Author's Note: Yeah, I know, the Doctor and King Arthur have been done to death, fanfic-wise. Not gonna keep me from putting my stamp on it, though. Hopefully my version will at least be different enough to be entertaining.

This fic takes place between The Next Doctor and Planet of the Dead, and is completely unrelated to any of my previous stories or series.

Personal note: I'm still in school and working, both, so don't expect me to power through this very fast. Hopefully at least a chapter a week, but no promises.

Disclaimer: Doctor Who and all its characters and main situations are the property of the BBC, not me.

Prologue

London Times, dateline 24th April 2018

The scientific community, indeed, the entire country has been awash with speculation and controversy ever since the earth-shaking discovery last fall of what has been dubbed The Tor Treasure. No Times reader need be reminded of the contents of that solid oak chest buried deep in the newly-rediscovered caverns winding through the heart of Glastonbury Tor: scraps of parchment, sadly deteriorated; the shallow, jewelled dish, scorched and distorted as though from a blow, that some have intemperately dubbed The Holy Grail; and most importantly and astonishingly, the broadsword, adorned with a single giant ruby, still untarnished and sharp within its intricately-worked leather scabbard after centuries of burial in the dark.

Could this truly be Excalibur?

All avenues of scientific analysis have continued to pile on layer after layer of mystery, rather than answers.

Both dish and sword have been found to have been fashioned from combinations of pure metals in such concentrations as have never been found together on this planet. Geologists speculate the most likely sources of their ore to have been meteorites. Yet not only do the two artifact's exact composition differ from each other (meaning they would have had to have been different meteorites), but no other meteorite even approximating either has ever been found.

Further, although the ruby in the sword has been traced through chemical analysis to have come from northern India, and most of the jewels in the dish have likewise been sourced from various spots in Scandinavia and northern Europe, several of the dish's other stones have yet to be positively identified at all; they are a crystal unknown on this Earth.

These facts lead many to the conclusion that both objects are of extra-terrestrial origin. Although such visitations have been incontrovertible in recent decades (see Times archives stories), no such ancient visit has yet been established. The box itself, of good stout English Oak, has been positively carbon dated to the early sixth century, and the discoverers attest that it was patently undisturbed since then.

Finally, the parchment scraps have been put to the most rigorous analyses by independent (not to say competing) teams, and the results of each one – on the parchment itself, the ink used, linguistics analysis, etc – all point to the same era as the box. Yet others point to certain anachronisms within the text as proof against taking it at face value.

Skeptics claim the Tor Treasure is the most sophisticated, elaborate hoax yet discovered, citing the possibility of the sword and dish having been manufactured recently from scraps left by one or more of the invaders of early this century. Others, however, raise the simple question: why should we assume the recent, quite public invasions or visitations to have been the first? Who knows what other visits have been lost in the mists of time from our deep history?

We may never know the answers, but the search for them goes on...