Author's Note: As always, I appreciate all the wellwishing from the
assembled community of and all the support that you guys have given me.
Thanks
in particular to my beta, Syrinx, the wonderful person who pointed out
my inconsistencies and bad grammar, allowing me to produce a better
story, far more quickly than I might be able to.
Shameless plug:
And if you haven't read my first fic, 'The Story of the General',
please do so immediately after you've read through this one. It's a
bunch of fun. Onto the story.
Prologue
Smoke curled up
from the ruins. The man looked at it, his eyes and face emotionless.
His short black hair wafted gently in the wind. His features might have
seemed cruel in an earlier age, but now they expressed only a fraction
of the agony that he felt. He had a classically cherubic face with full
cheeks and sharp eyes. But they seemed to show only two emotions; pain
and equanimity. He pushed those emotions away. Quickly and quietly he
set out upon the battlefield.
Turning over the corpse of a Moon Guard soldier, he quickly searched
for any sign of life force, then felt for a pulse. The soldier, no more
than twenty five, was dead. The battle had been fought at terrible
cost. The entire Moon Guard had been killed and their bodies mutilated.
He sighed, then surveyed the landscape. The commander must have been
brilliant, he mused. The Moon Guard, outnumbered seventy to one, had
held their ground for three brilliant hours buying more time for the
Endymion and Serenity's escape. He moved on.
The senshi had
retreated across a field to a more defensible ridge. The trail of youma
bodies highlighted their path quite well, he thought ironically.
The gardens were in ruins. The famed garden palisades and the stunning
white roses that grew within them had attracted thousands from all over
the solar system. Terran botanists had visited the moon of several
occasions in order to create those roses and Mercurian and Lunar
architects had drawn up the layout for this room.
The numbers of
enemy officers increased dramatically as he neared the palace. Out of
youma to expend, the enemy force had begun to expend its commanders in
an attempt to make a finalbreakthrough. A tactic of desperation, for
any reasonable force commander would have waited for reinforcements to
continue the assault.
But, he reflected with a grim smile, there
were higher goals at stake. Any let up and the royalty would have
retreated to the loyalist strongholds to the east. Time was of the
essence and Beryl had inspired her soldiers to fight on to the death.
It was there that he found the body of the first senshi. Sailor
Jupiter's body was surrounded by enemy soldiers, piled atop each other
like dominoes. He knelt down quickly, feeling for a pulse. It was a
futile gesture, but he had to try.
As he continued, he felt the
taint of dark energy filling the air around him. He gazed around,
pulled his own energy around him like a shield, and then moved on.