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They changed the food in her cage each morning, but it went untouched.

She sat rapt in her contemplation of the Sphinx's eye in her hand. A dead, jellied thing through which she stared like a window on Eternity. Her arm stretched through its depths to clasp at what was lost.

Vael, her chosen one, was trapped in some closed nightmare prison beyond the bounds of reality. He fought against her call with his thoughts like a caged animal, but he could not resist one so ancient and wise as she. There would be ways to bring him back to heel.

The eye in her hand returned the powers she had lost. She sought through the depths of Eternity for other wisdoms she knew. But across the Universe, the voices of truth were falling silent.

The Sphinx of Thule was murdered. The Logistomancer of A32K, foreseer of that cold empire of logic for ten thousand years, was in her final systems dotage with no sign of a successor program.

Time was growing murky. Seeing was no longer an easy gift. From the nest-worlds of Klanti came rumours that the Core Sybilline had succumbed to a male and her power was diminished. The Pythia still caught distant thoughts from Sosostris in the West Spiral, but they were mordant and cloudy. The voice from the North Constellations of The-Nameless-That-Sees-All was silent.

The Pythia foresaw a point when there might be no more seers. The web of thought that linked the augurers and oracles of the Universe was broken. The veil of Time would no longer be pierced by thought, it would have to be physically travelled. She had foreseen that long ago. Why else had she instigated the Time program? Her powers, branded as superstition by the faithless, were drawing to an end. The Universe would become an empty and desolate place. She would soon be a lone voice.

That is what the eye of the Sphinx showed her. But such visions could be clouded or misunderstood. She reached for Vael's mind again. Vael held keys that would unlock the future.

In the darkness where Vael was trapped, she had touched another mind as well. It was a mind of great power, a mind beyond the strictures of Time. In that briefest encounter, she had immediately recognized an equal. She would find this mind again and consult its wisdom, just as the mighty had once come to consult her. For she must know the future.

But in that mind she had also glimpsed thoughts that chilled her. It claimed to be born of Gallifrey. But she was Gallifrey, knowledge and life. How could she not know this mind already? Unless . . . unless it had yet to be born.

And in this complex, bewildering mind, she had also glimpsed the name of Rassilon.

Above all things, she feared that name.

She must know the future.

In the empty void beyond Time, she found Vael again. He no longer resisted, but his thoughts were dull and confused. The Pythia could no longer see, but she must know. Her luck was cursed. Only the Sphinx could see truly, so she must have the Sphinx's sight.

The formal assembly of one hundred councillors, who sat in the cavern below, watching her cage, awaiting her death, were deafened by the Pythia's scream. Clinging to the wicker of her cage, she gouged out her own eye and inserted the eye of the Sphinx in its place.

There was a new moon in the sky. Slowly rising to its zenith through nebulae of flowing dust. A smoking caldera, surrounded by ruined buildings, marked its birthplace on the world below. The moon glowed from within, seeming to the Pythia like a luminous skull. When it had reached the centre of the sky, she saw that it would begin its descent like a slow comet on the squat, black, fortified structure that lay in its path.

This was not what the Doctor had in mind. If he was going to be in at the Beginning, he should not be dangling upside down like a cocooned fly in an iron spider's web.

Vael was dangling in a cocoon next to him, pretending to be unconscious. Around them, the machinery of the Watch Tower clanked and spun with a vicious alacrity. The sort of thing Brunel would have appreciated.

Directly overhead, the new moon would be moving