Awake
Winner of the Sailor Moon Land Backwards-Forwards Challenge
by Kihin Ranno
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For ten centuries, the Earth slept. Ice covered the landscape from pole to pole. Nothing stirred, every one of them safe the darkness that had ravaged the Earth in the beginning of their internment.

One day, the darkness died.

Six of them woke up.

Their arctic prisons cracked, releasing them into the unknown. After one thousand years of darkness, they were nearly blinded by it. They awoke as newborns, shrieking at the strangeness. None of it was familiar. After a millennium of slumber, they had known only oblivion.

It was all they remembered. They had forgotten everything.

The tallest one, the one intrinsically different from the rest, calmed first. He looked around at the rest crying in the face of this agonizing newness, and he felt a need to shield them. He did not yet know it for he did not know the words, but this was love. And so he learned the first lesson.

He gathered them, and they huddled for warmth. They were naked and unashamed, ignorant of embarrassment. They stayed there, frozen and freezing until the sun had begun to dip down below the glaciers.

Only then did it occur to one of them, the one with hair the color of the darkening sky, to observe their surroundings. She left them, and they followed her, longing to stay close to all that was familiar.

They were surrounded by shards of what had once been their homes. The leader of their movement reached out and grasped one. She drew back immediately with a feral cry. Her finger was different now, red and wet. And so she learned the second lesson: pain.

Suddenly, another one – the smallest of them who was the most afraid of this strange new world – saw a shard different from all the rest. It shined.

She knew immediately that this would not hurt her. She drew closer, ignoring the grunting and mewling of her companions. They were afraid of its glitter, but she knew this would not hurt her. In fact, she had a sense of longing for it. She learned desire, the most destructive lesson of all.

But she learned joy too, and perhaps that was the purest.

She sighed in ecstasy, and if they had known what music was, they would have likened the sound to it.

She reached out and caressed it with the tiniest, barest fingertip.

It flared. It exploded with light and power, and every last one of them howled. They were enveloped in silver and light. They were warmed; then they burned.

With an explosion of raw power, they remembered how to be human. They remembered who they were

The Ginzuishou's light retreated, leaving the four Senshi, Tuxedo Kamen, and the new Queen Serenity standing and whole. They all stayed perfectly still and wept in silence, having lived a lifetime in an instant. Finally, Serenity took a deep breath and spoke the first words uttered on the planet Earth for a thousand years.

"It's time."