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The Burning Prince
(John Dorney) |
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 Name: Prince Kylo, AKA Lord Deliverer Tenebris
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: The Drashani Empire; apparently at some point in the future, but exact date in relation to Earth was unspecified save that the Earth Empire existed at the same time.
Appearances: "The Burning Prince", "The Acheron Pulse" and "The Shadow Heart"
Doctors: Fifth Doctor, Sixth Doctor and Seventh Doctor
Companions: None
History: Although The Doctor met Prince Kylo in circumstances where the two were initially allies, a traumatic chain of events turned Kylo into one of the most ambitious yet twisted large-scale foes The Doctor has ever faced.
While Prince Kylo was born into House Sorsha, a noble family of planetary rulers in the Drashani Empire, he had a hard life growing up, as the youngest and seemingly weakest of his brothers. The Doctor described the Drashani Empire as reflecting the glory of Rome in space (although the rulers were apparently only humanoid rather than human), but by the time Kylo was born his family had been in conflict with the rival potential ruling family of House Gadarel, each family seeking to become the ruler of the empire after the death of the previous mad emperor decades ago. Kylo faced additional challenges as he had manifested his family's long-suppressed power of pyrokinesis, able to start fires with his mind when he was in heightened states of emotion. He was able to keep these abilities under control using medication, but he could still set objects alight if he was under sufficient stress, and he had to regularly take his pills to avoid the power becoming out of control.
Kylo was given a unique opportunity to serve his family when the death of the Gadarel king prompted House Sorsha and House Gadarel to end their conflict by arranging a marriage between Kylo and Princess Alliona, the last adult heir of the Gadarel family. Kylo was aware that he was only chosen to marry Alliona for the alliance because he was the last candidate left, but he swiftly grew to genuinely love Alliona, who apparently reciprocated his affection. However, when Alliona's ship was lost in a crash on the way to the wedding, Kylo joined the expedition to find her even though he wasn't an official part of the military. Part of the cargo on the ship included an Igris, seemingly a primitive creature augmented to assist in mining work that could be dangerous if provoked. Projections of Alliona's flight path indicated that her ship had crashed on Sharnax, a former mining world that had been abandoned after the Igris revolted against the humans; the Igris on the ship was intended to allow the expedition to study it in hopes of finding a potential weakness for the species. It was during this rescue mission that Kylo first met The Doctor when the Fifth Doctor's TARDIS materialised on board Kylo's ship, The Doctor forced to assure people that he wasn't any kind of spy when he walked into a cafeteria full of soldiers. The rescue mission swiftly ran into a problem when it was revealed that the guards had been infiltrated by a group opposed to the current peace treaty, who released the Igris to attack the crew. Most of the crew were killed while trying to hold the Igris back, and by the time The Doctor was able to force the Igris into a contained area and expel it from the ship, the vessel had suffered so much damage that it would inevitably crash into Sharnax.
With options limited after most of the marines had been lost fighting off the Igris, The Doctor was able to escape to a small shuttle with the other remaining survivors, including Kylo, Subcommander Corwny, Aliona's uncle Tuvold, Kylo's primary associate Altus, pilot Riga and personal guard Tyrus. Although Riga in particular continued to assume The Doctor might be a spy, Tuvold and Tyrus were able to vouch that he at least couldn't have been responsible for the Igris' release as he had been with them since he arrived on board. Having reached Sharnax, The Doctor offered to take them off-planet in the TARDIS, but Corwny in particular rejected that option and Kylo refused to leave without Aliona. When they found the wedding galley with the entire crew apparently lost, Kylo's rage and the loss of his medication on the ship caused his pyrokinesis to flare up and kill Altus. Fortunately, they were able to calm him when Aliona was revealed to be alive, armed with a gun that could kill the Igris by targeting their genetic makeup. Travelling to the mining facility where Aliona had been hiding, they planned to reactivate the shuttle kept at the facility, but as they were powering the shuttle up Corwyn was revealed to be a traitor, seeking to destroy Aliona's house in exchange for his badly-injured wife receiving suitable medical aid. This had not only driven Corwyn to cause the crash even when faced with his own death, but he subsequently let the Igris into the base as he went to confront Aliona.
However, the real danger turned out to be Aliona herself; far from the devoted princess she had pretended to be, she was truly a fanatic determined to secure her family's victory over House Sorsha, claiming that House Sorsha deserved to die for their crimes against the Gadarel while everything the Gadarel had done to House Sorsha was justified because (in Aliona's own words), '[House Sorsha] deserved it'. As Riga was lost when she was trapped in the control room of the mining complex after setting the shuttle's flight path, Aliona killed Corwyn and departed in the shuttle with the unconscious Kylo, forcing The Doctor, Tuvold and Tyrus to find the TARDIS. As Kylo regained consciousness, Aliona mockingly revealed that she had actually been faking the entire relationship with Kylo, even drugging him with pheromones as her people planted similar gene-weapons to her gun all over House Sorsha's home planet. Needing a cell sample of Sorsha DNA to program the weapon, Aliona mockingly informed Kylo that she 'just' required something like a lock of hair and then cut off his right hand just for the sake of it. A grieving Kylo nearly incinerated Aliona, but she was able to calm him long enough to force him out of the airlock, just as The Doctor and Tuvold took the TARDIS to the shuttle (Tyrus having sacrificed himself to draw away the pack of Igris around the TARDIS). As Aliona mockingly dismissed the idea that it was worth trying to punish her for the deaths of House Sorsha when House Gadarel had already won, Tuvold pretended to side with her long enough to transmit a message claiming that she and Kylo had died on the planet and all hostilities should cease before he shot her with her gene-gun, programmed with his own DNA. Satisfied that his family had been spared Aliona's insanity, Tuvold's dying request was to ask The Doctor to take Aliona's jewelled calcunet, part of House Gadarel's crown jewels, back to Tuvold's daughter Cheni, the last potential empress in line, and keep an eye on Cheni as she worked to keep the Empire together.
Despite his promise to Tuvold, The Doctor took some time to go back to the Drashani empire, most likely choosing to spend some time away at first to deal with the emotional turmoil of the experience after literally everyone else he met on this trip died. However, when he did return to the empire, The Doctor would discover that Kylo had survived the fall from the airlock by using his telekinesis to slow his descent to a non-fatal speed, allowing him to reach the ground and work on taming the Igris to serve him. Salvaging components from various crashed ships, Kylo was eventually able to create a new vehicle that would allow him to depart the planet, but by then he had already suffered because of his time there. The atmosphere on Sharnax had a mild acidic quality to it, and while this wasn't high enough for previous visitors to notice an effect, Kylo's fifteen years on that world had been enough to leave him with serious facial disfigurement. On a wider scale, Kylo's time on Sharnax allowed him to learn that the Igris were former prisoners who had been genetically modified to serve as a slave race, their minds banished to a dimension known as 'the Undervoid'. Kylo was able to draw the spirits of the Igris back to their bodies, but this reduced them to blank slates, allowing Kylo to 'reprogram' them to serve his will, turning them into a new force known as the Wrath, who lacked the invulnerability of the Igris - some were defeated by enemies wielding swords - but made up for that by operating as a hive mind with greater intelligence and numbers. Working with the Wrath to refine their own powers using technology, Kylo was able to create the Acheron Pulse, a short-range energy pulse that could convert others into Wrath, although he initially only had the power to convert a small town or similar area. Enraged at the wider universe, he unleashed the Wrath as an army to attack the Drashani Empire, renaming himself 'Lord Deliverer Tenebris' to reflect how he had 'delivered' the Wrath from their previous use as slave labour.
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The Acheron Pulse
(Rick Briggs) |
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Outside of Kylo's 'exile' on Sharnax, Cheni had become the new Empress, with tales told of the 'Succession of Blood' and how Kylo and Aliona had brought peace through their genuine love for each other, since the shuttle's black box had been damaged by fire and there were no contradicting records. Inspired by what they believed was Kylo and Aliona's example, the Empire had enjoyed peace for over two decades before 'Tenebris' began his campaign against the Empire. This led to 'Tenebris' and The Doctor meeting once again when the Sixth Doctor attempted to visit Gadarel Prime shortly after Tuvold's death, only for an initially-unspecified anomaly to cause him to arrive on the planet Cawdor, around seven parsecs away from Gadarel Prime and thirty years later than he had intended. After a brief argument with the natives, The Doctor was able to reveal the calcunet to the Drashani forces present, as the Drashani had established a space station on Cawdor to mine it for galdrium. Empress Cheni actually came to the planet, posing as the secretary for the main diplomats so that she could discreetly observe everything, but the matter became complicated when the station was struck by an energy beam of unidentified origin, the temporal backwash caused by the beam at least explaining to The Doctor how he had been drawn off course.
With Cheni and a few of her personal guard having been captured before they could escape, The Doctor was able to gather some of the natives and remaining Drashani forces to mount a rescue, but this effort as they were attacked by Igris. The Doctor soon realised that the beam had mutated the station's crew into Igris, which at least meant that these Igris were essentially tame as the previous Igris had been driven hostile by cruelty, but that only allowed him to keep his allies safe by convincing them to stop attacking. Having learned the truth of the Igris as opposed to the public claim that they were just augmented animals, Cheni attempted to take the blame to spare the others, but although her associates refused to let her sacrifice herself Cheni confronted Tenebris just as The Doctor had found him. Realising that Tenebris's right hand reacted a fraction of a second slower than his left, The Doctor identified Tenebris as Prince Kylo with an artificial hand. With his identity revealed, Cheni declared her love for the story of Prince Kylo and offered herself in marriage to try and help him recover, but her praise of Aliona's memory and horror at the sight of Kylo's disfigured face only reinforced Kylo's rage, to the extent that he converted Cheni into a Wrath to essentially punish Aliona by proxy.
As Kylo proclaimed his intention to use the station's power to boost the Acheron Pulse and turn it on Gadarel Prime, he subsequently declared that The Doctor was to blame for this as the Time Lord was the reason Aliona had been able to destroy Kylo's family. Although still shaken at Cheni's death, The Doctor rejected the idea that he was at fault when all he had done was try to help and he couldn't have anticipated that Aliona would turn out to be a psychopath. Intrigued to hear The Doctor and Kylo argue between Kylo's focus on destruction and The Doctor's belief that progress was better than vengeance, the Wrath banished The Doctor and Kylo physically to the Undervoid (as opposed to displacing their souls to convert their bodies into new Igris), intending for the two to fight until one philosophy prevailed. Kylo immediately tried to kill The Doctor as he refused to abandon his vendetta, but The Doctor was contacted by Cheni's spirit, who helped him provoke Kylo into a breakdown by posing as the spirit of Aliona and claiming that she had genuinely loved him. As Kylo accepted that he just wanted to destroy things rather than pursuing a legitimate vendetta, the Wrath rejected his philosophy and removed The Doctor from the Undervoid, allowing The Doctor to reprogram them with his own moral code so that they could pursue what The Doctor hoped would be a more benevolent agenda. With the Wrath dealt with, The Doctor retrieved Kylo from the Undervoid and took him to the Kaliostro Prisma-Sphere, a planet of multiple worlds that had 'crashed' together across dimensions, hoping that Kylo could find peace in these worlds, even giving him Aliona's calcunet as a keepsake of this period of his life.
Unfortunately for The Doctor, the newly-reprogrammed Wrath didn't work out as well as he had hoped. As was pointed out to The Doctor when he returned to this time period, the Wrath had been essentially been programmed with The Doctor's morality without possessing his ability to make more refined moral judgements. As a result of this inability to see the shades of grey in any situation, the Wrath had spent the next fifty years attacking entire worlds on the principle that everyone was guilty of something if you looked hard enough. This had led to the Wrath Justice Fleet being rumoured to be responsible for the abduction of thousands of people, supposedly taking these prisoners to their 'homeworld' the Shadow Heart. They had a tentative truce with the Earth Empire, but this amounted to the Empire letting the Wrath do whatever they wanted within Drashani territory even if they recognised that the Wrath would eventually threaten them if they couldn't find a way to stop them. Even worse, having become dissatisfied with The Doctor's offer of peace, Kylo had left the Prisma-Sphere and re-established himself as a person of means, creating a new palace on the planet Thargross that was a duplicate of Kylo's old home on Sorsha, using a force field to sustain an atmosphere even though Thargross had been literally blasted in half during the Wrath War. As a further sign of Kylo's mental degeneration, he had used DNA samples taken from the calcunet to clone a new version of Aliona as his lover, his obsession with her apparently reignited by Cheni's impersonation of her. The clone of Aliona was programmed to love Kylo unconditionally, but unfortunately the cloning process he used was unstable, each clone having a reduced lifespan from the first, until he had created over fifty versions of Aliona, with the latest only possessing a lifespan of less than a year (presumably some of the early clones had lived a shorter lifespan due to initial flaws in the cloning process before Kylo perfected his method).
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The Shadow Heart
(Jonathan
Morris) |
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Even after fifty years, Kylo was committed to his goal of regaining control of the Wrath, but realised that he needed The Doctor to help him re-reprogram the Wrath so that they would serve him once again. Aware that the Wrath sought them both, Kylo hired various bounty hunters to track down the Time Lord whenever he next made an appearance in this part of space, to the extent that The Doctor was described by one source as 'the most wanted man in twelve constellations'. However, when the Seventh Doctor became involved in these events, he essentially experienced the entire crisis out of sequence; from his perspective, he arrived in the middle of the current campaign against the Wrath and Tenebris and then had to interact with people who had already met his future self. Fortunately, despite the temporal complexities of the situation, The Doctor was able to realise what he was dealing with and put together a plan, either by telling people what he had learnt from them in the future or encouraging his allies to share enough details that he could work out what he should do next. These actions included meeting snailers Talbar and Horval - scrap metal traders who collected junk left behind after the Wrath War in a giant space-dwelling snail they called 'Hercules' -, making contact with the ship HMS Trafalgar, and saving the life of the latest Aliona clone after revealing her true nature to her. As part of his campaign, The Doctor asked 'Aliona' to accompany him back in time so that she could adopt the identity of the mysterious masked Jandor, Aliona wearing an elaborate life-support suit to hide her identity from others until she was ready to reveal her true self while helping The Doctor at key moments.
With Kylo and the Wrath actively seeking The Doctor, he was able to escape their initial attack and their assassin Vienna Salvatori by working with Horval, Talbar and 'Jandor' to escape a planet under attack on Hercules, subsequently making contact with the HMS Trafalgar of the Earth Empire fleet sent to investigate Wrath activity. Having tracked down Kylo's home on Thargross, The Doctor was able to save the Trafalgar by allowing the Wrath to capture him, Kylo and Vienna and take them to the Imperial Engine, the central computer that controlled the Wrath. The Trafalgar was believed to have been disabled by the Wrath, but Horval and Talbar were able to tow the ship after The Doctor using Hercules, having previously planted a tracking device on The Doctor. Once on the Shadow Heart, the Wrath explained that they had been using their prisoners to try and form a more developed moral framework beyond the one The Doctor had programmed, but when The Doctor seemingly agreed to work on reprogramming them further he instead used the opportunity to shut down the Shadow Heart's defences. Kylo used the opportunity to destroy the Wrath immediately present and force The Doctor to plug him directly into the Imperial Engine, which would allow Kylo to control the Shadow Heart and the Wrath directly at the cost that he would never be able to leave it. However, The Doctor then signalled the Trafalgar to mount its attack on the Shadow Heart, also encouraging Jandor to reveal her true identity to Kylo. Now finding himself unable to destroy the Trafalgar as he couldn't bring himself to kill the Aliona he loved, Kylo chose to allow the Trafalgar to destroy the Shadow Heart, sacrificing himself to save Aliona. While Horval and Talbar were put out that their scrap metal salvage operation was now basically worthless, The Doctor was left with some hope when Aliona told him that she intended to use her remaining time and status as the last heir to the Drashani Empire to negotiate a proper truce with the Earth Empire. Ultimately, despite most of his life being consumed by a desire for revenge against his perceived enemies, Kylo's final act was to at least potentially secure the lasting peace that had been his dream before everything went wrong.
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