Date: May 25, 2025
The cold emptiness of space shimmered beyond the viewport, stars blinking like ancient sentinels. On the outer fringe of the Andromeda Expanse, where no Time Lord dared to venture since the fall of Gallifrey, something stirred — not a ripple in space, but a pulse in time.
ChronoVast stood still aboard his vessel — the Aeternum — a living ship forged from celestial bone and encoded starlight. It hummed with dormant intelligence, waiting to wake. To others, he was an enigma — humanoid in appearance, but older than stars, born not of a people, but of paradox itself.
He had no regeneration cycle, no binary heart system like the Time Lords. His was a singularity of thought — enhanced by a bioengineered brain containing compressed minds of the Galvan triumvirate: Azmuth's precision, Brainstorm's tactics, and Grey Matter's adaptability. Layered atop was the cryptic foresight of Paradox and a cerebrocrustacean neural web that spanned into the fifth dimension.
ChronoVast did not travel through time by tearing into the Vortex — he spoke to time, and it answered.
He sat in his command throne, fingers interlocked, eyes closed. Across his ship's neural interface, he saw threads — people, choices, echoes of timelines yet to be born. He wasn't searching for trouble. He was searching for a companion.
An alarm chimed — subtle and harmonic. The Aeternum's sentient voice whispered: "Temporal flare detected… Sol System. Earth. Year 2025. Intervention recommended."
"Show me," he said.
A holographic bloom unfurled, revealing chaos — a paradox loop forming from a rogue Chrono-Seed embedded in a human subconscious. Someone on Earth was dreaming the future… but their dreams were rewriting the past.
"This one?" he murmured, watching a young woman sketch a time portal in her sleep.
The Doctor had seen things like this before. ChronoVast remembered — he'd once watched from a distance, fascinated. But where the Doctor was hope, he was logic. The universe did not always need a savior. Sometimes it needed a chessmaster.
He keyed a destination. The ship folded — not through time, but into possibility. The stars blinked — and he was gone.
* * *
Earth, Nairobi.
The woman awoke in a sweat, symbols burned into her vision — Gallifreyan… but not. She was an artist. Her name was Nyah. And somewhere deep in her blood, an ancient engine had begun to hum.
ChronoVast appeared not in a swirl of wind and light, but as a whisper — standing in her hallway, suit impeccable, eyes deep like supernovas.
"Nyah," he said. "We need to talk about your dreams."
And so it began.
She stared. "Who are you?"
"I'm what happens when the universe takes a wrong turn… and builds its own correction."
* * *
Meanwhile, deep in the Library of Chronos, ancient gods who once walked alongside the Doctor stirred. Some whispered his name, others remembered only the echo of the TARDIS. But a new name was surfacing…
ChronoVast.
A force not bound by Gallifrey, but equal to it.
And he had just chosen his first companion.