Brief Synopsis: Somebody from Rayden's past is haunting him, and she holds his future in her fingertips. Literally. See, she's the goddess of prophecy.
Based on: Mortal Kombat: Conquest, sometime before the end of the series.
Rating: R. Contains slightly religious themes, blood and gore (of course), uberangst, and soap opera-ish gods.
This chapter is rated PG
You used to captivate me by your resonating light
Now I'm bound by the life you left behind
Your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams
Your voice has chased away all the sanity in me
These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase
When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears
I've held your hand through all of these years
But you still have all of me
-Evanescence, "My Immortal"
Anara the bartender looked up to greet the customer who just walked in on this hazy August afternoon. The bar was silent. It was too early for anybody to be in at harvest-time.
It was Taja. The young redhead who worked at Reyland Exports with Siro and Kung Lao. Siro was a regular. After Jen's untimely death, her bodyguard had taken to occasion her bar more often than not, drinking his spirits mournfully.
"Anara, has Siro been in today? Kung Lao and I have been looking everywhere for him, we haven't seen him all day."
The bartender gave her a small, sad smile. "I'm sorry, Taja. He hasn't been in since yesterday."
Taja sighed and crossed her arms. "I guess I'll have some wine, then. I need to relax."
"Sure thing. Make yourself at home." Anara poured Taja's request as the redhead sat down at the bar.
"You know, Anara …this isn't such a bad town, Zhu Zhin."
"It'll grow on you," the bartender supplied while absently cleaning a glass. "I've been here my whole life. Inherited this bar from my parents. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else."
"I know what you mean. I ---" Taja cut off abruptly as the door opened and Siro walked in, looking twice as he noticed the ex-thief sitting there.
"Siro! Where have you been? Reyland was so busy this morning, and you left Kung Lao and me to tend it ourselves." Taja stood up, her hands planted on her hips. She inconspicuously planted herself between Siro and the wine.
"Well, it must not have been that bad, since you're here drinking …"
"It was bad! How could you expect ---" The door opened again, and she paused to look over at the entrance, half expecting to see Kung Lao.
A middle-aged woman wearing a grey dress walked in, a scowl line permanently engraved between her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. There were no laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Taja found that strangely depressing.
The woman greeted the three with a brief nod before taking a seat at one of the round tables on the floor, her back to the far corner of the room. Anara shrugged almost imperceptibly and walked over to see what the woman wanted to order.
Taja gulped down the rest of her drink, threw a coin next to the empty glass, and dragged Siro back to Reyland Exports, ignoring his stammers of protest.
"What can I do for you?" Anara asked the quiet old woman, a friendly smile beaming across her face.
"Die." The woman whispered to the
bartender, standing more quickly than a youth could have.
Anara felt herself pushed out of her own body. She traveled back on the iron thread that connected the old woman to her puppeteer, a white-haired god.
He chuckled darkly and closed a bruising hand around her wrist.
She tried to scream, but his lips were already covering hers.
***
Siro was reminiscing about his exploits of the morning, a blonde with "legs to her ears that was stacked to the rafters like a brick barn" for Kung Lao, who looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Taja, who could have glared a hole through the wall.
The ex-guard, however, was oblivious to the feelings of his friends, as he stood in front of the table they were sitting at like a stage actor. As his lewd story reached the climactic conclusion, he spread his arms wide and bowed from the waist, expecting at least a scattered applause from his captive audience.
When he received none, he looked up to see them looking inquiringly over at
Rayden, who was looking at something out the window with a strangely worried
expression.
"Rayden!" Siro injected loudly, startling the quiet god. He raised his eyebrows questioningly, looking away from the window. "You must appreciate the, ah, finer aspects of city life! Tell these two what they're missing."
"Do you mean disease wise or the part where ---" Siro cut Rayden off before he could get started on the sarcastic --yet moral-- rant.
"C'mon. It must be like this in …wherever it is you're from. Don't you have a little goddess waiting back home for you?" Siro grinned, apparently not seeing the raw stupidity of teasing the god of electricity.
Rayden looked away, darkly. Kung Lao said into the silence, "Siro …"
"What's her name?"
"Siro, maybe he doesn't want to talk about it!" Taja stood up, fists on the table, and looked out of the corner of her eye at the god.
"Hey, I know this stuff. Why do you think he's brooding?"
"Brooding?" Rayden inquired lightly, his voice not matching his demeanor. He was looking back out the front window. "Who's brooding?"
"Men, Gods …it's all the same. So what's her name?" Rayden sighed quietly and Siro tried to smother a smirk.
"Siro!"
"What, do you think you're ---"
"Rauni."
"What?"
"Her name was Rauni."
"Hah! See, Kung Lao, I told you."
"Was…"
Rayden looked over at Kung Lao, who had whispered it. "Was." He confirmed quietly, not meeting his eyes.
"Was?" Siro paused in his victory dance to look over at the overcast god. "What?"
"She's dead," Kung Lao supplied. When they looked back to the table Rayden was sitting on he was gone.
If they had looked out the window, they would have seen him walking toward Anara's bar.
***
"How was I supposed to know she was dead? That guy's got serious girl problems." Siro announced at the breakfast table the third morning since they had seen Rayden. "You don't honestly think he'd just give up on Mortal Kombat because I teased him a little, do you? The guy's got a life, too."
Taja looked startled but remained silent. Siro took the point and stopped talking. After five minutes of quiet, Kung Lao inquired about the weather, which reminded them all of Rayden again.
Annoyed, perhaps a trifle jealous, and seeking the rambunctious solitude that could only come from the bustle of hard-working strangers, Taja went for a walk.
Out in the marketplace stood Anara. She was motionless. Her silent presence seemed to dominate the entire city square, her poise like that of a queen. She wore a dark cloak, the hood drawn up over her forehead and shadowing her eyes. Her hands were at her sides, and she seemed to have no belongings with her. Taja carefully approached her friend who seemed like a stranger.
"Anara?" Taja enunciated clearly, not entirely certain the woman would hear her.
The bartender turned her head slightly to meet Taja's eyes, and drew her hood back with a strange grace that seemed so out of place in this little dusty city, and so unlike Anara.
The bartender still looked the same.
She had a thin, pale face surrounded by a wavy curtain of light brown
hair. Wide brown eyes gazed calmly at
the ex-con artist as they studied each other.
Her lips were blood red, and curled up into a smirk.
"Tell Rayden that I am waiting." Her voice was quiet and arrogant, like she was used to being listened to.
Taja's mouth opened like a fish, and as she blinked, Anara was gone.
***
"I'm telling you, it was creepy. It wasn't Anara."
"And she was looking for Rayden?"
Taja raised an eyebrow at Siro. "Well, if we ever see Rayden again, I'll be sure to tell him."
"He's right there," Kung Lao said quietly over his shoulder from his position in front of the second floor windowsill, pointing with his chin when the two walked over to him.
Rayden, wearing an inconspicuous dark cloak, stood as still as the stranger Anara had, only he wasn't silent. He was speaking quietly, his eyes focused solely on a spot in the air.
The voice that answered him was the bartender, who made herself visible only after her statement was made. The people walking around them stopped to stare.
The god sighed and crossed his arms, casually shifting his weight to his right leg, which was placed slightly behind the other, as if he was preparing for an attack. He immediately snapped into a musical, quicksilver language that the mortals couldn't make out, though it didn't serve well to drive away the crowd.
She twirled a pretty pirouette, her arms gracefully over her head, before sweeping into a full, mocking curtsy. Her skirts flowed around her legs like water. Rayden said something sharp, and her eyes snapped back to his, her mouth forming a snarl that turned her soft face into something frightening. Threatening wisps of electricity danced in the air around Rayden, and she backed up a few steps.
"The silver arrow of the sky will fall to the red man as the new moon threatens. It is this I see, and this I wish to warn you of. But know this, my dear one. Prophecy is never free." She had moved closer to Rayden as she spoke, and at the word free she placed a hand on his chest. She spoke so the mortals could understand, and stand as witness.
"Go back from whence you came, spirit," Rayden growled, the Words of Power drawing over them like a heavy blanket. "You are not welcome on Earth."
"I am welcome for as long as you are, dear heart. You should know that by now. We cannot stay apart for long." She grimaced and disappeared so suddenly that a faint red light remained in a vaporous silhouette until it diffused into the air like blood into water.
Rayden seemed to unconsciously take a step towards the place she once stood.
The mortals looked at one another in confusion.
"I guess you might want a bit of an explanation," Rayden said from behind them. They turned away from the quickly dispersing crowd of onlookers to see the god looking at them with such an exhausted expression that they nearly turned down his offer.
Nearly.
"That was Rauni?" Taja asked quietly.
"That was Rauni," he confirmed, drawing a slightly shaky breath. "Or, at least, part of her.
"When I was growing up there was this famous myth about two beings sharing the same …essence. Soul. The thing that …makes you…you. It was a pretty specific story, though there were no records of it ever happening, before …. Whatever happened to one was felt by the other. You know, one gets a cut, the other does, too." Rayden rubbed his wrist as if he was remembering some past pain, and paused to look out the window to where he and Rauni just stood, rare emotion stirring in his eyes. Siro, Taja and Kung Lao remained silent, drawing the facts together separately. "They were called soultwins. Rauni and I were the first.
"The Elder God Shinnok decided to take advantage of the fact, seeing as I inherited Earth and it happened to be what he and every other corrupt entity in the universe wanted. So he devised a plan to kidnap Rauni. She was the goddess of prophecy, much less dangerous than lightning, he decided. With …blood magic he developed a curse to act as a barricade between us. I couldn't find her, and they tortured her.
"Shao Kahn …Shinnok's son …tracked me down. He …broke the barricade spell." He looked down at his hands. They were trembling slightly.
Taja sat down hard on the ground, and felt her eyes go wide at the story. Rayden wasn't one for talking about himself, she had just assumed it was some sort of 'rule.' Siro sat down next to her, but Kung Lao remained standing. He seemed stunned that the fight between Rayden and Shao Kahn had gone back so far.
Rayden was distinctly uncomfortable talking about his torture. "Needless to say, they caught me by surprise. I lost Earth. I don't know how long I stayed in that cell, but one day Rauni prophesized the downfall of Shinnok. He was so pissed that he …he killed her, and put the piece of her that made her my soultwin into a diamond vial. I don't have any idea how he kept me alive, but he …he didn't protect my mind. I ...something snapped. I defeated Shinnok and banished him to the Netherealm, and got Earth back. But I never knew what happened to the vial."
To Be Continued …