Sailor Saturn was into her thirtieth year as the Saturn senshi when the destruction of the Asteroid Belt occurred. That event would go down as one of the most devastating event to occur in the Silver Millennium. The destruction and her subsequent demise would cause people ever after to fear the powers of Saturn.
    While almost all Sailors Saturn were quiet and introspective in nature, the people around her at the time reported that she was perhaps quieter than most, more isolated than most. She was certainly the least approachable of the senshi. It was perhaps these qualities that caused many to label her insane, particularly after her actions  at the Asteroid Belt. Certainly, the madness that followed the destruction would forever be associated with Sailor Saturn and indeed, was laid at her door as its cause.
    While the actual psychological well-being of Sailor Saturn was not known, what was known was that one night, Sailor Saturn disappeared from her quarters and destroyed the Asteroid Belt along with 8 of the Forges and its 500,000 inhabitants. The next day, a new Sailor Saturn took up the Silence Glaive, the stewardship of the solar system and the position as Guardian of the Ancients.

                 From The History of Modern Silver Millennium.
 

    Alone in her predecessor's rooms, the new Sailor Saturn stood waiting. It was the first time she came here, to this particular suite of rooms just behind the Council. She stood in the center of the vast bedroom and wondered. It wasn't what she had expected of the most powerful person on Saturn. The room was empty, barren. A kinder person may say austere, but she was Sailor Saturn, and Sailor Saturns did not lie. Not, thought the youngish girl, even out of kindness. Austerity, at least, has about it some kind of spirit, a life, an air of chosen, or even enforced simplicity. This... was lifeless. No living creature stirred it, no person stood by its large windows and looked out onto the heavens. The air was still, heavy, unmoving.
    It was as if no one had lived it in for the last thirty years. Except, perhaps, ghosts.
    The dim light from the far-off sun fell through the large windows in pale sheets, sending minute particles in the air dancing. The Saturn senshi held out her hand and let the light play on her pale fingers. Did the previous Sailor Saturn ever stood here, like I am now, touching the light? She thought, watching the shadows her hand made. What was she thinking of? Did she dream? Had it been someone else who stood there thinking and wondering, nothing more would come out of it except for dreams out of a fevered imagination. But because she was the new Sailor Saturn, because she wondered, the truth came to her. Memory descended quietly.
    The new Sailor Saturn leaned her staff of office against the wall, sat herself on the bed and remembered...

   Quiet, introspective Saturn. Her loneliness crooned to her constantly, her powers and status a barrier more impenetrable and formidable than her Silence Wall. Caught and lifted beyond her family by her powers, she stood isolated by the flaring of a single Saturn signil.
    Knowledge of her ineffectualness wound itself through her consciousness, jeering at her helplessness. The most powerful and the weakest of all the senshi. The Silence and the Song. Both powerful, both unusable. To use the first was to destroy the worlds, to use the second would be to change them beyond recognition. And her duty was ever to maintain the status quo.
    By her first year as Sailor Saturn, all illusions had been pared away, revealing the desolation and her one duty. She had clung to that duty as a drowning man would a lifeline. It was the quite possibly the only thing that gave the meaning of her life clarity, the only thing that survived the harshness of the perfection that she demanded of herself. And so Sailor Saturn held on, year after year after lonely, desolate year.
    Seasons passed, the Ring turned and the pale, luminous lilies of Saturn bloomed and faded and bloomed again with it. Only Sailor Saturn, in her quiet rooms, sat unchanging, waiting. With every pass of the Infinite Ring, sorrow grew deeper within her eyes and the senshi of Saturn retreated, with growing frequency, into the solitude of her rooms.
    Clutter began to irritate her. It became a constant reminder of the imperfect world -- of her own imperfection. So the servants took away the paintings, the sitting room furniture, then everything else that could be moved away from her rooms. Toward the final years, there was only a single pot of night-blooming lilies, a desk and her bed left in those cavernous rooms. When she had no official duties to perform, the senshi of Saturn would retreat back into her room, back to the emptiness, to comtemplate upon the meaning of duty and perfection.
    It was about this time when the first mutterings about insanity arose. A bureaucrat who thought himself snubbed when Saturn refused an invitation; an admiral of one of earth's many countries who felt ignored; the times she stood silent at the many official functions she was forced to attend in her capacity as Sailor Saturn. Whispers grew out of the silence and  graduated into gossips and outright lies. She withstood them all with the same capacity she endured everything else.
    In her thirtieth year as Sailor Saturn, the call to duty finally came. A call as compelling and irrefutable as the universe. It came through a quickening of the blood, of sudden vivid scenes unfolding in her mind's eye, with power throbbing in every particle of her being. It was a rush of sudden, certain, knowledge -- that her guardianship of the Ancients' Secrets was being challenged.
    At a time when no Ancients roamed the system, the Forges of the Asteroids were being used. The so-called Lesser Wonders of the Ancients, what the common people called the Forges, although Saturn knew it by a different name. Twelve steps. Twelve stages. Twelve gates. One by one, she could feel its secrets unravelling before her. One by one, the forges awoke. Something very similar to panic -- if panic was cold, if panic was relentless -- bloomed within her. Duty called and demanded that she carry out her vow to protect the Ancients and the secrets they left behind. Power flickered at her fingertips, cold and silent and waiting.
    Four of the Forges were already used, the fifth was slowly starting to come to life and she must prevent it from happening at all costs. Gathering her power about her like an enormous cloak, the Sailor Saturn stood. Her Glaive, that instrument of Silence, materializing under her hand between one moment and the next.
     A brief incantation and she was transported to the fifth Forge. Holding her Glaive, she stood in front of the fifth Forge, that tiny depression, the point where the known dimensions met and prepared into the next. Sailor Saturn stood to prevent anyone from going further down the Forbidden Way.
    It was a Mercurian. One of the harmless, knowledge-crazed, but usually law-abiding Mercurians. A flicker of surprise teased at her brain, but the Saturn directive remained stern. The Mercurian was obviously shocked by her sudden appearance, and not a little frightened, like a boy caught by his tutors at a game he was expressly forbidden to play. Sailor Saturn smiled in her mind, where no one but her could see.
     "Sail-- Sailor Saturn!" the Mercurian stuttered, "What, How could you be here?" he asked in shocked amazement. He looked about him, as if half expecting to find himself in the swamps of Saturn instead of the Asteroid forges. Then his face abruptly cleared and brightened. "If you could be here, then, this must be the mana flux where all the dimensions meet. It all fits. It must be! I was right! The Forges are the key!"  Delighted, he laughed and danced a few steps in his glee, throwing his lens up into the thin air on the Asteroids and catching them with a little leap.
     Upon hearing his words, Sailor Saturn frowned mentally. The fact that he was wrong wasn't the point. The Mercurian shouldn't have been here in the first place. People of his ilk, of curious, tinkering minds that could not let matters rest, these should not be able to come so close to the Knowledge. Her mind turned cold. He had to be stopped. Now. Before it was too late. Sternly, she told the Mercurian, "Stop now. The Forges are out of your reach."
    Her cold words cut through his joy like a sword or a Glaive. The Mercurian collapsed like a punctured balloon. Bewilderment showing plainly on his face, he asked plaintively, "What? Out of my reach but... I'm already here. It's all so close. I could almost, just give me some time... I know I can get the answer."
     The faintest trace of sympathy rose above the self-imposed calm and sank back down again. Sailor Saturn repeated simply, violet eyes glowing, "Stop now."
    "But why?" the Mercurian protested again, more fervently this time. "I'm so close. This knowledge could help the system. At last, we have the means to understand. If we knew more about the Ancients, how they thought, the way the wonders work, we could replicate them ourselves. It would help us all! Forgive me, Lady Saturn, but how could you expect me to stop?"
    All final traces of emotion leeched out of the senshi. Her duty was clear; the Ancients' secrets must be kept. Coldly, she repeated to the Mercurian, eyes like dark purple shards of ice. "You may not continue. Your search for knowledge about the Ancients must stop here. They are and will remain unknowable."
     Provoked beyond caution, the Mercurian burst out, angrily, " This is ridiculous. No knowledge is unknowable! It-- it's against the tenets of Knowledge itself! My colleagues and I have slaved over the Forges, trying to decipher its secrets for years!" he gestured wildly at his equipment. "I can't stop now. We are so close! My colleagues at the Great Library are depending on me! Forgive my rudeness, Lady Saturn, but you can't stop me. You must not!"
    But Sailor Saturn was no longer listening. When the Mercurian gestured, he had drawn her attention to a recorder. One of the equipment used to record and transmit information. The information snagged, its implications caught in her mind. How long -- ? Have all the information been sent back to the Great Library yet?
    Her world contracted. All she could hear was her own deep breathing. The ghosts of the Mercurian's words whirled around her mind, pulsing and beating to a primal rhythm that resonated with the very marrow of her being. It struck deep into the essence of her reality.
    Every thought, every scrap of knowledge melded and formed a massive web.
    She could see into all the past and the present and the myriad futures that may Be. With a sense of prescience, she looked into the now and saw that she was too late. Even if she killed the Mercurian now, the seeds of knowledge were already sown deep into the fertile minds that worked in the Great Library. Curiosity would water it and the knowledge from this experiment would make it grow. Once they had grasped the knowledge, they would work at it, as relentless as she could be in their own way. They would go on, perhaps onto the next generation, or the generation after that, until something, some result was obtained.
    The results of the Ancient's works. The gates to the Ancient's secrets was opening and she could not relock it.
    Duty howled at her, her lifeline, her salvation. The knowledge was loosed, this must not be. She must stop it. Pale lids fell over the too-bright eyes, shutting out sight, distractions. What can I do? She casted the question out to the silent presence in her mind. I can't fail. I mustn't. The answer slowly came to her, in drips and draps. The only way to prevent the knowledge from escaping... The only way to stop the gates from opening was to *destroy the gates*.
    Even as the barest outlines of the answer came to her, power bloomed in Sailor Saturn. She could now hear, from a distance, the Mercurian's voice calling out to her, "Sailor Saturn. Are you all right? Sailor Saturn?" Anxiety coloured his voice. Further knowledge bloomed within her mind. The cost of her power, the cost of her duty, would be her life. *Duty or Life* Sailor Saturn smiled sadly. Thinking she smiled at him, the Mercurian heaved a sigh of relief.
    Sailor Saturn held out her Glaive. She had made her choice long ago, when she first took up the Glaive. In the moment before her destruction, the senshi spared a moment of pity for the poor Mercurian, and the rest of the Asteroidians. It was too late now. The senshi of Saturn probed further into the future, casting out questions like a net. If. If. If. The answer returned. Eight? So many? But there is no help for it. There is no help for them -- or me.
    Pale lids fell over the luminous violet orbs and Sailor Saturn consigned the greater half of all the Asteroids, the Mercurian and herself to the Silence.

     Lost in her reverie, Sailor Saturn came to herself at the knock on her door."Enter," she called out softly.
    A guard stood outside, clearly unwilling to step into her room. Already, the news and fear spread, she thought, saddened and resigned.
     The guard cleared his throat, "My lady, many of the ambassadors of the countries of Earth and of the other planets have arrived. They have spoken to the council and now demands to speak to you..." his voice trailed off in a mixture of embarrassment and fear.
     "Are they meeting in the Great Council?" Sailor Saturn asked calmly.
    The guard swallowed hard, "Yes, my lady. They are." The guard flushed slightly. "I... I am commanded to bring you to them, my lady."
     Sailor Saturn stood. The guard stiffened, taking a involuntarily half step back before he recovered and stood at attention again. Saturn smiled faintly. "It won't be necessary, armsman," she said in her cool, quiet voice. "I remember the way well enough." She retrieved her Glaive from against the wall and looked around the room where her predecessor had spent thirty years of her life, alone with her duty. She turned back to the guard. "Actually, there is something... Could you have someone bring some night-blooming lilies to my rooms again?"
    The guard stared. "Lilies?" He blinked and frowned. "Again?"
    Saturn smiled faintly and walked past the guard and towards the Great Council.
    She walked down the hall, her boots clicking on the polished floor as she took each measured stride. She was about to enter the Council Hall when a faint cough stopped her. She turned slightly and looked behind her. An old man stood there, haggard, grief in his eyes and the lines of his face. She knew of him, of course, as the father of her predecessor although they had never met. Standing at the entrance where a hallful of assembled nobles and Council members and ambassadors of the planets waited upon her, Sailor Saturn halted and waited for a grieving old man.
    Tears welled in his old rheumy eyes as he looked at the new senshi. Stiffly, with grief, the old man bowed to her with difficulty. Gravely, she nodded and acknowledged his greeting. There was nothing more she could do for him. She was not his daughter.
   Saturn stood there for a moment longer, then readied  herself for the fallout from the destruction of the Asteroids. Sailor Saturn pushed open the doors and faced the enraged crowds. 
    It was but another facet of her duty.