All of Us Sinners (Doctor Who)

Dancing and Death

Once, on the side of a mountain on the planet Gallifrey, a young Renan had found himself (yes, Renan was born a boy but regenerated into a woman later) lost in waves of red grass and silver-leafed trees. As the young boy realized he was lost, he started to run in the direction he thought his home was. After his direction proved to be wrong, the child sat down and cried in despair.

Oh, how young Renan wished he had stayed nearby like he was told. For what felt like hours, the boy sat on a golden rock, wailing for his mother. Finally, the black haired woman made her way up the mountain, finding her third youngest weeping almost at the tip of the snow covered peak.

After the incident, Renan mapped out the area on the mountain, created markings on trees to guide himself home, and learned the directions that the suns rose and set, and the two moons of Gallifrey. Even as he matured into a young man, old enough to go to the Academy, he kept the way home close to his hearts. The Gallifreyan wastelands were a bit harder to navigate, but when she, no longer called her parents given name of Renan but now called Orestes, tried to escape and go back home, she almost did it.

After being captured and brought to the Capitol and before the Council, she cried for her mother, begging them to just let her go home. The men and women in their red robes just stared at the girl, pleading with them to send for her mother. Through her tears, Orestes told them of how she had heard something tell her that her mother was in trouble and she needed to go home.

Without alerting the girl of their actions, they did send for a check of the girl's family. The Council was astonished to find that Orestes' mother had been forced to regenerate due to complications in childbirth. The group decided to keep the girl around, to see what else she would say.

After months of questions from the Council and answers from the emotionally empty girl, they made a decision. On the seventh day of the third month, the Council decided the girl was of more use staying in the Capitol than returning to the Academy. She was given true Time Lord status, and with that, her final name. A woman stepped forward to the girl and bestowed a title upon her. Where many other fresh Time Lords chose their own titles, she was not given such power. The woman declared her The Prophet.

After that day, the girl was paraded around, the Council demanding answers about the coming days, time and the consequences of interference, the fate of Gallifrey itself. The girl was tortured when she did not give an answer, as if punishing her would strengthen the bond she had with the Time Vortex.

In some ways, it did. Instead of the occasional whisper or warning, the Vortex spoke to her constantly, muttering in rambles, questions, and split lines of prophecy. She would occasionally see glimpses of the future: a broken window on the side of a house finally giving up and falling to the ground, a child under a blue sky tripping and scraping their knee, a field of pressed down flowers under a dark night sky, the edge of a picnic blanket nearby.

As she matured into true Time Lord adulthood, things only continued to evolve until one day, she stood before the Council to tell them of the whispering of the Vortex that sang of the destruction of Gallifrey. The prophecy poured out of her in the form of Old High Gallifreyan, the musical language practically a shriek with the force that came from the Vortex through her. The girl was left sobbing at the end, wishing she could curl up and be left alone on the floor for a while.

Instead, the Prophet was dragged out of the Council chambers and thrown into a prison in Arcadia that reduced her innate Time Lord ability to withstand centuries passing without aging much to a mere fraction of what it should have been. The girl watched as her dark eyes and long dark hair had the color and the life drained out of them. She watched lines appear on her face that she had no experience to have earned them from. All while these things happened, the child inside cried for their mother, begging for her to come find them and take them home to be safe within the mapped world of the mountain they grew up on.