasp. He ran, pushed through the robes and bodies of Time Lords that encircled the portcullis. He erupted out of the throng and into the cold desert night, and he kept running. He was sure they were after him and he kept running. He ran and he ran until the fires of the ceremony were a long distant memory and that all that remained were the silvery moonbeams. He kept running; the screams of the terrified, the screams of war and hatred rang in his head. He closed his eyes only to see the twisted forms of death and destruction pouring out portcullis.

At some point he fell and rolled down into a small pit or gully. He curled up at the bottom of the gully, hugging his knees. Who would want to be lord over that? Why would anyone show that to a child? What was the lesson to be learned from that?

He felt the tears welling up. He hadn't cried since he had been taken into the citadel to start at the academy, but he couldn't stop the tears now. They streamed down his face hot and fierce. He took frantic gasps and his entire body shook as he sobbed into his arms. The monsters he'd seen the brutality, the savagery, he could never go back. He had cried for some time, he wasn't even sure how long, when he'd heard the footsteps. He curled up even tighter when he heard the sound of someone dropping down into the gully next to him.

"I finally found you." the voice said. The boy recognized the voice as belonging to his older brother. The boy swallowed a lump in his throat and looked up to see the taller boy who looked to be a teenager with scruffy brown hair. He was wearing a long, red robe with a golden rope-belt around his waist. The teenager looked around and found a rock where he sat for a bit. The teen leaned back and looked upwards. The boy looked up and saw fingers of orange-purple of the first sunrise. The boy looked back down to his brother to find the teenager looking at him with greenish eyes. "So, do you want to talk about it?"

The boy just curled up tighter in the little ball he had formed of himself.

"The others are looking for you." the boy's brother said quietly. "They're worried you'll encounter some wild animal and get eaten up."

The teenager slipped his hand into his robe and pulled out a small thermos. He opened the top and poured a liquid into the cap and took a long sip of the contents. The teen offered the cap to the boy but the boy simply shrugged away from the offer. The teen shrugged and took another long draw from the cap, apparently finishing it. He screwed the top back onto the thermos and slipped it back into his robes. The teenager then looked back up into the sky. The long distant song of birds signified the morning chorus's beginning.

"It's pretty intense." The teenager said quietly. "Trust me I know. No one is prepared for what they see in the schism. I can assure you none of us, not even the greatest of Time Lords has gone through it without shitting their pants in one way or another. Some break down in tears right then and there, some go absolutely mad, some have to be led away after going into a catatonic state, the smart ones though, run the hell away."

The boy looked up at his brother. "I…I…couldn't help it, I saw them….the monsters, I saw them in our streets, I saw them murdering our families…I saw so many worlds ablaze and the fires….I saw the death and the destruction…"

"Yeah, there's that." the teenager said, putting his hands behind him and balancing them on the rock as he leaned back. "There's a lot of that. The universe is a terrible place. The Spiral Politque is terrifying and the Great Houses hide most of it, but you saw the other side of it too, right?"

The boy sniffled slightly and rubbed his blood shot eyes with the sleeve of his dark robes. "It started out so…beautiful, so dynamic and exciting…I wanted to see all of it."

"Then do that." the teen said quietly. "Go out there and look at all of that. You know, just because the rest of the universe is a shithole doesn't mean you have to accept that all of it is. You're going to be a Time Lord for Omega's sake; do something with that."

The boy gasped slightly. From the moment that they entered the academy, it was drilled into them that Time Lords don't go out into the universe they only watch it.

"But…but…" the boy started, starting to unfurl from his ball. "It's not…it's not allowed…"

"Says who? Some old duffers in dusty cloaks…they won't be around forever…" the teen said standing up and walking over to the boy. "Remember all those stories about Salayavin? Imagine that! Only you know without the robbery and piracy. You're brave, I've seen you face bullies twice your size!"

"But…but I ran away from the schism…" the boy whispered, looking away from his brother.

The teen laughed and punched the boy lightly in the shoulder. "Look, being brave, that doesn't mean you aren't scared…it means being scared and doing what you're supposed to. When confronted with what you saw the right thing to do was run away. To give you time to figure out how to fix the problem. Any sane person would have run away. The one's that survive to make a difference aren't the ones crippled by the visions, aren't the ones that go doo-lally at them, aren't the ones that fall on their knees weeping, the ones that make a difference run away from it and come back with a plan to fight it. What you did wasn't wrong, what you did was the right response, was the sane response. You're the only one in your class to run, the others either looked and went mad or fell on their knees completely consumed by it."

"I…I am so embarrassed." the boy said quietly.

"Don't be, you know what I did when it was my turn?" the teen asked quietly. The boy shook his head, looking up at his brother. "I cried…I saw all of those beautiful things, those pieces of art, those ancient texts, the curios and the artifacts destroyed and all I could do was cry. It was such a waste. I didn't have the strength to break away from it, to run…I just…watched in tears, they had to lead me away."

"I mean I'll never get into pilot's school though my grades…" the boy said quietly.

"Shh, now, jeesh you got a few years before that." the teenager said, ruffling the boy's head. "Look, there's an old guy in your school, I think his name's Borusa or something, see if you can't get an apprenticeship with him. He's tough but I've heard he's quite good and very connected, if anyone can get you back on the right path it's him." The teenager got up and turned to his little brother and extended a hand. "But first we need to get you back to the citadel. The others are probably going absolutely mental, usually when they get a runner they find them a few meters from the ceremony grounds…you realize you ran for like five miles? No wonder they couldn't find you!" The teen smiled as his littler brother's hand enclosed around his. "Not only do you run, but you never stop….that's a strength…you remember that."

The boy smiled as his older brother helped him out of the gully and onto the plains that surrounded them. The grass twirled around them in rivulets of red grain that swished. There was a hover car parked not far away and the teen led the boy to it. The boy got into the passenger seat, his brother behind the wheel. The engine whirred quietly to life.

"If, if I do go out there, I want to save it all…" whispered the boy. He looked to his brother.

"Just remember, never be cruel or cowardly, never give up, never give in." the teenager said as he reached over and ruffled the boy's head again. "Even if you have to run away, remember it's only so you can come back with a plan to fight back. Got it?" The teenager reached into his robe and pulled out a small cube. "I plan on saving all the universe's great treasures. I'm going to create a huge museum for all those things lost to history, so that one day we can restore them, but for now, all I can do is save them in these stasis cubes." The teenager put the cube in the boy's hand. "Here, take this one, maybe one day you'll find something to save with it, so that one day you can restore it."

The boy smiled brightly as he looked at the crystal cube. The hover car lifted off of the ground, and slowly it turned and started to go back to the citadel.

888

The curator looked out into the darkness of the space. It had been here once. The museum, the greatest collection of artifacts ever known to the universe, had once occupied this point in space and time. A Time Lord museum, vast and impossible on the inside, but a simple asteroid on the outside. Even it had fallen in the end, lost in some minor skirmish with the Daleks or some other foible of the Time War, his memory was fuzzy. He winced slightly as he pressed his hand on the small of his back.

He was truly ancient now. Long past his prime, long past his point of no return. He looked away from the monitor and into a mirror, his face was saggy, his nose was still prominent though, but then again, he always had liked that nose, it was clearly an improvement at least. His hair was like a tight curling pile of snow on the top of his head, his eyes were glacial lake blue.

His sources had led him to this location, to these coordinates. No matter what he thought he had to try. He'd always thought Irving was mildly insane. Many of the best Time Lords were. But if ever there was a chance that that ancient painting he was looking for was to have somehow survived the Time War, it was going to be in the Braxietal Collection, safe beyond the normal bindings of time and space. The question was the museum was always known to have been lost, but not necessarily destroyed.

"And if I know him…then…" the curator grunted as he pulled at a level and trundled around the console of the ship. With one hand his arthritic fingers fumbled through buttons and switches and dials with the other hand he counterbalanced with a cane. He looked up at the monitor as he watched the temporal phase shift and an asteroid wobbled into existence. A large toothy grin spread across the curator's face. "Hiding in plain sight…the Daleks thought it destroyed…and it was just…pinched slightly to the left of reality…clever, he was always clever…"

The curator made out the landing plan and did his final environmental checks. He walked away from the ship's console toward the door, walking past a small hat rack with a tweed jacket hanging off of it. He snagged it with one hand and slipped into it awkwardly. After he rustled into his jacket he pressed forward against the door which creaked open with a decidedly wooden tone. He stepped outward onto the landing pad, and turned pulling the door with blue, wooden panels closed behind him and locking it. He shivered slightly as the cold of the place swept around him. He tapped his cane testing the artificial gravity, smirking at the fact it still functioned. He slowly walked forward and came to a pair of giant doors, which opened slowly of their own accord. Beyond the doors was one person and old man with a grayed moustache. He wore old robes, with gold frilling on the seams and leafy embroidery all over it.

The curator walked up to the old man. "I've found you, finally, you know what that means."

"So it's come to that?" the old man said.

"I had some stasis cubes given to a Zygon contingent not too long ago. Now it is only a question of waiting for the Zygons to make their move." the curator said with a smile. "Did you ever think that that cube would end up doing what it would?"

"Brother, I told you on that day that I wanted to save all those things lost to history and restore them to the universe when it came time." the old man said quietly with a smile. "What prouder moment can I have, than restore the greatest, most beautiful world in the Spiral Politique to its prominence in the sky? I defied reality escaping the end, just like you did, Doctor. All for an insane plan to save Gallifrey and restore the Time Lords. Now, I think I have that painting you're looking for…what was it called?"

"Gallifrey Falls No More." The old curating Doctor in a dulcimer tone with a grand impossible smile as his older brother slapped him on the back and lead him laughing into the collection.

"Ah yes, I think you'll find the story behind it the most curious of circumstances." Irving Braxietal said quietly with a broad smile matching his brother's.