The memories of life rolling a stone up a hill in hades, a child scorned and burned just to breathe in a world made for legions of hell. My life was buried in books, in magic and the dream of escaping the underworld. The many villages, hamlets, camps that litter like dead roaches across the hellish landscape of the Nether Realm never able to grow, never able to live long enough to reach adulthood. Though I have escaped, it had come at a great cost to my health, and my search for knowledge and power has taken an even greater toll.
One does not become a sorcerer without having seen themselves become destroyed piece by piece year after year.
What is left of me?
What is left of you, Kronika?
My hands, gentle across the glass, slowly traced down and slid off. The white radiance began to dime and with a sudden shock, cracked. D'Vorah's eyes pierced the glass as mine had with horror and curiosity. the entire orb shattered before us, with only the metal left and not long after the glass pickled under the mud beneath our feet, so too did the metal fade into the sands of time.
The voice I heard did not sound as though it were of the living, but an echo of a being once powerful enough to leave her mark across the entire fabric of existence. The mortal coil was swirled around her pinky, and someone did not let it linger.
The vision she showed me, the timeline I travelled was a sight so strange and foreign and yet answered so many questions as to the why this world is so bleak, empty, and yet promising for those such as myself seeking power and knowledge in the crags of time.
Kronika, a voice that cracked and hissed as though it stretched through the micro and x rays of space just to reach my ears was beautiful, but there was death and deadliness in her voice. She spoke of things that happened that never did, but yet I saw it, many times over.
D'Vorah's curiosity prickled her mandibles at me and she looked up at the darkness above us, then back at me, with barely a hint of light to see the reflection of my eyes in hers.
"We should leave." The only answer to any question she may have. "Let us go, bug."
She lifted me with her bony carapace hands and hoisted us into the air with her monstrous wings to the entrance of the wiry tunnel. Once out, we travelled across the caverns carved by the what little remained of the Kytinn. So few, barely enough to call an army, after a second glance.
The Kytinn would soon be extinct.
"This one senses something above ground." D'Vorah held me back at the chest before we reached the earth and stone steps that spiraled beyond the spinning totems of the elder gods that had opened the gates into this monstrous cave of prehistoric disgust.
She was right, as I could feel it too. It was a presence I had not felt since––
"How did I know I would find you crawling around my island, Quan Chi." A familiar voice echoed down into the caverns.
"Shang Tsung?" D'Vorah let me step up toward the dim moonlit entrance and the bound sorcerer stared back down at me.
He wore leather, black and red. Pants and boots that hid in the shadows of the night, and a long black coat with red embroidery of a dragon that stretched up from his right shoulder and across to the other side. He assisted me in the climb up the steep stairs to ground level and then I turned back to D'Vorah.
As she readied her wings to fly up, my hand stretched out to stop her. A gesture that might suggest I would rather assist her than let her expel more energy, but it was not that at all.
Behind D'Vorah, my three assassins emerged from the shadows. Jataaka, Kia, and Sareena. Three agents of hell that managed to escape the Nether Realm just as I had, if not as painfully as I did.
"This is where you get off, bug." My words were a death sentence.
Without even a glance back, I could hear the scream and the cracking of insect-like armor that formed her body. The slime that splattered the earth and stone. The wings that fluttered as within the cave, a great fire erupted after a skull whispered from the fingertips of my fellow sorcerer and spiraled down to consume any living creature that remained in those horrid tunnels.
Did I not say the Kytinn would soon be extinct?
"We have much to discuss, if we are to seal this deadly alliance of ours." Shang Tsung smiled, thin and worm-like. He was such a cunning beast that you could never really tell when his truths crept from those lips, or if the truth was really hidden in the daggers of his eyes.
"And I have much to show you, old friend." Together we would embark on this new journey to carve the world into the timeline it needed to become.
Only the wisdom of a sorcerer can know the what the future holds. And the vision held within my mind was a future far different than Liu Kang and Kitana imagined they'd create.