The eternal darkness is the gift given only the moment you feel death slowly settle within the confines of your mind. Though it fades and not truly eternal, there is no greater wonder than that fleeting moment of ethereal bliss.
She would call bullshit. Her ribs ached and her bones clicked as she felt herself move over a hard floor. The darkness was eternal, for her eyes could not see beyond the blackness that surrounded her. The smell was putrid, like rotted flesh and stale breath aged through rusted metal.
"Do you have a light?" A voice, cracking and withered reached out to hear in the darkness.
This jolted her to action and she leaned up and pushed her body backward into what felt like three round poles. Sonya wasn't certain what it had said until a moment later when it clicked and searched down her body for a bump at her side. There was always a gun, and always a flashlight.
The light shined in the darkness, and the darkness would never understand it. The eyes that looked back at her, old and narrowed. Cracked hands broken with age and twisted by disease reached out to shade the old man's face. Sonya lowered the focus of the light away from his eyes and took a better look at the man behind the metal bars across from her.
Carved into the stone, his prison cell wasn't deep. She'd figure about two meters on each side. He sat, unable to move his weary bones, unable to rejuvenate those withered muscles beyond shading from the light.
The man was old, ancient, she'd swear. His beard, white and grey rivers that flowed down to the bars even as he leaned against the back of the cell. His frame was minuscule and he looked more fragile than glass. His voice, though frail, sounded familiar.
"You are so much more gorgeous in person, Sonya Blade." He flirted and tried his best to smile with those thin, dry lips.
"Who are you?" She leaned back against the bars behind her and raised the light enough to see him better, but not to blind him.
"I was once a great sorcerer named Shang Tsung."
The voice rang little bells, but it took a moment for her to recall. His was the voice in her head this whole time.
"You don't look great." He could see the grim reality in her face, knew it was not an insult, but an observation, still he laughed it off through a cough and nodded.
"You're right. I am old, and I am dying." His eyes were dull, but every so often as the light would move, they would shine like a hyena in the night. Green, but a dim light. "I have expelled all but the last of my power to get you here."
She understood what this meant. As he slouched further, his bones shook when he tried to raise himself and she could see the struggle in his eyes as he could not pull himself up with his own weight. Her last memory was not of this darkness, but the ground far below. She would have fallen had he not saved her.
"Thanks," she added, "but where am I?"
"Deep in the ruins of Goro's Lair." A female voice startled her from behind.
Sonya darted to the bars with Shang Tsung behind her and focused the light on two faces that peered back from just behind the rusted metal. Quiet and vigilant they sat as she spoke with the feeble sorcerer.
"What the fuck!" Sonya tried to comprehend the sight before her, but she was unable to grasp the whole picture. Too much all at once. Shang Tsung snickered through a dry whisper as the light shined in the darkness and a hiss returned from jagged teeth.
"I am Kitana," she turned toward her left, "this, my sister Mileena."
Nothing from the face that bared its gruesome maw beneath the eyes that matched the thin woman in torn blue cloth, barely enough to cover herself with.
"Doesn't talk much." Shang Tsung explained of Mileena, "but that was never the plan."
Slowly Sonya pulled herself from the floor and peered the light down the hall. She was buried under the bowels of the island, the tunneled turned and expanded beyond visibility both ways. Other cells were etched, but only served to explain the putrid smell from the corpses and bones that were cast to her by the light.
"How long have you been here?" She asked of them all.
"A long five-hundred years." Kitana returned, her strength better than Shang Tsung's as she pulled herself to stand eye to eye with Sonya.
"Bullshit!"
"My beautiful Sonya, time is not the same in Outworld and Edenia as it is in Earthrealm. What may only survive a hundred years on Earth, can be stretched by thousands in other realms."
"How old are you?" She looked over to Kitana.
"Ten thousand years, child." She responded, then the light turned toward Mileena, who had stood to meet the stranger.
"That's enough talk. I did not bring you here just to chat, my dear." Shang Tsung, unable to pull himself up, reached out to her with his faded breath. "Come."
"I'm guessing you want me to free you?" She cut as many corners in their conversation as she could see even a breath took every toll on his body. "What do I do?"
"I'd caution letting him free." Kitana reached out to her, but Sonya pulled away. "It would be better to let us go instead."
"Why not us all? Sonya, my dear, would be jailed with us if she were caught."
Silence.
"There is no key for this lock. No lock for a key." Shang Tsung spoke as Sonya searched the bars for something to shoot.
"What then?"
"Your blood, Sonya Blade." He smiled and fell against his side and began to cough.
"You going to live to see this gate even open?" Kitana pondered.
"What I hold in me has kept me alive to this point, but it is all I have left. I need more, or–"
He could see Sonya's dilemma play out before her eyes. There was a pocket knife in her shorts to pull out and cut, but would she really want to?
"It is all right." Kitana guided her. "My lock can be broken."
She turned to find it and her hand raised from pocket to gun.
"Let us out and we'll help you." Sonya didn't trust the vile maw beneath the eyes that peered out from the dim light, but she didn't trust the old man either.
"Fuck it." She cut a sliver of flesh from her palm and pressed it against the old bars.
"Excellent." He managed to let out before another spell cast from his lungs against the floor and his body shook from the energy it took just to relieve itself of each hoarse breath.
Her hand wrapped around the bar and a line of red began to slither down the pole. Out of the corner of her eye, stretched to its furthest point in the dim light she saw a shape emerge. A man turned the corner and spotted her.
She looked back at the bars with little change save for the blood that spilled down and then back at the man that charged forward.
The cell would not open. The flashlight fell from her grasp in her desperation and the man raced closer.
"Shit!"