Part I - The Deepest Twilight
I am one of many lost souls who inhabit D-point, Beryl’s domain. Unlike the others, I am fortunate enough, cursed enough, to remember my original name. Names have power: if a person knows your name, he has power over you. The bearer of a name has power as well, for even the simplest name can bring the bearer back to himself when all seems lost. Names are remembrance, and memories...are ghosts.
My name is known to very few among the living now; I have lost track of how much time has passed. After all, there is not much present at D-point to allow for an awareness of time. Indeed, why be aware of time’s passing at all when you are one such as I? And yet I often lose track of my purpose. It comes with the territory, if you’ll excuse the pun. My sense of humor is not what it once was.
So you want to know my name. As usual, no one listens to what I’ve been saying. You’re as bad as Jadeite was. Knowledge of my name will bring you no power. I am dead, in case you haven’t noticed. In fact, I am worse than dead – I am trapped at D-point for eternity.
You don’t want power? You want to understand me? Laughable. Understand this: I am beyond all help. I am a murderer. She called me that, with her very last breath, as those ocean-blue eyes closed in the most sacred of slumbers...
You ask again. Do you really want to know? Do you really want to know the darkness that lurks in my soul, the innate evil present in this ruined entity? Very well. You will be like all the others I have chanced to meet. All comforting and patronizing at first...and then the horror, the repulsion, the loathing will spread over your face, the myriad emotions forming a direct reflection of how I view myself. You must really want to know my name.
I am the least of Endymion’s generals, not because of our original ranking, but because I killed a fellow general. It wasn’t even an accident. I murdered a man who meant more to me than my blood brother in cold blood, out of sheer spite. And so I have doubly sinned.
My name is Zoisite, third of the Shitennou. We were the Sky Kings who ruled the Earth and loved the senshi. But what is love, when men are weak? There is darkness in men’s souls...* My story is simple. As one of Prince Endymion’s generals and closest friends, I held great power and influence on Earth. Of course, I wisely spent my time reading books in private and flirting with women in public. By the time I met Ami, I had a reputation of being a lady killer who preferred shapely blondes – the more brainless, the better. Who is Ami, you ask? I’m getting there, my impatient listener.
Ami is the woman I loved, who loved me in return. Ami is the name I want to hear a thousand times, every day of every year this universe exists, and even beyond then. Ami is the pure, sweet sound that I want to roll off my tongue for eternity. Ami is the woman I sacrificed for a whore.
Surprised? You should have known better.
You see, there once was a young noblewoman named Beryl. You are acquainted with the name, I believe? Perhaps not the woman. She was sweet once upon a time. Sweet on Prince Endymion, I mean. He flirted with her a little more than was wise, and one day, he lost his own heart. But he lost it not to Beryl, but to a curious little lunar bunny who wandered down to Earth one day and entranced him.
She turned out to be Princess Serenity of the Moon Kingdom. Our Endymion never does anything by halves, as you can see. Why bother with the ladies back home when you can have an exotic Moon princess and an all-out, intergalactic war?
In the end, Queen Serenity agreed to give her precious daughter to Endymion. While the celebrations flourished, the bitterness festered in Beryl’s soul. She grew angry, sullen, and full of hatred. And all this poison was directed towards the princess, since at that point, she was still infatuated with Endymion.
So then the question arose: how to get to the most powerfully-protected princess in the universe? Through her guardians, of course. After all, Serenity was hopeless at self-defense.
And this is where Ami comes into play. You remember Ami, do you not? Ami is the senshi of Mercury, and one of Serenity’s guardians. She dwells by her side yet, in her present incarnation. The senshi were so powerful in the Silver Millennium that even Beryl and the demon who promised her Endymion and the world on a silver platter embedded with Serenity’s skull dared not challenge them.
But the Seven Shadows defeated them, you say. Of course. They were strong enough. But did you know, without us, the almighty Shitennou, Beryl would never have been able to set them free?
So how does one trap a senshi? Exploit her weaknesses, of course. Everyone has weaknesses, no matter how indomitable they seem, and the easiest frailty to prey upon is love. Each of the generals loved a senshi. It’s truly amazing how things work out like that, isn’t it? But then again, these things are fate. So Beryl got it into her scheming little head that she needed us on her side to steal Endymion back. Her plans were really quite stupid, actually. They worked because we proved stupider.
The senshi were the most famous, most beloved women (other than the two Serenitys) in the universe. There was no way that they would be allowed to marry the lowly little upstarts from Earth who thought they were on par with planetary royalty. Even Endymion was not numbered among them; Earth was known as “that dinky little sphere with the audacity not to be a part of the Silver Alliance.”
At the time of Serenity and Endymion’s engagement, Ami was actually promised to a prince who had managed to unite all the clans of the Asteroid Belt under his banner. Admittedly, this was quite a feat, since the clans had spent the last eleven centuries trying to slaughter each other into oblivion.
Ami and I promised each other we would marry, somehow, someday, that she would break her engagement and that we would live happily every after. It was complete idiocy. Bad enough that Queen Serenity had allowed her daughter to marry the Prince of Earth. Her word was law: she was the focal point of the Silver Alliance, and she could marry her daughter to who she liked. But the senshi? It could never be allowed to happen.
Beryl’s sneaky little spies were all over the Moon Palace at this point, and they overheard an argument between Ami and me. Do you know how often this memory has returned to haunt me? Hundreds of times. Thousands. Billions. An infinite number of times. You will see why...
I had been in a foul mood for a week, ever since I had proposed to her and she had refused me. Looking back, I suppose she had good reason: what a bad husband I would have made. Actually, you could say the timing was not quite right, then, for a marriage. Probably because I murdered her within the month.
I looked at her coldly. “I don’t believe you. You were smiling at him, laughing with him...and you say you won’t marry him?”
Her eyes blazed. How I loved the shape of those eyes, their clear ocean blue, the long black lashes. “What would you have me do? Insult him for no good reason? He’s a good man. It’s not his fault we cannot be together.”
“He’s a good man,” I mimicked, rolling my eyes.
“Stop it!” she ordered.
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you playing princess today, then? Are there some days you can be my lover, and other days you cannot?”
She was absolutely furious now. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Zoi.”
Through gritted teeth, I spat, “I know exactly what I’m saying. You were flirting with him.”
“I wasn’t flirting. I was being diplomatic, which is something you’re doing very poorly at the moment.”
“Are we on to criticizing my diplomacy now? I’m not tactful enough, not highborn enough, not diplomatic enough for the almighty princess of Mercury, is that it?”
She actually threw a book across the room. I’d never even seen her dog-ear a page before that day, but she hurled it like she wanted to kill something – me, probably. A pity she hadn’t done it. “What is wrong with you today, Zoisite? What is it that you want from me?”
I wanted everything, and I believed I could have it. “You know what I want. I want you to marry me. I want you to be my wife. I want to be with you always.”
Her face crumpled. “You know I can’t,” she whispered. “Even if we could marry now, we could never be together. You belong on Earth. All your powers are Earth-based. All the seers are talking about an era of darkness that approaches, and I won’t be here much longer. I’ll need to fight whatever threatens the universe.”
You can imagine how this made me feel. She hadn’t mean to, of course, but it is never wise to force a man to face his impotence. She could fight, I couldn’t, and that was that. She slammed down the lid on the possibility of us ever being together it, crushed it as easily as a withered petal crumbles into clouds of dust, and then nothingness.
“I care you – isn’t that enough? I love you. I truly do. I love you more than anyone I have ever loved before.”
I refused the most precious thing she could ever have given to me, the thing I had been searching for ever since I had first met her.
“It’s not enough.”
I grabbed my cloak from where I had thrown it carelessly across a chair and hurled myself from that lovely refuge of blue walls and delicate furniture where it always looked out of place, where I always felt out of place. Everything inside it reminded me of her, and the fact that the clumsy, long-haired general could never be a part of her life started killing me even before Beryl did.
“Where are you going?” she cried in distress. I had told her I had the afternoon free, and she had canceled an important meeting just to stay with me, to preserve what precious time we had left. To this day, I wonder if she knew something I had not. Perhaps Princess Rei of the psychic powers had cautioned her, perhaps she hadn’t.
“I’m leaving,” I threw the words at her over my shoulder. “Since I’m obviously not wanted in a world where I’m useless nobody in comparison to the great power of the senshi.” If she had asked me when I was coming back, I would have replied “Never.” But that wouldn’t have been true, in the end. Better if it had been.
“Zoi, please,” she pleaded with me. Ami never begged. Never. It gave me a perverse sense of pleasure...power...then, I was so angry. It sickens me now, to think of her tears and that maltreated, beloved book of hers lying lifelessly on the sapphire-hued carpet. “Don’t leave. I promise you – I won’t marry him. I swear I won’t! I’ll break it off!” She was crying then, but I was crying too, inside. “What will it take for you to stay?”
I paused for a long moment. She stood behind me, I knew, her face pale and her eyes huge in her face. I saw that look again recently, without the heartache in her eyes. It had been replaced by fear and hatred, you see. Naturally. We were enemies, I was evil, her ultimate task was to destroy me, and life was as simple as that.
“I’ll ask you one last time. Will you marry me?” I looked over my shoulder at her. Everything rested on her answer.
“I can’t,” she whispered. I was good enough for her to love me, important enough to her that she would break off such a crucial engagement, but, in the end, not good enough for her to marry.
The balance shifted, tilted irreversibly in favor of the side of evil. I sometimes imagine that if she had lied to me that day, not that she would ever have done so, this never would have happened. Funny how the folly of one man can bring the downfall of a whole world, isn’t it? But it’s not funny.
I teleported back to Earth that very afternoon, brushing off surprised queries from my friends. It was in the gardens, by Endymion’s precious roses, that Beryl found me. She sidled up like a crab, trying to play her previous role of flighty court lady in the middle of a (bad) attempt to seduce the handsome general. I scowled at her, wanting to be left alone, even though Endymion had forbidden us to speak cruelly to her. He hadn’t realized how demented she was at that point. I realize now that his blindness to her love may have been cruller than anything we, his generals, could have said to her.
I won’t recount our whole conversation. It would be detrimental to my ego, you see, to recall my imbecility. And...besides...my memory is not always clear of those times. I suspect it is an aftereffect of a great deal of torture. I am not sure if I was the one being tortured or the one doing the torturing now.
In the end, I remember asking breathlessly, “So you promise – you swear on your soul! – that you will grant me the power? Power that isn’t earth-based, that could match the power of the senshi’s?”
Beryl said she had gotten it from a long-unearthed source that held the magic of the gods; after thorough questioning, I determined that what she had said and seen sounded reasonable, according to the accounts of ancient sorcerers. It turned out she had awakened not the magic of the gods, but of the demons. It was Metallia she had managed to revive.
“Yes,” she answered sleekly, “that is what you want, is it not? She will love you then, and no one will protest a union with such a strong man.” She caressed my shoulder. I shook her off impatiently, not noticing that her newfound claws cut through the expensive material. Nothing but the best for the foppish general who cared for nothing but his clothes and his conquests. “Is it a deal?”
I nodded slowly. She smiled. “All you need to do is touch this orb and swear on it,” she said, holding out a ball, full of swirling greenish-yellow light against the dark fog that flooded the globe. I glanced at it askance until she coaxed, “The orb will grant you the power you so avidly desire.”
My last resistance: “Do you swear that she won’t be harmed? That no one will be hurt?” I was already feeling guilty about my behavior, with good reason, and planning on apologizing to Ami and doing whatever I could, even if the deal fell through. But wouldn’t it be nice, I had thought to myself, if I could also show her that I had found a solution to our problems and relieve her anxiety over protecting Serenity from whatever dark force was coming at us? I just hadn’t realize then that the dark force would be me.
Her teeth gleamed whitely in the sunlight. There were no fangs then. “I swear, Zoisite – on my soul.” I now realize that the problem with the bargain is that Beryl didn’t have a soul at that point, not anymore. If you swear on something that doesn’t exist, well, what good is that? Belief only goes so far, good intentions only go so far, with certain things.
So this is my story. You know the rest. My other friends were somehow ensnared. Don’t ask me how; I don’t know, I don’t want to know, if it could have been by me. We were brainwashed, forgot the senshi, awakened the Seven Shadows, invaded the Moon Palace, so on, and so forth. I met my demise at Mars’s hands, or should I say, her flames. She took a somewhat indecent pleasure in roasting me to death. I still blame Jadeite for her foul mood that day.
One moment, please. I sense the arrival of visitors. Company is quite rare up here, you know. The youma limbs do not count as sentient company; they appear periodically in accordance with Beryl’s foul moods, and sometimes I even get crystallized specimens for company. Exhibit A, General Jadeite. No? You don’t want to admire Jadeite? You want to come with me instead and see who has come? Jadeite will be crushed that you don’t want to admire his good looks, you know..
You’re sure? Let us go, then, you and I. How many visitors are there, you ask? Hm. I’m a little rusty at this, you know. The dead are not allowed to use magic. But if you’ll look over here, you’ll see five distinctive sets of footprints, and a little up ahead...
* “There is darkness in men’s souls” is a quote from Albert Camus’s The Plague
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