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"What is our potential," the doctor corrected. "I lead, and all things branch from me, but they reach further, spreading past my own limitations." His own heart seems to beat in time with the grail as his fingers wrap around it.

"Surely, you hear their answers as well as my own. They're young and passionate, aren't they? But fragile, as all humans must be." He'd look at Caelius then, arch and accusing, but cannot look away from the heart.

The force finds itself briefly treated a life that is full as it is dark. It is a life of taking and growing and then growing on, past himself. The roots are mostly hidden, corpse upon buried corpse feeding all that grows above ground, knotted and tangled around a woman, beautiful and childlike, her once bright eyes long since grown dull. The heart beat throbs through all of it, and he was right, there are many many lives, branching form his own, seeking and straining toward greatness, both barren and fruitful, both sturdy and frail.

And then there is this, as he loses himself and then regains himself between one fraught moment and another: a great scaled form, wrapped firmly around the trunk. Circe's hand can reach no further and the doctor's own remains still, trapped.

Priessst.

The beast, beyond her affectionate title, is nameless, lost with time and steeped in sacrifice upon sacrifice offered at her blades. She is a growing thing and a patient thing, but she is swift as she leaves her bearer, spectral scales brushing against bark and root. Where Circe laughs, she remains silent, the two moving in along their own paths, twining 'round and round, down and down.

There is a pull, powerful as the tides, and now it's impossible to tell who is being drawn where.

The doctor spends a long few moments simply staring at it, both saved and lost. But maybe not entirely.

His hands, as always, are steady as they reach for the seed.