Zirconia

Zirconia carries herself like an ancient crone swathed in flowing dark purple robes that hide nearly all of her, leaving only her hands and face bare. Her exposed skin is lavender and deeply creased with wrinkles, and a smile almost never crosses it. A scowling shadow-face rides on her cloak and can beam out an image of Nehelenia whenever the queen wishes to speak through her. Thin, insect-like pincers jut beneath her chin, lending her the look of a praying mantis, and she wears a white horned helmet marked at its center with the black dot of the Dead Moon Circus. In one hand she grips a towering white staff that carries her flaming eyeball, Zircon. Her name traces back to zirconia, a material grown into gemstones or used to imitate diamonds.

There seems to be no joy anywhere in Zirconia. She was made from Nehelenia and appears to live for nothing but serving her, and she treats her underlings with harsh impatience, barking at them to find Pegasus and berating every failure. Rebellion earns no mercy from her: she came to blows with one of the Amazoness Quartet not long after meeting them, and only Nehelenia's protection kept her from wiping the group out when their mockery of her age wore thin.

Nehelenia's fear of becoming old and ugly gave rise to Zirconia, who in turn wields several powers, firing off blue energy waves, casting spider-like threads, and splitting into duplicates of herself. Using a magic orb, she turned a tiger, a hawk, and a fish into the Amazon Trio and sent them prowling through people's dreams to learn whose held Pegasus. When they outlived their usefulness she dispatched the Amazoness Quartet to finish them, though Pegasus later revived the Trio, gave them dream mirrors, and settled them in a forest in Elysion.

The Quartet took over the search but proved a constant thorn, disrespecting Zirconia and jeering at her age while Nehelenia's favor shielded them. She and Zircon kept naming their targets, and Nehelenia eventually revealed that the dream mirror they sought would be gold. Zirconia finally used Zircon to draw out Sailor Chibi Moon's mirror, the golden one, imprisoning her within Nehelenia's mirror and later sealing the disobedient Quartet inside mirrors of their own. Her attempt to fool the guardians with reflections collapsed, and in the fight that followed she spawned clones of herself, only for Sailor Mercury to pick out the real one, the sole copy still carrying Zircon on her staff, and strike her with Mercury Aqua Rhapsody. She summoned the Quartet and began draining their power, but the moment they shattered their orbs and surrendered Nehelenia's power, her plan failed. Zirconia fell back to the mirror room, where Nehelenia, now holding the Golden Crystal, walked out through the glass. Unable to exist while her queen stood outside the mirror, Zirconia flared red and vanished for good. A creature resembling her would surface once more out of Nehelenia during the final battle with Sailor Moon. She stands as the only major Dead Moon villain never redeemed, though counting her as a piece of Nehelenia complicates that; the Cloverway dub oddly recast her as male, and she is among the rare foes to shrug off Moon Gorgeous Meditation, having taken it while shielding the Amazoness Quartet.