#tempered

[gallifreyanhotfive]

Randomly flipping through my book collection again

[mumblelard]

there used to be

so many of us

[the-final-sentence]

You took everything out of me and I, I just loved your name.

Terri Ellen Cross Davis, from "Tempered"

[thesingingcanary]

#pastmidnight Decalages / Offset 1.

[ordinum]

The fighting in the streets... Aquilinus thought he was doing everything right. He stayed with his unit, made sure they didn't do anything foolish. Protected them to the best of his abilities. A loud screech. Protect the tower. Protect the tower. Protect the tower. Glory be to Garlemald.

[wiirocku]

1 Corinthians 13:5 (CEV) - rude. Love isn't selfish    or quick tempered. It doesn't keep a record    of wrongs that others do.

[doctornolonger]

Three “Tempered” fragments

Dave Rudden’s short story “Tempered” from the recent anthology Doctor Who: Origin Stories features a beautiful piece of Faction Paradox-related canonwelding. Here are three fragments of the story, interludes from between the story’s main scenes:

They come for the boy at sundown.

He has dined lightly, as per Academy tradition. Smoked magenta seeds – something simple to line his stomach. It is a long, hard walk to the caldera. Some children fall to exhaustion before they even make it halfway and must be carried back to live with the shame forever.

Not me, the boy thinks with the pure and terrible certainty of the young, as the Time Lords enter the room, their faces set and grim. I’m special.

The second:

They walk in silence.

The boy does not speak, as per tradition. The Time Lords do not speak, because there is nothing to say. Dust the colour of oxblood stains their robes. It tastes like tin, and ozone and power.

Ahead, light the colour of milk peals and crackles. It dances at the edges of the boy’s sight, but he keeps his eyes on the ground.

It is not yet time for him to see.

And the final:

There are many things of which the Time Lords do not speak.

Some of this is jealousy. Even at eight years old, the boy knows that Gallifreyan supremacy is built upon secrets – the secrets of their TARDISes, the secrets of time travel, the secret weapons in their vaults and the secrets to their regeneration.

He’ll know those secrets someday. He’ll know all of them.

But first, this.

The caldera is a cauldron-shaped hollow, crumbled like a cavity in the mountainside. It would have been utterly unremarkable but for the throbbing unlight at its core.

The Untempered Schism. A rift in space-time. A glimpse into everything that is and was and might be. Every acolyte who wishes to join the Academy must come here. To be a Time Lord is to have stared into that abyss and, with cool disdain, the boy notices how the three Time Lords escorting him cannot bring themselves to look again.

‘Now,’ one of them says.

I’m special.

The boy looks.

There are many things of which the Time Lords do not speak. Some of it is jealousy.

Some of it is fear.

From the moment Russell T. Davies’ The Sound of Drums introduced Gallifrey’s “Untempered Schism” in 2007 – “a gap in the fabric of reality, through which could be seen the whole of the vortex” – Faction Paradox fans have tried to canonweld it with The Book of the War’s “caldera”, the empty crater where the first Time Lords forged history in their image. In “Tempered”, Dave Rudden ties the knot: he takes us along for an initiation ceremony, on the long trek up to the caldera, and shows us what lies inside.

[opulenteats]

Peanut Butter Cup

Source