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By Root 531 0

grey palace, which at first she took to be like the palace of Catherine herself. It was a truly enormous building, surrounded on all sides by the broken city streets, as if the whole construction had been dropped into the landscape from a great height. Indeed, there were certainty enough huge, jagged cracks in the cobbles. The gateway to the palace was wide, like a mouth into the underworld, although there were no sentries to guard it: and the other buildings in the vicinity seemed to collapse towards the site, as if their walls were falling before it, bowing in reverence. The palace had a tower constructed at each corner, spires which later witnesses felt sure were supposed to be silver, but which (like everything else in the realm) had come to blank greyness. Against the blue sky the towers looked as black as soot, and the most central part of the building had fallen into such disrepair that the elaborate carvings had been scraped away so that none of the faces could be seen. There were no apes when Katya arrived there, no sounds of hooting from the streets. This was a part of the Kingdom which the animals had yet to deface.

As it’s described in Scarlette’s journal, it was almost like one of the ruined temples of the Mayakai. But Katya herself maintained that as alien as it was, the building somehow reminded her of the House on Henrietta Street… or at least, the House as it had been after the arrival of the Doctor. Not in its appearance, perhaps, yet she felt they somehow ‘shared the same blood’.

Katya seems to have spent some time at the gateway of the palace, reluctant to enter but equally reluctant to explore the rest of the fetid city. It was some time after her arrival, though nobody can say exactly how long, that she became aware of a noise from one of the ruined streets nearby. At first. Katya panicked, concealing herself behind one of the palace’s massive stone towers, before she realised that the figure approaching her was quite human.

Juliette had arrived at the palace. Juliette, with the red hangman’s marks around her neck, dressed in the same ceremonial black gown in which her failed execution had taken place. Surely, though, Katya must have been as alarmed by the girl as by any ape. She came dragging a body over the broken cobbles, a prone form ‘nearly twice her size and weight’. Katya soon realised that it was the body of the Doctor.

Finally, with her face covered in sweat and her black dress clinging to her body Juliette looked up and noticed that she wasn’t alone. The tension in the air must have been appalling, as Juliette and Katya faced each other across the ruins. They had never really seen eye to eye, but now… Katya must have eyed up the body of the Doctor, and wondered what Juliette had done to him.

Juliette uttered a single sentence, to break the silence which followed. She said: ‘This is where he belongs, I’m sure.’

Katya said nothing, according to her later testimony. If Juliette was unnerved by this then she had no opportunity to say so, because at that point the Doctor attempted to speak. Flat on his back in the middle of the palace’s ‘courtyard’, he said something Katya couldn’t identify. Both Katya and Juliette moved in closer to him as his lips moved again.

The Doctor slowly opened his eyes, though he looked straight through the two women who anxiously hovered above him. He looked up at the looming, darkened mass of the curious palace, at its black towers set against the bright sky. The only word he managed to say, as he looked up at the haunted palace, was:

‘Home.’

During his time at Henrietta Street, the Doctor had often spoken of other worlds and other elemental realms. There was a definite similarity between this palace and the otherworldly spires he described in some of his more distracted, absent-minded moments. It was always Scarlette’s belief that the home of the elementals had long since been destroyed, but perhaps this was the one part of that realm he’d carried with him into the Kingdom… or perhaps the apes themselves had brought it here, making it clear that they were