Mileena: Fangs of Elegance by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Mileena-Fangs-of-Elegance-1258987827

Mileena: Fangs of Elegance ANIMATION

Mirror of Flesh

They had arranged the mirrors like a prophecy—tall, rimmed in cold brass and set at angles that made a hundred Mileenas drift across the floor like a flock of fractured birds. Each reflection wore the same silk, the same braided hair, the same impatient tilt of jaw, and between them something else swam: a mouth with teeth that did not belong to silk and court, but to hunger and iron. The mirrors did not lie; they multiplied. They also lied with a gracious industry only sorcerers understand.

Mileena stepped between the glass teeth, feeling the hum of Shang Tsung's magic under the floor. The laboratory was a cathedral of experiments: tanks that kept whispers suspended like fish, racks of gauze bags each labeled with a name, tables where instruments learned to slice and beg for mercy. The air smelled of ozone and jasmine and the faint, metallic sting of old blood. Lamps burned with an orange that made porcelain skin look like icing. Behind Mileena, the doors sealed without a sound.

"You came alone," a voice said, silk and gravel folded together.

Shang Tsung appeared not as a man but as an idea of one—robes whispering, skull-pale fingers like the roots of something that had been dug up. He perched on the lip of a vat as if it were an armchair and smiled with a patience born of long calculations. "I am always pleased when my work acknowledges me."

Mileena let her eyes travel the room. "You could've told me. Made it easier." Her tone was brittle, sharpened by nights of hunger and accusation. She kept her hands where she could see them: gloved, delicate, a mockery of the claws beneath.

"Would you have come, if I had told you what you are?" Shang Tsung asked, and for a moment his features wore something like pity—which, in him, had the same warmth as frost.

Mileena's laugh flickered like a blown candle. "What I am? You think I don't know? You made me; you made every cruel seam." She stepped closer to the nearest mirror. Her reflection mimicked her, but the mirror also showed another face hovering behind it—cool as a shadow—Kitana's face. It was not a reflection at all but a memory pressed flat against glass.

"You are not 'made,'" Shang Tsung corrected with peculiar fondness. "You were fashioned from necessity. Kitana needed a shadow, a fail-safe. You are the compromise between royalty and rage—a blade wrapped in a flower."

"A flower with teeth," Mileena said. Her voice curdled when she smiled. She knew the tale: stolen tissue, stolen blood, the last, secret grafts of Tarkatan sinew sewn into a courtly mask. It was always told like a fairy story—until the happy lines were stripped away and teeth showed through.

She stared at the version of Kitana in glass. The princess in the mirror had no hunger at her lips, only a sovereign calm that had been trained into porcelain. "Do you know what it is to be told you are an echo?" Mileena whispered. "Do you know what it does to a girl to live beside a woman who is the original? To be called a mistake in whispers?"

Shang Tsung folded his hands. "You are strong because of both. You are exquisite and terrifying. That is very useful."

"Useful." Mileena tasted the word like poison. "Useful. That is what I am to everyone who smiles at me."

The mirrors vibrated. A siphon in the far wall siphoned memory like water, casting ripples of old battles across the glass. In one pane, Mileena saw herself at a younger age—smaller, knees bleeding, being consoled by a hand that was not gentle. In another, she saw Nirvana: a field of blades where she roared until her voice was raw and the lovers of blood sat in applause. Between those two images was a blankness so large that it felt like a theft.

"Define yourself," Shang Tsung said softly. "Not as the clone, not as the sister, but as you."

Mileena stared at him as if he had asked her to cut her heart out and set it on fire. "I—" Her tongue stumbled over the syllables. Words had always been thin armor. "I am what I must be. I am what I become when knife meets flesh. I am—"

"Name is a net," Kitana's image said, and this time the voice was in the glass and the glass alone. It was the perfect court cadence, untroubled by hunger. "You think a name can bind you. It cannot."

Mileena's reflection scoffed. "You always were fond of speeches."

Kitana in the mirror smiled, a small, sovereign thing. "I am fond of truth."

"Then tell me," Mileena demanded.
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