She could feel time, like a slow flame flicker away in a steady dance that died minute by minute every time her eyes would open.
Night, day, it didn't matter now. She would rot here for eternity if they let her. No, eventually Outworld's slow crawl of time would catch up to her and she'd wither and die, but for now, having been locked away in the darkness for hours, all she had to count on was time.
Skarlet, her arms bound in a straight jacket and her legs chained apart, stood in a most awkward position for her. No comfort, no rest, no means to bleed unless she bit her tongue, but even then no need, no one to kill, no way to escape. Could she bleed out and spill onto the other side, or would this cell be a magical tomb like that of Shang Tsungs?
Speaking of, as she thought of the withered sorcerer, his voice so frail still carried upon the ancient stone of the tunnel they were now buried in beneath the island.
"Can he you hear me?" He asked and his sound felt like the trickling of water down thin river stones, even though she knew he must be but a few turns away from her.
"Yes, sorcerer." She was shocked to hear that she could even speak, let alone that her voice was so beaten into the mud of her own existence after the torture from Kollector nearly ground her flesh to a sticky paste.
"Quan Chi tortured you?" He was as surprised by this as she.
He coughed back the words she almost spilled from the cold spit in her mouth and sucked in the stale grave air. She didn't know what to say.
What little voice she had, she spat it out for him. "Kotal Kahn."
"Skarlet," he reached out to her in his most human of tones, almost unrecognizable to hear her voice from him in such soft, almost caring manner, "my old enemy. You and I both suffered Shao Kahn–"
She finished his sentence with a softer, "but we survived."
"This too shall pass, but not you and I." If he could touch her, he'd reach for her shoulder and stare into her eyes knowingly, like some plan cruised down the smooth curvature of his arm into her, but he couldn't. She couldn't see his eyes, nor the intent behind them.
"No," she sucked the tear back in, the salt burned her eyes, and the words seared her soul, "it's over for us, old man." She paused with no response from the withered sorcerer, so she added, as if grasping for his company in this cold expanse of time, "it's been a long time coming."
Silence.
Nothing.
Nothing but her tormented thoughts.
"What makes you say that?" After a long pause he finally reached out again.
"I have been dead inside my parents destroyed me." She confessed, "and every thing I've done since has been to escape this feeling inside."
"How do you feel?" Shang Tsung's voice cast against the stalagmites, and hewn stone like a vacant shadow, as if it should be reflected back at him. She was just there to hear it.
"Empty." She choked on herself, "fucking nothing!"
Silence again but her own tears as they cut down her cheeks.
"I understand, Skarlet." His words reflected back at him, "you've lived your life latching to anything, and anyone that would help you forget about the person inside your head. The world you've fought desperately to escape, and yet everyone we've followed, every murder we've committed, every choice we've made has lead us to this."
"Trapped inside our minds." She finished his sentence again, a pattern she desperately wished to end with this.
It was a long moment of silence before either would speak again. Skarlet, unable to see beyond the rusted bars that held her, and the unable to move beyond the confines of her chains and bound cloth had begun to feel her body decline in strength, or perhaps the will to be strong. What little fight she had left in her she had started to lose one struggle at a time. The thoughts of escape dwindled and as hours passed the only struggle left was to escape herself.
"How have you survived?" She added, to help him understand, "this."
"I still have three souls left in me. All that keep me alive." He confessed, but she would she believe the old manipulator?
"I don't have one of those." She spat at herself.
"I know." This caught her by surprise and her lips stretched and twisted her cheek. He could almost feel the contempt burn the jagged hall of the prison tunnel and quickly changed who it should be cast toward. "Do you know why Kotal Kahn betrayed you?"
"Quan Chi has control over him." She understood that much, though not the depth of it.
"Not in the slightest." Shang Tsung contradicted her, "he betrayed you because the moment you no longer served a purpose to confirm his own delusions of himself, you became his enemy."
"What do you mean?"
"Kotal Kahn has lost his will to live. Only a thin string still pulls him through this world and he believes Quan Chi is the one that could take him to the end of it."
"How do you know all this?"
"Ermac tortured me for years. They talk too much."
"Much like you." She bit at him.
"And you." He bit back. "Troublesome girl, I never should have cloned you."
"No, you shouldn't have." Skarlet struggled again in her confines. She wanted to strangle him as those sour memories bit into her flesh.
"Did I strike a chord?" He could feel the tension and plucked at it like a string.
It was her turn to respond with silence.
Nothing.
He smiled in the darkness. He had struck her deep, but not well enough to bleed. Fire burned in her still. Some will to live and need to survive, even as she denied herself the desire to be strong.
There was hope in her yet.
"You're not the only one I've reached out to." He assured her, but nothing was returned.
A moment later he reached out again, but only to receive more silence.
"Take away Kotal Kahn, the army that followed your every order. Take away that scathing shit of a prince, Rain, and even Shao Kahn and the blood magic he began to instill into you one cruel lesson at a time and what do you have left?"
He was about to answer the question after a long pause as if she had given up on their conversation, but as he parted his parched lips to partake in his own query, she answered.
"Me." Skarlet's voice echoed through the tunnels.
"That's how I've survived all this time." He answered her previous question with his own. "This is not how it ends for us."
As if by a miracle, the a dance of tiny shadows tapped at the cold stone far from her cell and peered down the hall. It was light, true fire light and though she could not reach the prison bars to look past the rust and darkness, she could see the scant trace getting closer and closer.
This light was not that of Ermac's aura.
It was not the cold light of Quan Chi come to end them.
Shang Tsung's voice, a withered whisper in the wind of stale darkness lifted in temperance high on rocky hills. As it reached her ears, the dull whisper felt like roar in her heart.
"It has begun."