Forgotten Land
9/28/2010
SUM: Endymion stumbles upon the hidden world of the Moon.
AN: You're all going to kill me, but that's ok, because I'd gladly do it all for you. I have decided upon a new story... and it's all the fault of a girl who dresses up in cosplay and I stumbled upon her princess Serenity outfit picture and the words scrawled on the bottom caught my attention. I pray this will be short. Really this probably should have been another couple, one of the generals and... Rei or Minako perhaps, but I don't really write those couples too often and not as standalone fics. Though I used to love Makoto fics... sigh, the olden days... (On an up-note, I THINK this is the first new story in 2010)...
ONE
As a small child, Endymion learned to hunt. His father and bodyguards took him out to the woods and entrenched themselves in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by towering Ginko trees, the nearest branch usually well out of reach, especially for a child. The same child who tripped and crashed into the forest floor, following the men and their footsteps. As he grew, he too set traps, followed scents and hunted. The floor squishing beneath his feet as he followed his prey. Sat in those trees high above and waited, chased after ones that he missed, swinging down from the branches and landing silently as a cat.
He was considered by all a panther. Dark and able to blend into the surroundings of the forest, which cast shadows at any time of day, emerging a fierce and dangerous creature with grace and finess. The only sign any of the prey got was the mass moving towards it quickly and silently and intent, if it say him at all.
The leaves fell, it grew colder and the game changed. Different food was hunted, different methods employed. The colors changing from green and a canopy overhead to crushing beneath boots and grinding into the roots of the forest floor. Or soggy and slippery, the seasons changed, the environment changed, and still he was taught the way of his ancestors. He grew with it, learned to hear before others, smell what was not only upwind but also down. He became the fiercest hunter of them all, always getting what he wanted.
He was not all hunt. He gathered as well, these long trips out with the men of his life. He sat and watched the stream flow by. The fish swam and he usually left them be, unless that was his game for the season. Looking down into the water at the pebbles tumbling around, at the mercy of the rushing rapids. Watching the water, seeing it change from calm to chaos and back. Not sure which he preferred more.
Laying back against the grass the few scant months that there were any, when he was at home, or just out of the woods. He would look up into the sky and ponder about the stars and the sun and the moon. Night was his game, even in broad-daylight and so he had a strange affinity for the Moon, which was visible both day and night, but belonged to the night, allowing it to shine more brightly than in the day when it looked like another cloud in the sky and had to share its glory with the sun. However the Moon might need the sun to shine, but it could over power the sun at any moment, sliding in between it and the earth and blocking all light. Putting the sun out, if only for a moment. The earth had the same ability on the moon, blocking the sun from it once every cycle.
It was a co-dependent relationship though, for when the moon was bright and full you could make out the individual blades of grass, the way the moss clung to the side of a tree. If you were real lucky, you could see the air move and shift directions.
His childhood had taught him many things, he learned everything everyone could teach him and he far outgrew his father in hunting, trapping and anything else the old man could teach him. The son was better than the father, tapping into things the father either never knew existed or achieving it where the other couldn't.
His childhood might have taught him a lot of things, but it could not teach him what he was about to discover. Nothing would prepare him for his next journey.