Alcestis
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Alcestis was a Minoean priestess native of Akrotiri.
Due to being trained in the temple of the imprisoned "Titans", (PROSE: Fallen Gods [+]Loading...["Fallen Gods (novel)"]) or Chronovores, (TV: The Time Monster [+]Loading...["The Time Monster (TV story)"]) known as the Fallen, she had a facility with sensing currents in the fabric of reality. Her lifespan was also augmented by the time energy stolen by the Fallen on behalf of the people from their enemies, such as the Athenians. After the Fallen began to send demonic bulls to attack the city and its surroundings, yearning to be set free rather than continue to obey the king and priesthood, the Eighth Doctor arrived and struck up a friendship with Alcestis, who was living by herself, having been ejected from the temple due to a lack of faith. The Doctor, whom she had first seen paragliding down from orbit due to his ship refusing to get too close to the Fallen, taught her how to use her senses to learn how to fly and defeat the bulls.
As their relationship grew to take romantic undertones, they eventually moved into the King's palace, only to discover that the King was the mastermind behind using the Fallen's powers of manipulating time to make himself and his people live forever. Alcestis was sickened to realise the kingdom's prosperity was born of this crime, and that she herself had reaped its benefits. Even after the King was killed and the Fallen defeated, Alcestis split from the Doctor, wanting to tear the kingdom down and kill all who had been complicit in the great crime. Her attempt to kill the king's heir Deucalion, whose lifespan had been extended to span hundreds of years without his consent by feeding him the life-force of all his siblings, was halted by the Doctor, who fatally stabbed her, though he felt conflicted about the decision.
On the cusp of death, Alcestis was saved by the Fallen and transformed by them into a maddened harpy-like creature. Hoping to use her as the instrument of their revenge, they locked her and the Doctor in a Prometheus-like time loop with the last of their power in revenge, hoping Alcestis would spend an eternity killing the Doctor over and over again. After untold hundreds of loops, however, the Doctor managed to get through to Alcestis.
With him still bleeding from an open wound in his stomach, the two of them worked together to use the crystals' power to fly out of the looped pocket reality, which collapsed behind them. After landing on the beach, Alcestis only saw the wounded Doctor's discarded flight-harness; he himself had already vanished, leaving behind only a strange, wheezing, groaning sound. Their last exchange had been Alcestis telling him that she couldn't "do the things [he'd] done", prompting the Doctor to reply: "You never know. You might do better". The wounded Doctor then presumably regenerated into his ninth incarnation; several accounts suggested that the version of the Eighth Doctor documented by this account, still last of his kind after making the difficult choice of destroying his home to avert a war, (PROSE: Fallen Gods [+]Loading...["Fallen Gods (novel)"]) would go on to become the Ninth Doctor who fought the Shalka with Alison Cheney. (WC: Scream of the Shalka [+]Loading...["Scream of the Shalka (webcast)"], PROSE: Sometime Never... [+]Loading...["Sometime Never... (novel)"], etc.)
While searching for the Doctor's grave, (PROSE: The Shape of the Hole) Bernice Summerfield visited Akrotiri and found an ancient painting of Alcestis with an inscription declaring that she had killed the Eighth Doctor. (NC: False Gods [+]Loading...["False Gods (short story)"])
Alcestis later aided Bernice in her war with the Deindum. (PROSE: The End Times [+]Loading...["The End Times (short story)"])
Behind the scenes
Although this was not made explicit in Fallen Gods [+]Loading...["Fallen Gods (novel)"], Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman intended for Alcestis's attempted murder of the Eighth Doctor to lead to his regeneration into what was then accepted as the incumbent Doctor: Richard E Grant's Ninth Doctor.
