Something was wrong.

The Doctor could feel it, an uncomfortable sensation in the back of his mind. An itch on the back of his hands. A burning sensation throughout his nervous system. Something was very wrong with time.

This wasn't the way things were supposed to go.

The Time Lords had minimized the influence of magic many centuries ago. The gods had been chained. Bound to a pact. Magic was confined to the shadows. This would be a world of mortals. Let science be the way forward. Liberate mortals. Let them make their own choices.

It was all very convenient.

The Time Lords were the masters of Science. It allowed them to be put in charge. It allowed their godhood, all with a thin veneer of "benevolence." Non-interference was their philosophy, a by-word, so that no individual could harm the Timeline they created for their chief benefit. A timeline where Gallifrey was at the top of the galactic hiearchary and the Time Lords at the top of Gallifrey.

Now, with the Time Lords gone the conditions of this pact had been made...flexible. The lords of hell had been first to act of the earthly divinities. Heaven responded. The earth was torn apart by warriors empowered by heaven and hell. Various other Pantheons responded, attempting to protect the lands and peoples they had been attached to. Magic became widespread and grew greatly in power. Humans became the universe's finest sorcerers, and alien militaries paid a king's ransom for an average Earth Mage's services.

The Doctor didn't believe any of this happened originally. It can't have. Hell, no matter how ambitious and desperate, could not have intervened elsewise. Ireland and Britain hadn't been taken over by the powers of the Otherworld, Sidhe and Gods. The middle east hadn't become a warzone between Hellbound cultists and the Abrahamic faithful. All the gods of America hadn't been aligned in a great pact to protect Earth from alien gods more dread than even the lords of Hell.

It wasn't all completely terrible. Many gods were generous, helpful and benevolent in ways that the Time Lords never were. Magic was a wonder. And Earth was, barring the antics of some cults, safe from alien invasion.

Still, Hell was a danger to all who did not swear fealty and most of those who did. Heaven would overlook, "excesses" in order to keep it's territries from being usurped by rival Pantheons and from Hell. The Sidhe and human cultures were vastly different, and often resulted in partnerships involving one party exploiting the other. No Pantheons had complete control of their followers and petty conflicts would flare up into massacres and fierce battles between forces who should have been allies.

The Doctor should be fixing this. As the last Time Lord, who else's responsibility could it possibly be? He should go back to the beginning. Stop Hell from breaking loose.

But he had no idea how to untangle this mess in a way that wouldn't result in another. Any kind of new, limited interference pact, if even possible, would result in the world falling into chaos. Restricing magic would result in the deaths of millions.

Plus the fact that no timeline correcting paradox or unraveling of time and space was occurring gave him pause. Maybe the Gods were meant to be active. Maybe Magic was meant to be in the open. It was just his selfish Time lord philosophy, his mind encoded with a Time Lord preferential timeline as its bias, that was making him feel so uncomfortable.

What if he created a worse paradox by interfering?

The Doctor didn't know. But he did know that, miraculously, he was alive and didn't have to regenerate. Rose was alive. Even Jack, who had gone off to die was alive. Fenrir had annihilated the entire Dalek fleet, all because Rose prayed for aid from anyone and found a "Bad Wolf" in the mood for a meal.

They were alive and intact.

The Doctor decided the world could live with this new status quo. He could live with the pain of the anomaly, the deviation from the Time Lord Timeline, until that pain faded as it would when it fully settled. Became the new normal.

He would just have to make the status quo better. Interfere, help out, fix little things all the time, big things when he could. Like he always did.

Gods help him.