Chapter 3: Motivational Memories

Charlie woke to Maurly whining and licking her face. She hadn’t realized that she had fallen asleep on the floor. She sighed and gathered herself up, watered Maurly, sent him to gather prey for himself, and drug herself to her room. She flipped on the TV, knowing what happened last night would be on the news, and started to undress slowly, laying her clothes and blades in separate piles on her bed. She smiled to herself as she wrapped her towel around her body, gathered up her blades, and walked quickly to the bathroom, as she listened to the TV tell about the carnage found at the bar this morning. She yawned. She wasn’t used to being up during the day. She took out the blade cleaner and wiped each one carefully until it shone, admiring the ornate designs and inscriptions on the handles.
Maurly padded back to the bathroom and brushed against her leg, trying to figure out what was going on. Charlie sighed and scratched her wolf’s head idly as she thought.
Back when she was a young girl, her father gave her his swords. They were hand molded from silver, and completely irreplaceable. No other blades like them were ever made. Charlie only used those blades when she was working an extremely big job, because it made her feel like her father’s spirit was with her. He was killed by an assassin on the night that she turned ten, along with the rest of her family. The only way she made it out alive was because she hid in the shed behind her house. She had been playing in her tree fort when she heard the screaming from the house and hid in the shed. She remembered that she thought that her parents were fighting again, and wanted to stay out of it as much as she could. She stayed in the shed until a half hour had passed after the screaming stopped, and went inside to figure out what the fight was about. The first thing she saw was a man standing dressed in all black running out the front door…
She ran through the house and called for her parents. She found them in the living room, murdered with a bullet through each of their foreheads. From the looks of things, they had been tortured before they were actually killed. She screamed and ran from the house crying.
A man was walking down the sidewalk, and he grabbed her and kept her from running into the street like a madwoman. She cried in his arms, and explained what had happened. This man happened to be named Jaenes, and he was the leader of a group of assassins known as the Assassins of Justice. He took her in and trained her to be an assassin.
Charlie felt a tear roll down her cheek as she remembered that fateful evening. Suddenly her eyes grew fierce and her fists tightened. She had learned the name of the man who had killed her family when she entered the Assassins of Justice, and Jaenes had promised her permission to go after him when she felt it appropriate. She had recently gained knowledge of him being in the area, and now she was ready to get her revenge.
She patted the top of Maurly’s head decidedly, and went to pick her weapons. While she did so, her mind wandered back to when she first adopted Maurly.  It was about a year after Jaenes had taken her in.  They were out in the forest training when suddenly a fire erupted at the edge of the woods.  They smelled the smoke and began to run to safety.  While they were running, Charlie heard the high-pitched whimpering cry of a small infant animal.  She stopped dead in her tracks, and spun to face the opposite direction, pivoting effortlessly on the front of her feet.  Choking back the thick dark smoke, she found a small wolf puppy that had been abandoned by his mother when the fire broke out.  She scooped up the small writhing animal and sprinted back to where Jaenes was now waiting for her at the edge of a clearing.  Together, they swiftly raced back to the assassin’s base camp, an inconspicuous house in the center of town. Since then, Charlie and Maurly had been inseparable.

Charlie climbed into bed and slept until night. She knew that it would be a lot of work to take another assassin down that was trained as well as she was, but at the same time, she knew that it would be worth it. Though this man had experience, his skill was held back compared to hers because of the fact that he chose guns, instead of blades, his agility, hearing, and sight was lessened by age, and he chose to take his time in his assassinations, preferring to torture his victims instead of outright killing them.

Reviews

[freelancejouster]

notes as i read: carnage is a brilliant word. are the designs and inscriptions important? do they signify anything? it seems like there should be more to the last lines. it's just a summation, so much unlike what the rest of the story is...

i wish i had started reading this earlier, lol, i'm so sucked in right now, great work honey.

[Meat of Dog]

I like that you used silver for the blades. Not only is it a unique thought, but also (likely due to outside fantasy genre exposure) I made a subconscious reference in my between the silver blades and the wolf. Not that they are connected, but it ties them together. I also like this idea that she is an assassin, assassinates assassinates, and her family was killed by assassins. Instead of being repetitive it instead creates an isolated feeling, as if the world of assassins is exactly that, it's own cultural group.

Another suspenseful chapter! Nice cliffhanger, too. It's nice that the torturing was portrayed as a factor that lessened his skill, especially since blood lust is not easy controlled, making him less perceptive. I'm interested to know how this fight goes down!

other suggestions:
-"She sighed and gathered herself up, watered Maurly, and drug herself to her room." It is kind of implied now that she gives Maurly water, but not food. It seems to to be mentioned very often, which puts a false sense of significance to the fact, causing me to think something will happen with the water (correct me if that's indeed the case).
-"Jaenes (jay-ness), and" an pronunciation guide isn't really necessary here. Partly because it breaks the flow, and partly because that was how I pronounced it in my mind to begin with. The name seems phonetically spelled.
-"the top of Maurly’s decidedly" Head?

[Coyote Poetry]

A very strong chapter. More history and explanation of why she became a assassins. I like the detail of maintaining the knifes and the logic of the knife for killing over the gun. A excellent chapter. Thank you.
Coyote