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intuitive-revelations · 4 months ago

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As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been thinking a lot about the exact chronology of ancient Gallifrey, and specifically I've put a lot of attention on the Caldera and the Citadel, plus related things like the Eye of Harmony, the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, the Untempered Schism etc.

All these things seem to be located in the same place on Gallifrey, albeit some at different times, and often overlap in nature. After some thinking, I think I've worked how everything goes together, as well as the order of events. At some point I want to create a fully history, but for the sake of this we'll focus primarily on the subjects above, with some other major events sprinkled in for context.

A Very Brief History of the Capitol

[ID: Surviving parts of the old Capitol, in an illustration from Lungbarrow. Crystal-like towers and walkways stand over a waterfall. The TARDIS, in pyramid form, dematerialises.]

Pythian Era - The capital city is built near the Mountains of Solace and Solitude (likely, in antiquity, a stronghold against the Gin-Seng cats to the south). Beneath the Pythia's temple, in the centre of the city, is the Cavern of Prophecy. Within the cave is a deep, deep opening known as the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, which holds, in the astral plane, something known as the Gate of the Future, a tear into the time vortex far greater than the similar natural rifts that occur elsewhere on Gallifrey. Time flows out from it, from the future, to the past Gallifrey. In times of meditation, the Pythia sits in a hanging cage above the Crevasse, breathing in the rising vapours, which aid her in her clairvoyance.

[ID: Gif edit made by me, featuring the last Pythia sat in a small cage slowly swinging in a chasm as a mist slowly rises around her.]

The Intuitive Revelation - The Neotechnologists, led by Rassilon, bring a revolution. The Pythia curses Gallifrey with sterility and cuts the ropes holding her cage, falling into the abyss. The Gate of the Future inverts, forming the Gate of the Past. Visibly, the Doppler-effect like colouring of the vortex changes - no longer red, flowing towards the viewer, but blue and flowing away (ironically directionally the reverse of the real Doppler effect). Time from the new future flowing into the chaotic past.

The new government take control of the Capitol. A new age of space exploration arises, with the Shobogans taking on the name, for now, of "Space Lords". One of these first individual explorers, semi-authorised predecessors to future Time Lord renegades, is a woman named Tecteun.

The First Attempt - The stellar engineers, including Rassilon and Omega, make their first attempt at capturing the energy of a collapsing star, recieving the energy on Gallifrey using an obelisk, like that later used to channel energy from the Eye of Harmony, in the middle of the city, using the nature of the Crevasse.

The experiment is a catastrophic failure. A hole is punctured into the Spiral Yssgaroth, unleashing Vampires through openings throughout the universe, fracturing out from the experiment.

[ID: From The Book of the War, an illustration of the "Eyes of the Yssgaroth", human-like eyeballs looking through holes punctured into spacetime.]

Part of the Old Capitol is destroyed in a great blast, destroying the Cavern of Prophecy and opening up the Crevasse, leaving a giant crater: the Caldera. It is likely that many are killed. Left behind in the middle of the crater, is the Gate of the Past, now manifest in the physical world: an open gap in reality. In this form, it becomes known as the Untempered Schism.

(I also suspect this is when Rassilon is forced to regenerate for the first time, to the shock of on-lookers, having secretly previously recieved Tecteun's genetic modifications - I plan to expand on this theory in a future post.)

The Vampire War / Rebuilding of the Capitol - The exact circumstances of the experiment are covered up. Rassilon, leaving to fight the Vampire hoard, swears Omega to secrecy regarding the project during the Arcalian High Council's investigation.

[ID: A gif, rotating around the Citadel is constructed over the Caldera, from part of the (likely partially-symbolic) time-lapse in The Timeless Children.]

Though some of the city survives, including parts of the Pythian temple, a new colossal city-complex begins construction in the place of the old one, suspended over the Caldera, the centrepiece of the new Capitol: the Citadel. It is built as a defensive structure, both for the war, and to protect the new, growing elite, surrounded by a great circular wall named "Rassilon's Rampart". The "core" of the structure, on which the towers rest, reaches down deep into Caldera and the deeper Crevasse.

Meanwhile the Untempered Schism is taken out of the city by those fearing further destruction, to a place in the nearby hills that will one day be known as the Weeping Field, where prospective Time Academy students are initiated.

[ID: The Untempered Schism in the Doctor's time, as seen in The Sound of Drums. It sits in a stone frame on red grass, with the Seal of Rassilon in front of it, and flames on either side. Within it, the blue "past" variant of the RTD1-era time vortex flows away from the viewer. The Citadel's lights are visible in the background.]

(Side note: it's possible the Untempered Schism's 'ring' is deliberately designed to evoke the Caldera. Note how it's lined with pieces sticking out. Look a bit like the battlements on Rassilon's Rampart, don't they? Surrounding the hole into the vortex just as they surround the crater.)

The Anchoring of the Thread - Several centuries later, once the Vampires are more or less defeated, Rassilon returns home. He coups Pandak I, forcing him to resign, and takes the Presidency.

By now the Citadel is more or less completed, though for the next few centuries it still lacks its characteristic dome, likely added during a later founding conflict.

[ID: Gallifrey, around the time the first TARDISes are grown, from The Lost Dimension. In the background past a small outsider village is the Citadel, new and gleaming, but undomed.]

The Triumvirate retry their experiment at Qqaba / Polyphilos, attempting to capture the collapsed star. When the experiment goes wrong once more, Omega's ship falls inside, as spacetime threatens to crack open again. With temporal energy flowing though him (a la the Bad Wolf), Rassilon reshapes the laws of physics, forming an event horizon, and black holes as we know them.

The black hole is dimensionally captured and suspended in the moment it collapses and the event horizon is formed, creating the Eye of Harmony, controlled using the Obelisk of Rassilon storied in the Panopticon Vaults. Meanwhile, the black hole itself is suspended within the temporal singularity of the Caldera, deep below the Citadel.

Harnessing the power of the Eye and the Caldera rift, Rassilon "anchors" chronology around Gallifrey, creating the Web of Time and placing it under the control of the Gallifreyans, now Time Lords.

Future Developments - Over the years, many changes come to Rassilon's Gallifrey.

Over the years, the more and more of the old city is replaced with new towers, forming the new Capitol around a now domed Citadel. Interweaved with these buildings over 28 square miles is much of the new Time Academy, such that the Academy is sometimes considered a whole city itself annexed to the Citadel.

While the remnants of the Pythian Temple are eventually torched by Rassilon, hunting down dissenters, many old buildings remain intact. These continue to be inhabited far into the future, in a community known as "Low Town" or the "Lower Len", as opposed to the "upper" city above. Shanties surround the surviving buildings, some climbing up Rassilon's Rampart.

Another such community is based around the "Old Harbour", whcih once sat on the coast of the now recessed Sea of Time. Nowadays, it likely sits on the shore of the small (possibly designed) lakes near the Capitol, where streams from the mountains presumably once drained directly into the sea.

[ID: From Hell Bent: a screencap as Rassilon turns from looking out the window from an Inner Council chamber high above the Capitol. In the background can be seen some lakes between the mountains, with some signs of what might be buildings on their shores.]

(Side note: I reckon this shot above might actually give us a glimpse of Old Harbour. I might just be imagining things, but there's some small features around and on the lakes I reckon could be docks or buildings? Interestingly, this also comes as Rassilon asks about the Cloister Bells ringing, and Old Habour is well known for the bells in its clocktower, which might explain why Rassilon was looking out at it from the window.)

In the space around the Eye in the Caldera, the Cloisters, the core of the APC net and later the Matrix, are constructed. The structure itself is, externally at least, relatively small, but it generates an entire 'micro-universe' on the Astral plane once accessed by the Pythia. Indeed, just as the Crevasse once allowed the meditating Pythia to see the future, so does the Matrix create its own prophecies.

[ID: From Hell Bent, the Doctor and Ohila converse in the entranceway to the Cloisters, a dark space with glowing optic fibres running across cobwebbed columns.]

In the Matrix is a "womb-like" null-space is where most TARDISes are grown, taking advantages of the Caldera's spatio-temporal properties. Budding within the Citadel Cloisters, a TARDIS's "Cloister Room" is one of the first parts to grow.

By the time of the Time War, though possibly earlier, the sealed Caldera also forms the resting site for many dying Battle TARDISes, the Under Croft, where they presumably decay and fertilise the growth of new time ships.