The Goddess and the Long Forgotten Soldier
The storm clouds rolled in steadily and determinedly. These summoned by my fears. Implacable and resolved to herald the ruin that is my life. They celebrate my demise.
I strike the unforgiving ground with my staff. Cannot the gods attest to my pain, and read the obituary for all to see the fool I had been? I am but a slave to my dead memories, trapped within a carnivalesque world of my own making. And I, once possessed by the blackness calling itself, Metallia, had died a thousand deaths. Even now, as dream and nightmare negotiate a peace settlement, I cannot rest.
I was once the mighty Shitennou, Lord Kunzite. But in truth, I was a failure, as a man, lover and even a friend. For it was by my own hand I so cruelly took the life of the only woman I shall ever love. The image of sumptuous golden locks, cerulean eyes filled with smoldering promises, Oh gods how I long to taste those sweet lips again.
If I were half the man I thought I was, surely, something deep inside should have remembered the power and the love for my king, his princess, their heirs and successors -- my Minako. But no – I betrayed them, too. Therefore, is it not only fitting that the forces of love and good fortune desert me now as they had then?
She, the maiden I had slain, victorious at our last meeting, as Sailor Moon put an end to the Dark Kingdom and its wicked queen, but I am not yet free. I had shed the soul of the past, the darker legacy that lay at my feet. The dagger with a haunted intent, its face mocking me, a parody of a heart I possess. By my own hand, I have plunged its point many times against my heart.
I am slain. I am broken and bleeding, the lost ghost of a man. I, chained to a past that made love to the wishes of others, concealed hermetically in a prison of my own choosing. In the face of my dark past, have I the right to complain? For I -- the failed Kunzite, once mighty hand of the Dark Queen, her lover, a marionette to her lust and unfathomable hatred for love's purity and bounty, should I not suffer for my crimes. I suffer as she suffered, is it not that misery loves and craves its own company in the face of regret, jealously guarded dread and self-destruction? We fell. We had all fallen too the beat of our own dark ambition.
I see it all, once again as angry tears fraternize with those of the tempest overhead as I stand on the veranda, looking out onto the darkened sky, battered and bruised like a neglected and abused lover, holding her breath lest she meets the downpour of pain threatening to strike at the slightest hint of resistance.
I run into the rain. Into the field, having assumed my Shitennou form, my crystal blade unsheathed.
If I really believed for one moment that it would make any difference, I would finish things now with my crystal blade and drive its point home into my blackened heart. Would I find release? No, of course not, as if . But this, the sensual touch of lady death, she is the coward's way out. I have lived by her codes of dishonor for far too long.
I am retched, impoverished and crumbling within. I was in a state of decay As I sated myself on the wishes of others, a cursed child cast in a mold, I was a stranger to myself, dead long before I could speak my first word, my soul, the embodiment of old age.
I hate the darkness, but am so much more afraid of the light. Don't get me wrong, but I only see the face that haunts me in its silvery mirror, my own.
I have nobody to blame but myself. I hadn't taken up the challenge to smash the enemy of my people, and of my liege. But now, as the lightning flashes and friends desert me and fire claims the hill with forks of electric blue, epiphany strikes like the chime of a laden clock of retribution. I must turn it around, but how.
I turn and see the curtain of rain approach, and know what I must do.
Standing in the field, holding my sword aloft, I call upon the power within, unclaimed in lives thrice I had lived.
As I scream the names of friends near and far, declaring my penitence. I am answered in the form of a series of icy darts that sting like nettles. These burning and punish, pounding my lean and tall body, my hair long and silvery-gold in the light of the storm.
I feel a presence. That part of me once so easily seduced by the daughters of Chaos. But it stands against me this hour and my time is come. I cry, yell and brandish my sword. I pirouette, dance, parry and thrust at the invisible thought form stalking my soul. I hear a cry, a raven's cry. The doppelganger appears, a shrunken daemon, a shimmering blackened simulacrum, a mirror of my shame and my curse.
I call out as I bring my gleaming sword, now glowing with a brilliant golden light, down upon the thing once attached to my soul for countless ages past, decapitating it. The image shatters into points of golden light, my sword alight and I too on fire.
I live and stand firm. I stand triumphant and purged of my Youma. I am forgiven. I am loved and as I fall to my knees, I weep and hang my head as the storm bears witness to my unlikely victory. I had been fighting myself.
Clouds swirl in energized agitation, their furious anvils gather and explode as the water pools around me. I drop my sword to the sodden earth. I am soaked and beaten. But I have won the day.
As if I am looking upon a new day, the furrows of my desires for the planting, these forgotten wishes, to gather the harvest, lie in wait unfulfilled. These, now emerge unbidden. I understand. No longer, shall the virgin fruit taste unripe and sour on my tongue, for the tides of my love and rejuvenation have taken root and burst forth unencumbered. I stand facing the midpoint of my life. But like a wide-eyed youth, my crystal eyes look up at the sound of footsteps, her golden feet squelching in the mud. The oozing and moisten flow of the earth slipping between her toes like the fingertips of the furtive lord on his celestial wedding night as he pays his wife her due salutations in bed. My eyes travel upward over the delicately sculpted ankles, elegant calves and the youthful womanly shape of that one I had seen in visions and dreams. I saw to a time when she had no name. And when she did, I knew it -- ambrosia for my Minako, my Minerva.
I knew her as the sweet village girl, a true blonde Goddess, all of sixteen when first we met.
She pursued me relentlessly. Why I kept turning away, I don't really know: a haunted lure, a heart afire, a life-force seeking union.
Oh, how I resisted you when you came, the child of the dawn. Though I was harkened to another, the lover who dances through the women of my many lives, only one had I wished to find. But her name, her face I scarcely remembered.
A simple act of kindness had brought us together. I found her cat. Snowy white, its unconscious form lying sprawled upon the side of the road, a dart embedded in his neck. I ministered to the feline, sucked out the poison and used the power I had always possessed to draw him from the brink. Yet, when he spoke, and the crescent shone in a blaze of living gratitude, I knew it all. Even if Lord Artemis didn't remember me, perhaps it is just as well. The light blinded me in that moment of remembering and out of the lonely void, I had found an ally, and found Minerva.
She stood still, hands by her side, her pale lavender summer dress soaked, its hem-sopping wet, the water flowing off her magnificent body. Through the threadbare fabric, I saw her womanly curves: the valleys and hills of a terrain I had forgotten. This place that lay distant, a land I had forgotten due to my self-imposed exile, at least until this moment. I had once vowed I would never set foot again on this sacred ground.
Oh, my beautiful Minerva, her hair, a cascade of gold, unable to fulfill its mandate to shine and dance in the warm summer breeze still captivated me.
She, like me, a drenched and yet, purified figure. I looked into those now yielding eyes, and without a word, she smiled. The day grew darker. The Stormlight flowing over her beautiful silhouette, she continued to smile and stepped up to me, wrapping her hands about my head. She held me against her belly, her clothing, and the heat of her body, primordial and comforting. We stayed like that for a time. The rain fell. She knelt, and cradled my head against her chest, her breasts a soft retreat from the pain and rage I had allowed myself to feel, really feel. In that moment, she rose and her garment fell about her ankles. And once more, she knelt and took me in her arms, I shed my inhibitions and my raiment.
I, a battle weary warlord, finding my place in the sun under the ablutions of the rain of sky and the fecundity of the moisten earth -- the goddess and I, the old soldier and the young lady, becoming one.
END
