B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (15 page)

Other Great Old Ones included Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, the Gods of Ragnarok, Gog, Magog, Malefescent and Tor-Gasukk. Across the universe, the earliest civilisations worshipped the Great Old Ones.
 [30]
Not even the Time Lords knew much about them.
 [31]

The Celestial Toymaker was from the old times, “a spirit of mischief from the infancy of the universe”. He was a hyper-dimensional being with a whole fragment of reality to himself, but had to obey the rules laid down during the “childhood” of the universe.
 [32]
The Toymaker survived a catastrophe that destroyed his home universe. He carried a part of that universe within him, and so was exempt from the natural laws of our universe. As the Toymaker’s universe receded from our own, it pushed back his personal time and extended his life. The Toymaker would live for millions of years - at first he helped life to prosper for hundreds if not of millennia, and created ships, cities, continents and entire planets. He then grew bored, destroyed what he had created... and found destruction as tedious as creation. To distract himself from the endlessness of existence, he amused himself with the chance and uncertainty found in games.
 [33]

The beings known as the Ancient Lights had existed before the Big Bang, and controlled many of the other beings in the earlier universe in accordance with the laws of astrology. They discovered they had great powers in the new universe, and influenced the development of astrology on many worlds. The Zodiac on Earth would have twelve signs; on Ventiplex, thirteen; on Draconia, seven.
 [34]

Six almost-omnipotent beings,
the Guardians, existed from the beginning of time. They were the White Guardian of Order and the Black Guardian of Chaos
; the Red Guardian of Justice; the Crystal Guardian of Thought and Dreams; the twins, the Azure Guardians of Mortality and Imagination; and the Gold Guardian of Life. They formed the upper pantheon of the Great Old Ones.
 [35]

Each segment of the Key to Time, which was forged near the end of the universe, represented a particular Guardian.
 [36]

The universe was able to constantly regenerate itself when the Cosmic Balance between Law and Chaos was maintained. Miggea was the Queen of Seirot - in the great fight between Law and Chaos, when the Archangels of Law fought the Archangels of Chaos, she represented Law. The Doctor remarked that the battle was “a bit Miltonian... only without all that religion”. This was the Battle for the Balance, but Miggea’s pursuit of Law was ruthless to the point of being evil.
 [37]

Shug-Niggurath died giving birth, causing the whole planet Polymos to absorb its offspring, the Nestene Consciousness. The Nestene Consciousness went on to colonise many planets, including Cramodar, Plovak 6 and the Reverent Pentiarchs of Loorn.
 [38]

The Chronovores existed outside the space-time continuum, consuming flaws in its structure. They weren’t constrained by the laws of physics.
 [39]

The first of our universe’s native entities - such as the Mandragora Helix,
the
Eternals
and the grey man’s race -
sprang into being.
 [40]
The Mandragora Helix was old even when this universe was born.
 [41]
 It claimed to have escaped the Dark Times, and to have created a new home in a nebula, in the heart of “beautiful chaos”.
 [42]

The Time Lords would come to worship some of the more powerful Eternals, such as Death, Pain, Vain Beauty, Life and Time. Certain Time Lords entered a mysterious arrangement to serve as the “champion” of one or more of these Eternals.
 [43]

Sentient micro-organisms named Meme-Spawn were said to have originated at the dawn of time. They drifted through galaxies for millennia on end, absorbing every spoken language they encountered.
 [44]

Over the first few billion years, the first stars were born. Planets and galaxies formed.
 [45]

The oldest question in the universe, hidden in plain sight, was “doctor who?”
 [46]

? - The Pandorica Opens
 [47]

Planet One, the oldest planet in the universe, had a cliff of pure diamond with fifty-foot letters from the dawn of time - the very first words to be recorded. The words read “Hello Sweetie”, and had been placed there, along with a set of space-time co-ordinates, by River Song. The eleventh Doctor and Amy found the message and, as instructed, travel to Stonehenge in 102 AD.

Xaos was the oldest planet in the known galaxy.
 [48]

? - “The Life Bringer”
 [49]

The fourth Doctor freed Prometheus, a member of a hyper-advanced race resembling the Greek gods. From their vast city, they were co-ordinating the re-engineering of the lifeless galaxy, moving black holes and stars. Prometheus had been imprisoned for releasing the “life spores” before Zeus was satisfied that they would grow into “perfect peaceful loving creatures”. The Doctor helped Prometheus escape with a sample of imperfect life spores, and Prometheus headed for another planet to spread them once more. The Doctor was unsure whether he was watching the distant past or the distant future.

On many worlds, sugars, proteins and amino acids combined to become primordial soup, “the most precious substance in the Universe, from which all life springs”.
 [50]
Hundreds of millions of years later, the first civilisations began to rise and fall.

Jelloids from the binary quasars of Bendalos were the longest-lived race in the universe, and many think they were the first living creatures.
 [51]

Thirty thousand million light years from our solar system, the first civilisation came into being. The beings were humanoid, and developed for ten thousand years before wiping themselves out in a bacteriological war. The grey man and his race saw all this, and he constructed the Cathedral, a machine “designed to alter the structure of reality”. The grey man’s race had been extremely dualistic, but Cathedral formed ambiguities and chaotic forces that ran throughout the universe, breaking down certainty. Its interface with physical reality was the Metahedron, a device that moved from world to world every eighty thousand years, remaining hidden.
 [52]

The slug-like Teuthoidians originated from near the beginning of time, and were among the universe’s first space-faring races. Owing to a fold in hyperspace, some of their number interacted with the universe’s final moments on the planet Chaos.
 [53]

? - “Voyage to the Edge of the Universe”
 [54]

Commander Azal launched a mission from Damos that reached the edge of the universe. There he merged with a version of himself from another universe, gaining infinite power... but couldn’t decide which universe was his to return to. Nearby, beings faced the same dilemma... one had waited for ten thousand years, another for twenty-five thousand years, another seventy-three thousand years.

Legend held that Valdemar was the Dark God captured and destroyed by the advanced and philanthropic Old Ones, after centuries of the biggest war in mythology. Following this, the Old Ones vanished. The Time Lords ranked this as the sixth greatest mystery in the universe. The fourth Doctor and Romana later learned that the Old Ones had punched a hole into the higher dimensions in an attempt to study them, and unleashed a hole that grew and grew, warping reality. Valdemar was the last of the Old Ones, and had entombed himself as a way of containing this reality-warping.
 [55]

What remains of the ancient races suggests awesome power - many had great psychic ability and matter-transmutation powers that were almost indistinguishable from magic. All considered it their right to intervene in the development of whole planets, and to destroy such worlds if they failed to match up to their expectations. Comparatively primitive races worshipped immortal beings such as Light and the Daemons of Damos as gods. The legends and race memories of many planets contain traces of these ancient civilisations. Horns have been a symbol of power on Earth since man began, and beings of light have been worshipped.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and these great races gradually disappeared from the universe.
 [56]

New societies sprang up to replace them, and soon the universe was teeming with life. In the late twentieth century, the Institute of Space Studies at Baltimore estimated that there were over five hundred planets capable of supporting life in Earth’s section of the galaxy alone.
 [57]

The Dark Times and the First of the Time Lords

“There was a time when the universe was so much smaller than it is now. Darker, older time of chaos. Creatures like the Racnoss, the Nestenes and the Great Vampires rampaged through the void.”

The
Infinite
, a spaceship that could grant your heart’s desire, came from this time. It was later lost to legend, and used to be inhabited by one of the Great Old Ones.
 [58]
Many races evolved before the Time Lords.
 [59]

The first humanoid civilisation in the universe evolved on the planet Gallifrey, and mastered the principles of transmat technology while the universe was half its present size. They became the first race to master Time. Some legends said the Time Lords existed far in the past; there was some evidence that they lived in the present, and some say they come from the future.
 [60]
Gallifrey was born before the Dark Times.
 [61]

See the section on Gallifreyan History for more detail.

As the Gallifreyans were the first sentient race to evolve, they established a morphic field for humanoids, making it more probable that races evolving later would also be bipedal and binocular. Non-humanoid races only evolved in environments that would be hostile to humanoids.
 [62]
Rassilon ensured that only humanoid lifeforms survived on many planets, primarily to prevent the Divergents from existing. He used biogenic molecules to restructure the dominant species of sixty-nine thousand worlds.
 [63]

Time Lords were around before humanity evolved.
 [64]
Evolution on Gallifrey, as on many other worlds, had been accelerated by the mysterious Constructors of Destiny.
 [65]

A civilisation devoted entirely to war developed the Raston Warrior Robot, then vanished without trace.
 [66]
The Caskelliak were created as weapons of war, and were tasked with polluting and destroying entire worlds. Their creators perished in a war that they had initiated.
 [67]

The Time Lords explored space and time, making contact with many worlds and becoming legends on many others.
Rassilon’s experiments created holes in the fabric of space and time, which unleashed monsters from another universe, including the Yssgaroth.
 [68]

The Time Lords unwittingly loosed the vampires on the universe. Until the Time Lords hunted them, vampires fed off mindless animals to service their needs. They later resorted to feeding off other beings.
 [69]
Seventeen known worlds, including Earth, have stories of vampires.
 [70]

The vampires enslaved whole worlds until the Time Lords defeated them.
 [71]
The vampires were immune to energy weapons, but Rassilon constructed fleets of bowships that fired mighty bolts of steel and staked the beings through the heart. The Vampire Army was defeated, and only its leader, the Great Vampire, survived by escaping through a CVE into the pocket universe of E-Space.
 [72]

The origins of the Time Lords are obscure, but in the distant past they fought the Eternal War against the Great Old Ones and other invaders from outside our universe, beating them back and imposing Order. Science and Order supplanted Magic and Chaos as the Time Lords mapped, and so defined, the universe.
 [73]
The Time Lords were the first to map “the web of time”.
 [74]

The Carrionites lived at the “dawn of the universe”, and discovered a means of manipulating reality - using words as science - that resembled magic. The Eternals found the right word to banish the Carrionites “into deep darkness”, and nobody thereafter knew if they were real or imagined.
 [75]
The Hervoken, a race with the ability to shape matter and time, fought a war with the Carrionites millions of years ago. They were eventually banished from the universe by the Eternals.
 [76]