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Desert Oceans, Withered Flowers
By Silver Sailor Ganymede

Haunted eyes surveyed a war-torn land: a desert eternally stained the colour of blood. The carnage was greater that time than it had ever been before, at least to her memory, and she had been riding through these planes for as long as she could remember, at first a regal child upon her father's horse then later as a warrior in her own right.

She mused upon the strangeness of her life as she stood there, amogst the death and the rivers of blood. The only heir to the throne of her planet, she had been raised to fight in much the same way a son would have been, though she had also been sent to live with a sect of Priestesses in order to learn, as was custom with the girl-children of noble families: men were at war, they had no need for frivilous knowledge.

She stood amidst the sanguine stains upon her planet, amongst the corpses of the slain, some her own, some of the rebel tribes of her planet, many of whom had died at her hand. She would not normally have joined the fray of battle unleashing so much fury, but she had and she supposed that the reason why was, in truth, her own stupid fault.

She had lost her lover, the beautiful one who had come from a planet as different to her own as it was possible to be. Whereas her planet, Mars, was a constantly raging battlefield, where war held rule and all else was forgotten, her lover's planet, Neptune, had been in the grip of tranquility and peace; war was something they had almost forgotten… almost. It was only recently that they had been drawn into a war between themselves and the neighbouring planet of Uranus, a planet that was almost as skilled in the art of war as Mars itself. That was when the Neptunians had come to Mars to seek help and training for that war: that was when she had met her lover.

The eldest princess of Neptune had been a flower in the desert, for one so beautiful had never been seen there; the beauty of the Neptunians truly did surpass even that of those of Venusian blood. Sea green eyes and hair had never been seen on Mars, yet seemed to be the mark of the Neptunians, and the princess was the most beautiful of her peoples. She was about as different to her, the Martian princess, as possible, for she had tied back her raven hair in the way that the men of her planet did, and eerie violet eyes glared out from behind raven tresses.

She sighed at the memory of the Neptunian princess; she had fallen in love with her beauty, her grace… everything about her. But they had argued and her lover had left, back to her own planet. It was then that she had met the daughter of the Uranian king and they had married in order to form a pact between the planets. The flowers had all withered, the desert oceans dried up forever.

Her lover was gone from her now, all because of her own bloodlust, her own stupidity. The only sea that flowed over Mars now was desert ocean filled with the blood of the slain, for only the warmongering survived on this planet of hatred.