The Beginning of Fate

Part 7

Selena walked through the castle alone. It was late, very late. Everyone else was in the rooms, sleeping. She walked quietly and swiftly, a mouse on the run from prey. She went unnoticed by anyone in the house as she trotted through serpentine halls. She stopped stiffly, listening. After she made sure she had imagined whatever it had been, she continued.

Her small slippers went noiselessly across the floor. She sauntered on. And soon, she was there.

'There' was a door, a large silver door. She knew that this was where she would find the answers she was looking for. She stepped up to the reflective metal door and reached up on her tiptoes for the handle, which she tugged at severely. The door swung open.

She looked around the empty room, there were large columns on one end, and beyond them lay a balcony that faced the bright blue earth. She watched the planet in silence for a moment, then turned to examine the rest of the room. Hanging in front of the columns diagonally from the ceiling was a large screen facing the floor. Below the screen lay a single stool and panels of buttons. The rest of the room sat empty except for a large crystal glass tube that filled the far corner.

Selena glared at the panels, she knew it. She knew what they had to be. Her mother had told her the people of the Moon had ways of watching over the earth, and protecting it. She had grown up knowing that was her duty to fulfill, protecting the earth.

She walked to the panels and kneeled on the stool so she would be tall enough to reach them. There were quite a few butting in front of her, but it didn't take her long to figure out which she had to push, soon the screen above her filled with an identical image to the one she saw if she looked straight ahead, through the columns. The Earth was projected onto the screen the same as she saw it beyond her keyboard, but all it took was one press of a button and the image on the screen changed. She focused in towards a small patch of land hidden in the ocean, and soon she was looking at the inhabitants of a little city, a city on the Earth.

She knew where she needed to go, clicking and pressing she moved the image on the screen to a castle, large and foreboding, with high stone walls and dark gray shadows, the palace of the earth. She thought of the pictures of the palace that she had seen in books, where the castle was beautiful and seemed to glow. She looked at the brambles around the palace, she saw wilting black roses entwined among the large thorns. Her hand came to her mouth and she gasped. She knew it, she knew this had to be the reason. Thought back to the conversation she had heard earlier that night, what the adults had been saying.

~*~ "Selenity! We can no longer trust you! Our boy should never have come with us; he is being infected by your evil Lunar ways!" the queen of Earth raged with anger towards the Moon Sovereign.

"Again with these accusations, Iku? What have we ever done to your Endymion?"

"He came to me today saying that he had become quite close with that daughter of yours." Iku said it as if her son had committed murder, "He says she and him promised to always be friends! I tried to tell him that this was strictly forbidden and he said, 'Well, I'd like to change that one- day. I'd like to see her again. We are very good friends and I don't see why we aren't allowed to see each other.'"

"What, may I ask, is wrong with that?"

"Your daughter is inserting rebellious thoughts into my son's mind! He is challenging our custom and tradition! It was your little monster that set him on this road! He was perfectly behaved until he met her!"

"And that is why he ran away as soon as he found the chance? Iku, I seriously doubt that my daughter has anything to do with your son's idea. And I also think it is a very good one. I have seen the poison that reeks through your world, the people of earth are becoming more and more vile, whether you see it or not. Have you not seen the roses? Those roses which represent the dreams of every living soul in your world are withering away and becoming foul, because your people no longer even have the virtue in themselves to sustain the life of a flower."

"Selenity, you do not understand the woes of my people! We are-"

"You are perfectly well off...which has made you greedy and careless. You are open to anything that comes your way because you do not wish to fight it only find a way to gain power and money from it."

"I am afraid Selenity, that that is not the problem, but that your people, the people we sent here centuries ago to care for us, have not done your duty."

"We watch every single moment of your wretched planet, and do all we can for it. We have protected you from invaders, and even done what we can for the defiled state you have left it in, keeping your air clean and your water drinkable. All from the perch you have imprisoned us on, so that we may never leave. But occasionally you will come here, and occasionally those from earth will migrate here. I have seen them, the come here dark, violent, and afraid. Soon they learn the truth. The Earth is poison for the mind and spirit."

"I sincerely doubt that! You only lie. I am afraid that I can no longer stay here. As soon as you have selected who are to be the new 'heirs' to the crystal and who are to protect us from afar. Then we will leave forever. No more contact with the Earth, we will no longer come here and you will no longer be able to use the communicators to contact people on Earth. If you fail to keep your duty as Queen as protect your mother planet, then we will destroy you without warning. We have the weaponry to do that very easily."

"And exactly what am I to do for your planet?"

"Give us the life of that crystal of yours!"

"Even if I wanted to, I could not. The crystal saves what is good and demolishes what is not. Your planet would be completely wiped out, it is too evil."

"Selenity. You and I will never meet again. I promise to destroy you. My son will forever be banned from contact with that little girl of yours. You have made your own decision."

"No, Iku, it is you who has done all the deciding...." ~*~



How come? Why can't she be his friend? What was so wrong with having him around? He didn't seem harmful; he didn't seem like something that could hurt you. And how come his Mommy was so hurtful? Why didn't she like the idea of being able to be everyone's friend? She knew she couldn't let this happen, knew what she had to do. She had to learn, learn why the people of Earth were suffering so.

And there she saw it. The castle surrounded by black roses... ~*~ Those roses which represent the dreams of every living soul in your world are withering away and becoming foul, because your people no longer even have the virtue in themselves to sustain the life of a flower...~*~

But why? Why? She had cried asking herself what could make an entire kingdom hurt so; the only answer she could come up with was hate. They hated her, the hated her mother, they hated her people. Where had the hate stemmed from, why did they need someone to hate?

So here she was looking for the answer, and the only thing she was black, evil roses. The sight of them was making her stomach lurch. So many roses, so many people who could no longer see wrong. But she saw in the midst of them a group of buds, dark red buds, a splatter of red and black, and one was pure red. Crimson standing out from the splattered mass 'children' her mind flickered. 'They are not fully bloomed and not fully intoxicated by the hate of this world.' She looked again at the pure red bud, it was taller that the rest, next to two taller roses along side it, the roses were in full bloom and such a deep black it hurt her eyes to look at them. 'The royal family...Endymion. Of course, he is pure.' She smiled at Endymion's red rose, surrounded by the black hate of his parents. She was about to click, to search the surface of this planet for and explanation of the hate when the screen went blank.

Selena gasped and turned around. To her side, with a finger above a button on the panel, was Minako.

"Selena, even if you could find the source of the hate, you could not stop or solve it."

"How did you-?"

"I followed you, it didn't take long to figure out what you were up to."

"But how do even know about the problems of earth?"

Minako turned her head towards Selena, her eyes suddenly seeming wise, and her smile sad. She pointed to the glass cylinder that filled the entire corner of the room, like a small room of it's own, "Do you know what that is, Selena?"

"A transport?"

"Yes, instantly leave one spot and appear in another. Do you know where it goes?"

"Earth, I suspect."

"Do you think that Earth would only have one Transport, and one that leads only to a place they are forbidden to go?"

"No. They probably have lots of them, they aren't confined like we are."

"It would be very easy then, on Earth, to get away to some place happy, some place far."

Selena suddenly understood where all this was going, "You are from Earth, aren't you?"

"I was... I was."

"But?"

"It's evil there, very evil. There *is* no source for it any longer. I had to get away. I left a note on my pillow and ran away. I went to another solar system in this galaxy, and trained to come here. A place, that by rumor, was exactly the opposite of Earth."

"What about your parents?"

Minako looked down at her feet, her fist clenched and her eyes narrowed, "I doubt they noticed I left."

Selena was surprised by her response, "How can they not notice when their daughter goes missing?"

"They never paid attention to us kids, never fed us or bathed us. They were always to stoned to care. We took care of ourselves. I was youngest, and a burden to my other siblings, so I left."

"But won't your siblings notice?"

"Yeah, but they'll get over it. All of us got kinda numb to pain after a while. When your own brothers and sisters die so often, it kinda stops hurting. My mother gave birth to about sixteen kids, only nine are left, including me. And six of them have grown up or moved out anyway. The last two, the two I left behind, have taken after our parents and are drunk most of the time. My twin brothers, they're only ten."

"Are you okay with it?"

Minako's eyes moved from her feet to Selena, "I was for a while, it was how things always had been. But once I decided I needed a change and left, I learned that there was nothing okay with the way we grew up. But in a place like Earth everyone is concerned with their own problems and nothing gets solved."

"And there's no way to help the earth?" Selena asked sadly.

"No. The earth is poisoned forever."

Selena looked down sadly, "Oh." She could feel tears coming on, but held them back. How was Endymion supposed to grow up in a world like that?

Suddenly Minako smiled, "Don't worry. Endymion will be okay."

"How do you know that?" Selena asked, nit bothering to wonder how Minako had known what she was thinking.

"Because, he is still completely pure even though he has reached the age where most become vile, which means he will stay pure."

"But-"

"Trust me." And amazingly, Selena did.