Transposition
by Nyohah
Interlude:
Cadenza
Two Thousand Years Before MK1
"More wine?"
The voice was deliberate and polite. It didn't echo in the stone chamber, but she could hear it perfectly above the sound of tumult stories below—a steady pounding amid a quieter roar. The pounding, she surmised, would be deafening to those not so high above it. Such were the benefits of impregnable towers.
Sorceress Ennir sat up on the divan where she had been lounging, dress hanging precariously. It revealed too much, she knew, but to do so in her position of power was irresistible. No one could argue her position had been won by her style of dress.
She held her diamond glass out to the man and smiled. Not at him, but at her own reflection in the mirror lining the wall behind him. She liked mirrors, especially in arrangements that showed her all sides of herself. She was vain enough, true, but above all else she liked to watch the threads. There were thousands ending in her, glinting and incorporeal, as taut as bowstrings. Never had one snapped. She never let anyone leave her service, and no one had ever tried.
Enticed by the mirror, she walked toward to it, her steps slow and deliberately in time with the pounding. She held her hands up to it but didn't quite touch it. Fingerprints would ruin everything. She was close enough that she could see nothing but herself, her facial features blurred, too close to focus on, her back turned to the man who had spoken, her wine forgotten. It was an arrogant gesture, but that had been her intent.
The thousands of threads made her look, she admitted, like a pincushion (and perhaps she overcompensated with her style of dress even though no one else could see them). Their meaning, however, made them too dear to her to ever wish away. Only one of the thousands of threads began in her, and this was her favorite. She traced its reflection in the air with a finger. It looped and danced around itself in patterns like Mandalorian embroidery before ending, like all the others, in her own flesh.
The man behind her had only two threads. One, flapping gently in some ghostly breeze, trailed out of sight, tied, no doubt, to the one who had sent him. The other withdrew rapidly back into him, held so close to his body that it was almost invisible to her.
It wasn't her only clue that this Shang Tsung wasn't here strictly for the purposes he claimed.
Clones, he had said. He wanted to learn the noble art of cloning. But he didn't look the type that fancied himself a warlord. He had no need of armies, and if he did, his master would provide.
Ennir was legendary for her clones. They were convenient, and it was for this convenience that most would-be warlords wanted them. But Ennir didn't value her clones because of their convenience. She valued them because they were so easily bound. Tsung, she expected, would understand this, had he actually come for clones.
An explosion below them made her reflection tremble and the wine bottle rattle in its ice. She twisted and arched her body backward to look at the man, forcing a small, sweet smile. Men were men, eternally, after all, and she had half a mind to kill this one.
Ennir was legendary for more than just clones, and she knew what interested this Tsung, this human. For he was just a human, an ordinary human with a soul-consuming drive for power and a handful of necromancy skills. Necromancy was her great art and immortality a difficult gift to wield. This war she had fashioned had gone on for ages. The so-thought eternal Mandalorians had changed, irrevocably, so long ago the Edenians could not remember their true form. Great Edenian civilizations had risen and fallen around her, the only true constant the realm had. The humans had, sometime, discovered civilization. She hadn't paid much attention. And now, although the Edenians and their new great society, the Kitsune, had decided they wanted Ennir out, when the next great change of power took place, Ennir would be exactly where she had always been, standing behind everything and gently coaxing her war the way she wanted it to go.
True patience, millennial patience, made immortality the power it was. Ennir doubted this Tsung capable of it. A hundred years his lifespan? She could lose her war steadily for a hundred years, and neither she nor her master—Tsung's master—would give an order in concern.
"I must admit," Tsung said, settling himself on her divan, "the pounding is getting on my nerves."
Ennir turned back to the mirror. "It sounds like a funeral march, don't you think?" Her breath fogged the glass.
"Very fitting." Tsung took a sip of his wine. "But I fear, with the Kitsune below, it's your men that are dying."
"They're not men," she dismissed.
"I suppose you could argue that."
"They're not. I made them, and I know all there is to know of them. They fear their own deaths much less than the idea that they might not die for me. They're puppets who think and move on their own, nothing more."
"And you, wielding all the strings."
Ennir glanced back at him, grinning fiercely at the pun he didn't realize he had made.
"You must have some extraordinary power," Tsung continued, "to control an army as large as yours."
"Yes, it's lovely," she answered girlishly, tracing her finger in circles in the air just in front of the mirror. The human thought he was clever, speaking in metaphors, trying to broach the true subject from beneath, full of himself and his perceived subtlety. She glanced to her left in the mirror, where she could see his reflection, fuzzily. He stretched out casually, filling the space she had vacated. She looked back to her own blurred reflection, raising an eyebrow. This Shang Tsung fancied himself a spider, but she had the web.
"I think you may be wasting your power on this war," Tsung said. "The only true progress you made against the Mandalorians happened long ago. Yet the war rages on, and you toss away your subjects like you can replenish an army overnight."
"They're clones, dear Tsung. I could."
"Even clones take some time—"
She whirled. "You speak of clones, but we both know why you're really here. And if you can't even realize that a steady war means a steady supply of bodies separated from a steady supply of souls, and a steady supply of souls means endless power, then I suggest you stop trying to wheedle my secrets from me and flee down into the chaos before I demonstrate the concept for you by separating your soul from your body."
Tsung was unfazed. "Truthfully, then? I worry for your well being. The Kitsune have made much progress. They're stronger than your clones, and they're driven. You always have to worry about the disciplined, driven ones. You initial instinct may be to mock them, but they will never cease to surprise you with their stupidity. They're almost as willing to die to kill you as your clones are willing to die to save you."
Ennir turned slowly back to the mirror, resisting the urge to spit. Humans were so smug about their progress. It was their perspective lying to them, nothing more. She had seen thousands of years of civilizations and their so-called progress, yet humans were neither stronger nor smarter than they had been initially. They used their strengths to coddle themselves, to weaken themselves, and they called it progress.
"Don't you think the pounding has grown louder?" Tsung asked.
As though on cue, the Shadow Priests flanking her door hissed and stepped in front of it, blocking the entrance.
Ennir turned in shock. Tsung swirled the wine in his glass, unconcerned. She curled her fingers into claws and crept toward him, preparing to lunge. Pounding on her door interrupted her sudden drive for violence. Female shouts came through the door, then an axe.
Tsung looked up at her and smiled. Ennir calmed herself and straightened, turning back to her mirror, far enough away that she could see her entire body in perfect focus. She always looked small from a distance, and it seemed from sight alone that she was trapped by the threads of loyalty, tied in place.
Ennir watched in horror as the threads snapped, and she was free, a lone girl with a single twirling thread idly twisting back on itself around her. Reflected in the mirror, Shang Tsung raised his wine glass in a toast.
