The Enemy

The Enemy were the Time Lords' mysterious opponents in the Second War in Heaven.

They were neither one specific species nor one specific political viewpoint. They were rather a process in themselves, and they possessed an opposing Web of Time contrary to the Web of Time which the Time Lords had constructed and imposed on the universe.

They did have a specific name and a specific leader, but the Time Lords were loath to refer to either, not because they feared speaking the names, but because conceptualising them in those terms would be to misunderstand them as something concrete, rather than as a series of events. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Greyjan the Sane claimed that they were ancestor cells which had been irradiated by temporal interference and then energised by a leaking bottle universe. The Eighth Doctor offered the more entertaining possibility that they were likely to be eventually revealed as "Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, carrying a big stick." (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) They were more accurately described as a living series of events in constant temporal flux. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

A rare instance of direct contact with the Enemy occurred to Chris Cwej during his intervention in the filming of Mujin: The Ghost Kingdom. The cryptic exchanges that passed between them ended with the words, "The Scourge. Harvey. Hermes. The coolest character is the one whose face you never get to see." and is represented by a total absence of anything on the recovered film. Not blackness, just emptiness and the background filmstock. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Another encounter occurred when Marcus Americanus Scriptor encountered something resembling a sphinx that was hunting a renegade Time Lord who had escaped the War by jumping into a parallel universe. It was described as being constantly in flux, and was implied to be a powerful enemy agent, if not an enemy itself. (PROSE: Warlords of Utopia)

Tonton Macoute once cooked the corpse of an Enemy soldier. (PROSE: Tonton Macoute)

Compassion stated that the Enemy was merely a distraction and that the true threat to the Time Lords would come from within. She later hinted the emergence of House Lucia was the true threat to Gallifrey. House Lucia's connection to the Enemy was only hinted at by Compassion and her companion Carmen Yeh and was not elaborated upon. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Behind the scenes

 * Despite reports to the contrary, the Enemy were never originally planned to be the Daleks. Other books in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series make it clear that the Enemy cannot be the Daleks. The confusion arose in relation to a later BBC Books arc, culminating in Sometime Never..., which had been intended to feature the Daleks until legal issues prevented it.
 * Lawrence Miles intended to reveal who the Enemy were in the next novel he wrote, but editor of the range at the time Stephen Cole prevented him from doing so.