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Sailor Moon -- Circles of Time

"Interlude, with Stars"
by Allen Gainsford 

Based on characters and situations created by Naoko Takeuchi

------------------------------------------------------------------------

She was reborn.  It was unexpected.

She floated in darkness.  It was silent, and very peaceful.  She drifted
for a time, her eyes closed, her body still.  She felt different,
strange.  Relaxed.

Relaxed.  That was an odd thought, but it was true.  She hadn't felt so
good in -- what?  Centuries?  More than that.  Somehow, it was as if a
great weight was gone from her shoulders.  She almost found she missed
it ...

What _was_ this?  Why was she still alive?  What had gone wrong?

She had expected nothingness.  An ending.  Not even an afterlife, if
there was one; for everything she was -- her self, her _soul_ -- had
been passed on.  Closing the circle.  The old became the new; the
guardian became the babe.

(She remembered those final moments: just moments ago, it seemed.  She
stared down at her sleeping parents, raised her staff, let the energies
flow.  It was like exhaling a breath as big as the world.  Then there
was only a fading memory -- a last chance to say goodbye -- and then --)

And then, the silence and the void.  The endless darkness in which she
floated.  Was this eternity, then?  The idea should have repelled her.
Instead ...

Instead, she felt oddly excited, expectant.  As if she were waiting for
something.  But what?

Even as the question entered her mind, it came.  A force at her back,
lifting her, impelling her forward.  A great upswelling.  She was
rising, faster and faster, onward and outward, upward and beyond; then
a last great rush -- a whirling, disorienting feeling -- and --

Suddenly there was light on her closed eyelids.

She opened her eyes and saw the stars.

Stars -- stars, oh, stars!  The stars were everywhere.  A multitude of
stars, a host, a myriad!  A galaxy-full.  She was bathed in starlight;
she was borne on the radiance of a billion suns.  It touched her, it
warmed her, it filled her to overflowing.  A cry burst out of her; a sob
of purest joy and wonder.

New-born in brilliance, shedding tears of gladness, she spun onward and
outward, through a darkness filled with light.

            --**--

At last it occurred to her to look back at where she had come from.
And, finally, she understood.

It hung below her, huge and old: a shape wrought of shadow and light,
churning slowly.  She felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
Silent, numinous, powerful, swirling with mystery and filled with
potential ...

The Galaxy Cauldron.

The heart, the centre of creation.  The birth-place and the graveyard of
stars ... and of starseeds.  The nexus of possibilities.  The core, the
heartland, the holy place.

As she stared down at it in awe, it seemed to change -- a fluctuation
of the light, perhaps, or a subtle difference in perspective -- and she
saw [shift] a colossal whirlpool of luminous gases, slowly turning, and
at its centre, a radiant core that was too bright to look at.  And then
it changed again and she saw [shift] a vast, open cylinder of energy at
the foot of a shadowy cliff, and a path leading away uphill; and again,
faster and faster, [shift] a roaring, seething knot of power, endlessly
writhing and throwing off smaller, glowing knots of its own; and [shift]
a great sea breaking on a silent shore, but the sea was full of points
of light; and [shift] a tree whose roots and branches spanned creation,
and whose leaves were stars --

And finally she could not bear to look any more.  She closed her eyes,
and when she opened them again the Cauldron was gone, and the glorious
myriad of stars had been replaced by the familiar sprinkling she knew.
She hung in space, naked and alone, and she wept at what had been taken
away.

            --**--

When she came to herself again, she wiped her eyes and drew a long,
shuddering breath.  It felt as if she had just been cast out of heaven
-- a deep, bitter pain, not physical but of the spirit.

She tried to ignore it, to think about what she had seen.  About what
had become of her.

She had transferred herself onward, passing her own starseed into the
unborn child in her mother's womb.  Completing the journey begun so long
before, even as she set that same journey in motion.  Creating a circle
in time that could defend time.

That should have been the end.  She had expected it; she had anticipated
only nothingness.  Instead, she had been reborn out of the Cauldron.

Why?

Somewhere there would be answers, she thought determinedly, and she
would find them.  She was Meiou Setsuna, Sailor Pluto, and at such
things she did not fail.

She held out her hand, and her staff appeared: her talisman, her Time
Key, its weight comfortable and familiar in her hand.  She lifted the
staff to open the Gate of Time.

Nothing happened.  She stared for a moment, confused.  Then she tried
again.  The Gate stubbornly refused to appear.

It took some time, and quite a lot of experimentation, and a fair bit of
cursing, to convince her.  The Gate no longer answered to her.  Her
staff no longer functioned.  She was stranded.

At last, defeated, she "stood" with hands on hips, still floating in
space, staring at the staff in front of her, and muttered to herself,
"How am I supposed to get back to Earth, then?"

And suddenly she found herself in a room filled with smoke and flame.

Her first impulse was to yelp in shock, but centuries of experience
helped her stifle that.  Her next impulse was to put the fire out.
While she was groping around for a fire extinguisher, she discovered
that something else had changed, besides her staff.  Her hands were
passing straight through the furniture without touching it.

That did make her yelp, but fortunately nobody was around to hear it.
There was some doubt, she realised after a moment, whether they would
have heard her if they had been there.  A little experimentation showed
that she was quite intangible.  Neither the flames nor the smoke
bothered her at all.

She walked around, trying to get her bearings.  After a few minutes she
realised, with a horrible shock, that she recognised the room.  It was
strewn with wreckage, it looked as if a bomb had gone off, but still --

It was her laboratory.  Her temporal research laboratory in Crystal
Tokyo.

A little further thought told her _when_ this must be.  It was the year
4030.  The day of the explosion that catapulted her back into the past;
the time when she first began her guardianship.  In fact, the accident
must have happened only moments before.

Another circle closed, she thought slowly.

Why here?  Why now?  What did this mean?  She began to have an uneasy
feeling that she knew.

But how?  What were the mechanics of it?  After a little thought she
realised that she had not moved until she'd thought about travelling to
Earth; then, apparently instantly, she had been there.  She wondered if
that mean that if she thought about --

[shift]

She was standing in her quarters in the palace.  She looked around,
amazed, and tried to repress a shiver.  It had been so long -- how many
centuries? -- since she'd been here, at least on her personal timeline;
but the room still looked heart-wrenchingly familiar.  There were a pair
of pictures on the bedside table, 3D images suspended in crystal, of her
mother and her daughter.  At the sight, her eyes blurred for a few
seconds.

She sat down in the bed to think, and ended up falling straight through
it.  As she stood up, rubbing an entirely imaginary hurt, she wondered
why she did not fall straight through the floor as well.

A little experimentation showed that she could, if she wanted.  The
level she held seemed to be entirely abitrary.  She could stand with
her feet ten centimetres off the floor ... or ten centimetres _under_
the floor.  She could probably fly, if she tried; but a little further
thought convinced her to postpone the experiment.  Apart from anything
else, she was still naked, and likely to remain that way until she could
work out how to put on clothes she could not touch; and she was not yet
certain that nobody could see her.

The thought of clothing reminded her of her staff.  She had left it
floating in space.  With a frown of annoyance, she held out her hand.
The staff appeared promptly.  She hefted it, her expression thoughtful.
This, she could touch.  Why not anything else?

That, too, she uneasily thought she could guess.

She practised moving for a while, flitting ghostlike about the Palace.
It seemed she could be anywhere she wanted, just by thinking about it.
During her travelling, she inadvertently found out that she _was_
imperceptible to others.  And just as well, or the Queen would have had
something to say about her appearing like that ...

Before long, though, she grew tired of the game, and tired of haunting a
place she only dimly remembered.  She did not belong here any more.  The
place that was fresh in her memory, that she thought of as home, was
back in the twentieth century.  The old house in Tokyo --

[shift]

And so, she thought slowly when she saw where she was now standing, it
seemed she could travel in time as well.

Again, she spent some time in experimentation, visiting hundreds of
places in as many time periods.  Here, at last, she found limits to her
abilities.  She could not come near to a place where her earlier self
already existed.  Even her own ghostly form was a presence that she
could not approach.  And perhaps, she decided in the end, that was just
as well.

            --**--

She sat on a cliff-top overlooking the Aegean in the year 3368.  The
sunset was particularly beautiful.  She stared out to sea, watching the
sunlight dancing off the waters, and let her conclusions trickle through
her mind.

It did make a kind of sense, she supposed.  She was no longer a closed
circle in time; she was, if anything, a tangent.  Her connection to the
Gate of Time was severed; instead, she _was_ a gate in herself.

She had passed her starseed on to her unborn self, creating the temporal
circuit of her lifetime ... and as she did so, the _she_ that did the
passing spun free.  She was flung away, outward, cast into oblivion ...
only to be caught up in the ceaseless cycle of creation, destruction and
renewal that was the Galaxy Cauldron.  Caught, and spat out again,
alive.  Renewed.

Changed.  That was inevitable.  She was now only loosely bound to space
and time; but that was certainly better than not being bound at all.
The only thing she could touch was her staff, and that was because the
staff was part of herself: her talisman, the ultimate expression of her
inner self.  How appropriate that it was shaped like a key, she thought
wryly.

And of course, when she returned to Earth, it was to the moment after
her circle had first arced back on itself.  In returning, she had merely
picked up the threads that had been left hanging, as it were.

How or why the Cauldron had cast her out again, alive, was still a
mystery, and one that she might never solve.  But it occurred to her
that perhaps the Cauldron was not, after all, a mindless process.  If
not, then it was possible that her survival was intended; that her life
was being shaped once more.  And if that was the case, then perhaps ...

After all, she knew exactly who had shaped her life thus far.  She had
done it herself.  People called her the great manipulator, but the one
she manipulated the most had always been herself.  And she wondered: if
she were to look again into the Cauldron, all the way through, to the
bottom and out the other side ... might there be, at the far end of that
mighty cycle, a familiar face looking back?

Creation was an infinite number of circles, and they all met at the
Cauldron.  Perhaps someday she would find out.

            --**--

And so, as the sun sank down towards the horizon, there remained only
one question.  Invisible and intangible as she was, what was she to make
of her life?  And perhaps there was an answer to that, too.

She lifted her staff toward the sky, and said quietly, "Pluto etherial
power, make-up."

And the ghost-thin winds of the Aether came, and bound themselves about
her.

When the transformation was complete, she looked down at herself.  Her
costume was much the same as it had once been, she saw; only the colours
had changed.  Her leotard was no longer white, but a faint, pearly grey.
The bows on her chest and back had turned charcoal-grey, only a fraction
lighter than her skirt.  The stone on her breast was a while opal.  She
shrugged.  It would do.

She stood for a time, breathing the salt sea air.  The wind stirred her
hair, and she smiled.  Bending down, she picked up a stone and threw it
down the cliff, into the sea.

-- This would not last, she knew.  The transformation bound her more
closely to the material world, and while it persisted she could touch,
and feel.  But already she could sense the gentle, persistent tugging
that would draw her back, in time, to her phantom state.  She was not
sure how long it would take -- perhaps an hour or two, no more.

She shrugged again.  It would do.

            --**--

She walked away from the cliff, letting herself slip smoothly back out
of phase with the world.  Her final question still nagged at her.  What
_was_ she to make of life, now?  She could, if she chose, keep up a
limited kind of contact with the life she had once led.  She could go
back to what she had been doing.  If she chose.

On the other hand, she did not really feel eager to go straight back to
what she had been, as if nothing had happened.  There were other things
she'd like to try.  If only she had the opportunity --

That was when it hit her.

She did have the opportunity.  Here, now, she had the choice.  She had
laid down the guardianship of Time, and there was really no reason why
she should take it up again.  Her mission was accomplished.  She could
do whatever she wanted to do.

She was free.

It was like an epiphany.  Like a hammer-blow.  She stood in the middle
of the road and started laughing.  After a few seconds she realised that
she was crying as well.

She was free.  The job was finished, she was free, and she could do
anything she felt like.  She wanted to dance, to sing, and after a bare
instant's hesitation she did.  She capered through a village, shouting
like an idiot.  It was a good thing she was invisible again.

What _did_ she want to do? she wondered, later.  Something small to
start with, perhaps.

Her eye fell on her staff, and on the garnet at its head.  An old, old
memory came back to her.  A voice that had told her: [Save the seeds of
the people who are near the core of the dream.]

She had done it, long ago.  She had saved them.  They were still there,
their patterns held within the staff.  Waiting.

She shrugged, then nodded.  All right.  It seemed like a reasonable
starting-place: to find places in the Pattern where those smaller
patterns would fit, and restore them to the Dream.

After all, how hard could that be?

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