6 A.M.
Winter's morning.
Lying to cheek to cheek in his cold disgrace, the stale air dug a smile apart to his spade tongue, and Liu Kang awoke.
Pulled his hands across his face and pulled away from the sheets out of shape for the start.
A glance outside as the coffee burnt down his esophagus, the moon, like a ship waded through the dark sky.
Beyond the pale, everything black.
This is where it starts, and this is where it will end.
He waited until the sky was blonde to bury himself like the dead in his bitter bed. One night after the other one car wreck into a horrid tragedy, he avoided the satisfaction of the sorcerer anytime he would appear.
With the sound turned off he waited.
As the night awakened, a knock on the door tore Liu from the distortion world of his mind to the echo chamber of the broken halls of the Hong Kong slums.
Shang Tsung would be so proud of the sight before him. Mutilation is the most sincere form of flattery. Instead, Liu Kang looked down at the green eyed girl who looked as though she had woken a ghost from a long slumber.
He looked past her to the hall left and right to find no one and reeled back, eyes wide shut and mind buried in a tangle of wires at the sight.
"Haven't seen you at the club for days." She wasn't sure why she should be there, but fumbled out to him, which his lips twisted in thought and nodded. In the long pause, she wasn't sure if she should fill it, but spoke either way, "well. Thought you died."
"No." He spoke and offered her in.
"No thanks." She refused and turned.
He grabbed her and turned her toward the waste land of his stained clothes and dreams to be anonymous.
"Please, sit." He urged.
Feeling like a child and looking like a women, she had been forecast with an attempt to guilt herself. She entered, but there was nowhere to sit. The room looked like a beheading, empty, and stained like a moth after flame. No furniture but a bed and few dishes save for take out, the small studio was poorly lived in.
Much like Liu's body.
"I'm not comfortable with this." She wanted to go, but her feet wouldn't move.
Eat me, drink me.
"I don't even know your name?" He snapped himself awake. This strange human in his home. He could see her horror mirrored in the sundown of his blank stare and pulled away to open a path for her and the doorway. "Sorry."
You want to kill her.
Like they do in the movies?
He wiped his face clean of all distress and waited for her to leave, but now she wouldn't.
It took a moment, but he stepped back toward the bed and gestured her to leave. Her voice in his head, though her lips sealed.
The moment his skin touched hers, to grab and to pull from his broken world, he felt the coarseness of her skin like sandpaper for the first time. It didn't feel like that the first time he met her, he thought, and reeled back quickly.
Want us to strip, like a flicker of celluloid?
Devour you into us, become our everything?
"Just what I predicted."
Liu broke the trance of horror and felt the sorcerer emerge beside him. The cold energy of souls collected and solidified into the flesh of the callous Shang Tsung.
"Sick of immortality?" He pulled attention back to the girl.
"Only acting, baby." Ermac lifted from her shoes, from her body, and the wrappings, cloak, and leather pulled off her clothes into his.
"What is going on here?" Liu pulled back into a right stance, unsure which to strike first. "You've been her this entire time?"
"This is business not pleasure." Ermac shrugged. "Don't worry, there's another one just like you, waiting in line if you don't want to come with us."
"Then I'll take his soul as well!" Shang Tsung burst into action.
He reached for the center of Ermac's gravity, the chest where the brightest of green light broke the surface of the entity's leather attire. The sorcerer pulled Liu back as the entity reached out for him. The light grew and the room filled with a green energy so luminous and harsh to the touch, Liu forced his eyes closed and backed himself against the wall to escape the glare.
"Don't be surprised we can look you in the eye." Ermac remarked as the souls siphoned from them without much fight from the entity. "We are worse than what you think you'd catch from us."
Shang Tsung ignored the comments and bravado and inched forward to siphon closer and as he did his flesh began to wrinkle, stain, and sink to the bone. The very anthesis of expectation, he noticed too late to cut it off in time until his knees buckled beneath Ermac.
The old man reached for the robes of the entity and tried with all of his power to climb up his knees to find some steady ground beneath his own, but Ermac pushed the withered sorcerer off like dust from his shoulder.
"We were created to torture you." Ermac added, "we don't need the souls that now poison you, but you need ours."
"Enough of this!" Liu rushed in Shang's defense, or perhaps he believed he was next. With a quick right jab, he crunched his fist into the dried abdomen of Ermac and as he pulled back, he was surrounded by stone and metal bars.
Rushed to the rusted metal, he screamed at the green orbs that stared back in the darkness.
"We don't need you to be our possession, but we will make you kneel."
A haunted soul locked in this stone home, wailed and pounded.