the wolf

"...No... Tycho couldn't be that stupid, could he?" Fatman mused, and as he did he remembered just what kind of being he was dealing with at the moment. This was Tycho, the One True Mad God of the Marathon, the very entity that had besmirched the name of his own patron deity not so long ago.

After that fateful day upon L'howon's orbit, Fatman and Durandal knew if he had ever survived, he'd do just this.

And so it began, as the sun overhead started to grow, and then collapsed just as instantly. The overmass of the solar entity's body started to warp and distort, growing ever smaller; ever smaller, and ever blacker, as if it were taking the form of a total eclipse.

The radio started to crackle. Fatman looked at it, then the sun, then back to it. At last, after a long pause, he spoke to The Doctor:

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

The Time Lord responded, jolted awake by the tremors of the TARDIS. His response to Fatman was frantic for a moment: "What, what's wrong? Why are you sorry, Fatman!?"

"Doctor, it's Tycho. He's... he's early nova'd the sun."

Blackened tendrils of an ageless sort, warping time and space and light and solar dust around them, burst and wriggled from the surface of the pitch-black sun in numbers unlike any sort seen by mortal man.

"He's unleashed a W'rkncacnter."

The words rang hollow in the auditory nerves of the Last Time Lord. His jaw hovered open there for a while as rory and Amy came to. "Doctor!" "Doctor, what's wrong? Doctor!"

Amy started to shake him; his response was to grab Rory and Amy, and hold them close. "I'm sorry, you two... I'm so sorry... but there's nothing I can do..."

The tendrils fumbled and wrapped together upon the surface of the pitch-black sun, extending in a crude shape not unlike a skeleton's spine. They gleamed like darkened metal together for seconds at a time, and yet they were as empty and flat as ink as well. Ribs started to form, then shoulder plates, then arms; six skeletal arms extended from the sides of the unnatural thing extending from the surface of the sun.

"There's nothing I can do..."

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

A skull formed next on the thing, pointed and black, just like the rest of it. It was vaguely draconian in shape, and yet canine as well. In its hollowed eye sockets, tiny pinpricks of light appeared, and clashed together to form a chaotic jumble, ever-spinning at speeds that man should not see.

Stars around the skeletal being burst and warped, stretching uncannily like dots of white ink upon the surface of stretched black rubber.

It opened up its skeletal maw and howled.

And then...

Silence