Midnight hung like a rope in Outworld and swung the hour of need over the palace like a sword of Damocles. One by one the alliance of warriors, champions, Earthrealm, Edenia, Outworld, and more quietly sought council in the private meeting hall high in the tower. The floor that still stained in Goro's blood, Kitana stood at the head of the table with Fujin.
To their right, Bo' Rai Cho, Kung Lao, Ermac, and Sonya Blade. At the foot of the table stood Kenshi and Ashrah. To the left of Kitana was Sub-Zero, Frost, Smoke, Sareena, Nightwolf, and Mileena. Behind them, Reptile and Cyrax sat at the furthest corners from one another to watch as the night crawled over the skies of Outworld.
"We have Liu Kang." Kitana announced.
"Have you spoken with him yet?" Nightwolf pondered.
"Not at length, I thought it would be better if Fujin saw him first." She explained.
"Wise. Liu Kang is not himself." Nightwolf nodded and added, "half of his soul has been divided. What resides in him is darkness."
"A revenant he means." Fujin laid it out, "so he is not to be trusted, nor to be allowed freedom from his cell until we have found the other half."
"Could we not just find Quan Chi and merge them together?" Sonya asked, all of this still unsure and the ignorance glossed over in her eyes.
"Not anymore." Hanzo added, the last to enter the room and ensure the halls behind him were clean of any soul.
"The only way to fix him is to reunite him with his other half, to make his soul one." Fujin explained, but it still didn't catch all of them, nor did it need to as Kitana would explain.
"Rain is also here, with Kia and Tanya." Her words caught some by surprise, of them would be Mileena.
"So?" Frost couldn't grasp the importance, and of course not all knew, so Kitana remained quiet.
"We will need him." Fujin turned to her and Reptile. "All of them, if we can convince them to help us."
"No." Kitana refused. All eyes on her, she stood firm against the deity.
"He does not walk. Kia and Tanya and Hotaru do not walk."
"The Black Dragon doesn't walk either, Fujin." Sonya chimed in.
"We have No Face, Tremor, and a few others, but not Kabal." Sub-Zero confirmed, "he escaped."
Fujin paused and an ugly quietness fell over the group. Only the mechanical hum of Cyrax could be heard until finally Mileena spoke up.
"I could convince them." She assured Fujin.
"No." Kitana rejected it immediately. "You don't understand."
"Maybe we should." Sonya added, "you don't decide everything. I want to know what's going on and why we're even doing this. How does this affect me and Earthrealm?"
She had the words at the tip of her tongue but the little daggers they were should not release. Kitana swallowed them and glared down the row of eyes that looked back at her.
"Fine." She backed down.
Fujin explained the plot to this point from the emergence of the titan Kronika to the many timelines that had gotten them to this very moment. That was all good and well, though over the heads of several, but the important part had only just begun.
"Kotal Kahn," he rushed to this very moment in time, "must now be at the deepest depth of the Netherrealm. His end game is to resurrect Jade after the failed tournament near five hundred years ago. We've failed to stop him."
"Then why bother gather?" Smoke prodded.
"The only one that can reverse it is Raiden. He knows where the hourglass is and the helm to help reverse time." Fujin continued, "if we can find Raiden, he and I can go to the hourglass and go back and stop this."
"Like the millions of times before now? How many times have we had this conversation?" Mileena was perplexed.
"This once." Kitana assured. "It won't work like that. We have screwed around with time so much that it has begun to tear at the fabric of not the realms, but reality itself."
"Death cannot be undone, there are consequences to every action. In this timeline, it is our only life, but I do believe it can be done, Kitana." Fujin was so sure, and she was not.
Having tried so many times to fix the problems of the world, she had come to learn that no matter what you did to the timelines, it would break another way. Her eyes fell still on Mileena. She could sense the trust wane within her sister, and it pained her to see, and cursed her to feel the sais form in those eyes.
She couldn't explain it any better to him, perhaps Liu Kang could, or Raiden.
"Let's start with what we know." Sub-Zero suggested. "Liu Kang, how do we fix him?"
"We must find the other half of his soul." Nightwolf spoke up.
"Shang Tsung has it." Ermac finally chimed in. The entity looked across and over all the eyes around and reached out to with a small green energy that formed the shape of a human, a mortal soul that had been acquired which begged for freedom just before Ermac extinguished it with a clenched fist. "Shang Tsung holds Liu Kang prisoner as we do so many souls thanks to the magic of the deadly alliance."
"Then we find Shang Tsung and we kill him." Sonya assured. She could already feel the torture and the hold the sorcerer had over her during the tournament. The scrape of discomfort that raked across her neck as she was forced to touch it, and the burning of Quan Chi that had tried to infuse Cage's seed into her. "I will do it."
"Not alone." Kung Lao caught her eyes with his.
"She has me." Cyrax stood at attention.
Sparing the moment of three others that joined in the mission, Fujin parted from the crowd with Mileena and Kitana to the prison tower where he would speak with Liu Kang.
"I will speak with Rain and Hotaru as well." Fujin informed her. "Alone."
Left at the foot of the tower, Kitana stood with Mileena as the rain began to fall over the purple skies of Outworld.
In this moment all they had were each other and Kitana finally felt the distance that begun to cut them apart with a knife that she herself had welded.
Mileena parted from her to return to the group and the stewardess of Outworld could only stand alone and stare at the emptiness she had suddenly surrounded herself with.