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Once upon a time, in a far off sector of a very old galaxy, there lived a king. He began a good and wise man, as many do, but power corrupts, and as his lifespan was extended his mind withered, and he began to lust for blood. The war he began spread across the galaxy, and the face of his army was that of a warrior kidnapped on her wedding day, cloned into billions of soldiers.
And one of these early prototypes was hidden away, sleeping at the heart of the defense grid that shielded the vile old king, her anger and rage fuelling the guns as she slumbered. The war had raged for many years when a crew of space pirates found their way to her, the sentient moon at the heart of their spaceship called to release her from her suffering.
And so Sleeping Beauty was awoken, and her tale diverged from that of a bloody old king and the people he tore apart in his crusade. Welcome to that other day — and things only get more complicated from here.
The Mechanisms would return to Zantine, though too late for the battle, and the only survivor would be the Briar Rose's long lost love, Cinders. It was as close to a happy ending as possible, even if the two would be on the run for the rest of their lives. Even if the Briar Rose had called back to Jonny D'ville and his crew, and been told to make her choice: join them, or stay behind.
If Jonny D'ville had a heart left to break, it would have happened then.
That is where the story ends, usually. But not for us.
It so happened that, across all of time and its possibilities, the Mechanisms would meet the Briar Rose again. Why not play out that interlude a second time, they supposed, as it was entertaining the first time around.
It was a rather self-punishing act, perhaps, to look into the eyes of a woman that one knew was destined to leave them again, but no one has ever said that Jonny D'ville was known for his good decision making.
However, this tale would not play out the same way twice.
This Briar Rose made a choice: our Sleeping Beauty chose to become a Mechanism, heedless of those who would stop her. But she did not choose our curse, no — she chose the curse of a thing older than time, and she chose it for the most banal of all reasons, the most beautiful: love. She was reborn as a creature of Yog-Sothoth, wearing a mortal form but bleeding radioactivity and a font of utter, absolute power. In this way, she too would be immortal.
And for a time, they were happy, the cowboy and the lost clone. They tore their way through the universe and through each other, and each death they gave each other was an act of love. She was the queen of a Dreaming Kingdom, and he was her prince, and for many millenia they would blaze like an ever-burning wildfire.
However: there are lies we tell ourselves, and lies we tell the universe. The Mechanisms called themselves 'immortal', and the universe believed them … for awhile. But despite the time jumps and parallel universes, all things end, and the Mechanism came to know what the shape of their ends would be, long before their time.
Jonny knew he would die in a barfight, on a nameless backwater asteroid. A knife clean through the heart that would, for some reason, stick. After a millenia of losing all emotion, he would laugh, viciously excited to die.
And this knowledge was a torment to his love, for to be a thing of the winnowing, roiling unspeakable light of the Bifrost is to cede from reality and exist forevermore. Her immortality was no lie. There would not be an end to her, only an end to what she had once been in order to subsume into the Bifrost itself and the reamins of Yggdrasil as its pulsing lifeblood and the very color of its endless dreams. The face she share with billions would die its final death, and somewhere, in the core of the train, she would keep one souvenir of the reason she chose her fate. The metal never rusts, but the heart is a reminder of where her own heart truly lay, and the many millenia she spent in love.
She leaves the knife in its final resting place, as she will not pretend that the heart will ever beat again.
But … though tragedy is a familiar song, and this tragedy greatest of all, what fairness is it, for a man to obsess over his own death, a suicide pushed back billions of years and prophecized to come to pass? What does in mean, in all the universe's narratives, to have given up even before the quasi-immortal life had ever started? The world is cruel and unfair, and so is the conclusion.
This is where the story ends, usually. With death to the Mechanisms, and the queen gone to her kingdom.
But in the tales of the mad men who glimpse that light before their brains bleed with it, and those who seek the dreams of higher powers and scribble out their last warnings, some say: the Queen of the Dreaming Kingdom has a prince.
The Queen has a Prince, wreathed in shining bramble tattoos, eyes aglow the same as the Queen, his love. He has no heart, no need for it, no beating sound of life, and he is known to appear on the battlefields in the worst of nightmares, pulling men from foxholes with the wildest of grins. He does not do them a kindness — no, dreams and nightmares are two sides of the same coin, and the Queen and her Prince embody them both, and the chaos and fear more often than not.
The Queen has a Prince, and neither of them have any name, nor walk in truly mortal forms, but there is a vastness beyond reality goverened by the power that courses through their veins and genes. No longer is the prince haunted by the ticking time bomb of a heart he never asked for, and there is no more a violent end to yearn for. Even when they tire of their games in their kingdom, when they lose touch with playing at a fascimile of humanity, they will be together. That is the thing most certain: instead of giving up on all things, the prince took his love's hand, and made his own choice. In this way, they would never again have to part.
Some things are decided, ends meant to be. Jonny D'ville dies on a nameless backwater asteroid, and the Briar Rose abandons the known universe for Dreaming Kingdom within the Bifrost. But somewhere, the Queen of the Dreaming Kingdom has her Prince by her side, and just this once, there can be a happy ending.