The next day, Clara sat on the stairs, holding her 101 Places To See book in her arms. The TARDIS materialised outside, and she grinned.
***
"So we're moving through actual time?" she asked later, once they'd returned to the vortex. "What's it made of, time?"
McKenzie raised her eyebrows, surprised. "Adding that to the list of questions no one's come out with before."
Clara rolled her eyes. "I mean, if you can just rotor through it, it's got to be made of stuff, like jam's made of strawberries. So what's it made of?"
"Well, not strawberries," the Doctor assured her very seriously. "No, no, no, that would be unacceptable."
"But tasty," Wanda added.
"And we can go anywhere?" Clara checked.
"Within reason," McKenzie replied, then tilted her head, rethinking. "Well, I say reason..."
"So we could go backwards in time?"
"And space, yes," the Doctor confirmed.
"And forwards in time?"
"And space, totally," he grinned.
"So where do you want to go?" Wanda asked. "What do you want to see?"
Clara stared, her eyes wide. "I don't know," she realised. "You know when someone asks you what's your favourite book and straight away you forget every single book you've ever read?"
McKenzie groaned sympathetically. "All the time."
Simultaneously, the Doctor made a face. "No. Totally not."
"Well, that's a thing that happens," Clara told him.
Wanda raised her eyebrows. "So? Back to the question?"
Clara nodded. "Okay, so, so, so I'd like to see... I would like to see... What I would like to see is..." Her eyes lit up with an idea, and she turned back to face them. "Something awesome."
The Doctor snapped his fingers, getting to work.
***
The TARDIS landed on a rocky ledge looking out onto an asteroid belt. The Doctor guided Clara and Wanda out with their eyes closed, McKenzie closing the doors behind them.
"Can you feel the light on your eyelids?" the Doctor checked. "That is the light of an alien sun. Forward a couple of steps. Okay. Are you ready?"
"Yes," Clara answered, then changed her mind. "No. Yes."
McKenzie smiled, putting her arm around Wanda's shoulders. "Welcome to the Rings of Akhaten."
The girls opened their eyes, their jaws dropping as they saw the star system before them. "It's..." Wanda trailed off, shaking her head in wonder.
The Doctor grinned. "It is. It so completely is. But wait, there is more."
"More what?" Clara wondered.
"Wait, wait, wait." He glanced across at McKenzie's wristwatch. "In about five, four, three, two..."
The asteroids' orbit revealed a gleaming golden pyramid closer to the sun.
Clara gasped at the beauty of it. "What is it?"
"The Pyramid of the Rings of Akhaten," McKenzie introduced them. "It's a holy site for the Sun Singers of Akhat."
Wanda blinked. "The who of what?"
"Seven worlds orbiting the same star, all of them sharing a belief that life in the universe originated here, on that planet," McKenzie explained.
YOU ARE READING
One Last Chance |6| The Ascension
Science Fiction✅ approx. 215,000 words After the horrors of the war against Thanos, the Doctor and McKenzie are finally together again, albeit missing a limb. But that isn't the only thing they are bereft of. The death of their son cut them to the core and they wi...
