Debris

Prologue

He walked in to find the saloon deserted, abandoned perhaps.

The place was a mess, with old wooden tables and chairs scattered all over the floor.

He looked down at his own calloused hands while approaching the bar – they seemed smaller somehow, lighter. He reached for his pistol but it was nowhere to be found and then he noticed it: he had suddenly turned into a younger version of himself, he was fourteen again and most of the dark thoughts and bitter memories that should have been weighing heavily on his head weren't there to haunt him anymore.

A ray of sunlight interrupted his train of thought as it swirled around and found its way through a crack in a distant wall. The piano started to play and there she was on stage once again, ready to perform. Her blue dress suddenly reminded him just how immaculate, how pristine she looked while on the spotlight – she was a bright, courageous woman and a very talented one also. He grabbed one of the ruined chairs and dragged it closer to the stage; eager to listen. She was a vision, his vision.

The fourteen-year-old cowboy grinned softly as he observed the way she was walking towards him; her head held up high, ready to sing. Then she stopped walking, rather abruptly, stood in the center of the stage and, with the required dramatism of the artist, placed both her hands at the sides of her waist – the vision was complete now, he recognized it instinctively: the pose, he knew it by heart after watching his mother perform for so many years. That was finally it; she was going to sing for him once more.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out.

He frowned, unsure of what was truly happening, until he realized she was already singing – only he wasn't hearing her. Something was preventing him from hearing her voice he loved so deeply. He gestured her to stop but she paid no mind and kept on singing her inaudible song – he knew he wasn't deaf; he was perfectly able to hear every little sound taking place all around him.

Her voice was the only exception.

His mother's voice, that breath-taking sound he used to love so much, was the only exception.

It was a bad dream. It was a curse. To be able to live for so long came with a price: there comes a point when your memory decides it's time to take some things away from you and you don't even notice they're gone until it's too late. Perhaps it was the savage and rather exaggerated passing of his years, burying his oldest and probably dearest memories and making him colder and colder every day; now far from the warm embrace that had once held him so tenderly. Or perhaps it was the true sentence for every single crime committed all over the years, the one that hurt the most – being able to remember the atrocities from those long-lost days like it was yesterday but having forgotten the one true thing he should have remembered.

It was a punishment.

A sad expression set in his eyes as he gave her one last look only to find that she was gone; the woman had vanished in a sepia-colored breeze, never to return again. The light from the stage was already extinguished by now and suddenly it's all debris; just like a fine recollection of carefully chosen memories scattered all over the place, like a black void or a wild whirlpool of faces and images that he can see but cannot touch, and the time - the distance between him and those long lost pieces of a puzzle that seems to be not his anymore ricochets throughout the nighttime for him to remember that perhaps he's already forgotten much more than he should have.

Arc I

Chapter I

Of Dreams and Dreamers

He opened his eyes to find himself lying in a bed that wasn't his – both his wrists were tied up to the sides of the bed, his arms fully outstretched. His face mask was nowhere to be found and his naked torso was feeling more than just the morning chill – there were traces of blood all the way down to his stomach and he had a nasty, long and presumably deep laceration all across his abdomen, just a few inches below his navel. There were some bandages that had been applied around his belly so he could only see a fraction of the actual cut. He tried to move but it was nearly impossible, besides being tied up he felt tired and rather numb. He closed his eyes again, foreseeing the headache that was coming his way; then took a deep breath and tried to remember what had happened to him.

"Sorry about the bindings." A soft but masculine voice welcomed him from across the smoky room. "You were tossing and turning in your sleep, delirious I believe. So we had to tie you up to the bed for us to clean your cuts…" The voice continued, endearing and apologetic. "Now, keeping the bandages in place was a whole other mess. Yours is a truly restless spirit, son."

Erron's eyes focused on the old man as he tried to figure things out.

"Missing in action, the official statement from the palace" The old man interrupted Black's thoughts, his voice serious yet kind. "The rebel-seekers found you nearly bleeding to death and they brought you here for us to patch you up. Some of them are even expecting a reward. You better watch your back when you leave – you are money on legs for many people now." The man said. From his looks and the way he spoke, the mercenary deduced that the man was in his mid-sixties or perhaps his early-seventies and of course, he was definitely an Earthrealmer.

Rebel-seekers?

Us?

"Anyway, it is important that you stay put and that you behave like the good kid I know you are. Finish all your homework in time and we'll go to the beach for the weekend." The old man said tenderly before spacing out, his eyes were wandering somewhere in between the bed and the wall. Old, human and nuts; winning combination Black mumbled to himself.

The mercenary stared at the old man for some minutes, witnessing his almost lobotomized expression. He tried saying incoherent things out loud to catch his attention but as soon as he noticed that the man was lost in his own world he started to move his wrists insistently and relentlessly until he felt the bindings coming loose. Once freed from them, Black tried to sit down but the pain he felt across his wounded stomach almost paralyzed him as new traces of blood came quickly and stained his bandages.

Perhaps the crazy old man was telling the truth but the mercenary couldn't afford staying there much longer to find out; there was no time to lose – he was needed in the palace, he had a job to do. He needed out.

It took all his strength but he finally managed to stand up and start walking. He found his hat, his face mask and all his belonging sitting on a wooden chair by the only window in the bedroom. All the while the old man just stood there, in the center of the room, completely oblivious of his presence. He could have pointed one of his guns to his head and the old man wouldn't have even blinked. He considered killing him for a minute – he could not be trusted after all or so it seemed: he presented a story that was starting to sound convincing enough but then, all of a sudden, it was nonsense. He walked towards the man and examined him cautiously: he had several marks scattered across the parts of his body that weren't covered by his clothes; the signs of struggle and perhaps, even rebellion. Black moved near the chair again and slowly started to pick up his belongings one by one. By the sounds coming from the outside he could tell he was in a populated area, that place wasn't just a hideout lost in the middle of nowhere. Once he was done with his clothing, he approached the man once more; he looked him in the eye and whispered an almost inaudible grump, perhaps his version of a thank you.

The mercenary was ready to leave when he heard the old man say:

"You're not ready to go but if you have to, I hope you're careful out there." It seemed that, somehow, the man had managed to get a hold of whatever clarity he had left in his mind. "The fact that you can't age does not make you immortal." The man concluded without even moving or blinking.

Black turned around bearing a puzzled look on his face. As if trying to take advantage of the man's little gap of consciousness he rushed back to him and asked: "Do you know if I was alone when… when they… when I was found?" but the man wasn't there anymore, at least not in a way that could prove useful for the mercenary.

Black sighed helplessly as his face began to show a mixture of pain, tiredness and disappointment, then reached for his pocket and placed a couple silver coins by the bed. He left the room with nothing but confusion and a few freshly-reopened wounds. The mercenary walked towards an empty corridor that led him to a dining hall where a woman in her thirties was polishing a revolver with the same dedication only he himself would have towards any fire weapon. She seemed to pay no mind as Black walked past her, breathing in his surroundings and examining the place: he was definitely in a typical Outworld house, modest but cozy and significantly smaller than his own place in the palace. He felt tempted to ask the woman a million different questions about that house, the old man, and his very own situation but he just walked on by, pain clearly reflected all over his face, and reached for the door. As he opened it, his suspicions became true: that place was just a typical city house and it looked like it was midday or the early hours of the afternoon, maybe. Outworlders were coming and going with their bags and baskets, the marketplace was perfectly visible from the doorway.

He was about to leave when the woman's voice made him turn over his shoulder as he heard her say: "Never mind about Harry, the poor man went nuts a few years back. Now, fifty percent of what he says is true and the other fifty percent is an illusion but the good news is, you choose the fifty percent part you want to believe in." A soft chuckle escaped her mouth as she looked up at him: "By the way, I didn't hear a gunshot – thank you for not killing him."

Black leant on the door and grabbed his stomach as if he could stand no more, blood certainly starting to run down and slip through his fingers.

"Those cuts and wounds of yours – they don't speak Tarkatan, if you know what I mean." The woman said, visibly concerned but quite certain at the same time.

"Earthrealmer, aren't you?" Black whispered the question through clenched teeth, the pain he was enduring was now unbearable. She stood up and rushed to his aid, holding him with her right hand on his waist and her left hand on one of his shoulders. She felt the weight of his body resonating all across her back and legs as he closed his eyes and began to fall.

"Aren't we all?" She whispered back.

He slept for three days; occasionally regaining some consciousness every now and then during brief periods of time until the incomparable sounds of violence woke him from his slumber for good.

The pain he had felt before was mostly gone by now and the minute he removed the bandages from his abdomen he saw brand new skin tissue starting to show at the sides of his larger wound, the laceration exposed across his stomach – he was healing. Unlike his last awakening, he wasn't tied up to the bed so he could move around without much effort. He stood up and walked towards the wooden chair where his belongings were sitting – again. The sounds of sobbing and screaming that had caused him to open his eyes a few moments ago were persistent, even louder than before. He grabbed his pistol and left the room in silence.

The fact that this time there was not a single light in the corridor helped him blend in the darkness as he made his way to the dining hall. He was still a bit dizzy but he was definitely feeling much better than the last time he had walked down that same corridor. The dining hall was barely lit but it was enough for him to see the woman in her thirties sobbing uncontrollably, holding her head between her hands as a man was pointing a gun at her. The crazy old man was there too, his expression dumb and absent, with two men flanking him. Black stayed in the hallway and tried to signal the woman to lower her head but she didn't see him. Harry was trembling like a small child, mumbling something to himself over and over again.

"The rebel-seekers, the rebel-seekers, the rebel-seekers…" The words were louder every time and the old man was shaking violently now.

Black watched the scene in silence, still concealed by the shadows of the night, until one of the men surrounding Harry slapped the man in the face, visibly annoyed by the old man's attitude. Blood started to pour from the corner of Harry's mouth and now his voice was carrying the message loud and clear, like an alarm: "The rebel-seekers, the rebel-seekers, the rebel-seekers…" The man who was pointing his gun at the woman let out a sigh full of intolerance and, without a word, turned around and shot him in the head. Harry's body collapsed cold to the ground, lifeless. Black could see how the woman, now terrified, was trying her best not to scream. The two men that had previously flanked Harry walked towards the door and leant their backs against it.

"Are you sure you're not telling lies, woman?" One of them asked, raising an eyebrow, visibly losing his temper.

The woman shook her head in response. She took a deep breath, her hands trembling, and said: "He's not gonna make it, his cuts were too deep, he lost a lot of blood -" she paused, allowing her mind to carefully choose her next words: "Ever since you brought him here he's been unconscious, almost gone. To be honest, we were expecting more from a man who has Shang Tsung's magic running through his body… but I guess in the end, he's just a man." Her voice was soft and surprisingly full of remorse.

Instinctively, Black understood that the woman was protecting him, even at the cost of Harry's life.

He still needed out, now more than even – going back home to the palace was his number one priority but he knew the woman needed his help. He was not a merciful man; there was no doubt about it, but this time the need was mutual: she needed him to help her stay alive and he needed her to answer all the questions piling up inside his head.

The rebel-seekers?

Us?

"We're taking him anyway." The man that was still by her side grunted, his gun now pressed against her left arm.

"He'll die before you even get to the palace;" she answered quickly and nervously, but both Black and the woman knew his condition was not that critical – in fact, her last words acted like the cue he had been waiting for to finally pull the trigger, "there'll be no reward for you to collect anyway. The Kahn wants his guard back alive, if you show up with his dead body, I don't think he'll be happy."

As soon as she finished that sentence the two men standing by the door were both dead, traces of blood were streaming down their faces. The sound of Black's pistol firing startled both the woman and her remaining captor.

"You were looking for me?" Black asked coldly, almost nonchalantly, as he walked towards the light. He was ready to shoot the third man when the woman grabbed the kitchen knife she had been hiding among her clothes and buried it into her captor's neck, seizing the small window of opportunity Black had surprisingly given her. The man began to choke with his own blood, desperation taking over his features as he struggled in agonizing pain until he kissed his own life goodbye. In just a matter of seconds he was dead on the floor as well as his partners. The woman looked at Black in the eye, as he approached her disdainfully.

"You look better," she said, trying to regain her composure. She knew she should have said thank you instead but the blood contaminating the atmosphere was getting the best of her; the inner channel that connected her mouth to her brain seemed temporarily blocked due to the shock of death and the horrifying image of Harry's body lingering still on the floor.

She was all alone now, for the first time ever since coming to Outworld, and all the possible futures she had in store were slowly fading before her own swollen eyes.

"I've been better -" Black replied harshly as he placed his pistol on the table, "but I guess I cannot complain."