"How long have you been following us?" Scorpion demanded to know.

The undead wraith's voice sounded decidedly more sour than usual, though Anya couldn't see him, and it was obvious he was not going to give up trying to convince or order the Hydromancer women to explain how they'd gotten the jump on him. She might have thought his efforts funny if not for the fact that she was filled with terror. She'd seen Scorpion fight before, and she never thought someone could defeat him as easily as their mysterious captor had. Coupled with the horror stories that Kitana had regaled them with earlier, his loss forced fear to pulse through her body from her heart until she trembled as violently as a leaf in the wind. It might help if she could see, but their wardens marched them through the woods with cloth sacks on their heads, and so her blindness made the situation even more disconcerting.

They now wound their way through the dark forest, no less than two warriors flanking every Earthrealm Champion, carefully cutting through the trees with long knives so they could pass. Everyone walked behind the blond woman, an obvious show of deference to their leader. She, in turn, had ordered her fighters to keep Anya close, but the nurse hadn't dared speak since their capture. If this bothered the blond woman, she didn't say so.

Instead, her attention was focused more on Scorpion. "Since you crossed into our territory," their leader finally answered him.

"Well, I don't recall seeing you," Kabal called from somewhere close behind them. Like Scorpion, he was ungagged because of his mask. "And I'd definitely recall seeing you. You tend to stand out. So, uh, what's your name, pretty lady?"

"You and your ilk invaded our boundaries," she growled. "Therefore, I shall be the only one asking questions."

"I'm going to kill you," Scorpion furiously hissed.

"You had your chance, foul vermin," she calmly replied.

"You just caught him off guard," Anya said in his defense. Perhaps as a mercy to one of their own kind, they'd let her go ungagged as well, but she still guarded her tone with the blond. The other said nothing in response. The women holding either of her arms, however, tightened their already iron grips and she whimpered.

"I hear a sorrowful noise, Hellspawn," the leader began as Anya's guards squeezed her arms. The arrogant smirk in her voice was unmistakable. "I believe that is the sound of your pride weeping."

"I will hang you over a great precipice by your feet," Scorpion retorted.

"Well, aren't you a snarky one," Kabal said over the wraith's threat. "I like 'em feisty. So, where have you and all your little friends been hiding for the last few hundred years or so?"

"Untold numbers of Hydromancers have been tortured throughout the millennia for this information," she began, "but there has been no evil great enough to make us surrender our secrets. Why then, do you believe I will tell you?"

"So we can be friends," he said, the stall-tactic apparent in his voice. "We've all got a common enemy now, so I really think we should be friends. I want us to be friends."

"It is good to have goals. It keeps us motivated. But I would not wager anything you cannot do without."

"That's not very hospitable of you," Kabal retorted flatly. "You know, first impressions are everything."

"And I already despise you," she replied. "Imagine how much I will hate you when you make your second and even third impression on me."

"Look, we're not bad guys," Anya interjected. "We're from Earthrealm and we're just trying to get away from Onaga. If you could just let us go, we'll be on our way, and-"

"No."

Anya frowned. "What do you mean, no?" It was stupid of her, she knew, but what she really wanted to say wasn't quite so diplomatic. That wouldn't have bothered her so much – the ache in her heart, coupled with fear and anger, was nearly unbearable and she welcomed death – but Kuai Liang would be pissed off at her for getting their friends killed for running her mouth.

"I was not aware the word had multiple meanings."

"We're just trying to find a way to beat him," she quickly added. "We didn't know this was your territory. We're sorry for trespassing. Please, let us go."

"So you do acknowledge that you do not belong here. This should make it easier for the Queen to decide what to do to the spies lurking around her lands."

"We're not spies!" she yelled.

"Annalise Anderson, I would have you stop talking," Scorpion growled at her. "This fool has already pronounced judgment on us, and you are not in a position to change her mind."

Anya, flustered, felt thankful that her head was shrouded to hide her wide eyes. Scorpion was up to something. She didn't know how she knew, but there was something about the way he spoke that caused her gut to leap into a somersault and tug her towards a certain conclusion. He knew something she didn't. Her breathing grew noisier and quicker, and she prayed her wardens did not detect the change. About a minute later, the group stepped onto sturdier ground where no old leaves, vines, or twigs crackled beneath their feet, where there was nothing but solid stone to walk on.

"Uncover their heads," the leader ordered after they came to a stop.

Anya felt a hard breeze wafting from below her and gradually rising into the air in a spiral current around her. She then saw its source the moment one of her guards yanked her bag from her head. "Oh, my God," she muttered. They stood upon a high precipice at least a mile up that overlooked a small basin and an even tinier village blanketed with gray haze. A lazy and ruddy river twisted through the bottom like a snake sluggish from lying in the sun, cutting the settlement completely in half, its source a distant waterfall crashing down a sheer cliff wall on the opposite side of the dell. Sickly trees the color of a corpse's skin densely forested the space.

Anya exhaled and squeaked embarrassingly loud as the Hydromancers marched everyone close to the edge. She was afraid of heights; carnival rides and buildings didn't bother her so much, though she avoided them on principle, but sheer mountain drop-offs terrified her, and she began to press backwards against her wardens. They, in turn, gripped her even harder and pushed her forward, so she whimpered and started to cry as she struggled to get free.

The Hydromancer chieftain seemed to take pity on her then because she held up her palm to her warriors and said, "No, Sisters, she is not to be put into one of the hanging cages. We will take her to the Queen instead."

"Yes, Milady," both women said as one as they bowed and then pulled Anya back.

Then the nurse saw what the blond meant by 'hanging cages'. On an intricate pulley system that stretched between the two cliffs, barred crates barely bigger than a human dangled from thick ropes and swung gently over the dell. Currently, the second-in-command was barking orders at her underlings to turn a crank lever, and as they heaved and hoed, the rope gradually brought them just over the lip of the cliff. One by one, the Hydromancers wrestled their prey into the tiny prisons, and then the women in charge of the crank moved in concentric circles to drag the cages out again. Not a single warrior gave up without at least trying to resist, and even Khadija and Sherman put up a fight, but in the end there was precious little they could do with their hands bound tightly behind their backs, and so they found themselves stuffed into their individual crates.

Scorpion was the last warrior, and to Anya's relief, he immediately side-kicked the warden to his left in the side of her knee, but by the time she screamed in pain and crashed to the ground, he'd already tossed aside his smoldering rope bonds and grabbed the second. He moved so blindingly fast that the densely freckled redhead had no idea what had happened until he hoisted her over his head in a graceful arch and then slammed her body into the first warrior's head. Even then, Anya wagered, she still probably had no clue; both women laid on the ground in a dazed, groaning fugue.

"I love you, Scorpion!" Kabal yelled from his distant crate. His was one of the first pulled over the dell.

Anya rolled her eyes and sighed in disgust at her friend's smart-ass remark, and she imagined that if the wraith weren't currently preoccupied with the Hydromancer chieftain, he'd have probably killed the man with his bare hands. But as it stood, the blond woman had already hurled her spear towards him with such a look of derision plastered on her face that the nurse scarcely thought she could ever match it. But fire glowing in her intense lavender eyes didn't stop Scorpion from stepping to the side and grabbing it in much the same fashion she'd done to him earlier that day. He calmly plucked it from its course, whirled around in a tight circle, and threw it back at her again. As if making a deadly statement, it plunged into the rock ground between her feet.

She looked at it in surprise, but the wraith was already upon her. He scurried up a tree beside her and launched off it into a kind of spinning kick that Anya had only seen in movies before she met Kuai Liang. It was one of her favorite martial arts movements, probably because it seemed to mock the laws of gravity. Scorpion's leg arched through the air towards the warrior woman's head, but she'd anticipated the attack and flipped into a backwards handspring, so his kick sailed harmlessly over her.

From Anya's vantage point, they both recovered about the same time, but the woman was quicker on the draw, and by the time the wraith had turned to face her, she was already running up his chest like a wall. When her feet reached his shoulders, perhaps a split second later, she wrapped her legs tightly around his neck and then threw herself backwards. Immediately, she yanked him with her, and he flew forward, rolling through the air like a baseball. But he continued with the roll, purposefully now, so when he hit the ground he rolled to his feet. At the same time, however, the chieftain had already plucked her spear from the ground and was charging towards him as if to run him through.

"Scorpion, look out!" the nurse screeched.

As he had before, he stepped aside and grabbed her spear, but this time he used it to flip her onto her back. She coughed on the rock ground and started to resist, but the wraith immediately stomped in the middle of her chest with his boot, and a loud crunch broke through the silence. Her ribs, the nurse suspected, were just broken. The woman groaned and rolled her head painfully to the side. Then Scorpion gracefully twirled the weapon from one arm to the other, bringing it around his head as if dangerously tangoing with an airplane propeller, and then suddenly drove it towards her face with breakneck momentum. Anya squealed and flinched; she might have been a nurse and accustomed to blood and guts, but she didn't think she could stand the sight of the blond woman blinded so violently. But there was no sound, not even the breaths of the Hydromancer warriors as they all held theirs. Uncertainly, she turned and looked.

Anya had no idea what was more impressive: the fact that Scorpion had stopped the spear right at her cornea, or the fact that the blond woman hadn't even blinked.

He didn't hold his position. As the entranced Hydromancers remembered themselves and charged towards him, he twisted the spear again, but this time launched it into a tree. Then he hurled his kunai spear through one of the narrow bars of Kitana's crate nearly halfway over the dell, and quickly lassoed the loose end of its rope around the chieftain's ankles before he hoisted her onto his shoulders. To everyone's surprise – well, not really to Anya's because she was used to his impossible stunts – Scorpion then ran like a cheetah towards the edge. When he reached it, he launched them both into the open air, and then he promptly let go of the woman before he dove through a new portal spitting fire below him. The blond woman, in turn, yelped as she careened towards the dell floor, but was jerked back several times by the stretchy kunai rope before she came to a stop.


An hour later, after rescuing their leader, her pride hurt even worse than her body, the Hydromancers escorted Anya into the village. She knew her friends hung directly above her, probably scared, especially little Sherman, but she found her thoughts were selfish. The young nurse wondered why she'd been singled out as the sole prisoner to be brought to camp. She hoped it was due to a sense of kinship, but logically, she knew that couldn't be the case. The chieftain had accused her of sorcery – Shang Tsung's sorcery, to be exact – and obviously the women warriors did not appreciate that.

The village was more ancient than she expected. From above, it looked medieval and primitive, sure, but up close it was much, much older, more akin to an antiquated tribal society than a feudal township. A tall fence decorated with yellowing skulls surrounded it, and she couldn't help but swallow hard as her wardens led her through the main gate, which had, eerily enough, an entire skeleton fastened to its wooden poles. Once inside, though, she didn't see the evil monsters Kitana and Jade had described. But she did see many lavender-eyed Hydromancers of all ages: girls dressed in rags and animal skins playing in the short roads between huts and old women working their gnarled fingers raw washing clothes in big vats of water. Many of those women, Anya noted, and even some of the more middle-aged ones, had terrible burn scars at various points and severity on their bodies. The scars, in fact, seemed to be a common affliction amongst the older population.

The younger generations, those about her age and below, seemed to be in better shape in terms of scarring, but everyone here verged on emaciation. Even the chieftain woman ahead of her, Anya now realized, had dark shadows on her cheeks and eye sockets, and the exposed portions of skin on her torso, legs, and arms was shrunk too tightly over her wiry frame. As she hunched over her second-in-command's shoulder, the nurse distinctly noticed her spine protruding. How in the hell any of these warriors had the strength to lift a spear, much less use one, boggled her mind. Her heart lurched in pity for her, and for all these people, especially when she saw a young girl about four eat a morsel of some kind of meat, and then start to cry because it was all her mother could give her. There was nothing left, she heard the waif-thin woman say. Now Anya started to cry – silently – because the scene before her reminded her of pictures she'd seen of the Nazi Holocaust as well as places like Ethiopia and Somalia. These people were starving.

And where in the hell were the men? she wondered as she let her tears quietly fall down her cheeks. She thought about asking her captors, but was fairly certain they'd shoot down her question just as soon as it left her lips. So she tried to smile instead at the Hydromancer civilians who now eyed her curiously. Word of her arrival had clearly spread to these reclusive people. While she received her fair share of hostile frowns from the older women, many of the younger people regarded her as a strange anomaly, at first cocking their eyebrow in confusion and then smiling as brightly as they dared. But none of them bothered the warrior's entourage.

The chieftain and her second-in-command led the group to the far end of the village where it tapered off into the forest. Enormous gaps appeared in the trees, paths of devastation where the soil had melted into solid rock and no living things remained. A larger hut than the rest hid behind it, and as they approached, a Hydromancer woman swaddled in a long black cloak met them, her face concealed in a deep hood.

"Greetings, Tetrach," she greeted in a voice that sounded oddly familiar. "What has brought you before me?"

"It is not a matter for you, it is for the Queen, Malorie," the other hissed.

"She is preoccupied, Kailyn. If it is important, speak it and I will interrupt her."

Kailyn glowered at the woman but finally sighed. "I do not know, exactly," she confessed, struggling to breathe. "I am convinced sorcery is involved, though."

"And why is that, Milady?" she asked tersely. The blond woman clinched her fists so tightly that her knuckles turned white. And it was no wonder. The hooded woman's tone annoyed even Anya. Malorie was clearly an underling to the Queen, was probably the Tetrach's underling as well, yet spoke to her with such pride that the nurse almost wanted to see her deck the woman just to take her down a peg or ten.

The blond warrior controlled her fists but glared at her antagonist angrily. "Do you not see the way she resembles Catja?"

"A mere coincidence," she said as she stepped around the Tetrach to more closely inspect Anya. "She does not look like something Shang Tsung conjured."

"Oh, thanks," the nurse mumbled.

"Silence!" the woman hissed. She looked back to Kailyn. "Did you look for the truth in her heart?" she asked.

"I did."

"And?"

"She believes she is her daughter."

"She cries," Malorie abruptly changed the subject as a slightly aged hand wiped a tear from her cheek and tasted it. The nurse wrinkled her nose in disgust but said nothing. The hooded figure smacked her lips together quickly, almost obscenely, and then looked at the Tetrach. "She feels compassion for our people because we are hungry, Kailyn. Have you ever known one of Shang Tsung's abominations to feel compassion?"

"No," the other grudgingly admitted. "But that does not mean we are not being tricked."

"Hmmm...That is a problem. You are easily tricked, Kailyn, and that is not something the Falcata Tetrach can afford to be," she replied.

Suddenly, she threw off her hood and revealed a middle-aged woman with the same hair as Anya – rich mahogany brown that was long and straight – though a third of her scalp was bald, her skin bulbous and transparent like melted wax. The burn scar had spread to her face, climbed down her forehead, blinded a lavender eye white, and dribbled down her cheek almost to her jaw. Her ear on that side was little more than a large, veiny blister, brown and pitted with age. Smaller and less severe patches marred the skin of her neck, but Anya couldn't take her eyes off the one on her face. It reminded her of the Phantom of the Opera, though at least the Phantom could remove his mask.

"My Queen, forgive me!" Kailyn cried as she and her second-in-command both dropped to their knees. "I did not know it was you."

"I believe your prisoner was telling the truth, Kailyn," the woman said with a knowing grin, ignoring her servant's apology. Her tone had lost nearly all of its arrogance, put none of its potency. "So why don't you?"

But Anya heard none of that. She couldn't believe what she saw. It was something from a nightmare, she quickly decided, and suddenly she couldn't breathe. She knew this woman. No matter how much time had passed since she had last seen her, no matter how much grief and anger had twisted her memories of her, no matter how much those memories had faded, Anya knew her. And she always would.

"Mom…" she whispered, barely able to speak as all the other women warriors fell to one knee in respect. Fresh tears flooded her eyes and spilled down her cheeks. "Oh, my God."

"Hello, Anya," Catja replied. "I've been waiting for you."


Author's Note: Thanks to Firebending Master for not only helping me, as always, with the fight scene, but also for giving me the confidence to do something risky like bringing Anya's mom back from the grave.