The waters around him red as blood sloshed and spat at the hull of the ancient wooden ship. Masts of aged and stained linen wrapped around the wind and poles of wood chipped and lined with stories of battle and trauma beyond barely held proud into the red sky of the Netherrealm.
A man stood at the wheel, the pilot, the captain, the dull statue of an immortal lost in a sea of blood and eternity. He knew nothing of where he was, only his name still remained.
The man was young, brown of hair that was short and curled at the tip of his widow's peak, and eyes to match that stared out horrified and inquisitive all the same.
The man was practically naked to the captain. Adorned only in stained white linen undergarments, he reached for his heart and felt the warm puddle that pooled between his chest. A glance down and the river of blood streamed slowly to a stop at his waistline. His fingers tucked into the frayed fabric to find a slit inside his chest three knuckles deep and two fingers wide vertically.
No pain.
Panicked, he approached the captain, though not the only person on the whiskey and blood scented ship.
"What's going on?"
"The Keepers have brought you here. Do you remember?"
He tried.
He could only vaguely recall the sight of two men, or what looked like men that guided him through a passage toward a sea of blood. Not much else, and even then, only the words formed in his mind, not the images. Soon even those faded, but yet he still held tightly to his identity.
"What is your name?"
The old man, the immortal with pitch black skin painted from the crown of his skull all the way over the crease of his nose, accented only by his dull white eyes. He had a full and white beard, lips barely worms that writhed past the furs of his mustache as he spoke. He clothes were tattered and weathered, as though he had worn them for eternity, muddy, black, and caked in stains and filth.
The man shifted heavily from the steering of the ship to a crooked wooden cane that held him afloat on his weakened knees.
"I am Kharon, ferryman of the Netherrealm."
"I am–"
Kharon grunted and held a fragile hand out to the young man, head shook and eyes narrowed.
"Keep your name, young man. It's all you have left."
The young man, perplexed, turned away from the ferryman out to the eternal blood sea and then back to those behind them who rode astray as he did upon this ancient rocking ship.
He spotted at the stern another young man, dark of skin and black of hair adorned in princely silk of purple, gold and black. His body near emptied of blood and yet he reached desperate for the sea to fill him, but even the wayward souls knew that any that fall into the Blood Sea will fall for eternity.
Another two individuals male and female of asian descent, where, he could not say, he couldn't even remember what he was or where he had been before this very moment, but the man held her close she who wore black and blue and fanned them in the wind of thick humid hell. He had long hair and looked once strong and proud, but now they wore expressions of sadness, loss, and their eyes vacant. All they knew was to hold each other as if that was the only thing they had left of themselves.
Who ever they were, who ever they are now.
The linen slapped his chest and stomach as the blood caked him and let the hot, humid air lick at him like a sloven ox desperate to wet the dry weeds. He pulled it off with a wet slap and tossed it overboard.
He could now see the wound where the knife had gone into him. No memory of how, or if someone did this to him.
All he knew was his name.
All he had left was his name.
Even still.
He turned back to Kharon, his eyes suddenly sunken, lost at sea like the ship that carried him.
"Where are you taking us?"
"Only Herald knows."
Kharon turned back, eyes widened as best they could as the young man desperately felt his face and plucked at his skin like it were fabric he tried to pull away.
"Remember yourself. No matter what they do to you. Don't be like my friends here."
"What will happen to them?"
The young man saw several others beneath the deck through the grate under his feet, like stowaways Kharon hid from hell itself."
"I care for them until they can remember themselves."
"Am I one of them?"
"Who do you think you are?"
Kharon blistered him. His tone sharp, and gravelly like an anchor dragged across dead coral, but he felt no anger in those eyes.
"Speak!"
The young man tried.
"I don't remember."
His fingernails that dug at his cheek bones were like foreign needles. His own voice a hoarse caw like ravens that balked at him from the mast.
Dissociative.
"You must remember yourself if you're to find your way out of the Netherrealm."
He tried to remember. His mind panicked and scrambled through the shroud of his mind and desperately scraped for anything and everything. Even a syllable would be something, but all he could pull from this bleak hat was nothing.
He was nothing.
No one.
Just meat.