Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (short story)

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Main character(s):	Life
Featuring:	Angels, Intrepid
Main setting:	The Shadow Spire
Key crew
Publisher:	Obverse Books
Writer:	Jayce Black
Release details
Part of:	The Book of the Peace
Release date:	25 November 2018
Format:	Online vignette
Faction Paradox
← Previous	Daring Initiation
Next →	Inside the Looking Glass

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing was the fifth promotional short story released in The Book of the Peace Dossier.

Summary

to be added

Characters

• Life
• Time
• Fate
• The enemy
• Death
• Voyager
• Life's Angels
• Kifah
• Gustav
• Intrepid

Worldbuilding

• Early breeding-engines stank of steaming grease.

Notes

• The Eternal Fate was first mentioned in Mags L. Halliday's short story A Handful of Silver in the charity anthology Perfect Timing 2. Fate then featured, alongside Life, in Chris McKeon's unlicensed completion of Craig Hinton's Time's Champion. The idea of Chronovores being Life's agents is also present from that novel, where Kronos is Life's champion, inspiring the description of Angels in this story as very reminiscent of Chronovores (being winged and crystalline).
• The reference to "the first parahuman brigades" alongside the first breeding-engines is a reference to Lance Parkin's short story Executive Action from the charity anthology Walking in Eternity, where Wardog and other parahuman members of the Special Executive are said to have been created in Rassilon's first experiments with Looms. The Special Executive and killer cats of early Gallifreyan history were previously juxtaposed in Daniel O'Mahony's A Rag and a Bone in the 2003 fanzine Myth Makers Presents: Essentials.
• The fleeing of the Menti Celesti depicted in this story parallels the Eternals' abandonment of reality during the Last Great Time War, first mentioned in the Doctor Who Annual 2006.

Continuity

• Death first appeared in PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation and Time first appeared in PROSE: Set Piece.
• Life has a "six-folded home". (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
• Some of Life's followers are Kithriarchs (PROSE: Lungbarrow) and aunts. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress)
• Two-pulsed magicians (PROSE: Interference) and hermits (TV: The Time Warrior, PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation) who survived "the Architect and his Anchoring" (PROSE: The Book of the War, Christmas on a Rational Planet) remember the first parahuman brigades (COMIC: 4-D War) and the killer cats of the south. (PROSE: The Return of the King, et al.)
• Life shakes her head like an avatroid (PROSE: Lungbarrow) would to a childe. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved..., Against Nature)
• On his ship the Voyager skins and flays the occasional "self-titled wizard seeking immortality". (COMIC: Voyager, Once Upon a Time-Lord)
• Grouped together in the thousands, the Angels, like the Chronovores, form an "impossible celestial host". (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)
• The Shadow Spire is a place of refuge for Faction Paradox. (PROSE: The Story So Far...)
• Intrepid was previously mentioned in PROSE: Daring Initiation.
• Gustav the Martian lives in a shell. (TV: The Ice Warriors)

External links

• Official Hark! The Herald Angels Sing page at Obverse Books