The Enemy

The Enemy, also known as the Adversary, (PROSE: Newtons Sleep, And To Dust We Shall Return, et al.) was the opponent of the Time Lords during the War in Heaven. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) The Book of the War claimed that it was not a species or a political faction as much as a process. It had a name, but the Great Houses were reluctant to use it. (PROSE: The Book of the War) The form of the Enemy was constantly shifting. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) Some theorised that the real War was against "the archetypal concept of enmity itself". (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)

Pre-War speculation
Before the War, multiple parties speculated about the enemy's identity. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Rassilon foresaw that the Time Lords were imperfect despite their knowledge, and after realising who the enemy really was, he charged the Watch with killing four Time Lords when the time was right. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

Chatelaine Thessalia incorrectly predicted in The Little Book of Absolute Power that the enemy would be mainly motivated by survival or keeping its history intact. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Greyjan the Sane hypothesized that the Enemy were ancestor cells which had been irradiated by temporal interference and energised by a leaking bottle universe. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

The Rivera Manuscript described a renegade's praxis-induced vision of the enemy's devastation of the Homeworld. In that vision, enemy soldiers appeared to closely resemble posthuman Ashla shock-troops. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

During his first encounter with the War, the Eighth Doctor travelled to Mictlan with Kathleen Bregman and saw an alien agent of the Celestis who wore a parody of ceremonial Time Lord robes. He later told Bregman that the robed alien was one of the enemy, saying, "Try to forget you ever saw it. I know I will." (PROSE: Alien Bodies) He went on to erase the enemy's identity from his memory. (PROSE: Toy Story) At later times he joked that the enemy could be "Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, carrying a big stick" or "eighty-seventh-century Earth Reptiles with transforming T.rex time machines. The whole of established human history could be a Time Lord attempt to eradicate their causal nexus." (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5) Helios said that the Doctor had seen the enemy, and that going into Omega's anti-matter universe would lock that future into place. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

In the Infancy Gospel of Grandfather Paradox, the Grandfather suggested that spiders could be a good enemy for the Great Houses. (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefings)

The Matrix predicted that the enemy destined to destroy Gallifrey would be unknown until Last Contact. 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 Supreme 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) At date index 309456/4756.7RE/1213GRT/100447TL, the Matrix projected that the Vore were a potential candidate for Last Contact, so the council mandated that no Time Lord was to engage the Vore or come within one parsec or one century of any of their moons. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

The Book of the War speculated that increasing paranoia on the Homeworld may have itself caused the War, saying the idea "makes a certain sense, given the nature of the enemy." (PROSE: The Book of the War) The enemy was also believed to be a conceptual infection of imagination created from races destroyed in the anchoring of the thread. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock)

Secrecy during the War
In her speech to the Fifth Wave on the thirtieth anniversary of the Cataclysm, House Military strategist Entarodora said the ruling Houses kept secret the identity of the enemy and its leadership because, if the Houses believed the true enemy was simply a rogue House or a species of time-active upstarts, they would "simply shrug and go back to sleep." Instead, the secrecy made the enemy into monsters, and the subsequent fear would keep the fight alive.

The Book of the War posited that the name was kept secret because the "why" of the enemy was more important than the "what". It also speculated that the enemy might come from beyond the Great Houses' noosphere, not because it came from another universe but because it operated on principles that the Houses weren't built to understand; it said that, unlike the Yssgaroth, the enemy was "civilised, cultured, and intelligent enough to have an agenda beyond pure destruction." (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Gods and Sphinxes
As recounted by Christine Summerfield in her memoirs, when she came into contact with the Great Houses' agent Chris Cwej, they were on a war footing due to recently having discovered something terrible about the "Gods", here referring to god-like beings in whose shadow "all the civilisations in the universe" had grown up, including both humanity and the houses.

Most active among the Gods were the Kings of Space, a pair of Gods who created their own Sphinx-space on the edges of the established universe and created an army of sphinxes who clashed with the Great Houses' forces on several occasions, although the Kings were believed to be "renegades" relative to the orthodoxy of the Gods, and were not the ones the Houses were primarily worried about. Hearing it said that "nobody [had ever] ever come back alive" from Sphinx-space, Christine wondered if "the Gods kept sending back dead bodies, with little notes attached", (PROSE: Dead Romance) closely paralleling the "Head of the Presidency" incident which The Book of the Enemy referred to as the first message from the Enemy to the Great Houses, where the President of the Homeworld travelled to a supposed Enemy base and was sent back in the formed of a severed head with a note clenched between its jaws. (PROSE: The Book of the War) As part of negotiations to salvage the bottle universe, Cwej made a pact with the sphinxes, agreeing to give them access to proper time travel, which they desired. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Christine eventually speculated that Chris Cwej's universe was a bottle universe, and the Gods had originated as the Great Houses' counterparts in the universe of the level "above", fleeing from yet another enemy. (PROSE: Dead Romance) Indeed, one account suggested that the universe of I.M. Foreman, in which the better part of the "true" War in Heaven was fought, was indeed a different universe from Cwej's universe, and that its Time Lords were fleeing into the bottle universe to escape the War, becoming God-like. (PROSE: Interference) However, many other accounts depicted the universe Christine entered, and where Cwej was active as an agent of the Houses, as the same level of reality the War in Heaven was fought in. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire, etc.) Cwej believed that these Gods might be "parts of the universe‘s framework" and "might have been there since the beginning of time". (PROSE: Dead Romance) According to one account, Cwej later discovered that the group of so-called "All-High Gods" who had taken over Dellah were instead Ferutu. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)

Thaumoctopus memeticus
One account of the Enemy held that a crashed timeship began infecting the local biology of the Earth, resulting in the Thaumoctopus memeticus, a four dimensional mimic octopus that could take on any form, including that of ideas. (PROSE: T.memeticus: A Morphology) The Enemy did field timeships during the War. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)

Lolita
Although, before the War, Lolita claimed to her sister that she was concerned about the Enemy — explaining the War would be "us versus them, our pilots against their pilots", that the enemy was going to "change everything, if it can", and that even their mother would likely be damaged — (PROSE: Toy Story) some legends indicated that the Enemy was descended from "a 101-form timeship who was so indistinguishable from a human that it lived and died as one". (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...) Indeed, the Egyptian god Horus described Lolita as a "process" and "a new kind of history", (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh) echoing The Book of the War's description of the enemy as a process and the War as "a struggle between one kind of history and another." (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Some accounts suggested that Lolita was not the Enemy as the Great Houses knew them, but was behind their rise and was puppeteering them for her own ends. According to Carmen Yeh's heavily-fictionalised memoir Fantastical Travels in an Infinite Universe, Compassion believed that "the enemy" as commonly understood was a meaningless distraction and the real threat to the Homeworld would come from within, specifically "House Lucia" or "family". (PROSE: The Book of the War)

When he was given visions of its past by the Yssgaroth consciousness, the human psychic Az Dixon caught a glimpse of "a time where the Yssgaroth gazed upon a living time machine, granting it the strength to rise up against its masters and the potential to become the greatest Adversary they ever faced". (PROSE: Preternatural Nights) Godfather Auteur asserted that the enemy was created by Lolita as the sires of a temporal and metafictional version of Count Dracula. According to Auteur, Loita had primed Dracula to become the Enemy through a timeline in which he came to rule over the British Empire and led vampires into space. Organic Enemy space-time vessels kept the timeline hidden from outside view. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine)

Other accounts suggested Lolita was grooming humanity to become a threat to the Great Houses. In established history, a moment known as the Ghost Point occured right before humanity could have found new ways to think, ways unpredictable to the Great Houses. (PROSE: The Book of the War) However, in the early decades of the 21st century, despite the Ghost Point, the history of Earth began to advance once more, with a shift claiming this curve towards advancement was caused by the campaign for the office of President of the United States run by Matt Nelson. This campaign was being manipulated behind the scenes by Lolita. (PROSE: Head of State) Every Time Lord knew the enemy's home planet was Earth, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) leading the Time Lords to try to destroy the planet in the 20th century. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)

Spiders
Due to the interference of Faction Paradox and its Remote soldiers, the Third Doctor regenerated on Dust. This was a revision of the original version of history, (PROSE: Interference) in which he regenerated after defeating the Eight Legs on Metebelis III. (TV: Planet of the Spiders)

The Doctor's later incarnations never stopped the Eight Legs' plan for universal domination. (PROSE: The Blue Angel, The Ancestor Cell) The Enemy shared a connection with the Eight Legs. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, The Map and the Spiders, et al.) Therapy filters applied to War-time agents of the Great Houses recovering from OMEGA level events deleted terminology relating to spiders. (PROSE: Subjective Interlock, The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale, Timeshare, A Choice of Houses, No Enemy But Despair)

Original Mammoths
In the posthuman era, Cernunnos, leader of the Original Mammoths, was resurrected at Terra Primagenia. Returning to the remains of the pre-universe mammoth empire with the unwitting help of Avus, Cernunnos began planning to undo the anchoring of the thread in a War against the Great Houses. (PROSE: Cobweb and Ivory)

Daleks
In a parallel universe where the Second Doctor was pardoned instead of being exiled to Earth, the Sixth Doctor was Lord President Admiral of Gallifrey during the War. There, the Enemy had always had access to rudimentary time corridors and travel machines, but they gained temporal manipulation powers after the Master defected to their side. The Doctor described them as an old foe with calculating tin minds and jet-black saucers. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)

Iris Wildthyme owned a book entitled Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks; (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion) during the War, Ostrev remembered fellow Time Lord inductees sharing an illegal copy of the book, whose title had been redacted to ''Doctor ? in an Exciting Adventure With the Enemy'' because proper names in the titles of documents were automatically edited out by House Military software for "reasons of war security." (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)

Gallifrey eventually fought the Daleks in a time war known widely as the Last Great Time War, (TV: Gridlock) but which was occasionally called simply "the War". (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) Given that the Daleks were their opponent during this conflict, the Time Lords sometimes simply referred to the Daleks as "the enemy", (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence) and the Squire recalled the Dalek Empire as the "Great Enemy" the Time Lords faced. (COMIC: Pull to Open) In its section on the Last Great Time War, a history book about N-Space recounted that the Time Lords had long prophesied a coming war that would bring about their destruction "at the hands of a mysterious enemy." (PROSE: The Whoniverse) One history of the Daleks written after the Last Great Time War claimed that the Time Lords had first decided to take action against the Daleks because they believed the coming of the Daleks "represented the emergence of the enemy they had long prophesied". (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

Nevertheless, some accounts, while entertaining the possibility of the Enemy being the Daleks, dismissed the possibility. The Time Lord Homunculette, passing through a ravaged Earth in the course of his quest for the Relic, reflected that Earth was lucky compared to Gallifrey: it had been invaded, "but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments", whereas, in Homunculette's opinion, the Time Lords "were up against something really dangerous". (PROSE: Alien Bodies)

A briefing described "xenophobic mutants travelling in their own personal war machines" as one of the several groups that some considered the Enemy but were in reality just one of the groups trying to take advantage of the War in Heaven for their own ends. (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefings) Lawrence Burton thought to himself that the enemy might be those "outer space robot people" that appeared in "at least two films with Peter Cushing"; however, he dismissed the possibility as implausible. (PROSE: We Are the Enemy)

Doctor Who
When asked who could fight a war against a race of gods, Abschrift quickly replied, "Who indeed." (PROSE: Warlords of Utopia) The Doctor said he wasn't working for the High Council and was only one of the enemy "depend[ing on] where you're standing." (PROSE: Alien Bodies) He was one of the Four Names that Rassilon instructed the Watch to assassinate after he realised the identity of the true enemy. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) The Doctor was fated to rule the post-War universe with an iron fist as the Emperor, one of the "four surviving elementals", Time Lords who had survived the destruction of their Homeworld in the War in Heaven. (PROSE: Father Time)

Metafiction
Multiple accounts of the Enemy involved varying levels of fiction and reality interacting.

Notably, Lawrence Burton considered the idea that as a writer of Faction Paradox, he was the enemy; to him the Great Houses were no more real than a children's show. (PROSE: We Are the Enemy) One meeting with the Enemy had an agent of the Great Houses read backwards words in the air before gazing upwards at an aspect of the Enemy as reality flickered to the left, as if the enemy were reading a book containing the agent. (PROSE: Life-Cycle)

The Piebald Man, while being persecuted by humans, speculated that one day the rejects of human society would live only as stories, and be "far more powerful" then. (PROSE: First Draft) The Sceneshifters guided three specific human writers who broke down the barrier between ideas and the physical world to success so as to accelerate their plans. (PROSE: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy) One account held that a war was being fought not by ships, but by living ideas fighting amongst themselves, and that there was a book related to the enemy that when read would erase those written from reality and place them into fiction. (PROSE: The Book of the Enemy)

The Friend
The Enemy was not actually a monolithic force, for it had within itself its own disagreements and political disputes between entities. Some among the Enemy's ranks became horrified by War and fell in love with Earth and the universe as it was under Superior rule, so they defected and became the Friend. Because they had a common Enemy, the Friend maintained neutrality with the Superiors. (PROSE: Vignettes of an Uprising, Rebel Rebel) Within the Daylight Saving, the Friend had a Board of Directors who were incompatible with reality because they were still members of the Enemy "metaphysically, if not politically." (PROSE: Vignettes of an Uprising)

Activities during the War
Although the Enemy's identity was shrouded in uncertainty, many of its activities in the course of the War in Heaven were relatively well-known. The Enemy once launched an "all-out assault on the 14th, 11th and 49th centuries". (PROSE: The Brakespeare Voyage) The Enemy attacked the nexus world of Golgalith to try to destabilise the Web of Time, beginning the Battle of Golgalith that ended in a victory for the Great Houses. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape) A boy from Faction Paradox claimed to the Eighth Doctor that he had himself originally been a resident of the 49th century, but had fled in the TARDIS from the Enemy after they "overran his home". His history had subsequently been rewritten over and over, sometimes by the Enemy, leading to the Doctor forgetting their original origins and believing themselves to have always been a Time Lord from Gallifrey. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

Powers
The enemy was seemingly bound by the same Protocols of Linearity as the Houses: it was unable to attack vulnerable points in the Homeworld's history, instead, encountering the Houses in the same order that it was encountered by the Houses. This was supported by the initial battle on Dronid, in which the enemy's forces were as ill-prepared as the Houses' First Wave.

Many Great House academicians posited that the enemy was farther along in their ability to use high chaotic limiter settings.

The Book of the War said the enemy "trie[d] not to" violate the laws of physics. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Qixotl noted that the enemy could wipe out information just as quickly as they could destroy matter. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) In its entry for the enemy, The Book of the War referenced its articles on the Churchill Index, Immaculata Formosii, the Gods of the Ainu, "Miss Hiroshima", Mohandassa, Sixth Wave Defections, S'tanim, and Violent Unknown Events; however, none of these entries existed in the book, implying that the enemy had tampered with the text. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Representatives
House Military soldiers used the colloquialism "Rep", an abbreviation of "representative", to refer to the enemy's agents. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5) Tonton Macoute once cooked the corpse of an enemy soldier. (PROSE: Tonton Macoute)

The enemy had a small automated outpost on Simia KK98; there, a Gabrielidean soldier working for the Time Lords was wounded by a combat satellite. As he died, the Doctor visited him; later, the soldier was rescued and turned into a Shift by people dressed in flowing robes with high collars, designed as parodies of the costumes of the High Council. These agents sent him, now calling himself Mr Shift, to represent the enemy at Qixotl's auction for the Relic. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)

In the Mount Usu duel during the filming of Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom, Chris Cwej and Michael Brookhaven encountered an enemy agent which apparently summarised its own mystique: "The Scourge. Harvey. Hermes. The coolest character is the one whose face we never get to see." It was represented by the total absence of anything on the recovered film, appearing not as blackness but instead as emptiness and background filmstock. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

On Roma CLII, Marcus Americanius Scriptor killed a creature that was hunting a renegade who had escaped the War by jumping into a parallel universe. The monster was implied to be working for the enemy. (PROSE: Warlords of Utopia)

Behind the scenes

 * When they were first mentioned in Alien Bodies, the Time Lords' foe in the war was called just "the enemy", without any capitalisation; this format was followed in The Book of the War and the rest of Mad Norwegian Press' Faction Paradox books. However, following on a brief uppercase reference to "the Enemy" in Unnatural History, the proper-noun title was employed in later BBC Books novels The Taking of Planet 5, The Quantum Archangel, and The Ancestor Cell, as well as the Faction Paradox books published by Obverse Books, most notably including The Book of the Enemy.
 * Though Lawrence Miles originally intended the enemy to be an "unseen-and-unknowable factor", by the time he finished writing Alien Bodies, he'd "figured out exactly what was going on and why". However, "moods changed", and he came up with a whole list of other possibilities. None of them were good enough to be the definitive answer, but eight were almost good enough, one of which was a "whale-king" fashioned after the of European superstition. Miles intended to reveal the enemy's identity in his final Doctor Who novel, and he asked the BBC if they could publish a book where one single page had eight different versions, so the revealed enemy would depend on which book a person purchased. Range-editor Stephen Cole shot down the idea because he preferred to keep the enemy's identity a complete mystery.
 * The Boy suggests in Unnatural History that before his history was rewritten, his primary "origin story" was that he had run away from his home in the 49th century after it was overrun by the Enemy. The Brakespeare Voyage later confirmed that there had indeed been an Enemy assault on the 49th century, lending credence to this statement. This is a metafictional reference to the original "Dr. Who" pitch document from 1963, some drafts of which suggested that the Doctor and Susan "escaped their homeworld after it was invaded by the Palladin hordes who are still pursuing them": this reading thus identifies the Enemy with the rather mysterious "Palladin hordes". Although by all appearances not part of Lawrence Miles's design, this retconned, implied connection would make the Enemy technically go back to the very earliest form of Doctor Who lore ever committed to paper, right alongside the Doctor and TARDIS themselves.
 * When writing for The Book of the Enemy, authors were told that the enemy must originate through the agency of the Earth, must either be humanoid or have humanoid agents, and can't be the Daleks or anything else they can't get the rights to.