Caldera

Caldera
Location:	Mountains of Solace and Solitude, Gallifrey / The Homeworld
First appearance:	The Book of the War [+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"]
Appearances:	TV: The Timeless Children PROSE: Tempered

You may be looking for A. St. John D. Caldera or Eye of Harmony.

The caldera was a sacred area of the Homeworld that acted as a node point where all lines of historical influence converged and one could stare directly into the heart of time. It was a crater, created by the first emergence of the Yssgaroth into the universe. The Great Houses' Citadel was built over it.

It was located on the site of the machine-heart of the anchoring of the thread, (PROSE: The Book of the War) whose centre had been the obelisk channelling the power of the Eye of Harmony. (COMIC: The Final Chapter) The Untempered Schism, a gap in the fabric of reality, was located at the heart of the caldera. (PROSE: Tempered) A "null-zone" connected to the caldera site used machinery to draw out data from across space and time, and was also the only place where new timeships could be constructed; (PROSE: The Book of the War) the Cloisters, which were the physical form of the Matrix, were directly connected to the TARDIS workshops. (TV: Hell Bent)

Nature

The caldera was a crater in the mountainside of Solace and Solitude. (PROSE: Tempered) The caldera was created at the site of the "machine-heart" used in central ceremony of the anchoring of the thread, (PROSE: The Book of the War) shown in one account to have taken place out in the open, with the obelisk channelling the power of the Eye of Harmony standing in the centre of a plain surrounded by distant mountains. (COMIC: The Final Chapter)

As shown in the records of Gallifreyan history shown by the Spy Master to the Thirteenth Doctor, the Citadel was built over the crater over generations. (TV: The Timeless Children) until the caldera was wholly covered over in later eras, becoming a "womb" facility which was the only place on the planet in which timeships could be made; (PROSE: The Book of the War) while the Untempered Schism was still out in the open in the Master's early life, quite near to the Capitol, (PROSE: Tempered) the Obelisk was buried directly beneath the Panopticon, its location forgotten by all but a few Time Lords, by the Fourth Doctor's lifetime. When he rediscovered the secret, the Decayed Master was able to raise the obelisk, though the Doctor prevented him from unleashing its power. (TV: The Deadly Assassin) Thereafter, Devonire could see the caldera on a balcony from his home. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

History

Origins

Rassilon about to activate the machinery incorporating the obelisk of the Eye of Harmony. (COMIC: The Final Chapter)

The caldera was created on the day of the anchoring of the thread. In a special ceremony, "elite representatives" of each of the Ruling Houses gathered (PROSE: The Book of the War) with Rassilon (COMIC: The Final Chapter) at the "machine-heart" on the Homeworld. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Rassilon used the Great Key of Rassilon to activate the Eye of Harmony, effecting the anchoring. (COMIC: The Final Chapter)

However, the moment of strain allowed a "primal manifestation" of the Yssgaroth to break through from another universe. As it broke through, the entity destroyed the machinery and it was commonly understood that this had created a crater that was also a wound in space-time itself: the caldera. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The caldera on Earth

In contrast to The Book of the War's description of a single emergence point, (PROSE: The Book of the War) one Faction Paradox-influenced account of the start of the war against the Great Vampires, shown to the Eighth Doctor's companion Sam Jones, showed a plague of portals to the Vampires' dimension opening all across reality, not just on Gallifrey. One of these tears in reality opened at the location of what would later become the centre of the Earth; indeed, Rassilon created the Earth as a hard matter shell to conceal the anomaly. (PROSE: Interference ^[+]Loading...["Interference (novel)"])

According to the Shift, human civilisation right up until the 21st century showed every sign of being distorted in certain specific ways consistent with being built over the caldera. This abruptly stopped at (PROSE: Head of State ^[+]Loading...["Head of State (novel)"]) the so-called "Ghost Point" at which humanity's progress halted for reasons which scholars found difficult to explain, failing to achieve the potential they had clearly been gearing up for. (PROSE: The Book of the War ^[+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"]) The Shift's theory was that the caldera had remained on Earth for that span of history, then been covertly "half-inched" by the Great Houses and taken back to their own planet, thereby usurping humanity's potential to become the masters and designers of History. (PROSE: Head of State ^[+]Loading...["Head of State (novel)"]) This would have confirmed a form of the "Younger World Story". (PROSE: The Book of the War ^[+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"])

Indeed, The Thousand and Second Night, an apocryphal fairy tale planted on Earth to give potentially biased clues about the motivations of certain parties within the War, related how the "cauldron of creation" was made when the world of the "djinn" (here meaning the Yssgaroth) was destroyed, and "Allah" (here meaning the Houses' founder) placed within it "an infinite blackness". At the end of days, the tale said that Allah would dissolve the world in the cauldron and create the new world.

However, "Iblis", the leader of the "djinn", wanted the cauldron so he could have Allah's power, so he convinced the djinn to help him steal the cauldron from "Jannat" — the Homeworld — and bring it to "Jahannam" (the elder vampires' dimension). Allah sent his "angels" to defend the cauldron, and many were killed by the djinn. However, there was a person who was neither an angel nor a djinn, whose name was known only to Allah. He advised Allah to hide the cauldron from the djinn and protect it from them, so Allah formed the Earth around the cauldron and placed Man on Earth to guard it. Now unable to reach the cauldron, the djinn mixed with human women and created the Mal'akh, who lay in wait until the angels returned to take the cauldron back to Jannat.

The Shift observed that if a party managed to drill the caldera out of the Earth before the point at which the ancient Homeworlders would steal it back and bring it back to the Homeworld on the day of anchoring, that person could usurp the usurpers, and unwrite all of the Houses' history. In its original corporeal form, it discovered that this was part of Lolita's agenda, via her human persona as an American political candidate, but was turned into a shift before it could report this to its superiors. (PROSE: Head of State ^[+]Loading...["Head of State (novel)"])

Put to use on the Homeworld

Whether it was there from the start or had to be recovered after billions of years hidden within the Earth by its own relative timeline, it was agreed that the caldera sat, for all of the Homeworld's history, at the "core" of the Great Houses' capital city. (PROSE: The Book of the War ^[+]Loading...["The Book of the War (novel)"], Head of State ^[+]Loading...["Head of State (novel)"]) As an "absence" in the fabric of the universe, it was the only place where the non-linear processes necessary to the creation of new timeships could be created. A "null-zone" connected to the crater site was created, and came to be referred to as a "kind of 'womb'": (PROSE: The Book of the War) the Matrix, whose Cloisters were connected to the "old [TARDIS] workshops". (TV: Hell Bent) Over the generations, the crater in the middle of the plain was covered until the Citadel reached up into the sky. (TV: The Timeless Children)

Uses of the Untempered Schism

The Untempered Schism as it appeared at the young Master's initiation. (TV: The Sound of Drums)

The heart of the caldera came to be known as the Untempered Schism. (PROSE: Tempered) When the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS brought him to ancient Gallifrey, allegedly "billions of years" before his time, he and Cindy Wu witnessed young Gallifreyans being forced into the schism by a group of Time Sentinels. (COMIC: Old Girl) During at least one ceremony during the Dark Times, a group of students were thrown into the Schism. Their physical forms were splintered by unprotected travel through the Time Vortex. (COMIC: The Wishing Well Witch)

In later eras, the Schism would come to be used as part of an initiation ritual for children of Gallifrey, who were taken before the Schism at the age of eight to stare at the "raw power" of time and space through the gap in the fabric of reality. The young Doctor and young Master both underwent this ritual. (TV: The Sound of Drums)

Oblivion and rediscovery

The obelisk is uncovered by the Decayed Master. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)

Eventually, the citadel was built up over the site of the caldera, which became a "womb"-like crypt of sorts which was the only place where new timeships could be born. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The obelisk channelling the power of the Eye was located directly beneath the Panopticon, with a mechanism activated by the Rod of Rassilon allowing it to be raised into the centre of the Panopticon if necessary. Its location was forgotten, and its sheer existence became a myth.

Eventually, its location was rediscovered by the Master, now in an undead body bereft of regenerations. He arranged the assassination of the President, stole the Rod and raised the obelisk, intending to release the power of the Eye to grant himself new regenerations, destroy Gallifrey, and gain "unlimited power" over the physical universe. He was prevented by the Fourth Doctor. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)

Renewed use

A short while after the murder of the President, the Grandfather began to lay the groundwork for the foundation of House Paradox. (PROSE: Crimes Against History) His Godfather-lieutenants travelled through the caldera to access an "abomination's graveyard" from which they sourced the skeletons of what appeared to be members of their own kind corrupted by the Yssgaroth taint, which they claimed were from an alternate timeline where the Homeworld had lost the war against the Yssgaroth. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

During the War in Heaven

Three decades after the Faraway Declaration but a few years before the official outbreak of the War in Heaven, President Umbaste decided to stare into the caldera with no biodata protections, fully opening himself up to it. This sent him into a fugue state as his mind, separated from his body, wandered the meta-structure of history. When he returned to himself, he could only repeat the word "One", and he allegedly ended up disintegrating himself, (PROSE: The Book of the War) although there may have been more to his death. (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories)

Other information

In art and culture

In tapestries on the Homeworld, the caldera was depicted as a black disk with Yssgaroth swarming out. (PROSE: Against Nature)

Imitations

This section's awfully stubby.

Please help by adding some more information.

In the 51st century, humanity engineered an artificial, sentient sun as a power source that was also a temporal singularity, similar to the Time Lords' Eye of Harmony. It was known as Crivello's Cauldron and temporarily became the Black Sun. (COMIC: Fire and Brimstone)

Behind the scenes

The caldera's description and function is similar to how the Eye of Harmony is presented in non-televised media, specifically The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The audio story Neverland asserted that the Eye of Harmony was the "hitching post" of chronology, the central point from where the Web of Time was anchored. The description of the caldera in The Book of the War being "covered over" in later eras of Gallifreyan history seemingly alludes to the plot point in The Deadly Assassin of the Eye's location having become an obscure secret after the Panopticon floor itself was built over it. This does not necessarily imply that The Book of the War endorsed the popular conflation of the Eye with Omega's engineered sun as documented in The Three Doctors, with the "engineered sun" powering the Homeworld being alluded to in the Book separately from the caldera.

In an unexpected twist, however, the caldera was similar to the Untempered Schism later introduced on television in The Sound of Drums, being a gap in the fabric of reality on Gallifrey of great mythic significance into which characters sometimes looked, or even walked, to scry the timelines, despite the experience driving some Time Lords insane. In a rare case of acknowledgement of Faction Paradox elements in material stemming from the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who, Dave Rudden's short story Tempered later alleged that the Schism was located at the heart of the caldera.

External links

• Caldera at the Faction Paradox wiki