First Visitor
She had waited, waited for years, centuries for her beloved daughter to reawaken to her destiny. She knew it would be years still before she would be reborn but still the time was drawing close.
She had waited all alone for all that time. Her spirit never leaving the ruins of her once beautiful kingdom, all she did was look back at the past and anticipate the future.
Then she felt the dust over in the sea of dust neighboring the one that now held the ruins of her kingdom, hidden by magic from the planet below that had forgotten them.
She decided to look into the situation, her mind for the first time since the fall locked squarely on the present. As a spirit it didn't take her long to find the source of the disturbance, a spindly metallic craft now rested on the surface.
Queen Serenity had never seen anything like it. Was this some new Dark Kingdom weapon or tool? But there was nothing left on the Moon for them to use, so what did this mean?
She listened carefully and heard a voice come from the object.
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
Houston? Eagle? Now the craft incited more curiosity than concern. She could sense no magic from the ones within, so she realized that they had to come using another means.
She spent hours inspecting the vehicle from the outside. The first visitors to her world in nearly a millennium would have their privacy respected until they were ready to come out. Chemical propulsion, binary computers and made with oxygen tanks it could only have reached here from the Inner Solar System, that could only mean Earth.
They made back to the moon, only this time they did so on their own power, not that of the Moon Kingdom or the Dark Kingdom.
It was something that filled her with hope, for the Earth to reach here with the level of development they had would have taken an immense amount co-operation, to the queen it meant that when her daughter would be reborn she would be sure it would be to a world she felt was worth fighting for.
The hatch on the craft opened, a man in a bulky white suit with a round helmet stepped onto the leg of the craft.
She could hear the man speak into the radio in his helmet.
"I'm at the foot of the ladder. The LEM's footbeds are only depressed into the surface about one or two inches. Although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it, it's almost like a powder down there, it's very fine."
Her own body lost to the ages she had expected her own daughter to be the first to step foot here after so long. But she found she didn't mind, she could tell this was a man of great courage and humility, someone who would be a fine example to princess and her court to look up to. Perhaps part of following her destiny would be following this man's footsteps.
"I'm going to step off the LEM now."
The man then took the first step on this world since a once powerful empire fell, carrying with him the courage, knowledge and the desire for peace that got his people to reach back to this place. The man would never know she was here, only the princess would be able to see her, but the hope that the princess would be able to fulfill that destiny had never been stronger.
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
A/N:
Dedicated to the memory of Neil Alden Armstrong
August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012
Our first ambassador to the Moon Kingdom