#tempered

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.