"Serenity Tsukino, get your butt in here! I called twenty minutes ago!"

Serena rolled her eyes. At the age of thirteen, she already knew she was different from everyone else, including her parents. Couldn't they understand she needed to meditate?

Slowly Serena stood up, facing the setting sun, she turned to walk back down the grassy hill to where her family's home sat under the shadow of apple trees. There were two buildings actually, the guesthouse and the family's home. She walked in to her actual home to see her mother, father, and drooling little brother saying grace over the steaming food set in front of them.

She scooted into her seat and sighed. She'd miss the Earthrise again for three nights striaght, and it was at that time in which she could hear the best, that time and the time of the Earthset. She'd just have to wake up at dawn to hear.

"Serena?"

"Hmm?" Serena said. She absently ate bite after bite.

"When did you start to like broccoli?"

Serena looked at her fork for the first time, and at the minituare green tree stuck on it's end. She made a face and pulled the broccoli off the end.

"Never!"

================================

Serena pulled her cloak around her shoulders tighter and trudged through the grass topped with fresh dew. She came to the top of the dark hill and sat down, not watching the place in which the sun would rise, but watching the place where the Earth would set. She cleared her mind and waited.

Slowly whispers reached her ears, growing louder and louder until she could hear them like her own thoughts. Voices of the Moon telling her the secrets of time.

"There is a place among the wildflowers,

Where hopes and dreams have blooms,

Where night and day become only one,

And summer thunder booms.

Where you can find your inner self,

And your own magic too,

Identities can be revealed,

And gold becomes silver true,"

The new rhyme was swept away by the wind and replaced by one she knew by memory. But Serena didn't notice, for her mind was stuck on those eight lines she'd never heard before. Why did they seem so important?

The Earthset fully and the voices disappeared again leaving her world seeming too quiet.

She faced the golden morning and started back down the hill so that her parents wouldn't miss her. But her body faltered, and she stumbled face first into the grass, her legs crippling beneath her. She fell into the grass, the fresh dew coating her face making her unbearably cold. But she barely noticed.

Because she felt a pain sharp between her ribs, like a knife pushing into heart. It was a harsh pain like she'd neer felt before in her life. Tears fell down her cheeks that she didn't know she'd been crying. She curled up in a ball, trying to dull the pain, but to no avail. I'm dying, she thought. I'm dying all alone. She laid there weeping for what seemed like hours, screaming every so often in anguish. Until her father found her and scooped her up into his arms. He rushed her into the house, but they couldn't find the source of her pain.

"It's not my pain," Serena said wincing. "Something bad has happened. Something terrible."

The pain suddenly lessened, then disappeared. A tremendous weight lifted off her and a light feeling filled her body. She felt like her entire body was being lifted up into the air. And the tingling feeling she got when she formed the silver orbs filled not only her hands but every inch of her skin. She glowed silver for seconds, escpecially her forehead.

"Serena!" Raye called appearing in the doorway. She'd had a premonition about it. Mina, Lita, and Amy filed in behind her. They felt Serena change more than anyone else did. Finally the silver disappeared and Serena was crying.

"It's horrible!" she said. "The Queen is dead! I saw her. I saw her."

Her friends surrounded her and hugged her. They sat around her on the bed and started crying. They knew what Serena was speaking of was true.

"What are you talking about Serena?" Her mother yelled panicking.

"It is true," Raye said a glass tear falling from her eyelashes to her cheek.

"The Queen cannot be dead!"

The five girls ignored the arguments and merely cried at the loss of a beautiful soul, and the start of a new and terrible thing.

A neighbor appeared in the doorway bawling her eyes out.

"The news has spread. The Queen has been murdered."
The Tsukinos started dropping their own tears, but they could not take their eyes off their sobbing daughter who'd shone silver and known the exact moment of the Queen's death. Was it sorcery? Or was it magic of the Moon? What to believe they could not decide.

"Let us go to the temple and pray," Serena's father said. The entire household trooped crying to the temple to pray for the spirit of the Queen. Church bells from the Moonrisen churches rang out, tolling their sadness out over the village. The only movement in the village was of that to go to the church of their choice. The sacred temple, or the church that bore crescent moon upon it's steeple.

They came into the full temple and fell upon the floor to pray. Raye headed towards the front because she was the Priestess. Serena couldn't stand the sound of weeping, and crying, but it was not only that sound that was making her cry harder and harder. It was the screams echoing through her ears. The cries of anguish that no one heard. The Queen died alone, and Serena had felt her despair as she did so.

And the voices. The voices of the Moon were not waiting for the Earth to rise or set, they were speaking to her now. Telling her everything she would need to know, but somehow she couldn't proccess it. She couldn't remember what exactly she was supposed to do, though she knew there was something to be done.

That pain had been too much. But not only physically, but emotionally. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. Her mind ached with the memory.

"Serena!" her mother said gripping her shoulders.

Serena snapped out of her memories and realized the scream erupting from her throat. She closed her lips immediately and pushed herself back up into the kneeling position she'd been in before falling down and curling up in a ball again.

Her friends looked at her with sympathy. Something had happened to her. Something to do with the Queen's murder.

What was the connection?

Author's Note: Okay, next chapter this gets serious. It's serious now, but no more year skipping after the next chapter. I wish more people would review because I'm seriously afraid that no one likes this story! Do you? Really? I mean I promise it'll be good! And Darien will make his entrance. I guess it might be a boring story. Sorry. Just review anyway. For moral support. I need it.

Until the next time,

Ai No Senshi