Queen Beryl angrily tapped the arm of her stone throne as an image of a girl with silver armor and a glowing sword appeared before her.

"You are certain that this is the Moon Princess?" she demanded.

Zoisite bowed as he answered, his most recent failure had left him on even shakier ground with Beryl. "There is no doubt, your majesty."

The image shifted and showed the glowing crescent moon which had appeared on Illyana's forehead when she gripped the rainbow crystal.

"Yes. You are right. It is her," Beryl said as she leaned back in the throne, her voice becoming calmer. "Still…"

She examined Illyana's features closely, from the incomplete armor covering her left arm to the look in her eyes.

"She has clearly not fully awakened yet, but something is different about her. That sword, that look on her face, they don't belong."

'Is this your doing, Queen Serenity?' she wondered. 'Did you plan on turning your darling daughter into a warrior in one last attempt to thwart my plans?'

"Zoisite!"

Zoisite quickly bowed again. "Yes, my queen?"

"The princess is now your primary target. You are to take her life immediately. Everything else is secondary."

"It will be done, your majesty," Zoisite declared, vanishing in a cloud of flower petals.

Beryl lifted the arm which had been on the arm of her throne and rubbed her chin in thought.

"Kunzite," she called out, the undertone of rage which had been barely concealed when she had spoken to Zoisite vanishing.

The greatest of the Shittenu stepped out of the shadows and into the spot where Zoisite had stood. "My how I serve you, Queen Beryl?"

"You must find out all you can about the Moon Princess."

"I am to aid Zoisite?"

"No." Beryl looked at the image of Illyana again. "This foe is far beyond his capabilities. When she destroys him, we will learn more about her power."

Kunzite could not fight back the gulp which rose in his throat and took an involuntary step back. "You would sacrifice Zoisite?"

"He has failed me too many times. Let his last failure at least prove useful for something. You will prepare our true attack on the princess and her guardians.

She focused on Illyana's eyes. Even in hologram form, Illyana's glare sent a shiver down her spine.

"You will discover who she has already fought to make her this way. And if they still live, you will bring them to me. I will know everything there is to know about the princess before I destroy her."


Amy was waiting with Luna and Artemis in the lobby of JFK Airport when Mina, Rei, and Lita finally landed back in New York.

"How was your flight?"

"Long," Mina answered.

'At least you were able to sleep," Lita complained. "I had no leg-room and couldn't get comfortable the whole time. I swear, I'm gonna go straight to Xavier's and wring Illyana's neck for abandoning us halfway around the world."

"About that…" Amy said.

"What is it?"

"She never returned to the school."


Charles Xavier rubbed his forehead as the Sailor Guardians entered his office again. The situation and his lack of control over it was giving him one of the worst headaches he'd ever had when not pushing his telepathic powers.

"I understand time was of the essence, but you should still have spoken to me first. I would have dispatched the X-Men to help and bring everyone back."

To his surprise, none of his guests appeared apologetic. They were as determined as ever.

"Where is she?" Mina demanded.

Xavier sighed. "Illyana … doesn't just teleport through space. She moves through time as well. And her control over that aspect of her power is … lacking."

The guardians' angry expressions turned to concern as they looked at each other.

"So she's … lost in time?" Amy asked.

Xavier nodded. "The farther she travels, the worse her control over when she arrives is. You were quite fortunate that you arrived in Tokyo when you needed to and not a year in the past or future."

Mina had to sit down. "We … we didn't know."

"I guess … she had a reason for not teleporting us back with her," Lita observed.

"Do you have any idea when she'll be coming back?" Mina asked.

Xavier looked down in thought. "Going by past experience, I would expect her to arrive about one to two weeks after she intended to. If she overshot her arrival by an especially long amount of time she will try again, and she will have more control the second time since she will be only moving through time and not space. She seems to just accept the lost time if it is less than two weeks."

Mina scowled. "We'd better hope the enemy doesn't learn about this. Otherwise they could lie in wait and attack the moment she reappears, before she or any of you have a chance to defend yourselves."

"So, I take it my school is now in danger?"

Mina nodded. "I'm afraid so. I'm sorry."

Xavier stood up. "I knew this would happen sooner or later after your first visit. I'll have to tell the X-Men and the New Mutants everything. I'd have preferred to do this when Illyana was here, but it does not seem that I have any choice."

"Wait," Mina said. "Can you tell us what happened to Illyana a year ago?"

Xavier stopped. "Kitty should not have told you about that. It wasn't her place."

"Look, Kitty seems to think that Illyana hit me because she was angry at us for not being there to protect her a year ago, but she's wrong."

Xavier raised his head in surprise and looked at her. The other guardians also reacted with surprise.

"Unlike my comrades, my powers are based on the heart instead of an element. I'm an empath."

"You could sense her emotions, when I cannot even read her thoughts?"

"Yes. That's part of what made me such a good detective when I was Sailor V. If Illyana was as angry as she pretended to be, I'd have seen that punch coming and been able to avoid it. She was feeling a lot of things, but anger wasn't one of them."

"Do you all have abilities like this which you can use when you are not transformed?"

"I have certain abilities as a Shinto priestess," Rei said.

"I don't know if it counts, but I've always been much stronger than I should be given my size and weight," Lita said.

"I also don't know if it counts, but I've been told my mind functions more like a computer than like other people's," Amy said.

"Fascinating," Xavier said. "The four of you may actually be mutants like Illyana."

"Don't change the subject," Mina said. "Are you going to tell us what happened a year ago, or not?"

Xavier grimaced and shook his head.

"You can't, or won't?"

"Both," he answered. "The only one who knows exactly what happened is Illyana herself. And she's never even told her brother or Kitty."


Zoisite growled in frustration as he attempted to use the dark crystal to reveal the princess' location.

"How is this possible? It's like she doesn't exist on Earth!"

Nothing he tried seemed to work. The dark crystal should have revealed the location of the rainbow crystal Illyana had taken from him, but Jiji's crystal seemed to have vanished entirely. The Sailor Guardians' cats had developed technologies that made the girls difficult to track, but he could always narrow their location down to a certain area. With the princess, even that was proving impossible.

"Did she destroy the rainbow crystal?" he wondered. 'She couldn't have. They need the Silver Crystal more than we do.'

He took out the two rainbow crystals he had succeeded in obtaining. With Beryl's displeasure at his failures, he would be forced to battle not only the princess but all four guardians at the same time. His only hope would be to be able to harness the power of these fragments of the Silver Crystal.

Zoisite's attempts to track down the princess through facial recognition or by using the unique energy signature her sword was found to give off had proven just as unsuccessful.

"Damn it!"

He put the dark and rainbow crystals away and summoned an image of Greg.

"If I can't find her, I'll have to wait for her to show herself,' he thought. 'She first appeared when I went after this boy and his rainbow crystal. There may be a connection there. It's all I can do.'


Rahne had a dazed look in her eyes as she opened the door to her room.

The last day had been one of the most enjoyable she'd had in a while. After months of failure, she'd finally begun to feel comfortable using the computers to do her schoolwork. She'd scored the winning basket in the New Mutants' basketball game despite being so much shorter than Sam. She'd gotten farther in writing her story. And Dani's recovery was progressing nicely.

What the professor had just told them had completely shattered her good mood.

Rahne sat at her desk and looked at the pages of lined paper she'd poured so much of her heart and soul into the last few weeks, hours spent with a pencil in hand each night telling the story of the beautiful Princess Alystraea and her struggles against the Silver Sorceress.

'Why did it have to be her?'

Part of Rahne's good mood the past day had been the fact that Illyana was gone. She did not have to interact with or look at the sorceress.

The professor had just told them about the four girls who had been coming to the mansion and their relationship to Illyana. And so Rahne learned that as she was writing her fantasy of being a fairy-tale princess who would defeat the evil sorceress, the equivalent of a group of fairy godmothers – complete with talking animals - had come to reveal that the real princess of a lost kingdom was the evil sorceress all along.

Rahne screamed and began to cry as she ripped the first page of her story in half.

'It's not fair! She's a witch! She consorts with demons and comes from hell! She's pure evil! So why is it her?'


Lita and Rei went straight to bed as soon as they got back to their apartment. Between their jet-lag and spending most of the day at Xavier's they were exhausted.

Amy did not join them. She alone of the group had family in the area, and while she spent a lot of time with her teammates, she slept in her own apartment so that he parents would not worry about her.

This left Mina all alone with her thoughts.

"What's wrong?" Artemis asked.

"When we were helping Xavier explain the situation, I could sense how Illyana's classmates, the New Mutants, were feeling about her. Only the one in the wheelchair, Dani, seems to like her at all."

"Given how she's treated you it's not surprising that she doesn't have many friends."

"I asked Dani about that, and she said that Illyana's always been nice to them. It's only with us that she's been acting this way. She said that their problem with her is just because she's a sorceress. She's been trying to make friends, but they fear and hate her too much to let her, especially that redhead. There are people I've put away for life who don't hate me as much as she hates Illyana."

"That doesn't make any sense. Why would Illyana deliberately antagonize you if she needs more friends and is nice to people who hate her?"

"I wish I knew. Knowing what people are feeling doesn't always mean I know what they're thinking, and with Illyana, I can't understand her at all."


A pair of newcomers sat in the kitchen of the Xavier's mansion and talked excitedly. Douglas Ramsay had been summoned by the New Mutants when a meteor which turned out to be an alien life-form landed near the mansion. In an instant his life had changed, he now knew that he was a mutant with the power to understand and speak any language, and he was hanging out with a shape-shifting alien who was made of organic circuitry rather than flesh and blood named Warlock, carrying out a conversation entirely in binary code.

They stopped talking as a disk of light appeared near the refrigerator. As the disk disappeared, it revealed a girl with blonde hair who Doug had met before through Kitty.

Illyana gaped at the unexpected sight of Doug and a misshapen alien in the kitchen.

"Doug? And what is that?"

"This is Warlock. He and I are on the New Mutants now."

"Wait, what?" Illyana realized that Doug was wearing a yellow and black New Mutants uniform. "How long was I gone?"

"I think about ten days."

"Just great. It seems I missed quite a lot."

"Yeah. It was crazy when Warlock arrived."

Warlock finally spoke up. "Self has observed that 'crazy' seems to be the normal state of affairs in this school."

"Yeah. Crazy like everyone worrying about a runaway princess,"

Illyana buried her face in her palm. "Ah, spit and hades."

"Everyone knows now, the New Mutants included."

"Don't call me a 'princess' again," she warned. "I'm in a bad enough mood as it is."

"Um, ok," Doug stammered, shocked by the intensity of her voice and glare.

"There you are."

They turned to see Xavier standing in the kitchen doorway.

"Illyana, we need to talk."

Illyana gave Doug and Warlock one last look before following Xavier into the hall.

"You didn't have to tell everyone," she complained.

"I'm afraid I did. They deserved to know why you had disappeared for so long, and now that this Dark Kingdom is threatening us, they needed to understand the danger we are in. I will not put your hurt feelings above the safety and well-being of all my other students."

"And you're not off the hook yourself," he continued. "You left the school grounds without permission after I had grounded you, and you used your power to travel halfway across the world despite knowing you have no control over such a large distance."

"What was I supposed to do?" Illyana demanded. "Rei's grandfather was being attacked at that moment."

"You should have informed me of what was happening! Maybe there wasn't enough time to gather the X-Men to help this time, but I could have at least sent the Blackbird to bring you home if I had known where you were going!"

Illyana stopped and looked down.

"I didn't think of that."

"No, you didn't."

Xavier sighed. "We received a phone call the other day from Greg, that boy you and Kitty saved. He said that he needs your help and asked that you come meet him in the city as soon as you returned."

"I thought I was still grounded."

"You are. But you've already proven I can't keep you locked in your room, and exceptions can be made if it's to help another person."

"Did he say why he wants me to meet him instead of just coming here himself?"

"He said if you helped him, he'd explain how you fit into this conflict, and he didn't think you'd want anyone else around for that."

Illyana pursed her lips. "Well, he's right about that."

"So, what will you do?"


Greg gulped as he watched Illyana get off the bus across the street. He raised his arm to get his attention, and when he had it, he turned and walked into a nearby alley.

He stopped at the alley's dead end and turned to face her.

"You didn't teleport," he observed.

"I'm trying to avoid having to do that after my latest mishap. What, you didn't see that coming?"

"Yes and no."

Illyana's nostrils flared in anger. "I'm not in the mood for cryptic statements. You said you'd explain what's going on, so talk. Why did you tell the guardians I was this Moon Princess?"

"Because you are, no matter much you deny it. And because of that, you're the only one who can save the world."

"I'm only involved in this because you told those girls I was the person they were looking for. They seemed to be getting along just fine without me."

"That was against Beryl's minions. Against the mastermind and the force behind her, they can't win without your help. And you can't win without theirs."

Greg's voice cracked as he continued. "Please. This is the only thing I can do … to save Amy. I can't fight like you can. And I can't even predict the future as well as I used to."

"Huh? What do you mean?" Illyana asked.

"Before, I always saw one future – the future. But ever since I saw you in the park, my visions have gone crazy. I'm now seeing many different possible futures, and I have no way of knowing which is the real future anymore. There's something about you that makes the future uncertain, like your very existence has an effect on time itself."

"That's why I asked you to help me," he explained. "This power was bad enough before, but now it's driving me crazy. I know you have a spell that can take a person's powers away. I want you to cast it on me and free me from this curse."

Illyana was taken aback. "Any spell I cast would be dangerous."

"It'll be fine," he assured her.

"I don't-I don't know…"

"If you were in my shoes, and someone had the power to give you a normal life, you'd seize it in an instant."

"I would," she agreed. "All right. Just stand still."

Illyana held out her hand towards Greg. There were no words, no fancy gestures, and no glow.

"There. It's done," she said after three seconds, lowering her arm.

Greg squinted as he attempted to glimpse the future again.

"I can't see anything! You did it! I'm free!"

To her surprise, he began backing away from her. "And … I'm sorry about what comes next."

Illyana barely had time to open her mouth before she was seized in a dome of black energy. She turned her head to see Zoisite descending to the ground behind her, accompanied by what looked like a blue woman with dead white eyes and a row of razor-sharp teeth, another youma.

"I knew I'd find you if I watched the boy closely," the Shitennou said with a malicious grin. "I don't know where you've been hiding the last ten days, but you should have stayed there!"

He held out both arms towards the energy dome. "That mistake will cost you your life."

The dome contracted, the sides moving in to press against Illyana's body and hold her limbs in place. Electrical energy sparked along its surface, sending powerful shocks through her body.

"Illyana!"

Zoisite looked at the entrance to the alleyway, where the four Sailor Guardians had appeared.

"We didn't make it in time," Sailor Jupiter said.

Zoisite nodded at the monster he had brought with him. "Biel, deal with them."

Greg through himself to the ground behind the guardians as the blue youma leapt at them. Sailor Venus held out her arm and pointed at the creature.

"Crescent Beam!"

A beam of golden energy shot out of her finger and struck the youma head-on. The creature screamed as the Sailor Guardians' leader continued her attack, her arm unwavering as her beam drove the monster further back, until with a final yell, it disintegrated.

The distraction dealt with, Sailor Venus took out her crescent compact and prepared to throw it at Zoisite.

"Wait!" Greg yelled.

The guardians all looked at him, and he continued: "You can't interfere now!"

Sailor Venus looked back at the dome where Illyana was trapped. It was pulsating with even more energy now, all of which was being shot through Illyana's body. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was wide open, with there not being enough time between breaths for her to either scream or take a proper breath.

"Our entire mission is to protect her - we can't let her die!"

"Trust me!" Greg insisted. "I didn't call you here to save her, but to witness."

"Witness what?" Sailor Mercury asked.

Sailor Mars took a deep breath. "He may be right. I'm sensing … something."


Far away, in the Dark Kingdom, Queen Beryl watched the fight through her crystal ball with deep confusion.

"At this rate Zoisite will actually succeed. What are those Sailor Guardians waiting for? Are they really just going to let her die? Or do they know something we don't?"


Zoisite laughed maniacally as he increased the force of his attack even further.

"I had hoped you'd scream or beg for mercy before the end, but it's too late for that now. By now, every nerve in your body must be screaming out in agony. That's your body's final desperate bid to stay alive."

Sailor Jupiter screamed "that's enough!" and stepped forward.

"I don't care what you think you saw," she snapped at Greg. "There's no way we can let this go on! Supreme thu-"

Illyana's eyes shot open, and the energy dome exploded, cutting off Sailor Jupiter's attack before she could launch it. The shockwave knocked the guardians and Greg over and threw Zoisite into the wall behind him, cracking it.

The spot where the dome had been was covered in smoke, blocking their view.

"What just … happened?" Sailor Jupiter asked. "Hey Rei, what's wrong?"

Sailor Mars was trembling and hyperventilating from fear. None of her friends had ever seen her this panicked before.

"There's no way," she whispered. "This can't be possible."

"What?"

The smoke was beginning to clear, and they could make out a dark figure standing within it.

"Impossible!" Zoisite exclaimed. "There's no way she could have survived that!"

"That doesn't look like Illyana," Sailor Jupiter said. "It's too big. Amy?"

Sailor Mercury summoned her visor and began to analyze the figure in front of them. "I don't know. None of the readings I'm getting from her make any sense. And the energy readings are off the scale!"

Sailor Venus clutched her heart. "It's her. But…"

Zoisite rose to his feet and unleashed a blast at the figure. The blast cleared the smoke away, revealing what stood before them.

The figure wore the same clothes as Illyana, but they were torn her body's growth in size and changes in shape. Her skin had turned a deep shade of red similar to Jiji's. Her eyes were pupilless, glowing orange, and two large fangs stuck out of her mouth. A pair of large horns stuck out from under her bangs, which had become unkempt. A long, muscular tail stuck out from the back of her pants, and her legs below the knees had turned into goat legs, complete with split hooves instead of toes.

The guardians were speechless. They could only stare as the creature which used to be Illyana, turned to glare at Zoisite.

"What is this trick? Are you trying to frighten me? Well, it won't work!" he declared, even as his trembling voice betrayed his terror.

Illyana only hissed in response.

"Say something, damn you!" Zoisite screamed, launching a two-handed blast at her. The blast struck her head on, but she stepped forward, completely unfazed.

"That … that doesn't look like any princess I've ever heard of," Sailor Jupiter said at last.

"The darkness I sensed in her," Sailor Mars said between labored breaths. "She's … she's pure evil … so much worse than any of the Dark Kingdom's servants."

"What do we do?" Sailor Jupiter asked their leader. "Do we fight her?"

Sailor Venus shook her head. "Don't … don't make me-"

Every attack in Zoisite's arsenal proved useless against Illyana in her new state, forcing him to use his last resort.

He took out the two rainbow crystals he had brought with him. "Maybe this will-"

Illyana waved her hand, and the crystals flew out of his grasp. Zoisite's flower petals surrounded him as he prepared to escape, but with a flick of her hand Illyana made the petals disappear, preventing his disappearing act.

"I can't believe what I'm seeing," Sailor Jupiter said.

Zoisite backed away, terrified for his life.

"What are you?"

Illyana raised her hand into the air, and an incredible force pushed Zoisite to his knees.

"Please, have mercy," he begged.

Illyana bent her fingers, and Zoisite's face was forced into the pavement in front of her. She lifted her leg and placed her hooved foot on the back of his head.

Zoisite screamed into the pavement, helpless as she began to press down on his head.

"She's gonna crush his head like a walnut!" Sailor Jupiter yelled.

"We've got to stop this," Sailor Mercury said. "Even Zoisite doesn't deserve this."

"Damn it," Sailor Venus said. "We have no choice but to stop her before she attacks us. And the only attack we've got that's powerful enough is the Sailor Planet Attack."

'But … that would almost certainly kill her," Sailor Mercury said.

Sailor Venus looked at Zoisite, whose screams were growing louder and more desperate as cracks began to form in the ground beneath his head. She closed her eyes for a moment to steel herself for what had to be done.

"I know."