The Event The Event was the prophesied beginning of the War in the devastation of Gallifrey by a surprise attack from the Enemy . ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) However , due to the War King ' s preparations , the Homeworld was not in fact devastated , ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) and the War instead began on Dronid in the Cataclysm . ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " , " The Book of the War " ) Prediction . Channeling the powers of the Edifice , Compassion once showed the Eighth Doctor a vision of the Event . ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) The Rivera Manuscript detailed a renegade ' s praxis - induced vision of the Enemy ' s first attack on the Homeworld . In it , the enemy first attacked the Homeworld ' s noosphere , telepathically corrupting many members of the Houses and overwhelming them with seizures and madness . The chapterhouse s of the Homeworld were then destroyed by black fireballs that materialised out of the sky , described as " supercharged chunks of the causal nexus itself . " At this time , a number of stolen timeship s returned to the Homeworld , detonating on materialisation . Enemy soldiers resembling Ashla shock - troop s materialised out of gouges in the sky , besieging the groups of survivors in their loomsheds for days before plunging into the machinery of the breeding - engine s , detonating and leaving the looms intact but mutated . Finally , the Enemy neutralised the Homeworld ' s power source and the entire Homeworld vanished into cataclysm . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) In the Doctor ' s vision , the surviving Time Lords decided to break their non - interference policy and retaliate by going back in time and razing the Enemy battle - world s before the attack on Gallifrey occured , preventing the Event . The Enemy erased this counterattack from history by detonating a star - killer in the systems where the Gallifreyans had obtained the materials used to construct their fleet at a point before the materials had been mined . These strikes and counterstrikes continued and quickly spread into a full blown War . ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) Legacy . Far into the War , at a time when the Time Lords were losing , details of the Event and several other aspects of the start of the War were kept from the Gallifreyan public . ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) Prevention . Several decades before the War , the War King came to his people after experiencing a vision of the future War and prepared them for the conflict . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) When the War began it was not in a surprise attack on Gallifrey , but in a battle on Dronid which the Great Houses were prepared for . There was an Enemy attack on Gallifrey in the early days of the War , ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " , " The Book of the War " ) but it was nothing like the attack described in the Rivera Manuscript . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) At a time far into the War , the Faction Paradox warfleet decided to travel back in history to Romana III ' s Gallifrey shortly before the first Enemy attack . ( PROSE : " The Gallifrey Chronicles " ) The Faction planned to take over Gallifrey , prepare for the Event , and launch their own War against the Enemy . The Eighth Doctor decided to use the powers of the Edifice to obliterate Gallifrey before the Enemy could , destroying the Faction and killing almost all of the Time Lords . Compassion believed that the destruction of the Time Lords at this time also prevented the Enemy from maturing into a threat to the universe ; ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) however , she would go on to fight the enemy many times later in her life . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " , " God Encompasses " , AUDIO : " In the Year of the Cat " )