The strange desert landscape was still and silent as a painting. The strange, crooked mountains pointing towards the umber sky resembled nothing so much as a group of magnetic filings climbing up to a vast magnet. The effect was only heightened by the grey sands that muffled all sound. Sheltered on three sides by mountain outcrop stood a tower, a spire of obsidian topped with a strange spherical sculpture made of gold, or at least a gold-like material. It must have been a good few miles away, but its titanic scale and colossal shadow made it feel as though one could reach out and touch its smooth sides.
And, sinking slightly in the grey sand, in the shadow of that tower sat a tiny blue box, a small light twinkling on top.
And within that box was a space.
And within that space sat six ponies, all of them silent.
Sweetie Belle broke the silence first. “So… where are we, exactly?”
Dinky snorted and shoved a monitor aside forcefully. “Wish I knew. All I’m getting back is error messages. I can't even get a galaxy, or a century, I can't even get a reading on the atmosphere.”
“So we can't go out there,” Button said, frowning.
“I think there might be some space suits in the wardrobe,” Scootaloo piped up.
“We’re overthinking this,” Apple Bloom said. “We’re in the dreamscape, right?”
“The Matrix,” Dinky corrected. “It’s the collection of every Time Lord mind that ever was.”
“Whatever. Th’ important thing is, it ain’t real out there, so we should be fine.”
“No. You heard Romana. If we die out there, we die in real life,” Dinky said.
Rumble held up a hoof. “So since everypony in the hospital is just unconscious right now, not dead, we can assume that the atmosphere is fine, right?”
Dinky hesitated. “...I suppose that’s so,” she allowed. “Alright. If the TARDIS won’t tell us where we are, we’d better go out and look for ourselves.”
“Cool. Let’s boogie,” Scootaloo said, shoving the doors open and stepping onto the dry sands beyond. The others filed out after her, all rendered suddenly silent by the landscape beyond. They weren’t in Ponyville anymore. This was suddenly terrifyingly real.
After a moment, Sweetie kicked at the sands. “As far as alien planets go, it’s kinda boring,” she said. “I was really expecting a lot more for our first time out. Maybe a big jungle with purple trees, or a huge city with flying carts, or something.”
“Yeah, it looks more like a big quarry than anything else,” Apple Bloom said. “Well. ‘part from that.” She gestured to the tower. “We’re all agreed, that’s th’ way we’re headed, right?”
Button glanced around. “Yeah, doesn’t look like there’s much of anywhere else to go.” He hefted his bag onto his shoulder, then paused. “I… should leave this in the TARDIS. For safekeeping.”
“I gotcha,” Rumble said, pulling the handle. It rattled, but didn’t open. Frowning, he pulled harder. “Uh, hey, Dinky?”
Dinky scratched her head. “That’s weird. There’s a secret key hidden behind the ‘X’ in the ‘Public Call Box’ sign, try that.”
Rumble released the handle and flew up. “Uh, Dinky? Did this sign always say ‘Police Public Call Bo’?
“Come again?”
“Sorry, ‘Public Call No’.” Rumble corrected.
Sweetie looked at the sign on the door. “Out of Order?” she asked, incredulous. She got up and peered through the windows. “It’s completely dark in there.”
Apple Bloom hefted her saddlebags. “Well,” she said shortly. “Ah s’pose ya can’t get more clear a message than that. We done been locked out. No way to go but forward.” She set off across the sands in the direction of the tower. One by one, the others started after her. Dinky lingered at the box for several seconds longer than the others before grudgingly turning away and walking after them.
Fluttershy’s eyelids fluttered as she woke. A familiar face smiled down at her. “Hi, Fluttershy.”
“...Twilight? Whazz going on?” She rolled over on the cold stone floor, pushing herself back onto her hooves.
“Well, that is the million-bit question,” Twilight agreed, turning around.
Fluttershy glanced about the room, taking stock of the situation. Discord was curled up in a corner, sulking next to Sombra. Celestia, Luna, Sunset Shimmer, Cadance, and Shining Armor were all having a quiet, intense conference by the windows. Dash was flying agitated laps around the ceiling, while Applejack and Trixie watched from the wall. Big Mac stood patiently as Rarity fixed her dress, which was clearly a coping mechanism of some sort, and Pinkie was talking quietly to a morose Ditzy. That was almost all of them…
Fluttershy turned around and saw the Doctor. He was sitting on what looked to be some kind of altar at the center of the room, his head resting in his hooves. Quietly, she made her way over to him, climbing the stairs hesitantly until she was at his side. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Hm,” he said.
Fluttershy tried a different tack. “Do you know where we are?”
The Doctor snorted. “Oh, yes.”
A pause. “...Will you tell me?”
“It has many names," the Doctor said. "Rassilon’s Tower. Rassilon’s Tomb, though that’s not entirely accurate these days. The Dark Tower. Most relevantly, it’s known as the Center of the Death Zone.”
“...Oh.”
“On Gallifrey.” He spread his hooves. “Quite a homecoming.”
“...Oh.” She hesitated. “So I guess the interface didn’t work quite as planned.”
He glanced at her, almost surprised. “On the contrary. It worked perfectly well. Unfortunately, there were far grander designs in place than mine.”
“Sorry? I don’t think I follow…”
The Doctor said nothing more, only staring dead-eyed at the main doors.
Scootaloo glanced back at the TARDIS. “Is it me, or is the tower moving away from us as we get closer?”
“It’s just you,” Apple Bloom said.
“Might be,” Dinky said at the same moment. She paused and glared at Bloom. “We’re in the Matrix. If you can think of something, it can happen here.”
Bloom stopped dead. “Alright.” She shut her eyes tight and furrowed her brow.
“What are you doing?” Rumble asked. “We have to keep moving.”
Bloom opened her eyes and looked around. “Well, considerin’ we ain’t currently standin’ in an apple orchard, Ah’m gonna call shenanigans on that idea of yers, Dinks.”
Dinky scowled. “Well, I don’t know. That's what Romana said, right? Thought shapes reality. Maybe you just aren't thinking hard enough."
Apple Bloom snorted. “Sure,” she said, her voice practically oozing with derision. “That’s the problem.”
Dinky cocked her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know any more ‘bout this place than th’ rest of us,” Apple Bloom said. “We all charged in here blind, an’ now we’re stuck, thanks to you.”
Dinky’s face darkened. “Well, pardon me,” she snapped. “I said that you should leave if you wanted to. You chose to come along, didn’t you?”
“Oh, and now you’re blaming us for your bad planning” Scootaloo said. “We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have shelter. How long do you think we can survive out here?”
“I’m sure we’ll be fine when we reach the tower,” Rumble said, keeping his voice level.
“Oh, right, the tower that keeps moving farther and farther away?” Scootaloo said, turning on him.
Dinky shut her eyes tight. “No,” she growled. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. None of this is how it was supposed to go! Why can’t all of you just get along?”
Nopony said anything. Slowly, Dinky opened her eyes, breathing heavily. All of them were staring at her. “Oh,” she said. “Finally. Thank you. Now, as far as food and water go… um…”
Dinky realized that her friends weren’t staring at her. Rather, they were staring past her. She turned around and saw exactly what they were all staring at. She lifted a hoof and pointed. “So, that hole wasn’t there before, was it?”
“...No,” Sweetie Belle said, her voice distant. “No, it was not.”
“Oh,” Dinky said. “Good. I’d hate to think I’d overlooked it.”
“Should we…” Scootaloo hesitated, then set her jaw. “I mean, let’s take a closer look.”
The hole was really more of a crevasse -- a great crack in the surface of the landscape, about two meters wide and eight meters long. All six peered down into the fissure. “How deep do you think it is?” Rumble asked.
“We could drop something down, see how long it takes to hit bottom,” Apple Bloom suggested.
“What do we have that would be heavy enough to hear?” Dinky asked.
All eyes turned to Button. He took a step back. “I’m not jumping,” he said.
Scootaloo rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dummy. What do you have in your bag?”
“Oh!” He opened a flap. “Uh, the prototypes obviously aren’t going anywhere. I’d rather keep most of my tools, and this roll of bandages might come in handy… Ah!”
“Ah?” Sweetie repeated.
Button waved a roll of duct tape in the air. “Got a thousand and one uses,” he said. “Dropping a roll to check the depth is the thousand and second.”
Sweetie Belle levitated the tape to the middle of the crack. “Three, two, one,” she said, letting it fall.
A fraction of a second later, they heard it connect with something. Then, they heard a lot of angry muttering and hissing.
“Okay,” Dinky said, backing away quickly. “I think we can safely say that however deep it is, it isn’t nearly deep enough.”
“When I say run,” Scootaloo began.
A scaled green hand reached out of the pit and grabbed the dirt. “RUN!” Sweetie screamed, taking off at a gallop. The others quickly followed suit, Button scrambling to sling his bag back over his body as he ran.
Behind them, scaly green figures hauled themselves back onto the surface and, after a moment’s readjustment, started to run after them.
“So, er, Doctor.”
“Hm?”
Fluttershy adjusted her position slightly to turn toward the Time Lord. “I couldn’t help but notice, um, that you seem to know an awful lot about this place.”
He inclined his head, acknowledging the truth of her statement.
“Is it… very famous on your planet? Er, on Gallifrey?”
The Doctor thought about that. “Sort of,” he hedged. “It’s well known, but more in the sense of El Dorado than Manehattan.”
“It’s a myth?”
“No, not at all. I’ve been here before. Mind you, I also visited El Dorado. No, this was the final resting places of the most famous Gallifreyan in history -- Rassilon, the man who made the Time Lords. In the capitol, you can’t throw a bloody stone without hitting one of the great relics of Rassilon. If you didn’t, you probably just chucked the Great Rock of Rassilon across the room.”
Fluttershy giggled, and for a second, the Doctor grinned. It faded quickly, though. “Yes. Rassilon. Greatest Time Lord of them all,” he said, more than a hint of mockery in his voice. “Never meet your heroes, Fluttershy.”
“Um… I’ll try.”
The Doctor sighed. “Sorry. Off track again. The Tower of Rassilon was said to hold the secret to immortality. So, of course, it was placed in the middle of the arena where, in ancient times, Time Lords would force some of the most dangerous creatures in the universe to fight to the death.”
Fluttershy covered her mouth, horrified. “That’s terrible! All the poor little animals…”
The Doctor's eyes bulged slightly. “Poor little animals? Well, I suppose if anyone could count a drashig as a ‘poor little animal’, it’d be you. And poor little warriors, and robots, and stranger, and worse… And, in time, poor little me.”
Fluttershy gasped. “You? You had to fight here?”
The Doctor nodded. “Oh, yes. Four different incarnations, and several of my closest friends, to boot, all forced to survive the Death Zone in order to discover Rassilon’s secret of immortality.”
Fluttershy thought about that. “If this is a tomb,” she said slowly. “Well, it can’t have been that good a secret, can it?”
The Doctor actually laughed aloud at that and clapped her on the back. “Congratulations,” he said, grinning. “You officially have more common sense than my former tutor.”
“Do I?”
“Oh, yes,” the Doctor said. “He’s the one that roped me into this business to begin with. He got his immortality, all right. He was petrified for eternity, a living decoration on Rassilon’s casket.”
“Oh, my.” Fluttershy glanced back at the stone sarcophagus and frowned. “Um. It doesn’t look like he’s on there.”
“No. I did manage to rescue him, eventually.” The Doctor paused. “Hold on. How did you know he wasn’t one of the others?”
“What others?”
The Doctor turned and looked at the casket himself. Where he’d last seen a row of Time Lords carved bas-relief into the side panels, there was now merely a set of blanks.
“...Interesting,” he muttered. “Very suggestive, as it happens. And very symbolic.”
“Symbolic?” Fluttershy repeated. “How?”
“All the Time Lords are gone,” the Doctor said grimly. “Art reflects life, hey? He always did have a certain fascination with that.”
“He? Who?” Fluttershy looked around the room again. “Rassilon?”
“As a matter of fact,” the Doctor said, raising his voice and rising to his hooves. “I’d say all of this is rather symbolic.”
All eyes were on him as he strode down the stone steps to the ground. “The Sepulchre of Rassilon,” the Doctor said, rolling out his ‘r’s. “A place of great importance to the Time Lords. A place of treachery. A place associated with regeneration, new life, and immortality. Moreover, a place to where no fewer than four of my incarnations were abducted, along with a number of my best friends.”
“Uh… okay,” Rainbow said, finally coming down for a landing. “All that sounds cool and stuff, but if it’s symbolic… well, what’s it symbolic of?”
The Doctor ignored her, choosing instead to glower at the main doors. “Come on, then, you asinine anachronism! Show yourself!”
There was a long pause. Then, the sound of slow clapping echoed through the room. Everypony spun around to see a white stallion stepping out of the shadows behind the tomb. “Congratulations,” he said drily. “It only took you until I actually told you my name before you worked it out.”
He was an older stallion -- his frown lines were pronounced, and he appeared to be scowling almost constantly. His coat was as white as frost, and his eyes were brick red. His mane, tail, and cutie mark were hidden by his black skullcap, high collar, and cape.
“You missed one, by the way,” the newcomer said, brushing past the other ponies until he was face to face with the Doctor. “Arguably the most important one of them all.”
The Doctor’s face was tight with rage and fear. “Oh?” he managed. “Alright. Enlighten me, then.”
The stallion gestured toward the obelisk in the center of the room. “Rassilon’s warning,” he said coolly. ‘To lose is to win and he who wins shall lose’.” He gave a shark’s smile. “You lose, Doctor. But don’t worry. Your victory is close. Closer than you might think.”
Trixie coughed loudly. “So, uh, who’s the creep?” she asked loudly.
The newcomer turned slightly. “It would be unwise to heckle overmuch, Miss Lulamoon,” he said coldly.
Trixie rolled her eyes, but then she caught sight of the Doctor’s face. “Really, Trixie,” he said. “Don’t make him do something that we’ll regret.”
“Alright,” Trixie said warily. “But really. You seem to know this stallion, Doctor. Who is he?”
The Doctor stared at the newcomer for a long moment. The white stallion smirked at him. “Tell them, Doctor.”
The Doctor took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “A long time ago, I was put on trial by my people --”
“Too long ago,” the Valeyard said, stalking around the Doctor slowly.
The Doctor glared at him. “By my people, the Time Lords. I was charged with reckless interference --”
“Rightly so.”
“And endangerment of the web of time.”
“Don’t forget that little added charge of genocide.”
Everypony gasped. The Doctor scowled. “You know perfectly well that they were genetically modified organisms. They weren’t even a proper species, and that’s before you get into the fact that they would have eradicated all animal life on Earth.”
The stallion sneered. “So much for your moral high ground there.”
“Yes, well. As you can guess, this was my prosecutor -- the Valeyard.”
The Valeyard smiled coldly. “Tell them what else I am.”
The Doctor cocked his head. “An inveterate evidence tamperer? A blight on everything I care about? The man who made me think I’d let my best friend die? He has a humansona. He’s a legal clerk, and his name is Tim. He's a liar, and a twister, and utterly ruthless.”
“All quite true,” the Valeyard said, preening.
“You’re a hypocrite. You break the very laws of time you claim to uphold,” the Doctor said, warming to his theme.
The Valeyard put a hoof to his chest. “You flatter me too much, Doctor.”
“You stand in opposition to everything I hold dear,” the Doctor said coldly.
“I’m your shadow. You can’t escape me.”
“But I killed you,” the Doctor snarled. “Or, well. Did I? Can you kill something that never existed in the first place?”
They were pacing around one another now. “You can’t kill me, Doctor,” the Valeyard said. “So long as my potential exists, I’ll be around.”
“But it doesn’t exist! You said you were from somewhere in between my ‘twelfth and final incarnations’? Well, guess what?” He thumped his chest. “This spot’s already occupied, mate! Why don’t you buzz off and bother the other temporal anomalies?”
Celestia stomped a hoof. “Doctor!”
Both the Doctor and the Valeyard stopped and looked at her. Her mouth was a tight line. “What are you saying?” she asked. “It sounds almost as though -- as though --”
“Yes?” the Valeyard said with a wicked grin.
Celestia opened her mouth, but no words came out. The Valeyard frowned in mock disappointment. “Can’t bring yourself to say it? You always were bad at facing uncomfortable truths, Celly. No matter.”
He reached a hoof back and pulled up the hem of his cape. “A picture says a thousand words, after all.”
Everypony stared. His cutie mark was, in every respect, a twin of the Doctor’s.
Romana trudged up the road to Sweet Apple Acres. Her head hung low, and her tail dragged on the ground. She was so very tired -- physically, mentally, emotionally. She wanted to go back to her rooms at Berry’s, drag herself to bed, and have a nice long cry. She wanted to throw herself into her work, distract herself from the events of the evening. She wouldn’t say no to a glass of ginger vodka and a nice, cuddly barmare to curl up next to, either.
But all that was for later. Right now, somepony needed to investigate what exactly had gone wrong in the Doctor’s TARDIS, and she was the only available pony who was remotely qualified to do so. She glanced up at the farmhouse as she passed by. Somepony ought to tell Granny the news, too, once she woke up. Thank Rassilon that wasn’t her job. She had seen enough drawn, tired, and miserable faces tonight, worn by visitors passing in and out of the rooms like ghosts.
She sighed and tore her gaze from the farmhouse. She wasn’t here for that. She was here for the barn. Or at least, what was inside the barn.
She trotted in and tried the lights. They didn’t come on, and she frowned. “That’s not a good sign,” she muttered, lighting her horn.
The aura sparked and flared for several seconds before stretching out toward the TARDIS like candyfloss. “That’s even less of a good sign,” Romana said grimly, following the trail through the blue double doors.
She flinched at the sight of the mechanical alicorn standing just out of the way of the path toward the console before she realized it was inert. “Goodness me,” she muttered, stepping up to examine it. “So you’re the one that started all this trouble, hm?”
Romana looked the device up and down in the flickering golden light of her horn. “Very peculiar design choices,” she muttered. “Particularly for the Doctor. For one thing, it’s not nearly garish enough. The Prydonian collar, too -- it’s very unlike him to pay homage to Gallifrey.”
She studied the machine for a few more moments before she shook herself to her senses. “Ridiculous,” she muttered, turning to the console. “Now where did he put the telepathic… controls…”
There was a pile behind the console. There was a pile where no pile should be. The pile was a pile of things that looked dreadfully familiar. Trembling, Romana brightened her horn and looked at the pile of bodies lying there. The light from her horn went out like a candle, so that nopony could watch as she broke into tears.
Don’t look back, Button Mash repeated to himself over and over again. Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t look back.
Button looked back.
He immediately regretted it. Four figures were in hot pursuit of him and his friends. They looked like elongated dragons -- green, scaly bipeds with long, whip-like tails. The only real difference was, these guys looked like they had had their snouts smashed flat with a shovel -- the silver masks that covered their faces did nothing to alter this illusion. Of course, all that rather paled in comparison to the fact that they were chasing him and his friends. Gaining on them, even.
He quickly tore his eyes away and looked forward again. The others were well ahead of him by now. He had never been the fastest of the bunch, even when he wasn’t being weighed down by his bag of tools.
His bag. Could he throw it at his pursuers? It was big and clunky enough to trip them up, and it would free him from his burden.
There were just two problems. The first was, how could he take off his bag without slowing down and getting caught? The second, which admittedly was only an issue once he’d figured out the first, was, could he bear to sacrifice the culmination of years of work?
Well. Yes, actually. It wouldn’t be much good to him if he was dead.
But that brought up an interesting question. His friends were all faster than him. If he got caught now, he could put up enough of a fight to make sure the others got away. If he kept running until he was completely exhausted, these strange creatures might give up first, or they might overtake and capture all six of them. It was a weird variation on the trolley problem.
His mind spun with the implications -- yes it was a noble thing to do, but suppose these creatures just killed him on the spot? He couldn’t think about this in moral absolutes the way he might in a video game, this was his very real life on the line. Was he willing to die for friends he hadn’t seen in years?
Much to his surprise, he found he was, rather. But would his sacrifice really be able to save them?
That was the moment his hooves left the ground and he was hauled into the air. In thinking, he had slowed down, lost track of his pursuers. Now he hung upside down as the four of them crowded around him. Button looked around, feeling oddly resigned. “Well,” he said. “I guess this might as well happen.”
There was absolute silence. Button shut his eyes tight. “Wait,” said one of the figures. “These things can talk?”