Word Count: 1253

“Ganymede... Ganymede...”

There was a large room far from Liesel's bedroom, passed the gardens and a courtyard, beyond the hall of mirrors, that felt, to Ganymede, more haunted than the rest of the palace.

There were many rooms she had not yet been brave enough to enter, either due to the amount of destruction and the danger venturing inside might pose to her, or due to the feelings of unease certain places elicited within her, as if she were better off not remembering what had once transpired within them, or as if she was not welcome there.

She had avoided this room for so long for both of those reasons.

It was a large room, the largest she'd seen inside the castle so far except for the ballroom, though the two were nearly equal in size and grandeur. She suspected she knew what this room was upon spying the remains of a crumbled set of gold and red velvet chairs. The whispers were louder here, incessant, bouncing between the walls and echoing off of the cavernous ceiling, calling to her in a way she found impossible to ignore. It was desperate, oppressive. Ganymede could feel the weight of it at her back, settling upon her shoulders, a thousand years of memories and expectations, a thousand years of emotion and loss forced into the confines of a single room.

As it so happened, it was one of the most badly damaged rooms in the castle.

Each of the great crystal chandeliers had come down, no more than piles of mangled gold and shards of crystal on a heavily scratched and gouged wooden floor. Many of the columns that once supported a balcony that surrounding the perimeter had been pulled down, large pillars that laid split and scattered, some that had nearly been pulverized, so that the balcony, too, had been forced from its perch, and now only remnants of it remained on one side. Where there may have once been statues now there was nothing but rubble, and the mirrors along the upper gallery were now little more than dust in the wind that blew through the cracks in the walls and the gaping holes up in the ceiling.

Ganymede could hardly walk without tripping over debris, and was forced to climb over one of the chandeliers and a pile of fragmented column to enter further into the room. Yet there were still features she could see that were moderately intact—a tiered dais on the far side of the room, where the gold and velvet chairs laid crushed beneath the canopy of state that was once perched over them, and two arched doorways that led out into the red glow of Ganymede's eternal night.

“Ganymede... Ganymede...” the voices called.

It was frightening, how she felt in this room, the weight of responsibility it presented her with. She felt as if there were people there still, lurking in the shadows, buried beneath the rubble, waiting, watching to see what she might do.

Her heart was racing, but Ganymede could not bring herself to leave.

Instead she took a steadying breath and slowly, slowly closed her eyes.

There was a flash of light in the darkness, bright and blinding, and when it receded she could see the room as it had once been, through the eyes of the boy who had seen it last.

Quote:
Liesel's knees ache upon the wooden floor, his head tipping back to accept the anointing oil. Beyond the white-robed priest he can just see the two figures sitting upon the dais—the king a corpulent man with a perpetually bored expression, the queen a gracefully aging woman with an equally disinterested gaze. They sit there only because it is customary for them to attend, otherwise Liesel expects he would not have seen them there at all.

As the priest draws closer the view is obstructed by his robes. Liesel's eyes lift to the ceiling, with its sparkling chandeliers and painted figures of old. Angels, saints, divine beings his people no longer worship with the dedication of their ancestors, for they'd long been replaced by the quest for knowledge, the quest for truth, the quest for more. Somewhere up in that collection of images are his own origins, the first sad boy to find himself taking up the mantle of Sailor Ganymede. Liesel avoids looking at that particular figure, as he fears it would shake his already wavering resolve.

The past is in the past. He's accepted that. This is his fate, and he will bear it as hundreds have before him.

The priest's thumb touches Liesel's forehead, pressing warm oil into his skin in the symbol of his people. Over, over, down, left, down. It will be his for the remainder of his life.

An open heart joined with jagged light.

“To Ganymede, to my King, and to my people, I vow to remain faithful and true for as long as I live,” Liesel recites the oath he's spent the last six years struggling to prove genuine. “And after, until the end of time.”


A light flashed again behind Ganymede's closed eyes. The images reversed, sped up, flew forward in quick succession. The King's face, the priest's hand, the paintings on the ceiling, the heavy wooden double doors that led into the room, the archways beyond the dais, the crowd that gathered along the periphery, the hard wooden floor, the oil upon her forehead—but it wasn't her forehead, it was Liesel's. These were Liesel's experiences, not hers. She'd never been there, never known those people, never uttered such an oath to anyone except the one she held most dear.

As she knew Liesel had once uttered it to another young man.

There were faces that stood out more clearly than the rest—a middle-aged man in a dark suit and robes, a jeweled collar of gold draped over his shoulders, his hair prematurely gray and his blue eyes sharp, intense, always watchful; a boy Liesel's age with dark auburn hair in a low tail and olive eyes that seemed distant and guarded, in a green tunic decorated by Jupiter's insignia; and a woman Ganymede had never seen before, her hair dark and glossy, tumbling down her back in loose curls, with light blue eyes set in a pale face, in a feathered cap and pink jacket.

Everything else was a blur. It drew away from her. Once so close and almost real, now it drifted back until everything seemed out of focus except for the figure of Liesel on the ground, and the priest's hand tracing oil onto his forehead.

Forward and back the memories came and went, so close Ganymede could almost feel them, could almost see things as they'd once been seen, and hear things as they'd once been heard, then so far away they seemed like little more than imaginings, illusions created by an overactive imagination in a dark and desolate place. She struggled to hold onto them, but they slipped through the cracks and dissipated like smoke on the air.

When she opened her eyes there was nothing but destruction to greet her, just a sad, empty room cluttered with rubble and a thousand years worth of decay.

But the whispers continued as they always did, closer and closer with each breath.

“Ganymede... Ganymede...”

And in the distance, beyond the arched doorways that led out in to perpetual night, Ganymede could see Liesel's ghostly figure out on the balcony, as thousands of voices rose up to greet him.