Cerulean skies stared down into his eyes and his face felt embraced by the heavens, tight, warm, and forgiven. As the rain fell to each cheek and the river flowed down the curves of his flesh, he heard a voice through those eyes.
"We will see each other again."
The skies echoed these words until they began to fade into the dull roar of thunder that broke over the heavens. The clouds, blue and elegant suddenly darkened and crashed into one another like great ships at war. Lightning struck around Liu Kang, a threshold of heat and energy he could not pass.
"Your soul is mine!" Another voice echoed, but not the same as the heavens.
Liu stared down at his feet as the ground shook beneath him. He stood on the precipice of a great pit, an old bridge held him up only by the strength of his will. At one end, a cavern of green light that traced a ledge toward a large portal door, but ahead, a spire into a shallow cavern, covered in chains.
The moon watched, wide in the sky, fascinated by his horror. He thought, in a strange moment of awareness, that the moon so large should rake the coast half across the globe in a tidal wave so great no living being could survive it.
It was not pleased and reddened before him. A man, Chinese with black mid-length hair combed slick back and adorned in fine jewelry, cat claws, leather and embroidery that told Liu he was not just rich, but powerful in society.
Liu Kang raised his fists, switched his stance to prepare for battle. All he wore were the grey sweats he had slept in, but the man across the bridge only twisted his lips into a wry smile and rubbed his hands together to clean them of that intention.
"I am not here to fight you, Liu Kang." The man stepped closer, and with each step forward, those hands that rubbed further apart began to form a luminous green energy between them like a thousand fireflies merged into a single point of light. "To the contrary."
"Who are you?"
"You will meet me soon enough, here on my island." He gestured with a free hand around him, and finally Liu got a better look of this dreamscape.
The sea was vast, the skies deep and dark, the moon greater than he could have ever imagined on earth. However, as grandiose as some of it seemed, the jagged spires that threatened to pierce them should they fall and the blood soaked bridge they stood on painted a darker picture the more he looked at the dim traces of civilization on this otherwise barren island.
"We made a pact, Liu Kang, the day the Mortal Kombat tournament went to hell and Outworld split into two." The man let the energy fall from his palm and it slowly began to form into a human figure.
"I don't remember making a pact with you? I don't even know you." Liu's awareness began to shake the bridge around him. His comfort raised as the idea of this dream being nothing more than illusion started to take over. It seemed to worry the man across from him, but soon Liu would waken, and this strange dream he would have again and again each night would be over.
As he had many times before, the man stood back and allowed the energy to take center stage. This is when Liu would began to jolt himself from the dream, as the figure began to mirror his own face.
The vision of himself, skin grey with veins of red light that cracked through the flesh stared back at him. A near demonic version of himself. The man across the bridge would always find joy in the terror found within Liu's eyes, and then he'd awaken.
"Stay with me, Liu Kang." The man begged.
He always refused and the red dawn outside his window always stared back at him with weary eyes when he shook from this nightmare.
Once he held a mug in hand and the world around him began to jar itself back to being, the dreamscape now just a dim fog that fell from his eyes and whispered from his aching breath, Liu Kang stared outside his bleak window at the dull world beyond him.
The storms seemed to subside when he got to work. The sea was grey, sleet like metal, but calm. He took that to mean the seas were weary, cautious even of the storms that had flown overhead.
The old man was gone. The storyteller that sat there to watch the ocean and occasionally buy raw oysters from them was no where to be found on this grey, dull day. Liu was concerned, but the daily grind of life and work kept him busy. Fewer catch to put out and fewer hours to work this maudlin day. It started to wear on him come time for the sun to peak its head over the world and glare with its midday heat.
There was no sun. Just clouds, and the threat of a storm over uncertain seas and a barely living city.
He checked into the office and pulled out his card from the file to clock out, ready to head out before the night had even thought to approach, when he caught a glimpse of what he thought was the old man come to sit on his perch and tell his tall tales.
"Thought you weren't coming today." He called out with a smile.
"Not today." The man in the conical hat answered back.
The man was tall, in old ragged robes that covered his body and a long, wide straw hat with a tapered point that splayed out with little breaks in the straw to peer beyond the veil of the shadows it created. He stood at the display for the shark caught, aimless throughout the ocean just like the sailors.
"I wouldn't eat these, if I were you." Liu approached. "It's bad for the shop, but shark is typically full of mercury."
"No one said man was perfect." The man reached out to run his index and middle finger tips along the smooth side of the shark's back toward the fin.
"What about God?" Liu presented.
"Even the gods aren't perfect." Liu Kang caught a glimpse of the man's eyes as watched him turn from the shark toward him.
"You believe in more than in one?"
"Do you believe in any?"
"No." Liu replied with an ugly pause between them before the man turned away and whispered back.
"Shame." The robed figure began to depart, one glided step after the other with effortless movement further from Liu, but this time he followed.
When the robed figure realized Liu was at his side, he tilted his head up, which allowed his follower a glance beneath the conical hat.
The man was pale, and an older gentleman with nearly full white hair. Liu could see some grey strands draped elegant past the threshold of his face and the robes. His eyes looked as though crows had scratched him for years and years, and yet did not look older than the storyteller, or even too much older than Liu. Perhaps, Liu thought, this is what wisdom looks like.
"Who are you?" Liu stopped him. "You come here every other day for months and don't say a word, suddenly an old man talks about fairy tales and you think you don't shut up."
The old man stopped and lifted his head further to let Liu see him more fully, though the rest of his body was still shrouded in the old robes. His eyes were white, almost cataract, but a dull hued void of pupils stared back at him.
"I tried to find you with the Shaolin Monks, instead I find Kung Lao." The old man replied.
"You're a stalker then, great." Liu through up his arms and glared, "last thing I need is to be catfishes by an old man with delusions of grandeur."
"Enough." The man's voice commanded him. It echoed and carried gravity Liu had never felt could come out of an old man like him. "I'm here to prepare you."
Liu wasn't sure how to think. He looked into those white eyes, and they stared back, almost through him. He tried to think of what this meant. If it wasn't stalking, which he was thoroughly convinced about, perhaps it would be something about those fairytales the old storyteller told.
Instead he glanced down the alley to find his boss with arms out, expectant of his employee to have met him before the shift's end. He looked back at the robed man, the conical hat down again and his back turned.
He chose not to respond and return to that daily grind.
The man finally spoke, his voice clear and deep like thunder as it rang through his ears. "Listen to Shang Tsung."
Liu traced his steps back with his eyes to find the man has vanished. Just alley, just crates and trash, a dumpster and two girls that walked up with shopping bags.
The elevator broke. The grey walls blended like the sea as he waited for it to lift him up to his apartment. There he threw off whatever burdened his flesh, but sleep captured him before any drip of hot water could sooth that working soul.
He stared up, the ceiling fan swayed as it always did. It blurred into lines and the soft hum cooed him to sleep just as it did every night before. He'd wake up, go to work, and live out his life a slave to mundane humanity.
Then he'd dream. The bridge seemed longer this time, but cracked and pieces of it he remembered were there, were not. He looked down the side to find reddened spikes stare back up at him.
"You're soul is mine!" That voice, that tone, it was always what summoned the other man. The sorcerer watched him fumble on the bridge, but noticed a slightly more aware Liu Kang, not so much awake, but of his dream surroundings. He tinkered with the cat's claws on two of his fingers and spoke, almost impatiently, "how far shall we go this time, Liu Kang?"
"Who are you?" Liu Kang approached, but the man always seemed further away as the bridge grew with each step.
"I am the sorcerer Shang Tsung, and this is my island."
"Tell me, why do I keep coming back here?"
"Bad food?" Shang Tsung jested, poked at the dream walls around them with a twisted smile, but the ugly pause between them told him Liu did not get it. He added with a flick and swish of his wrist to change their surroundings into an almost desert like ground beneath them, "perhaps there is something you yearn for?"
There was a great throne between them. An arena filled with peasants that looked near medieval in apparel and the skies were a dark shade of purple and blue like a dense smog, but it was no cloud. It was clear sky above him, and heat beneath him.
"Where is this?" Liu was lost in this world.
"You're not the Liu Kang I remember." Shang seemed disappointed, and it reflected as the arena began to crumble, blood stained the hot sand beneath them. "I remember all too well when Quan Chi interrupted the tournament. You made a pact with me that day."
There was no answer for him. Liu watched the world and the walls of their reality begin to degrade. He had begun to wake up.
"This should be us here, instead defiled by that coward." He showed Liu Kang one last image.
They stood together on a spiral staircase that reached an upper level that looked down over a red logo of a dragon with metal spikes that reached out to pierce the air above it. Liu Kang stood opposite Shang Stung, who was dressed down in black and his nose bled. He noticed a woman chained to a whole, adorned in a brown tattered dress and a man with a well groomed head of hair, and stern eyes that watched him intently beside the woman.
"What do I do?" He could feel his breath deepen, his eyes moved faster in their sockets. He had little time to seek an answer.
"You must free your soul." Shang Tsung replied, almost like a whisper as the waking world pulled Liu by the throat and jolted him up from the bed.