Brother Gareth stood inside the control room of the TARDIS, and silently blessed the Lord-Friend Joshua as he beheld the power. Near to him were two figures, dancing to the subtle music of the TARDIS's engines: The beautiful woman Gareth knew as the Doctor, and the young boy, her son, Ian. Suddenly the TARDIS was still, both within and without. "We've landed!" Ian cried out, excitedly. None of them knew where or when they had materialised. The TARDIS, according to the Doctor, was on random. Ian ran over to the central console, kissed it, and said "Thank you."
"Ian and the TARDIS have a bond," the Doctor explained to Gareth as she stroked the TARDIS console and ruffled her son's hair. "The old girl's practically helped me raise him." Seeing and hearing her words, Gareth could not help smiling. The TARDIS was a machine...yet also so much more. "Now then," the Doctor said, flashing Gareth a grin, "Let's have a look at the scanner!" Gareth heard her words, but his mind kept replaying her grin, the glitter of her eyes that matched the soft gold of her hair...Remember your vows, he reminded himself as a window seemed to open on the wall of the TARDIS control room, displaying what lay outside the craft: A gray, rocky landscape, dotted with what looked like pine trees. Ground and trees were being lightly sprinked with a fine rain of snow.
When the three of them stepped outside, Gareth, in his robes, said "It is written in the holy scriptures that when the people of Mondas landed on the Fourteenth Planet, snow was falling. A new world to them...A new world to me now, thanks to you, Doctor...and you, Ian." At these words, the Doctor again blessed him with that golden smile of hers before shivering in the cool, sharp air and rubbing herself. Then, adressing both him and her son, she announced "Time to see a bit more of where the TARDIS has brought us. Doesn't feel like anywhere I've been before..."
"You've seen so much, haven't you?" Gareth asked as he walked along beside her through the rocky terrain, young Ian a few years ahead.
"No denying that," replied the Doctor, her hands in the pockets of her long coat. "Seen such wonderful things... and also things so horrible, you couldn't imagine them. From the formation of the first galaxies to the darkness after the last of them have gone. I've been called a saint...and a sinner."
"Perhaps," Gareth told her, "some of us have to be sinners before we can be saints."
"Mum, Gareth?" Ian's voice abruptly reached them. They saw the boy having halted on the path. "I suddenly have a bad feeling about this," Ian continued, not looking at either of them, frozen by a strange and deep terror. From around the base of the rock wall ahead appeared what seemed a machine of some kind, but which to the Doctor was sickeningly familiar: Bronze casing, the lower section decorated with half-spheres; the mid-section's front adorned with two mechanical arm-like appendages, one shorter than the other. From its' domed top sprouted a stalk terminating in a circle of blue light...an eye.
"Gareth," the Doctor whispered, "Remember I mentioned the horrors I've see in my travels? Well, this is one of them...A Dalek."