Cosmic Keys to My Creations & Times

Endymion stood beneath the canopy of stars looking up at the blanket of tiny lights above, countless worlds stretching out as far as the Galaxy Cauldron at the heart of the Milky Way—the place from where all life issued forth, where all spirits retired to at the end of their cycle.

In his chest, there came the pang of something almost like regret. All except him, all except his wife, his daughter, timelessly locked into the heart of the Silver Millennium, their lives the engine that kept the nights bright with moonlight, the days warm with sunlight. In time, thousands of years from now, the light of the princesses of each planet in the solar system would dim and return to the cauldron, just as they had before, and, with life and death in her hands, so Neo Queene Serenity would take them back from the cauldron's guardian and fashion them anew, the same but different, just as had happened before when the last age had ended, when Metalia had overshadowed all.

Within this timeless structure, even gods died. At the door of space and time in an æon beyond his imaginations, a time before Kaguya Island, before Artuqa even, aged Pluto had stood watching over the order of things, his Garnet Rod in hand, the wife he had won for himself by deceit long since having returned to the cauldron alone, all of his children likewise gone—all but one.

Endymion did not know of that which occurred before the birth of his wife's mother. In his first life, when he had been young, a Prince of the Golden Kingdom that counted the whole Earth as its principality, Queene Serenity had already been on the throne of the Moon Kingdom for longer than anyone could remember. The age of the gods was a story that was passed down amongst the people of the Earth until, at last, Metalia rose, Serenity was dethroned, and he had lost his life, pulled back from the cauldron alongside his love and the spirits of her attendants by the last wish of the moon's dying monarch.

The daughter of Pluto had not died at that time. Rather she had stood before the Space-Time Door and watched in silence, unable to avert tragedy, incapable of breaking the sacred laws of the post inherited from her father.

It had been during his first lifetime that she had ascended to the role, he believed. At the time, he had been young and foolish, concerned only with courtly interests, content to hunt game with his knights, to dance joyously with his true love at the masques held by the Moon Kingdom. Whilst revelling in such happiness, he could not have conceived of a god dying of old age, of his daughter sentenced to an eternity of loneliness for the sake of the cosmos, the sanctity of the past and the future. Queene Serenity's rule had been just, but it had not always been fair.

In time, would the people of Crystal Tokyo say the same of his wife, would they say the same of him?

Now that the door stood unguarded for the first time in millennia, the first since its function had been enshrined, now that he himself had sent Pluto's daughter back into the past to protect his wife and the future she represented, would his legacy be considered just or fair?

A sad smile touched his lips as he bathed in the starlight. How could a man destined to live forever leave a legacy, he asked himself.

In the face of terrifying new foes, he had turned daughter against father, instructed her to break the commandments of a forgotten god and a woman who had given up her life so that her own daughter might live on in eternity. In the face of terrifying new foes, he had gambled on his memory of the boy he once was, and the girl who would grow into the woman he had married. Now, all he could do was hope for the best, and believe in those cherished memories of who they both once were.

Above, within that canopy of tiny lights, he watched as one by one, they began to fade into shadow.