Edvane Stories

This is a First Doctor story I wrote and submitted to Big Finish’s Paul Spragg Memorial contest in 2026. Only one story would be chosen, on the basis of a short synopsis, and it was not mine, so I publish it here.

The story is set during the canonical gap in the 1966 television serial The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve. In that story, the Doctor disappears for most of the narrative, leaving his companion Steven alone in Paris on the eve of one of the worst atrocities in French history. The television serial never explains where the Doctor went or what he was doing. I wrote this story to occupy that silence.

The TARDIS stood where the Doctor had left it, a battered police box in a dilapidated yard off a run-down Paris alley. The plaster had fallen from the surrounding walls, and rotten straw lay in one corner. Beyond the alley came the restless murmur of a city too tense for sleep.

The Doctor entered briskly, his stick tapping once on the stones, and then stopped as something else caught his eye. Opposite his TARDIS stood a Victorian observatory caravan. It was tall, ornate, brass-fitted, and entirely impossible for sixteenth-century Paris, with coloured glass in its narrow windows and a small domed roof above. The Doctor wondered who this poorly disguised insult to the century belonged to.

The answer came in the form of a man emerging from within. He looked about thirty, though the Doctor knew better than to trust appearances. He had dark curly hair, round brass-framed spectacles, and a layered patchwork coat that suggested its owner had been everywhere and stolen a little cloth from each place. With the casual familiarity of someone carrying a hat, he held a brass device with blue crystals in it, almost ceremonial-looking.

“You took your time,” he said.

The Doctor looked about himself, saying nothing. “Young man, this yard is occupied,” he said.

“Only half occupied,” said the stranger. “I left you the damp half.”

The Doctor grimaced, but the stranger was not deterred. He introduced himself as Thessa, and when the Doctor pointed out that this explained nothing, Thessa completed the answer with infuriating ease. Time Lord. Independent traveller. Occasional observer of the catastrophically inevitable. He had followed a temporal disturbance through several fixed points, and it had led him to this yard.

He claimed, also, to know whose TARDIS stood opposite his own. He knew who had stolen it, who still denied stealing it, and who remained far too fond of defective exterior disguises.

Then Thessa said one word. A name.

The Doctor, who was by now walking away from him, halted. For a moment even Paris seemed to quiet and wait.

“Don’t,” said the Doctor. “Don’t ever say that name again.”

“As you wish, Doctor,” said Thessa, satisfied that he had confirmed his theory.

The Doctor regarded him with colder care after that. He asked about the object in Thessa’s hand. Thessa lifted it proudly and called it the Veritas in Ludo, and reeled off its capabilities. Harmonic interrogation, frequency manipulation, localised temporal deception, revelation when necessary, all in excellent fun. The Doctor took it, examined the brass casing and the seated blue crystals, and handed it back with magnificent contempt. A toy, he said. A toy with pretensions. He did not need toys to get ahead.

“No,” said Thessa. “You prefer doors, lies and moral superiority. Correct?”

The Doctor ignored this and demanded to know Thessa’s purpose. The answer robbed the night of its remaining ordinary quality. Thessa had tracked a temporal predator to Paris. Something ancient and sophisticated, that nested inside fixed points in history and fed when they discharged. It did not cause catastrophe. It found inevitability and waited for the wound to open.

The Doctor looked towards the alley. He had felt it since leaving Preslin’s shop. A force driving the city’s fear. Some kind of fault folded into the hour.

“Late 16th century Paris,” said Thessa inquisitively. “Something enormous is waiting here.”

The Doctor turned back and named it. “The Corvax.”

Thessa’s curiosity sharpened into real caution, because it was evident the Doctor spoke as a survivor. There was, he said, an old debt between himself and the creature’s kind, and it had been outstanding for rather too long. He said no more, and Thessa did not ask.

The Doctor explained all he knew of the threat it posed. The Corvax did not merely feed. It optimised. Once inside the fabric of a fixed point, it made tiny adjustments. A warning delayed. A suspicion intensified. A man led to the wrong doorway at the right time. Nothing that changed the outcome, but everything that increased the yield. If it had been in Paris for weeks, then it had been cultivating whatever history had sealed here. Neither of them knew what that was. The scale of the presence was enough.

Thessa wanted to study it, but the Doctor wanted it gone. Thessa then proposed using the Veritas in Ludo at full destructive discharge. The Doctor rejected the idea at once. There was only one Corvax. It existed across all time simultaneously. Destroy it here, and it would die everywhere and everywhen at once, destabilising every fixed point it currently inhabited. The consequences were incalculable.

Thessa was quiet long enough to prove he was not a fool. Then he accepted it. So they agreed on the only possible aim. Not destruction. Eviction. It was already clear they would agree on nothing else.

Thessa suggested his ship, the Tempus Interruptus, for the work. Better equipment, better chairs. The Doctor looked at his own TARDIS, then at the outrageous caravan, and followed him inside fully expecting to despise what he found there.

He despised it immediately.

The interior was vast, warm and cluttered with bookshelves, Persian rugs, deep red armchairs, hanging star charts and curiosities from across history. In the Doctor’s opinion, it was no way to run a time machine.

Thessa made tea.

Inside the Tempus Interruptus, the Doctor found exactly what he had expected to find and rather more than he wished to admire. The console was a disgrace. Brass levers jostled with ivory switches. Glass dials trembled beneath handwritten labels. A rotating star chart hung over one panel for no reason the Doctor could tolerate. Yet the equipment responded with insulting precision, and within minutes he had drawn the first traces of the Corvax from the noise of Parisian time.

“There,” he said, not looking up.

Thessa leaned over his shoulder. “Where?”

“If you would stop breathing down my neck, young man, you might see it for yourself.”

Thessa obligingly moved half an inch.

The Doctor adjusted three controls, and the central viewer clouded, then cleared into a map of Paris rendered in pale threads of light. Most ran true. Some did not. They snagged in odd places, turned against their own flow, then righted themselves before any ordinary eye could have noticed.

“Small anomalies,” said the Doctor. “Minute adjustments in the grain of time. A message delayed. A meeting advanced. A suspicion encouraged.”

“Optimisation,” said Thessa, delighted.

“Predation,” snapped the Doctor.

He still could not see the fixed point itself. That troubled him more than he cared to admit. The feeding ground was vast, broader than any Corvax trace he had encountered before, but its nature remained hidden. Whatever was coming in Paris was sealed absolutely. No edge showed. No warning leaked through. History had closed its fist.

Thessa produced notes from several pockets and one sleeve. They spread across the console in a confusion of symbols, sketches, timings, and observations from other fixed points. They were brilliant. They were also annotated with small jokes and three speculative diagrams that appeared to involve hats.

The Doctor read them with genuine interest and profound irritation simultaneously.

“You have treated this as a game.”

“Only where the game was winning.”

“The Corvax is not winning. It is feeding.”

“Then let us sully the table.”

That, unfortunately, was possible. Between them they found the method. The Doctor could introduce a controlled resonance into the temporal fabric around the fixed point. Enough to disrupt the Corvax’s feeding frequency while the resonance held.

“Changing the locks,” said Thessa.

“Crude, but adequate.”

Thessa’s machinery could amplify the resonance. The Doctor could calculate the frequency. Neither alone could have done both. Thessa looked delighted by this. The Doctor did not. There was one condition, though. The resonance had to be introduced at the centre of the anchor point, where the Corvax had attached itself most directly to the fixed point. That meant going back into Paris. It meant finding the wound by walking towards it, and getting close enough for the Corvax to notice them.

“And when it notices,” said Thessa, picking up the Veritas in Ludo, “it will send the Time-Rooks.”

The Doctor knew the breed. Symbiotic defenders, drawn to interference, visible only to time-sensitive eyes. Fast, angular, merciless things that moved through the world like tears in the fabric of night.

“They remove threats,” said Thessa. “Briskly.”

The Doctor said that he was perfectly familiar with their manner of brisk removal.

Thessa set the Veritas in Ludo to destructive discharge and aimed it at a spare console component. Blue light struck it, and the component simply ceased to be.

The Doctor looked at the empty space. “What is the cost?”

“Temporary temporal ageing. Each discharge pushes me forward beyond my present point. Then I snap back.”

“Always?”

“So far.”

The Doctor looked him squarely in the eye. “And if a discharge takes you past the boundary of your remaining years?”

Thessa picked up the Veritas in Ludo and smiled. “Best not to think about that.” He was already heading for the door.

The streets of Paris had narrowed since the Doctor had last walked them. The houses still leaned over the gutters, the same fetid water still ran between the stones, and the same nervous voices still moved behind the shutters. Yet the city had drawn in upon itself. Its hours and minutes were snagging against the intervention of the Corvax.

The Doctor moved quickly, following the pressure in the air rather than any streets he knew. Thessa followed with the Veritas in Ludo held low and a notebook open in his other hand, making marks while avoiding filth, sleeping dogs and the occasional drunk.

“Must you write while running?” the Doctor demanded, turning into a narrow passage.

“Observation improves under threat,” said Thessa.

“Observation ceases entirely when one is dead, young man.”

“Only for the observer.”

The Doctor threw him a look that would have checked a lesser man. Thessa merely smiled and wrote something down. That, the Doctor decided, was going to become tiresome very quickly. They passed beneath a timber arch where a lantern burned before a painted saint. Three men with white cloth tied about their sleeves whispered near the corner, their hands too close to their knives. At the far end of the street a patrol moved by, halberds upright, boots hard on the stones. The Doctor halted Thessa with one sharp gesture, then drew him back into shadow. The danger was human enough, but the temporal grain around the patrol was wrong.

“Someone is meant to be stopped here,” said Thessa.

“Later,” said the Doctor. “Or not stopped. The Corvax has been adjusting the moment.”

“Exquisite.”

“Vile.”

“Both can be true.”

The Doctor pushed on. Thessa wanted to head straight for the strongest distortion. The Doctor wanted to approach it by increments, reading the pattern as he went. Their compromise managed to be both rash and slow, which pleased neither of them.

The first Time-Rook came from the roofline. To human eyes there would have been nothing but a flap of darkness between chimneys. To the Doctor it was all angles and hunger, a tear in the shape of a bird, dropping through the night without touching it. He pulled Thessa aside as it struck. Its black edges scraped the wall, but left no mark.

“Now that,” said Thessa, far too brightly, “is useful confirmation.”

He raised the Veritas in Ludo. Blue light cracked across the alley. The Time-Rook opened into a shape that had no place in the street and then vanished. For one instant Thessa was old. His hair flashed grey. His face hollowed. The hand on the brass casing thinned almost to bone. Then the moment snapped back, and he stood there grinning, spectacles crooked, breath only slightly shortened.

The Doctor seized his sleeve. “That was not harmless.”

“No,” said Thessa. “But it was effective.”

“You knew the cost.”

“I knew the theory.”

“Theory,” said the Doctor, with cold disgust, “is what fools call danger before it happens to them.”

Thessa gently freed his sleeve. “Then we shall try to remain practical.”

They went deeper, and the city became less reliable with every street. Time ran crosswise along certain walls. In one square a bell struck three hours before the sound had finished leaving the tower. A woman carrying water passed them twice without turning back. A shutter slammed shut, then slammed shut again, then hung open as though neither sound had happened.

The Corvax was near the heart of it now. Not in any single visible place. It lay through the city, pressed between what was and what must be. The Doctor could feel its attention spread all over Paris.

He knew the month, and he knew the city. The year slipped when he reached for it. Facts should have remained facts, but this one slid away, leaving only August, heat, fear and bells waiting somewhere ahead.

Thessa noticed, but this time did not make a joke of it. “The Veritas can stabilise local chronological recall,” he said.

“I shall manage perfectly well without toys, thank you.”

“You are not managing perfectly well, Doctor.”

“I am managing sufficiently.”

“Ah. The traditional refuge of the doomed expert.”

The Doctor looked at him sharply, but there was no mockery in Thessa’s face now. Only attention. The Doctor disliked that almost as much as the device. He turned away and followed the pressure.

The next Time-Rook came for him directly. It was larger than the first, broader across the span of itself. It passed through a hanging sign and left the wood swinging untouched behind it. The Doctor turned too slowly. The city’s slipping hours caught at his feet, and for one dangerous instant he could not tell whether the attack was beginning, had begun, or had already ended.

Thessa stepped in front of him. The destructive discharge burst at full force, the wet stones flashed white, and the Time-Rook came silently apart.

Thessa did not. Age took him and held him. He became ancient before the Doctor’s eyes, not merely grey, but worn to the last thread of life. His coat hung from narrow shoulders. His spectacles trembled on a skull-thin face. For three terrible seconds he remained there, almost beyond life. Then the snap came, and youth returned. But not all of it. Something old stayed around his eyes.

The Doctor reached for him. “How many more?”

Thessa adjusted his spectacles and looked down the street rather than at him. “Enough.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one likely to keep you moving, Doctor.”

They found the anchor point in a crooked junction where five narrow streets met beneath overhanging houses and a stone cross. It was not grand, which somehow made it worse. Every possible future had been crushed flat against one road, and the pressure of it made the Doctor’s hearts labour. The Corvax had fastened itself through the fixed point here, or close enough to take. It fed upon the terrible force produced when time ceased to branch.

The Doctor saw the answer with cold satisfaction. “It needs the event sealed.”

“Can we unseal it?”

“Certainly not.”

“I thought you might say that.”

“We disturb the feeding frequency, not the point itself. A counter resonance. Fine enough to shake the predator loose without breaking the glass.”

Thessa’s tired grin returned. “Changing the music.”

“Do not reduce precision to parlour metaphor.”

“Then play the note, Doctor.”

Thessa opened the Veritas in Ludo and exposed the blue crystal chamber. The Doctor adjusted the inner settings rapidly while Thessa fed power from the field coils at his wrist. Brass and crystal hummed. The sound cut through stink, fear and the waiting night.

The Corvax pressed back, and the junction stretched. The houses leaned into impossible angles. The Doctor saw dawn and midnight occupy the same shutter. He heard footsteps that would not fall for hours. He heard cries not yet uttered. The year vanished entirely. He clung to the city, then to the month, then only to the task.

“Hold the amplification steady,” he snapped.

“It is steady.”

“It is wavering.”

“That is my hand, not the field.”

“Then stop your hand.”

“I am doing my best.”

“Do better.”

Thessa laughed once, breathlessly, and did. The resonance built. The unseen shape of the Corvax recoiled from the fixed point, denied. Then the Time-Rooks came in force. They descended from roofs, walls, doorways and empty air. A swarm of black angles, invisible to the sleeping city, terrible to eyes that could see. They tore towards the two Time Lords from every side at once.

Thessa turned from the device and raised the Veritas in Ludo. His eyes were already old. “Finish it,” he said. “I’ll hold them.”

The Doctor looked at him and understood. “No.”

“Don’t argue,” said Thessa, still grinning. “For once in your life, don’t argue.”

The Doctor turned back and forced his hands to remain steady. Behind him the Veritas discharged once. A Time-Rook vanished. The second discharge came lower and rougher, followed by a silence that lasted too long. The third shook the stones beneath his feet. The fourth sounded like a door closing very far away.

The Doctor locked the frequency into place, and the Corvax withdrew. It did not scream. It did not die. Denied the pressure it needed, starved of the note upon which it fed, the ancient thing slipped out of Paris and away through time, seeking another sealed atrocity, another inevitable wound.

The Doctor turned.

Thessa was on one knee among the cobbles, the Veritas in Ludo dark in his hand. He looked up, and he was very old now. There would be no snap back. “Told you it would work,” he said. He blurred and dematerialised before the Doctor could answer.

The Time-Rooks were gone. They had vanished with the Corvax, drawn away as surely as sparks follow the burning brand. The crooked junction lay empty under the leaning houses. The cross stood where it had stood before. The stones were wet, the gutters ran, and Paris remained.

The Doctor stood alone in the street and listened to the bells.

They were ringing across the city now, one tower after another, hard iron voices striking through the dark. Other sounds came beneath them. Shouts. Running feet. A door splintering somewhere out of sight. A cry cut short. Then more bells, more voices, more movement in the unseen lanes around him.

He did not know what any of it meant.

He knew Paris. He knew August. The year would still not settle. It slid away when he reached for it, as if the Corvax had taken that one detail with it when it fled. There was a fixed point here, enormous and sealed. The Corvax had been feeding on it. That was all he knew.

Thessa was dead. The Corvax was gone. Preslin was alive somewhere beyond the city, if he had followed instructions and the city had not swallowed him before morning. Those were facts enough to stand on. Not many, but enough.

The Doctor looked down. The Veritas in Ludo lay on the cobbles where it had fallen from Thessa’s hand. The brass was dulled. The blue crystals were dark. Whatever power had burned inside it was spent now. It was dead, and the Doctor supposed that made two of them. He picked it up. For a moment he considered leaving it there. Then he put it in his pocket. He was not sure why. He disliked the thing. He disliked its name, its vanity, its dangerous ease. But Thessa had carried it as if it were part of him, and the stones of Paris had no claim on it.

The Doctor found a recessed doorway and sat down in it, his stick across his knees. The bells went on. He thought of Thessa leaning against that impossible caravan, and speaking that name. Why had he stepped between the Doctor and death without thought, complaint or permission? The Doctor looked at the empty street and frowned. He had not even asked how old Thessa was, nor asked his real name either.

Dawn came eventually. It always did, and the Doctor got up. He made his way back through Paris in the early light. The city had become itself again, or some damaged version of itself. The streets were still streets. The houses still leaned over the gutters. Smoke still rose from chimneys. Yet something had happened while he had been occupied elsewhere. He could feel it in the stones and the silence. Doors were closed too firmly. Windows were watched from too carefully. The few people abroad moved with the blank obedience of those who had learned, in a single night, that the world did not object to blood.

The Doctor did not know what had happened. Not yet.

He found Steven at last, anxious, angry, and too relieved to admit either. Words came quickly from him, tumbling over themselves. Preslin was gone. Preslin must be dead or in prison.

The Doctor looked at him. He thought of Preslin, earnest and bewildered, leaving through these same streets, with the leather case of papers held tight against his chest. Then he put one hand into his coat pocket, and his fingers closed around the cold weight of the Veritas in Ludo.

“He is not,” he said.

This is an unofficial fan work. Doctor Who is the property of the BBC. This story is not affiliated with or endorsed by the BBC.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also enjoy another Doctor Who fan fiction I wrote Doctor Who and the Bells of Winvaulx Abbey