War prediction

War predictions were predictions of the destruction of Gallifrey in a war. Despite the Time Lords being unable to observe their own future due to the Protocols of Linearity, throughout their history, multiple parties were able to guess at Gallifrey's future. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles, The Book of the War)

Matrix prophecy

The generation of Time Lords before the Doctor's amassed enough information to glean something of their future. They knew that a spate of attacks would strike Gallifrey, one by one. These would include Omega, the Sontarans, Tannis, Faction Paradox, Varnax, Catavolcus, and the Timewyrm. A single Time Lord would be central to all these events, and Gallifrey would survive each attack. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors, The Gallifrey Chronicles)

However, Gallifrey would nevertheless fall in a war against an implacable enemy, who would be unknown until Last Contact was made. Then, the one Time Lord would find the Lost Scrolls of Rassilon and lead Gallifrey from the darkness.

The president and members of the Supreme Council knew this prophecy, but they kept it hidden, fearing that Gallifrey would fall into chaos if it was widely known. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) The council was split on whether to tell the Matrix to look for threats matching the description, since such action might inevitably lead to contact and conflict with the enemy. Deliberation on the topic took several millennia. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

The Doctor was aware of this prophecy. His student Larna (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) shared it with the renegade Time Lord Ulysses, his human wife Penelope Gate, and the immortal Mister Saldaamir at the Shoal. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) Larna would later assist a renegade Time Lord called "Daniel Joyce" with his research in San Francisco. Saldaamir, a close associate of the Doctor's father, (PROSE: Unnatural History) also came to live in San Francisco. (PROSE: Beige Planet Mars)

When Padrac became Lord President and gained access to the Matrix, he saw that in every projection of Gallifrey's future, the Time Lords were destroyed by war, attrition, or collateral damage in the battles of other species. The only scenario in which Gallifrey survived was the one where the Time Lords were the only race in the universe. To achieve this, Padrac founded the Doom Coalition, who planned to use the Crucible of Souls to convert all the universe's energy into regeneration energy, making the Time Lords immortal while destroying the universe. (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls)

At date index 309456/4756.7RE/1213GRT/100447TL, the Matrix projected that the Vore were a potential candidate for Last Contact, and a conflict with Gallifrey would result in fatalities of 20-40% of the Time Lord population. As a result, the Supreme Council mandated that no Time Lord was to engage the Vore or come within one parsec or one century of any of their moons. Marnal said that the Klade, the Tractites, the Ongoing, and Centro all had the power to destroy Gallifrey, but none of them would dare. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) The Doctor speculated that those same groups were responsible for the Effect, along with the Nibblepibblies. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

The Hybrid

Main article: The Hybrid

In 2002, Sam Jones told Griffin about a Gallifreyan prophecy concerning a hybrid. She said the Doctor was a hybrid, his father a Time Lord and his mother a human, and that he was destined to unite the two races and "bring good old human niceness into their alien society." Though she thought she was bluffing to stall Griffin, the Eighth Doctor later asked her who had told her about the prophecy. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

The Twelfth Doctor later revealed that all prophecies in the Matrix concurred that the Hybrid of two warrior races would conquer Gallifrey and stand over its ruins before unraveling the Web of Time, destroying a billion billion hearts to heal its own. He went on to say, "The Hybrid is me." Ashildr suggested that the Doctor was the Hybrid because he was half-human. (TV: Heaven Sent, Hell Bent)

The Imperator

After ten millions of years of stasis on the Homeworld, inexplicable anomalies appeared in the breeding engines. This was interpreted by some as the Homeworld's acausal reaction to the events-to-come. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The Imperator was one such anomaly, and he pushed for the Great Houses to drop their non-interventionist policies and become involved in the outside universe in preparation for an inevitable upcoming conflict. He also founded the Order of the Weal, run by his friend and disciple, Chatelaine Thessalia. (PROSE: The Book of the War, The Return of the King) Though the Order eventually turned on the Imperator, Thessalia used it as a vessel for her own plans and preparations.

Thessalia believed that the Homeworld's enemy would be motivated unambiguously by a racial-survival agenda and mainly concerned with maintaining the integrity of its own history. She also expected the first attack on the Homeworld to be aimed at its noosphere, with physical fighting only occurring in the final stages of the war. In anticipation of this, she commissioned the babels as a defence. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Greyjan the Sane

Greyjan the Sane was the shortest-reigning Lord President of Gallifrey. Before becoming President, he researched the patterns of time. He believed that a law like chaos theory governed paradox. This research led him to foresee the War in Heaven, and he invented a plan for creating backup Gallifreys. He was publicly perceived as a prophet of doom.

He also researched the origins of life. Observing the common physical and chemical characteristics of all life, he theorized all living things in the universe were descended from a single "ancestor cell". However, before that cell, other organisms existed with exotic and alien biochemical systems, and by feeding off TARDIS pollution and the energies of temporal paradox, these cells would be able to grow into life that was impossible for the Time Lords to fathom and utterly inimical to their existence, which would eventually destroy Gallifrey. This theory drove him to suicide after only three years in office.

After his death, his sciences were outlawed and declared arcane, though Romana III would later build his Nine Gallifreys. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

Romana

After the Doctor rescued Charlotte Pollard and began the anti-time infection of the Web of Time, the Matrix started to break down. Upon entering its projection of the future, the Doctor saw a Gallifrey choked with smog and ruled by Imperiatrix Romana. The planet was part of "the empire of Zagreus", engaged in a ruthless five-dimensional war against any perceived threat to the Time Lords' supremacy. (AUDIO: Neverland)

After the Doctor visited the Enclave, (PROSE: The Blue Angel) the Time Lords began monitoring the war there and noticed reflections of a conflict in their own future. This drove Romana to regenerate into a harsher incarnation and become War Queen of Gallifrey. She created the Nine Gallifreys and instructed her servants to seek out and capture Compassion with brutal means because she knew that Gallifrey would use type 103s in their future. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon)

During Romana's final term, an anomalous singularity appeared centred around Earth. It grew exponentially, draining energy from the universe around it and twisting space-time out of shape. The pre-cogs, Time Lords who channeled the timelines to predict Gallifrey's future, began to see the same future in every timeline: a future where Gallifrey had fallen and the Time Lords had never existed. (AUDIO: Intervention Earth) Shortly thereafter, a war broke out. The Watchmaker said this war would inevitably end in the destruction of Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Enemy Lines)

Irving Braxiatel

Upon hearing rumours of a threat against Gallifrey, Irving Braxiatel planned a scheme to preserve the Time Lord biodata archive so he could reconstruct Gallifrey after its inevitable fall. (AUDIO: Panacea) After Braxiatel stopped Romana II from regenerating, saying her next incarnation had sent him to prevent a horrible war, the Watchmaker said that he needed to choose to remain on Gallifrey with the knowledge of what was to come, or to hide himself away forever. (AUDIO: Enemy Lines)

At some point in his timeline, Braxiatel began preparing the planet Maximediras as a new homeworld for his people. (AUDIO: Resurrecting the Past) After he discovered that the Deindum were destined to replace his people as the most advanced time-traveling species in the universe, he tried to prevent them through time travel and, when that failed, all-out war. (PROSE: Present Danger)

The War King

81 years before the outbreak of the War in Heaven, the Homeworld's most infamous criminal and renegade surrendered himself to tell the then-President his knowledge about the Houses' future enemy. The President didn't believe him, so five years later, the renegade returned and addressed a Closed Session of the ruling Houses. They pardoned him of his crimes, but the President was still in denial, so the renegade left the Homeworld for forty years to prepare defences. Upon his return, the ensuing drama with the Faraway Declaration culminated in his promotion to the High Council under Lord President Umbaste. He immediately took action, appointing the first Academician for Game Logic and commissioning the 90-form timeships.

Umbaste would later open his biodata to the caldera in an apparent attempt to gain insights into future events. It launched him into a fugue state, his body just a husk while his mind travelled through the meta-structure of history. When he resurfaced over a year later, all he could do was repeat the word "One". The Book of the War said that he eventually committed suicide, (PROSE: The Book of the War) but Mr. Smith said that the secret minutes of House Dvora revealed who really killed Umbaste. (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories)

After Umbaste's death, the renegade became the Homeworld's the War King, and he immediately began preparing defenses and developing the House Military in preparation for the War. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The Event

Main article: The Event

The Eighth Doctor had a vision of the Enemy's first attack on Gallifrey. In it, the three oceans boiled away and the northern hemisphere's great mountain ranges were levelled. However, the Time Lords then went back in time and razed the Enemy battle-worlds before the attack could happen; the Enemy then countered this strike by using a star-killer to retroactively destroy the systems where the Time Lords had found the materials used to construct their fleet. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

The Rivera Manuscript, written by a renegade of the Great Houses, told of the narrator's imprisonment by an unknown power and the results of his forced exposure to a high dosage of praxis. The account seemed to predict the enemy's first invasion of the Homeworld, first targeting the noosphere before poisoning the breeding-engines and unleashing the Homeworld's sun. Chatelaine Thessalia also predicted that the enemy would first target the noosphere.

When the enemy invaded the Homeworld at the start of the War, the predictions of the Event were avoided thanks to the defences that the War King had prepared. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Miscellaneous

Ruath foresaw that there would be no sign of civilisation on Gallifrey by the 20th century. (PROSE: Goth Opera) Christine Summerfield visited the ruins of the Homeworld. (PROSE: Dead Romance) The planet New Alexandria appeared to be Gallifrey after the fall of Time Lord civilisation, (PROSE: The Crystal Bucephalus) as did Ardethe (PROSE: Deadfall) and Winkle's Wonderland. (AUDIO: Zagreus)

Entarodora expected the War in Heaven to end either in the War being retroactively annulled or in one side's inexorable victory, upon which a new kind of history would be founded. Despite this, there were some brief attempts at peace, like the Venue Accords. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Frightened at the prospect of erasure during war, the Celestial Intervention Agency preemptively removed themselves from time, becoming the Celestis. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)

The cat people vanished from the Homeworld at the beginning of the Imperator's rule because they foresaw the coming War. (PROSE: The Return of the King)

Before the start of the War, some Homeworlders started calling the Diaspora the "First Diaspora" in anticipation of a great Second Diaspora after the enemy's destruction of the Homeworld. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Some time after the Carnival Queen caused President Romana to accidentally release Grandfather Paradox from the prison planet, (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet) Romana made amends with the Sisterhood of Karn, and Pythia's Curse was lifted, returning the possibility of childbirth to Gallifrey. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) Disgusted and frightened by the implications of these changes, the "Great Grey Eminence" attempted to fix the timeline by making a deal with Faction Paradox to fold the Doctor's timeline back upon itself and rewrite Gallifreyan history. (PROSE: Unnatural History) In the process, Rassilon guided the amnesiac Eighth Doctor to interfere with his own past and make some "improvements to the pattern of history". After these changes, Flavia was President, and the Eighth Doctor went to travel with Sam Jones (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) rather than someone who would try to "screw" him. However, the Doctor was able to remember both Flavia and Romana being the current President, (PROSE: Unnatural History) and he had memories of both having parents and being Loomed. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon) However, Faction Paradox in fact performed these changes to introduce Rassilon and Gallifreyan history as a whole to the idea of Paradox; (PROSE: Unnatural History) indeed, approximately fifty years into the War in Heaven, the House Military had endorsed paradox as a strategy to the point that the War King reintroduced Faction Paradox to the War Council as "House Paradox". (AUDIO: Body Politic)

The Accord foresaw a "great war spreading through time". They feared that the 1970s and 1980s, which had been temporally weakened due to the Doctor's frequent visits, would be damaged, so they tried to reinforce those decades by altering the time DNA of every person who lived through those decades so that they subconsciously realised that there were inconsistencies with history. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time)

In the Tomorrow Window, the Eighth Doctor saw visions of Time Lords in a turquoise cathedral and of a flying saucer standing over a ruined city being patrolled by Daleks. (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows)

The parasite goddesses Time, Life, and Fate fled the Spiral Politic at first foresight of the War in Heaven. Much later, Life's angels proclaimed the end of the War to the inhabitants of the Shadow Spire. (PROSE: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)

Narvin said that all Time Lords had "felt in [their] bones" that war was coming for generations, a fact which he described as a collective premonition. The only questions were "when" and "how". (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention) Years before the outbreak of the Last Great Time War, he sent Valyes to Skaro to commission the Fourth Doctor to destroy the Daleks in their earliest history. (AUDIO: Ascension, TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

External links

• War prediction at the Faction Paradox wiki