Elder race

One account used the term of elder races to refer to the civilisations and entities which had flourished in the original palimpsest universe where time was entirely linear and time travel did not exist.

According to this account, the original palimpsest universe was destroyed when one of the elder races, (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir) the Gallifreyans, soon to become the Time Lords of the Great Houses, (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Book of the War) discovered how to achieve time travel via an engineered black hole. As the singular timeline shattered into a myriad of inconsistent possibilities, "the elder races tended to do four things: one, go mad. Two, leave. Three, get killed. Four, regress". Given that "suddenly, everything went and everything was up for grabs", some groups, (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir) such as the Great Vampires, (TV: State of Decay) "decided to swarm across the universe destroying all life", while others developed other peculiar forms of madness, such as one "chap", (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir) the Toymaker, (TV: The Celestial Toymaker) who began dressing up as a Chinese mandarin and to squander his great power on childish games and toys. One of the only survivors of the elder races to remain broadly unchanged was the mysterious Mr Saldaamir. (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir)

This account echoed aspects of others which used the terms of Old Ones to refer to species from the early universe. (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead, etc.) In these accounts, however, the early universe tended to be described as Dark Times of chaos and irrationality, with the Time Lords' anchoring of the thread bringing linear time instead of damaging it. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Book of the War)