#the imperator

[gumi-artpoidd]

a loyal lapdog

[vileiguana]

Can we talk for a second though about how Cerydra's phone case design is CHESS YURI?? THIS WOMAN IS GAY AND HOYO IS MAKING IT SO OBVIOUS FOR US.

[k-chips]

The completely opposite way people reacted to Aglaea at the beginning and to Cerydra now is INSANE.

People hated Aglaea so bad at first because she was "mean and cruel🥺🥺🥺👉🏻👈🏻" when all she did was getting pissed at us because we couldn't respect ONE single rule after 5 minutes in Amphoreus and now they're loving and praising Cerydra who's 100% more cruel, "insensitive" and straightforward then Aglaea could ever be!

And, don't get me wrong, I LOVE CERYDRA. She's cool af, her writing is amazing and I loved every scene with her (SPOILER I also cried for her at the end sshhh she did nothing wrong fuck you Lygus) the point isn't about liking or not Cerydra the point is hating Aglaea for no fucking reasons. Aglaea deserved the same amount of love and respect Cerydra is (rightfully) getting, if not more!

BUT

I came to a conclusion:

The only difference between what Aglaea did to make people hate her and what Cerydra did, is us. Aglaea "threatened" us and Dan Heng while Cerydra was also like that, yes, but to random npcs.

People hated Aglaea just because she DARED to be a bit mean with their poor little Dan Heng 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺👉🏻👈🏻👉🏻👈🏻👉🏻👈🏻 (and Caelus/Stelle, ofc)

Ok all this just to say I'm convinced that, once again, a female character got hate because she didn't was all flowers and rainbows with a fan favorite MALE character thanks for coming to my Ted talk bye

(I... Realize that every time I talk about Star Rail it's either to simp for Aglaea or Welt or to shit on Dan Heng... And I don't hate Dan Heng, I swear! I just can't stand when a community is THIS obsessed with the stereotypical "emo edgy character" when there are other characters who deserve as much love as he gets)

[thienvaldram]

Gallifreyan House Lore – Forgotten Lives

The Doctor is from ‘The House on the Mountain’ (The House of Lungbarrow)

The Holmes Doctor is housed in a place called the Sequester. He works for some kind of Time Lord interventionist group, the name is never specified.

The Houses mentioned are Gloaming, Cockrow, Brightening, Noon, Decline and Aurora. These seem to be the houses directly involved in whatever organisation Holmes is a part of.

Cockrow, Brightening and Noon are ‘The Daylight Houses’ and are poorly acquainted with the organisation, only rarely showing up, meanwhile Gloaming, Decline and Aurora are the ‘Night Houses’.

The Daylight Houses held no sway in Holmes’s trial and were merely there for court protocol.

House Gloaming are science oriented and prefer not to show up despite their dominance in favour of research.

House Decline is said to be ‘The Doctor’s House’, indicating the names used at the Sequester are probably codenames. With Decline being Lungbarrow.

Decline is said to have produced their ‘fair share of renegades’.

House Aurora is ‘Morbius’s House’, (Dvora?). They are one of the less influential houses in this era. A decent amount of them are said to have defected when Morbius did.

The Sequester seems to be a CIA predecessor. So I’m guessing Time Lord agencies go.

Founding of The Mathematical Bureau

Division disappear off the map to do whatever their own thing is

The Unity forks from new more radical members of the Addition (The start of the Broken Generation) like the Magus.

Morbius rises to power as Imperator and becomes President

The Unity defects to Morbius when the Civil War kicks off

The Sequester is set up to help fight the Civil War, the Holmes Doctor is drafted into it after returning to the Homeworld freshly regenerated (as per Harper’s final story in FL3)

The Civil War ends

The Doctor regenerates and escapes the Sequester.

The War Chief Incident, the Sequester is retooled into the Celestial Intervention Agency.

[comicbooksaregood]

Doctor Strange

Volume: 4

Issue: 3

Eaters of Magic

Writers: Jason Aaron

Pencils: Chris Bachalo

Inks: Tim Townsend, Al Vey, Mark Irwin

Colours: Chris Bachalo

Covers: : Chris Bachalo, Tim Townsend

Marvel

[doctornolonger]

The story of Tegorak

In one mysterious passage of Lance Parkin’s The Infinity Doctors, two members of the Chancellory Guard visit a long-forgotten room called Archive Chamber 403:

The room, like many in this part of the Capitol, was filled with dusty display cases and ancient lacquered cabinets. Raimor knew that this was part of the Citadel that dated back to the time of Rassilon. It was still possible to see that from the angle of the roof, the quality of the masonry, the shape of the room. The brickwork and panelling along one wall was recent, a partition perhaps only ten millennia old, but it couldn’t hide the room’s heritage: in former times this had been an open balcony which had overlooked the old starharbour. Since then this room must have been a hundred things, from the office of a high‐ranking Ordinal to student lodgings. Nowadays no one ever came here, except the patrol. […] One comer was dominated by a vast suit of armour. A rusty plaque informed anyone who read it that it had once belonged to Tegorak, although the name meant nothing to Captain Raimor.

The name “Tegorak” means nothing to the book’s readers, either – unless those readers are lucky enough to be familiar with an obscure fanzine called Apocrypha. We’ve joked about the idea of Doctor Who apocrypha, but this is the real deal: Adrian Middleton never wrote an official story, but his work in Apocrypha from 1993 to 1995 impacted some of the Wilderness era’s most influential authors, leaving his subtle mark on everything from Big Finish’s Gallifrey to – of course – Faction Paradox.

Copies of Apocrypha were shared with me by a generous friend who was researching some of these references, and as I make my way through the issues, I’ll be posting about all of the various ways they influenced later stories at my #Doctor Who Apocrypha tag. But for today, our topic is Tegorak.

Below the cut you can discover Tegorak’s full story, posted online for the first time. Travel with me to millions of years back in time, just 50,000 years after Morbius’ rebellion, 160,000 years before the birth of the Doctor…

Relevant entries from Apocrypha

THE INVASIONS     -12,188,000/-12,150,250 (112,000/149,750 Q)

After thousands of years separated from the rest of the galaxy, the Time Lords found that, for each culture that died, more new ones would arise. With the expansion of so many civilisations, Time Lord secrecy could not be enforced. A string of increasingly dangerous attacks upon Gallifrey were launched by successive cultures, all of whom knew of the legend of the Time Lords.

BLACK MOUNTAIN     -12,150,250 (149,750 Q)

As invasions against Gallifrey became more frequent and, potentially, more dangerous, a young Arcalian Cardinal named Tegorak rose to prominence.

Tegorak (whose name meant “Black Mountain”) called for a positive means of defending Gallifrey. In the midst of a particularly nasty invasion by a race known as the Sybarils, the old President was killed, naming Tegorak as his successor. Thus, at 330, Tegorak became the youngest President ever. Taking up a sword and donning the battle armour of an ancient Gallifreyan Warlord, he was forced to carry the battle to the steps of the Citadel itself. The last of the Sybaril invaders [pictured below – ed.] fell as an emergency meeting of the High Council was called.

THE GREAT CRUSADE     -12,150,204 (149,796 Q)

President Tegorak decreed that the preservation of Gallifreyan society could only be achieved by setting up a line of defence surrounding Kasterborus. To do this, all planets within the constellation would need to be controlled by the Time Lords. Recruiting a small army from the normal Gallifreyan populace, he took his fleet to the worlds neighbouring Gallifrey. There he recruited a vast mercenary army, establishing a number of defensive outposts.

Resentful of the new President’s policies, some worlds in Kasterborus moved against the Time Lords, having to be dealt with in what was described as a ‘necessarily bloody manner’.

THE BETRAYAL     -12,150,200 (149,800 Q)

While Tegorak was away the Matrix Lords made contact with Chancellor Garlan, ruler of Gallifrey in the President’s absence. Projecting images of a bloody future in which Time Lord society would be supplanted by the mercenary followers of Tegorak (who would go on to form a vast cosmic empire), the Matrix Lords convinced him that Tegorak would have to die.

Garlan dispatched an assassin to kill the President. The attempt failed, and Tegorak returned to discuss the attempt on his life with his fellow Time Lords. In the mean time, Garlan had convinced the remainder of the High Council of the threat that Tegorak now posed. So, when the President arrived to address the Panopticon, he was shot down by his fellow Time Lords.

THE ESCAPE     -12,150,200 (149,800 Q)

Avoiding death by use of the Presidential Time Ring, Tegorak returned to his TARDIS where he was forced to regenerate. Fearing his bloody revenge (he was easily capable of destroying Gallifrey), Garlan turned to the Matrix Lords for guidance. Rassilon himself intervened, and laid a trap for Tegorak, preventing him from taking any action against Gallifrey.

WHERE DO ‘BLACK MOUNTAIN’ AND ‘THE GREAT CRUSADE’ COME FROM?

Essentially, these are creations of my own, taken from a storyline that I have. Basically, Rassilon cannot, in Gallifrey’s 12 Million year history, be the only hero of Time Lord society. Black Mountain is the Gallifreyan equivalent of Alexander the Great, carving out a space empire to guarantee the safety of his own people. He is Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and King Arthur, an allegorical character who did nothing but good for his people, and who was repaid with betrayal by his closest friends.

Commentary

With the exception of my editorial comment (marked in brackets with “– ed.”), the quotes above come from Apocrypha issue 2 pages 4, 5, and 29. Regarding the dates next to each event, I’ll share Middleton’s original explanation in a future post, but the short version is that “-12,150,200” means 12,150,200 BC, and “Q” refers to years after Rassilon’s founding of Time Lord society.

Besides the namedrop of Tegorak in The Infinity Doctors, I don’t think the “Black Mountain” has been mentioned in any other official Doctor Who sources – although please tell me if I’m missing something!

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had any impact. Just one page before Apocrypha introduces Tegorak, it summarizes the story of another outsider Lord President who was exiled and then gathered a mercenary army to attack Gallifrey: Morbius, from the Classic serial The Brain of Morbius. It’s hard not to notice the parallels – and I think there are clear signs that the Tegorak story influenced later depictions of the Morbius Presidency.

The full discussion of that will have to wait for a future installment, though. There are more Apocrypha puzzle pieces to collect first!

[wyrdvora]

The Imperator caused the Enemy to exist, by progression

The Book of the War states that the Spiral Politic is the noosphere of the Great Houses. A noosphere, especially in the context of FP, can be understood to be the cultural sphere of things that can be conceived. This means that anything beyond the understanding of the Great Houses appears to come from another universe, or be totally alien, to any inhabitant of the Spiral Politic.

The Spiral Politic was, in the Pre-War Era, stable. This was due to the cultural stagnation of the Great Houses. But when the Imperator began his Acts of Intervention, it accelerated the development of Culture on the Homeworld. This acceleration echoed across all of the Spiral Politic, causing it to stretch at its seems and... Let in alien concepts. For the first time in 10 million years, mutually inconceivable forces were at play. These forces were known, collectively by the Homeworld, as The Enemy. This means that every horror of the War is the Imperator's fault.

I have reason to believe that the Celestis were actually one of these forces (but not the Enemy Proper, of course). But that's for another post.