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Gallifrey was burning.
Once a golden world suspended in the heart of eternity, now a graveyard of ash and fractured time. The Citadel had fallen; its white spires lay in ruin, reduced to molten glass beneath the relentless firestorms. The sky was a bleeding crimson, riven by thunder and the mechanical shrieks of Daleks. The air reeked of smoke, ozone and death. Every heartbeat of the planet pulsed with agony.
The cries of Time Lords and the terrified wails of children tangled with the mechanical chorus of the enemy: Exterminate. Exterminate.
And in the heart of that apocalypse, the Master knelt amidst the wreckage, his black coat torn, his hands trembling as they cradled the lifeless body of his daughter.
Illiyra lay in his arms. His daughter. His only child.
Her body was still warm, deceptively so and for a moment, he could almost pretend she was only sleeping. But her weight was wrong. There was no rise and fall in her chest. Her pulse had vanished into the storm of time.
He pulled her closer, pressing his face into her hair. It still smelled faintly of Gallifreyan herbs the scent of home, of safety, of everything he no longer had. His shoulders shook violently as a strangled sound escaped his throat, half-sob, half-scream, breaking the air like glass.
“No… no, no, please…”
He rocked her gently, back and forth, as though motion alone could call her back from the void. His eyes, usually so sharp and cruel, were now hollow the eyes of a man who had finally met a loss too vast even for madness to swallow. His breath came in ragged bursts, each one a sob strangled before it could break. Around him, the battlefield roared, but in his mind, there was only silence, the kind that follows the death of something sacred.
His voice cracked, foreign to his own ears. The words trembled, useless. He buried his face in her neck, clutching her as if sheer will could drag her back from the void. Around him, the ground trembled; the Daleks advanced. But the Master didn’t move. Couldn’t.
For all his arrogance, for all his cruelty and cunning, the universe had finally taken something he couldn’t replace.
He had fought gods and monsters, burned civilizations, cheated death itself. But he couldn’t outwit this. He couldn’t bargain with the silence in her eyes.
His hands — the same hands that had wielded weapons and rewired destinies — now shook uncontrollably as he stroked her cheek, brushing away the blood. Her skin was cooling beneath his fingertips.
“You promised,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “You promised you’d stay safe. You were supposed to run, Illiyra, you were supposed to live.”
He kissed her forehead, his lips trembling against her cold skin.
And he had failed her.
The world exploded again somewhere behind him a shockwave of fire lighting the crimson sky, but the Master stayed where he was, a black silhouette against the burning horizon, rocking gently as he held her.
“You foolish, brilliant girl,” he murmured through clenched teeth. “You should’ve run. You shouldn’t have been like me.”
A bitter laugh escaped him, small, sharp, quickly devoured by the roar of war.
She had been his everything. The last piece of the Oakdown line. His blood, his child. The only being who had ever looked at him and seen goodness. Her mother was long gone, his parents and cousins buried in the war that had consumed Gallifrey long before this one. He had nothing left. No family. No peace. Just her.
He had wanted a son once. Foolishly. But the universe had given him a daughter — a daughter who, through every regeneration, stubbornly chose to remain in a female form. A daughter who inherited his eyes, his walk, his sharp mind and unfortunately, his defiance.
But he loved her. More than he loved the stars, more than he ever loved the Doctor. More than he had ever dared to admit, because she was the only tether keeping him from falling completely into the dark.
Whenever he fled across time, when he fought, plotted, and burned worlds to prove himself, he knew there was someone waiting at home someone who still believed he could be better.
Illiyra defended him, even when the universe cursed his name. She knew what he was a madman, a monster and yet she admired his brilliance. She understood his obsession with the Doctor; she saw the love and hatred tangled beneath it. She never judged. She never turned away.
And he… he had spent lifetimes keeping her away from his wars. From his sins. Every scheme, every conquest, every escape, he kept her far from it. Not because he doubted her courage, but because he feared that one day his enemies would find her. That the universe would take from him the only soul that still called him Father.
And now, it had.
When the Daleks breached the Time War, Gallifrey’s High Council resurrected him, gave him a new regeneration cycle, a new body, a new chance. They told him it was an honour. A gift. Redemption through warfare. He took it, of course. The War Master born from fire, bred for victory.
He told himself it was for glory. For power. For the pleasure of proving the Doctor wrong.
But that wasn’t the truth. He was fighting for her.
Every father wants to be a hero in his daughter’s eyes. He wanted, just once, to deserve the pride she felt for him.
But what he never understood was this to Illiyra, he had always been a hero.
She was proud of him even when she shouldn’t have been. She missed him when he disappeared. She mourned him when he died. She loved him when no one else in the universe would dare to.
And now, her body lay still in his arms. Her dark hair matted with blood and dust. Her eyes, once so alive, half-lidded and dull. Her last breath had been spent saving another a child who wasn’t even her kin.
She had run into the fire to rescue someone else’s future, knowing it would cost her own.
“Foolish girl,” he whispered, voice cracking, pressing his forehead to hers. “You were supposed to live. You were supposed to run.”
He had begged her to flee, to hide. But she had never listened. She had inherited his recklessness, his defiance, his will to act. And she had paid the ultimate price.
She had burned through twelve regenerations by then, seven during this cursed war, five before it. There were no more left to burn. This was her last face, her final incarnation.
The Master sat there in the ruins of Gallifrey, surrounded by fire and screams, and wept. His hearts ached with a pain deeper than death.
Not even when the Doctor left him had he felt this hollow. Not even when his flesh decayed and rotted away did he feel so broken. Not even when he fell into the Eye of Harmony did he know despair like this.
He pressed a trembling hand to her chest, as if he could will her hearts to start again. But the universe gave him nothing, no mercy, no miracle. Only silence.
Her final words echoed inside him, fragile and eternal:
“Live, Father. Live for me.”
And so he would. He would carry her within his hearts, within every atom that refused to die. He would live because she asked him to. Because fathers keep the promises they make to their daughters.
When the next explosion lit the red sky, the Master rose to his feet. His face was wet with tears and ash. He did not look back.
He fled the battlefield, not as a coward, but as a father who had promised to live.
And though Gallifrey would burn and the stars themselves would fade, a single truth remained unbroken in his hearts:
He would live for her.
He had lost his daughter, his only light and in that moment, something inside the Master died with her.
But he would live.
Because she had asked him to.