Author's Note: Thanks to my pen pal, Obelisk of Light, for inspiring one of the Cryomancer's name :)
Where the current cavern gave way to more tunnels, a circle of roughly a dozen tall men formed. All were heavily draped in thick animal hides and fur, and most carried deadly weapons formed from ice, but it was their leader who arrested Kuai Liang's attention. The white wings of hair at his temples and his gleaming blue eyes were more than enough to mark him as a blood relative; the man bore an uncanny resemblance to Bi-han were his brother a few years older. Kuai Liang exhaled uncertainly, unsure if he felt happy, relieved, intimidated, or afraid to be in the presence of his people for the first time.
The leader of the Cryomancer warriors slowly surveyed the people he'd just snared in ice, and his lips curved upward in a wicked smile when his eyes found Hotaru. He chuckled and crossed his arms.
"It's been a long time, Hotaru," he said. "You're looking well."
"Begone, Yan-lam!"the Seidan snapped. "I have no dispute with you, unless you interfere. Our business is with these fugitives."
"Thanks for stating the obvious, Captain Always-Gets-His-Man," Kenshi said to him.
"And what business might that be?" Yan-lam asked, ignoring the blind man. They might as well have been discussing the weather or menus, so casual was his tone.
"Justice!" Hotaru bellowed, squirming to get free. "Their leader, the Earthrealm warrior known as Sub-Zero, attacked the Dragon King and stole an artifact-"
"I didn't steal any artifact!" Kuai Liang protested. His face was hot and swollen, not to mention stiff from dried blood, so his words came out slightly muffled and slurred. "It chose me when I was trying to rescue Smoke from Grandmaster Oniro and-"
"Silence!" the Seidan hissed.
Yan-lam instantly stepped forward and raised a hand wreathed in fog and glowing blue. "I'd rather like to hear the specifics, if you don't mind."
"You, of all people, know that the Dragon Medallion belongs to Onaga," Hotaru growled. "Xing, the fugitive's ancestor, had no claim to it and should not have taken it from Shao Kahn."
"Oh, good!" Even if Kuai Liang couldn't see it for himself, the smile on Yan-lam's face was more than blatant in his tone. "So you do acknowledge that the half-breed did not actually steal from Onaga. That should make this much easier."
Kuai Liang bristled at being called a half-breed, but said nothing. What energy he had left was rapidly fading; the cobalt collar clamped tightly around his bloody, sweaty neck made sure of that. At the thought, the Cryomancer glared at Kabal, whose attention was rigidly fixed on Yan-lam. Kuai Liang promised to kill the traitor the first chance he got.
Meanwhile, Yan-lam turned his head slowly – and then in a single leap, impossibly swift and leaving a flurry of snow in his wake, he landed and knelt before the Seidan General. His whale-skin boots crunched upon the ice crystals, filling their ears with a sound like wine glasses clinking together. The Cryomancer carefully folded his ice-charged hands over his knee, but the message in the action was clear.
"An attack on any Cryomancer is an attack on me," Yan-lam told Hotaru pointedly. "An attack on me is an attack on the Shŭdí. Are you prepared to plunge Seido into war with the Cryomancers – and, most likely, with Earthrealm once you've killed their Champions? Make no mistake, that will be the result of any further violence here.
"And even if it's a war that the Realm of Order could win, you won't be around to see it. Because I assure you, you and your contingent here are not enough to defeat the Lords of Mòhé side by side, and I will make it my mission, above even survival, to ensure that you are among the first to fall."
Now Yan-lam shrugged as all his prisoners, save Hotaru, looked at him in both awe and fear. "Besides," he continued, "You need my help. Or have you already forgotten that you've set fire to any and all supplies you had to survive in the Bīnglĕng Di Dìyú, a far more dangerous adversary than I?"
"Empress Sindel will conjure a portal to lead us out, just like she did when she led us in," the Seidan argued. "So I do not need you to get me out."
"Are you sure? It would appear that the Empress is dead." Yan-lam nodded towards her trapped body beside Fujin, and her skin was sheet white, her head drooping onto the ice flow.
Now Hotaru seethed; Sub-Zero wondered if Yan-lam had made one assumption too many and if his Cryomancer kin would actually have to carry out his threat. Unlike the simple puppets he'd teamed up with, General Hotaru might just have the authority to personally declare such a war. That would certainly make the Earthrealm Champions' mission to ally themselves with the Cryomancers a lot harder.
For a long moment, Hotaru thought about it while ten kori weapons all waited, ready, eager. But for all his stubborn determination, the Seidan knew a losing battle when he saw it. "Very well, I will stand down," he finally growled. "But know this: my hands may be tied now, but I won't forget Sub-Zero's crimes. He is a chaos-monger."
"Aren't we all?" Yan-lam replied pointedly before he stood and jumped from the ice flow. Then he walked to Anya and Tomas. Anya's face was white and pale, but shaded a ruddy pinkish-orange from the column of fire next to her, and dark circles ringed her eyes. Both of them had their arms tied tightly behind their backs, and both were inexplicably soaking wet and shivering.
"So who do I have here?" he asked as he looked down on the nurse, and then at one of the warriors, a teenager by all accounts. "Shaoqiang? Can you identify these intruders?"
"I see two Hydromancers, Father," the boy said. "There were three, but you killed the male."
"He's not dead!" Anya yelped. "You have to cut off his head or dismember him or something! You've got to be sure!"
Before she could say another word, Yan-lam slapped her hard in the cheek. Blood instantly burst over her lips and large, embarrassed tears spilled from her eyes.
"I'm going to kill you!" Kuai Liang shouted. He struggled against his icy restraints, ignoring the stabbing pain in several spots against his skin while the ice bit into his flesh.
Yan-lam ignored Kuai Liang and pointed his finger at her, the threat apparent. "That was a warning, little girl," he hissed. "Your barbaric people may tolerate having female warriors fight alongside men and allow women join the discussions with the men, but the Cryomancers do not. I advise you to remember that while you're with me. You'll suffer far less if you do."
Then he returned his attention to his son. "Continue, Shaoqiang."
"That Hydromancer," he began, pointing to Anya, who was now silently crying tears of rage, "is most likely one of their Healers, perhaps an Artisan. The other one is almost certainly a Falcata warrior. They are traveling with the Wind God from Earthrealm and five of its Champions. The fat man is probably Bo'Rai Cho, one of Outworld's Champions but an Earthrealm sympathizer."
"Excellent," Yan-lam congratulated him. His head now faced another teenage boy. "Yee Gung," he began, "what am I, as the Jinzhou, to do about them?"
The other boy, a ferret-faced copy of Yan-lam, clutched the torch in his hand even tighter and said, "The Bīngfă clearly states that you must take them to the Shŭdí immediately."
"So we shall," he smiled. "Well done, my sons. You are learning quickly. Soon, you will become great Bīng zhànshì like the Lords of Mòhé."
Over an hour later, after a blindfolded journey through a maze of frigid, dark tunnels, the awful sound of metal screeching against metal filled their ears, and they stepped into a new corridor that reeked of mold and urine. Then what was presumably a cell door noisily slammed shut.
"Ugh, where are we?" Tomas asked, no trace of his normal jocularity in his voice. He carried an unconscious Kailyn in his arms after volunteering back at the hot springs and the Cryomancers, who didn't seem anxious to touch a 'filthy' Hydromancer, seemed more than happy to let him. They were repulsed when they slapped the cobalt collar around her neck.
"I'm pretty sure we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto," Anya told him. Though Kuai Liang couldn't see her, he could hear her teeth chattering far ahead near the front of the line.
"I'm pretty sure we're not even on the Yellow Brick Road anymore, Dorothy," Kabal said to her.
"Go to hell," she snapped. "I have nothing to say to you, you fucking traitor."
Inwardly, Kuai Liang cheered at her declaration. "There was some of the fire he'd been missing as of late. "You heard her," he hissed at the detective. "Don't talk to her."
"Where are you taking us?" Kenshi demanded to know. "I thought we were going to see the Shŭdí, whoever he is."
"We are," Yan-lam said. "But first, you will stay in the prison while I notify him. We have just crossed over into Mòhé. Abandon all hope of escape. No one leaves without our blessing, and those who try die in agony trying."
As he finished speaking, the Cryomancers ripped off the prisoners' blindfolds, and suddenly, Kuai Liang realized they really were in a prison. Cages arranged in perfect rows formed paths through a moderately sized room with a dirt floor. Anya, whiter than she'd been the last time he'd seen her and sporting a wicked purple bruise on her cheek, glanced over her shoulder as if she preferred going back to the maze of tunnels to venturing further into this place. She clearly was uncomfortable.
Kuai Liang was less than comfortable too. The collar around his neck seemed to weigh a ton, a point obviously lost on his escort. The man hustled him forward, even when his knees buckled and he collapsed as he walked through the tunnels. The warrior, who had a thin Fu Manchu mustache cutting grooves through swollen chipmunk cheeks, followed the line around a few support columns made of ice into a smaller, dimmer room full of more cages. It was mostly empty but smelled of grease and unwashed bodies, and Kuai Liang vaguely wondered if it had ever been cleaned.
The cages, all smashed together and in direct opposition to the ones facing them, were barely bigger than dog kennels. At the other end of the room, there were two pre-pubescent girls stuffed into a barred box. Both wore tattered rags and cobalt collars, and when the group marched closer, Kuai Liang recognized lavender eyes like Anya and Kailyn's: they were Hydromancers. They both looked at him in fear and curiosity, but wisely said nothing while their captors opened several cages.
"Get in," Sub-Zero's warden barked after he shoved Shujinko in the one next to the girls.
Too weak to argue or fight, he obeyed and then watched as they closed the cage door and locked it with a padlock shaped like the Yin-Yang symbol. Beside Kuai Liang and Shujinko, Bo'Rai Cho got stuck in the tiny doorway of his cage, reminding the Grandmaster of a story Anya once had read to the Lin Kuei children called Winnie the Pooh, specifically a chapter when Pooh ate too much honey and got stuck in Rabbit's rabbit hole. Unlike the children's story, however, Bo'Rai Cho didn't remain stuck for long; two of the Cryomancers immediately shoved him through with the soles of their boots firmly planted on his butt. Farting loudly, he finally made it through, and the warriors promptly threw Fujin, who was still tightly tied up and wriggling like a worm, into the cage with him. Kuai Liang felt relieved when they put Anya with Kenshi directly in front of him rather than with Kabal. The traitor, fittingly enough, was imprisoned in the same cage as Hotaru, the one to his wife's right, across from the Hydromancer children.
They put Tomas and Kailyn on Anya's left, and Kuai Liang noted that as soon as they'd locked them in together, his best friend had rested the Tetrach's head on his leg and pressed his palm to her still-oozing scalp wound to slow her bleeding. She wasn't quite unconscious, nor was she awake, but rather, somewhere in-between. Kailyn groaned and talked incoherently in a small, barely audible voice.
"I shall return within an hour," Yan-lam announced. "Pray to whatever gods you worship that the Shŭdí will see you. You won't be happy to see me if he doesn't."
"What is that supposed to mean?" Kabal wanted to know.
"If the Shŭdí doesn't want to see us, he'll undoubtedly order our immediate executions."
"Very good, Half-Breed," Yan-lam laughed. "Live in fear." And then he, followed by the other warriors, left. Only two of the men remained behind to guard the prisoners.
"Tomas, how is she?" Fujin asked as soon as the Cryomancers left. He was propped up against the cage wall, his knees crowded into his chest because Bo'Rai Cho took most of the room.
"Her blood pressure is dropping," he instantly answered. "There's definitely a skull fracture in her right temporal lobe, and her ear is bleeding. My sensors tell me that roughly twenty percent of her face is paralyzed."
"Oh, my God!" Anya exclaimed. Now she looked at her wardens. "Please take this collar off so I can heal her," she said. "I promise I'll behave and won't try to escape. I'm not much of a warrior – anyone here can attest to that."
"No," the muscular one told her curtly. "Be quiet."
"Well, at least take the collar off of her," she said as if she hadn't heard him. "You need to let her heal. She'll die if you don't."
"And what is that to me?" he replied. "One less animal in this world. What's not to love about that?"
"Voleh!" Tomas yelled as he crawled to the bars with the missile bay in his cybernetic palm open and ready to launch.
The Cryomancers did not take kindly to his threat and immediately sprang into fighting stances with their glowing blue arms raised to attack. Kuai Liang could hardly hear over the sudden shouted protests, commands to stand down, pleas for the men to not kill Tomas, and curses in Spanish. Finally, Fujin stuck his fingers against the corners of his mouth and whistled loudly to get everyone's attention. It worked.
"That's better," he said as everyone quieted down. "Tomas, put your guns away. That's not helping anything." The cyber-ninja first glared from him to the Cryomancers, but grudgingly obeyed. Then Fujin looked at their wardens. "Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"We know you, Wind God," the shorter, squatter one said. "You're the son of Shinnok."
"Then you know that I am fond of the Hydromancers. I am especially fond of her. She always has been and always will be under my protection."
"And why is that, Lord Fujin?" the muscle-bound Cryomancer sneered.
"Because she's the mother of my child," he plainly stated.
Every prisoner's jaw dropped at the revelation, and even the Cryomancers' eyes widened in surprise. Kuai Liang was half-certain that if he could see his own face right now, his eyes would be bulging from his head too. It might've been a comical thought had he not looked at Tomas; to his surprise, the Czech man's face was contorted into an ugly frown.
After Fujin let everyone have a moment to let the news sink in, he continued: "As you can undoubtedly tell, I have a pretty good reason to want her to live. Now, you may have me tied up for now, but I promise you, sooner or later, I'll get free. And if you two goons have let her die, you will live to see me end every man, woman, and child in Mòhé, starting with your families. So if you are wise, you will remove her collar as well as her sister's, and you will leave them off long enough to let her heal her."
Both men stiffened. "We cannot remove her collar," the muscular one said. "She is a Falcata, a deadly warrior."
"Deadlier than me?" Fujin growled.
"I vouch for her," Kuai Liang blurted out. He wasn't entirely sure why; he could barely stand the Tetrach. "I vouch for them both. You may call me a half-breed, but I'm still a Cryomancer like you."
"What's your point?"
"That Hotaru's wolves mauled me not long ago, and even though the Hydromancers knew what I was, they still took me into their village and healed me as a show of good faith. I would've bled to death if they hadn't." He inhaled deeply. "That woman, the Falcata, is only here as a peaceful emissary. She and her sister are both honorable women. So I'm asking you to give them both the benefit of the doubt, and if they try to escape, you can kill me in punishment."
The Cryomancers looked at each other, and after a long moment, the muscular one said, "Very well," while the short one sauntered first to Anya's cage. When the cage was open, he motioned for her to approach, and when she obeyed, he quickly unfastened her cobalt collar and then cut her hands, which were still tied behind her back, loose.
Before the Cryomancer closed the door and locked it again, Anya had already thrust her hands through the bars into the adjoining cage and gently rested them on the fracture just above Kailyn's ear. The short man had to work a bit harder to free the Tetrach from her collar, and he closely watched the fiercely scowling Tomas as he fiddled to unlock the clasp, but soon yanked the horrid restraint from her neck. Instantly, the color returned to Kailyn's cheeks and she inhaled a deep but ragged breath before her eyes fluttered open. Tomas, Kuai Liang couldn't help but notice, couldn't contain his beaming smile as he now stroked her blond curls in relief.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty, it's about time you woke up," he told her. "While you were taking a nap, the rest of us were actually working." He clicked his tongue and shook his head. "Some people's children."
Kailyn blinked, clearly still disoriented, but managed to grip his hand on the top of her scalp. "I…I thank you for tending to me while I was unconscious," she croaked, her voice dry.
"Think nothing of it," he replied. "Though, I am glad you're better. I was getting tired of carrying you. You're heavy."
"Tomas!" Anya yelped. "That's not funny."
"Oh, I am sorry," Kailyn apologized, unaware he was teasing her. "I did not mean to burden you."
"Well, the least you can do is give me a kiss. Not-" he cut her off before she could protest "-a Tetrach's kiss. Just a plain old peck."
With that, he made duck lips, eliciting a chuckle from everyone except Fujin and Hotaru, who were both scowling, but for entirely different reasons. Kuai Liang glanced at the Wind God, noting the way he was silently peeling the skin from Smoke's body with his eyes, and the Cryomancer was more than glad he was still tied up in Hotaru's bola snare. He suspected his best friend would already be dead otherwise.
Kailyn, through all of this, looked up at him in wide-eyed panic, clearly unsure what to do as he leaned closer…and closer…and closer…until at last, he found her cheek. With a loud smack, he planted a gentle, comical kiss on her, and then grinned as he sat back up, patting her curls yet again.
"I do not understand," the Tetrach said. "I thought I was meant to kiss you, not the other way around."
Tomas scoffed. "Can't you take a joke?" he admonished with a smile. "What kind of an asshole would I be if I made you give me a kiss just for helping you out? I would have done the same for any of my friends. You just happened to draw the short straw today."
Kailyn's face, which had been twisted in confusion, now relaxed into a rare smile. "Thank you," she said warmly before she squeezed his hand.
"That being said," he continued with a smirk, "feel free to kiss me anytime. Deep down, you know you want to."
"I do not!" Kailyn argued.
Tomas rolled his eyes. "My sensors are calling you a liar. Your pupils are dilated, which admittedly could be because of your head injury. But since they're presenting with a changed breathing pattern, a racing heartbeat, and sweaty palms, I think not."
Kailyn looked at her hands in surprise, and then quickly rubbed them on her shirt as her cheeks flushed red.
Smoke, meanwhile, continued: "And that's not even counting the chemical dump going on in your blood right now. My sensors detect a dramatic increase in your levels of adrenaline, dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and phenylethylamine. Oh, and you're excreting pheromones like crazy. It's like your brain decided to have a rave and it invited everyone to the party."
At the declaration, Anya glanced at Kuai Liang and smiled; in spite of the pain in his face, he couldn't help but smile back. He didn't say anything, but when he looked at her, all those same things still happened to him, even if she did get on his nerves sometimes.
The Tetrach, however, didn't understand, and she said so. "I do not know what you mean, Tomas Vrbada," she said. "What does that mean?"
He chuckled. "I think it means you love me," he said simply.
The Tetrach now sat up like a shot, her head barely shorter than the cage ceiling, her face tomato red. "I most certainly do not!" she yelled.
"Oh, I think you do," he smirked, which she clearly found even more infuriating.
"You have never been more wrong about anything!"
"Hey, it's okay. There's no reason to be embarrassed. I knew it'd only be a matter of time before you came around. Sooner or later, everybody loves me. It can't be helped."
"I don't love you," Hotaru growled.
"Oh, you will," Tomas told him matter-of-factly as he winked at him.
"Can we please talk about something else?" Fujin grumbled.
The cyber-ninja's electric blue eyes twinkled in amusement, and Kuai Liang immediately knew what he meant to do. Sure enough, he said, "Oh, come on, Easy-Breezy-Beautiful. Don't you think she and I would be a match made in Heaven?"
"Tomas," the Cryomancer said warningly, clearing his throat. "Don't."
"It's okay, Cousin," Fujin told him in a dangerous tone. "Give me some credit. I have better control of my emotions than you obviously think. I am not jealous or possessive like you."
"That's not how it looks from my vantage point," Kenshi mumbled.
"I have no reason to feel such things," the Wind God insisted. "For one, Kailyn thinks he's a fool, and she doesn't suffer fools well. For two, do you honestly think she's the only mortal woman I've ever been with? There are, quite literally, millions of beautiful women waiting to have a shot with me. One woman's attention ultimately means very little to me in the grand scheme of things."
A profound expression of anguish crossed Kailyn's face at the announcement, and her eyes filled with tears she struggled to contain. It was a look not unlike the one she had the night she told Kuai Liang and Tomas her story about being Rain's prisoner. Now, as he did then, the Cryomancer felt terrible for her.
"You bastard," Tomas cursed at the Wind God. "That was uncalled for."
"No, it is alright," Kailyn said, swallowing hard and struggling to remain composed. "Lord Fujin is correct. We were only together for a short time. Therefore, your attempt to elicit feelings of jealousy from him was foolish at best."
"Kailyn, I'm sorry," he told her as a single tear streamed down her face. She wiped it away in angry embarrassment. "Sometimes, I don't know when to quit."
"I have noticed," she half-heartedly chuckled, her breath shuddering. She smiled and patted his cybernetic hand to reassure him.
Now Kailyn looked around at her surroundings, taking everything in, her eyes eventually resting on the two pre-teens in the cage beside Sub-Zero. "Devyn? Keely?" she asked in disbelief. "You are alive?" A joyful smile crossed her face as she crawled to the bars closest to them and gripped them to peer through.
"Aye," the older one with springy auburn curls said. "The Cryomancer knobs took us prisoner in a raid on our trading party to Eridu."
"So that is what happened to you," she said. "When you did not return, we feared the worst."
"Naw," she replied. "The fannybawbags brought us here tae be their slaves. They wanted me and Keely tae climb intae their main shitehoose and clean it oot wae our water, but we didnae want tae so we said we wid rather be ded than clean up the snell-fannies' shite. There wiz a right kerfluffle, and they dragged us here."
"Oh, great," Kuai Liang mumbled. "A miniature Adaia." At the mention of the Hydromancer Grand Healer, he noticed Anya stiffen and scowl. "What's the matter with you?" he asked her.
"Nothing," she chirped, clearly lying. "So, obviously, you know these girls," she said to Kailyn to change the subject. "You want to introduce us?"
"Of course," the Tetrach said. "That is Devyn. She is a promising, young Warrior. When she is old enough, she will be invited to join the Falcata."
The girl with curly red hair beamed, but the other one, the girl with mousy brown hair twisted into messy braids, looked down and away as if she wished to melt into the floor. Anya smiled at her and asked, "Who are you?"
The girl looked at the guards nervously, and then to Kuai Liang with a fearful expression. He knew she probably would've been less afraid of him anyway, but his battered and bloody face probably didn't help matters. So he tried to smile reassuringly at her, and it provoked a timid smile back.
"My name is Keely," she said in a small voice and then gathered her knees to her chest.
"Keely is a member of the Healing Class like you are, Sister," Kailyn explained to Anya.
"But she's nae very good at it," Devyn added. "She's a slecher."
"Hey, kid," Kabal began. "Speak English."
"Silence," Yan-lam ordered as he and his armed contingent, minus his sons, returned. Kuai Liang glanced up at him as he walked to him and stood before him. "I'm still trying to figure out if you're a friend or a foe," he bluntly declared as his eyes locked onto his prisoner.
"Don't be stupid," he replied, quite undiplomatically. "I'm not the enemy here. Not yet…"
"And how many of us would you kill if you were the enemy?"
"Your men attacked me and the others, not the other way around. And in answer to your question…All of you."
"I suppose you might have tried, at that." The Cryomancer faced him squarely with arms crossed. "Fortunately for you we were close by when your little skirmish began. Had we reached you just a little later, I suspect the filthy, diseased Hydromancer and his ilk would've killed you."
"Someone was fortunate, anyway," Kabal taunted from the cage behind Yan-lam. "You're welcome to believe it was Sub-Zero if that makes you feel better."
Yan-lam chuckled as he glanced over his shoulder at him. "What a peculiar-looking man you are. One of Shang Tsung's creations, I presume?"
The remark touched a nerve with him, and he immediately kicked the bars with his feet, making both Anya and Kenshi jump. The Cryomancer returned his attention to Kuai Liang, now grinning.
"You can do some pretty amazing things with your powers," the Grandmaster praised.
"Well, I should hope so," he said, nodding. "I am a full-blooded Cryomancer, after all. And you'd be surprised how many tricks you can learn after spending centuries in isolation."
"No need to be defensive," he drily remarked in response. "I applaud your initiative." He cast his cold gaze across each Cryomancer, slowly, calmly. "If we've concluded this sizing-up of each other, we should discuss what comes next. Has your Shŭdí made his decision?"
One salt-and-pepper eyebrow rose. "That eager to die?"
"I don't like waiting."
Yan-lam's lip twitched. "Very well. Come, Half-Breed. We'll consult with the Shŭdí and decide our next move." He looked at his men. "Get them out. Remove his collar but put them back on the Hydromancer witches."
After the warriors pulled them from their cages, they marched onward through a dark, square tunnel. Surrounded by twin columns of Cryomancers, they trekked from the prison through frozen corridors in the primeval ice lands and deeper into Mòhé. None of the Cryomancers seemed remotely as comfortable with the prisoners, especially the Hydromancers, as Yan-lam did; Kuai Liang, for his part, would have had to actually be sleeping to care any less how they felt, at least so long as they left Anya alone.
A few more minutes of ice and snow crunching the warriors' heavy treads, a constant popping as through the ice itself were an arthritic grandparent, and the procession came to a stop in front of a two-story tall gate hewn from a bluish-black stone.
"Welcome to Mòhé," Yan-lam told them all. "You are about to enter a place only a few outsiders will ever see. It may very well be your final resting place, so I do hope you enjoy it."
Kuai Liang chose to let the comment pass without response. The next length of their journey passed without conversation, save for the occasional resentful murmur of Cryomancers who would much rather do anything than trudge over the ice and babysit some intruders.
Any spiteful satisfaction Sub-Zero might have gained from their discomfort vanished utterly, however, beneath a tide of cold agony that flowed from up ahead a split second after the Dragon Medallion flashed on his chest. It wasn't his pain, he wasn't suffering in any physical way. But he was somehow aware of the torment of others even though these dark hallways were empty except for them. It was an anguish of people who'd carried it inside them so long that they'd ceased to feel it themselves, rather like the chill of rain in the air, or that first gust of wind heralding a blizzard, sensed by the spirit rather than the body.
And he felt, too, the abrupt passing of far too many souls.
"Shudi Tsai Bing's throne room," Yan-lam announced as they entered through a large set of double doors, also hewn from that bluish-black stone, at the end of the hallway.
The room, once they were safely inside, was at least twenty feet tall and three times that, lengthwise, on each side. A throne of gleaming silver, the curve at the top of its backrest serrated into thousands of finely wrought fractals, provided the only seat in the otherwise spartan room.
The twin column of Cryomancers, along with their prisoners, approached the raised dais at a casual pace. When they were stationed before the throne, the guards shoved everyone to their knees.
"What are those things doing here?" The voice was gruff, powerful, clearly accustomed to instant and unquestioning obedience – but it also wavered, ever so slightly, so slightly it would have been imperceptible without the Dragon Medallion's sudden help, with repressed anguish.
"A pleasure to see you," Fujin greeted in an effort to get the man's fierce scowl off the Hydromancers.
The most powerful man in Mòhé sat upon the throne, gripping it so tightly that it was a wonder how the armrests hadn't cracked, and when Kuai Liang gazed upon him for the first time, his legs went numb with shock and fear. The Cryomancer above him was unlike the others. The same blue eyes, yes, but platinum hair trimmed short and slicked back. Shoulders and chest were built like a bull and draped in an ornate robe, a midnight blue robe with silver trim and all manner of fractal designs. A semi-circle of silver, also engraved and sculpted to look like snowflakes, formed a solid crown upon his head. The solid jaw, distended into a wicked scowl, seemed more than capable of chewing through a block of ice. He looked just like…An Zhi.
