Origins of the Last Great Time War

The origins of the Last Great Time War referred to the roots of the massive temporal conflict between the Time Lords of Gallifrey and Daleks of Skaro. The conflict could be traced back to many prophecies, pre-War skirmishes, military enhancements, and even more. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor, AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element, X and the Daleks, et. al) As the Ninth Doctor later recalled, the War was "the final battle" between the Daleks and Time Lords. (TV: The Parting of the Ways)

At the most basic level, the Time War stemmed from the rivalry between both sides, (PROSE: The Whoniverse) and the conflict actually had many simultaneous origin points across the histories of Time Lords and Daleks. For the Daleks, the earliest beginning point for tensions was at the very start of their existence due to a Time Lord mission to avert or alter their creation, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) whereas the Gallifreyans had long feared a coming time war due to the prophecies generated by the Matrix, (TV: Heaven Sent, Hell Bent) even having also endured an attack from their future enemy early in their existance. (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass, The Stranger)

Prophecies
The Time Lords became aware of their future involvement in the Time War a long time before it began, and many prophecies, stories and legends were generated around the idea. (TV: Heaven Sent) However, the Seventh Doctor reacted with complete surprise and horror at the concept of another time war breaking out. (AUDIO: Damaged Goods) Nevertheless, one prophecy concerned a hybrid of two warrior races, with many assuming this being would take part in the War. (TV: Heaven Sent) The Daleks and Time Lords alike assumed themselves to be the two warrior races that would make up the Hybrid, (TV: Hell Bent) leaving the question of whose side the Hybrid would fight for up in the air. Indeed, it was feared the being would bring about either Gallifrey's salvation or destruction. Many years later, after the War, the Twelfth Doctor stated that the Hybrid was destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins. (TV: Heaven Sent)

Ruath knew that there was a point in the future where Gallifrey ceased to exist. (PROSE: Goth Opera) One generation before the existence of the Doctor, many prophecies emerged concerning future threats that Gallifrey would survive before meeting its end in a war with an implacable enemy; (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors, The Gallifrey Chronicles) some accounts suggested that this "mysterious" and "long prophesied" foe was in fact the Daleks. (PROSE: The Whoniverse, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

During the Second Dalek War, the Dalek Supreme led a force of Daleks to the Cathedral of Contemplation, seeking to use one of its time corridors to instantly attack Earth Central's High Command. Their plot was foiled by the Fourth and Tenth Doctors, although the earlier incarnation was surprised the Daleks did not try to use the power to invade Gallifrey. Aware of the Time War, as it was in his past but the Fourth Doctor's and Dalek Empire's future, the Tenth Doctor only responded by saying, in due time, the Daleks would "try invading everywhere". (AUDIO: Out of Time)

Speaking with Martez after the creation of the Mutant Daleks, the Eighth Doctor noted his fear that the Daleks' unending war against the rest of the universe "may one day destroy everything". (AUDIO: Blood of the Daleks) The Time Lords foresaw the War during the life of the Eighth Doctor, as Straxus told him they saw "something terrible in the time tracks". (AUDIO: Fugitives) Irving Braxiatel was aware of the fact that the Time Lords were doomed, so he plotted to move them to the world of Maximediras. (AUDIO: Resurrecting the Past) However, the planet instead became a POW camp during the Deindum War. (PROSE: Present Danger)

Shortly before the War began, the Matrix prophesied that Gallifrey could be destroyed in a number of ways; (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls) one of these prophecies indeed held that Gallifrey would fall in a time war, (AUDIO: Songs of Love) but other possibilities held Gallifrey could be destroyed by the attrition, collateral damage, or wars fought by other species. (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls) Following the extinction of the Mechonoids, the Dalek Emperor's strategy computers and assessment engines predicted a coming war, one which would be fought against an ancient enemy of the Daleks, that would rage throughout time and space. The Emperor knew this conflict would require the Dalek Empire's every strategy and resource to survive, leading to the Emperor establishing the Cult of Skaro. (PROSE: Birth of a Legend)

The Accord also 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 and set out to reinforce the two decades before they were hit by the war. They altered the DNA of every single person that lived through those decades on a temporal level so that they subconsciously realised that there were inconsistencies with history. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time) Terminatron also knew of a coming conflict that would "shake the very foundations of reality" and told Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart about it, making the Brigadier remark "not another one" quietly. (PROSE: The Two Brigadiers)

Origins of the archenemies
Given that it stemmed from the rivalry between the Daleks and Time Lords, (PROSE: The Whoniverse) the Last Great Time War had many simultaneous origin points across the histories of both time travelling factions. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) Both of these histories were extremely complicated and in states of temporal flux. (PROSE: Gallifrey: A Rough Guide, Alien Bodies, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Also vital to the story was the life and travels of a renegade Time Lord known only as "the Doctor", (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, et. al) whose life was also in a state of flux due to their travels through time (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) and other powerful factors. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, et. al)

The Daleks were a race of genetically engineered mutant beings that relied on cybernetic travel machines for life support and combat. Convinced of the superiority of their own race, the Daleks sought to wipe out all non-Dalek life that they knew existed, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) with their ambitions starting out as their quest to become masters of their homeworld, (AUDIO: Return to Skaro) only for the Daleks to later develop to a point where they sought mastery over all creation (TV: Gridlock) through omniversal genocide. (TV: Journey's End) This ambition would be one of the reasons the Dalek waged their war with Gallifrey. The Tenth Doctor reflected that the time war between the Daleks and Time Lords was a battle "for the sake of all creation". (TV: Gridlock)

By most accounts, the Daleks arose from the Kaled race of the planet Skaro at the close of a Thousand Year War against Thals, with most accounts also crediting the mad scientist Davros for their genesis, only for the Daleks to turn on their forefathers upon deciding they could manage on their own. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, WC: ) Numerous other accounts of the creation of the Daleks existed, including some involving a scientist named Yarvelling or the planet Ameron, but later historians disregarded these alternate tales as myths. However, they also realised the Time War could be affecting even this early period of Dalek history; the temporal affects of the War could have briefly made these alternate origins "become" true before history was returned to the story of Davros, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) which was foregrounded as the truth in the post-War era. (TV: The Stolen Earth, et. al) Indeed, a structure known as "Yarvelling's Church" existed during the Time War. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War)

The Time Lords had also attempted to meddle in the creation of the Daleks by sending the Doctor, who by this point in their life had battled the Daleks many times, to Skaro to prevent their rise. Although Davros' programming for the Dalek mind had been completed long before he encountered the Doctor, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) some combatants in the Time War came to believe the interference in Dalek history, or possibly even the Time Lords' existence at all, was what drove the Daleks to develop into heartless murders. (PROSE: Engines of War) Indeed, the Daleks saw this Gallifreyan mission as an act of aggression (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) and thus focused their great hatred upon the people of Gallifrey. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Becoming hostile towards the Time Lords once they learned of the mission, (WC: , et. al) the attempted interference effectively made it so one beginning point of the Time War was the very start of the Daleks' existence. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Believing that no other life-forms mattered, (TV: The Evil of the Daleks) the Daleks saw the Time Lords assuming sole authority over time (WC: Gallifrey War Room) and then using that power to try to subvert their genesis as offenses that needed to be corrected. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) Furthermore, another personal reason the Daleks developed a hate for the Time Lords came from the Doctor: (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, et. al) thanks to their repeated stands against the Dalek race, the Doctor became their single greatest enemy, (TV: Victory of the Daleks, et al.) with the lives of the Dalek species and the Doctor becoming "impossibly entangled" (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks) as they battled each other throughout time. (TV: Victory of the Daleks, et. al) In fact, Gallifreyan research claimed the Doctor's departure from Gallifrey (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) in a stolen TARDIS with his granddaughter Susan (TV: The Name of the Doctor, et. al) had, at least in part, been to hold back the Daleks; the Dalek Combat Training Manual published during the Time War claimed the Doctor, likely convinced to do so by the Celestial Intervention Agency, sought to stop the Daleks from ever acquiring Hand of Omega so took it with him. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Hiding the Hand in London, 1963, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) the Combat Training Manual went onto claim the Doctor had pre-programming the device to act against the Daleks, only for a memory bomb hidden in his TARDIS to wipe his knowledge of the Daleks and the plot (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) when he left the Earth with Susan and two new human companions, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. As such, he unfamiliar with the Daleks until his first encounter with the exterminators a short time later, (TV: The Daleks) with his memory of the Hand of Omega and his plot to use it against the Daleks only returning to his mind during his seventh life. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) However, other accounts suggested the Daleks were, truthfully, completely unknown to the Doctor until their first meeting, (TV: Into the Dalek, et. al) with the Master and the First Rani also claiming the Doctor was completely unknown to the CIA when he left Gallifrey. (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir)

Meanwhile, the wider Time Lord society on Gallifrey remained focus upon a policy of non-interference, swearing to only watch the wider universe (TV: The Sound of Drums) and maintain the Web of Time, (TV: Attack of the Cybermen, et al.) having been the ones who established it to make the universe rational. (PROSE: The Book of the War, So Vile a Sin) Indeed, Gallifreyan society had emerged from the Dark Times. After arriving in this chaotic period of universal history, a Dalek Time Squad tried to attack the planet in revenge for the Time Lords' later mission to their own existence, hoping to prevent the Gallifreyans from ever becoming the Time Lords. After three incarnations of the Doctor, who had also arrived in the Dark Times, successfully defended their homeworld, (PROSE: Mission to the Known, All Flesh is Grass) Gallifreyan society was free to develop into its powerful position but knew that a powerful enemy was coming in their future. (TV: Heaven Sent, Hell Bent; PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

The research of two solar engineers, Omega and Rassilon, helped Gallifrey establish time travel and its powerful place in the universe. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) After Omega was lost to their final experiment, (TV: The Three Doctors, et. al) Rassilon became regarded as the founder of Time Lord society, but his true nature as an autocratic Lord President was not known to later generations until he was resurrected by his people for the Time War. (PROSE: Engines of War) The Fifth Doctor once entered Gallifrey's past and served as Supreme Coordinator during Gallifrey's Civil War. Leading an alliance of races against Morbius, he experienced a nightmare in which the Daleks requested to join the war effort. (PROSE: Warmonger)

During the life of the Doctor, after deciding to look the other way on the renegade's interference across time and space, the Time Lords came to see them as an easy agent to use whenever there was a crisis in history that needed to be solved, instead of getting their own hands dirty. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen, et al.) Indeed, this was a major reason the Time Lords chose the Doctor to interfere with the Daleks' genesis, with their previous experience against the Daleks also being a major reason. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, PROSE: The Dalek Problem, et. al)

One Time Lord reflected that the Doctor's rare returns to Gallifrey typically followed a normal pattern, with the renegade arriving to defeat "some disaster", which the writer further implied was almost always the Doctor's fault, before leaving again. However, he noted that this pattern changed when the Time War began. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) Dalek-Time Lord tensions would rise on the path to the War. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks, et al.) The Time Lords put aside more and more of their non-interference ideals in the name of hindering Dalek expansion, culminating in their attempt to avert or alter the Daleks' existence with the Fourth Doctor. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) The Time War would have major effects on Gallifreyan society; they fully set aside their non-intervention policy in the name of fighting the Daleks (AUDIO: All Hands on Deck) and were largely corrupted, turning from peaceful watchers to dark warriors. (TV: The End of Time, et. al)

The Daleks learn of the wider universe
No matter whether he had already known of the threat of the Daleks in buried memories (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) or truthfully had never heard of the beings, (TV: Into the Dalek, et. al) the First Doctor soon had his aforementioned first meeting with the Daleks during his human companions' first trip to an alien world; fascinated by a metal city in the distance, he led his companions into the city under the false claim they needed mercury for the TARIDS fluid link and quickly encountered the Daleks, (TV: The Daleks) whose xenophobic and "evil" nature shocked the Doctor. (TV: Into the Dalek) Escaping the city, the Doctor and his companions led the Thals against the Daleks to take over the city before the Daleks could wipe out all life on Skaro through a neutron bomb. (TV: The Daleks)

The Doctor and his companions thus left Skaro with the belief the exterminators were destroyed there and then, (TV: The Daleks, AUDIO: Return to Skaro) unaware that the Dalek race had secretly survived their encounter. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth) Whilst human historians later claimed the Fourth Doctor's mission to Skaro, during which he was accompanied by human companions Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith, marked the first moment where the Daleks learned of life beyond Skaro, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) one Dalek stated their first encounter with the First Doctor and his companions was what taught them that time travel was possible and that life on other planets existed, convincing the Daleks to look beyond Skaro to become the masters of the whole universe. (AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro) Indeed, the Eleventh Doctor later displayed great regret for ever entering the Dalek City. (COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone) However, meeting with the Daleks was also vital for the Doctor's growth; after seeing the "evil" of the Daleks, the Doctor swore to fight foes like them across his travels.

As the Twelfth Doctor later put it, the encounter taught him the meaning of his name, as it showed him that "the Doctor was not the Daleks". (TV: Into the Dalek) Shortly after the battle, the Seventh Doctor's companion Ace arrived on Skaro in an attempt to time lock the Dalek homeworld with an omega device, but she incorrectly used the device and briefly resurrected the Dalek combatants of the battle, with one swearing to Bernice Summerfield that the Daleks, instead of merely fighting to become masters of Skaro, would master time travel and control the rest of the universe. The Seventh Doctor managed to restore history to its proper course but noted that the Dalek City would soon be breached and its occupants reactivated. (AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro) When the Thal scientist Tryana inadvertently brought this about, the Dalek Supreme attempted to claim the Doctor's TARDIS during his second visit to Skaro for use in conquering other worlds. Although the Supreme's resurgent force of Daleks was decisively defeated, the Thals feared that other Dalek settlements existed elsewhere on Skaro. (AUDIO: Return to Skaro)

The incident in retrospect
The first encounter between the First Doctor and the Daleks in the Dalek City (TV: The Daleks) proved to only be the first in a long line of battles between the Doctor and the Daleks. In the lead up to the Last Great Time War, when the Eighth Doctor declared to the Reborn Master that he had no intention of joining "an insane war across the timelines," the Master mocked him as denying the truth: as the Master saw it, the Doctor had been fighting a war against the Daleks since he first landed on Skaro and continued fighting them across time and space. The Doctor attempted to defend himself by noting his first encounter with the exterminators had not been planned and stated it was the Daleks' who always attacked first, leaving him no choice but to respond to their invasions and attacks. The Master mocked the response as effectively being "they started it" and declared the Doctor a "one man army" waging a war. (AUDIO: Eye of the Masters)

During the Time War, the Time Lords reflected upon the Daleks' history and read every Thal account of, at least, their initial battle in the Dalek City. They found that the Doctor's companion Ian was mentioned in every telling of the event, earning the human the respect of the Gallifreyans due to his role in convincing the Thals to fight. As such, during a diplomatic mission to the Sense Sphere alongside Susan during the War, they recruited Ian for his apparent skill in anti-Dalek negotiations, along with his experience on the Sense Sphere from another one of his adventures with the Doctor. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence) The Dalek Combat Training Manual produced during the War also reflected upon the battle and noted Gallifrey's technical teams were greatly confused by the Daleks' reliance on static electricity during the event. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

During the incident, the Dalek War Machine casings present had been unable to move outside of the city's static-powered metal floors, (TV: The Daleks) yet the Time Lords found that no Dalek they had encountered during the War thus far had that weakness, with some coming to ponder whether the Thal-Dalek battle was actually waged much later in the Dalek timeline, potentially after some great event had forced the Daleks to retreat back to their home. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) However, most accounts agreed this event was indeed an early part of Dalek history. (PROSE: The Whoniverse, AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro, et. al) In fact, the Time Lords also found that the Silver Daleks of the later Vulcan Incident had a great reliance on static power and ultimately placed the Thal-Dalek battle to be early in the Dalek timeline, as shown in the opening section of the Combat Training Manual.

The Time Lords came to write that an exploitable reliance on static power was only present within "some" Dalek "factions" and understood that Daleks deployed into combat had "more robust" power systems. While they could find no exploitable fault involving static power in any casing they managed to capture, the Gallifreyan military ordered that, if any of its combat personnel found evidence of a static-based vulnerability present within the Daleks, they needed to inform the War Council right away. The incident had also shown that the Thals' anti-radiation drug, despite having been created as a medicine, was fatal to Dalek mutants. As such, the Time Lords reached out to Thal representatives for samples of the drug, only to underestimate the pacifist ways of the Thals; as the drug had been created to be a medicine, the Thals were unwilling to surrender it for use as a weapon. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Venturing beyond Skaro
The Dalek race eventually ventured beyond Skaro to establish the Dalek Empire. However, some records suggested the Daleks at first could not figure out the secret to faster than light space travel, forcing the exterminators to create alliances with the Voord and other such races for time. In fact, some individuals claimed the Daleks were only able to deduce the science behind faster than light travel by forcing the Doctor to reveal it, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) matching an account that suggested the Daleks and Voord allied together to force "Dr. Who" into giving them the secret to "ultkron travel". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Daleks)

The Reconnaissance Dalek, identified by the Thirteenth Doctor as one of the first reconnaissance scouts to leave Skaro, was able to identify the then unfamiliar incarnation as an enemy when she revealed her identity. The Dalek also knew of the Doctor's TARDIS. (TV: Resolution) The first Dalek starship to achieve hyperspace travel was the first Dalek flying saucer, designated Proto 13. (COMIC: The Amaryll Challenge) Now equipped with faster than light travel and invading numerous worlds, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Daleks eventually found their way to Earth and conquered the planet in the 22nd century. (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) This occupation marked an early use of the bronze Dalek casings (COMIC: A Stitch in Time) that became infamous in the Time War. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

Arriving ten years into the occupation, the rivalry between the Doctor, still in his first incarnation, and the Daleks deepened when the traveler vowed to put a stop to the Dalek conquest, aiding human rebels with this companions to bring about the liberation of the planet. Leaving her grandfather at his urging after he saw she had fallen in love, Susan stayed behind to live with the human rebel David Campbell (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) and helped rebuild the Earth, even battling a surviving Dalek drone. (AUDIO: After the Daleks) An older Susan Foreman also once arrived in the Dalek occupation in the Doctor's TARDIS. While she quickly escaped, she was pursued through time by a Blue Chrono-Dalek. Breaching the TARDIS as Susan introduced a child to the controls, the Dalek cornered the two and proclaimed that the Daleks would take control of the time capsule. (TV: Susan and the Daleks)

The loss on Earth led to the Daleks almost entirely focusing their xenophobia against humanity and the Doctor, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) whom they initially believed to be a man whose travels through time led to him becoming "more than human". (TV: Evil of the Daleks) Eventually, however, the Daleks learned the Doctor was a Time Lord. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, et. al) During the Time War, the Time Lords reflected upon the 22nd century invasion and were saddened to see the rebels had failed to produce anti-Dalek bombs out of the invader's own metal. Still, they found humans from a later Dalek invasion did manage to. They were also impressed by Susan's ability to hack into the Dalek communications network, so technical teams were directed to study her actions. It was also decided she would be a vital warrior for the conflict with the Daleks. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

In the late 2180s, the Daleks launched a second invasion of Earth with the assistance of another renegade Time Lord, "the Monk", and a Dalek from the future known as the Time Controller. Under orders of this unit, the Daleks plotted to turn the Earth into a "plague planet" equipped with a time warp engine to pilot the world through the Time Vortex, intending to wipe out any planet that would one day pose a threat to their empire. The plan was foiled by the Eighth Doctor and his allies at the cost of his great-grandson Alex and his companion Lucie Miller, (AUDIO: Lucie Miller / To the Death) generating a deep hate the Eighth Doctor felt towards the Daleks in the build up to the Time War. Meanwhile, a Time Lord by the name of Kotris saved the Time Controller from destruction and brought the Dalek to the pre-War era. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks)

Early Dalek time travel
Inspired by the Earth, many worlds began to rise up against Dalek rule, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) although they managed to retain their foothold on numerous planets to keep up their vast empire. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Amid this period of conquest, the Daleks decided the Doctor and his companions were their greatest foes for liberating the Earth, (TV: The Chase) in addition to their actions on Skaro. (TV: The Daleks, et. al) Deeming the extermination of the time travelers a priority, the Daleks turned their resources towards developing time machines of their own, (TV: The Chase, et. al) not only to aid in their conquests (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor, et. al) but specifically to end the threat of the Doctor. (TV: The Chase, PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

These space-time vessels were known as "DARDISes" (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel) and were capable of dimensional transcendentalism like TARDISes. (TV: The Chase) Reflecting upon early Dalek time travel, the Time Lords of the Time War-era came to believe these machines were based own their own space-time vessels, guessing in the Dalek Combat Training Manual that the Daleks captured one of their time capsules and reverse-engineered the stolen technology. However, they also suspected it was possible the Daleks had managed to recreate Gallifrey technology after merely having had enough time to study the design of a TARDIS. Nonetheless, Gallifrey's War Council and technical division hoped they could retroactively apply a special program into TARDIS dematerialisation circuits to serve as a "Trojan Horse" and stop the Daleks from ever developing time travel. However, upon realising this plan posed a threat because the Daleks could discover and weaponise this hypothetical program, a subcommittee was tasked with analysing the effectiveness and aftereffects of this strategy. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

The Daleks also became known to a being known to the Time Lords as the "Timewyrm", which gave them trouble in developing time travel by "twisting paths" to alter temporal possibilities. Dubbing her the "Golyan Ak Tana", the Daleks sent a task force to exterminate her, only for her to destroy them by feeding on their energy. The Time Lords, meanwhile, had long since developed prophecies that held the Timewyrm would bring about the end of the universe and consume Rassilon, (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation) but the Seventh Doctor moved to defeat the Timewyrm before this prophecy could come to pass. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Genesys, et. al) In fact, another prophecy warned that Gallifrey could survive the Timewyrm's rise, but it would fall nonetheless, with Penelope Gate believing it needed to fall "at precisely the right time". (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) Indeed, the Tenth Doctor explained Gallifrey's apparent destruction at the end of the Last Great Time War to be a fixed point in time. (TV: The Fires of Pompeii)

After a number of experiments resulted in the creation of a successful time machine, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Dalek Emperor and the Black Dalek Leader dispatched (PROSE: The Chase) a squadron of Pursuer-Daleks (AUDIO: The Daleks) to hunt down and exterminate the Doctor and his companions. With the Dalek squad chasing the Doctor and his friends throughout time and space, (TV: The Chase) one journalist later suggested this incident to be the first skirmish of the Time War. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) During this operation, the Daleks deemed the Doctor and his companions to be their greatest enemies, (TV: The Chase) but they later came to see how the Doctor took on many companions over their ensuing lives; thus, the Daleks eventually dubbed the Doctor's companions mere soldiers, (AUDIO: Jubilee) instead largely deeming the singular Time Lord as their sole greatest enemy. (TV: Victory of the Daleks; COMIC: Defender of the Daleks, et. al)

Using their time machines, the Emperor also planned to lead the Daleks in a new invasion of Earth, intending to attack during the year 2415. However, its personal time machine proved to be faulty. Whilst the Dalek invasion force landed on Earth in 2415, the Emperor was lost in time and, whilst he ultimately returned, the Daleks were left without a leader, leaving their invasion of Earth a complete failure that ended in their surrender. (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor) Additionally, early Dalek time machines relied on taranium, creating a means of time travel that, while impressive, was highly unstable, (PROSE: The Chase) expensive to use (PROSE: Mission to the Unknown, The Mutation of Time) and unreliable in offensive operations. (COMIC: The Secret of the Emperor) The attempt to pursue the First Doctor through time also had further consequences by consuming all of the Daleks' taranium supply. (PROSE: The Chase)

The chase for the Doctor was brought to an abrupt halt when the Daleks encountered the Mechanoids on the planet Mechanus, (TV: The Chase) kicking off a war and rivalry between the two factions (COMIC: The World That Waits) that would last right up to the Time War. (PROSE: Birth of a Legend) Furthermore, after the Daleks were distracted by the Mechanoids, the Doctor and his companions managed to escape their grasp. Having been looking for a way to return Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright to their own time, the Doctor studied the DARDIS and let the two return to the 1960s in it after warning them of its possible dangers. (TV: The Chase) Even though the Twelfth Doctor later said the Dalek vessel was "not as good as the TARDIS", (PROSE: A History of Humankind) it successfully returned them to their home time, albeit two years off from when they left. Chesterton and Wright then destroyed the ship to hamper the Daleks' temporal efforts. (TV: The Chase, PROSE: The Chase)

Indeed, this action severely crippled the Daleks' existing time travel research for years to come, (PROSE: Mission to the Unknown) but it also deprived the Time Lords of an opportunity to study the surprisingly advanced Dalek time technology. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) In 2223, the Daleks native to the era did not have temporal technology that gave them "precise control of vortex travel". Believing such technology would be "of value", they installed a duplicate under the name Magnus Drake onto Earth so he could establish new technologies for them to harvest during a repeat invasion. (AUDIO: Vengeance) During this incident, Daleks again were equipped with bronze casings (AUDIO: Master!) despite it being early in their timeline. When the invasion was launched, the Dalek Litigator became an invasion commander when it traveled back to this stage of the Dalek Empire to hunt down the Master, who had escaped his execution in Skaro's future. (AUDIO: Vengeance)

At some point, the Daleks made themselves into a time sensitive species, (PROSE: The Last Message) earning themselves the title of "Time-Sensitive Daleks". (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times) The Emperor of the Restoration, while it needed to search non-Dalek terms to describe what it felt, felt "pride" at this innovation of its species. (PROSE: The Last Message)

The Supreme's masterplan and beyond
It was through strenuous, long-term efforts that the Daleks harvested sufficient quantities of taranium to continue to use the time machines and proceed with the research, (PROSE: The Mutation of Time) creating a new, modified version of their timeship design. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Taranium was also the vital component of the Time Destructor, the Daleks' first time-based superweapon that was the center of the Black Dalek Leader's master plan in the year 4000 to conquer Earth and its allies. (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan, PROSE: The Mutation of Time) The Celestial Intervention Agency believed that the Daleks had a long term plan that called for an attack Gallifrey sometime after the fall of the Earth. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) However, the First Doctor stole the taranium core to deactivate the Time Destructor, kicking off another chase throughout space and time. During this hunt, the Daleks encountered an earlier version of the Monk, whom they briefly allied with before he escaped from their grasp. Ultimately, the Doctor, after losing friends during the chase, turned the Time Destructor against the Daleks, annihilating all infrastructure in place for the planned invasion. (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan, PROSE: The Mutation of Time)

The Time Destructor was destroyed upon activation (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) when its taranium core was exhausted. The loss was a devastating blow for the Dalek Empire (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan, PROSE: The Mutation of Time) and kicked off the Great War, which brought the Daleks to the brink of destruction. (PROSE: The Evil of the Daleks) During a Multi-Doctor Event, the Second Doctor and his companions briefly caused an alternate timeline where the Time Destructor plot succeeded, though the Second Doctor quickly restored history to its proper course. (AUDIO: Daughter of the Gods) During the Time War, the Time Lords believed the Time Destructor Incident was proof that the Daleks were willing to do anything to ensure their total victory. Unwilling to let their foes re-create such a powerful and indiscriminate weapon, the Time Lords tried to locate any remaining taranium deposits to stop the development of new Time Destructors, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) only for both sides of the War to use Time Destructors as the conflict dragged on. (PROSE: Natural Regression, AUDIO: The Innocent)

Amid the Great War, the Daleks discovered a means of time travel that did not need taranium, although it was made possible only by accident due to human experiments in 1866 that the Daleks managed to exploit. Equipped with this power, the Emperor arranged for the capture of the Second Doctor in Operation Human Factor, ordering him to use the TARDIS to spread the so-called "Dalek factor" throughout Earth's entire history. However, the Daleks were then distracted and heavily set back by a civil war instigated by the Doctor, who had introduced a "human factor" into a number of Daleks. (TV: The Evil of the Daleks, PROSE: The Evil of the Daleks) While one account alluded to this being "the final end" of the Daleks (PROSE: The History of the Daleks) like the Doctor had hoped, the Daleks pushed back the rebels, eventually rebuilt their forces, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks) and even adapted the human-established time travel into time corridor technology. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

As the Daleks' campaigns carried on, the Dalek Empire also came to develop chameleon circuits and continued to use dimensional transcendentalism. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) Meanwhile, surviving humanised Daleks escaped Skaro and made their way to the planet Kyrol, where they later met the Eighth Doctor. (COMIC: Children of the Revolution) Eager to exploit the Human Factor against the Daleks, the Time Lords began to search for these survivors during the Time War, sending out operatives to Kyrol upon hearing rumours of their presence. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Even though the humanised Daleks had all met their end in a battle against the powerful being Kata-Phobus, (COMIC: Children of the Revolution) the War-era Time Lords, like the Daleks, were more than willing to alter history to secure an advantage. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence) Equipped with information from the Doctor's experiments that brought forth the "Human Factor", the Time Lords also began to research if a "Gallifreyan Factor" existed. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

The Daleks were brought to the attention of the Time Lords by the Second Doctor during his trial when he told them that they were the most dangerous of all his foes. (TV: The War Games)

The Emperor's multi-part plot
Under the command of the Dalek Emperor, Daleks in War Machine casings launched a complicated plot to take over the Earth in the late 20th century. By the time of the gambit, the Daleks had force field technology powerful enough to keep a TARDIS in place and a high frequency sonic beam that was able to get through the TARDIS's own defenses, allowing the Daleks to fill the time capsule with frequencies that could destroy a Time Lord's brain. Following the Sixth Doctor's capture, a Scientist Dalek also began to dismantling the TARDIS consule unit to investigate the inner workings of the time machine, much to the rage of the Doctor&mdash;who decried the Dalek's actions as "indiscriminate tinkering"&mdash;and a higher ranking Dalek, who revealed the scientist had not been given orders to carry out such actions.

The rogue Dalek countered that its scientific role gave it a duty to find out how the TARDIS worked, but the Doctor wrote it off as the Dalek being ambitious. Before his escape, when the Dalek officer demanded the Doctor to explain how the TARDIS worked, the Doctor responded that its "meddling minion" had heavily damaged the capsule. After his escape, the Doctor needed to take time to repair his TARDIS before travelling back to defeat the Emperor's plot. (AUDIO: The Ultimate Adventure)

Setting the pieces in place
Aided by an alliance with yet another renegade Time Lord,, (TV: Frontier in Space) after he arrived on Skaro, (PROSE: Verdigris) the Daleks were granted access to his knowledge of temporal mechanics. Further research was carried out by the Gold Dalek, who specialised in time travel campaigns, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) resulting in them "discover[ing] the secret of time travel" and learning how to change history on a larger scale than was previously possible, (TV: Day of the Daleks) though mastery of time travel still eluded them. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks, et al.) The War Doctor once implied the Time War began as soon as the Daleks held temporal technology that they could use effectively against the Time Lords. (AUDIO: The Innocent)

After the Second Doctor brought the Daleks to the attention of the Time Lords during his trial, (TV: The War Games) it was further suggested by a journalist that the Daleks were again brought to the attention of the Time Lords when (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) the Third Doctor discovered an alternate timeline in which the Gold Dalek and its forces, using time travel to create a time paradox via a time loop, successfully conquered Earth by starting World War III in the late 20th century. The Doctor quickly encountered with a team of human rebels trying to avert their future, (TV: Day of the Daleks) with the Time Lords later writing that these guerrilla fighters were waging "a crude time war" against the Daleks. Blind to "the complexities of four dimensional temporal mechanics", (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the rebels failed to realise they were completing the Daleks' time paradox, as their actions were set to ensure the Dalek-controlled future came to pass. (TV: Day of the Daleks)

According to the Time Lords, the rebels had thus created "perpetual" time loop, but the Doctor's intervention was able to finally free the Earth from the Dalek occupation; (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) aided by UNIT, the human rebels, and his assistant Jo Grant, the Doctor was able to finally avert the Third World War and prevent the Dalek-controlled future. (TV: Day of the Daleks) By one account, it was this incident that taught the Doctor that the Daleks had survived their Civil War, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks) but other accounts showed the Second Doctor had already learned as such. (COMIC: Bringer of Darkness; AUDIO: The Final Beginning, et. al) Analysing the "Time Paradox Incident" during the Time War, the Time Lords believed the human rebels' time machine being based upon the Daleks' temporal equipment was proof the Daleks themselves had copied a Gallifreyan time capsule to establish their initial time machines. This incident also occurred on the Doctor's exile on Earth, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) which he had been sentenced to after his trial. (TV: The War Games)

During his exile on Earth, the Doctor had often battled the Master, who allied with a number of alien conquerors in his efforts to take over the planet. (TV: The Dæmons, PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, et. al) After his many defeats, the Master finally left the Earth and made his way to Skaro. (PROSE: Verdigris) After his many other alliances with alien powers, the Master had decided to partner with the Daleks, who had grown so hateful of humanity and the Doctor that they were willing to hear his plan; meeting with the Supreme Dalek Council, he proposed (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Operation Divide and Conquer, which called for a series of false flag attacks against the Earth and Draconian space empires to turn the two great powers against each other, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) weakening them to the extent that they could be easily conquered by a sudden Dalek invasion.

The plan was primed to place the entire sector under Dalek control, but what the Master asked for in return, or if the Daleks even intended to honour their promise for whatever it was, remained unknown. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Indeed, the alliance between the Daleks and the Master was uneasy, with both sides wanting to be the one who came out as a galactic ruler. (TV: Frontier in Space) Nonetheless, the Daleks were fascinated as the plan began to unfold just as the Master promised and began to consider further alliances, only for the Doctor to get involved; (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) with the Time Lords having allowed him to continue his adventures throughout time and space, with Jo Grant at his side, after he put a stop to the First Omega Crisis, (TV: The Three Doctors) the Doctor and Jo arrived in 2540, where they discovered the tensions between Earth and Draconia and found that the Master was behind the conflict. (TV: Frontier in Space)

With the two empires alerted to the Master's deception, the Daleks were forced to reveal themselves when the Gold Dalek arrived to take control of the operation. In a move that had major repercussions for the rest of Dalek history, this Supreme did not have the Doctor exterminated, instead allowing the Master to capture his old friend so he could watch the galaxy fall. Instead, the Doctor escaped, leaving the Supreme Council to believe the Master's supposed compassion for his fellow Gallifreyan lead the Doctor to an operation on Spiridon; (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) as both empires prepared for war against the Daleks, the Doctor sent a message to the Time Lords for aid in stopping the Daleks' imminent attack on the two powers. (TV: Frontier in Space) In his message to Gallifrey, he noted that he suspected they already knew of the Master's alliance with the Daleks. (PROSE: The Time Lord Letters) By the Time War, the Master's alliance with the Daleks and the Draconia-Terra skirmishes they instigated were covered in CIA File QQQ/57. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Receiving the Doctor's message, (TV: Frontier in Space) either the CIA (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) or the High Council, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) specifically Castellan Terrynate, (PROSE: The Time Lord Letters) made an unusual decision by directly helping the Doctor, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) albeit by doing the bare minimum; (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) they remotely guided the TARDIS to Spiridon, where the Doctor and Jo aided a group of Thals in neutralising a Dalek army in place for the coming invasion by using an ice volcano. (TV: Planet of the Daleks) As the Time Lords learned in their initial intel of the Spiridon operation, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the Daleks had also been experimenting on adapting the native Spiridon's invisibility for their own kind, (TV: Planet of the Daleks) only to abandon the operation when they were unable to overcome the light wave sickness. The Time Lords considered themselves fortunate for this chain of events. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Nonetheless, the Daleks remained interested in invisibility technology up to the Time War, with Davros eventually managing to develop it for them. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks) Reflecting on the Spiridon Incident, the War-era Time Lords were also surprised by the weakness the Daleks on the planet showed towards cold temperatures because they had seen Daleks operate in the cold of deep space, writing that it was a "possible operational inconsistency" within their foes. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Whilst the Sixth Doctor once claimed that every Dalek mutant was weak to cold temperatures, (AUDIO: The Ultimate Adventure) many accounts showed that Daleks could operate in winter weather. (AUDIO: The Dalek Occupation of Winter, et. al) To try to understand what happened, the Time Lords came up with several theories: they pondered whether Daleks needed training for low-temperature operations but admitted it was more likely the casings on Spiridon had been modified, either for suspended animation or the invisibility experiments. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Remaining entombed for decades, the army the Doctor and the Thals immobilised remained frozen throughout the ensuing (PROSE: The Whoniverse) Second Dalek War launched by the Earth and Draconian empires against the Daleks. (PROSE: Love and War) Even though there were several accounts that held the entombed Spiridon army was released or destroyed in pre-Time War Dalek history, (COMIC: Emperor of the Daleks, AUDIO: Return of the Daleks, et. al) the Time Lords feared the Daleks would gather the resources needed to excavate the army during the War; it was thus recommended that reconnaissance TARDISes make customary stops in Spiridon's star system and immediately report any increase in Dalek activity to High Command. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) The Doctor's message to the Time Lords about the Dalek threat was also stored in the Panopticon Archive. (PROSE: The Time Lord Letters)

Contradictory accounts and the role of time travel
According to human historians, the Gold Dalek, using a primitive time tunnel from what it learned from the Master, had only launched its time travel-based invasion of Earth to redeem itself after the failure of its alliance with the Master and the Dalek loss on Spiridon, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) although the Gold Dalek had in fact not recongised the Third Doctor during the Earth invasion (TV: Day of the Daleks) but did recongise the enemy of its kind during their alliance with the Master. (TV: Frontier in Space) With the Daleks seeking the avert the liberation of Earth at the hands of the First Doctor, the Dalek Combat Training Manual claimed the new invasion of Earth had occurred as soon as they had time travel equipment, further claiming that the Daleks began their chase throughout time against the First Doctor after the Earth had again been conquered. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

The human historians, meanwhile, claimed that the chase for the First Doctor was launched after the time travel-based invasion, claiming the Black Dalek Leader had been inspired by its fellow Supreme's operation. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Both further claimed the Time Destructor Incident was launched sometime after the alliance with the Master and the Spiridon operation. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) The Daleks also held a grudge against the Master after he abandoned their alliance and blamed him for their defeats at the hands of the Doctor. Despite admitting that their "goals weren't perfectly aligned", the "Bruce" Master later claimed it was the Daleks who "threw away" the potential of their partnership, claiming they had not listened to him. He also alleged that he simply abandoned their strategies because they had began to fail and that the Doctor's victories were not his fault. (AUDIO: Vengeance)

Some scholars suggested the Master and the Daleks, likely because of their mutual enemy in the Doctor, had made further alliances, but no authentic records of these later partnerships existed. Indeed, it was believed the Master's failure had set back a possible Dalek conquest of humanity by hundreds of years, although the Supreme Council dubbed this an inconvenience out of the belief the Daleks would ultimately triumph (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) as the Second Dalek War with Earth kicked off. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) The Master and the Daleks did indeed make further alliances, but the Master earned the Daleks ire as he continually abandoned their plans to save his own life. (PROSE: The Novel of the Film, The TV Movie) At one point, he tried to ally with both the Daleks and the Cybermen on Kendrax. (PROSE: Special Occasions: 1. The Not-So-Sinister Sponge) During the Second Dalek War, (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) the Daleks also continued their research into time travel, learning lessons from the failure of the Gold Dalek's temporal invasion. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

In large part because of the Master's betrayal of their alliance against Earth and Draconia, (PROSE: The Runes of Fenric, AUDIO: Vengeance) but also because of his subsequent failures in their next alliances, the renegade would later be tried before the Dalek Emperor (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) and his whole parliament. (PROSE: The Runes of Fenric) Although the Time Lords claimed in the Dalek Combat Training Manual that the Daleks moved to put their former ally on trial right after their first doomed partnership, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) most accounts agreed the trial was held later in Dalek history, possibly with the approval of the Time Lords. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, et. al) Overall, there many parts of Dalek history that appeared to contradict or disagree with one another, (PROSE: Alien Bodies, et. al) or were simply hard to fit within the overall timeline, with even the Time Lords being unable to establish a complete summary of Dalek history. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

A young member of Faction Paradox credited the Doctor for this, claiming that the Dalek's greatest foe had managed to trick "the Dalek Empire into tangling their timeline so bad that their history collapsed under the weight of the paradoxes". (PROSE: Unnatural History) Nonetheless, not even the Eighth Doctor could remember every detail of Dalek history due to its constantly changing nature, (PROSE: Alien Bodies) with the Daleks themselves also interfering with their own past. The Last Great Time War's temporal effects only made their history more confusing. It was known that the Dalek Wars were kicked off after the failure of the Master's plan, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) but fact that they were waged throughout much of the 26th century (PROSE: Love and War, et al.) conflicted with accounts of the Age of Universal Peace. (PROSE: Break-through!) Indeed, after arriving in the Second Dalek War, the Tenth Doctor once remarked "Dalek history was confusing enough before the Time War". (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks)

One journalist speculated the Daleks involved in the 26th century conflict were not actually native to that era, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquest) with other historians knowing that the Daleks were willing to dip back into their own past to try to turn defeats into victories. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) While the Second Dalek War never developed into a time war, the Daleks' time travel research during it was capable, at least in theory, of large-scale temporal manipulation. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) Indeed, even though the seemingly endless series of Dalek Wars against humanity were waged long before Davros drew up plans for the Daleks to wage a war against Gallifrey and its High Council, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Davros, acting as the Dalek Emperor, was seemingly involved in the Dalek Wars during the events surrounding Operation Genocide. (COMIC: Nemesis of the Daleks)

Ogrons mercenaries were also employed during the Gold Dalek's occupation of Earth and the Master's plan. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, et. al) The Daleks continued to employ the Ogrons into the Dalek Wars (COMIC: Nemesis of the Daleks) and beyond (COMIC: The Only Good Dalek) because of their obedience and usefulness as cannon-fodder. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) However, the Eighth Doctor later learned the Ogrons were only inserted into pre-Time War Dalek history by the Overseer in an attempt to change history. The outcomes of these events remained the same, but the Doctor could remember versions of these events both with and without Ogrons. (AUDIO: Planet of the Ogrons) The Daleks continued to use Ogrons during the Time War (AUDIO: The Uncertain Shore) and afterward. (COMIC: The Only Good Dalek)

The Second and Third Dalek Wars kick off
After the exposure of Operation Divide and Conquer and the Dalek loss on Spiridon, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) the Draconian and Earth empires declared hostilities against the Daleks, kicking off the Second Dalek War. (PROSE: Love and War, Deceit) Despite the mass casualties the Daleks inflicted in the First Dalek Incursion alone, their enemies kept up the fight; (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) the Time Lords believed that, if the Daleks had been able to launch their planned surprise attack, it was more than likely the universe's space-faring powers would have been wiped out. In large part because (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the Time Lords had sent the Doctor to Spiridon to take out the Dalek army, (TV: Planet of the Daleks) the universe instead stood a fighting chance. The war was nonetheless a major conflict for Earth and the Daleks, (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks, et. al) with the Dalek Combat Training Manual comparing it to the Time War by saying they were both large-scale Dalek attacks against the universe. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

By the end of the Second Dalek War, the Daleks were losing the conflict but sought to master time travel, an essential step towards universal domination. One Dalek officer in particular, Dalek X, was notable for his push in developing Dalek temporal engineering, arguing that the Daleks would only achieve their supposedly rightful place as the supreme beings by conquering both space and time. (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) After the failed attempt to exploit the Cathedral of Contemplation's temporal abilities, (AUDIO: Out of Time) the Supreme Dalek's Temporal Research Team pressed on in a bid break into the Time Vortex via the Arkheon Threshold and change history. Although the Arkheon gambit originated as a means of defeating the Earth Empire, Dalek time-travel theory stated that mastery of time travel would begin with the destruction of the Time Lords and end with the subjugation of humanity. Dalek X denounced the Time Lords as weak and inferior for failing to use their powers to assert their superiority over all other lifeforms.

Ongoing bombardment intended to breach the Threshold interfered with the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS while in flight. It "slipped a time track" and landed the Doctor in the midst of the war, where he fell prisoner to Dalek X and was blackmailed into cooperating with them. However, Dalek X's decision to use the Doctor's TARDIS as a control element in their experiments allowed the Doctor to escape captivity and eradicate the Temporal Research Team. The disaster threw the Dalek Fleet into disarray and put an end to their attempts to win the war via time travel. Earth Command later attacked the Dalek base on Arkheon and the Doctor closed the Threshold, (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) leading the war to "fizzle out". (PROSE: Deceit)

Despite the defeat, the Second Dalek War had accelerated the Daleks' time travel research and demonstrated their growing confidence and capability of using mass manipulation of time as a weapon of war, effectively laying the groundwork for a future temporal conflict. (AUDIO: Out of Time, PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) Travel via time corridor became the Daleks primary means of time travel, but this method remained, in the words of the Seventh Doctor, "very crude and nasty". They coveted a system of time travel as sophisticated as that possessed by the Time Lords. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) The Fourth Doctor feared what would happen if the Daleks managed to get a copy of the TARDIS Instruction Manual. (PROSE: The Pirate Planet) Beyond allowing travel between different temporal coordinates, Dalek time corridors could be used as magnetrons, latching onto a target in the Vortex and pulling it to one end of the corridor. One significant advance in Dalek time travel technology came through the Time Controller device, which was portable but needed time to charge. Another weakness was that it was easily disabled. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Less significant to the time travel advancements, the Second Dalek War had seen a large-scale deployment of the bronze Dalek casings (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) that would later be used in the Time War. (TV: Dalek, et. al) Whilst bronze casings had seen use as far back as the 22nd century Dalek invasion of Earth, (COMIC: A Stitch in Time) the "protective armor" seen in the Second Dalek War was a very advanced weapon used to its full extend by the Daleks, (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks) with a distinct red variant used by the Supreme Commander. (AUDIO: Out of Time) While the Daleks largely went back to silver and grey casings after the war, (TV: Death to the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, et. al) the bronze drone casing and red Supreme casing would become standard issue for the Time War and were extensively used throughout the conflict. (TV: Dalek, The Day of the Doctor, COMIC: Ambush, AUDIO: Aimed at the Body, et al.)

In the 27th century, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the Dalek Wars continued through the Third Dalek War, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) which was largely defined not by fighting but the outbreak of a great space plague that the Daleks engineered after their alliance with the Master. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Deploying a team of Silver Daleks to the planet Exxilon to prevent the parrinium cure from falling into humanity's hands, the final action of the Third Dalek War came with the Exxilon Gambit, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) which ended with the Third Doctor, his companion Sarah Jane Smith, the native Exxilons and the Marine Space Corps stopping the Dalek plot, (TV: Death to the Daleks) allowing the cure to be dispersed across the Earth Empire's territory. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Although the Daleks launched a second mission to Exxilon when a new mutation of the space plague began to affect both them and humanity, (AUDIO: The Dalek Protocol) the "Exxilon Incident" of the 27th century was amongst the events the Time Lords of the Time War reflected upon in the Dalek Combat Training Manual, writing that they "now" knew the space plague had been of the Daleks' own making. During the incident, the Daleks had also immediately lost power to their weapons thanks to a beacon in the Great City of the Exxilons; fascinating at using similar technology as a defence, agents were sent to the more-technologically advanced past of Exxilon to learn how to construct such a device, although the Time Lords also saw that the Daleks on Exxilon had used telekinetic power to remain mobile, showing that Daleks could still be lethal in situations where they seemingly had no power. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

The Third Dalek War ended after the first Exxilon mission as well, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) although the conflict had left many human beings dead (PROSE: The Chase) like the Second Dalek War before it. (PROSE: Love and War) Future Time Lord agent Chris Cwej (PROSE: Dead Romance, The Dying Days, et. al) grew up watching EarthDoom XV, a highly fictionalised show about the Third Dalek War, (PROSE: Sky Pirates!) in his home time period of the 30th century. (PROSE: Head Games) The show terrified him and many other children of the time despite its low production values. (PROSE: Sky Pirates!) As he grew older, he still knew of the great destruction brought on by the exterminators and thus continued to greatly fear them as the "greatest murders" present within the universe. As such, when the Great Houses sent him to negotiate with them during the War in Heaven, he was mortified and his encounter with the exterminators left him feeling inhuman. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Mission to Skaro
Although Dalek dominance was kept at bay, the Time Lords continued to observe them growing stronger and more dangerous. They put aside their policy of non-interference (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) after their "latest temporal projections" foresaw a future where the Daleks had accomplished their long-held goal of wiping out all other lifeforms. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks) The Time Lords judged that the Daleks were too dangerous to continue to persist (WC: ) and decided the mutants were a threat to the survival of all of reality. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor) Beyond having seen how the Daleks were a "malignant infection" on the universe, the Time Lords came to fear for their own safety in the face of the Dalek menace, even believing the Daleks were the long prophesied enemy who would emerge (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) to destroy them. (PROSE: The Whoniverse)

Upon seeing the potential time stream where the Daleks had succeeded in their mission of extermination and became "the dominant creature in the universe" (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks) either through the Matrix's projections (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) or the APC Net, (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) the Time Lords deemed it necessary to act and break their sacred law of sacred law of non-interference, defending their decision by arguing a pre-emptive strike against the Daleks before they even arose would save trillions of lives, potentially their own civilisation as well, and allow their lives to "return to normal". Agreeing the Doctor was the man for the job, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Time Lords intercepted the Fourth Doctor as he was using a transmat beam and redirected him, along with his companions Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, to Skaro during the Thousand Year War that gave rise to the Daleks. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

The plan to avert or alter the creation of the Daleks was conceived by the Celestial Intervention Agency (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) with help from the team monitoring the APC Net. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) According to most accounts, the High Council knew of and approved the mission. (PROSE: The Stranger, et. al) The Dalek Combat Training Manual described the mission as being the "High Council's decision" and claimed that it was "unprecedented" in Gallifreyan history. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) To outline the mission, a Time Lord messenger was sent to meet the Doctor (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) in the trenches of Skaro, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) where the messenger told the Doctor of the future they had foreseen and outlined the the certain objectives for this mission:
 * If possible, to avert the creation of the Daleks
 * If that is not possible, alter their development and make them less aggressive
 * If neither is possible, find some intrinsic flaw or weakness to exploit in the Daleks (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

The exact identity of this messenger varied depending on the account. Many tellings held that he was a a Time Lord from the Fourth Doctor's own era, explaining why that was the incarnation chosen. (PROSE: A Device of Death, A Brief History of Time Lords, et. al) One account held that the messenger was Lord Ferain, who was the Director of Allegiance within Gallifrey's Celestial Intervention Agency and writer of An Alternative History of Skaro: The Daleks without Davros, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) whereas another telling held the Time Lord who led the mission was the coordinator of the APC Net, Jelpax, after his team foresaw the Dalek-controlled future. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) By one account, the messenger had been Lord Cardinal Brastall. (PROSE: A Device of Death) By another account, the messenger was Valentine. (WC: Death Comes to Time) A final account claimed Valyes, a Time Lord from a future point in time when Gallifrey was threatened by Daleks, had been the messenger. (AUDIO: Ascension) The CIA's own documents claimed the messenger had been Director Deliavatsud, whose administration had failed to recongise the threat of the Daleks for 25,000 years.

These documents outlined a very different account of the mission's background, claiming that it was an unauthorised affair; Deliavatsud, who only learnt of the danger the Daleks posed when he consulted the APC Net about their expansion in 101,197 TL, launched what became known as "the infamous Deliavatsud Intervention" by stealing a Time Ring as a way to unlawfully Time Scoop the Doctor and his companions to Skaro. Whilst the Doctor was found innocent "on technical grounds" due to being forced into the mission, Deliavatsud's blatant rejection of the non-intervention policy resulted in him being disintegrated by the High Council as punishment, which forced the CIA's further interventionist activities to be handled in secret. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) In the days before the War in Heaven, it was indeed said that the "interventionist elite" carried out many retro-genocides in secret. (PROSE: The Book of the War) However, the punishment for Deliavatsud's actions and push to go underground left the CIA crippled for years. A large amount of Deliavatsud's research into "the Dalek Situation" was also taken and destroyed by the High Council, so the newly-appointed Chief of Multihistorical Research, Professor Qualen, was selected to research into the future of "The Dalek Problem". (PROSE: The Dalek Problem)

Despite his initial reluctance to work for his people again, the Doctor quickly agreed to the mission upon learning it involved the Daleks and being told of the future his people had foreseen, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) additionally realising he had little choice in the matter (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) because his people had already dropped him into the Thousand Year War with Sarah and Harry. Quickly becoming involved in the conflict between the Daleks' Kaled forefathers and their Thal enemies, the Doctor bore witness to the first Grey Daleks being activated and even met Davros, whom he failed to convince to change the mutants into a force for "good". Davros believed the Daleks were already going to help the universe by wiping out all "inferior" life forms. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) The Time Lords had thus failed to realise that, by sending the Doctor to this time period, Davros would learn of life on other planets and be inspired to see the Daleks become masters of time itself. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, A Brief History of Time Lords)

Although there was dispute between accounts on whether the Daleks themselves learnt of alien life through this mission, (AUDIO: The Lights of Skaro, PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) meeting the Doctor proved the existence of life beyond Skaro and the possibility of time travel to Davros himself. He was overjoyed to find these alien lifeforms believed his "children" were a great threat to their existence, thinking it proved that he was a genius and that the Daleks were indeed superior to all others. From this moment forward, Davros actively wanted his Daleks to advance beyond Skaro and believed that was an inevitably, ultimately wishing for them to control all space and time. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) After the early Daleks all but wiped out the Thals and destroyed their home city, the Doctor rallied an ultimately failed coup against Davros and was finally presented with a chance to wipe out the Daleks by destroying their incubation room, only to falter at the last second. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

Pondering whether he could alter Dalek development to turn them into a merciful force (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) and finding himself unable to commit genocide, he questioned if such an act would make him "no better than the Daleks" and whether "some things" in the universe would be better with the fear of the Daleks uniting people. However, he believed he did not need to make the decision when it seemed the anti-Davros coup had worked out. Instead, the Daleks returned to the Kaled bunker and wiped out those who opposed Davros, leaving the mad scientist in control of the surviving Kaleds. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) Believing his people had been right and realising Davros would never allow mercy to be introduced into his "children", (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Doctor returned to the incubation room to finish his mission, only for his work to be cut short. By his estimation, he had only set back Dalek history by a thousand years. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

With the rise of the Daleks no longer able to be altered, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Doctor and his companions left Skaro after watching the Daleks betray and gun-down their creator for his supposed inferiority, although he told Sarah and Harry of his hope that something good could emerge from the destruction the Daleks inflicted upon the universe. They also parted ways with the surviving Thals and Mutos, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) who fell under the leadership of the Thal soldier Bettan. She went on to found the Thal tribe whose descendants the First Doctor encountered during his first visit to Skaro. (PROSE: The History of the Daleks) She also had some kind of involvement in the Time War and foresaw its "final event". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War) Meanwhile, the first Dalek Davros had created, (PROSE: The Evil of the Daleks) the Dalek Prime, cemented its control over its race despite being locked underground for the time being. Whether or not the Doctor's thousand year delay actually altered Dalek history (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) was a matter for conflicting accounts;

At the most basic level, numerous significant events, such as their encounters with the Doctor, appeared to remain the same for the Daleks (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, et. al) after the mission was cemented in history. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) One account did claim the fallout of the Doctor's mission created a new version of Dalek history, with the Time Lords observing changes to the timeline resulting from the mission as the Doctor left Skaro. The Dalek Empire was significantly diminished, with thousands of worlds becoming free from Dalek rule, but the Time Lords had hoped for this number to reach millions. They considered the Doctor's mission a failure but quickly identified an opportunity to counterbalance the shortfall, diverting the Doctor to the weapons research facility of Deepcity. They predicted that the success of the Doctor's actions there would give rise to a race of synthetic robots capable of bringing about the downfall of the Dalek Empire. (PROSE: A Device of Death)

The CIA's own records were again a differing account, claiming that the Doctor's actions on Skaro had not created a future better for the Time Lords but only established a bootstrap paradox; according to the The Dalek Problem published by Qualen, the version of Dalek history that emerged from the mission was the same timeline that the Doctor and Time Lords were already living through. According to these findings, the mission had averted a different timeline, one in which the Thals failed to destroy the Kaled Dome, Davros was allowed unleashed the Daleks against their enemies by Kaled leadership, and the insane genius declared himself himself ruler of Skaro, only to be exterminated with the rest of the Kaleds by the Daleks. This sequence of events was changed when the Doctor's presence resulted in the Thals destroying the Kaled Dome thanks to Davros' manipulations, setting in motion the version of Dalek history he already knew. In both versions of the Dalek timeline, the exterminators grew to one day threaten the Time Lords themselves (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) and had the possibility to conquer all of the universe. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem, TV: Genesis of the Daleks)

Seen as a declaration of hostilities
The Daleks eventually learned of the Time Lords' attempt to subvert their development, which they henceforth viewed as the Gallifreyans having launched a pre-emptive strike and act of aggression, so the Daleks planned to strike back at Gallifrey. Thus, while it was the total opposite of the Time Lords' intention, (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) the incident had generated Dalek hostilities towards the Time Lords that would eventually lead to the War. (WC: , AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests, The Innocent) Remembering how he had held the fate of the Daleks in his own hands during his fourth incarnation, the Eleventh Doctor himself referred to it as the "first shot". As such, the Doctor blamed themself for starting the Time War. (COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone) Whilst different incarnations of the Doctor had different thoughts on whether destroying the Daleks in their entirety was right, (TV: Journey's End, et. al) the Eighth Doctor and the War Doctor believed they should have destroyed the Daleks when they had the chance. (AUDIO: Blood of the Daleks, The Innocent)

Whilst datafiles in the Doctor's TARDIS vaguely stated that "some" considered the Doctor's mission the beginning of the Time War, (WC: Who Are The Daleks?) the entirety of the Dalek race held this belief. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage, et. al) Enraged by the Time Lords' actions, the Daleks decried it as an act of war and focused their "terrible and mighty capacity for vengeance" against Gallifrey (PROSE: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) as soon as they learned of the mission. (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) The Dalek Time Strategist claimed the mission made it so, "from [the Daleks'] earliest beginnings," they sought time travel and time weaponry, (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) with Davros indeed having realised that the Daleks would need to match the Time Lords' own equipment, reasoning that they could steal Gallifrey's own space-time vessels and weaponry if needed, before moving to conquer all of time and space. (PROSE: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

The War Doctor believed the Daleks never forgot the Time Lord mission to wipe them out; in effect, he believed he had started the War by failing to destroy the Daleks and that, by agreeing to work for the Time Lords during the mission, he had given the Daleks their target. The War Doctor, (AUDIO: The Innocent) the Time Strategist, (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) and Eternity Circle all stated the act the very beginning of the Time War during the conflict itself. (PROSE: Engines of War) Dalek historians felt that the Time War was "born from" the mission, (PROSE: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) while one Gallifreyan author wrote that the CIA, by launching the mission, "may have managed" to "light the spark" of what would become the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) During the fighting, the young Gallifreyan Rojan considered the incident to be an early event that helped lead to the War, leaving him to ponder whether the High Council had brought the War upon themselves. When he came to see the evil of the Daleks, however, he believed his people's actions against the exterminators to be justified. (PROSE: The Stranger)

Nonetheless, even after they had learned of the mission, the Daleks knew they were not yet ready to wage a time war against Gallifrey and so began to gather their strength and refine their technology for the coming conflict. (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) One account, which also dubbed the mission the "first shot", believed it "perhaps" made the Daleks' further aggression towards the Time Lords justifiable, though it also admitted Gallifrey had only launched the operation after foreseeing the Dalek-controlled future. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) During the War, Cardinal Ollistra indeed maintained that her people were not the aggressors, despite the Time Strategist proclaiming as such to her face. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) The Time Lords had nonetheless kept their attempt at genocide secret from their agent Chris Cwej, who was horrified by his masters' actions when the Daleks told him about the mission. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

The Matrix, however, did not foresee the conflict that arose from the mission. It was later theorised that the War was too far into the future the supercomputer to predict (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) despite its past of predicting far-off events. (TV: Hell Bent) Despite writing that the mission was an origin point for the War, one Time Lord author claimed this allowed the CIA to carry on as before, while the Doctor was free to carry on his travels, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) despite the CIA's own documents, due to stating the mission had been unauthorised, claiming the mission set back their interventionist polices. In fact, Qualen claimed the "disgraceful and ill-considered actions" of the Doctor and Deliavatsud had been "useless" and nearly led to the dissolution of the CIA as a whole. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem)

The mission in hindsight
Ironically, scholars on wartime Gallifrey came to believe that if the Time Lords had allowed the Dalek timeline to evolve without interference, and so let Davros refine his creations at that early crucial stage, then they might have become the less aggressive creatures that they had sought to create. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Alternatively, Qualen came to believe that the Daleks were destined to arise whether or not the Doctor's mission had succeeded; based upon Davros' own research, he believed that the ongoing nuclear civil war on Skaro would have inevitably resulted in the creation of the Daleks "or something very like them." (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) Indeed, the Dalek Prime once claimed Davros had interfered with their development by bringing them into being earlier than they were destined to, (PROSE: War of the Daleks) although Davros proclaimed at other times that the Daleks only acted the way they did because he made them in his own image. (AUDIO: The Davros Mission, et. al)

Qualen believed even the assassination of Davros during the attack that left him crippled would only delay the evolution of the Daleks by "a few thousand years". He believed that the only true way to wipe out the Daleks before their rise would to be destroy both the Thals and Kaleds during their final battle, defending this proposed genocide by arguing it would save the many more lives the Daleks destroyed. However, he believed the Doctor's presence during the rise of the Daleks had forever closed off such option and would instead create a time loop. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) During the Time War, the Time Lords did make other attempts to "re-engineer" Dalek history, only for the Daleks to always survive and assert themselves into every possibility they brought about, as if the universe wanted the exterminators to be a part of history. (PROSE: Engines of War) The Eighth Doctor had previously noted the Daleks and their plots were vital parts of the Web of Time. (AUDIO: Neverland)

When the War Valeyard removed the Daleks from existence during the conflict, (AUDIO: The War Valeyard) the Dalek Time Strategist quickly managed to restore its race, leaving the Eighth Doctor to admit that "erasing" the Daleks "didn't stick". The Time Strategist took the Doctor's comment as proof that he admitted the Daleks were inevitable, which it believed rendered their ultimate victory "inescapable", but the Doctor maintained it was merely him looking for a compromise to try and stop the War. (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks) The War Master did launch a successful effort through the Anti-Genesis codes to subvert Dalek history by replacing Davros as the creator of the Daleks. (AUDIO: From the Flames) However, this timeline was then undone by the Master, the Dalek Time Strategist, and the an alternative universe version of the Master. (AUDIO: He Who Wins)

Speaking at the First Clandestine Symposium to Consider Policy Regarding the Dalek Expansion with an address titled "The Mechanical Marauders", Qualen reflected upon the Doctor's mission and possible future actions Gallifrey could take against the Daleks. Believing they would be unable to attack the Daleks at their origins, he argued that the CIA needed to handle anti-Dalek interventionism on "a case-by-case basis" in the name of keeping Gallifrey and "crucial time lines" safe, while allowing "non-crucial points" to fall to the Daleks if an intervention there would not result in the protection of these "crucial" points nor totally defeat the Dalek threat. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) Similarly, Time Lord Commander Veklin proposed anti-Dalek defense during the War as an advantage only Gallifrey's allies deserved. Realising that her people were waging the conflict without considering helping every other planet against the Daleks, Susan Foreman was horrified at the idea of Gallifrey withholding that protection from those it did not benefit from. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence)

The Daleks, meanwhile, reflected upon the Fourth Doctor's mission for the Time Lords with hatred, judging it to have been an act of war that they needed to respond to. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage, et. al) The Fifth Doctor knew that the Daleks would be eager to strike back against Gallifrey for the "attack on their origins". (AUDIO: Effect and Cause) However, the Dalek Eternity Circle reflected on the mission with a degree of appreciation, judging it to have been the moment the Doctor showed them mercy was a weakness. (PROSE: Engines of War) According to human historians, the Daleks did not judge themselves ready to strike back at the Time Lords in revenge until the aftermath of the Dalek-Movellan War through (PROSE: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Duplicate Incident, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) but other accounts suggested that the Daleks had made even earlier efforts to strike against Gallifrey. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem, et. al)

The Game of Rassilon
During their ancient days, the Time Lords had partaken in a blood sport they called "the Game of Rassilon"; for the amusement of the Time Lords, lesser beings were Time Scooped from their native time periods to fight in the so-called "Death Zone". (TV: The Five Doctors, PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Before excluding the exterminators, as well as the Cybermen, from the Game for "[playing it] too well", the Daleks were among those dropped in to fight other races, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) although the Fifth Doctor once insisted the ancient Time Lords had "never" dropped Daleks nor Cybermen into the Game. (TV: The Five Doctors) Upon learning of what the Time Lords were doing, it was believed the Daleks interpreted this as an act of aggression, helping to build the tensions that led to the Time War. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Although Gallifrey went onto disband the Game of Rassilon and shut down the Death Zone, deeming in an anarchic practice of a less civilised time, (TV: The Five Doctors) the Daleks claimed they had needed to create a treaty with the Great Houses that officially barred them from being Time Scooped, further claiming this treaty gave them permission from the Time Lords to create their early, simple time machines. However, Christine Summerfield was unsure as to what the Daleks could have promised in return, and Time Lord agent Chris Cwej had never heard of the supposed treaty until he arrived on Skaro for new negotiations during the War in Heaven, though his superiors were known to keep secrets from him. The supposed treaty was broken when the Time Lords tried to wipe out the Daleks (PROSE: Dead Romance) at their genesis. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks, et al.) Upon learning of the supposed treaty during the War in Heaven, Chris believed the Daleks and was mortified his masters had negotiated with the killers in the past. (PROSE: Dead Romance)

Long after the shut down of the Death Zone, the rogue Lord President Borusa, seeking the immortality supposedly promised in the Tomb of Rassilon at the heart of the Death Zone, reactivated the Game to gain access to Rassilon's tomb, scooping several incarnations of the Doctor and many of his human companions into the Death Zone to help his plot. As part of the new Game of Rassilon, Borusa also Time Scooped many different alien beings, including a number of Daleks; (TV: The Five Doctors, AUDIO: The Five Companions) one Grey Dalek from the Movellan War period (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) was destroyed in its attempt to kill the First Doctor and Susan Foreman in a mirrored room, (TV: The Five Doctors) while several other Daleks encountered five of the Doctor's former companions elsewhere in the Death Zone. These Daleks could not identify their new surroundings, understanding only that they had been transported by an "unknown force". (AUDIO: The Five Companions)

Also involved in the new Game of Rassilon were Cybermen, specifically a number of CyberNeomorphs under several Cyber-Leaders, and Sontarans; (TV: The Five Doctors, AUDIO: The Five Companions) Cybermen would go on to have some involvement in the Time War, (COMIC: Outrun) whereas the Sontarans were never "allowed" to join the conflict (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem) despite their hope to join what they saw as history's greatest conflict. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) The incident also set a precedent for the Time Lords to partner with the Master in desperate circumstances, (TV: The Five Doctors) setting the stage for the Time Lords to restore him to life for the Last Great Time War, either before the War (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) or during it. (PROSE: The Whoniverse)

Borusa himself received the gift of immortality, but at a great cost; a projection of Rassilon revealed that this eternal existence would be a damnation, freezing Borusa upon his sarcophagus like the other power-hungry Time Lords who had come before him. (TV: The Five Doctors) By one account, Rassilon, having lured Borusa to him through the promise of immortality, had been the one to reactivate the Death Zone and bring the Doctors together upon deciding Borusa was not fit to be Lord President. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) The Eighth Doctor later persuaded Rassilon to release Borusa, for at least a short time, to guide Gallifrey, (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) and the Seventh Doctor believed Borusa had seemingly passed on into the Matrix for good after changing his ways. (PROSE: Blood Harvest) However, the War Doctor discovered that Borusa was still trapped in the Death Zone during the Time War. During the War, the resurrected Rassilon transformed Borusa into a possibility engine that he used to see potential timelines. (PROSE: Engines of War)

Additionally, the series of events involving the Fourth Doctor and Romana II's defeat of Skagra (TV: Shada) were prematurely aborted due to the Time Scoop sent after them by Borusa during his gambit for immortality. (TV: The Five Doctors, WC: Shada, et al.) Ultimately, theorised to be a result of ensuing temporal instabilities, the adventure unfolded at least four times, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) with the Eighth Doctor and Romana, who by that point had been elected President of the High Council, at one point "resuming" their adventure. Upon arriving in the Time Lord prison of Shada, numerous Daleks were imprisoned (WC: Shada) despite seemingly having been absent from the cells during the Fourth Doctor's versions of the Shada affair. (TV: Shada, et al.) Shada would manage to survive the Time War. (COMIC: The One)

Although one account claimed that the 23rd century Dalek invasion of Earth was merely a simulation created by the energies of the Land of Fiction, (PROSE: Head Games) other accounts implied it to be a real event, with Davros stealing a sacred Time Ring from Gallifrey and allying with the current Dalek Emperor. After directing the Seventh Doctor to battle the Dalek invasion, the Time Lords froze Davros in time as punishment, (GAME: Dalek Attack) although later accounts indicated he somehow escaped, as evidenced by his later moves against the Time Lords. (TV: Remebrance of the Daleks, et. al) Nonetheless, he had come to question whether emotions he despised like fear existed within the Daleks in some form, marking the start of questions about his "children" (PROSE: An Incident Concerning the Continual Bombardment of the Phobos Colony) that he would carry with him into the Time War. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks, The Third Wise Man)

Shazar, the Ercos intervention, and the Movellans
Working with Shazar, a half-Time Lord, the Daleks took control of and captured the Fourth Doctor's TARDIS, which they replicated in anticipation of an invasion of Mutter's Spiral, which would be followed by a campaign to become masters of time itself. Although Shazar attempted to fool the Time Lords into believing that the Doctor was the traitor, the Doctor was able to interfere with the Daleks' plot, resulting in the fleet of new TARDISes destroying themselves while Shazar was captured by the Time Lords. On the planet Jewel, Shazar was placed on trial and remained imprisoned (COMIC: Return of the Daleks) all the way up to the First Auction in Heaven. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) The Time Lords later directed the Doctor to the Dalek occupied planet Ercos, where he prevented the Daleks from using the Dalek driller to destroy Earth. (COMIC: The Dalek Revenge)

In line with the Time Lords' predictions, (PROSE: A Device of Death) the Daleks eventually engaged in a war with the robot Movellans. Although the Dalek Prime later claimed the Movellan War was a fabrication, (PROSE: War of the Daleks) many accounts showed that was not true, (AUDIO: The Triumph of Davros, et. al) with the Daleks even becoming "quasi-robotic" beings for a time to better understand their foes. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) The Celestial Intervention Agency even learned an Emperor Dalek was killed during the war, forcing the Dalek Prime to take full control of the Empire. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) A faction under a Supreme Dalek ventured to Kembel to regain lost information about time travel. (AUDIO: The Triumph of Davros) Because both the Daleks and Movellans had time machines, their conflict indeed rose to become a war fought throughout time. (AUDIO: The Dalek Gambit)

As the war ground into a stalemate because of the Daleks' altercations to themselves, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the Daleks returned to Skaro in an effort to rescue Davros for his organic insight, using a large number of slaves to dig up the buried Kaled bunker. In addition to a Movellan detachment arriving, the Daleks found themselves again opposed by the Doctor, who was joined by another Time Lord, his companion Romana II. (TV: Destiny of the Daleks) Romana's prior incarnation had learned about the Daleks by reading up on them (PROSE: The Pirate Planet) and knew that the Doctor had defeated them many times before. (AUDIO: The Dalek Contract) After encountering a projection of a Dalek in the Knowhere, (PROSE: The Pirate Planet) she had her first encounter with the Daleks in the Proxima System, where the Doctor, K9 Mark II, and her battled Daleks and the Black Guardian's creation Cutherbert. (AUDIO: The Dalek Contract) During the incident on Skaro, however, Romana II nonetheless claimed she knew nothing about the Daleks.

Allying with the many beings the Daleks had enslaved, the Doctor and Romana managed to destroy the Dalek force and gave Davros over to the freed slaves, who planned to hand the scientist over to Earth security and stand trial for "crimes against the whole of sentient creation". (TV: Destiny of the Daleks) Later, the Tenth Doctor, having found himself in pre-Time War Dalek history, prevented a Dalek operation that involved the rescue of Davros and time travel. However, much to Davros's glee, he inadvertently let it slip during one of his conversations that he had seen a devastating war caused by the Daleks. A viral attack created by Davros convinced the Movellans to begin work on a devastating anti-Dalek virus, (AUDIO: The Triumph of Davros) as the Daleks had returned to their organic origins after their stalemate. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Indeed, reflecting on the incident on Skaro, the Time War-era Time Lords found Dalek victories after the Movellan war proved they had overcome their reliance on inorganic logic. They believed the "unprecedented" use of non-Dalek humanoid species within Dalek efforts was the reason for this advancement. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Whilst the Daleks continued to see all non-Dalek life as expendable and murdered their allies when their usefulness was over, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) the Daleks did make some room for "inferior" lifeforms within their command structure, hiring mercenaries (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) and creating duplicates of real beings to serve as "Dalek Troopers" to make up for the massive loss in Dalek life brought on by the Movellan virus. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) The Daleks also began to force young humanoids into their battle computers, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) using their imagination as a way to form new strategies. (TV Remembrance of the Daleks) Upon reembracing their organic nature, the Daleks themselves had found they could establish new, creative strategies, but it took effort (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) for the normally uniform species to act in such a manner. During the Time War, the Daleks went as far as to establish the Cult of Skaro and similar orders, which normally stayed away from the frontline to think in new ways. (TV: Doomsday; PROSE: Engines of War)

After the Imperial Daleks' failed effort to use the Warfleet video game as a new form of battle computer, (AUDIO: We Are The Daleks) the Twelfth Doctor also believed the Daleks continued to slave children to the devices during the Time War, telling Bill Potts that an ancient Dalek harvest ship they encountered had been redeployed for the War. (COMIC: Harvest of the Daleks) The "secondary command structure" the Daleks found themselves establishing in the aftermath of the Movellan war became of great interest to the Time Lords; (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) forming an "axis of dark powers", (COMIC: Pull to Open) the Daleks did make alliances with other life forms during the Time War, albeit always with the plan to betray them once they no longer needed their aid. (PROSE: Engines of War, et. al) The Gallifreyans hoped that the CIA could infiltrate the secondary command structure with undercover agents. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

To move against Gallifrey
Helgrim, a Time Lord scientist, once kept Dalek mutants in the Institute as part of an experiment, but this ended in a disaster that led to the passage of a new law that forbade the study of Daleks. (AUDIO: Unregenerate!)

Much of the Dalek Empire collapsed as a result of the devastating Movellan virus, which set the stage for the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War through the start of factionalism amongst the now-separated sector commands. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) While the Daleks would eventually manage to recover, (AUDIO: Death and the Daleks, et. al) the devastation was so great that the CIA hoped it had spelt the end of typical Dalek conquest for the time being, with Qualen claiming that the Daleks would be less likely to rely on planetary invasions against technological powerful cultures or attacks with overwhelming numbers. Indeed, the Qualen Commission's research into the Daleks found that most Dalek expansion in the aftermath of the Movellan war was carried out through time travel incursions or deception. He credited this to their low numbers and status as being scattered, (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) with the Daleks also finding that the growing factionalism in their ranks contributed to the failing conquests and wars. (AUDIO: Innocence)

Nonetheless, Qualen revealed at the First Clandestine Symposium to Consider Policy Regarding the Dalek Expansion that the APC Net's best estimates showcased there was still a risk of the Daleks managing to conquer locations like the Mutter's Spiral, so he warned his fellow "interventionists" to stay vigilant because the Daleks remained a great danger to the Great Time Line. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) Indeed, the Daleks continued to hold the Time Lords responsible for much of their recent misfortune (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) and began to search for ways to develop a cure for the virus, which would give them a chance to restore their empire. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) Realising they needed a great biologist with an understanding of their biology, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) a Dalek Battlecruiser under a Supreme, the Black Dalek Leader itself, attacked the prison station where Davros was being held in suspended animation (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) in 4590. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Daleks)

After being freed and agreeing to develop a cure, Davros also began to alter the minds of several Dalek drones and Dalek Troopers, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) intending to take full control of the Dalek Empire after his creations had betrayed him time and time again. At the same time, the Daleks believed themselves ready to strike against Gallifrey with their admittedly primitive time travel technology, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) launching the plot as revenge for the Time Lords' mission to destroy or alter their creation. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) In what the Time Lords remembered as the "Duplicate Incident" (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) launched to "destablise" Gallifrey, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Daleks decided to target the Doctor with a plan to create duplicates of him and his companions, who would be ordered to return to Gallifrey and murder the High Council of the Time Lords. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks)

Theorising that the sudden extermination of Gallifrey's leadership would throw the planet into a panic they could easy exploit through an attack, the Daleks established a time corridor between London 1984 and their battlecruiser in the future, using the link to the past to create a force of duplicates with which they could capture the Doctor (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) and then invade the Earth. Using the time corridor, the Daleks entrapped the Fifth Doctor, Tegan Jovanka, and Vislor Turlough and started the duplication process upon capturing the Doctor, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) with the Doctor quickly realising that, just as he had been the Time Lords' unwilling agent who attacked the Daleks, he was now being forced to take on the same role for the exterminators. Nonetheless, the Dalek plot ended in failure; the Doctor's duplicate was never completed after he escaped with a freed duplicate (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) named Stien. As the Daleks loyal to the Supreme began to hunt down those converted to Davros's cause and exterminate the mercenaries, Stien moved to destroy the battlecruiser.

The ship exploded after the Movellan virus was released by Davros and the Doctor alike, wiping out the Dalek drones in Davros' lab and on Earth. Although Davros himself began to succumb to the virus, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) he managed to escape death and retreat, (AUDIO: Davros, et. al) although the CIA assumed he died in the battlecruiser's destruction. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem) The Supreme also survived the incident, (PROSE: Resurrection of the Daleks) but the Doctor was certain its planned invasion of Earth would fail when the duplicates broke free of Dalek control, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) although the Time Lords were not so sure. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) According the The Dalek Problem, the incident had pointed to the continued threat the Daleks posed despite their low numbers, which led the Time Lord Council to begin gathering information on the Daleks. On the orders of the Office of Multihistorical Research, the CIA began to intercept and reorganise some of the reports. In the years after this, Deliavatsud finally consulted the APC Net about the Daleks and then hastily launched the Fourth Doctor's mission to Skaro in the first place. (PROSE: The Dalek Problem)

The destruction of the battlecruiser also destroyed the inactive duplicate of the Doctor, along with the duplicates of Tegan and Turlough. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) Ultimately, while the plot to assassinate the High Council failed, the Time Lords understood it was a direct response to their mission to alter the Daleks at their genesis. The Time War-era Gallifreyans deemed it to be "an early skirmish in what [would] eventually escalate into the Time War itself", (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) with human historians agreeing. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) A Time Lord historian judged it to be one of the many events that "inadvertently began" the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) Upon reflecting on the duplicate plot, the War-era Time Lords ordered every transduction operative to preform numerous security checks on any time capsule that was en route to the homeworld, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) becoming well aware of the threat duplicates posed and how they could easily sneak onto Gallifrey if left unchecked. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence)

In fact, one of the ways the Daleks "[tested] the strength" of the Time Lords and threatened the High Council before the War officially began was another plot involving duplicates, but this mission was to replace members of the council with the Dalek servants. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) During the War, the Time Lords tried to re-create the Movellan virus due to how effective it had been against the xenophobic mutants, but the early tests of their new sample failed to actually harm the Daleks, teaching the Time Lords that their enemies had gained immunity to the infection; (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) whilst Davros's plot to take control of the empire was exposed and he was forced to flee, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) he had managed to establish a cure for the virus that was transmitted to Dalek Supreme Command, ending the threat of the Movellan virus. (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) The Thals would manage to develop an even more efficient strand of the virus, but the capsule containing the sample ultimately never saw use. (AUDIO: The Davros Mission)

Nonetheless, the Daleks soon found themselves distracted: instead of focusing their efforts (TV: Revelation of the Daleks, et. al) on new moves against Gallifrey like the Supreme's duplicate gambit, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) Davros' actions had officially opened a schism amongst the already fractured Dalek ranks, (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) with some Daleks coming to believe they needed to fall in line under the leadership of their creator to re-establish their empire, (AUDIO: Innocence) while others continued to deem him an inferior lifeform who needed to be exterminated. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks, et. al) These two factions would eventually develop into the Imperial Daleks and so-called "Renegade Daleks", respectively, generating tensions that would eventually bring the Dalek Empire into a bloody civil war. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, et. al) Before the civil war could officially erupt, the Supreme began searching for Davros in an effort to force him to stand trial. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks)

The struggle on Necros
Intent on establishing a race of Daleks who were totally loyal to him, Davros eventually set himself up as "the Great Healer" of Tranquil Repose on the planet Necros, where he began to establish the first generation of Imperial Daleks (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) out of the remains of human beings. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks) During the ensuing "Necros Incident", (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) which began when he lured the Sixth Doctor to Necros to finally enact his revenge upon the Time Lord, the Doctor told the Dalek creator he intended to take him to the High Courts of Gallifrey, where he would stand trial for his life. (PROSE: Revelation of the Daleks) Whilst a number of individuals became involved in the incident, including the Knight Orcini of the Grand Order of Oberon, it was ultimately the Alpha unit and its Daleks, on behalf of the Supreme Dalek, who took Davros away for a trial. Orcini then gave his life to try to stop the Daleks from leaving, failing to prevent their escape but managing to destroy Davros' newly created army. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks; PROSE: Revelation of the Daleks)

While it was possible a few Imperial Daleks survived and were taken back to Skaro, the destruction of the rest of Davros' work was a major relief to the Time War-era Time Lords, who feared the consequences of the Daleks being able to reproduce themselves using "any genetic stock." Had the Daleks been able to secure such an advantage, despite it relying on "impure" DNA, at this point in their timeline, the Time Lords were certain the Daleks would have used the "unparalleled resource" to the fullest, leaving them "virtually impossible to counter". (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Whilst the Supreme's Daleks did showcase their species' typical reverence for purity, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) the Alpha Dalek and its team had been more than willing to bring the Necros Daleks back with them to Skaro on the condition that they be reconditioned to obey the Supreme. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks) The Time Lords nonetheless accepted that the Daleks, at some point during the Time War, would master the ability to use any possible genetic stock to replenish their ranks, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) deploying them as expendable soldiers who could be sacrificed without concern because, in the words of the War Doctor, they were not "real Daleks". (PROSE: Engines of War)

The Time Lords also greatly respected the actions of Orcini, with the Dalek Combat Training Manual specifically calling out Commander Andred's "excellent" text "Orcini and the Battle of Vavetron" if any recruit was interesting in learning more about him. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Additionally, the capture of Davros kicked off a series a events that led to the official outbreak of civil war between the Imperials loyal to him and the "Renegade Daleks" loyal to the Supreme (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) and the Dalek Prime. (PROSE: War of the Daleks) Although one account of the beginning of the civil war held that Davros secured his own empire by turning the Spiridon army to his side after the Sixth Doctor and Seventh Doctor interfered, thus meaning the meddling Time Lord had a major role in bringing about the devastating civil war, (COMIC: Emperor of the Daleks!) other accounts held that this was not the case, (AUDIO: The Davros Mission, Innocence) with the Time Lords suspecting that Necros Daleks brought to Skaro had helped their creator establish his control over the empire.

Nonetheless, Gallifreyan research into the civil war showed them that the conflict "severely reduced" the expansion of the Dalek Empire, which made the Time Lords grateful for "Davros's unbridled ambition" to lead his own empire because of its massive consequences for the Dalek race. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Both Dalek factions continued to hold a grudge towards the Time Lords and the Doctor, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) with the Supreme even suspecting it could unite the scattered renegade factions by killing the Time Lord who had costed them so much over their lives. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) Both Dalek factions also tried to use time travel to their advantage, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) with Davros and his Imperials once launching an effort to change history at the Battle of Waterloo, (AUDIO: The Curse of Davros) but the civil war nonetheless marked a major setback for the Dalek race. (PROSE: War of the Daleks)

The civil war in swing, a time war declared
Instead of focusing their efforts on expanding the Dalek Empire (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) or their still-present anger towards the Time Lords, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) the Dalek race found itself with two factions that were dedicated to the eradication of each other, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) with the Imperials being given new biomechanical enhancements by Davros that the renegades, named as such by Davros, decried as impurities. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Although some renegade groups refused to join the Supreme's war, the Imperials decried the renegades as being impure because they now lacked the upgrades the Imperium embraced. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) It was also possible that future Dalek factions, such as the New Dalek Paradigm, interfered with this conflict. The conflict was a period of temporal advancement for the Imperials, with Davros creating a massive Dalek mothership known as the Desinty of the Stars. The renegades, meanwhile, were stuck with crude time tunnels (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) controlled via a Time Controller device.

While the Seventh Doctor once implied the time travel methods of both sides remained "very crude and nasty", (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) Davros' Imperium developed to such a point that it engaged in a "time campaign" known as the Pas Jass-Vortan, which was remembered as "The War to End All Wars" (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) before the Last Great Time War took on that title. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) Davros, indeed, had even greater dreams for his Daleks, having learned of an ancient Time Lord stellar manipulator known as the "Hand of Omega", which could transform Skaro's sun into an incredible power source (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) and wipe out entire star systems. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) With such a power at his disposal, Davros planned for his Dalek Empire to become the masters of the universe and time itself by wiping Gallifrey from history, the very same plot the Supreme had failed to accomplish multiple times. While Davros' ambition to move against Gallifrey remained unknown to all as the civil war raged on, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Supreme and its renegades eventually learned of the Hand of Omega as well. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)

Both sides thus moved to secure the Hand with the hope of using it to triumph over the other and develop, in the words of human historians, "their own sophisticated time-travel technology" with which they could "gain mastery over all of time and space"; with the Hand, the Daleks could finally become the "supreme beings" of the universe by rewriting all of time in such a manner that only they survived, with their rival faction being destroyed in that purge. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Learning that the Hand had been hidden on Earth in the city of London in 1963, both Dalek factions rushed to claim the superweapon, unaware that the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace had also arrived. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) As noted above, it was possible the Doctor had always known the Daleks would come for the Hand and thus had already programmed it to act against the Daleks, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) although he had not predicted the arrival of two distinct Dalek armies, having not yet become aware of the civil war. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)

By this time, the Daleks had also made their intentions towards the Time Lords clear; (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) eager to become the new Lords of Time (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) and still enraged by the Gallifreyans' attempt to subvert their evolution on Skaro, the Daleks were preparing to to wage a time war against Gallifrey. Whilst the High Council of the Time Lords believed the Daleks only had access to "primitive" time corridor technology at the moment, the Time Lords learned that the Daleks were mounting for a campaign they called the Pa Jass-Vortan &mdash; which translated to "the Time War" &mdash; that would see them fight the Time Lords across "four dimensions". Aware that the Daleks were intelligent enough to upgrade their time travel technology to a level with which they could wage this war, the High Council grew concerned that, given time, the Daleks would break through the transduction barriers (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch) around Gallifrey (TV: The Invasion of Time) and bring war to their doorstep. (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch)

The war reaches Shoreditch
The Imperials and Renegades heading to Earth in 1963 to claim the Hand of Omega (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) marked the next Dalek attempt to attack the Time Lords, (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) although the Daleks themselves were mainly focused on destroying each other (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) instead of their wider goals for the Hand (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) during what came to be remembered as "the Shoreditch Incident" (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) or, to the Time Lords, the "Hand of Omega Incident". (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) After recovering the Hand and ensuring it would destroy the Daleks instead of becoming their newest weapon, the Seventh Doctor and Ace, worked to keep the human Intrusion Counter-Measures Group out of harm's way while also playing both sides against each other to draw them to the compromised weapon. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) It was later written in the Dalek Combat Training Manual that the Time Lords were complicit in the Doctor's actions, viewing it as a pre-emptive strike. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

However, while puppeteering events to his ends, the Doctor encountered a Time Lord operative who had no idea what the Doctor was doing in the time zone. The Time Lord was in fact the same Gallifreyan who had given him the mission to alter Dalek history at their genesis long ago, with his department having taken a specific focus on the Daleks to try and ensure they did not develop the advanced time travel technology needed to wage their planned time war against Gallifrey. Meeting with the Doctor, the Time Lord warned the renegade of the brewing conflict and helped him take out an Imperial Slyther, which was tracking the Hand of Omega but only managed to lock onto the scent of Brian Donlevy after the weapon hid its energy signature. After helping the Doctor kill the beast, the Time Lord promised the Slyther would be given a dignified treatment because it was merely a pawn of the Daleks. However, he made sure to warn the Doctor once more of the coming Time War, revealing that whatever he had planned for the Imperials and Renegades would merely be a skirmish compared to the brewing conflict. As he explained, the War was already spreading "its tendrils" through space and time in concerning ways that not even Gallifrey understood. He warned the Doctor that they were "destined" to soon meet again. (PROSE: The Slyther of Shoreditch)

The following morning, the conflict between the Imperials and Renegades began to rage throughout the streets of London. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) During the battle, one Imperial Dalek found itself sent into the future year of 2016, where it learned of the fate of the mission. Before it could travel back to 1963, it outmaneuvered by the students of Coal Hill Academy, teacher Andrea Quill, and a post-Time War Ace, ensuring the Dalek was destroyed upon its return to 1963 and keeping history stable. (AUDIO: In Remembrance) The Shoreditch Incident also became a battleground of the Time War when the War-era Susan Foreman, tricked by a Dalek duplicate, arrived within it to retrieve the Hand of Omega, only to be met by the Time War-era Daleks and the Eighth Doctor. Escaping the Renegade Daleks and War-era Daleks, Susan and the Doctor returned to the War. (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention) The battle in Shoreditch ended in an Imperial victory after Davros's forces, chief among the Special Weapons Dalek, overwhelmed the Renegades and retrieved the Hand. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Destruction of Skaro
With the Hand in his possession, Davros revealed to the Doctor his intentions to make his Daleks the new Lords of Time and turn their resulting power against Gallifrey, but the Doctor gloated him into activating the Hand. Thanks to his modifications, the Hand did not turn (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Skaro's second sun (PROSE: The Stranger) into a power source: instead, the star went supernova. The resulting blast destroyed the Dalek homeworld, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) all Daleks on it, (AUDIO: Terror Firma) and the rest of the Skaro system. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) The Hand then returned to 1963 and destroyed the Imperial Dalek mothership upon making contact with it, although Davros was able to flee in an escape pod just in time. With the Doctor then convincing the Black Dalek Leader to destroy itself, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks) the incident seemed like it could be the permeant defeat of the Dalek race, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) but the Doctor knew this was not the case. (PROSE: Remembrance of the Daleks)

Reflecting on these events during the War, the Time Lords found and began to investigate "several temporal anomalies" concerning the destruction and eventually rebirth of Skaro. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Indeed, many different accounts existed surrounding whether or not Skaro was actually destroyed. (PROSE: The Whoniverse, et. al) During the Time War, the Dalek duplicate of Lehena claimed the Doctor had only destroyed "one version" of Skaro. (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention) Similarly, in the aftermath of the civil war, the Dalek Prime claimed it was not Skaro but the terraformed world of Antalin that exploded, but the Eighth Doctor and Davros both expressed doubts about this. (PROSE: War of the Daleks) Indeed, another account of post-civil war Dalek history showed both the Eighth Doctor and Davros agreeing that Skaro, along with much of the Dalek race, was destroyed in the blast. (AUDIO: Terror Firma) The Twelfth Doctor recalled Skaro really was destroyed by remembering his seventh incarnation tricking Davros into destroying his own home. (PROSE: Twice Upon a Time) In line with the idea that the real Skaro was lost, a number of accounts held that the planet needed to be restored in some way. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire, et. al)

After the civil war, many different theories emerged to explain how Skaro seemed to survive. These ranged from Skaro being remade using with another planet to it actually being restored through temporal maneuvers. (PROSE: The Whoniverse) Post-Time War human historians knew about the Antalin claim as a series of rumors, but they concluded the truth about what happened to Skaro at the close of the civil war was lost "in a complex web of causality and half-truths"; Skaro's timeline was the subject of much tampering and rewriting during the Time War, essentially leaving it impossible for any truth to be picked out of its legends. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Although even the Seventh Doctor himself was unsure whether Skaro was restored or remade with another world, the Time Lords became aware of Skaro's continued existence. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) While in the Temporal Plexus, the Doctor accidently created a new timeline, where the Daleks were peaceful academics and even on good terms with the Time Lords. However, the Doctor and Ace discovered the new timeline was unstable, forcing them to return to the Temporal Plexus and prevent it from being formed. (PROSE: The Ripple Effect)

Aftermath of the civil war
While most Dalek attention was focused upon cleaning up from the civil war and rebuilding the Empire in immediate aftermath of the Shoreditch Incident, (PROSE: War of the Daleks, AUDIO: Daleks Among Us, Terror Firma) it was said the Daleks' next step after the destruction of Skaro was to start a war with the Time Lords. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) Indeed, various accounts treated the destruction to be a cause of the War; human historians identified it as one of the skirmishes that the High Council was forced to take notice of, helping to fan the flames of tension between the Time Lords and Dalek High Command. (PROSE: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) During the incident, the Doctor also made sure to list out his full presidental title, directly connecting Gallifrey to the destruction of Skaro and making a Time Lord author credit the blast as one of the starting points of the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of the Time Lords)

The young Gallireyan Rojan considered the detonation to be a cause of the Time War, (PROSE: The Stranger) and Andrea Quill remembered it as such as well. (AUDIO: In Remembrance) However, the Seventh Corsair claimed to her parrot that the destruction of Skaro did not trigger the Time War but rather an earlier, smaller-scale time war. According to her, this smaller conflict was eventually erased by the larger one along with all memory of it ever happening. (PROSE: One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes) Additionally, different accounts existed on which faction had won the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War. (PROSE: War of the Daleks, The Restoration Empire, et. al) No matter the case, it was clear tensions were growing between the Time Lords and (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) whatever Dalek faction had triumphed. (PROSE: War of the Daleks, The Restoration Empire)

One account claimed it was the Renegades under the Dalek Prime, who put Davros on trial to root out his remaining supporters. (PROSE: War of the Daleks) Another telling held that the surviving Daleks organised into the Dalek Hive under a massive Supreme Dalek, only for Rassilon to puppeteer events to destroy the last of the Dalek race. (COMIC: Fire and Brimstone) However, other accounts showed the Imperial faction won the civil war in the end. One specified that Davros was flung into the Time Vortex and worked to establish a new Dalek race on the Doctor's home as revenge for Skaro's destruction. Realising the Doctor valued the Earth over Gallifrey, Davros established his new empire by transforming humans into Daleks, but ultimately he lost himself to an emerging "Dalek Emperor" personality. (AUDIO: Terror Firma) A second account held Davros did not go through that but instead tried to contact other Daleks active in the universe. (AUDIO: Daleks Among Us)

A third account specified that Davros lost control of his faction after it looked like he had abandoned them. In response, one of his Supreme Daleks exterminated the rest of the Dalek Council and declared itself the new Emperor. Transforming the Imperium into what it dubbed the Restoration Empire, the so-called Restoration Emperor (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) moved towards fulfilling Davros's ambition of overthrowing the Time Lord High Council, a decision that led to the Time War. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) With the time travel corridors and machines used by its empire still primitive compared to the might of Gallifrey, the Emperor ordered its Dalek Scientists to advance their temporal technology. Over the course of decades, the Emperor's scientists did so and worked on the topic every day.

The Dalek drones fielded by the Empire, meanwhile, were not experts in the fields of temporal physics and politics. However, the Emperor later contemplated that experience in the field of time travel work could have given one drone a greater understanding, (PROSE: The Last Message) with River Song indeed noting that it was wrong to write off Dalek drones as beings that could not think for themselves. (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times) As the temporal technology at its command still was not at the level of the Time Lords, the Emperor blamed them, suspecting that the lords of Gallifrey were interfering in Dalek history. (PROSE: The Last Message) It was indeed true that the Time Lords were interfering with the development of the Restoration Empire. Even despite that, the Daleks were growing stronger and getting ever-closer to the power level they would need to wage war with the Lords of Time themselves. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire)

Also, at some point, a Dalek Puppet Emperor announced his hostility to the Time Lords. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) During the War, the Time Lords hoped to use the schism apparent during the civil war to their advantage, even considering forming an alliance with one of the different factions. However, their tactical team discovered that, by the Time War, the Dalek race was once again a united empire, with the Time Lords even finding that had no chance at engineering a divide within the Dalek Empire. Still, their analysis of the "Hand of Omega incident" left them hopeful that they could hack into the network of battle computers. During the War, they carried out "promising research" that implied they could either directly hack into the database or sneak sleeper agents among the humanoid slaves the Daleks used for the network. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Act of Master Restitution
Following Skaro's apparent destruction and rebirth, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) the dangerously high-tensions between the Dalek Empire and Time Lords (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) convinced the newly-elected Lord President of Gallifrey, Romana II, to enter into negotiations with the Daleks (PROSE: Lungbarrow) under the Act of Master Restitution. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords, Meet the Doctor) A Dalek scouting party had captured the Master, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) who was either in a body regarded as his final incarnation (TV: Doctor Who, PROSE: The Novel of the Film) or his stolen Trakenite body. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors) At this time, his relationship with the Daleks had heavily soured (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) due to the many alliances he had abandoned to save himself and, in the Daleks' eyes, his efforts to "usurp" their "rightful place" as the "supreme creatures of the universe". (PROSE: The TV Movie)

In return for calming tensions, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) Act of Master Restitution established a peace treaty between the Daleks and Time Lords on the condition that the Daleks would have a chance to execute the Master (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) after holding a trial on Skaro. (TV: Doctor Who) With the Great Houses not even considering the idea of war coming (PROSE: The Book of the War) despite their tensions with the Daleks, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) Romana's move to negotiate with the Daleks was controversial on Gallifrey. Gallifreyan terrorists opposed to Romana used a singularity bomb from Skaro's second Dalek Imperium in a failed attack on the Tharil Embassy. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) As part of the Act of Master Restitution's attempts to calm the rising tensions, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) it even signified the opening of a Dalek embassy on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Lungbarrow) According to the Time Lords, the Master's trial was nothing more than a show trial held only for "strategic reasons".

As such, the Time Lords were certain the Master had no chance of clemency. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) However, human historians pointed that the Master's trial was the first and only time the Daleks gave an alien foe a trial of any kind, which they suggested spoke to a level of respect between the Daleks and the Master despite their alliance being built on hate. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) With a particular focus on how the Master had failed them during Operation Divide and Conquer, (PROSE: The Runes of Fenric, AUDIO: Vengeance) the Dalek who held the rank of Emperor and Supreme accused the Master of having denied the Daleks their place as "the supreme creatures of the universe". (PROSE: The Novel of the Film, The TV Movie) On the order of the Dalek Litigator, (AUDIO: Vengeance) the Master was then exterminated.

While one account suggested the Time Lords were not involved in this process, (PROSE: The Novel of the Film) most agreed the Act of Masterful Restitution allowed the Seventh Doctor to travel to Skaro unharmed. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, et. al) According to the human historians, that the Daleks allowed their greatest foe to arrive and not harm him spoke to the respect between them and the Master. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) However, the Master actually survived his execution through a Deathworm Morphant and took on a new body. (TV: Doctor Who) The Master's survival broke Romana's peace treaty, leaving his survival to be remembered as a beginning point for the Time War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Target: Gallifrey
The Sontarans once judged the Time Lords to be "a race of great technical achievement" who were "lacking" in the "morale" a culture needed "to withstand a determined assault". (PROSE: A Brief History of the Time Lords) Alternatively, The Book of the War, which may have just been propaganda written by agents of the Great Houses, (PROSE: The Book of the War, Pre-narrative Briefings) claimed the many invasions Gallifrey faced (TV: The Invasion of Time, et. al) in the years before the War in Heaven were always doomed to fail. (PROSE: The Book of the War) However, the Daleks proved that was not the case by being a true threat to Gallifrey's power. (WC: Gallifrey War Room, PROSE: The Ancestor Cell et. al) While there were many races throughout history who had dreams of invading Gallifrey, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen) the Eleventh General believed the Time Lords had not faced a force that was an actual threat to them until the Daleks. (WC: Gallifrey War Room)

Although it was indeed the greatest and most terrible of them all, (AUDIO: The Triumpth of Davros, et. al) the Last Great Time War was the "final battle" between the Time Lords and Daleks (TV: The Parting of the Ways) after many events, including Dalek invasions of Gallifrey, set the stage. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element, et. al) Such a rivalry existed between the two factions that Missy once claimed "murdering a Dalek" was like golf to a Time Lord. (TV: The Witch's Familiar) With the Daleks having already deemed themselves ready to destabilise Gallifrey, as they had believed that since the time of the Duplicate Incident, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Daleks began to prepare themselves, their armament, and the rest of their technology for a great conflict against Gallifrey (PROSE: Birth of a Legend, The Restoration Emprire) sometime after the civil war that had distracted them was finally over. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: The Restoration Emprire)

Seeking to assert themselves as the new Lords of Time, (GAME: City of the Daleks, et. al) destroy the Doctor, (TV: The Day of the Doctor, et. al) enact revenge on Gallifrey for the attack on their genesis, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor, et. al) and prove once and for all that the Time Lords were their inferiors, the Daleks continued to grow eager to destroy Gallifrey (WC: Gallifrey War Room) and exterminate its population. (PROSE: Engines of War) When the Black Guardian created an alternate timeline where the First Doctor never left Gallifrey, eventually becoming the Lord President instead, the Dalek Empire exponentially grew in power without the Doctor to stop them, forcing the Time Lords to regularly appease the Daleks, even as they continued to advance. Earth also became a battleground between the Imperial Daleks and numerous other species without the Doctor to protect it. Ultimately, however, this alternate timeline was averted by the Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Bernice Summerfield at the urging of the White Guardian. (COMIC: Time & Time Again)

Cloister Wars
When the Sontaran Empire invaded Gallifrey with the Vardans, their campaign was fought off by the Fourth Doctor, (TV: The Invasion of Time) but, according to Dalek historians, the failed invasion revealed the existence of the Matrix and the vast stores of knowledge contained within to the wider universe. Although fought long before the Time War, the Daleks joined the ensuing Cloister Wars at a time when they had already come to see the Time Lords as their ancient enemies. Said to be the first faction to attack Gallifrey during these wars, the Dalek Empire made its first ever effort to uncover Gallifreyan secrets when it invaded with Bronze Daleks, seeking to uncover secrets about the Time Lords and prophecies relating to the future of Skaro. As such, a scouting party of bronze drones managed to infiltrate the Cloisters that held the Matrix. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

Attacked by Cloister Wraiths and fibre-optic cables, which would trap invaders in the Matrix and force them into becoming its defense, (TV: Hell Bent) the Dalek squad was lost within the mists of time and forcefully wired into the system, leaving them trapped. The same fate awaited the many other species who attacked Gallifrey during the wars. Rumors claimed these trapped Daleks survived into the post-Time War era, still wired into the system and left to beg for extermination. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Indeed, venturing into the Cloisters with his companion Clara Oswald under the post-War Capitol, the Twelfth Doctor encountered a trapped bronze Dalek, which he speculated to be leftover from the conflicts, begging to be exterminated. He reasoned there was nothing the two of them could do to save it and moved on. (TV: Hell Bent)

According to the Time Lords themselves, the Cloister Wars were actually waged very early in their history. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Indeed, once implied as such, claiming that a young version of herself and the Doctor had fought in the wars. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice) The Sontaran invasion, meanwhile, was fought much later in Gallifreyan history, (TV: The Invasion of Time) though several species said to be involved in the Cloister Wars, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) like the Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels, had access to time travel, (TV: The Chase, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, Once, Upon Time, et. al) explaining the discrepancy between accounts. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual, Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

The Time Lords also claimed the Hybrid prophecy (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) some feared was connected to the Last Great Time War (TV: Hell Bent) came from the Cloister Wars period. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) In any case, following the Sontaran invasion, Gallifrey was again invaded, this time by the Dominators. Although the Fifth Doctor claimed that there was never "any serious risk of us being conquered", the Quarks' did cause significant enough damage to the Capitol that a replacement building was prepared. (AUDIO: Time in Office)

Etra Prime incident
In Rassilon Era date 2776.2, (AUDIO: Neverland) still in the early days of Romana II's presidency, the Etra Prime incident began when Romana made a ceremonial visit to Etra Prime, only for the planet, Romana, and the 299 other delegates from the Temporal Powers on Etra Prime to be removed from time and space by the Dalek Empire. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) One Gallifreyan author felt that the Dalek capture of Romana could be seen as the event that inadvertently started the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) For twenty years, the Daleks forced Romana and the others to work as slaves, mining what they called the "Apocalypse Element" on the missing planet. The Daleks assigned Romana the designation "Prisoner Unit 117", (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) a name that they would continue to refer to her with during the Time War. (AUDIO: Homecoming)

Using the Apocalypse Element, the Daleks planned to detonate a massive explosion in the Seriphia Galaxy near Gallifrey, thus remaking the entire galaxy into "a million Skaros" from which they could launch new campaigns. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) In 2796.8, (AUDIO: Neverland) after Etra Prime had been missing for twenty years, the Daleks returned the planet to attack the Temporal Powers' Archetryx Convention and secure a Monan Host time vessel, with which the Daleks would complete their synthesis of the element. Romana was allowed to escape to inform the Sixth Doctor and CIA Coordinator Vansell of the Daleks' apparent plans, leading to the interim Lord President retreating to Gallifrey. The Daleks followed while disguised as the Monan Host, invading Gallifrey to access to the Eye of Harmony to control the explosion they had set off in the Seriphia Galaxy. While establishing their new powerbase remained their primary goal, the Black Dalek, hiding the Empire's true plot, claimed the Daleks would take control of Gallifrey's resources and augment them with Dalek technology to cement themselves of the new masters of time.

Fighting their way to the Eye, the Dalek squad killed the interim president and many of the Chancellery Guard, (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) matching the Book of the War 's description of such invasions as showcasing the failings of the guard. (PROSE: The Book of the War) While the Black Dalek and its forces died in the process of containing the explosion, (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) ending the incident the Time Lords came to simply recall as "the Dalek invasion", (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) their plot had succeeded; Seriphia was remade into a new galaxy, which the Daleks planned to use as a base of operations for further conquests. Though Romana stated that the Time Lords wouldn't tolerate a Dalek Empire on their doorstep, (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element) the Daleks successfully annexed the reborn galaxy, using it to launch the Second Great Dalek Occupation. The remade galaxy was important enough that the Dalek Supreme remained based there. (AUDIO: Invasion of the Daleks)

Like the Time Lord author who wrote A Brief History of Time Lords, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) Rojan believed the Etra Prime incident to be one of the events that started the Time War. (PROSE: The Stranger) Kellen believed it foreshadowed that the Time Lords would need to fight to keep control of the universe, abandoning the non-interference policy in the process. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) Other individuals believed the event began the escalation of tensions that led to the War, negating Romana's earlier attempts at peace, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) with the author dubbing it "an early warning of the Time War to come". (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Dalek invasion of time
When the Eighth Doctor saved Charlotte Pollard from dying aboard the R101, (AUDIO: Storm Warning) it caused fluctuations and slippage throughout the Web of Time that threatened its stability, as the Neverpeople began to exploit her survival to try and enter the universe. (AUDIO: The Time of the Daleks, Neverland) While the Doctor and Pollard had stopped the Nimon from using the fluctuations to take over time, (AUDIO: Seasons of Fear) a time fissure emerged within the Time Vortex that the Dalek Empire detected and elected to exploit with a Temporal Extinction Device, which they designed with information from the time barriers of Kar-Charrat and data gathered on Gallifrey about the Eye of Harmony during their invasion. With the Temporal Extinction Device fired into the fissure, the Daleks would be able to rewrite history to their own design, making themselves into the new masters of time. With the plan established, over a thousand Dalek flying saucers (AUDIO: The Time of the Daleks) organized into battalions (AUDIO: Neverland) under the Dalek Emperor itself were launched into the Vortex.

However, the Dalek's launch failed and cause temporal instability instead. With several Daleks landing in the 2050s and briefly causing General Mariah Learman's time travel experiments to work upon honing onto her Orthopositronium-based time travel, the Daleks allied with her with the aim of using her equipment to perfect their plans, briefly causing history to begin changing. However, the arrival of the Doctor and Pollard, whose presence unknowingly provided a source of chronons for Learman's master clock to work as a temporal stabiliser, complicated the Dalek plan. Upon capturing the Doctor's TARDIS and Pollard, who they remained unaware was needed for the master clock to succeed, the Daleks prepared to launch the Temporal Extinction Device for a second time, only for Pollard's escape with the Doctor aboard the TARDIS to rob them of their possible success. The Daleks were suddenly trapped within a time loop where they would constantly go through the deployment of the device, its failure, their alliance with Learman, and their subsequent deployment of the device, setting the stage for the loop to continue (AUDIO: The Time of the Daleks) within a time pocket.

Reckoning that not even Dalek ingenuity could rescue the exterminators from the paradox they had set around themselves, the Doctor reasoned that, after several million years in the loop, the Emperor would reach out to none other than the Time Lords and beg for release; as he explained to Pollard, his people would be willing to free them to ensure the Web of Time remained safe because of how important the Daleks were to it. However, with Romana still the President of Gallifrey and reasoning that she would be angry over her capture at their hands during the Etra Prime incident, he believed they would be trapped for a further twenty years as a punishment after they reached out. However, the Doctor and Polland were quickly captured by Romana as she and the Celestial Intervention Agency began investigating the emergence of anti-time through Polland's existence. Through the Matrix, they had foreseen that, if the situation continued, the Web of Time would would fall into shreds, with Gallifrey falling into corruption under Romana, who would take on the title Imperiatrix.

Shown the projection after he was captured by the Time Lords, the Doctor watched as the twisted version of Romana rejected the Dalek Emperor's plea for help. Despite being warned by the Emperor of how important the Daleks were to history, the projection ended with Romana declaring its species enemies of the Time Lords and having the entire fleet destroyed, wiping out the Daleks. Tricking the Time Lords into entering the realm of anti-time through the myth of Zagreus, the antipeople then made it seem as if their great founder Rassilon survived to convince them to bring a casket of anti-time to Gallifrey. Convinced Rassilon was within reach, Vansell's anger at Romana and Time Lord society finally boiled over; Vansell believed the time had come for his people to make changes to the Web of Time for the betterment of the universe, starting by destroying the Daleks while they were trapped within the Doctor's time loop. Certain that Romana would ultimately let the Daleks go free, he rebuked her with a scathing rebuke of Time Lord society:

"We have held ourselves back too long, bound by caution, tradition and deference! We're a joke! We maintain the universe, oh yes &mdash; we preserve it in amber! Its injustices uncorrected. Aggressors go unpunished in the name of mediation. Doctor, you placed the Daleks &mdash; the Daleks, the most evil, ruthless, coldly calculating race to have ever stained our history &mdash; in a time loop. We could crush them, now, ensure that the torments they visit upon every peoples they encounter never occur again! But will we? Will we? We could work with our allies &mdash; the Monan Host, the Warpsmiths of Phaidon, humanity even &mdash; to build a consensus for progress across all the galaxies, to be a radical force for the advancement of a common good! [...] So come on, Madam President. The Daleks, what will you do? Will you let them go eventually? Will you? Of course you will. You don't have the imagination for anything else."

- Coordinator Vansell rebukes President Romana

Vansell also wrote off the Doctor as a failed ex-President. As he fell further into the antipeople's hands, Vensell almost brought the casket back to Gallifrey before snapping back to his senses. The Coordinator then sacrificed himself to help stop the anti-time plot, which the Doctor and Polland completely put a stop to. The real Rassilon, alive in the Matrix, assured Romana that the the universe of positive time would survive thanks to the Doctor's efforts, but he warned her further challenges awaited her reign. (AUDIO: Neverland) Despite the great many crises she needed to deal with during her Presidency, Romana and her friends always managed to triumph (AUDIO: Enemy Lines) until the Time War broke out and changed everything for her; as the Tenth Doctor put it, "things went well for Romana... until the Time War." (COMIC: The Forgotten)

In the meantime, the Eighth Doctor was infected by antitime and became "Zagerus," but he was exiled into the Divergent Universe by Romana to protect Gallifrey's universe. (AUDIO: Zagreus) After the infection was purged from the Doctor and he returned to N-Space, (AUDIO: The Next Life) he was captured by Davros and his new race of Imperial Daleks, with the encounter proving to the Doctor that he was back in his home universe. (AUDIO: Terror Firma)

The War with the Enemy
In an abnormal state of reality (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) that was known to intersect with the Eighth Doctor's life, (PROSE: Father Time, et al.) the Time Lord Hedin noted that, in his opinion, the best aspect of Gallifrey being the most powerful faction in the universe was that no other force was. In particular, he feared what would happen if the Daleks or the Faction Paradox had the might of Gallifrey at their disposal. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

150 years into Romana's Presidency, by which time she had regenerated into her third incarnation, the Great Houses of the Time Lords began to fight a time war against "the Enemy". Although it was seen as a "War in Heaven" to the lesser species of the universe, the Time Lords simply called this temporal conflict "the War". During this conflict, the Doctor was a figure of some importance, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, Alien Bodies, et al.) and the fighting appeared to culminate in Gallifrey being destroyed, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) seemingly by the Eighth Doctor, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) although the planet he destroyed may have been a cloneworld. (PROSE: The Story So Far...)

Subsequently, only a few "time elementals" remained in the universe. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) Although it seemed that the Enemy was the foe long prophised to destroy Gallifrey, (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) the identity of the Enemy was a contentious matter shrouded in mystery and misdirection, but there were varying signs about whether the Daleks and the Enemy were the same. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5, et. al) Indeed, accounts gave contradictory information regarding the relationship between the War in Heaven against the Enemy and the Last Great Time War against the Dalek Empire.

Identity
Some accounts suggested the Wars were, to some degree, synonymous, with one Time Lord with a major involvement in the War in Heaven becoming involved in rising tensions before the Last Great Time War. (AUDIO: The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, X and the Daleks) Some accounts of the Last Great Time War also simply referred to it as "the War" and acknowledged the existence of multiple Gallifreys, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor, Doctor Who and the Time War) lining up with the official name of the War in Heaven being "the War" and the Homeworld's Nine Gallifreys project. (PROSE: The Shadows of Avalon The Book of the War, et. al) The term "War in Heaven" was coined by "lesser species" who sought to describe the conflict. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Book of the War, et. al) Human historians would later refer to the Last Great Time War as a war that had "[raged] in the heavens", leaving it unnoticed by most species. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

Carvil, a Time Lord defeated by the Eighth Doctor during the Last Great Time War, (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror) later became leader of the Clock-People, (PROSE: Out of the Box) who were survivors of the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Story So Far...) The Greth also referred to the conflict that the Clock-People had been involved in as "a great war", (PROSE: Out of the Box) a term used by Rose Tyler and the exterminators themselves to describe the Daleks' war with Gallifrey. (PROSE: Dalek, TV: Daleks in Manhattan) Additionally, the Etra Prime incident launched by the Daleks, viewed as an early conflict in what would become the Last Great Time War, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor, et. al) was discussed on Gallifrey at the onset of the War in Heaven as one of its warning signs. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)

The novel Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion) was renamed "Doctor ? in an Exciting Adventure With the Enemy" to hide the "proper names" of the subjects. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5) Some historical texts even held that the Daleks were the "mysterious enemy" (PROSE: The Whoniverse) that Gallifrey had long prophesied would emerge (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) to destroy them. (PROSE: The Whoniverse) The Squire later proclaimed the Daleks to have been "the Great Enemy" of the Time Lords. (COMIC: Pull to Open)

The Player also directly referred to the Daleks and the Great Time War as "the enemy" and "the war", respectively, during his encounter with the First Doctor to keep details secretive. (AUDIO: The Plague of Dreams) The Tenth Doctor, thinking back to the destruction of Gallifrey at the end of the Last Great Time War, remembered the events of the Eighth Doctor's destruction of Romana III's Gallifrey to stop the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell, The Eyeless) The Time Lord Homunculette, however, was certain that the Daleks and the Enemy that faced the Time Lords were distinct, believing that the Daleks were nothing compared to the threat his people were facing during the War in Heaven. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) According to some Great House briefings, a species of "xenophobic mutants travelling in their own personal war machines" were trying to take advantage of the War in Heaven for their own means, to the point that some people with a flawed understanding of the War wrongly believed these biomechanoids to be the Enemy. (PROSE: Pre-narrative Briefings)

However, even during the first linear year of the Last Great Time War, (TV: The Stolen Earth) the Time Lords continued to underestimate the Daleks until they realised the might, persistence, and hatred of the exterminators. In fact, the General came to believe that the Time Lords had not understood "[their] enemy" during that first year. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man) The General was certain his people had never faced an external threat that posed a true danger to their power and homeworld until the Daleks and their Time War. (WC: Gallifrey War Room) Direct encounters with the Enemy were classified as "OMEGA level events," (PROSE: Subjective Interlock) and the Dalek conquest of Arcadia during the Last Great Time War was classified as deserving a "Priority Omega" warning code. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)

One historical account claimed that there had only been two other time wars, the Halldon-Eternal skirmish and the Omnicraven Uprising, before the Last Great Time War. However, this account admitted to not knowing the full story of Gallifreyan history; (PROSE: Meet the Doctor) indeed, there were many other Time Wars waged in Gallifrey's past, (PROSE: Damaged Goods) including the conflict with the Great Vampires who became involved, to varying extents, with the War in Heaven and Great Time War. (PROSE: The Book of the War, COMIC: The Bidding War) In fact, one N-Form reactivated for what it termed "the War" originally assumed the conflict was simply a continuation of the war against the vampires. (PROSE: Damaged Goods, AUDIO: Damaged Goods)

The ancient wars also helped establish the rationalistic universe (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) the modern Time Wars were fought for. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, TV: The Day of the Doctor, et. al) The Daleks had also definitively been the Enemy in a parallel universe version of the War in Heaven created by the Quantum Archangel. In this version of the conflict, the Sixth Doctor led the Time Lords and his fellow renegades to abandon the non-interference policy to begin the War, only for the Master to later side with the Daleks to help them secure an advantage. Eventually, the fighting forced the Doctor to destroy the universe with a superweapon. (PROSE: The Quantum Archangel)

As parts of each other
Other accounts gave hints that the Last Great Time War could be a part of the War in Heaven or vice-versa; in the lead-up to the War in Heaven, Chris Cwej negotiated an alliance between the Great Houses and the "race of machine people" whom the Houses had once tried to erase from history because the "All-High Gods" were a common enemy to both; (PROSE: Dead Romance) the machine people agreed to play the part of the Enemy in several microscopic models of the War with far less scope and intensity. The only Homeworld to survive one of these Wars did so by abandoning looms and returning to organic models of birth, allowing it to enact the victimhood ritual of an entrenched last stand by crying out to future, "Won't someone think of the children!" — (PROSE: A Prelude to a Prelude) matching the circumstances on the last day of the Last Great Time War. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)

Alternatively, there was a period of the Last Great Time War where the Daleks were wiped from existence by the War Valeyard. (AUDIO: The War Valeyard) Until the Daleks were restored by the Dalek Time Strategist and a copy of Davros, (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks) the Time Lords were unable to exactly recall who they had been fighting, leaving them to ponder who their mysterious, unknowable enemy had been. Not even the countless slaves the Daleks had conscripted to serve as disposable troops could remember whom they had been serving under. (AUDIO: Dreadshade)

The War in Heaven as an aborted timeline
During the Faction Paradox invasion of Gallifrey, the Eighth Doctor elected to destroy Romana III's Gallifrey to try to avert the existence of the War in Heaven, seemingly ending the conflict by essentially aborting the timeline in which the War occurred at the cost of Gallifrey, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) although some accounts implied the planet he destroyed was not the original homeworld, which would make his actions for naught if true. (PROSE: The Story So Far..., et. al) Nonetheless, the Doctor did find himself in the post-War universe after these actions. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)

Seemingly earlier in Gallifreyan history, Irving Braxiatel went on a mission to cancel out the existence of Romana III, albeit a Romana III who seemed different (AUDIO: Enemy Lines) from the one involved in the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) According to Brax, he did this on her orders to avert a war that devastated Gallifrey, but he did not go into detail about what that conflict exactly entailed. Nonetheless, Brax's actions seemed to ensure Gallifrey would not know a new, full scale war until the Last Great Time War. His actions also ensured Omega never escaped his anti-matter universe, (AUDIO: Enemy Lines) which he had in a perverted state of reality that, in some way, came before the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors)

The Last Great Time War as following the War in Heaven
Yet other accounts, however, implied that Gallifrey somehow returned from its destruction in the War in Heaven, allowing the Last Great Time War to occur after this apparent Time Lord victory in the earlier time war. Before Gallifey's restoration, (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows) the War in Heaven resulted in the Time Lords being nearly wiped from history save for a few survivors, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) so, though the Daleks were seen as being far less dangerous than the Enemy during the War itself, (PROSE: Alien Bodies) they began greatly growing in universal prominence in the post-War universe, taking advantage of how the Time Lords were no longer present to quell advanced time travel development in the lesser species. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)

Indeed, the War Doctor reflected that the Daleks and the Time Lords were on equal footing when it came to time travel power during their Time War, (AUDIO: The Innocent) with the wider Time Lord military even fearing Dalek technology was more advanced than their own equipment. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) The Tomorrow Windows had given the Eighth Doctor a glimpse of a future in which the Time Lords were restored after the War in Heaven, but they also warned him of the Daleks, showing grey drones and a saucer sweeping over a ruined city. (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows) Baron Amatsumara once claimed that "the true War" would begin when the War in Heaven ended, (PROSE: Head of State) and the powerful Great Black Eye that watched over the post-War universe, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, The Gallifrey Chronicles) waiting for a chance to strike, may have been the eyestalk of a Dalek. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)

The rogue Great House of Faction Paradox had also played a major role in the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Book of the War, et. al) In fact, the Clock-People, the group whom Carvil came to lead (PROSE: Out of the Box) after his involvement in the Last Great Time War, (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror) were actually survivors of Faction Paradox from the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Story So Far...) However, the Thirteenth Doctor believed that the Faction had "left the universe far behind" sometime before the Last Great Time War began. While Siblings Same and Different were known to have taken part in the conflict, the Doctor rationalised that they could have been part of a "fraction" of the Faction that elected to remain in the universe, with the Doctor even pondering whether more of this possible remnant were active in the universe long after the war with the Daleks had ended. (PROSE: The Paradox Moon)

History in crisis
Long after the Time War had ended from his perspective and thinking himself its last survivor, the Tenth Doctor declared himself the Time Lord Victorious on Mars, believing he was worthy of holding power over time as the supposed victor of the War. Instantly regretting his actions after the death of Captain Adelaide Brooke, (TV: The Waters of Mars) the Doctor found himself travelling back to the Dark Times, where he encountered the Kotturuh species which had supposedly distributed mortality to the universe. Believing he could defeat death itself and rewrite history for the better, including possibly saving Gallifrey and preventing the evolution of the Daleks, the Doctor poisoned the Kotturuh, (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) which caused fluctuations in time. (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times)

As a result of these changes to history, the Daleks of the Restoration Empire, which itself may have only existed because of the changes, (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) appeared as if they had no memory of the Last Great Time War. The Tenth Doctor once claimed the changes to history had "brought back" the Daleks, explaining how they were able to hunt post-War incarnations of the Doctor. (COMIC: Defender of the Daleks) Once history was restored to its proper state after the crisis, however, (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass) it was clear the Restoration Empire, at least after the changes to history were done, was a version of the Dalek Empire as it existed before the Time War, potentially being the Dalek faction that led the Daleks into the war with Gallifrey. (PROSE: Exit Strategy) During the Time War, the Time Lords were unable to figure out where members of the Restoration Empire fell within Dalek chronology and listed them as an anomaly. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

Whatever the case, the Restoration Empire became involved in the Kotturuh crisis as a result of a bootstrap paradox instigated by one of its drones, which had been sent back to the Dark Times as part of a Dalek Time Squad that failed in its mission. Left in a damaged state, the surviving drone sent out a message warning the universe of the Doctor's actions. Having realising that history was under attack, the Emperor of the Restoration received the message and learnt it was sent by a drone that was currently active on Skaro, serving as part of a Dalek Time Squad, (PROSE: The Last Message) more accurately designated a battalion, (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times) tasked with temporal missions. The Emperor deduced that whatever future mission this squad would be deployed into would failt. After questioning whether the Time Lords were behind the historial changes it felt, the Emperor was intrigued by the drone's warning about the Doctor's involvement.

With that, the Emperor prepared to alter the course of Dalek history by moving its forces to respond. Concluding that history was being attacked and that the Daleks could be hurt by the changes, (PROSE: The Last Message) the Emperor ordered its forces to invade the Archive of Islos (WC: The Archive of Islos) to secure more information before acting. Still, the Emperor was hopeful the message had pointed the Daleks towards the temporal supremacy they had long sought. (PROSE: The Last Message) However, the Islos invasion ended in failure; the Archivians unleashed a being the Daleks dubbed "the Entity" and were forced into retreat until its defeat in the Battle of Mechanus. (WC: The Archive of Islos, The Sentinel of the Fifth Galaxy, The Deadly Ally) Under the direction of the Dalek Prime Strategist, the escalation of events nonetheless gave the Daleks to a chance to cripple the Mechanoid Empire, which had risen to become one of their greatest rivals. (WC: Day of Reckoning)

However, the secret masters of the Entity, a Dark Times species known as the Hond, returned to the universe after its defeat. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) Driven to wipe out all life in the cosmos because of their own pain, the Hond attacked the Daleks. Finding themselves losing this new war, the Dalek Prime Strategist suggested they forcefully recruit the Doctor. After they located the Tenth Doctor, who was at an earlier point in his personal timeline so had yet (COMIC: Defender of the Daleks) to poison the Kotturuh, (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) he was surprised the Daleks had no record of the Time War. Despite having captured him to serve as their savior, the Emperor was initially reluctant to let the Doctor check Skaro's defenses, citing that he had spoken of a war between the Daleks and Time Lords. After the Doctor saved the Hond from their pain, thus ending their urge to kill, he escaped with the help of the Thirteenth Doctor. Nevertheless, the Prime Strategist suggested they recruit another incarnation of the Doctor, specifically considering the Eighth Doctor. (COMIC: Defender of the Daleks)

With Dalek Scientists learning that the changes to the timeline had their root in the Dark Times, (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) the Strategist and many other Time-Sensitive Daleks were sent back to the Dark Times as the Dalek Time Squad (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times) that the Emperor knew would be destroyed. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire) To reach the Dark Times, the squad joined forces with the Eighth Doctor after entrapping him. (AUDIO: The Enemy of My Enemy) By order of the Emperor, the Dalek squad planned to "return the situation" in the Dark Times "to Dalek advantage", (PROSE: The Guide to the Dark Times) either by restoring the proper course of history or ensuring the temporal disruptions helped the Daleks. While it knew the mission would end in the Time Squad's destruction, the Emperor was certain that its troops would not die in vain. While the Time Lords indeed had tried to hurt its state, the Emperor understood that the Restoration Empire was only growing in power and would soon be ready to challenge the Gallifreyans themselves. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire)

Into the Dark Times
During the Time War, the Time Lords' scrutiny of Dalek history brought forth a range of sources providing "recent intelligence" that indicated the Dalek Time Squad had somehow managed to enter the Dark Times, at the periphery of the temporal exclusion zone observed by most time sensitive races. Knowing that the Time Squad was ruthless even by Dalek standards and that they would use time itself as a weapon given their temporal position, they were included in a guide to the Daleks written for the War, with images provided labeling members of the Restoration Empire. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Until that point, the Daleks had never managed to break into the Dark Times, (PROSE: Mission to the Known) with the Time War itself also failing to enter that period. (PROSE: Secrets of Time Lord Victorious)

Eventually, the Daleks and Eighth Doctor, as well as the Ninth Doctor in a Vampire coffin ship, confronted the Tenth Doctor, who was in command of a mercenary fleet. The Tenth Doctor dismissed them as merely being a Kotturuh illusion before ordering his forces to attack Mordeela. (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) Despite destroying the Doctor's fleet save the flagship, the Daleks and Vampires were unable to save Mordeela. Believing they'd failed to restore history, (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass) the Dalek Time Squad moved out to harvest genetic material from the beings of the Dark Times. (PROSE: Mission to the Known) While the Strategist was eager to continue this and use such genetic material for future plans, (PROSE: Exit Strategy) the Dalek Time Commander and Dalek Executioner ceased the operation after watching a recorded message from the Emperor about a secret contingency plan, the Ultimate End, designed to take what the Emperor felt was the "maximum advantage" of their presence in the Dark Times. (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass, Mission to the Known)

Much like what the Time Lords had attempted to do to the Daleks, (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) the Emperor ordered its Commander and Executioner to lead an attack on Gallifrey, ordering them to destroy the world before the Gallifreyans "evolved" into the Time Lords who would one day threaten them. By averting the existence of the Time Lords, the Emperor believed the squad could bring about "the eternal victory of the Daleks". (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass, Mission to the Known) Having not been informed of the Ultimate End plan ahead of time, the Strategist, however, regarded the blunt assault as a tactic that was too ambitious for the current mission. (PROSE: The Restoration Empire, Exit Strategy) However, what the Strategist did not know was that the Emperor had launched the mission into the Dark Times with the knowledge it would fail, as the Dalek ruler had seen the surviving drone's future message. The Emperor had considered receiving the council of the Strategist ahead of its plan, yet the Emperor, for reasons it decided it could not reveal, elected to chart the Daleks' future on its own this time around. (PROSE: The Last Message)

At this time, the Emperor had also "foreseen" that the Time Lords would one day lead a union of all races against the Daleks and do so with the mission of wiping out the exterminators. The Emperor regarded this as an effort by the Time Lords to become the universe's "dominant creatures". In its recorded message, the Emperor screamed that such a plan would fail against the Daleks. (PROSE: Mission to the Known) Coming together to protect the planet, Gallifrey was defended by the combined efforts of the three Doctors and their Vampire allies. The Daleks' assault was finally stopped by the judgement of Inyit on undead hybrid Drones that the Squad had created. The Eighth Doctor subsequently forced the Squad's saucer into the Time Vortex (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass) and sabotaged the saucer such that it broke apart in the Vortex. (AUDIO: Mutually Assured Destruction) Blaming the Emperor's secret scheming, the Strategist declared to itself that the Daleks once more faced an uncertain future; the secrets of the Dark Times were cut off from the Daleks now that they were forced out of it and their saucer destroyed, the Doctor still lived, and Gallifrey survived. (PROSE: Exit Strategy)

When the Tenth Doctor agreed to cease his rewriting of history and to leave the Dark Times, the proper course of history, save the spread of mortality now being by natural means rather than by the Kotturuh, was restored, (PROSE: All Flesh is Grass) including the Last Great Time War. (TV: The End of Time, et al.) In fact, the Kotturuh crisis had only ensured the War would occur; the Prime Strategist reckoned that the Emperor would declare war on the Time Lords after the defeat of the Ultimate End, reasoning that the Emperor would blame the Time Lords for any permanent changes to history. The Stragetist deduced that this coming conflict would see the Emperor throw the entire Dalek race against the Time Lords, with time itself becoming both a battlefront and the source of weaponry. As it realised, time could be both the ultimate enemy to and the ultimate resource of the Daleks. Indeed, such a conflict would be the first time the Daleks and Time Lords properly clashed on such a scale; in scope, the inevitable war would far surpass the previous temporal weapons designed by the Daleks and the Time Lords' previous inference in Dalek chronology.

While initially unsure if the Emperor would lose the War, the Strategist concluded the Daleks would lose the Time War if the Emperor led its people alone. As such, the Strategist escaped from the Time Vortex via an emergency temporal shift. Plotting to usurp the Emperor should the ruler fail again, the Strategist decided it was worthy to become the Emperor who led its people into the Time War. (PROSE: Exit Strategy) The surviving drone from the Time Squad also sent its message across time, fulfilling the bootstrap paradox that brought the Restoration Empire into the Kotturuh crisis in the first place. (PROSE: The Last Message) The drone, repairing its casing and adopting a bronze design while doing so, also encountered the Fourth Doctor on Starship Future and attempted to avert the existence of the Time Lord Victorious by telling him of the future events. Although the Doctor refused to believe it, he had pondered if the Time Lords had directed his TARDIS to the Starship Future. (AUDIO: Genetics of the Daleks)

The rising tensions
During his travels with Fitz Kreiner and Trix MacMillan, the Eighth Doctor encountered evidence of a coming Time War on a planet corrupted by temporal distortion. (PROSE: We Can't Stop What's Coming) By a later period of the Eighth Doctor's life, the Time Lords began foreseeing the future Time War (AUDIO: Deeptime Frontier, Fugitives, The Crucible of Souls) as tensions rose between them and the Daleks. (AUDIO: X and the Daleks, et al.) The Daleks began fighting the Time War before it was formally declared by the Time Lords. (AUDIO: Sins of the Father) According to The Secret Lives of Monsters, the Daleks had declared war on the Time Lords when they first learned of their attempt to alter their creation, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters) with the Dalek Time Strategist claiming that the Daleks knew of the Time Lord mission "from [their] earliest beginnings". (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage)

Motivated by glimpses of his peoples' future, (AUDIO: Fugitives) Kotris partnered with the Dalek Time Controller to erase Time Lords from history by infecting the Eighth Doctor's companion Molly O'Sullivan with retro-genitor particles that would latch onto the Doctor's Gallifreyan DNA and undo its past. While this attack was erased from history when Straxus' past self was killed, the Time Controller swore it would find a new way to destroy the Time Lords, (AUDIO: X and the Daleks) and these actions began a sequence of events leading to the creation of a singular consciousness known as the Eminence (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness, et al.) that, for a time, became a threat equal to, or possibly bigger than, the Daleks. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master)

Return of the Master
Concurrently, CIA officer Narvin decided to recruit the Master to fight against the Daleks in the nearing Time War, (AUDIO: The Devil You Know) with the Time Lords believing that he would be the perfect warrior due to his savagery. (TV: The Sound of Drums) To ensure the Master survived for the War, he needed to be given a new set of regenerations, (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) but there was historical confusion about how he had been resurrected and from what demise he had been rescued. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords) One historical text claimed that the Master was resurrected during the War itself, (PROSE: The Whoniverse) while other accounts showed he had been restored to life during the rising tensions that led to the War. (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master, Sins of the Father, et. al)

One account implied the Master had been restored after being pulled from the Doctor's TARDIS, leaving the ship damaged but giving the High Council their warrior. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War) Indeed, the timeship Lolita once recalled that the War King (WC: Overture to 'Sabbath and the King') &mdash; a former Time Lord renegade and friend to the Doctor. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors, The Taking of Planet 5) who had once used the title of "master" (AUDIO: Sabbath and the King) was taken from her "sister" when the Great Houses "wanted [him] back", though she claimed her sibling had willingly released him. (WC: Overture to 'Sabbath and the King')

According to another account, the Decayed Master's final demise was at the hands of the Ravenous; the CIA recruited three other incarnations of the Master &mdash; the "Bruce" Master from before the War, the War Master from the conflict, and Missy, who existed in the post-War universe &mdash; to save their other self, resulting in the resurrection of their former incarnation, who regenerated into the "bald" Master. (AUDIO: Day of the Master) Subsequently, the newly regenerated Master knew that the Time Lords had rescued him from his "predicament" and realised he was being "brought back into the fold" and for something they had foreseen. While at the time he was not quite sure what he was being "softened up for", (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) he would later become aware of the fact that he was restored to life for the war against the Daleks. (TV: The Sound of Drums)

Rise of the Eminence and Time Controller
However, after recruiting the reborn Master, the Time Lords foresaw another possible future in which the Eminence, not the Daleks, would be the only life form left in the universe. While Time Lords and Daleks both became opposed to the Eminence, the Time Lords hoped to use the Eminence as a weapon against the Daleks, which the Eighth Doctor compared to "fighting a fire with nuclear weaponry". The Master was thus instructed to use the Eminence to fight the Daleks (AUDIO: Eyes of the Master) and helped to bring about its creation. (AUDIO: Masterplan) However, the Master betrayed the Time Lords, first by allying with the Eminence (AUDIO: Rule of the Eminence) and then the Dalek Time Controller, creating a new timeline to rule over.

Both partnerships were brought down by the Eighth Doctor, Liv Chenka, and Molly O'Sullivan, (AUDIO: Master of the Daleks) who was able to avert the alternate timeline. At that time, the Time Controller had been declared impure by the rest of the Dalek Empire: the Time Controller had been inoculated with retro-genitor particles and became a rival to the Dalek Supreme. Ultimately, the Eminence was also eliminated, with it being revealed the Time Controller had transformed into the Eminence at the start of the consciousness' existence. As such, the destruction of the Eminence marked the destruction of the Time Controller, so the Supreme ordered the creation of a new Dalek Time Strategist, (AUDIO: Eye of Darkness) which went on to be a major player in the Time War. (AUDIO: The Shadow Vortex, et al.)

The Free Time front
Sometime after adopting the bronze casings (AUDIO: Gallifrey VI) they used throughout the Time War, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) the Daleks created the Dogma Virus to corrupt Time Lord DNA and eventually wipe out the Time Lords. They sent the virus to Gallifrey through an organisation known as Free Time, who were working for them. (AUDIO: Panacea, Ascension) The Daleks then hacked into the Matrix, giving them a backdoor to invading Gallifrey. The Dalek Supreme led an invasion force into the Matrix with the intention of leading them out into Gallifrey itself. The plan was stopped by Romana II and her third incarnation, who created enough defences inside the Matrix to allow it to be shut down. Romana II trapped them in a time loop to ensure that a temporal war with the Daleks would be avoided.

According to this account, the Fourth Doctor's mission to avert the creation of the Daleks had been ordered during this time. Acting through his own authority and unaware that Romana had succeeded in defeating the Daleks, Narvin sent Valyes to Skaro to give the Doctor the mission, (AUDIO: Ascension) accidentally creating the Dalek-Gallifreyan tensions that led to war. (PROSE: Engines of War, COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone, et al.) Later, once the War had begun, Rassilon commended Narvin for his decisive thinking, though Narvin admitted that he had been hasty in his choice of agent. (AUDIO: Assassins) Alternatively, Cardinal Ollistra, who indeed stated the mission had in fact been from the CIA, believed it had been a "misjudged operation". (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage) The supposed future in which the Daleks had destroyed all other life may have just been a claim from Narvin to save Romana, (AUDIO: Ascension) but other accounts treated it as a legitimate future the Time Lords had foreseen. (PROSE: The Whoniverse, Meet the Doctor, et al.)

Attempt to prevent the War
It became clear that the Matrix was "always predicting doom and gloom". (AUDIO: Deeptime Frontier) In response, Padrac, a Time Lord on the High Council, founded the Doom Coalition to prevent Gallifrey's future destruction by destroying the rest of the universe (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls) with a Resonance Engine; (AUDIO: Stop the Clock) he had foreseen through the Matrix that, if any other civilisation were to survive, Gallifrey was apparently destined to be wiped out. Not all these predictions concerned a war that Gallifrey would fight, with some suggesting collateral damage from battles between lesser species would be enough to destroy the homeworld of the Time Lords, (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls) but he also foresaw that a time war was indeed possible. (AUDIO: Songs of Love) Around this time, the Renegade Time Lord the Eleven vocally underestimated the threat the Daleks posed, believing that the Time Lords were powerful enough to handle the exterminators. (AUDIO: The Eleven)

Beyond planning for Caleera, a Time Lady with incredible physic powers whom he had charmed years prior, to power the Resonance Engine to destroy the universe, (AUDIO: Stop the Clock) Padrac plotted to use the Crucible of Souls, designed by the renegade Time Lord the Clocksmith, to convert the life force left over from every destroyed civilisation to make the Time Lords truly immortal. After the Eight Doctor and his companions were seemingly defeated by being sucked out into no-time, (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls) Padrac prepared Caleera for her role as the Resonance Engine's power source, publicly revealed his plan to other officials, and launched a coup to become President of the High Council. (AUDIO: Songs of Love)

Most survivors of the High Council to hide themselves in New York City in the 1970s, allying with the the Monk and the Weeping Angels to build the city into a stronghold that could survive Padrac's attempt at destroying the universe. (AUDIO: The Side of the Angels) Councillor Alekall, meanwhile, remained on Gallifrey to lead a resistance. Allying with the resistance, the Eighth Doctor and his companions stopped the Doom Coalition by revealing to Caleera that Padrac had never loved her, stopping the Resonance Engine. Now fearing the future of Gallifrey was set in stone, Padrac, whilst being imprisoned, accused the Doctor of ensuring their homeworld's demise. (AUDIO: Stop the Clock) During the Time War, Gallifreyans remembered Padrac as a dictator. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures)

Ravenous crisis


Time Lords Rasmus and Brallix manned the Deeptime Frontier to mine dark chronons as a power source for Battle TARDISes if the Eye of Harmony were lost, additionally recruiting the brilliant human scientist Daria Visteron. Visteron experimented with time windows and was terrified by seeing a future where Time Lords at war used fleets of destructive TARDISes; to terrify the Time Lords back, she used Deeptime Frontier to release the Ravenous from their prison dimension. (AUDIO: Deeptime Frontier)

The Eighth Doctor helped to put a stop to the Ravenous crisis, unaware that it had brought out the existence of the "Bald" Master he had fought previously. (AUDIO: Day of the Master) After the Ravenous crisis, the Eighth Doctor and his companions were then trapped in London during the 2020s for a time. (AUDIO: Lost Property, et. al) One of their first journeys after that involved Bronze Daleks. (AUDIO: Paradox of the Daleks)

Narvin and the Master prepare
The "Bald" Master eventually regenerated into an incarnation (AUDIO: Masterful) who became known as "the War Master" due to his involvement in the Time War, (AUDIO: The War Master) but he was involved in events prior to the conflict, helping Gallifrey to build up the military force with which it would fight the Dalek Empire. He partnered with Narvin, who had come to accept that the War was inevitable (AUDIO: Sins of the Father) after his failed attempts to avert it as "the Coordinator in Extremis". (AUDIO: Desperate Measures) In fact, Narvin knew during this period the Daleks were already prepared for the War against his people. (AUDIO: Sins of the Father)

During this period, the Master manipulated the society of Callous (AUDIO: Call for the Dead, The Glittering Storm, The Persistence of Dreams) to obtain large quantities of Swenyo for Time Lord battleships that would be used in the coming conflict. In return, he was given a Chameleon Arch by Narvin. As he left, Narvin reflected to the Master that the Time Lords had battles to fight, noting that, while the War was yet to be formally declared, that did not matter to the Daleks. While on Callous, the Master had turned a group of Ood against their human masters in order to help him obtain the Swenyo. (AUDIO: Sins of the Father) This action became a part of a legend, which claimed he had saved the Ood, about the Master that spread during the Time War. (WC: The Legend of... the Master?)

Dalek preparations
While later histories would claim they were created during the War itself, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, A Brief History of Time Lords) the Dalek Emperor created the Cult of Skaro before the coming conflict to explore new methods of Dalek warfare. Assigned secret strategy chambers on Skaro, (PROSE: Birth of a Legend) the four Daleks that made up the "cult" &mdash; given the names "Sec", "Caan", "Jast", and "Thay" &mdash; were ordered to think in non-Dalek ways to find new ways to exterminate and survive. (TV: Doomsday, Daleks in Manhattan)

By this time, the Daleks had officially adopted the bronze casings (PROSE: Birth of a Legend) with which they would fight the Time Lords. (TV: Dalek, et. al) Additionally, the Seventh Incursion Squad under Sec had just succeeded in wiping out another old enemy, the Mechonoids. (PROSE: Birth of a Legend) However, during the War, the Time Lords displayed an interest in using Mechanoids for their war effort against the Daleks.(PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) Before the War, a Dalek Saucer Commander led an army of Daleks aboard saucer X-K Beta-19 to energise and harvest the core of the planet Galacton as fuel for the Dalek Seventh Fleet. (PROSE: Mission to Galacton) Before the Dalek departed for the War, the Daleks and their Emperor waged battles against the rest of the universe (TV: The Parting of the Ways) and maintained "long period of occupation" (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) known as the Tenth Dalek Occupation. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Davros's preparations
Despite the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) the Daleks eventually allowed Davros back into their ranks, albeit only as an advisor who lacked commanding authority. Through this agreement, Davros was able to further refine and upgrade the Dalek casing. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks) Despite his previous wish to rule over his creations, (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks) Davros had also changed, seeking not to rule the Daleks but to instead be part of their lives. He had fully committed himself to being a father to the Daleks, despite admitting to himself that the Daleks would never love him as such. Prior to the War, Davros was also forced to admit to himself that it was becoming harder to deduce which Daleks had become insane and which still remained, by Dalek standards, "sane". Around this time, Davros and the Doctor also established a number of Christmas truces, where the Doctor tried to convince Davros to change the Daleks into a different species to spare the universe from further bloodshed.

Eventually, incarnations of the Doctor met and decided the Eleventh Doctor should be the next incarnation to meet with Davros, hoping that the Dalek creator would be more open to an incarnation he had never met before. In truth, the Doctors were scared of what would happen if they continued to battle with the Daleks, who always returned with greater hate after each defeat. The Doctor always arrived to these meetings unarmed and without allies, knowing that Davros had built a secret countermeasure into the Daleks. If the scientist ever betrayed their agreement and brought his children to a truce, the Doctor would offer themself up for extermination, so long as Davros was also killed. While Davros failed to admit as such, the Doctor knew the Daleks would instantly sacrifice their creator if it meant victory. Unknown to the Daleks, they had been given a self-destruct mechanism built into their casings that would trigger if they attempted to fire on their creator.

Shortly before the War, the Dalek Empire also learned that the Krillitane rebels based on the planet Gryphon's Reach were close to developing true invisibility technology in the form of a phase-cloak. Eager to claim this technology for themselves, the Daleks targeted the world but were forced to contact Davros for aid after failing to find the facility. They also learned the Doctor would be present and hoped their creator would be able to ensure their nemesis did not halt their mission. Agreeing to his children's request quickly, Davros upgraded the Daleks' sensors and watched the attack unfold from his command ship. However, the Doctor, still the Eleventh Doctor active in the pre-War era, instead combined Krillitane and Gallifreyan technology to interfere with the Daleks' systems, blinding the attackers instead of making the Krillitane invisible. While Davros promised he could redesign the Daleks to counteract the tactic, the Daleks claimed Davros had failed them one too many times and severed their connection with him.

Desperate to reconnect to his children, Davros found redemption by designing them a perfected cloaking field and leading over a hundred Daleks in an ambush on Alacracis IV, where they cornered the Doctor during the latest Christmas truce. However, the Doctor showed Davros the Daleks' devotion to victory when he offered himself up for extermination, so long as Davros was also killed. Despite their creator's objections, the Daleks fired, triggering their secret self-destruct and wiping out the entire force. Amid the rubble, the Doctor reminded Davros that the Daleks were predictable and noted this would be their final Christmas truce. The following day, Davros grappled with what he had seen after hiding the Dalek remains aboard his command ship, thereby preventing the rest of the Daleks from learning of his countermeasures. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks)

The Doctor
Sometime before the Time War broke out, (COMIC: The Time Ball) the Doctor took on a companion named Josie Day after meeting her at one of his houses. (COMIC: The Pictures of Josephine Day) His adventures with Josie helped to heal his spirit for the conflict to come. He had also already taken to wearing the clothing (COMIC: The Time Ball) he mainly wore throughout the fighting. (TV: The Night of the Doctor, et. al) He also displayed a dislike of soldiers during these travels and was already weary of war. (COMIC: Music of the Spherions)

Gallifrey's final preparations
The Dalek Empire began to launch attacks against Gallifrey's allies in the Temporal Powers, further convincing the Time Lords that war was growing near. (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention) The Daleks launched these attacks to isolate the Time Lords. (GAME: Lost in Time) As the War approached, President Livia established the War Council, which set up six different facilities around Gallifrey to help their war effort, details of which were reluctantly shared with the CIA after Livia ruled on a dispute between the Agency and the Council. When the Daleks annexed Monan, Gallifrey further hastened its preparations for war.

Unknown to the CIA, a seventh facility was set up in the Death Zone as part of Project Revenant. Revenant was an initiative to resurrect deceased Time Lords from the Matrix using a facility kept in a pocket dimension. In secret, those involved in Project Revenant (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention) made contact with Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society (PROSE: Engines of War) who had been manipulating Gallifrey from the Martix for some time already. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey) Rassilon was persuaded to return to the world of the living to lead his people in a crusade against the Dalek Empire. (PROSE: Engines of War)

War breaks out
According to Dalek historians, "no one [was] certain" if it was the Time Lords or Daleks who committed the final act of aggression that proved to be the final straw. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) Indeed, the War Doctor implied even those fighting the War had forgotten how it had began. (AUDIO: The Innocent) According to historians, after the Daleks had vanished from time and space, they emerged to face the Time Lords with a clear war footing, forcing the unprepared Time Lords to "plunder" warships from their own past. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) By one account, the Daleks first moved to attack Gallifrey's allies in the Temporal Powers, which convinced the Time Lords to formally declare war. President Livia Caralis declared the conflict after the destruction of Phaidon. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures)

It was known that every part of the Time War "has happened, then not happened at all, then happened again but at a different time entirely", thereby explaining why (PROSE: A Brief History of the Time Lords) there were differing accounts of the War's beginning. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures, The Innocent, PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe) After the Daleks declared war, they contacted Davros and asked for his help in the conflict. Although he had just resolved to himself to abandon the Daleks after the prior day's events on Alacracis IV, he was filled with pride at his "children" upon learning they had declared war on Gallifrey and quickly agreed to help them. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks) With that, the greatest and most destructive war to ever be inflicted upon the universe began. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)

The version of the universe that emerged from the fires of the War was different from its status before the War. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe)

Behind the scenes

 * The Dalek invasion of pop culture, published as part of Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe, claims that "the true beginning of the Time War" was depicted in Secret Message from the Time Lords, a 1977 Weetabix commercial in which a Supreme Dalek orders all Daleks to find and exterminate all packs of Weetabix containing secret messages from the Time Lords. Indeed, it does appear to depict the first live-action instance of Dalek hostility against the Time Lords beyond their conflicts with the Doctor, preceding their plan to assassinate the High Council of Gallifrey in Resurrection of the Daleks.