The Moon was as full as ever when I peeled back my eyelids. Huge and beautiful but silent. My dagger too refused to make a noise. Patting my pockets, I found that it had disappeared. I panicked. I looked up to my Darling, sole domina of the sky, but no answer came.

I was utterly alone and the silence of the night shook me as if I were a child. By my side were the pale bodies of the Young Woman and the Boy, drained of blood. I looked about in desperation. London was in its death throes. The remaining skyscrapers had sunk and been reduced to crumbling stumps. The tarmac had been torn apart and buildings teetered on the lips of wide chasms. I wavered as reticence swept through my mind.

Only a few months ago London was a bustling capital, brimming with people going about their lives. Some content, most not. Ants going here and there, fretting over minor things. And I was one of them. Was I happy then, in my ignorant and blinkered world? Perhaps.

Why was I so unsure of myself, burdened with such guilt? The Doctor was smarter than I and had already made a life of striving to help humanity. I took that brilliant mind from the world.

And then the innocent child. He was blessed and touched from birth. What if Fate could have made him a finer one than I?

Lost in my despair, I had forgotten the glory of my visions. A part of me was evidently still human. Weak and unimaginative. I approached the pit below the Moon and it was this part of me that trembled. Slipping over the rocky edge and into the pitch black, the claws of gargantuan beasts reached out for me. Their hands passed me down from one gentle grip to another, bearing me deep into the subterranean womb. Down, down I went, swallowed further and further by the throat of the earth.

In this place was a tree. A twisted, ruddy tree. The air was still, fixed and frozen in place. I gazed at its form and was reminded of the icon in the citadel. Both had that same cruel and powerful aura. Both were beautiful and terrifying.

From a branch held towards me, hung a crimson fruit. Shaped like a dried persimmon and gleaming with an iridescent twinkle, it quivered like a beating heart. Already transformed by the three cords, I shuddered to think what this final fruit would do. Yet if I stopped now, if I let this night drift away, what then? I would be at the mercy of those soldiers. How humiliating. How shameful. She chose me. The dagger chose me.

Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, Napoleon. You broke laws to make empires. I shall do the same although I seek an eternal one. This is the destiny of my becoming. As in autumn, when the trees lose their shrivelled leaves, I have taken this night to shed all that is feeble in me.

I snatched the fruit into my hands, tearing it from the tree. My teeth tore into its skin and I gnashed at its flesh. I tasted the distilled power that rested within and swallowed it whole.

Above me the jaws of the pit closed tight. In the impregnable darkness, the keys to death arrived.