The Daughter of Gallifrey

1: The Impossible Bookshop

It was a Tuesday.

Some might think Tuesdays aren't extraordinarily exciting days, but, in this particular case, they would be dead wrong.   

So very dead wrong.   

A girl sat on a bench outside of a shop, waiting for her mum who was inside. She was twelve. A very young twelve. In fact, she had only turned twelve about a week ago.   

She had gotten a bicycle and several girly shirts from her mum for the occasion. She sold the bike and the shirts to some of her schoolmates. She used the money to buy books. The girl loved books. Everything about them she adored. People now could read books on fancy Kindles and iPads and listen to them on iPods and such, but she stuck to real books.   

Real books she could hold and smell. Oh, that brilliant smell. She had decided long ago that there was no smell that could match the scent of pages in a book, new or old.   

She read about everything, and right now she was engulfed in a tale of dragons and knights and heroic quests. The main character was a woman who dressed up as a man and fought better than anyone she met. The girl wished she could slay dragons and conquer kingdoms as the woman did.  

But she lived in London in the 21st century, and, as far as she knew, there were no dragons or medieval kingdoms around.   

She looked up from her book and scanned the street. Men and women jostled past each other on the sidewalk. The throngs of people didn't interest her though. Instead, something else caught her eye. A door she had never noticed, tucked between a two large department stores across the busy street. The girl was perplexed. That door had certainly not been there before. There was no way she would have missed it all this time.   

She read the sign above it. Books, it said, quite plainly. Books? She knew all the local bookshops and this one was not one of them. A new shop? She glanced back at the store behind her, checking for her mum, before standing up, slipping her book into her bag, and crossing the street.   

In just a mo, the girl stood in front of the mysterious door. She looked up at the sign, to the crowds of people to her left and right, and pushed the door open, one small hand on the brass knob.   

"Hello?" she called into the shop and was startled by her own voice replying. It was only an echo, she thought, calming her heart in her chest. The shop was big enough to produce an echo. It seemed impossibly large, in fact. Much bigger than the space between the stores. She looked up and saw that there were at least eight floors of the shop, connected by a spiral staircase.   

"Impossible," she muttered. She stumbled back until she reached the door, swung it open, and reentered the crowds. The girl inspected the building up and down. Only two stories. She stepped back inside. But there they were, all eight floors. Each one seemed to go on for ages.   

The whole shop was full of books, so she browsed them, but cautiously. There was something odd about this place. Some books she had read, others she had never heard of. Some were in other languages. The shop had every genre, every kind of book, possibly every story ever told.   

The ones with ancient, tattered pages interested her most. Their thick, scuffed covers of leather were embossed with letters she didn't know and words she couldn't read.   

She sifted through loads of books, and the higher she went up the staircase, the more excited she became. So many books. So much to learn, to discover, to explore, to imagine. So many worlds to dive into. There were adventures awaiting her in every single one of the thousands, or millions, of books in the shop.  

She ascended to the seventh level and was moving a small stack of books set in front of the ones in a shelf, when she felt a tug at the corner of her eye. She looked to the side and saw a thick, black, leather-bound book staring back at her. Not actually staring, mind you, as it had no physical eyes, but the girl felt it's gaze on her face more intensely than her own mum's glare. It had no title or author inscribed on the cover. No markings of any kind.   

She knew it was special though. That tug she had felt told her this book was something different, perhaps something magical.  

The girl tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and kneeled in front of the book where it lay on the floor. She picked it up with both hands, and as soon as her skin made contact with the leather, the hairs on her arms stood on end, as did the ones on the back of her neck.   

She slowly opened to the first page and was bathed in golden light. Her eyes widened in awe. Tendrils of the light curled off the page and encircled her. It was so warm and bright. The golden particles slowly seeped into the girl's slightly opened mouth, which she had let fall open a bit. It poured into her through her eyes as well, gradually turning them the strange gold color and causing them to glow as brightly as the book.   

Suddenly, she was aware that something unnatural was occuring and was struck with fright. What exactly was happening to her? She felt a shift inside herself and, stunned with terror, she let out a ear-splitting shriek.