Pitre
I was born with no name.
My mother and I lived among a cadre of performers that sailed around a myriad of universes. We had no real home, but I was unbothered by that. The only thing that mattered was the warmth of my mother's touch and to me, that was better than any place we could call our own.
She cradled me even when I was too old to be rocked in her arms. She, like me, was indentured, promised to a life of searching, and it grated her. I can remember the hollowness of her eyes against the beating green of her irises, and around them were swaths of black and blue that had become so deep it was as if they had always been there painted on her face.
As a child I clung to her. I found comfort in her and she found her only source of joy in me. We lived in the shadows of a cavernous tent that billowed in whatever ethereal wind that found it. Our home was one that roved and sucked the life out of nameless planets that found themselves unfortunate enough to fall into our crosshairs.
Each new place brought out the insipid nature of those living in the tent. There was no kindness among us and with every passing year our seemingly endless drift among the dimensions blurred together, a dark watercolor bleeding in every direction. It was why I cherished my mother so: her soft touch, the gentle tambor of her voice, her calming presence amid the beating drum of insanity.
When I was six, they finally gave me a name. Well, they gave me a job, I should say, and the nickname followed. I was a clown, a shell awaiting a higher purpose, who spent my days performing acts of oddity and delight. My audience? I was unsure. But it seemed for the rest of my life I would play a part of this world, one I somehow knew was meant to bring joy, but ultimately only brought people pain.
And the other clowns? They were the only ones who found pleasure in my existence, but all of it was derived from my pain. They loved to laugh at me, in spite of me, and poke and prod at my small frame.
Rivers of tears created roads on my face that told my story better than words could ever capture. Their raucous laughter pelted me. Little clown, they called me. Petit pitre. It stuck, rippling through us, floating up from the peasantly life the clowns endured, up to the colorful favorites who lived among us and above us at the same time, all the way to the witch. The old witch. The old hag.
Her eyes bugged and twitched against her grey skin. Her drab, purple robes hung from her bony body that had contorted under the crushing years of agony she subjected us to. And, equipped with my new name as a weapon, her cruelty only grew. I remember the first day pitre rolled off the witch's tongue, an insult meant to stifle a young child's sense of self, as if all I would ever be was a joke.
We traveled aimlessly. What we were searching for, I did not know. That is, until a great solar eclipse burst off the Milky Way's sun, giving us an opportunity to travel to that dimension and lay claim to something the witch wanted so badly. By the time Earth loomed below us, I was already a young man. I was small for my age-something in which the others enjoyed all too well. But after years of enduring it, their barbs felt less like bullets and more like hard drops of rain. Bothersome, yes, but harmless if you let yourself succumb to it.
The fervor of our arrival in Tokyo was palpable. Everyone could hardly contain their excitement. The witch had come to us and told us of our mission-of our purpose-and we drank it in. If we succeeded, it would restore us to a glory many of us had never known. Even I, the smallest of the clowns and undoubtedly the weakest, felt something in me stir.
The witch's face was twisted and weathered, her fingers a bundle of bones sucked of their youth. She usually spoke only to her three favorites, forcing the rest of us into a silent servitude. My mother told me that on Earth, we would be asked to perform our hardest task yet. We were bound here by an evil curse, she told me, one that forced us to live in the tent until the end of time.
But if we found the right person to break the curse, we could be free.
I didn't understand at the time the power of the curse or the power of the witch. Their chokehold had kept us isolated from any meaningful existence for many years. I myself had been born into it all and knew nothing different. The promise of something better—of something new—kept our spirits high, even as our comrades were plucked by the favorites to do their bidding.
One by one, the clowns left and never came back, and each time another one of us was summoned, a favorite would appear looking increasingly annoyed. And as more of us were sucked into what I assumed was the witch's plan to break the curse, the favorites' expressions soured and turned desperate.
My mother finally was called to go, and while I was no longer a boy, the desire to wrap myself around her leg like a child burned in me. It was the blue-haired favorite, the one whose shrill voice filled the room with a deafening scrape.
I had always known somewhere in my heart what they were asking us to do. We were vessels, spirits bound for self-sacrifice. If she did not win—which looked unlikely—she would die and float along in the universe until she found her final resting spot. Without me.
So I waited and I waited and I waited.
She did not return, and neither did the blue-haired favorite. The two others never showed their faces either. Instead, four girls appeared. They looked young like me and as they embedded themselves in our tent, I wondered if perhaps it would be possible for me to have a friend. They enjoyed playing games to pass the time and their childlike demeanor gave me hope that things might change. But I was a fool to believe that. They wanted what the others had already picked clean to the bone—clowns to do their bidding, weak souls they could bend into monsters of their making.
Then came the darkness. A brilliant light ripped across the sky, illuminating the folds of the tent with a radiance I had never seen, but as soon as it had come, it was gone. We were sucked through to another dimension, the pressure bending the tent and us with a force that was oppressive and horrific. My bones cracked and my body caved. Was this death? Around me, the tent crashed and bodies went flinging.
Like wooden marionettes, we clamored, our frail pieces shattering underneath the destruction of the only life we had known. I looked up and the tent had ripped open, revealing a brilliant gold mirror against the shining backdrop of endless sky. The last thing I saw was a silhouette in the light of a warrior with glittering blonde hair, an aura around her that twisted and bent into every direction.
Before I died, I could feel her power and I could sense the witch was slipping along with me.
I awoke in the River of Souls, unsure of how I had managed to make it there. Everyone next to me was drifting and I looked down to see that I was too. I swam against the current, but it didn't seem to matter. It wasn't until I found her that I really understood.
She was pale and her flaming red hair blazed against her skin. Perhaps it was fate that drew us together, or perhaps it was something much more contrived, but whatever it was, she and I met in the River and she told me her story. She had been under the servitude of an evil being named Metalia that took hold of her covetous desires. Metalia was revealed to be a much more malevolent creature-one that wanted glory and absolute control. One that would stop at nothing to shroud the world in darkness.
So she and her subjects followed Metalia into the storm, chasing a seemingly intangible power from dimension to dimension until they were bested by Sailor Moon, a guardian of the Milky Way that had incredible power only rivaled by her beauty.
It sat with me for days. Had we not been traipsing across different dimensions chasing darkness as well? Had we not been bested by a beautiful woman in the Milky Way? Was she the one that expelled us from our lives?
I couldn't stop. Every single soul I encountered in the River, I asked. What do you know of Sailor Moon? Of Metalia? Rarely did they have an answer. Some feigned interest in my questions, others asked me to elaborate, but all had nothing of much use to me. Then suddenly one day the River was churning uncharacteristically as if it were disturbed by something that poisoned its waters.
It was the witch.
I had been afraid of her for my entire life, taught not to look in her direction if I could help it. Here, though, I was not bound by the hallmarks of the tent. I was not a clown. I was a spirit drifting to my ultimate end, one burning with questions and demanding answers.
If she remembered me, she did not show it. Her eyes were glazed over with defeat, her leathered skin a deeper shade of grey than it had been in the tent. She was rambling incoherently—something about her beauty slipping away—and I told her, quite frankly and surprisingly, that she had never been beautiful. I braced myself for her indignation but was greeted with a pitiful laugh.
The things she had done, she said, made her this way. But if I only knew her before I would understand. Nehelenia, she called herself. A queen, she claimed. Brought down by Sailor Moon and tricked by Chaos to wage a war of his making instead of living her life content with fleeting youth.
Sailor Moon. I had to know more.
Nehelenia sputtered on about golden mirrors and dreams and together we swam. The farther in the River we went, the more she talked. We were not always a sad, twisted circus. We were once sent to entertain and bring joy to the people of the universe, but Nehelenia's greed and desire to be young got in our way. And in the end, it was she who put us above Tokyo to feed on the people of Earth.
Nehelenia had brought us to the edge but it was Sailor Moon who signed our death warrants.
Sailor Moon, Nehelenia seethed. If it wasn't for her, we could've lived. The clowns poised with defending the circus met their end at her hand. She admitted she was foolish to try and overtake her, but in the end she wanted a better life for herself and in turn for us.
I festered. All of my life I had been seen as weak, so much so they never sent me out to attack. Instead they had sacrificed my mother and the other clowns as part of their sick power play. I wanted to scream at Nehelenia and to bring my hands around Sailor Moon's throat, but alas, I was dead.
She could see the hatred in my eyes. As we inched ever closer to the Gates of Hell, Nehelenia was spouting off even more. She had sold her soul for beauty and youth and gave herself over to the dark power of Chaos. She said it still lived and was fueling another powerful foe who was determined to defeat Sailor Moon once and for all.
Each passing minute I dreamed—no, I ached—to aid in her fight. Nehelenia was well on her way to meet her maker while Sailor Moon still lived, unperturbed by the fact she had demonized an already slighted motley crew. She was the one who had killed my mother—she was the one who killed me. We were faceless monsters not even worthy of redemption.
I wanted to crush her so badly, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, but I was running out of time. I pulled together knowledge from anyone who would listen. Souls from dimensions spilled into the River, some good of heart and others not. Determined, I asked questions about magic, about the overwhelming pull of darkness, about transforming what little power I had as a clown into something much stronger.
And bit by bit, I practiced every piece of advice I was given. A kernel of small knowledge—of magic, of power, of self sacrifice—was a step in the right direction. But my magic was simply not strong enough to do anything other than push myself away from the Gates of Hell. I toiled away as the River flowed around me, praying to any deity who would listen, and focusing my skills on passing souls. My efforts were not in vain. Word had spread of the information I sought, and as if blessed by a higher power, Chaos found me.
He had no form but I could feel him within me. He swirled in my chest and filled my head with these ideas and abilities. I bowed to him and invited the darkness to consume every last part of me. As Chaos took over my bodiless soul, I was no longer a sad clown dangling from the puppet strings of a cruel master. I was Pitre, a man who would find vengeance for his mother.
Chaos told me the limitations of magic. If I wanted to fight Sailor Moon, I had to become alive again. She had the power. The silver millennium crystal was in her hands, he told me, and it was the most powerful crystal in all dimensions. Once I had its healing powers, I could be restored.
Getting, he said, would be another task entirely. The laws of life and death would not allow me to expel myself from the River—if I could do it, all evil beings would do it—but I had to convince someone else to find the crystal and restore my body. And even then, I could only send them to a middle dimension, the very one where the River flowed. They could not reside on Earth forever. They would be neither alive or dead. I needed to choose wisely.
After a while, Chaos stopped coming to me, but it didn't matter. I had learned all I needed to know. Sailor Moon had the power to bring me back to life, and when given the opportunity, I would destroy her. As the years ticked away, I practiced channeling the darkness and formulating my plan. I didn't care if I had to lie or to steal, I would do whatever it took as she took the only thing that had ever mattered to me: my mother.
I continued to ask every soul who would stop and talk about Sailor Moon, and everytime no one knew much of anything. My fate changed the day I came across Dimande. He was defeated and bitter, and I doubt he knew it when he met me, but he was the first person I had come across since obtaining my new power who knew her.
As he spoke of her, his eyes were filled with a sad longing, the look someone has when they've lost someone they love. I could feel him. I understood him. I didn't need to ask to know that he would jump at the opportunity to see her again. He was all too willing to tell me the details of his life—sometimes unprompted—an arrogant fool who wanted his enemy to submit to him in more ways than one. All I had to do was spin an equally sympathetic tale and let my boyishness lull him into a false sense of security.
Some might say it was cruel to kick a man when he was already down, but simply by looking at Dimande I knew there was no better victim for my plot. I gave him an opportunity to see the woman he loved one more time. Not only that, I offered him the hollow promise that I would avenge his people knowing full well I would not.
I thought he was a fool.
As time ticked on, I waited for him to buckle under the weight of it. I made it difficult for him to betray her and I made it difficult for her to resist. When she finally crumbled beneath my will in the salon that day it was so much easier than I thought it would be. Restored once more, I was going to make her pay for the life I had endured.
And when it finally came time to crush them, I was going to be the one to take her, to drag her to Hell and back just to see her squirm.