Foward Through Time

by Renee Lytle

Sailor Pluto keeps time. She guards it, knows it intimately, and can even manipulate it. But contrary to what many in the Moon Kingdom believe, she does not control it. It controls her as it controls seemingly everything in the physical world. There was once a time when Pluto was free of linear time but even as she watches loved ones fade she refuses to leave.

1. Prologue

I don't remember being young. I've been conscious for such a long time it's hard to even think about. And it's not as though I can't remember just because it's been so very long.

It's more like I don't remember not being. The moment it took between this place without me and this place with me was just that – a blink in time and space. There was no one to witness me before I could hold memories, if there was even such a time, and so there was no one to help me remember a childhood.

I do know that there was something before me. Stars and galaxies spanning across time itself appeared without my presence. Then, among the star-dusted manifestations, I was suddenly there.

And there was nowhere in particular. Or rather, it was everywhere all at once while still only existing in one body. This physical body that was the anchor to my conscious thoughts and the thing that drove me to pull myself from the void that is everywhere and only exist where my body existed.

This body that didn't look like anything around me was the reason I searched for other bodies that were like my own. In my conscious mind I knew my purpose was to find these other bodies. They existed somewhere in the impossibly large vacuum of the space and time I ended up in.

Did I somehow get lost from them?

So I searched. And for the first time in my conscious thoughts I knew what time was. The knowledge that others were out there gave it to me. Such a sharp thing too – giving me such a sense of life and urgency that with each passing moment of being kept from these others became painful and frantic in my mind.

I didn't know loneliness until then either. Flinging myself throughout space without another thing to see and feel besides cold, hard stars consumed me and yet I didn't even know what it was. The feeling of loneliness was the only thing in my mind besides time yet I didn't know what it was.

How do you deal with such a thing when you don't even know what to call it?

No, I don't remember being young and I don't know what was before I was. I don't know for how long I explored space; time wasn't linear for me then. It only seemed to become so when I came home to the Moon Kingdom.

Yes, that I do remember. I remember finding you, Queen Serenity.