Vael Voryunsti Sheverell was not cut out to be a Young Hero. At the Academia, he played truant from lectures as often as possible. Other Young Hero cadets gathered in the watery sunlight on the ancient caution steps that surrounded the learning halls, debating philosophy and strategy with their sandaled tutors. Vael studied Time theory alone.

 

He could spend days by himself, only leaving his books to stare from his tiny barrack room window at the wine-dark sky over the city. He would listen to the tales of the traders in the merchant port and space harbour below; strange-featured people who thought in strange accents as they bartered the wares of every exotic corner of the Gallifreyan Empire. They always bragged tales of the latest exploits of the Heroes on the widening frontiers. Hunting the lacustrine Sattisar and battling with the Gryffnae, whose great stone heads were studded with jewels. They brought news of the century-long siege of the Winter Star and a plague of batworms on the asteroid archipelago.

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But Vael did not want to mingle with these ruffians. He wanted only to listen and watch from a distance, just as he observed and watched his fellow cadets and was despised for it. He attended academic parades only on pain of expulsion, guessing that the Court of Principals would never carry out such a threat for they knew that he was an Individual.

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This was no guess, he had been as good as told it. He had once seen his tutor speaking in the market with the aged and venerable Pythia from the city temples. The tutor's face was turning crimson as he tried not to choke, for the old priestess's blue, fur-trimmed robes reeked of the woodsmoke and incense in which she was bathed when she consulted the past and future. She leaned from her palanquin and singled Vael out across the busy plaza, remarking on his thick mop of red-gold hair: the sure sign of an Individual. He would have made a good pilot, but he was too old for that now.

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He was certain she had meant him to hear, for she glanced directly at him as she spoke, but he blocked his own thoughts when he felt the pressure of her enquiring mind. She did not appear surprised; she simply grunted, her suspicions confirmed, and ordered her transport on.

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After that, the Court of Principals seemed more tolerant of Vael's misdemeanours. The warning reports to his home ceased and the letters he sent back dwindled to perhaps one a season. During all his time in the City, he had been relieved to be five hundred leagues from family ties and prying thoughts. He ignored his parents' show of concern for him, knowing that his welfare was secondary to family reputation. Their concern was confined to letters. They never visited him. Their merchant estate in the distant Soonwell Valley was expanding and his elder sisters were both partners with children of their own.

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Vael loathed the cadets' arduous training, especially the physical endurance courses. Sports, swordplay and military manoeuvres bored him, so he exercised his mind in creating new excuses which would exempt him from attending lectures and practicals. This should have counted against him, but he had learned how far he could play on a tutor's tolerance and still get what he wanted. His capacity to remember things that children forget when they become adults did not desert him. Above all, his ability to shield his mind against the greatest curse of the Gallifreyan civilization marked him out as an individual among Individuals.

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In the old days, before the Intuitive Revelation, secrets were a precious gift on Gallifrey. For most of the population, cursed with the relentless mental fog of telepathy, secrets were an unfathomable mystery. No idea or notion was yours alone. The air ceaselessly droned with the commentary of public opinion; the thoughts of the people's minds invaded each other's heads in an unending chorus of unharmony, before passing into the great pool of collective existence that made up the root of Gallifreyan culture. Some cadets could be taught to shut out the endless babble; to others the shutting out came naturally. Yet those who succeeded faced the greatest horror of all for a Gallifreyan: the terrible isolation of silence. Only those who endured this fate would rise from the plebeian masses as Individuals with all the makings of a Young Hero.

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It was at the time of the return of the mighty Hero Prydonius from his greatest voyage that Vael failed his final assessments. When he saw the posted results, he just shrugged and headed back through the gathering crowds for the privacy of his solitary barrack room.

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Winter was biting at the City early, freezing the mud on the streets that were unheated - and that year many more streets were cold than before. The dreary summers of recent times seemed havens of warmth in comparison. A bitter wind from the Northern Lakes scythed through the dingy corridors. Steam rose in carved clouds from the food stalls in the market.

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The sharpened air buzzed with the thoughts of the people as the crowds choked those streets that were heated, rejoicing in the Hero's return. The whisper was that one of the Future Legends had been fulfilled.

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Vael blocked his mind from the rumours, but there was no escape: the media were equally full of Prydonius's triumphant homecoming. Live coverage on all channels as the Hero's ship, the Apollaten docked in the flight harbour, its space-corralled prow nudging into the icy anchor gantries. On the quays, the cheering crowds were already working themselves into a frenzy.

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Vael heard a knock on the door. He knew it would be Loie, the cadet in the next room. The only one who bothered to talk to him, even though he despised her. Loie would have seen the results as well, but Vael could exist without her sympathy. He resisted making a fierce retaliation to the enquiring thoughts that came through the door. Instead, he shut himself off from her persistent knocking and thought no giveaway thoughts at all.

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On the screen there were in-depth interviews with Prydonius and his crew, relating their quest into the blood-red mists of distant Thule, where they had overthrown the reign of a marauding Sphinx. There were visual reports from the documentary team that had accompanied the voyage, but despite the euphoria, all the interviewers pressed home two questions: was this the last of the epic space journeys? And did the new experiments into time travel number the days of the Space Voyager?

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Haclav Agusti Prydonius, the Hero and seasoned interviewee, shook his mane of black hair and laughed out loud. "I'm no lackey of Rassilon and his neo-technologists. There'll be no substitute for the Old Order." To affirm this he produced his greatest trophy, retrieved from the ruin of Thule - the severed head of the Sphinx itself. Preserved temprogenically, it would be donated to the Academia Library for study. Perhaps, Prydonius added mockingly, it would be persuaded to divulge the answers to some of its riddles.

 

Vael switched off the screen in disgust and wrapped himself in a fury he was unaware he harboured.

 

He knew he was special - even appointed for some future he could not yet see. He would not be next to nothing; not sink back into the faceless chorus of the people. He railed at the injustice of the Gods, the capricious and all-powerful Menti Celesti, who saw all things but did nothing! Shaking, he reeled round and fell back in tenor at the implacable figure that stood over him.

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The Pythia, her masklike face streaked with gold and her long grey ringlets coiled with silver wire. She was a cold statue, but Vael caught the woodsmoke smell and saw the talismans that hung from her robes, glinting with the trapped starlight of long-lost constellations.

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The only thought Vael heard, and was unable to block out, was "How wasteful!" The silent look that it accompanied was of downright contempt for his failure. In a rage that forgot the deference due to a priestess so venerable, Vael thrust back a defiant curse on all the ritual and lore of Gallifrey. "Your days are numbered. Superstition will be swept away in the new Age of Reason."

 

The Pythia's gilded eyes narrowed for a moment and her bony hand clutched at the sceptre head of the wand on which she leaned. In that instant, Vael felt her search into his mind as clearly as the star glass through which she saw other ancient Pythias in other worlds and times. He thought to feign dutiful shame, but what was the point? By now the priestess understood that he was special too.

 

For long moments outside the natural ebb of thought, he was held speechless by her scrutiny. Then her eyes, unnaturally black like the void, released him. He was dismissed. A torrent of thoughts flooded his unshielded mind: the carnival of Prydonius's victory parade through the snowy city. The cacophony of Gallifreyan minds was for once unified into a single harmonized and joyous chorus of triumph.

 

​"Like the radiant sun in the sky, supreme in glory, so Prydonius, our greatest hero, returns in glory to Gallifrey"

 

Vael fell back unconscious.

He clung to the sides of his sleeping-pallet as the stars whirlpooled above him. He was the centre point on which the reckless universe spun. Silhouetted figures darted across the blaze of coloured gas clouds and white meteors traced a web of paths against the radiance. Against the spinning vortex a head leaned in over him, upside down like an examining physician.

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"So that's the dream!" Vael yelled aloud.

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From light aeons past came the angry roar of the pitiless Sphinx. Vael cried out in fear at a bent figure, cowled in darkness, that reached out a skeletal hand to him for help. The hood of shadow slid back to reveal the wizened face. An old man imploring the brash youth he had once been to think again and change the ordained future. In the dream half-light, Vael knew himself.

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Through the dark iridescence of the cosmos came the distant flicker of a star. As it approached, Vael saw that its light had a regular pulse. It crowned a hard oblong that tumbled towards him out of the maelstrom. The shape's blue-panelled surfaces snatched at the primal glare of starlight as they spun. Vael willed it to stop, but there was no escape. How could he control his dreaming? How did he know that the unreadable runes on its sides read "Police Public Call Box"? It tumbled nearer. It would crush him.

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Vael awoke in a cold sweating fever. The chanting from the streets was still pounding into his mind. The Pythia was gone with the fading nightmare, but the smell of woodsmoke still clung to his dingy room. He ran his clammy hands over his face and through his red-gold hair, vainly trying to shut out the rabble's thoughts; he needed the privacy of his own head, but the cheering for the returned Hero mocked at Vael's failure and lost powers.

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Pushing his way on to the icy streets, he was jostled along on the tide of the celebrating throng. It was easier to drift with them. The icon banners, the drone of the pianalaika bands, like the voice of the relentless frost. Where he went did not matter; he had no future, that was plain. He was cast out, no longer appointed or anointed. So he wilfully immersed himself in the crowd's euphoric thoughts and was lost. Nobody.

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"Rejoice, people of Gallifrey. Praise and honour great Prydonius and his mighty heroes!"

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Easier said than done. 

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Vael had forgotten his coat. He shivered either from the vicious cold or a fever. Suddenly famished, he found himself buying a greasy quickfish from a stall at the edge of the Street. He knew he was just responding to junk thoughts, urges put in his head through cheap advertising, but he ate the gristly morsel anyway, even half enjoying its tacky blandness. It was finished in a few mouthfuls and then he wanted more; it was either more junk thoughts or they had impregnated the food with something that stimulated hunger. He bought another.

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The waves of excitement from the crowd were rising like heat, almost tangibly circling above the city like great wings. The snow-laden sky shuddered under their beats. Carried on the heady air and antagonized by it, Vael moved with the surging crowd. Underfoot, the slushy streets were littered with trampled pamphlets supporting Rassilon's opposition faction.

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Vael found that he was twisting his kerchief into a tight cord that burned his hands. His head began to swim as he was pushed on towards the parade route. The streets here were heated, making him sweat all the more. A fresh spark of anger was beginning to smoulder in him and his soul was dry as tinder.

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Cutting through the unified chanting of the mob, he heard his name called. Beside him, moving with the crowd, was Loie.

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"Vael Voryunsti, you should have answered the door."

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Vael might have thought "Fall off!" loud enough for her to hear through the chanting, but he couldn't ignore the imploring brown eyes. "Why should I?" he snapped.

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She took hold of his arm. "You'll freeze out here without a coat. Look, I heard the tutor this morning. You got the highest exam quota ever in temporal manifold physics."

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"So?" He snatched his arm away, but as he turned to leave her, the crowd erupted and the first dancers in the victory procession rounded the top of the street. Their voluminous skirts billowed out round them like scarlet sails as they whirled their way along the route.

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"You think that they'll drop you. Is that it?"

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"Why shouldn't they? I failed every other assessment!"

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"But they can't afford to waste you, Vael."

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"How wasteful," he heard the Pythia say again.

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The spinning dancers were passing and behind them trundled a great decorated bier drawn by a plumed leviathan. The lumbering creature, its three tusks encrusted with silver, swung its massive head in time with the chanting of the crowd. On the bier, the returned crew of the Apollaten flung showers of gold coins to the crowd. Standing amid the piled tributes of fealty to the Gallifreyan Empire, they waved their ceremonial swords in triumphant acknowledgement.

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​Loie took Vael's arm tightly. "You're too valuable to them. They need temporal physicists for the Time Scaphe experiments."

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The chanting of the crowd was cutting into his feverish thoughts. He wrung the kerchief through his hands. "What do you care? Leave me alone! I'm nobody! I don't want to be anyone!" He turned away from her and stared up at the bier.

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High above the crowd, Prydonius lifted a glass case in a victory salute. Inside, the gnarled feline, feminine head of the Sphinx stared out over the throng.

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Its amber eye glittered and met Vael's stare. "Who are you?" was its riddle.

​"You're an idiot!" shouted Loie in disgust at him. "Be nothing then! And you'll stay that way!"

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He cried out in hatred, his anger kindled, and rounded on her.

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Amid the riotous joy of the crowd, Loie screamed and fell back, her hair smoking and face blistering under the force of another's spite.

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Vael turned and forced a way through the mob. He ran, angry and afraid of the power he had unleashed from inside himself. Now he was nothing. He had no future, but that was what he wanted. The future could do without him. He could hide forever in his own mind. No one would know, because no one had seen.

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The uncontrolled euphoria of the crowd was changing the colour of the sky overhead. Patterns of light shifted among the heavy clouds like an aurora. It started to snow. The city seemed to spin. Council Police were moving on to the streets to deal with a number of fights that had broken out and one reported case of spontaneous combustion.

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Vael reached his room and flung himself on to the pallet, burying his feverish head under the pillow. Shut it all out. As long as no one had seen.

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Again the stars spun and the dark blue oblong tumbled towards him, its beacon flashing, its engines grating. But he denied it. It was not his future. He was safe from it. And then he saw the eye again, ancient and terrible, as the Sphinx had always been to those forced to worship it. The eye glittered and pierced him with its next riddle.

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"Did I see?"

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​Of course it had seen. Why else should it ask? He had been wrong. There was no escape from the future, and as the future came closer, he saw it clearer too.

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Again the blue box . . . a TARDIS, whatever that was, tumbled. Again he was held; they were all held by the malignant eye. The eye of the Sphinx; the eye of the Pythia.

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