Soul's Shadow (Doctor Who - SI)

Part IV (XII)

The Master grinned at me, almost proudly, and my heart did some weird little jump.

The nasty words from the beast meant nothing. Maybe I was clinging to whomever paid me attention, but was that really wrong?

"Well..." The Master thumbed behind him at the devil, as if it was only some random bystander. "If the old thing there bothers us too much, we can at least get rid of it."

The beast roared in his chains. No, it was more like a desperate howl. "You can't! The planet would lose its orbit and fall into the hole!"

"Yeah... that's indeed a pity," the Master drawled uninterested. "Everyone out there would soooo miss this ugly rock." He gave me a cheeky wink. "Let's wait for a bit. As I know our annoying Doctor he'll come up with something to get us back to the surface. And it will be so stupid it actually works."

Surprisingly the devil stayed silent after that. All truths or lies didn't help him now. No matter what he did, we always had the option to simply leave. One way or the other.

The Master continued to study the images and the untranslatable letters on the stone walls. There wasn't much to see, actually, but the images were clear enough, even without understanding the text. Deciphering the message hadn't been hard... if it weren't for the constant distraction the beast had used.

What a clever tactic. For most people it would have worked.

At some point I undressed the space suit, feeling way too hot inside the thing. And since we could breath here anyway, it wasn't worth the risk of having my circulation collapse on me. Heat had never been my favourite temperature.

I wondered how long we would have to wait. And for what exactly. The Master's trust in the Doctor was weird, but then again it seemed as if they had fought each other often enough to know the other Time Lord somehow always emerged with something to gain the upper hand. Like it was an ancient game. One building traps, the other one developing unforeseeable ways to get around them.

The beast paced up and down inside the lava, slowly drawing circles within his tiny realm. Trapped here for centuries he surely must already have gone mad from boredom. For a while I watched, wondering what exactly he might be.

"Are you?" I muttered eventually, sitting down on a rock near the lava.

The beast stopped and his dark eyes wandered over me.

"The devil, I mean," I elaborated. "The true one."

"I am," he simply stated. "Whatever your planet holds true as evil, I am."

Puzzled I blinked, tilting my head. "I don't think I get it," was all I admitted. "How can you be, when they have trapped you here 'before time'?"

The beast only chuckled in his low voice, continuing to pace. He truly seemed afraid we could destroy the seal. So, fear was something he was able to feel. Or maybe just an abstract version of it. It made me wonder if he also had spoken the truth when he had claimed not to ever feel lonely.

He stopped just as the thought had crossed my mind, eyes resting upon me. I swallowed and glared back, feeling less and less uncomfortable doing so. The longer I looked at the horrifying face, the more it lost its horror.

"You can't leave," I concluded. "Destroying the urns would release your body, but would destroy the force field. The moment your body gets freed, you'll be sucked into the black hole." A dark stare was my only answer. "So... you try and escape your mind instead. Implant it into another person, who will then take it away from here. That's the only way to escape, right?"

"Now, that took you long," the Master mocked and stepped next to me. He shook his head with an amused look. "Seriously, why do you pity that thing? You've got nothing to do or what?" He laughed. "Okay, okay, you don't... but still. A monster like that doesn't deserve any compassion."