Quick reminder: Sailor Moon and its characters are the property of Takeuchi Naoko and a bunch of other people. They don't belong to me. I've just borrowed them for a not-for- profit story. Please don't sue, not that you'd get any money from me anyway. Being a student, I'm perpetually broke.

This story will be totally incomprehensible if you have not read the other parts of "The Wars of Light and Shadow", and it would also help if you were at least slightly familiar with the tail end of the R series as dubbed by DIC. (For the information of those familiar only with the original version, I'm using the dub names again, so Diamond = Demand, Emerald = Esmeraude, Sapphire = Saffir, and so on. I'm ignoring the "Negamoon" heresy, however, since it's obvious in this universe that the Negaverse and the Dark Moon are not directly related.) At least two of the later Dark Moon episodes are quoted in the text.

Yes, it's finally here. Sort of. I've been having really serious problems with the beginning of this story--I re-wrote it four times in all, and I'm still not entirely satisfied with the results. But then, I almost never am. I guess I'd been hoping that, after the ease with which "Little Lies" fell out, this one would be just as easy. Boy, was I wrong!

Currently, there are about a dozen chapters of this story. It's still not finished, and it's getting more and more complicated by the moment. Furthermore, my beta reader is even busier than I am, and she hasn't been able to get back to me yet on the first 10 or 11 chapters. Therefore, chapters will be trickling out slowly and may be pulled for revision without notice. You have been warned.

This story begins roughly six years after the end of "All Darkness Met". The world hasn't stood still in the interval, and many of the characters have changed (and, hopefully, in Serena's case, matured!) The Scouts have received their later-season attacks/transformations even though this is based on the NA dub, in which said attacks never appear. Also, Sailors Uranus and Neptune have surfaced at some point, although filling in the details is left to the interest of the reader.

There is a lot of jumping around in time inside the story. For convenience, if the timeframe of a scene differs from that of the previous scene, I've tagged it with a date as well as a narrator. Oh, and General Cuprite and Cuprite are, for narration purposes, two different people. You'll see what I mean.

I do love feedback, people! Email eliddell@puc.net.