Epilogue
There was a story that Saturn had once ruled the skies. In this place—beyond the end of the universe, beyond the haunting, disembodied voices that the people of Earth had long since become—he could remember the first time he heard the tale, the vastness of the great planet illuminating what was left of the cosmos after the fall of everything.
Standing upon the surface of Rhea, the young man ahead of him looked out upon the sky, the stars so very different from those he had known in childhood. Dressed in a simple black shirt and blue jeans, his black baseball boots worn with age, the clothes he wore seemed oddly out of place, quaint reminders of the time he had lived in, the life that had been his before the collapse of everything.
"A penny for your thoughts, young man?" he asked as he approached, the softness of his step startling the boy.
When he turned with more than a little surprise upon his face, the older man was consumed by momentary nostalgia, remembering who he had been, where he had come from—and what this young man was now about to experience.
Hesitantly, the boy smiled gently, still slightly ill-at-ease in the presence of his mentor.
"I was just thinking—" he stopped himself, trying to find the right words, "I was just thinking if there was another way."
Behind his mask, the older man regarded the child with sorrow.
"Not now," he said sadly, "not now things have progressed this far. Had not the Destroyer become involved, then perhaps things would not have necessitated your involvement, but now time is askew and we cannot turn a blind eye to this."
The boy nodded, the frustration clear on his face, and the older man thought then that if things had been different, if they weren't so constrained—yet quickly he pushed the thought to the back of his mind; all stories have an ending, just all stories must have a beginning.
If things had been different, he never would have become Saturn himself.
The boy nodded sadly, already having known the answer before he had even voiced his doubts.
"When should I leave?"
Beneath the dark armour, his mentor seemed to shrug.
"When is irrelevant. Leave when you feel you are ready, Joshua; now, tomorrow, one year from now, a decade from now—it matters not, you will still arrive at the same point in the past regardless of when you depart this place."
"I guess so," he murmured, not fully convinced.
Saturn was silent, unreadable, waiting in silence, the colossal sight of the burning planet named after him in the distant sky over his head.
Sadly, he brought his right arm up, the smooth silver of the device bound to his wrist glittering with lights upon its display. He swallowed hard, and then, at last, said the words, more than a little sadness in his voice.
"It's morphin' time!"
The light above Saturn's head seemed suddenly to burn that much brighter.
"Cronus Power!"
About him, light seemed to gather, the device upon his wrist drawing time and space in, warping it, writing the tale of the universe's history anew. In the brilliance of that illumination, young Josh McClain never saw the figure standing quietly behind the man he assumed to be his mentor, no taller than a child, no older in looks than a girl, 13 or 14 at best, the long sleeves of the charcoal jacket she wore, several sizes too large for her, hiding the soft skin of her hands completely, the countless tattoos that covered her arms, running all the way up to her shoulders.
Time shifted silently and brilliantly, and, in an instant, he was gone.
A/N: Josh McClain created by dannyrockon122 ~ u/5185539
