The Aeon of the Time Lords (Book Two - the Double Era Series)

Chapter Ten

Suddenly, the screen fizzed out for a second.

"No! No!" the Doctor exclaimed, hitting the side of it. The screen was no longer fizzing, but it had changed entirely what they were watching.

There, gazing up at a blue void, was a different girl entirely. While the first had been somewhat aged and greying, this new girl was young. Her eyes were green instead of greyish blue now and strawberry blonde curls bobbed around her round face. This too, was a regeneration of me... This being my second. As he looked at the blue she stayed so intensely fixated on, the faint sound of feet hitting the ground slowly increased.

"The vortex, of course," he breathed, "She somehow came upon the vortex."

"Someone's running," I relaid what I heard, "Someone's running on the other side of this vortex. We have to help him, Master! He's running from something! What is he running from?"

"You," a voice he never thought he'd hear again stated, "He's running from you and what you've done."

"But... I didn't do anything!" I exclaimed, turning over my shoulder to look at someone I could only guess was the Master. The Doctor wasn't able to see his face in the dream, but he knew it all to well, anyway.

"There was a prophecy," the Master pressed, "That the Ood told you about this man... What did it say? Who is running from you, Lady Aeon. Who is running from you?"

"The Prophecy warned me of the numberless Lord," I whispered, forcing myself to remember, "A doctor among the people. The Doctor Chr..." At this point, the Doctor had seen enough. He knew it was dangerous for me to hold this kind of information. He knew I was having trouble remembering what I was trying to say now, but I'd had to long to find that much of this prophecy I explained. It was not the prophecy itself he was worried about. Those things proved to be flukes about half the time. He was worried about what the prophecy revealed. He turned to the Time Lord sleeping soundly and frowned. To protect the universe, he had to stop me from ever searching through the remaining parts of my brain for that information. For years, I must have spoken in my sleep, but not just because that's just how I worked, no... I was rewinding and replaying past events. I was re-observing and recalculating. It was, of course, sub-conscience, but that only proved to make it worse. He had to stop the process, now.

Kneeling beside me, he placed his finger-tips on each side of my temple, trying to erase that little piece of information. As it turned out, though, he could not successfully remove the memory of the prophecy, because it followed me everywhere. He suddenly realised there was only one way to rid of the memory.

He had to steal from me almost every thing I'd ever remembered about Time Lords and space and time travel. He had to get to transfer the memories and put them away were they would do less harm. Fortunately, he wasn't directly attached to my memories, but still enough that I couldn't remember our first encounter, our first travels through time and space in his big blue box. I'd be fine to go back inside, again... But only after he met me.

"Doctor! No!" my eyes suddenly jolted open, registering to the suddenly vaporising memories, my dreams being interrupted, since they'd mostly been made up of previous events, "Doctor! It'll kill me! Doctor!"

"You'll regenerate," he soothed, continuing his work. What I said was true. My brain began shutting down at the sudden loss, trying to protect itself from further interference. He removed the last of the memories and started putting a message in my head for when I had finished regenerating. My systems were failing and a voice in the back of my head screamed,

"Regenerate! Regenerate!" I didn't want this. I knew if I regenerated now, I'd have to let go of the memories he'd stolen from me. I had to decide now, because when I was done cooking, he'd have successfully taken every bit of Time Lord left in me. I'd be an echo of a Time Lord, then. An echo of a far greater something I was one of the last of.

Was it better to die a Time Lord or to live a lie?

"I'm sorry," he whispered, spreading the last of the message though my head. That's when I realised it. This was how I would pay for my crimes against my people. This was going to be the last revenge of the Time Lords, all along. I would be forgotten, just as they would be.

We would all died with Lord Doctor.

"Doctor," I whimpered. Just as I entered the state of regeneration, four words flew into my thought process.

Aeon. Ruler. Human. Fifteen.

~The End~