Kitana: Royal Storm by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Kitana-Royal-Storm-1279861520

Kitana: Royal Storm ANIMATION

The Memory of Bone

Kitana’s sanctuary was the Garden of Perpetual Evening, a palace atrium where twilight clung to the petals of outworldly orchids. Here, the air smelled of damp soil and night-blooming jasmine, a scent she had crafted to erase the iron-and-ash stench of Shao Kahn’s rule. Yet, for seven nights, the scent had curdled.

It began as a pressure behind her eyes, a migraine birthing visions. Not memories, but possibilities—echoes of a life unlived. She saw herself not as the rebel princess, but as the loyal daughter of Shao Kahn, her fan not slicing through his Tarkatan hordes, but through the ranks of Earthrealm’s defenders. She saw Liu Kang broken at her feet, not with defiance in his eyes, but betrayal. These were not mere fantasies; they carried the visceral weight of truth, the muscular certainty of a history written in bone.

On the seventh night, the garden bled. The twilight purpled into a bruise. The jasmine scent evaporated, replaced by the ozone crackle of portal magic, but twisted, sour. From between the roots of the largest, black-barked tree, something pushed its way to the surface. Not a plant. A figure.

It was assembled from the dark earth and the polished white fragments of... something. It stood in a mockery of her own form, its body a tapestry of rich loam and jagged, interlocked bones. Where a face should be was a smooth, polished oval of pearl-like material, currently blank. It held two long, cruel-looking ribs in each hand, clicking them together softly.

“Princess,” it said, and the voice was the horror. It was her own, but filtered through a decade of imagined loyalties—cooler, imperious, laced with a smug certainty she had fought to unlearn.

“What are you?” Kitana demanded, fans sliding into her palms with a whisper of steel.

“I am the ‘what if,’” the creature replied, its blank face tilting. “The branch pruned before it could bloom. The beloved daughter Shao Kahn sculpted from your own clay, using the memories he siphoned from you during your… indoctrination. He called them imperfections. I call them potential.”

It moved then, not with her fluid grace, but with a terrifying, jerky certainty. It was like watching a puppet mastered by a brilliant, cruel mind. It lunged, bone-blades whistling.

Their first clash was a symphony of wrongness. Kitana knew every move she had ever trained, and this thing knew them too, but perverted them. Where she would spin and slice for a disabling blow, it hacked for dismemberment. Where she would leap to gain altitude, it drove downward to impale. It fought with her skill, but with his philosophy: dominate, desecrate, destroy.

“You hesitate,” the thing taunted, its voice a silken mockery as it parried a fan-strike. “You see yourself in my form and flinch. He knew you would. Sentiment was always your flaw.”

“It is my strength!” Kitana retorted, launching a kick that shattered one of its bone-blades. The substance beneath was not dirt, but a fibrous, meaty darkness.

“Is it?” The creature flowed backward, its form shimmering. The blank face began to shift, features rising from the smooth pearl like a sculpture responding to an invisible hand. It became her face, but harder, the eyes gleaming with a familiar, conquest-hungry amber—Shao Kahn’s eyes in her sockets. “Think of the power we would have wielded. Together. Father and daughter, unifying the realms not through clumsy rebellion, but through absolute order. No more wasted potential. No more doubt.”

The face shifted again, softening, the amber fading to a warm brown. It was her mother, Queen Sindel, as she might have looked had she never been broken. A kind, proud smile. “Join us, Kitana. The family can be whole again. As it was meant to be. No more loneliness in the dark.”

The seduction was a physical blow. Kitana’s breath hitched. To have her mother back, to have a purpose without the constant, grinding resistance… The garden seemed to lean in, the twilight warming to a golden hour.

Then the thing’s hand, now looking disturbingly flesh-like, reached out and stroked a nearby orchid. The vibrant purple blossom withered instantly, turning to gray dust. The smell of rot blossomed.

“At a cost,” Kitana whispered, the spell breaking.

“Creation requires destruction,” the not-Sindel said, its voice now a melodic chime. “You know this. To build a perfect Eden, one must first burn the weeds.”

Terror replaced the fleeting tempta
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