Queen Beryl: an exploration
Excerpt from Volume 10, Chapter 12
Queen Beryl is without a doubt one of the most controversial and hated figures seen in all of Silver Millennium history. Among those who survived the Fall, she is either seen as a monster, a creature of pure chaos who brought down a golden age, or a misunderstood and broken figure lead down a path which left her with no choice but to cross the moral event horizon. The question at it's core, therefore, is who is she or rather who was she truly?
The Monster, The Myth, The Truth?
What is known at least fairly early on is that Beryl was a handmaiden of one of the major temples of Earth, dedicated to the worship of one of their many nameless gods. It is known that at some point that she had become infatuated with Prince Endymion, the next in line to the throne and became consumed by her lust for the man. Through unknown means, Beryl came in contact with the demonic force from the sun known as Metalia and afterwards managed to, with her help, cause an uprising on Earth and take her forces to The Moon, massacring the people there and in the process bringing about The Fall.
Now other than these facts, the view of Beryl has varied quite a bit from telling to telling. There are some who have claimed that Beryl was a complete and utter monster from the beginning, taking pleasure in the chaos and destruction she was bringing in her wake. These accounts also including an incident which is not spoken about much in any other history, that of the fate of the previous King of the Earth. It is said by these individuals that Beryl, in an attempt to gain power for herself, wooed the King, becoming his lover before ultimately murdering him and apparently devouring his heart in a grotesque cannibalistic display. This account seems to have been given by some of her closest followers and paint an extreme picture of a woman who had been little more then a monster in human skin, who found a like minded fellow in Metalia. However, given the sources used, there has been suggestions of some natural bias.
Others had seen Beryl as someone who had been destroyed by her own tragic love story, unable to show her affection to someone who was very obviously of a higher social class then herself and then discovering that he had already been in love with someone else, driving her to make what is very much nowadays described as a "Faustian" deal with Metalia. In fact there have been some suggestions that the very act of this deal destroyed her original personality, creating instead a new creature driven by the one strongest emotions that she had before: her jealousy and lust, this being seeking out to destroy the very thing which had driven her creation.
The one thread which all these accounts seem to agree on is that she became the leader of the rebel forces on Earth, which unusually enough seems to have become controversial in it's own right. Some of her followers saw her a legitimate leader, one who could unite a people forgotten and left to suffer under the rule of uncaring "gods." Others, however, seem to have simply seen her as a means to an end and saw her as little more then an insane monster who's power was an attraction to them as a manner in which they could accumulate their own personal glory. For many survivors, however, she has still remained somewhat a figure of dread and fear, the cause of so much suffering for the other worlds.
So the question still remains: Who was Queen Beryl? The monster or the hero? The doomed romantic or the insane psychopath? Perhaps in the end she truly has become the very monster which has become the subjects of so many nightmares and regrets for those who lived through those troubled times, the fearsome and terrible witch who brought down a golden age yet still unseen by the Solar System.