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By Root 385 0

or Prime Ministers forty feet from head to toe. Though the apes hadn’t infested the palace, a few had evidently visited it, as the statues’ faces had been torn away while their hands had been cleanly snapped off. Then again, that could have been simple entropy. The statues were dressed in colourless stone robes, their empty necks hung with huge chains of office, wide collars at their necks and books of law in their hands. There were massive inscriptions at the base of each idol, written in an archaic alien language which even the Doctor’s confidantes couldn’t decipher. Nonetheless, Fitz claimed to recognise the style. As he and Anji made their way through the citadel, their footsteps must have echoed through the halls like the pounding of hammers.

It’s not known what they expected to find in the central chamber. It’s possible that they were hoping for some machine of elemental manufacture, which could solve their problems once and for all. If so, then they were to be disappointed. The chamber was as bleak as the rest of the building. The area was immense, by all accounts, like an amphitheatre rather than a hall. There were five walls, the floor a perfect pentagon (or at least it would have been perfect, if the flagstones hadn’t been dislodged and stained by age and dirt). Surrounding the vast floor were five stone barriers, behind which an uncertain number of calcified grey seats had been positioned. The rows of seats seemed to go on forever – the hall ‘was so high that no ceiling were visible, save for a blackness o’erhead which might as well have been the night sky’ – but the general feeling was that this was some form of debating chamber, a forgotten Parliament of a fallen civilisation.

A senatorial arena to defy even that of ancient Rome. A single symbol painted in faded colours on the black floor of the huge chamber, a closed eye, suggesting the eye of Shiva (one of the favourite gods of the tantrists) which, Indian legend held, would destroy the world if ever it opened. And in the dead centre of the chamber, in the dead centre of the eye, lay the Doctor.

Lore claims that it took Fitz and Anji a whole minute to reach him from the hallway, which might indicate the size of the area. The Doctor lay flat out on the stone slabs, and crouching at his head was Katya. Even before they were anywhere near him, it was clear to Fitz and Anji that the Doctor’s condition had worsened. He was still, apart from his chest, which rose and fell so rapidly that his lungs seemed fit to burst. Still dressed in her gown of red and black, breast heaving under the silk, Katya’s face was set in steel and yet quite pale while she attended the alien Doctor.

What state must he have been in, by this point? It had gone beyond simply coughing up bile. Breathing was now the only thing he could do. Indeed, one version of the story claims that ‘his eyes clouded over with the bile… making them orbs of black set into his countenance’. When Fitz and Anji arrived at his side, panting and out of breath, he wasn’t even able to gaze up at them. Anji barely knew where to look, having understood that death was coming and that there was surely no escape, while Fitz could only murmur something about his mother. And Katya? Katya looked up at them, and shrugged. Fitz tried to give her a reassuring look. She’d done everything she could.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the Doctor raised his hand. His eyes were still fixed on the ceiling, or possibly so full of jet black that they couldn’t see at all. But with unerring accuracy, his fist clamped itself around Anji’s arm, something which made not only her but all those assembled jump out of their skins.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You should never have come this far.’ It sounded like nothing so much as his final statement.

And this from someone with an illness that nobody could identify, let alone cure. It had been widely believed in the House that it would be cured upon the arrival of the TARDIS, and when that had failed everyone had immediately assumed that the wedding ceremony would do the job instead. The feeling was